The Queen's Cipher (55 page)

Well, that was one way of looking at it.

“Then there’s the sheer hypocrisy of the British government, let’s not forget about that. Arresting Gerry Adams for a crime he was supposed to have committed forty two years ago, timed to disrupt Sinn Fein’s election campaign when they stood to make massive gains in the Irish elections.”

“I think that’s a bit unfair.”

“Is that so? What about the well-documented crimes committed by British forces during the Troubles, when are they going to be properly investigated? I’ll tell you when, never! It’s one law for us and another for them. Is that plain enough for you, Dr Brett?” 

It is, Brennan, entirely plain.

“And you think I’m opposed to this kind of hypocrisy?” he heard himself ask.

“I do indeed. I know it to be so. Your parents gave you Christian socialist values. They were for banning the bomb, particularly as they had the good sense to realize that Polaris wasn’t an independent deterrent. It belonged to the Americans who can do what they like on your turf.”

“Sorry, where’s all this leading?”

“Towards you and your fight for a bit of truth in academia; wrestling with the blinkered bigotry of your fellow dons. Of course, you’ve needed a helping hand once or twice.”

“And you supplied it?” Freddie didn’t want to hear the answer.

Brennan chuckled to himself. “By doing something you wouldn’t dream of doing, breaking and entering. Did you know your pal Cartwright was a sadomasochist? No, I thought not. His laptop was full of bondage pictures his wife wouldn’t have been happy with. So I blackmailed him with them. That’s why he stopped bothering you.”     

Freddie’s mouth had gone dry but he couldn’t stop there. He needed to know. “I suppose it was you who blew up his car in Oxford,” he croaked.

The man was so still he didn’t seem to be breathing. “Cartwright went back on his word. He’d have destroyed your career and we couldn’t have that, could we?”

“How about Dawkins, the guy suing me for libel; did you take care of him as well?”

“Him too, another nasty piece of work, I’ve no regrets about that.”

Brennan had to be deranged. All his movements were leisurely, as if operating in slow motion, nodding and smiling, conveying his innate reasonableness.

“You do seem to make a lot of enemies,” he added.

“What about my friends? Did you drown Donald Strachan?”

“I know nothing about that.” The murderer frowned and shook his head. “I was asked to investigate the actor so I paid him a visit a while back. Don’t give me that look! He was fast asleep with his woman. I don’t mind telling you I was blown away by his Shakespeare research. He had formed some really good theories about the authorship and what’s more he’d shared them with you. What a coincidence that was, Strachan and Brett working together, who would have guessed it? Caring about you as I do, it made me …”

Freddie couldn’t contain his anger any longer. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” he snapped, “fracturing my cheekbone and breaking a rib.”

The Irishman’s cold eyes came alive for the first time. “I’m very sorry about that.”

This was positively surreal. Multiple murderers don’t go in for apologies.

“For God’s sake, why did you do it then?” Freddie spat out the words.

Rather than answer the question, Brennan asked one instead. “After I beat the shit out of you in Oxford, why didn’t you just give up?”

“Because you bullied me and I don’t like bullies.” The words were out before he knew it.

The Irishman stared at him and he stared back, their eyes interlocking. “Fair enough,” Brennan grunted. “I’d react in that way. In fact, I was counting on it. I couldn’t solve the Shakespeare mystery and you seemed to have a hot line to all kinds of things in the past. But it looked as if you’d given up when you took on that consultancy. That worried me, it really did, so I thought a bit of GBH might gee you up. And look what you’ve achieved? You’re a tenacious bugger, Dr Brett, I’ll give you that.”

“Let’s get back to that night in Oxford. Did you break into my flat?”

“Yes, sure I did, to check you weren’t keeping things from me.”

Freddie wanted to make a crushing retort. But the words wouldn’t come as a self-confessed killer lectured him on trapdoors and cyber-highways in his machine’s digital architecture. No computer was a safe hiding place. Wherever you buried your secrets, a good analyst could always winkle them out. Brennan said he was ‘a gamekeeper turned poacher,’ boasting of his time in America designing symmetric-key algorithms and protocols to protect the integrity of electronic data.

