The Silent Pool (17 page)

The Pastor flipped the Zippo®’s top open, shut, open shut. He said nothing.

‘What are you doing with the lighter?’ asked Erasmus.

‘Holding fast to that which is true.’

The Pastor clicked the lighter open. The young man whimpered.

‘Why did you put the children in the room above the gym?’ Erasmus began to move forward slowly, closing the distance between them.

The Pastor clicked the lighter shut. ‘To protect them until the police arrived. Unfortunately they are slow, over worked, so I have been forced to deal with this sinner myself.’ His thin lips came together in what may have been a smile. He clicked the lighter open.

‘He's going to burn me! He said he would!’

Erasmus noticed a trail of petrol on the gym floor leading to a foot in front of the Pastor.

Erasmus held out of his hand. ‘Give me the lighter.’

The lighter clicked shut.

‘He wanted to burn the books. Shall we not let him?’

The lighter clicked open and this time the Pastor struck the flint. A flickering, yellow flame appeared. All he would have to do is drop it and the books and the boy would explode into flames.

‘That would be murder.’

‘Please no!’ screamed the boy.

The Pastor tilted his head slightly. ‘Would it? Or would it be justice?’

There was a silence for a second. Erasmus was only a few feet away from the Pastor now. If he leapt forward he put his chances at no more than 50/50 of saving the boy from the flames.

‘Please help me,’ said the boy.

The Pastor held the lighter up to his eye line and looked into the flame.

‘And what is your name?’ the Pastor asked.

‘Erasmus Jones. I guess you can call me a concerned parent.’

The Pastor looked at the boy.

‘Sometimes a cause is greater than mere human life. The soul is eternal, the flesh is of this world only. Are you prepared to die for your cause? I would gladly die for my mine.’

The boy sobbed.

Erasmus shrugged. ‘I've seen plenty of dying. I think it's highly overrated. You seem the type who might enjoy it though.’

The Pastor clicked the lighter and the flame flickered.

‘You wanted the boy to burn and the children to die, didn't you?’

The Pastor's tongue flickered around his ruby red lips as though he were on the edge of saying something.

Erasmus took another step forward. His rubber soles slid on the petrol that lay slick on the gym floor. He had a cold, hard feeling that he had never been closer to death than at this precise moment.

‘Why would you want to do that?’

There was a loud crash and then the door to the gym was flung open. It was the commander of the security detail. He took in the scene before him.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ he asked the Pastor. ‘The police have arrived now.’

The Pastor clicked the lighter shut and threw it to the boy on top of the books who caught it with his free hand. He started crying.

‘Everything is just as it should be,’ the Pastor said calmly.

The Pastor moved close to Erasmus and stooped to place his face level with Erasmus’. His nostrils recoiled at the man's smell: it reminded him of dry old books and something else, something deep and bestial. His grey eyes fixed on Erasmus’.

‘I know you. I know your soul,’ said the Pastor. Erasmus felt a chill. It was like the Pastor was seeing inside him, searching something out. He dismissed the thought.

‘And I know your soul. You're an arsehole,’ declared Erasmus.

The Pastor ran his tongue over his top lip and then smiled a humourless smile, revealing a Californian set of top teeth and a trailer park bottom half.

‘Humour does not feed your soul and a starved soul will perish.’ He didn't wait for a response but turned to the commander. ‘Get this parent out of here.’

‘He hit me with his car, sir.’

‘A misunderstanding, I'm sure.’ The Pastor walked away.

‘This way,’ said the commander.

‘Your boss is a psychopath,’ said Erasmus.

The commander pushed him in the back, propelling him towards the gym doors. ‘Get out of here! You're lucky you are not going to jail.’

Erasmus didn't need asking twice and he headed outside to see Miranda and Abby. When she saw him waking across the school playground Abby shook out of Miranda's embrace and ran towards him. Erasmus scooped her up and she gleefully hugged him.

‘You saved us, Daddy, you saved us.’

Miranda was smiling. ‘She's right, you know,’ she said.

Erasmus wanted to say that he would always be there to save them but his heart wouldn't let him. He couldn't make promises that he knew where impossible to keep.

