Silver (18 page)

“What do you need, boss?”

“Run the number on this SIM card for me, last call made, last one received.” He recited the three strings of numbers printed on the back of the card and waited while Lethe did his thing. It took a couple of minutes. In that time Frost looked around the room. Even discounting the body on the bed it was aterly sad room, white built-in wardrobes around the bed, from corner to corner and up to the ceiling. He opened a few of the cupboards and the night stand drawer. There was nothing particularly out of place in any of them, clothes and the junk of life shoved away in drawers to be forgotten about. She had been reading Agatha Christie. She’d never know who did it, Frost thought. He walked across to the window and looked out over the backyard. The word yard (in terms of grass and flowers and greenery) was a bit of a misnomer. It was a patch of cracked paving and unruly weeds fenced in by rotten wood that had been painted with brilliant white emulsion. The slats of wood looked like Papa Death’s rictus grinning up at him.

“Okay, here we go,” Lethe said in his ear, breaking his macabre chain of thought. “Last call in was from a cell phone registered to one Miles Devere. You recognize the name?”

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” Frost said, running the name through his memory. “Check him out though, just to be on the safe side.”

“Will do. Right, so, last call out, now this is interesting  
. . .” Lethe broke off. Frost could hear the sound of his fingers rattling off the keys beneath them. “Last call out was to the Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse, a bonded warehouse down by the Canning Docks. And what’s interesting about that, I hear you ask? Well, that was abandoned in 1983 and condemned in 2006. It’s a ruin. They had a campaign in the ’90s to try and stop the decay of all these old buildings that were built during the Industrial Revolution. Stop the Rot it was called. They made a lot of noise about preserving our heritage, but I don’t think they had a lot of luck—certainly not in this case. Nicholls is due to be torn down and replaced by luxury apartments. The phone was reconnected twelve days ago. So riddle me this, boss: why would a derelict building suddenly need a working telephone?”

“Running a line into the site office as they get ready for the demolition,” Frost said.

“Oh, go on then, take all the fun out of it with a practical answer, why don’t you?”

Outside, Frost heard the doppler of a siren rising and falling as it raced through the night. It could have been more than four or five streets away, and it was getting closer all the time. He resisted the urge to run. They weren’t coming for him. Sirens were as common as takeouts in this part of the city. He could think of a dozen reasons off the top of his head why they were heading anywhere but here, to this two-up two-down terraced house with the dead woman lying in a whorish sprawl on her bloody sheets. But with each heartbeat the sirens grew louder, and he knew each of those dozen reasons was wrong.

“Okay, Jude. I think I’m in a bit of trouble here,” he said, walking over to the door. The sirens couldn’t have been more than a street away. “Tell me the plod aren’t on the way here. Lie to me if you have to.”

“You really want me to lie?” Frost could hear the humor in his voice. He was enjoying this far too much. “Well, then, three squad cars most definitely haven’t been scrambled to number 11 Halsey Road, the last known residence of one Tristan James, ex of this parish, and his wife Wilma and their eight-month-old son, Marcus. No police on their way whatsoever. You might as well put your feet up and watch TV. Nothing exciting is going to happen whatsoever.”

“You’re not a very convincing liar,” Frost said.

The door downstairs opened.

Frost backed into the room. Whichever way he looked at it, being found in the house with the dead girl wasn’t good. He moved slowly toward the window. “Can you see out there?”

“In two seconds I’ll be able to.”

Frost didn’t know how Lethe did what he did, probably hooking into a Defense satellite and or something equally illegal and frightening. The boy had a way with machines. All that really mattered to Frost right then was that Lethe was his eyes and ears. He wouldn’t be able to get out of the house without him.

“Give me their positions,” he whispered into the headset, barely daring to vocalize the words. He tried the window, but it had been painted shut. He pushed against the frame but there was no way it was going to give without making a god-awful racket. The last thing he wanted to do was let everyone in the house know exactly where he was.

He crept back to the bedroom door, doing his best to keep his weight distribution even so that the floorboards didn’t betray him. He could hear them moving about downstairs, working their way through the rooms. They sounded nervous, pumped up, ready for a fight. They were talking loudly, barking instructions at each other. He stood absolutely still. No way this was going to end well. They’d be listening for the slightest out of place sound. The way he figured, he had at best a minute before they came upstairs. The place wasn’t that big, and there weren’t that many places to hide. It would take no time to sweep through the downstairs, and given the all-pervasive reek, they all knew they were in a death house. They were expecting to find a corpse. They weren’t expecting him to be there. If he startled them, it could all go south very quickly. “Lethe,” he breathed, “please tell me they didn’t send a Tactical Response Unit.”

“No guns,” the voice in his ear assured him.

