Night Sessions, The (9 page)

“Think of me as a recording device,” said Skulk. “A camera on a tripod, perhaps.”

Mazvabo sipped coffee and straightened some sheets of paper on her desk. Ferguson watched this composure-gathering behaviour without a word. Mazvabo looked up.

“So, inspector,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

“Well, professor,” said Ferguson, “you might explain to us why you told the Bishop of St. Andrews that his life might be in danger.”

“You might explain,” said Mazvabo, “how you come to believe I did such a thing.”

“Fife Police told us what the bishop told them.”

“Ah,” said Mazvabo. “That's all right, then. For a moment there I wondered if you'd been tapping phones.”

“Not at all,” said Ferguson. “Now, can we continue?”

Mazvabo gazed out the window for a few seconds, sighed, then faced Ferguson again. “All right,” she said. “Have you heard of the Congregation of the Third Covenant?”

“I've heard of the Covenanters,” said Ferguson. “And of the two Covenants. Was there a third?”

Mazvabo looked momentarily flustered. “Well, in the eighteenth century
some of the Cameronians did in fact sign…” She shook her head, smiled, and waved a hand. “Forget that, it's a detail of history. The Congregation of the Third Covenant has nothing to do with that. It's a new…movement, I suppose. A very small one, I believe. A sect. It holds that the states that derived from the English Revolution—Britain, the British Commonwealth and the United States—were bound in a special way to God by the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant. That they were and are covenanted nations.”

She paused. “You look puzzled,” she said.

“I don't quite follow,” said Ferguson. “Why do they think these covenants signed by people back in the 1630s and 1640s are still relevant?”

“You wouldn't say treaties signed back then aren't still relevant, so long as they're still upheld.”

“Treaties can be denounced,” said Ferguson.

“Precisely!” said Mazvabo. “They don't just lapse. Neither do covenants with God, made in the name of those who signed them and all their posterity.”

“Well,” said Ferguson, “I don't regard myself as bound by the signatures of my ancestors.”

“I dare say you don't,” said Mazvabo. “God might take a different view. So might a constitutional lawyer, for that matter. As a policeman you are bound by Magna Carta, the Declaration of Arbroath, and the Declaration of Right, just as much as by the Constitution of the Republic of Scotland—which you didn't sign either.”

“Very interesting, no doubt,” said Ferguson. “Now, can we get back to the point?”

“The point, inspector, is that the Third Covenant sect holds that the Great Rejection—the Second Enlightenment, as you would call it—has had very solemn consequences. By becoming secular republics in the case of England and Scotland, and in the case of the United States passing the Thirty-First Amendment, the one explicitly disavowing any religious basis, the post-Rejection states in the English-speaking world have broken the Covenants, and are therefore under God's judgement in a way that states not derived from the British state of 1638 are not.”

“I see,” said Ferguson. “Without wishing to offend, I'd say that's a risk I can live with. I'm still waiting to hear what you think is the relevance of all this.”

“The relevance,” said Mazvabo, “is that these people believe that the only way to avert certain direct manifestations of God's wrath—natural disasters,
plagues and so forth—is for the saints of the true Covenant Church, namely themselves, to visit severe judgements on what they call the ‘apostate’ Churches and in due course on the ‘apostate’ states.”

“‘Visit severe judgements’? What does that mean? Denounce, condemn, or what?”

“It means to kill people,” said Mazvabo.

For a moment Ferguson found himself unable to speak. He had to clench his teeth to prevent his jaw from sagging. The insouciance of believers seldom failed to amaze him.

“All…right,” he said at last. “How do you know this?”

Grace Mazvabo looked out of the window again.

“It's a little embarrassing, inspector,” she said. “I'm a deacon in the Church of Scotland. I attend Greyfriars Kirk. One of my duties—well, it's self-imposed, really—is to make sure the church is tidy before and after Sunday services. Straighten out cushions and footrests, make sure the psalters and Bibles are in the right places, pick up any obvious litter, that sort of thing.”

“People leave litter in church?” said Ferguson.

“You'd be surprised,” said Mazvabo, with a wry smile. “I could tell you some…anyway. A few months ago—May or June, maybe—I began to find tracts—religious leaflets, you might say—left here and there in odd places around the church: slipped into Bibles, at the ends of pews, sometimes stashed in the rack of church leaflets and magazines. These tracts were—or claimed to be—published by this body called the Congregation of the Third Covenant, which I'd never heard of. When I read them I was quite shocked. They used very intemperate language. So, of course, I gathered up as many of them as I could find.”

