As the sun rose above the Sierra Nevada, Kreuz suddenly had a blinding revelation of what had happened to the treasure of Châlus. His excitement was such that he could hardly breathe. His pulse was racing and his vision kept clouding over. He ran to one of the narrow windows and stood by it, gulping in lungfuls of the cold morning air until he felt calmer.
Without flattering himself, he knew that only he could have unravelled such a mystery eight centuries after the event. He had solved an enigma that had baffled scholars and treasure hunters alike for eight hundred years: who had re-hidden the hoard of gold that had cost the life of Richard the Lionheart? The prime suspect had always been his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. After eight centuries, Kreuz had discovered her motive! He felt weak with excitement, seeing the whole picture so clearly. He knew everything except where she had re-hidden the treasure. And when he knew the answer to that, knowledge would be in his grasp that men had sought since the dawn of time.
Kreuz sat down with the two parchments in his hands, frustrated that he was so close and yet still so far from the end of the trail. He had no idea that it was going to be ten long years before he uncovered the next clue, brought to him by Jay Francis as a result of her nightmare experience at the recital in Canterbury Cathedral.
Part II
Chapter 1
Half-asleep, Jay tried to piece together what had happened in the Chapter House the previous evening. All she could recall was walking onto the platform – and then her memory was blank until she was sitting backstage with Carl comforting her. Fragments of memories seemed to fit in between: the face of the cameraman below her, looking up … the conductor’s arm frozen in mid beat … the orchestral flautist’s look of alarm. And there were other memories as well: of violence and anger, noises, shouting. These did not make sense because they could not have happened during a concert, so where had they come from?
Jay wondered what was in the injection her father had given her, and drifted off to sleep again.
In the dream, she was angry. No, she was furious with a man who had been a friend and then betrayed her, turning against his protectors not on any point of principle but from arrogance and greed. ‘If Henry were here …’ someone had cried.
Was it her own voice?
‘If Henry were here, he would kill you with his bare hands.’
The dream faded into her mother’s voice and a hand shaking Jay gently into consciousness. She opened her eyes and saw the familiar wallpaper of her childhood bedroom. She felt the clean sheets and the crisply-laundered pillow case against her cheek. From the light coming through the Laura Ashley curtains, she guessed that it was about mid-morning. Outside there was the familiar cry of seagulls and a north- easter was hurling intermittent curtains of hail against the window-panes.
Her mother smiled. ‘You were so deeply asleep, but Daddy said to wake you.’
Jay pulled herself up in the bed, took the large cup of sweetened tea and grimaced at the taste.
‘You’re to drink it all.’ Her mother drew the curtains. ‘You were muttering about a bucket. Whatever was that all about, I wonder?’
Not bucket, Jay thought. It was Becket! ‘Damn Becket!’ Those had been the words cut off by the slamming of the door. She sat up in the bed and grasped at the cosy, boring familiarity of the scene in the bedroom: her in bed, her mother spoiling her with a cup of tea, always too sweet. ‘I’m feeling fine now,’ she said.
Her mother did not sit down to chat. She sniffed the air and departed with: ‘I can smell something burning in the kitchen. Daddy’s back from his morning calls. He said, if you want to chat with him, how about a pre-lunch sherry in the drawing room?’
‘I’ll be down,’ said Jay.
Typical mother’s understatement, she thought. Do I want to chat with him? After what happened last night, there are a million questions I want to ask him.
She shuddered at the memories but saw with relief that her hands held the cup and saucer without trembling. She put them down and held both hands horizontal, fingers outstretched. They were perfectly steady. Her ears heard only distant traffic and some birdsong from the garden. There were no compelling echoes of phantom voices.
Tentatively, Jay put her feet out of bed onto the thick pile carpeting and stood up with none of the giddiness and nausea of the previous evening. She crossed the room to the dressing table, opened the flute case and assembled the instrument. With a deep breath, she lifted the flute and played the first four bars of the solo from the Dance of the Blessed Spirits.