“I attached a kernel based keylogger to your laptop and an infinity bug to your phone. Nothing could have been easier, Dr Brett. By the way, do you mind if I call you Freddie?”

Yes, why not. They should be on first name terms before trying to murder one another.

“Mine’s Shaun. It means gift of God in Irish.”

“What I don’t understand Shaun is how you knew we were going to Canonbury Tower and got there before us. We never mentioned that on the phone or on the computer.”

Brennan shook his head. “I was never at Canonbury Tower. You must have imagined it.”

“What about Wolfenbuttel? It had to be you I ran into me outside the Herzog August.”

“
Jawohl mein herr
, installing security cameras. Some stuff I’d nicked from a warehouse in Hanover. But the whole thing was a waste of time. I’d given up and was going home when I bumped into you – quite literally. Luck of the Irish you might say. Thought I’d stick around and see what you got up to and it brought me here.”

“How did you manage to track my movements in Venice?”

“That was simple. I saw which hotel you checked into, broke into your room while you were out and attached miniature GPS tracking devices to all of your clothes. There’s one on that lightweight thing you’re wearing.”

Brennan pointed to Freddie’s jacket and, sure enough, there was a tiny bug nestling in the lapel. How had he failed to notice it?

“So here we are having this friendly chat,” Brennan added, “before we get down to business. You must tell me all about your fear of water.”

Once again he had switched topics without warning.

“How do you know about that?” Freddie asked.

“There is very little I don’t know about you,” Brennan retorted, “even down to your preference in ladies underwear.”

Cheryl kept spare pairs of knickers in his bedroom cupboard. He hated the idea of someone else touching them.

“You should try exposure therapy,” the Irishman was saying. “It’s the best way of dealing with a phobia. What you really need is a therapist whom you can trust.”

Always happy to receive a bit of advice from an enemy, I’m with you all the way. Perhaps you know a good therapist. You sound as if you could use one.

“You know, Shaun, you’re a truly amazing character. You beat me up, threaten me and claim to care for me, all at the same time. Tough love, I suppose. So why don’t we settle this in a civilized manner, sort things out over pasta and a decent bottle of red wine?”

Brennan gave a short laugh. “Nice try! You Oxford chaps really take the biscuit. You seem to think every problem can be solved at the dinner table.”

“Not at all, I’m not that naïve but, as you say, we have a lot in common. Isn’t that worth exploring?”

“Now you’re using sophistry. You seem to forget I was brought up by Jesuits.”

“How could I forget something I never knew in the first place?”

This got under the Irishman’s skin. “You’re twisting my words,” he growled. “I’ll tell you what your precious university means to me – a lot of stuffed shirts upholding out-of-date core values and students with a breathtaking sense of entitlement who get to Oxford because their parents have money or breeding. Deep down, you lot still think the nation owes you a living.”

“That’s the trouble with you Irish, you live in the past,” Freddie retorted. “As for the implication that I’m somehow connected to Britain’s ruling elite, well, that’s a load of crap and well you know it. I’m non-conformist, always have been.”

Brennan waved an admonishing finger in his direction. “That’s right, you don’t toe the line. No one can trust you, including me. I’ll be taking that book off you now.”

Stay calm, Freddie thought, and keep him talking. “What do you plan to do with it?”

“What do you think? Sell it to the highest bidder of course. Unless I’m very much mistaken that wee book you’ve got there is political dynamite. It will blow a hole in one of the most popular and enduring British myths. William Shakespeare, the Stratford born playwright, is the common man made good and an icon for a superior culture. Just imagine those English Literature scholars squirming in their seats when they have to admit that Shakespeare had a partner. That will give pleasure to my Irish soul and improve my bank balance at the same time.”

“You really are a mass of contradictions. You talk like an Irish nationalist and you claim to be working for the IRA, yet all you’re really after is money.”

“And that doesn’t interest you, Dr Brett? We’re both greedy. The fact that I’m planning to double-cross my brothers in arms doesn’t alter the fact that the Bacon treatise has amazing propaganda value. Now hand it over. I’ve watched out for you. It’s your turn to do something for me.”

Brennan was claiming to be his partner in crime. He had done Freddie’s murders for him and wanted the codex in return. It was beyond reason, an insane proposition. Freddie choked back his disgust and wondered what to say next.

