Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(72)
“Lies! All lies!” the caller shrieked. “You’ve been to the Bishop’s Throne, so you must know what the code will reveal.”
Code? Ryan thought.
“I don’t understand,” he said, quite honestly. “I’m not a historian, or a devoted follower of Cuthbert—I’m just a regular guy. I don’t know anything about a Code of St. Cuthbert.”
“You had better learn, then, hadn’t you?”
“There’s not enough time—”
“For an intelligent man such as yourself, nine hours should be ample time for you to recover the bones. One last thing, Ryan. There must be no other police involvement. If I spot a single police officer, your wife will die. If you fail to deliver on time, your wife will die.”
Pure, white hot rage coursed through Ryan’s body, but he held it in check and told himself to be careful, and tread softly.
“How do I know she isn’t already dead?” he forced himself to ask.
“You don’t,” the caller said. “I suppose we’ll have to trust each another to deliver the goods. Nine o’clock, Ryan. Don’t be late.”
The line went dead.
CHAPTER 38
Ryan, Phillips and MacKenzie were seated around the table in the kitchen at Elsdon, with Chief Constable Morrison connected via speakerphone.
“We can be discreet,” she was saying. “Lowerson and Yates expect a call, imminently, from the Clinical Director of the Northern Cancer Centre with the name of the perp’s oncologist. Once we speak to them, we’ll have his name and address and, as soon as we do, we can execute a raid—”
Ryan considered the options as objectively as he was able. It had been a longstanding maxim of his never to negotiate with terrorists. Unfortunately, when his wife was involved, principles tended to fly out of the window.
“No,” he said, clearly. “He said no police, and I won’t risk it. He’s dangerous, and sees people as a means to an end. He wouldn’t think twice about killing her.” Ryan tried not to let emotion cloud his judgment, but it was an impossible task.
“If you want my tuppenceworth, I say the lad’s right,” Phillips put in. “It’s one thing sending in a couple of plain-clothed officers, keeping them well back. It’s another thing to raid the man’s house. His mentality is geared towards sacrifice and the idea of an afterlife—he won’t mind offing himself, if his number is up, and there’s a chance he’d take others down with him.”
Morrison thought for a moment. “Mac? What’s your take on this?”
MacKenzie handed the baby back to Ryan, who rubbed slow circles across his daughter’s back and was hardly able to believe that he could feel instant joy in response to the sound of her gurgles, whilst also feeling such intense pain.
Before MacKenzie could give her opinion, Ryan’s phone beeped to indicate another incoming call from Yates. He pressed a button to enable her to join their conversation.
“Mel, what have you got for me?”
“We heard back from the Clinical Director, who gave us the name of an oncologist who thinks he treated the man we’ve described. We spoke with Doctor Welsh just now, and he told us about a patient called Bill Chatterley he first treated back in 2017, whose prognosis was terminal. He had an enormous tumour growing on his brain but, to everyone’s surprise, a few weeks later, they did a scan and found it had stopped growing—or even reduced in size.”
“Which Bill attributed to a miracle,” Ryan said.
“Yes, and the same thing happened a second time, two years later, in 2019. He was referred to Doctor Welsh again, who reiterated her prognosis based on what appeared to be irrefutable evidence—another large tumour had grown, this time in a different part of his brain, and it should have been enough to kill him. Instead, he recovered a second time, and Doctor Welsh thinks it reaffirmed Chatterley’s belief that the reason for his recovery was the miraculous healing of St. Cuthbert and the fact he’d been praying at his shrine, religiously.”
“This was back in early 2019 but, apparently, when the oncology team approached Chatterley to offer him a routine follow-up appointment, he presented with what Doctor Welsh described as ‘very erratic behaviour’. He thought it might have been symptomatic of further tumour growth, but Chatterley refused to have any further treatment and Doctor Welsh hasn’t seen him since.”
“What do we know about Chatterley?” Ryan asked, urgently. “Do we have an address?”
“He’s already known to us, in a manner of speaking. William—or Bill—Chatterley was on our list to visit, as a matter of fact. He’s a specialist art restorer who runs his own firm, Finest Restorations, and was one of the key contractors in charge of uncovering the fifteenth-century frescoes in the Deanery at the cathedral, as well as restoring the murals of St. Cuthbert and King Oswald, in the Galilee Chapel, during the renovation works three years ago. He’s a big deal in the world of art restoration.”
Ryan wondered if that’s how Chatterley came to know Mathieu Lareuse, who had worked in art galleries selling forged pieces of art until business allowed him to drop the pretence of a legitimate profession. If Lareuse had been an expert in mouldings and metalwork, Chatterley could have been a useful contact if you were looking to make a quick buck from forged paintings.