The Lost Treasure of the Templars (4 page)

Above the commercial premises was a small two-bedroom flat. When the estate agent had sent her the details of the property, the apartment had been described as “charming and compact.” Like almost everything said by estate agents, this was not actually a lie but certainly required the truth to be interpreted in a somewhat elastic manner. When Robin had seen the “spacious living room,” which supposedly doubled as a dining room, she almost pulled out there and then.

“I doubt,” she'd said to the agent, “if you could swing a six-week-old kitten in that room, and if you tried it with a fully grown cat you'd hit all four walls every time. That would certainly piss off the cat, and it doesn't do much for me, either.”

“Actually,” the agent had replied, “that expression—”

“I know,” she'd interrupted. “It refers to a very different kind of cat. You don't need to tell me.”

The agent had nodded—Robin suspected that all estate agents went through some kind of training course that taught them that whatever customers said you always had to agree with them—but pointed out certain advantages that she might not have appreciated. The small rooms would make it cheaper to heat in the winter, and she wouldn't have to buy as much furniture with less space to fill. And he had closed his argument by emphasizing the unpalatable facts Robin already knew: that particular shop with the apartment above it was the only property for sale in the town that came anywhere near fitting her requirements and was also within her modest price range, and he did have three other clients who had all expressed a serious interest in the building.

So she hadn't discussed it any further, but simply said she'd take the property, subject to the usual survey and the bank deigning to grant her a mortgage in exchange for a slice of her soul and a large proportion of her disposable income for the next quarter of a century, and had moved in just over six weeks later.

And, in fact, it hadn't worked out too badly. The master bedroom—if the enlarged box room could be dignified with such a grandiose title—just about accommodated her six-foot-wide bed, albeit with only about a foot of space on either side and around five feet at the end of the bed. The so-called guest bedroom she had immediately
turned into a study, and apart from that, and the miniscule living room, she also had a bathroom with a separate lavatory and a kitchen that was about six feet square.

Compact it certainly was.

She carried the mug of coffee into the study, maneuvering carefully around the cardboard boxes—even the central passage of the flat was quite narrow—and then resumed her seat, slightly altered the angle of the adjustable light on the desk, and positioned the mysterious book squarely on the leather desk protector in front of her. She took hold of the hand-tooled leather cover and lifted it.

Then she sat back in her seat, an expression of mild shock on her face, because something totally unexpected had just happened. She'd made a discovery that both surprised her and also, she suspected, served to explain something that up until then she hadn't understood.

The
Ipse Dixit
book wasn't actually a book at all.

Helston, Cornwall

One of the biggest problems with performing genealogical research is that it can be incredibly addictive, as David Mallory had already discovered. In fact, there were three problems with doing it. Apart from the addiction question, it was also comparatively expensive and definitely time-consuming.

His interest in the subject had been triggered by an apparently inconsequential remark his mother had made to him, just a few days before she'd died in the hospital the previous year after a long illness. At the time, he hadn't given much thought to what she'd said—there were far more pressing matters occupying his mind in the days immediately before and following her death—but as the months had passed, his thoughts returned to what she'd told him, and he'd begun to wonder if she was right.

He'd also wondered if it mattered. And, although he was quite sure that it didn't, the switch that engaged his curiosity had been tripped, and there didn't seem to be any easy way of turning it off. So he'd done a little
research on the Internet, but he had quickly realized that to fully explore his ancestors he would need a piece of specialized software to enable him to plot his family tree, because his standard word processing program just wasn't capable of doing it and he didn't want to have to write a database to do the job. He would also need a list of Web sites and other resources that he could access to obtain the information he was looking for. Successful genealogical research, he had quickly realized, was more a matter of knowing
where
to look rather than just knowing
what
to look for.

Once he'd bought and loaded the genealogy software, which cost less than he had expected, and had more or less gotten used to its quirks and foibles, Mallory had started rolling back the years, tracking his ancestors through time. And he'd found it simply fascinating, not to mention all-consuming.

