The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (18 page)

Anna laughed. ‘The American man who gave it to me thought it was priceless, too. Until he found out that the thirteenth-century Cathar script he’d paid twenty thousand dollars for was a fake.’

A fake?’

‘It’s no older than this house,’ Anna said with a chuckle. ‘About eighteen-nineties. He was so
pissed off–
is that the right expression?–that he gave it to me for nothing. He should have known. As you say, a genuine item in that condition would have been worth a small fortune.’

Roberta smiled. ‘We Yanks are suckers for anything more than three hundred years old.’ She moved away from the framed scroll and looked across at the tall, wide bookcase, running her eyes along the hundreds of books in Anna’s collection. There was so much here–history,
archaeology, architecture, art, science. ‘Some of this stuff is so interesting,’ she murmured. ‘One day when I get time…’ She remembered she had a little book of Post-it notes in her bag, still out in the car. ‘Excuse me for a moment, will you? I want to write down a few of these titles.’ She trotted out of the room.

Anna moved close to Ben. ‘Come, I’d like to show you something,’ she said. He stood up, and she took his arm. Her hand was warm on his skin.

‘What do you want to show me?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘This way.’

The two of them walked out of the french window and down the long garden. At the bottom, a rocky path led up to the open countryside and after they had scrambled up a short slope Ben found himself looking out at a magnificent sunset panorama. He could see for miles across the mountains of the Languedoc, and above it all the sky was a cathedral-rich canvas of shimmering golds, reds and blues.

Anna pointed across the valley and showed him two distant castle ruins, serrated black outlines perched miles apart against the sky on high mountain peaks. ‘Cathar strongholds,’ she said, shielding her eyes against the falling sun. ‘Destroyed by the Albigensian crusade in the thirteenth century. The Cathars and their ancestors built castles, churches, monasteries, all across the Languedoc. They were all crushed by the Pope’s army.’ She paused. ‘I’ll tell you something, Ben. Some specialist historians have believed that these places have a deeper significance.’

He shook his head. ‘What kind of deeper significance?’

She smiled. ‘Nobody knows for sure. It was said that somewhere in the Languedoc there lies an ancient secret. That the relative positions of Cathar sites give the clue to finding it, and that whoever could solve the puzzle would discover great wisdom and power.’ Her dark hair was blowing in the gentle evening breeze. She looked beautiful. ‘Ben,’ she said tentatively. ‘You haven’t told me the whole truth. I think you’re looking for something. Am I right? Something secret.’

He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

Her almond eyes sparkled. ‘I thought so. And it has something to do with alchemy, with the legend of Fulcanelli?’

He nodded, and couldn’t help but smile at her razor-sharp perceptiveness. ‘I was looking for a manuscript,’ he admitted. ‘I think Klaus Rheinfeld knew about it, and I’d been hoping he could help me. But it looks like I was wrong.’

‘Perhaps
I
can help you,’ she said softly. ‘We must meet again. I think we could work together on this.’

He said nothing for a moment. ‘I’d like that,’ he said.

Roberta had come back from the car to find the house empty. She heard their voices carrying on the wind, and looked out of the french window. She saw Ben and Anna climbing back down the slope towards the garden. She could hear Anna’s chiming laugh. Her slim figure was silhouetted against the sunset. Ben
offered her a hand. Was it her imagination? They seemed to be getting on very well.

What do you expect? Anna’s gorgeous. She’d be hard for any man to resist.

‘What kind of thoughts are these, Ryder,’ she said to herself. ‘What do you care, anyway?’

But then she realized. She did care. A terrible thing was happening to her. She was falling in love with Ben Hope.

Ben was in a sombre mood the next day as he wandered aimlessly through the dusty streets of Saint-Jean. His search had slammed into a dead end.

When he’d phoned Fairfax two days earlier he’d held back from mentioning that the manuscript might have been destroyed. He’d been hoping that Anna Manzini would be able to tell him something positive. That had been a stupid false impression to give the old man. Now everything looked black, time was dragging by and he had no idea where to turn next.

In a square next to an ageing World War One memorial statue was the village bar, a one-roomed affair with a tiny terrace where leathery old men sat like reptiles in the sun, or played games of
pétanque
in the empty square. Ben walked in, and the clientele–all three of them, playing cards in a shady corner–turned to look as the tall, blond stranger appeared. He nodded them a sullen greeting, which was returned with grunts. At the bar, the proprietor
was sitting reading the newspaper. The place smelled of stale beer and smoke.

