The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (20 page)

Ben slept less than an hour before his dreaming thoughts jerked him guiltily awake and he kicked his legs from the bed. He carefully lifted Roberta’s sleeping arm off his chest and rolled out from under it. He got up, lifted the Browning from the table and grabbed his bag.

Finding his way by moonlight he padded quietly into the ante-room. He clicked the door softly shut behind him and flicked on a side-lamp.

The rules of the game had changed. Suddenly it was clearer that these people, whoever they were, were after the manuscript too. He had work to do.

The plain black jacket he’d taken from Anna’s house was still in his bag. He pulled it out and went through the pockets again. Apart from Rheinfeld’s notebook and the fake scroll that her attacker had torn out of its frame, they were empty. There wasn’t a scrap of a clue as to its owner’s identity. Who was he? A contract killer, maybe. He’d come across those people before, but never one like this, never a sick maniac who tortured women.

He wondered about the fake scroll. Why had the man taken it down from Anna’s wall? Just like its previous owner who had passed it on to Anna, he must have been fooled by its carefully forged antiquated style and appearance. That could only mean that whoever else was looking for the manuscript had no better idea than he did exactly what it was or looked like. But certainly it was important to them. Important enough to kill for.

He took out Rheinfeld’s notebook, pulled it from its plastic wrapping and sat down with it on a couch near the lamp. Until now, he hadn’t had a good chance to study it up close. Was Roberta right about it? Was it possible that Rheinfeld had transcribed from memory the secrets that he’d stolen from Gaston Clément? He hoped so. There was nothing else to go on.

He turned the filthy pages slowly, scrutinizing the text and drawings. So much of it seemed like nonsense. Scattered apparently at random throughout, appearing on the corners and margins of some of the pages, were scribbled alternating combinations of letters and numbers. Some of the combinations were long, some short. He flipped back and forth and counted nine of these scribbles. They reminded him a little of Klaus Rheinfeld’s ravings on Anna’s dictaphone recording.

N 18 N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15 22 R      20 R 15
U 11 R 9 E 11 E 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A
13 A 18 E 23 A      22 R 15 O

What to make of them? To his eye they looked like a
code of some kind. Perhaps a set of alchemical formulae. None of them seemed to relate to anything else on whatever page they appeared. Whatever significance they had, it was impenetrable.

He ignored them and moved on. He came across an ink sketch of what looked like a fountain. Its base was marked with strange symbols similar to ones on the gold crucifix. Below the drawing was an inscription in Latin.

Back in his student days he’d had to wade through a lot of old religious texts written in Latin. But that had been a long time ago. It took him a while to scratch about with the words and come up with a translation. It read
While the blood flows from the blessed wound of Christ and the holy Virgin presses her virginal breast, the milk and the blood spurt out and are mixed and become the fountain of life and the spring of Wellbeing.

The fountain of life…the spring of wellbeing. These sounded like references to some elixir of life. But they were so vague. He read doggedly on. He came to a page with just one line of text, and beneath it a circular symbol. The writing was French, the curly script barely visible through splotches of old blood and Rheinfeld’s fingermarks.
Again he translated.

The symbol beneath it, he recognized right away. He flipped back a few pages. Yes, it was that same raven emblem again. It seemed to appear again and again. So the text was telling him that it concealed an important point. But what?

A bloodstain was covering something written under the raven image. Ben carefully scratched away the dried blood with his fingernail until he could make it out. The hidden word was DOMUS. Latin for house. What to make of that–
House of the Raven
?

The only other reference he could find to the raven was an equally puzzling rhyming stanza. This time, it was written in English.

He wasn’t even going to try to figure that one out. Moving on, he came to the last three pages in the notebook. They were identical except for three different arrangements of apparently meaningless jumbled letters, one on each page. He read them over and over again. At the top of each of the three pages were the cryptic words ‘The Seeker Shall Find’. They
read to Ben almost like a taunt. ‘The seeker shall get totally lost, more like,’ he muttered.

Below these three inscriptions, a line of Latin read
Cum Luce Salutem. With the light comes salvation.

Below that, each page had an even more perplexing arrangement of baffling text. The first of the three pages read:

The second page read:

And on the third page the text was arranged:

The last three letters in each arrangement, M.L.R, looked like initials. Did the R stand for Rheinfeld? But his first name was Klaus. What about the ML? It
didn’t seem to make any sense.

What about the broken words above the MLR? Ben sat back on the couch. He’d always hated puzzles. He gazed into space. A moth flew past his nose and he watched it flit towards the lamp on the table next to him. It darted here and there and then flew inside the thin cloth lampshade. He could see it walking up the other side of the material, transparent with the light from the bulb.

Then it hit him.
With the light comes salvation.

He gripped the three pages together on their own, folding the rest of the notebook away from them, and held them up to the lamp. The light shone through the flimsy paper, and suddenly the jumbled letters formed themselves into recognizable words. Taken together, the three blocks of text now read:

Maybe we’re getting somewhere now
, he thought.