Not the names themselves, of course, because that was what they were, just names and dates with links to other names and other dates, but the time he spent wandering off into the endlessly intriguing byways of history, fleshing out the characters behind the names on his charts, the men and women to whom he quite literally owed his very existence.

He'd quickly established that his mother's throwaway remark—she'd told him that he was the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son, though she couldn't remember all the names—was absolutely accurate. For whatever reason, he appeared to be the end product of a patriarchal lineage that had invariably involved firstborn male children, or that, at least, was what his researches had shown so far, and he had already managed to dig back as far as the end of the eighteenth century with some of the branches of his family tree.

The problem he was facing, and which he found was taking up more and more of his spare time, was that the further back he tried to go, the more difficult and time-consuming the search became. He'd been able to access the first, the most recent, records without even stepping out of his study, because he'd found them online, but he very quickly ran out of options there, and even the extensive records held by the Mormon Church didn't contain all the information he sought. Instead he was having to physically visit cemeteries and churches, looking for weathered and faded headstones in forgotten weed-choked corners of graveyards, or search handwritten parish records, ancient property deeds, and the like. That sometimes necessitated spending a day off or even a full weekend traveling to another town and often booking a hotel room for one or two nights, and that meant his new and compelling hobby was starting to get expensive as well, with the escalating cost of fuel, meals, and accommodation.

But for the moment, he could afford it. Or, rather, he
would
afford it, which wasn't exactly the same thing, because now the bug had really bitten. And his mother's death had left him a house he didn't like and didn't need and was actively trying to sell, and a bit of money as well, so it wasn't as if he was exactly strapped for cash.

In his own mind, he rationalized his new and almost all-consuming pursuit as a kind of tribute to his mother, a way of celebrating her memory by investigating and describing in detail her family tree, as if establishing her lineage would somehow help to reinforce his memories and recollections of her.

He barely even remembered his father, who'd died in a road accident when he was still a child, and his mother was all the family he'd ever had, or had ever known. His
father's untimely demise had robbed his mother, Mary Anne, of any chance of having any other children, and him of the possibility of growing up with any siblings. She had never expressed the slightest interest in finding another man with whom to share her life, and had settled down, grieving but apparently contented, to raise her son alone. It was only when he became a teenager that he finally realized that some of her irregular weekends away with one or other of her female friends, or slightly longer visits to distant and usually unnamed relatives, weekends and periods when the young David would be farmed out to a neighbor or another friend, might admit of an alternative explanation.

Not that he blamed her in the slightest. Ever since he first considered the matter, David Mallory had been convinced that each of us has only one life, and the secret to happiness is to be content with what one has, to play the cards fate has dealt. And fate, in the person of a driver so drunk that when he'd been cut from the wreckage of his car, suffering only from a broken arm, he was hardly able to stand, let alone drive, had at a stroke orphaned David and made a widow of his mother. As far as he was concerned, whatever it took to get through life was fine with him, and his mother, like everybody else, had needs and wants that had to be satisfied.

So in his opinion, establishing a full and complete family tree was one small way in which he could honor the memory of the woman who had brought him into the world and had largely been responsible for shaping him into what he was.

And so, when his workload permitted, he continued pursuing his hobby. At the age of thirty-two, Mallory was already established in his third career. He'd left school at nineteen, not having quite made the grade to get into
even a minor redbrick university to read anything he thought would enhance his employment prospects. He couldn't see a bad media studies degree doing much for him, and that was about all that was on offer. Instead he'd joined the police force for a brief and inglorious career.

The reason he'd left had nothing to do with his wishes but everything to do with the jagged scar that ran in a faint zigzag pattern down the left side of his cheek, white against his tanned flesh. He hadn't wanted to leave, but his superiors had made it very clear to him that he and the police force were about to part company, permanently. And, the superintendent had told him on the day when Mallory handed back his warrant card, he was extremely lucky not to be facing prosecution himself over what almost everybody in the Bristol police force had begun calling “the Incident.”