He noticed a Missing Persons poster on the wall.

He sighed. Another one.
That’s what I should be doing–helping kids like that. Not hanging around here wasting time.

Leaning on the bar, he lit a cigarette and asked for his flask to be refilled. They only had one type of whisky in the place, an especially vile fluid the colour of horse urine. He didn’t care. He ordered an extra double measure of the same and sat on a bar-stool, gazing into space and sipping the burning liquor.

Maybe it’s time to give up this fiasco
, he was thinking. This job had never been right for him, from the start. He should have stayed objective. His first impression had been right. Fairfax, like all desperate people who want to save someone they love, had fallen victim to his wishful thinking. So there was a good chance the Fulcanelli manuscript was lost–so what? It was probably all bullshit anyway. There wasn’t any great secret.
Of course there wasn’t.
It was all a fantasy, all myths and riddles and fodder for gullible dreamers.

But could he say that Anna Manzini was a gullible dreamer?

Who knows–maybe she is?

He slid his empty glass along the bar, tossed some coins on the pitted wooden surface and asked for
another double. He’d already finished that one, and started on another, when the three old card players in the corner looked round at the sound of running footsteps.

Roberta burst in, looking flushed and excited.

‘Thought I’d find you here,’ she said. She was out of breath, as though she’d run all the way from Pascal’s cottage. ‘Listen, Ben, I’ve had an idea.’

He was in no mood for her enthusiasm. ‘Tell me about it some other time,’ he muttered. ‘I’m thinking.’ He was–thinking about picking up his phone and telling Fairfax it was over. He’d wire him back his money, give up and go home to his beach.

‘Listen, this is important,’ she insisted. ‘Come on, let’s go outside. No, don’t finish that. You look like you’ve had enough already. I want you with a clear head.’

‘Go away, Roberta. I’m busy.’

‘Yeah, busy drinking yourself into a stupor with that gut-rot.’

‘Gut-rot is what happens to you when you drink it,’ he corrected her. He pointed at the glass.
‘This
is
rot-gut’
, he said emphatically.

‘Either way,’ she grunted impatiently. ‘Look at you. Call yourself a professional?’

He shot her a ferocious look, slammed the glass down on the bar and slid down off the stool.

‘This had better be very, very good indeed,’ he warned her as they stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.

‘I think it is,’ she said, turning to face him with an
earnest look as she got her thoughts in order. ‘OK, listen. What if the manuscript Klaus Rheinfeld stole hadn’t been destroyed?’

He shook his head, confused. ‘What are you raving about? Pascal saw it in pieces. It was ruined in the storm.’

‘Right. Now, remember the notebook, Rheinfeld’s notebook?’

‘What about it?’ he grunted. ‘This is what you drag me out here for?’

‘Well, maybe it’s more important than we thought.’

He furrowed his brow. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just listen, OK? Here’s my idea. What if the notebook was the same thing as the manuscript?’

‘Are you crazy? How could it be? They gave it to him at the hospital.’

‘I don’t mean the actual notebook, stupid. I mean what’s written in it. Maybe Rheinfeld copied the secrets down into it.’

‘Oh right. From inside a secure hospital,
after
he’d lost the original? What did he do, channel the information? I’m going back inside.’ He turned impatiently to go.

‘Shut up and listen to me for once!’ she shouted, grabbing his arm. ‘I’m trying to say something, you pigheaded bastard! I think Rheinfeld could have remembered it all and written it down later in his notebook.’

He stared at her. ‘Roberta, there were over thirty fucking pages of riddles and drawings, geometric shapes, jumbled-up numbers and bits of Latin and
French and all kinds of stuff in there. It’s not possible to remember all that in perfect detail.’

‘He walked around with it for years,’ she protested. ‘Probably living rough, with no money. It was all he had. He was fixated on it.’

‘I still don’t buy that anyone could have that kind of memory. Especially a fucked-up alchemy nut,’ he added.

‘Ben, I did a year of neurobiology at Yale. Granted, it’s unusual–but it’s
not
impossible. It’s called eidectic memory, also known as photographic memory. It’s usually lost by adolescence, but some people retain it all their lives. Rheinfeld had an OCD, from what I can gather–’

‘OCD?’

‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,’ she said more patiently. ‘He had all the symptoms, kept repeating actions and words for no apparent reason–or for no reason that anyone could understand except him. Now, it’s been known for compulsive neurotics to have uncanny powers of memory. They can store huge amounts of detail that you and I would never be able to remember. Difficult mathematical equations, detailed pictures, enormous chunks of technical text. It’s all on scientific record going back almost a century.’

Ben sat on a bench. His mind was quickly clearing of the whisky fog.

‘Think about it, Ben,’ she went on, sitting next to him. ‘They gave Rheinfeld a notebook to write down his dreams–that’s a standard part of psychotherapy.
But instead, he used it to preserve the memories he was holding inside, keep a written record of the information that he’d stolen and then lost. The psychiatrists couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing, where the stuff was coming from. They probably dismissed it as lunatic gibberish. But what if it was more than that?’

‘But he was crazy. How can we trust the mind of a madman?’

‘Sure, he was crazy,’ she agreed. ‘But mostly he was obsessive, and the thing about obsessives is, they’re crazy about details. As long as the detail he wrote down was close enough to the original, what matters isn’t his craziness but that the notebook might contain a perfect, or near-perfect, replica of the documents that Jacques Clément didn’t burn because they’d been passed to him by Fulcanelli.’

He was silent for a few moments. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Of course I’m not sure. But I still think we should go back and check it out. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?’ She looked at him searchingly. ‘Well? What do you say?’

Anna couldn’t concentrate on her work. Still unable to come up with a satisfactory plot for her historical novel, she’d been reduced to sketching out a rough draft of the author’s introduction. It should have been easy–she knew the subject so intimately. But the words just wouldn’t flow. Now a new distraction had formed in her mind to add to the writer’s block that had been troubling her for so long. Each time she tried to focus on the page in front of her, after a couple of minutes her mind began to stray and she found herself thinking about Ben Hope.

Something was niggling her. Something buried at the back of her mind. What was it? It was distant, hazy, like a half-forgotten word hovering teasingly on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t crystallize into clear thought. She glanced down at Rheinfeld’s notebook, lying at her elbow on the desk, the dagger blade rubbing slipped between its pages. Maybe there was more to the notebook than she’d ever thought. The markings…

She reclined back in the swivel-chair, gazing out of
the window. The stars were coming out, beginning to twinkle in the darkening blue sky above the black-silhouetted line of mountaintops. Her eye followed the string of Orion’s Belt. Rigel was a distant sun, over 900 light years away. The stars brought history alive to her. The light she was seeing now had started its journey through space almost 1,000 years ago; just to gaze up at it was to travel back in time, commune with the living past. What dark, terrible, beautiful secrets had the stars witnessed over medieval Languedoc? She sighed and tried to get back to her work.

She put down her pen. It was only just after nine, but she decided she’d have an early night. Her best ideas
often came when she was relaxed in bed. She’d have a hot bath, make a drink and curl up with her thoughts. Maybe the morning would see her with a clearer mind, and she’d be able to call Ben Hope and arrange to see him again.

She wondered what trail he was following, what significance the gold cross and this Fulcanelli manuscript might have. Was it connected with her own research into the Cathar treasure? So little was known about it that most historians had all but given up on the old legend.

A curious feeling, one she hadn’t felt for a long time…She smiled to herself. The excitement she felt at the prospect wasn’t just out of intellectual curiosity. She was keenly looking forward to their next meeting.

She shut her study door and walked along the corridor to her bedroom. She went through to the ensuite bathroom beyond and turned on the bath taps, then undressed and slipped into a bathrobe, tying up her hair. She glanced at her face in the mirror, but it was already steaming up from the splashing hot water.

She stiffened. Was that a noise from downstairs? She turned off the taps and cocked her head, listening for it. Maybe the pipes. She turned the taps back on, clicking her tongue in irritation at her own jumpiness.

But as she was just slipping her robe off her shoulders to get into the bath, she heard it again.

She knotted the belt of her bathrobe as she walked
edgily back through the bedroom and out onto the landing. She stood listening, her head cocked to one side, a frown furrowing her brow.

Nothing. But she’d definitely heard something. She quietly lifted up the Egyptian bronze Anubis statue from the wooden pedestal on the landing. Weighing the jackal-headed god’s effigy in her hand like a club, she padded silently down the stairs in her bare feet. Her breathing was quickening. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the statue. The dark downstairs hall rose up to meet her with every step. If she could get to the light switch…

There it was, that sound again.

