The Sacred Sword

Chapter Fifteen

Professor Penrose Lucas stepped out onto the balcony of the clifftop villa and gazed out from the rocky coast of Capri across the still, dark waters of the Gulf of Naples. His migraine was throbbing, and he was still quaking from the nightmare that had racked him for what seemed like hours before he’d eventually managed to tear himself away from it, sitting bolt upright in bed with a gasp, drenched in sweat.

Even now, his father’s roar continued to reverberate in his ears.

‘Hell rip and roast you for a bastard, boy!’ Whack.

Penrose shuddered. He could still smell the dreaded leather belt that the old man had kept coiled ready for use in a jar of vinegar, the filthy sick sadist. Penrose wouldn’t ever forget the sting of that belt on his skin. The lashing crack of the leather. The sound of his own screaming, still sharp in his memory after thirty years.

‘Remember me, boy. Those who are tainted shall drink the wine of the wrath of God, and they shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels!’ Whack. Whack.

Penrose watched the white crests of the waves in the darkness until his father’s voice receded to nothing and his migraine began to ease.

How he had detested that man, with a burning force of hatred whose violence had never abated, from his earliest youth to the time he’d left home, to the day of the old man’s death eleven years ago. Standing there at the graveside surrounded by those forlorn, snivelling mourners who’d lacked the wits to see through the tyrant’s veneer of charm, Penrose hadn’t been able to restrain himself from cackling out loud as he’d watched the coffin descend into the ground. His only regret had been that the Reverend Gerald Collingsworth Lucas, Deacon for the Diocese of Winchester, had now been released from the agony of the cancer that had been eating him away, one wretched cell at a time, for over a decade.

By the time of his father’s long-awaited, infinitely relished passing, Penrose’s academic career had been well on track. A sparkling talent, he’d been set from early on to become one of the youngest university professors of his generation. He’d never married, never formed any serious relationships with women and had few friends, devoted instead to his work and to the first glimmers of what had eventually evolved into his first book. When he hadn’t been buried in the rapidly expanding manuscript of God? What God? he’d been nailed to his desk writing hosts of long, impassioned online articles about the evils and corruption of organised religion, most especially those of Christianity.

After the completed book manuscript, all one hundred and eighty thousand incendiary words of it, had unexpectedly sparked off a bidding war between major British publishers and Penrose had found himself suddenly in possession of a six-figure advance that he didn’t really need, he’d immediately begun putting the money to good use. Thus had begun the second stage of his war against the church and his father’s memory.

Penrose secretly paid seventeen thousand pounds to a firm called Hardstaff amp; Baldwin Ltd, a shabby little private investigation outfit in Darlington, to dig up as much dirt as they could on members of the clergy, of any Christian denomination, across the north-east of England. Within three months, H amp;B’s diligent sleuthing had managed to produce video footage of a well-respected pastor in Leeds, one Reverend Tobias Bateman, sneaking away from his wife at night for regular visits to the notorious Water Lane red light district in Holbeck, where he was reported to enjoy being tied up and beaten by a lady wearing only a shiny leather mask.

Penrose swiftly closed in for the kill. The ensuing media furore led to the defrocking, disgracing and divorce of the good Reverend Bateman. The source of the information remained a secret, naturally. Penrose’s money had been well spent, and he had a lot more to burn now that his book was selling like hot cakes. Having tasted blood, he now enlarged his operation to include the whole of England, an initiative that cost him the remainder of his publishing advance and then some more. To his horror, his investigators turned up nothing for months. No church sex romps, no internet poker-addicted bishops or lesbian nuns, not a shred of scandal or intemperance to be found anywhere. Penrose began to realise he was going to have to become more creative.

It wasn’t long afterwards that he hit paydirt, in the form of a highly esteemed and well-known psychotherapist called Dr Nora Gibbs, shrink and hypnotist to sports personalities and television celebs. Purely by chance, one of Penrose’s growing network of investigators stumbled across an old legal case and happened to report it back to his employer. It appeared that two decades earlier, when Nora Gibbs had been Nora Jamieson and a student at Sussex University, she’d been arrested in possession of amphetamines, cocaine and a quantity of magic mushrooms, which she’d been distributing to her fellow students — one of whom ended up hospitalised as a result. It had been a minor scandal at the time, but nobody had ever before dug up the connection with the famous Dr Gibbs.

