The First Apostle (8 page)

Bronson glanced at his watch. “The mortuary is about a fifteen-minute drive, and we need to be there at nine. You’d better drink that, then we should both go and get ready. Do you want me to ring for a taxi?”

Mark shook his head and took another sip of his coffee. “We’ll take the Alfa,” he said. “The keys are on the hall table, in the small red bowl.”

They left the house thirty minutes later. The temperature was already climbing steeply and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, a beautiful day. It would have suited their moods better if it had been raining.

Joseph Cardinal Vertutti stared at the ancient text in front of him. He was in the archives of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the most secret and secure of the Vatican’s numerous repositories. Most of the texts stored there were either Papal documents or material that would never be made public because it was protected by the Seal of the Confessional, the promise of absolute confidentiality for Roman Catholic priests for any information gleaned during the confessional. Because access to the archives was strictly controlled, and the contents of the documents never revealed, it was the ideal place to secrete anything the Vatican considered especially dangerous. Which was precisely why the Vitalian Codex had been stored there.

He was sitting at a table in an internal room, the door of which he’d locked from the inside. He pulled on a pair of thin cotton gloves—the fifteen-hundred-year-old relic was extremely fragile and even the slightest amount of moisture from his fingertips could do irreparable long-term damage to the pages. Hands trembling, he reached out and carefully opened the Codex.

The seventh-century Church of Christ, headed by Pope Vitalian, had existed in chaotic times. The arrival of Muhammad and the subsequent emergence of Islam had been a disaster for Christianity and within a few years Christian bishops had virtually vanished from the Middle East and Africa, and both Jerusalem and Egypt became Muslim. The Christian world had been decimated in just a few decades, despite the strenuous efforts of Vitalian and his predecessors to convert the inhabitants of the British Isles and Western Europe.

Somehow Vitalian had found time to study the contents of the archives. He’d summarized his findings in the Codex that bore his name and which Vertutti was studying yet again.

He had first seen the document just more than a decade earlier, and it had frankly terrified him then. He wasn’t even sure why he was looking at it again. There was no information in the Codex he hadn’t already studied and memorized.

The conversation he’d had with Mandino had disturbed him more than he was willing to admit, and as soon as he’d returned to his offices in the Vatican, Vertutti had spent more than an hour meditating and praying for guidance. It greatly concerned him that the very future of the Vatican had, almost by chance, been placed in the hands of a man who was not only a career criminal, but—far worse—also a committed atheist, a man who was apparently almost rabid in his hatred of the Catholic Church.

But as far as Vertutti could see, there was no alternative. Mandino held all the cards. Thanks to Vertutti’s predecessor in the dicastery, and despite the most explicit prohibitions against the dissemination of such information, the mobster had intimate knowledge of the quest begun by Pope Vitalian almost one and a half millennia earlier. On the plus side, he also had the necessary technical resources to complete the task, and men who were willing to follow whatever orders he gave.

Vertutti’s gaze dropped down to the Codex. He’d been turning the pages of the ancient document without really seeing them. Now, as he stared at the Latin sentences, he realized that the open page described the finding of the text that had so terrified Pope Vitalian, and had produced the same effect on his successors through the ages. Vertutti read the words again—words almost as familiar to him as the prayers he offered daily—and shuddered.

Then he carefully closed the Codex. He would replace the document in its climate-controlled safe and then return to his office and his Bible. He needed to pray again, and perhaps the holy book would guide him, reveal to him the best way to try to avert the disaster that was almost certainly just around the corner.

To say the identification of Jackie’s body had been traumatic was an understatement. The moment the mortuary technician lifted the sheet to reveal his wife’s face, Mark virtually collapsed, and Bronson had to grab his arm to steady him. The police officer who’d been waiting for them outside the mortuary opened his notebook and asked formally, and in passable English, if the body was that of Jacqueline Mary Hampton, but all Mark could do was nod, before turning away and stumbling from the viewing room. Bronson sat him down in the waiting room, then returned to talk to the officer.

Bronson was holding it together, just. If Mark hadn’t been standing beside him, relying on him for support, he probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the moment. He’d been in mortuaries dozens of times as an attending officer, waiting for desperate relatives to confirm their nightmares and identify the corpse on the table, but this was the first time, ever, that he’d been on the other side, as it were.

Jackie looked incredibly peaceful, as though she was merely asleep and might at any moment open her eyes and sit up, and as beautiful as ever. Somebody had taken a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was brushed back and looked freshly washed; her complexion appeared flawless. Bronson forced himself to take a closer look, tried to be professionally detached, and then saw the heavy makeup on her forehead and cheeks, obviously concealing large bruises. And she was pale, much paler than she’d ever been in life.

He shook hands with the police officer, took a long last look at the woman who’d been his first and all-consuming love, and stumbled out of the room.

Once the documentation had been completed, Bronson and Mark headed outside to the parked Alfa Romeo.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Mark said, tears streaming uncontrollably down his face, his eyes red and puffy. “It only really hit me when I saw her body just lying there on that slab.”

Bronson just shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to speak without breaking down.

Their route out of the town took them past a pharmacy. Bronson pulled the car to a stop at the side of the road, went into the shop and emerged a few minutes later carrying a small paper bag.

“These should help,” he said, handing the bag to Mark. “They’re mild tranquilizers. They’ll help you to relax.”

At the house, Bronson poured his friend a glass of water and insisted he take a couple of the tablets.

“I won’t be able to sleep, Chris. Everything’s just going round and round in my head.”

“At least go and lie down upstairs. You need to rest, even if you stay awake all afternoon.”

Reluctantly, Mark took the drink and headed for the stairs.

