Past Lives (31 page)

The nun’s eyes opened like saucers. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

There’s no time to explain. ‘Is there a way out?’

‘
I don’t think so, Madame. There is only one door and it was locked behind me.’

Simone wrung her hands in frustration. She gripped the girl again and said, ‘Then you must do exactly as I say if either of us is to leave here alive! Do you understand?'

The girl looked terrified

'I will have to give you an injection but it's harmless and will have no effect on you at all. Dom Ignatius will not know that. You must pretend to be sleepy and answer any questions you are asked in a sleepy voice. Do you understand?'

The girl said, ‘I think so . . .’

Simone wondered if she was taking in anything at all. 'You must pretend to be someone else, a girl who lived in the past. Make up a name, any name. Do it now! Tell me!'

The girl looked about her. 'Maria,' she said.

'Maria who?'

'Maria . . . Portelli.'

‘
Good. Keep your eyes closed and make up the answers. If things get difficult, talk rubbish. If at any time I should pinch your arm like this . . . ' Simone demonstrated. 'Pretend to pass out. Do you understand?'

'No,' answered the nun truthfully, ‘But I trust you, Madame, I’ll do as you ask.’

'Good girl, as soon as you’re back with the sisters you must call the police. Understood?’

Simone heard Ignatius return and pretended to be helping the nun rearrange her habit when the door opened.

'It’s time. Let's get started.’

'Would you lie down here please, Sister,' said Simone in a pleasant but deliberately formal way. Her eyes sought Noni's as she swung her legs up on the table. All she saw there was innocence and bemusement but at least she wasn't saying anything to Ignatius.

Simone set up the delivery apparatus and inserted a needle in Noni's arm, apologising for the discomfort and seeking eye contact again to see whether or not she was going to play along. She noticed the girl’s skin was parchment white and unblemished. She could not have been more than eighteen years old.

Simone opened the delivery valve. 'Just relax,' she said quietly, 'Let your mind go blank. Relax completely.'

To Simone's relief the girl closed her eyes. She pretended to be making adjustments to the flow for the next minute or so before saying to Ignatius, 'I think she's ready.'

Ignatius, his eyes full of anticipation, stepped forward. 'Who are you, girl?' he asked.

'Maria . . . ' replied the nun sleepily.

Simone offered up silent thanks.

'Maria who?'

'Maria Portelli.'

'Where do you live, Maria?'

' . . . Marsaxlokk.'

'What do you do there, Maria?'

' . . . Help my mother.'

'What year is it?'

Silence.

'What year is it?' Ignatius repeated.

'Nineteen ninety-seven . . .'

Ignatius looked cold and hard at Simone and then stood back from the table. Simone pinched Noni and she let her head fall to the side. ‘She’s passed out completely,’ said Simone. ‘I don’t think we got rid of all the contaminating substance. She’s going to need proper medical help. Perhaps the sisters could call . . .’

Ignatius ignored her. The nun’s answer had made him suspicious. He snapped open one of the vials, wet his finger and put it to his lips. Without saying anything he approached the table and slapped Noni hard across the face. The nun let out a scream and scrambled off the table to take refuge in Simone’s arms.’

'Are all the vials like this?' snapped Ignatius.

‘
Yes,’ said Simone defiantly but inside she was so afraid that she felt nauseous.

Ignatius brought up the back of his hand in a sweeping arc and caught Simone on the left cheek bone. The force of the blow was sufficient to throw both her and Noni across the room where they ended up in a heap on the floor. Noni was sobbing, Simone holding the side of her face and trying to clear her head.

Ignatius stood over the pair of them, his right hand nervously fingering his cheek, lips twitching. Simone could sense the anger in him. She could feel it in the air; smell it; almost touch it. She had difficulty breathing as she waited for the explosion of violence she knew must come. Noni sensed it too. She closed her eyes and started praying out loud, clinging ever more tightly to Simone.

The awful moment was interrupted when the door opened and Stroud stood there, looking absurdly pleased with himself. ‘I have the information we need,’ he announced.

A look of disbelief appeared on Ignatius's face. 'You found a plan of the governor’s house?’ he said, sounding incredulous.

'No, but I came across something just as good. As you rightly said, the old cathedral was destroyed by an earthquake so there wasn’t much information about that and there was none at all about the governor’s house but, when the builders were preparing the foundations for the new cathedral, they came across an old well shaft . . .'

Scepticism seemed to evaporate from Ignatius. The anger that had shone in his eyes was replaced with excitement. 'Go on,’ he said.

'And it caused big problems,' said Stroud. 'The workers found a skeleton lodged in the shaft and saw it as some kind of omen. They downed tools and refused to go anywhere near it. All building work came to a halt.'

'So what happened?'

‘
The architect, a man named Lorenzo Gafa, called in the Church in the shape of Bishop Palmieri to break the impasse. Palmieri declared the well to be a hallowed grave and read the burial service over it. After that, they just closed up the opening and built on top of it. The site of the shaft is marked here on Gafa’s plan of the new cathedral.' Stroud showed Ignatius the photocopy of the plan he had made at the records office.

''Brilliant,' said Ignatius, who seemed to have forgotten all about the women for the moment. 'Absolutely brilliant. And do you know what? I can tell you who the skeleton belonged to.'

Stroud looked at him in disbelief.

'Think, man,’ whispered Ignatius. ‘James of Caesarea.'

'My God,' murmured Stroud. 'That's why he couldn't tell us any more about his return to the house of Publius. He died there. You took him right up to the point of his death!’

'What's been going on here?' asked Stroud, acknowledging for the first time that Simone and Noni, were in the room. They were still huddling together.

