The Lazarus Vault

XXIX

According to the hospital, her mother died while Ellie was on the plane somewhere above the English Channel. Ellie didn’t think anything could make her feel worse, but somehow it did. She should have been on hand, at her mother’s bedside — not drifting up in the clouds. It felt like a metaphor for something: lofty, blinding, insubstantial.

Doug didn’t come to the funeral. She sent him a text message telling him the news, but ignored all his replies asking when the funeral would be. Blanchard didn’t come either, though he sent his representatives: two men in a blacked-out Mercedes, parked across the road from the crematorium with the engine running. The wipers never stopped, presumably so that the soft rain gathering on their windscreen wouldn’t obscure the view. Ellie almost considered inviting them in, offering them the chance to do their job properly, without pretence. There were plenty of seats.

Afterwards — after Mrs Thomas had said a few words about what a kind lady Mrs Stanton had been; after a choir had sung ‘Men of Harlech’ out of the CD player in the corner; after she’d watched the coffin conveyed onto its gas-jetted pyre — they went to the tea shop on the corner. No one stayed long. By two thirty, when Mrs Thomas picked up her terrier and announced she had to go and collect her grandson from school, the low clouds were already threatening a premature dusk.

Mrs Thomas kissed her on both cheeks and gave her a hug. ‘Do be careful,’ she said. ‘You’re on your own now.’

Ellie went back to the house and fetched a few things from the attic. She supposed she’d return some day, even if only to sell it, but she said goodbye anyway. Just in case. She turned off all the lights and the heating, and made sure the doors were locked. Outside, the black Mercedes was struggling to reverse into a parking space on the narrow street. Ellie waited until it was wedged in, then left the house and hurried down towards the station. She knew they’d catch up with her — but not before she’d had time to use a payphone. She let it ring three times, then hung up.

I’m on my way.

Ellie took a taxi straight from Paddington to Claridge’s. It was only seven o’clock; Blanchard wouldn’t be back from the office for hours. The final details of the Talhouett takeover agreement had proved elusive; for the last two days, teams of lawyers had been working around the clock, garrisoning every spare corner of the Monsalvat office. Ellie had barely noticed them.

She lay on the bed and thought about what she had to do. She opened the brandy decanter and poured in the phial of liquid Harry had given her. She stared at the paintings on the walls and they stared back: a gallery of callow knights and flimsy damsels, in dark forests or empty wastelands. It surprised her that Blanchard subscribed to this romanticised, Victorian take on the middle ages. Somehow she’d thought, with his far-back ancestry, he’d prefer a more authentic view.

Blanchard came in at eleven, smelling of coffee and cigar smoke.

‘You should have called. I would have come straight away.’ For the first time she could remember he looked tentative, unsure what to say. He sat down on the bed beside her and undid his tie.

‘How was it?’

‘It was my mother’s funeral.’ What do you expect?

Blanchard took a decanter of brandy and poured two glasses. ‘This will help.’

Ellie didn’t touch it.

‘If you want to be alone tonight …’

‘No.’ She spun around, pushing him back on the bed. She stood in front of him. Staring down, she unclasped her necklace and earrings and laid them on the dressing table. She shrugged off her jacket. Without artifice, as if she were in a shop changing room or the gym, she unzipped her skirt and unbuttoned her blouse, Blanchard lay there, watching and sipping his brandy. She held his eyes as she unclasped her bra and laid it over the other clothes on the back of a chair.

The lights in the suite were low. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed herself in the mirror, the curves and shadows of her naked body. Her raven hair hung down her back; her breasts were hard and cold. She looked like one of Blanchard’s pre-Raphaelite maidens, transported by ecstasy or death. She wondered if she had the strength for what she had to do. For the first time in her life, she felt utterly alone in the world. In a strange way, that made it easier.

Blanchard began unbuttoning his shirt. ‘We don’t have to —’

She got onto the bed and knelt over him. Her hair brushed his face.

‘I need you.’

