The Book Of Secrets Part 10

XX.

Paris, 1433

The cloaked man stood in the churchyard, glancing between the arch above him and the book in his hand. To anyone watching anyone but me it must have seemed some sort of piety, the book perhaps a Bible or a book of hours. I knew better.

I had spent half the night copying the book by candlelight, thrilling to the phrases that flowed through my pen. I should have abandoned it to another scribe told Olivier I did not have time and forfeited the fee. But I could not. The words crept into me, seizing me the same way they had that night in Cologne. I had found out the customer's name from Olivier: Tristan d'Amboise. When he came to collect his ma.n.u.script I lingered on the stairs at the back of the shop, and the moment he left I followed, all the way to the churchyard.

I stood behind a gravestone and watched. The sun setting behind the spire of St Innocent's flung a long shadow across his shoulders. Above him, seven painted panels adorned the great arch over the churchyard gate, set there by Nicholas Flamel, the magician who crossed Mercury with the Red Stone and produced half a pound of pure gold. The pictures returned to me like a long-forgotten dream: the king with the sword, the cross and the serpent, a lonely flower on the high mountain guarded by griffins. Flanking the arch, painted on the walls, two lines of women in coloured dresses processed solemnly towards the gate.

I looked back down. Tristan d'Amboise had gone. Before I could blink, a rough hand reached around my shoulders and pinned my arms; a knife pressed against my neck. Stubble sc.r.a.ped my cheek as he put his mouth to my ear. 'Who are you? What are you doing?'

'Pr . . . praying,' I whispered, terrified that if I so much as swallowed he would slit my throat.

'You followed me all the way from the bookseller's shop. Why?'

'The book,' I gasped. My eyes swivelled in their sockets, desperate for some s.e.xton or curate to rescue me. The churchyard was empty.

'What about the book?'

'I know what you seek. I I want to help.'

He pulled the knife away and spun me around, holding me at arm's length. The knife lingered between us.

'How?'

It was the first time I had seen much more than his back. He was beautiful, with a head of dark curls and creamy skin that flushed easily. His eyes burned with the fire of youth. Despite the situation, I felt the long-dormant demon stir in my loins.

'I trained as a goldsmith. I know how to alloy metals and how to purify them with quicksilver. I can fire them with powders, hammer them thin as air or carve them with mystic symbols. And I know the ways of gold.'

The knife wavered. He hushed his voice, though there was no one to hear us but the dead.

'Do you know the secret of the Stone?'

'No,' I admitted. I fixed my gaze on his and stepped towards him, daring him to either drop the knife or impale me. He lowered the blade. 'Let me help you.'

'After long errors of three years or thereabouts during which time I did nothing but study and labour finally I found that which I desired.'

So wrote Flamel in his book. I did not persevere for three years, but after six months all I had discovered were his errors. The further I delved into the secrets of the Art the further I seemed from it. Yet I could not abandon the quest. At first I a.s.sisted Tristan one or two evenings in the week, but in those early, heady days our progress seemed rapid, success imminent. Evenings gave way to long nights spent sweating over the forge, both stripped to the waist, until dawn came and I slunk back to Olivier's house. With so little sleep my eyes became unreliable. My scripts grew ragged and irregular, feeble imitations of the proud specimens by the door. Olivier, proofreading, spilled so much red ink on my ma.n.u.scripts it became an embarra.s.sment.

Inevitably, he soon realised how little I went to my bed. The first time he caught me trying to creep in just after sunrise he warned me not to repeat it; the second time he threatened to expel me from his house; the third he pleaded with me not to ruin my livelihood. I resented his kindness even more than his anger. Deep in my soul I knew he spoke the truth.

I left the next day. Tristan gave me a room in his house, and there I devoted my every hour to breaking Flamel's secret. I slept only when exhaustion compelled me, ate little and left the house so rarely his neighbours must have taken me for a ghost. After six weeks I realised I was, to all effects, a prisoner.

XXI.

