Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(62)

“Exactly. The more insight I have into this person’s mind, the better chance I have of catching him.”

“You think it’s a male, then?” Charles asked.

Ryan gave up all pretence of confidentiality and nodded.

“It feels male,” he said. “The association with Cuthbert, the physicality of the person I saw at the British Library…it fits.”

“From a historical perspective, anyone who knows about Cuthbert would also know he was reputed to have disliked women because he saw them as distractions.”

“Quite right,” Charles chimed in, and received a playful nudge from his wife.

“There’s a long black marble line across the floor which traditionally barred women from crossing into the nave,” Anna said. “Anyone who wanted to devote themselves to the cult of Cuthbert would know about this and, frankly, speaking as a woman, it’s a stumbling block.”

Ryan grinned, and looked back at the folder, thinking of all the time she’d taken that day to try to help him.

“Thank you for doing all this, I—what’s this?”

He pulled out the last page of the folder, which consisted of a single sentence which read:



If Cuthbert ye seek, look atop the highest throne



“Ah,” Anna said, with a gleam in her eye. “This is the interesting bit.”

She reached for the folder and extracted forty sheets of paper, each showing a printed image of a different page from the St. Cuthbert Gospel, not in chronological order as they appeared in the gospel book, but numbered with a red pen in the top right corner of each page. Moving aside their coffee cups, Anna laid out the pages for her family to see, then sat back down again.

“Notice anything?” she asked.

They studied the images, but nothing was immediately apparent, except to Charles.

“These dots,” he said, tracing a finger over what, at first, appeared to be no more than a tiny fleck or a photographic blip beneath certain letters.

“I wonder why I didn’t see it,” Ryan said, and could have kicked himself. “I might have known ol’ hawk-eye would have spotted it.”

“Old habits die hard,” Charles shrugged. “Is this the message it spells out?”

Anna nodded. “When I was going through the full digital version of the gospel book, I hardly noticed these little pin-pricks and, to be honest, I wouldn’t have noticed them at all, if I hadn’t been looking for something unusual in the first place,” she said. “Anybody flicking through those pages would probably miss it—there’s only a single dot beneath a single letter on different pages throughout the book, and they had even been jumbled into an anagram. It took me a minute to unscramble the letters.”

Ryan smiled, and wondered how long it would have taken him to perform the same task—days, probably.

“Whoever did this was smart, and they were obviously very familiar with the specific details of this book,” Anna said. “For instance, it already has pinholes on parts of its pages, but those relate to its binding, nothing more. Whoever concealed their message in this way knew it would be a fairly safe bet that anybody casually looking through the book wouldn’t consider the new pinholes to be significant—unless they were already looking for something of significance.”

“Especially as the book is written in Latin,” Eve said. “It’s only once you put individual letters together that it makes any sense, in English.”

“Exactly.” Anna nodded.

“What do you think it means?” Ryan asked, trying to understand what it was about that single sentence that had been so important as to motivate someone to kill. “That Cuthbert’s spirit has ascended to heaven, or something like that?”

“Possibly,” Anna said. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I feel like something’s tugging at the edge of my mind. It’ll come to me, probably after a good night’s sleep.”

Ryan smiled, and rose from his chair to walk around and kiss her.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“For looking into all of this,” he said. “I want you to know how much I appreciate it—how much I appreciate all of you.”

He looked between them, and knew the time had come to say what he hoped he would never have to say.

*

They moved into the living room, where all was cosy and warm.

Charles and Eve settled themselves on one of the sofas, whilst Ryan and Anna took the opposite one, tidying away some of Emma’s leftover toys into a basket as they went. They took the time to stoke the fire and turn the lights down low, before Ryan broached the subject he had been avoiding all evening.

“Things have changed, over the past few days,” he began, and reached over to link his fingers with Anna’s. “Previously, there was a nebulous threat from a person who was careful and quiet, organised and ruthless. In the last two days, that person’s behaviour has escalated. Two people have died in as many days, and another artefact has been taken, causing serious injuries to another person in the process.”

Charles reached down to lay his hand over his wife’s, in silent support. They had lost one child to a madman already; they would not be losing another.

“What can we do?” he asked. “Tell us, and we’ll do it.”