Past Lives (33 page)

He looked down at the sword and wondered about it. It was a simple, short, two-edged Roman weapon but it obviously held some special significance if Ignatius cared more about it than the gold. It felt heavy and, although surprisingly free from corrosion, the metal was dull in colour and the cutting edges even duller. If he were forced to use it in anger, it would have to function more as a blunt instrument than anything else.

His plan was to ambush Ignatius and Stroud when they started to hunt for the sword. Ignatius would have a vague idea of where it had landed but his life had been in danger at the time so he wouldn't have been concentrating. It was odds-on that the two men would split up in their search. He would take them out one at a time. Please God, one of them had the key to the padlock.

Sheet lightning dispelled the shadows for a moment before yet another loud clap of thunder was followed by the sound of torrential rain outside

As the noise of the thunder died away, Macandrew heard Ignatius say, ‘I’ll take that.’ He suspected he was talking about Parvelli’s gun. This was bad news. Next he heard the sound of something being dragged across the floor. This was followed by a distant thud. He guessed that Parvelli had joined the fat man at the foot of the shaft.

The main lights in the Chapel of the Cross were extinguished and Ignatius and Stroud started removing the tarpaulins, as yet unaware that anything was amiss. Their voices became clearer without the screens being in the way.

'I’ll secure the box: you get the sword,' said Ignatius.

Stroud swung back one of the ornate iron gates and stepped out on to the floor of the cathedral where he stood still for a moment and was silhouetted by another flash of lightning against the back wall of the chapel. He looked first to his right and then to the left before saying, ‘I can’t see it.’

'What do you mean?'

'It’s not there.'

Stroud started to walk in Macandrew's direction; he was taking small steps, head bowed, looking to right and left. Macandrew willed him to come closer. His pulse rate was rising. This was the man who had cold-bloodedly mutilated him without the slightest compunction. The idea of using the sword on him was tempting and his fingers closed tightly on the hilt. There would be a strong sense of poetic justice about bringing down the blade on his neck, but he dismissed the idea: he was no cold-blooded killer – apart from that, the blade was too blunt.

When Stroud was about six feet away, Macandrew raised the sword. The lighting was at its poorest here and Stroud had had to stoop even more to see what was in front of him. He was practically kneeling when Macandrew stepped smartly out of the alcove and brought the base of the sword’s hilt down on the back of his head. It was a short, sharp blow and the man collapsed in a crumpled heap and lay silent.

What Macandrew hadn’t reckoned on, was the sound of keys and money spilling out from Stroud’s pockets. The noise of coins hitting the marble floor and rolling seemed to go on for ever as Macandrew appealed to the heavens for more thunder to cover the noise. It was not to be. He watched in horror as the last coin pirouetted to an agonisingly slow halt.

When he looked up, he saw Ignatius standing at the chapel gates with Parvelli’s gun in his hand. A bullet whined off the floor in front of him and marble chips flew up in his face just before he dived back into shadow. As if to mock him, a clap of thunder now filled the cathedral, prompting him to curse fate out loud.

He knew that he didn't have a hope of making it across the floor to the exit and that there was a limited number of hiding places on this side of the building. He decided on the desperate gamble of not moving away at all from the area of the Chapel of the Cross. His impromptu plan was to get back up on the scaffolding and lie perfectly still until Ignatius concluded that he must have escaped after all. It was a long shot but he was facing a man with a gun. Anything he did now was going to be a long shot.

Above the sound of the rain, he heard a groan come from the direction of his previous hiding place and knew that Stroud was coming round. He should have hit him harder but hadn’t wanted to risk killing him. Now –and too late - he was having second thoughts about that.

'Pull yourself together, man!’ he heard Ignatius say. ‘It was Macandrew who hit you! He has the sword! He mustn’t get away!’

While Ignatius was occupied with Stroud, Macandrew saw his chance to crawl across the floor in front of the Chapel of the Cross and pull himself back up on to the scaffolding. There was no tarpaulin screen now to give him shadow but the lights Ignatius and the others had been using had been extinguished so candles were now the only source of lighting apart from occasional flashes of lightning. Still keeping hold of the sword, he reached the uppermost level and stretched out along the planks, preparing for a long wait. When he thought about it, he cursed himself for not leaving the sword behind. It was this that Ignatius was after and he wasn't going to go anywhere without it.

As he lay, listening to the torrential rain on the cathedral roof, he wondered about Simone and whether or not he was going to survive to help her. He was picturing her lying unconscious in the stone bath beside the nun when a nightmare was born. He suddenly realised that it wasn’t a bath at all that the two women were lying in; it was a water cistern! That was why there were no steps down into it and why there was a chute in the wall! These ‘baths’ were for collecting rainwater! Simone and the nun were going to drown if the storm continued!

Macandrew’s pulse was racing but he held his breath as he heard Ignatius’s voice again. 'He's still here I tell you!'

'Come on,’ said Stroud’s groggy sounding voice. ‘We've looked everywhere.'

'He's here, I tell you. We're just not thinking.'

Macandrew’s heart was thumping in his chest. He felt sure that Ignatius must hear it if he came any closer. He couldn't risk turning his head to look but he was sure that he was nearby, maybe even directly below.

The scaffolding moved a little as a hand was slapped against an upright. 'We haven't checked up
there
,' said Ignatius. His voice sounded confident and Macandrew feared that the game was up. He was hopelessly trapped. The only direction he could now move in was further into the Chapel of the Cross and that led to a dead end. He wished he hadn't thought of that expression.

He felt the scaffolding move again as if someone had started to climb up it. Then he heard something clunk against one of the bars below. When he thought that one of them must just be about to clear the top section, he made a lunge towards the end of the structure in order to hit whoever appeared first. There was no one there.

