Absolute Proof Read online

  It felt strange being home. Surreal, almost. As if the past few weeks had all just been a bad dream. Except that the scar on his head and his painful foot reminded him of the reality. As did the terrors that came to him every time he closed his eyes.

  He glanced at his watch. Imogen, who ran the website for an online magazine in Brighton, wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours yet. It would give him time to shower and shave, put the champagne on ice and the flowers in a vase. He was so much looking forward to seeing her. To holding her in his arms, to the comfort of normality again. To making love to her – God, it had been so long – and to just talking to her, telling her about the nightmares he had been through and how thinking of her had got him through it.

  Maybe later they’d go out for a curry; they both loved Indian food, and he craved the normality of a restaurant.

  He climbed the three flights of stairs to the top floor, slipped his key into the lock and opened the door. As he stepped into their book-lined hall he heard music, The Fray, one of his playlist groups, which surprised him. Was she home?

  He entered the living room and saw on the coffee table an open bottle of wine, half drunk, and two partly empty glasses. And a large bomber jacket slung on the sofa.

  He frowned.

  The music was coming from further along the apartment.

  ‘Imogen? Darling?’ he called out, his voice catching in his throat, a sudden cold feeling in his stomach.

  He put his bag, the bottle and the flowers down, then walked out of the living room and along the hall, the music getting louder as he approached the bedroom door. He heard another sound, too. A moaning sound. He hesitated outside for a moment before he pushed it wide open.

  And saw his wife, stark naked, a look of ecstasy on her face, her hair thrown back, her small, round breasts wobbling, straddling a naked, bearded man.

  Then Imogen saw him.

  6

  9 Years Later

  Wednesday, 1 February

  The old man was trembling as he made his way slowly up the steep Somerset hillside in the darkness, weighed down by the burden he carried in his heart. The weight of all human history. The eternal struggle of good versus evil. The love and wrath of God. The mockery of Satan.

  Unaware of the night-vision binoculars trained on him, he trod carefully on the slippery grass, guided only by the weak beam of his small torch, the GPS coordinates on his phone and the sense of mission in his heart.

  Destiny.

  His feet were wet inside his sodden brogues and a bitter wind blew through his thin overcoat; a chill clung to his back like a compress of cold leaves. He carried a heavy spade and a metal detector.

  It was 3 a.m.

  A skein of clouds raced across the sky above him, pierced for fleeting moments by shafts of stone-cold light from the full moon. Whenever that happened he could see the dark shadow of the ruined tower on the hilltop, a short distance to his right. There was a preternatural feeling to the night. The clouds felt like the travelling matte in one of those old Hollywood films. Like a scene he remembered where Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were driving along in a convertible, apparently at high speed, with the scenery passing behind them, but their hair remained immaculately in place.

  But tonight, old movies should be a long way from his mind, and his thoughts on just one thing.

  Destiny.

  Tonight, here, was the start of the journey. He was frail and he did not know how much time he had left on this earth. He had been waiting for the Call for so long he had begun to doubt it would ever come. And when it finally did, it was in His mysterious way.

  There was someone whom he had been told could help him, but he was not able to find this person, not yet. And because time was running out on him, he had decided to go it alone.

  The air was alive, electric; he could feel the prickle on his skin, like goosebumps. The wind was full of whispers he could not decipher.

  He smelled the sweet grass. Somewhere close by he heard a terrible squealing. A fox taking a rabbit, he thought. The squealing became increasingly pitiful and finally stopped.

  He checked the constantly changing coordinates on his phone against the ones on the slip of paper he had in his breast pocket. Closer. Closer.

  Nearly there.

  He stopped, drawing breath, perspiring heavily despite the bitter cold. It had been a tiring two-and-a-half-hour drive to get here, followed by a long walk round the perimeter, in search of a place where he could scale the fence. He’d forgotten his gloves, but it was too long a walk back to the car to fetch them.

  Pulling out the scrap of paper, he studied the coordinates in his meticulous handwriting once more.

  51°08'40"N 2°41'55"W

  He was close.

  He felt a burst of energy. Took several paces to the left, then a few more, further up the hill.

  Closer!

  An instant later, the digits on his phone’s compass app matched.

  51°08'40"N 2°41'55"W

  He was here. On the spot. And at that moment the clouds above him moved away from the moon and a beam of light shone down from above. Someone up there was showing him. This was the sign.

  His destiny!

  Feverishly he began to dig, gripping the spade as hard as he could with his frozen, arthritic fingers. He dashed it into the ground, stood on it and pushed it down, then levered up the first clump of earth. Several worms squirmed. He moved the spade back a short distance, and dashed it in again.

  As he did so, a bright light from out of nowhere danced all around him. Not the moon, now, but the beam of a powerful torch. Two torches. And he heard a voice. An angry male voice.

  ‘Hey! You!’

  He turned round. For a moment he was dazzled by the beams directly in his face. Blinking hard, he directed his own more feeble torch beam back. The light fell first on a young, uniformed police officer and next on the middle-aged man, in a parka, standing beside him.

  ‘It’s here,’ he replied. ‘Right where I’m digging. It’s right under my feet!’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy?’

