The Lost Relic

Chapter Forty-Four

It was after two in the morning when Ben rode the little Honda along the cobbled streets and through the Porta Settimiana, a Renaissance-period stone gateway that led into the Trastavere quarter on the west bank of the Tiber. Before ditching the motorcycle in a narrow, winding lane, he searched through its side panniers and found a pair of sunglasses and a floppy hat. He slipped the shades in his pocket. From there it was a short walk to Rome’s botanical gardens. He scaled a locked gate, and minutes later was walking free among moonlit parkland. The night air was sweet with the scent of flowers. He stuck to the shadows, silent and invisible.

Always seek out the high ground. A long hill led him to a wooded ridge overlooking the city, where a hollow among some shrubs offered a vantage point to rest up for a few hours. He sat immobile among the leaves and let nature absorb him until he was scarcely even there any more. He watched the stars and the city lights and wondered how Fabio Strada was doing. Thought about Darcey Kane and the things that were happening to him. Thought about Jeff Dekker and the rest of his team back home in France. They must surely have seen the news by now. Jeff would be worried, but he’d know better than to expect a call from Ben. First, the phones would be tapped. Second, it wasn’t Ben’s way to involve his friends in his own troubles. Jeff was ex-SBS. He’d have done the same. Sometimes, a guy just had to work things out on his own.

And then Ben’s thoughts turned to Brooke, and dwelled on her for a long time. He’d never missed her this much. She’d never seemed so far away from him.

By sun-up, he was on the move again.

The obvious place to find an Italian count would have been in his ancestral palazzo – except that Pietro De Crescenzo had said he didn’t live there. Resorting to the Rome phone directory, Ben found four possibles and figured out a route that would take him roughly west, then north, then northeast across Rome. He wore the sunglasses as he made his way across the city. Wear them in Britain, and you drew instant suspicion, as though their only purpose was as a disguise for crooks and terrorists and murderers on the lam. But in Rome, everyone wore shades and he was just another face on board the crowded buses and trams that he used to criss-cross the city.

Someone had left a morning paper on a bus seat, and Ben picked it up. The screaming headline article covered most of the front page. As more details of the Tassoni murder began to emerge, British government officials were remaining tight-lipped over speculation that the killer on the loose was a former soldier of 22 Special Air Service.

On the next page, Ben read an interesting article about himself, written by a leading criminal psychologist called Alessandro Ragonesi. According to Ragonesi, the ruthless training undergone by Special Forces soldiers, notably the British SAS, was designed to strip away any modicum of humanity, programming once-decent men into robotic killing machines capable of committing the worst atrocities without question, pity or remorse. Even years later, the slightest psychological trauma or other stressor could potentially reawaken that programming and trigger random acts of psychopathic behaviour. Amid a welter of scientific jargon, Ragonesi explained how the experience of the gallery robbery might have sent this former black-ops soldier into a state of mental confusion that had resulted in the tragic killing spree at the home of Urbano Tassoni. Who knew where the deranged assassin would strike next?

The wonders of modern neuroscience, Ben thought. Give that man a cigar.

The first De Crescenzo residence he visited, just before 8 a.m., was a tiny terraced house with an ancient Volkswagen Beetle outside and two scraggy german shepherd dogs snarling at him from behind a mesh fence. He couldn’t imagine the dapper count living here. At the second place, he was told the old man called Pietro De Crescenzo had died a year ago. Two down, two to go.

It was after nine by the time Ben found the third place on his list, a crumbling eighteenth-century apartment building that retained a certain elegance and could potentially have been the home of the Pietro De Crescenzo he was looking for. But when he knocked on the door, a stunningly pretty, dark-haired girl of about twenty-two answered and told him her boyfriend was at the office. She could have been a model.

De Crescenzo didn’t seem the type.

Three down. One left.

It was pushing on for ten in the morning and the sun was warming up fast when he stepped off the bus and made his way on foot through what looked like an even wealthier suburb than Tassoni’s. Tall cypress trees screened the houses from the road. As he approached the tall wooden gates, two things told him he was in the right place. The first was the enormous, sprawling white house he could see through the greenery. It was impeccably tasteful and refined: all the things he’d expect from a man of De Crescenzo’s artistic sensibilities.

