by James Becker
“Not necessarily. Churches, like every other kind of structure, occasionally need repair or renovation, even though the fabric of the building will usually remain the same, and I’m sure the Templars would have known that. But graves are only very rarely touched, because they are the last resting places of friends and family members. So I hope we’re more likely to find what we want out here, rather than inside the church.”
At some time in the past the area in front of the tower had obviously been used as a graveyard, as was confirmed by a number of ancient upright gravestones and what looked like the tops of some underground crypts that projected above the grass.
Mallory gestured at the nearest of the old stones.
“Let’s make a start here,” he said.
His prediction was right: there were a lot of gravestones that included the shape of a skull, often with crossed leg bones as well in a kind of pale imitation of the classic pirate flag. Each time they saw anything like that, they stopped and examined both the front and back of the gravestone carefully, but saw nothing that seemed in any way helpful to their quest.
“Let’s have a look at the crypts, or whatever these stone structures are,” Mallory suggested, sounding both hot and frustrated. “They might be a more likely location anyway, because they’re obviously a lot bigger than a standing tombstone. There’s more space on them to hide a clue.”
They walked over to one of the biggest, half-buried in the grass of the churchyard and lying in front of the gray stone tower. That yielded nothing that looked even slightly like the shape of a skull, nor did the raised burial chamber that lay even closer to the church and to the right of the tower itself.
“There are a few more over on the far side of the church,” Robin said, “though this is beginning to look like a bit of a wild-goose chase to me.”
They walked over toward the other small crypts she’d indicated, and began to examine each of them just as carefully as they’d inspected the standing tombstones. But, again, although several of them bore weathered carvings that resembled skulls, and in a couple of cases complete skeletons, none of the crypts yielded anything else. They found no anomalous markings that could have been construed as a piece of text or anything else even slightly helpful to their quest.
And then Robin spotted something that looked slightly out of place, or at least unusual. At one end of a half-buried crypt she noticed a carving. In fact, really just the outline of a carving, because the stone was badly weathered.
“Does that shape look even faintly familiar to you?” she asked. “There, on the end of that crypt.”
Mallory looked where she was pointing, and shook his head.
“Not really, no. It’s certainly not a skull.”
“I know that,” Robin replied, somewhat testily. “But we are looking for a Templar tomb, or at least a tomb that dates from the time when the Templars owned this area, aren’t we?”
“Yes, obviously.”
“Well,” she said, pointing at the shape she’d seen, “I know that’s not a skull, but it does look to me like a carving of a horse, and there are definitely two people riding on it. And that is one of the classic Templar motifs. So at least we know this stone is the right kind of age.”
“True enough.”
They walked over to the stone crypt and knelt down to examine it more closely.
The carved shape was more or less in the center of the end panel of the tomb, and appeared almost to be framed by two carved diagonal shapes that ran from the upper corners of the stone down toward the ground, almost like an uncompleted letter V. Where they reached ground level they terminated in the top of a curved object that looked immediately familiar to both of them. And the lumpy but rounded upper ends of the diagonal shapes more or less confirmed it.
“I know what this looks like,” Mallory said, his voice tinged with excitement.
“So do I,” Robin agreed. “We’re looking at the top half of a carving of two crossed thigh bones, and my guess is that the curved shape that’s almost buried in the ground is the upper part of a skull. It’s a skull and crossbones, in fact.”
“That pretty much confirms the link with the Templars.”
“It does? How?” Robin sounded surprised.
“It goes back to Jacques de Molay. There’s a story that when he was burned alive in Paris as a relapsed heretic—meaning somebody who’d confessed under torture to whatever his interrogators wanted, but then recanted his confession once the torture stopped—his thigh bones and skull were pulled out of the ashes of the pyre by three Knights Templar, and then became something of a symbol of the order, usually surmounted by a skull. As we know, the skull and crossbones later came to be used by pirates on their flag, the Jolly Roger, but the origins of it do seem to date back to the early part of the fourteenth century. In fact, almost every pirate had his own version of the flag, but the skull-and-bones symbol was a part of virtually every one. Mind you, there’s another story, that the bones of de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, who was executed alongside the Grand Master, were collected by King Philip’s men after the execution, ground up, and then tossed into the river Seine. In reality, nobody knows what happened.”
“Didn’t Jacques de Molay curse the pope and the French king when he was executed, and they both died within the year?”
Mallory shook his head.
“That’s a myth. It’s true that both of the men who were responsible for the ending of the Templar order did die within a year, but that specific story of the curse wasn’t recorded anywhere until something like two or three hundred years later—I can’t remember exactly when—which almost certainly means it was made up to fit the facts. According to an eyewitness to the execution, Jacques de Molay did claim that God would avenge their deaths, but that was all.”
