The Heretic Scroll Read online

  And what measures might a man be allowed to stop that?

  But stop it how? That was the nub. Everything was happening so fast. Knowledge of it was leaking inexorably. Carmen Nero knew more than she’d let on, he was sure of it, as did Victor too. And never had he seen such naked ambition on a man’s face as on Taddeo Santoro’s when he’d contemplated the scroll. The man would push on with decipherment and excavation both. Threats hadn’t scared him off. Nor even the murder of his friend. Could anything then stop him? Anything short of…

  He shook his head to clear it of that unthinkable notion. But what alternative was there? The cross was too heavy for him to bear by himself, that was the truth of it. He needed to share its weight. With a trembling hand, he called Rome and asked for his Cardinal. As ever, though, it was the Cardinal’s secretary Francisco who intercepted. ‘Yes?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘I need to speak to him,’ said Alberts tremulously. ‘I need to tell him what I’ve learned.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s busy right now.’

  ‘He’s always busy. How am I to—’

  ‘Put it in your report. He reads them closely, I assure you. If he has anything to suggest, he’ll let you know.’

  ‘But he never says anything. He gives me no guidance—’

  ‘I have to go now,’ said Francisco. ‘But, believe me, the Cardinal has great faith in you. He’s confident that you’ll do whatever is necessary to bring this troubling situation to a happy conclusion.’

  ‘No. Don’t go yet, I beg you. It’s too much for me. Ask him… Ask him please to take this cup away from me.’

  ‘But you yourself know how that passage continues, Monsignor. Let his will be done. Not yours.’

  The phone went dead. Alberts stared at it a moment. He felt small, useless and overwhelmed. He went through to the kitchen. The knives were kept in a wooden block. He took out the longest, heaviest and sharpest. Almost out of curiosity, he placed its tip against his heart, then gripped its hilt tight in both hands. He closed his eyes and ordered himself to fall forward, to let the tiled floor do the work. But he couldn’t do it. He placed its blade to his throat instead, cold and sharp. One stab, that was all. How many times had he dreamed of it, the sweetness of that silence? But how many times had he baulked for lack of courage?

  With a sigh, he put the knife back down. A kind of fatalistic numbness descended on him then, much as the Holy Spirit was supposed to feel. He knew then what he was he going to do that night. He knew it even though it appalled him. The decision was out of his hands. He went through to his bedroom, moved his chair over to the hanging cupboard. He brought down the steel lockbox and set it on his bed. He fished out his key, opened its lock, lifted its lid, and stared down in trepidation at its contents.

  Yes. It was out of his hands.

  II

  Cesco hit heavy traffic on his way out to Herculaneum. So many of the cars he passed had heavily loaded roof racks or trailers that he came to suspect word of an evacuation had leaked, and these people were getting out ahead of the rush. Numerous pleasure boats were fleeing the town’s marina too, their sails glowing brightly from the low-dipping sun.

  He parked outside the police station, then buzzed to be let in. The front desk alerted Valentina to his arrival, then sent him up two floors to Serious Crimes. Messana was deep in conference with Izzo. She showed him to a stand-alone computer in the basement, handed him Raff’s memory cards, excused herself with urgent business and left him to it. It puzzled him that she no longer wanted to go through the disks together, but he shrugged it off and settled in.

  The chair kept rocking whenever he shifted his weight. He folded up a sheet of paper to set beneath its foot. The third memory card was blank, as if never used. He popped it back out. A different make from the others too. He bit his teeth together at the obvious implication. Messana had gone through the disks herself and had found something interesting too. So she’d kept that disk for herself, then had made up numbers with a new one.

