Finding a cafeteria serviette deep in one jacket pocket, Studs wipes quickly at his shiny sockets, blows his nose and pulls himself together before he resumes his survey. Nothing in the crazy-quilt of random surfaces and signs before him indicates even the homeopathic water-memory of a church. The past is cauterised. There’s even a dull red patch halfway up one mongrel wall which, without benefit of his corrective lenses, looks to him like a wax seal on the doomed territory’s document, a deal that was signed off some several generations back, all done and dusted. Nonetheless, this isn’t what James Hervey the short-trousered gothic schoolboy saw, scuffing his satchel on the rough sills of the eighteenth century. This isn’t what the unnamed pilgrim monk home from Jerusalem experienced a thousand years before, prompted by angels to the centre of his land and carrying a rugged cross to put there when he found it, hewn from heavy rock, a message from Golgotha like a petrified kiss on a postcard. And back then, there would have been no doubts about the provenance of the communication, not with Fed Ex seraphim arranging the delivery. Nobody would have wondered who the sender was, even with no return address. The angel couriers were rigorous scientific bona fides, their cruciform stone the equivalent of a Higgs boson particle arrived to validate the standard theocratic model. A big deal, in other words. An enchilada that was more than whole.
No wonder they made such a fuss about the artefact, set it into the Horseshoe Street face of St. Gregory’s where it remained a site of pilgrimage for centuries, all of those last-ditch fingertips tracing the worn-smooth axes to their intersection, all the lame and blistered feet which bore them here. The centre of the country, measured by God’s own theodolite. That surely must have carried some weight with King Alfred when he named Northampton foremost of the shires, effectively the capital in an alternate history where William never came. The great cake-scorcher was just rubberstamping policy laid down by the Almighty. More than merely royal pasturage this spot was holy ground, marked out by things with burning haloes at the say-so of an ultimate authority. That’s how they saw it, how it was: a violent and miraculous reality much like Studs’ own, perfumed by horseshit for the want of cordite. In a dark age the noir outlook would be a foregone conclusion.
And yet, even with the gulf of a millennium to separate the relic’s origins from Hervey’s schooldays, wouldn’t the conceptual charge and inspirational importance of the object remain undiminished in believing eyes, especially those of a seven-year-old boy whose father was a clergyman? For ten years, near enough a quarter of his prematurely interrupted life, the ailing child had laid his hands or eyes upon the primitive and earnest talisman, the chiselled X on an interior treasure-map, a seeding crystal of Jerusalem itself. The simple, fundamental shape would have been printed on his bedtime eyelids, colours back to front in the screensaver drift before sleep, a test pattern on the hypnagoggle-box. Enough to stamp that minimalist template onto Hervey’s coming life, Studs would have thought. A fragment carried here from the eternal holy city could provide the dynamo which drove the young ecclesiast in one side of John Wesley’s operation and then, acrimoniously, out the other. The Rood in the Wall they called it, manifesting Hervey’s granite-hard conviction, powering his writings, Theron and Aspasio or his sepulchral meditations, energies eventually earthed in William Blake who closes off the metaphysic circuit when he writes Jerusalem.
Slow increments of early dusk are gathering around the scowling Sherlock as he contemplates the haphazard assembly of a dozen centuries, the spectrum of failed social strategies and mix of incompatible building materials represented by the mural mess in front of him. The rood has long since disappeared and taken the wall with it, leaving only a conspicuous and desolating absence. He can’t help but wonder where it went, the crude-cut icon sent to tag the middle of the land, the centre of his pulp investigation. Was it spirited away by sharp-eyed demolition workers, either mercenary or conceivably devout? Perhaps more likely, did it go unrecognised, its aura faded, its significance by then bled out into the thirsty dirt, abandoned in a deeper drainage ditch than that in which the tombstone of Saint Ragener was finally discovered sometime in the nineteenth century? Composed of matter near as ancient and enduring as the world itself, a great plus-symbol to denote the site’s positive terminus, Studs knows that it must still exist somewhere, as widely scattered shards if nothing else. When space and time are ending the device’s disparate molecules will still be there for the finale, possibly intact, a symbol that has long outlived the doctrine symbolised, with its imputed righteousness remaining aeons after Hervey, Doddridge, Blake and everybody else are gone the way of all flesh at the far ends of a predetermined universe.
An atavistic pineal tingle tells him that he’s being watched, an ingrained P.I. reflex critical to his imaginary line of work. Swivelling his extraordinary profile, like the cliff-face simulacrum of an Indian chief in Fortean Times, he glares uphill to where a rotund little man with curly white hair and a matching beard, possibly one of Santa’s helpers, stands poised apprehensively on Marefair’s corner. The rube’s face, bespectacled eyes wide and fixed on Studs with an expression of startled incomprehension, rings a faint ’40s hotel reception bell in his recall, sets him to shifting the half-empty coffee cups and stacked pornography from his internal filing cabinet, sifting through the outdated mug-sheets for a moniker to go with the familiar, shifty features.
As the piece of work turns hurriedly away like he’s pretending that he hasn’t just been clocking the detective, making across Marefair for the other side and pointedly not looking back, the penny drops. The interloper on Studs’ private made-for-TV drama is the former councillor James Cockie, that same jovial countenance affixed beside the header of a weekly column in the local Chronicle & Echo, copies of which he’s perused while staying at his mum’s place. This being the code name for his office. You can’t be too careful.
Watching the retired council head laboriously roll his fleshy snowball off up Horsemarket towards the Mayorhold, the unfrozen Piltdown man-hunter reflects on Cockie’s late but perhaps pertinent arrival in this last stretch of the storyline. While technically the genre generally demands the killer be a character the readers or the viewers have been introduced to early in the game, there’s always those convention-bucking mavericks like Derek Raymond, with his greasy beret still behind the bar down at the French in Soho, mimicking real life in that the culprit’s often no one who’s been seen before. In oddball works like that, Studs soberly reflects, the tale turns out to have been more about the labyrinthine mental processes of the protagonist than the contortions of the case he’s trying desperately to solve. That said, there’s no compelling literary imperative that rules out the ex-councillor from the inquiry. With the former Labour politician’s dwindling mass receding from view in a slow red shift, Studs puts it all together.