Written in the Blood

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

  ‘Lock the entrance!’ she shouted to Soraya. She gazed around the room for something to brace the door from which they’d emerged, which was when she saw the carnage.

  At the far end of the library, a table and three chairs had been overturned. On the floor nearby lay a man’s corpse. His throat had been cut. Chips of crushed ice were melting into the blood pooled around him. A few yards away, Catharina Maria-Magdalena Szöllösi lay on her back. Her eyes were open.

  In death, the woman wore an expression of savagery such that Leah had never seen. She was wreathed in blood, her body pierced and slashed. Another man lay dead beside her. Against the fireplace slumped one of her Belső Őr, his hands twitching as he tried to close the wounds puncturing his chest.

  Catharina’s adviser, Ányos Szilágyi, sat on the floor by the window, back resting against the drapes. His breath whistled in his mouth, around a déjnin blade buried up to its hilt.

  Leah felt her scalp shrinking. So much death. She turned to the children, hopeful they had not seen what waited for them, but they stood in a circle, mouths hanging open. ‘Eyes on the ceiling, all of you,’ she ordered. Then, when they didn’t respond, ‘Do as I say!’

  To her left stood a mahogany coffer covered with antique navigation instruments. Sweeping them to the floor, she dragged the chest across the locked servants’ entrance.

  Soraya lowered Elias to the floor. The woman rushed to the library’s main door, a thick slab of centuries-old hardwood, and twisted the key.

  At the room’s far end the two wounded men stared, and Leah saw, in their eyes, that they had been the cause, rather than the intended victims, of this slaughter.

  Soraya seemed to see it, too.

  ‘Don’t let the children watch,’ she said, bearing down on the Belső Őr guard by the fireplace. He kicked his legs, trying to worm away from her.

  ‘Everyone’s eyes back to the ceiling,’ Leah urged. ‘Now!’

  Soraya reached the man and knocked him onto his side. Teeth bared, she grabbed his head and wrenched it around, snapping his neck. Turning, she stalked towards Ányos Szilágyi. His eyes widened as she approached, reaching up blood-soaked hands to fend her off.

  Something slammed against the door to the servants’ passage, rattling it in its frame. Leah heard voices outside the main library entrance. Its handle jinked back and forth.

  By the curtains, Ányos Szilágyi crabbed backwards. Soraya planted a foot against his chest and pushed him onto his back. His head smacked down on the floorboards and he coughed, a dark mist of blood.

  Bending, Soraya gripped the handle of the déjnin knife protruding from his mouth. Leah turned away, but she heard the sound that followed, and nearly gagged.

  The library door shuddered as something heavy hit it from the other side. In the far wall, the door to the servants’ passage began to reverberate. The children backed into a tight group.

  Soraya wiped her forehead, leaving a streak of blood. Her eyes, when she found Leah’s, were flat. ‘We’re trapped,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

  CHAPTER 36

  Villa del Osservatore, Italy

  As his Range Rover accelerated up the hill towards Villa del Osservatore, Ivan Tóth drummed his fingers on the rear seat’s armrest. Beside him, Joó was shouting into his phone. Tóth could only hear one side of the conversation, but it didn’t sound good.

  Behind them a convoy of cars, containing the remaining five members of his tanács, followed them up the slope.

  ‘Is it secure?’ Joó snapped, fingers tight around his phone. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’ He paused. ‘Well, find them. Yes, we’re almost here. He’s beside me.’

  When Joó hung up, Tóth said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Catharina’s dead. Ányos, too.’

  ‘Ányos? How the hell—’

  ‘I don’t know! Something went wrong. I told you I should have been there.’

  ‘You had to stay away. Politically—’

  ‘Politically? How do you think this is going to play out, politically?’

  Tóth bit down on the retort he’d been about to deliver. Never before had Joó addressed him so abruptly. More disturbingly, he’d never seen his tanács colleague agitated like this.

  ‘It’s a disaster,’ Joó muttered. ‘That’s what it is.’

