The Heretic Scroll

by Will Adams

  ‘You never said anything.’

  ‘Not to you, no. But I told Taddeo, and Taddeo told the others. But enough of this. I need to get out there while I can. I need to know.’

  ‘You can’t drive,’ said Carmen firmly. ‘Not with your burned arm.’

  ‘I can drive fine.’

  ‘No. You can’t. And you can’t shift rubble either.’ She plucked Lucia’s car keys from her hand before she could stop her. ‘Besides, you once promised me a Villa tour,’ she added, opening the driver’s door and getting in. ‘This is your chance to make good.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I

  Carmen hadn’t driven yet in Italy, and Naples was no place to start – especially in an unfamiliar car with an evacuation in full spate and people panicked by the latest tremor and the coal-black skies around Vesuvius’s ragged peak. It took all her focus, therefore, even before the rain began, infused with the usual grime that left such dirty smears on the windscreen that she had to crane and squint to see.

  They were, at least, headed in the easier direction; the lanes out of the Red Zone were choked with anxious traffic. But the junctions were almost completely gridlocked too, which at least gave her the chance to leave Cesco a message for when he retrieved his phone, apologising for vanishing, explaining where she was headed, and offering him a lift back out. Then she turned to Lucia. ‘You never did tell me your plan to prove him innocent.’

  ‘That hardly matters now, does it?’

  ‘I’m still curious.’

  Lucia gave an awkward smile. ‘Would you mind? To be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing. I’ll tell you one day, I promise.’

  ‘Fine. Thanks, anyway. For believing in him.’

  ‘You did too.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ Carmen said wryly. ‘I love him.’

  ‘Still? I thought… haven’t you moved out?’

  ‘Not because of that.’ She considered explaining about her mother, but couldn’t face it. ‘Can we not talk of something else?’

  ‘Sure. How about Alberts. What the hell got into him?’

  ‘Your scroll really freaked him out.’

  ‘Yes. But why?’

  Carmen shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I kept throwing out ideas. They all alarmed him. But none of them was it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The thing that terrified him.’ She recapped it all for her, how she’d taxed him with Thomas and Tertullian. The strange way he’d reacted when she’d suggested Marcion had pre-dated Luke, as though she’d found the right door but hadn’t yet looked through. They crossed another junction. The traffic loosened yet remained chaotic enough to demand full concentration. Sirens wailed in the distance. They reached a checkpoint. A stout policeman ordered them back. Carmen spun him a story about Lucia’s disabled mother. He glowered but let them through. The sirens grew more piercing, muting every other minute for instructions to be delivered. Everything was closed and shuttered. They saw almost no one, save for a few clusters of people huddled beneath awnings as they waited for the next coach out.

  ‘Turn right here,’ said Lucia.

  Carmen nodded and headed down towards the sea. A family in matching gumboots and macs was hurrying for the ferry docked in the town’s harbour, the father pushing a shopping trolley loaded with luggage. She turned left at the foot of the road, then left again up Via Mare. Lucia set the Villa’s gate opening with her fob, but the latest tremor had evidently put its tracks out of true, for it made a horrible screeching noise and only opened a foot or two before wedging stuck. Lucia got out to put her shoulder to it, pushing it wide enough for the Ka to fit. She guided Carmen through, then climbed back in, dripping wet.

  The track down to the escarpment floor was treacherous with small landslips and foamy rivulets of rainwater that made the tarmac sound sticky beneath their tyres, but they reached the foot safely enough. The steep walls made it look like a canyon, and so much rainwater had already gathered that the drainage ditch was overflowing. Carmen glanced at Lucia, worried that it might maroon them; but Lucia didn’t seem concerned, and she should know.

  She pulled up by the metal barriers at the foot of a muddy earthen ramp. A squall hit as they hurried up it, soaking them to the skin. A line of heavy grey tarpaulins ran along the Villa’s front. One had ripped free of one of its tethers and was flapping in the wind, like the wing of a wounded bird. They slipped through the gap into a mercifully dry space protected by corrugated sheets of translucent plastic roofing held aloft by scaffolding poles anchored in large concrete blocks. And despite the thundercloud gloom and Lucia’s evident impatience, the scale and splendour of the place brought Carmen to a halt.

