She was frightened of going alone, but she possessed neither the capacity for trust nor the money to go out and recruit an assistant, even if she had known where to find one. The Frenchman she had enticed out of the cafe on the road to Rouen had turned out a useless coward. He’d have left her to Trave if she hadn’t got to his truck in time. No, she was better off on her own. But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t go prepared. The day before she had found a man in Montmartre who was willing to sell her a gun. There was nowhere to fire it, but she had practised the mechanism again and again before going to bed, and now she felt confident that she could use the revolver to good effect if she had to. It gave her a sense of security, knowing that it was in the shoulder bag by the bed, wrapped up in her clothes with the codex.
She kept the book with her at all times now after what had happened before, but it really didn’t interest her much anymore. It was a means to an end. Nothing more. The cross was somewhere in Marjean Church. Sasha was sure of it. She could think of nothing else.
She dressed carefully, settling her hair down over the upright collar of her padded jacket so that the livid burn mark on her neck was almost invisible, and then went downstairs to eat a late breakfast. An hour later she had paid her bill and was on the road north. She hummed a tune to herself as she came out into the open fields of the Norman countryside and then realised with a start that it was The Marseillaise. She was filled with a sudden rush of optimism and pressed her foot down on the accelerator, taking the Citroen speeding down the road, like an arrow between the winter hedgerows.
This time she had no difficulty finding the gateway, but the sudden descent into semidarkness as the car passed under the overhanging trees filled her with a sense of foreboding, and it was a relief to get back out into the light. She parked beside the ruined chateau and immediately began walking up the path to the church. She was early and there was no one in sight, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t being watched. The church made her feel that way. It dominated the surrounding landscape with a brooding presence, and Sasha was not the first to be unnerved by it. The gun in her pocket felt more reassuring with every step she took.
There was a new silver-coloured padlock on the door, but for some reason it was already open and there was nothing to keep her from walking inside. She stopped at the beginning of the nave to get her bearings and then froze to the spot when an apparently disembodied voice spoke to her from only a few feet away.
“You’re standing just where my father died,” said the voice. “There used to be a bloodstain on the stone, but it’s gone now.”
For a moment Sasha could not see who was speaking, but then a figure she recognised stepped out from behind a grey stone pillar in the south transept and began walking across the nave toward her. It was Mary Martin, but a different Mary from the one Sasha remembered. She was dressed in a leather flying jacket and a pair of blue jeans, and the slightly masculine effect of her clothing was accentuated by the easy authority with which she moved. She made Sasha feel like an intruder.
It had to be Mary who had sent the note. And Mary was Rocard’s daughter. Somehow she must have survived the massacre of her family at the end of the war.
“You killed Cade,” said Sasha, blurting out the accusation a second after the idea had entered her head. “It wasn’t Stephen at all. It was you.”
“That’s right. It was me,” said Mary, acknowledging her guilt with an easy smile. She was standing close beside Sasha now and looked her straight in the eye until Sasha dropped her gaze. The experience was disconcerting. Sasha felt as if Mary was looking inside her, and she backed away toward the door, resisting the temptation to take the gun out of her pocket.
“I’m glad you killed him,” she said. “You saved me the trouble of doing it myself.”
“Why do you say that?” It was Mary’s turn to look surprised.
“Because of what he did to my father. Cade took everything from him: his work, his family, his position in society. And then he laughed about what he’d done. I heard him one night at the manor house.” Sasha made no effort to hide her bitterness as she remembered the last poverty-stricken years of her father’s life spent in the cold tenement room in Oxford while Cade lived in the lap of luxury only a few miles away.
“Well, we’ve certainly found something we agree about,” said Mary, looking Sasha up and down with a new regard. “You know, I wasn’t even six when he and Ritter killed my parents. But I still knew it meant nothing to Cade. And he didn’t just kill them either. He tortured my mother and our old servant before they died. I heard him shouting at them down in the crypt before he shot them.” Mary spoke in a flat, even voice that was strangely at odds with the terrible events she was describing. It was as if she was talking about something that had happened to somebody else, not to her at all. Perhaps that was the only way she could cope with such terrible memories.
“Where were you?” asked Sasha.
“When they came into the church? I was in the tower. There are windows on the stairway, and I spent a lot of time up there when I was a kid, watching the Nazis down below. I liked seeing them when they couldn’t see me. Most of the windows look outside, but one of them faces down into the church. You can see it over there,” said Mary, pointing to an opening halfway up the back wall. “I had a grandstand view. And then, after I heard the gunshots, I ran up to the top of the tower and stood there, watching our house burning up in the twilight. It’s funny: if they hadn’t done that, they might have found out about me. And Cade might still be alive.”
“But he isn’t,” said Sasha harshly. “He’s dead, and you’ve got what he was looking for. I know you have.”
“The cross, you mean,” said Mary, staring Sasha straight in the eye.
“Yes. You said in the note that you’d show it to me.”
“Only if you’ve got the codex. That’s what I said.”
“How did you find out I’ve got it?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess once I heard you’d come back here again. I have friends in the village, you know. This was my home once upon a time.”
