The Lazarus Vault

by Tom Harper

  Doug’s gaze strayed to the leather tube with the poem inside it.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Can you find us a car?’

  ‘I think so.’ He looked reluctant so say anything else, but the ferocity of Ellie’s stare battered down his reticence.

  ‘Lucy has one she let me borrow once.’ He headed for the stairs. ‘I’ll just pack my things.’

  XXXIV

  Bay of Morbihan, France, 1142

  HOW DID HE know my name?

  It isn’t the most important problem facing me, but I can’t let it go. My thoughts have detached themselves: my mind floats serene, while my body flails and kicks against its fate. I’m Jonah, fighting the water, the sea, the fundament itself. I know I can’t win, but I can’t stop trying. If the God wants His victory, He’ll have to earn it.

  How did he know my name?

  From the boats, the sea seemed so calm. Now that I’m in it, even the gentlest waves come higher than my head. In the troughs, all I can see is water; from the peaks, only fog. I’ve lost my armour, but it’s taking all my strength just to stay afloat. The water’s freezing. My body rises and falls on the waves: each time it falls, the water comes a little higher. Soon I’ll drown.

  Something strikes my shoulder, harder than a wave. I’m so numb I only half feel it, but it still enrages me. I don’t want to be rushed. I look round. A dark mass glides past, like an enormous fish broaching the water. Except instead of scales, the stripes on its flanks are wood and tar.

  It’s a boat.

  I stretch out an arm and clamp on to the hull. It probably frightens the life out of them, but they haul me aboard. Three men: by their ages and their faces I guess it’s a father and two sons. They fillet me with their eyes and find nothing good. I lie in the bilge, breathing in salt and blood and dead fish. They don’t speak to me.

  We pull into a rocky bay. Green weed trails off black stones. The sons wade ashore to check their fish traps. The father gives me a black stare: he doesn’t want me on his boat. Half-drowned and almost naked, I’m still trouble. He’s rubbing the amulet he keeps nailed to the transom to fend off evil. I think he might try to kill me. I vault over the bow and splash ashore. Barnacles and oyster shells are like razors under my bare feet. The men at the fish-traps watch me go. Nobody tries to stop me.

  Night falls. The mist cleared in the afternoon, but now a thick fog comes rising off the ground. I stumble on through the darkness. I daren’t stop. I’m freezing – my wet shift clings to me like sin. If I lie down to sleep, I’ll probably never wake up.

  Thump. I’ve walked straight into a stone. I reel away, clutching my knee. Thump. Another stone clips my elbow. I step back, and almost fall over a third.

  The moon comes out from behind a cloud. I’m standing in a field of stones, rectangular slabs all facing the same way. It looks like a churchyard, though there are no markings. They stand in tight echelons, rank upon rank reaching deep into the fog that swirls around them.

  I know where I am. I’m dead. It’s a relief to know. I wonder if I died in the castle – if the fisherman was a spirit ferrying me to the world beyond – or if I’ve died since I came ashore. It doesn’t matter. I’m a ghost now.

  Is this heaven? It doesn’t look like hell.

  I hear a noise in the fog. The jangle of armour, the thud of someone walking into a stone and a low curse.

  There’s someone else here. Is he an angel? A demon? Another ghost? I drop behind a stone, burying myself in the fog.

  ‘Peter!’ he calls. ‘Peter of Camros!’

  I don’t recognise the voice. It isn’t Malegant’s.

  How did he know my name?

  God knows everything. I’m not sure if the angels do, too, but I assume God can tell them the relevant facts.

  But he cursed when he hit the stone. Angels don’t curse.

  Am I really dead? I’m not so certain any more. Saint John says of heaven: There will be no more pain, neither sorrow nor crying. Surely I shouldn’t have stubbed my toe in heaven. Surely my heart shouldn’t beat so fast.

  The fear convinces me. If I were dead, I’d have left that behind. But if I’m not dead, where am I? And who is he?

  Another noise: the rattle of chain mail, like coins shaken in a purse. I look around, trying to judge where the sound came from. All I see is stones.

