by D C Macey
Helen looked away, thinking about the others who had died just because they knew, even when they didn’t know they knew. Could she live with herself if she knowingly triggered DCI Wallace’s death too?
‘So, we need to protect ourselves. But how?’ said Helen, she couldn’t see a way forward.
Xavier had slumped a little. Suddenly drained, his age showing, it seemed to be something of an effort for him even to raise his arm. He managed. He pointed a single finger up. ‘One,’ he said. ‘I have friends who could help but they are far away. For now, we must see to ourselves.’ A second finger pointed skywards. ‘Two, they don’t yet have all the daggers, so they are still in the dark.’ A third finger went up. ‘Three, I think the daggers they have already seized were just good fortune, thrown up by chance and Sam’s unrelated efforts. They took them because they could.’ Xavier paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts or his breath, or both.
Another finger popped up. ‘Four. There must be a way to find the other daggers, to call them back together. Perhaps, that might be the purpose of John’s dagger, Helen’s dagger now, as it sits here at the heart, I don’t know. But there must be a way, a device, something, and it must be here.’
His thumb rose joining the fingers to make an open palm. ‘Five. The killers are here only because they knew a dagger, the key dagger, was here in Scotland. The one from which all the other daggers travelled away so long ago. Only those who were originally entrusted to protect the daggers, the sections of the message, whatever it is, could possibly know of the message’s existence and the place from which they all originated. Only one of those could know there was a message to find. So the killer must be a task holder, must have their own dagger,’ Xavier stopped talking and let his hand drop. Those around him stirred and shifted, shocked by Xavier’s deduction.
‘Wow, that is crazy,’ said Helen. Though, like the others, she was struck by the simple logic. ‘It’s sick. I thought you guys, us guys… We are meant to be the good ones. This lunatic is one of you, one of us, I guess. And he was after John all the time. Now he’s coming after me? For what? My ring? A dagger or some other device that I don’t have, that nobody has ever seen? Unbelievable. Mad. God help us all!’ She threw her hands up in despair.
Xavier briefly raised his own hands, mirroring Helen in sympathetic agreement. ‘Yes, it is mad, but logical. Each of the daggers is engraved, but not with words; just a series of interwoven lines that will somehow combine. A code, I don’t know how, that is the essence of it; none of the task bearers could ever read or know the message they guarded. On their own, each of the daggers is useless. To track down and get all the other daggers they would need the one from here, St Bernard’s. The one John had and hid. Your dagger. You are at the centre Helen, your blade is what they want, that’s why they’re here. Oh, they will want mine too, but yours is special. Also, I think if it’s not your blade, then in your church’s possession is hidden something that will say where the other daggers were sent. There must be a way to gather them all back together again; a way to reassemble the parts of the message when the old Templars needed it again.’
Elaine, who had been sitting quietly throughout the meeting, finally broke her silence. ‘What I don’t understand, Xavier, is if none of those guarding the daggers knew where the others were, how come you and John Dearly were friends? It doesn’t make sense to me.’ She was not accusing Xavier of anything underhand, but it was an anomaly that did not fit with the old priest’s story. Everybody bristled cautiously as soon as the question was asked. Angelo sensed the change in mood at once and tensed. Xavier waved him to ease.
‘It’s a good question, my old friend,’ Xavier smiled at Elaine and spoke with careful measured words, ‘and the answer is also built on friendship. Not mine and John’s, no. A friendship much older. When Henri de Bello sent out his knights from this place, they went with their tasks, probably knowing they would never return or see their friends and comrades again; knowing that the return of the daggers might take more than their own lifetimes. Like the others, my predecessor, who was sent to Sardinia so long ago, was probably resigned to never seeing or hearing from those old comrades and friends again. Each had set out from Scotland to their own secret destination, carrying away their tasks, scattering across the known world.