Two days after Penrose’s tip-off, the celebrity shrink received an anonymous letter giving her very specific and clear instructions on how to avoid revelations about her past being leaked to the national media. Some time later, a very well-known male TV presenter, who’d been receiving hypnotherapy treatment from Dr Gibbs for stress and depression, suddenly recovered deeply repressed and hitherto undreamed-of memories of serious sexual abuse at the hands of the nuns and priests at the Catholic boarding school he’d attended in his youth. The TV presenter, shaken and angry but eternally grateful to his shrink for having made him aware of his forgotten past, went public with his allegations. Despite the lack of a single shred of evidence, the ensuing storm was enough to bring about the closure of the school. A retired priest called Father O’Rourke narrowly avoided being lynched by a mob that gathered outside his home, and died soon afterwards of heart failure.

It was Penrose 2, God 0. He would lie awake at night, savouring the ingenious brilliance of his coup and fantasising about what he could achieve if he had more money to spend. With a big enough budget, he could bring the whole rotten thing down. Squash all of the cockroaches flat. By now he was hard at work researching his second book, Murdering for God, a scabrous condemnation of every war atrocity and act of violence ever perpetrated in the name of Christianity. Meanwhile, he’d launched his brand-new website along with its own popular discussion forum that attracted enlightened thinkers and militant atheists from all over the world.

He was rolling.

It had been one rainy early October day, heading back to his car after a hard afternoon’s lecturing of a group of second-year anthropology students, that the Hand of Fate had reached out to Penrose Lucas in a very unexpected manner. And his life had changed.

The stranger was loitering near a sleek black Mercedes that Penrose had never seen in the University staff car park before. The Mercedes looked brand new. The number plate was private. The man was about forty, greying above the ears, lean and sharp-featured. He was wearing a dark suit and a camel coat that was worth Penrose’s monthly salary. His shoes gleamed on the wet tarmac. As Penrose approached his car, the man stepped away from the Mercedes and walked up to him. ‘Professor?’

Penrose stopped. The man was smiling and looking him right in the eye.

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Rex O’Neill,’ the man said. ‘I represent The Trimble Group.’ He reached into the pocket of the camel coat and came out with a business card. Penrose took it. The card was shiny and black, completely blank except for the organisation’s name embossed in gold across the front. No number or address.

‘The Trimble Group? What’s this about?’

O’Neill smiled. ‘Don’t bother trying to look us up, Professor Lucas. You won’t find us. But we’ve been watching you, and have taken a special interest in your work.’

‘My work?’

‘I’m not talking about your academic career,’ O’Neill said with a twinkle. ‘Let’s just say that your… extracurricular activities have been closely monitored by the people I work for. You’re a very clever fellow, aren’t you?’

Penrose’s legs weakened and his guts twisted. ‘What are you talking about? Am I in trouble?’ He was convinced that this was some kind of reprisal against him. Someone had been spying on his spies. Now the Church of England had sent hired thugs out to ice him. He was ready to bolt like a scalded cat.

‘Relax, professor. Quite the contrary.’ O’Neill reached into his pocket, and instead of pulling out a gun he produced a crisp white letter-sized envelope, which he handed to the terrified Penrose. ‘Go on, open it.’

Penrose hesitated, swallowed hard and then tore open the envelope. Inside was an unsigned cheque. It was made out to him. The name at the bottom was The Trimble Group. The amount was one hundred thousand pounds. Penrose gaped at it.

O’Neill chuckled at the look on his face. ‘That’s just a very small taster. My employers have a proposal to make to you. If you’re interested in hearing it, meet me in the bar of the King’s Lodge Hotel at midday tomorrow. I’ll take you to meet them. They’ve come up from London specially to make your acquaintance.’

‘I don’t understand. Who are your employers?’

‘One step at a time, professor. If once you hear the proposal you’re not interested in proceeding any further, there’ll be no hard feelings. The cheque will be signed and the money’s yours. But if you agree to come on board… well, let’s just say the rewards will be considerable for someone of your qualities. My employers believe you’re just the man for us. In fact, the only man for us.’

Penrose stared again at the cheque. This was no practical joke. It was real. Had to be. ‘Come on board what?’ he said. ‘Just the man for what?’

O’Neill only smiled. ‘See you tomorrow, Professor Lucas,’ he said, and walked away towards the black Mercedes.