Solomon Creed: The only thriller you need to read this year. Simon Toyne

And now the plane had crashed and he couldn’t get hold of him and everything was fucked and he had to un-fuck it and fast.

      Sunlight flashed on the passenger window of the Cherokee as Javier threw it open and escaped from the oven of its interior. He looked furious. Carlos got out too, head down, eyes jumping. They shambled towards the door, doing the most piss-poor impersonation of two people trying not to look suspicious Mulcahy had ever seen. He selected a new contact from the Skype menu and raised the phone back to his ear just as a heavy knock thudded on the other side of it.

      ‘It’s open,’ he called out and Javier burst in.

      ‘The fuck’s up with that, leaving us out in the car like a pair of motherfuckin’ dogs?’

      The phone clicked as it connected. ‘Tío,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage but loud enough for Javier to hear. ‘It’s Mulcahy.’

      Javier stopped dead in the doorway, so suddenly that Carlos bumped into him from behind.

      ‘There was a problem at the pick-up.’ Mulcahy was looking at Javier but talking into the phone. ‘The plane never showed. We didn’t collect the package. We don’t have your son.’

       13

      Solomon walked quickly, keeping to the shadows of the boardwalk and out of the sun, feeling the warm, worn timbers beneath the soles of his bare feet. He didn’t look back at the hospital. He would hear if anyone was following him.

      He took deep breaths to try to calm himself, and smelled the town all around him, paint and dust and tarpaper and decay. He felt calmer now he was out of the confines of the ambulance with its sickening movement.

       Why did he dislike confinement and crave freedom so strongly?

      Maybe he had been incarcerated, even though he hadn’t shown up on the NCIC. Perhaps he had been imprisoned another way.

      Ahead of him the church glowed, as if lit from within, and towered over the surrounding buildings: a town hall; a museum; and a grand house partly visible behind a screen of jacaranda trees, its roof clad in copper like the church and similarly aged, suggesting it had been built at the same time. The rest of the buildings making up the street and lining the boardwalk were all variations on the same theme, souvenir shops selling the same things: flakes of gold and copper floating in snow globes; treasure maps with ‘Lost Cassidy Riches’ written on them in old-style block letters; T-shirts with the name of the town printed in a similar style; and Jack Cassidy’s memoir stacked high in every window.

      Solomon pulled his own copy from his pocket and flicked through the pages, hungry to see what else was written inside, hoping something might spark a new memory. Apart from the dedication the only other thing he found was a single passage at the end of the book that had been underlined:

      I had always suspected the book contained a clue that would lead me to riches, but by the time I found it and understood its meaning it was too late for me and so I resolve to take the secret of it to my grave.

      More secrets, but none that interested him. He turned back to the dedication and studied the handwriting, neat and smooth and written with a wide-nibbed pen. It appeared formal and old, but he didn’t recognize it. Maybe there were clues in the printed words. He flicked to the first page and started to read:

      It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it …

      He carried on reading, sucking in Jack Cassidy’s story as fast as he could turn the pages, his head filling with all the images and horrors Jack Cassidy had encountered on his odyssey through the desert. The memoir was ninety pages long and he had finished it by the time he was halfway to the church. He turned to the photo on the cover again and wondered why James Coronado might have given this book to him. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he wasn’t even Solomon Creed. Except he felt that he was. The name fit and so did the jacket. That had his name in it too.

      He slipped the book in his jacket and read the label stitched inside his pocket: Ce costume a été fait au trésor pour M. Solomon Creed – This suit was made to treasure for Mr Solomon Creed.

      This suit …

      So where was the rest of it? Why did he only have the jacket? Where were his shoes? And how in Jesus’s name could he read French? How could he read English so fast, for that matter?

      ‘Je suis Solomon Creed,’ he said, and the language felt comfortable in his mouth, his accent smooth and slightly thick and syrupy – southern French, not northern Parisian.

      Southern French! How did he even know that? How could he speak French and know the origin of his accent and yet have no memory of learning it or speaking it before or of ever being in France? How much of himself had he lost?

      Some smaller writing was stitched on the edge of the label: Fabriqué 13, Rue Obscure, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn.

      The Tarn. Southwestern France. Cathar country. Formed in 1790 after the French Revolution. Capital Albi. Birthplace of Toulouse-Lautrec. Fine medieval cathedral there, larger even than the church he was now walking towards. Built of brick not stone.

      He hit himself on the side of the head to silence the noise.

      ‘Shut up,’ he said aloud, realizing how mad he would appear to anyone watching. He looked around. No one was. Maybe he was genuinely mad, some delusional freak with an equally freakish mind: all this information tumbling through it like white noise and none of it any use.

      ‘I am a crazy man.’ He stated it, as if admission might be the first step towards cure. He said it again, then repeated it in French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic. He hit himself on the head again, harder this time, desperate to make it all stop or coalesce into something useful. He needed to tune out the noise and focus only on the concrete things that might help him remember who he was, the things that bound him to his forgotten past – the suit, the book, the cross around his neck. Physical things. Undeniable.

      He reached the end of the boardwalk, stepped out of the shadows and into the stinging heat of the sun. The church was even more impressive up close, its spire forcing his eyes up to heaven, the way ecclesiastical architecture was designed to do.

      Know your place, it seemed to murmur. Know that you are insignificant and God is almighty.

      There was a large sign planted in the ground beside a pathway leading up to the church with CHURCH OF LOST COMMANDMENTS written across it in copper-coloured letters, a reference to something he’d read in Jack Cassidy’s memoir.

      He continued past the sign and down the pathway towards the church. There was a fountain over to one side with a split boulder at the centre and marks on it showing where water had once flowed over the stones. He recognized this from the memoir too – water coming from a split stone, a miracle out in the desert commemorated here by a fountain that was no longer running.

      He drew closer to the door and saw words cut into the stone above it, the first of the lost commandments the church had been named for:

       I

       THOU SHALT HAVE

       NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

      It reminded him of the ‘No Guns’ sign he’d seen outside the old saloon on the outskirts of town; no firearms allowed there, no other belief systems allowed here. His eyes lingered on the carved numeral, the same mark he carried on his arm. Maybe it was not an ‘I’ but a number. Or maybe it was nothing at all and the church would hold no answers for him.

      ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ he whispered, then passed into the cool, shadowy relief of the entrance and through the door into one of the oddest churches he had ever set foot in.