  An owl calls, far off in the trees to my left. I think my pursuer must be distracted. I pull myself up on one of the stones and peer over the lip.

  For a moment, the moon is bright and clear. A few dozen paces away, a dismounted knight stands waist-deep in the stones. He’s bare-headed, but the links of his armour gleam like fish-scales in the moonlight.

  ‘Peter?’ he calls.

  How does he know my name?

  The moon goes behind a cloud. He disappears from me – and I from him. I drop down and start crawling away.

  I might not be dead, but I’m certain I’m in a nightmare – trapped in that endless, featureless graveyard, scuttling about on my hands and feet, chased by an enemy I can’t see. In my headlong flight I career into stone after stone. I run straight into one and feel a splitting pain through my skull. But I’m getting away. My feet are silent on the wet grass; he can’t move without an iron chorus singing his every step. I weave between the stones, following the owl towards the trees. The knight’s sounds grow distant.

  I run into the forest. The terror I felt among the stones has me full in its grip. Sometimes I find snatches of paths and follow them; sometimes I just blunder through. Branches rip and tear at me: soon even my shift is gone. I rush on.

  A tree root catches me and I sprawl on the ground. My head feels splintered; my skin is bruised and torn; my limbs are bloodied. I lie there, naked, wondering if I’ll ever get up.

  Something snaps and rustles in the undergrowth. I hear a snuffling sound. Is it an animal? A fox or a wolf? I imagine it savaging me, gnawing my entrails out of my stomach while I’m forced to watch. Perhaps I have arrived in Hell after all.

  The creature shuffles out of the thicket. He bends to look at me: I can feel his breath warm on my cheek. I feel a hand or a paw on my back.

  He rolls me over. I stare into his face.

  XXXV

  Oxford

  DESTRIER LEFT THE car at the end of the street and walked back to the address he’d been given. He forced himself to walk at a moderate pace – he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. The Aston Martin was memorable enough.

  He found the house. The curtains were drawn but the lights were on – good. He slipped a pair of brass knuckles over his right hand and knocked with his left.

  No one came.

  He got out Ellie’s mobile and dialled Doug’s number. He lifted the letterbox flap and heard the phone ringing inside. There was no answer, and no sound of movement either.

  He waited through another minute’s silence and decided to go in. It was a college house, used by generations of students: the lock was a joke. It took him thirty seconds to get in, another ninety to establish no one was home.

  But only recently. The kettle was still warm. In the bathroom, steam still fogged the mirror; wet footprints walked across the carpet, and the towel on the door was damp. In the corner, beside the laundry basket, he found a woman’s sock.

  He ran outside and looked up and down the road. It was empty.

  Three streets away, Doug and Ellie sat in a borrowed Nissan and waited for the windscreen to demist. On the pavement, a petite girl in tight jeans and a figure-hugging top watched anxiously.

  ‘She’s just a friend,’ Doug said. Ellie hadn’t asked. She sat in the passenger seat, hunched forward, willing the wall of fog in front of her to clear. She wasn’t going to judge Doug.

  A half-moon gap appeared in the windscreen. Doug rolled down his window.

  ‘Thanks again,’ he said to Lucy.

  ‘Drive carefully.’

  They pulled away before she could have second thoughts. Halfway down the street, Doug jamme
d on the brakes.

  ‘What is it?’ Panic was never far from the surface.

  ‘I left the lights on at home.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Ellie pleaded. ‘I promise you, I’ll pay for it.’

  If we ever come back. She didn’t say it, but Doug picked up the sentiment. He put the car in gear and started moving. ‘Where are we going?’

  MV Noordwind, North Sea

  They sat at a plastic table and picked at the food in front of them: eggs, beans, anaemic bacon and sausages, slowly congealing in grease. Outside, a grey swell heaved and pressed under a grey sky.

  It would have been faster to go from Dover, but Ellie insisted on avoiding London and the motorways. Doug rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue: he drove through the night, crossing the country on B-roads and backroads until they rolled into Harwich with the dawn. The wait for the ferry had been agonising, sitting in the concrete lanes constantly checking the mirrors while Doug got some sleep. She’d almost been sick when they had to show their passports, though the immigration officer had barely glanced at them. Only when the bow had slammed shut, when she’d scanned the faces of all the passengers coming up the gangway and watched the piers recede behind them, did she allow herself to relax.