Mallory stood up straight, glanced around, but saw nobody anywhere near the churchyard. He slipped the rucksack off his shoulder, opened it, and took out the collapsible shovel. He snapped the handle into place and again checked that they were unobserved. The solid bulk of the church meant that there were only a couple of places where a passerby could see them at all.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said. “I’m going to do a bit of unauthorized gardening, so yell out if anyone starts taking an interest.”
He rammed the blade of the shovel into the grass a few inches clear of the rounded shape they could see and levered up the turf to expose the earth beneath it. Then he drove the blade down into the ground and started shifting the earth itself. The soil was hard packed, but largely free of stones, which would have made the task that much more difficult, and within a couple of minutes Mallory had cleared most of the earth from the carved shape, which they could now clearly see was a skull.
“There’s a brush in my bag,” he said. “Could you pass it to me, please?”
Robin rooted around and then handed Mallory a two-inch brush with stiff bristles.
Kneeling down beside the hole he’d made, he quickly used the brush to clear the last traces of the soil from the carved-stone skull. Then he bent even farther forward to examine it closely.
“Can you see anything?” Robin asked, peering over his shoulder.
“I’m not sure. The stone is very discolored from being covered with earth for so long.”
“Any writing or anything like that?”
“Not as far as I can tell, no. But there is— No, hang on a minute. That’s a bit odd.”
“What is?”
“It’s the skull. The shape of it, I mean.”
“You’re not making sense,” Robin said irritably. “Tell me what you mean.”
“The skull,” Mallory said again. “It’s kind of rounded. Most skulls are more elongated in shape.”
“So?” Robin asked, an even greater edge to her voice. “So what?”
“It looks like there’s a line around it. As if the skull h
ad been carved as a separate unit and then attached to the stone. But I don’t know why that would have been done. I would have expected the carving to be all one piece.”
“Is that all?”
Mallory sat back on his haunches and shook his head.
“I think it is. No text, no inscription. Nothing useful, as far as I can see. Maybe we’re in the wrong place, or in the right place looking at the wrong thing.”
“Or maybe you’re missing the obvious.”
“What?”
“There’s a very obvious reason why the shape of the skull would be circular rather than elongated. And why there might be a line around it.”
Mallory had no idea where she was going with that.
“What do you mean?”
“According to the text we’ve translated, the text that has brought us this far, somewhere here there’s supposed to be this license or permission or whatever it is. That’s not the kind of thing that could be carved into a piece of stone. Or at least I don’t think it is. I think we should be looking for a container of some sort. So do you think that the skull could be a lid or cover, something that you could just lever off? And that there could be a cavity behind it?”
Mallory leaned forward again and looked closely at the carving, and used the brush to clean it as much as he could.
“Maybe,” he said. “It is a distinct line, with no breaks that I can see. It’s definitely worth a try.”
He turned back to Robin, who had already anticipated what he would most probably need and was offering him the jimmy and the heavy screwdriver, holding one in each hand.
“Choose your weapon,” she said.
Mallory picked the jimmy, because its curved shape would allow him—he hoped—to insert the point of the tool behind the edge of the carved-stone skull and then use the curve as a lever against the edge of the crypt to shift the stone.
He slid the point in, rammed his closed fist against the other end of the tool a few times to try to seat it as firmly as he could, then applied pressure to attempt to lever out the carved stone. For a few seconds, nothing happened, and then there was a sharp crack and the jimmy slammed into the stone of the crypt.
“Is that it?” Robin asked eagerly, leaning forward to see what had happened.
Mallory looked down into the opening he had created and shook his head.
“No. All that’s happened is a sliver of stone from the carved skull has cracked off. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to shift this or not without a lot more digging. I really need to be able to apply pressure all round the skull, to ease it out slowly. The only good news is that you were right—the skull is definitely an insert, not an integral part of the crypt. Where that piece of stone cracked off I can see the join quite easily.”
He positioned the jimmy a few inches farther around the skull and prepared to apply pressure once more, but then Robin stopped him.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t think it pulls out,” she said, “or not like that, anyway.”
She pointed at the skull.
“See how deep the eye sockets are? The holes go inches down into the stone, and the skull is completely circular. I don’t think you lever the skull off to free it. I think you turn it, and probably when it was placed there originally the Templars or whoever stuck a piece of wood or something into each eye socket to give them something to grip hold of so they could turn it easily.”
Again, Mallory was grateful for Robin’s sharp eyes and almost instant grasp of a situation.
He hadn’t got any suitable lengths of wood—or any wood at all, in fact—but what he had got was a pair of heavy-duty pliers with rubber-covered handles. He took the tool out of his rucksack, opened the jaws wide, and then drove the handles as deep as he could into the stone eye sockets. Then he picked up the jimmy again, inserted the end of it between the handles of the pliers, and tried to turn the head using this makeshift combination.
