by Jon Mackley
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. She scoured the carving for some suggestion that this was the object they were looking for. She wondered if she should be looking at the seventh station, because they had seen a seven-sided star in Holywell, perhaps the ninth station as that was the next odd number, or even the eleventh station which was the next prime number. She didn’t know.
Her body ached with dejection. She realised she wouldn’t be able to walk out with the face of triumph she had hoped to give to Will. Instead, she conceded she needed his help once more, and he would probably be reluctant to return to the church until the following day.
She gazed at the statue of a woman warrior at the fifth station. Her plate armour shone with silver and gold, and the tunic over the armour was the colour of polished ivory, embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis. Lara smiled inwardly when she saw the tunic had fallen forward to reveal a steel plated thigh – even in the Middle Ages the artists couldn’t resist a little eroticism. She wondered if the sword by her side was simply to make it clear that she was a warrior of God.
Her face shone with the radiance of an angel, but her hands were folded over her heart and her eyes had the concentration of a prayer. She carried a long spear in her hand, with a flag attached at the top. The point of the spear pointed up to the fifth station. She smiled as she realised she was looking at Joan of Arc. She wondered if this was the message the poet was telling her: they should travel to Rouen and visit the place where the English had burned Joan. However, she knew enough history to remember that Joan of Arc was around half a century after the poet would have written Gawain.
She remembered the gargoyle in Holywell and followed the line of vision that Joan had been staring at for the last centuries. There was an ornate tapestry against the wall showing the church in times gone by, surrounded by heraldic symbols. It was relatively new, however, and would contain no clues as to the next place that the poet had visited.
She examined the characters on the flag. Most of them were unreadable, obscured by the folds in the long banner, but she was able to make out three characters. Her heart beat excitedly. G=W, like the initials that young lovers carved into trees.
‘Can’t be right,’ she said with a shrug. Will had told her that the French hadn’t used the letter W: ‘War’ became ‘Guerre’; ‘William’ became ‘Guillaume’. It didn’t make sense.
She turned back to the aisle. Her breath caught in her throat. In her excitement, she’d not heard the door opening, or the footfalls in the church. Silhouetted by the light of the door she saw half a dozen men waiting for her, all of them wearing trench coats.
11
Panicking, Lara searched for a means of escape, but the men in the trench coats surrounded her. Her vision started to blacken with fear. Her coat clung to her back. The man closest to her was the man with the round glasses she’d seen from the train in Stamford.
The men in the trench coats took a step closer.
Visitors to the church were startled by the sight of the men. The woman who had been meditating on the candles moved towards the exit, but one of the men stopped her.
‘S’il vous plaît, Madame, restez tranquille,’ he spoke in a calm voice. ‘Ça ne durera pas longtemps.’
The woman took a tentative step away, then fled to one of the shadowy chapels.
The man moved towards Lara. He smelled sour. His expression was unreadable. ‘Mrs Greaves,’ he said. His tone was flat. Lara gave no answer. ‘We need you to return what was stolen from us.’
‘I don’t have it,’ Lara said and winced. She had wanted to say ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Her heart was racing, her chest felt constricted.
‘Then who does?’ the man said.
Lara did not answer. If they had caught Will outside then they would have searched him, found the manuscript and disposed of him. It meant he was still free. She wished she could have told him of the last clue she had spotted. She might not have been able to work it out, but he would have a chance.
If he was still free.
The man moved closer to her. He towered a foot above her. Now she smelled his breath – the bitter scent of a spray. She saw pockmarks in the skin across his cheeks. She even saw a slight squint in his right eye, making the piercing blue more menacing.
‘So, Lara Greaves,’ he said. ‘Lara Greaves from Stamford. Left from home a few days ago, changes to her maiden name. Seen in Chester, seen in Holywell, seen in Crewe, seen in Marseilles and finally in Avignon. Why would you be in all those places?’
‘Sightseeing,’ Lara said acerbically. She found a mask of false courage, but he broke it simply by narrowing his eyes. She felt like she was being crushed. Her legs were almost unable to bear her weight.
Like a striking snake, his calloused hand snapped out and grabbed her jaw, squeezing her cheeks together. His fingernails dug into her skin. She tried to pull away, but she was stopped by the man standing behind her. She tried to turn her head, but the fingers dug in deeper. ‘Where is Will Stevens?’ he snapped. ‘Where’s the manuscript?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Lara said coldly.
His eyes drilled into hers. His face twisted. She looked away, looked at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but at him. His fingers squeezed harder. He brought her face close to his. ‘I only give one chance,’ he hissed. ‘You could have answered and we’d have let you on your way.’ With a sudden burst of energy, Lara snapped her head free from his grip. The two men flanking her grabbed her arms. Her jaw and cheeks stung. Involuntary tears welled in her eyes, but she resisted rubbing her face. That would have given him satisfaction. She stared down at the flagstones again.
