The Alchemist's Secret (11 page)

‘Inspecteur Luc Simon,’ he said, striding towards them. He fixed Roberta with his green eyes. ‘I’ve warned you about this already. Stop wasting our time. This is a simple suicide. We found a note…What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘What note?’ she asked suspiciously.

Simon held up a small clear plastic bag. Inside, curled against the cellophane, was a small sheet of notepaper with a few lines of handwriting on it. Simon gazed at it. ‘He says it wasn’t worth it any longer. Stress, depression, debts, the usual problems. We see this all the time.’

‘Eh oui
,’ said the lieutenant, with a philosophical shake of the head.
‘La vie, c’est de la merde
.’

‘Shut up, Rigault,’ Simon growled at him. ‘Madame, I asked you a question. What are you doing here? That’s twice today, when I get called out on a false alarm homicide,
you
turn up.’

‘Let me see that bullshit note,’ she snapped. ‘He never wrote that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said to Simon, jerking Roberta’s arm and cutting in before she said too much. ‘My fiancée’s upset. We’re leaving now.’ He pulled her aside, leaving the inspector standing there staring keenly at them as assistants scuttled around him.

‘Your fiancée
?’ she hissed at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? And let go of my arm, you’re hurting.’

‘Shut up. You don’t want to spend the next ten hours being grilled by the police, and neither do I.’

‘It’s not suicide,’ she insisted.

‘I know,’ he nodded. ‘Now listen to me. We’ve only got a few seconds. Is anything in here different, moved, changed in any way?’

‘Someone’s been through the place.’ She motioned towards his desk and tried not to look at the huge vertical splatter of blood on the wall and ceiling. The desk was empty, Michel’s computer gone.

‘Rigault, get these people out of here! Come on, let’s move!’ Simon was shouting from across the room, pointing at them.

‘We’ve seen enough,’ Ben said. ‘Time to go.’ He led her towards the door, but Simon intercepted them. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of leaving town, Dr Ryder? I might want to talk to you again.’

As they left the apartment, Simon watched them with a frown. Rigault gave him a knowing look and tapped his head with his finger. ‘Crazy Americans. They see too many of their Hollywood movies.’

Simon nodded pensively. ‘Maybe.’

Montpellier, South of France

‘Marc, pass me the screwdriver. Marc…Marc? Where are you, you dozy little shit?’ The electrician got down from his ladder, leaving loose wires hanging, glaring around him. ‘That little sod’ll never learn anything.’ Where had he disappeared off to now?

The kid was a liability. He wished he’d never given him a job. Natalie, his sister-in-law, doted on her son, couldn’t see that he was just a loser like his father.

‘Uncle Richard, look at this.’ The apprentice’s excited voice echoed up the narrow concrete corridor. The older man put down his tools, wiped his hands on his overalls and followed the sound. At the end of the shadowy corridor was a dark alcove. A steel door was hanging open. Stone steps led down into a black space. Richard peered down. ‘What the hell are you doing in there?’

‘You’ve got to see this,’ the kid’s voice echoed from inside. ‘It’s weird.’

Richard sighed and clumped down the steps. He found himself in a huge, empty cellar. Stone columns held up the floor above. ‘So it’s a bloody cellar. Come on out, you’re not supposed to be in here. Stop wasting time.’

‘Yeah, but look.’ Marc shone his torch and Richard saw steel bars glinting in the darkness. Cages. Rings bolted to the wall. Metal tables.

‘Come on, beat it out of here.’

‘So what is it?’

‘I dunno. Kennels for dogs-who gives a shit?’

‘Nobody keeps dogs in a cellar…’ Marc’s nostrils twitched at the smell of strong disinfectant. He shone his torch around and saw where the smell was coming from, a concrete sluice cut into the floor leading to a wide drain cover.

‘Move it, kid,’ Richard grumbled. ‘I’m going to be late for the next job-you’re holding me up.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Marc said. He stepped over to the glinting thing he’d seen in the shadows and picked it up off the floor. He studied it in the palm of his hand, wondering what it meant.