‘Who’s there?’ She wanted her voice to sound strong and confident, but it came out in a shaky treble.

The loud knock at the door made her jump. She gasped, her heart thumping. ‘Who is it?’

‘Anna?’ said a man’s voice from outside the door. ‘It’s me, Edouard.’

Her shoulders sagged with relief and her arm hung limp by her side, still clutching the Anubis. She ran to the door and opened it, letting him in.

Edouard Legrand hadn’t been expecting such a warm welcome, after she had turned him down flat on the phone several times. He was pleasantly surprised as she ushered him inside the front hall.

‘What are you doing with that thing?’ he said with a smile, nodding at the statue in her hand.

She glanced down at it, feeling suddenly foolish. She set the Anubis down on a table. ‘I scared myself so much just now,’ she said, placing her palm on her
still-fluttering heart and closing her eyes. ‘I heard noises.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, these old houses are full of strange noises. Mine is just the same. You probably heard a mouse. It’s amazing how much noise a tiny mouse can make.’

‘No, it was you I heard,’ she said. ‘Sorry if I seemed flustered.’

‘I didn’t mean to alarm you, Anna. You were not asleep, I hope?’ he added, noticing her robe.

She smiled, relaxing now. ‘Actually I was just about to have a bath. Perhaps you could fix yourself a drink, and I will be down in five minutes.’

‘Please, go ahead, don’t let me rush you.’

Damn
, she was thinking as she walked into the steamy bathroom. It looked like encouragement, the way she’d hurried him inside. Talk about giving out mixed signals.

She couldn’t say she actually disliked Edouard Legrand. He wasn’t completely without charm. He wasn’t at all bad-looking either. But she could never in a million years return the feelings he obviously had for her. There was something about him, something she couldn’t define, that made her feel uncomfortable around him. She’d have to get rid of him as gently as possible, but quickly and firmly before he started getting the wrong ideas. She couldn’t help but feel a little pang of guilt. Poor Edouard.

Downstairs, Edouard was pacing up and down in the living-room, working over the lines he’d prepared. Then he remembered the champagne and flowers that
he’d left in the car, not wanting to appear too boldly at the door like a serenading suitor brimming with expectations. But as she’d let him in without protest and was obviously eager for his company, now was the time to produce them. Where was the kitchen? Maybe he’d time to stick the bottle in the freezer to chill it down while she was having her bath. They could have such a perfect evening together. Who knew where it might lead? Jittery with excitement, he went back outside to the car.

Anna climbed out of the bath, towelled herself dry and pulled on a pair of jogging pants and a blouse. The Mozart symphony playing on her bedroom stereo system was entering its bright second movement, and she hummed along to it. As she came downstairs she still hadn’t quite figured out how she should handle her unexpected visitor. Maybe she should let him stay a while, try to play it cool.

The front door was wide open. She tutted. Where had he gone? For a walk around the garden, in the dark? ‘Edouard?’ she called out through the doorway.

Then she saw him. He was leaning through the open window of his car, his head and shoulders inside as though he was reaching for something.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, half-smiling. She trotted down the steps from the villa, breathing in the warm night scent of flowers.

His knees were bent and his body seemed to sag against the side of the car. He wasn’t moving. ‘Edouard, are you all right?’ Was he drunk?

She reached out a hand and shook his shoulder.

Edouard’s knees gave way and he flopped backwards. He crunched down on his back on the pebbles and lay staring up at her with sightless eyes. His throat was slashed open in a wound that gaped from ear to ear, cut to the spine. His body was soaked in blood.

Anna screamed. She turned and ran back towards the house. She slammed the door behind her and picked up the phone in the hallway with a shaking hand. It was dead.

She heard it again–the sound she’d heard before. This time it was clearer, louder. It was the metallic scraping of steel against steel. It was in the house. The living-room. A knife-blade dragging slowly, deliberately, down the bars of her birdcage.

She ran for the stairs. Her foot pressed against something soft, warm and wet. She looked down. It was one of her canaries, lying broken and bloody on the step. Her hands flew to her mouth.

Through the half-open door of the living-room she heard a laugh, the rasping chuckle of a man who was plainly enjoying his little game with her.

