by Unknown
Arthur heard him perfectly well but wanted him to repeat it. “What did you say?”
“We listened to your phone call. Don’t bother to deny it.”
“We?” Holmes asked. “Who the hell is we?”
“Interested parties.”
The notion was incongruous. Scholars were interested in the Grail. Readers. Laymen. Not people with guns who tapped phones and broke into houses.
“Who are these parties?” Arthur asked. “And why are they interested in the Grail—and me?”
“Don’t waste my time. Where’s the new material?”
“It isn’t here,” Holmes said.
“You’re lying.” He pointed the gun at Arthur. “He showed it to you already, didn’t he?”
Arthur stared at him angrily and refused to answer.
“Don’t give it to him, Andrew!” Anne said. “We’ve seen his face. If you give it to him he’ll hurt us.”
Holmes looked at her hopelessly and sadly. “I expect we’re buggered either way.”
Griggs shook his head ominously. “I’m not going to give you more time. Be a good bloke and hand it over.”
“Please, just go,” Holmes said wearily. “We won’t call the authorities. It’s not that important. It’s just an old relic, bound for a museum if it’s ever found. It’s not worth hurting us.”
“You’re wrong. It is that important,” Griggs said. He put the computer and folder down on an end table and plucked a throw pillow from the sofa. “Last chance. Will you tell me?”
Holmes was defiant. “No! Go away!”
Griggs put the pillow against the barrel of the gun and immediately fired a muffled shot. For a moment no one moved. Then Arthur saw Anne looking profoundly puzzled as the bodice of her dress turned from green to red.
Holmes lurched to her side and at that instant Arthur acted more from instinct than premeditated intent. He’d been a good rugby player in his day and went low for the larger man, aiming to tie up his arms at his waist before he could get off another shot, then sweep him off his feet and body-slam him to the floor.
It didn’t go as planned.
Before he made contact he heard a blast, saw a muzzle flash and felt a searing pain in his side. But he kept charging and drove the man against the wall, knocking down a painting. He ignored the pain and tried to get the intruder to the floor but the man seemed to be glued to the wall and nothing he could do would tip him.
He knew it was only a matter of seconds before the gun was pressed against him and fired so he suddenly pulled away enough to get his hands up against the man’s face, desperately groping for his eyes with his thumbs.
When Griggs brought the butt of the pistol crashing down on the dome of Arthur’s head, the jolting pain short-circuited his nervous system. His arms went limp and his vision stopped working, replaced by something flashing and bright, as if he’d been made to stare into the sun with eyes wide open.
The blow didn’t seem to hurt at all. There was hardly time for it to register as the blazing sun suddenly set and Arthur fell into blackness.
4
Something was wrong, very wrong.
The light was flat, artificial, muted, and the sounds were mechanical—all whooshing and beeping.
Arthur’s head hurt and so did his left side. His throat was tight and sore. He blinked and the ceiling came into focus. Off-white acoustic tiles. He moved his fingertips and felt coarse linen.
He was in a bed, on his back.
He tried to sit up and discovered his arms were tethered to rails and in a few moments a woman filled his view, a young nurse with a friendly face.
“Mr. Malory. You’re awake. Let me fetch the doctor.”
A doctor. Why? What had happened?
The nurse returned, undid his restraints and elevated the bed. She offered him juice from a straw. His mouth was desperately dry and he sipped aggressively. His chest felt tight and he had a spasm of coughing.
“Take it slowly.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the John Radcliffe Hospital. This is the Neurosurgery Intensive Care Unit.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three days.”
“What happened to me?”
“Let’s have your surgeon, Mr. Singh, answer that. He’s on his way.”
The doctor was a diminutive man in blue scrubs, unsmiling, clearly hurried. Before Arthur could open his mouth he saw a penlight in the doctor’s hand and felt stinging bright light in his eyes. After a brisk neurological exam checking the strength of limbs and sensation, the neurosurgeon was ready to talk.
“You had a skull fracture and a small subdural hematoma, which I evacuated. We’ll leave the bandages on until tomorrow or the next day. You sustained an injury, a fracture to one of your ribs.”
“My side hurts like hell.”
“Did you know you have an extra pair of ribs?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the one on the left probably saved your life. The bullet glanced off it. Otherwise it might have struck your spleen, in which case you would have bled to death.”
“A bullet?”
“You don’t remember what happened?”
“No.”
“Post-trauma amnesia is common. Your memory of the events may or may not return. There’s no way of predicting.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’d rather leave that to the police. They’re champing at the bit to interview you. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. You also had smoke inhalation, which required breathing assistance and sedation until early this morning. But at this point you seem to be doing quite well. We should be able to send you to the wards later today.”
Arthur spent the next few hours grinding away, trying to remember what happened. He recalled driving to see Andrew Holmes, arriving, giving Anne her present, heading off to the restaurant and returning prematurely. At that point he confronted a black curtain that stubbornly would not part to reveal anything more.
His nurse readied him for transfer and told him that various friends had tried to visit the past few nights but had been turned away. She was having trouble recalling their names.
