Night Sessions, The (8 page)

Dave looked down at it. The message on the screen read:
don't react. i'm a cop. still in?

“Oh, yeah, neat pic,” said Dave. “Oh well, gotta get back to work.”

He stood up, drained his bottle.

“Nice meeting you, Mikhail. From that pic, I reckon you'll soon be shopping for a darker frock. And you're with just the right woman to help you find it.”

Jessica grinned. “See you later, Dave. Leave the girl talk to us girls.”

“I'm not a girl,” said Mikhail. “I'm still a guy.” He wiggled his shoulders luxuriantly. “Trapped in a woman's body.”

“Now that,” said Dave, leaving, “is a kink
too far
.”

Adam Ferguson leaned back at his desk and let fall two drops of industrial
grade Optrex into each eye. He blinked a few times, placed his contacts back in and blinked some more. The investigation wiki restabilised. His eyes remained sore. It had been a long evening.

Mukhtar's incessant smoking didn't help. That the SB chief was perched beside the open window didn't help. The leki had directed the draught from its cooling fan across the side stream, and that wasn't helping much, either.

Mukhtar's people were spread out across the rainy city's Thursday night. In a seamen's club in Pilton, Muscles McCann was competitively slugging vodka with a heavily tattooed UVF veteran. Specky Dilke nibbled digestive biscuits in a Morningside front room, in the after-meeting social of the Edinburgh chapter of SMASH, the Society of Militant Atheists and Secular Humanists, bored out of his skull with freethinking respectability. The Kinky Kazakh extracted fashion tips and suspect names from a flame-haired and well-connected goth in a Newington nightclub. In a buckysheet shebeen in Turnhouse, Black Angela teased incriminating reminiscences from a bitter old Sozi and tried to keep his hands off her thigh.

The PNAI was mulling over the ever-increasing mass of camera data from around Easter Road, and churning out far too many positives for most of them to be anything but false. In some bunker in Hendon, systems programmers toiled into the night, psychoanalysing the over-twitchy reflexes of that over-extended, unstable intellect. In the situation room Hutchins, Patel and Connolly were trying to second-guess it with straightforward eyeballing and frequent recourse to Ogle Face. Ferguson guessed their eyes were as sore as his. Sergeant Carr's uniforms had stopped knocking on strangers’ doors and gone to their own.

Ferguson was thinking of doing the same when a call came through from the duty sergeant in St. Andrews.

“Ferguson here.”

“Sergeant Singh, sir. Fife Constabulary have just logged a request for protection from Citizen Donald John Black, who says he's the Bishop of St. Andrews, which apparently he is, sir, though officially we wouldn't know. In the circumstances, though…And we thought you might like to know about it.”

“Indeed yes. Thank you, sergeant. Can't say I'm surprised at another worried Catholic priest.”

“No, sir. He's Scottish Episcopal Church. They have bishops too, sir.”

“So I've heard,” said Ferguson. “Has he been threatened?”

“Not as such,” said Singh. “He says he received a warning that he might be in danger. He was very reluctant to say more, but he eventually admitted it
came from a Professor of Church History in New College, Edinburgh, name of Grace Mazvabo. The bishop claimed Mazvabo was in a position to know what she was talking about—something about Covenanters—and then clammed up. Apparently he'd spent a few hours thinking it over and working himself up to high doh about it, then decided to give us a call. Unofficially, sir, I think the DI here would appreciate your advice.”

While listening, Ferguson had scribbled “Bishop of St. Andrews” and “Covenanters” on his desk slate. He tapped the stylus on the search icon and was startled to see that the first line to come up was:

“Bishop of St. Andrews murdered.”

Startled, he expanded the story. The murder of the bishop by Covenanters had been done four centuries earlier.

“What was that, sir?” asked Singh.

“Sorry, sergeant, I must have yelped.” Ferguson explained why.

“And your advice, sir?”

“Off the record,” said Ferguson, “I'd advise your DI to give the bishop an armed guard. We'll pay this professor an unannounced visit in the morning.”

Singh rang off. Ferguson relayed the conversation to Mukhtar and Skulk.

“Does that twitch any tentacles, Mohammed?”

Mukhtar shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said. “‘Covenanters’ aren't on our radar. There's a pub of that name on the Mile, and of course I know the history, but that's it.”

“History?” said Ferguson.

“I was educated before the reforms,” said Mukhtar.

“I'll endeavour to catch up,” said Ferguson.