  He marched back upstairs to Serious Crimes. Its lights were off and its door locked. He asked next door. Messana had gone off with Romeo Izzo some twenty minutes earlier. He thought dark thoughts of her, then took out his phone to protest. But what was the point? She’d only deny it. And maybe he was wrong anyway. He returned downstairs and carried on, just in case. One of the disks was full of pictures of artefacts taken at a museum warehouse. He remembered the day well, an ill-fated experiment at shooting on-site rather than in the studio, only for it to prove too cramped and the light too poor. It had been early in his time with Raff, so he’d been trusted only to lug equipment and sit in the van while…

  He frowned, stopped, went back a page. Yes. A broken funerary stele depicting the robed shoulder and bearded chin of a man with a long staff. He’d seen it recently, he was sure of it. Not that day at the warehouse or at the studio either. Where then? He enlarged it on screen then rocked back in his chair, the better to contemplate. And so it was that, when he finally realised, the answer so convulsed him that he had to grab the edge of the desk to stop from toppling backward.

  III

  Closing time arrived in Rare Books & Manuscripts. Victor and his assistants politely rousted Carmen and the other researchers from their places to collect their books and materials. The larger library would remain open a few hours yet, however, so she found herself a free berth to continue her research into Marcion, Tertullian and St Paul, adding ever more tabs to her browser until she had dozens open, each offering a slightly different angle or new lead.

  She learned, for example, that the ten letters of St Paul that Marcion had included in his canon were widely accepted as authentic. But that the authorship of the ones that Marcion hadn’t included, yet which had made it into the New Testament all the same, was far less certain – not least because certain aspects of their theology so clashed with Paul’s undisputed works that they seemed written almost to counter them. She also came to understand better why Marcion’s belief in Docetism had obliged him to strip Jesus’s nativity and childhood from the Gospel of Luke; and why his disdain for Judaism had made him expunge most references to Jewish scripture.

  She read up, too, on the Jewish school run by Gamaliel that St Paul had attended as a young man, and which had so clearly influenced his Christianity; and how his insistence on embracing gentiles in the new faith had led to its first great civil war. Its particular battlegrounds had been circumcision, cleanliness and the interpretation of Mosaic law. But the underlying conflict had been Christianity’s relationship to Judaism, the one carried on so fiercely by Marcion himself with his categorical rejection of both Jewish scripture and its God. And made particularly pertinent by wider events taking place in the ancient world at that same time, what with Simon Bar Kokhba inciting the Jewish people into their ill-fated revolt, leading to their brutal defeat and the final levelling of the Second Temple for one to Jupiter to be built in its place.

  That truly had been a desecration.

  The thought made her frown. The Olivet discourse had overstated Roman reprisals in 70 CE, but fitted almost perfectly the events of 136. Maybe Jesus had been a prophet after all. She sat back, gave herself up to contemplation. For her, history came in flavours. There was the history that one knew, from reading books, journals and primary sources. But there was a level beyond, a history that – for lack of a better word – one experienced. For Carmen, this was usually triggered by visiting a place or by holding an artefact in her hands, by letting her imagination take charge of her knowledge, transporting her, almost physically, back to the time in question. And she realised for the first time how terrifying Bar Kokhba’s defeat must have been for the Jewish people. How disorienting. Driven from their homes and homeland, their families slaughtered, their property and wealth all seized. And, to top it off, their culture and religion – the ways in which they’d made sense of the world – torn down, trodden into the dust, made to look worthless and absurd. What wailing there must have been. What sorrow
and confusion. And desperation too. Desperation for a new way to make sense of the world, to regain their bearings and plot out a fresh course. And the feeling gradually settled on her that a whole new land lay hidden at the very periphery of her view. But, peer and squint though she might, she couldn’t quite make it out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I

  Cesco settled back into his chair. The police computer wasn’t hooked up to the Internet, so he brought up Miranda Harcourt’s website on his phone instead; but he could find no trace of the funerary stele, however long he searched, whatever terms he used. But he was sure that was where he’d seen it when he’d checked out her site the other day. One hundred per cent sure. And the fact that it was now gone could hardly have been more damning.

