The Messiah Secret (5 page)

‘Different wills, I suppose?’

‘All completely different, and each cutting out one or more different family members. The trouble was, each time he made a new will, he never bothered telling the new solicitor acting for him about the earlier ones, although he made sure he told the beneficiaries of the new will.’

‘But not the people he’d just disinherited?’

‘Of course not. That wouldn’t have been any fun, would it? So as soon as he was found dead, various family members crawled out of the woodwork, each of them
expecting to inherit about two hundred acres of prime Suffolk real estate and a country house stuffed full of antiques.’

‘So who is the beneficiary?’ Bronson asked, sounding puzzled.

‘For the house and land, I’ve no idea – but in his final will, or at least the last one that’s turned up so far, the old man gave everything inside the house – the entire contents, that is – to the British Museum.’

‘So you’re up there to assess the bequest?’

‘Yep.’ Angela drove her fork into the salad and took a mouthful. ‘The Suffolk Police have finally allowed museum staff to go into the house. Until now, it’s been out of bounds as a crime scene.’

‘So you’ll be away all week, then?’ Bronson asked.

‘Hopefully no longer than that. Until I get there, I really don’t know how much there is to do.’ Angela paused and crossed her fingers surreptitiously under the table. She hoped her next question didn’t make her sound too desperate. ‘We’re staying in a local pub, if you fancy popping up one evening?’

As befitted the founder and major shareholder of NotJustGenetics Inc., JJ Donovan’s office was on the top floor of the building. It occupied most of the top floor, in fact. Two of the walls were almost entirely glass, offering spectacular views of Monterey and the ocean beyond, but these days Donovan rarely bothered looking out in that direction. He’d even had his desk moved closer to one of the inner walls and positioned a couple of couches and several armchairs by the picture windows in its place.

His desk was a wide expanse of bird’s-eye maple supported by a stainless-steel frame and legs, his chair a futuristic combination of chrome, steel and leather. Opposite the desk, about half of one wall was entirely given over to video displays. Eight digital plasma screens displayed a selection of domestic and international news feeds. In the centre of the desk, a smaller digital screen displayed exactly the same feeds, but was touch-sensitive, so Donovan could
simply press the tip of his finger on any of the video pictures to select the sound for that particular channel.

Also on the desk were three telephones and two computer screens, one displaying the logo and the status of the NoJoGen network, and which showed the progress of any of the development programmes being run by the company’s scientists. The other was just a regular PC hitched to a broadband router, which allowed him to surf the web or do anything else he wanted. This machine was an obvious area of vulnerability, so it was separated from the company network, which was shielded behind a physical firewall, and the most powerful software firewall, antivirus and anti-intrusion programs money could buy. Jesse McLeod had stated that even he couldn’t hack his way inside the system and if
he
couldn’t do it, he’d added modestly, nobody else could.

The only incongruous note in Donovan’s hi-tech office was a large display cabinet positioned beside the door, containing a collection of old books. Really old books. Or, to be absolutely accurate, old copies of really old books. And in a locked safe set into the same wall, a safe that incorporated sophisticated thermostatic controls and devices to regulate the humidity, lay his most prized possession. It was little more than a scrap of papyrus that he’d privately named the Hyrcania Codex, based upon the single name he’d found in the text.

In complete contrast to the work his company did, which was arguably beyond the cutting edge of the science
of genetics, Donovan had long had a fascination with ancient manuscripts and codices. As his business had blossomed, he’d had the finance to indulge his passion, and he’d bought relics at auction and from specialist dealers. He’d even learned a little Hebrew and Aramaic along the way, though he usually employed specialists to produce translations of the works he had purchased.

Over two years earlier, a single phrase he’d read in the translation of one part of the Hyrcania Codex had electrified him, and it was this discovery that had driven the non-medical searches that he’d tasked Jesse McLeod with.

That morning, Donovan arrived early at the building and followed his usual routine. He slid his Porsche 911 into his named slot in the underground car park and took the stairs to his office. He never used the lift because he got little enough exercise during the day, and he had never seen the point of sweating away pointlessly on some machine in a gym. Climbing six flights of stairs non-stop every day would, he hoped, give him a short but regular cardio-vascular workout.

Anyone looking at him would probably agree that it was working. Donovan was tall, just over six two, and slim, with thick black hair that he kept trimmed close to his scalp – not a crew cut, but not far off. Dark brown, almost black, eyes and a large straight nose dominated his face, and even when he’d just shaved he still seemed to sport a five o’clock shadow. When he smiled, which he did
often, because JJ Donovan was a man with a lot to be happy about, he showed two rows of brilliant white teeth, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘forty-grand smile’, because this was exactly what they’d cost.

He put his briefcase down on his desk and switched on both of his monitors. On the PC connected to the internet, he pulled up a classical music broadcast and pumped the sound through the desktop’s built-in speaker system. Then he flicked the switch that powered up the wall-mounted monitors and watched CNN for a few seconds. Finally, he looked at his network computer and checked the internal message system.

The note from Jesse McLeod was the third one he read. He read the text twice, then reached for the internal telephone.

