Secrets of the Dead Read online

  ‘Hector?’

  Now it was Norris’s turn to look baffled. ‘Who’s Hector?’

  I don’t know, she wanted to scream. The name had come to her like a ghost, unbidden and unexpected. ‘Isn’t he my husband?’

  But even as she said it, she knew that wasn’t right. I’m not married, she thought. And then, with the ghost of a smile, I’m pretty sure I’d remember that.

  Norris was looking at a piece of paper. ‘According to his passport, his name was Michael Lascaris.’

  And that did mean something. The smile left her; she slumped back in the bed. The monitor raced away at a million miles an hour. Beep. A red sports car gunning through mountains. Beep. A dark bay and a bright pool and dead faces watching from their plinths. Beep beep. Waking up in the middle of the night. A man with a gun. A struggle. The scream as Michael fell over the cliff – her scream. Beep beep beep beep beep …

  Someone banged through the door – not a man with a gun, but a woman in green overalls with a syringe in her hand. ‘Wait,’ she heard Norris say. ‘Give her a chance.’

  But they wouldn’t give her a chance. Strong hands clamped around her arm and a sharp point slid into her flesh. The monitor slowed its runaway pace.

  Then there was silence.

  ‘So you remember Michael Lascaris?’

  The metronome beat of the monitor was stable now, a gentle andante. They’d sat Abby up in her bed, though she couldn’t move much more. A plaster cast covered her right arm and shoulder, entombing her chest and most of her stomach. Somewhere underneath, she’d been told, was the bullet wound.

  You were shot. It still didn’t seem like her. Being shot happened to other people – victims. Abby had seen enough wounds in her old job to know they weren’t just things that happened on TV or in the cinema, but there’d still been the distance. You suffer, I pity.

  ‘Do you remember Michael?’

  ‘He drove a Porsche.’

  Norris’s piece of paper had grown into a folder. He flicked through the pages.

  ‘A 1968 Porsche Targa, red, UK registration?’

  Abby shrugged her one good shoulder. ‘It was red.’

  She wasn’t trying to be flippant – not much – but Norris took it badly. He stood, flapping his folder at her.

  ‘I know you’re in a bad way – Christ, you’re lucky to be alive – but you have to understand how serious this is. Someone bursts into a house and attacks two European diplomats. It doesn’t look good.’

  He didn’t burst in, Abby thought. He was already there, out by the pool with Michael.

  ‘The Montenegrins are running around like it’s the end of the world. They’re terrified it’s going to cause a storm in Brussels, derail their EU application, put them on a terrorist blacklist or whatever. Frankly, they’re overreacting.’ A stern glare, as if it was her fault. ‘You’re not that important.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But we’re still trying to keep it quiet. It doesn’t look too good for us either. Pretty embarrassing, to be honest.’

  The monitor accelerated a fraction. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.’

  ‘We’ll cope.’ The sarcasm missed him completely. ‘But we need to know what happened.’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  But she was stalling. There were pieces there, waiting to be turned over and examined. She didn’t quite know what they’d show, but she knew they frightened her.

  ‘Let’s start with Michael Lascaris.’

  A fragment of their earlier conversation came back to her. ‘He’s not my husband.’

  ‘We know that now. Your file in London said you were married; you and Michael were found together; we made an assumption. Turns out we were wrong.’

  ‘Am I divorced?’ Again, she knew she’d got it even before Norris confirmed it. The word tasted sour and true.

  ‘Michael Lascaris fell off a cliff,’ Norris continued. ‘The police fished his body out of Kotor Bay three days later.’

  Abby forced herself to sit up straighter. Pain shot through her ribs, making her wince, but she held herself steady. ‘He didn’t fall off the cliff. He was thrown off it.’

  ‘So you do remember.’

  ‘It’s starting to come back.’

  Norris took out a pen. ‘Let’s take it from the beginning. Was going there your idea?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Michael’s?’

  ‘The villa belonged to a friend of his.’

  ‘Did he say who this friend was?’