“Was one of them Andrew Holmes?”
The nurse looked down and answered, “No, not him. Some other men. One of them had a beard.”
“Tony Ferro?”
“Yes, I think that was his name. A woman was with him, tall and striking.”
“Sandy Marina?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. They’ll be coming again tonight they said.”
The moment his bed was rolled onto the lift to take him to his ward he had a spontaneous memory flash. The nurse seemed to notice the surprise on his face and asked if he was all right. He nodded. But a snippet had formed in his mind.
Anne had opened the door to their house. They had stepped inside. The sitting room was in disarray. They’d been burgled.
But what happened next?
The black curtain closed again.
That afternoon he was settled into a room with an elderly roommate who seemed to do nothing but sleep and fill a urine bag. The television didn’t work. There were no books or magazines. He asked a ward nurse if his mobile phone and wallet were anywhere to be found but was told he had no personal belongings when he was brought into the ICU. He requested telephone service and waited for it to activate. Left to his own devices, he tried without success to further part the black curtain.
A respiratory therapist came in to give him a breathing treatment to loosen the mucus in his irritated lungs. While breathing vigorously into a tube, trying to lift a row of floating balls to the tops of their columns, Arthur was struck by a series of flashes.
A large man at the top of the stairs.
A gun.
Questions about the Grail.
Agitated, Arthur waved off the therapist and frantically tried to push the limits of his memory. What became of Holmes and Anne? How had he been injured?
And th
en over dinner, while slurping Jell-O, the rest of it came as if a dam had burst in a spontaneous flood of disturbing images.
A gunshot. Anne bleeding. Bull-rushing the intruder. Another gunshot. Pain in the side, a frenzied and primal fight for survival, terrible pain in the head.
That was all. Maybe there would be more but he thought not. He sensed the recollection was complete. He still didn’t know if Anne had survived her wound. He didn’t know what had happened to Holmes but the way the ICU nurse had avoided eye contact at mention of Holmes’ name disturbed him.
The answers came soon enough.
Tony Ferro and Sandy Marina arrived during visiting hours, both of them a study in concern and sadness. Arthur hadn’t seen them since the last time the Grail Loons had met in Oxford at the Bear Inn. Sandy was a professor of religious studies at Cambridge, a stately, vivacious redhead in her forties with a wicked wit and a cackling laugh to match. Tony was a bear of a man with a heavy full beard, his gut bulging over his omnipresent sweater vest. Though not yet fifty, premature graying made him seem older. Both he and Sandy awkwardly approached Arthur’s bed, seemingly unsure of what to do or what to say.
Arthur had them draw the partition between him and his roommate and told them to pull up chairs. He could tell from their faces and Sandy’s tears that Holmes was gone. He held out his hand and Sandy took it.
“We were told you might not remember anything,” she said.
“I didn’t but I do now. It all came back. But nobody’s told me what happened to Anne and Andrew. Please.”
Sandy and Tony exchanged difficult glances before Tony nodded and cleared his choked throat.
“Whoever did this set the house on fire. They think it was petrol taken from Andrew’s shed. A neighbor saw the flames and managed to get the front door open. He found you near the hall and managed to pull you out. He couldn’t reach them. The fire brigade found their bodies after they knocked down the fire. The newspapers are saying that they were both shot and were probably dead before the fire consumed the house. They’re gone, Arthur, they’re both gone.”
The three cried softly for several minutes until Arthur started painfully coughing and Sandy insisted they leave until he settled down. In a minute he called them back from the corridor and asked whether the intruder had been caught.
“No,” Sandy said. “We’ve been told the police have no suspects. They’re looking for one or more burglars.”
“Burglars?” Arthur exclaimed. “It wasn’t burglars.”
“What then?” Tony asked.
“There was one man. He wasn’t a house burglar. He was after the Grail.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Sandy asked with a startled look of fresh concern.
“He broke in while we were out to dinner. We came back early because Anne was unwell. We surprised him and he pulled a gun on us. He had Holmes’ laptop and one of his research folders from his study. He said he wanted the documents Holmes had recently discovered.”
“What documents?” Tony asked.
“Holmes rang me a few days ago and told me he’d made a new discovery, something really significant—somethingthat involved me, believe it or not. He told me that he thought the Grail could actually be found and that he needed my help.”
“How did this man know about this?” Sandy asked.
“He said that interested parties—that was the way he put it—interested parties had tapped our phone call.”
“Who the hell would be interested in the Grail in that way?” Tony asked. “It’s a bloody historical artifact that may not even exist! It’s been sport for us, a wonderful exercise in academia, perhaps a grand metaphorical quest.”
“If it did exist and were found,” Sandy interjected, “it would have substantial monetary value.”
Tony nodded. “But still—to kill for it when it hasn’t even remotely been found? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I’m only telling you what the man said.”
“Did Holmes show you what he’d found?” Sandy asked.
Arthur shook his head. “He was going to tell me after dinner. He never got a chance.”
“Everything was burned,” Sandy said. “Everything. His wonderful library, all his papers. We may never know what he discovered. A small tragedy heaped upon a far greater tragedy.”