“The codex is here,” said Sasha, tapping her bag. “Now show me the cross.”
“So you can steal it? Have it for yourself? Is that why you want to see it?” asked Mary, making no effort to conceal her contempt.
Sasha said nothing. She bit her lip, and her hand trembled on the gun in her pocket.
“What would you do to get it, I wonder?” asked Mary, smiling. “Would you kill defenceless men and women, execute old people like Cade did? How much is it worth to you, Sasha?”
Sasha’s temper finally snapped. There was clearly only one way to get what she wanted, and that was by force. She should have seen that at the outset, instead of wasting time talking. Taking a step back, she took the gun out of her pocket and pointed it at Mary’s chest.
“Give me it,” she said. “You know what I’ll do if you don’t.”
For a moment Sasha felt a sense of power rush through her veins, but then doubt set in. Mary didn’t seem in the least frightened of the revolver, and the odd air of authority that she carried with her was in no way diminished.
“You better follow me,” she said in an even voice. “It’s down here.” Then, without any hesitation, she turned her back on Sasha and the gun, went through the door into the vestry, and began climbing down the winding stairway to the crypt. Sasha followed a little way behind, listening to Mary’s voice coming back up to her from below.
“The cure who was here before this one, Pere Martin, was my father’s best friend. He took me in when my parents died, and afterward he helped me escape to another part of France. But before I left he gave me a locket that my father had entrusted to him when the Nazis came, to give to me if anything happened. There was a picture of my parents in the front and the code was written inside the back.”
“Crux Petri in manibus Petri est.”
“That’s right. I don’t know if my father knew what it meant. Pere Martin
certainly didn’t.”
“But you know, don’t you?” said Sasha, retraining the gun on Mary now that she had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Tell me what it means.”
“It means just what you think it means. Simon Peter’s cross is in Simon Peter’s hands.”
“Abbot Simon’s hands?”
“Yes. Of course it wouldn’t have taken Cade long to work that out, but he had to crack the code first,” said Mary, who continued to seem entirely unfazed by the gun. “He didn’t come back here for four long years after 1944, and when he did, he found nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because he looked in the wrong place. Just like you did. And then he got impatient and opened up all the tombs, and still he found nothing. He tore the place apart, and that’s when Pere Martin found him down here among all the skulls and bones, beating his head against the wall in frustration. I wish I could’ve seen him,” said Mary, with a faraway look in her eye.
“Cade told Pere Martin he was looking for a jewelled cross that the Nazis had hidden somewhere in the church. Of course Pere Martin knew it was a lie. He was the one who’d told me about the legend of the Marjean cross years before when he gave me the locket. But he said nothing. Just waited until Cade had gone, and then he told me everything that had happened. I already knew that Cade was after the cross. After all, I’d heard him torturing my mother for it before he killed her. And after Cade came back, I made the connection between the Peter in the code and the Abbot Simon who was buried down here. But I didn’t need to open his tomb to know that the cross wasn’t there, because I knew from Pere Martin that Cade had already done that. I realised the answer was somewhere else, but it still took me a long time to work it out.”
“So what is the answer? Where is the cross?” demanded Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer. But Mary ignored the questions. It was as if she was determined to tell the story her own way, and neither Sasha nor the gun were going to deflect her from her purpose.
“I found the cross and Cade didn’t,” she said, “because I knew this place a great deal better than he did. That was the difference between us. You probably haven’t noticed, but down beyond the house there are a few old broken-down walls. They’re almost disappearing in the long grass now, but I played there a lot when I was a child, spying on the German soldiers as they went backward and forward from the house. And one day I was digging, making a tunnel to Australia, and I found an old moss-covered stone buried in the ground with a Latin inscription indented in its surface. It was square, the wrong shape for a tombstone, and I never told anyone about it because it was my secret, my lucky stone, and I kept it covered up with leaves and grass. It was only much later,
years after I’d left this place, that I realised it was the foundation stone of a chapter house for the monastery, laid by Simon, Abbot of Marjean, in the year of our Lord 1328.”
Mary spoke slowly, emphasising the date, but Sasha just looked perplexed, and Mary had to say the year again.
“1328, Sasha. Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” she asked pointedly. “It was the year after Abbot Simon died according to the dates on the wall over there. Except that that’s not what the dates mean. The foundation stone made me realise that. Look. You see the same thing all along both these walls. One date for each name. And the date is the year they became abbot. But Simon is different from everyone else. He has two dates. 1321 and 1327. Why’s that?”
“Because there are two Simons,” said Sasha breathlessly, suddenly beginning to understand.
“Yes. Two. And the second one died within a year of his promotion. That’s why the next abbot, Josephus, has the year 1328 under his name. And the beauty of the whole thing is that there’s no record anywhere of this second Simon. Nothing except the foundation stone lost under the grass. The monks who hid the cross must have seen to that. And so no one knew about his existence except me. That is, until I told Cade all about him in the summer of 1956.”
“Why? Why would you do that?” asked Sasha, shocked. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear.
