Jack Pendragon - 02 - Borgia Ring Read online

  Stokes lifted the top picture close to his face. ‘It’s difficult to see clearly …’

  ‘Here.’ Pendragon came round the desk and handed the professor a magnifying glass.

  ‘It’s ancient. Gold, obviously, and with a large jewel, maybe an emerald. I’d have to do some close analysis. We have some useful computer-enhancement software in college.’

  ‘They’re yours,’ Pendragon said as he stood up. ‘And, thank you, Professor.’

  France, February 1589

  When I bring to mind the journey from the Venerable English College in Rome to the city of Paris, the overriding memory is of my bones being chilled to the very marrow, for it was the coldest winter anyone could remember. Sebastian Mountjoy, three servants and I took ship at Civitavecchia, a short ride from the Vatican, making Genoa through high swells and two terrible storms four days later.

  When we reached good solid land, it felt like God’s blessing on us. I had been ravaged by seasickness almost before we left port. But although we had exchanged water for land, there was no respite from the cold. The southern part of France is renowned for its mild winters and comforting coastal breezes, but the exceptionally harsh weather had spread far. Indeed, we witnessed snow in the town of Nice.

  Of course, the weather worsened as we travelled north, so that by early-February, when our party reached Lyon, we were unable to make any headway at all. Luckily, Sebastian found us comfortable rooms in a small guest house close to the city wall. The town was packed with other stranded travellers, some of whom were fretting about the enforced delay, while others simply accepted it as God’s will. Sebastian and I were definitely in the latter category and those three days and nights we were forced to stay put in the good town of Lyon proved a welcome diversion. Our mission was of the utmost seriousness and we knew we were walking into danger, but these facts only added to our desire to take advantage of the respite. I recall with fondness playing dominoes before a roaring fire, eating good venison and sampling the local hops. I’m sorry to say that, in truth, these things constitute the last good memories I can now draw upon.

  On the fourth morning after our arrival in Lyon, we managed to return to the road heading north, but it was very hard going and slow. Fourteen freezing days and nights we spent on that road. The landscape had changed and was rarely more than a white carpet, punctured occasionally by the outline of a church spire or a city wall. Sometimes a purple rope of smoke ascending to the chilled heavens broke the monotony.

  It was close to dusk on the eighteenth day of February when we finally reached Créteil. An early and unexpected thaw had turned the snow to slush. For a month Paris and all the towns around it had been entombed in snow. Hundreds had died. Theirs had been cold deaths, so very different from the reaper’s tally during summer when plague-ravaged bodies bobbed in the Seine. With the thaw came water and mud, whole streets where the sludge ran knee-deep.

  From a high point on the road, just outside Créteil, and sitting straight in the saddle, I could just make out the outline of Paris, solemnly shrouded in brown. My back ached and my limbs were sore. I was filthy, hungry and exhausted. I also felt an undeniable sense of disappointment, for this view of Europe’s largest, grandest city was nothing like the one I had hoped for. Paris looked like an amorphous thing, decrepit, the colour of ditchwater.

  ‘Not far now, my friend,’ Sebastian said from his own mount to my left.

  ‘And not a moment too soon,’ I replied, digging my heels into my horse’s sides and flicking the reins to urge on the exhausted beast through the mud weighing down her tired legs.

  Le Lapin Noir was popular: warm and dark. The servants stabled the horses and had them fed and I followed Sebastian into the main room of the inn. It was a wide, low-ceilinged room, with just one window looking out on to the dark road. Most of the locals were gathered around the huge fireplace in the far wall. The air was thick with smoke from the damp wood and the whole place stank of embers and sweat. The regulars eyed us suspiciously as we entered. A young boy led us to a back room which we had to ourselves. There, a meaner fire burned in the grate, but it threw out a good heat. A rough wooden table and a pair of chairs took up most of the floor space, and we threw ourselves into the chairs.

  I could see the inn-keeper in the main room but he was busy with his regular customers. It was only as a servant brought over our food that I caught the inn-keeper’s eye. He came over to us and studied me warily.

