Gospel Truths Read online

  Praise for the Novels of J. G. Sandom

  GOSPEL TRUTHS

  “Sandom’s masterful first novel, based on a true incident, spins a complicated web of corruption, greed, and deception that connects international banking, high Vatican officials, notorious fascist scoundrels, and the London police… in a search for a lost Gnostic gospel that could topple the Church. By turns contemplative, descriptive, and emotive, this mixture of mystery and intrigue reveals intense preparation and fine writing.” —Library Journal

  “A splendid, tautly woven thriller… An intelligent mystery of tremendous spiritual and literary depth.” —Booklist

  “A fascinating, highly involved and detailed mystery… A captivating and engrossing novel.” —Mostly Murder

  THE HUNTING CLUB

  “A gripping story, well told… Not only a tale of murder and betrayal, but an intelligent exploration of issues of male identity.” —Scott Turow

  “Slickly entertaining, right down to the last, inevitable twist.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Terrific! Flawless…A seductive and hypnotic story that compels attention from the first page to the last.” —Robert Nathan

  “Sandom writes with stunning elegance and nearly poetic beauty…A sure hit with any suspense reader.” —Booklist

  ALSO BY J. G. SANDOM

  The Hunting Club

  The Unresolved

  For Zane and Else

  Even the most matter-of-fact contents of consciousness have a penumbra of uncertainty around them. Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be.

  CARL G. JUNG

  Man and His Symbols

  Prologue

  AMIENS, FRANCE

  May 20th, 1990

  IT RAINED AS MAURICE DUVAL DROVE HIS BATTERED BLUE Peugeot through the gate behind Place Saint Michel, onto the crackling gravel drive which skirted the cathedral and the ancient Bishop’s Palace. As he neared the palace, Maurice dropped his cigarette through the open window. The rain was falling fiercely. The white stone window frames glimmered dimly between muddy brick. The wet slate roof shimmered through the trees. Maurice cut the engine and the car crawled to a stop.

  Behind the falling rain, the sound of organ music swelled the evening air. Someone was practicing late, he thought. The night watchman was nowhere to be seen. Maurice slipped his porkpie hat onto his head and took the pistol out again, to check the ammunition, to calm himself.

  Above the southern wing of the palace, the rose of the cathedral’s transept window glowed red and cobalt blue. In a year or more the renovation of the palace would be finished, and a trade school would replace the emptiness. But Maurice knew that to the farmers and fishermen of the province the building would always remain the Bishop’s Palace. The emblem of Picardie was a snail, after all, and despite its name a bishop had not slept within the residence for a hundred years. The windows were boarded shut, the walls emblazoned with graffiti. He closed the car door noiselessly and headed for the southern wing.

  A cement mixer stood by the door leading down into the basement. Maurice hesitated. Was he too late? He pulled a flashlight from his jacket and turned it on. The basement door was closed but he could clearly see a piece of paper wadding stuffed beside the bolt. The organ music had stopped. Cold rain washed the palace walls. He pressed his elbow to his side to feel the gun again. Then he opened the door and stepped inside.

  The air in the basement was sweet with Noviganth and other chemicals. Empty Kronenbourg beer bottles lay strewn across the floor and on the dusty windowsills which faced the outer palace square. Maurice moved through the room, illuminating the corners with his flashlight. He had almost reached the door leading up into the palace when he saw the hole. It had been neatly concealed behind a pile of earth, cut in the ground right at the foot of the southern wall. He walked slowly across the basement wing and shone the flashlight down into the opening. A piece of corrugated iron partially blocked the shaft, but he could still make out a kind of tunnel, hemmed in by stones. He tossed his hat on the ground and began to kick the dirt roughly to the side.

  It took him only a few minutes to lift the corrugated iron high enough for him to slip down into the opening. He moved headfirst, the flashlight bouncing in his hand as he dragged himself along on his belly. Suddenly the organ music echoed up the passage, and he realized he was moving underneath the cobbled road between the palace and the great cathedral.

