The First Apostle (9 page)

“So what are you saying—someone broke in but didn’t take anything? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Exactly. And the other thing I’ve found relates to Jackie. I’m really sorry about this, but we need to consider the possibility that she didn’t just fall. She may have been pushed.”

Mark studied his friend’s face for a moment. “Pushed?” he echoed. “You mean someone . . . ?” Bronson nodded. “But the police said it was an accident.”

“I know, Mark, but while you were asleep an officer brought the autopsy report to the house, and after he left I studied it very carefully. There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense.” Bronson selected one of the sheets of paper and showed it to Mark. “Jackie’s body had numerous bruises on it, obviously caused by her fall down the staircase, and I’ve no doubt that what actually killed her was hitting her head on the banister. But this one injury here really worries me.

“On the left side of her head the pathologist found a single compressed fracture of the skull: that’s on the opposite side to the more severe injury. In his opinion, that wound had been caused by a roughly spherical object about three to four centimeters in diameter. It would have been a painful injury, but certainly not fatal, and had been inflicted at about the time death occurred.”

Mark nodded. “She probably hit her head on the stairs or something when she fell.”

“That’s obviously what the local police thought, but that injury bothers me. I’ve looked all the way up the staircase and in the hall, and I can’t find anything of the right size and shape to have inflicted the wound, and which she could possibly have hit when she fell.”

For a few moments Mark didn’t reply. “So what are you suggesting?” he asked eventually.

“You know exactly what I’m suggesting, Mark,” Bronson said. “Take the fact that someone has obviously broken into the house, and that Jackie had an injury on her body that I don’t think could have been caused by her falling, and there’s only one possible conclusion. I think she disturbed the burglars, and was hit on the head by a bludgeon or something like that. And then she fell against the banister rail.”

“Murdered? You mean Jackie was murdered?”

Bronson looked at him steadily. “Yes, I think she was.”

“What do you know about ciphers, Cardinal?” Mandino asked.

The two men were sitting at a busy pavement café in the Piazza del Popolo, just east of the Ponte Regina Margherita, people bustling past on the street. Vertutti would under no circumstances allow the man to enter the Vatican: it was bad enough having to deal with him at all. This time Mandino had three men in attendance. Two were bodyguards, but the third was a thin, bespectacled man with the air of an academic.

“Virtually nothing,” Vertutti confessed.

“Neither do I, which is why I’ve asked my colleague—you can call him Pierro—to join us.” Mandino gestured toward the third man sitting at their table. “He’s been involved in the project as a consultant for about three years. He’s fully aware of what we’re looking for, and you can rely on his discretion.”

“So this is someone else who knows about the Codex?” Vertutti demanded angrily. “Do you tell everyone you meet, Mandino? Perhaps you should publish information about it in the newspapers?”

Pierro looked uncomfortable at Vertutti’s outburst, but Mandino appeared unruffled.

“I’ve only ever told those people who needed to know,” he explained. “For Pierro to analyze the snippets of dead languages we’ve been translating, he needed to know what we were looking for and why. He can read Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Coptic, and he’s also something of an expert on first- and second-century encryption techniques. I was lucky to find him.”

The glance Pierro directed at Mandino immediately suggested to Vertutti that the “luck” might have been somewhat one-sided, and he guessed that Mandino had used threats or some kind of pressure to persuade the academic to work with him.

“You’re obviously familiar with the Latin phrase we found, Cardinal,” Pierro said, and Vertutti nodded.

“Good. We know that all early ciphers were very simple and basic. Until about the fifth century, illiteracy was the norm for the majority of the population, and not just in Europe but throughout the whole of the Mediterranean region. The ability to read and write, in any language, was almost the sole preserve of religious communities and working scribes. And it’s worth remembering that many of the monks were essentially copyists, reproducing manuscripts and books for use within their own communities. They didn’t need to understand what they were duplicating: the skill they possessed was that of making accurate copies of the source documents. The scribes, or amanuenses, on the other hand,
did
have to understand what they were writing, because they were producing legal documents, taking dictation and so on.

“Because of such widespread illiteracy, there was rarely any need to encrypt information, simply because so few people would have been able to read anything that had been written. But in the first century the Romans did begin to use a simple plain-text code for some important messages, particularly those relating to military matters. The code was, by modern standards, childishly simple: the hidden text was formed from the initial letters of the words in the message. As a further refinement, sometimes the hidden message was written backward. The problem with this type of encryption was that the plain-text message was almost invariably stilted, just to accommodate the secret text, and so it was often obvious that there
was
a concealed message, which rather defeated the object of the exercise.

“Another common cipher was known as Atbash, a simple substitution code originally used in Hebrew. The first letter of the alphabet was replaced by the last, and so on.”

“So are you suggesting that
‘Hic Vanidici Latitant’
contains a cipher?” Vertutti asked.

Pierro shook his head. “No, I’m not. In fact, I’m quite convinced it doesn’t. We can eliminate an Atbash cipher immediately, because anything encoded in Atbash invariably resulted in gibberish, and the Latin phrase is far too short for a plain-text code to work. As a precaution, I’ve run several analysis programs on the Latin words, but without result. I’m certain that there’s no hidden meaning.”

“So why am I here?” Vertutti demanded. “If there’s nothing more to be learned from this inscription, I’m just wasting my time. And you, Mandino, could have told me all this over the telephone. You do have my number, don’t you?”

Mandino gestured to Pierro to continue.

“I didn’t say there was nothing else to be learned from this phrase,” the scholar persisted. “All I said was that there was no hidden message in the words—that’s not the same thing at all.”

“So what
did
you find out?” Vertutti snapped.

