The Trinity (36 page)

“Sorry, I should have it here somewhere.” He pulls the wallet triumphantly from the inner pocket of his black leather coat. “Ah, here it is. How much did you say the fare was?”

As the cab driver turns to read his meter, Crowley grabs him from behind and in an instant puts one arm around his neck to choke him. With his other gloved hand, he manipulates the driver’s head until his neck snaps.

It is the one lesson he kept from his father, who taught the young Alexander self defense all through junior high, as he was sure he would be picked on later in life.

The cab driver dies instantly. His head slumps down, and he looks as if he’s taking a nap.

Crowley reaches over the seat and turns off the ignition.

“Cheers.” He leaves the taxi and goes to find his two young protégés.

They are standing at the gate of the Jewish cemetery attached to the synagogue. Chris is standing with his hands in his pockets, shivering from the still cold morning; it is not quite 10:30 a.m. Brad is holding the bag just as Crowley did, with a tremendous amount of delicacy.

“Excellent, excellent,” the priest says, surveying the cemetery, which is perhaps only an acre, with a wooded rise in the middle, providing a shelter from the view of the motorists and pedestrians who may happen along the wide boulevard and narrow sidewalk.

Crowley reaches into the duffel bag and pulls out a manila envelope containing a handwritten letter, another letter done by Brad per the priest’s instructions over the phone on the previous Friday. He attaches the letter to the granite face of the cemetery gate with a roll of tape that he has in a pocket of his jacket.

He will reveal the contents to Chris later, when circumstances deem the knowledge necessary.

They enter the cemetery, Crowley walking in the front, Chris and Brad walking behind him side by side. Crowley leads them to the center of the cemetery.

He points to a spot of bare ground next to a flower-strewn headstone, and Brad gently deposits the bag. He then grabs the two young men and tells them to form a circle with their hands. Awkwardly, they do, and Crowley looks to the sky and asks Odin to guide them and protect them as they do his bidding, returning the northern part of Europe to its rightful heirs and banishing all interlopers from Odin’s realm.

Chris shudders as a passing cloud covers the sun at the conclusion of Crowley’s plea to Valhalla, as if Odin is acknowledging the priest.

Crowley opens up the bag and retrieves the wine bottles. He deposits them haphazardly around the trees that provide them shelter. He then takes his crude pipe bombs, made with the material he has been collecting, and deposits them next to the bottles.

Slowly and deliberately, he ties them all together with a 60-yard spool of ignition wire that he managed to buy through the mail from a granite supply company in the States, the kind of wire quarrymen use to tie dynamite caps to blast rock.

The company wouldn’t ship explosives overseas. He did inquire.

He connects a wick to each of the four pipe bombs and places gasoline soaked handkerchiefs in the tops of the wine bottles, to serve as crude wicks for those as well. He then takes a leftover wine bottle and pours gasoline on the trunks of the nearby trees.

Chris and Brad stand by wordlessly and watch him. They know from observing his clumsiness that he is a novice in the realm of pyrotechnics.

Brad lights a cigarette. “You want to blow us all up, you common idiot?” Crowley barks, and Hinckley immediately stomps out the cigarette. He keeps stomping until even the smoke is extinguished.

Finally, the pipe bombs and wine bottles are arranged to Crowley’s satisfaction. They have been in the cemetery for half an hour and Chris can hear the Glasgow roar, the cacophonous sounds of traffic that don’t quite overpower the collected voices of the pedestrians that drift over the cemetery from the sidewalk.

Crowley douses the Umbro bag and leaves it in the center. It is now empty, and he no longer has any use for it. He walks with the spool of wire trailing behind him, making a path towards the cemetery gate. Brad and Chris hurry along beside him, too afraid to stay behind him, in case they, too, somehow become ignited.

The spool runs out just inside the gate, and in the full view of passersby who take no notice, Crowley asks for Brad’s lighter. Brad fumbles it out of his pants pocket and hands it to the priest, who holds the end of the wire in his right hand.

“No,” says the priest. “You want to be part of this, you light it.”

Brad lights the wire. Chris is shaking. He notes that Hinckley is as calm as bathwater.

The wire hisses and they follow Crowley out of the gate. Chris wants to run, but Crowley walks as if he were walking down the aisle during the opening procession of a Mass.

They are just ten yards away when they hear the pipe bombs go off, a near deafening roar. The pedestrians freeze, but the automobile traffic moves on. The pedestrians only stop for a moment as they write off the noise as just another sound of urban civilization.

They are almost a full block away when they turn and see the smoke rising from the cemetery, and a block and a half away when they hear the sound of sirens.

Crowley grins broadly. He walks between Brad and Chris, his arms around them.

Constable Robertson arrives in his little storefront station half an hour before Holliday is due to arrive.

He turns on the lights. The fluorescents hum and seem so out of place in the century-old building. Robertson plugs in the hotplate and takes a mug and rinses it out in the sink and readies it for a cup of tea. It is Saturday. His office is usually closed and calls are forwarded to the station in Brechin, but he does come in on occasion if there has been a bit of trouble the night before or if there are reports to write or follow-up calls to make.

The kettle whistles after what seems an eternity and he pours the tea. The steam from the clean but stained mug rises and ends at his furrowed brow. He bobs the tea bag up and down and discards it in the lined wastebasket next to his desk, pours some milk and adds more than his usual amount of sugar, as he is trying to build up the energy and maybe a little courage to confront the priest.