She had never made love like it before. A frenzy possessed her: grief, guilt, fear, hatred — a storm of pent-up emotion cracked open like a thunderhead. She prised his lips open and pressed herself inside him: her tongue, her breasts, her fingers. She bit and pinched and raked her nails down his back, raising welts like burns wherever she touched. She forced him into her; she rocked back and forth against his hips, moaning and gasping as if exorcising a demon, careless of who could hear it in the corridor or the world outside. Blanchard finished before she did, but she made him go on, holding him inside her until she screamed. She fell forward on top of him, pressing herself against him. She was sobbing, though she didn’t know what the tears were for. Their faces were so close the tears wet them both. Blanchard wrapped his arms around her and told her he loved her. For the first time since she’d known him, he sounded frightened of her.

She didn’t know how long they lay there. Somewhere in their passion the clock had got knocked over. When she heard Blanchard’s breathing soften, she pushed herself up and looked down.

Blanchard’s face was still. In the hollow of his throat, the small gold key hung where it always did.

Ellie blew on her hands to warm them, then reached down and lifted the key. There was no clasp: she had to loop it over his neck.

The chain brushed his ear and he stirred, murmuring something in his sleep. Ellie went still as stone. If he caught her now he would surely kill her. She waited, not daring to breathe.

The doctored brandy had done its job. Blanchard settled back and let dreams reclaim him. Ellie pulled the key free and rolled away off the bed. She dressed quickly: not in her funeral clothes, but in an old pair of jeans and a tight-fitting jumper. She rummaged in Blanchard’s suit and found his access card, then pulled the cufflinks out of his shirtsleeves.

She grabbed her backpack and tiptoed out of the room. Her watch said half-past midnight. Harry had said the spiked drink should last for about eight hours, but she thought six was safer. And she had a lot to do.

For the first time all week, the bank was dark. The bid teams must finally have gone home. Foil wrappers and wire cradles from champagne bottles littered the lobby floor; she assumed it meant good news. Even the security guard seemed to have indulged: he was nowhere to be seen. She let herself in with Blanchard’s card and went straight to the lift.

From high in the corner of the foyer, a camera’s black eye recorded her entry. The pictures travelled instantly to the fifth floor, where a computer analysed them and compared the face coming through the door with the card that had been used to open it.

Ellie arrived on the fifth floor half a minute behind her image and let herself in to Blanchard’s office. Down the hall, the computer recorded the fact. She pulled a small laptop out of her bag, bought for cash on the Tottenham Court Road. With an electrician’s screwdriver, she prised the mother-of-pearl inlay off the cufflinks she’d taken from Blanchard’s shirt. A small circuit-board, the size of a five-pence piece, lay nestled inside.

‘Is there a video camera or something in there?’ she’d asked when Harry gave them to her. They’d been in the changing rooms at a clothes shop on Oxford Street, pressed into awkward intimacy behind the curtain.

‘The sleeve would obscure a video camera. This is a gyroscope and accelerometer. It measures the pattern of his movements, the distance and direction, and the software can correlate that with the keypad to work out which buttons he’s pressed.’

Ellie had looked doubtfully at the small cufflinks. ‘It sounds like science fiction.’

‘These things are everywhere now — mobile phones, laptops, music players.’ He’d given a sheepish grin. ‘We actually got these from a video-game controller.’

‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’

She slid a nail under the circuit-board, pulled it out of the housing and connected it to the computer using a plug that Harry had given her. A window opened on-screen with a picture of a telephone keypad. The virtual buttons flashed; a second later, a number appeared superimposed.

She swung pack the painting that covered the safe.

Contrary to the office joke, Destrier didn’t live at the bank. His home was a mock-Tudor mansion near the A12 in Essex, which he shared with two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and whoever could be paid or persuaded to share his bed. That night, she was a skinny girl with vacant eyes and no chest; she barely looked thirteen, though the agency had assured him she was old enough. Whatever his impulses, he knew what his employers would do if he got caught out with an underage girl.

And now his phone was vibrating in the darkness. He fumbled for it on the bedside table, rubbing his eyes as he stared at the screen.

He tapped the screen to call up the details.

