The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar

8 Quest for Facts

Back in Upney Lane’s fancy morgue, things were looking bleak. After taking pictures of the peculiar markings on the cadavers brought into Nirvana Public the night before, Dr. Barry Hooper and his colleague, Dr. Glen Victor, sat down in the office for heavily caffeinated beverages and some discussion.

“They gone yet?” Glen Victor hummed like a dying engine over his mug of coffee.

“Yep, next shift is here, changing in the locker room,” Barry reported.

“Cup of black for ya,” Glen muttered listlessly. “My God, I’m so exhausted.”

“So, we’re off soon,” his colleague consoled, taking the cup from Glen with a grateful nod.

Shaking his head profusely, Glen disagreed with Barry’s nonchalant reply. “No, no, no, man, not from the shift,” he moaned, his coarse hand enveloping the hot mug and slipping two fingers through the handle for no reason at all, least of all grip. His skin was remarkably immune to direct heat, something that had always made Barry flinch. “I’m tired trying to figure out what these immigrants are part of. It’s like finding a Satanic seal on a Catholic nun, Barry. Something is going on, something we should take note of.”

“Oh, big deal, mate,” Barry sniggered as he stirred his coffee. “They were obviously part of some modern gang, locally, you know? Something affiliated with their culture. My God, man, not every cross is meant as some sort of religion or cult.”

Glen looked up, his sharp eyes on Barry. “True, but the same sign on several men?” He got up and took a folder from the pile of paperwork. “Several men who just happened to buy the farm at the same time, the same day, doing something that seems extremely ritualistic to me, Barry!”

“I think you’re thinking way too much into this, but if it bothers you so much you can take it up with the boss,” Barry suggested, looking through the thick plate glass at the fresh staff members coming in, greeting each other with an exchange of nods. “He might enjoy oddities of this nature as much as you do.”

“What do you mean?” Glen asked. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that our deceased Muslim immigrants here have no family coming to get them?”

Barry hadn’t known this. He frowned, turning in his stance to face his colleague. “How do you mean?” he asked Glen. “You couldn’t get family to pick them up?” He shrugged. “Why don’t you get a family friend to sign the off, then? I’m sure their community works as a unit with such things relating to religious funeral practices and so on.”

“Barry,” Glen sighed, too tired to work up more stress, “what I mean is that these men do not have families. The leader of the Barking community that we usually have to go through to facilitate official procedures… he says these men are not from their community, Barry.”

Dr. Barry Hooper knew that the incessant repetition of his name was always a sure sign that Glen was beyond irritated with his laid-back assumptions. He could see that the peculiar occurrence had squarely uprooted what little peace Glen Victor had left in his waning personality.

“Alright, okay then,” he offered eagerly to accommodate Glen’s concerns. “Tell me what you think is going on here. I agree, usually Muslims are extremely attentive to their dead and their traditions, which does make this a bit disconcerting.”

“Thank you,” Glen accepted, like a very unhappy and bitchy wife. “I think we’re dealing with immigrants of another sort altogether. Look at us! We assumed. But based on what exactly did we assume that they were Islamic extremists? Their dark eyes and hair?”

“Um,” Barry dreaded the correction, but he was obliged to, “the fact that they were executing a woman in a burka by means of lapidation?”

“Oh, Christ!” Glen exclaimed in fury, much as Barry had expected. The annoyed medical examiner was perspiring terribly, beads of sweat dripping from his jaw as his livid face quivered at the rectification. “Don’t you think that was the perfect way to murder someone? Think, Barry, think for a moment. If you want to shoot your wife and you don’t want to get caught, you stage a robbery, right?”

Barry didn’t quite know how to answer such a harsh question, but he didn’t have to. His fervently spitting colleague presented more options to elucidate his theory. “Look, you would make it look like an accident, or a case of the wrong place at the wrong time! Don’t you get it?”

By now, the day staff had congregated around the last embalming slab to listen to the ludicrous argument which had them a bit shaken. Dr. Victor was ranting like a madman and until now, his raving had been countered by the calm dismissive tone of Dr. Hooper. However, Dr. Hooper had suddenly realized what Dr. Victor was aiming at.

“By God, Glen, you are right!” he replied.

“Listen, don’t be such a right cu—,” Glen seethed, but he was interrupted short of a vile simile the eavesdropping staff were bracing for.

“No, Glen, I genuinely fathom what you’re trying to tell me,” Barry insisted. Glen’s wild eyes stared stiffly at him. “If you wanted to kill someone without worrying about being arrested, you’d make sure it happened in a place, and by means or methods, where it would not seem out of place.”

Glen’s face lit up and he raised his hands in what was almost an embrace, but instead he simply slapped Barry against the upper arm, smiling, “That! That is it, old boy!”

