Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower. Simon Toyne

on the leylandii in Bonnie and Myron’s garden. The increasingly warm summers were drying out the ground and weakening root systems. Sharp, cold periods were allowing these cankers and other forms of rot to take lethal hold on even the strongest of trees. You could cut out canker if you got it early enough, but by the looks of it this tree was already too far gone.

      Liv laid her hand gently on the trunk and inhaled deeply on her cigarette. The smell of the sap on her fingers mingled with the smoke. In her mind she saw the cypress burning where it stood, branches twisting and blackening, hungry flames licking at the red sap as it boiled and hissed. She looked at the silent car park, checking she was still alone, spooked by what her imagination had just conjured up. She put it down to her own fragile emotional state, coupled with the exhaustion of witnessing a ‘natural’ labour that had ended with white-coated men whisking Bonnie to a waiting ventouse. At least both babies, a boy and a girl, were healthy and well. It wasn’t quite the story Liv had set out to write, but she guessed it would do. It certainly had plenty of drama. She remembered the moment when she had pulled the emergency cord.

      Then she remembered the call.

      She’d had the cell for years. It was so old she could barely send a text, let alone take a picture or surf the net with it. Not many people even knew she had it. Fewer still possessed its ex-directory number. She ran through the very short list of those who did while she waited for it to get up to speed.

      Liv had adopted what she called her ‘home and away’ system shortly after starting work on the crime desk. The very first story she’d covered had required her to chase down and interview a particularly slippery attorney representing an even more slippery local property developer being sued by the State on several counts of bribery to obtain building licences. She’d left a number for the lawyer to get back to her. Unfortunately the man who’d called her back was his client. She’d been halfway up a cherry tree with a pruning saw in her hand when she’d taken the call. The force of the abuse he’d hurled at her had almost made her fall out of it, but she’d walked into the kitchen, grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down everything he said, word for word. The entire incident, and the direct quotes arising from it, became the cornerstone of the damning article she subsequently wrote.

      She learned two valuable lessons from the incident. The first was never to be afraid to put herself in the story, if that was the best way to tell it; the second was to be more selective about who she handed out her number to. She bought herself a new cell and began to use it exclusively for work. Her old one, with a new SIM card and number, had subsequently been reserved exclusively for friends and family. It now shuddered in her hand as it ended its start-up sequence. She peered down at the screen. She’d missed only one call. There were no waiting messages.

      She pressed the menu button and scrolled through to the missed-call log. Whoever had called her had done so from a withheld number. Liv frowned. As far as she could remember, everyone who had this number was also in her address book, so should automatically be recognized. She took a final drag on her cigarette, ground it into the damp pine needles and headed back towards the hospital to say goodbye to the human part of her human interest story.

      33

      The church that filled one side of the great square in the old town was always busiest in the afternoon. It seemed to scoop up the crowds who had spent the morning wandering around the narrow cobbled streets, staring up at the Citadel. The weary visitor would enter the cool, monolithic interior and be immediately confronted with the answer to their unspoken prayers: row upon row of polished oak pews offering, for no charge, a welcome place to sit and contemplate life, the universe and how unwise their choice of footwear may have been. It was a fully working church, holding services once a day and twice on Sunday, offering communion for those who wanted it and confession for those who needed it.

      It was into this throng that a man now entered, slowing momentarily to remove his baseball cap in a half-remembered gesture of deference and let his eyes adjust to the gloom after the sun-bleached brightness of the streets. He hated churches – they gave him the creeps – but business was business.

      He threaded his way through the knots of tourists staring up at the soaring columns, stained-glass windows and arching stonework of the clerestory – all eyes to heaven, as the architects had intended. Nobody gave him so much as a glance.

      He reached the far corner of the church and his mood immediately soured. A line of people sat on a bench by a row of drawn curtains. He briefly considered jumping the queue, but didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself, so sat down next to the last sinner in line until an apologetic-looking foreigner tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to a vacant booth.

      ‘It’s all right,’ he stammered, avoiding eye contact and gesturing towards the corner. ‘I want the one on the end.’

      The tourist looked perplexed.

      ‘Go ahead. I’m funny about where I do my confessing.’

      The man hunkered down on the bench. Normally his freelance business took him to the shadowy recesses of a bar or a car park. It felt weird, doing it in a church. He watched two more sinners emerge before the stall he needed finally became available. He was out of his seat and into the booth almost before the previous incumbent had emerged. He yanked the curtain shut behind him and sat down.

      It was cramped and dark, and smelt of incense, sweat and fear. To his right a small, square grille was set into a wooden panel slightly lower than head height.

      ‘Do you have something to confess?’ prompted a muffled voice.

      ‘I might,’ he replied. ‘Are you Brother Peacock?’

      ‘No,’ the voice replied. ‘Please wait.’

      Whoever was on the other side of the grille got up and left.

      The man waited, listening to the whispers of tourists and the clicking of cameras. They sounded to him like the rasping legs of scuttling insects. He heard movement on the other side of the grille.

      ‘I am the emissary of Brother Peacock,’ a low voice announced.

      The man leaned forward. ‘Please forgive me, for I have sinned.’

      ‘And what have you to confess?’

      ‘I have taken something from my place of work, something which does not belong to me, something I believe concerns a fellow Brother of your church.’

      ‘Do you have this thing with you?’

      A pale hand dusted with freckles took a small white envelope from an inner pocket.

      ‘I do,’ he said.

      ‘Good. You understand that the purpose of confession is to enable sinners who enter the house of God burdened with their sins to leave again free of those burdens?’

      The man smiled. ‘I understand,’ he said.

      ‘Your sin is not grave. If you bow your head before God I believe you will find the forgiveness you seek.’

      A hatch slid open beneath the grille. He passed through the envelope, feeling a slight tug as it was taken from him. There was a brief pause. He heard it being opened and inspected.

      ‘This is everything you took?’

      ‘It’s everything there was to take as of about an hour ago.’

      ‘Good. As I said, your sin is not grave. I bless you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. You may now consider your sins absolved – provided you remain a friend to the Church. Bow your head before God once more and he will reward his faithful servant.’

      The man saw another envelope poking through the hatch. He reached down and took it. The door slid shut and whoever had been on the other side departed as quickly as he had arrived. Inside the envelope was a thick wad of unsigned hundred-dollar traveller’s cheques. They always paid him this way, and he smiled at the neatness of it. If he had been followed, which he knew he hadn’t, he could plausibly claim they’d been