Secrets from the Dark Horizon: A Reader's Companion Guide (The Dark Horizon Trilogy Book 0)

by Duncan Simpson

  As she hauled the bag off the counter and turned to place it in the numbered storage rack, Vinka’s gaze rose to the angled mirror on the wall behind the counter. Instinctively, his eyes were drawn to the reflection of the man in the scarlet plaid shirt. He appeared to be mouthing words to an invisible companion, but what he said was lost in the din of the dining room. Vinka’s brow narrowed. The man touched his ear and then did it again. Time slowed. In a moment of dreadful recognition, the man in the red shirt looked up and stared directly at Vinka’s reflection. His cover had been blown.

  Before Vinka’s line of vision snapped back to eye level, the cloakroom attendant had dropped the bag and reached for her service pistol hidden in the racking. She turned on her heels and came face to face with Vinka’s raised Glock 17 pointing directly at her temple. A dark shadow had fallen across his face.

  ‘Mistake, bitch,’ he whispered, as his finger tightened around the curve of the trigger.

  In the back of the surveillance van, Detective Milton bit down on his inhalator. The plastic tube flexed between his teeth and snapped.

  The steel-cored sniper round erupted from the rifle barrel. By the time the crack of the high-powered weapon sounded from the opposite side of the street, the projectile had already gained a velocity of 830 metres per second. It was designed to spin in flight. Set in motion by the four right-handed helical grooves tooled into the rifle’s barrel, the spin served to gyroscopically stabilise the projectile in the air. As a result, the bullet’s flight was only marginally degraded by its impact with the front window of the restaurant. The same was also true of its flight through Vinka’s head. The bullet entered through the back of his skull and punched a track through his brain, macerating all soft tissue in its wake. After exiting through his eye socket in a cloud of red mist and skull fragments, the bullet whistled past the shoulder of the cloakroom attendant before slamming into a marble pillar behind her.

  The back doors of the surveillance van swung open, and Milton’s huge frame suddenly appeared. Seconds later, he was running at full speed towards the restaurant. As he ran, he shouted into his handheld radio.

  ‘What the hell just happened? I need a situation update now.’

  Voices crackled back. Next came the call signs from the unmarked patrol cars parked at either end of Marshall Street.

  ‘Situation update!’ Milton’s voice reverberated down the earpiece of the female officer stationed at the cloakroom.

  Her back pinned against the wall, she tried to verbalise the scene at her feet. ‘Suspect … down. Suspect down. He pulled his weapon and …’ Her voice faltered, her throat clamped solid by the carnage at her feet.

  ‘Condition? The suspect’s condition?’ said Milton. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’

  ‘It won’t be needed,’ she said slowly. ‘Half his head is missing.’

  As she spoke, the policewoman became aware of something on her cheek.

  ‘Who discharged their weapon? Who took the shot?’ Milton’s voice was getting breathless.

  ‘No one in here. The shooter must have been outside.’ As she spoke, she stared down at her hand and the red grit she had just brushed from her face. She took a moment to realise what it was and began to cry.

  With his police badge raised high above his head, Milton burst through the front door of The Faversham and was quickly followed by four armed uniformed officers. A hundred terrified faces stared at Milton in complete silence. After nodding his orders, two of the policemen headed towards the swing doors at the back of the restaurant leading to the kitchen, and the others took positions in the centre of the dining hall. Half-walking, half-running, Milton ran over to the undercover cloakroom attendant.

  She stood there shaking, her wide eyes staring into empty space. Slowly, the detective unpeeled her fingers from the handle grip of her firearm and dropped the gun into his coat pocket. Then he lowered her trembling hands, waved over to the police officer wearing the red lumberjack shirt and directed him to look after her.

  At his feet was the body of a dead man whose face had been cloven in two by a spike of molten metal travelling at twice the speed of sound. The effects had been catastrophic.

  Milton’s eyes tracked over the body to the canvas bag lying on the floor. He walked over to it while snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. The bag was about the size of a laptop case; light green, almost military. He thought for a second and then pulled back the zip. For a long while, he stood there staring at the bag’s contents. It just didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

  The sound of screeching tyres from a police car arriving outside shook Milton from his thoughts. Mumbling to himself, he searched the inside pocket of his coat for his mobile phone and dialled a number. It only took two rings to get an answer.

  ‘Vincent, its Lukas. There’s been another shooting.’

  ‘Jesus, where?’

  The detective whispered into his handset. ‘Soho, in a packed bloody restaurant. Vincent, I’ll explain later. Now I need your help.’

  The detective picked up the canvas bag and placed it the counter. ‘I need you to tell me why people are being killed because of these bloody books.’

  Chapter 2

  Wednesday 10 December

  Vincent Blake waited patiently for DCI Milton to finish reading the final page of the forensics report. In that moment, two things separated the men: the first was an unremarkable office table, its well-worn exterior a testament to the years it had stood in Milton’s office; the second was certainty as to the provenance of the small leather-bound book sitting proudly on the table top.