  He drummed his fingers on the table. A museum piece on Harcourt’s website. Yet there was no way Raff could have stolen it that day out at the warehouse. They’d loaded and unloaded the van together; he’d have noticed a heavy piece like that. And if Emilia had subsequently brought it to the studio for fresh photography, it would only have been after entering it onto her new database, so that its absence would quickly have been noted.

  His mental jigsaw fell apart. He tried to fit the pieces to a different pattern. Raff had always been on the lookout for new photographic ideas and techniques. With the museum such an important client, he’d spent hours browsing the websites of rival institutes, auction houses and dealerships, in search of inspiration. They both had. All too likely, then, that Raff had stumbled across Harcourt’s website by accident, only to recognise the stele or some other piece. As evidence of wrongdoing, it would have been far too flimsy to risk alienating a top client. Safer and easier to keep an eye on it by following Miranda Harcourt on Twitter. Then, when she’d announced her next visit to Naples, he’d done a fuller background check, then had gone down to the Lungomare to see who she was meeting. And that was why that waitress had thought they’d left together – because when she’d left her hotel, and walked right by him, he’d jumped up to follow.

  Another riff of fingers on the desk. It fitted, yet was circumstantial. And it invited an uncomfortable question: who then was the real thief? Someone with access to the pieces before they were catalogued. Someone who could scrub existing records, cover traces, hide gaps. Someone no one would suspect. And someone Raff liked, too, or he’d have mentioned it. Put like that, there was only one candidate. Sweet, doe-eyed, motherly Emilia herself, she of the almond cakes and chocolate puddings, the helpless tears of apparent grief.

  It was still only a suspicion, but one strong enough to share. But who with? Emilia was his friend. He didn’t want to smear her with false allegations of theft or – God forbid – involvement in Raff’s death. Yet he couldn’t let it slide either. He only knew one person at the museum well enough to approach with something this delicate and explosive. Fortunately, that happened to be Il Direttore Taddeo Santoro himself, who’d taken him and Carmen under his wing on their arrival in Naples, minor celebrities that they’d been after their Alaric triumph. Cesco called his office now, only to find that he’d gone home already to work on some upcoming speech. He put down the phone and sat there brooding. This wasn’t information to sleep on, not with a hole in the museum’s security and one man already dead. He knew where Santoro lived too. The other side of Naples, yes, but only twenty minutes or so beyond his own apartment.

  He zipped the memory card away in his pocket, then turned off the computer and headed for the stairs.

  II

  ‘She’s my wife!’ shouted Zeno D’Agostino, finally losing his temper. ‘I insist you bring her to the phone!’

  ‘Oh, you insist on it, do you?’ scoffed his mother-in-law. ‘And if she says no? What exactly will you do to us then?’

  The question threw D’Agostino. Was it possible Emanuela had told her about his involvement in Raffaele Conte’s death? Yet her tone expressed no fear, only contempt. ‘You’ll see,’ he said darkly.

  The phone went dead in his hand. He stared at it for a moment, seething, and was halfway through redialling when there came a knock at his front door. His neighbour Alicia, no doubt, back with her wretched petition. He went angrily to answer it, finally in the right frame of mind to tell her where to stuff it. To his dismay, it wasn’t Alicia at all, but rather yesterday’s two detectives, Romeo Izzo and Valentina Messana. He had to steel himself not to slam his door in their faces. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘How did you even get in?’

  ‘Your neighbour,’ said Izzo placidly. ‘A tall man. Russian, I think.’

  ‘Ukrainian,’ corrected D’Agostino, for it wasn’t in his nature to let mistakes go. ‘Well? What can I do for you?’

  ‘A few minutes, that’s all. One or two follow-up questions from yesterday.’

  ‘And it has to be now, does it? Only I have an engagement.’

  ‘A man’s been murdered. If your engagement is more important…’

  He took a breath. ‘No, no. Of course not. Come in.’ He stepped aside for them, then closed the door before any more of his neighbours could see them.

  ‘Is your wife here?’ asked Messana. ‘We were hoping to speak to her too.’

  ‘My wife?’

  ‘Emanuela, isn’t it? Is she here?’

