5th March
Helen, Mandy and I were driven out of Waterford past St. Basils.
Two police cars were parked outside the church.
A uniformed officer stood in front of the hall entrance, and blue and white police tape barred access to the building.
‘What’s happened?’ said Helen in alarm. ‘Is Reverend Leadbetter OK?’
Mandy Watkins paused for a moment as if wondering what to say. ‘I don’t want to explain too much at the moment, so please don’t ask extra questions until we get to where we’re going,’ she said. ‘I can tell you that Reverend Leadbetter is physically OK. He collapsed on the floor of his office last night and hit his head on the stone floor, but that injury doesn’t seem to be too serious. He has, however, had some kind of mental breakdown. Before you ask,’ Mandy added, ‘yes, this is all related to where we’re going, but I can’t tell you any more until we get there.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Worthy Down near Winchester,’ Mandy replied.
‘You mean the military base,’ said Helen.
Mandy nodded.
‘I hope this isn’t taking you away from any work you were planning for today,’ Mandy said to me, making safe conversation.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’m completely retired now.’
Although I was only fifty, I had earned a fair amount of money from a small computer business. Duck had also bought me out of my share of our dad’s farm, which gave me enough capital and income from investments to not have to work again – an opportunity I had immediately taken with gusto.
‘I had nothing special planned today either,’ said Helen in answer to Mandy’s question.
Helen had been an only child and had inherited property from her parents and an aunt. The combination of income from capital and rent from one of the properties had also allowed her the luxury of not needing paid employment.
We sat in silence for most of the rest of the journey. The overarching questions in my mind were about why a senior police officer was escorting Helen and me to an army base and how that could possibly be related to the mental health of our local vicar.
Those questions could clearly not be asked after what Mandy had said, but their existence rather stifled further small talk.
It took about an hour to get to the base. Mandy showed a letter to the guard on the gate, who made a brief telephone call from the gatehouse and then explained directions to our driver.
We stopped outside a detached bungalow, where a smartly dressed woman of around sixty stood waiting for us. We all got out of the car.
‘Good morning, Mr. Morrison, Mrs. Hargreaves, Chief Inspector,’ the woman said in an upper class English accent. ‘I’m sorry about all this cloak and dagger stuff. I’m Joan Stanford,’ she added before shaking hands with each of us.
I noted the alert, intelligent expression in her eyes – as if she was sizing us up from our first moment of meeting.
‘Please come inside,’ she continued, gesturing towards the open front door of the bungalow. ‘I’ve had some cereal, croissants and coffee sent over. I assumed that none of you would have had much time for breakfast.’
The paint and wallpaper on the inside of the bungalow betrayed the long period since the rooms had been decorated. There were noticeboards on the walls and a few desks and telephones. We seemed, however, to be alone in the building.
In the middle of a room that might have been the lounge in a residential property were some comfortable looking armchairs. These surrounded a low wooden table on which the food had been placed.
‘Please sit down,’ said Joan Stanford, ‘and help yourselves to the food.’
‘It’s very kind of you to have arranged breakfast,’ I said, ‘and I’ll certainly be eating some of it, but it feels very odd not having any idea of why we’re here.’ I sat down in a chair with my back to the window. ‘Perhaps you could just provide a simple overview.’
Joan Stanford walked to a table on the far side of the room and picked up two booklets and two pens. She returned to the chairs in which Helen, Mandy and I were now sitting and gave a booklet and a pen to Helen. She then handed the other booklet and pen to me.
The front of the document had the words ‘Official Secrets Act’ printed upon it.
‘I’d appreciate it if you could both sign one of those,’ Joan Stanford said to Helen and me. ‘Normally, I wouldn’t expect anyone to sign anything without reading it properly, but it’s standard stuff that all civil servants complete. It just commits you to keep secret anything you learn that has a bearing on national security.’
‘National security,’ repeated Helen.
‘I’m going to have to tell you some things this morning that are very sensitive,’ Joan Stanford continued. ‘After that, you might choose to walk away and have no more to do with all this. Whether you do or not, however, what I’m going to say must remain in the strictest confidence.’
I recalled having signed the Official Secrets Act when I had worked in the, then, Department of Health and Social Security as a student. Technically, that probably still applied. Nevertheless, I wrote my name and address in the relevant section of the booklet and signed it without further thought. Helen did the same.
