Night Sessions, The (18 page)

“I've no reason to doubt it.”

“OK, OK,” said Campbell. “Tell you what. If the cops turn up here I'll ping you. Otherwise, assume all's fine. And there's no need to call me if you do see anyone acting suspicious. Call the cops if you think there's any threat to—well, you know. And if you think it is a cop, undercover or whatever, just tell me tomorrow.”

“Fine. See you in the morning, then.”

“If we're spared,” said Campbell.

Cornelius and Emere came out of the Thai restaurant to a dark evening and a chill breeze off the lake, carrying a sulphurous whiff from the bay.

“A drink, then head home?” said Emere, slipping a hand under his elbow.

“Sure,” said Cornelius. “The Pleasant Fucker?”

“That'll do,” said Emere.

They turned the corner into Arawa Street. The Pheasant Plucker was a little way up. Emere stopped at one of the sidewalk tables, one hand on the back of a chair.

“It's cold,” said Cornelius.

“I need a smoke,” said Emere.

“What'll be your other poison, then?” Cornelius asked.

“Gin and tonic,” said Emere.

Vermuelen stepped into the warm interior. Dim light, a fire, the smell of roasting meat. As he stood at the bar waiting for his pint and Emere's G&T, he heard loud American voices from one of the restaurant tables and glanced over. A half-dozen or so men were in the middle of dinner. One of them, he saw with surprise, was Brian Walker. Cornelius had seen some of the others around town—owners of stores, car dealerships, outdoor activities centres, that sort of thing. He was surprised to see Walker among them—most of the American exiles around here were militant Protestants of various kinds, Baptists and Adventists and Reconstructionists. They were the kind of people who were constantly hatching anti-US plots, not all of them imaginary. The conversation was, predictably enough, about the outrages of the secularist regime in the US.

Walker noticed Vermuelen looking, and responded with a cold stare, as if it were Vermuelen who was out of place. Vermuelen nodded, turned his back, took his drinks and went out.

Shortly after nine on Sunday morning Grace Mazvabo, as was her habit, hopped off the tram at the West End stop that was still called St. John's. She crossed Princes Street and went down the steps beside the big ornate building now called the West End Venue, and into Princes Street Gardens. No one else was about in the park. The sun was bright, the air already warming to the low twenties Celsius. The first fall of leaves littered the path. Grey squirrels checked her out, figured she wasn't about to drop them a crust, and hightailed off in low leaps like stitches of fluff. She strolled along, in plenty of time, the Ross Bandstand below on her right, the Castle on its basalt plug above. There was something about the Castle that always called to Grace's
mind her deepest sense of assurance, in its fusion of geology and history, its literally sheer dominance of the landscape, its projected might the ancient and medieval equivalent of a strategic nuclear deterrent. How crucial the strong castles of the princes and lords, the walled towns of the burghers, had been for the Reformation.
Ein feste burg ist einser Gott
, indeed. While it stood she could easily believe that the College a hundred or so metres downslope from it, and the Kirk yet farther down its glacial flank, would some day regain their lost prominence.

Not, of course, in the old way—not to be an Establishment, let alone a temporal dictatorship of the Kirk Sessions, or a perpetual grey cloud drizzling on the nation's spirit. Nothing like that. But just to take its place again as a respected voice, a part of the conversation, acknowledged to have something to bring to the table. A point of view, worked out in living connection with a tradition entwined inextricably with the nation's past all the way back to Columba's coracle precariously ferrying the faith across the Irish Sea. In rejecting and disdaining that voice, holding it in too much contempt even to take the trouble of silencing it, the nation had lost a way of making sense of itself. And it wasn't as though the Church of Scotland, or Scotland's other mainstream Churches and indeed other religions, had done anything to deserve the Great Rejection. They'd been innocent victims, collateral damage, caught up in the blast radius of recrimination against the Dominionists and Dispensationalists, the Scientific Creationists and Christian Zionists, the corrupt and cynical elements of the Roman hierarchy, the Islamist jihadis and the Third Temple zealots and all the rest who'd done the real damage in the Faith Wars. And now it was in danger of happening all over again.

It just wasn't fair.

