Spear of Destiny Read online

  ‘How touching of you to ask. Your grandfather asked the same thing of me last night. When I answered him, he clammed up. No matter what inducements I offered him and his friend, they refused to part with the information I needed. Perhaps you will do better, you or your niece here.’

  ‘Then get on with it,’ spat out Ethan.

  ‘What we came for last night, what we are here for tonight as well, are not things of any great significance to you. You have never seen them, they have no sentimental value to you, as they did for your grandfather. Perhaps you will find it easier to part with them. You already know that Lukacs and I have no compunctions. No morals, no ethical code. At least, none that either of you would recognise. You are a policeman, and you see the world with a policeman’s eyes, all rules and regulations passed on to you by someone else. That’s pitiful. Your sort will always lose. You lack the willpower, the inner strength, the natural hardness of mind and body that gives victory to the strong.’

  Ethan opened his eyes. There was no shame in anything now. Sarah’s nakedness was no reason for embarrassment, not for her, not for him. He could see nothing beautiful or desirable in her, not now, not in this bitter cold, with the threats of rape and death hanging in the unfeeling air. The only emotions he felt were pity and fear. For some reason – a true instinct, as he would later reckon it – he thought of photographs he had seen of women herded into concentration camps and stripped naked.

  ‘Tell me what you want, take it, and get out of here,’ said Ethan.

  ‘Pray to whatever god you worship that you know where to find them. We’re here to take what rightly belongs to us. The Spear of Destiny, the Grail, the Crown of Thorns, all the Christ relics. If you know where they are, you would do well to tell us. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I find it hard to believe your niece will have any trouble.’

  He looked round at Sarah, who was shivering badly now as the intense cold bit through her skin. The Beast was holding her firmly from behind, pinning her arms to her side. Her skin was showing signs of exposure, her lips had turned blue, and wave after wave of involuntary shudders passed through her. Ethan looked into her eyes and almost recoiled at the horror and helplessness he saw reflected in them.

  ‘Tell him, Ethan. Whatever they are, they aren’t worth this.’

  ‘You promise you will let her go the moment you have the relics in your hands?’

  ‘Of course. Why would I encumber myself with her? Lukacs and I will be out of your hair as soon as the relics are handed over. Believe me, you will never hear from us again. Your bumbling police will never track us down; perhaps you can warn them not to bother trying. Now, tell us where they are.’

  He told them.

  Beauty looked him up and down.

  ‘How do you know this?’ he asked.

  ‘I…told him,’ said Sarah. ‘The relics are still there. You can take them. I hope they make you happy. I hope they bring you close to God.’

  The sarcasm was lost on the intruders.

  ‘Take us there now,’ said the blond man.

  ‘I have to find the key to the mausoleum.’

  ‘Then you’d better be quick before the little lady here dies of cold.’

  The place to start was in the kitchen, in the old pantry, where a key box had been fastened to the wall for generations, and where every key that had ever passed through Woodmancote Hall hung from a hook or nestled among a tangled heap of its brass and iron companions. Ethan worked his way through them systematically. Behind him stood Beauty and the Beast, and with them Sarah. Ethan had insisted that they give her a blanket to cover her, and slippers for her feet, but that was the only concession they would make, and at every moment, it seemed likely they would take it away again.

  The key to the family vault was on a hook at one side of the box, apart from the rest. A thin cardboard label in a copperplate hand had obviously hung from it for a very long time. It was a large brass key that had clearly not been used very often. The last but one death had been Gerald’s wife Edith. She had been interred in one of the last vacant spaces, in the expectation that Gerald would join her there in due course. Ethan had been twenty-three when Edith died. He had never known her very well, and for most of that time as a child.

  He had been a man at the time of the last interment, a man of thirty weeping uncontrollably, watched by friends and family, helpless to assuage his grief. Struggling against the tears, he had helped shoulder Abi’s coffin to its final destination inside the vault. He had locked the door behind her with his own hand.

  ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, and led the way outside.

  The snow had stopped falling, but a bitter frost lay in the air and, in the sky above, the moon hovered in silence, as though itself the origin of all this coldness, its white light lying undimmed on the unbroken passages of snow. Sarah thought she would die as the frost crept across her skin. This was the way they had gone the night before, on their way to midnight mass. She had slipped her arm through Ethan’s, feeling great comfort in it. But tonight there was no comfort in anything, no mood of celebration, no dimly remembered holiness. Just this: a killing cold and men who would rape and kill her as they would shoot a racehorse with a broken leg.

  The mausoleum was set back at the end of a sloping lawn, beside the willow-bordered expanse of Beecham Water, a large pond that some called a small lake and others dismissed as an outsize puddle. Built from marble in the eighteenth century, the vault held the remains of generations of Usherwoods, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren. The earliest coffins had been removed and reburied in the churchyard at the end of the nineteenth century, to make way for another crop of the dead.

  The lock turned reluctantly, aided by sprays of hot water and WD-40 brought for the purpose by Ethan. Beauty held a torch while he worked the lock.

  An owl hooted mournfully somewhere close by. Bare willow branches moved against the sky, rattling in the light breeze. Across the surface of the frozen pond, moonlight lay like spilt milk. Suddenly, an animal screamed. There was movement among the trees on the other side of Beecham Water. The lock gave way, and the key turned fully. They were in.

  The door swung back with a tearing sound, as if it was about to peel away from its hinges. Ethan made a mental note to have the hinges oiled before they came to need replacing entirely. Beauty shone his torch inside. He said nothing and betrayed nothing of the excitement he felt at this moment.

  The bright beam played across a central aisle flanked on both sides by deep niches filled with coffins. Not even the sudden influx of fresh air could dispel the musty odour of death and disuse that hung over the entire vault. Cobwebs festooned the interior, and spiders that had known nothing but darkness all their lives scurried away at the touch of light.

  Ethan hesitated at the entrance, knowing how simple it would be for their attackers to kill him and Sarah here and leave their bodies until it was time for the next burial. Beauty shoved him inside, and Lukacs came after, dragging Sarah unwillingly behind.

  Despite Beauty’s torch, the tomb seemed a vast place of darkness, darkness that began with the eyes and ended in the very depths of the soul. From the ceiling above there hung banners of tattered spiders’ webs, grown dirty after long, long years without light. Each niche and each coffin bore the name of its occupant, but Ethan preferred not to take note of them. Some of these were people he’d known in his youth and childhood, others bore the names of ancestors of whom he’d heard stories told by his father and grandfather round the fireplace or in his bed late at night. And there, on his right, without need for a nameplate or other sign, lay Abi’s coffin tight inside its niche, its metal ornamentation already rusted, cobwebs weaving their way into the gaps and interstices. He had to fight against the temptation to picture what lay inside.

  At the far end, placed on a table and propped against the wall, were several objects whose identity was not at first obvious. They walked down in silence. Ethan heard a sharp intake of breath beside h
im as Beauty showed emotion for the first time. He heard the man mutter something in a language that was not German. In front of them stood a Roman lance, and at its foot a pottery cup, and what looked like a dome of thorns. The German – for Ethan was by now certain that was his nationality – played the torch beam everywhere, picking out yet more objects: a wooden board with writing in three languages, a short piece of wood, and a piece of fabric, folded several times and rusted with age.

  ‘Is this everything?’ the German demanded. ‘If there’s anything else and you don’t tell me, you will both die.’

  ‘This is all I know about. I’ve seen nothing like them anywhere else in the house.’

  For several moments, their fate hung by a thread. Ethan knew that if they were to die, it would be now. Then the German nodded. Lukacs stepped forward, still gripping Sarah tightly by one arm, while she fought to cover her half-naked body with the other. Her feet were filthy, and her skin was already grey with cobwebs. She stifled a cry as a large spider scuttled across her right foot. With his free hand, the big man reached inside his coat and brought out a large lump of fabric that opened moments later to become a holdall. He handed Sarah to the German, then placed the relics – the pilum in two halves – into the bag and zipped it tight.