‘You wouldn’t have let me go anyway,’ she gasped. Again, she found hidden reserves of false courage. ‘So you may as well dispense with false hope and clichéd threats.’
He didn’t speak. His silence was an unbearable pressure on her shoulders. She glared up at him.
His lips cracked into a well-practiced, cruel smile.
The woman who had tried to leave returned. A priest followed her. The woman pointed at the men and spoke hysterically in rapid French. The priest glowered at the man. ‘Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, vous êtes dans la maison du Seigneur.’
The man gave a placating smile. ‘Oui. Et nous allons maintenant.’ He turned to Lara. ‘They want us to leave. Let’s not do this the hard way. Not in church.’
The man standing behind her put a restraining hand on her shoulder. The two others stayed at her side. The one in front turned and walked out of the church. The grip on her shoulder became tighter. Lara gasped. She stumbled forward. She glanced at the priest with desperate eyes. He shook his head sadly.
The skies had darkened. The clouds were heavy with impending snow. Cold scratched her face. Her eyes took moments to adjust to the change in the light: the buildings and streets were covered with an obscuring purple smear. Her eyes flicked desperately, hoping to see Will. If she saw he was safe, she thought everything would be all right.
But Will would have made himself invisible. Her heart sank as she was forced forward. Whatever feelings he might have for her, following the trail was most important. Letting her fall would mean he could buy himself extra days of freedom.
She only remembered fleeting moments of her abduction. She was marched through the narrow streets. If anyone saw her plight, no one came to her aid. She was bundled into the back of a van. A couple of blankets lay screwed up on the floor. Shivering, she pulled one around her and sat on the other.
The engine started. She tried to wedge herself in a corner to avoid being hurled around like a rag doll.
The van soon stopped writhing through the streets: the engine raced as they picked up speed, no doubt on the autoroute. She tried to make herself comfortable. She knew it would take an hour if they were taking her to Marseilles. She wondered if she would be able to explain to airport security that she was being taken by force. It probably wouldn’t do any good. The men w
ould have concocted a story for her extradition.
Time ceased to have any meaning. She wanted to sleep, but her mind was racing. Was Will all right? Her thoughts galloped to what she had seen in the Église Saint-Pierre: would Will go back, now their pursuers had their prey; or would he leave the church alone, fearing that lightning could strike twice.
Her thoughts flew to the statue of Joan of Arc. She was an anachronism as far as the poet was concerned: a fifteenth-century warrior against the English. And what of the secret she had carried for half a millennium.
But what if the poet was essential to the establishing of the church? she wondered. Even if he’d died before the completion, those constructing it would have completed things. The poet wouldn’t have allowed the trail to reach a dead end, even though he was in his grave.
This posed another problem. Her understanding of the clues relied on two icons. Any Catholic Church showed the Stations of the Cross, and she was assuming the fifth station was tied in with the Seal of Solomon because of their understanding of the message in Solomon’s scroll. What statues had been beneath the other stations, did they also have statues of warrior maidens with a banner? What would she have found then? Perhaps G=L, or even G=G?
Now her mind hurtled back to the barge: Will had already told her the French language had transposed letters. If this was the clue they had been looking for, it seemed the poet had wanted them to see what was, once again, blindingly obvious. All they needed to do was find out what it meant to find out the next location.
Her heart fell. There was no “they” any more. She was out of the game. And Will didn’t know what she knew.
She listened to the roar of the engine; speeding to an unknown destination. She felt the van urgently weaving through traffic. She wondered if her captors believed she knew more than she actually did. Clearly, they had found her through surveillance rather than working out the clues from Solomon’s Scroll.
The engine died. She heard a door slamming, but no one came to open the van doors. She heard muffled voices talking outside. Then the van started again, but she could no longer hear the sound of tyres hissing against tarmac. She jerked forward: the van was driving up a steep incline.
Then her ears were filled with the sound of roaring engines. Deafening engines. She felt movement. The intensity pushed her back against the van doors. She wanted to place the blanket behind her, but she found the pressure too much even to move. The vehicle lurched once and then she felt her heart leap into her stomach.
My God, she thought. We’re flying, flying back to England … or somewhere else.
The plane levelled out after a while. Her heart was palpitating; she clung to the blanket with perspiring hands. Rational thought gave way to panic. What if they planned to open the cargo doors and drop the van outside?
She latched on to two thoughts: no department, covert or otherwise, had the budget to drop a van out of an aeroplane. More rationally, however, she knew the men needed to interrogate her, find out what she knew about the manuscript, the clues and Will.
Will, she thought. She wondered if he was safely on his way to the next clue, having found the statue and worked out the relevance of “G=W”, or perhaps Will had worked out that there was a different lapis in the middle of a stella. Or perhaps he didn’t realise she’d been abducted and he had gone back to the church to find her. What would he think if he saw she wasn’t there? Would he be waiting for her in the hotel room? Would he be waiting with the same intentions as the previous evening …?
Will, she thought again. She wondered why her captors had been in such a hurry to take her away from there. Why had they not left her in a stronghold and forced her to reveal where they had been staying?