  The memories were coming more easily now. ‘An Italian judge.’

  The pen moved across the paper. ‘Was he there? The judge?’

  ‘Just us.’

  ‘A romantic getaway.’ There was a tone in his voice that Abby didn’t like. She slumped back.

  ‘It didn’t end up very romantic.’

  As quickly as she could, she fed him the scraps that had come back to her. Waking up in the night; hearing a noise; going out to the pool terrace.

  ‘Michael was fighting with the other man.’ She paused. All she had were fragments, glimpses and moments. Norris wanted a coherent story. ‘The house was full of antiques. I suppose he was a burglar. Michael must have heard him and surprised him. I tried to help. He –’ She broke off. With everything she was desperate to remember, that was one image she wished she could forget. ‘He pushed Michael over the cliff. Then he came after me.’

  ‘Did you get a look at him?’

  She tried to think, but it was like a dream. The harder she interrogated it, the more it receded. She peered into faces and saw only blurry blanks.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And you’re sure no one else was there?’

  ‘I don’t remember anyone.’ She read the disbelief on his face. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Somebody rang the police.’

  ‘Maybe it was a neighbour.’ But she knew that wasn’t right. She could remember the darkness – no lights for miles around. And Norris was shaking his head.

  ‘The call came from the villa. That’s how they knew where you were.’ Norris put down his pen. ‘You must have done it. You were too weak to talk: you didn’t say anything. Just left the phone off the hook and crawled away.’

  The effort of remembering was giving her a headache. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples. ‘I don’t remember that at all.’

  She opened her eyes, hoping Norris might have disappeared. Instead, he’d turned to a vinyl pocket at the back of his folder and was pulling something out, a sealed plastic bag, with gold in it. He held it up for her to see the necklace inside: an intricate labyrinth woven around a monogram, the shape of a P with the loop continued back left across the stroke. It looked old.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘It’s mine,’ she said. ‘I was wearing it that night.’

  ‘What’s the design?’

  Was he testing her – a trap? What would that prove? I barely remember my own name. Her eyes darted around the room: the monitor that looked like an ancient wireless set; the drip feeding her veins; the peeling paint; the crucifix over the door …

  … and something connected. A spark leapt between the necklace and the crucifix, bridging the gaps in her mind with a bolt of understanding so sharp it hurt.

  ‘Michael gave it to me. It’s an old Christian symbol.’

  She tried to stretch out, as if the old metal might still retain some memory of Michael that she could touch. The bandages and strappings held her down.

  Norris dropped the necklace into the folder. Abby felt an ache of loss, her last fragment of Michael slipping out of reach again. Was this how it would be for the rest of her life? Longing for something she could never have back.

  ‘The police found it in the pool at the villa. They thought it might be connected to your attacker.’

  He snapped the folder shut and stood. ‘I think that covers it. Unless there’s anything else you can remember?’ He moved towards the door.

&
nbsp; ‘Wait,’ Abby called. She could feel the panic returning. ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’

  Norris paused in the doorway.

  ‘You’re going home.’

  IV

  Constantinople – April 337

  EVERY TIME I open a door in this city it’s like entering a forgotten storeroom in a vast mansion. Everything’s covered in dust. Every footstep leaves a print, every touch leaves a smear. You’d think the city had been lost for centuries. But this isn’t the hallowed dust of antiquity – it’s the dust of a craftsman’s workshop, the dust of creation. And it’s still settling. Every day it casts a haze over the city. I can taste it on my tongue as I walk to the library: the brittle flavour of cut stone, the sweetness of sawn timber, the tartness of the quicklime they mix into the cement. Much longer and I’ll become a connoisseur, able to recognise every note of Athenian marble or Egyptian porphyry or Italian granite in the atmosphere.

  But dust never settles on memories. The longer I live, the cleaner they become: each one buffed and scraped and chiselled into glossy, hard perfection. Extraneous details are ground out and smoothed over. All that remains is my story.

