The Lost Treasure of the Templars (19 page)

“But who killed those men?”

Mallory shook his head again. “I don't know, but there was such a short window of opportunity that it really must have been another one of the same group, another Italian, I mean. We didn't leave your apartment until we heard the police car approaching, and actually saw its lights, so realistically the police would have arrived on the scene within minutes. So the only person who could have climbed the stairs to the apartment and then shot those three men had to be the fourth man in the SUV. Nothing else makes sense.”

“But why would he kill his friends?”

“We don't actually know that those men even knew each other,” Mallory pointed out. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more it looks to me like a contract, a job that needed doing in a hurry and for which a group of mercenaries were hired. That would explain the identical contents of their wallets and the fact they were all carrying exactly the same types of weapons. As for the why, the only reason that makes sense to me at the moment is that somebody decided it was vital that none of them could be allowed to talk to the police or the authorities here. When whoever it was went up into the
apartment, he was probably hoping to get the other men out of the building before the police arrived, but when he found that two of them were unconscious and all of them tied up so that they couldn't move, he probably realized that that option wasn't going to work, and so he just walked around pulling the trigger.”

“Oh God,” Robin said, tears welling up in her eyes. “That means I killed them.”

Mallory looked at her.

“Don't be so stupid,” he said, trying to snap her out of the mood. “The man who killed those three Italians certainly wasn't you. It was the man who climbed the stairs after we'd gone and fired his pistol three times. That wasn't your fault, so don't you even start to feel guilty about what happened. If you hadn't done what you did back there, the chances are that both of us would now be dead. I don't wish anyone any harm, but if it's a choice between three Italian thugs lying on slabs in a mortuary and the two of us in the same state, then my vote goes to the Italians, thank you.”

The briefest of smiles illuminated Robin's face as she glanced across at Mallory.

“You have a way of cutting to the chase and immediately making me feel better,” she said, “and because of that I'll even forgive you for calling me stupid. I'm sorry, but I think I'm still kind of in shock because of what Betty told me. She said the police want to speak to me as soon as possible to eliminate me from their inquiries.”

Mallory gave a hollow laugh. “That's just police-speak for sticking you in a cell until they can assemble or create enough evidence to charge you with something. Don't you believe it for a second. Our best bet at the moment is to stay well below the radar until we find out exactly
what's going on. And the answers must lie within the text on that parchment. We absolutely have to decipher the Latin and then translate what it says.”

Robin was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again her voice sounded distant and somehow detached.

“I don't think I've ever broken the law in my life,” she said, “until last evening, anyway, and even then I was only acting in self-defense. But I really don't like the feeling of being a fugitive through no fault of my own. Are you sure we can't just contact the police and make a clean breast of everything? I mean, what's the worst that could happen?”

“That's entirely up to you, but I think it would be a very bad idea, even leaving aside the fact that those three men are now dead. If they hadn't been killed, you'd probably still be in trouble, because it would be difficult to convince the guardians of law and order in this country that you didn't know that the book safe had that vicious antitheft device built into it. After all, they could establish that you'd already sent an e-mail to me containing some of the words from the manuscript—that's how we met, after all—and they could argue that because you didn't try to stop that Italian from trying to open it, that was pretty much the same as assaulting him yourself.

“You couldn't even prove that those men were threatening you. Yes, they had guns in their pockets, but at the end of the encounter you walked away without a scratch on you, and you left one man with really badly mangled hands, another knocked unconscious with a possible concussion and probably a broken wrist—when you kicked his arm I definitely heard something crack—and the third one with a dislocated shoulder. However you weigh that
lot up, the obvious conclusion is that you—or both of us—were the perpetrator of the attack and they were the victims.

“And now that we know somebody else walked into the apartment just a few minutes after we had left and killed the three of them, I don't have the slightest doubt about what would happen if either of us went to the police. We would be immediately arrested and we'd spend the next few months in separate prisons somewhere, waiting for the case to come to trial.”

Robin nodded. “But we didn't fire a gun. Neither of us. Couldn't we prove it?”

“Proving a negative is extremely difficult. If we'd been arrested at the scene, just after the killings had taken place, then we might have a chance of doing that. There are tests that you can run to show whether or not a person has fired a pistol, and of course you would have tested negative for that, though I would be positive because of what happened afterwards. And neither of us would have had the murder weapon in our possession. In those circumstances, then we possibly could have walked away. But once we'd left the scene of the crime, our chances of doing that would have fallen away to zero. The police could argue that we'd worn gloves, or washed our hands a sufficient number of times to remove all traces of cordite, and lobbed the gun into the sea or a rubbish bin or some ditch miles away from Dartmouth. Something like that. And we'd be in trouble. Probably a lot more trouble than we're in now, difficult though that may be to believe.”

Robin nodded.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “When you put it like that I know we're doing the right thing. We really do have to solve the puzzle of the parchment and what's going on
with these Italians before we even think about talking to the police.”

“Apart from wondering if her employer was a triple murderer,” Mallory asked, “how was Betty?”

This time there was a real smile.

“Whatever the police may have told her, I really don't think she'd believe that of me. I mean, I sell books for a living! I don't go round killing people, obviously. But I think confused is the word that covers it best. The place was swarming with cops when she arrived to open the shop this morning, and she said she had to produce her driving license and show them her photograph before they'd believe
she
wasn't Robin Jessop. A tense few minutes, apparently. Anyway, there's no damage to the shop, and the crime scene is in the apartment, which of course is entirely separate, although it's obviously a part of the same building. Despite the murders she's told me she'll be happy to keep working there until I get back. Quite a tough lady, our Betty.”

“One question,” Mallory said. “Can you remember the first thing she said to you when you made the call?”

“Er, yes, I think so. She just asked where I was. Why?”

