by Alex Archer
Roux paused and then changed tack, switching to Annja’s encounter with Owen Llewellyn, and how it had ended. “She didn’t even check to see if the sword was still in the car with him,” Roux said, clearly exasperated.
“Didn’t sound like she even could have. Cut her some slack.”
“She had a choice. We all have a choice. Let’s be blunt about this—she didn’t have to call an ambulance straightaway. He was a dead man, after all, so it served no purpose. She didn’t have to drive Llewellyn’s car off the road. It happened, but she could have confronted the man, couldn’t she? This is Annja we’re talking about. She isn’t like other women, and she most certainly isn’t some helpless victim. She inherited Joan’s sword for a reason, Garin—to fight back, not to run away.”
“You’re being hard on her, old man. It’s not like she was running away. She was picking her battles. It’s survival instinct, same for you or me.”
“Well, she screwed up one way or the other.” Roux grunted. “I’m not really in the mood to dissect it all.” The waitress returned with their coffees. Garin flashed her another smile, knowing full well the effect it would have on the poor girl. She nearly dropped the little biscotti she was supposed to lay on the side of their saucers. Flustered, she smiled back at him, more than earning her tip. That little smile made his day; what was the point if you couldn’t bring a little sunshine into people’s lives?
“When did you last check that this mantle was safely tucked away?”
“Not long ago.”
“A little more precise?”
“Maybe a hundred years ago, give or take.”
“That’s a lot of giving and taking.”
“There was some restoration being done then to repair the damage caused in the English Civil War. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers hadn’t managed to disturb it between them, but there was a good chance builders would. I couldn’t take the risk.”
“Right, but if the guy who’s been searching for these treasures is dead, doesn’t that mean everything’s good now? He’s not exactly going to be looking for this stuff from beyond the grave, is he?”
“Unlikely, I’ll grant you that.”
“And if he’s already found it, then he’s going to have it stashed somewhere, so we’re going to have to play detective and find it. But given he didn’t know we were onto him, I doubt he’s hidden it well. Probably left it at home.”
“Everything is so simple in your world, isn’t it, Garin?”
“That’s a bit harsh.”
“Is it? Kill it, screw it, steal it—that seems to be your credo. Sometimes life’s more complicated than that. The answers don’t always tumble into your lap, and a charming smile doesn’t get the pretty girl to drop her knickers.”
“Jealous?”
“Not at all.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“Oh, I do, every day. Believe me. I go to bed at night thinking I’m really not jealous of your life. There but for the grace of God go I.”
“I’m not sure about that, old man. I can’t see your smile charming the birds from the trees. Scaring them out of the high branches, maybe.”
“I liked you better in 1431. Only marginally, but better.”
“Likewise. Funny how we’re still stuck with each other after all this time. I would say you must have done something terrible in a past life, but even God would have forgotten about your past lives by now. So, the way I see it, there’s no point taking risks. If this cloak of invisibility is still where you hid it, then what exactly is there to gain by trying to get inside? I mean, it’s under armed guard. No one is getting in or out. And if Llewellyn had already found it, then Annja’s on the case. We can sit back and enjoy the show.”
“Which all sounds very reasonable, but there’s something you are forgetting.”
“Am I?”
Roux nodded. “The laws of physics actually.”
“I don’t follow?”
“A man cannot be in two places at once. It is as simple as that. It is an impossibility that Owen Llewellyn could desecrate the grave of Gerald of Wales, kill my friend in the process and, simultaneously, be stealing the whetstone from the museum in Caerleon. It doesn’t work. Simple physics. Two locations over one hundred miles apart, two robberies only hours apart? No. The CCTV stuff shows Llewellyn was in St. Davids.”
“Which means someone else was in Caerleon,” Garin finished. “He wasn’t working alone.”
“He wasn’t working alone,” Roux agreed. “Now you see the urgency?”
Chapter 24
Awena decided that it would be for the best if the sword was put away with the whetstone in her father’s study. Leaving it out would only make Geraint think she was taunting him with it, trying to rub his face in the fact they’d found not one but two of the treasures, and instead of building bridges between them it would only serve to burn them. That was the last thing she wanted.
The flame had flickered out the moment she’d put the sword down on the kitchen table, barely leaving a scorch mark on the scrubbed pine surface. The steel was cold to the touch a second later when she’d tentatively tested it with a fingertip.
It wasn’t until she lifted it by the hilt that it burst back into life, somehow responding to her touch.
She carried the sword nervously through the house, climbing the stairs slowly, and crossing the landing to the study door with the flame licking at the air with each step. It heated the air in front of her. She could feel it.
Awena opened the door.
The whetstone still lay where she’d left it, in the middle of their father’s desk.
