The Lost Treasure of the Templars (9 page)

“Treachery is the only crime you can't forgive,” he said, then drew deeply on the cigarette and narrowed his
eyes against the smoke. “In fact, in my book, it's more than a crime. I believe it's a mortal sin. If the decision had been mine, I would have broken every bone in his body before finishing him off. What about his family? Had he any close relatives?”

“No wife, of course, just like the rest of us, but he had a sister and a brother as well, at least until about two hours ago. The sister lives in Modena, and he seems to have had no recent contact with her, but his brother was here in Rome. I sent out another team to take care of him as well, just in case he had let anything slip. We can't afford any loose ends, and particularly not at the moment.”

“Why now especially?”

“Because we've had a definite hit,” Silvio Vitale replied.

Dartmouth, Devon

“So you live above the shop, as they say?” Mallory asked.

“Yes. In fact, I bought this part of the building,” Robin replied, leading the way up the metal spiral staircase. “I needed both a shop and somewhere to live, because I really didn't want to have to commute to work, and this seemed to fit the bill. It's pretty cramped, but it works for me.”

“It must have been expensive, the commercial premises and accommodation. Selling books must pay well.”

Robin glanced back at him over her shoulder.

“Not as well as I'd like,” she replied. “But I had a small inheritance from an aunt, and that was enough to cover the deposit and start the business. For the rest of it, just like everyone else these days I've had to sell most of my soul and almost all my income to the bank on the corner of High Street. But I'm building up a customer base, mostly people like you who are interested in specific and unusual subjects, and so far I'm showing a reasonable profit.”

She stopped on the metal landing at the top of the
external staircase and took a set of keys out of her handbag. She selected a Yale, slid it into the lock, and opened the door.

“The loo's that door there, if you want it,” she said, “and my office is the one where the door's open. I'll put the kettle on, but the coffee's only instant,” she warned.

“That's fine with me,” Mallory said, heading for the lavatory. “Frankly I can't tell the difference.”

Five minutes later, they were sitting on opposite sides of the desk, two mugs of coffee steaming but largely forgotten beside them as they stared at the black leather book safe and its two rows of protruding spikes. Both of them were wearing white cotton gloves at Robin's insistence, just in case her suspicion about the spikes originally being poisoned was correct. The pair she'd found for Mallory was the biggest she had, but they were still an extremely tight fit.

He held his hand horizontally over one of the rows of spikes, comparing the thickness of his palm to their length, and whistled softly.

“My hand is a lot bigger than yours,” he said, “but I think that if I'd been holding the book safe when it was triggered, those spikes would have gone straight through my palm and come out the other side. They must be nearly two inches long.”

“According to my ruler, they measure just over one inch and three quarters.”

Mallory nodded, then bent to look even more closely at the two separate mechanisms that were built into the relic: the catches that held the lid closed and the triggering mechanism that was designed to fire the spikes. Then he stared at the slim hole cut into the side of the book safe opposite to the spine, where lengths of paper had been attached to look like the pages of a book.

“That opening,” he said after a few moments, “doesn't look to me like it was intended to accept any kind of key that I've ever seen. But that shape is very familiar to me.”

“It is? What is it?”

“It looks like the top of a sheath for a sword, or maybe a dagger. It's like a flattened oval, thicker in the middle and then tapering on both sides to where the sharpened edges of the blade would be. And there's something else as well.”

He reached over to the pen rest on the edge of Robin's desk and picked up a pencil. He used its sharpened end to point to two small raised areas in the metal on the inside of the book safe, one above and the other below the center of the flattened oval.

“I don't know how much you know about stabbing weapons,” he said, “but the blades of most knives and swords intended for stabbing rather than hacking include a grooved channel that's commonly known as the blood gutter, though it should properly be called a fuller, after the blacksmithing tool used to make it. Most people think it's intended to allow a blade to be pulled out of a body more easily, but actually it allows the weight of the blade to be reduced without affecting its strength. I think those two bits of metal were probably intended to fit inside the fullers on a double-edged blade. A particular blade, I mean, so the keyhole, that narrow oval slot, has been designed to prevent the wrong knife blade from being inserted. If that isn't the case, then I've got no idea why they're there.”