There was a rap against the open door and two men in suits entered.
“Sorry to interrupt,” one of them said, “I’m Detective Inspector Hobbs of the Thames Valley Police and this is Detective Sergeant Melton. We’d like a word with Mr. Malory if we could.”
Sandy bent over to kiss Arthur and Tony patted his shoulder.
“You get better,” Tony said. “We’ll see you as soon as you’re able at the Bear to continue our chat.”
When they were gone, DI Hobbs and DS Melton stood over Arthur’s bed.
Hobbs, the older man with the demeanor of an undertaker, said, “We know you’ve had an ordeal, Mr. Malory, and we understand you’ve only been off the respirator since last night. In light of your head injury we don’t expect you’ll have a clear memory of what happened but we want to see if you recall anything, anything at all.”
Melton, young and eager, added, “This is the start of a dialogue, Mr. Malory. As time goes on, victims tend to remember more and more and we’ll want to know every future recollection because—”
Arthur stopped him midsentence. “I remember everything.”
“You do?” Hobbs said.
“I don’t know why—perhaps it’s unusual, but it took me only a few hours for it all to come back.”
Melton took out a pad and pen. “That’s excellent, Mr. Malory. Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell us everything you recall about the events of the evening in question.”
Arthur methodically told his story, interrupted only by periodic coughing fits that forced him to press against his side to control the pain. As he talked, he absorbed the facial expressions of the detectives and wasn’t at all surprised in the end when they barraged him with questions marinated in skepticism.
“So this fellow in the house,” Hobbs asked, “this Caucasian man … you’re saying he wasn’t a run-of-the-mill burglar?”
“Hardly.”
“Despite the fact that your wallet, mobile phone and wristwatch were stolen, despite the fact that when you came in the place had been ransacked, despite the fact we haven’t found Mrs. Holmes’ purse or Professor Holmes’ wallet or watch.”
“Yes, despite all that,” Arthur said.
“This Grail you’ve talked about,” Melton asked, “this would be the same as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?”
“Are you mocking me?” Arthur’s mood further darkened.
“No, hardly,” Melton replied unconvincingly. “It’s just that I’m not all that familiar with the Grail and those kind of things.”
“The Grail has been an object of fascination for two thousand years, widely written about by scholars, playwrights, and novelists. I’ve been studying it myself for quite some time—as an interested layman—and that’s how I met Andrew Holmes.”
“Do you know if the Grail is even real?” Melton asked.
“No, of course not.”
“I see,” the young man said, smirking.
“You say this man claimed to have tapped a recent phone call with Professor Holmes?” Hobbs asked.
“He said that interested parties were responsible.”
“And who might these interested parties be?”
“I’ve no idea. He wouldn’t say.”
“People who would commit serious offenses—including murder—in pursuit of an object that may not even be real? Does that make sense to you, Mr. Malory?”
Arthur shook his head. “No. But it’s what he said and more importantly it’s what he did.”
“Head injuries are a funny thing, Mr. Malory,” Hobbs said gravely. “In my considerable experience people’s memories are often dramatically altered by this kind of trauma. And you
had it even worse what with being shot and sustaining smoke inhalation. You’re probably on pain medications too, right now, aren’t you?”
Arthur nodded, unhappy with the direction this was taking.
“I’ve talked to specialists about the subject,” Hobbs continued. “The mind plays tricks. You went to see Professor Holmes about some Grail business of his. That’s what was on your mind. It’s understandable that you’re remembering things through that prism, isn’t it?”
“I remember what happened,” Arthur said emphatically before succumbing to a paroxysm of coughing.
“Well, we’ll send the nurse in,” Hobbs said. “And we’ll have a police artist visit you tomorrow morning to make a sketch of the perpetrator. I’ll leave my card on the table if you wish to change your statement. And we’ll return in a day or two to see if your memory of that night changes, all right then, Mr. Malory?”
#
Jeremy Harp ushered Griggs into his library and shut the door to prevent his wife wandering in.
Griggs appeared as impassive as always, his face a cipher. Harp had never seen him angry or for that matter happy, sad, or frustrated. He was efficient and mechanical, though Harp had rather expected that some emotion might have registered after the monumental cock-up in Oxfordshire.
Griggs handed Harp Andrew Holmes’ laptop and the Montserrat folder.
“Are you absolutely certain you weren’t followed here?”
“I’m certain.”
“Where have you been the past three days?”
“Lying low.”
Griggs had come to Harp through a personal connection. A close associate in Switzerland, a Khem, had retired to Costa Rica some years back and had let Griggs go as part of a staff downsizing. Harp liked his profile and brought him on. He was retired from the Specialist Protection Branch at the Metropolitan Police and was proficient with weapons. More importantly, Griggs had two traits that Harp particularly favored: he was intelligent and knew how to obey orders. Harp assigned Griggs to take care of his personal security and used him from time to time on Khem business. He paid him well, very well. As far as he knew, Griggs had a flat in London but was also provided accommodations in a guest house on Harp’s estate that Griggs used frequently.