  The policeman gave out a deep sigh, dropped the report nonchalantly onto the floor and leant back in his chair. It creaked back disapprovingly. Milton was an ox of a man who stood over six feet five inches tall. His skin was dark from his Caribbean ancestry, and his face wore a prominent scar from a knife attack during a drugs bust south of the river. He looked over to Blake, and the crack forming at the side of his mouth stayed around long enough to form a transitory grin.

  ‘Vincent, all this lab stuff means nothing to me. What can you tell me? Is it genuine?’ Blake leant forward and slid the volume carefully across the table to his old friend.

  In contrast to the detective’s imposing frame, Blake was a lean man. He was dressed smartly in an open white shirt, a pressed grey suit and a pair of gleaming black boots. He dragged his chair behind him and quickly positioned himself at Milton’s side, as if he were there to turn the sheets of music for a concert pianist.

  ‘This one’s a puzzle, it really is.’ Blake’s eyes were now locked onto the small, dark-tanned volume finished with gilt decorations. ‘The cover is good. I initially thought it might have been aged chemically, but you can usually smell if it’s been done that way.’ Blake leant over the book and gave the cover an exaggerated sniff. ‘There’s absolutely no trace of chemical tampering. It’s in fabulous condition.’

  He opened the antique book and continued. ‘I’ve done isotopic testing to confirm the age of the paper and the type of parchment glues used in the bindings, and they all check out.’

  He rotated the volume ninety degrees so that the policeman could get a clear view of the first page. It was blank apart from a signature in neat lettering in its top right-hand corner.

  Isaac Newton

  ‘The handwriting is consistent with the originals in the British Library. See the sweep in the tail of the letter I and the forward leaning letter S? These are all very characteristic.’

  Blake paused and again rearranged his chair position. ‘The answer to your question—whether the volume is a fake or not—is actually contained within the forensics report.’ A smile spread slowly across Blake’s face as he recovered the abandoned report from the floor. ‘I asked the forensics team to run a full spectroscopy analysis of the coloured inks used throughout the book.’ After quickly finding the appropriate place in the report, he read aloud the list of inks that most closely matched the atomic profiles revealed by th
e laboratory analysis. ‘Orpiment, yellow ochre, madder, azur d’Allemagne, vermillion, malachite green, ivory black, red ochre, vert azur—’

  ‘Okay, Vincent, enough, enough!’ the policeman protested. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is that all these colours were commonly available in London in Newton’s time, but getting hold of these colours today, blending them and artificially ageing them to produce these shades would be very difficult to do.’ A frown fleetingly passed over Blake’s brow. ‘Every part of my analysis indicates that it’s genuine.’ He paused. ‘The bigger mystery is what does it all mean?’

  Blake thumbed carefully through the yellowing pages and then let the volume fall open. For a long moment, the two men just stared at the revealed writing. Both sides were alike, as if the book’s spine were a mirror producing a reflection of itself. The entire surface area of each page was filled with handwritten numbers neatly tabulated into columns, with ten columns to a side. At certain points down the length of each column, a particular number was stained with a spot of translucent coloured paint. Finally, Blake broke the silence.

  ‘Every page of the notebook is the same. Newton wrote hundreds of notebooks during his lifetime, but not like this one.’

  Milton gave a quiet grunt and nodded.

  ‘They could be tables of results from his experiments, but the numbers and colours appear to follow no discernible pattern. More likely that it’s code.’

  ‘Code?’ said the detective.

  ‘Code to protect his research from prying eyes,’ said Blake. ‘Lots of the old scientists did it, and some modern ones still do. It’s all about being the first to go public with a discovery. Until you go public, you protect what you’ve discovered. Reputations depend on it.’

  ‘So you’ve got no idea what it means?’ asked Milton.

  ‘No idea at all.’ Blake shrugged and gave out a long sigh. ‘Leave it with me and I’ll see what I can come up with.’

  Milton checked the date on his watch. ‘Two weeks. You’ve got two weeks and then it will need to be returned to its owner,’ said Milton.

  Blake nodded.

  The policeman retrieved a sheet of folded paper from his jacket pocket, along with a shiny silver foil bag, and smoothed both out on the table top. Milton picked up his pen and signed the bottom of the Evidence Appropriation Form with a casual squiggle before sliding it and the silver evidence bag over to Blake. The detective waited until Blake had signed before continuing.

  ‘Two weeks, no longer,’ said Milton.

  ‘Right you are. What about the courier who was shot? You get an ID on him?’

  ‘There wasn’t much left of his face, but his fingerprints came up with a match. Hold on.’ Blake waited as Milton retrieved his briefcase from underneath the table with his feet. He picked it up, laid it flat next to the book and flipped open the locks. From inside he located a photograph and handed it to Blake.

  ‘Tarek Vinka. A grade-one hard bastard. Bosnian, ex-army, turned mercenary. Interpol has been after his hide for years.’

  Blake stared at the police mug shot of a man standing against a background of horizontal lines indicating the man’s height. He looked like a bare-knuckle boxer.

  ‘He’s been linked to a number of armed robberies in France and Luxembourg, and a kidnapping in Milan. I don’t think he’s going to be missed anytime soon.’ The detective gave a half-smile that died fast. ‘So we have another robbery.’ Milton started rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘And a Bosnian mercenary gunned down in a busy restaurant. The only clue we have is this bloody book.’