  ‘Good landlord,’ I said as cheerily as I could manage, ‘we are in search of a gentleman named Gappair. Do you know if he is here this evening?’

  The man had a weather-beaten face and no more than two teeth in his head. ‘No idea, sir,’ he lisped. ‘Never ’eard of him.’ And without another word he walked off, back to the hubbub of the main room. I glanced at Sebastian who looked as lost as I felt.

  We concentrated on our food for a while. We were famished. Sebastian was first to finish and rose from the table to relieve himself. I was left alone to study the figures in the other room. Sebastian was still out in the back yard when there was a commotion at the door to the inn. A figure in a black cape, his face shrouded from view, was being turned away by the inn-keeper. Two of the publican’s friends, big, burly farmers by the look of them, came up behind the inn-keeper, ready with their support. In a moment, the cloaked man was gone and the room had settled down again. I turned back to the table and saw a folded piece of paper next to my empty bowl.

  I was opening it when Sebastian returned. I read it as he lowered himself into his chair. It said: ‘Chapelle Ste-Jeanne-d’Arc, Rue Montmartre. Midnight.’

  We couldn’t take our horses out again so soon after such a long journey, so we hired a couple of rather elderly mares from the inn-keeper. Thanks to the mud and the intense dark of a moonless night it took almost three hours for us to travel the ten miles from the inn to the Chapelle Ste-Jeanne-d’Arc. Things became a little easier as we reached the centre of Paris where the streets were cleared of old snow and drained of the worst of the slush. And our one great advantage was that Sebastian was familiar with the city from his younger days when he had spent a year studying at the Abbey of Montmartre.

  He told me that, although still beautiful, the Chapelle Ste-Jeanne-d’Arc was now a mere shadow of its former glory. Half a century earlier, in the days of Francis I, it had been one of the city’s finest chapels, a favourite of the Royal Family. Now the most significant thing about it, he said, was its large cemetery, still a popular final resting place for the great and the good of Paris. Sebastian had walked through the cemetery on more than one occasion in his younger days and was quick to find the main path that led through the sacred ground, threading a route between massive black slabs of marble, stone angels and crosses taller than a man. We had brought only a single lantern with us and we used it sparingly. A little light filtered through from buildings on Rue Montmartre, but I was entirely in Sebastian’s hands.

  The solemn grey outline of the chapel took me by surprise as it emerged suddenly from the gloom. We dismounted and tethered the horses close to the door. Sebastian relit the lantern and led the way. The ground was soft underfoot, mud covering our boots and splashing our calves.

  We came to the chapel’s great wooden door. It was unlocked, but the hinges were rusted and worn and it took both of us to push it inwards, the old hinges complaining as it went.

  Inside, it felt unnaturally cold, far more so than the windswept graveyard. Shadows flickered over the walls; there were brief flashes of colour as moonlight seeped softly through the stained glass in the clerestory windows. It was absolutely silent except for the sound of our boots, loud on the flagstone floor. Then we heard a faint click, followed by a tap. We stood still in the semi-darkness, straining to hear. The sound stopped. We walked slowly up the nave. It was so dark we could see only a few feet to either side of us. The sides of the chapel remained in shadow. A few steps on and the pulpit reared out of the gloom, an ugly stone block. Behind it stood a huge carv
ed cross, a pale Christ hanging bloodied upon it.

  The sound came again. A tap, then another. It was growing louder, coming closer. Sebastian turned with the lantern and we each caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure standing a few feet before us, a flash of long, white hair, piercing black eyes in a sallow face.

  ‘Welcome,’ the figure said in a rasping voice.

  Sebastian was a step ahead of me. I saw him crumple as he was struck by a heavy object that swung out from the darkness. Stunned, I moved to catch my friend as he fell. But as I bent forward, I felt a rush of air, the sound of a heavy object whistling past my ear, and then a terrible pain shot through the side of my head. The face of an old man, his almost translucent hair flying in front of his eyes, flashed before me. Then the ground reared up, twisting and blurring before me, as my legs gave way and blackness enveloped me.

  Stepney, Saturday 4 June, 9.05 p.m.