“No need,” said Mukhtar. “Get some sleep. Skulk can bring you up to speed in the morning.”

Skulk and Ferguson left the building together. Ferguson unfurled his umbrella and stood still for a moment.

“Goodnight,” he said. “Take care.”

“Goodnight,” said Skulk. “See you at eight?”

“Eight-thirty,” said Ferguson. “Bottom of the Mound.”

He crossed Leith Walk and headed into the alleyways and stairways that led to Rose Street. Skulk watched him in the lamp-post camera feeds, one after the other, until he turned in to the Abbotsford. Ferguson would have one pint there, then catch the tram home to Morningside.

Skulk tilted its head to let the rain run off down the back, and walked up to Waterloo Place. It crossed the road and turned the corner on to North
Bridge. No one on the North Bridge was going home alone. The leki rattled along at a good clip, past huddled couples and noisy families in the tram shelter, through a group of skinny girls whose heels clacked like hooves as they scattered across the street, pretending to flee; exchanged infrared pings with a road sweeper that laboured along the gutter, its non-reflective thoughts bare as machine code.

Skulk turned right onto the Mile, up for a couple of hundred metres and then left, onto the George IV Bridge above the dark chasm of the Cowgate. At this time tomorrow it would be crowded, rain or no rain, but tonight it was almost empty, Thursday's revellers mostly behind the doors of the clubs. The machine stalked between the two big libraries to the top of Candlemaker Row, into the alley of Greyfriars and up and over the gate into Greyfriars Kirkyard. It paced past the church towards the Flodden Wall, and paused at the corner where the path turned towards the Covenanters’ Prison.

Somewhere at the back of the roofless mausoleum of Thomas Potter (
Nuper Mercator Edinburgis
) a pebble shifted. A long shape lifted itself from the ground. Skulk saw it first in the infrared, then in the ultraviolet, and then, as it stepped into the visible spectrum, grey. A tall man, unclothed, covered with coarse hair; clawed hands, clawed feet, legs lean and long. His lupine features creased, his canine teeth bared in welcome.

“Good to see you, Skullcrusher,” he growled.

“Good evening, lieutenant,” said Skulk. “We have matters to discuss.”

Ferguson walked into the Abbotsford hours later than usual, so he wasn't surprised to find his favourite seat occupied. He was surprised to find it occupied by his wife. Isla grinned at him and glanced pointedly at her almost-empty glass. Ferguson nodded, and got a gin and tonic alongside his usual pint. Isla made room for him by shoving her coat on to the sill behind the seat.

Isla was a small, dark-haired woman, her body language neat and self-contained, in such respects more or less Ferguson's opposite. He had the height and build more fit for a copper on the beat than for a detective. No one would ever put him forward for undercover work. In terms of career he and his wife were opposites too. He'd always aimed to rise through the ranks. Isla's ambition had always been to get better and better at the job she enjoyed, and certainly not to administer or organise or lead other people doing it. After ten years as a research technician in the cell-biology unit at the Western General Hospital, she could probably have supervised an entire PhD project or run the lab herself, but she preferred, as she put it, to work at the wet end.

“Do you come here often?” Ferguson raised his glass to her.

“I knew you'd be out late, but not all night, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Timed it not badly.”

“Not bad at all,” Ferguson said. “Ah, that feels good.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “How was your day?”

“Usual,” Isla said. “Apart from the ambulances screaming in, the cops on the doors and the emergency stem-cell bookings for next week. Some kind of bombing, I gather.” She nudged him. “It's you who's had the day worth talking about.”

“You've seen the news. There's not much that wasn't on it I
can
talk about.”

Isla made a show of looking around. “That much of a den, this place?”

Ferguson chuckled. “I can see two journalists and one known hoolie from right here.”

Isla took a deep breath. “Adam, please. I don't want to know about details, I want to know how you feel about it.”

“OK, OK.” Ferguson sighed. He'd been pleased to see Isla, but he found in himself a sliver of annoyance that he wouldn't have his habitual half-hour to think alone over a pint. Well, he'd just have to think out loud.

“The scene wasn't too bad. I've seen worse at RTAs. Much worse. And the injured had been carted off by the time I got there. But the whole thing with a bombing and a priest—Jesus!”

“So to speak.”

His smile at this lame witticism was a little forced.

“Sorry,” Isla said. “All that gives me the creeps, too. It's like the bad times coming back.”