She still wished she’d had the time to show it to him, to see his face as he realized what she’d found.
She placed the sword on top of her own prize, the flame once again flickering and failing as soon as she released her grip, but this time the sword didn’t return to its former inert state.
The steel blade crackled with electricity, blue sparks dancing and fizzing over its surface.
She reached out with a finger, not quite touching the steel. Sparks bridged the gap, tingling her skin and crackling through her body as she felt a sudden surge of energy. Awena wanted to call Geraint, to show him what had just happened, to ask him what he thought was happening...but he’d made his position abundantly clear. She was on her own in this. He wouldn’t be joining her in the family business.
She lifted the sword from the precious whetstone, resurrecting the blue fire.
She set it down again, this time on the hearth of the study’s disused fireplace. The flue was blocked somewhere up above with a bird’s nest.
The flames went out, the blade cold to the touch.
So, it was clearly the combination of the two treasures together that had caused the peculiar effect. Fascinating. And if she needed any proof that the stone really was the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd this was it. Surely there had to be something in her father’s notes about the proximity effect of one treasure on the other. But where to begin looking?
Then she remembered the journal he kept in the top drawer of his desk.
Her father was a creature of habit. Whenever he came home he copied the voluminous notes he’d jotted down into a leather-bound journal, detailing where he had been, where he was planning on going next and, most importantly, why. She had her own habits, of course, one of them being that every time he left them again she’d spend ages deciphering his writing. She could rarely make any sense of it, but it was still the right place to start looking for answers now, she was sure of it.
The pages were covered in his familiar spidery scrawl. There were roughly sketched diagrams with what he considered important points ringed to highlight them. It was idiosyncratic, but it was a system. Whenever he mentioned one of the treasures by name he would writ
e it in red ink, making it easy to pick out.
She ran a finger down the spine, fingertip resting on the number twenty-six. There were another twenty-five journals just like this one on the shelves behind the desk.
Awena settled in his chair, deciding to work backward, and started to read through the current book first. Hopefully as he’d come closer to the sword, he’d left a trail of some kind, not back to where he’d found the sword, but more like bread crumbs of thought to where he’d be going next.
She spent a fruitless hour reading through what amounted to her father’s life until she reached the last few entries. They offered some hints and more suppositions, but seemed to point toward St. Davids. There was nothing about where he was going after that.
She put the book down on the table beside her and went to the bookshelves to pull down another one and then another after that, burning the midnight oil in her quest to follow her father. At first she looked for any mention of the sword or the whetstone, not expecting to find mention of them together. She would have missed it, too, if it wasn’t for a reference to Gerald of Wales. She saw one word in the entry underlined three times—combine—and a question mark. She read the entry three times before she realized there was nothing in it, though her father had noted “cv. 19” in the margin, which she took to mean “cross-reference with journal nineteen.”
She searched the shelves for the leather-bound journal she hoped he was referring to, but it wasn’t there. It was the only one in the sequence that was missing.
She was about to give up when she lit onto the safe—it was behind an idealistic painting of Bran the Blessed surrounded by a conspiracy of ravens. Her father had always identified with Bran, telling her how he was the true root of the Arthurian myth, with his cauldron sharing so many of the properties of the Grail, and Bran himself a kind of Fisher King character.
She lifted the painting down from the wall, revealing the fireproof safe where he kept his most valuable possessions. Some men might have used their daughter’s birthday or their wedding day as a combination, but not her father. He used 04 03 11, the day the Welsh Assembly gained direct law-making powers independent of Westminster. That was her father through and through.
She spun the dial—four right, three left, eleven right—and turned the capstan lock to a satisfyingly deep click of the bolts disengaging, and opened the safe.
She had only seen inside the safe once, when he’d explained to her the most precious things in his world were hidden inside, and made her commit the sequence of numbers to heart in case the worst should ever happen to him. She’d never been tempted to look inside when he was away. People needed their secret places. To know them all, to know everything about a man, was almost like robbing him of a part of himself, the bit where he could be him and only him, not the person you needed or wanted him to be. Awena had always respected his need of privacy, but that didn’t stop her looking inside for volume nineteen among the other secrets he’d stashed in there.
She carried the journal back to the chair and sat beneath the light, lost to time, and opened the book, hoping that it would open a new window into her father’s world.
Her heart sank after she’d turned the first page, the second, the third, the tenth, twentieth, and realized that none of the words on the page meant anything to her.
She knew a little Latin, a few conjugations and phrases appropriated by Shakespeare, but nowhere near enough to be able to understand the sheer mass of words neatly inked inside the book. The only thing she knew for sure was that it wasn’t her father’s handwriting and the book itself was far older than anything else in his collection.
To all intents and purposes, it was another dead end.