  He crawled forward for another fifteen meters in this fashion when he sensed the air grow fresher about his face. The stone tunnel turned abruptly to the left. Then, just as suddenly, it opened onto a larger corridor below him. He shone the flashlight through the darkness. The floor of the corridor was a good two-meter drop from the mouth of the tunnel.

  Maurice lowered himself carefully down into the corridor. As he turned, he saw the lintel of a narrow doorway to his left. It led into a small room, a closet really, around which ran a low stone bench.

  Beyond the closet the corridor curved sharply to the right. Maurice started slowly up the darkened passage. The music seemed louder now, and for the first time he realized that it was not particularly good, just a patternless series of notes, an endless repetition.

  He turned the flashlight off and crouched clumsily against the wall. Someone else was in the passage up ahead.

  Whoever he was, wherever he was, the stranger moved quietly. Then he stopped.

  Perhaps a minute passed before Maurice could hear the stranger move again. There was the sound of cloth on cloth, of metal on stone. He switched the flashlight on, aiming it into the darkness like a weapon.

  A man’s face turned to face the glare, his arms laden with objects—a book, a scroll, a golden cross. His eyes were charged with terror as he leapt into the light.

  Maurice pulled out his gun just as the cross descended, glittering. The flashlight tumbled from his hand, dragging the darkness down. He pulled the trigger to the sound of breaking glass.

  There was a dull thud as the two men came together, and then the cold retreating echo of a cry.

  “That was close.” Father Marchelidon lifted his hands from the keyboard. He glanced through the opening in the wall of the organ room to the cathedral floor below. The sound of thunder followed. “Did you hear that?”

  The bearded man beside him shrugged. “The wind,” he suggested. “Thunder and wind.”

  “It sounded like a scream,” the priest said.

  “Someone heard your playing.” The bearded man laughed and clamped an arm about his companion’s narrow shoulders. “The ghost of Antoine Avernier, no doubt. Have I told you the story of his death? It’s one of my best. He carved the choir stalls, you know.”

  “Save it for the tourists, Guy.” The priest looked down again into the dark basilica. Nothing stirred and yet the shadows seemed a little longer, the cathedral colder.

  The night watchman shone his flashlight through the windshield of the blue Peugeot. He had not noticed it pull in, and this worried him. It was his boss’s car.

  “Maurice?” The rain fell heavily from the darkness above, stinging his eyes. There was no answer. “Maurice.” He shone his flashlight round the square and sighed. It was a lonely job, night watchman, not suited to his friendly temperament, his unfashionable sense of camaraderie.

  He turned from the car and began to walk back toward the Bishop’s Palace. The basement door was slightly ajar. He ran his fingernails along the gap. This was unusual. This was wrong.

  With another sigh he leaned down, careful to support his back, and picked up a piece of rain
-soaked scrap wood from the ground. If it were the Flichy boys again, he would need it. They had evil temperaments, he thought, unsuited to anything but petty crime and pimping. They would end up dead someday, not just dead but casual dead, in an alley, in an oily harbor with their pockets empty. He opened the door.

  Perhaps he had had too much again. But it was cold for May, he told himself. And besides, his bottle was his only stalwart friend these days, the only ally left.

  The light bounced off the far wall and returned. He scanned the basement carefully, the corners and the windowsills. Then he smiled and called out loudly once again, “Maurice.” There was no answer. He checked the door to the main part of the palace. It was locked. He turned away and in that movement he resolved, as he had done already twice that month, that he would leave the bottle home next time. He was too old to rely upon his reflexes alone, to think his instincts would preserve him as they had done in Vietnam and in Algeria. The breaking of a twig had saved him once, the splinter of a palm across the path. But the Flichy boys would never give him that. They were too cautious, and providence had left his life a droplet at a time.

  The night watchman moved back through the basement room, not once aware of the two hands which pushed the dirt up slowly from below, until the hole in which Maurice had vanished only thirty minutes earlier had disappeared from view, until the ground was smooth and featureless and almost all was as it had been.