  ‘I hope you are telling me the truth,’ said Beauty. ‘If not, you will see me again.’

  Ethan opened his mouth to protest, but at that moment the German lifted his hand and brought the gun down hard against his skull. Everything went black. Ethan fell in a heap to the floor.

  8

  The Charnel House

  First there was darkness, then he opened his eyes and there was still darkness. His head was aching and spinning, and when he tried to move it, the pain grew instantly more intense and the spinning made him want to throw up. He took a deep breath and lay still. Blinking hurt, and it did nothing to dispel the darkness. He could hear voices, but something told him they were only in his head, echoes from the past, fading, then running back with renewed intensity. It took some time for it to sink in that he must still be in the mausoleum. That was when he realised just how cold he was. He’d no idea how long he’d been lying in that spot, he could barely remember the moment when he’d been struck. Hours might have passed, a whole day. He tried to stand up, but the dizziness took hold of him, and a crashing pain sliced through his skull. He fell back to the floor and lost consciousness again.

  When he became lucid for a second time, the darkness was just as intense, the cold was more biting, but the pain in his skull had receded somewhat. His first thought this time was to ask himself what had happened to Sarah.

  ‘Sarah?’ he asked, then again, this time more loudly, ‘Sarah? Are you there? Can you hear me?’

  No one answered. He was stabbed by the thought that their assailants had killed Sarah and left him for dead. And that was when it sank in to him that he was lying on a stone floor surrounded by the bones of his family, and that if he didn’t get out of there fast he’d freeze to death and remain there until someone brought a coffin and put him in it. Something unpleasant walked onto his face and began to creep across it, over his chin, then onto his mouth; but he was too far gone to do more than take notice of its presence.

  Part of him – and not a small part – wanted to curl up and go back to sleep. He hadn’t noticed the cold or the pain throughout his head and limbs when he’d been asleep, and at the moment sleep felt like the best thing in the world. Just another minute, maybe two, maybe half an hour; an incessant voice soaked through his brain, teasing and enticing him. ‘What’s the point of getting up?’ the voice insinuated. ‘Sarah’s dead, Abi’s dead, Granddad’s dead, you’ll be dead soon, better sleep it out, better give in, better let go, go with the flow, with the slow flow, with the so so slow flow, with…’

  He snapped himself awake, sending a bolt of pain through the base of his skull, where it met his spine and travelled on down his body. It was the best thing he could have done. The pain brought him fully awake. He reached up and knocked the huge spider squatting on his mouth flying into the darkness.

  It took most of his strength to struggle to his feet, and the moment he did, he pitched forwards onto the floor again. His legs, numb with cold and nerveless from hours of immobility, simply would not support him. Using his arms this time to push himself to a sitting position, he bent forwards to rub his legs in an attempt to force warmth and life back into them. He had come out dressed only in the thick pyjamas he’d been wearing in bed, over which he’d thrown on the tweed jacket he’d left over a chair. Flexing his legs and gritting his teeth against the jagged pains that shot up and down them, he took a deep breath, then thrust up from the floor, staggering for balance.

  He thought he’d go down again and feared another fall might break a leg or an arm. But remembering where he was, he managed to lurch to one side, first one step, then a second, until he crashed into an obstruction and grabbed hold of it by both hands. Running his hands over it, he recognised it as the end of a coffin.

  That was the moment he realised that he didn’t know which way he was facing. There wasn’t a single chink of light in this place, not so much as a pinprick. It was eternal dark in here, interrupted only by the brief moments of death that brought men in dark suits carrying coffins.

