King Solomon's Diamonds

21 The Portent

Under the gloomy skies of Oban, the news of the local doctor and his wife’s vehicle accident spread like wildfire. Shocked, local shop owners, teachers, and fishermen all shared the mourning of Dr. Lance Beach and his wife, Sylvia. Their children were left in their aunt’s temporary custody, still reeling from the tragedy. Everyone had liked the general practitioner and his wife, and their gruesome death off the A82 was a terrible blow to the community.

Hushed whispers made their rounds through the supermarkets and restaurants about the senseless tragedy befalling the poor family so soon after the doctor had almost lost his wife to the nefarious couple who kidnapped her. Even then, the citizens of the town were surprised that the Beaches had kept the events of the abduction and Mrs. Beach’s subsequent rescue such a well-guarded secret. However, most people just assumed that the Beaches wished to move on from the terrible ordeal and did not wish to talk about it.

Little did they know that Dr. Beach and the local Catholic priest, Father Harper, had been forced to venture past the lines of morality to save Mrs. Beach and Mr. Purdue by giving their reprehensible Nazi captors a taste of their own medicine. Obviously, most people just would not understand that sometimes the best revenge on an evildoer was — revenge — good old Old Testament wrath.

A teenage boy, George Hamish, was running through the park at a rapid pace. Known for his athletic ability as the high school football captain, nobody found his focused racing at all strange. He was clad in his tracksuit and Nikes. His dark hair was at one with his wet face and neck as he ran at full speed across the green rolling lawns of the park. The rushing boy was not paying attention to the tree branches that hit and scratched at him as he ran past and under them towards St. Columbanus Church across the narrow street from the park.

Barely dodging an oncoming car as he darted over the tarmac, he leapt up the stairs and slipped into the darkness beyond the open doors of the church.

“Father Harper!” he cried, out of breath.

Several congregates present inside turned in their pews and hushed the daft boy for his lack of respect, but he didn’t care.

“Where is the Father?” he asked, unsuccessfully begging for information as they only looked more frustrated with him. An older lady near him would not take the youth’s disrespect.

“You are in a church! People are praying, you insolent brat,” she scolded, but George ignored her sharp tongue and started running down the isle toward the main pulpit.

“There are people’s lives at stake, lady,” he said in flight. “Save your prayers for them.”

“Great Scott, George, what the hell…?” Father Harper frowned when he found the boy hurrying toward his office just past the main hall. He swallowed his choice of words when his flock scowled at his uttering and dragged the exhausted teenager into the office.

Closing the door behind them, he frowned at the boy. “What the hell is with you, Georgie?”

“Father Harper, you have to leave Oban,” George warned, struggling to catch his breath.

“Excuse me?” the Father said. “What do you mean?”

“You have to get far away and don’t tell anyone where you’re going, Father,” George implored. “I heard a man asking about you at Daisy’s curio shop when I was making out with h… uh… while I was in the back alley,” George corrected his tale.

“What man? What did he ask?” Father Harper.

“Look, Father, I don’t even know if this bloke is right in the head for the stuff he claims, but you know, I just thought to warn you anyways,” George answered. “He said you were not always a priest.”

“Aye,” Father Harper affirmed. In fact, he’d spent much time relaying the same fact to the late Dr. Beach as well, every time the priest did something men of the cloth were not supposed to know. “This is true. Nobody is born a priest, Georgie.”

“I suppose, aye. I never think of it that way, I suppose,” the boy stammered, still out of breath from the shock and the running.

“What exactly did the man say? Can you be clearer about what made you think he was going to do me harm?” the priest asked, pouring the teen a glass of water.

“Many things. It sounded as if he tried to rap your rep, you know?”

“Rap my rep?” Father Harper asked, but soon got the meaning and answered his own question. “Ah, hurt my reputation. Never mind.”

“Aye, Father. And he was telling some of the people in the shop that you were involved in killing some old lady. Then he said that you’d kidnapped and killed a woman from Glasgow a few months back when the doctor’s wife had gone missing… he just went on. Also, he was telling everyone how you are a sanctimonious bastard who hides behind your collar to make women trust you before they disappear.” George’s telling poured from his memory and his shivering lips.

Father Harper sat down in his high back chair, just listening. George was surprised that the priest did not show the faintest sign of offence, no matter how vile his recounting became, but he chalked it up to the wisdom of clergymen.

The powerfully built, tall priest sat staring at poor George, leaning slightly to the left. His folded arms made him look thick and strong and the index finger on his right hand was brushing gently along his bottom lip as he took in the boy’s words.

When George took time to empty the glass of water, Father Harper finally changed position in his chair and rested on his elbows on the desk between them. With a great sigh he asked, “Georgie, can you remember what this man looked like?”

“Ugly,” the boy replied, still swallowing.

Father Harper chuckled, “Of course he was ugly. Most Scottish men are not known for their fine features.”