“I’d be intrigued to k-know whether you studied Shakespeare at school?” he asked weakly.

“Of course I did. It was a kind of penance for our sins.” Brennan’s forbidding eyes took on a misty, faraway look. “
Romeo and Juliet
and
Julius Caesar
stand alongside memories of catechism classes, fish-on-Fridays and the Angelus bell. The priests used to ring that bell and …”

It was now or never. Freddie whipped the half brick out of his pocket and hurled himself on his foe. Brennan staggered back with blood gushing from his temple. A second blow, this time to the chin, brought the Irishman to his knees. All the frustration Freddie had ever felt was channelled into the murderous fury of his assault. “Here’s payback for Oxford, you murderous thug,” he roared, lashing out wildly at his fallen opponent with his hardened clay knuckleduster. “See how you like it.”

His rage was liberating. He wanted to keep the fire alive inside of him, an all-consuming bloodlust that wiped away all thoughts of civilized conduct. Rewrite the laws of nature; let the unfit survive and the weak prosper. But this hubris was to prove his undoing.

Lunging forward without due caution, he was head-butted in the groin and doubled up in agony. The Irishman was back on his feet in a flash, snarling through clenched teeth, throwing punches from all angles. A powerful right hook smashed into Freddie’s jaw, causing his brain to ricochet, followed by a left to the kidneys that ripped all the breath out of his body. He fell forward, gasping, only to receive a vicious wallop in his already damaged ribcage. He saw bright lights and dropped the brick.

He tried to remember the boxing moves he had been taught at school but there was no place for Marquis of Queensbury rules in this makeshift ring. Brennan walked through his feeble left jab to administer more punishment. It was like trying to stop a juggernaut. The Irishman may be twenty years older, covered in blood and unable to see properly, but he fought instinctively, wading in with meaty punches to the jaw and solar plexus.

Panting for breath and in a dazed state of disbelief, Freddie backed away.

“You’re a fucking maniac,” he gasped. Reaching the edge of the canal, there was nowhere else to go. He was a trapped animal expecting the coup de grace.

Rain was beginning to fall as Brennan charged forward. Freddie swayed sideways in the faint hope that his opponent’s momentum might carry him over the edge. It was the last thought he had before Venice exploded, its buildings crumbling into an infinite darkness.

*

The soft patter of raindrops reawakens his senses: one after another, sometimes several at a time, these tiny droplets drum upon his skin while the great dream hovers overhead.

Does he know what awaits him? Is that why he is so reluctant to open his eyes, as he shuffles together the jagged shards of remembrance to form a picture, vague at first, but increasingly clear and troubling. A thumping headache has to be acknowledged; the feeling that the two halves of his brain are being wrenched apart to cause nausea and blurred vision.

He is floating weightlessly on a bank of freezing fog. That is his first impression as he takes a tentative peek at the night sky. He tries to speak and swallows a mouthful of evil tasting liquid that acts like smelling salts, restoring some measure of mental alertness. Spitting out the toxic fluid, he remembers the fight and realizes that one of Brennan’s blows must have knocked him into a canal that stinks of rotten eggs and pig’s swill.

His waterlogged lungs force him to vomit up froth and air bubbles and this, in turn, triggers a panic attack. He knows the symptoms only too well – dizziness and a rapid heartbeat.

Twisting his head in the dark, he can see no sign of his adversary. This at least is welcome news. So too is the proximity of a wharf with gondolas moored alongside it. He can swim to safety. But his arms and legs aren’t functioning properly. He wants them to cut through the water in a splashy front crawl or, failing that, to dovetail together in a more sinuous breast stroke but for some reason the message isn’t getting through.

He has never managed to overcome the phobia he’d first experienced as a schoolboy who couldn’t swim, thrashing around in the pool while his classmates held him under. I am not going to drown, he tells himself. It’s a silly irrational fear. Yet his muscles refuse to respond. They are numb and lifeless. This must be something else. A paralysis brought on by Brennan’s heavy punches. And to make matters worse, the tide seems to be rising. Wrong again, without the use of core and lower back muscles to keep his body stabilized, his saturated clothes are dragging him beneath the surface.