  The hooded figure was carrying a black metal box about the size of a large camera case. He moved rapidly along the silent, empty corridor until he reached the control panel for the university’s CCTV system. After snipping the cables, he closed the cover. At the front desk and in the monitoring room in the basement of the main administration building, the surveillance monitors turned blue.

  Moving swiftly on to the stairwell, the intruder took the stairs three at a time. By the fourth floor he was out of breath and stopped for a moment, bent forward, hands on knees. Then he eased open the door into another narrow corridor. A sign on the wall announced he was in the Department of Plant Biotechnology, Queen Mary College.

  A door with wire mesh over its window panel was locked. Beside it was a keypad. With latex-covered fingers he punched in the code for which he had paid hard cash earlier that day. There was a satisfying click and he eased the door inwards. A sallow glow emanated from overhead safety lights. He could just make out rows of steel benches, gas taps, sinks, racks of chemicals. Along one side of the large lab stood a set of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. Next to that a gas cabinet, its thickened glass door closed and locked. On the far side was a window on to the room beyond. Inside, he could just see the outlines of many plants crammed into a tight space. Foliage pressed against the inside of the glass.

  He was about to walk that way when he heard voices from the corridor beyond the lab. A square of massicot appeared at the door as someone flicked on the lights in the corridor. He ducked down out of sight at the end of a row of benches. Someone tried the door handle.

  ‘It’s locked,’ a voice said.

  ‘Good,’ came the reply. ‘Let’s check upstairs.’

  He waited a few beats before straightening up, straining to listen. Then he walked slowly towards his goal. The door into the greenhouse was opened with the same code as for the lab door. He closed it carefully behind him.

  It was stifling inside, the smell of damp, and rotting soil, almost overpowering. He paced slowly along the rows of plants, neatly bedded in evenly spaced pots. He avoided brushing against the leaves and only touched a plant with his gloved fingers when it was necessary in order to get by.

  He had no interest in plants, otherwise he might have appreciated the wonderful colours in the greenhouse: the rich ruby reds, sunset shades of orange, the cheeriest yellows and sombre jungle greens. Instead, his mind was focused on one thing, his objective. Passing the end of the second row and scrutinising the third, he saw them at last, a pair of small unassuming plants at either end of the row. One had narrow, murky green leaves and small red flowers, a plant that would be easy to overlook. The other had broad leaves with pale green veins spreading seemingly at random on their upper surface. The stubby plant rose from a large bulb only half-submerged in soil.

  He opened the metal case. It was empty. Taking a pair of cutters from his pocket, he severed the first plant at its base and lowered it into the box, folding its leaves to fit it in. Stopping at the second plant, he cut through its stems and likewise folded them into the box. Closing the case’s lid, he clipped it shut.

  At the door, he listened for voices outside. Then he eased it open and slipped out into the corridor and down the stairwell. Walking casually past the desk at the entrance to the building, he emerged into the hot night and the glare of headlights on Mile End Road.

  Stepney, Sunday 5 June, 6.20 a.m.

  ‘You look pleased with yourself,’ commented Jack Pendragon who had just returned to his desk with a large cup of his favourite Bolivian coffee, black, no sugar.

  ‘That’s because I am,’ Jez Turner replied, striding towards him while eyeing the cup. ‘The CCTV disks arrived at two this morning. I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Help yourself then,’ Pendragon responded, nodding towards the cafetière.

  ‘Cheers, guv.’

  ‘So what have you found?’

  ‘Best see for yourself, sir.’

  The media room was three doors down the corridor. It was stuffed with electronic equipment: two large flat-screen monitors, a video mixing desk, and a wall of metal units comprising DVD players, hard drives and digital enhancers. Turner sat at the control panel and Pendragon leaned towards the monitors, letting his young sergeant deal with the technology.

  ‘As you’d expect, there’re a few cameras on Mile End Road. Working on the principle that our man would have disabled the cameras at the site almost as soon as he got there, I went back over the footage from all the CCTV in the area between one-forty-five and two-fifteen.’ As he talked, Turner flicked through the seven separate camera positions along Mile End Road, Globe Road and White Horse Lane, the three major roads within a few hundred metres of the construction site.