“And that was all you did?”

“I showed them to the minister, Reverend Dow. He agreed with me that they weren't the sort of thing we wanted in our church. Sometimes people do leave tracts with the best intentions, even if they're perhaps doctrinally a little more fundamentalist than what the Church preaches today, and we leave them alone. It is the same gospel, after all, even if more, ah, narrowly proclaimed. But these—no! Quite unacceptable! From then on I made a point of checking for them whenever I tidied the building. Sometimes I found them before the morning service, sometimes after the morning or evening service. But I believe I did gather up most of them. Since the beginning of August, I haven't found any.”

“You have no idea who was leaving them?”

Mazvabo shook her head. “It might not even have been someone attending services. The Kirk is historic—it's something of a tourist attraction. People pass through it all days of the week.”

“What about if it is someone in the congregation? Couldn't you have watched for them?”

Mazvabo's eyes widened.

“I'm sorry, inspector,” she said. “I know you have to take, what's the phrase, ‘no official cognisance’ of religious belief and practice, but you seem to be woefully ignorant of what actually goes on in your own city. Your own manor, if that's still the word.”

“It isn't,” said Ferguson. “But go on, please.”

“Greyfriars, Tollcross, the Old Kirk on the High Street…these are the only church buildings open for Church of Scotland Sunday services in Edinburgh. All the other church buildings have had to be sold. These three keep going from tourist revenue. Now this may surprise you, inspector, but there are well over two thousand people in Edinburgh who go to a Church of Scotland service every Sunday. More in the summer and Festival season. The churches are packed. There's no way to spot who's leaving the leaflets.”

“Have you kept any of these leaflets?”

“Oh yes,” said Mazvabo. “I have one copy of each of them here.”

She stood up, went over to a file cabinet, opened a drawer, rummaged about, and produced a handful of folded A5 sheets. She held them out to Ferguson, and recoiled slightly as Skulk reached out a tentacle and took them.

“Without my dabs, that's one less DNA sample to rule out,” Ferguson said.

Skulk slid the leaflets into an evidence bag, closed it and passed it to Ferguson.

The paper was white, the print black and dense. The heading of the outer page of the leaflet at the top of the stack, in an ugly ornate font, read:

5th BROADSIDE of the THIRD COVENANT

Death to Apostates and Covenant-Breakers, saith the LORD of Hosts

It went on from there, its mix of seventeenth- and twenty-first-century English as arbitrary as its capitalisation. Ferguson read to the foot of the page.

“You never thought to take these to the police?”

“No. That's what I'm embarrassed about, Inspector.”

“
Embarrassed
?” Ferguson tried not to shout. “These are explicit death threats!”

“I didn't see them as credible,” said Mazvabo. “Honestly, I didn't. Until yesterday, when that dreadful thing happened.”

“At which point,” said Ferguson, “you
still
didn't go to the police. You passed a private warning to the Bishop of St. Andrews. Why?”

Mazvabo raised her eybrows. “Why? Because I assumed that if whoever was behind these leaflets really meant what they said, then they might decide to repeat the most notorious murder committed by the original Covenanters. Their fourth broadside certainly seemed to hint at that—it makes some very hostile remarks about the Episcopalians—and I thought of Donnie Black because I thought—”

“I meant,” said Ferguson, “why didn't you go to the police?”

Mazvabo looked down at her desk, then straight at Ferguson.

“I didn't feel comfortable doing that,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

And so you should be, Ferguson thought.

“Why didn't you feel comfortable?” he asked.

“Well, you know how it is,” said Mazvabo. “The police aren't exactly
friendly
to the Churches, and I just felt…as I said, I'm sorry.”

“You mean, you thought this was a problem that the Churches should take care of themselves, and that bringing in the police would damage the Churches?”

“I didn't think of it as a serious problem until yesterday. But yes, something like that was at the back of my mind.”

“That's the kind of thinking that got the Churches where they are today,” said Ferguson.

Mazvabo winced. “Yes, I'm very much aware of that. If there's any way I can make up for it, please let me know.”

She still didn't get it, Ferguson realised. Whether there was anything to this lead or not—and he doubted that—holding back on reporting overt threats of carnage that she herself took seriously brought her close to complicity, rather than complacency.

