by Kim Fleet
It has happened, the worst that can be. He is taken, seized while he tended his garden and carried to London for trial. I shall smuggle myself there, that he shall see a friendly face at least when he meets the executioner. I know not what happened to the Holy Blood and pray that it is safe yet.
A fire lit in his chest. Documentary proof that a relic known as the Holy Blood of Hailes had somehow survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the dismantling of the shrines. It could be a fake, of course, as all the so-called relics could be fakes, but even so, here was evidence that there were rumours amongst the Catholic community that the Holy Blood still existed. And maybe the phial he’d excavated at Hailes was the one that was being smuggled in to heal the sick.
He shivered at the thought of the risks these families ran. After the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I and declared that anyone who assassinated her was doing so with heaven’s blessing, Catholics were automatically branded traitors. Being found with a rosary, hearing Catholic Mass, being visited by a priest: all were punishable by death. The risk this man from Hailes ran, carrying what was believed to be a holy relic, was enormous. He, and the families he visited, were putting themselves in mortal danger.
All that peering at tiny writing had made his head hurt. A snooze to take him up to lunchtime would sort it out, then he’d pop into the office and check that work was being done, even without him there to crack the whip.
He closed his bedroom curtains, undressed to boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and slipped into bed. The sheets were cool and crisp and he snuggled down into the middle of the bed, soothed by the chill pillow. A little nap would put him right.
When he awoke, it was early afternoon and a soft rain was falling against the windowpane. He stretched and wandered into the kitchen, groggy from sleeping too long. Someone had been in his flat while he was asleep. His keys hung on a row of hooks under the kitchen unit, a separate hook for each key. The one on the end was missing.
On his desk he found a note:
Hi Aidan, you were sleeping peacefully so I didn’t wake you. I’ve borrowed your car and gone to get the Holy Blood. Won’t be long. See you later, Eden. P.S. Please stop drinking coffee – it won’t help your headache xx
He didn’t like it, didn’t like it one little bit. His head throbbed at the memory of being struck. Whoever had stolen the Blood was willing to kill for it, and now Eden was going to snatch it back.
He rang her mobile. It went straight to voicemail.
‘Eden, it’s me, Aidan. Stop whatever it is you’re doing. Please. It’s not safe.’
He hung up and bounced the phone against his lower lip, thinking. What was it he’d seen that morning when he tidied up Eden’s flat? A pile of papers and envelopes, and tucked amongst it all, a business card. What was the name? Something about Ulysses. He chased the memory until he caught it, then did a quick Internet search to hunt down a phone number.
‘Hello, my name’s Aidan Fox,’ he said, when the phone was answered the other end. ‘I believe you’ve met my girlfriend, Eden Grey. I don’t know where she is right now, but wherever it is, she’s in terrible danger.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
14:32 hours
A productive morning, Eden thought, as she sped up the motorway, moving easily between the gears and overtaking a line of cars in the middle lane. A couple of drivers glanced over at her as she passed, a spark of respect and envy at Aidan’s immaculate black Audi. Her car, elderly and rather disreputable, simply wouldn’t do for the mission she had in mind.
Both Bernard and Gabor had identified the same relic collector: a man called Jonathan Luker, and she’d spent the morning trawling the Internet for everything she could find about him. He certainly flashed a lot of wodge at auctions, and had he been Frankenstein, he owned enough bits of saints to make up a whole one and reanimate it.
She clicked on the indicator, changed lanes, and took the slip road off the motorway, heading towards a small village outside Wolverhampton, and to an address revealed by the electoral register as Luker’s residence. The house was tucked down a narrow, potholed road and she winced each time the car bounced and the exhaust scraped on the road. She missed the signpost the first time: it was obscured by a stand of trees. Evidently if you needed a sign to show you where you were going, you didn’t belong here. Doubling back, she found the road and bumped along to the village: a chocolate box arrangement of Georgian brick homes around a triangle of village green, a tiny Norman church with a graveyard that was three feet higher than the path, and a pub that charged fifteen quid for a ploughman’s lunch and served game pie with a julienne of carrots.