The second was the metallic silver Volvo saloon that came speeding out of the gate, scattering gravel over the road in its wake. Ben instantly recognised the hunched, gaunt figure clutching the wheel. The count was going somewhere in a hurry – too much of a hurry to notice Ben standing there on the pavement watching as he sped off into the rising heat haze.

Ben walked in through the open gates before they whirred shut automatically, and made his way up to the house. The front door wasn’t locked. The entrance hall was cool and white, with frescoes on the walls and a tasteful arrangement of gleaming white nude statues. Wandering into a large white living room, he saw a blonde in a flimsy dress sitting on a sofa with her head in her hands. On the coffee table nearby was a fancy lighter set into a block of onyx, and next to it a bottle of vodka and an empty cut crystal tumbler. Both the level in the bottle and the woman looked as though they’d taken a fairly serious hammering the night before.

Ben was standing just a couple of metres from the woman by the time she registered his presence and squinted up at him through a morning-after haze. She looked about forty-five, but if the vodka was a regular thing she might have been eight years younger. Her hair was flattened on the right side where she’d been sleeping on it, and her mascara was smudged. She didn’t seem to care that the strap of her dress had slipped down her arm.

Ben took off his shades.

‘Do I know you?’ she slurred in Italian. Obviously too busy to keep up with the TV news, Ben thought.

‘I’m a friend of your husband’s.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘I know. I just saw him driving off. What’s got him leaving in such a hurry?’

She made a contemptuous gesture, and the dress strap slipped a little further. ‘What do you think?’ she muttered. ‘Numbnuts is only interested in one thing. Art. Always art.’

Ben sat down next to her. She smelled of Chanel No.7 and stale booze. She gazed at him unsteadily for a second, her eyes still bright from the vodka. ‘Who did you say you were again? This isn’t about that thing that happened, is it?’

‘Just a friend,’ Ben said. ‘The name’s Shannon. Rupert Shannon.’ He took out his pack of Gauloises. ‘Smoke?’ She nodded and plucked one out between long red nails. He lit it with the onyx lighter, and then one for himself.

‘Ornella De Crescenzo,’ she said through a cloud of smoke, and held out her hand for him to shake. She clasped his fingers for a few seconds too long, but that might have been the hangover fuzzing her senses.

‘Pietro’s told me so much about you,’ Ben said. ‘I feel as though I know you.’

She nearly choked. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Did he say where he was going?’ Ben asked her. ‘It’s important that I speak to him.’

Ornella made a vague gesture. ‘Some guy called him late last night. Art dealer or something. I forget the name. It’s all the same to me. And this morning, he’s all in a rush packing up his shit, tells me he has to drop everything and go to Spain, some place near Madrid. Of course he won’t fly, wants to take my car, it’s faster than his. I said, touch that car and it’s divorce.’ She laughed giddily.

‘Madrid is long way away.’

‘So I won’t have to see the stronzo for a day or two. Leave me in peace to do my own thing.’

‘Like drink yourself to death?’

She snorted, took another long drag on the cigarette. ‘Sounds good to me.’

‘It can get expensive trying,’ he said. ‘I know.’

Ornella sidled up to him, and he caught a whiff of her vodka breath. ‘Rupert Shannon. That’s a beautiful name.’

Ben had borrowed it from the biggest, dumbest swinging dick of an ex-soldier he’d ever known, a brigadier’s nephew who’d miraculously held it together for three years in the Paras – and later, for a brief time, had somehow worked his way into Brooke’s affections. ‘Kind of you to say so, Ornella.’

She arched an eyebrow and moved closer. ‘Have you come to stay with me a while, Rupert?’ she said in a low purr.

Ben smiled. ‘I think maybe you could do with a coffee.’ The kitchen was a cavernous affair off the entrance hall, with a state-of-the-art cappuccino machine that looked as though it had never been used. Ben fired it up and made two strong black coffees, put the cups on a tray and carried them through to where Contessa Ornella De Crescenzo was lounging back on the sofa, still nursing her hangover. He made an excuse about needing to use the bathroom, and left her alone to sip the coffee as he trotted upstairs.