He had always had a knack with computers, writing his first program in C while still a teenager, and after he had shed his dark blue uniform for the last time he gravitated toward information technology. He hadn't wanted to get into programming because he'd always found the coding and seemingly endless debugging terminally frustrating, but IT support seemed a more attractive prospect, and he'd started doing that for a local company.

But almost five years of explaining what to do to people apparently too dense to actually follow simple instructions, and fixing problems that a reasonably bright fourteen-year-old could do in his sleep, had soured that for him as well, and he'd left after his mother died, to set up his own business.

He called himself a computer consultant, which meant pretty much whatever he wanted it to mean: everything from tuition on application software, through virus
removal and security advice, up to systems analysis and supplying, installing, and commissioning complete systems for companies installing or upgrading networks.

He was able to pick and choose his jobs, big and small, and even when he was working that usually just meant he had to be available on the end of a telephone and have access to a computer with a broadband link to the Internet and hence to his client, but not necessarily physically in any office building, which he was finding very convenient as he pursued his new interest.

That afternoon, he'd left the company where he'd just finished installing a small network to replace their older system and driven the short distance back to his cottage, a square and uncompromisingly rugged granite-built house that had stood in its small patch of land at the edge of a village near Helston for almost two hundred years, changed and modified by successive owners but still retaining much of its original character.

Mallory had recently begun contacting other people who were carrying out genealogical and related research, finding them through Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms, and offering to supply copies of the information he'd so far established, in exchange for any help they could provide with the data he was still seeking. So far, this had proved to be a largely unproductive field of investigation, with almost nobody who had responded being able to give him any information that he hadn't already uncovered for himself.

So when he'd made himself a coffee and switched on his laptop computer to check his e-mails that afternoon, he frankly wasn't expecting very much from the various e-mail replies he'd been sent.

But actually the fifth message he opened seemed potentially hopeful, and when he opened the attachments
the sender had provided and looked at the contents, at the scans of the documents his new correspondent had unearthed and the sections of the family trees he had managed to create, Mallory realized that he was looking at what amounted to a part, an important part, of the missing data in his own searches. Because a number of the new genealogical charts he was looking at unquestionably related to at least some of his forebears.

And when he read one of the accompanying notes that supported the family trees, he also realized that his research would now have to start heading in a direction that he had half suspected from one earlier trail he'd followed.

It looked as if he'd been right in his guess, and if so, that meant his family actually had its roots not just in a very different part of Britain, but in an entirely different country.

Dartmouth, Devon

“How very curious,” Robin Jessop murmured to herself as she looked at the book that wasn't a book.

Even on a close examination, it still looked as if that was what it was. The cover was black leather, fairly plain in design but with an embossed border, and with the words
Ipse Dixit
in capital letters impressed and picked out in gold leaf on both the spine and what looked like the front cover. Both titles were quite worn and the name on the spine, especially, quite difficult to make out. But it wasn't a front cover, because it simply didn't open. The edges of the pages, too, looked more or less as one would expect, but were firmly stuck together. The giveaway was a narrow flattened oval hole that ran through the sealed pages, more or less in the center of them but just below the front cover, obviously intended for some kind of key.

A key that, of course, she didn't have.

But that wouldn't necessarily be an obstacle, she reasoned. It was clearly a book safe, and it looked so much like a genuine book that she was quite certain that would
be its principal defense against discovery. It was like the old adage: where do you hide a tree? Answer: in a forest. So where do you hide a book? In a library, obviously. The probability was that dozens or perhaps even hundreds of people might have seen the object on one of the bookshelves in the old house belonging to William Stevens's relative and had never even thought to take it down and examine it. If anyone's gaze had rested on it for more than a few seconds, he would probably just have assumed it was just a dull old book and ignored it.

