Mystic Detective(8)

Paul was in Leeds – only an hour or so away from Manchester – but a very different culture. Not as cosmopolitan or as rich as Manchester and a different kind of meanness haunted its city streets. Both cities had known poverty (and still did) especially during Paul’s childhood in the 1980s when the destructive madness of Margaret Thatcher blighted a whole generation in the North.

The recovery was slow. Manchester re-branded itself as a modern multi cultural post industrial city. Dirty deals were done with the money men and a boom of sorts resulted. Leeds with its lingering Yorkshire dourness was slower off the mark but a kind of prosperity seemed to arrive by the mid to late 1990s.

Paul was in Leeds for a meeting with an informant, Clive, a disillusioned ex member of OM who Frankie had tracked down via an ex student of his. They met in the bar at lunchtime at the Playhouse Theatre among luvvies and wrinkles. Clive was a youngish looking man dressed in a lurid T shirt (featuring the Clash of all bands!) and jeans despite the rather cold Autumnal weather. He was thin and tall with a pencil thin moustache and a goatee beard, looking rather like a hackneyed painter but without the acne.

- I understand you can help me with some information about OM
- It will cost you (was the reply as Clive, furtively looked round and leaned forward to speak softly to Paul)
- Fine, if its good
- How about one hundred quid upfront?
- Fifty for starters
- OK
Paul handed over 5 ten pound notes.
- What do you want to know?
- Well, a client of mine has a daughter who got caught up with OM and when she left they wouldn’t let her go, started stalking her, demanding money…
- Sounds typical
- What’s it all about, I don’t get it
- You need to understand the way they think
- Tell me
- Well. The self as we no it is an illusion. When you join OM then you lose your separateness and join the Overself, the OM Self. So everything you have is signed over to OM. Until you take this step you wont be happy. When you do you are guaranteed eternal bliss. OM will then take care of all of your material needs. They target well off unhappy people, loners, people with a spiritual itch.
- So what happens when you leave?
- Probably your client’s daughter had not done the final death of the self ceremony.
- Death of the self?
- Yes it’s a ritual practice in which the sanyasin fasts for 72 hours and then at dawn a special ceremony occurs in which they are given a new OM name and hand over all their worldly goods.
- Hmmm (Paul remembered the state his friend Xavier was in after his time at the OM Centre in York and his own visit their.)
- It sounds like she quit just before the ceremony and that they are trying to get her back. They are very good with IT stuff. They’ve hack into her email, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter accounts. Probably even her mobile phone.
- How do you stop them?
- They are very tenacious
- You might be able to pay them off but it would cost a packet. And they don’t like people quitting and telling what happened.
- You got contacts
- Yes but it will cost you (Paul assed over another 50 quid) and don’t tell them were you got the information. York is not their main centre. It is just their public face, it is their level one. It is at their level two centre that the real damage is done. That’s where the death of the self happens. Their level two centre is in California.