  ‘I’m saving the world.’

  ‘You’re defacing private property.’

  ‘Listen, please listen.’

  ‘No, you listen,’ the man in the parka said. ‘You are trespassing. Who the hell gave you permission to start digging up sacred ground in the middle of the night?’

  The old man replied, simply, ‘God.’

  7

  Thursday, 16 February

  A Latin quotation was fixed to a wooden door in the cloisters of the St Hugh’s Charterhouse monastery, in the heart of the Sussex countryside, fifteen miles north of Brighton.

  Mihi enim vivere CHRISTUS est, et mori lucrum.

  Its English translation was: For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

  Behind that door, in the privacy of his spartan cell, Brother Angus sat at his desk, immersed in reading. For many years he had lived a solitary existence, spending many hours a day, seven days a week, on his knees in his tiny prayer cubicle.

  But increasingly frequently in recent months he had ventured out of his cell and along the cloistered walkway to the vast, oak-panelled, galleried library. On each visit, he systematically searched for relevant volumes through the thousands of leather-bound titles – many pre-dating the printing press – and brought as many as he could carry back to his cell.

  Any monk here could, if he chose, remain inside his cell and never leave it. Food was placed every morning through the hatch beside his door by one of the brothers. Brother Angus was a deeply worried man. And he had no one with whom he could share his concerns for a couple more days, when he was next permitted to speak – for just one hour – on the Sunday walk.

  He would be sixty-three years old next month and he did not know for how much longer he would be serving his Lord. Not long, of that he felt certain. Perhaps, because of his sickness, it was likely he might not even see another winter. Perhaps not even ano
ther summer. Until recently, he had been content with the life he had been given, although it had not always been thus. A child of the 1960s, he’d once lived the wild life to the full. A university drop-out, he’d been lead guitarist in a heavy metal band, Satan’s Creed, and had for many years lived an alcohol- and drug-fuelled rock ’n’ roll life touring, mostly in Germany, playing gigs in clubs and out in the open air, and having endless sex with groupies.

  Until one day he’d seen the light.

  Several lights in fact. Penlight torches of doctors peering into his pupils after he’d massively overdosed on a cocktail of stuff he couldn’t even remember taking. Operating theatre lights. Then the brightest light of them all. The light calling him.

  A Greek Orthodox nurse in the North London clinic that dried him out, and saved his life, told him about her brother who was a monk, living in a monastic commune on the holy peninsula of Mount Athos. Angus had always been drawn to Greece, and something about the spirituality of the Greek Orthodox religion appealed to him. He converted. Then, with the help of the nurse’s brother, he was given a visa to visit.

  He went there for five days and stayed for five years, finding deep spirituality in the harsh regime of prayer, work, silence and little sleep. Until one day God called him back to Horsham in Sussex, England. His ageing mother was ill and needed him.

  He nursed her through Alzheimer’s for the next seven years until she died. He was planning to return to Mount Athos when, one day shortly after her funeral, he happened by chance to drive past the St Hugh’s Charterhouse monastery gates and saw the light again, brighter than ever this time. He turned the car round, drove in and gave the vehicle to the Prior to dispose of, telling him to put the proceeds towards the upkeep of the place.

  He had been there ever since. And he would never leave now. This was his home – or at least his temporary home, until –

  Until he was truly home.

  Perhaps.

  St Hugh’s had been constructed during the order’s wealthy days as a safe haven for French monks fleeing the Revolution. But few French monks had ever gone there. Like so many such places in recent centuries, whilst it had been built to house over two hundred monks, new brothers were scarce, and as the older ones died, it was increasingly hard to replace them. There were currently just twenty-three monks in residence, including the Prior and his deputy, and most of them came from elsewhere in the world. Silence wasn’t just rigidly enforced, it was naturally enforced, too. Of those twenty-three monks, seventeen of them each spoke a different language. The monastery, like many in the world these days, short of monks, welcomed brothers from all orders.

  Few who came stayed for long, finding the discipline and routine too hard. Recommended to be in bed by 8 p.m., they had to rise at 11.50 p.m. for the next prayer session, which they took part in either in the solitude of their private chapels or in the communal chapel, presided over by the Prior.

  Brother Angus’s cell was unusually spacious by monastic standards. It was on two floors, and he had a self-contained walled garden where he could grow his own vegetables. The downstairs comprised his private chapel, where a picture of Jesus hung on the wall above a statuette of the Virgin Mary, on a makeshift pedestal fashioned from a tree trunk. Along the short corridor was a space housing his workbench and the tools he needed to carry out the maintenance on his cell and garden.

  His upstairs quarters, consisting of two small rooms, were furnished with his bunk, a wooden desk and chair, and the prayer cubicle. A turquoise hot-water bottle hung upside down from a hook beside his little washroom, and there was a small woodburning stove, providing the only heat he had during the long winter months. He should light the stove now, he knew, as he shivered, his cowled habit affording him only meagre protection from the bitingly cold draughts. But he was too immersed in the ancient English of the book he was currently reading, which he was having to decipher as he went along.

