Sanctus by Simon Toyne Page B

back? Give them a lecture on jurisdiction?’
    Arkadian shrugged. ‘So far they haven’t even admitted he’s one of theirs.’
    He glanced over at the gaping body of the monk, the body cavity now empty, the surgically precise scars round his neck, legs and arms still visible. Maybe the scars were some kind of message, and whoever came forward to claim the body would know what they meant.
    Reis picked up a cardboard container from underneath the examination table, restarted the recording, and began squeezing the contents of the monk’s stomach into it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The major intestine contains very little, so our friend’s last supper wasn’t exactly a banquet. Looks like the last thing he ate was an apple and maybe some bread a while before that, which I’ll label and send for analysis. The stomach contents appear to be largely undigested, suggesting that his digestive system had wholly or partially shut down, indicating a high degree of ante-mortem stress. Wait a minute,’ he said, as something shifted inside the slippery membranes between his fingers. ‘There’s something else here.’
    Arkadian stepped over to the table as something small and dark dropped into the soup of apple pulp and gastric juices. It looked like a curled-up strip of overcooked beef. ‘What on earth is that?’
    Reis picked it up and moved across to the sink, knocking the long arm of the tap with his elbow and holding the object under the stream of water.
    ‘It appears to be a small strip of leather,’ he said, laying it down on a tray lined with a paper towel. ‘It was rolled up, maybe to make it easier to swallow.’ He took a set of tweezers and started opening it out.
    ‘He was missing a belt loop from his cassock, wasn’t he?’ Arkadian whispered.
    Reis nodded.
    ‘I think we just found it.’
    Reis moved it alongside a centimetre scale etched into the surface of the tray. Arkadian sent another picture to the case file. Reis flipped it over so he could photograph the other side and all the air seemed to be sucked from the room.
    Neither of them moved.
    Neither of them said anything.
    Arkadian raised the camera.
    The click of the shutter snapped Reis out of his trance.
    He cleared his throat.
    ‘Having unrolled and cleaned the leather object, something appears to be scratched on its surface.’
    He glanced up at Arkadian before continuing.
    ‘Twelve numbers, seemingly random.’
    Arkadian stared down at them, his mind already racing. The combination for a lock? Some kind of code? Maybe they referred to a chapter and verse from the Bible and would spell out a word or a sentence that might shed light on things, possibly even the identity of the Sacrament. He checked the numbers again. ‘They’re not random,’ he said, reading the sequence from left to right. ‘Not random at all.’
    He looked up at Reis.
    ‘That’s a telephone number,’ he said.

Chapter 30
     
     
    The primal screams echoed round the bright room with a desperate, animal quality that seemed out of place in the sleek modern setting of the New Jersey hospital.
    Liv stood in the corner, watching Bonnie’s face contort in pain. Her phone had woken her a little after two in the morning, dragging her out of bed, into her car, and south on I-95 with all the empty trucks making their way out of New York City. It had been Myron; Bonnie’s waters had broken.
    Another lung-deep scream tore through the room and she looked across at Bonnie squatting naked in the centre of the room, howling so hard that her face had gone purple and the cords in her neck stood out like high-tension cables. Myron held on, supporting one arm, while the midwife held the other. The howl ebbed slightly, making way for the incongruous sound of waves lapping against a beach. They flowed gently from a portable boom box in the corner.
    In Liv’s nicotine-starved mind the supposedly soothing sounds of the seashore morphed into the tormenting crackle of cellophane being ripped off a fresh