Then again, maybe not.

OK, break it down into bite-size pieces. ‘The End’–what was that, just saying it was the end of the
book? That was all he could make of it. But at least that was more than he could understand of roasted water and lakes of blood. He rubbed his eyes, bit his lip. For a moment, his frustration gave way to fury and he had to control a powerful urge to tear the notebook to shreds. He gulped, tried to calm down, stared sullenly at the phrases for a long minute. Willed them to reveal some kind of meaning to him.

But if it really didn’t mean anything, why go to the trouble of setting up the phrases over three consecutive pages like that?

Like most self-taught linguists, Ben’s spoken French was far more fluent than his grasp of the written language. As far as he could make out, though, the line ‘the lake of blood’ should have read in French
‘LE LAC DE SANG’.
Instead it had been written as
‘LE LAC D’SANG’
, with an important letter missed out. Was it just a mistake? It didn’t seem to be. The spelling looked deliberately done that way. But why?

He struggled to think clearly. It was almost as if…as if the writer was playing with the form, toying with the letters…compensating for a lack of letters? Now why would he
do
that?

An
anagram?.

He snatched a piece of hotel notepaper from the table and started scribbling. He began eliminating one letter at a time by circling them, trying to create new words out of the strange phrases. He got as far as
‘L’UILE ROTIE N’A MAL…
‘the roasted oil has not wrong’…when he realized it was a blind alley and lost patience with it.

Scrunch.
He threw the paper ball furiously across the room and started again on a fresh sheet.

Five more attempts, and he was beginning to think he’d end up buried alive in crumpled paper. But now it was beginning to look like something coherent.

In another fifteen minutes he had it. He looked down at his sheet. The new words weren’t in French, but in the real author’s native Italian.

It was his
signature.
Ben breathed deeply. It looked as though this was what he’d been searching for all along.

There was only one small problem. Even if what he had here
was
a word-for-word transcription of the elusive Fulcanelli manuscript, he still didn’t have anything worth taking back to Fairfax. If the old man had thought the manuscript was going to offer up some kind of medical prescription, or a simple home recipe for making life-saving potions with easy step-by-step diagrams, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. A cryptic mass of arcane riddles and
gibberish wasn’t ever going to help little Ruth. This search wasn’t over yet. It was only just beginning. It was after 6.30 am. Light-headed with fatigue, Ben rested back on the couch and closed his burning eyes.

The night breeze rustled the treetops above him. He sat on his haunches, perfectly still and unseen in the bushes, waiting and watching, as silent and patient as any of the wild predatory creatures that lived in the dark forest around him. His mind was shut off from the pain of his cuts and bruises, the graze on his cheekbone and the rawness of his palms after sliding down through the branches of the trellis. He hardly felt anything any longer. But his rage felt like a bubble of molten steel in his throat.

There was nothing Franco Bozza hated worse than failure, than being thwarted, especially when success had seemed so assured. His prizes had been taken from him, and he was powerless to do anything about it. He’d lost.

For the moment.

He waited a while longer, his breathing slowing down as his fury diminished to a simmering rage. His head cocked as he heard the siren in the distance. The wail of the ambulance grew louder on the empty country road, and then it sped by Bozza’s hiding-place,
turning the trees and bushes momentarily blue with its flashing lights.

He watched it approaching the entrance to the villa further up the road, slowing for the turn. Before it got there, car headlights appeared, coming the opposite way. Seconds later a battered Renault passed the ambulance in the narrow road. It seemed to slow as the ambulance turned into the villa’s drive, then it picked up speed and Bozza could hear the rattle of its engine approaching. As it came by, he was already moving through the trees to the hidden Porsche.

He caught up with it easily and quickly. As he drew nearer, he waited for a bend in the road where a junction turned off. He switched off the lights. If the Renault driver was paying attention, it would look as though the car behind had turned off in another direction.

Now he sat focused with all his concentration in the darkened, invisible Porsche, with only the dim tail-lights of the Renault to lead the way down the twisting lanes. After a few miles his quarry slowed and turned into the drive of a small country hotel. He pulled the Porsche over to the side of the road, got out and slipped into the grounds.

Hope and the American woman didn’t see him as they walked inside the hotel, but he was only fifty metres away in the shadows. He was under the trees looking up at the building when he saw lights come on. Middle window, first floor.

Time passed. Around midnight he saw two figures
in the window. They were dancing.
Dancing.
Then they disappeared and the windows went dark.

Bozza waited a while longer, methodically calculating the layout of the hotel. Then he circled the building until he found a kitchen entrance that wasn’t locked. He stalked along the quiet corridors until he came to the door he wanted. His spare knife was tucked through his belt.

Bozza was inserting his wire pick into the lock when the strip of yellow light appeared at the bottom of the door to the honeymoon suite. He cursed silently, withdrew the lock-pick and retreated into the dark corridor. Hope was too dangerous to confront without the element of surprise. He’d have to wait longer for his chance.

But it would come, it would come.