She put the flute down and looked at herself in the dressing-table mirror. She was always pale. It went with being a musician, forever late in bed. Dark smudges under the eyes was all there was to show for the trauma in the Chapter House. She remembered her mother looking over her shoulder in that same mirror years before. She had been brushing Jay’s long hair when she wondered aloud: ‘Where do your looks come from, Jay? There’s no one on my side of the family or Daddy’s with blond hair and green eyes.’ Then she had added: ‘And where does talent like yours come from too? That’s nothing to do with Daddy or me, either. He’s tone deaf and I just about know where middle C is on the piano.’
Jay’s thoughts returned to the present when the telephone rang downstairs. Through the open door she heard the same calm voice repeating a message as her mother wrote on the telephone pad, ending with the inevitable: ‘I’ll tell the doctor.’
There were three bouquets of flowers in the hall, delivered by Interflora: one from her personal manager Sir Ewan Sinclair, one from Carl and the other from Zoltan, the conductor. Jay read the cards and felt like an invalid.
Her father put down his newspaper as she came into the comfortably furnished drawing room with its overstuffed armchairs, Persian carpets and chintz curtains. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ he asked, as though Jay had been in bed with ‘flu for a couple of days.
‘Better,’ she said, holding her hands out to show him. ‘Look. No wobbles, Dad. I even blew a few notes on the flute.’
He eyed her noncommittally above his half-moon spectacles.
Jay took the glass of sherry which her mother poured before leaving the room. Still her father said nothing. He never did lead the conversation.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she probed. ‘Because I can’t remember a thing.’
He sipped his sherry, taking his time about it. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I saw. You walked out and smiled at the audience. Everything seemed fine.’
‘And then?’
‘You tuned up and nodded to the conductor.’
‘And?’
‘He’s not very good, is he? All show and no brain.’
‘So? That’s what the public likes.’ Jay was impatient; her father always took so long to answer a question. ‘What happened next?’ she asked. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘The music started and your face went blank.’ He gestured with both hands open, palms upwards.
‘Was there a noise?’
‘I don’t think so. No, the audience was quiet.’
Jay sought a logical explanation for the noise: ‘Perhaps a latecomer slammed a door or scraped a chair on the floor?’
He shook his head. ‘You played the duet with a sort of wobble on the notes. At least that’s what it sounded like to my ears. When it came to the solo, I thought you were going to faint and fall right off the platform. Your mouth hung open and you nearly dropped the flute. Then you turned around and walked off-stage in a daze. On the way, you banged into several of the fiddle-players’ chairs, as though you couldn’t see properly.’
‘I was feeling my way through a thick fog,’ she said, remembering that much.
‘Has this happened before?’ he asked neutrally, taking another sip of his sherry.
Jay wanted to ask about disseminated sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumours. But it was impossible ever to ask him direct questions.
‘No,’ she said distantly. ‘But I suppose I ought to have a check-up. Can you r
ecommend a specialist in town I could go to?’
‘For what?’ He ticked off on his fingers some of her worst fears: ‘Cancer? A brain tumour? Muscular dystrophy?’ There was a twinkle in his eye as he spoke that reduced her fears to the level of figments of an overactive imagination.
Jay sniffed and let the tears come.
He finished his sherry calmly and stood up. ‘Before you go to a consultant, I recommend a visit to Dr French in Herne Bay. Of course, he’s only an old buffer of a GP, but he has been known to put patients’ minds at rest from time to time. If you want me to give you a quick once-over, you know where the surgery is.’
Jay followed him along the corridor and through the baize door that divided the private part of the house from the doctor’s surgery. The examination was brief but thorough.
‘There’s nothing physically wrong with you,’ he said. He glanced at his notes as though she were a new patient whose particulars he had not yet memorised. ‘You’re a very healthy woman of twenty-nine who …’
‘Could it be some virus?’ she tried.