“Like killing someone on Halloween, see?” the two physicians heard one of the assistants explain to the others outside the office. “You kill someone on a night where everyone is used to birds screaming, blokes full of blood, right bruv? Right?”

“Right, Brent,” Glen rolled his eyes and sighed as he peeked around the doorway of the office. “Dead right, son.”

“So who got their ticket punched like that? Someone what was coming in here?” Brent the day assistant asked to the back of Glen Victor who slumped into the office and shook his head. “Fucking Ali-G, working for us, Barry. I tell you, I weep for the future of the medical profession.”

Barry could not help but chuckle at that.

When the cups were empty and the debate had come to a point, the two had to decide on what to do with the bodies of the men who were not going to be collected. In their unofficial opinion, these men were plain and simple killers, foot soldiers hired to make a hit look like a form of religious punishment in an establishment where such acts were regrettably not frowned upon.

“Look,” Glen started, a lot calmer than previously, “I think we should call in someone who knows symbology or at least, obscure cults, to have a look at these tattoos. Maybe an expert would be able to tell us where they come from — if they are a militant group of assassins marked the same. You saw the credo. ‘Soldiers,’ but of what?”

Barry sat deep in thought, rubbing his neck as he stared past his colleague in contemplation. Then he nodded slowly. “I concur. It would be the best way to ascertain what we’re dealing with before we go off half-cocked and run the risk of attracting the wrong attention. I mean, if these boys are indeed a group of hit men, Glen, we’re playing with something deep and dangerous. I say we don’t tell anyone else about this until we know what that seal represents. Only then will we know how to proceed, right?”

“Right,” Glen agreed resolutely. “Now, who do we know who could analyze this thing for us without going out and telling everyone about it to get some sort of credit, if it’s important?”

“I can ask my wife. She works at the London Archives, knows a lot of academic rats who keep a low profile just lecturing and so on,” Barry suggested. “And she won’t send us to someone we cannot trust.”

“Alright, mate. You do that,” Glen agreed. “For now though, we keep our killers nice and out of sight. We don’t need the other MEs jarring about in the freezers and open the case up all over again.”

With that, Dr. Victor summoned two dieners to assist in the relocation of the eight bodies under the premise of extended storage period to accommodate retarded collection arrangements on the register and called it a day.

An uncharacteristically clear morning greeted Dr. Barry Hooper as he walked to his car. Thick eyes, plagued by fatigue after the full night he’d had during his shift, made the place look glaring and overly bright. To exacerbate his visual problem, the walls all around the parking area were painted white, reflecting the awful morning light. Like every other day, he unlocked his vehicle to the sound of the 8:35 a.m. train passing on the other side of the wall where the tracks intersected.

With a sigh to rid himself of the numbing onslaught of tiredness, Dr. Hooper tried to ignore the deafening noise of the clacking iron wheels punishing the metal beams carrying the monstrous engines. His ears ached from the din he had to endure after the tomb-like silence of the night shift. Although last night was probably the most eventful they’d had in a long time, the place was still eerily quiet compared to other offices, perpetually a stark contrast between his shift and his release from it.

All he wanted to do was to get home, take a scalding shower and heading for bed. The night’s strange discovery along with the storm had left him unnaturally cold. Barry felt as if he’d flayed one of the Muslim cadavers and put on its skin. A sensation lingered over his body, as if he wore a dead skin. Was it the weather or perhaps the projection of perplexity behind the pearly dead eyes of the new arrivals?

Claire, his wife, would be at work by now. Without her home, their bedroom was a cozy, messy haven of heaven where he could just creep into the unmade bed (she left it so for him deliberately) and doze off. The best part was her absence, the lack of shrill-pitched questions and the incessant warnings and commands of a bossy wife. It was an underrated pleasure for Barry.

Today he wouldn’t mind speaking to her because this time he’d have something to talk about. And it was something that had nothing to do with how many clean shirts he still had, if he had taken out the trash, or why he would rather watch the National Ten Pin Bowling Championships than accompany her to Madge, the widow’s couple’s bridge night. Today he would have a subject to throw at her to chew on. He needed information from her, information that would fill her jaws long enough to make her forget the mundane rubbish she planned to yoke him with.

Barry smiled as he started his car and pulled out of the parking area. The notion that finally he would have something to burden her with, for a change, miraculously alleviated his fatigue for the drive home. And he could sleep deeply for hours before having to confront her with the interesting task he’d have to coax out of her.

Claire Hooper was a battle-axe, of Irish descent, and could intimidate a great white shark with one scoff. But she could be really sweet when approached correctly and Barry already knew which angle to use — he would ask her expertise, in those words, he reckoned. That way she could not resist getting him the information he needed, even just to prove that she knew someone on the board or at the universities.