  Cars passed in and out of the area, picked up in one camera to be followed in one or more of the others, before vanishing again out-of-frame. A white van could be seen on five separate cameras as it travelled up White Horse Lane, left into Mile End Road and then next right into Globe Road. It disappeared into the night north of the monitored zone. What they really wanted was someone to approach Alderney Road, a turning off Globe Road. Then for that someone to take a right into a small side street that wound round to Frimley Way. There were no cameras on Alderney Road or Frimley Way, but they could see that anyone turning off Globe Road would just be visible from a camera set close to the Fox’s Head pub, twenty or so metres from the junction.

  Turner ran his fingers over the video mixing desk and fast-forwarded the images from a set of cameras. They watched as the time display sped by. A red car flashed past, followed a few moments later by a taxi. A pedestrian appeared at the edge of the image and walked briskly towards the deserted pub and out of sight.

  At 2.07.14 on the digital timer, a solitary figure in dark trousers and an open-necked shirt appeared in the first camera on White Horse Lane. He walked quickly towards Mile End Road. Turner switched cameras as the figure reached the main road and turned left. He switched again and they could see the figure approaching the camera, crossing the street and turning into Globe Road. Shifting to the camera at the Fox’s Head, the two policemen now had their sharpest view of the figure so far. As it approached the pub, it happened to look around and then slightly upward, scanning the road ahead.

  Turner stabbed the pause button. ‘Anyone you know?’ he asked and glanced up at his boss.

  ‘Can you get that image any clearer?’

  ‘I was just about to,’ Turner said and leaned towards the rack of equipment on the right wall. He turned a dial and punched a couple of black plastic keys on a pad.

  ‘Let’s close in …’ He stabbed more buttons and the picture changed. Lines grew sharper and at the centre of the image a short, bulky figure was caught mid-stride. The man’s features were suddenly recognisable.

  ‘Bring him in,’ Pendragon said in a monotone.

  From their position in an anteroom on the covert side of a two-way mirror, DCI Pendragon and Sergeant Turner watched Tony Ketteridge fidgeting in his chair in Interview Room 1. Dressed in shorts and a garishly patterned shirt, he was sweating profusely. Too many
buttons left undone revealed an expanse of chest hair and a gold chain. There were damp patches in the fabric of his shirt, under the arms and around his abdomen. His hair was a mess and he had a two-day-old grey-flecked beard. He reminded Pendragon of the pictures of Saddam Hussein taken after US troops had dragged him from his hideout.

  ‘He looked even worse half an hour ago,’ Turner said, as though he had read his boss’s thoughts. ‘Took him ten minutes to answer the door. Wife’s at church, apparently.’

  Pendragon led the way into the interview room next door.

  ‘What the hell’s this all about?’ Ketteridge protested immediately.

  The DCI had a mug of coffee in his hand. Without replying, he settled himself into a chair and switched on the digital recorder set at the end of the metal table between him and Ketteridge. He recorded the time, date and other details of the interview, then removed a sheaf of glossy prints from a clear plastic folder. He slid one of the images taken from the surveillance film across the table towards Tony Ketteridge. ‘Did we catch your good side?’

  The blood drained from Ketteridge’s face. He looked away and heaved a heavy sigh. ‘It’s not what it looks like …’

  ‘Oh? So what exactly is it, Mr Ketteridge?’

  Ketteridge screwed up his mouth. ‘I wasn’t going to the site.’

  ‘You were very close to it … and at a very odd time of night.’

  Ketteridge bit his lip and closed his eyes. Pendragon studied the man’s podgy face. He looked utterly exhausted.

  ‘I suppose there’s no bloody chance that what I say can be kept from the missus, is there?’ he said finally.

  Pendragon glanced at Turner who was standing a few feet away, close to the wall. ‘Well, that would depend on what you had to say.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Mr Ketteridge … I don’t imagine I need remind you of the seriousness of the situation. Amal Karim died sometime between one-thirty and two-thirty yesterday morning. The CCTV at the site was put out of action at fourteen minutes past two that morning, and you were seen not a hundred metres from there at seven minutes past. What would you conclude from that?’