‘Could be,’ he smiled. ‘In the Middle Ages, they’d have said a demon had entered into you. Today, if we doctors can’t explain something, we say it’s due to a virus. It sometimes means about the same.’
‘So what happened?’ She felt like screaming at him, to make him take it more seriously. Something had happened.
‘When did you last have a day off?’ he asked.
‘Musicians don’t have days off, Dad. You know that.’
‘And when did you last have a day without working or thinking about work?’
‘Oh God,’ she sighed. ‘When I went skiing last Easter.’
‘That was nearly a whole year ago. It’s a long time without a break.’
‘This is a crucial time,’ Jay said. ‘I’ve got a new album coming out. There’s the tour with the chamber orchestra. And the American tour starts in two months.’
‘It’s always a crucial time in the music business. You can’t ever let up, can you?’ Her father was staring at a photograph on his desk. ‘If you want my opinion as to what happened, I’d say you had a sort of blackout caused by over-work – nothing that a spot of holiday wouldn’t put right.’
‘A holiday?’ Jay laughed. She felt enormously relieved that he had found nothing obviously wrong. ‘I’ve got bookings right through till the end of August, Dad. I can’t take a holiday.’
‘Load of balls,’ he said.
She had never heard him use bad language before. It was as surprising as if a bishop had farted at her.
He grinned like a naughty boy at his own vulgarity. ‘Everyone needs a rest sometimes.’ He turned around the photograph so that she could see it. It had been taken on her first day at the Mozart School when she was thirteen. In it, Jay was standing between her parents in the quadrangle, looking awkward and clutching her new flute case protectively in front of herself. She recalled the loneliness of her years at the high-powered school for prodigies, the agony of learning that she was not the best, the determination to beat the competition and the relentless hours of practice starting at six o’clock each morning and ending late at night, every night with no holidays or weekend breaks.
‘Well?’ Her father was watching Jay. ‘I don’t believe in telling my patients what to do but, in my humble opinion, if you don’t want to risk losing your nerve completely, you need to take a rest.’
‘Is that what you think?’ Jay’s voice rose in indignation. ‘You think I lost my nerve on the platform last night?’
‘Stage fright,’ he said.
Jay stood up. ‘I don’t get nerves,’ she shouted, wanting to throw the photograph at him. ‘I know myself well enough, Dad. I’m not the sort that cracks up from pressure.’
He raised his hands to calm her, eyes shrewd above the reading glasses. ‘It’s a tough life you have, Jay. The closer to the top you get, the tougher it is. I know how hard you work. And, though you won’t like my saying this, you have no one to share the highs or lows with, have you? That’s hard for a performer, exposed to criticism day after day. Psychologically it’s a lot of pressure for one person to absorb.’
‘I wondered when we’d get round to my status as a single woman,’ she snapped.
‘I’m not your mother,’ he remarked calmly. ‘The last thing I’d want is for you to marry the wrong man just to provide me with a grandchild. But I am saying that being single doesn’t make it any easier on you to cope with the stresses of a very tough lifestyle.’ He grinned, ran his fingers through his hair and looked for a moment as she remembered him from childhood. ‘You can’t find a bloke who measures up to your old dad, is that the problem?’
Disarmed, Jay smiled back at him. ‘Lots of blokes,’ she said. ‘But no one I want to live with on a permanent basis.’
‘Oh, I nearly forgot.’ He crossed through a note on his telephone pad. ‘That nice man Carl Moritz rang earlier this morning to see how you were feeling. He sounded very concerned. And last night, he was so solicitous and competent that I felt almost superfluous.’
Jay laughed. ‘Your probing may be more subtle than Mummy’s,’ she said, ‘but it’s just as obvious, Dad. So for your information, Carl is an old friend but nothing more. Not on my side, that is. We had what you’d call an affair a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out.’
