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By Root 766 0

He peeled off his soaked clothing and showered and went to find fresh underwear in the bag still unpacked from France on his bed. He unzipped the bag and felt the bulk of its hidden cargo between his folded clothes immediately. Black, voluminous in finely printed pages, it was an old and much-used missal. He held it in his upturned hand and allowed it to open itself against the spine. It did so on a dark green bookmark. But it wasn’t a bookmark at all, when he picked it out. It was a British Library pass, carrying the faded stamp of the British Museum and made out in ink turned violet by age to someone called Susan Green.

He dropped the pass back into the missal and noticed with a frown that it marked the start of the funeral liturgy. Closing and turning the book in his hand, he looked at the embossed cover, the heraldic defiance of a Maltese Cross still visible, stamped in the hide. He opened the missal to the flyleaf. Lascalles’ name was written there, and under it the date of his ordination. And there also, in much more recent ink, was written a telephone number and the prefix for France.

There was a phone in his room. He dialed the number. More of Covey’s money tolled across Europe through the night as Seaton waited for an answer. The phone at the other end rang forever. When it was answered, the Franciscan was not roused, in greeting Seaton, to his familiar chuckle of bonhomie. ‘Ach, you have almost killed the Monsignor, you and your gefallene Engel friend.’

The mountain accent was hard, mulish.

‘Please, Brother.’

‘He sleeps.’

Seaton closed his eyes. ‘Then wake him.’

He waited through another eternity of Dr Malcom Covey’s metred time. Or was it Professor Covey’s largesse, measured out in children’s treats and legitimate travel expenses? He could see Covey, right enough, at the wheel of a vintage Delage. He could see the white walls of the tyres and smell the hide on the seats. But he had met Malcolm Covey, shaken hands with the flesh and blood of him. And he knew with a certainty that Covey was a man. Fat men didn’t wrinkle like the thin. But Covey, fat as he was, was surely nowhere over fifty. Seaton closed his eyes. Figures and algebraic letters danced and flickered in chrome yellow on the blackness of his lids.

‘Paul?’

‘He was a genius, Father. Their boy. Their sacrificial. He was taken precisely because of who he was.’

‘Not who he was, Paul. He was taken because of what he would have become.’

And Seaton understood. His legs dumped him, strength-less, on the bed next to his bag. He understood. He had to fight to breathe. He held the reciever of the phone against his ear, suddenly dumb. It was the vaccine Peter Morgan might have developed. It was the surgical procedure he could have pioneered, the disease for which he would have found a cure. They had bartered with the Devil over the good for mankind in him. Their sacrificial had been chosen with precise and infinite care.

‘And the girls?’ Seaton did not recognise his own voice.

‘What do you think?’

The peace treaty that one of them would broker, Seaton thought. The campaign against some awful endemic corruption. The life-changing charity that one of them might found.

‘What should I do, Father?’

‘Bury the boy. Make him safe. Put him, finally, to rest. Do this and I believe the evil emanating from that place will altogether cease.’

‘I’m not a priest.’

Lascalles laughed. It sounded awful, the lonely amusement of a dying man, a last consolatory gasp at life. ‘You are what you are, Paul,’ he said. ‘Being what you are, I have every faith that you will find a way.’

The phone went dead. Seaton knew that he could spend the entire night redialing and its cloistered ring would still remain ignored in the mountain keep. He had everything that the Jesuit Lascalles was going to give him. Give them. He sleeps, the Franciscan had said. And soon his body, at least, would enjoy the profound rest of the dead. He had survived to the age of a hundred, waiting for the promise of what Seaton and Mason had been chosen to accomplish. He had endured patiently from the moment