The Monster in the Cardinal's Robes

The Cardinal wiped his blade on the white sheets of the bed. The knife hilt was carved in the shape of a serpent, its mouth open where the blade issued forth, like some kind of sharp demonic tongue. All three children were dead, their throats neatly slit while they slept. The other forty children in the British orphanage dormitory slept on soundly. The Cardinal turned to leave, red robes flowing behind him. In the dim light of flickering candles, gray shadows danced on the walls. He met a child in the corridor. The Cardinal knew that his size and big build could be very intimidating and a scary sight so he greeted the child with a gentile whisper so as not to wake the others.

"It is alright sonny, you go back to bed now and get a good rest."

The child was half asleep, nodded and passed by. The Cardinal hoped that he would think little of the encounter until it was too late to remember the details of it.

He left by a rarely used back door to the orphanage, climbing a wall and landing in the grass beyond. He moved across the lawn carefully smoothing the trail behind him. A nondescript black Skoda Octavia RS waited beyond the trees. The car was fast but anonymous and had tinted windows to hide its passenger. The driver checked him in the mirror and drove off without a word or turning around.

~~~~

The detective, Martin Harris, was no stranger to the Catholic world having been brought up in an orphanage like this one many years before. His memories were of priests with canes and perverse desires. A priest abused him and made him into a devout atheist. Despite the cleanup under the last few popes, he was no fan of the Roman Catholic church. His choir boy faith was irretrievably shattered by dark memories.

Harris studied the crime scene. The forensics guys had taken samples from each of the murdered children. They scanned the entire ward for fingerprints but the probability was that the killer wore gloves. Every single person in the building was under investigation and a search for blood splatter on clothing was underway. He was assured that the building was in lockdown during the night and there was only one used entrance and this had been manned during the night. No one had gone in or out during the time between the murders and the discovery of the bodies early that morning.

The orphanage was remote. Martin left the dormitory. He needed to think and process what he knew. He took a walk around the seven-foot walls.

He had many questions. Why only kill those three children and not the others? The cuts had been precise, surgical even. The children would never have woken up, just died in their sleep. Interviews with the staff had marked the three as troublemakers continually up to no good and bullies of the other children. But he doubted that any of the other children themselves could have had the strength and precision to execute the cuts that he had seen and none of them had any of the victim's blood on them. A search of the complex had revealed no weapons except carving knives all safely stored in a locked kitchen and immaculately clean.

There was a single witness, a little boy, who claimed that he met a very large man in long robes in the corridor while going to the bathroom. The man had a strange accent. Since all the staff wore long robes and many had foreign backgrounds this was not very helpful. But again Martin wondered, if that had been the killer why had he left the boy alive? This has all the hallmarks of a targeted assassination by a professional hitman, but boys, orphans, what possible value lay in these deaths?

Harris noticed a trail of slightly flattened grass leading to the wall. It was not carelessly flattened but there was a trail nonetheless. Maybe the killer would not have seen this in the dark and been unable to conceal it. The trail led into the forest. Harris followed it seeing the road just a hundred feet in the distance. He looked for footprints. There was nothing. He moved to the road looking for a clue. It was then that he saw what could have been a tire track in the dirt on one side. The guys in the field team could identify this

Sure enough, some time later his friend checked the track.
"It is too smudged to identify a type."

"How old is the track?"

"It could be a week old, or just a few hours; there is no way to tell."

"What have we got by way of traffic cam footage in the area," asked Harris.

"Nothing from the local speed cameras. The only continual feed is off the security cameras on the high street of the local village. It is a bit of a bottleneck for local routes and cars must pass that way to get back to the main motorway junction. We have subpoenaed all the footage and are checking it now,"

Three hours later the expert came back with a series of possible hits. Five cars passed through the village during the night. Most were identified as locals but there was one, a Skoda Octavia RS used by a Cardinal in the Vatican, Monsignor Pietro Filoni. His driver was visible in the driver's seat but tinted windows obscured the rear seats.

~~~~

The arrest of a Cardinal, on suspicion of murder, made the headlines. Harris, as the lead detective for the case, took the opportunity to meet Pietro Filoni in a Rome holding cell. The purpose was to substantiate the facts and to see if there were any grounds for extradition to the UK.

Harris studied the prisoner seated before a table between them, to which he was chained. Stripped of his robes Monsignor Filoni was an impressive man in jeans and a t-shirt that barely concealed his musculature. In his early forties, dark-haired, with intense brown eyes, his enormous hands rested on the grey metal of the table as if in patient prayer. He looked relaxed and at peace with himself. This irritated Harris.

"Detective Harris, I was told of your visit. How can I help you today?" asked the Cardinal, his nearly perfect English had a slight Italian accent.

"You know the charges made against you. Why did you do it?"

"Maybe I was merely visiting an old friend who lived nearby, unconnected with the orphanage. I think you know I will not stay in jail."