  * * *

  I know the library by the Academy, though I’ve never been inside. Two black sphinxes crouch either side of the door, riddling passers-by: people call it the Egyptian Library. The sphinxes aren’t new, even Constantine can’t manufacture his new city from whole cloth. When you’re in a hurry, you have to work with what you’ve got. He’s ransacked the empire to fill his city with antique treasures: statues, columns, stones, even roof tiles.

  And books. As I push through the door, past the crowd who’ve gathered on the stairs, I can see hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts, neat scrolls tied and stacked in their criss-crossed shelving like bones in an ossuary. The unfamiliar smell hits me a second later: the must of old parchment and the rotting-grass scent of papyrus, distilled by the heat into something so ripe it makes me gag.

  The room is round and wide, with overhanging balconies under a domed ceiling painted with cyclamen and roses. It was designed to be a garden of knowledge, ordered architecture to grow cultivated thoughts. But already, the shelves around the rotunda have grown wild like thorns, tangled and dark, sometimes even spilling their fruit on the ground. All the windows are glazed shut, trapping the smell in the room and magnifying the sun’s heat. The whole room seems to sweat out its poisons.

  A dozen anxious conversations fall silent as I step through the door. I can tell the men who recognise me by the way their faces fall. I don’t take it personally. In my pomp, I used to enjoy it.

  A man’s waiting for me. He looks older than me, though he’s probably younger. He squints, leaning his head forward like a quail pecking grain. He’s wearing a calf-length tunic in grey cloth, and unlike the others he doesn’t have ink splashed on his hands or sleeves. I guess he makes his living carrying books, not copying them.

  ‘Are you the librarian?’

  He just about manages a nod. His face looks crushed, like a balled-up scrap of cloth. He’s lived his life among his scrolls, neatly rolled and stored. He didn’t expect this in his library.

  ‘Is the body still here?’

  He looks horrified. ‘The undertakers came an hour ago.’

  A murder with no body. ‘Can you show me where you found him?’

  He leads me down a narrow aisle between shelves, twisting and turning until suddenly we come out by a wall and a window. Yellow light leaches in and falls on the desk below, which is littered with papers and scrolls. The stool’s pushed back – it’s easy to imagine the reader has just gone to relieve himself, might come back any moment to find us leafing through his things.

  ‘Do you know who did it?’

  It’s an obvious question, but it has to be asked. The librarian shakes his head vigorously, affronted. He gestures at the walls of manuscripts hemming us in.

  ‘No one saw anything.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘His assistant – a deacon called Simeon. The Bishop was lying face down on the table. The deacon thought he was asleep.’

  ‘Is the deacon here?’

  Without answering – or perhaps by way of an answer – the librarian scuttles away. He holds out his arm like a stunted wing, trailing it along the shelves as he moves. A lifetime staring at books must have left him almost blind. No use as a witness.

  And what can I see? An inkpot and a reed pen on the table, with an ivory-handled knife and a small jar beside them. Thin shavings litter the table where the Bishop sharpened his pen.

  Why didn’t you use the knife to defend yourself? I wonder.

  I uncork the jar and sniff the white paste inside. It smells like glue. I put it back down and examine the pile of papers beside it. Bishop Alexander was a voracious reader: half the table is filled with scrolls, some untouched, others left open half-read. A few seem to have shaken off the spindles that held them down and rolled themselves up, perhaps when the dead man hit the table.

  In the centre sits a different sort of volume. A codex, individual vellum pages bound together to make a book. It seems an awkward and fragmented way of reading, but I know the Christians like it. I peer down to see what he was reading when he died.

  It’s impossible to tell. His broken face fell straight on to the book, drowning the words in blood. The left page is illegible, the right unwritten. His past obliterated, the future empty. I try to wipe off the written page, but the blood’s congealed. All I do is smear it. Shadows of words swim beneath the stain like fish under ice – unreachable.

  ‘Do you think you’ll find answers in there?’