Richard strode over to the lad, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the steps. ‘Look,’ he warned. ‘I’ve been in this job since before you were born. One thing I’ve learned, if you want to stay in work you mind your own business and keep your mouth
shut.
OK?’

‘OK,’ the boy mumbled. ‘But-‘

‘No buts. Now come and help me with this bloody light.’

Paris

For the last four years, Ben had worked alone. He relished the freedom it gave him, the ability to sleep where he wanted, to move as fast and as far and as light as possible, to slip in and out of places alone and inconspicuous. Most important of all, working alone meant that he was responsible for himself and himself only.

But now he was lumbered with this woman, and he was breaking all his own rules.

He took a convoluted route back to the safehouse. Roberta’s puzzled expression deepened as he led her down the cobbled alleyway, through the underground parking lot, and up the back stairway to the armoured door of his hidden apartment.

‘You live here?’

‘Home sweet home.’ He locked the door behind them and punched in the code for the alarm system. He flipped on the lights and she gazed around the apartment. ‘What is this, minimalist neo-Spartan?’

‘You want a coffee? Bite to eat?’

‘Coffee’s good.’

Ben went into the kitchenette and lit the gas ring under his little percolator. After a few minutes it bubbled up and he served the coffee with hot milk out of a saucepan. He opened a tin of cassoulet, heated it up and dumped the steaming sausage-and-ham stew onto a couple of plates. He still had half a dozen bottles of red table wine. He grabbed one and pulled the cork.

‘You should eat something,’ he said as she ignored her plate.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘OK.’ He finished his own plate, then pulled hers across the table and wolfed down the last of the stew with gulps of wine. As he ate, he could see she was shaking, her head in her hands. He got up and put a blanket around her shoulders. She sat in silence for a few minutes. ‘I can’t stop thinking about Michel,’ she whispered.

‘He wasn’t your friend,’ he reminded her.

‘Yeah, I know, but still…’ She sobbed, wiped her eyes and smiled weakly. ‘Pretty stupid.’

‘No, not stupid. You have compassion.’

‘You say that as though it were a rare thing.’

‘It is a rare thing.’

‘Do you have any?’

‘No.’ He poured the last of the wine into his glass. ‘I don’t.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s late. I’ve got work to do in the morning.’ He drained his glass, jumped up from his chair, and grabbed a pile of blankets and an armchair cushion. He chucked them on the floor.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Making up a bed for you.’

‘Call that a bed?’

‘Well, you could have had the Ritz if you’d wanted. I did offer, remember?’ He saw her look. ‘It’s only a one-bedroom flat,’ he added.

‘So you make your guests sleep on the floor?’

‘If it’s any consolation, you’re the first guest I’ve had up here. Now, can I have your bag, please?’

‘What?’

‘Give me your bag,’ he repeated. He snatched it from her and began rifling through it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ She tried to grab it back from him. He pushed her away. ‘I’ll have this,’ he said, pocketing her phone. ‘The rest you can keep.’

‘Why are you taking my phone off me?’

‘Why do you think? I don’t want you making any calls from here behind my back.’

‘Boy, you really have a
big
problem with trust.’

Roberta couldn’t sleep well that night, couldn’t shut out the memory of the day’s events. What had started out like any other day had turned her whole world upside-down. Maybe she was crazy, hanging on here when she could have taken the money and been on a plane home first thing in the morning.

And what about this Ben Hope? Here she was, locked in a hidden apartment with a guy she’d only met that day and barely knew. Who was he? He was attractive, and he had that winning smile. But there was that coldness, too, the way he could look at her with those pale blue eyes and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

There was another thought that wouldn’t go away. It was the knowledge that someone was interested in her research. Very interested indeed. Interested enough to kill for it. That meant several things. It meant that someone was threatened by what she’d been discovering. Which meant it had real value. She was on the right track, and even if it was a dangerous position she was in, she couldn’t help feeling a tingle of excitement. She had to know more.

She broke off from her thoughts and lifted her head off the cushion, tensed and listening. A voice. She struggled to get her bearings in the dark, unfamiliar room. After a few seconds she orientated herself and it dawned on her that the sound was coming from behind the bedroom door. It was Ben’s voice. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. His voice grew louder, protesting against something. Was he on the phone? She got up from her makeshift bed and crept to his door in the dim moonlight. She pressed her ear softly to the door, careful not to make a noise, and listened.