  Part I

  Chapter I

  LONDON

  August 10th, 1991

  HE WAS LATE, OR EVERYONE ELSE WAS EARLY ONCE again. Nigel Lyman dug his elbows into his sides and leaned into the morning, moving with the cadence of a military parade. He was not a particularly tall man, but there was a solidity about his body, a tightness of the neck and shoulders, that lent itself by nature to this kind of grim, determined walk. He moved as if to prove the definition of a line.

  A fierce breeze plucked the rain, and as Lyman walked he pointed his umbrella at a dozen different clouds, jabbing at the fickle wind. The sidewalk was almost empty. Most of the city was at work already, save for a few resilient shoppers, the tardy secretaries, the intentionally lost. The street coursed dreamily along, the shop walls rising to the rain, the gray slate roofs and grayer sky of London.

  Lyman turned off the street and entered the police station. A small crowd waited by the lift. He passed them with a terse hello, and noticed—as he headed for the stairwell at the back—that a line of water trailed his wet umbrella down the hall. It was going to be one of those days, again.

  He took the steps two at a time, trying to ignore the dark familiar landmarks of the first few floors, the sergeant constable on duty, the holding cells, the paperwork policemen, where Dotty Taylor worked with rows and rows of numbers in accounting.

  When he reached the fourth floor, he stopped and took his scarf and coat off, dropping them delicately across a battery of pipes near the door. Then he hung up his umbrella, the bent spoke closest to the wall.

  No one gave him much more than a passing glance as he entered the office, but Lyman knew they registered his presence. It was almost ten A.M. Some were just too polite, he thought, too bloody shy, or too embarrassed to say anything. Some really didn’t care. And then there were the rest, who hoped that one day his apparent lack of gumption would be noticed but who refused to drag his failings from the shadows by themselves, afraid perhaps that adding peccadillos to his already damning sins might seem vindictive.

  He walked between the rows of desks. Eight policemen shared the office, and most sat with their faces turned away, trying not to look at Lyman. Some read reports with studied concentration. Some talked in whispers on the telephone.

  Lyman sat down at his metal desk. It was the tidiest in the room, the surface empty save for an ancient telephone, an ashtray, and a battered old PC.

  “Starting early,” Inspector Blackwell said beside him.

  Lyman turned, facing Blackwell and the open window. It was always open, sun or snow. He reached into his pocket, removed a tin of licorice, and popped one in his mouth.

  “By the by,” continued Blackwell, “Chief Superintendent Cocksedge wants to see you. As soon as you come in. Hello. Are you there?”

  Lyman frowned. “When did Cocksedge poke around?”

  “Poke?” Blackwell’s eyebrows seemed to skate across his forehead. “The detective chief superintendent does not poke. His representatives may poke. He delegates. He confers.”

  “Just answer the question, Blackwell.”

  “He sent the Lemur down at nine.”

  “Thanks,” Lyman answered in a kind of cough. His head hurt. It had hurt since late last night, or even longer. He pushed his chair away from the desk.

  “I won fifty pounds in the football pool yesterday,” Blackwell crowed.

  Lyman ran his fingers through his hair. It was still thick, just grayer round the edges, like burnt paper. “Good for bloody you.”

  “Now I can pay you back that twenty quid.”

  Lyman straightened his suit jacket. “Wrong again, Blackwell. It’s I owe you.”

  Inspector Blackwell smiled. “There you go,” he said. “Clever lad. And when exactly, if I may ask, are you going to pay me?”

  Lyman glanced down at his shoes. They were soaked through. He turned and headed for the door.

  “Give him our best,” Blackwell called after him. “And don’t forget my money.”