  II

  All the different police forces squabbling over jurisdiction at least enabled Izzo to extricate himself. The murders were solved, after all, the perpetrator was dead, and his boss kept demanding he return to Herculaneum. So he passed on what he knew, then slipped away, only to find Cesco Rossi waiting. ‘You still here?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘You have all my shit,’ said Rossi.

  Traffic was atrocious, even for Naples. One hundred thousand people lived in Vesuvius’s Red Zone, and they all seemed to be on the road. His mobile kept ringing too: his boss, Valentina and then his taxi service. His heart skipped a beat. In all the mayhem, he’d pushed Mario and Isabella to the back of his mind. ‘What is it?’ he demanded, with uncharacteristic belligerence, fearing what was coming.

  ‘What do you mean, what is it?’ retorted the taxi man. ‘It’s chaos out there, you’ve no idea. No way I’m getting a car to your place before—’

  ‘Son of a whore! You gave me your word.’

  ‘Don’t put this on me. You knew last night this was going to happen.’

  ‘When, then? Be straight.’

  ‘I don’t know. Truly I don’t. Everything’s crazy. If there’s any way you can do it yourself… any way at all…’

  ‘Fine,’ scowled Izzo. ‘Thanks for nothing.’ He rang off and thumped the dashboard. ‘We’re taking a detour,’ he told Cesco. ‘Though what the hell I’ll do with them…’

  ‘Why not drive us all back out?’

  ‘My boss wants me doing door-to-doors.’

  ‘I’ve got a door. You can take me to it.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what he has in mind.’

  ‘That’s why you made detective. Initiative.’

  A blare of horns ahead. An overloaded roof rack had spilled luggage across the road. The backed-up traffic fought to squeeze by while the family darted out to retrieve it. His phone rang again. Andreas, Herculaneum’s media liaison. ‘That clip of yours,’ he said. ‘The mugger you wanted IDed.’

  ‘It’s okay. We got him.’

  ‘I know. You don’t understand. This guy who just rang in, he’s saying he spent last night with Alberts.’

  ‘With him, with him?’ asked Izzo.

  ‘With him, with him. A taxi driver called Idris. He took Alberts home from Herculaneum the other day. Says there was a spark but your man was too shy to do anything with it, so he gave him his card instead. Last night he used it, asked to be picked up at his apartment, taken to Ponticelli. He got there to find him waiting outside. Said he had bags upstairs he needed help with. Only when they got up there…’

  ‘What time was this? What time exactly?’

  ‘The call came in at eight forty-eight. It took him about half an hour to get there. He lives closer, he said, but he wanted to look nice.’

  ‘Landline or mobile?’

  ‘Mobile. So your man could have called him from Posillipo to give himself an alibi. But I thought you’d want to know anyway.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’ He ended the call, glanced at Cesco. ‘I’m not going mad, am I? The bastard did confess?’

  ‘Right before charging an armed policeman.’

  ‘Suicide by cop? He strike you as the type?’

  ‘How would I know? But a tormented gay man under extreme stress…’

  ‘An
d the honey? The glazing brush? The knife? How do you explain that?’ They reached a checkpoint. Izzo showed his badge and got waved through. The roads here were almost empty, but the sirens were a headache. They reached his apartment. The lot was empty. He pulled up by the front doors. ‘Wait here,’ he told Cesco. He hurried inside and up to his apartment. There was luggage everywhere. Suitcases, overnight bags, shopping bags, all piled on top of one another. No way would it all fit. ‘Which ones are Mario’s?’ he asked, as Isabella appeared, her hand on his son’s head. Her lips pursed but her eyes flickered to a small vinyl Disney satchel and a large brown holdall. Izzo slung them over his shoulder, then turned back to her. ‘Any two,’ he said.

  ‘You expect me to move my whole life to the other side—’

  ‘Fine. I’ll do it.’ He studied them a moment, chin in hand.

