Page 45 of The Salt King

Jericho sparkled at him and went to a filing cabinet. “I’ll get you that list.”

Avelyn didn’t want to sit in silence with the ras, so he turned down Jericho’s offer of a spare office and set up at the end of one of the long tables in the dining room instead. It also had the effect of making the interviews feel more like a casual chat over a hot drink, and it was much easier to stop people and ask if someone could find this or that person for him, and tell them the Inquisition wanted to see them.

He had already spoken to Fabian and didn’t want to do that again, and nobody could find Annunciata,15 so he started with another nun from Lagos. She had shaken off lung cancer, as far as Jericho could tell. She also had a faint but distinct salt light halo.

“And when did the cure happen—can you pin it down?” Avelyn asked.

She looked awkward. “Sorry, can you say that again? I’m . . .”

Having trouble with his accent. He repeated it.

“About a week ago, Father. It was just after Matthew.”

He looked up. Fabian had said the same thing. “Why, do you know?”

“I can’t understand,” she said with a hint of frustration, as if she wanted to accuse him of not trying hard enough. “Where are you from?”

He pointed to the floor to say here, and felt defeated.

“I said, why did it happen just after Matthew’s cure?” he said again, concentrating on flattening all the intonation right down. It didn’t help that he couldn’t hear it. Father Li said he sang his English, which seemed ominous coming from a Welsh person.

She nodded once, decisive. “It was that I truly believed. I saw Matthew walk, and . . . well, I hadn’t asked for any cure before. I try not to ask God for anything. He isn’t a vending machine. But then . . . I just realized it could genuinely, truly happen, Father, do you understand? And once I did . . . it was as though a light opened in me somewhere, and God was in it.”

Avelyn wrote that down.

She was watching him closely. “Father, I should say, I find God through my work. I’m not the sort of person who talks about a deep personal relationship with the Lord. Those people always sound to me like one beer off telling you they once met Elvis serving burgers in a diner.”

He wasn’t sure she could have said anything that would have made him take her more seriously.

The next person was a fire-breathing conservative priest from the States who appeared on exorcism podcasts and was emphatic that he wasn’t at An El because he was hiding from the accusations. He talked as if Avelyn would have heard about them, and Avelyn, who hadn’t but had very much met a hundred versions of him before, didn’t ask. The man looked like he lurked outside secondary schools.

He had a halo almost as bright as Annunciata’s.

“Yeah, it happened a week ago,” the priest said, flexing his hands to show Avelyn that he could. His name was Reyes. “Awful arthritis until then. You should have seen my hands, knotted like rope.”

No doubt from all the grabbing of unconsenting passersby.

“But I prayed on it, and over maybe three days, the pain went away and I played the piano for the first time in ten years.”

A week ago.

“How do you pray?” Avelyn asked.

“Say that again, sorry?”

Avelyn considered making flash cards to hold up, then said it again.

“Like, tell it to you?”

“Yes please.”

“Sure. Dear Almighty God, please grant a favour to this humble servant of yours, and relieve of me the terrible pain I’ve been suffering. I know there’s redemption in suffering, but I reckon I’m as redeemed as an old sinner is likely to get.”

Avelyn let that canter a few laps around his head. “Did you have any expectation that that might be effective?”

Reyes made a meowing noise.

“No, it was a genuine question,” said Avelyn.