Sanctus by Simon Toyne Page A

examination bench by the wall and started taking routine measurements of the liver, heart and lungs, as well as tissue samples from each.
    Arkadian looked up at the TV in the corner and was once again confronted by the eerie sight of the man now lying in pieces in front of him standing proud and very much alive on the summit of the Citadel. It was the footage all the networks were now using. It showed the monk shuffling towards the edge. Glancing down. Tipping forward, then suddenly dropping from view. The camera jerked downwards and zoomed wide as it tried to follow the fall. It tightened back in, losing focus as it found him again and struggled to keep him in frame. It was like watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, or the footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. There was something momentous about it, and deeply terrible. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. At the last moment the camera lost him again and pulled wide just in time to reveal the base of the mountain and the crowds of people on the embankment recoiling in shock from where the body had hit the ground.
    Arkadian dropped his gaze to the floor. He replayed the sequence in his head over and over, piecing together the glimpsed fragments of the monk’s fall . . .
    ‘It was deliberate,’ he whispered.
    Reis looked up from the digital scales currently displaying the weight of the dead monk’s liver. ‘Of course it was deliberate.’
    ‘No, I mean the way he fell. Suicide jumps are usually pretty straightforward. Jumpers either flip over backwards, or launch themselves forward and tip over head first.’
    ‘The head’s the heaviest part of the body,’ Reis said. ‘Gravity always pulls it straight down – given a long enough fall.’
    ‘And a fall from the top of the Citadel should be plenty long enough. It’s over a thousand feet high. But our guy stayed flat – all the way down.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So it was a controlled fall.’
    Arkadian went to the stainless-steel tray holding the cassock. He grabbed a set of tongs and peeled open the stiff material until he found one of the sleeves. ‘Look. Those rips you found at the wrists? They were for his hands. It meant he could pull his robe tight against his body – like a kind of wing.’ He dropped the sleeve and sorted through the grisly folds until he found the other cuts a few inches above the hem. ‘And these were for his feet.’ He dropped the material back down and turned to Reis. ‘That’s why he didn’t fall head-first. He didn’t jump off the mountain – he flew off it.’
    Reis looked across at the broken body under the examination lights. ‘Then I’d say he really needs to work on his landings.’
    Arkadian ignored him, following this new thought. ‘Maybe he thought he could reduce the speed of the fall enough to survive it. Or maybe . . .’
    He pictured the monk again, his arms stretched out, his body tilted down, his head held steady, as if focusing on something, as if he was . . .
    ‘Aiming.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I think he was aiming for a specific spot.’
    ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
    It was a good question. Why aim somewhere if you were going to die wherever you landed? But then, death wasn’t his primary concern, it wasn’t nearly as important as . . . witnesses. ‘He was aiming because he wanted to land in our jurisdiction!’
    Reis’s brow furrowed. ‘The Citadel is a state within a state,’ Arkadian explained. ‘Anything that side of the moat wall belongs to them; anything this side is our responsibility. He wanted to make sure he ended up on our side of the wall. He wanted all this to happen. He wanted public investigation. He wanted us to see all these cuts on his body.’
    ‘But why?’
    ‘I have absolutely no idea. But whatever it is, he thought it was worth dying for. His dying wish, literally, was to get away from that place.’
    ‘So what are you going to do when some big religious cheese comes calling, asking for his monk