He goes over to the teletype and rips up the accumulated paper. He scans the items line by line and looks for what is germane to his part of the country.

He sees the word “Trinity” and stops. He reads of the murder of the cab driver, of the fire in a Jewish cemetery in Glasgow, a city that seems worlds away to him, full of industry and commerce and pestilence. It is not known if the murder of the cab driver is related to the desecration of the cemetery, but it is assumed, and the investigations are intertwined. There is mention of a note left on the cemetery gate, and that is where the name “Trinity” is drawn from, but the contents of the note are not printed for the rest of law enforcement in Great Britain.

Holliday will know, thinks Robertson. He’ll have all the details on the tip of his tongue, have them as part of his intimate knowledge.

He is somewhat comforted by the fact that the crimes occurred on a Saturday, making it unlikely that Crowley is indeed responsible, as he has Mass to perform Saturday afternoon. That would take the problem away from his attention, and his life and work would return to normal, as leisurely as a cup of tea with someone he has known for years stopping in at the station.

He checks the time on the report, approximately 10:45 a.m. He sighs. There was plenty of time for Crowley to return to Lutherkirk, plenty of time to perform Mass.

He looks out the window and sees two Americans walking down the street, a husband and a wife, older, senior enlisted, he guesses. The man doesn’t have the slender or genteel look of an officer. He is slightly pudgy and mustached with silver-rimmed glasses. They live in the village. Robertson has seen them about, but they occupy that parallel universe of America that floats through the Lutherkirk air. He doesn’t bother to memorize their names, as they will be gone suddenly, transferred to another part of the world. The man sees Robertson in the window and smiles and waves. He has seen the constable before. He recognizes and respects the uniform.

Typically, the constable would return the smile and the wave. But not now. He has developed a subconscious resentment for Americans. If the Americans weren’t here, none of this vileness would have happened. There would have been no murders, no rocks thrown through windows, no grotesque suicide in a cottage just outside his wee little village. Life would have progressed with nary a ripple.

He pretends not to see the Americans. He looks at the top of his desk and shuffles some papers.

Holliday arrives as the sun sets. His white Cortina pulls up in front of the station and he parks not quite parallel to the curb.

“Wouldn’t dream of doing that back in Dundee,” he says. “Kind of nice to be up here in the country and not have to worry about such things.”

“No, we just have racist priests sailing around the bloody country leaving a bloody wake in their trail,” Robertson says with a hint of a smile.

Holliday laughs, and coughs as he loses his breath in a guffaw. He wheezes for a moment and his face turns red, but in an instant, his composure returns. “As soon as I retire, I’m giving up the fags.” He points at a box of cigarettes tucked into his shirt pocket. He is wearing a tweed jacket that at one time fit him quite nicely but now hugs him at the waist and in the shoulders and it is too short in the sleeves. He is wearing a striped and faded blue shirt and a wide maroon tie. None of the three articles of clothing match his gray trousers, but the disorder of his attire is just part of the overall essence of the inspector, so he doesn’t really come across as looking peculiar at all.

“Tea?” asks Robertson, pointing to the kettle on the hotplate next to his desk.

“That would be fine,” replies the inspector. “We had better develop a plan of attack before going to see this priest bloke.” He looks at his watch and sits in a chair in front of Robertson’s desk, crossing his legs and making himself as comfortable as possible in a padded metal chair.

Robertson plugs in the hotplate and rinses another mug for the inspector. He returns to his desk. “I suppose you know about Glasgow?”

“Yes, I do. I think our friend is getting nasty again.”

“But we have no proof.”

“Correct. We have no proof.”

“I’m a bit out of my league here. How do we get proof?”

“Well, usually someone has to tell us something. The last time we visited our good American priest, he seemed to like to talk, but not about the truth. So we talk in his fashion—not dishonest, but misleading.”

“How do you mean?”

“Follow my lead when I talk, and you’ll see, but I want you to remain as close as possible to the door, just in case.”

“If he bolts?”

“Yes, or if someone else comes in.”

They are silent as the kettle comes to a boil. Robertson stands to make the tea, but Holliday puts up his hand, telling him to stay seated, that he will fend for himself. The inspector stands up and re-hitches his sagging pants as far over his vast stomach as possible. He makes himself tea. A little milk, a lot of sugar.

He sits down, retrieves a cigarette from his pocket, and offers one to the constable.

Robertson shakes his head and slides a clean ashtray across the desk for the inspector to use. “You know,” says the constable, “he may not be involved. To go all the way to Glasgow on a day he normally works—granted, he doesn’t work until late in the afternoon—would be a bit unusual. Unless he knew what he was going to do, and had it planned to the minute. What did the note say, by the way?”

“Oh, yes.” Holliday pulls a wad of paper from inside his jacket. “An old friend of mine in the Strathclyde department called me. They have armies of racists in that bloody city, but the armies don’t have a wide number of targets to choose from. Just some Pakis, some Turks, a few blacks, you know, transplants from the West Indies, no large population. Never, ever, has he seen something so randomly violent as this.” Holliday relays more information to the constable, the crude pipe bombs and wine bottles, the discarded athletic bag, the cab driver murdered and the letter, a chilling and worrisome letter, promising more things to come.