The Hanging Christian – Episode 7

Freya puts her life on the line as she goes undercover back into the cult. Will she be found out?

access ah well Chocolate christian Duke of Cambridge fiction freya lee hanging late lol monday serial patrick brooks plot twist prince william professor seydowsky recording device room royalty wills

Catch up on Episode 6 here.

__________________________________

Freya stared hard at her abdomen in the mirror as she buttoned up her blouse. Could you make out the subtle outline of the recording device through the fabric? Definitely not.

She turned back to her laptop and checked Facebook. Dull. Dull. She scrolled down her newsfeed. Dull. Ha. Dull. Fuck you Bethany Chivers. Dull.

She looked back in the mirror. Tucked her hair behind her ears. What exactly was her plan, here? The next scheduled meeting wasn’t for another six days. She could try to do a bit of investigating of her own perhaps. Take the initiative…

There was a gentle knock on the door. Freya started, and then exhaled slowly. Calm the fuck down. It was probably just Bea wanting a moan about just how much of a “mare” her day had been.

She got up, unlocked the door and opened it.

Professor Seydowsky was standing there, holding what looked like a box of chocolates. It took every inch of her self-will not to scream and slam the door in his face.

“May I?” he said with what seemed like a wink, but definitely couldn’t have been. Freya didn’t know what to do. This would have been weird enough if he were just her supervisor, but add in the fact that she’d watched him participate in the murder of a student and that she was wearing a police bug, and basically this was just a really weird dynamic.

She ushered him in, trying not to let her hand shake.

“Do you… want a cup of tea?” she said.

He laughed. “No thank you, Freya, I won’t deprive you of a bag. I know how addicted you undergraduates are to your earl grey.”

She tried to laugh, and it just came out as a kind of squeaky giggle.

He sat down on the edge of her bed, placing the chocolates carefully down beside him on the duvet.

“How are you feeling about last night?” he said. He patted the spot on the other side of the chocolates. She sat.

“Um… fine… I guess…”

“Come on now, Miss Lee, don’t pretend you haven’t been deeply affected by it.”

She didn’t know how to respond.

He unwrapped the chocolates. “Here, take one.”

She took a bite. The taste was bitter. She felt like she was accepting blood money, payment for keeping her mouth shut. Why wouldn’t he just leave, why wouldn’t he get the fuck out of her room?

“I know I said before that it just takes time,” said the professor, “well it does. But then again, sometimes it is more… efficacious to just plunge onwards. To brush it from your mind via some occupying distraction.”

Freya really didn’t want to know where he was going with this.

“Something very exciting will be happening tonight, Miss Lee. Something far more exciting than anything that we have achieved over the last oh, twenty years, at the very least. I would normally say at this point that you are perfectly free to say that you’ve had enough and want no more to do with us.”

He laughed.

“But firstly we both know you’re still hooked, and secondly, you know far too much about us to just go on about your daily life as if nothing had happened.”

 __________________________________

The meeting place was now a large, unlit and generic conference room in St John’s Fisher Building. Freya sat at the large mahogany table next to Professor Seydowsky. Her mouth still tasted of tart chocolate. Of course she’d agreed to come with him – how could she decline? But it was also the perfect opportunity to nail these bastards. She just hoped she’d actually managed to turn the recording device on properly.

A thick-joweled man with a fuzz of grey on his bulbous skull stood to speak after everyone was settled. His voice was coarse and yet somehow languorous.

“This is it, my friends. We’ve been waiting for this night. For years, we’ve been waiting for this night. But now the moment is perfect. Our explosives testing in the centre of town last term went perfectly, and now our target has come and is nesting right in the very heart of our city, right in our grasp. We cannot let him escape. We cannot let him slip through our fingers. We cannot let this man, who gives no tangible benefit society and yet is honoured and funded by the public purse just for who his family is, we cannot let this man run rough shod over our city. Not only are his family’s outdated place in society an insult to rational meritocracy, but he even has the audacity to damage the Access image of our university! No more! Tonight is the night we assassinate Prince William, erstwhile Duke of Cambridge!”