And if she was right, and that had been the intention of the person who'd constructed it, the locking mechanism would quite probably be something fairly simple, a very basic key of some kind. What she needed to do was to try to find out exactly how the mechanism worked before attempting to open it, not just jam a screwdriver or something into the slot and hope for the best. And to do that she needed two things: a much brighter and more focused light and a magnifying glass.

The lens was no problem because she had two on the desk in front of her. One was quite small but powerful, offering a magnification factor of fifteen or twenty—she couldn't quite remember which—that she used for detailed examinations, while the other was much bigger and low powered, a tool she used when the quality and size of the print inside books required it. She always mentally referred to that as her “Sherlock Holmes glass” because to her eyes it was very much like the magnifying lens the fictional detective was often portrayed as holding.

The light was more difficult, because it needed both to be bright and to have a very narrow beam to allow her to see right down into the interior of the flattened oval keyhole on the side of the object. Her desk light was bright, but far too diffuse to be much help, even when
she angled it directly toward the keyhole. As she'd expected, she could see almost nothing inside the opening. For a few moments, she held the object in her hands, considering it. She shook it, but as far as she could tell it was empty. Certainly nothing inside it rattled or moved, and it weighed about what she would have expected, assuming it was basically an iron or steel mechanism inside the leather binding.

She needed a flashlight of some sort, and strangely enough, the best one for the job was probably the cheap and tiny battery-powered LED light attached to her car key ring. The light was sold as an aid to locating a keyhole in the dark, which was never necessary with modern cars because of the remote central locking system they all possessed, but she had found it useful on a number of occasions when trying to insert her Yale key into the back door of the shop. The beam wasn't particularly powerful, but it was bright and well focused, and that was what she needed.

The keys to her Volkswagen Golf were in a shallow ceramic dish on the narrow hall table, which stood at the end of the passageway next to the door to her apartment, behind which a circular flight of metal stairs led down the outside of the building to the single-car parking space and the rear door of the shop. It was the work of just a few seconds for her to step into the passage, collect the keys, and return to her desk.

But when she sat down, she didn't immediately do anything, just sat in thought for perhaps a minute, because before she went any further she definitely needed to contact William Stevens. At that moment, the object still belonged to him, and before she spent any time trying to open it, she needed to either buy it off him or get his permission to go ahead.

She touched the space bar of her laptop computer to wake it up and composed a detailed e-mail to him. In it, she explained that she had assessed the collection of books and the vast majority were of little or no value. However, she added, there were a number of older volumes that clearly were of some importance. She listed the titles and the latest auction values she had been able to find for each of them, included the dates and locations of those auctions so he could check them himself if he so wished, and then added all the values together. It came to just under eight hundred pounds. From this sum, Robin added, the auctioneer's commission and charges would need to be deducted, and her own fee for valuing the collection.

She also described the book safe, for want of a better expression, describing it as accurately as she could and pointing out that it was most likely merely a curiosity and as far as she could tell from examining it, it did not contain anything and was locked. She finished the e-mail with a proposal, pointing out that some of the books were the kind she would be interested in buying as stock items for her shop, and making him a flat offer of seven hundred and fifty pounds for everything.

She marked the message high priority, and then sent it to him. As soon as it had gone, Robin picked up the phone and called Stevens on his mobile number. He answered almost immediately.

“William, it's Robin,” she said. “I've gone through all the books you sent me, and done my valuation bit on them. There aren't a lot there of high value, frankly, but there are a few that would be worth selling and that I would be interested in buying myself. What I've done is send you an e-mail listing those books and giving you the latest auction valuations that I've been able to find,
and then I've made you a cash offer for the lot, for the entire collection.”

Stevens's response was almost exactly what she had expected.

“How much?” he asked.

“Seven hundred and fifty pounds,” she replied, “and in my professional opinion I don't think you'll get any more than that if you take them to auction, but of course that's entirely up to you.”