Breakfast seemed an age ago, and Bronson found he was hungry. He looked in the walk-in larder and the big American fridge and found ham, bread and mustard, and made himself a couple of sandwiches and a pot of coffee to wash them down. When he’d finished eating he loaded the plates into the dishwasher and crept upstairs. Outside Mark’s bedroom he stopped and listened at the door. He could hear the sound of gentle snoring, so he knew the tranquilizers had done their job. He smiled briefly, then retraced his steps.

Bronson had looked around the house that morning, but he wanted to check the property again. He was still worried about the “burglary,” and was sure he must have missed something, some clue that would reveal why the property had been broken into.

He started in a methodical way, in the kitchen where the door had been forced, and then worked his way around the rest of the house. He even checked the garage and the two outbuildings where Mark kept the lawn mower and other gardening tools. Nothing appeared to be missing, and he could find no other sign of damage or forced entry anywhere in the house. It just didn’t make sense.

Bronson was standing in the hall, looking up at the staircase where Jackie had fallen, when he heard the crunch of car tires on the gravel drive. He peered out the window and saw that a police car had pulled up outside the house.

“You are Signor Hampton?” the officer asked in halting English, stepping forward and extending his hand.

“No,” Bronson replied, in fluent Italian. “My name’s Chris Bronson and I’m a close friend of Mark Hampton. You’ll appreciate that the death of his wife has come as a severe shock. He’s asleep upstairs and I really don’t want to disturb him unless I have to.”

The officer, seemingly relieved at Bronson’s command of the language, reverted to his native tongue. “I’ve been sent here to give Signor Hampton the results of the autopsy we carried out on his wife.”

“That’s no problem,” Bronson replied. “Come on in. I can explain everything to him when he wakes up.”

“Very well.” The policeman followed Bronson into the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened the slim briefcase he was carrying. He extracted a buff folder containing several typed sheets of paper, some photographs and diagrams.

“It was a tragic accident,” he began, and passed two pictures across to Bronson. “The first photograph shows the staircase of the house, taken from just inside the hall. If you look here”—he took a pen out of his uniform jacket pocket and pointed—“and here, you’ll see two slippers on the stairs, one close to the bottom and the other nearer the top. And this one shows the victim’s body lying on the floor at the foot of the staircase.”

Bronson braced himself to look at the image, but the picture wasn’t anything like as bad as he’d feared. Again, the photograph had been taken from just inside the hall, and had probably been intended only to show the position of the corpse in relation to the staircase. Jackie’s face was not visible, and Bronson found he was able to study the picture almost emotionlessly.

“Reconstructing the sequence of events,” the officer continued, “it seems clear that she ran up the stairs but lost her footing near the top and her slippers fell off as she tumbled down the staircase. We found a small patch of blood on the banister rail with three hairs adhering to it, and the pathologist has matched those to Signora Hampton. The cause of death was a broken neck, caused by a violent sideways impact to the right side of her head with a blunt object. It seems clear that when she lost her footing on the stairs she hit her head on the rail.”

Bronson nodded. The conclusion seemed logical enough based on the available forensic evidence, but he still had some unanswered questions.

“Were there any other injuries on the body?” he asked.

The officer nodded. “The pathologist found several bruises on her torso and limbs that were consistent with an uncontrolled fall down the staircase.”

He riffled through the papers and selected a page containing outline diagrams of the anterior and posterior views of a human body. The drawings were annotated with a number of lines pointing at areas of the body, and at the end of each was a brief note. Bronson took the sheet and studied it.

“May I have a copy of this?” he asked. “It will help me explain to Mr. Hampton exactly what happened to his wife.”

“Of course. This copy of the report is for Signor Hampton.”

Ten minutes later Bronson closed the door behind the police officer and walked back into the kitchen. He spread the pages and photographs out on the table in front of him and read the report in its entirety.

Halfway down the second page he found a single reference that puzzled him. He looked carefully at the injury diagrams to cross-refer what he’d read, but that merely confirmed what the report stated. He walked out into the hall and up to the top of the stairs, and looked very carefully at the banister rail and the stairs themselves. Frowning, he returned to the kitchen to look again at the pathologist’s report.

Half an hour later he heard the sound of movement upstairs, and shortly afterward Mark walked into the kitchen: he looked a lot better after a couple of hours’ sleep. Bronson poured coffee and made him a ham sandwich.

“You’re probably not hungry, Mark, but you have to eat. And then we need to talk,” Bronson finished.

“What about?”

“Finish that, and I’ll tell you.”

He sat quietly as Mark drained his cup and sat back in his chair.

“So talk to me, Chris,” Mark demanded.

Bronson paused for a second or two, choosing his words with care. “This won’t be easy for you to accept, Mark, but I think we have to face the possibility that Jackie didn’t die from a simple fall.”

Mark looked stunned. “I thought the police said she’d hit her head on the banister.”

“She probably did, but I think there’s more to it than that. Take a look at this.”

Bronson got up and led Hampton across to the kitchen door. He opened it and pointed to the compressed area of wood on the frame close to the lock.

“That mark was made by a jimmy or something very similar,” he said. “When I checked the lock on the inside of the door, I found that all the screws had been pulled out. But the lock had then been refitted on the door and the screws replaced. Someone broke into this house and made every effort to keep that fact a secret.”

“You mean a burglar?”

Bronson shook his head. “Not unless it was a very strange kind of burglary. I’ve investigated dozens back in Britain, and I’ve never encountered one where the criminals tried to hide the fact that they’d broken in. Most thieves take the easy way in, grab whatever they can, and get out again as quickly as possible. They’re interested in speed, not stealth. I’ve looked around the house and I haven’t found any sign of anything missing. It’s difficult to tell, because of all the work being done, but your TV sets and computer are still here, and there’s even some jewelry and money lying on the dressing table in the master bedroom. No thief would ignore stuff like that.”