Nicholas sat beside the bus window and rested his left temple against the steamy glass. He had mistrusted Elliott from the first and he had been right to be cautious. The academic was obviously working for the Church. Carel Honthorst wasn’t the only one in their employ; it had been a two-pronged attack. If one of them didn’t get him, the other would.
He glanced at his fellow passengers, all involved in their own thoughts, silent in the fuggy bus, no one meeting his eye. And then Nicholas remembered something that had happened the previous evening.
‘You sleep so badly,’ Father Michael had said. ‘I’ve made you a hot drink – that should help.’
Nicholas had smiled his thanks, but when he tasted the over-sweetened drink he had winced and thrown it out of the window to avoid hurting the old man’s feelings. He could imagine how surprised the priest would have been to see the empty glass the following morning and Nicholas up and about when, by rights, he should have been felled.
The treachery winded him. Father Michael had promised support, had pledged to make amends for his past negligence, while all the time attempting to wheedle confidences out of Nicholas. Where were the papers? he had asked. Are you still going to expose the conspiracy? And while he had been feigning concern, he had been reporting back to the Church. Expressing sympathy as he had drugged Nicholas’s food, distorting his dreams, increasing his paranoia along with his intermittent confusion.
Then another thought occurred to Nicholas. Was it the priest who had planted the crucifix in his bed? He had heard him snoring, but he might have managed it. Unless there had been someone else in the house, someone quick. Someone who knew the layout of the rectory. Someone who had expressed doubts about Nicholas’s suspicions. His sister, Honor.
He couldn’t believe it. Not Honor. She was too straight. She had told him what she thought directly – she wasn’t the type to sneak around. But she had been prying into his history, digging up the past, his litany of sins regurgitated. She knew what he had done and how suspicious it looked …
‘Sorry, mate,’ a man said, knocking into Nicholas as he sat down next to him. ‘Rain again, hey? What can you do?’
Ignoring him, Nicholas kept staring out of the window. At the next stop he left the bus and watched it as it passed. But the man didn’t move, just stayed in his seat as the bus moved on.
Seventy-Six
Philip Preston’s Auction House, Chelsea, London, 2.00 p.m.
All great auctions were an event, Gerrit thought, looking around him, but this was a fucking eye-opener … Amused, he watched collectors, dealers and private buyers sitting on their dainty gold chairs, a few lardy arses hanging over the sides. They were trying to appear nonchalant, but the temperature in the hall was increasing with tension and that peculiar, florid heat of greed.
Philip Preston mounted the dais and checked his microphone, which hissed and clicked into the hall like a woken rattlesnake, Philip unusually awkward as he began the auction. He was leaving the Bosch chain until last, the final and tremendous lot, cleverly building up the tension. And there was plenty of that. Leaning forward, Gerrit looked along his row, surprised to see Hiram Kaminski, a dealer who had professed to want nothing to do with the chain. And yet here he was and, just behind him, the beautiful and glacial Eloise Devereux. Her manner revealed nothing but her glance settled on her father for a long instant and her expression warned him that she would never stop, never give up until she had discovered who had killed her husband and her mother and punished them. And if it turned out to be Gerrit der Keyser, so be it.
Over a hundred people had gathered into the hall, security at the doors and at the front and rear of the dais. All eyes were focused on Philip Preston. No one noticed the stooping figure of Sidney Elliott in the crowd, or the ominous Carel Honthorst. No one spotted Father Dominic from St Barnabas’s, or the ever-curious Mark Spencer. They were all fixated on the Bosch chain. The chain that provoked fear and desire in equal amounts. The infamous chain which had supposedly carried a secret so potent it had resulted in murder.
If there were ghosts in the hall then Sabine Monette was there alongside Claude Devereux and Thomas Littlejohn. If there were ghosts, the guilty spirit of Father Luke was also watching. But one person was missing; the instigator of the sale and the man who had begun the rumour of the Bosch deception.
The troubled – and troubling – Nicholas Laverne.
Seventy-Seven
Church of St Stephen, Fulham, London
Running in from the battering rain, Honor knocked on the side door of the vestry. There was no answer. Again she knocked, this time loudly, thumping the iron knocker up and down. Finally Father Michael answered her.
‘Where’s Nicholas?’ she asked him.
But he didn’t reply and he seemed ill at ease. Surprised, Honor moved past him into the hall, glancing towards the kitchen. Inside sat a man she knew. A thickset man with bad skin. A man she recognised from the photographs Mark Spencer had shown her. Carel Honthorst.
Spooked, Honor stepped back, almost losing her footing as she ran out into the street and made for her parked car. She had just clambered inside when Honthorst caught up with her and tried to wrench open the door with his uninjured hand. Horrified, Honor turned on the ignition and slammed her foot down on the accelerator. The car jerked forward, its wheels spinning, and as it knocked Honthorst off balance Honor swerved out into the traffic, a passing taxi blaring its horn.
One hand on the wheel, Honor reached into her bag for her mobile. At the traffic lights she stopped, glanced into the rear-view mirror, and then phoned Nicholas’s number.
It rang out.
‘Pick up!’ she said frantically. ‘Pick up!’
But there was no answer and the lights changed, forcing Honor to drive on. She knew that there was only one reason for Carel Honthorst to be at St Stephen’s – he was in league with Father Michael. In collusion with the Catholic Church. There was no other explanation. She thought of what Nicholas had told her. About his dreams, the night terrors, the food poisoning, the crucifix he had found in his bed, the one she had only recently remembered giving him as a new priest. All the things she had put down to imagination and paranoia. But she had been wrong. Nicholas wasn’t unstable, he was in danger.
And then his words came back, haunting and damning: ‘When did you stop knowing who I was?’
Seventy-Eight
Head lowered, Nicholas kept on walking. The rain was coming down hard and he bought an umbrella from a street trader, holding it close to his head and turning up the collar of his coat in an attempt to disguise himself. He felt more alone than he had ever been, but he wasn’t going to back down. Unless someone stopped him, he was going to expose the truth. Nothing else mattered to him. If it cost him his life, it was worth it. He had no family to speak of, no reputation left. No home, no friends. He was an outcast.
But he was still fighting. And all he needed was access to the internet. He cursed the fact that he had left his phone behind when he fled St Stephen’s, but he would have to improvise. Crossing Beak Street, he entered Soho, the nub of the capital, a place overrun with bars, shops and internet cafes. Entering a narrow alleyway, Nicholas walked into a cafe and paid for online access.
Sitting down in front of the computer, he typed in a website name and watched, relieved, as the site came up. He had prepared it weeks earlier, entering copies of the Bosch papers and a photograph of the chain in which the papers had been found, together with explanations of the text and relevant translations. The information had been updated, ready to go live. He accused the Church of deception in concealing the death of Hieronymus Bosch and named The Brotherhood of Mary. He explained that many of Bosch’s works had been faked by his family in the interests of making money, with the collusion of the Catholic Church. The whole sordid and bitter tale of Bosch’s incarceration was laid out in the words of a contemporary, someone who had witnessed it.