  The Range Rover pulled onto Villa del Osservatore’s private drive, swept through the gatehouse and past two Belső Őr. The guardsmen’s faces were grim, eyes dark. Even from inside the car’s muted cabin, Tóth could hear the villa’s watchtower bell pealing out its warning. ‘What else?’

  ‘Leah Wilde hasn’t been found. Nor the children.’

  ‘But they were there. They—’

  ‘I know! But with Ányos dead, there’s no one to lead.’

  Their car slid to a stop in a rain of gravel. Tóth recognised Victor Makovecz, one of Ányos’s lieutenants, waiting for them outside the villa.

  Throwing open his door, he jumped out. ‘I hear you lost them,’ he said, striding towards the entrance.

  Makovecz stiffened. ‘I’m not sure you should go in there while—’

  ‘You try and stop me,’ Tóth hissed.

  Inside the library, shocked by the two swift executions her friend had performed, Leah turned to Soraya and shook her head. ‘No, there’s a way. If we hurry.’ She strode across the room. ‘Children, I need you all to stand back.’

  As her charges retreated, Leah crouched down in front of the blood-sodden rug covering the floor. She began to roll it up, grimacing at the fluids that oozed from its fibres. Quickly, she revealed a trapdoor cut into the polished floorboards. A recessed iron ring lay at its centre.

  Catherina’s mother had shown Leah the hidden exit years earlier, during a tour of the grounds. ‘One of the benefits of inheriting a home from the papacy,’ the old Főnök had told her. ‘Historically, they’ve been quite adept at covering their backs.’

  Leah grabbed the iron ring, braced her feet and pulled. The trapdoor yielded unwillingly, dragging with it a frayed matt of cobwebs as it swung upwards. Beneath, a flight of steps descended into darkness. The air smelled damp. Cold.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ she told the children. ‘Hold hands and follow me. Mind your feet. It gets slippery.’ To Soraya, she added. ‘Pull it closed behind you. There’s a bolt on the underside.’

  It would, she thought, grant them perhaps a minute’s reprieve.

  Leah activated her phone’s tiny torch, took a breath and led them down the steps to the cave network beneath Villa del Osservatore.

  Behind her she heard the boom of the trapdoor falling back into place, and a rattle as Soraya shot the bolt home.

  From the other side, a crack like a pistol shot as the library door broke apart.

  Tóth strode through the library’s shattered entrance, and what he saw appalled him. The floor was a montage of bloody footprints. At its centre, an opening revealed a flight of steps descending into darkness. The splintered remains of a trapdoor lay to one side. Three Belső Őr stood beside it.

  Behind them lay the blood-slicked corpse of Catharina Maria-Magdalena Szöllösi. Completing the grisly tableau, four more bodies, including that of Ányos Szilágyi.

  Furious, Tóth marched up to the guards hovering beside the library’s secret exit. Pointing to Catharina’s corpse with one hand, he slapped the nearest man’s head with the other. ‘You’re going to leave her lying there like that? Your own Főnök? Get a blanket, wrap her up, and get her out of here. Now. And show her some respect while you’re doing it.’ To Makovecz, the senior Belső Őr he’d met outside, he said, ‘I’m putting you in charge. No one is to speak a word of this until I talk to them first.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do we have any more dead?’

  ‘Four who remained loyal to her. We had no choice. And you’d already sanctioned it.’

  ‘I didn’t sanction this mess,’ Tóth hissed. He took a breath, exhaled it explosively. ‘It’s not your fault. Get the rest of thes
e bodies out of here. All of them. And somebody stop that goddamned bell from ringing.’

  ‘I’ll see to it myself.’

  ‘Not you!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a bell! Delegate it!’ He took another breath, calmed himself. ‘The rest of the household: where are they?’

  ‘We’re holding them in another part of the building. Do you want to see them?’

  ‘Yes. But not yet. First let’s—’

  He broke off as he heard a commotion behind him, and saw the remaining five members of his tanács enter the room.

  They stopped dead as they took in the scene.

  ‘My God,’ one of them whispered. ‘What have we done?’

  Tóth was glad the man had said we. He wondered how much time he had left before they started saying you.

