Temple of the Winds Page 6

  Malone completed a circuit of the floor and was about to admit defeat when he caught a faint whiff of acrylic paint. He had patched enough rust holes in his old Escort to know the smell well, and how difficult it was to get rid once the paint particles got into hair and clothing. He stared down at the nearest youth who had his back to him. The brilliant glow of the sun's image in the centre of the circle highlighted tiny beads of sweat on his temple. He had been exerting himself recently. The white sole edging of an Adidas trainer poked out from under the gown of another youth to his left. Malone touched each one on the shoulder for a couple of seconds. One gave a noticeable start at the contact. With that, the policeman returned to Roscoe's side.

  `Those two,' he muttered.

  Roscoe placed a bony finger to his lips and the two men returned to the entrance hall.

  `Frank and George,' said Roscoe regretfully. `They were saved on our last London mission. I will ensure that they face up to their responsibilities. Criminal damage? Well, I daresay they've done worse.'

  `I can't speak for Miss Duncan, but if the graffiti is removed pronto, she'll probably drop the matter.'

  Roscoe nodded. `I will send them around to the woman's shop first thing.'

  There was nothing in Roscoe's tone to suggest hostility towards Ellen Duncan, but that was the second time he had referred to her as `the woman'; it made Malone wonder what she had done to annoy him. `I don't think that would be such a good idea, Mr Roscoe. They've already given her a bad fright. Perhaps a cleaning company?'

  `Yes -- of course -- good thinking, sergeant. I'll attend to it in the morning.'

  Malone thanked Roscoe and apologised for disturbing him.

  `Not at all, Mr Malone. We like to maintain our good working relationship with the police. Your Inspector Evans is an excellent man. His Pentworth Morris Men raise such a lot for charity, as I'm sure you know.'

  `I do know,' said Malone evenly.

  `They put on a show here last month. I don't recall seeing your face--'

  `I was probably on duty. Good night, Mr Roscoe.'

  Malone paused as he was crossing the courtyard and used his mobile phone to leave a message on Ellen Duncan's answering machine to say that a local resident had been disturbed to hear about the graffiti on her shop front and that a cleaning firm would remove it immediately.

  He was returning the phone to its waist clip when the main gates swung open and he was temporarily blinded by the headlights of a giant Winnebago camper. As it trundled past and headed towards the rear of Pentworth House, Malone caught a glimpse of Nelson Faraday at the wheel. The Londoner was an unlikely lieutenant for Roscoe, but if you wanted to get the measure of a man, take a look at his friends.

  Faraday was 35, a sadist. Very tall, lantern-jawed. A dress sense as sharp as his shiv. A permanent scowl, and a lot of previous that was wasn't permanent because of the Spent Convictions Act. Faraday hadn't pimped or beaten-up or raped a prostitute for ten years -- no Schedule 1 offenses -- so the law said he was clean. Leopard and spots were two words that had crossed Malone's mind as he watched the vehicle's tail lights disappear.

  The big white camper, emblazoned with a picture of Johann Bode and a logo that showed a divine mailed fist smashing a planet, was Roscoe's mobile temple to take the word to the masses, provided they were huddled or downtrodden and preferably old enough to have been written-off by despairing parents who would be unlikely to come searching for their errant offspring.

  It was used several times a year when Roscoe craved new blood because too many devoted disciples were proving less than devoted when it came to praying in the Solar Temple, working long hours on Pentworth House's highly productive farm, or making ice cream, or baking bread, and decided that begging, prostitution, or flogging The Big Issue on street corners was an easier deal.

  The camper would set off from Pentworth House, with Faraday driving, and be later sighted in the sleazy areas of Brighton or Southampton. Inside the camper were hot showers, warm beds, a galley that doled out not Salvation Army soup, but junk food on a grand scale: fried chicken quarters, hamburgers, kebabs, and french fries by the tonne: natural bait for the young and hungry. And while they queued, they would be regaled by a dazzling, professionally-produced video shown on a giant projection screen with a superb sound system that used clips from recent big budget science-fiction movies interspersed with an unblinking Adrian Roscoe preaching the message of his Bodian Brethren.