  She gave him a resentful glower. ‘The red one,’ she said. ‘And the brown.’ The two largest and heaviest, of course. They banged painfully against his knees as he led the way back down. Cesco opened the boot to help him pack, but there wasn’t room for it all, so Cesco kept the brown holdall to put on his lap when they climbed back in. He turned to Mario with a cheerful smile. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ he asked.

  ‘Mario.’

  ‘Good to meet you, Mario. I’m Cesco. Your dad’s just arrested me.’

  ‘He’s joking,’ said Izzo, throwing Cesco a dark look. ‘He’s a friend, that’s all.’

  The station was no distance. He pulled in alongside Valentina’s Renault. There was no one at the front desk. He keyed in the passcode, put Isabella and Mario in the waiting room, and hurried with Cesco up to Serious Crimes. Valentina was at her desk, headphones on against the sirens. She took them off when she saw the two of them, raised an eyebrow at the chaos.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Izzo.

  ‘These wretched videos. They’re taking for ever to upload.’

  There was a stack of printouts in the tray, each one a woman lying drugged on Santoro’s bed. ‘Jesus,’ muttered Izzo, flipping through.

  Cesco found his belongings in a pair of blue plastic tubs. He glanced at Izzo for permission. Izzo nodded. Cesco pocketed his wallet and keys, checked messages on his phone. ‘Bloody Carmen,’ he grunted. ‘She and Lucia have gone to the Villa.’

  ‘They’ve what?’

  ‘I know, right? And you think I’m…’ He broke off with a startled frown. Izzo followed his gaze to a second blue tub, containing a pair of tripods and three cameras. ‘Where did you get this?’ demanded Cesco, picking up a Canon EOS.

  ‘It’s Santoro’s,’ Valentina told him. ‘From his safe.’

  ‘The others, maybe. Not this. This is Raff’s.’

  Izzo stared at him. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I worked two months with him,’ said Cesco. ‘You think I wouldn’t recognise his camera? See this scratch. I knocked it off a table. He cursed me for a week. He loved this thing. It was his workhorse. He took it everywhere. No way on earth he’d have let anyone else have it, not even Santoro.’ He spread his hands and asked the question all three of them were thinking: ‘So what the hell was it doing in his safe?’

  III

  A palatial Colonnaded portico stretched away from Carmen on both sides, even though this had merely been the top floor of at least four storeys reaching all the way down to the ancient shoreline. Broken walls of bright frescoes marked out the ancient rooms, as did lines of marble columns and floor mosaics. But Lucia allowed Carmen little time to drink it in. ‘This way,’ she said impatiently, striding off towards a low wooden cabin.

  The squall had left them both wet through. Their shoes squelched rudely on the uneven stone floor. The cabin was unlocked. Lucia turned on its lights. It was part office, with a pine table and some chairs. But mostly it was a storeroom, with picks, spades, barrows, sieves and other archaeological equipment leaning against the left-hand wall; metal lockers against the right; and overalls and hard helmets hanging from pegs between, above large plastic tubs of gloves, goggles, masks, torches and bottled water. They exchanged their wet clothes for dry overalls and boots, put on safety helmets, filled a small waterproof backpack each with torches and other supplies. Lucia handed Carmen a rock hammer then took a crowbar for herself. They went back out. Rain drummed on the corrugated roof. Carmen’s socks were still wet. They made her toes clench. A tunnel buttressed by scaffolding led inside the hill. They’d barely passed through it when another tremor struck. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself and looked up at the stone ceiling, thirty metres of petrified lava between them and the Town Hall. How vast and weighty it looked suddenly. How vast, weighty and riven with dark cracks, needing only one good jolt to set it tumbling, crushing them or trapping them inside.

  The tremor passed. Lucia went to the wall and flipped a switch. A string of lights came on with wiring that buzzed like an angry hive. She turned them off again and tried another switch. A new string came on, illuminating a flight of steps up to a wooden walkway that led deeper into the hillside, covered by a film of dust that proclaimed them the first people down here in a while. Lucia set off along it, walking so quickly that Carmen could only cast longing looks at the mosaics they passed of gorgons and Furies, naiads and nymphs. The storm fell silent behind them. The air grew less clammy, though faintly sulphurous. A hummock of debris waited to be sieved and processed. A stone staircase led down to a very different kind of passage, a mineshaft hewn through the grey volcanic material that had flooded this place nearly two thousand years before. The stone was damp and there were tidemarks low down, suggesting they were almost at the water table. They reached an ancient wall finished with the crushed tile and mortar called cocciopesto. They turned left and followed it for a dozen more paces until Lucia came to a stop. Carmen moved alongside her. A massive slab of rock had fallen across the passage ahead, exactly like the drawbridge Lucia had described, with the space beneath it filled with debris.