“You're right,” Robin said. “What you say does make sense. And I suppose the mere fact that the ‘key,' if you like, was a dagger—a weapon that most men in medieval times wore around their waist every day as a matter of course, just as a part of their normal dress—would have
added another layer of protection for the book safe. One dagger, I assume, looks very much like any other dagger, and somebody trying to crack the secret of the book safe wouldn't have any idea there was anything special about one particular weapon. They'd have been able to hide the key in plain sight, if you like.”

Mallory was still bending forward over the desk, closely examining the mechanism inside the object.

“I think I see how this works now,” he said.

He gestured again with the point of the pencil. “Look here, on both sides of the slot where the blade of the dagger would be inserted. There are two metal bars, one on each side. As the correct blade was slid inside, its edges would have pressed against these two bars, which are hinged. If you move them outward, then the opposite ends would have fitted into these two slots, here”—he pointed at two rectangular cutouts on the pair of metal levers that were attached to the rows of spikes—“and that would have locked the mechanism and prevented it from being triggered. It's really quite sophisticated. Whoever made this had both time and talent, and was also pretty good at metalwork.”

Mallory put both hands inside the book safe, rested his thumbs against one of the bars carrying the spikes, and his fingers around the one on the opposite side, and then squeezed them together. The springs were strong, but so were his fingers, and in a few moments his efforts were rewarded by a distinct double click as he reset the booby trap.

“Pardon me for asking,” Robin said, “but why have you just done that?”

“For safety,” Mallory replied. “If you're right about the age and the history of that thing, the booby trap wasn't triggered for several hundred years, and in all that
time the spikes stayed safely inside the book safe. Leaving them sticking out like that is pretty much an invitation for somebody to hurt themselves, so I think it's actually safer if the trap is reset. I don't suppose you'll be sticking a screwdriver in it again.”

Robin thought about that for a moment and then nodded.

“You're probably right,” she agreed, “and it'll certainly be easier to store it in my safe like that.”

Mallory stretched out his hand to the rolled parchment, but Robin stopped him.

“Don't touch it,” she snapped, and Mallory drew his hand back as if he'd been burned.

“I can't do much if you won't let me see the manuscript,” he said, sounding hurt.

“Sorry. It's just that it's very fragile and you need experience to know how to handle something like that.”

“I'm not an idiot. I've been studying old documents in churches and libraries for the last year or so, tracing my family history. I do know something about this.”

Robin shook her head.

“Sorry again,” she said. “I didn't know that. Most people don't have a clue about the damage you can do to old parchment just by touching it with your bare fingers.”

Mallory silently lifted his gloved hands in front of her face, and she nodded.

“I'll need to get some professional advice myself on how best to preserve it,” she said.

“So I presume you've copied it?” he asked, sounding only slightly mollified.

“I've copied it and scanned it as well. That was pretty much the first thing I did after I got over the shock of the booby trap triggering.”

She lifted the parchment carefully, using a couple of pencils, lowered it into the book safe, and then closed the lid, pressing it down until the catch clicked to lock it. Then she carried it over to the safe from which she had removed it a few minutes earlier, put it inside, and locked the door.

“Do you think it's valuable?” Mallory asked. “That book safe, I mean.”

“I really don't know. When I realized what it was, I assumed it was just a curio, and there are people who collect that kind of thing—medieval instruments and weapons and so on—but I really have no idea if this has a significant value or not.” She laughed shortly. “The reason I'm keeping it in the safe is so that I don't stab myself with it and nor does anybody else who comes up here, like Betty.”

“Betty?”

