The Bosch Deception Page 15

  Father Dominic’s stomach growled a welcome, his hand resting against his cassock. ‘Bless you, my child. Have you come for me to hear your confession?’

  The person nodded, hardly visible through the metal grille, the voice a low whisper.

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  ‘When was your last confession?’

  ‘Many years ago.’

  Father Dominic shifted his position; the bench was hard on a bony posterior. ‘But you are here today and want to repent of your sins?’

  Again the low whisper, impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sins have you committed, my child?’

  There was a momentary pause before the person continued. ‘I am guilty of anger and pride. I have been very lonely for a long time, Father. Too much alone …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘… I have slept with women, even paid for a prostitute. It was wrong, Father, but I was lonely, a long way from home, and I needed comfort.’

  The same old story, the priest thought. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No. And I have dark thoughts, terrible thoughts, Father.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Hatred.’

  ‘You must rid yourself of these thoughts. They are an insult to God—’

  ‘But I can’t rid myself of them,’ the voice replied, ‘and I have such bad dreams. Every night the dreams come. Always the same.’

  Father Dominic shifted his position, and his stomach growled again. Embarrassed, he touched his belly, pressing his finger into it in the hope of stopping the noise. He would hurry this along, he thought, then eat.

  ‘God forgives everything. I will give you a penance—’

  ‘There’s more, Father.’

  There would be, the priest thought, irritated. ‘Go on, my child.’

  ‘This is my confession and as such you cannot break my confidence. What I tell you, you can tell no one else.’

  Father Dominic nodded. ‘I cannot break the oath of the confessional, no.’

  ‘It would be our secret.’

  ‘Yes. Apart from us, only God would know.’

  There was a long pause. For a moment Father Dominic thought the person had left, slipped silently out of the booth, but then the voice continued.

  ‘I let someone down. I should have helped them and I didn’t. I did in the end, but by then it was too late.’ The whispering paused, took in a slow breath. ‘I live with that – knowing I could have saved a life and didn’t.’

  Wrong-footed, the priest found himself taken aback. This was not what he had expected. ‘Did you take a life?’

  ‘No. I watched someone else take a life.’

  ‘Have you told the police about this?’

  ‘Yes, Father, I told the police. But it was a long time ago and everyone’s forgotten it now. I was punished, but that wasn’t right – the real culprits got away with it …’ Again a long pause, a blurred image behind the grille, Father Dominic straining to see who was talking. And failing.

  ‘Did you give false witness?’

  ‘No!’ the whisperer said sharply. ‘I told the truth.’

  ‘Then God will punish the evildoers.’

  ‘But will He, Father?’

  Sudden anger in the priest’s voice. ‘You doubt God?’

  ‘Why should I believe in Him when He allows such injustice?’

  ‘It is not our place to question God!’

  The whispered voice continued. ‘Did Father Luke believe that too?’

  A sick feeling crept over the priest, a curdling memory stirring at the back of his mind. He felt suddenly claustrophobic in the booth and attempted to loosen his white dog collar, his hand shaking. The confines of the confessional were closing in on him, the musty smell of wood and furniture polish sticking in his throat.

  ‘Father Luke is dead.’

  ‘I know. He was murdered outside the Brompton Oratory only the other day,’ the voice replied softly. ‘How does it feel to have lost your ally, Father? To know that God does catch up with evildoers in the end. And that next time it will be your turn—’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You know me, Father Dominic,’ the voice said, suddenly no longer a whisper but a voice the priest knew only too well.

  ‘Laverne!’

  ‘Yes. And before you decide to leave the confessional in a hurry, think again,’ Nicholas said coldly, ‘and listen to what I have to say. I know what you did. What I exposed ten years ago was the truth—’

  ‘You went to the press! You attacked a priest, you abused the Eucharist. You tried to discredit the Catholic Church, of which you were a serving member.’

  ‘You and your kind discredited the Church long before I blew the whistle. I thought I could stop what you were doing, but I left it too late. Patrick Gerin died.’

  ‘He committed suicide!’

  ‘He was murdered!’ Nicholas retorted. ‘You know it and I know it. If you didn’t put the rope around his neck, you drove him to it. And no one wanted to know. Instead I was made out to be lunatic, a fantasist. Well, the Church might have gagged me once, but not this time. You’re trying to keep me quiet again. Trying to stop me going public with what I know. You lied, priest. You lied to the police—’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You told them that I’d phoned Father Luke, implied that I wanted to settle an old score with him. You set me up—’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Forgive me for not believing you.’

  ‘A man did call him – I overheard the conversation,’ Father Dominic blundered on, his hands pressed against the grille which separated them. ‘He said it was you. Father Luke said it was you. He believed it was Nicholas Laverne.’

  ‘It wasn’t. Besides, he would have recognised my voice.’

  ‘From so long ago? No, Father Luke was getting deaf, he had trouble with voices.’ The priest was pleading, clinging to the grille. ‘Believe me, he thought it was you. He was afraid, he was older, he had—’

  ‘A bad conscience.’