“That's more than I expected,” Stevens said. “They're yours.”

“Thanks. But could you please read my e-mail first, see what I've said to make sure you understand my valuations and why I've made the offer that I have? If you're still happy with the figure, then I need your confirmation in writing—just replying to the e-mail would be fine—and your bank account details so that I can do a transfer. If you want cash, I can do that as well, but obviously I'll need to go to the bank first.”

“No, a transfer's fine. I'm just around the corner from my house now, so I'll go and check my messages and get back to you in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, William.”

Robin didn't have long to wait. Less than five minutes later her laptop emitted a musical double tone to indicate the receipt of an e-mail. She opened the program and read the message with a smile of satisfaction. William Stevens had simply confirmed that he was happy to accept the stated sum for the entire collection of books, including the book safe. He'd added his bank details, and within another few minutes Robin had logged on to her business account and arranged the transfer.

As far as she was concerned, the moment the bank's computer reported that the transfer had been initiated
and was in progress and could no longer be stopped or amended, the deal was done. She sent another very short e-mail to Stevens confirming that the money was on its way, then pushed the laptop to one side and turned her attention again to the mysterious leather-bound object sitting on her desk.

She propped it up with a couple of books so that it sat at an angle, the small hole in the pages directly in front of her, and shone the small LED flashlight directly into the opening. She took the small magnifying glass, the more powerful of the two, and used that to try to peer into the locking mechanism. It wasn't easy to do, because even the tiniest movement of the magnifying glass meant that everything would suddenly become blurred and out of focus, because of the power of the lens, and it took several minutes for her to finally be able to gain a clear idea of what she was looking at.

Strangely enough, it didn't look to her as if the opening in the locking system was designed for a key at all, because she could see no sign of a lock. In fact, as far as she could tell, the lid of the book safe was held in place only by a catch, or possibly by a number of catches, and all that she would need to do in order to release it was to slide something like a slim screwdriver through the hole until it made contact with the mechanism, and then give it a firm push. The thing that gave her pause was that although it certainly looked like a catch, held in place by a short spring, there seemed to be other levers as well that didn't seem to be directly connected to it, and she had no idea what possible purpose they could be serving.

She shrugged, laid the book safe flat on the top of her desk, and positioned its spine against the horizontal pen holder that was an integral part of her old desk, to give herself something to push against because she expected
that the mechanism would be stiff through lack of use and the dust of the centuries. And she didn't think that was an exaggeration because her best guess was that the object was most probably medieval. The mechanism might even, she acknowledged, be rusted solid, though if it had been kept in a library for most of the time, she hoped that wouldn't be the case.

She turned her attention to her small tool kit that, frankly, didn't contain very much: four screwdrivers, a couple of pairs of pliers, and a utility knife with a retractable blade, plus a handful of the screws, nails, washers, and other assorted bits of hardware that seemed to migrate into every toolbox over the years. Two of the screwdrivers had Phillips head bits, and so were of no use to her, and one of the others was simply far too big, the blade too thick to enter the slot. But the last screwdriver had a narrow but quite long blade—she thought it was the kind used by electricians—and she guessed that would probably be long enough, because as far as she could tell from her examination of the book safe, the catch was only four or five inches inside.

Robin slid the end of the screwdriver through the hole cut in the false pages of the book safe, doing her best to keep it straight so that it would make contact with the catch on the inside. She heard the very faint sound of metal touching metal, and then the screwdriver blade would go no farther.

“Here goes nothing,” she muttered, changed her grip so that the heel of her hand was on the end of the screwdriver, and pushed firmly.

The screwdriver slid perhaps another half inch inside the book safe. There was a faint click and then a sudden loud thud.

Robin Jessop was so shocked she released the
screwdriver and flung herself backward away from the desk, the back of her wheeled chair slamming into the wall behind her.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, getting to her feet, her eyes still fixed on the book safe.