A Conspiracy of Faith Read Online Free

paper, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. It was what was at the bottom of the bottle.
    On close inspection through the sand-blown glass, the coagulated mass looked remarkably like blood.
    “Do you think I could take this bottle with me? Is there anyone here I should ask?”
    “Try Emerson. He drove with David for a couple of years. I’m sure it’ll be all right.” The secretary turned toward the corridor. “Hey, Emerson,” she yelled, rattling the panes in their frames. “Come here a minute, will you?”
    Miranda said hello. Emerson was a pleasant, stocky man with sad eyes.
    “You want to take it with you? Be my guest. I’m certainly not wanting it myself.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s probably just nonsense. But just before David died, he remembered the bottle and said he’d better get it opened and do something about it. Some lad off a fishing boat handed it in to him in John O’Groats, and then the boat went down with the lad and everyone else on it a couple of years after. David felt he owed it to the lad to see what was inside. But he died before he got around to it. Not exactly a good omen, is it?”
    Emerson shook his head.
    “Take it away, by all means. There’s no good about that bottle.”

    That same evening, Miranda sat down in her terraced house in the Edinburgh suburb of Granton and stared at the bottle. It was some fifteen centimeters tall, blue-white in color, slightly flattened, and relatively long-necked. It could have been a scent bottle, though rather on the large side. More likely it had contained eau de cologne and was probably a good age, too. She tapped a knuckle against it. The glass was solid, that much was apparent.
    She smiled. “And what secrets might you conceal, dear?” she mused, taking a sip of red wine from her glass before using the corkscrew to scrape out whatever it was that sealed the neck. The lump smelled of tar, but the bottle’s time in the sea had made the exact nature of the material hard to determine.
    She tried to fish out the paper inside, but it was clearly in a state of decomposition and damp to the touch. Turning the bottle in her hand, she tapped her fingers against the bottom, but the paper budged not a millimeter. This prompted her to take the bottle into the kitchen and strike it a couple of times with a meat tenderizer.
    That helped. The bottle splintered into blue crystals that spilled out over the work surface like crushed ice.
    She stared at the piece of paper that lay on the chopping board and frowned. Her gaze passed over the shattered glass and she took a deep breath.
    Maybe it hadn’t been the best of ideas after all.

    “Yes,” her colleague Douglas in Forensics confirmed. “It’s blood all right. No doubt about it. Well done. The way the blood and the condensation have been absorbed into the paper is quite characteristic. Especially here, where the signature’s completely obliterated. The color of it, and the pattern of absorption. Aye, it’s all typical.”
    He unfolded the paper using tweezers and bathed it in blue light. Traces of blood all over, diffusely iridescent in every letter.
    “It’s written in blood?”
    “Most certainly.”
    “And you agree with me that the heading is an appeal for help? It sounds like it, at least.”
    “Aye, I reckon so,” Douglas replied. “But I doubt we’ll be able to salvage much more than the heading. It’s quite damaged, that letter. Besides, it might be very old. The thing to do now is to make sure it’s properly treatedand conserved, and then maybe we’ll have a stab at dating it. And of course we’ll need to have a linguistics expert take a look at it. Hopefully, they’ll be able to tell us what language that is.”
    Miranda nodded. She had her own idea about that.
    Icelandic.

4
    “Health and Safety are here, Carl.” Rose was standing in the doorway, looking like she wasn’t going to budge. Maybe she was hoping to see a fight.
    A small man in a well-pressed