Jack Pendragon - 02 - Borgia Ring

by Michael White

  He led us out of the room and down a narrow corridor with closed doors to left and right. Striding ahead, he held up a torch to light the way. Reaching the end of the corridor, we descended a narrow spiral stairwell. Shadows flickered against the walls, human outlines exaggerated by the torch’s dancing flame. Our footfalls echoed on the stone stairs. We must have taken a dozen turns down them before Agrippa drew to a halt before a heavy wooden door. ‘Do not be afraid of what you see behind this,’ he said, his face illuminated by shifting patterns of light. ‘For I am master here.’

  The room stank – a horrid animal stench. I could not at first understand where the smell was coming from, and Sebastian looked equally bemused. But then, gradually, our eyes grew accustomed to the dim light and, at the same moment, I heard a low rumbling sound and the scrabbling of claws on stone. A bear, at least seven feet tall, clambered to its feet, flattening a pile of turds. It was shackled by chains at each ankle and had a thick steel collar about its neck joined to a sturdy chain that ran to a bracket on the wall. Shocked, Sebastian and I both jumped back. The bear was dark brown, with a strip of lighter fur running the length of its torso. Its eyes were darker than the fur, watery and pained. The beast was muzzled, but I could just see a red tongue lolling between broken teeth. It was a dreadful sight, and I was filled with a confusion of emotions. Fear lay uppermost, but pity and puzzlement were there also.

  Agrippa stood perfectly still, torch held at head height, silently contemplating the pitiable animal.

  ‘Fear not,’ the alchemist said. ‘The beast is terrified of fire, and he knows I can wound him mortally before he could possibly harm us.’

  ‘What is this all about?’ I exclaimed, eyeing the bear warily. ‘Why is this noble creature kept here in the dark, festering in its own filth?’

  ‘You will soon understand,’ Agrippa said. Before I could tell what he was doing, he’d stepped forward, lifting with his free hand a slender wooden pipe and blowing hard down it. Something flew from the end, catching the light from the torch as it sailed through the air. Then the bear growled. Some sort of dart, akin to the ones I used at play in my youth, was protruding from the beast’s hairy belly. It looked down at it, puzzled. Slowly, the poor creature rocked to and fro before stumbling forward. It snarled and swung one huge paw directly towards me. I fell back just in time, the massive paw slicing the air an inch from my face. The chains binding the creature took the strain and he was yanked back, crashing against the wall, his eyes ablaze. It was then that the animal let out a horrible, agonised wail, a sound of fury and defeat. It shuddered and slid down the wall, legs splayed, eyes vacant.

  I stood paralysed, simply staring at the poor beast as Agrippa stepped towards it. From under his cloak he produced a small glass vial.

  The creature was shaking uncontrollably. Its eyes were rolling, the whites almost iridescent in the flickering torch flame. Agrippa showed no fear. He grabbed the bear’s head by the fur and yanked it back. The poor thing’s unfocused eyes rolled around in their sockets. The magus ran the vial across the dribbling lips of the beast, catching foam and saliva in the glass receptacle which he stoppered and returned to its place under his cloak.

  ‘We are done,’ he said, without the slightest visible sign of emotion, and made for the door. Terrified we might be locked in, Sebastian and I swiftly followed him out and watched as he slammed shut the door. Then, barely able to order our racing thoughts, we followed him up the stairs and back to the laboratory.

  ‘What in the name of the Father did you do down there?’ Sebastian exclaimed. His face was wet from his exertions and he was shaking.

  ‘I have set you on your way, young man. That is what I have done.’

  Sebastian stared at the alchemist, lost for words.

  Agrippa leaned forward to stoke the fire. ‘I am an alchemist, Father Mountjoy. I deal in strange substances and strange forces, just as you deal in prayers and biblical texts. Roberto Bellarmino has given you the vehicle for your task, I am to provide the substance to make it work.’

  We stared at the alchemist in silence. He held the vial in some sort of metal arm and placed it into the heart of the fire. ‘During my long years on this earth I have learned much,’ he said. ‘I have met many illustrious men and women. I have been taught well. It was the great Leonardo da Vinci himself who first discovered the power of Cantarella.’