  Detective Chief Superintendent of Police Brian R. Cocksedge, late of the Royal Navy, was fond of quoting Siegfried Sassoon in a dramatic baritone whenever he was struck by the oppressive realization that Man was, comparatively speaking, barely out of the trees of Africa. At times, especially when he had been upstaged again by the New Scotland Yard, he would stand firmly in the doorway of his office, pitching his voice at no one in particular. “‘When the first man,’” he’d cry, “‘who wasn’t quite an ape/Felt magnanimity and prayed for more,/The world’s redemption stood, in human shape,/With darkness done and betterment before.’”

  Nigel Lyman reflected on this as he waited for the lift. He had never really cared for Siegfried Sassoon. To him redemption was a dubious exercise, an almost Arthurian quest, one which had little to do with real human motivation, and therefore even less to do with crime.

  He pressed the button for the lift again and uttered a faithless prayer that the chief superintendent was not in one of his discoursing moods again. Indeed, he thought, given a choice between a grim oration and a short farewell, he would prefer the door. What else could it mean? he asked himself. It was amazing he had lasted quite this long. The lift doors creaked open.

  The chief superintendent’s secretary, Mrs. Clanger, eyed him with a codlike, blinkless stare. “Ah, Mr. Lyman,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure you have the time? I mean, after all.” She looked at her wide-faced watch.

  Lyman tried to usher up the smile of a conspirator. “Sorry I’m late. I had an early meeting across the river.”

  Mrs. Clanger did not soften. A moment passed, and finally she poked her vintage intercom and announced his presence.

  “Right. Send him through,” the chief superintendent bellowed in response.

  Lyman walked briskly across the room and opened the door. The chief superintendent’s office was cluttered and ill lit, but Lyman took in the details with a single practiced glance: an overfull metal file cabinet; a faded rose-and-foliage shade atop a standing lamp; several photographs in neat walnut frames, mostly old navy friends and famous personages; a sizable portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, artist unknown; a rugger ribbon; an honorary degree from Bristol University; green curtains, standard issue; and a massive coatrack and umbrella stand, barely visible beneath several coats of various weights and textures.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Cocksedge stood at the window behind his desk, staring out into the wet gray street. Lollipop crosswalk lights blinked on and off below, lending his already waxy countenance an orange patina. “Nasty, isn’t it,
” he said, pulling at his narrow mustache.

  “All week,” Lyman answered.

  “Yes. All week.” Suddenly Cocksedge turned fully round. His face was long and pale, with a pair of creases running up and down both sides of his forehead, like poorly sewn seams. “Good for pike fishing though, eh, Lyman?” He took a reluctant step toward his desk. “It says here you’re a …” His hand flipped through a file. “A ‘fisherman of some experience,’ whatever that means. Surely every boy in England over five years old is a fisherman of ‘some experience.’ What do those people in personnel do all day? It’s beyond me, I’m sure.”

  Lyman remained silent.

  Chief Superintendent Cocksedge sighed loudly. He pulled his chair out and sat formally behind his desk. “I’ll be honest with you, Lyman. You’re in a bloody mess.”

  “I know, sir.”

  The chief superintendent raised a hand. “Don’t interrupt me, dammit. I’m trying to help you, Lyman. I’m on your side.” He turned to the beginning of what Lyman gathered was his file.

  There was that picture of his ex-wife, Jackie, on her old bicycle, Lyman noticed. It was stapled to a set of crinkled yellow pages. Personnel always used yellow for dependents. Lyman wondered if there were some logic to the color.

  “Now,” the chief superintendent continued. “There are certain gentlemen here at City of London and at Metropolitan who are of the opinion that Nigel Lyman’s talents are on the wane, that after a promising beginning he has fiddled away his career.” He scanned Lyman’s face. “I am not one of them,” he added gravely. “Of course, I won’t pretend to understand your personal feelings concerning that ghastly business in the Falklands. Frankly, and I say this as a father as well as a former officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, I don’t believe it should have anything to do with the business at hand, with getting the job done. The Falklands war was nine years ago. Think of the boys who died last year and this year in Kuwait. Your son’s death, tragic as it was, was but one part of the price we all pay for decency in this country.”