No one could be trusted, Nicholas thought as he ran along the road and then jumped on a bus. He could hardly believe what he had seen. His old mentor had been working against him all the time. Either from choice or pressure, Father Michael had tried to stop Nicholas – and he had nearly succeeded. Far from being idle, the Church had been working hard to silence him. They might have succeeded too if he hadn’t been lucky the night he collapsed, a tourist finding him unconscious on Brompton Road.
Nicholas sat beside the bus window and rested his left temple against the steamy glass. He had mistrusted Elliott from the first and he had been right to be cautious. The academic was obviously working for the Church. Carel Honthorst wasn’t the only one in their employ; it had been a two-pronged attack. If one of them didn’t get him, the other would.
He glanced at his fellow passengers, all involved in their own thoughts, silent in the fuggy bus, no one meeting his eye. And then Nicholas remembered something that had happened the previous evening.
‘You sleep so badly,’ Father Michael had said. ‘I’ve made you a hot drink – that should help.’
Nicholas had smiled his thanks, but when he tasted the over-sweetened drink he had winced and thrown it out of the window to avoid hurting the old man’s feelings. He could imagine how surprised the priest would have been to see the empty glass the following morning and Nicholas up and about when, by rights, he should have been felled.
The treachery winded him. Father Michael had promised support, had pledged to make amends for his past negligence, while all the time attempting to wheedle confidences out of Nicholas. Where were the papers? he had asked. Are you still going to expose the conspiracy? And while he had been feigning concern, he had been reporting back to the Church. Expressing sympathy as he had drugged Nicholas’s food, distorting his dreams, increasing his paranoia along with his intermittent confusion.
Then another thought occurred to Nicholas. Was it the priest who had planted the crucifix in his bed? He had heard him snoring, but he might have managed it. Unless there had been someone else in the house, someone quick. Someone who knew the layout of the rectory. Someone who had expressed doubts about Nicholas’s suspicions. His sister, Honor.
He couldn’t believe it. Not Honor. She was too straight. She had told him what she thought directly – she wasn’t the type to sneak around. But she had been prying into his history, digging up the past, his litany of sins regurgitated. She knew what he had done and how suspicious it looked …
‘Sorry, mate,’ a man said, knocking into Nicholas as he sat down next to him. ‘Rain again, hey? What can you do?’
Ignoring him, Nicholas kept staring out of the window. At the next stop he left the bus and watched it as it passed. But the man didn’t move, just stayed in his seat as the bus moved on.