It was awkward work, because he had to use one hand to keep the pliers firmly in place while turning the jimmy with his other hand. And, just as with his first effort at levering the stone skull out, nothing happened.
“Try going the other way,” Robin suggested. “Clockwise rather than anticlockwise. As soon as you see any movement, we’ll know which way you have to turn it.”
Mallory changed the position of the jimmy and again applied a turning force to the carved stone. And this time there was movement. Barely perceptible, and accompanied by the unmistakable sound of stone moving against stone, but movement nonetheless.
“That’s the right way,” Robin said, “but just be careful. You know how much the Templars—or at least the people who left this trail for us to follow—liked their booby traps. Don’t, for God’s sake, just sit there in front of it any longer.”
That was undeniably good advice. Every time Robin and Mallory had stumbled across one of the ancient Templar secrets, they had also had to contend with some kind of lethal defense mechanism. And they had no reason to suppose that this Templar relic would behave any differently.
Mallory stood up and changed position completely so that he was beside the end of the crypt and leaning down and over it to remove the carved stone. That made it even more difficult to hold the pliers in place while he used the jimmy, but slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the stone skull began to rotate.
When it had turned through about twenty degrees, it became noticeably easier to rotate, and Mallory removed the pliers and placed the jimmy to one side. He opened up his rucksack again, this time the side pocket, and pulled out the pair of heavy work gloves.
“They should provide some protection if the stone’s coated with poison or something like that.”
Robin looked doubtful.
“In our experience so far, the Templar booby traps have tended to be violent and mechanical,” she said. “I don’t think they believed in using anything quite as subtle as poison. So just be careful.”
“I will. And you keep well clear while I do this.”
Mallory shifted position so that he was almost lying on the top of the crypt, leaning down to shift the stone with his gloved hands at full stretch. Before he did anything else, he checked that Robin was still well out of danger, standing a few feet behind him and to one side of the ancient stone structure.
“Here goes,” he said.
He gripped the skull as firmly as he could with the gloves, and continued rotating it steadily in a clockwise direction.
It began moving even more easily, and then, quite suddenly, the stone was torn out of his hands by some unseen force, and the whole crypt vibrated as a hidden mechanism did its deadly work.
39
Somerset
Marco Toscanelli normally did precisely what Silvio Vitale told him to, working on the very sound basis that if he did so his life expectancy was likely to be significantly longer than if he disobeyed the man in charge of the organization.
But just occasionally he “interpreted” his orders in a way that allowed for a certain amount of flexibility. On that day, his particular concern was that Mallory and Jessop might return to Templecombe well before Vitale expected. In fact, they might even turn up there while the police were still investigating the crime scene. And if that happened, they might well discover whatever the real clue was in the village.
The experts in Rome had deduced that “behind the eyes” was most probably a reference to the reverse of the painted wooden panel known as the Templecombe Head, and they’d clearly been wrong about that. Mallory and Jessop—or certainly Mallory—had probably known that, because he or they were already inside the church, presumably talking to the vicar or whoever he was, the little man who’d tried to stop them from taking the relic and been shot for his pains, when Toscanelli’s men had appeared. And if they had known that the panel didn’t hold the answer, it was at least possible th
at they might work out where the answer actually was. If they did that, it would be a disaster and the Dominicans would once again be reduced to playing catch-up, following the English couple instead of leading the race.
So it was essential, in Toscanelli’s view, that he get some eyes on the ground in Templecombe sooner rather than later.
Vitale had specifically ordered him not to return to the village until the British police had left the area. That, Toscanelli knew, was intended as a blanket command meaning that all of the group should stay away, but he hadn’t specifically said that. So when he told three of the team to get in their car and drive back to Templecombe, he rationalized that he was bending the rules rather than actually breaking them.
The instructions he gave them were very specific.
“Lucca, you are to stay in the car at all times, just in case you need to get out of there in a hurry. You two, Mario and Michele, are to find yourselves vantage points in the village where you can watch out for Mallory and Jessop. If you see them, just watch them.”
“I thought Vitale had issued a kill order against them?”
“He had, but it’s been temporarily rescinded because the wooden panel didn’t contain the information our experts thought it would. So for now we just let them live in case they lead us to what we’re looking for. But if they do find it while you’re watching them, the moment you’re certain—and I do mean completely certain—that they have cracked it, all bets are off and you can take them out.
“But before you do that, you call me and tell me what you’ve seen.”
40
Templecombe, Somerset
Mallory rolled off the top of the crypt when the entire structure shuddered, throwing himself backward and—he hoped—out of danger.
“Are you okay?” Robin asked.