“If that's what she asked, then I think that more or less proves the police were monitoring the call and telling her what to say, because if she'd found out this morning that three men had been found dead in your apartment, and then you called her, that would have been the first thing she'd want to tell you. The fact that she didn't means she was being closely supervised, and the police were probably hoping that you'd just blurt out your location as soon as she asked the question. You didn't, I hope?”

Robin shook her head. “No. I'm not an idiot. I obviously didn't tell her where I was or why I wasn't at the
shop. In fact, I didn't answer her question at all. I just told her about the couple of orders that needed sending out, and tried to keep the conversation as businesslike as possible. And then she told me that three men had been found dead in the apartment. That was a hell of a shock, and I denied all knowledge of what had happened. That wasn't difficult, because it was news to me, and I hope that was obvious from my voice. I was totally stunned because what she said was so completely unexpected.”

“You did the right thing,” Mallory said. “By being matter-of-fact and just telling her what you needed her to do today in the shop, you will at the very least have raised doubts in the minds of whichever police officers were listening to the call, and that can only be a good thing. But I presume she asked you again where you were, because that's what the police will want to find out.”

“She did, yes, but again I didn't tell her. All I said was that I'd had to go away unexpectedly, which has the advantage of being the absolute truth. Then she said that the police wanted to see me as soon as possible. At the end of the call she also told me that they'd already questioned her about my movements and the usual sort of stuff about friends and family members that I might be staying with. This morning the police took Betty up to the apartment to ask her if anything had been taken, and she said everything seemed to be in place, as far as she could tell, except for my laptop. If you remember, that was still on the desk when we left the office, but she was quite certain that it wasn't there when she went up to check out the apartment.”

“Obviously whoever killed the three Italians took that as well, and that could be a bit of a problem for us.”

“Why?” Robin asked.

“Because the scanned images of the parchment are on
that laptop, as well as the transcription of the encrypted text. If you remember, I copied that from my computer onto a memory stick, and then you saved the file onto your laptop. That means that whoever took your machine—and he's obviously one of the bad guys—will know pretty much the same as we do about the parchment.”

“They won't get into it,” Robin said. “That laptop's protected by a password.”

Mallory laughed shortly.

“If only that were true,” he said. “Cracking a Windows password is really pretty basic stuff, and you can download a whole bunch of programs from the Internet that'll do the job in a few seconds, or minutes at the most. And even if they can't do that, there are tools you can use to boot the machine from the optical drive and simply bypass it. Trust me, if they know what they're doing, they'll be able to get inside it.” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Did she—Betty, I mean—say anything else?”

“Well, she could hardly avoid mentioning the fact that there was a lot of blood on the floor of the office, though I don't know if the police really wanted her to say that. I think I replied, but I was still in shock and I can't remember what I said. Then she told me again that the police wanted to talk to me, and said I had to get back to Dartmouth as quickly as possible. I told her I couldn't and that I wouldn't be back for at least a week, and then I had a slight brain wave, and I said I couldn't talk anymore because the taxi had just arrived to take me to the airport. I also told her I'd dropped my mobile and broken it. Lies compounded on more lies, but I hoped that would create a bit of confusion.”

Mallory nodded approval.

“That was good thinking,” he said. “I don't suppose for a moment that the police will believe you, but by now they'll know where you made the call from, and they'll certainly have to run checks on all the passenger lists for flights departing from Exeter Airport, just in case you actually have flown off somewhere. And that will give them something to keep them uselessly occupied while we're working on the parchment and trying to decide what to do next.”

Exeter, Devon

Dante had driven the Ford hire car down virtually every road in Exeter, using the location of the last camera that had detected the Porsche Cayman as the starting point for the search, and they had seen not the slightest sign of the vehicle. There had been one false alarm when Mario spotted a black Porsche in a side street, but when they'd driven along the street to investigate, the car had proved to be a 911, not a Cayman, and the registration number was completely different.

They'd grabbed a late lunch, just soft drinks and sandwiches bought from a garage when they filled the tank on the Ford, and eaten their inadequate meal parked by the side of the road, all three men keeping a sharp lookout just in case the Porsche suddenly appeared.

“He must have parked the car off the road,” Mario suggested, stating what was now obvious to all of them.

“We know that,” Toscanelli snapped, not in the best of tempers.

“Well, shouldn't we be taking a look in the car parks?”

“We will,” Toscanelli promised, “but that's really the last resort. The trouble is that if Jessop did leave the car in a parking lot, we have no guarantee at all that he would be coming back to it, so even if we found it, we might be no further forward. I was hoping we could find the car outside a hotel, something like that, somewhere we could be sure that the vehicle would help us find the two of them.”

Toscanelli's phone rang again at that moment, and he answered it immediately.

“Sì?”

Then he switched to English, and when he finished the call he was once again energized.

“Get moving,” he said to Dante, looking at the map of Exeter. “Keep straight along this road for about a hundred meters, then turn right. As quick as you can.”

“What's happened?” Mario asked.

“That was our lay brother again,” Toscanelli replied. “Two things. First, Robin Jessop is now officially a person of interest, not quite a suspect but the next best thing, in the multiple murders that took place in Dartmouth last night. That isn't going to help us, obviously, because it means that the British police will now be looking for him. But the good thing is that because his status has changed, we should learn, through our brother, about every sighting and trace of the man.”

“So where are we going?”

“Just to the north of the city center here,” Toscanelli said. “Less than fifteen minutes ago Jessop made a telephone call to his shop in Dartmouth from right here in Exeter. I've got the location of the public telephone he used, so that gives us another confirmed position to resume our search.”

He paused and glanced at his two colleagues.

“They're still here and we're closing in on them,” he said, a wolfish smile on his face.