She felt another change in the pressure. She didn’t know how long they’d been flying. Time had concertinaed. Sometimes she felt she’d been in the van for hours, other times she felt it had been a matter of minutes. The aeroplane banked to the left. She heard the engines powering down. She blocked her ears, trying to control the effects of the drop in altitude. She tried to swallow, to stop the sensation of her blocked ears. She felt her stomach falling; her heart remained in her throat. Then there was a bump, which threw her off balance, another bump and the racing of reversing engines, and then the aircraft taxied to a halt.
She had no idea where she might be. Perhaps she had been dropped in some surreal detention centre, like the Village in The Prisoner.
The van’s engine started. Someone was shouting orders outside. Lara was tipped backwards as they reversed down the cargo hatch. Then she was jostled as they crossed uneven, perhaps rocky terrain. Then she was forced forward: the van was going downhill.
The sounds of the engine changed to an echo. It was less intense; the van drove slowly before coming to a halt. The sound of the doors reverberated as they slammed.
The rear doors opened. Lara wanted to inhale fresh air, but she found the air was fetid, like breathing in a mausoleum. A blinding torch pierced the back of the van. Lara shielded her eyes with her arm. She tried to see the world beyond the spectral, shadowy figures. It was impossible to make anything out, but the world was black, unnaturally black. Her instinct was to run. A hand restrained her before she had even started to move. She guessed it would be futile to try.
The lights darted, scratching negative images in her eyes. She couldn’t focus.
Then someone squeezed into the van beside her. Her coat was pulled away and her sleeve rolled up. A tourniquet was wrapped around her arm. Her fingers started to tingle. She struggled, trying to free herself from the grip, but the man held her firmly. A quiet, but firm, voice sounded in her ear. ‘This is a sedative. You’ll be fine if you relax.’
Lara tried to be calm. She had never liked needles, but she didn’t fight against whoever was injecting her. She did not trust the voice, but at the same time, she had a terrible vision of the needle breaking in her vein if she fought against it.
‘Where am I?’ she asked, but her voice sounded groggy and distant, as though a drunk was trying to speak to her from ten metres away.
If her captors had heard her, they didn’t answer her question. Grips tightened on her arms, but her arms felt numb and the grips seemed remote. Suddenly she was looking into her lap. No matter how much she tried to straighten her neck, the muscles wouldn’t respond. She tried to speak again. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth; her lips felt rubbery. Whatever she said didn’t make sense. Her shoulders couldn’t take the weight of her head any more. She felt herself plunging into a black abyss.
*
She was aware of the thumping headache before she was awake. It was the kind of headache that followed a late night of excessive drinking, the kind that stabbed at the back of her eyes; the kind where she daren’t open her eyes because she knew the room would still be spinning.
Eventually the brilliance of the light prised her eyes open. She clung to the side of the bed, trying to steady the swirling motion of the room. She was disorientated; she thought she was in hospital, but couldn’t remember getting here. The whole room was arid of life and smelled of disinfectant. The windowless door was shut tight. The odour of the decontaminated sheets clawed at her throat. She stared up at the long beams of strip lighting and wondered if there was some way to turn them off. Even if there was, she doubted if she had the strength in her legs to get up to do it.
Like a dim memory from an unhappy childhood, Lara was able to claw through the darkness of the past and to recall she’d been in Avignon, at the Église Saint-Pierre. After that, everything had become a hazy blur. She wondered what the time was, what the date was, but her jewellery had been removed. There was a pale band of skin where her wedding ring had been once, but she couldn’t remember if she’d removed it before she had left Stamford, or whether … she remembered the men in the trench coats … they might have taken it. Either way, there was no remorse that it had gone.
She looked down at the starched blanket. She was wearing a bland hospital gown.
She glanced around the small, sterile room. There were no decorations or hangings.
She strained to hear sounds around her, but her only answer was the faint buzzing of mild tinnitus. No footfalls outside the door, no sound of rain lashing outside, no hum of vehicles on distant roads, no phones ringing or emergency buzzers.
She rolled over and closed her eyes again, trying to calm her headache. Her head was filled with the purple explosions of an oncoming migraine. Nausea clutched her stomach. She needed to sleep, but the disorientation, the headache and the insipid room were not conducive to rest.
Lara had never felt suicidal before. She was terrified by the unknown, but in the past she’d believed there was some doorway in her future that could be opened, some way to escape her troubles – even if that escape led her into the arms of someone like Michael.
But on the wrong side of a closed door, not knowing who was on the other side, she found her choices were limited. She was out of control in this situation. She looked down at the hospital gown again and flushed at the thought of the violation. A blanket of misery covered her.
Her spinning head had lessened. If there were no decorations, it was because there was no intention of making it comfortable. This wasn’t a place of convalescence. More like a research centre. It had an aura of death. Lara grimaced, wondering how many times the very sheets upon which she was lying had been used to cover the face of the dead.