  The layout of the mausoleum was straightforward enough: a high-ceilinged space divided on each side into niches, like a wall of pigeonholes. Most of the niches were filled with coffins, leaving only a few to receive the next interments. It should be a simple matter to find the door, open it, and get out into the fresh air. Using the coffins to his left as a guide, he crept forward, aching in every joint as his legs moved across the granite floor.

  It took him less than a minute to reach the far end. He ran a hand across it, and encountered nothing but cobwebs and stone. The stone wall ran right across the rear of the building, from one bank of niches to the next. The mausoleum had been well built, to withstand the ravages of rain, damp, and storm.

  It took less time to turn and walk to the other end, where his outstretched hand struck the door. Carefully, he ran his hands over the wood until he came to the line that separated the two halves. His fingers moved up and down on either side of the line, but even as they did so, his heart sank and he became absolutely still. He’d been looking for a handle, or two handles, two knobs, two ways of opening the door. But he knew it was a waste of time, that no one puts handles on the inside of a mausoleum.

  He pushed hard, now against one side, now against the other. The heavy door remained unmoving. Harder now, he pushed and pushed again. Surely his assailants would have run out, not taking time to lock him inside. Surely they would not have wished such a fate on him. But then he thought of what he had seen in his grandfather’s study, the mutilations on the two bodies, the callous way the man called Lukacs had stripped Sarah and forced her half naked into the coldest night of the year.

  As it sank in on him that he was trapped, that he would die here in the cold and dark, absolutely alone but for the uncaring dead, he felt panic rise in him. The door was solid wood built into the masonry on heavyweight brass hinges, and he knew it was utterly beyond his strength to effect the slightest damage on it, or to move it even by a fraction. His legs, weakened by cold and hunger, went from under him, and he fell awkwardly and painfully on his right hip, knocking the breath from his lungs and jarring his elbow. In that moment, he knew himself defeated, and with that ghastly understanding, knew Sarah too would soon be dead, if they had not killed her already.

  He dragged himself into a sitting position, with his back to the door, and waited until he had more control over his breathing, and the pains in his hip and elbow subsided to a more bearable level. He had no way of knowing whether or not he had broken anything, but he realised that it scarcely mattered. Where would he walk to, what would he use his arm for?

  He had no idea how long it would be before the air became stale, but he was sure it would in time. His eyes had adjusted to
the dark, but that meant nothing for there was no light in here at all. The only sense that meant anything in here was touch, and all he touched was the work of spiders, or the rotting masks of death ancient and renewed. Everything in this stone chamber would return to dust, and he would go down to dust with the rest.

  It was hard to think, hard to bear the inevitability of what awaited him. He felt a tugging and tearing at his heart to think how, without blame, Sarah had been pulled into whatever plot lay behind this whole business. He thought hard to grasp what it could be about, but nothing fitted, nothing made sense, nothing satisfied his sense of justice and orderliness. Objects that might be relics of the crucifixion and might not, taken from a tomb in the Libyan desert, had ended up in a tomb in the English countryside, and had now been stolen by men whose motive Ethan could barely guess at. Could Christian relics drive men to murder, or to bury a stranger in a mausoleum, or to strip a woman naked and threaten to rape her?

  His hip was still painful. Carefully, he transferred his weight to the other side, holding himself upright by his left hand. As he shifted, he felt something dig into his left thigh. He couldn’t think what it was at first, but when he slipped a hand into his trouser pocket, he brought it out holding the box of cook’s matches he’d put there the day before, when lighting the candles for dinner.

  He put the matches down on the floor beside him, thinking that they would at least give him a little light before the darkness took him entirely. After a few minutes, however, it occurred to him that he might strike a couple of matches in order to take a closer look at the door, in case there was some mechanism he had missed with his bare hands.

  He opened the box gingerly, fearful of spilling the contents across the floor, and took a match from inside. It was a long match designed to burn for some time. He struck it against the side of the container, and a bright light flared up. Holding the match carefully in order to get the maximum time from it, he used the little flame to orient himself.