‘Supported by a little group that had travelled with him, my predecessor quietly set up a small holy community and chapel. Doing good, helping, serving, becoming accepted, growing into and becoming part of the community and always waiting, always ready for the call were it to come. It never did.
‘But one day, many years later, ships from Scotland did come, though not with a message for our hidden knight. Driven wildly off course by a fierce storm, they were pausing, recovering before continuing on their journey that would take them to Avignon, in the south of France. They had messages for the Pope, seeking forgiveness for King Robert’s crime of murdering a man at the church altar - to have Scotland readmitted to the Christian world, to see the excommunication lifted. On board the Scottish ships was one particular man, once a Templar Knight too, but now a highly respected Edinburgh priest. He travelled at the request of the Scots king, to provide spiritual support to the travellers, and to support the petition to the Pope.
‘By chance, that priest was from here; Archie’s, John’s… Helen’s predecessor. The forced stop in Sardinia and the Edinburgh priest’s chance visit to a local chapel brought two old friends and comrades back together. Reuniting two men whose bond of trust had been forged in battles in Europe and Palestine, who had served in peace together, had fled King Philip of France together and had finally been separated to serve alone, in secret; surrendering old friendships to protect the Templars’ wealth and power.
‘Once reunited it was a bond that remained unbroken. A friendship and a shared secret burden that passed quietly and unremarked down the years until here we are today. Though I should tell you I know of no others anywhere.’ Xavier ended with an emphatic shrug.
‘But this is still only part history, part hand-me-down story. There are no facts to build a plan on,’ Helen looked round the group for inspiration.
‘It may be story, but there is stuff to go on,’ replied Francis. ‘Two daggers have been stolen, people killed to get them. So somebody puts a serious value on these artefacts and this story. You and Xavier share a common strand of the story, with identical signet rings. In the absence of a better explanation, I fear we must accept the story. We know the threat is real, know the danger exists, and we must challenge it somehow. In the meantime and in the absence of anything else, I for one am happy to accept Xavier’s account.’
‘If we could find the other daggers before them, perhaps we could finish this somehow,’ said Sam. ‘They thrive on secrecy. If we could get the whole story together and somehow make it public, then we would cut the ground from under their feet. There’s no point in killing to keep a secret everyone already knows.’
Sam’s suggestion was sketchy, but it was an idea. Nodding heads marked the progress of excited agreement as it rippled round the room. A chink of light? A way out? A straw to clutch at, certainly.
Helen looked at Francis and Sam. ‘Yes, but we can’t do anything if we don’t know where the other daggers are. Nothing will work if we don’t have this key dagger, the parish dagger, which might point us to the others. So we need to find it first.’ She turned to Elaine. ‘Have you any idea at all where it might be? Any clue, any secret place that John might have used?’
All eyes turned to Elaine as she shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. I knew about the ring, obviously. I knew that our parish had a different selection process for its ministers and that John held something in trust that was for the minister only and secrecy was paramount. I knew we had a long history and he had a trust fund for public good; but I’ve never heard anything about a dagger and never seen one either. Though, if it were a special secret known only to the minister, I would never have known, would I? It’ll be hard to find. Let
’s face it, John and all those before him have had a long time to find a hiding place.’ Faces dropped around the room at this cold shower.
Helen looked at her. ‘You’re right, but have you ever looked for it, I mean actually gone hunting for it?’
Elaine shook her head again. ‘No, of course not, never, but then none of us knew there was a dagger to find, did we?’
The meeting was interrupted by Helen’s mobile phone ringing. She looked to see who was calling, excused herself and answered the call. After listening briefly, she spoke into the handset. ‘That’s fine. I’ll be along as soon as I can. Just give me a few minutes.’ She hung up the call and looked round. ‘The police have finished; they didn’t find anything of interest. I’ll need to go over to the church and lock up.’
