Once in the grand, palazzo hall, other sounds mingled with it. Trish’s laughter, the subtle, seductive sound of her voice, the clink of their celebratory glasses on New Year’s Eve, the passion of her lovemaking. It would be a long time, he knew, before the ghosts were exorcised; perhaps not until he finally handed this grand mansion over to whichever charity needed it most.
His heels clicking on tiles, he crossed the floor and entered the study, flicking on the light against an afternoon gloom which threatened rain. On the desk lay Zepelli’s manuscript, the page he had been reading before he had left for the funeral, still uppermost on the pile.
Taking his chair, he stared down at the sheet, covered in Zepelli’s neat and flowing handwriting. Millie’s words came back to him.
If he’s picking out italics with underlines, what’s he going to do with those he’s double underlined?
The evil that was Gerald Burke had sought The Deep Secret for most of his life, and for the last thirty years, ever since the death of his father, it had been there, right under his nose. Like the proverbial tree hidden in a forest, it remained invisible. Croft wondered whether he would have realised it if Millie hadn’t mentioned that some of the words were double underlined.
Julius had told Zepelli that The Deep Secret had to live on, and Zepelli had arranged matters so that it could, and he had contrived to do so without passing that secret to his dangerous son or Julius’s equally menacing offspring.
And in the week since they had returned to Scarbeck, he had checked the manuscript over and over again. It amounted to just twenty words. They were in random order, and only fourteen were double underlined, but once he had those, it had not taken long to arrange them into a sensible sentence.
The Deep Secret depends upon the pressure of a confident, sudden touch and a penetrating stare to produce instant somnambulism.
Was it the truth? Julius Reiniger had used drugs, cough mixture and chloral hydrate, to swiftly subdue the prisoners he interrogated, and although he had not specifically said so, Zepelli had hinted that Julius pulled the same trick with the Penarth woman they had robbed and raped. Croft had always believed that Franz Walter used drugs too.
And yet…
One percent of the population. That was the estimate Walter, Reiniger and Zepelli had placed on the numbers susceptible to The Deep Secret. In a town like Scarbeck, that would mean about 1,300 individuals. The police would be satisfied that the code had been broken with the solution to the word search, especially after finding what was probably Reiniger’s body in Bristol, so they would never look at their copies of the manuscript again. He had no idea whether anyone would ever dig out the secret files on Folshingham Hall, which probably contained the only other reference to it, but even if they did, it would not be in Croft’s lifetime.
You did say you knew how to find it, and I assume you will be making the effort, won’t you?
He had not told Millie that he had already broken the code, that he already knew The Deep Secret. It was better that she did not know. Better that no one knew. When he went back to the university to pick up his research, he would test it. If it proved a fallacy, he would say so.
But if it proved to be a fact… what then?
He collected the manuscript together, slotted it into the folder, and locked them in the safe.
If it was true, if there really was a Deep Secret, it was far too powerful a weapon to be left in the hands of greedy and amoral men. He would become the guardian, and when he died, it would die with him.
THE END
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