That was one less thing to worry about. He heard them clumping about beneath him—which meant he had less than half a minute to get out of the house. He couldn’t just run down the stairs and out the front door, no matter how much the simplicity of the idea appealed. They would be on to him before he was halfway down the stairs. He didn’t really want to have to explain what he was doing in the house. But, for that matter, he didn’t really want to shoot anyone either. So it was all about not being caught.

“Three cars in the street out front,” Lethe whispered in his ear. Frost almost laughed at the younger man’s theatrics. It wasn’t as though it was Lethe who was standing over a corpse, separated from half a dozen policemen by a few inches of wood and plasterboard. “Two men are still outside. One is heading around the side of the house, going for the backdoor. That means three are inside.”

Three wasn’t a good number.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Frost whispered, rubbing at his forehead. “Can you do something? Cause a distraction?”

Without waiting for an answer, Frost crept across the landing. He ignored the baby’s room; the window there looked out onto the front of the house. That left the bathroom which, as he had expected, had a tiny fly-window that was neither for use nor ornament. Frost started to reach around for his gun, ready to shoot his way out if he had to, when he saw the chair half across the bathroom doorway. Again he was struck by how out of place it was. He looked up. There was a small loft access hatch in the ceiling directly above it. The hatch was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. He didn’t have a lot of choice. It was that or charge down the stairs guns blazing straight onto the evening news.

Frost heard the downstairs backdoor opening.

The cops had done the first sweep.

They were talking now. He could hear every muffled word they said.

“You check upstairs,” one of them said. Frost heard the crackle of a radio. They were sending in a situation report: downstairs all-clear.

Frost didn’t wait for the sound of the first footsteps on the stairs. He stood on the chair and reached up. Placing the flats of his palms on the wood he pushed slightly, lifting it less than an inch clear and eased it aside. Moving quickly, he gripped the sides of the loft hatch and pulled himself up, swinging his legs inide the hole as he heard the heavy sound of the policeman climbing the stairs. He didn’t have time to slide the hatch all the way back in place. All he could do was ease it across so that it covered most of the hole and hope no one looked up. Frost lay on his back in the dark, listening to the sound of the search beneath him. The chair was still directly under the hatch, but there was nothing he could do about it so it wasn’t worth worrying about. He lay on his back, his Browning cradled against his chest.

“Oh, sweet Lord,” he heard, followed by the hacking sound of a man heaving his guts up. More footsteps on the stairs, running this time. Frost risked rolling onto his side, and put his eye to the crack. He couldn’t see much through the narrow gap, the shoulder of one uniformed officer and part of the back of another. “Trust me, you really don’t want to go in there.”

“Damn,” another muttered, backing out of the room.

Frost didn’t dare breathe. All it would take was for one of them to realize the chair was out of place and to look up. And because he didn’t dare breathe, the smell clawed its way into his lungs, trying to force him to. He closed his eyes, willing them to go back downstairs. He couldn’t exactly hide in the loft space forever, and soon the place would be swarming with forensics and crime scene investigators. One of them
would
look up. They would see that the hatch was out of place, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He tried to think. His prints were all over the house, but he hadn’t touched the woman or the bed. But he had touched the window, her phone, the door handle. Had he touched the balustrade? Had he touched anything downstairs? He cursed himself for being an idiot.

“What kind of animal would do something like that to a woman?”

That was a damned good question.

Frost had spent enough time around killers to know that this kind of murder needed hatred to fuel it. It wasn’t just about killing. Using a knife made it intimate. Slashing once or twice was hard, being forced to look into the eyes of your victim while they fought you, but slashing forty or fifty times? Opening up the woman like she was some kind of medical exhibit? That was more like an autopsy than a killing. That took rage.

“Vince,” one of the voices beneath him said. “I think you better take a look at this.”

They moved out of his line of sight. They were in the nursery.

The darkness above him was filled with the sound of his breathing. It was so loud in his ears he couldn’t believe they couldn’t hear it down there.

“Now would be a really good time to give me that bloody distraction,” Frost rasped. The words came out like a prayer.

Lethe was listening.

15

This Garden

Then
-
The Testimony of

Menahem ben Jair

The boy looked up at his father, adoration in his eyes.

Jair had never been able to look up at his own father that way. What did it feel like to look up into the face that you would grow into? It was a simple right every boy deserved. But then, Jair had never known his father. He had been murdered before Jair was born. This garden was the only place he felt close to him. Jair came here at night sometimes and imagined the sigh of the wind through the olive branches was his father’s voice. His mother had begged him time and again not to come, not to dwell in the past. It was a place for ghosts, she said. He didn’t know whether she meant the past or this garden, or both. It didn’t matter. She was a ghost herself now. When he picked up one of the scattered stones he couldn’t help but wonder if it had been the one that had killed his father. He felt out the sharp edges with his thumb. More than once he had clutched a stone and driven it against his temple, trying to feel the same pain Judas must have felt, but he couldn’t. All the stones in the world couldn’t capture his father’s pain because it wasn’t physical. He knew that better than anyone.