New York City

They were back in the same room, with its police-issue plastic table and folding metal chairs. This time the door was open, offer ing a view into the busy corridor beyond. Perhaps that was what made the room feel safer. Perhaps it was because he'd brought Seth Goldberg. He'd been an idiot for ever coming here without a lawyer. But then, he hadn't thought he had anything to hide.

Seth sat at the table and flipped through some papers in his briefcase. Nick had always a.s.sumed defence lawyers were magicians wise, grey-bearded, irascibly benevolent but Seth was only in his mid-thirties, young enough to have been at college at the same time as Nick. The difference might as well have been a decade. Where Nick felt like a perpetual kid trying to get served in a bar, Seth moved with a bow wave of authority that seemed to impress itself on everyone he met. They'd known each other at NYU, connected in a loose sort of way by over lapping acquaintances and softball. Nick had never imagined they'd end up in a police station together as client and attorney.

Nick glanced out of the door and felt the fresh scar on his chin. The first thing Seth had done that morning was buy Nick breakfast. The second thing he'd done was send him to the drugstore across the road for a razor and some shaving gel, which he'd then insisted Nick use in the coffee shop's cramped bathroom.

'Rule number one: you're only as innocent as you look. If they play the tape of this interview back in court and twelve jurors see you looking like the Unabomber, they're not even going to care what you say.'

'What happened to not judging a book by its cover?'

'Did you ever buy a book with a s.h.i.+tty cover?'

The door banged against the wall as Royce blew in. Today's suit was grey again, but sliced with white pinstripes that made him look like a stockbroker.

'Thanks for coming back. We won't take too much of your time.'

Royce sat and waited while the technician adjusted the camera.

'We've spoken to your neighbour's kid. He confirmed that he saw you in the corridor at approximately the time the shot was fired.'

'When the shot was fired,' Nick corrected him.

'He wasn't able to confirm the presence of the masked gunman you described, because he ran inside his apartment as soon as he heard the shot. But he heard footsteps.'

For the first time since Bret had called, Nick felt the knots inside him begin to unwind. He sat back, so relieved he barely heard what Royce was saying about other lines of enquiry, potential connections, different angles. Only when he heard a name 'Could you please describe your relations.h.i.+p with Miss Gillian Lockhart.'

Nick blinked with surprise. Gillian's name still produced a physical reaction, even now. A part of him was always ready to talk about her, desperate even, a sad drunk at a bar. Seth shot Nick a look that said, Be careful.

'I met Gillian about a year ago, on a train. We got talking. I gave her my number, we kept in touch, eventually we started .. .'

Started what? Nick had dated girls where he'd have known the exact word, each phase of the relations.h.i.+p a.n.a.lysed and cla.s.sified in earnest conversations. Dating. Going steady. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Married. Divorced. A complete taxonomy. With Gillian, things just sort of happened.

'We got together.'

That wasn't good enough for Royce. 'Was it a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p?'

Nick blushed. It was like being back in the cabin at summer camp, adolescents in the dark desperately bragging about who'd done who. He glanced at Seth, who simply shrugged.

'Yes.'

'Were you living together?'

'Gillian kept her own place. Somewhere on the East Side. She had a room-mate from h.e.l.l we never went there.'

That was another wound. He'd always been emotionally a step ahead of her, always ready to commit. But she'd been adamant. 'I need my s.p.a.ce, Nick. I've opened myself up before. I need to take it slowly.' And he'd sworn to himself that he'd prove he was different, that she could trust him.

'And what was her occupation at this time?'

'She worked as a conservator at the Cloisters museum.' He would have bet money Royce had never been there. 'Up in Fort Was.h.i.+ngton Park. It's where the Metropolitan Museum keeps its medieval collection.'

'Was Ms Lockhart acquainted with your room-mate, Bret Deangelo?'

Nick checked with Seth, who nodded and made a note on a yellow legal pad.

'Sure. Bret and I were in the apartment together while I was going out with Gillian.'

'Did they get along?'