  His compelling eyes and commanding voice made it impossible for all but the strongest-willed to turn away. He used his formidable oratory skills to deliver a seductively simple message that preached purity of prayer as being more important than purity of body. Better still, he told a story: a gripping story of great civilizations across the galaxy who had abandoned God and became locked in terrible battles -- of mighty star-roaming cruisers crewed by demons and witches from which even the angels fled in panic.

  One such civilization had risen on what had been the fifth planet of the solar system. Over a period of a thousand millennia the people had forgotten their origins and had become omnipotent. They were so powerful that they believed that their collective entity was God... Until God, after repeated warnings which they heeded not, struck them down by smashing their planet to thousands of asteroids. They were, Roscoe proclaimed, guilty of the ultimate presumption deserving the ultimate punishment.

  Raising bony, clenched fists above his head he declared that mankind on the third planet from the sun was embarking on the same disastrous course. But it wasn't too late because God had given us a warning by revealing to Johann Bode the terrible punishment he had meted out to the fifth planet. The revelation had been in the form of a fabulous, yet simple, mathematical formula that anyone could understand, that gave the positions of all the planets of the solar system. The `law' stated that there should be a fifth planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but there was no fifth planet -- merely a belt of asteroids -- space rubble whose mass added up to what had been a fair-sized planet, circling the sun where a planet should be.

  But had message of Bode's Law been heeded? Roscoe trumpeted. Had the world of 18th Century astronomers recognised it as the word of God? No! Satan and his forces of witchcraft had intervened by ensuring that the scientists would prostitute the divine word for their own ends. Bode's Law predicted a seventh planet so the scientists used the law to search for it -- and they found Uranus -- exactly where the law said it would be. Glory for the astronomers. Victory to the devil and his acolytes of witchcraft. Then the astronomers found Neptune and Pluto, and still they refused to accept Bode's Law as God's warning.

  `But we can accept it!' Roscoe thundered, his rich voice booming from speakers without a ripple of distortion. `We can warmly embrace it in the resolution of our prayer and in our steadfast rejection of Satan and his disciples of darkness and witchcraft. We seek not only God's forgiveness but his intervention. We seek his help and guidance so that his terrible wrath, which destroyed the fifth planet, will never be needed against Earth. And we seek his forgiveness, not for our sins, but for the forgiveness of others so that all Mankind will survive. The purity of our bodies is of no consequence to God! All that matters is the purity of our prayers and our implacable opposition to Satan and his witches!' Malone, who had once followed the camper, reflected that Roscoe's message had everything: science; hi-tech star wars; astronomy; astrology; and an almost total absence of any complex theology and doctrine. Roscoe's cult was sufficiently outlandish to stand apart from the established religions. It's greatest attraction was it's simplicity. It was an easily-understood cult shorn of all dogma. All it demanded was prayer for the salvation of others, and the fervent rejection of Satan and all his works, although the cult's concepts of the devil and his acolytes were firmly rooted in medieval Christian beliefs.

  Roscoe was particularly fond of proclaiming that Man's sex drive was the gift of God and that even Christ in his teachings had shown little interest in the so-called sins of adulteries and
fornicators.

  Above all, the doctrine of the Bodian Brethren tapped deep into a growing need for simplicity; and its basic underlying message was unique in modern cults, and indeed in the monotheistic religions.

  Purity of prayer is more important than purity of body!

  In other words he did not require his followers to adopt a monk-like existence: they could go on boozing, snorting-up, and fucking their brains out. Roscoe included. Of course, what clinched the matter as far as the young were concerned was that Roscoe preached that life was God's gift and was meant to be enjoyed to the full. That gift included an appreciation of music -- all music -- the louder, the better.

  The side door swung shut behind Malone. Relieved to be clear of the brooding gates of Pentworth House and its strange occupants, he broke into a jog, gradually building up his pace for his three kilometre run home.