  Simultaneously, the two men gazed back at the book.

  ‘There is one thing,’ said Blake. ‘The last page is different.’

  Before the policeman had time to ask why, Blake was busy locating the page.

  ‘There,’ said Blake.

  ‘And what the hell is that?’

  The page staring back at the two men couldn’t have been more unlike the previous ones. Instead of having columns of numbers, the page was given over to a drawing, expertly executed in black ink. The design was circular, and its circumference almost touched the edges of the page. It was divided into twelve equal quadrants, like the spokes of a wheel. Where the end of each spoke intersected the circle’s perimeter, the same small peculiar motif had been copied.

  ‘They look like bees,’ said Milton, his eyes scanning around the face of the illustration.

  ‘I thought that too. Bees,’ agreed Blake.

  ‘And this?’ The detective pointed at the word written at the centre of the circle.

  ‘Clavis? It’s Latin,’ said Blake. ‘It means “the key”.’

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  PART 1:

  THE LOCATION FILES

  The London Location Files

  The London Location Files

  Detailed below are the scene locations featured in the Dark Horizon Trilogy. They are real places, with real secrets. Each location has a story to tell, and together they make a fascinating mosaic of one of the greatest cities on earth.

  Location 1: Boodle's Club

  Location 2: The London Library

  Location 3: Freemasons’ Hall — Great Queen Street

  Location 4: Hunterian Museum

  Location 5: St Clement Danes

  Location 6: Fountain Court

  Location 7: Gresham College

  Location 8: Temple Church, London

  Location 9: Ye Olde Mitre Tavern

  Location 10: The Temple Bar Memorial

  Location 11: Jerusalem Tavern

  Location 12: The Site of the old Priory of St John’s, Clerkenwell

  Location 13: St Paul’s Cathedral

  Location 14: Canonbury Tower

  Location 15: The Roman Amphitheatre at the Guildhall

  Location 16: Crossbones Graveyard

  Location 17: The London Stone

  Location 18: St Mary Woolnoth

  Location 19: Circus Space

  Location 20: The Monument to the Great Fire of London

  Location 21: St Helen’s Bishopsgate

  Location 22: The Masonic Temple at the Andaz Hotel

  Location 23: The Site of St John Horsleydown

  Location 24: London Wall

  Location 25: The Minories

  Location 26: Christchurch, Spitalfields

  Location 27: St George-in-the-East

  Location 28: St Dunstan and All Saints Stepney

  Location 1: Boodle’s Club

  M’s club

  (First introduced in The Devil's Architect)

  Address: 28 St James's Street, London, SW1A 1HJ

  Underground: Green Park (Jubilee, Victoria, Piccadilly Lines)

  Website: www.boodles.org

  Boodle's is a private members' gentlemen’s club founded in 1762 by the Earl of Shelburne, who later went on to become Prime Minister. The club was named after its austere head waiter, Edward Boodle. It occupies a special place in the pantheon of British gentlemen’s clubs, and many of the most established are still in the third of a square mile known as St James’s. The area boasts a network of hidden passages, alleyways and courts to explore.

  Boodle’s is the second oldest club in the world, with the neighbouring White's gentleman’s club being the oldest. Boodle’s distinctive white plasterwork exterior is dominated by a striking Venetian window. The club is one of the most prestigious in London, with admittance strictly governed through a nomination system by existing members. The story goes that the club used to boil its coins before before passing them on so as not to dirty members’ hands.

  Notable members have included:

  David Hume (1711–1776)

  Adam Smith (1723–1790)

  William Petty-FitzMaurice, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, KG, PC (1737–1805)

  George ‘Beau’ Bryan Brummell (1778–1840)

  William Wilberforce (1759–1833)


  Sir Winston Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (1874–1965)

  Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908–1964)

  James David Graham Niven (1910–1983)

  Brigadier John ‘Jack’ Profumo, 5th Baron Profumo, CBE (1915–2006)

  Four members of Boodle’s have been awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Secret Fact

  Ian Fleming is said to have used Boodle’s as the inspiration for the Blades Club in his James Bond novels. The character M was a member of Blades, which was referenced in the novels Moonraker and You Only Live Twice.

  Location 2: The London Library

  A shockingly good read

  (First introduced in The Infinite Fire)

  Address: 14 St James's Square, London, SW1Y 4LG

  Underground: Green Park (Jubilee, Picadilly & Victoria Lines) or Piccadilly Circus (Picadilly & Bakerloo Lines)

  Website: www.londonlibrary.co.uk

  The London Library is the world’s largest independent lending library and one of the city’s hidden gems. Situated in upmarket St James’s Square, the library’s collection now contains over a million books stored on 15 miles of shelving.

  The library was founded in 1841 by the writer and historian Thomas Carlyle. Desperate to find a quiet place for study and frustrated by the convoluted processes for accessing books at the British Library, Carlyle had a vision to create a comprehensive lending library where subscribers could enjoy books in the comfort of their own homes, and this became the driving force for the library’s inception.