She left it at that, not wanting to recall the jealousy that her success had brought out in Carl. At least, she thought, I helped him realise that he would never make it as a player, while as an orchestral manager he’s one of the best …
Jay’s father nodded sympathetically. ‘I could help you unwind with a session of hypnotherapy after lunch,’ he suggested. ‘It used to do you a lot of good.’
‘No need,’ Jay shook her head. ‘I feel fine now. Whatever it was that was troubling me, has gone.’
He stood up. ‘Then it’s time for lunch. D’you know what I’m looking forward to in my retirement?’
‘Tell me.’ Jay opened the door for her father and gave him a hug for being so solid, so boringly dependable, so sane.
‘Eating curry at lunch-time,’ he grinned, ‘after a lifetime of being afraid to breathe garlic fumes into my patients’ faces at afternoon surgery.’
*
The deserted promenade of an English seaside resort on a squally February afternoon was a good place to think. In jeans and a headscarf and anorak borrowed from her mother, Jay walked along the prom past boarded up amusement arcades and restaurants where last year’s menus hung curled up in grimy glass cases displaying collections of dead flies. She stood in the shelter of a wind-break and watched surf pounding the shingle beach with swathes of spray blocking the view, isolating her in a world of whiteness.
Because she had spent so much of her childhood away at boarding school, Jay loved the cold, clean loneliness of the north Kent coast in winter. The truncated pier, the pavilion with the booths for fortune tellers and instant photo machines, the padlocked ice cream stalls and sordid amusement arcades all exuded nostalgia for her. All the vulgarity of the summer season was missing, the pervasive stench of chip oil and fried onions blown away by the gales whose salt-laden air scoured the resort clean each winter.
She stepped from the shelter into the full force of the wind and let the spray numb her face and hands. A few hardy sea anglers in plastic oilskins and sou’westers were fishing from the promenade. They were old men who recognised her as the doctor’s daughter and mouthed greetings as she passed, head down against the biting north-east wind.
Several phone calls had interrupted Jay’s lunch. Her mind went back to the first one, during which the soup went cold. Sir Ewan Sinclair was calling to let her know that he was au courant and worried for her. At the end of the conversation, Jay had agreed that Carl should find a replacement solo flautist for the chamber orchestra engagements until Easter, which was four weeks away, while Jay took a break. And Carl had rung ten minutes later to say that it was all fixed and she must not wor
ry about anything, leaving Jay feeling like a patient in hospital whose decisions were all being made for her.
Two calls had been from journalists. To them Jay had used Carl’s suggestion: sudden food poisoning and, yes, she understood that the television recording would be re-scheduled. And a couple of musician friends had called. Jay had only realised to what extent the telephone had become her master when her mother commented: ‘No wonder you’re tired. If a musician can’t ever eat a meal without being called to the phone half a dozen times, it’s worse than being a doctor.’
Her father had suggested: ‘Could you live without the sound of telephone bells for a week or so? It might make all the difference.’
It was worth a try, Jay thought. She didn’t want a repeat of last night, ever. And she couldn’t risk not being on form when the new album came out. Mentally she went through her engagements diary, striking out the cancelled recitals and the television rehearsal and recording days. A solitary seagull appeared as a dot in the leaden sky. It hovered overhead and swooped suddenly to grab something out of the water just below where Jay was standing, then wheeled in the air currents above the promenade, wings outstretched and calling almost plaintively. Jay fitted words to the notes. Come away, it seemed to be calling. Come away!
She made up her mind fast, as she usually did. A holiday was what she needed but at zero notice she would not find a friend to go with. So she’d go where she had a friend: to France. If she left straight away and drove fast, she could catch the evening car ferry and be on the other side of the Channel by dinner-time.
Chapter 2
The old house on the edge of Tel el-Sultan was dark, as were all the other ruined houses of the village, but below it, on the plain between the hills and the sea, lights flickered in windows of apartment blocks and headlights moved along roads into and out of Beirut. Navigation lights of ships decorated the sea and a civilian airliner roared low overhead with its landing lights on, passing across the face of the full moon like a huge bat.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 4