‘I'll always try,’ was the best he could manage.

Miranda smiled at him again and he felt something inside, emotions he had repressed, stir into life. He recognised it for what it was: hope. For the first time in a very long time he didn't immediately stifle those feelings.

He allowed himself to smile back.

CHAPTER 20

Mayor Lynch had never liked hospitals. The fact that he had now reached a certain social and monetary level where the hospitals he visited tended to be tucked away in leafy suburbs and were decorated akin to a fashionable hotel, didn't change the fact that he didn't like the places. Every time the Mayor entered a hospital he was filled with a dread that he would not be leaving and today was no exception.

He sat in the waiting room of the Murrayfield Hospital and tried unsuccessfully to find something to read in a glossy magazine but it was full of adverts for watches.

The one good thing about private hospitals, as far he was concerned, was that he was usually the only person in the plush waiting room. There was nothing worse than being confronted with real illness. Private hospitals were better at hiding it than the dirty NHS hospitals that he was forced to visit every now and again as part of his job. It was something that he had come to loathe: a meet and greet with society's real underclass, the unwell. The smells, sights and sounds of the sick made him feel generally unwell and you could just imagine the life threatening diseases and germs just idly waiting on some door handle or unclean surface for the moment when his hand landed on it.

The Mayor thought of this and shuddered. From somewhere unseen he heard a light whisper of compressed air as perfume was discharged into the waiting room.

He had always known it would come to this. The unexplained twinge that wouldn't go away, the visit to the GP, the referral to the consultant – not because the doctor thinks there is anything up but better to make sure – the X-rays, the scans, the nodding and shaking of heads of radiologists, and then the wait for results, the call to come in and, ‘No we can't discuss it with you,’ and then now, the last moments of life before everything changes.

The Mayor dropped the magazine back onto a pile of its equally glossy and aspirational cousins. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as pain shot up through his buttocks to his back.

He thought about Bovind and the city. If he got the news he was expecting from his consultant, the permatanned and increasingly tardy Mr Grey, then all bets were off. He had funding guaranteed for twelve months for the city. He would take a stand, graciously thank the Bovind Foundation for the monies received but, in the spirit of enlightened secularism, insist on educational freedom and on the council's right to approve any damn planning permissions for women's health clinics it bloody well wanted to. Yes, that was the way forward: make a stand and then step down on a purely temporary basis while his treatment took its grim toll. His mood sank as he pictured tubes and brownish fluids entering and exiting it his body. He ran a hand along his thinning hairline. It wasn't much, but he couldn't bear to lose it.

The door to the consultant's office opened and Mr Grey stepped out into the waiting room. He smiled at Mayor Lynch.

‘Mr Mayor, always a pleasure, please come through.’

The Mayor thought his legs might give way. Maybe it was another symptom.

The Mayor followed Mr Grey into his rooms. The rooms here were more like lawyers’ offices, all oak panelling and bookcases. There were even a couple of large palms by the window. Mr Grey sat behind a large mahogany desk and beckoned for the Mayor to sit down in the empty chair. The Mayor looked at the chair with trepidation. He was reluctant to sit in it. There was no escape from the bad news once he sat down.

Mr Grey nodded. ‘Time is money. Your money,’ he said, and then chuckled.

If it wasn't for the fact that his life was in his hands the Mayor would have punched Mr Grey right there and then. The Mayor sat in the chair.
The death chair
, he thought.

‘How are the kids?’ asked Mr Grey.

‘Mmm fine,’ said the Mayor. Inside he was screaming, ‘Get on with it!’

Mr Grey picked up a brown paper wallet and had removed some paper from within. He scanned quickly across the numbers that formed the contents of the report. Numbers that added up to bad news the Mayor was sure. He let out a little hysterical squeal.

‘You OK, old man?’ asked Mr Grey.

‘Just stifling a sneeze, I've got a cold. Is it bad news?’ he asked.

Mr Grey smiled. ‘Mmm, bleeding from the back passage. Always a chance it could be something. Well, let me see what your tests say.’

He studied the papers in front of him.

‘Ah yes, I see.’

‘See what?’