Joan Stanford sat down in the remaining armchair, picked up a plate and placed upon it a croissant, a small pack of butter and a sachet of jam. ‘I’m employed by MI5,’ she began. ‘As you probably know, we try to protect the UK against internal security threats. For some time we’ve been monitoring a group within the Church of England called “Anglican Research for Knowledge” – ARK for short.’
‘I’ve never heard of that,’ said Helen, beginning to assemble her own breakfast.
‘Very few people have,’ replied Joan Stanford. ‘It was formed at the time of Henry the Eighth to make sure that all occult knowledge was kept in the hands of the Church. They undertake investigations into supernatural claims,’ she added with a smile and a tone of irony, ‘to see if they are missing any cosmic tricks.’
‘Sounds harmless enough,’ I said. ‘I’m not convinced that there are any supernatural phenomena, so they probably don’t find a whole lot to threaten national security.’
‘I tend to agree with your perspective, Mr. Morrison,’ replied Joan Stanford. ‘It’s not what they find that’s the problem; it’s the way they go about looking – or at least some of them.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Helen.
‘Members of ARK tend to be very fundamentalist in their beliefs. Some of them believe that their mission takes priority over all other considerations – even the morality that you would normally associate with modern Christianity.’
‘In what way?’ I queried.
‘We believe that they are responsible for the disappearances of a number of people who they believed had access to arcane knowledge. We suspect there have also been some related murders, although bodies have never been found.’
The room fell silent. Helen and I were stunned.
‘That’s insane,’ I said.
‘That’s one outcome of strongly held, irrational beliefs,’ Joan Stanford replied. ‘Once someone can believe something that defies logic, there are no boundaries left to restrain their delusions and their resulting behaviour.’
‘Why MI5?’ I asked, looking towards Mandy. ‘Isn’t all this a police matter?’
‘About two years ago, one of the clergy within ARK seemed to have become unhappy with things that the group were doing.’ Mandy spoke for the first time. ‘He made contact with the police and briefly mentioned concerns about the group planning to use weapons of mass destruction. That’s how it became a national security issue.’
‘Did your informant say any more?’ asked Helen.
‘A meeting was set up in a disused warehouse. When our detectives got there, however, the Revered David Butler was already dead.’
‘Have you any idea who else is involved?’ I asked.
‘We know some of the hierarchy of ARK,’ answered Joan Stanford. ‘They sometimes hold secret meetings in the Chained Library at Wimborne Minster, which we have bugged.
‘It seems that, within their hierarchy, Bishop Horatio Rycroft is the one who has direct contact with the subgroup of which Butler was part. That subgroup, and we don’t know the identities of its other members, seems to undertake interrogations of those of interest to ARK. Despite that,’ she continued, ‘we don’t have any clear evidence to link Rycroft or the other leaders of ARK with any crimes.
‘We know that Bishop Gerald Hunter is the official coordinator of ARK, but from the discussions we have recorded at Wimborne Minster, it appears that the real leader is known as Arkangel. We don’t know the identity of Arkangel.’
‘What has all this got to do with us?’ Helen focussed back upon the question that we had carried with us from Waterford.
‘We were conducting a sting operation to engage Arkangel and expose the more radical members of the group,’ Joan Stanford explained. ‘We arranged for someone credible to let it be known that he had powers of prophesy.’
‘Sam!’ gasped Helen.
‘Shit,’ I said, as the same revelation struck me. ‘So you recruited Sam as a spook, and all this nonsense about “the book” was a cover story to find other members of ARK and catch Arkangel.’
‘Almost,’ confirmed Joan Stanford. ‘Sam had already been working for MI5 or MI6 for forty years. International travel as an archaeologist was a very convenient cover when he worked for MI6. He’d already been involved in very many major operations.’
Joan Stanford paused and then sighed. ‘Of all the things we try to predict in MI5, having a key operative hit by a meteorite is not an eventuality that we factor-in. When Sam died, we thought the whole plan was over – two years of work destroyed, and to make matters worse, we believed that Arkangel had just made contact with Sam.’
‘Arkangel had contacted Sam,’ Helen repeated.
‘We don’t know what form that took,’ Joan Stanford clarified. ‘Sam sent me a text message at about one o’clock in the morning on the sixteenth of January – my mobile was off. That was shortly before the meteorite stuck. He wrote that he wanted to talk to me urgently about a contact from Arkangel – apparently there was something critical on his laptop that was related to it.
