The Black Sun Conspiracy

Chapter Nineteen

“Wow,” Sam pressed his nose against the car window as it sped along tiny, narrow streets. “This place looks like it’s been professionally lit! It’s incredible.”

“If I recall correctly, it is,” said Nina. “This place prides itself on being the best preserved medieval city in Europe. Check out the stepped gables.”

“What’s a stepped gable?”

“The thing you’ll see on top of nearly every building in Bruges. Gables that look like steps. You find a few back home because of the trading links with the Low Countries, though we call them corbie steps. They’re not as common as they are here, but after the last few months I’ll take any taste of home I can get.”

Sam shifted round, adjusting himself so that he could see out of the front windscreen. The buildings up ahead of them were squat, cozy-looking places that mostly had pointed roofs with the stair-stepped facades that Nina described. Softly lit by gentle streetlights, they looked inviting — as if the Old Town in Edinburgh had a shorter, prettier Flemish cousin. The streets were cleaner than any he had ever seen before, the buildings devoid of graffiti. ‘We must be in the posh bit,’ Sam thought.

In the front passenger seat, Nina gave a sudden gasp. Sam and Purdue were instantly alert, leaning forward to follow her gaze. “It’s fine!” She waved them back, flushing slightly in embarrassment. “No need to panic. Nothing bad. I just saw someone who looked like someone I used to know, that’s all.”

Twisting in his seat, Sam looked back. He only had a moment before the car turned a corner, but he spotted a stocky man with dark hair standing in a doorway. They were too far from him for Sam to recognize his face, but something told him that he knew who Nina had mistaken him for. He reminded him of the man that he had met while visiting Doctor Lehmann, investigating the box of Nazi artefacts that had led him into this strange adventure. “You’re thinking that he looked a bit like your ex, aren’t you?”

“He did, a bit,” said Nina. Sam saw her steal a glance at Purdue, a look that he could not interpret. “But it’s nothing. My mind is playing tricks on me. It’s hardly surprising that I’m seeing things everywhere. It’s not as if Steven would have any reason to be in Bruges.”

“You came here with him once before, did you not?”

Purdue’s question took Nina by surprise. “Yes, I did,” she said quietly. “But I don’t remember telling either of you that. Let me guess — you have your sources? Yes, you always do.” She fell silent and turned her head away, staring intently at the road ahead of them, but Sam thought that he could see her digging her fingernails into her palms, a sure sign of Nina’s anger or pain. He wondered whether Purdue was watching for it too. Whether he was or not, he refrained from pushing the subject any further. They completed their journey in silence.

The latest safe house was a compact place, whitewashed on the outside with the date 1673 inscribed above the door. Matteus had not been able to arrange for an agent to greet them in person, but it hardly mattered. It was a straightforward property and a small one — a little living area with a couple of armchairs, a sofa and a fireplace, a kitchen/dining area with a well-stocked fridge and pantry, a perilously steep flight of stairs leading up to two bedrooms and a bathroom. It felt almost as if the apartment they had inhabited in Florence had been brought to Belgium and rearranged over two stories.

Sam wondered whether he should offer to take the sofa and leave Purdue and Nina with a room each, but there was no chance. Before he had finished formulating the thought, Purdue had taken Sam’s backpack, Nina’s carrier bag of newly-acquired clothes and his own case and distributed them upstairs, putting Nina’s belongings in with his own. ‘They must have sorted things out, then,’ Sam thought. Nina voiced no objection, and he felt sure that she would have made her feelings known if she had an issue with the sleeping arrangements.

“If you will excuse me,” Purdue said, “I have some work to.” He stepped into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving Sam and Nina to head back down the steep flight of stairs.

Nina headed straight for the kitchen and began rifling through the cupboards, looking for glasses. “No spirits here, by the looks of it,” she said, “but I spotted a few bottles of wine in the pantry, so those will have to do. Can you grab one while I find a corkscrew?”

Sam did as he was told, selecting a bottle of Pinot Noir from the rack in the pantry. It was chilly. Evidently it had been stored in the unheated house for some time. He took the bottle through to the living room and set it on the hearth. Someone had stacked wood, ready to be lit, with a small box of matches sitting by the log basket. Sam struck a match and the kindling.

“What are you up to?” Nina put down the glasses and corkscrew and came over to watch Sam trying and failing to get the fire to catch.

“This is a lot easier with lighter fluid,” said Sam, watching the tiny flame dwindle and die without spreading to the twigs. “Remember those wee compressed fuel pellets we had in Antarctica? They’d be a real help just now.”