  A watcher followed the florescent-striped figure's long, easy strides along the darkened streets. It was the crab-like device that had followed Vikki the previous afternoon but it was now equipped for operating where there were likely to be more people about. It waited under a parked truck until Malone was a safe distance away, gently flexing the pump muscles in its eight legs to stimulate the flow of coolant through its joints. The fluid maintained its body temperature to as near ambient temperature as possible, thus making it difficult to see in the infra-red segment of the spectrum. The system was one in its formidable stealth armoury.

  Once its quarry was several paces ahead, it moved off in silent pursuit, unaware that it had competition in the surveillance stakes.

  Chapter 5.

  CATHY PRICE'S HOME WAS an excellent location for her to spend many hours keeping Pentworth under close observation. Her office-cum-bedroom at the top of the octagonal tower of Hill House, a rambling Edwardian folly inherited from her mother, was the highest point in Pentworth with stunning views of the town and the surrounding countryside from its eight windows. A window cleaner called once a week to ensure that the optically flat panes were always spotless so that nothing interfered with the images she saw through her 110mm Vixen refractor telescope, mounted on the arm of her electric wheelchair.

  At 32, Cathy was mentally and physically in good shape, with an exhibitionistic pride in a body fine-tuned each day by three hours vigorous exercising on various machines in her living room one floor below. Mondays -- pumping iron; Tuesdays -- the rowing machine; Wednesdays -- furious pedalling on an exercise bicycle; Thursdays -- back to the weights. A relentless regime that had become her master -- not only because the alkaloids released into her bloodstream during these bouts of frenzied activity gave her powerful orgasms, which was reason enough, but mainly because she was terrified that her body would atrophy if she didn't drive it to its extremes.

  Her pony had thrown her at the age of ten and left her without any sense of balance. The stirrup bones in her middle ears that sensed the position of the body were fine, but the part of the brain that maintains balance by sending a continuous stream of signals to the leg, thigh and foot muscles, had been permanently damaged by the fall. As a result Cathy was 100 per cent fit and 100 per cent disabled. She could slide into and drive an ordinary car -- although the ordinariness of her restored 1960 E-Type Jaguar was questionable; she could move from chair to chair; sit up; use her exercise machines; and even make energetic love -- always in a frenzied manner as if she feared that even that ability would be taken from her. In short, she could do everything that most able-bodied people can do, but she could not stand or walk. Hours of physiotherapy as a teenager had failed to persuade other parts of her brain to take over the function of maintaining balance.

  Driven by her indomitable spirit and a burning desire never to be dependent on anyone, she had taken a degree in graphic arts at Kingston University. Following the necessity of moving her mother to a residential home, she had raised a mortgage on the house, used the money to buy a turnkey Macintosh computer system, and had set herself up in business designing catalogues and brochures for the ever-expanding junk mail industry. Her work had started inauspiciously enough seven years before with the production of stylish menus for pubs and restaurants in Surrey and West Sussex.

  Which was how she had met Josh.

  He had tracked her down -- determined to discover the creator of such innovative nightclub fliers -- for recruitment into the graphic design department of his advertising agency.

  Josh had changed her, and her life.

  Before him she had been a virgin -- self-effacing and painfully shy in the presence of men -- largely as a result of her disability -- although assertive enough on the phone where business was concerned. The telephone was a great equalizer. Her only interests other than her work had been cooking in her neat little kitchen with its low worktops. But after Josh she was a different woman. With his infectious fun attitude to sex, he had treated her as normal in every respect and made no concessions or patronized her in any way. Married, with two children and a devastating streak of honesty, he had told Cathy that he wanted her for three things: sex, sex, and more sex. A candour she warmly embraced and which set the tone of their tempestuous weekly encounters. He was a skilled, rampant lucifer match that had plunged lustily into her tinder box and set her on fire, releasing a lifetime's latent inhibitions. It was an article of faith with Josh that fucking shouldn't start until his partner had come at least five times. He joked that to achieve this he had grown a six-inch tongue and learned to breath through his ears.

  Now Cathy was no longer interested in cooking; she was just cooking.