Ignatius didn't reply at first: he was preoccupied with the cathedral plan, using a ruler to take measurements and making notes on a small pad. After a long pause, the question finally registered and he said, ‘They’ve been making fools of us - making salt water. The sister knows too much. Give them something to keep them quiet and lock them up in the cellars. We’ll take care of them all later.’

Night was falling and Macandrew was almost out of his mind with worry. Simone had not returned and he was being forced to consider the worst. Apart from that, the whole routine of the place seemed to have changed. Neither the fat man nor Parvelli had come to check up on him. He had listened frequently at the door for any clue as to what was going on but the place seemed as silent as the grave.

Once more he stopped pacing up and down to bang on the door and shout for attention, but to no avail. He tried pulling at the window bars yet again. If only he had a lever, he thought and not for the first time. Although the acid had eaten a fair way into the metal, direct pulling clearly wasn't going to work just yet. He looked around yet again for something to press into use but there was nothing obvious then his gaze settled on a chest of drawers below the bench.

The drawers were each about four feet wide and six inches deep. If he could remove a drawer front . . . He pulled the top drawer out and dropped it on the floor to smash away its flimsy bottom and sides until all he was left with was the solid drawer front. He was left holding a perfectly serviceable four-foot lever.

He slipped it between the first and second bars on the window and applied pressure. He was almost at the limit of his strength when the window bar snapped at its acid-weakened base and he felt a surge of euphoria. He grabbed at the free end of the bar and worked it loose from its top mounting. The first bar was out. He dropped it on the floor and started with renewed vigour on the second.

The second bar yielded just as quickly but the third refused to budge for the best part of fifteen minutes. Macandrew was close to exhaustion by the time it finally yielded and joined the other two on the floor. He cursed the humidity that was making him sweat so freely and had to rest for a few minutes just to recover his breath but he could see that the window space was now big enough for him to squeeze out through.

He steeled himself for what was to come. It was not going to be easy but there was no other option if he was to be of any help at all to Simone - assuming that he wasn’t too late already. This was something he pushed to the back of his mind as he climbed out on to the broad window ledge and looked down at the lane some thirty-five feet below, a move that caused his stomach to turn somersaults. He steadied himself and raised his eyes to concentrate on the building across the lane. The jump seemed a lot more improbable than it had when he’d first considered it. It was still possible . . . but only just and that was because the window ledge opposite was slightly lower than the one he was jumping from.

He focused on it before closing his eyes for a moment and going through the leap in his mind. One powerful spring and his hands would grasp the arched stone relief above the window opposite while his feet landed safely on the ledge. He would then open the window and climb inside to raise the alarm. The police would be there within minutes . . .

He inched forward on the window ledge until his toes – and most importantly the wound site - were clear of the edge and the balls of his feet were in the best position to provide thrust. He took a deep breath and prepared to jump. He had bent his knees and was on the very point of take-off when a wave of doubt seized him and he seemed to sense instinctively that something was wrong. He aborted the jump at the very last moment, almost overbalancing in the process but managing to rescue the situation while teetering on the very edge of disaster. There was something about the glass in the window opposite . . . He felt himself go weak as he saw what the problem was. The window across the way was
barred
only the bars were on the
inside
and not immediately obvious behind the dirty glass. He could just about make them out when the light hit the window at a certain angle – the angle he achieved when he bent his knees. If he had made the jump, he would have been stranded on a ledge, high above the ground, with no way into the building and no way back.

Macandrew crawled slowly inside and felt the bitter taste of failure sap his remaining energy. 'Jesus Christ . . .’ he murmured. ‘What an idiot.’

When he’d stopped reliving the near disaster, he came to realise one important thing. He had made an awful lot of noise in the last hour or so but still no one had come to see what all the fuss was about. Could he be alone in this wing of the building? He looked first at the door and then at the iron window bars lying on the floor. He now had the tools he needed to break out . . . and he could make as much noise as he pleased.

The door was solid so there was no chance of smashing straight through it. Instead, he attacked the lock. It took some time to gouge out the area surrounding it but once he got the bar behind the mechanism, it broke away without much resistance. He could hardly believe it when he found himself standing outside in an empty corridor.

Still with an iron bar in his hand, he made his way along the passage, looking into each and every room as he went. The clinic, for whatever reason, seemed deserted. Al the rooms were empty. The main connecting door to the convent proper was still locked but the door to the back stairs was open. He made his way down to the basement and started looking in the cells along the bottom corridor. There was still no sign of life. He got the impression that Ignatius and the others had had to leave suddenly . . . but what had they done with Simone?

At last he found evidence of recent occupation in one of the rooms. An architectural plan, a ruler and two pens lay on a table but no people. He stood there, feeling almost ill with apprehension, when he noticed a trap door cover in the floor of this room. It had caught his attention because it was slightly raised as if it had been opened and not replaced properly.

He pulled at the iron ring and looked down into darkness. He couldn’t find a light switch but could see that there was a rough wooden ladder leading down into the blackness. There were candles back in the cells. He fetched one, lit it and sat down on the floor to swing his legs round into the opening. He descended awkwardly, feeling relieved when his feet finally made contact with the solid stone floor.

He held up the candle to illuminate what appeared to be a long, Roman-style bathhouse. Rows of sunken, square stone chambers stretched out as far as he could see along one side of the cellar, each about ten feet square and five feet deep. Each had a stone chute leading up to and disappearing into the outside wall.

His blood ran cold as he looked down into the first one and saw Simone lying there. Beside her was a young nun. Both lay perfectly still. He hurriedly propped up the candle by the side of the bath and lowered himself into it, cursing the fact that there were no steps and briefly wondering why not. He squatted down beside Simone and felt for a pulse, thanking God out loud when he found one. She was unconscious but she was alive. The nun was breathing too.