Macandrew saw that he had been duped. They had only been pretending to climb up. In reality, Stroud and Ignatius had been shaking the structure and hitting the bars in order to make him break cover. Now both were looking directly up at him and Ignatius was pointing the gun at his chest.

Ignatius’s features relaxed into a condescending little smile and Macandrew threw himself flat as he saw him purse his lips as a precursor to pulling the trigger. The bullet hit a pillar behind his head and stone chips fell like hail below. Macandrew scrambled sideways along the gantry but he was just moving further into a
cul de sac
. He was now as far away from the gun as he was going to get but that was only into the far corner of the chapel. He was only delaying the inevitable. He was trapped in a corner, twenty feet above the altar with nowhere to go.

Stroud and Ignatius moved in for the kill. They pushed open the gates of the chapel in unison and walked side by side towards the altar, keeping their eyes on him all the way.

Thoughts of Simone and her plight compelled Macandrew to make one last gesture of defiance. It wasn't something he could explain afterwards but, as the two men came to a halt, he stood up straight and swung the sword round his head like an avenging angel. He brought the blade scything round into the steel cable that supported the giant crucifix above the altar and cut clean through it.

The heavy cross, already leaning at an angle out from the wall pitched forward and came down on to the two men below who could only watch in horror as it fell directly on top of them.

From where Macandrew stood up on the scaffolding, it looked as if the figure of Christ had struck them down with his outstretched arms; one man lay crushed under each horizontal element, eyes wide open in death. Macandrew surveyed the scene, in utter disbelief. He was not going to die after all . . . but Simone was if he didn’t get a move on!

He lowered himself to the floor and scrambled over to the bodies to begin a desperate search for the padlock key. Outside the rain seemed heavier than ever.

He found the key in Stroud’s inside jacket pocket - practically the last one he looked in - but thunder drowned out his expletive-filled diatribe about what fate had against him. He stumbled out into the storm, getting soaked to the skin before he’d managed to cross the square. A mixture of anguish and adrenalin drove him all the way back to the convent through streets that were more like rivers, thunder threatening his ear drums and raindrops peppering his face like steel rivets. There were moments when he wasn’t sure if he was really awake or in the throes of some awful nightmare but he was still carrying the sword and it felt real enough.

The side door to the convent was unlocked – just as he had left it. He half ran, half stumbled down the steps and along the corridor to the room with the trap door, flinging himself to the floor and yelling Simone’s name into the dark opening. There was no reply. All he could hear was the deafening sound of rushing water.

He grabbed at the candle he’d used earlier, cursing as the first match he scrabbled from the box refused to light, and then broke through his own clumsiness. He had a second failure when water dripped from his hair on to the candle flame but a third attempt saw him climbing down the wooden ladder, candle in hand.

Down here, the sound of water running into the cisterns was so loud it pained his ears. He held the candle out over the cistern and saw in one heart-stopping moment that two bodies were floating in the water. The nun was face-up, although water was lapping over her face but it was the back of Simone’s head that he could see. With a cry of anguish, he jumped down into the water and tried to turn her over but it was difficult because of the chain securing her to the wall.

He couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead and the candle had been extinguished when he’d dropped it on the floor to jump in but he could tell that the chain was the limiting factor. Practically all its free length had been used up and, if the water continued to rise, it would shortly cover both women completely.

Macandrew took a deep breath and sank beneath the surface of the cistern to start work on the padlock in complete darkness. The water, still rushing in from the rain chute in the wall, buffeted him as he worked by feel alone. His lungs were close to bursting when he felt the key finally turn and the padlock snap open to slip off the ring.

He surfaced and took in a great gulp of air before submerging again to free the women completely from the chain. He pushed them up, one at a time, on to the edge of the cistern, having to half roll their bodies over the lip as energy drained away from him. Simone was first and then the nun. He was perilously close to exhaustion as he started to pull himself out, his arms at one point reaching an uneasy equilibrium on the side of the cistern when it seemed that strength would desert him and he would slide back down into the water. One final, desperate heave brought him out.

The nun was breathing but Simone wasn’t. He had to get air into her lungs. He rolled her on to her back and started mouth to mouth respiration, willing her to start breathing with every fibre of his being. Thirty agonising seconds had passed before Simone coughed slightly and water welled up from her lungs. Macandrew thought it the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard as she continued to cough and retch. He rolled her over on to her front and helped her expel the remaining water.

'You’re safe,’ he murmured as he finally stopped to turn her again and cradle her in his arms. ‘It’s over.’ Simone couldn’t hear him. He’d said it as much for his own benefit.

He sat, holding her, rocking back and forward, seeking refuge in a kind of mental limbo where he could escape all that had happened if only for a few moments. He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there when a change in the sound of the water pouring in brought him back to his senses. The storm had ended: it had stopped raining. It took less than five minutes for the sound of running water to stop completely, returning the cellar to an eerie silence where even the occasional drip sounded loud.

Macandrew felt Simone stir in his arms and did his best to reassure her as she came round.

‘
Mac?’ groaned Simone. ‘What happened? My head . . . ’

‘
How much do you remember?’

‘
Stroud to give us something to knock us out while they went to the cathedral to get some sword Ignatius kept talking about.’

Macandrew filled in the blanks. He had just about brought her up to date when Noni started to come round too and Simone moved over to comfort her, holding her and reassuring her as Macandrew had done for her. When both women had recovered sufficiently, Macandrew helped them up the ladder. Noni was despatched to tell Mother Superior to call the police.

‘
Dry clothes would be nice too!’ added Simone.