“To lure him over here so I could take a shot at him. Give him back a little of what he’d done to my parents. The cure helped me, although perhaps he wouldn’t have done so if he’d known what I had in mind. But still there was no need to spell it out. Back in 1948 Cade had promised him a reward for any new information that might lead Cade to the cross, and so the opening was already there. Everything went perfectly. The cure wrote to him about the foundation stone, and less than two weeks later he was here with Ritter. I waited to see him come out empty-handed before I fired. That was part of what I’d promised myself. But I wasn’t brave enough, or perhaps I was just nervous. I shot him from too far away and he lived to tell the tale. Until I got inside the manor house last summer, that is, and did what I’d failed to do four years ago.”
“So the cross was in the tomb until he came. You had it all the time,” said Sasha. Her agitation was plain to see. The gun was trembling in her hand. But the threat of it still seemed to have no effect on Mary. She smiled and said nothing.
“Where is it now?” demanded Sasha, finally losing her self-control. “Tell me where it is or I’ll kill you.”
“It’s where it always was,” said Mary evenly. “I know of no better hiding place than the one the monks made for it six hundred years ago.”
Mary crossed over to Abbot Simon’s tomb. The lid was still slightly officentre, resting in the same position that Sasha had left it in the week before. But Mary ignored the top of the tomb. Instead she took a small chisel out of her pocket and chipped away the stone-coloured plaster in a line halfway down the side. It came off easily, and Sasha could see that it had only recently been applied. Soon a clear dividing line was visible, and it was obvious that there were two tombs, one on top of the other. When Mary had finished removing the plaster, she pushed with only moderate force against one end of the lower sarcophagus, and the other end came swinging out into the open.
Sasha looked down into the open tomb and saw what she had been searching for all her life. The cross of St. Peter. It was lying between the two skeletal hands of the dead man, and the red rubies and green emeralds embedded in the ancient wood drew Sasha forward as much as the hollow eye sockets and empty mouth repelled her. The cross was bigger than she’d imagined and glowed with a kaleidoscope of colours, so that the wood of first-century Palestine was almost invisible underneath. The jewels were there because this object was as close as men could get in this world to the Son of God. Nothing was more precious than the true cross on which the Saviour had redeemed the sins of mankind and given back to a fallen race the hope of everlasting life.
Sasha remembered Sir Galahad, who had been the only one of Arthur’s knights worthy to drink from the Holy Grail. She was different too. Unique and separate. She leant forward and claimed the cross of St. Peter for her own.
Mary could have taken the gun from her then. It would have been easy, but she chose not to. Instead she went first up the stairs, leaving the crypt behind, crossed the main body of the church, and opened the door. Sasha looked out from behind her, checking there was no one in sight. She had already decided what to do. She pressed the revolver between Mary’s shoulder blades and pushed her back into the dusky interior.
“I’m going to lock you in,” she said. “I’ll phone someone to come and let you out once I’m far enough away.”
Mary didn’t react or resist. Her face remained inscrutable, and for a moment Sasha wondered why it had all been so easy. But not for long. She had the cross in her bag and nothing else mattered. She shut the heavy church door behind her and secured it with the padlock. There was no other way out. Mary couldn’t come after her. She walked out of the porch, heading for the path down to her car, but she had only gone a few steps when she felt the barrel of a rifle in the small of her back, forcing her down onto her knees. Her pistol spilt out onto the ground, and the flinty sharp stones cut into her skin, causing her to cry out. She l
ooked up at Paul Martin through the tears that had welled up in her eyes and realised what a complete fool she had been.
Too late, she remembered that day in Oxford when she’d last seen Mary. She’d been in a Jaguar with this same man. Sasha recognised his cold narrow eyes and the strange high cheekbones that accentuated the boniness of his face. How stupid she had been to assume that Mary was alone. The cross had blinded her to what should have been so obvious. Mary had planned it all from start to finish. Even the padlock. Paul opened it now with a key and stood aside to let Mary pass.
But perhaps it was not too late. Sasha reached out toward the pistol lying on the ground, but Paul was watching her. With a quick movement he fired past Sasha’s outstretched hand, and the revolver exploded in a rain of metal fragments. Sasha froze in shock. She cowered against the wall of the church while Paul reloaded again and again, took aim with an unerring accuracy, and shot out the tires of her car one by one. The shots reverberated around the empty landscape, losing their final echoes in the encircling woods as the car subsided down onto its useless wheels.
Quite gently, Mary unlaced Sasha’s fingers from around the handle of her bag, and then extracted the codex and the cross from inside.
“You’ve had what we agreed,” she said. “You’ve seen the cross of St. Peter. Now I’m taking what is mine, paid for with my parents’ blood. Don’t try to follow me. You understand me, don’t you, Sasha?”
Sasha nodded. She had no doubt about what Paul would do if they met again. She’d seen the way he used the rifle. Now he was pointing it at her again, and instinctively she obeyed its command, backing away into the church.
Mary looked her in the eye one last time, and then she closed the door. A moment later Sasha heard the snap of the padlock and the sound of footsteps walking away down the path. She was a prisoner inside the church.
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