  Seated at his desk, with his stack of library volumes, Bible, prayer books and prayer timetable laid out in front of him, he had a view out of the window across his garden wall to the peaceful graveyard, surrounded by the monastery’s Gothic Revival cloisters.

  Rows of plain wooden crosses marking, anonymously, the burial plots of the brothers who had gone before him. And one day soon his earthly body would lie among them. But where would his spirit be?

  That was a question that until recently had never been a problem. But he’d spoken about it to the Prior on several occasions, and each time he had been less and less convinced by the Prior’s assurances. The more he read and analysed, the more his faith was being tested. What, he had started to think increasingly frequently, if there was nothing? Nothing at all?

  What if he had spent all these years – wasted all these years – praying into thin air?

  He was searching through the pages of this book now, hoping God would guide him to a passage, buried within it, that would give him answers. It was imperative. He didn’t know the outside world any more. So much had changed since he’d first entered holy orders. Even though he’d stepped out of them to nurse his mother, he’d been wary of technology. The outside world had moved on so much in these past decades. He rarely used a phone, though he was becoming more proficient on the internet.

  He had been afraid that soon he would become extinct, just rotting bones beneath an anonymous cross, like all the others who had once been here with him and before him.

  Then, only a few months ago, he’d received a message. The potential consequences of it had made him even more afraid, because the message was so unclear.

  Something was happening. There was religious turmoil in the world that was increasing and polarized in a manner that had not happened for centuries. God was giving him signs and messages every night when he slept. Giving him instructions about going online, moving forward. But instead of clarity, he was feeling increasingly confused.

  There were days – weeks, sometimes – when all the messages and signs blurred together, and he had turned from seeking religious texts to scientific ones. Most of the monks here lived without modern technology, but Brother Angus now found himself studying some of its more lateral-thinking exponents. One in particular whom he read avidly was an American called Professor Danny Hillis, the creator of the parallel processor and co-founder of the company Thinking Machines Corporation. The company’s motto was: We’re building a machine that will be proud of us.

  And some of the inventor’s words struck a chord with him.

  There was one particular passage from a talk Hillis had given back in the mid 1990s that had stuck with Brother Angus: ‘In man’s search for God, I’m not sure we’re necessarily going to find Him in the vaults of a Gothic cathedral; I think it is more likely we’ll find Him in cyberspace; technology might be the way to open that hailing frequency.’

  Angus had risked the Prior’s wrath – and possibly exclusion from St Hugh’s – by trying to convince him to give each monk a computer with internet access, rather than just the dated and slow communal one in the library, but he would not hear of it. He had dismissed it by saying, ‘God tells each of us all we need to know. The day we cease to trust that is the day we should cease to be a monk. Perhaps you are having a crisis of faith, Brother Angus? Just remember, everything that ever was, still is. It is there in God. Seek and you will find. Ask him and he will tell you.’

  In his prayers, Brother Angus asked Him with more and more urgency every day. The message he got back was that something was going to be happening, and soon. Something as fundamental to the Christian world as the Coming of Christ.

  A Second Coming?

  Or a Great Imposter?

  8

  Thursday, 16 February

  Ross Hunter nearly didn’t answer the call. The display on his landline read NUMBER WITHHELD. Probably yet another of the automated nuisance calls that were one of the banes of everyone’s lives these days. He was on a deadline with his editor, Natalie McCourt, at the Sunday Times Insight section, who
needed his piece exposing six Premier League footballers involved in a film production tax evasion scheme by 4 p.m. – exactly twenty minutes away.

  Montmorency, their dark grey labradoodle, lying on the floor close to his desk, seemed focused on two deadlines at this moment. Would he finish that bone, which he was crunching noisily and irritatingly, before his master took him out for a walk? And would they go out for a walk before it was dark?

  In the days that followed Ross often wondered just what it was exactly that had made him pick up the phone. But he figured even if he hadn’t, the caller would have almost certainly rung back. And then rung back again. Ross was pretty high profile these days, and knew better than to ever dismiss any call he received. His first big break, years ago as a fledgling reporter on Brighton’s Argus newspaper, was just such a call out of the blue. That had led him to the story of a sex scandal, which had ended with a local MP having to resign his seat.

  ‘Ross Hunter,’ he said, staring down at the darkening Patcham street from his den in the former loft of the house he and his wife, Imogen, had moved into, trying to start over, soon after that terrible afternoon when he had arrived home from Afghanistan to find her in bed with another man.

  She’d begged forgiveness. Told him she’d been dreading being informed by the Foreign Office that he was missing presumed dead, and that she’d sought comfort with an old friend. Desperate to regain normality back then, he’d accepted her explanation and forgiven her. Subsequently he discovered she had not told him the truth and the affair had been going on for far longer. Their relationship had never been quite the same again. It was like gluing together the pieces of a broken glass. It was intact but the joins were ever present. They’d tried to paper over the cracks by moving home. Now she was pregnant, but he still felt doubt.

  He just could not trust her. Not totally. There were days when she arrived home late from work with excuses he wasn’t sure he believed. Occasions when she awkwardly ended a phone call when he walked into the room. Always then the memory returned. Her naked body on top of the bearded man in their bed.