Beyond the village was a lane that led to Jonathan Luker’s house. She passed through wrought-iron gates, up a recently repaved driveway and around a carriage sweep. She parked, checked her appearance in the rear-view mirror, and stepped out of the car. Dressed in a plain black suit with black boots, a pale blue blouse and a sapphire silk scarf, she looked sober and respectable but avoided shades of undertaker. Her briefcase was impeccable black leather. She grabbed it from the back of the car and looked up at the house.
It was a Queen Anne villa with Dutch gable ends in a pleasant pinkish brick. A shrubbery stretched either side of the carriage drive, dripping disconsolately, the leaves blackened with frost. The front door was wide, pale oak, set in a stone porch. She pulled the handle to the side and heard a jangle echo deep inside the house.
The door was opened by a short Filipino man in a Nehru jacket and taupe trousers. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m here to see Mr Jonathan Luker,’ Eden said.
‘He expect you?’
‘I’m here on official business,’ she said, hefting her briefcase. As predicted, the man’s eyes tracked the briefcase.
‘What business I say him?’
‘I’m from his insurers.’
The man stood aside and she stepped into a square hallway panelled in dark wood. The doors leading off the hallway were all closed, and the only light came from the glass panel above the door. It was like entering a cave.
‘This way.’
She followed the man through the house to a conservatory at the back, overlooking a sloping lawn and borders crammed with the skeletons of old rose bushes. ‘Mr Jonathan, person to see you,’ the manservant said, and scuttled out of the room.
The back of a large leather armchair faced her, and on the arm of the chair rested a bony hand. A figure rose from the chair and stood in silence before her. He was tall and thin framed, and his skin hung in grey pouches as though it was too big for him. His hair was shorn away, leaving a plain of stubble.
‘Mr Luker?’ she said. ‘I’m Sara White from Wisley and Brakeman, your insurers.’
He shook his head. ‘They’re not my insurers. I’m with one of the big firms.’
‘They pass the specialist cover onto us,’ Eden said. ‘Antiques, artwork, high-grade jewellery.’
‘And do you have any identification, Miss White?’
‘Of course.’ She snapped open the fasteners on the briefcase and extracted a thick, creamy envelope. Inside, on embossed letterheaded paper, was a sentence stating that Wisley and Brakeman handled specialist insurance, and requested that their employee, Sara White, be given every assistance and courtesy. Eden had designed it and had it printed that morning.
‘We believe that you’re underinsured,’ she said. ‘The gold price has rocketed in recent years, as I’m sure you know, and though it’s not at the same level, we’ve found a number of clients haven’t increased their insurance. I’m here to do a valuation and check that you have adequate cover.’
Jonathan Luker rubbed his chin. ‘I doubt it’s a problem. I tend to over insure.’
Eden pulled a notepad out of her briefcase and flicked through the pages. ‘You bought a Russian triptych last year? At the time it was valued at one hundred thousand pounds.’
That was what Luker paid for it at auction.
<
br /> She consulted the notepad again. ‘Our current valuation estimates it’s worth approximately one hundred and eighty thousand pounds.’ She let the silence swell between them, determined she wouldn’t be the first one to speak.
‘Interesting,’ Luker said, pulling his lower lip thoughtfully. ‘You’re proposing to do the valuation now?’
‘Yes, if that’s convenient. I can update the list of insured items and check you have the right cover.’
Luker hesitated. She glanced around the room and her eye fastened on a small chair with a shield-shaped back in the adjoining room. When she’d joined Revenue and Customs, years before, she’d shadowed each of the different teams, getting a view of the whole of the organisation’s work, and had spent three months with the team that valued antiques for probate and capital gains. She dragged up some of what she’d learned and prayed she was correct.
‘Nice Hepplewhite-inspired chair,’ she said. ‘Nineteenth century?’
‘Very good,’ Luker said.