“I'll bear that in mind,” said Ferguson. “Before we go, would you be so kind as to provide a DNA sample, so that we can exclude yours from any test of the leaflets?”

“Of course,” said Mazvabo, sounding cheerful for the first time. Her smile froze as the leki's tentacle appeared in front of her, holding a cotton bud. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

“I don't like these things,” she said, after Skulk had bagged and stashed the sample.

“You needn't talk about the leki as if it isn't there,” Ferguson said, rising to leave. “It's perfectly capable of holding a conversation.”

“Oh, I know
that
,” said Mazvabo. “Turing test and so on. That doesn't mean it has any feelings to hurt.”

“I can see you're quite sincere about that,” said Skulk. “Might I ask why?”

Mazvabo looked a little taken aback.

“Well,” she said, “even if you
are
conscious in a human sense, which I doubt, you're still a machine, a deterministic system.” She smiled at the leki, glanced sidelong at Ferguson. “I hope you don't take offence.”

“I don't take offence,” said the leki.

Mazvabo forced a smile. “I'll take your word for it.”

She turned again to Ferguson. “Why are they called lekis, anyway?”

“From ‘Law enforcement kinetic intelligence,’” Ferguson explained.

Mazvabo laughed. “Well, that's that cleared up. I'd always vaguely assumed they were named after Joanne Leckie.”

“Who?”

“You don't remember her? The last Justice Minister under the Sozis.”

Ferguson shivered slightly. “No relation.”

“We enforce very different laws,” said Skulk.

It headed for the door. Ferguson followed. He paused in the doorway.

“By the way,” he said. “I see you use a phone clip. Do you happen to have an iThink?”

Mazvabo held up a pink-anodised version of the gadget. “I keep everything on it,” she said. “I'm not as old-fashioned as you might think!”

“Have a poke around in the games menu,” Ferguson advised. “Look for a game called Predictor. It works with most versions of the phone clip. It's very simple. You put the iThink on the table, tap it with a finger, and a light comes on.”

“Sounds a bit pointless.”

“I assure you it isn't,” said Ferguson. “Try it and see.”

“Fine, I'll try it sometime.”

“If you can spare a moment,” said Ferguson, “I'd like you to try it now.”

Mazvabo slid the tip of her thumb about on the face of the gadget.

“Found it!” she said.

She tapped the device a few times. After the third or fourth time she frowned, paused a couple of seconds and tapped it again.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “This can't be…”

She tapped it again. And again.

Ferguson closed the door silently behind him and left.

“That was a mean trick,” said Skulk.

Ferguson and Skulk got back to Greensides at quarter to ten. The Easter Road Incident Room was busy but quiet. DCI Mukhtar and Tony Newman had arrived before Ferguson had finished pouring his first coffee. He waved them to a huddle and told them about his meeting with Mazvabo.

“Good work, Adam,” said Mukhtar. “Though I must say I'm skeptical. I've never heard of this Third Covenant group.”

“Well, let's get the feelers out,” said Ferguson. “Tony, could you take the five leaflets, bag them separately, and make copies before you start analysing them?”

“Sure,” said Newman. “Do you want me to put the copies up on the wiki?”

“No,” said Ferguson. “I've eyeballed the top page there and Ogled the text. No match. It isn't online anywhere.”

“That's unusual,” said Mukhtar. “Even one-off nutjobs post their screeds. If there's a group behind this, it's even more remarkable if they haven't. Let's keep it that way. One hard copy to me, one to Adam.”

Ferguson nodded. “It's not just the DNA we need to analyse. Make that a priority, Tony, but get your folks on to the paper, the print, the ink straight away.”

“ASAP, boss. We've got another development that might be a bit more urgent.”

“Yes?”

Newman thumbed his chin, rasping stubble. “There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that around six this morning the Bomb Squad found the packaging at last. It was in a wastepaper bin that had got well and truly buried in the rubble. A big A3 Jiffy bag, Murphy's name handwritten on it, massive amounts—well, milligrams—of unexploded RDX residue inside. The bad news is that we have fingerprints and DNA on the outside of the package, and so far it's all Murphy's. We've asked the Bomb Squad to look out for any outer wrapping it might have had, but I'm not holding out much hope
for that. We're still going over the package, obviously. May take another few hours before we can rule out anyone else's dabs being on it.”

“OK, get on to the leaflets when you can. And, Tony—”

“Yes?”