“Patience, Cardinal,” Mandino said. “That stone’s been waiting for someone to decipher the inscription for about two thousand years. I’m sure you can wait a few more minutes to hear what Pierro has to tell you.”

The lanky academic glanced uncertainly from one man to the other, then addressed Vertutti again. “My analysis of the Latin phrase has only confirmed the literal meaning of the words.
‘Hic Vanidici Latitant’
means ‘Here lie the liars,’ and the most plausible explanation for the inscription is that the stone was originally in one of two places. The first possible location is obvious: it was placed in or close to a tomb or burial chamber that contained at least two bodies. If there was only a single corpse, the Latin should read
‘Hic Vanidicus Latitat.’
”

“I
do
read and understand Latin, Signor Pierro,” Vertutti murmured. “It is the official language of the Vatican.”

Pierro colored slightly. “I’m only trying to show you the logic that I was using, Cardinal. Please hear me out.”

Vertutti waved his hand in irritation, but leaned back and waited for Pierro to continue.

“I rejected that explanation for two very simple reasons. First, if that stone had been in or close to a tomb, there’s a very strong chance that whoever found it would also have found the bodies. And we can be reasonably certain that didn’t happen, because there would certainly have been a record of the discovery. Even in the Middle Ages, the significance of the burial would have been quite obvious.”

“And the second reason?”

“The stone itself. It’s simply not the right size or shape to be a grave marker.”

“So what was the other possible location? Where was that?” Vertutti asked.

Pierro smiled slightly before replying. “I have no idea. It could be anywhere in Italy, or even in another country.”

“What?”

“When I said there were two possible locations for the stone, what I meant was that if the stone wasn’t a grave marker—which I think I’ve demonstrated—there’s only one other thing it could possibly be.”

“And that is?”

“A map. Or, to be precise, half a map.”

Mark studied the autopsy diagram with care, and listened as Bronson translated the Italian description of the injury to the side of Jackie’s head. Then he nodded agreement.

“You’re a police officer, Chris, and you know what you’re talking about. What you say makes sense. I can’t think of anything that shape on the staircase or down in the hall.”

Bronson could tell that Mark’s grief was slowly being displaced by anger. Anger at whoever had violated his property and—deliberately or by accident—killed his wife.

“So what should we do now? Tell the Italian police?”

“I don’t think that would help much. They’ve already decided this was just an accident, and absolutely the only evidence we’ve got is an unusual wound and the fact that the back door of the house was forced. They would point to the fact that nothing was stolen, not even the cash that we found lying about, and you could interpret the injury to Jackie’s head in more ways than one. They’d nod politely, offer their condolences, walk away and do nothing.”

“So what do we do?”

“I think,” Bronson said, “that the first thing we should do is to try to find out what the burglars—or whatever they were—were looking for. I’ve been around the house a couple of times, and I’ve not noticed anything missing, but if we do it together we might spot something.”

“Good idea.”

But twenty minutes later, having checked every room, they’d found nothing. Everything of value—money, jewelry and expensive electronic equipment—was, as far as Mark could tell, present and correct.

The two men walked down the stairs to the kitchen where Bronson filled the kettle and switched it on. “Forget anything missing, Mark. Did you see anything out of place, anything in one room that should be in another, that kind of thing?”

“Bloody difficult to tell. Half the furniture in the house is covered with dust sheets, and some bits have been moved into different rooms to give the builders space to do their work.”

“You didn’t see anything that looked as if it had been disturbed or moved that
wasn’t
to do with the builders?”

Mark thought for a few seconds. Finally he said, “Only the curtains in the study.”

“What do you mean?”

“We haven’t owned this place very long, and there are a lot of things that need changing. The study curtains came with the house, and they’re hideous, which is probably why the sellers left them. Jackie couldn’t stand the sight of them, so we always left them pulled back, so you can’t really see the pattern. But when we were in the study I noticed they were drawn across the window.”

“And Jackie wouldn’t have done that?”

Mark shook his head. “Absolutely not. There are shutters on the outside of that window, and we’ve always kept them closed—that helps stop reflections appearing on the computer screen—so there would never be any need to draw the curtains.”

“Well, somebody must have done,” Bronson said. “The police would have had no reason to do so. Maybe the burglars closed the curtains because they were looking for something in the study and wanted to ensure no light shone through the window.”

“But we’ve checked the study,” Mark protested, “and there’s nothing missing.”

“I know, so we need to go back and check it again.”

In the study, Bronson switched on the computer, and asked Mark to check every drawer and cupboard in the room, just in case they’d missed something. While he waited for the operating system to load, Bronson rummaged through the papers scattered over the desk, and found invoices, estimates and quotations for the work the Hamptons were doing on the property, plus the usual collection of utility bills. There were also several sheets of A4 paper that he presumed Jackie had used to write herself notes, as he found shopping lists and to-do lists on a few of them. One of these interested him, and he put that piece of paper to one side, together with another, apparently blank, sheet.

When the computer was ready for use, Bronson checked what programs were installed and then scanned through the “My documents” folder, looking for anything unusual, but found nothing. Then he checked the e-mail client, looking in both the “Inbox” and “Sent items,” again without result. Finally, he opened the Web browser—like most people, the Hamptons had used Internet Explorer—and looked at the Web sites Jackie had visited recently. Or rather, he tried to. There were no sites listed in the history, so he checked the program settings. That puzzled him, and he leaned back in the black leather office chair with a frown.

“What is it?” Mark asked, closing the door of the cupboard they used to store their stationery.

“I don’t know that it’s anything, really. Was Jackie an experienced computer user? I mean, would she have fiddled about with program settings, that kind of thing?”

Mark shook his head. “Not a chance. She used the word processor and the spreadsheet, sent and received e-mails and did a bit of surfing on the Internet. Nothing else. Why?”