He didn’t have to check the registry to know who card 0002 belonged to. He stared at the picture underneath. The Stanton bitch. Every suspicion he’d entertained for the last six months — every doubt, every worry, every fear — crawled over his skin like lice.

Calm down, he told himself. He knew she’d been fucking Blanchard that night — had listened to it through the mic concealed in her phone. Her moans had still been in his ears when he screwed his own girl, who’d been limp and undemonstrative by comparison.

Maybe she picked up the wrong card. Perhaps Blanchard sent her to the office to get something.

He left the girl and went to the computer in the room next door. He connected to the office and brought up the security log.

Blanchard didn’t allow cameras in his office, or Destrier could have had a look at what Ellie was doing. All he could do was watch the log to see what happened next.

While he waited, he dialled Blanchard at Claridge’s. He let it ring until the voicemail picked up; hung up; tried again. No answer. He swore, though silently. Blanchard wasn’t the sort of man you cursed out loud, even from thirty miles away.

A new line appeared on the security log. Destrier stared at it in disbelief.

Ellie lifted the red folder out of the safe and laid it on Blanchard’s desk. She hesitated for a second, reading the gold-lettered LAZARUS on the cover and wondering what she would find inside. She felt the leather cords; she tested the seals between her finger and thumb. The wax flexed in her grip: it must have been resealed recently.

No way back from here, she told herself. On the wall, the damsel tied to the tree tipped her head back in a plea to the knight advancing on her. Save me? Don’t hurt me? The paint was silent.

Ellie snapped the seals. Crumbs of wax spilled over Blanchard’s desk, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. He’d find out soon enough.

She’d never seen a file like it. The earliest pages were sheets of parchment, still supple and smooth to the touch; they gave way to a stiff and brittle paper with an ivory sheen, that gradually softened into creamy writing paper and finally to regular A4 office paper. Some of the paper felt thin and grey, and she supposed that came from wartime. It was like looking at tree rings, history written in cross section.

But she needed the present — and she found it almost at once, a sheet of paper at the back headed ‘Vault Access’. Underneath was a list of strange words, foreign and archaic. Or, argent, azure, gules, vert … Each had a four-digit number beside it.

She closed the safe and jogged down the hall to the lift. When she slid Blanchard’s card into the invisible slot in the panel, the button for the sixth floor started to glow.

Her hand hovered in front of it, trembling. The ruby on her finger smouldered like a dragon’s eye. On her wrist, the seconds ticked by.

She stabbed the button.

With the merest tremor, the lift began its descent. Past the basement and the sub-basement, then a long eternity when it was nowhere. Ellie began to wonder if it had stopped, if some hidden sensor had betrayed her deception. Her heart twitched with panic; she gazed at the buttons, overcome with a desperate urge to push them and turn the lift back to the world above. But it was too late.

She didn’t feel the lift stop. The doors glided open, revealing the golden room with its treasures so tantalisingly unguarded. Every piece triggers an alarm. But what else might trigger it? She approached the jewelled cup on the plinth in the centre of the room. A movement in the glass made her flinch, but it was only her own ghostly reflection. She unzipped her top and pulled out the key.

Four carved beasts peered from the corners of the plinth: a dragon, a horned serpent that she thought might be a cockatrice, a griffin and a basilisk. Ellie knelt and peered in their mouths. At the back of each stone throat, a small keyhole invited the key. She slid it into the serpent, just as Blanchard had done. Her arm tensed as she reached in, as if the stone jaws might come to life, spring shut.

Nothing happened. The key fit the lock perfectly. She felt the mechanism bite as she began to turn. It was working.

Or was it that simple? It occurred to her that all the vault’s defences were built on illusion. It didn’t block your way: it invited you in, tempting you to betray yourself. The sixth floor that lay three storeys underground; the unprotected treasures on the shelves around her; the door hidden back where you’d come from.

Every piece triggers an alarm.

She eased off the lock and withdrew the key. Trying to stand where she’d stood before, she examined the cup in the case. It looked different to last time. Halfway up, the stem swelled out in a golden bubble, decorated on four sides with inlaid coloured stones. Ellie was sure the stone facing her before had been emerald green; now it was white, a fat pearl.