“The lady who runs the shop for me. I'll introduce you later. I can just see her wandering up here to ask me something and pricking the end of her finger on one of those spikes. But now that we've looked at it more closely, I'm beginning to think that it might well be valuable, simply because I've never seen anything like it before. I've done some searches on the Internet, and although book safes aren't unknown, I can't find any mention of medieval ones, and I couldn't find any that contained any kind of built-in antitheft device. Often in those days, important books included a lock of some sort to prevent them from being opened, but they were still just books, not safes, so I suppose it could even be unique. I'm still convinced it's medieval, and it's in pretty good condition, and rarity, condition, and age are all ticks in the right boxes as far as serious collectors are concerned.”

Mallory nodded. “It's an impressive piece of kit and if
you want my opinion—and I suppose that's the reason I'm here right now—without even taking a look at the parchment, I can tell you that whatever it is and says is important. Or at least it was important when it was put inside that relic, which isn't quite the same thing. Nobody would go to this kind of trouble, to have an object like that made, unless the contents were crucial to them in some way. So I guess the next step is to take a look at the text on the parchment and try and find out what it says.”

Robin sat down in the swivel chair and pulled open one of the drawers. She took two sheets of paper out of the drawer and slid them across toward Mallory.

“You'll recognize the first few words because those were the ones I sent you,” she said.

Mallory nodded, opened his computer case, and took out a sheet of paper on which he'd written the alphabet and the left-shifted Atbash cipher.

“This should be easy enough,” he said.

But Robin shook her head decisively. “Not necessarily. After we talked and I read your e-mail, I wrote out the cipher as well, but when I tried it on another section of text, all that happened was I turned gibberish into a different kind of gibberish, but certainly not into Latin or any other language that I recognized.”

“Did you, now?” Mallory said, looking down thoughtfully at the photocopy on the paper in front of him. “Well, I think that's good, because I like a challenge. It sounds as if whoever wrote this might have used more than one encryption technique, and that's interesting in itself, because again it suggests that whatever this text says it is—or at least it
was
when it was written—extremely important to somebody.”

Mallory looked at the photocopy again, then shook his head.

“It's not that easy to read even in the original,” he pointed out. “In some places I can't really see where one word begins or ends.”

“A lot of medieval documents were like that,” Robin replied. “Paper was a fairly rare and expensive commodity, so the words were crammed together and the whole width of the paper was used. And of course parchment was a lot more expensive than paper.”

“Well, we need to get this right, without any mistakes, just in case this reveals the location of the lost treasure of King John or something like that.”

“Not very likely,” Robin said, with a smile. “So, what do you suggest?”

“I know it will take a lot longer, but I think the first thing we should do is transcribe the whole of the original text onto a computer, letter by letter. That way we'll be able to identify any ambiguous letters and play around with the spacing if we aren't sure where one word ends and the next begins. Then we can print it out because it'll be easier to write the deciphered Latin text underneath, and an English translation under that, in the old-fashioned way, using paper and ink.”

“Okay. It'll take a while, but that's not a bad idea. I'm more used to looking at this kind of material than you are, so let me suggest that I read out the letters from the photocopy, while you type them.”

Mallory nodded.

“That works for me,” he said.

He opened his computer bag again, took out his laptop, and switched it on. He started up his word processing program and created a new file named “parchment.docx,” then waited with his hands poised above the keyboard.

Robin removed her spectacles and placed them on her desk, then picked up a pencil.

“You can read without glasses?” Mallory asked.

She nodded. “Yes. They're plain glass, not prescription lenses, more a kind of disguise. I find I get taken a lot more seriously if I wear glasses than if I don't. I know I'm not blond, but I've more or less seen the word
bimbo
forming in the minds of some men—people like my first bank manager here in Dartmouth, for example—when I've been trying to discuss business with them. So now I tend to wear them most of the time when I'm out and about, but actually my vision's pretty near perfect.”

Mallory considered her for a moment.

“I get the feeling there's an awful lot about you that I don't know yet,” he said.

“You have no idea,” Robin replied, “but I would remind you that you're the one who won't talk about that scar on your cheek.”

“Touché. Maybe later. Right, let's get started.”