She was still searching for something that would help her, anything at all, when the doorbell rang. She looked through a crack in the curtains. It was still the middle of the night. There was a car pulled up in the drive. It wasn’t her father’s.
She ran down the stairs, heart in her throat.
Nothing good ever happened in the middle of the night.
The hands of the grandfather clock in the hallway had settled on 3:00 a.m.
She’d read somewhere that more people died at 3:00 a.m. than any other time of day.
Awena answered the door.
Two strangers stood on the doorstep. She could feel the weight of death all around them. They couldn’t look her in the eye as the taller, gaunter of the two asked, “Miss Llewellyn?”
“That’s right,” she replied as they produced their warrant cards. She wasn’t listening as they gave their names. She stepped back inside the house, just a step, but it allowed them to enter, bringing death with them. Until that moment there had been a chance it wasn’t happening, that these two men hadn’t come bearing news that would change her life forever. And it stayed like that, until they were in the living room and she was sitting down, waiting anxiously for them not to say the word.
“Is it Geraint?” she asked finally. She’d heard the door slam earlier. An hour ago? Two? Surely not long enough for anything bad to have happened? But he’d been so angry, and that meant out of control, and that in turn meant his was the name that leaped into her head.
“Geraint?” The two police officers looked at each other for a second.
“My brother.”
“No, miss, it’s not about your brother,” the policeman began. “I’m afraid it is your father.”
She listened as they explained that his car had been found on an isolated mountain road through the Brecon Beacons. They mentioned a place name which was vaguely familiar but she couldn’t remember why it felt significant.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. You’ve found his car? Not him?” She started to hope that there was a mistake, that she had assumed he was dead when really they were searching for him.
The policeman shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” the gaunt officer said solemnly. “I’m afraid a body was found near the car. We believe it is your father, but we need someone to make a positive identification. I know this isn’t easy, but would you be willing to come to the morgue?”
“Yes, certainly,” she started to say, but then she heard the front door open and slam closed.
Geraint was home.
He came into the room, clearly expecting a fight, face still full of thunder from his confrontation with their father. The drive hadn’t cooled him down. “Whose car is that?” he demanded, then saw the two men sitting on the edge of the seats, leaning forward. “What’s happened?”
The police repeated their expression of sorrow and sympathy, but as she listened to it a second time it sounded hollow. They were just words the officers had learned to say. They didn’t mean anything. Maybe they’d had some sort of training course where they were given scripts to learn like telemarketers....
“Can we go together?” she asked. Geraint was as shocked as she was. She could see the pleading in his eyes. She didn’t want to go with two strangers to the morgue to stare at the lifeless body of a man she idolized, but she could see Geraint was struggling. She didn’t need to be able to read his mind to know he was regretting their fight. She could never make that right for him. His last words with his father would always be filled with hate. He’d have to live with that, but she could be there for him, with him. She could hold his hand and face death with him.
He nodded.
“I just need to freshen up,” she lied, and left them long enough to change her shoes and more importantly to make sure that the book was safely stowed in the fireproof safe. She included a stack of notebooks she pulled hastily from the shelves, before hanging the portrait of Bran back on the wall to hide the safe.
She hated thinking poorly of her brother, but she knew him better than he knew himself. He’d come back into this room before dawn, would see the books on the shelves and think of the life
lived and the life lost, and was angry enough with their father to do something stupid. After all, for him, destroying those books promised an opening to get rid of the past, to draw a line beneath everything that had gone before. All it would take was one match.
Chapter 25
They hid his body from her beneath a green sheet.
She waited for the mortuary assistant to draw back the sheet to reveal her father’s face.
It was harder than she’d ever imagined it would be.
She reached out to take Geraint’s hand.
“Is this your father?” the policewoman asked.
She placed a reassuring hand on Awena’s shoulder, but all Awena wanted to do was shrug it off. She didn’t need this stranger’s platitudes and false sympathy. It didn’t matter to her. None of it did. The woman was only doing her job. She was supposed to be sorry. There was no connection between them. They weren’t sisters.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s him. What happened?”
“All indications are that he was driving too fast in treacherous conditions and went off the side of the mountain road.”
“Did he suffer?”
The woman didn’t look like she wanted to answer, but she did. “He managed to get himself out of the car, but died of his injuries before the ambulance reached him.”
“So he suffered. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
The policewoman didn’t answer her this time. Instead, she said, “The car was badly damaged, but we’ve got our mechanics taking a look to see if there was any mechanical failure.”
“Not that it helps,” Geraint said. “He’s still dead whether it was his fault or the car’s.”
But it did help, Awena thought. It helped if it was the car that failed him. It meant it wasn’t his fault. But she knew his state of mind when he’d left the house. She should have tried to stop him. He was dead because she had let him go instead of making him see sense.