Oxfordshire
The video-clip was shaky and the picture quality was poor and grainy. The camera panned slowly around a big stone-walled room that was lit orange-gold by hundreds of candles. Long shadows lay across the black and white tiled floor. Three thick stone pillars stood in a wide-spaced triangle around the edges of the room, reaching to the vaulted ceiling. Against the far wall stood a raised platform, looking like a small stage. Above it, a golden sculpture of a ram’s head with long, curled horns glittered in the flickering light.
Leigh frowned. ‘What the hell is this place?’
‘I can hear something,’ Ben muttered. He turned up the volume on the laptop. The sound was the heavy breathing of whoever had been filming. Suddenly the camera whipped sideways and the picture became confused. ‘Oh, fuck’, said a frightened voice, close into the microphone.
‘That’s Oliver’s voice,’ Leigh whispered. She was gripping the edge of the table with white fingers.
They watched. The camera righted itself. A dark, craggy edge obscured a third of the picture. ‘He’s hiding behind a pillar,’ Ben said.
Some people were coming into the room. Blurred at first, the picture jerky, then sharpening up as the autofocus kicked in. The men filtered in through an archway. There were twelve or fifteen of them, all wearing black suits. The camera retreated further behind the pillar.
‘Olly, what were you doing?’ Leigh said with a sob in her voice.
Now the men were arranging themselves in a semicircle around the raised platform. They all stood in the same way, like soldiers standing to attention with their feet together and their arms clasped behind their backs. Their faces were hard to make out. The nearest was standing only a few feet from where Oliver was hiding. The camera hovered on the man’s back, travelled up to his neck and his cropped sandy hair. It autofocused on his ear. It was mangled and scarred, as though it had once been half torn off and sewn back on.
Ben turned his gaze on the platform, straining to make out the details. He realized what he was looking at was an altar. It was the focus of the room, illuminated by dozens of candles set in recesses in the wall. The centre of whatever was about to happen. It was like some kind of religious ceremony. But none that he’d ever seen before.
In the middle of the altar was an upright wooden post, maybe a foot and a half thick and about eight feet high, rough and unvarnished. Lengths of chain hung from it, two of them, thick and heavy, fastened to a riveted steel belt around the top of it.
Now there was movement. A tall iron door behind the altar swung open. Three more men came into the large room. Two were wearing black hoods. The third seemed to be their prisoner. They were clutching his arms. He was struggling. They dragged him across the platform to the altar.
The camera wobbled and the heavy breathing was quickening. In the background, the prisoner’s cries were echoing off the stone walls.
‘I don’t think you should see this,’ Ben said. He could feel his own heartbeat beginning to race. He reached for the Stop button.
‘Let it play on,’ she snapped back.
The men in black hoods shoved the prisoner against the wooden post and manacled him to the chains. His cries were louder now.
One of the hooded men stepped forward with something in his hand. He went up to the prisoner and raised his hands up to the man’s face. He had his back to the camera and it was hard to see what was happening. The prisoner’s screams were becoming shriller and he was struggling wildly against the chains.
Then the hooded man stepped away. There was something hanging from the prisoner’s mouth. It was a thin rope or cable. As the hooded man stepped away the cable was pulled tauter and Ben realized with a horrified lurch what was happening. The camera was beginning to shake badly.
‘Oh Jesus!’ Leigh exclaimed in horror. ‘They put a hook through his tongue!’
The hooded man stopped and turned to face the audience. The cable was pulled as tight as it would go. The prisoner couldn’t scream any more. His tongue was stretched six inches out of his mouth. His eyes were bulging, his body quaking.
The second hooded man came forward. Something glinted in the candlelight. He raised the ceremonial dagger above his head.
It came down in a flashing arc. The prisoner’s head was thrown backwards as his tongue was sliced off. The cable snaked away like a bowstring with the glistening tongue attached. Blood spurted from the prisoner’s mouth and his head jerked from side to side, his eyes rolling.
But his suffering was cut short. The hooded knifeman stepped forward again. The dagger came in low and stuck deep into the man’s abdomen. The blade sawed and stabbed like a butcher’s knife, slicing a path from groin to ribcage.
When his guts began to spill, even Ben had to look away.
It had taken a long time to calm Leigh afterwards. Eventually, the tranquillizers began to take effect and she lay sleeping on the hotel bed, her black hair spread across the pillow and her body rising and falling slowly.
Ben covered her with a blanket and sat beside her on the edge of the bed, watching over her and thinking hard. Then he stood up, went back to the desk and watched the video-clip again.
He watched it three times, pausing it frequently to study the details. He watched it right to the end. After the victim was disembowelled the cameraman had had enough. The picture went jerky, dark, then jerky again. He could hear Oliver’s ragged breathing. He was running.
Ben kept pausing the clip, staring at the screen. Stone walls. Some kind of staircase. The picture was crazy but by pausing frame by frame he could just about make it out. As Oliver ran on, the rough stone walls disappeared and he seemed to be in what looked like a very opulent house. A doorway, then a corridor. Shiny wood panels. A painting, brightly illuminated by a lamp above its frame. Ben paused the clip and studied it closely.
It was hard to tell, but the painting seemed to show some kind of meeting. The setting was a big hall. There were columns that looked a lot like the ones in the room where the victim had been executed. The same tiles on the floor. The men in the painting wore wigs and were dressed in what looked like eighteenth-century clothes-brocade jackets and silk stockings. There were symbols around the walls, but he couldn’t make them out.
He let the clip run on. Oliver’s breath was rasping out of the speaker as he staggered down the corridor. He stopped, swung round as if looking back to see if someone was following him. Nobody was.
Ben paused the clip again. He could see something. An alcove in the wall. Inside the alcove stood a statue that looked Egyptian, like a Pharaoh’s death mask.
Then the clip came to an end. Oliver must have turned off the camera. Ben was left staring at a black screen.
He struggled to understand what he’d seen. He clicked on the file properties. The video-clip had been created at 9.26 on the night Oliver died.
None of this made sense. The official version of the story, that Oliver had been drunkenly messing about on the lake with some woman he’d picked up at a party, was impossible to reconcile with the fact that, not long before his death, he’d witnessed a brutal ritualistic murder. Would Oliver have been capable of putting such a thing out of his mind to go off and enjoy himself? Who would?
Ben ran over what he knew. Oliver had witnessed a crime carried out by some highly organized and very dangerous people. He’d had evidence and he’d been desperate to hide it. Soon after he’d posted the CD to Leigh, he’d drowned in the frozen lake. The investigation into his death had been a little too rushed, a little too sketchy. And ever since Leigh