Such thoughts as these, comforting and familar even as they rankled, passed through Grace's mind as she walked the same path that she walked six days a week, Sunday to Friday. But as she walked she became aware that the treacherous little voice in her head was having none of it. She knew that voice very well, had known it since she was a little girl in Bulawayo, and (unlike some people she could mention) she knew it wasn't the voice of the Devil. It was the voice of a part of her mind that felt it wasn't being listened to. It didn't always speak the truth, it didn't always deserve a hearing, but it would only go away if it wasn't ignored. It came and went over the months and years, depending on how troubled her mind was. This time, she'd had that small unbidden voice in her head for a couple of days now, ever since DI Ferguson had inveigled her into playing that silly game on the iThink.

What the little voice had been saying was:
You don't have free will.
Now, that was ridiculous—the Predictor game itself had a ReadMe that explained how the trick was done. All that was happening was that her phone clip was picking up faint electrical traces of the
readiness potential
, a neuronal surge preceding and preparing the flexure of her finger. Even pressing the key was redundant—the light would come on if she tapped the desk instead. It was no more spooky than—in fact, it was exactly the same as—the way the phone clip enabled her to control the iThink, or tab and select on her frames, every day. The ReadMe had links to decades of discussions of the effect's much-contested philosophical implications, all the way back to the original Libet experiment in 1985.

From long and sometimes anguished rethinking of her Calvinist heritage, as well as her engagement with the philosophical naturalism that had become the default assumption for almost the entire academy, Grace Mazvabo had long since settled down to an easy acceptance that determinism was compatible with—as the philosopher Dennett had put it—any kind of free will worth wanting.

And yet, and yet…The light going on that maddening, almost imperceptible, but unarguable third of a second
before
she'd even
decided
to press the key seemed to mock such philosophical reassurance, and to let the little voice taunt her with an echo of her own words to the leki:
You're still a machine, a deterministic system.

Towards the end of the path, near the steps up to the Mound, Grace paused for a moment to eye one of her favourite statues. A lovely woman, leaning forward, two children at her flowing skirt, one of her hands holding out a book, the other hand open. It had no name on the plinth, and Grace could let her fancy read it as Education, or Motherhood, or even the Church as it had been and might some day be again, welcoming her children back into her arms.

This particular Sunday morning, though, the sunlight caught the statue's smiling eyes and made them wink, and its stone lips said in a voice that no one but Grace would hear:
Don't you recognise me, after all this time? You know who I am!

Grace looked back at the statue, shaking inside. The statue now seemed far older than its undoubted Victorian origin, a goddess from antiquity who had stood calm and firm through the two millennia of Christianity, and was now quite at home and at one with the age, her time come round again.

“Yes, Sophia,” Grace Mazvabo whispered. “I know who you are.”

She turned away and almost ran up the steps, the sphinxes on the roof of the National Gallery returning a stony gaze to her anxious eyes.

Ferguson found a vacant pew near the back of the church, nodded to the uniformed PC nearby, and sat down. The place smelled of polished wood and old paper, with a faint whiff of bodies and clothes. The congregation arrived during the quarter-hour before the service was due to begin. By the time they'd all settled, the church, though far from packed, was decently full: about three hundred, Ferguson reckoned. The social composition was skewed: towards older rather than younger, female rather than male, European and African rather than Asian, upper rather than lower working class. But it wasn't that distorted a sample of Edinburgh's population. Adolescents and younger adults tended to dress casually. Parents, grandparents and young children were dressed to the nines, as if living up to some ideal of Sunday best. It took Ferguson a while to spot Grace Mazvabo. The professor, whom he'd last seen in a plain grey top and trousers, was quite startlingly attired in a vivid bottle-green jacket and skirt, a similarly garish gold blouse, and a broad green straw hat. She noticed him, narrowed her eyes, acknowledged him with a curt nod.

Ferguson remained seated through the service. He didn't know when to stand and when to sit, and he wasn't joining in the hymns and prayers anyway. Nor, unlike the PC, was he ostentatiously taking notes of Reverend Dow's sermon. He let the whole thing wash over him while idly admiring the vaulting and the stained glass.

He left just before the end and waited by the door. Most of the congregation had dispersed by the time Grace Mazvabo came out. She didn't look pleased to see him.

“Back with the God Squads, are we?” she asked, with a sideways glare at the sub-machine-gun-toting PC on the church step.