  In the darkness deep beneath Villa del Osservatore, Leah reached the bottom of the flight of steps. When she raised her phone, the bluish light of its torch beam revealed the entrance to a tunnel chiselled out of the surrounding rock. Its sides were lumpen and damp, the ceiling only a few inches above her head. Murmuring encouragement to the children behind her, Leah stepped into it. She glanced over her shoulder, counting the heads of those who followed. Dimly she saw Soraya’s silhouette, bringing up the rear.

  Ahead, the tunnel took an abrupt turn. They emerged into a natural cave. The walls opened out and a draught brushed her cheek. The rock ceiling dripped with moisture. Another few yards, and the torchlight reflected off water.

  Leah heard a fluttering around her. Smelled the ammonia stink of guano. Lifting the phone higher, she saw hundreds of tiny eyes.

  Bats.

  They clustered together on the roof of the cave, a rippling skin of black wings and furred bodies. Behind her, one of the children cried out.

  ‘It’s OK, they won’t harm you. You’re safe, I promise.’

  The torch picked out the dim grey shape of an open-topped boat bobbing on the water, moored by a single rope attached to a bolt in the cave wall.

  Leah pulled on the rope until the vessel nudged up against a rock jutting out into the water. ‘Quickly now,’ she whispered. ‘Into the boat, and watch your step.’ One by one, she helped the children aboard. The moment Soraya took her seat, Leah cast off the rope. She leaped into the stern, using her momentum to launch the boat forward.

  Wanting to avoid starting the engine until the last possible moment, she reached out and used the walls of the cave to manoeuvre the boat along its course. They eased around a shallow bend. Ahead, she saw a glow of reflected daylight illuminating the last turn before the cave’s mouth.

  Behind her she heard voices. The tramp of boots on the steps. Above, the bats chittered, restless.

  The boat bumped against the rock wall, and Leah shoved away from it, steering them around its curve. The cave mouth opened into daylight, and she narrowed her eyes against its brightness. Mist rolled and coiled on Lake Como’s surface, so thick that they might have been emerging into the twilight domain of Hades.

  A shout from behind. She glanced back, but the tunnel’s curve now hid them from the secret dock. Her pursuers wouldn’t be able to use their phones down here, wouldn’t be able to notify the Belső Őr guarding the villa’s main landing stage on the far side of the peninsula. Even so, she would have to be quick.

  Bracing her foot on the back of the boat, she grabbed the outboard motor’s ripcord and yanked as hard as she could. The engine fired into life on the first pull. Calling to the children to hold on, she dropped into her seat and twisted the throttle. The boat surged out of the cave and into the mist-wreathed waters of the lake.

  One hand still on the tiller, Leah dialled a number on her phone.

  Until now, her rush of adrenalin had caged her fear. But as the boat thumped along beneath her, as she saw the frightened faces of the children in front, as she considered what might be happening in Calw, in Lake Maggiore and elsewhere, it broke free to assault her, and she gritted her teeth against its power.

  Please, she thought. Please answer.

  And then she heard Hannah’s voice.

  For a moment her relief was so intense she nearly lost her grip on the throttle. ‘Listen carefully,’ she shouted. ‘You don’t have much time.’

  CHAPTER 37

  Calw, Germany

  By the time Hannah Wilde let herself out of the complex and crossed the courtyard to the chalet she shared with Gabriel, the day was drawing to a close. She could feel the weak rays of the sun, low in the sky, as they struggled to warm her face. The last begonias wilting in the chalet’s hanging baskets laced the air with a lemon and cinnamon fragrance.

  Hannah opened the front door and went inside, and as it closed behind her she straightened, surprised that Ibsen hadn’t padded into the hall to nose her hand in his traditional greeting. From the kitchenette she had expected the clatter of saucepans and the steamy aroma of cooking as Gabriel prepared dinner. But the chalet was silent, and all Hannah could smell, coiling towards her, was the hard odour of blood – so out of place in this gentle haven of theirs that it tossed her insides into free fall.

  ‘Gabe?’

  As soon as she called his name she regretted it. But the sound of the front door opening would have alerted any intruder to her presence. A multitude of dark scenarios flashed through her head. Despite them Hannah remained still, head cocked and mouth tightly closed, straining to detect anything other than her own accelerating heartbeat.