“No, that’s not what I meant, Father,” George explained. He set the dripping glass down on the priest’s glass-plated desk and tried again. “I mean, he was ugly, like, a monster from a horror flick, see?”

“Oh?” Father Harper asked, intrigued.

“Aye, and he was by no means Scottish either. He had an English accent with something else,” George described.

“Something else like what?” the priest pried further.

“Well,” the boy frowned, “he has this German vibe to his English. I know it must sound daft, but it is like he is a German who grew up in London. That kinda thing.”

George was frustrated with his ineptitude at rightly describing it, but the priest nodded calmly. “No, I totally catch that, Georgie. No worries. Tell me, he did not drop a name or introduce himself?”

“No, sir. But he looked really evil and fucked up…” George stopped abruptly at his inadvertent cussing. “Sorry, Father.”

Father Harper, however, was more interested in information than enforcing social propriety. To George’s amazement, the priest acted as if he had not sworn at all. “In what way?”

“Excuse me, Father?” George asked in bewilderment.

“How… in what way was he… fucked up?” Father Harper asked casually.

“Father?” the astonished boy gasped, but the mean-looking priest only waited patiently for him to give the answer with a countenance so serene that it was scary. “Um, I mean, he was burned or maybe got cut.” George gave it some thought and then suddenly exclaimed eagerly, “It looks like his head was caught in razor wire and someone pulled him out of it by his legs. Chopped up, you know?”

“I see,” Father Harper replied, returning to his contemplative position as before. “Alright, is that all, then?”

“Aye, Father,” George answered. “Please just get out before he finds you, because he knows where St. Columbanus is now.”

“Georgie, he could have found that on any map. My itch is that he was trying to debase my name in my own town,” Father Harper explained. “Don’t you worry. God does not sleep.”

“Well, neither will I, Father,” the boy said as he started toward the door with the priest. “That bloke was up to no good and I really, really don’t want to hear about you in the news tomorrow. You should call the coppers. Let them patrol here and stuff.”

“Thank you, Georgie, for your concern,” Father Harper soothed with sincerity. “And many thanks for warning me. I promise, I will take your warning to heart and I shall be very careful until Satan backs off, alright? Alright?” He had to reiterate for the teenager to calm down sufficiently.

He ushered the boy he had christened years before out of the church, walking alongside him with wisdom and authority until they stepped out into the daylight. From the top of the steps the priest winked and waved at George as he jogged off back in the direction of his home. Drizzles of cool, broken clouds descended over the park and darkened the tar of the road as the boy disappeared into the ghostly haze.

Father Harper nodded cordially to some passers by before he returned to the lobby inside the church. Ignoring the still stunned people in the pews, the tall priest hastened back to his office. He had sincerely taken the boy’s warning to heart. In fact, he had been expecting it all the while. There was never any doubt that retaliation would come for what he and Dr. Beach had done in Fallin when they saved David Purdue from the modern day Nazi cult.

He walked briskly into the half-light of the small hallway of his office, closing the door a little too loudly. He locked it and drew the curtains. His laptop was the sole illumination in the study, its screen waiting patiently for the priest to use it. Father Harper sat down and typed in several keywords before the LED screen revealed what he was looking for — a picture of Clive Muller, a long-serving operative and well-known double agent from the Cold War.

“I knew it had to be you,” Father Harper muttered in the dusty solitude of his office. About him, the furniture and books, lamps and plants had been reduced to mere shadows and silhouettes, but the atmosphere changed from its static and tranquil air to a tension-riddled area of subliminal negativity. In the olden days, the superstitious may have called it a presence, but Father Harper knew that it was the apprehension of an inevitable clash. The latter explanation did, however, not lighten the seriousness of what was to come if he dared drop his guard.

The man on the photograph Father Harper had called up was the likeness of a grotesque looking monster. Clive Muller had been in the news in 1986 for the assassination of a Russian Ambassador in front of 10 Downing Street, but by some legal loophole, had been deported to Austria and escaped while awaiting trial.

“Looks like you’re on the wrong side of the fence, Clive,” Father Harper said as he scrolled over the scant information the internet had on the killer. “Kept a nice and low profile all this time, didn’t we? And now you take out civilians for dinner money? That must be hard on the ego.”

Outside, the weather was growing wetter and the rain was pattering against the office window on the other side of the drawn drapes as the priest closed the search and switched off his laptop. “I know you’re here already. Are you too scared to show yourself to a humble man of God?”

As the laptop died the room was almost completely dark, and just as the last flicker of the screen faded, Father Harper saw an imposing black figure move from behind his bookcase. Instead of an attack, as he had expected, Father Harper received an oral confrontation. “You? A man of God?” The man scoffed.

His shrill voice masked his accent at first, but there was no denying the heavy guttural consonants as he spoke in a solid Brit way — a perfect balance of German and English — that gave away his identity.