‘I’ve got a list of the items you’ve specified on your insurance documents,’ Eden said. ‘If you can show me where they are, I can do the valuations and add anything that’s needed. My first item is that Russian triptych.’
‘This way.’
Luker led her from the room. There was a square patch of white skin on the side of his skull, bordered with a dark line – the ghost of staples and stitches. She followed him through the house to the first floor, where Luker unlocked a door with a key he carried on a chain attached to his trousers.
‘It’s all in here,’ he said.
The room had high ceilings and a plain wooden floor that echoed when they stepped inside. Thick blinds shrouded the windows, blotting out what little daylight there was, giving the room a subterranean feel. Around the walls were glass cabinets and glass-topped display cases stood in the centre of the room. Luker pressed a switch and tiny lights came on in each cabinet.
Eden stifled a gasp. Gold glittered in every cabinet. Dead-eyed Madonnas glared at her, clutching chubby infant Jesuses. And the jewels: sapphires, rubies, pearls, emeralds. Everywhere she looked, precious gems fired coloured arrows at her.
‘It’s quite a collection,’ she said, fighting to keep her voice professional. ‘How long have you been interested in religious material culture?’
‘I started collecting icons in my twenties,’ Luker said. ‘And then I discovered reliquaries.’
Eden recovered herself. ‘The value of the reliquaries will obviously only be on the container itself, not the relics inside.’ She blessed Aidan’s recent lecture on the subject.
‘Of course.’
‘Let’s make a start,’ Eden said, putting down her briefcase and taking out the notebook again. ‘First item, that Russian triptych.’
Luker unlocked a cabinet, put on a pair of white cotton gloves, and removed the triptych, carrying it over to her as though handling his first-born.
‘Thirteenth century,’ Eden said. ‘Oil on wood painting, framed in gold. These have gone up in value enormously. Russian collectors, anxious to return them home.’
She scribbled a figure on her notebook next to the description of the triptych, then called out the next item. ‘Reliquary containing the toe bone of St Barbara,’ she said.
Luker went to a cabinet on the far side of the room, unlocked it, and drew out a gold statue about eighteen inches high studded with rubies and pearls. At the bottom of the statue was a tiny window of rock crystal, and behind it was a fragment of bone.
Luker had paid seventy thousand pounds for it, five years before. Eden had spent the morning wrestling with gold rates, and had recalculated the scrap value of each of Luker’s reliquaries. Now she took that value and bumped it up a bit.
‘I think that should be insured for ninety thousand pounds,’ she said, scribbling a note. She glanced at him. ‘Have you been unwell lately, Mr Luker?’
His hand crept to the back of his head. ‘A brain tumour,’ he said.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’
He gave a quick smile, his eye teeth flashing. ‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a miraculous recovery.’ A chill ran through Eden and she hurriedly turned the page of her notebook.
Next was another reliquary, and Luker fetched it from the same cabinet. Pretending to survey the whole collection, Eden peered into each cabinet, searching for the Holy Blood. The collection was organised according to type and location. All the Russian icons were together; and all the jewelled reliquaries were together; but there was no sign of the Holy Blood. On another circuit of the room, Eden spotted a curtain hanging across a recess in the far wall. It was tucked away in a gloomy corner, but a chair was placed in front of the curtain, as if Luker spent time sitting and contemplating what was behind it.
‘Is there a painting behind here?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Luker said. He turned with the next item in his gloved hands and she dragged her attention to it.
They worked on for an hour, Luker collecting each item in turn, Eden offering a valuation and making a note.
Part way through, the Filipino man appeared at the door, poking his face round as though afraid. ‘Mr Jonathan? Phone for you. Say it important.’
Luker locked the cabinet and pocketed the key. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said to Eden.
