“Strand worked the roughest of jobs, on the docks, as a lengthsman. Mapmaker, too, weren't you, Martin?” The old man sounded proud of his young charge. “All with a single aim, a single determination. Not everyone can point to that, Martin.”
“My word, Father, you'll have me blushing.”
“Sorry, if I've made you uncomfortable,” Jessica found herself apologizing to Strand. “People in my line of work are snoops. It's what we do for a living, and after so many years of experience, we get so good at it, that we upset people,” she added, smiling.
“You're a bit off, however,” he corrected Jessica with a smile of his own. He seemed an Adonis, handsome, strong, filled with light and energy. “You see, I worked to accumulate enough to follow my ambition. I never intended any other career choice. All else amounted to a part-time thing.”
“You did wonderful work, however, Martin. I recall that letter you showed me from the RIBA people, the Royal Institute of British Architecture,” Luc Sante explained. “Housed not too very far from here, actually, over on Portland.”
“Right you are again,” Strand said to Luc Sante. “The old boys' club, and the old boys want to keep their maps and information up to date. It was an interesting job, for the most part. Got me round the city.”
“And past many a DIVERSION sign, I'm sure,” Jessica added. “Would you know of any old mine shafts running below the city, say any ancient ones?” She pressed a metaphorical button, awaiting his reaction, but his expression could not be read, nor his body language. He gave nothing away.
“Just how ancient?” Luc Sante wondered aloud.
“My territory was confined, for the most part, to the Maryle-bone area, and no, I found no shafts you'd categorize as ancient, I'm afraid.”
“How ancient?” again Luc Sante wished to know.
“Roman times ancient. Anything pre-dating Christ, say.”
“No, I don't believe so,” said Strand, laughing now. He then apologized with a compliment. “We seldom to never see anyone so smart or pleasant looking as you here. Dr. Coran, so you will forgive my staring back at you?”
Luc Sante instantly bolstered the apology, saying, “We deal in derelicts here mostly, aside from the regular congregation, made up of the usual good, simple, caring folk and the occasional politician!” He stopped to stomp a foot and to laugh. “If not physical derelicts, derelicts of the soul. Most of these have given in to some form of addiction or other. Hence Father Strand's near nightly groups. So, you must forgive our staring at a whole person such as yourself, Dr. Coran.”
She snickered at the characterization of herself as whole. Strand interrupted, “There is the matter we spoke of earlier. Father, that is still left hanging, sir.”
Jessica's antennae went instantly up and at the ready.
Luc Sante's face dropped in an enormous and sullen frown as he replied, “Later, Martin.”
“It is much later now, sir.”
Luc Sante smiled across at Jessica. “Church business,” he explained.
“Bills,” Strand clarified. He then said in as stem a voice as Jessica had heard in the building, “With all due respect, sir, perhaps, sir, if you weren't so busy with police matters-my pardons to you, Dr. Coran-your psychiatric practice, and book writing, then the bills would be paid on time.”
The old man grimaced at Strand and smiled at Jessica in one fluid motion of the mouth, eyes and forehead, and then he asked Jessica, “Are you aware how the British preface with that phrase 'with all due respect,' Dr. Coran?” He pushed on. “It means, when translated, 'I have lost all due respect for you!' “
“Now that's not fair. Father,” Strand immediately defended himself. “I am concerned we do not close our doors like so many others have had to do in recent times.” The bills will always be with us, Martin. But how long will we have Dr. Coran's company?”
“Yes, sir. If you say so, Father.” With that Strand left them alone.
“The boy worries too much,” Luc Sante said with a spry grin. “Now, to the case. The hellhound is afoot, Watson,” he teased in his best Sherlockian tone.
For the next half hour, he and Jessica reviewed every aspect of the case together, the old man giving her his perspective on the tongue branding, as well as the coal, the dark wood fibers, and the beetle scrappings found on the victims. He called the tongue branding a cult identity ceremony. “It likely marks her as a cult member. She may well have willingly volunteered to die for the cult.”
Jessica thoughtfully considered this possibility. “The idea has, of course, crossed my mind that all the victims may well have belonged to some bizarre cult with strange rituals, but your confirmation means a great deal. Still, I had not, until you spoke of it, considered the victims of these serial killings as willing participants in their own deaths… Yet it makes perfect sense, at least in theory. Still, I have trouble believing that a group of people could so easily be of one mind.”
“The group mind is powerful, Jessica,” he countered. “We know this! In fact, we humans are in possession of so much hard evidence about ourselves on this issue, but we fail to use it to improve our institutions and our lives.”
“Are you talking about how the underlying assumptions of our institutions, our groups, are never questioned?”
“More than that. Nothing is acted upon even when it is questioned and found wanting.”
“Knowing that groups control individuals, why can't we make the leap to a kind of scientific, objective stance that will allow us to
… to… what?”
'To admit it-that our lives are controlled by the group mind! Examine it in all of its dynamic, and organize our attitudes accordingly.”
“If we understand the animal, why can't we change him?” she asked, sipping more tea.
“Precisely. We can no longer have the luxury of simply pulling out the underpinnings, the assertions and assumptions that govern our species, but we must discuss them, notice every particular of them, the main one being that we are governed by the group mind, a thing intensely resistent to change, suggestion, addition or subtraction, a thing equipped with sacred assumptions about which there can be no discussion. Can you forsee a day when this sort of irreverence to the group mind is taught in schools? The school itself is founded on the group mind, so no-never! Yet it is through our young and those who constandy challenge the status quo that we progress, if we are to evolve at all as a species…”
He then laid out before her a series of ancient books with illustrations of men, women, even children who, for the greater glory of their god had accepted, blindly followed, and willingly stepped up to an altar of sacrifice, to be beheaded, to have their hearts torn from them, some to have their blood drained, others pinned to crosses and burned at the stake.
“Even Joan of Arc, in the last analysis, sacrificed herself to God in not recanting her faith. Our victims may have died for their faith.”
Jessica tried to imagine the five crucified victims as willing accomplices in their own torturous deaths.
“It is a possibility,” he finished, closing the book on St. Joan of Arc.
“She listened to the voice of God in her head, too,” Jessica said.
“Or her subconscious, if you wish to think in more scientific terms. Either way, she held firm to her faith, however blind it appeared to the authorities who burned her at the stake.”
Time growing late, Jessica said she must go. She hadn't eaten Strand's goodies or finished her tea, and she felt a bit woozy, exhausted from the long, tedious day and now the exhalted conversations with Father Luc Sante. He called for a cab, and she said she could find her way out, preferring to wait in the open air. She'd suddenly begun to feel claustrophobic and warm all over, feverish. She knew she'd shared too much wine with him.
On leaving, Jessica met a strange-eyed pair of creatures with gray-and-orange hair whom Luc Sante, having followed Jessica out, introduced as recent converts, a pair of twins. The twin women, up in years, perhaps in their late fifties, smiled vacantly at Jessica who towered over their twisted frames. Luc Sante gave their names as Miss Caroline Houghton and her sister, Juliana Houghton, “Both of whom do volunteer work in the church, and both of whom are repaid in psychotherapy sessions,” he explained, adding in light jest, “A bargain for both in the barter.”