Splintered Icon (32 page)

'Eighteen degrees north,' I told her. 'Surely you knew that, the great navigator?'

More numbers. Then, 'Got it. At this latitude Aldebaran rises about seventy degrees east of north.' She looked out at the dark countryside. 'Where are we?'

Debbie said, 'Coming up to Ochi.' Her voice was strained. 'Pothole— too late.' There was a jarring thump.

'Okay,' I said. 'If Zola's sums are right, we find this Spanish plantation, look for something to do with a bookkeeper and see what lies along a line of sight at seventy degrees azimuth. If there's a polygon, we'll find your icon.'

A single red light emerged from the dark. Debbie braked and fell in impatiently behind a cement truck, water trickling from it. 'This is like something out of a pirate story. X marks the spot. We really are looking for buried treasure in Jamaica.'

'On the nail. But so is the competition.'

She said, 'Bugger this,' pulled out, put her foot down, pressed the horn and flashed the headlights, scraping past with a few inches to spare. Within the hour we were hurtling through Ocho Rios, past the Jerk Chicken Center, past another illuminated cruise ship, past the resorts and restaurants and along the same coast road which Stormin' Norman had sped us along three days ago in the opposite direction.

I said, 'Seven or eight minutes at this speed.'

Five minutes on I leaned over Debbie's shoulder. 'Slow down.' Then in the headlights there was a notice: Nueva Sevilla. Debbie slowed to a crawl and turned left.

I said, 'Switch off your lights.' A half moon gave us enough light to see a narrow, gently climbing road. It wound up towards a long, low white building, softly lit up by spotlights.

'The Great House,' Zola suggested. 'Every plantation had one.'

A track led off to the left from the road. Debbie trundled the car a few yards along it and stopped. We sat quietly, looking around. Zola said, 'Nobody.'

'I wouldn't expect anybody. They were depending on us to solve Ogilvie.' I said it cautiously.

'Anyway, you steered them to the Port Royal, didn't you?' Debbie's nervousness was reflected in her voice.

'So how come we're all strung up like violin strings?' Zola asked.

I said, 'Debbie, why don't you clear off awhile? Zola and I can meet you somewhere on the main road.'

'Are you kidding, Harry?'

Low, ruined buildings were scattered over the plantation as far as the skyline about half a mile away. We stepped out, closing the car doors quietly. I thought,
There's no logic to all this quiet stealth.

Debbie was looking over the parapet of the bridge. I could hear water gurgling. 'What are we looking for, Harry?'

'Anything to do with a bookkeeper.'

'A bookkeeper? Where the hell do we find a bookkeeper here?'

'Whatever, let's be quick about it.'

We split up, our torchlights spreading over the open ground as we dispersed. I was getting close to the Great House and beginning to worry about security guards when there was a restrained shout from down the hill. Debbie, in an excited state. 'Over here! I found it!'

And there it was, with a notice to say so:

THE BOOKKEEPER'S HOUSE

Constructed using the Spanish walling technique. The

bookkeeper was the work supervisor. On large estates

such as Seville, there were usually two overseers; one

to supervise field operations and the other to oversee

the factory work.

Zola ran up and hissed, 'Yes! Yes!'

I saw that the sea horizon was visible from our elevated position. The sky was sprinkled with stars and the Milky Way arched overhead. It was easy to see that Aldebaran, a brilliant red star, would have been a natural marker for Ogilvie.

'Is that the pole star?' Debbie was pointing at Arcturus.

'No. There's the Great Bear and there are the pointers. That's Polaris.' It was low in the sky, over the sea. I stretched my arm out. 'And this is seventy degrees azimuth.'

But Debbie trotted smartly over the grass and jumped over a low wall. My heart was thumping in my chest. We really were looking for buried treasure. It seemed unreal.

The directions took us back to the path onto which Debbie had turned the car. The track crossed a bridge and there it was:

THE NUEVA SEVILLA SPANISH CHURCH

1524-1534

In 1524 construction began at Nueva Sevilla, of a

stone church on the orders of the Spanish Abbott

Peter Martyr... Hans Sloane saw the church in 1688

and described it: 'the church had three naves with

rows of pillars and a very fine west gate'. The Gothic

style church also had buttresses. The chapel was

polygon in shape. Several fragments of carved work

in stone, such as mouldings, festoons, cherubs have

been found .. .