‘Of course there was no laptop found in the rubble of his house.’ Joan Stanford looked towards me. ‘You don’t have any idea where his laptop went, do you, Mr. Morrison?’
I shook my head. It took a few further moments before Joan Stanford’s words led to a question forming in my mind. ‘How do you know that there wasn’t a laptop found?’
‘Barney and his crew are MI5.’
‘The bugger took five thousand pounds to say nothing about the meteorite.’ I said indignantly. ‘If he was one of yours, he couldn’t have said anything anyway.’
‘He had to maintain his cover,’ explained Joan Stanford. ‘You can have the five thousand back now that you know the truth.’
‘I’m still not sure where Swan and I fit into all this,’ said Helen.
Joan Stanford swallowed a piece of croissant and sipped some coffee. ‘As I said,’ she continued, ‘when Sam died, we thought our sting operation was at an end. An odd series of coincidences have made us rethink that, however.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Helen.
‘Arkangel looked like taking the bait on the day before the meteorite,’ Joan Stanford began. ‘That presumably meant that he gave credibility to the notion that Sam had some arcane knowledge that allowed prediction of the future. Of all the ways that Sam could have died, being hit by a flaming missile from the sky is about as biblical as it gets. The psychologist we have assigned to this case believes that anyone with a concrete, fundamentalist bent to their thinking would interpret that as having cosmic significance. It would hence reinforce the belief that there was some real occult stuff going on.’
‘You mean they would think that God had sent a bolt from Heaven to kill Sam.’ I clarified.
‘Something of the sort,’ Joan Stanford replied. ‘Then, Christian Leadbetter reports to ARK that you’ve hidden some unknown but very secret item at your brother’s farm.’
‘Hang on,’ I interrupted. ‘Reverend Leadbetter is a member of ARK!’
‘He is,’ confirmed Joan Stanford, ‘although he’s more of a foot soldier. It’s probable that he knows very little about ARK or its other members and leaders. I take it that it was the meteorite you took to your brother’s farm?’
I nodded.
‘What revelation is coming next?’ asked Helen, visibly shocked by the disclosures so far. ‘I thought we lived in a fairly sleepy Hampshire village. Now we have flaming bolts from Heaven; secret, homicidal religious groups and spies.’
‘I’m afraid that there are a couple more twists to this story yet, Mrs. Hargreaves,’ Joan Stanford responded. ‘Leadbetter planted a listening device in your lounge to try, on behalf of ARK, to find out what you both knew about the secrets Sam had discovered.’
Helen blushed a shade of bright crimson. ‘The bastard!’ she exclaimed. ‘What did he overhear?’
‘Our techies checked out his laptop first thing this morning,’ Joan Stanford continued. ‘We think he heard and recorded your conversation, last evening, from when Mr. Morrison proclaimed that he had “the book” and that you and he were going to enact some rites and rituals to allow the future to be foretold, to when Mr. Morrison was about impose the necessary acts upon you.’
Helen and I looked at each other aghast. Shock, however, was rapidly displaced by our recollections of the previous evening and a vision of the vicar earnestly listening-in and misunderstanding our intentions. We dissolved into laughter, reminiscent of the previous evening.
‘It’s clear to me what you were doing,’ continued Joan Stanford with a smile, ‘and that is no concern of Her Majesty’s Government. I and our psychologist have taken the liberty of carefully listening to the recording, however, and from the concrete mind-set of a fundamentalist believer, particularly coming after the other factors I’ve listed, it all sounds literally plausible.’
‘What’s happened to the vicar?’ I asked.
‘We’re not entirely sure,’ confessed Joan Stanford. ‘Perhaps it was the supernatural revelations, perhaps it was the sexuality, but it all seems to have been too much for him. The initial view of the psychiatrist at Southampton General Hospital was that his presentation was reminiscent of an extreme case of shell shock as initially described during the First World War. He’s catatonic and been struck dumb.’
‘We gave the vicar shell shock,’ said Helen, looking at me again.
I could tell that we were both unsure whether the vicar’s predicament was funny or tragic.
‘I haven’t answered your main question,’ said Joan Stanford quickly, before we had a chance to draw a conclusion on that point. ‘Arkangel may possibly accept Mr. Morrison as the supernatural successor to Sam Collins, and we’d like you both to help us continue the sting operation.’ Joan Stanford looked grave. ‘If you will help us, we’ll do our best to protect you, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it could be very dangerous.’