Harris had seen the testimony and interviewed the witness, a retired priest. There was indeed a back story making the witness credible, but equally little evidence of any contact between the two since a meeting fifteen years before.

The image of the priest, who abused him so many years before, flashed before his mind's eye, coloring his vision of the man before him. The Cardinal too must be a monster murdering children. And yet?... He is either the devil himself or what? What good reasons exist to murder children? How could a good man do such a thing?

Harris tried a different approach, "Hypothetically speaking, are there any good reasons for a child to be murdered in their sleep?"

The Monsignor glanced at the camera.

Harris understood and understanding that he would get his answers no other way he unplugged the camera. This was not something he would have done in a British police station but he was a tourist here. As he did so he asked,
"So?"

The Cardinal paused, looked at Harris with apparent absolute sincerity, and said, "If you knew that a child would grow up to be a monster, murdering the innocent, abusing people, and sowing doubt in millions about the faith, might that be a reason to kill?"

This startled Harris, it sounded like an honest answer. "How could someone know such a thing?..." Is the Cardinal claiming God told him to do this, he thought?! In anger, he questioned, "What is the difference between a madman who thinks God speaks to him and one who has been so instructed? Does the bible not say do not kill?"

"Do not murder..." The Cardinal contradicted him. "The Catholic church is in the business of saving souls. But what if it could be known who was in the way and who would inspire the most despair and doubt in this world?" The Cardinal paused studying Martin carefully before addressing him personally. "Martin, we know you were abused by a priest. One of the reasons a ministry like the one we just speculated about might exist would be to prevent such abuses of power occurring in the church."

Martin did not know what to say in reply. The Cardinal's answer had unsettled him. He did not appear to be lying.

The Cardinal continued, "We know what you think about a system that did not police its monsters. Tell me honestly Martin, would it not have been better if someone with such a gift had rooted out the priests and helpers in your orphanage before they had the opportunity to abuse you? Maybe then you would still consider the church your friend."

This answer shook Martin Harris to his core. Years of suppressed rage clashed with this new reason to hope in God. How many times had he imagined fighting back against that priest, even killing him himself? But if Monsignor Filoni had done his job all those years before maybe he would still be singing in church every Sunday, still a believer, still trusting in the black-cassocked people giving sermons and masses. If only this man was speaking the truth. Such a man who did these things would be a hero, not a monster. He could go to places the police could not and achieve results beyond all hopes of justice through normal channels.

Martin studied the Cardinal before him. He saw tears of compassion in the man's eyes. He knew that this was a man who acted in all things out of the love of God. He could not be the monster of his imagination but rather the one who killed those monsters. He could not help himself and started to cry. The kind of tears that come from deep inside one's soul, a place covered over for many years by dark memories, pain and anger, yet still there, still capable of an eruption of feeling and life. His whole body shook with the weeping. He felt the love of God for the first time in decades and it broke him. He was on his knees, "O Lord forgive me," he said in a quiet sob, "I have been so blind."

"God sees you and His tears wash you clean."

Later that day the acquittal of the Cardinal was confirmed.


Notes ▼

CONTEST:

SURVEY

What a Character! : Official WDC Contest  (E) Create a memorable character using the given prompt for huge prizes! #1679316 by Writing.Com Support

PROMPT: Write a story about a classic horror villain
(vampire, werewolf, invisible man, mummy, Frankenstein, etc.)
who's not a villain at all ... just misunderstood.
INTERPRETATION: What are the key fantastical horror villains in contemporary literature? I would argue the demonical catholic priest abusing children is one of the biggest myths of modern writing in media and literature. I say myths because most catholic priests are not like that and the odd black sheep are less commonplace in the Catholic church than they are in the general population, especially since the cleanups by the most recent popes.
W/C: 1809 words at point of submission
FEEDBACK: Most reviewers have found this story disturbing, which is in part what it is supposed to be. One weighted the standard understanding of a detective against the Divine story argued here and suggested that a detective would not behave like this. One suggested that a reformed view of justice would have been better in which these troubled kids were set on a different trajectory to the one foreseen for them. Both are missing the point. Foreknowledge of what will happen, if reliable, trumps the giving of choices or the futile attempts of environmental engineering to try and change behavior. A Detective with the deepest sense of justice knows that the dammed should not be given opportunities to wound, spoil, and destroy and that their toxicity is best purged early rather than late. It is only a lack of certainty about who these people are that prevents this. Another angle of attack on the storyline is the credulity of the Detective in believing the Cardinal's words. Here again, resonance with the deeper redemption/salvation motif is required. This story will divide those who can trust God's Judgment to be a fair one and those who cannot. A further criticism that no one raised is that God would wait until Judgment Day for this verdict and it is not His policy to remove evil from the earth but rather to use it to test faith, much as viruses test the health of the body, either strengthening the immune system or killing the host.