'This is it, isn't it, Harry?' Debbie was whispering. Not thirty yards away was a small row of houses, lights showing through curtains.

'A polygon.'

Zola whispered, 'And I'll bet the icon's buried plumb in its centre.'

'Maybe the relic's long gone. Maybe some workmen dug it up centuries ago.'

Debbie, next to me, said, 'Oh, Harry. Not after all this.'

We crept quietly round the side of the ruin. The night screeching of the insects had started. Zola shone her torch into a door gap and said, 'Hey!'

An archaeological dig. All the paraphernalia was there: the tarpaulin, the terraced earth, the buckets, the trowels, the string marking off neat rectangular grids. We stared, baffled, our torch beams searching every corner. My head was whirling.

'Weh yuh ah luk fah, sah?'

Debbie gave a little scream and I nearly jumped out of my skin. A boy of about fourteen was standing behind us, holding a jamjar of water with big transparent shrimps swimming inside it.

'You gave me a fright,' Debbie said. It was an understatement.

Zola said, 'Have the archaeologists been here long?'

'Mi granpa wi no bout dat. Cum yah so.'

We followed the boy along the track. There was an isolated house in a field, with a porch and a corrugated iron roof. He opened the door and waved us in. 'Weh Grampa?'

There was a fit of coughing from the back of the house and an elderly man with walking stick appeared. He said something incomprehensible, but waved us in welcomingly. The boy went ahead and disappeared in the direction of a cooking smell from the back of the house.

The living room was small and lit by a single naked bulb hanging from the low ceiling. A television took up one corner and there were a few boxes with cushions and a single armchair. There was a sideboard with family photographs and a couple of candles. On the wall above the sideboard was a mirror. To the left of the mirror, sellotaped on the wall, was a picture of Haile Selassie cut from a magazine, and to the right, hanging on nails, was the True Cross.

There was a raised female voice from the kitchen: 'Yu too damn likky likky cum out a di kitchen. Go ketch sum wauta.'

The silver frame of the medieval description was gone. There were holes where, presumably, precious stones had once been. The three parts of the triptych were still together, however. On the two outer parts, faded but still recognisable, were two paintings. On the left was a mother and child. She had the enlarged eyes, elongated face and thin pointed chin of the Byzantium artists. The right-hand panel depicted Christ on the Cross. The centre part was plain. Recessed into its wood was another piece of wood, a rectangle about six inches by twelve. It was old and gnarled, like a piece of driftwood. Or like a piece of wood two thousand years old.

Apart from the missing silver and jewels, it was just as Ogilvie had described it.

The old man reacted to our stunned faces as if he had been struck. 'Dat neva cum from di dig,' he said in an outraged, defensive tone. 'Hi inna di family fi ah long time.'

Debbie said, 'I'd like to buy it from you.'

'Ow much?'

'A hundred US dollars.'

'As far back as mi gran puppa,' he said. And probably a lot further, I thought.

'I can go to two hundred US, but don't ask me for more.'

'Mi gi yuh it fah three hunner dallar.'

'It's a deal.' Debbie spoke coolly. She turned her back, fumbled in her sweater, and when she turned round again she had a stack of American dollars in her hand. Zola and I exchanged the briefest of glances. Zola's face was white; I felt my own wet with sweat.

Grandpa suddenly grinned. 'Neva did like it.'

The triptych was held in place by nails through the holes where gemstones had once been. The old man leaned his walking stick against the sideboard, eased the relic from the wall and handed it over to Debbie. It folded easily. She tucked it under her arm and counted out the cash, putting a note at a time into Grandpa's extended hand. It took a hundred years. When she finished I became aware that I hadn't been breathing. I gulped air.

He waved at us from the doorway. 'She ah wan tuff bargaina,' he called into the dark. He was using irony in the Socratic style, Ogilvie would have said.