  There.

  Faint, oh-so-faint, from somewhere deeper inside the chalet; a scratching, like the surreptitious investigations of mice inside the walls. Except that never in their time here had they suffered the incursions of rodents.

  Gabriel had left her only ten minutes earlier. She’d stayed back at the complex, wanting to catch up with some of its volunteers. What had happened since? How much could her life have changed in that short interval?

  Hannah reached out until her fingers touched the wall. Maintaining a light contact, even though she knew the layout of these rooms as well as the inside of her head, she moved along the hall towards the kitchenette at the chalet’s rear.

  The tang of blood grew richer.

  Locked inside her sightless world, expecting at any moment to feel the touch of an assailant’s hand or the prick of a blade, Hannah’s fingers found the kitchenette’s painted wooden doorway. Her feet moved from soft carpet to hard linoleum.

  She could hear the rush of her breathing, the pulsing of her heart. From the living room behind her, the tick of a cheap plastic wall clock. And from somewhere else, perhaps from one of the two ground-floor bedrooms, that scratching sound.

  She fought the urge to turn and run, to lunge back to the front door and slam through it, seeking help. Whatever had happened here – and something had happened while she’d been catching up with her friends – had happened because of her. If an intruder lurked inside the chalet, it was Hannah he sought. And if Gabriel were held captive somewhere in these rooms, she would not desert him. Even if she did attempt to flee, her chances of escaping from anyone who chose to pursue her were almost nil. Few of her potential aggressors would have any difficulty overpowering her. Not these days. Not now.

  Considering anew what might have happened to Gabriel, Hannah began to shiver. Gabriel: endlessly patient and nurturing. Her friend of sixteen years; her laughter therapist; her cheerleader. With him she had found a different kind of love to that she’d experienced with her late husband Nate, but it was no less powerful. If Gabriel, too, had lost his life because of her—

  Don’t. Don’t think about it.

  It was the only defence she could muster. Laughable, really. Knowing that she made herself an easy target, doing it anyway, Hannah straightened her back and raised her head. She tried, and failed, to stop herself from shaking.

  Another step further across the kitchenette floor and this time, when she lifted her left boot, the lino seemed unwilling to release it, parting with a sound like the smack of chewing gum. Her right boot landed in a p
ool of what could only be blood, and with her next step she nudged up against something large and soft.

  Hannah closed her eyes in denial of what she felt just then. She crouched, reaching out her fingers, needing to know but desperate to delay the moment as long as she could.

  Finally her hand touched smooth short hair. A curve of firm flank.

  Ibsen.

  She spread her fingers wide, feeling the warmth of him, waiting for what seemed like the passing of a season for the chest of her old companion to rise. But it remained still.

  Hannah stroked him, moving her hand up towards his head. When she felt the wet tack of blood around his throat and a ragged, fur-clogged wound, she sobbed, choked.

  Gone, just like that. A decade-long partnership of love and trust, torn from her in a instant.

  She whispered a quick prayer for him, and even though she felt an aching guilt at her betrayal, her thoughts marched in front of her.

  Ibsen was dead. Gabriel might still be alive.

  Don’t think. Act.

  Her old adage. It had served tolerably in years past. Perhaps not so tolerably now, tethered in this prison of darkness.

  Hannah rose to her feet. With slow, deliberate movements, hands outstretched, she stepped over the lifeless body of her dog and crossed the kitchenette to the countertop.

  The drawer beneath the sink contained knives. She paused in front of it as a thought struck her, so obvious that only her seesawing emotions could have concealed it until now. Sliding her hand into the back pocket of her jeans, she withdrew her phone.

  From the far side of the breakfast bar, a voice said, ‘I’d been looking for that.’

  Hannah’s heart almost seized, and then it began to gallop. She flinched away.

  It was a man’s voice, but its timbre was high-pitched, the tone mocking and effeminate.

  ‘Where is he?’

  He laughed. ‘You obviously haven’t read the script, Hannah. That’s not what you’re meant to say at all. You’re meant to say, Please don’t kill me. Or, What do you want?’