  I look up. The librarian’s returned with a young man – tall, with a handsome face and tousled black hair. He’s dressed in a plain black robe and sandals, his hands are stained so dark at first I think he must be wearing gloves. Then I realise it’s ink. Then I wonder if there’s anything else with it.

  I gesture to the empty desk. ‘You found the body?’

  The youth nods. I scan his face for guilt, but it’s such a mess of emotions I can’t tell. There’s sadness, but also anger; anxiety, but touched with defiance. If he didn’t know who I was before, the librarian’s probably told him. He’s determined not to let my reputation cow him.

  ‘Your name’s Simeon?’

  ‘I’m – I was – Bishop Alexander’s secretary.’

  His dark eyes watch me, wondering what I’m thinking. Does he really want to know? You’ll do. If Constantine needs a quick answer, then the young servant with ink or blood on his hands – who found the body, who had who-knows-what grudge against his master – he’ll do. If he’s a priest, Constantine won’t torture him or execute him. He’ll pack him off to some rock in the sea and justice will be done.

  But that’s not what Constantine wants. Not yet.

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘His face was smashed in.’ The deacon says it viciously: he wants to shock me. He’ll have to try harder than that.

  ‘How?’

  He doesn’t understand. ‘Smashed in,’ he repeats. ‘He had blood all over him.’

  ‘On his face.’

  Simeon touches his forehead. ‘The wound was here.’

  ‘A clean wound, like a knife would make?’

  He thinks I’m being obtuse. ‘I told you it was smashed in. Broken open.’

  It doesn’t make sense. If the Bishop was sitting facing the window, back to the room, the back of his head would have been the obvious target. But the blood on the book supports the deacon’s story.

  I pull out the monogrammed necklace Constantine gave me.

  ‘You found this?’

  ‘On the floor, next to the body.’

  ‘Did you recognise it?’

  ‘It wasn’t Alexander’s.’

  ‘And do you know who killed him?’

  The question surprises him. It’s so obvious, he thinks it must be a trick. He stares at me, looking for the trap, then realises that silence d
oesn’t make him look good either.

  ‘He was dead when I found him.’

  I let my impatience show, playing on his nerves. ‘I know he was dead. But whoever did this didn’t walk away spotless. He must have had blood on his clothes, or his hands.’ I let my gaze drop to Simeon’s ink-stained hands. He clenches his fists.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ This as much to the librarian – perhaps his ears compensate for his struggling eyes. But he’s already shaking his head.

  ‘They’re building a new church next door. Every day, all we hear is noise and workmen. It’s almost too loud to read. “Eripient somnum Druso vitulisque marinis,” as Juvenal says.’

  I’m not interested in his erudition. Constantine once said that men show off their learning when they have nothing else to say for themselves. My eyes drift away.

  And catch something. A spray of blood on the shelved scrolls, well away from where the body was. I push past the librarian, almost knocking him into his beloved manuscripts.

  My foot kicks against something in the shadows on the floor. It rolls away, deeper into shadow. Simeon moves to pick it up, but I wave him back and kneel down myself. The floor’s dusty, littered with broken fragments of wax and fine threads of papyrus. As my hand searches the darkness, I feel something cool and smooth under my fingers. When I pick it up, I see a small bust carved in black marble, about the size of a man’s fist. The face has wise features and sightless eyes, though both are obscured by the blood matted onto it. I guess this was the last face Alexander saw before it smashed his brains in.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The name is inscribed on the base,’ says the librarian. He can’t bring himself to look.

  I turn it over. ‘Hierocles.’

  I don’t recognise the name – or perhaps I’ve heard it and paid no notice. But the others know him. Simeon especially.

  ‘Hierocles was a great hater of the Christians,’ he says, though I can see he’s thinking much more.

  ‘Do you know where it came from?’

  ‘From the library,’ says the librarian. ‘We have dozens of them.’

  And as soon as I look, I see. Midway up each shelf, about shoulder height, stone heads sit on wooden plinths guarding the manuscripts. Except on the shelf where blood has spattered the books. There, the plinth is empty.