“Shift over, city boy.” Nina knelt by the fireplace and took the matches from him. “This is a job for someone who grew up on a farm with no central heating.” She reached into the fireplace and swiftly rearranged the logs on the fire dog before she shoved crumpled paper and twigs underneath. “You’ve got to leave room for air,” she said. “It needs oxygen to catch light.” The match flared in her hand and she pushed it gently into the heart of the pile. With a delicate crackle the flames spread over the paper, caught the twigs and began to lick round the edges of the logs. “There we go.”

“Well done. Now, this wine… we’ll have to drink the first one cold.” Sam picked up the bottle and removed the cork. “Unless you want to wait for it to warm up? Nope, didn’t think so.”

“Thanks,” said Nina, accepting a glass and taking a grateful sip. “It’s not bad, even if it is cold. I’m just a bit rattled. Seeing that guy and thinking it was Steven… it threw me off kilter. I just wasn’t expecting it.” She settled into one of the armchairs, tucking her feet under her. “That would be the last thing I’d need right now. Steven and his stupid little mafia games. Ugh. “

She fell silent and stared into the fire, sipping steadily. Sam watched her, unsure whether to push her for more information. One thing he had learned about Nina in the time they had spent together was that there was no point in trying to persuade her to talk. It would all come pouring out of her when she was ready, but until then…

“The stupid thing is that when he brought me here, I thought he was going to propose.” There was a hint of laughter in Nina’s voice, of the kind that serves to mask pain. “It wasn’t like him. We’d spent a while meeting in London if I was there for conferences, or he’d come to Edinburgh and visit me there. Never at his place, of course, though I didn’t know why at the time. He just said that he couldn’t really have guests because it disturbed his father. It’s ridiculous, really — I’d never have met him if I hadn’t been interviewing Dr. Lehmann for my thesis. He offered to meet me at his country club, but he needed Steven to help him get there. I knew he was physically frail, but I shouldn’t have let Steven persuade me that he was beginning to get senile and couldn’t be disturbed. I think I just wanted to believe him because I knew that there was something weird going on.”

Sam remembered Dr. Lehmann well — a keenly intelligent old man, though Sam was sure that he exaggerated his fragility in the presence of his son. Of Steven, Sam had no fond memories. He recalled only a short-tempered, spiteful little man who had made him feel distinctly unwelcome and threatened him to stay away from Nina. In addition, Sam strongly suspected that Steven had connections to the arms ring that had killed Patricia and come close to killing the entire expedition party in the Antarctic. Charles Whitsun had been Steven’s best friend, after all.

“Anyway, one weekend I was going down to visit him and he told me he wanted to take me away. It was all a big secret; I wasn’t allowed to know where we were going. I just followed him onto the Eurostar and all the way to Bruges. When I saw this place I panicked. I mean, it’s so… romantic, you know? He’d even booked the honeymoon suite in the hotel he’d chosen.”

“You didn’t want him to propose?”

“I wasn’t sure. And I thought that if I wasn’t sure, then I probably didn’t want him to. I just couldn’t see myself saying yes, even if he had asked. Not that it mattered in the end, because he’d actually brought me here to break the news that he was married. He’d been married for years. And his wife had found out about me.”

Sam could not help but laugh. “Sorry,” he said, trying to control it. “But… he took you on a romantic weekend getaway so he could break up with you?”

“Even better than that,” Nina grimaced. “He didn’t want to end things. He just expected me to be alright with it. Oh, he spun me the usual line of bullshit about how she didn’t understand him and he’d leave her eventually. It was sad, really. So clichéd. I couldn’t believe that I’d put so much time and energy into something so… pathetic. So I told him to forget it, and I left. But of course I had nowhere to go, and I couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t fully booked, so I ended up wandering around Bruges all night, trundling my suitcase behind me. And then he got pissed off at me for ending things and started sending me all these weird messages about how I’d better not think about getting involved with anyone else because he’d kill them, he’d kill me, all the usual nonsense that some men feel the need to spout. It stopped after a while. But I can’t say I’m keen to run into him again. I wouldn’t fancy him taking it into his head to start again.”

“Good thing it wasn’t him then,” Sam said, reaching for the wine bottle to refill their glasses.

“It certainly is.”

He waited to see whether Nina would say anything more. She did not. He wondered whether to talk to her about his theory that Steven was connected to the arms ring, but decided against it. It was clear that Nina did not want to discuss him any further, and as far as anyone could tell the arms ring had fallen apart after the death of Admiral Whitsun. ‘No sense in bringing it up, he thought. We’ve got enough on our plates as it is. Instead he took another deep draft of wine and watched the flames leap and dance in the grate, and they sat in companionable silence.