  But Josh had done more than eroticize Cathy; thanks to him she was on the way to becoming a rich woman, and Josh the UK's first virtual Internet webcam pimp.

  The Connectrix Quickcam perched on top of her computer monitor took a picture of her desk with the bed in the background. The miniature TV camera, a little larger than a golf ball, had been Josh's idea after a weekend's fun and games with a Sony camcorder. The Quickcam was a computer-linked electronic camera set to take a picture every ten minutes. It was totally silent in operation but its associated software obligingly generated a click through the Mac's speakers so that she knew when a picture had been taken. It took the Mac a few milliseconds to process the image into a JPEG file and complete the operation by dialing up her Internet server in France through a GSM mobile phone that was used for no other purpose. A further twenty seconds was all it took to despatch the image via the Mac's high speed modem. The process was repeated automatically six times an hour, 24-hours a day for the benefit of the CathyCam website on the Internet and the 150,000 plus CathyCam subscribers around the world who paid one Euro per month to access the site any time they wished to see the latest picture. After six months Cathy had learned to ignore the camera when working. And she always kept a coat draped across the back of the wheelchair. To her many thousands of admirers she was a healthy, grey-eyed blonde with an air of sweet innocence despite being an outrageous exhibitionist on occasions, without a hint of a serious disability.

  Most of the time she was out of shot because her work station was wide and the Quickcam's field of vision was narrow, or simply working. But her fans were imbued with that Job-like patience of all true voyeurs. They rarely complained, and were content to wait for that tantalising glimpse of a nipple, or even more if she was in the mood. To aid them she always slept with a bedside light on so that could appreciate her habit of kicking her duvat off the bed when asleep.

  Strange... They had more hardcore web porn at their fingertips than they could ever hope to see if they sat at their computers for a hundred years, and yet they logged into the relatively innocuous, low-resolution CathyCam website by the thousand, particularly now that her site was being publicized by several unofficial free access web pages that had popped up devoted to the `Best of CathyCam'.

  Right now the object of the sex fantasies and masturbatory aid of over 150,000 fans was out of shot, sitting at a north-facing window, peering through the eyepiece of the huge Vixen tel
escope, admiring the promising lunchbox jiggle of Mike Malone's genitals under his sweat-shrunk tracksuit as he jogged towards her along Pentworth High Street.

  The Quickcam snapped a picture of the unoccupied double bed.

  The slate roof of the Crown public house in Market Square obscured Malone momentarily, and then he was back in view, the street lights sheening his face with yellow sweat. Closer now, his balls bouncing merrily under his tracksuit. And then he was lost to sight when he swung onto the Chichester Road and wouldn't be visible for another five minutes.

  Cathy spun her wheelchair around and brought the telescope to bear on Ellen Duncan's herbal shop again. It had been an hour since she had seen two figures behaving suspiciously with aerosol paint cans and had reported them to the police. A pity that the shop was at the wrong angle for her to see what the little swines had drawn but an early morning drive would solve that.

  Time for bed but first a quick look at the recreation ground pavilion about 500-metres away. The little wooden building beside the bowling green, with its veranda benches sheltered from the wind, was often used for nocturnal activity. It was the town's unofficial youth club. Only last week, with the moon in its first quarter, she had seen Sarah Gale, skirt hitched around her waist, panties pulled to one side, sitting astride Robbie Hammond and indulging in advanced power lap dancing, the pale light on her pumping buttocks providing an interesting comparison with the real moon.

  The moon was obscured tonight but Cathy's eye was self-trained to interpret shadows. She looked for movement. People in a darkened car or on a park bench never kept absolutely still. A slight turn of the head, a hand encircling a neck would be enough for her brain to translate the patches of dark and darker into definite shapes. The flare of a match or cigarette lighter was always a bonus and sometimes enabled her to identify those whom she was observing.

  But the park was deserted, as were the huddled streets of the silent little town whose night time patterns of light and shadow were imprinted on her memory; the slightest change was always worthy of investigation. But tonight the street lights seemed fractionally dimmer. Humidity, no doubt -- it was warmer than usual for March.