‘Well, we performed a full battery of tests, as you know: full bloods and a colonoscopy and I'm afraid there is some bad news. You've got two huge haemorrhoids. The cure, some Preparation H®, soft toilet paper and a cushion.’ Mr Grey smiled his clinical smile again. He could see that the Mayor wasn't convinced. ‘The good news is that you're going to live!’

‘Oh, thank God, Doctor, thank you, thank you.’ For a moment the Mayor thought he might cry.

‘They are often brought on by stress. You need to relax more. I will run a biopsy on the tissue samples we took but don't worry it's all going to be OK. Just try to relax, please.’

‘Yes, relax, sure I'll relax, maybe take up yoga.’

The Mayor felt giddy with relief. He left the hospital with a newfound spring in his step. Now he knew that he wasn't dying any time soon the pain had almost vanished.

Randle, his chauffeur, held open the rear door of the Mayoral Mercedes for him. He ducked inside and then settled into the plush seats. He might try and see his luck with Mrs Lynch tonight. Things were looking up.

His mobile began to vibrate silently. His heart sank: as it was Bovind.

‘Hi Richard. It's Kirk. Hope it was good news.’

How did he know that he had been to the hospital?

‘Hello Kirk,’ he said wearily.

‘You sound like you need a good night's sleep. Listen, I've got a march planned for next Saturday, biggest ever faith march in Britain, in support of your education plans. Third Wavers and Muslims coming together: it's going to be huge. We need to show support now that we have the naysayers and the atheists attacking the great work you're doing.’

The Mayor had no idea what Bovind was talking about. ‘What naysayers?’

‘You need to put on the TV but don't worry about them. It's exactly how I planned it.’

‘I don't know about a march, shouldn't we just keep this low profile. The city is in good shape and anyway all marches go through the Chief Constable. I doubt he'll give permission at such short notice, they require overtime for the policing and weeks of notice.’

‘Chief Constable Mulholland is a Third Waver, he's fully onboard. Just wanted to give you the heads up. And don't worry, we're going make this town more famous than Fallujah! Oh, and Mayor, turn on the TV, I know you've got one in that nice Merc.’

The line clicked dead.

He turned on the TV in the headrest. It was already tuned to BBC News.

There was a man being interviewed. Mayor Lynch recognised him immediately. It was Professor Cannon, the leading evolutionary geneticists working today and perhaps the most famous and celebrated atheist on the planet. The sound was muted but Mayor Lynch could tell from the contorted face of Professor Cannon that he was working himself up into a righteous fury. He turned the sound on.

‘ – Mayor Lynch has dragged a twenty-first-century British city back into the Bronze Age. Myth and superstition have replaced rationality and logic, the forces of barbarism have been let loose like a cultural tsunami and the children of that city are the victims and all because Mayor Lynch was prepared to sell the future of his children to some religious pied piper selling ignorance and stupidity. Mayor Lynch is to the enlightenment what the Black Death was to the population of Europe. That's why I am pleased to announce that the faculty members of Liverpool University have asked me to address their annual fundraising dinner at St Georges Hall next Saturday. I want that meeting to become a focal point for rationality and opposition to this medieval mayor. I look forward to seeing as many of Liverpool's rational citizens there as possible.’

The Mayor turned off the TV. He felt a sharp pain in his right hand side and gasped.

Randles's voice came through on the intercom. ‘Where to Mayor?’

‘Hell in a handcart,’ mumbled the Mayor.

CHAPTER 21

Pete had already been at the Grapes for some time when Erasmus arrived. He was sitting at his usual table, back to the wall with a bottle of red on the table and a battered paperback,
The Third Policemen
, in his hands.

He gave Erasmus a lopsided grin. ‘I hear you've been given the boot. Something to do with harassing a member of the clergy, I hear. Very noble.’ He was bellowing as usual and some of the other regulars looked up and laughed when they saw Erasmus. He had a feeling Pete had taken some delight in telling the story of his friend, the lawyer, who had been barred from a church.

Pete gave a hoarse laugh borne of too many roll ups.

‘Temporary suspension of our business relationship. The firm are going after the Bovind Foundation account. And wait until I tell you about my encounter with those nutcases.’

Erasmus told Pete about the school and the Pastor.