On the table by the foot of the stairs, the Anubis statue was standing where she’d left it. She snatched it up again in a trembling hand. She could hear footsteps coming towards her. She dashed back towards the stairs. Her mobile phone was in the bedroom. If she could get to it and lock herself in the bathroom…

Her head jerked back and she cried out in pain. The man coming up behind her was tall and
muscular, with cropped steely hair and a face like granite. He yanked her hair again, twisted her around and punched her hard in the face with a gloved hand. Anna fell to the floor, her legs kicking. He bent down towards her. She lashed out with the Anubis and caught him across the cheekbone with a crunch.

Franco Bozza’s head snapped sideways with the blow. He put his gloved fingers to his face and studied the blood with an impassive look. Then he smiled. All right, the game was over. Now to business. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it harshly. She screamed again, and the statue fell from her hand and bounced down the stairs. She crawled away, and he watched her go. She was almost at the top of the staircase when he grabbed her again. He slammed her head against the banister rail and her vision exploded into white light. She slumped on her back, tasting blood.

He knelt over her, taking his time. His eyes were shining as he slid a hand inside his jacket and drew out the blade from its sheath with a smooth hiss of steel on synthetic fibre. Her eyes opened wide as he playfully drew the blade from her throat to her abdomen. Her breath came in rapid tremors. He kept her head pinned back with a fistful of her hair.

‘The information the Englishman was after,’ he whispered. ‘Give it to me. And I might let you live.’ He calmly held the knife against her cheek.

She managed to speak. Her voice sounded tiny. ‘What Englishman?’

She felt the coldness of the steel, and then she screamed in agony as he pressed the blade into her flesh. He took the knife away, looking at the three-inch gash. Blood streamed down her face. She shook her head from side to side, struggling against his grip. He held the knife against her throat. ‘Tell me what he wanted from you,’ he repeated in his rasping undertone. ‘Or I will slice you into small pieces.’

Her mind raced. ‘I gave him nothing,’ she insisted, blood trickling between her lips.

Bozza smiled. ‘Tell me the truth.’

‘I am,’ she protested. ‘He was looking for a document–an ancient script.’

Bozza nodded. This was what he’d been told. ‘Where is it?’ he whispered.

She paused, thinking hard. He pointed the knife at her eye and looked at her enquiringly. ‘Over the fireplace,’ she whimpered. ‘I-in the frame.’

His cold eyes looked into hers for a moment, as though assessing whether she was telling the truth. With deliberate movements he wiped the blade clean on the carpet and laid the knife down on the floor beside her head. Then he drew back his fist and smashed it into her face. Anna’s head lolled to the side.

Bozza left her lying on the stairs, sheathing his knife as he went down to the living-room. He ripped the frame down from the wall, broke the glass against the corner of the mantelpiece and shook the fragments out. He pulled the medieval script away from its mounting, rolled it up into a tight cylinder
and slipped it into the deep inside pocket of his jacket.

So Manzini hadn’t given anything to the Englishman. Usberti would be pleased with him. He’d found the woman quickly and efficiently, and he had found what his boss had sent him to bring back.

Now he’d bring the woman round and enjoy her for a while. He loved the looks on their faces when they realized he wouldn’t let them live after all. That terror in their eyes, that delicious moment when they were so powerless in his grasp. It was even better than the slow torture and the screaming climax that came afterwards.

He stepped back into the hallway and his eyes narrowed. The woman was gone.

Anna staggered into her study. She could hear the sound of breaking glass downstairs as the frame was torn apart. Blood was dripping down her throat from her gashed cheek, the front of her blouse sticky and warm with it. Her head was spinning but she managed to focus on the desk. Her outstretched hand dripped spots of blood across her research notes. Her fingers closed around the notebook in its plastic wrapping. Clutching it tightly, half-blind with pain and nausea, she staggered back along the corridor towards the bedroom.

From the foot of the stairs Bozza saw the bedroom door close. He followed, climbing the stairs in his easy, unhurried walk. As he approached the bedroom door he was reaching for the plastic pouch on his belt.

The woman’s bedroom was empty. On the far side
of the room was another door. Bozza tried the handle. It was bolted from inside.

Locked in her bathroom, Anna jabbed panic-stricken at her phone, smearing the plastic with bloody fingerprints. With a sick lurch she remembered it was out of credits. She dropped the phone, giddy with horror. She knew this madman wasn’t going to let her live. She was going to die horribly. Could she kill herself before he got to her? The window wasn’t high enough. She would only be crippled and he’d soon catch her again.