“Here to see you,” Ferguson said. “We have to talk. Discreetly.”

Mazvabo considered this. “All right,” she said. “Not right now. I'm going back in to tidy up.”

“Fine. I'll take a wander around the churchyard and I'll see you…where?”

“Martyrs’ Monument. The one that got vandalised. It's in the wall down there on the left. Can't miss it. Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

A slow orbit of the churchyard brought him to the place in fifteen minutes. Mazvabo wasn't there. Ferguson stood and read the inscription, faded by erosion and pollution, obscured by lichen and now by the red slogan sprayed diagonally across it. It began:

Halt paffenger, take heed what you do fee,
Thif tomb doth fhew, for what fome men did die.

The rhyme went on like that, solemn and steady and precise. At the foot, the inscription broke into prose:

From May 27th 1671 that the moft noble Marquis of Argyle was beheaded, to the 17th of Feb.ry 1688 that Mr. James Renwick fuffered, were one way or other Murdered and Deftroyed for the fame Caufe, about eighteen thoufand: of whom were execute at
Edinburgh,
about an hundred of Noblemen, Gentlemen, Minifters and Others, noble Martyrs for JESUS CHRIST. The moft of them lie here.

Ferguson was still trying to figure out the rule for writing “s” as “f” when he heard the gravel-crunch of Mazvabo's approach. She walked up, a handbag on her arm and a big black Bible in her hand, stood beside him and looked at the monument.

“It's impressive, in its way,” he said. “No pomp.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Were eighteen thousand really killed?”

“It's arguable,” said Mazvabo. “The number of executions, even including summary executions, was in the low hundreds, and that's often been used to discredit figures like this. But the inscription doesn't claim eighteen thousand executions, does it? If you include exile—voluntary, as it's been called—banishment, privation, death in often one-sided battle, enslavement in the West Indies and all the rest under ‘one way or other murdered and destroyed,’ then the figure is not as wild an exaggeration as some would like to make out. It's always easy to talk down the real numbers by talking up the official figures. And don't I know it! How many judicial political executions were there under Robert Mugabe? None! How many unjust deaths was he responsible for? It's arguable, but it was a lot more than none.”

Ferguson nodded. “I've…had to give such matters some thought myself.”

“I'll bet you have!” said Mazvabo. “Have you ever repented of them?”

“That's for another day,” Ferguson said.

“You may not
have
another day,” Mazvabo said. “That's one thing the old preachers got right.”

Ferguson turned to her. “No. It really is for another day.” He jerked his
chin at the monument. “The Third Covenant sect—do you really think they're inspired by traditions like this?”

“This, and more. They'll be steeped in the Killing Time, from books, sermons, tales. Martyrdom is a powerful meme, inspector. It reproduces itself.”

“But why now? What is there to be martyred for?”

Mazvabo gestured toward the PC at the door of the church, with his yellow jacket and black SMG. “You have to ask?”

“You know fine, that's for your protection. It isn't like the old days.”

“And the policeman inside, taking notes? That took me back to the old days all right. A real nostalgia trip, inspector!”

“There's an element of that,” Ferguson conceded. “It isn't the main thing the force has in mind. But to the extent that it is, it's a response to two murders and threats of worse, of
suicide bombing
, for God's sake, coming from inside the very heritage of this very church, a tradition glorified right here where we're standing now. So let's not get sidetracked from my question. Before any of this happened, what could motivate people to start killing again? Make them willing to be martyrs again?”

“You have to look at it from their point of view,” said Mazvabo. “They see the Churches as having compromised with the secularist state, accepting a marginal position in society and being grateful that they're not actively persecuted. It's true, the Church of Scotland and the rest may strive to reverse the Great Rejection, but we aren't even metaphorically up in arms about it. In a way, we've gained from disestablishment. You saw the congregation today. Nobody's here for the social cachet, quite the opposite. Going to church is very much not the done thing. We do it because we believe in it. We're not ashamed of our faith and we make sure that everyone knows it. That's why most of us dress for the occasion. It's the only reason why I put on this rather, ah, conspicuous suit and hat every Sunday and carry my old mission-school Bible-knowledge-prize Bible, even though we hardly ever read from the Authorised Version in church.”