A round of nods acknowledged she needed to go and she decided it was time to set some plans in motion. ‘Right, this is what I propose. We need to move fast before anyone else gets hurt, and let’s not forget that soon enough the police are going to start asking Sam and I difficult questions. You’ve all warned me there are no suspects and when that happens the media will simply find someone for a story. I don’t fancy being locked up while the police try to solve the apparently insoluble. If we can track down the guilty, we can somehow deflect the police onto them and minimise risks to innocent lives: ours, the police or the public. From what I’m hearing here, we have a better chance than anyone else.
‘Sure, they have a start on us, snatched our two daggers, but doing nothing is not an option. Our first step must be to get up, get out and find this parish’s dagger. Let’s find what we can and see where that takes us, let’s get ourselves some advantage. We’ve been taking a mauling. Now let’s turn it around, right?’
A cautious nodding of heads told her that the others were with her and she pushed on. ‘Let’s search the church, check it over, every floorboard, every stone, the works. Find the dagger. I know the police have just searched the church. But as we’ve already heard from Elaine, if you don’t know it’s there, you don’t know to look for it. Right now, we have an edge. Let’s use it, let’s get ahead of whoever’s coming at us.’
CHAPTER 23 - TUESDAY 18th JUNE - EVENING
Sitting comfortably in the swivel chair at his desk, Cassiter gazed out of the office window, observing the first signs of rush hour as the early birds tried to steal a march on the homeward journey. Having reviewed progress and planned his next steps, he was feeling reasonably contented with the world. This job for Parsol was now moving steadily towards completion. He did not really like working on his home patch, but if his people could function successfully pretty well anywhere in the world, they could do it here too, as they had been demonstrating so admirably. True, one or two overzealous moments had caused Parsol some passing concern, but by and large, things were proceeding as they should be.
There was just one dagger left to find in the city and he knew where to look. He also knew who to ask; that old church elder McPhee would be helping him with his enquires soon enough. Cassiter smiled to himself in anticipation and spun his chair away from the window. He pulled a memory stick from his jacket pocket and inserted it into a port in the desktop computer. Navigating his way to the location, he saw the two expected folders, each one containing the downloaded contents of a mobile phone.
He opened the first folder and reviewed its contents. Davy’s pictures of the dagger were there. He looked at them closely, admired the boy’s camera work and then continued scrolling through the pictures. He lingered for a moment, admiring some revealing pictures of a pretty girl that she really ought not to have let the boy take. Cassiter decided to keep those pictures too. He liked the look of this girl, and anyway, you just never know when material like that might prove useful. It was certainly not the sort of thing she would ever want leaking into the public domain. He searched on and finally decided there was nothing else of interest and closed the folder.
The boy had had a lucky escape in Oban and would need to be removed as he just might be able to identify Barnett, but it could be left in abeyance for now. There were more pressing issues to address. He would have a nasty accident when Cassiter was ready.
Cassiter turned his attention to the other folder. The contents of Suzie’s phone were quite uninspiring. Pictures of friends and babies. Benign, much as the girl herself had proven to be. She’d been no threat beyond her immediate engagement with the issue, but that had been enough. A remarkably radiant character inside, but such a plain exterior, and for one moment her naive sincerity had almost been disarming. Even when frightened for her life, she had still seemed to care so much for her family. Worried about their welfare ahead of her own. He did not put any store in family loyalty himself, but it had offered him such a wonderful lever to work with, to ensure her compliance. It had been quite touching to see how she obeyed his every instruction, believing he would keep his word, faithful to her loved ones right to the very end. Stupid girl.
Of course, he’d lied; her family had never been taken. As soon as she had gone to work on the Thursday morning, his man had done an emergency gas safety call to her home, and in the process stolen her sister’s mobile phone and clipped the house’s phone cable: simple but effective. The young mother had sat at home, incommunicado, innocently nursing her baby, completely oblivious to her sister’s pointless sacrifice.