  ‘Cantarella?’ I said. ‘I know that name.’

  ‘You do?’ Agrippa replied, turning to study my face. ‘Very few others have heard of it, young man. It has been kept a closely guarded secret. But perhaps shadows of the past remain to haunt certain places in Rome. Who is to say?

  ‘Cantarella is a poison, the most deadly ever known. You need not know its constituents, and I would certainly not reveal the formula. Suffice it to say that Leonardo, and later My Lady Lucrezia Borgia, knew many merchants, many travellers, who had visited exotic parts of the world and returned to Italy with strange substances. Among other things they brought back resins from lands said to be filled with dense, lush swathes of vegetation, enormous snakes, and people with skin the colour of pitch.

  ‘Leonardo, the consummate experimenter, discovered the formula for Cantarella when I was a child. He had no intention of producing a poison. It was a by-product of his investigations. He had been searching for a preservative for flesh, something to help him with his anatomical experiments. Later, when he worked for the Borgia family in the year 1499, he was seduced into revealing the secret to Lucrezia, then a nineteen-year-old acolyte of the Dark Arts. She realised the potential of the substance at once and was even more delighted when Leonardo let slip his theory that the potency of the poison could be increased a thousandfold if it was passed through the body of an animal and refined by the natural humours in that body.’

  Agrippa paused for a moment, withdrew the vial from the flames and peered at it in the light from the fire. He seemed satisfied and laid the glass vial in a cradle placed on top of a table.

  ‘Leonardo utterly refused to test his theory and abandoned the service of the Borgia family – an act of bravery that a lesser man would never have dared to contemplate. It mattered little, though. By then Lucrezia had learned all she needed. I was a mere boy but was drawn into her circle because I had a gift for Natural Philosophy. I like to believe I offered much to Lucrezia Borgia. I was her amanuensis, assisting in her earliest experiments to refine Cantarella. I gave her the philosophical rigour she lacked. We used cats, dogs and, on two occasions, bears, until we had perfected the technique. This,’ he concluded, lifting the vial from the cradle, ‘is refined Cantarella. One drop kills instantly.’

  ‘And the ring?’ I asked.

  ‘As I said, it is the vehicle. This …’ he eyed the liquid in the vial ‘… is the substance. It is my offering, my contribution to your mission. You are to use the ring and the poison to kill the English whore, Elizabeth Tudor.’

  ‘But why go to such elaborate lengths? What is wrong with a simple sword? The woman bleeds, like anyone.’

  ‘A sword is unreliable, young man. With a sword, you may injure but not kill. And believe me, Elizabeth has many enemies. Others before you have tried and failed using crude weapons. This ring and this poison are easy to conceal, and they are quite infallible. One scratch and the heretic Queen of England will be dead within seconds.’

  Stepney, Sunday 5 June, 2.45 p.m.

  Pendragon had only ever seen so much rain once before. He was nineteen then. It was the Long Vac. His parents had expected him to spend the holiday in their narrow terrace house just off Whitechapel Road, but he had just finished his first year at Oxford and gone straight to Paris with a group of friends. They had split up in the Bois de Boulogne, agreeing to meet up in Aix, with ten francs laid on who would get there first.

  After an hour spent sitting beside the road reading The Glass Bead Game, Pendragon was given a lift by a truck driver heading south. He hadn’t realised the driver was stopping at Lyon, and so was dumped on the e
dge of town at 3 a.m. He’d just started walking along the central reservation of the main road when the deluge started. Taking shelter under some trees, he watched as the storm approached across the river. Lightning like devils’ fingers stabbed the water and the bass vibration of thunder thumped him in the chest.

  Now Mile End Road, or what could be seen of it through the windscreen, looked like a narrow river that had burst its banks. Water lapped over the kerbs, making the road and the pavements one. Even with the wipers set to ‘high’, looking out through the windscreen created the illusion that they were sitting inside a waterfall.

  Turner’s phone beeped and he read a text from the station, passing on all the details they had. ‘Call came in at eleven minutes past two, guv. The owner, a …’ he looked closer at the screen ‘… Mr Conta … dino was there. Quite a few witnesses. Man collapsed at one of the tables.’