  Doug squinted at a piece of sausage and decided it was worth the risk.

  ‘Let me get this from the beginning.’

  Ellie put down her coffee. ‘There are two sides to this. There’s Monsalvat, Blanchard and all them – and there’s … a rival organisation.’

  Call it a brotherhood, though we’ve nothing against women.

  ‘Behind Monsalvat, there’s a French billionaire named Michel Saint-Lazare. Your Mr Spencer. Whatever’s in that box, Saint-Lazare’s ancestors took it from the brotherhood centuries ago.’

  ‘According to your friend Harry.’

  ‘I have to believe him.’ Two months ago, she’d never have believed she’d be saying that. ‘I can’t do this by myself.’

  Doug gave her a weary look. Exhaustion bruised the skin around his eyes; his face looked grey where stubble poked through, but he still tried for a smile.

  ‘You’re not by yourself.’

  Ellie reached across the table and squeezed his hand. ‘I know. But we won’t survive on the run for long. We’ll run out of money, for a start. All my bank cards come from Monsalvat. As soon as they work out I’m with you, they’ll probably find a way to cancel yours too – or track us if you use them.’ Doug looked sceptical. ‘They’re a bank, remember. They can do that kind of thing. Whatever we stole from them, they’ll move heaven and earth to get it off us.’

  ‘You could give it back.’

  ‘I’ve chosen my side. This organisation, the brotherhood, whatever you call them – they’re the only ones who can protect us.’ She crossed her fingers and prayed that was true. ‘We have to find them.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  Ellie sipped her coffee and made a face. It tasted of detergent.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Harry was my only contact.’ She’d tried the phone number he’d given her three times from the pier at Harwich. If no answer, leave a message for Harry from Jane. The voicemail had kicked in, but she hadn’t left a message.

  ‘Now he’s probably dead – or worse.’

  The boat rocked up and down in the swell. A toddler with a yellow balloon staggered down the aisle between the tables, fell flat on his face and started to wail. Ellie felt a kick of sympathy.

  ‘There’s a company in Luxembourg that Monsalvat have just taken over.’ A mid-ranking European industrial concern. By an accident of history, they own something that belongs to us. ‘They’ve got something that links to Harry’s people. If we can find it, maybe we can find our way to them.’

  ‘If we can find it?’ Doug repeated. ‘Are we just going to walk in there and ask if they’ve got an address for an ancient, secret brotherhood?’

  Ellie allowed herself a pale smile. ‘Something like that. Unless you’ve got a better idea.’

  But across the table, Doug’s eyes had closed and his face nodded forward. Driving all night had exhausted him; he couldn’t stave off sleep any longer. Ellie shot out her arm just in time to stop him toppling into his breakfast.

  *

  Near Bastogne, Belgium

  Doug drove; Ellie sat with two sheets of paper laid out on the map book on her lap. One gave a transcription of the poem, the other was a translation.

  ‘Mr Spencer asked me to make the translation,’ Doug explained. ‘I wanted to keep the form of the original, so it’s written in rhyming octosyllabic couplets. Eight syllables per line – it’s the standard form for early French romance poetry.’

  ‘Romance as in …’

  ‘As in romance language. In ancient Rome there was written Latin and there was a bastardised, colloquial form called Romanice. As the empire fell apart, Latin stayed pretty much the same, but Romanice devolved into the languages that became French, Spanish, Italian and so on. In the twelfth century, when people started writing in those languages, the stories they wrote were called romances, to differentiate them from stuff written in Latin. Nothing necessarily to do with romantic love. Even today, the French word for a novel is “roman”.’

  ‘OK.’ Ellie bent forward and read the translation, trying not to feel carsick.

  On mazy paths a Christian knight

  Sought noble turns: it was his right.

  From Troy to Carduel he rode,

  A maiden met him at the ford.

  She raised the bowl, he threw the spear,

  Her blood fell like a ruby tear.

  So now he scratches taut parched ground:

  The treasures sown will not be found.

