Sentence The Threehundredandsixtyfourth

He was incorrigibly dedicated to a defence of Justice, which informed his every action and had done for all of his near 50 years as an Officer of the Security Services; although an employee of the State, he had no time for namby-pamby governments which were so adapted to their own survival and therefore cultivated a population of sheeple which would ensure re-election – and even if the parties in power changed, the overall thrust remained; he could never countenance the use of torture to extract information, or assassination as an instrument of policy, yet now he was striding across the

Abbey yard, towards the stable with a double murder intended; for the last fifteen years, Tavish Dalwhinnie had been heading up a specialist team dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse: he had been appalled at the scale and extent, and together with officers for Border Security, they were trying to prevent the importation of children from, particularly, Eastern Europe, as well as the extensive grooming of vulnerable children already here, who should be safe in their own country, all of whom were abused and sold on, until they were discarded – alive or dead; there were extensive distribution networks and Tavish had long believed that the overall control was in the hands of a small and tight-knit cabal, based in Edinburgh, and known as The Ring of Gold – The Ring had been founded some 800 years ago by Sir Parlane MacFarlane, a notorious seducer of whoever took his fancy, almost a precursor of the Marquis de Sade, but without any of the French aristocrat's political or literary interests; The Ring only ever had 12 members, and on the death or incapacity of a member his place would be filled from a long list of applicants – through the many centuries, it's members had included notable political and religious figures, several kings and many nobles, and there were also a great many lower-class individuals, for the wealthy seemed to enjoy sharing their vices and pleasures with men they would never normally come into intimate contact with, and barely even acknowledge their existence; in recent times, the Kray Twins and Jimmy Savile had been members, before them Jack the Ripper (under his real name, known only to two other members) and two blood-lines were consistently represented: that of the Founder himself, under the name of his closest collaborator, his personal Man, Dominic Doubleday, through a son fathered by MacFarlane with Doubleday's wife, and the lawyers, every generation of Martin Elginbrods since the first child born to MacFarlane's own lawyer with Elginbrod's wife having been impregnated by Sir Parlane also; and it was MacFarlane and Doubleday that Tavish now sought, exasperated by the slowness of legal proceedings, the hoops he had to jump through long before any arrest or intervention could be sanctioned and now suddenly, inexplicably, by a fluke he could not understand, he was back at the very time when it all began: and he had the means, the opportunity and motive and knew that this chance might never again be available to him, so, with a clear conscience and armed with a heavy cudgel he had lifted from Brother Bede, the Almoners' office, he entered the stable and recognized the two, although their backs were towards him (now, Tavish had once been told by a retired Glasgow gangland enforcer that if you are going to hit and hurt someone, maybe kill him, you must come in fast and direct, with no hesitation, and intent only on doing your worst to him) so as he strode towards the two, Tavish's right arm was already describing the circle which would bring the heavily weighted end down on the back of MacFarlane's bare head; he had timed it perfectly, in just the same way as Leonardo could walk up to a wall and draw a perfect circle with his charcoal, the end meeting the beginning and leaving no trace of where the circle started and finished, and so it was that the gnarled and weighty end of the cudgel smashed through the hair and flesh and bone which formed Sir Parlane's head and dropped him to the floor, dead before he landed, and, even as Doubleday turned to see what had happened, the

cudgel was committed to it's second tour of duty, and as the serving man saw his master crumple and turned in the direction from which the other had fallen forward he was just in time to see the hardened wood which at that same instant smashed into his forehead, shattering his nose and forcing pieces of cracked skull-bone into his brain and he was dead almost before he realised that his end was coming, so fast had been the travel of the cudgel which drove through his brain and came to rest between his ears as he dropped to his knees and then toppled forward, the weapon pulling him down to the beaten earthen floor, on which scattered straw was fast turning red, so much blood was pumping from the two broken heads, and the bodies of the men lay sprawled in a heap, brutally slain; and Tavish, surprised by the amount of blood which was pooling around his feet and turning the ground to a sticky mud, simply turned on his heel and walked back from whence he had just come, wondering as he did whether anything will have changed in the world he came from!