Father and son walked hand in hand through the olive arch into Gethsemane.

The garden was in bloom. All around them color rioted, the clashes ranging from the subtle to the raw. He took a deep breath and led Menahem across the garden toward a small, white stone shrine. The grass was mottled with golden spots of light where the sun filtered down through the canopy of leaves. Every fragrance imaginable surrounded them. Despite the heat, the man shivered. The shrine had seen better days. The face of the saint had mildewed. A few trinkets had been laid out around the shrine in offering: a figurine made out of olive twigs and bound with reed, a nail, a fragment of slate marked with the cross, and a coin. That was his offering, a remembrance of the second man in the garden’s tragedy. Everyone remembered the betrayal but forgot the sacrifice. His son clutched his hand tighter, as though sensing his discomfort. There was a simple affection to the gesture, but it wasn’t strong enough to save a man’s soul.

He ruffled the boy’s hair. It was a rare moment of affection from the man. He didn’t know how to be a father. It wasn’t that his mother, Mary, had not loved him. She had. She had loved him more than enough for any child. But he wore his father’s face. Every day he grew more and more like the man she had loved, and it reminded her more and more acutely of what she had lost. He was a living ghost. Just by being close, by sitting in her lap and looking up at her, by smiling the same smile his father had smiled, he brought it all back. He was her grief as well as her joy. How could that not damage the bond between them?

“Do as o, boy,” he said, and knelt, bowing his head in quiet reflection. He stayed that way for the longest time.

Onlookers might have thought they were offering a prayer to the betrayed Messiah like so many others who made the pilgrimage to the garden. They weren’t. Jair was remembering the father he had never known while the boy was enjoying the closeness of his. It was the simplest of all pleasures. “The others may forget, but I will remember,” Jair promised the ghosts of the garden. “Others may hate, but I will love.” The words were more than just a promise; they were the gospel of a dead man. “Others may be blind, but I shall see.” He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but there were no tears. It was so strange to think that this was where love ended.

He looked at his son then, and all he felt was sadness. The boy was growing up so quickly. He was old enough now to know truth from lie. That was why he had brought him here. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms wide. The boy scurried forward and threw himself into his father’s embrace. The hug seemed to last and last, until finally the man broke away. “It’s time I told you what happened here.”

Jair reached into the folds of his road-stained robes and withdrew the battered leather pouch his mother had given him. He had been the same age as Menahem when she brought him here to tell him about his father. Until that day she had never talked about him. He felt the weight of silver in his hand. The coins had fascinated him when he was younger. Now he found them curiously comforting. He set the pouch on the ground between them. As best as he could remember they were sitting in the same corner, perhaps even under the same tree. She would have approved. She was one for symmetry, signs and circles.

“This is where my father died,” he said. “Twice.”

“I don’t understand,” the boy said.

And why should he? Jair thought, looking for the words to explain. “He died once in spirit, and then again in flesh, blood and bone. They talk about the resurrection of Jesus, they glory in the man who lived twice, but they forget my father, the man who died twice. First they broke his soul, forcing him to honor a promise, and then, when he was reduced to a shell of a man they broke that shell, battering it with stones. But we few, we remember. My father was an agent of Sophia. Do you understand what it means to say that?”

The boy shook his head.

“Sophia is Divine Wisdom, the Knowledge of God. So when I say Judas Iscariot was an agent of Sophia, I mean that he worked for the Divine Purpose.”

“He was carrying out God’s will?” the boy asked.

“Exactly. Think about the story you know, the Messiah on the cross, the resurrection—without your grandfather’s betrayal there could be no resurrection. Without the death and the resurrection the sins of man could never have been cleansed. There could be no new faith without Judas, Menahem. Don’t ever forget that truth. He gave everything, and is reviled for it.” He emptied the silver coins onto the grass and spread them out with his fingers. “All because of this.”

“Money?”

“Money given to him by the High Priest, Caiaphas, in return for the kiss that identified his friend, Jesus. They paint him as a villain now, because of these coins, but it was never so. Here, on the night before the kiss, Jesus drew my father aside and begged him to be strong, for already he was beginning to falter. You see, this betrayal, this agony thrust upon him, was not of his doing.” Jair had so much he wanted the boy to understand but it was so hard to find the words. “They were like brothers, their love thicker than blood. Your grandmother stood between them. She adored them both, these two great men. All these new lies have risen, but this is her truth, and from today it is yours to remember. Do not let the world forget, boy, and don’t let them convince you otherwise; they were friends into death. That is the only truth. Do not let the world forget it.”