The Mini bounced down the drive, which curved around to the right behind a low hill. As she straightened up the car, Angela could see the hall itself for the first time. She knew from what Roger Halliwell had told her that it dated from the late nineteenth century, a Gothic-revival structure built on the remains of a much older building.

From a distance, the house looked mellow and comfortable in the landscape. Set on a slight rise and overlooking a small ornamental lake, which was a somewhat bilious green in the mid-afternoon sunlight, it featured spires on the corners and a profusion of arched windows, the whole building constructed of what looked like the same type of grey stone as the pillars at the end of the drive.

‘Nice,’ Angela murmured.

Three cars were parked on the oval gravel area in front of the house, so she assumed the other members of the British Museum team had already arrived. These cars were
some distance from the house, which at first puzzled her, but when she pulled up next to one of them and switched off the engine, she saw why.

Along the façade of the property was a temporary fence, just a line of steel posts driven into the gravel surface of the drive and linked by plastic-coated wire, and behind that were several quite substantial lumps of masonry. And when she looked up at the old house itself, she realized that it was in a very poor condition indeed, with large gaps in the stonework where pieces had fallen out over the years. Several of the window panes were broken, and what paint there was had flaked badly.

She left her overnight bag in the boot of the car, but took her laptop case with her, and walked across to the main door of the house which was standing wide open.

She stepped into a large square wood-panelled hall filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests. On one side stood a mounted suit of armour, that to Angela’s inexpert eyes looked genuinely medieval, and on the other a life-size wooden carving of an erect bear, one paw raised high, the other held out at about waist height, a wooden plate clutched in its claws, possibly intended to be a receptacle for mail or perhaps keys. Avoiding the bear’s glassy eyes, she looked around. At the far end of the hall, beyond the bear and the suit of armour, a massive stone staircase ascended to the first floor of the house. On both sides of the hall were large double doors, open wide.

Choosing the doorway on the right-hand side, Angela
walked straight into an Aladdin’s cave of relics. The room ran the entire length of that part of the house and had probably originally been intended as a formal reception room. There were two tall windows at the far end; half a dozen others along the right-hand wall looked out of the front of the building towards the gravelled car park. The long wall opposite them was dominated by a huge fireplace. You could burn an entire tree in it which, Angela reflected, you’d probably need to do in the winter if you wanted to keep the temperature of the room much above freezing. On either side of the fireplace, built-in bookcases extended in both directions, the shelves lined with leather-bound volumes. Just cataloguing those would be at least a week’s work for somebody. But it wasn’t the elegant proportions of the room or the books or the faded decoration, or even the fireplace, that caught her eye. It was the floor.

Almost the entire surface of the scuffed parquet was covered with boxes and bags and chests, a haphazard collection of containers, interspersed with occasional bronze and marble sculptures and other, unrecognizable, objects covered in white dust sheets or plastic sheeting.

‘Good God,’ Angela muttered to herself. ‘If every room’s like this, it’ll take months, not weeks, to sort out.’

‘Ah, there you are, Angela.’ Richard Mayhew’s voice boomed out from behind her, stating the obvious. A large – in all respects – and florid-faced man who specialized in objects made from silver and gold, he seemed incapable of
ever speaking in anything less than a slightly moderated shout.

‘Richard,’ she said, shaking his hand. She pointed at the chaotic mass of containers in the room. ‘Are all the rooms as full as this?’

Mayhew shook his head. ‘No, not at all. This is the biggest room in the house, and it looks as if somebody – presumably the executors – decided to leave the furniture in situ, but bring almost everything else in here and the room on the opposite side of the hall. Personally, I’d have preferred to do it room by room, but there you are. Needs must, and all that.’

He looked round. ‘Now, we’ll be making a start in here first thing tomorrow morning. The other chaps are checking the rest of the house, making sure that we know what else there is to be assessed. The good news for you is that there’s a very large kitchen, and almost all of the china and ceramics we’ve found so far are already in there. I don’t think it’ll take you all that long to check them over. In the meantime, let me introduce you to the other chaps and give you the guided tour. It’s a fascinating old house with some very interesting features.’

He led the way back into the hall and across to the foot of the staircase.

‘What the devil happened here?’ Angela asked, stopping short when she saw a missing banister halfway up the staircase.

Mayhew coughed, and turned an alarming shade of
puce. ‘That is where the old man . . . er, died,’ he said. ‘Apparently he was found hanging from that piece of banister. Terrible business.’

Angela noticed a large brown stain on the flagstones near her feet, and looked away. There had obviously been a lot of blood. She decided it was time to change the subject.

‘Roger told me about the multiple wills Wendell-Carfax made.’

Mayhew smiled and relaxed a little. ‘Mischievous old sod. He was the last of the line, you know. Never married, no children. Just a few cousins who’re now all busily fighting each other over their share of the inheritance.’

He led the way up to a wide corridor on the first floor, spacious bedrooms opening up on both sides of it. ‘As you’ve probably guessed, Oliver was a quite a character, probably slightly mad. But his father – his name was Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax – was as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s him at the end of the corridor.’