  ‘Why involve us?’

  Turner turned back to the screen as more information came in. ‘Definitely doesn’t sound like natural causes.’ And he paused for dramatic effect. ‘Might be glad they did call. The dead man is Tim Middleton.’

  There were two police cars and an ambulance outside the restaurant and the pavement had been cordoned off. Two officers were putting up tape. They were drenched through. Pendragon and Turner dashed from the car. By the time they had covered the ten metres to the restaurant, Pendragon’s grey suit was several shades darker and Turner’s expensive suede jacket was as matt as an old chamois leather.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ he exclaimed as he peeled it off, wishing he had left it in the car. Pendragon wiped his face and watched dispassionately as drips fell to the marble floor of the entrance hall. Two ambulancemen walked past and then dived into the torrent. They had been called out but could do nothing for the dead.

  Pendragon could see a dozen people in the restaurant. A woman was sobbing, the sound drowned out by the beating rain. He nudged Turner and strode past the reception desk and into the main dining-room. The dense black clouds outside cast a sombre light over the room.

  The scene had been left pretty much untouched. Tim Middleton lay on his back. Blood and vomit covered his face and the front of his shirt. There were lumps of partially digested garlic bread in his hair. Dr Jones had arrived only moments before and was making a preliminary examination of the corpse. A chalk outline had already been drawn around the deceased and a police officer was videoing the scene. Middleton’s colleagues and two or three other diners were standing in a group at the other side of the room. Inspector Grant and Sergeant Mackleby, who had reached the restaurant a few minutes earlier in another car, were talking to the restaurant owner and scribbling in their notebooks. Pendragon turned as a tall chunky man approached from the direction of the toilets.

  ‘Are you in charge here?’ he asked gravely. He looked to be in his mid-fifties with a careworn face, a high forehead, and sparse, greased-back black hair. He wore cream chinos, a blue polo shirt and a tweed jacket. His hand was extended. ‘Max Rainer.’

  ‘DCI Pendragon. I’m sorry for your loss.’

  Rainer sighed. ‘I can’t quite believe it, to be honest.’

  Pendragon studied the architect. He seemed self-assured, coherent, but clearly shaken by what had happened. ‘Can you talk me through it?’

  Rainer described the scene, including a summary of Middleton’s speech and its shocking finale. ‘I was first to reach him after he … after he collapsed. It was all horribly violent. But, even so, I didn’t expect him to be … dead.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Pendragon said. ‘We’d like a full statement from you.’ He strode over to where Grant was still talking to Giovanni Contadino. Letting the inspector write a final comment in his notebook before stepping in, Pendragon addressed the restaurant owner. ‘No one left the restaurant after the incident?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So who do we have here?’

  ‘The party from Rainer and Partner and two other couples.’ Contadino pointed them out. ‘One pair were in the other room.’ He nodded towards a woman in a white dress and an older man with black hair greying at the temples. ‘The other couple were at the table over there.’ He pointed to a spot on the other side of the room from where Middleton died.

  ‘Can you remember what the victim ate?’

  Contadino answered immediately. ‘I just told your colleague – chicken pizza. He’d drunk a fair bit.’

  ‘Any seafood?’

  The man’s eyes opened wide. ‘You’re not …?’

  ‘We have to consider everything, Mr Contadino.’

  ‘But we’ve never had a problem. I mean … besides, none of the party ordered seafood.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your help,’ Pendragon said dispassionately. He crossed the room to where Dr Jones was kneeling beside Middleton’s body.

  ‘He was definitely poisoned,’ the pathologist said, without looking up. ‘Notice the yellow tinge to the skin? Unless … do you know if he ate shellfish?’

  ‘He didn’t. No one at the table did.’

  ‘Well, unless it was something he ate a while ago, it can’t be food poisoning. Staphylococcus takes at least an hour to present. E. coli more like eight, minimum.’

  ‘There’s nothing that works faster?’

  ‘Well, yes, toxins, Pendragon. Allergic reaction may explain it, but that’s rare. I can’t imagine he would have eaten or drunk anything if he knew he’d have an allergic reaction to it.’

