TSS. It didn’t look like an initial – more like an acronym for something. But what? Then, after a few more moments’ reflection, he remembered what Michaela had told him that morning, and it hit him.
TSS. The Sacred Sword. The Word document was the unfinished manuscript of Simeon’s book. It could have told Ben a great deal – but he didn’t rate his chances of breaking Simeon’s security code. Knowing him, it would be some incredibly obscure Bible reference or an unguessable piece of Latin. It was a non-starter. Ben checked the document’s properties, but it was like trying to see into a locked room from outside. The only data he could access were the document’s size, half a megabyte or so, and the date and time it had last been saved: 15.04 on December 14th.
Ben swore to himself and reluctantly closed the laptop down. Remembering the PC in the study, he decided to see if he might find anything out from Simeon’s email.
There was no password to hurdle this time. Sitting at Simeon’s desk, Ben scrolled through hundreds of messages, mostly concerning everyday church matters. Some were from the TV production company, others from an outfit called Blackwood Entertainment Management who seemed to have been in the middle of negotiating an agency deal to represent Simeon in his newfound role as television celebrity.
After flicking through a few more emails, Ben felt a pang of shame and began to sense that he was prying uselessly into Simeon’s affairs. He was on the verge of giving up when another of the messages caught his eye.
It was from the man Michaela had talked about on their walk through the woods. Father Fabrice Lalique, the priest whose recent suicide had so upset Simeon. Ben opened the message. It was dated a couple of weeks earlier and read:
My Dear Friends
By the time you read this message, I will be dead. I ask you not to mourn for me, as I am unworthy of your grief.
The shame of my sins is a burden I can no longer bear. May God have mercy on me for the terrible things I have done.
Let his soul rot in hell for all I care, Ben thought. He clicked out of the emails and went online to run a Google search on the name Fabrice Lalique. It didn’t take long to dig up a whole collection of French news reports about the priest’s suicide and the discovery, shortly after his death, of large amounts of obscene material on the personal computer at his home in Saint-Christophe, near Millau in the Midi-Pyrénées area of southern France.
Revelations about paedophilia had a way of wiping out anything positive that might have been said of a man’s past life or career; not surprisingly, the news reports were full of disgust, even hatred. There were various quotes from members of his diocese, all of them expressing their shock at the appalling discovery and very little in the way of sympathy for the dead man. Some online commentators had dubbed Lalique the Paedo Priest. Ben came across forums and websites where the scandal had sparked a furious debate, with pressure groups demanding that governments step in immediately to end the secret culture of perversion and abuse within the Catholic Church or, better still, tear the whole rotten edifice down once and for all.
Most of the online articles had published the same image of Lalique, pictured at some official event wearing his priest’s garb. Ben immediately recognised him as the jolly-faced, full-bellied man who’d been standing on the right of the group shot in Simeon’s photo. Other images online showed the scene under the Millau viaduct where officials had scooped up what little remained intact of Lalique’s body after the enormous fall from the bridge. As suicides went, it had been highly efficient.
Ben shut down the PC, left the study and made his way through to the living room, trying to make sense of it all and knowing he was a long way from succeeding. As he looked around him for inspiration, one of the books in the antique bookcase suddenly caught his eye. He opened the glass door and slipped the old Bible off the shelf. It was a beautifully leather-bound edition, and one that he hadn’t seen since his first year at Oxford. Carefully turning the cover, he saw his own faded handwriting. ‘To my friend Simeon, from Benedict Hope.’
Ben was touched that Simeon had kept the birthday gift all these years, and saddened. He flicked through the pages of the book he’d once known virtually by heart. He still remembered great chunks of it, though a lot had faded from his memory. Maybe I should read it again, he thought. Simeon wouldn’t have minded if he borrowed it.
Ben set the Bible down on a table and was about to close the bookcase when he noticed the collection of videotapes and DVDs on the top shelf. Some were movies, some were documentaries, some were religion-themed programmes taped from TV, with handwritten labels stuck to their spines. The one that especially caught Ben’s eye was a home-recorded videotape labelled SIMEON VS THE ENEMY. He remembered Simeon’s words from the day before: ‘I have many enemies’. It had been hard to tell to what extent he’d been joking when he said it.
The Arundels’ TV rested discreetly on a stand in the corner, with a DVD player and VCR nestling below it. Ben took the tape down from the bookcase and inserted it into the machine.
Chapter Fourteen
According to the date scrawled on the videotape’s label with a marker pen, Simeon had recorded the TV programme a little over a year ago. It was one of those highbrow panel discussion shows that tended to be aired late at night, called The Monday Debate. The presenter was some tweedy type whose face looked vaguely familiar to Ben from one of the rare past occasions when he’d ever turned on a TV. Since moving to France he’d never bothered with it at all.
‘Tonight on The Monday Debate,’ the presenter announced, ‘we ask the question that is becoming more topical every year: Is religion harmful, and would we be better off without it?’
Poised behind twin lecture rostrums like two rivals in a political standoff were Simeon, on the right, wearing his white dog collar but otherwise casually attired, and a man on the left whom Ben had never seen before. He was somewhat older than Simeon, somewhere in his mid-to-late forties, with thick swept-back hair that could have been dyed to hide the grey. He was less casually turned out than his opponent, wearing an expensive-looking and immaculately pressed light grey suit, and gave the impression of a man who took himself extremely seriously. His eyes were darting and intense. The presenter introduced him as Penrose Lucas, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Durham and author of the recent Sunday Times number one bestseller God? What God?
Clear enough what side he was on, then, Ben thought. He’d never heard of this Lucas guy. From the brief resumé the presenter gave of the man, it seemed that the sudden runaway success of God? What God? had propelled him out of academic obscurity and into the realms of minor celebrity, as something of a figurehead for the growing pro-atheist lobby.
As the debate opened, Penrose Lucas went straight in like a greyhound leaving the gate. Pointedly refusing to refer to his opponent as the Reverend Arundel and insisting on Mr, he began a rapid-fire tirade about the centuries of slaughter and persecution and senseless warfare carried out in the name of religion.
It was hardly a new argument, but it was one that many Christians found difficult to refute, and Professor Lucas clearly intended to milk it to its full crushing advantage. He was eloquent and passionate, his case compelling. Religious belief was the most devastating of all the follies ever dreamed up by humanity. Without its destructive influence, mankind would be able to co-exist in a blissful state of utter peace. A new age would emerge in the wake of its long-awaited banishment to the dustbin of history, like young green shoots growing up in abundance on a fire-blighted landscape. An age of reason. An age of secularism. An age of scientific enlightenment.
Having rapidly reduced two millennia of Christian tradition to rubble and its followers to gullible imbeciles, Penrose generously ceded the floor to Simeon. Ben watched his friend on the screen as the cameras zoomed in, and felt his throat tighten with sadness.
‘The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science,’ was Simeon’s opening line. The presenter seemed taken aback