  The car bumped over a pothole. For some reason, Ellie found herself overcome by bleakness.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ she asked.

  ‘Well for one thing, I think I know who wrote it. Chrétien de Troyes.’ He saw her reaction. ‘What?’

  Blanchard gave me a book of his for Christmas. But Doug didn’t know she’d been in Switzerland for Christmas, didn’t know she’d been there with Blanchard, and certainly didn’t know why he’d have given her a twelfth-century manuscript as a Christmas present. A manuscript she’d left behind, along with everything else she owned, at the Barbican apartment.

  ‘I saw a book of his poems at one of Saint-Lazare’s houses. What made you think of him?’

  ‘Well there’s the language and the metre, which are the same style as Chrétien wrote in. The subject matter, too: knights and maidens. Carduel is one of the places, in the romances, where King Arthur had his court. We think it’s modern-day Carlisle.’

  Doug broke off to concentrate as a white van overtook them. They were driving through the Ardennes, the road dipping and rising over steep ridges and wooded valleys. An easy landscape to imagine knights errant questing for damsels and treasure.

  ‘But the real clue’s in the text. Look at it. A Christian knight … from Troy. Chrétien is the French for “Christian”, and Troyes is how they spell the ancient city of Troy. Chrétien de Troyes.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘The whole poem’s a riddle. When Mr Spencer said he believed it hid the secret to a lost treasure, I thought he was crazy. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think he’s right. The taut parched ground is parchment, and the poet – Chrétien – is scratching at it with his reed pen like a plough. He’s sowing something in the parchment, hiding it in the poem.’

  ‘How?’

  The first two lines sound as if they might be a clue to something. Mazy paths … noble turns … his right … maybe you’re supposed to find a maze and always turn right.’ He saw the look Ellie was giving him. ‘Or something.’

  ‘You’re cherry-picking words and trying to make them mean something.’ Ellie closed the map book, shutting the poems away. ‘Anyway, if your Mr Spencer was actually Michel Saint-Lazare, what’s he looking for? The treasure was already in his vault.�
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  ‘Then why did he come to me?’

  ‘Because of me. Everything Blanchard’s done, he’s been trying to draw me in closer. He recruited me. He took me down to the vault. Getting you to look at the poem must have been part of the same plan. He knew we were together. He must have guessed you’d tell me about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was the question she’d been asking herself ever since the stiff envelope dropped through her letterbox in Oxford. Why me? Now she had an answer.

  ‘He was using me as bait. He knew my father had been part of this brotherhood. He must have thought that by bringing me into Monsalvat, dangling all these pieces of the puzzle in front of me, he’d draw the brotherhood into revealing themselves.’

  ‘Which they did.’ Doug reached the top of the hill and shifted into a higher gear. His gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead, though it was wide and empty.

  ‘Except now you’re not the bait. You’re the quarry.’

  *

  Luxembourg

  It was odd being back in Luxembourg – the same feeling she used to get going home to Newport from university. Like visiting a ghost town, except that the town carried on and she was the ghost.

  An eerie quiet gripped the Talhouett building. Ellie had seen the bid documents: she knew that in six months the building would be sold, half the employees out of work and the other half moved to an office park on the edge of town. She wore a black polyester skirt and a jacket that almost matched: they’d been cheap when they were new, and cheaper still in the charity shop where she found them. Tights from a service-station vending machine completed the outfit. It wasn’t much to look at, but that and her Monsalvat card got her past the front desk and into the Operations Manager’s office. She hoped the receptionist didn’t see her trembling.

  ‘Tell me everything you can about Mirabeau.’

  Claude Doerner, the Operations Manager, sat back in his chair and frowned. He was a middle-aged man with a middle-aged sprawl: his toothbrush moustache was the trimmest thing about him.

  ‘What is Mirabeau?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t mess me around.’ Fear sharpened her manner. What if Blanchard guessed she’d come there? What if they were watching? ‘I’ll be working on the integration team,’ she lied, ‘evaluating which personnel are going to be able to deliver the corporate synergies we need. Any cooperation you can give me will definitely be taken into account.’