'This doesn't seem right.' Zola's voice came from the dark. 'It's as if we're cheating the man.'

'I am Deborah Inez Tebbit and this has been in my family for a thousand years. This is my property. It's mine.'

I'm breaking into a sweat. I can't take it in. I can't believe we have it. All we need to do is reach the car and clear off. We are literally seconds away from pulling it off. The others are thinking the same. We walk briskly; and then we trot; and then we break into a run.

Past the Spanish church; over the little bridge, water trickling underneath; the car just visible in the dark, about thirty yards ahead. Almost there. We keep our torches off. Debbie is ahead of me, fumbling with keys. I look around, peering into the trees. We're going to pull this off! We really are going to pull this off! Debbie is still fumbling. I see moonlight reflecting from the windscreen of a car a hundred yards or so further up the hill; it's almost hidden behind a ruin. I just have time to open my mouth before a voice, speaking good Mediterranean English, comes from behind us, from the little church we have just passed. 'Thank you all, most sincerely. I would never have found it without you.' And we are lit up in the beams of four torches, neatly coming from the cardinal points of the compass: north, south, east and west.

CHAPTER 38

'It's not like forensic entomology, for example.'

The Professor - at least that's what I'm mentally calling him - is looking at the triptych laid out on the table in front of him. He is scanning the wood with a large magnifying glass, and droning on about wood and DNA. I place him in some third-rate North England university, stretching his minimal talents into a zero career and getting his professorship, if he has one, through his adeptness at screwing funds out of public trusts and councils.

They had expected us to escape, wanted us to. They had followed us without lights, a convoy of cars along the dark coastal road, all the way to the
Sevilla la Nueva
plantation. Hondros had taken the icon out of Debbie's hands: a thousand years in her family and she had held it for less than a minute. The cars had appeared from odd corners and we had been bundled into them, a car each. The convoy had taken us through the dark night, back through Ocho Rios, back along the deserted coastal road, back towards the Lego house. I sat between two men I'd never seen. Both were smoking heavily, but the nausea I was feeling wasn't altogether due to the smoke. The Lego house was easily seen, even in the dark; its whitewashed walls were glowing faintly in the starlight. The big motor boat was still in the lagoon, and again I had some brief fantasy idea about jumping into it and escaping into the wide ocean.

And now the electricity is restored and the stabbed, brained and electrocuted men are gone - dumped in the sea, probably - and we are sitting on the living room couch, which, being low, we have to struggle to get out of; any idea of a sudden leap is out of the question. And there are fresh people, again, I think, all Greek, or at least Mediterranean in origin. 'Inspector Menem' is with us; he has a gun in each hand, which seems excessive for three unarmed captives. And in the opposite corner a young black man with dreadlocks is rolling a large joint. I presume he's a local contact who supplied the guns, as easily obtainable in Jamaica as a packet of cigarettes. Cassandra catches my eye and gives me that cold smile.

Hondros and the Professor are about ten feet away, on the far side of the table. Cassandra in one corner, and the young black Jamaican in the other, are each about fifteen feet away from us. Debbie, on my left, is breathing in big gulps. I feel a sense of helpless rage, mixed with guilt, that she should find herself in this position. She is trying hard to keep herself under control.

The Professor's drone reaches its conclusion, delivered with all the smug certainty of a mediocre mind. Hondros asks for confirmation: 'It could be the Holy Relic?'

The Professor nods. 'Of course proper verification would require carbon-14 dating.' He smiles triumphantly. 'But I can safely rule out some sort of elaborate modern forgery.'

It's our death sentence.

'Thank you, Doctor.' Hondros folds the triptych shut. ‘I think you can leave us now. Cassandra, would you see to the Doctor's fee?'

The Professor gives a slight bow of his head. 'I would like to be well clear of this island before' - he glances briefly in our direction - 'before there is any unpleasantness.'

Hondros smiles smoothly. 'Have no fear, Doctor. You will be long gone before anything happens here.' Cassandra walks slowly across the room.

He gives us another glance, this one slightly anxious. 'They have seen my face, you know.'

'Doctor, you have absolutely no worries in that direction.' She raises her gun.