He wasn’t talking in there, he was
moaning-
and his voice sounded pained, tortured. He muttered something she didn’t catch, and then he called out more loudly. She was about to open the door when she realized he was dreaming. No, not a dream. A nightmare.

‘Ruth! Don’t go! No! No! Don’t leave me!’ His cries diminished back into a low moan, and then as she stood there in the dark she listened to him for a long time sobbing like a child.

Ever since his impoverished childhood in rural Sardinia, Franco Bozza had enjoyed giving pain. His first victims had been insects and worms, and as a young boy he’d spent many contented hours developing increasingly elaborate ways of slowly dissecting them and watching them writhe and die. Before the age of eight, Franco had progressed to practising his skills on small birds and mammals. Some fledglings in a nest suffered first. Later, local dogs started to disappear. As Franco progressed through his teens he grew into a master torturer and an expert in inflicting agony. He loved it. It was the thing that made him feel most alive.

By the time he’d left school at the age of thirteen he’d become almost equally fascinated with Catholicism. He was entranced by the crueller images of Christian tradition-the crown of thorns, the bleeding stigmata of Christ, the way the nails had been hammered through the hands and feet into the cross. Franco polished the basic literacy skills he’d learned in school just so he could read about the deliciously gruesome history of the Church. One day he came across an old book that described the persecution of heretics by the medieval Inquisition. He read how, after the conquest of a Cathar stronghold in the year 1210, the commander of the Church forces had ordered that a hundred Cathar heretics have their ears, noses and lips cut off, their eyes gouged out, and be paraded before the ramparts of other heretic castles as an example. The boy was deeply inspired by such macabre genius, and he would lie awake at night wishing he could somehow have taken part in it.

Franco fell in love with religious art, and would walk miles to the nearest town to visit the library and drool over historic prints showing grisly images of religious oppression. His favourite painting was
The Hay Wagon
by Hieronymus Bosch in the 1480s, showing horrible tortures at the hands of demons, bodies pierced by spears and blades, and-most exciting of all-a nude woman. It wasn’t her nudity in itself that provoked such choking feelings of lust in him. Her arms were tied behind her back, and all that covered her nakedness was a black toad clapped to her genitals. She was a witch. She would be burnt. This was what generated such intense, almost frantic, excitement in him.

Franco learned about the historical backdrop to Bosch’s painting, the furious misogyny of the Catholic Church during the fifteenth century when Pope Innocent
VIII
had issued his Witch Bull, the document that gave the Vatican’s seal of approval to the torture and burning of women suspected, however vaguely, of being in league with the Devil. Franco went on from there to discover the book known as the
Malleus Malificarum
, the ‘Witches’ Hammer’, the official Inquisition manual of torture and sadism for those who served God by drenching themselves in heretic blood. It instilled in young Franco the same violent horror of female sexuality that had permeated medieval Christian faith. A woman who indulged in sex, who enjoyed it, didn’t just lie there,
must
be the Devil’s bride. Which meant she had to die. In a horrible way. That was the part he liked best.

Franco became an expert on the entire bloody past of the Catholic Inquisition and the Church that had spawned it. While others admired the beautiful artwork by Botticelli and Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel for its own sake, Franco revelled in the fact that while these works of art were being commissioned by the Church, a quarter million women across Europe were being put to the stake with the Pope’s blessing. The more he learned, the more he came to appreciate that to subscribe to the Catholic faith and its legacy was, tacitly or otherwise, to espouse centuries of systematic and unrestrained mass murder, war, oppression, torture and corruption. He’d found his spiritual calling, and he rejoiced in it.

Eventually, in 1977, it came time for Franco to marry his intended, the daughter of the local gunsmith. He reluctantly agreed to the marriage to Maria, to please his parents.

On his wedding night, he discovered that he was completely impotent. At the time, this caused him no concern. He’d never cared that he was still a virgin, because he already knew that the only thing that could excite him was when he had his knife and could inflict pain. That was what drew him and made him feel powerful. Female flesh had no allure for him.