The cup had turned.

She circled the plinth, poring over the cup. The other stones in the stem were yellow — she thought it might be amber, though in fact it was a diamond — and a blood-red garnet.

She tried to remember a lecture series she’d been to at university, a wizened old professor who might have come straight from a monastery scriptorium.

Griffins were the guardians of gold.

Basilisks had a white spot on their head like a diadem.

The cockatrice had black eyes. Or were they red? Her memory faltered; she looked to her phone, but of course there was no reception down there.

You don’t even know that any of it corresponds at all.

Her heart thudded inside her chest; with every beat, she felt time racing away. She had to make a decision.

She put the key in the basilisk’s mouth and turned.

Perhaps, somewhere else in the building, an alarm went off or a light began to flash. In the deep vault, Ellie had no way of knowing. Behind her, she heard the hiss as the false door in the lift slid back to reveal the rugged wooden portal behind.

She checked her watch: almost two hours gone. She’d have to hurry.

The Aston Martin raced down the A12 towards London. The road was almost empty at that time of night; the needle hovered well above a hundred miles an hour. Inside, Destrier was barking orders to a chastened security guard. He’d gone to Blanchard’s office but found nothing, the door locked, the light off. That worried Destrier even more.

The line beeped to announce a new message. ‘Just find her,’ he shouted. He hung up, then glanced down to read the message.

He nearly drove off the road. He slammed the brakes and the rear end started to fishtail on the slick tarmac. He spun the wheel and swerved back, almost into the path of an oncoming lorry. Its horn blasted through the cold night, falling away like a dying breath.

Destrier eased his speed down to ninety while he gathered his thoughts. He glanced at the message again, hardly believing his eyes. Where the hell was Blanchard?

Ellie had brought a head-torch, but she didn’t need it. The hidden lights glowed into life the moment she crossed the threshold. She moved down the ancient aisle, scanning the vaults above for watching eyes, cameras or beams that would trap her. She saw nothing.

She crossed the transept and reached the back of the vault, under where the old church’s altar must once have stood, before the religion of wealth replaced the religion of charity. She thought of the mosaic half-buried in the floor, and wondered what older, darker faiths had flourished here before that. The iron doors glared at her like dead eyes in the furrowed walls.

Here, time becomes space.

She knew, without ever having being told, which vault it was. She remembered it from her visit with Blanchard: the two double doors in the floor painted with the Monsalvat crest and a steel keypad beside it. A black eagle on a red shield with a white chevron, clutching a golden spear. She looked at the piece of paper she’d taken from the Lazarus file.

Her last contact with Harry had been a CD and a book, delivered in a free newspaper again as she walked past Moorgate Tube station. She bought a portable CD player and sat outside in the Barbican listening to it. High walls of pebbledash and distressed concrete soared all around her. Ornamental water gushed out of a pipe into a series of ponds; wells sunk in the concrete revealed fragments of the medieval walls deep below the twentieth-century monument.

Harry’s voice spoke through the headphones. ‘All the vault codes at Monsalvat are based on heraldry. Each colour in the crest is allocated a number, which changes weekly. You’ll get the numbers from the file. Then you have to determine the correct formulation of the crest, which gives you the order. You’ll find everything you need to know in the book we’ve given you.’

Ellie had read the book like an eight year old, hiding under the duvet with a torch long after she should have been asleep. It taught her a new language, a new grammar — escutcheons and lozenges, charges and tinctures. She learned the difference between engrailed and enfossed, between metals and furs. She marvelled at the precision of it, even as she despaired of its intricacy. But she learned it.

Gules a chevron Argent, overall an eagle displayed Sable, armed and holding a spear both Or.

She consulted the paper from the file and found the numbers that corresponded to the colours. Each had four digits, sixteen in total. She entered them on the keypad, praying she’d remembered the medieval terminology correctly.

For a moment nothing happened. Then, with a creak that sounded as old as the stones themselves, the doors swung in.