'I guess.' Though it was a small apartment and Bret didn't often leave, Nick couldn't remember more than a couple of times when the three of them had been together. He remembered how awkward it had been: Bret trying not to be caught looking at Gillian's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, Gillian sitting stiff on the couch, and Nick bustling about trying to break the ice with inanities. Otherwise, Bret had somehow contrived to make himself invisible whenever Gillian was around. The best part of six months. It occurred to Nick that Bret had been doing him a favour.

'When was the last time you saw Ms Lockhart?'

'Some time last July.' July 23, around half past ten. 'Did she dump you?' Again, the sudden lurch into high-school crudeness. Nick flinched, but Seth was quick off the mark.

'Would you like to rephrase that question, Detective?' Royce adjusted his tie. 'Did your relations.h.i.+p end acrimoniously.'

'No.'

There had been a lot of fights with Gillian. Sometimes he thought she provoked them deliberately, because she couldn't resist the drama. She'd threaten to leave him, and he'd be up until four in the morning begging her to reconsider. Other times it just seemed to be the inevitable eruption of two tectonic plates colliding or moving apart those were the ones that could last days. It kept him on a knife-edge.

But there'd been no fight the night she left him. She'd cooked him dinner, teased him about his new haircut and gone to bed with him. She'd been subdued all evening, which was unusual but not unheard of. The next morning he woke alone to find a note on the pillow.

It's over. x G No apologies, no explanation, no tears, no way back. A one-night stand that lasted six months.

'Did you try to contact her again?' Royce asked.

Nick s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably in his seat. 'A few times.'

Those were memories he didn't want to relive: dark days of phones that rang and were never answered; emails written, re-drafted and abandoned; meals forgotten; work ignored so long that even Bret started to worry.

'So just so we can be clear when exactly was the last time you communicated with Ms Lockhart?'

'Last July. Then nothing until I got the video call from her three days ago.'

'So you weren't aware that she had moved to Paris and got a job with an auctioneers?'

'I learned that after I got the message.'

'Even though you'd shown no interest in finding it out for the previous six months?'

'I was worried. I told you what I saw on the computer.' Royce leaned closer. 'And did you then call Ms Lockhart from your cellphone about an hour before Bret Deangelo was murdered?'

The room seemed closer, the lights too bright. 'I got the number of her office in Paris and called it.'

'Paris is six hours ahead of East Coast time. Did you really expect she'd be there?'

'The auction house told me there was a late-night sale going on. I thought it'd be worth a try. You can check that with Stevens Mathison, if you like,' he added. Too defensively, judging by the look Seth gave him.

Royce powered on. 'Was it?'

'What?'

'Worth a try.'

'She wasn't there, if that's what you mean.'

'But you spoke to someone? Someone who'll confirm your story.'

'I don't remember his name. I I don't think he gave it. He sounded English.'

'We'll look into it.' Royce dismissed it and moved on. 'Now, when Ms Lockhart contacted you via email-'

'It was Buzz,' Nick interrupted. 'Right. The same thing you used for snooping on your room-mate.'

Seth raised his pen, a silent objection.

'OK, she Buzzed you have I got that right?'

Nick nodded.

'Did she send anything with her message?'

He was trying to be casual, but Royce couldn't really manage low key. He knows, Nick thought. Did I tell him? He didn't think so. They must have looked on the computer they'd taken.

There was no point stalling. 'She sent me a file a picture of a medieval playing card.' He saw the next question coming and cut it off. 'I have absolutely no idea why. I wish I knew.'

Something in the hopelessness of his voice seemed to check Royce's momentum. Seth took advantage.

'My client's been very cooperative in answering all your questions. Would you mind informing him why you're so interested in his former partner?'

Royce stood. 'I think, Mr Goldberg, you and I should have a moment alone.' He held the door open and gestured Nick to go out. 'We'll just be a minute.'

In fact they were ten. Nick watched them through the window in the door, the wires of the safety gla.s.s like prison bars. He could see both men standing, facing each other across the table and arguing intently. When they were finished, it wasn't Seth who came out but Royce.

'Your lawyer wants you.' He smirked. 'I'll be by the coffee machine.'