  ‘That was what you were running from?’ asked Carmen in amazement. ‘You were running from that?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have done?’ replied Lucia drily. She took off her pack, unzipped it to take out the gloves, goggles and breathing mask. Then she set to work.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I

  The Canon’s screen was too small for them all to see, so Cesco ejected the memory card and plugged it into Messana’s computer. The most recent set of files dated from the night before Raff’s murder. Cesco opened the first of them. It showed the awning of Miranda Harcourt’s boutique hotel just off the Lungomare. Harcourt herself appeared in the second, alongside a formidably built and stylishly-dressed forty-something man with short-cropped grizzled hair, an open-collared white shirt, a suit of expensively baggy pale-blue silk, shiny black leather loafers and mirror shades.

  ‘Know them?’ asked Izzo at his shoulder.

  ‘Her, yes. Miranda Harcourt. Him, I can’t quite place.’ The third picture showed the two of them ambling by the pavement cafe where Raff had taken his beer. Now Cesco recognised the man: Harcourt’s driver Vernon, present in so many of her photographs, rendered anonymous by his chauffeur’s uniform. Yet the way they joked and jostled was at odds with his prior deference. Less employer and employee than friends or maybe even lovers. They strolled to a chic waterfront restaurant, ate dinner at a terrace table. Harcourt settled up while Vernon fetched their rental BMW cabriolet, allowing Raff time to reach his own Lamborghini, whose tinted windscreen and yellow bonnet appeared in the next few shots as he tailed them out of Naples to Posillipo, then up a familiar potholed lane before vanishing straight into Taddeo Santoro’s villa.

  ‘The gates were already open,’ murmured Messana.

  Cesco nodded. ‘They were expected.’

  That was the last photograph. But there was one more file. A video clip. Heart heavy with foreboding, Cesco set it playing.

  II

  The drawbridge slab was far too heavy for Lucia and Carmen to shift. Fortunately, there was no
need. The way it had fallen across the passage had left it completely wedged, so that they only had to clear a channel beneath it. As for the rubble, it looked daunting but was actually made of compacted pumice and ash, lighter and more amenable than Carmen had expected. Yet the hammer and the crowbar both got good use, while the dust forced them into regular retreat despite their masks and goggles. Nevertheless, they made steady progress, clearing a pipe against the wall deep enough that they had to start taking it in shifts. Carmen clawed out more debris, then lit up the newly-created space. And yes, there was the hole Lucia had glimpsed, right at the base of the wall. She wriggled forwards and reached her torch through it, twisting her wrist this way and that, her cheek pressed to the rough stone floor as she craned to—

  Shock made her fumble and drop her torch. It landed with a splash on the far side even as she scrambled backward, her pulse pounding.

  ‘What the hell?’ asked Lucia. ‘Did you see a ghost?’

  Carmen took a deep breath and even managed a smile. ‘Kind of,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘I know. But still. A woman. Reaching out to me.’ She gave her heart another moment, then wormed her way back in. It was easier to see this time, without her hand in the way, for her torch had landed in water on the other side and was bobbing up and down, throwing out rings of eerie yellow light. And yes, there was indeed a woman a little way below her, reaching out in desperation as she was swept off by a warrior on horseback. Except it wasn’t Carmen she was reaching out to, of course, but rather her family and friends. A Sabine, perhaps, being stolen from her home to make a wife for Romulus and his first Romans. Her face, hair and robe were painted in the Graeco-Roman manner, as were the head and shoulders of her abductor too. But everything from her chest on down was bare white marble, washed of pigments by the groundwater that reached up to the horse’s forequarters, as though it were fording a river.