Cassiter didn’t bother looking at any more of the domestic messagery from her life. The girl had presented no risk. He closed her folder and dragged it to the waste paper basket. He turned his thoughts to Elaine McPhee.
• • •
A fruitless afternoon spent searching in the church had left Helen drained. She had wondered what they would find that the police had missed, but they had to start somewhere. Eventually, she left the others in the church and returned home to link up with Sam who had been asked to pop back to campus. Since MacPherson’s death, additional work had started to filter down the management pyramid on to his desk.
Helen leapt up as the security entry phone buzzed; she went to the front door and answered. Sam’s voice announced his presence at the street below and she pressed the entry-phone button to release the street-level door. She opened the flat door for him and headed off to put on the kettle, stopped and altered course for the fridge. He would probably prefer a beer.
Sam didn’t get a chance to speak as Helen shoved the beer into his hand, pulled him onto the sofa and bemoaned their fruitless afternoon’s search. She threw out questions on Xavier’s story, the threat they faced and their decision to fight back. He listened quietly as Helen’s words and rhetorical questions fired off like a stream of machine gun bullets. Finally she stopped. ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked.
As Sam weighed up his answer, she jumped up, took his now empty beer bottle and headed for the kitchen. ‘You’ll want another one of these, and you know what? I need some wine,’ she raised her voice a little so it carried from the kitchen and the tone was laden with indignation. ‘Whoever these bad guys are, they’ve got the daggers. We lost out on them before we even knew there was a race on. It’s sickening, you know, we had both of them within our grasp and now they’re just gone.’
She returned from the kitchen with the drinks. ‘It makes me so frustrated that these evil…’ she paused and struggled for a word from her regular vocabulary to describe them and then gave up. ‘These evil Bs have bullied, spied, tortured, robbed, killed, and now they’re walking away with whatever it is they wanted, Scot-free. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.’
Reaching the sofa, she thrust the fresh bottle of beer into Sam’s outstretched hand and sat back down beside him. She paused just long enough to take a big mouthful of wine and savour the slight burn and kick it gave as it ran down her throat. ‘It’s just so frustrating.’ She drained the wine glass and refilled it from the bottle that had accompanied her from the kitchen.
Sam squeezed her knee and let his hand slide lightly up to the soft of her thigh and squeezed again, ru
bbing gently. ‘We’ll get through this. But we need a plan and we need to stay strong too,’ he said.
Helen put the bottle down and took a drink from the refilled glass; she savoured the taste and swallowed, then took a second mouthful. ‘I can stay strong. Don’t worry about that, but a plan? Plan for what? The problem is we don’t know who we’re dealing with or what we’re up against.’
Sam nodded understanding, his hand still gently rubbing her thigh trying to give a little comfort. ‘Well, let’s top that glass up first, I’ve got things to tell you too and a drop more wine won’t go amiss; in fact you might just need it.’
Helen turned her head towards him with a slightly puzzled look. ‘Why? What do you mean?’
‘When I left you this morning, I took flowers across to the museum as a mark of respect for Suzie.’
‘I know. So what’s new?’
‘Well, where to start? Let’s say it ties in with your latest information pretty closely.’ The contents of Suzie’s envelope had been surprising but he had not mentioned it at their earlier meeting, allowing Xavier space to tell his story. It was starting to heat up now he had taken the time to think it all through. Inside the envelope he had found a copy of the museum’s own record of what they knew about the artefact’s story. Suzie had also tracked through the photographic archive to find good quality images of the dagger, ring and chain.
Sam explained how the museum dagger had a long history, a clear provenance; the old widow who had donated the artefacts had included her family’s history and records as part of the gift, and Suzie had managed to dig them out of the archives. The family record traced all the way back to the beginning of the fourteenth century and a knight, Bernard de Bras, who Robert the Bruce had made a lord for his part in the wars against England. Whoever this knight was, there had been no record of him or his family in Scotland and then suddenly there he was leading a small group of fighting men in support of Bruce.