Ferguson knew what she meant. The bad times encompassed the final years of the Faith Wars, and the upheavals that had followed, all played out against the climate crisis: the Sozi interregnum, the restoration, the Second Enlightenment. Ferguson, like Isla, had endured them all. It was in the last that he'd been a participant. At the time it had felt good. Even the bad things he'd done had felt good. He'd wanted to grind the God-botherers into the dust. The mood of revulsion against the Faith Wars had crystallised around the notion of a Second Enlightenment, one that would separate not merely the Church from the state, but religion from politics, and from public life altogether.

The fall of the great religious establishments had been as swift and sudden as that of communism. After decades of religious inspiration or exacerbation of terrorism, fundamentalism, apocalyptic wars, creationism, climate-change denial, women's oppression, poverty, ignorance and disease, it was payback time. In a variety of forms, secularism had swept the board in all the advanced countries. No politician with any religious taint had a chance of national election. Every prohibition influenced by religion had been repealed. Every trace of religious influence had been excluded from the education system, and no exemptions from the secular state education system were allowed.

The faith-heads had called it the Great Rejection, and that, Ferguson thought, was just what it had been. Rejection—that was what he'd felt. Never religious himself, there had been nothing personal about it: just a cold, hard determination that the reforms would be enforced. The reforms had had passive majority support and active minority opposition, expressed in everything from sit-down protests in the playgrounds of faith schools, through vehement denunciation, to terrorism.

The conflict had been complicated by the disarray of the state: the intelligence and security services were discredited and derided, and were
being systematically purged. Torture had been at least formally abolished, and was generally abhorred. The armed forces, shattered by defeat and severely cut back, were useless for internal security. The full brunt had been borne by the regular police.

The God Squads had faced down the spasm of religious reaction, and as a young PC Ferguson had been right in there swinging. He'd battered through congregations to drag seditious priests and mullahs from their very pulpits. He'd slung screaming schoolchildren in the back of police vans, then turned and batoned down their parents and slung them in too. In the two worst years of the civil disorder he'd shot, up close, three men and one woman, and he'd taken part in more beatings than he liked to recall. It had not been the cold, scientific torture of the Faith War years; it had been done in rage and frustration, and it had been the sort of thing that coppers had done in police cells routinely a generation or two back. But he never remembered it without shame.

“It's not like the bad times, yet,” he said to Isla. “I don't think it'll come to that. What gives
me
the creeps is the thought that something like this can still happen, after…all we did back then.”

Isla seemed to realise that this would be the most that she'd get out of him on the subject.

“Well,” she said, “it wasn't all bad times.”

She deftly switched the conversation to a lighter note. Their younger daughter, Niamh, a design student at Telford's, was in the throes of being a bridesmaid for one of her friends. These throes included designing her own dress, based on one seen in the background of her friend's grandmother's wedding pics: Isla waved her hands and talked about “blancmange” and “flanges.” Ferguson listened with wryly feigned interest. His and Isla's own wedding had been a simple affair, in the Victoria Street registry office. He'd thought at the time that one consequence of secularisation would be that weddings would remain like that. No such luck, it seemed.

When they'd finished their drinks Isla suggested they have another. Ferguson broke his habit and agreed. They caught the last tram.

Ferguson woke at 06:50. The alarm was set for 07:00. He remained in bed for nine more minutes. Isla shifted as he slid an arm around her but didn't wake up. At two minutes to seven Ferguson rolled over, sat up, reset the alarm to 08:00 for Isla, and got out of bed. He always enjoyed the early part of the day before he'd put in his contacts, but he couldn't resist catching the news. He showered with his phone clip tuned manually to the World Service. It was
one news source where he could be sure that the Murphy murder wasn't in the headlines. More problems with the soleta alignments. Another breakdown on the space elevator; cargoes for orbit delayed. The United Arab Republic had raised the price of electricity; the Shanghai and Tokyo markets had taken a small dip as a result.