It was a big place, and it took a few wrong turns and a lot of doors to check before Ben found what looked like Pietro De Crescenzo’s home office. There was a good deal of art on the walls. The antique desk bore a framed snap of the count and countess in their younger days, somewhere alpine – Switzerland, maybe. He had more hair and looked less cadaverous; she obviously hadn’t discovered vodka back then. Happier times.

Next to the picture was all the usual desk stuff – a phone, a jar full of pens and pencils, a lined writing pad, an exhibition brochure and a pile of opened mail, bills and letters. Ben glanced at the one on top long enough to see it was from the director of a gallery in Amsterdam that had loaned De Crescenzo one of the grand masters for his exhibition. The words ‘destruction’ and ‘tragic’ and ‘severe consequences’ featured heavily in the text.

Ben picked up the writing pad. Its topmost sheet had been torn away in a rush, leaving a serrated ribbon of paper trapped in the wire binding rings. He angled the pad towards the light. Whatever had been hastily scribbled in biro on the missing page, the pressure of the pen had left faint marks on the paper under it.

Ben grabbed a pencil from the jar. Using the side of the tip, he carefully shaded over the pressure marks. The handwriting that appeared in white was the jagged scrawl of someone scribbling in a hurry while talking on the phone It took him a few moments to make out the name Juan Calixto Segura. Under it was an address in Salamanca, Spain.

Ben turned on De Crescenzo’s laptop and did a Google search on the name. Segura had no website of his own, but he came up in listings of European fine art dealers. It seemed he specialised in Spanish painting from various periods: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Picasso. Ben’s eye skipped down the list, then stopped at a certain eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century Romantic painter and print artist called Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Ben murmured. He remembered what De Crescenzo had said about not liking to fly. It was a long drive across three countries to Salamanca, which made it all the more interesting that the count would feel the need to rush off to see this Segura so suddenly. Whatever the guy had told him on the phone, it had to be worth hearing. Ben copied the address more clearly on another sheet of the writing pad, tore it off and folded it into his pocket, then burned the original in De Crescenzo’s fireplace. He erased the computer’s memory of the Internet search, then headed back downstairs.

Ornella had finished her coffee and half of his and was up on her feet, only a little wobbly on her high heels. She’d cleaned up the smudged makeup. As Ben came into the room she teetered over to him with a big smile and ran her hand down his arm.

‘Will you stay for lunch, Rupert? I’m so lonely here, all by myself in this great big house.’

‘Lunch isn’t for two hours.’

Ornella De Crescenzo pouted innocently. ‘You’re right. However shall we pass the time?’

When the count’s away, Ben thought. ‘It was truly a pleasure to meet you, Contessa. I’d love to stay longer, but sadly I have a prior engagement.’

Her face fell. ‘Shame. You’ve been so sweet to me. There must be something I can do for you in return?’

‘Maybe another time,’ Ben said with a smile, and Ornella’s eyes sparkled like champagne. She thumped him playfully on the chest.

‘You’re a bad boy.’

‘You have no idea.’

On his way out the front door, Ben spotted a set of car keys in an ornate silver dish on a stand in the hall, and the shiny leather fob embossed with a distinctive trident emblem. Interesting.

Touch that car and it’s divorce.

Maybe there was something Ornella could do for him, after all. She wasn’t in a fit state to drive it, anyway. Ben snatched the keys and went out into the hot sun to look for where she kept it.

The ivy-clad three-door garage was around the back of the house. He used the remote bleeper attached to the key fob to open the middle door, and when it whirred up he let out a low whistle at what was inside.

Psychopathic SAS fugitive makes off in countess’s Maserati.

Silvana Lucenzi would lap it up.

As he jumped in behind the wheel of the sleek bronze GranTurismo, he was already planning his route. From Rome towards Genova, then passing by Nice and Marseille, through Andorra, then westwards through Spain to Salamanca. A twelve-hour drive, maybe thirteen. But when he twisted the ignition and the throaty roar of the 4.7-litre V8 filled the garage, he reckoned he could do it in less.

It was 10.34 a.m.

Ben slipped the shades back on, and hit the gas.