  ‘Not right now. No.’

  ‘Will she be back?’

  ‘What is this? Am I her keeper?’ Silence fell. Both detectives regarded him curiously. He ran a finger around his collar. ‘Not tonight, as it happens. She’s gone to see her mother.’

  ‘Ah. Is that right?’

  ‘Of course it’s right. Why would I lie?’

  ‘When did she leave? Only your good neighbour told us she drove off last night in quite a state.’

  ‘What is this? What are you implying? Am I under arrest?’

  ‘Do you need to be?’

  His heart was pounding so hard, he could feel his cheeks burn. The two detectives smiled identical police smiles at him, the ones that said that they knew everything. Crazy thoughts rushed through his mind. Say whatever it took to stay out of custody tonight. Fly out first thing tomorrow to some non-extradition country. Change his name, get plastic surgery, go to ground. But, almost as swiftly, reality came crushing back down. They’d arrest him before he even took off, then use his flight as a confession. They’d freeze his accounts to leave him destitute within a month. And he discovered, to his mild surprise, that his reputation mattered too much to him simply to surrender it without a fight. The self-knowledge gave him a certain courage. What proof could they possibly have, after all? Only supposition and circumstantial evidence. He was a man of distinction, blessed with influence and friends. Hold his nerve and they’d struggle even to bring it to court. All this passed through his head in a second or two. His heart resettled. His complexion returned to normal. He found himself entering a curious state of detachment, as though watching it all on a screen. With a polite smile, he gestured towards his living room. ‘Come with me, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I can.’

  III

  The traffic had grown even heavier while Cesco had been in the police station. Fortunately, the Harley allowed him to weave swiftly through it, so that it took him only fifty minutes to pass through Naples and out the other side to the wealthy suburb of Posillipo. He dawdled along its waterfront of chic shops and expensive restaurants, looking for his turning. He’d only been here once before, and that by dead of night. But there it was. He remembered the orange and yellow striped awning on that cafe. He turned up it, into the hinterland of pricey apartment blocks then across a junction up a poorly lit, narrow and winding cobbled lane in such disrepair that one might have been forgiven for thinking this the poorer part of town.

  If so, one couldn’t have been more wrong.

  A better clue was given by the long, high walls on either side, many topped by wire or broken glass, as well as by the automated gates and the glimpses they afforded of the fabulous villas strung along this lane l
ike pearls on a necklace. The Santoros lived right at the top, so that Cesco wound slowly back and forth for nearly five minutes before he reached it. There was nowhere to park outside, but the lane petered out just a little further on, he knew, ending in a patch of broken ground where people could turn their cars, or leave them to hike the hilltop.

  He parked beside a gold Ford Ka, packed away his helmet, walked back down the lane. The slap of his footsteps on the rutted cobbles emphasised just how quiet it was. Like the other properties, Taddeo’s was shielded by a high wall and an automated gate. There was a thin gap between the gate and posts, however, through which the house was visible. Some lights were on, upstairs and down. He could hear Wagner playing. He pressed the buzzer. The music was turned off and the upstairs lights went out, then the downstairs. But the gate didn’t open and no one answered. He buzzed again. Still no response. He stood there uncertainly. The death threat letter had demanded an end to excavations, yet Taddeo had pushed on regardless. Surely that made him a plausible next target.

  Cesco considered calling the police. But maybe Taddeo simply wasn’t in the mood for visitors. Besides, his presence here would take too much explaining. On the other hand, he couldn’t just leave it. The gate was easy to scale by its hinges. He vaulted it now, lowered himself on the other side. The gravelled drive was bordered by lush lawns of springy grass. He walked along the verge, careful to make no noise. The drive curled in a wide arc around the front of the house, the better to dazzle guests with the magnificence of its view out of the bay, before arriving at a large forecourt with a classical fountain at its heart that doubled as a kind of roundabout to help the flow of traffic for the grand parties Taddeo and his senator wife threw on the rare occasions she was back in town.