Part 22 (1/2)

But perhaps it was so incredible that Doug didn't see the omissions. He listened in silence. When she was done, he had only one question.

'What was it for?'

Ellie stared at the ceiling. 'I don't know. I didn't dare open the box in public.'

Doug glanced to the corner, where her bag lay beside a heap of stripped-off clothes. 'Shall we?'

She found some old clothes left over from the summer and dressed, adding one of Doug's heavy sweaters. She liked the weight on her body, his scent around her.

They drew shut the curtains in the living room and knelt on the floor, like children at Christmas. Ellie opened the bag.

Was it all for this?

She could see Doug thinking the same thing. A cardboard box and a leather tube. Could they really be worth dying for? Rain rattled on the windows: a fearful instinct made them both glance towards it. She remembered something Blanchard had once said. Money is a fiction, a suspension of disbelief. Value is only what two parties can agree on at any given time.

Blanchard thought it was worth killing for. Her father had believed it was worth dying for. That was some sort of agreement.

Doug slit open the tape on the box with a kitchen knife. Ellie opened the lid. They both stared in.

London Destrier had had some bad days in his life, some very bad indeed, but this was up there. He'd been awake since 1 a.m. and he still hadn't found Ellie. The lack of sleep he could deal with: the lack of results was a problem. He'd already been to Paris and back that day. He'd waited at the Gare du Nord with his men, watching the pa.s.sengers drain off the train until it was empty. The phone signal said she was still aboard, so he'd picked up a discarded ticket and talked his way on, pretending to have left his bag behind. He'd found the phone in the luggage rack: the station staff couldn't understand why he'd be so furious to recover his lost property.

It had been a long trip back to London to face Blanchard and Saint-Lazare.

He cracked his knuckles and forced himself to be calm. He didn't blame himself: he'd never been troubled by guilt. If he felt anything, it was pure rage rage that these people had disrupted his carefully arranged life. He hated them for it, and the hatred spurred his desire for revenge. He'd find them and tear them apart, make them pay for what they done to him. Find Ellie, get the box back, everything would be fine.

But he had to do it quickly. It might not be his fault, but it was certainly his responsibility. And the men waiting in the war room on the fifth floor weren't known for their patience.

So where had she gone? Not back to Newport he had men watching. Nor to the Barbican apartment. He'd pulled it apart and found nothing, though he hadn't really thought she'd be that stupid. Did she have a fallback meeting with the opposition?

He ran through her recent e-mails and phone calls, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Numbers she hung up on before they answered, calls that lasted under a minute. There was nothing. He had to admit, she'd been clever.

He paused as he found a number that looked strange. An Oxford dialling code. He entered it onto her phone and got the name straight away. Doug.

Hadn't she dumped him?

He found the recording of the most recent call she'd made to Doug and listened. 'I love you.' The giveaway pause. 'I love you too.'

It wasn't much to go on, but he knew he was right. The feeling in his gut told him so. He took the lift to the bas.e.m.e.nt parking and slid into the Aston Martin. He pressed the accelerator: the engine's growl echoed around the garage.

His satnav said it would take ninety-seven minutes. He reckoned he could do it in under an hour.

Oxford Ellie squeezed her hands down the sides of the box and lifted out the contents. It was a cube, about a foot square. The surface was black, cold and hard like obsidian, smooth as gla.s.s. Ellie twisted it around on the carpet, looking for a hinge or a crack or a lid. All she saw was her own reflection skewed back at her. It was surprisingly heavy, though the weight wasn't evenly distributed inside. She could feel one side was definitely heavier, which she a.s.sumed was down.

'I've got a hammer,' Doug said.

Ellie didn't answer. She was remembering her first day at work, two slabs of black plastic left on her desk as if by some lost civilisation or alien intelligence. She rolled the box over to make it right-way up, then stroked her hand across the gleaming surface.

A red light shone up at them. It was the same as her phone: glowing numbers hovering in the darkness below the surface. Only instead of a keypad, it was a grid of letters, like a wordsearch.

'I don't suppose you know the pa.s.sword,' said Doug.

She shook her head.

'I've got a friend in the Maths department who does some work on cryptography. He might be able to tell us more.'

Ellie didn't bother to correct the a.s.sumption he'd made. She could see by the clock on the wall she'd already been here over an hour. The pressure-gauge inside her was redlining again.

She set the black box aside and pulled the lid off the leather tube. She reached in. A scrolled-up sheet of paper no, vellum supple to the touch. She pulled it out as gently as she could and laid it on Doug's coffee table.

For the first time since the jaws of the vault snapped shut, she felt a pulse of hope. Finally, something that might be worth something. It looked like a poem, eight lines written on the vellum in a bold, medieval hand that reminded her of Blanchard's handwriting.

'Is that ...?'

'Old French,' said Doug. She caught the shock in his voice and looked up.

'What? Does it say something useful, some kind of clue?'

He shook his head. 'I've seen it before.'

'The poem?'

'This exact piece of vellum.' He gazed into her eyes, as confused as she was. 'I held it in my hands, just like you are now.'

Ellie stared at him. 'That's impossible. I pulled it out of the vault this morning.'

Doug pointed to a place halfway down the page, where the text nimbly diverted around a small hole in the vellum.

'You know how you make parchment? You pull it tight on a frame, like a drumhead, then sc.r.a.pe it with a knife until it's paper thin. The edges of the knife are curved, but sometimes a corner catches the skin and nicks it. The tension in the frame means even a pinp.r.i.c.k gets stretched to something you could put your finger through.'

Ellie nodded. She knew.

'But vellum's expensive, especially in the twelfth century, so you don't throw out the whole sheet just because of a small hole. If you're the scribe, you work around it literally. That hole in the eighth line was there when the scribe wrote it, and it was there three months ago when I examined it myself.'

Ellie still didn't get it.

'You remember Mr Spencer and his Scottish castle?'

Did she? So much had happened since then.

'The old man in the wheelchair. The poem he wanted me to look at.' Doug stabbed his finger at the vellum sheet; his fingertip hovered a millimetre above the surface. 'This was it.'

Mr Spencer. The Spenser prize. She'd wondered about it at the time and dismissed it as coincidence.

The Spenser foundation. Legrande Holdings. Saint-Lazare Investments (UK).

She rolled up the vellum and slid it back in its tube. It made a hollow thud as it hit the end, a decisive sound. Doug didn't understand.

'Don't you want to know what it says?'

'We need to leave.'