As soon as she heard his footsteps receding, she ran to the curtain and yanked it open. Behind was a glass case set into the wall, and in the case was the Holy Blood of Hailes. The crimson phial blazed despite the dim light, and the silver stopper gleamed. The glass case was a simple display case and the lock flimsy. Within seconds, Eden had inserted a paperclip and was jiggling it about, feeling for the resistance that would tell her she’d found the sweet spot. Desperately listening for Luker’s return, she thumped the glass door, the lock suddenly gave, and the door swung open.
A footstep in the corridor outside.
She yanked the silk scarf from round her neck and swaddled the Holy Blood in it, stuffing it in the bottom of her briefcase and piling papers on top. Then she swung the door shut. It wouldn’t lock, but she pressed the door to and jerked the curtain closed, then scuttled over to one of the far cabinets. When Luker came back she was gazing at one of the Madonnas.
‘They always look as though they know something we don’t,’ she said, indicating a sleepy-eyed Madonna.
‘That’s because they do,’ Luker said. He stared at her for a moment. ‘That was your boss on the phone.’
‘What?’ She recovered herself. ‘What did he want? Have I forgotten something?’
‘He wanted to remind you to value the reliquary of St Thomas,’ he said.
Eden looked down her list. Luker had bought that reliquary two years before, according to the auction reports she’d found on the Internet. A sudden unease crept over her, as though he was trying to catch her out. And who the hell was it on the phone? ‘Yes, I have it on my schedule,’ she said. She held his eye. ‘You do still have it? You haven’t sold it?’
‘I have it,’ Luker said. He opened a cabinet and hefted out a solid gold reliquary adorned with angels and studded with sapphires and pearls. He took a step towards her. ‘What I don’t understand is why your employer felt the need to call the house. Surely you have a mobile phone?’
‘Probably just checking up on me,’ Eden said, fighting the urge to take a step back. Luker was so close she could smell old-fashioned talc on his skin.
‘He didn’t say where he worked,’ Luker said. ‘Just said he was your boss. It was altogether rather odd.’
He suspects me, Eden thought. He knows there’s something wrong here. Time to make an escape.
At that moment, the glass door behind the curtain swung open. Luker let out a cry and ran over. He wrenched back the curtain and let out a yell that was half-howl.
‘What have you done with it?’
Eden picked up her briefcase and made for the door. Luker was across the room in a trice.
‘Stop right there
!’ He swung the reliquary, aiming for her head. She ducked, and it came down hard on her arm. The blow sent her staggering backwards and she crashed into one of the cabinets.
Luker came at her again, swinging the reliquary in a huge arc. It hit the cabinet, shattering the glass and sending icons spinning across the floor. The next blow struck her shoulder. She dropped to the floor, gasping, stars sparking in her vision.
Luker was breathing heavily. He lumbered over and bent to grab her briefcase. With a surge of effort, Eden swung it up into his face. Blood spurted from his nose. She scrambled to her feet and chopped him hard on the back of his neck. Luker fell face first onto the floor and she was on him in an instant, straddling his back and dragging his hands behind him. A shard of glass poked into her knee. She yelped and released her grip, then fought again to gain control.
‘Why did you kill him, Luker?’ she panted, struggling to hold him. ‘You didn’t intend to, so what happened?’
‘We had an agreement and he broke it. Demanded double what we’d agreed,’ Luker said. He bucked and writhed, heaving her onto the floor, his arm against her throat in an instant. “Filthy Luker”. That’s what he kept calling me. Shouting it in my face and shoving liquorice into his mouth.’
Eden wrestled one arm free. Her fingers groped around in the glass.
‘So you killed him?’ She struggled to breathe, her windpipe crushed.
‘He had thirty thousand from me. I turned up with another two hundred and he laughed in my face. Said now he saw how much I wanted it, the price had gone up.’ Luker leaned harder on her throat. ‘He went into the bathroom, still laughing at me, then came out clutching his face and screaming about his eyes.’
She was starting to black out. It was now or never. Her hands sifted through the shards and closed around the reliquary.
‘You hit him and searched his room.’ Her fingers, sticky with blood, took a firmer grip. She’d only have one chance.