“I really do want the copies on my desk before I get back to my office. Fifteen minutes, max.”

“Twenty,” said Newman.

“OK,” said Ferguson.

The forensic scientist hurried off. Mukhtar took a download of Skulk's recording of the conversation with Mazvabo.

“Before I go over this,” he said, “tell me if you thought she was telling the truth.”

“Oh, she was,” said Skulk. “I've flagged the points where she was evasive or showed discomfort, but they're pretty obvious.”

“Fine,” said Mukhtar.

The copies arrived at Ferguson's office at 10:20. Not bad. Ferguson tabbed his thanks to Newman and settled down to reading the leaflets. As he finished reading each one he passed it to Skulk. The first broadside consisted almost entirely of quotations from the Bible and from various declarations and proclamations of what was referred to as “The Church of Scotland” but from the internal evidence was actually some marginal persecuted sect, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second advanced as far as the twentieth century, denouncing abortion, stem-cell therapy, the teaching of evolution, and racism. The third presented the history of Christianity as a succession of apostasies, beginning with the rise of the Papacy (“the Roman Antichrist”), and culminated in a fulmination against Dispensationalists—who were, Ferguson gathered from the context, those who had welcomed the Faith Wars as the prelude to Armageddon and the Second Coming. They'd been only partly wrong: the actual battle on Israel's northern front hadn't been decisive, and its occurrence near the ancient battlefield of Megiddo had been accidental, but that iconic name, and the spectacle of the first real-time-televised massed tank battle involving tactical nuclear weapons, had made it apocalyptic enough.

The fourth broadside dealt with the Great Rejection: thin on history and doctrine, it was dense with citations of Acts of Parliament, decisions of courts of law and Church assemblies, constitutions—it was like a long footnote to some legal document that wasn't actually there.

The fifth, the first page of which Ferguson had already read, provided the missing legal document. It was a declaration of war: The Congregation of the Third Covenant, therefore, calls upon the true Protestant Church and People of SCOTLAND and the other REVOLUTION STATES, viz: the Former United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, all the former DOMINIONS of Great Britain and of all territories great and SMALL beyond the seas which have in times past and in divers manners benefited from the Preaching of the Word and the
manifold blessings of civil and religious liberty
deriving from the Reformation (albeit hampered and polluted by a succession of uncovenanted monarchs and other ungodly rulers, to whom in times past the Church was called upon to submit, but whose present successors we, for ourselves, as Representatives of the true Presbyterian Kirk and covenanted nation of Scotland, considering the great hazard of lying under such a sin any longer, do now hereby solemnly and publicly disown as usurpers and open covenant-breakers who have forfeited all claim to our civil obedience), to muster under its banner, and to wage war upon the apostate Churches and the covenant-breaking rulers of the said STATES, and upon all their voluntary servants, whether inferior magistrates or any other, and all who do betray to them or aid them in manner whatsoever against this covenanted work of REFORMATION, and to continue this work at all hazards until with God's blessing its victory shall be inscribed in the future THIRD COVENANT. Amen.

Ferguson finished reading the tracts with the same sense of coming out of a dark tunnel that he'd sometimes had after hearing a Sozi speech at university. The relentless series of logical deductions from questionable premises put him in an undecided state. If he took the fifth broadside seriously, it threatened and justified acts like the murder of Father Murphy. But it was hard to take seriously.

He glanced over at Skulk.

“Well,” he said, “what do you think? Serious threat, best lead we've got—or the ravings of one or more cranks?”

Skulk, unusually, hesitated before replying.

“I've checked all the citations of religious texts and legal documents,” it said at last. “They are all genuine. I have constructed a Boolean restatement of the reasoning. If the bizarre premises are accepted, the logic is valid. Someone
who accepted these premises would be morally and—in their own view—legally obligated to carry out the conclusion. Taken together, the broadsides are—to use an old term—a fatwa, a legal ruling by a competent religious scholar. Consequently, if we were to find someone who did accept these premises we would have a prima facie suspect.”

“Sometimes,” said Ferguson, “I suspect the expression ‘No shit, Sherlock’ was coined with lekis in mind.”

“It was not,” said Skulk. “The earliest examples of the usage pre-date—”

“I was joking,” Ferguson interrupted.

“So was I,” said Skulk. “I appreciate your humour.”

“Fine,” said Ferguson. “Now, can you apply your vaunted empathic abilities to the matter at hand? What do you make of the state of mind of the person or persons who wrote the leaflets?”