“I will not, father, I promise,” the boy said solemnly.

Jair smiled gently. “I know, my son. I know.”

“Then what happened?” Menahem asked, as though it was any other story he had heard and wanted to know the end of.

“After the fighting in the temple Jesus was a marked man. The Pharisees could not abide this man who walked among the poor people, spreading a message of love without fear. Without fear, boy, that is the important thing here. Love without fear. Love without avarice. Love without stricture. He took them out of the temples, bringing them back to the earth. He was their teacher. He hated what they had done to his god, how they had taken him away from the people and hid him in their huge temples and their false idols. He wanted people to worship the natural wonder, not its manmade face.” Jair picked up one of the stones and turned it over in his hand so the boy might see. “Look at this stone, see it properly, see the miracle of time and attrition and earthly forces that had to come together to press it into this final form. That, boy, is a miracle worthy of God. Putting them two by two atop one another to make a wall, that is just sense. Do you see the difference?”

The boy thought about it for a moment. “Yes, father,” he said, eventually. “The stone was always there, whatever shape we choose for it. Like the tree. By itself it can offer comfort and shade, bear fruit and provide, or the carpenter can reshape it to match his needs.”

Jair smiled. The boy had a sharp mind. “And which is the miracle?”

“The first, the tree.”

“But they are both creations, are they not?”

“No father. One is creation, the other is recreation.”

“Very good, Menahem. Very good.” Jair’s smile widened. He wondered if he had grasped the concept so readily when he was the boy’s age. He doubted it. “The Nazarene was recreating the god of their book, taking him out of the temples and into the fields, back to his original wonders, and reminding them that they did not need stone temples to glorify him. That frightened the Pharisees. Inside the temples they had control of the people. Strip them of their temples and you strip them of their power. Worse, change the way people think of their god, make him this caring father instead of some distant wrathful deity who purged the world with flood and plague, and you take away the fear. Without power, without fear, these men were nothing. And that more than anything frightened them.”

“So they wanted Jesus dead?”

“Exactly. They wanted to strip away everything that made him special, assuming that whatever remained would prove to be as craven as they themselves were. They couldn’t grasp the notion of sacrifice. It was outside of their philosophy. So to make him suffer, they made the people who followed him suffer. After his attack on the money-lenders the Pharisees turned their anger onto the people who listened to the message of this new caring god, and they hurt them.

“So here, in this garden, Jesus turned to your grandfather and begged him to help put an end to their suffering. Even though it meant ending his own life. Judas did not want to betray his friend. What man would? But what choice did he have? The people he loved were suffering. The Pharisees were persecuting them in his name, promising that the suffering would only end when Jesus was silenced. They spread lies and hate. They used both to undermine the truth enough to have people turning back to the temple for protection. It was all about fear with them. Always fear.

“So, together these two friends conceived of a plan that would end the tyranny of the temple once and for all. And they did it here, in this arden, the same place my father would surrender his friend to the soldiers, the same place the stones of the disciples would end his life. Here, in this garden.”

Eyes wide, the boy looked around as though seeing the place for the first time. Where there had been trees and shrubs he saw ghosts. Jair remembered that sensation. He remembered thinking he had seen his father incline his head just slightly and smile as his mother gave him the coins. The mind had a way of giving you what you needed most. He wondered who the boy saw.

“That promise destroyed my father. It killed the man he had been. Killed the kindness and the humor and everything mother loved him for. For the rest of his life he was a shell, a husk, a broken man. Not that there was much life left to him. Mother met him on the road here. He knew they were waiting for him. He knew they were going to kill him. She begged him to leave, to run, but he wouldn’t because he wanted to die.”

Something bothered the boy.

“What is it, son?”

“Why didn’t Jesus surrender himself? Why did he need grandfather to deliver him?” Menahem asked earnestly.

That was a question that had bothered Jair for most of his adult life. He had seen people spit at his mother, so called holy men, and curse her and call her a whore. It had cut deep. The Pharisees looking to smear her. He had asked his mother why Judas had to die for this other man with his new religion. Because she knew both men better than anyone, he thought she might have the answer. She gave him the only answer that made any sense: “Because he doubted himself. He doubted his own strength. Jesus needed someone at his side to be sure he went through with it. He wasn’t merely surrendering, he was sacrificing himself. He needed to know he wasn’t alone. So that was the sacrifice your grandfather made. He gave himself so that his friend could end the tyranny of the Pharisees.” And for that she allowed them to spit at her and call her whore.