  ‘We didn’t do anything!’ Father Dominic replied. ‘It was just discipline. We weren’t bad priests, not like those you hear about sexually abusing boys—’

  ‘Someone else said that. As though it lessened what you two did.’ Nicholas was thinking rapidly. He could see that the priest was afraid and was telling the truth. Someone had rung St Barnabas’s church, posing as him. And Father Luke would have believed them, thinking Nicholas was coming back to take his revenge. But it hadn’t been him.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ persisted Father Dominic. ‘I was only trying to help the police when I told them about the phone call. It was the natural assumption to make. You’d been our enemy once, you could be our enemy again.’

  ‘But why now? After so long?’ Nicholas asked, trying to find out what the priest knew and if he would give himself away about the Bosch secret.

  ‘I don’t know why you came back!’

  ‘I didn’t come back.’

  ‘Someone came back. Someone posing as you.’ Father Dominic was panicking, shaking. ‘No one expected to hear from you again. We thought it was all in the past. It was old history from ten years ago. We thought it was forgotten …’

  Nicholas slumped back on the bench. He had been sure that he had been framed by the Church, the death of Father Luke the means to silence him. After all, another scandal would be devastating to a religious order that had been tainted by recent claims of abuse. An order that had seen some of its highest members go unpunished.

  But if the Church hadn’t set him up, who had?

  Nicholas looked back at the grille, the priest’s hands still pressed against it. ‘Don’t lie to me—’

  ‘I’m not lying!’ the priest cried. ‘I swear I’m not lying. Someone killed Father Luke, and if it wasn’t you, who was it?’

  Nicholas pressed his own palms against the grille, feeling the priest’s flesh hot against his skin. ‘Swear it! On your
soul, swear that you are telling the truth. If you lie to me now I’ll find out, and I’ll send you to Hell personally.’

  Forty-Five

  Mark Spencer had to admit that Honor had pissed him off with the crack about looking down her blouse, but he wasn’t deterred. He liked her too much to give up and was eager to find a way to impress her. Which had just fallen into his lap. Having overheard her phone conversation, Mark had picked up on the name Carel Honthorst, and his unrelenting curiosity had done the rest.

  So now he was standing in the doorway of Honor’s office, smiling as she turned round.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said coolly. ‘D’you want something?’

  ‘No, I’m about to help you,’ he replied, sliding into the room and leaning against the window. The daylight didn’t flatter him, the sun beaming through his thinning hair and shining on his scalp. ‘I heard you mention someone called Honthorst.’

  She nodded, wary. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He was an old client of ours.’

  Now she was listening as Mark parted company with the window and perched on the side of her desk.

  ‘He was up for assault eight years ago. Slashed a man’s face in a pub. His father was a Dutch farmer and Honthorst was shoved into the Catholic Church to cool him down when he was a kid. He became a priest, but left soon after. Has a terribly fierce faith apparently. But he never talks about it – being godly doesn’t really tally with the kind of business he moved into.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Debt collecting.’

  ‘Wow!’ Honor said simply. ‘What happened to the charge of assault?’

  ‘Victim dropped it. I reckon he thought it wasn’t worth it, that he might end up with a Stanley knife in his face if it went to court. Since then, we’ve heard nothing from Carel Honthorst.’ Mark was happy with his performance. ‘But I remember him well. Huge man. Had something wrong with his skin. Pock-marked, or burnt. He used some kind of stuff to try and cover it up, but it looked awful. Not that anyone would tell him that.’ Mark paused, thinking back. ‘Joking apart, he was fucking terrifying.’

  So this was the man Nicholas had mentioned – the man who had followed her brother. The man who was apparently working for the art world and the Church.

  ‘Do we have an address for him?’

  ‘Why?’ Mark replied. ‘I’ve told you, he’s dangerous. Besides, any address we had all those years ago probably wouldn’t be relevant now … Anyway, why d’you want to know about him?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing important. His name just cropped up when I was talking to a client.’

  The lie caught on Mark’s internal radar, like a fly frying on a butcher’s light.

  ‘Why would Carel Honthorst come up in a fraud case?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Honor said lightly, turning back to her work. ‘Thanks for the information, Mark – thanks a lot.’

  But her thoughts weren’t on the case, instead they were on what she had said to Nicholas. It had been unforgivable, but for an instant she had doubted him. After all, they had lived different lives for years. What did she really know about her brother? Where he had been. What he had done. Who knew how badly exile had damaged him? He had unnerved her talking about the Church and people following him. And the crucifix …

  That had been the real worry – Nicholas talking about a crucifix that had suddenly appeared in his bed. It wasn’t possible for someone to break in, unheard, place a cross in a bed and then disappear. And Father Michael had been asleep, so it hadn’t been him. But that wasn’t all that was worrying Honor – it was the conversation:

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘The crucifix I gave you—’

  ‘Was in my bed …’

  But it couldn’t have been, Honor thought. Because she had never bought him a crucifix …

  So did that make her brother a liar? Or a madman?

  Forty-Six

  Old Bond Street, London

  It was snowing unexpectedly, the white flakes coming down fast. Then, just as suddenly, the rain started, drumming like a thousand tom-toms on the windows of Old Bond Street. Locking the front door of the gallery, Hiram Kaminski turned up the central heating and moved back into his office, settling down behind his desk. Judith was away, visiting her sister in Brighton, unwilling to leave him alone until Hiram insisted.