Ferguson put his contacts in after he'd shaved. Over breakfast he looked at the papers. His face was on the top pages of
The Herald
and the
Scotsman
—the latter under Tom Mackay's byline, treating it as a potential terrorism case but avoiding sensational speculation. The story was on the lower pages of the
Guardian
and
The Times
. The
Telegraph
ran a smug think-piece about how Scotland still relied on national police resources. Reminded, Ferguson invoked the PNAI. The overnight correction work had reset the system's suspicion parameters, but in the wrong direction. After requesting arrest warrants for everyone who had been on Easter Road for the past week, the PNAI was once more in the process of being talked down. The in-house nickname for the PNAI was Paranoia, partly because invoking it was like having in your head the voice of someone who had voices in
their
head, and partly because of the effect its mere existence had on the criminal fraternity and the general populace, who were apt to ascribe it far more nous than was its due. Ferguson sighed and checked the situation page. Lists of people who had visited Father Murphy were still being compiled and collated. The Kinky Kazakh's informant had come up with a short list of possible suspects who were involved in some weird goth sub-cult. The rest of Mukhtar's men had nothing to report. The two injured women were not expected to recover consciousness for some days, and might well have to be kept sedated in any case. The Catholic bishop, Dr. Curley, was scheduled to meet Ferguson at eleven. DCI McAuley wanted to see Ferguson late in the afternoon. Ferguson knew not to bother scheduling an appointment—McAuley would see him when McAuley wanted to.

Ferguson stuck his cereal bowl in the sink, dashed upstairs to kiss Isla's forehead—she was still sound asleep—then headed for the tram stop. It was fifty metres from his front door and he had only a minute to wait, so he didn't bother with his umbrella. As the tram lurched and clanged off down the slope towards Tolcross, Ferguson clung to a strap and blinked up the website for Edinburgh University, then the sub-menu for New College.

The college had once been the main theological training ground for ministers of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church. It still was, but there weren't many callings these days. The college had secularised with the times and now offered more degree courses in philosophy and in history than
in divinity. Professor Grace A. Mazvabo taught the history of the Church in Scotland, and specialised in and researched the post-Reformation period. Her c.v. listed titles of what seemed to Ferguson impenetrable obscurity and monumental triviality. Her brief bio gave her birthplace as Bulawayo, Zimbabawe. Her education from primary school onwards had been in Scotland, where her parents had moved as—Ferguson guessed from the dates—refugees, or asylum-seekers as they had then been known. Work for the Refugee Council was one of her voluntary occupations; another was listed as “deacon.” In conformity with the policy of official non-cognisance, the site didn't specify her Church.

Ferguson got off the tram halfway along Princes Street and crossed the road to find Skulk waiting on the portico steps of the National Gallery. The rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast. As Ferguson and the leki walked towards the Mound steps the sky darkened further, then lightened.

“That's odd,” remarked Skulk. “That partial eclipse should have been twenty seconds longer.”

“Trouble at t'mill,” said Ferguson. “It was on the news.”

“Fine,” said Skulk. It engaged in what Ferguson recognised as a moment of extrospection. “So it is. Now, about the Covenanters—”

“We'll be at the College in two minutes,” said Ferguson, beginning the ascent.

“I'll keep it brief,” said Skulk.

By the time the leki had finished its account they were standing in the courtyard of New College under a statue of a bearded man in a broad beret and long coat, a book in one hand, the other arm upraised.

“John Knox,” Ferguson said. “Was he a Covenanter?”

“No,” said Skulk. “They came later. He was a Reformer.”

“Looks more like a revolutionary.”

“That's correct,” said Skulk. “He was.”

Ferguson mimed a shudder, which involuntarily became a real one as he recalled the most unpleasant six months of his youth.

“As if I weren't prejudiced enough against this place already.”

“I've cleared us with the reception desk,” said Skulk, with an air of changing the subject. “Shall we proceed to Professor Mazvabo's office?”

“She's in?” Ferguson had been hoping to waylay her on the way into work.

“Yes,” said Skulk.

“Let's go,” said Ferguson.

Skulk led the way, up a sweep of steps at the back of the courtyard, up
some more stairs and through long corridors lined with portraits of stern men in black coats and white collars. The door of Mazvabo's office was closed. Ferguson knocked.

“Come in.”

The professor looked around from a kettle at the windowsill as Ferguson entered. She was a slim woman with a serious thirty-something face.

“Hello,” she said, frowning. “Who are you?”

“Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson, Lothian and Borders Police.” Ferguson held up his ID card. “Good morning, professor.”

Mazvabo nodded, turned aside, finished pouring hot water on instant coffee and sat behind her desk. She waved Ferguson to a worn chair on the other side of it.

“Take a seat, take a seat.” She glanced at the leki. “Does that thing need…” Her voice trailed off.

“To sit down?” Ferguson smiled. “No, it's quite all right.”

“To be here?” said Mazvabo.

“I'm afraid so, ma’am.”

“It makes me uncomfortable.”