“One person,” said Skulk. “To a probability of eighty-six per cent. That's a first-order analysis—the stereotypic and artificial style may conceal the work of more than one person, but more samples would be needed. My inclination is to assume a single author. There are no indications of mental illness or other pathology.”

“You're sure of that? It looks to me like something typed in different-coloured fonts.”

“Black ink is used throughout,” said the leki. “More significantly, there are no indications of paranoia—digression, self-reference, non sequiturs and so forth.”

“It seems to me,” said Ferguson, “that even accepting for the sake of argument that there is a God and he, she or it founded the Christian Church, et cetera et cetera, anyone who starts from the position that the true Church consists of their good self and a handful of others is by that very fact someone who has, shall we say,
issues
with this whole ‘reality’ business.”

“No,” said Skulk. “The position is not uncommon. Many small Islamist groups in the Faith Wars denounced all others as apostate. Nor is it purely religious. Similar positions have been adopted by numerous factions of Sozi dead-enders. On interrogation, no symptoms of individual mental pathology have been found to be present in most cases.”

“In most cases.”

“The author of these texts is not one of the exceptions, in my judgement.”

“OK,” said Ferguson. “You're the robot, I'm just a human being. I'll defer to your superior theory of mind, for now. But—”

Ferguson's desk phone buzzed.

“Dr. Curley's on his way up,” said the receptionist.

“I'll see him in,” said Ferguson, rising to open the office door. “Uh, Skulk—try to lurk in a not too overbearing manner.”

“I'll do my best,” said Skulk.

It leapt to the windowsill and folded its legs.

Dr. Hugh Curley was tall, middle-aged, thin of frame and feature, and wore a shirt and tie under his suit. He smelled of aftershave and cigarettes. The only clue to his profession was a discreet gold cross on his lapel. Ferguson couldn't remember having encountered him before, but he might have—he'd planted himself ostentatiously in enough churches, back in the God Squad days, to have glowered in the faces of half the clergy in Scotland. Curley, for his part, showed no sign of recognising Ferguson. He shook Ferguson's hand with a firm grip, nodded to Skulk, and sat down.

Ferguson, mindful of his own injunction to be polite, found himself unsure of the correct form of address for a bishop. He decided to settle for the academic title.

“Good morning, Dr. Curley,” he said. “Thank you for coming in. On behalf of the force and my department, I would like to express our condolences on the death of your colleague.”

“Thank you,” said Curley. “And thank you for inviting me. Your courtesy has not gone unnoticed. I expect, though, that you didn't invite me just for that.”

Ferguson nodded. “We'd also, of course, like you to take this opportunity to raise, in confidence if you wish, any questions, any issues that may be on your mind…”

Ferguson spread his hands. Curley tilted the chair back and steepled tobacco-stained fingers, then patted his fingertips together a few times.

“Issues,” he said. “Yes indeed, inspector. I have a few.” He leaned forward and grasped his knees, arms locked. “Let me begin by putting my cards on the table, so to speak. You can rely on me to tell you the truth, and to answer any questions you may have, without evasion or equivocation. Aside from the seal of the confessional, of course.”

“The seal of the confessional?”

“I can't reveal, by word or deed, anything told to me in the rite of confession.”

“Ah,” said Ferguson. “Does that have any bearing on the case?”

Curley's lip twitched. “Unfortunately, I can't even tell you
that
, one way or another.” He looked momentarily exasperated. “I wish I hadn't mentioned it. Let's set that aside. I'm well aware of the position I and the Church are in,
and it's not one in which I would tell a falsehood. Even if you didn't have that walking lie-detector over there watching my every word.”

“All right,” said Ferguson. “Go on, please.”

“First,” said Curley, “a rumour has reached me that your investigation takes into account the possibility that my late friend was preparing a bomb himself. Correct?”

“I'm relying on your discretion here,” said Ferguson. “The answer's yes. We are. But it's more a matter of something we can't rule out at this stage than a major line of investigation.”

The bishop made a slicing gesture with both hands. “You can forget that entirely,” he said. “Giving the slightest attention to that line of investigation is a waste of your time and resources. I knew Liam Murphy as well as any man living, for nearly twenty years, and for him to be involved in anything remotely like that is a sheer moral impossibility.”

“You seem very confident.” Ferguson said. “I'm sorry, but we'd need more than that to rule that out completely.”