  ‘Get out for the day,’ he had told her. ‘Get some sea air – it will do you good.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

  He had put his head on one side, regarding her. ‘What can happen in a day? We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened—’

  ‘Thomas Littlejohn sent us those damn notes—’

  ‘And poor Thomas is dead.’ Hiram had replied. ‘He can’t tell anyone about us. He can’t tell anyone where he sent the secret. Besides, the letter sat next door for three months, my dear. If someone had been watching us, they would have acted long before this.’ He was confident, dismissive. ‘Remember what we decided? The copies of the Bosch papers have been put in the bank. No one knows about them. And no one knows where they are.’

  ‘So who has the originals?’ Judith asked smartly. ‘Someone must have them.’ She had crossed her arms, defiant. ‘Don’t talk to me as though I’m a fool, Hiram. I understand our position perfectly. Thomas Littlejohn, Claude Devereux and Sabine Monette are all dead. Murdered. That’s no coincidence.’

  ‘We don’t know that it’s about the secret—’

  ‘What else could it be about? The price of plums?’ she snapped, irritated.

  ‘Philip Preston has the chain – he’s putting it up for auction. Why shouldn’t he have the papers too?’ Hiram asked. ‘He’s a sly man is Philip, a born negotiator. Think of the money he could raise with that exposé. Or then again, a man like that could be persuaded to keep it suppressed – for a fee. I don’t suppose the art world or the Catholic Church would like to see it splashed all over the newspapers.’

  She had thought for a moment, almost convinced. ‘You think we’re all right?’

  He had nodded. ‘I think we’re all right.’ He had kissed her gently. ‘Go to your sister’s and have a day out. Please, forget all this for a few hours.’

  But now Hiram was feeling lonely, rather regretting his insistence. As usual the gallery had closed at five, and although he had wanted time to work on the accounts, he was soon restless. Having bought a sandwich from a nearby cafe, he made himself a coffee and perched on the high bar stool in the back kitchen. The view was depressing, the grungy back of the opposite building a morose and uniform grey. Silently he chewed his sandwich, checking the time on his watch. Judith would be back around nine.

  His coffee wasn’t to his liking. Hiram preferred a finer grind, but that was his wife’s department. Good thing to have, he thought – a wife. Judith could be irritating, but he loved her. Always had done. And when she gave him a daughter, Helen, he was a happy man. In fact, Hiram thought, staring out at the blank view, he had been pretty lucky.

  A light came on suddenly in a window of the opposite building and he glanced up as it was opened. He couldn’t see anyone, but jumped when the window was slammed shut again. The noise startled the pigeons on the rooftops, a shuffle of birds rising up towards the glowering sky.

  Hiram finished his sandwich and moved back into his office. Tiredness came over him, a full stomach and the long hours making their presence felt. Yawning, he leaned back in his leather chair and, a moment later, slid into sleep.

  Forty-Seven

  It had stopped raining at last and the evening was dank and icily cold. Walking quickly, Sidney Elliott lit a cigarette and paused at the end of the street. It was a long time since he had been in London, his life revolving around his consultancy work for Cambridge University and his estranged family. A wife and two daughters lived in what used to be the family home, the house which had sucked money from him for over thirteen years. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife had been a chemist before they had married
; after the ink had dried on the licence, she had given in her notice at the laboratory and got pregnant.

  The first baby was born with problems. As was the second child. Not life-threatening, just learning problems and balance troubles. Problems that had required extensive and expensive treatment. As the children had gradually recovered, the marriage had gone on a respirator. No one pulled the plug, because Sidney wanted to believe that he could regain his family, that the wasted years could be retrieved. That his spectacular career – held in abeyance because of hospital visits and menial overtime jobs – could be reignited.

  As for his wife, Sara wasn’t going to tell Sidney that the marriage was over and had been for many years. Her estranged husband was paying the mortgage and the medical bills. When their daughters were old enough, Sara would divorce him, But not a moment before. The day came, of course. She told him, of course. And Sidney Elliott stood looking at his wife, at this woman who had taken a machete to his career and a cleaver to his emotions, and he had wanted to kill her.

  His stammering had increased from that day. His stoop intensified and he cut off all contact with Sara. Not so with his daughters, although over the following years they grew away from the round-shouldered, acerbic man who was always quizzing them about their mother.

  Was she seeing anyone?

  Did she go out?

  Was she happy?

  He made them nervous, edgy. He was demanding, imperious, then pleading. He was their father, but not a father of whom they could be proud. This man was just the pathetic remnant of their mother’s machinations.

  Then finally, one day at the end of a long summer, Sidney called to see his ex-wife. She was sitting in the garden, sunbathing in a spotted bikini with the radio playing beside her. Her skin was smooth, without a wrinkle, a testament to idleness and egotism. And before he could stop himself, he kicked over the sun lounger she was lying on and sent her sprawling into a bed of roses and well-rotted manure. The next day Sara took out a court order forbidding Sidney from coming within a hundred yards of her.