The Sacred Sword

Chapter Sixty-Four

It hadn’t been long before Penrose had recovered his wits and scrambled to his feet to run back into his office. Cutter’s invasion of his personal sanctuary, and the loss of the forty-two thousand euros in the garbage bag, were quickly bringing reality home to him.

And it wasn’t just money he stood to lose. He was suddenly convinced that the police must be on their way at that very moment to arrest him. Scurrying to the window, he threw it open and listened hard. He could hear nothing but the roar of the surf. No sirens, not yet. But they could come at any minute.

He hurried over to his desk and started hunting through the drawers for all the plans he kept inside. Lists of names, photographs of his victims; the discs containing the child pornography downloaded onto Lalique’s computer; the artist’s impression of the sword; detailed descriptions of every operation he’d painstakingly designed. All his hard work was now nothing more than evidence, enough to sink him so deep he’d never come back up.

He had to get rid of it all immediately. Grabbing the waste paper basket from under the desk, he shook out all the crumpled pages of book notes and started throwing the incriminating material into it.

Now, he had some matches somewhere, he thought feverishly, left over from the romantic candlelit dinner that had never happened, thanks to that ungrateful bitch Daria Pignatelli. He found them on the side, struck one and tossed the burning match into the waste paper basket.

He watched as the flames leapt up and the evidence began to blacken and curl. The incriminating paperwork caught light. The computer discs twisted and melted. He was safe now.

That was when it occurred to him that it was a wicker basket, and it would catch fire along with its contents. By then the flames were already spreading fast and he couldn’t stamp them out with his bare feet. The office began to fill with smoke. Penrose coughed.

The pool building comprised four integral changing rooms behind wooden doors labelled SPOGLIATOIO 1–4. Each contained its own luxurious shower cubicle, large wardrobes for clothing and shoes, storage units for towels, robes, hairdryers and assorted items, and lockers for personal effects, offering several possible hideyholes for a bag full of money. After a couple of minutes’ fruitless search of Spogliatoio 1, Cutter went next door to see how Grinnall was faring.

‘Bugger all luck,’ Grinnall said, standing in a heap of towels and slamming the lid of an empty storage unit.

‘Where’s Dave?’ Cutter asked with a frown. Grinnall shook his head. Cutter sighed and headed for the entrance, pausing at the poolside to glance lovingly at the holdall and its one-point-two-eight-million cargo. Grinnall bustled angrily into Spogliatoio 3, ripping into the storage spaces and muttering to himself about what he’d like to do to that twisted little fuck Penrose Lucas.

‘Dave?’ Cutter called outside. ‘Oy! Mills!’ There was no sign of him anywhere. Cutter strode back inside the pool building. He was about to say something to Grinnall when he stopped and did a double-take.

The holdall full of money was no longer where it had been sitting just a moment ago.

‘Terry, why’d you shift the bag?’

Grinnall came out of the changing room, looking disgruntled. ‘What?’

‘Where’s the money?’

‘I don’t know. Where’d you put it?’

‘Right there. Don’t wind me up.’

‘I’m not fucking winding you up. I never touched it.’

‘Then where the fuck is it?’ Cutter said, frowning deeply. His immediate thought was that Dave Mills must have sneaked in and made off with it. He panicked for a second and was about to run outside after him — but then he realised that wasn’t possible. His back had only been turned a moment. He looked all around him. Was he going crazy?

Then he spotted it. A dark shape at the bottom of the pool, sitting on the tiled floor of the deep end. ‘Oh, fuck, no!’

Without an instant’s hesitation, Cutter dived into the pool and began swimming towards the bag with powerful strokes. As he reached it, six feet underwater, he prayed the money wouldn’t be ruined.

Grinnall was standing anxiously at the edge of the pool, watching and praying much the same thing, when an arm suddenly snaked out from behind him, locked tightly around his neck and hauled him backwards off his feet towards the open door of Spogliatoio 3.