Free The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) by Anna Jaquiery

look like an academic,’ Chesnay said.
    He spent the next few minutes reading through the brochure in silence. Morel looked around the room. Despite being tiny it was comfortable. It was a place that would make you forget the outside
world. Morel couldn’t remember if Chesnay was married.
    ‘Any idea what sort of church would put out something like that?’ he asked finally.
    ‘It’s a hodge-podge of things, isn’t it?’ Chesnay said slowly. ‘A bit of this, a bit of that. At times, the language is reminiscent of the sort of evangelical
material you might expect, say, a Baptist church to circulate. For example, where it says:
Are you born again? Have you accepted the shed blood of Christ as the atonement for your sins?
But then there’s this’ – he pointed to an illustration – ‘which is very Russian and one of the leading symbols of the Orthodox Church.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘A copy of Andrey Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity. It depicts the three angels visiting Abraham.’
    ‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Rublev,’ Morel said.
    ‘Andrey Rublev is perhaps Russia’s most famous iconographer. Late fourteenth-early fifteenth century. The Moscow Patriarchate made a big deal about him in the 1980s – all part
of the Gorbachev-led revival, perestroika and glasnost etc. When all was forgiven and God was no longer considered a pariah.’
    ‘Russia?’ Morel thought about Irina Volkoff. She had said she thought the boy at her door was Russian.
    ‘Yes. After the collapse of the USSR, and without the safety net afforded by the Soviet state in areas like housing, health and education, people found themselves struggling, particularly
the older generation. Many Russians started looking for something to fill the void left by the fall of communism. Religion was the obvious answer, but the Russian Orthodox Church, as you may
already know, was discredited during Soviet times; people believed the Church was in cahoots with the Soviet regime, which of course it was. So many Russians turned to other religions.’
    ‘What kind?’
    Paul Chesnay rested his hands on his stomach and looked at Morel.
    ‘Everything – you name it. Hare Krishnas, Moonies, Mormons. Some have been more successful than others. As it happens, the evangelical churches have done particularly well over
there. Nowadays you’ll find, for example, that roughly half of all Baptists in Europe are Russian. It is astonishing in a way, when you consider how different these evangelical religions are
to the austere formality of the Orthodox Church. Then again, maybe the very reason they have attracted so many people is because their characteristics are so far from the old-school rituals. When
Billy Graham visited Moscow in 1992, just a year or so after the break-up of the Soviet Union, he made quite a splash.’
    Morel tried to picture the American pastor on his Russian pilgrimage, anointing a congregation of new converts. It had a touch of the surreal, though it could be said that America had always
exported its beliefs in some form or another. Politics or religion, it was a fine line that separated the two as far as that country was concerned.
    ‘Is any of that useful to you?’ Chesnay asked.
    ‘Everything you’ve said is interesting and helps, in a sense. In some ways, though, it doesn’t make my job any easier,’ Morel admitted. ‘I can’t work out
where I should be looking.’
    Chesnay took off his glasses and pinched his nose. ‘All I can say is that it’s unlikely to have come from an established organization. It’s not coherent at all. I’d say
it’s the work of an individual on a personal crusade. Incidentally,’ Chesnay continued, ‘I notice your guy keeps coming back to the word “crusade”. Now there’s a
word that crops up often among Baptists, particularly your modern-day Southern Baptists. Including the illustrious Billy Graham,’ he said, articulating the word
illustrious
with
exaggerated emphasis.
    ‘In