  ‘But I’ve never seen anything like this. According to witnesses, he was relatively normal just a few seconds before he projectile-vomited blood. And then there’s the eye.’

  ‘Precisely my point,’ Jones retorted. ‘Can’t be food poisoning.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘However,’ and Jones looked at Pendragon now, ‘if he was poisoned, which I would put money on, the dose must have been massive to cause such a rapid and violent effect. Either that or it was an incredibly powerful poison. One I’ve never seen or even heard of before.’

  There was a faint odour of damp in the briefing room. Pendragon noticed it as soon as he walked in with Turner. Other than this, a large brown-ringed damp patch in the ceiling was the only remaining indication that a gutter had given way under the pressure of water from the storm, causing a minor flood in this part of the station. Mackleby and Grant were already there. The sergeant was pinning a set of photographs of Tim Middleton to the board. Grant was tapping at a laptop, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘So, what have we got?’ Pendragon said as Mackleby turned and walked towards the nearest desk.

  She had a notebook and pen in front of her. ‘The restaurant owner was keen to help.’

  ‘He’s worried we’ll have Environmental Health round there.’

  ‘Yeah, but to be fair, guv, he did well. Stopped anyone leaving, got us there sharpish.’

  Pendragon nodded. ‘Learn anything from his account?’

  ‘Mr Contadino was in the kitchen when Middleton started to take a bad turn. He heard a woman scream and rushed in to see the victim hit the deck.’

  ‘What about the others from the firm?’

  ‘Sergeant Mackleby spoke to the women. I took statements from the men,’ Inspector Grant replied, without looking up from the screen. He tapped at a button, stood up and came around the desk. ‘Accounts match up. They all agree Middleton had tucked away a few. He was giving some sort of speech, a tradition in the company apparently. Then he started to slur his words and seemed disorientated. They thought he was sloshed at first, but then he spewed blood and collapsed. Rainer was the first to the body.’

  ‘Anything different from the women, Sergeant?’ Pendragon asked.

  ‘There is one thing that might be significant. A couple of the women saw Middleton arrive. He was late and they said he had a heated exchange with a couple who got to the restaurant at about the same time. Middleton was in a foul mood by the time he reached his colleagues at the table.’

  ‘You got the names of the
couple?’ Turner asked.

  ‘Better than that. You probably saw them. They were there earlier. I spoke to Contadino. He witnessed the incident too and told me there was almost a fight. After Middleton collapsed at his table, the woman … er …’ Mackleby stopped to consult her notebook ‘… Sophie Templer, was distraught. Her boyfriend, Marcus Campbell, wanted to get her out of the restaurant, but Mr Contadino would have none of it. He …’

  ‘We split them up straight away and had a chat,’ Grant interrupted. ‘Campbell didn’t deny there had been a scene at the entrance, but insisted it was nothing serious. Apparently, until quite recently, Ms Templer and Middleton were an item.’

  Pendragon raised an eyebrow. ‘Their stories matched?’ he asked Mackleby.

  ‘Yes, guv. They were in a different part of the restaurant from the Rainer party. Neither of them saw Middleton between the altercation and the time he died. They heard a commotion from the table in the main room, saw Contadino rush in there. Campbell went to see what all the fuss was about and Sophie Templer came after him a couple of minutes later. She saw Middleton on the floor and went to pieces. By the time we got there she had calmed down, although she was still in shock when I spoke to her.’

  Pendragon nodded and frowned, mulling over the information. ‘What about the deceased himself? Did you learn anything from his colleagues?’

  ‘They were all in shock, of course,’ Grant volunteered. ‘But you know, guv, I got the feeling none of them really liked the geezer.’

  Pendragon turned to Mackleby. ‘Sergeant? Did you sense the same thing?’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t think he was exactly flavour of the month at Rainer and Partner.’

  ‘Okay. All grist for the mill. Dr Jones is moaning like hell about being “overwhelmed by the dead”, as he put it, but he’s sure Middleton didn’t die from food poisoning. Unless it was something he ate earlier in the day. The only things other than deliberate poisoning that could act that fast would be toxins from seafood, and no one on the Rainer table had seafood.’