were gone. His face was turning red and he was scowling at her. Daria was confused. What had she done wrong? He kept pointing at her. ‘Get that bloody thing out of my sight!’ Frowning, she realised that his accusing finger was aimed at the little gold cross that she wore on a chain around her neck. She’d had it for most of her life, and believed that it protected her from evil.
And maybe she needed protection today. Daria was beginning not to like the look of this Englishman at all.
‘Do you hear me, whore? You do what I tell you to do! Take it off!’
Just because she was a whore, didn’t mean she let herself be treated like a dog, and she’d damn well wear her cross if she wanted to. Daria had a pretty fiery temper of her own, and she was happy to give him a healthy dose of it. She let off a rapid and very loud burst of Italian, telling him to watch his fucking mouth and she wouldn’t take her little cross off for anyone. If he wanted to screw her, he’d screw her with it on or else go and screw someone else, all right?
Penrose couldn’t take his eyes off the cross twinkling against the honey skin of her throat. His face twisted. How dare this filthy Christian slut talk to him like this? A paroxysm of fury gripped him and he launched himself off the bed and straight at her, slapping her arms aside with one hand and making a grab for the necklace with the other. His fingers closed around the gold chain and he yanked hard, trying to rip it off her neck.
Daria let out a cry as the chain bit into the back of her neck. She instinctively jerked away from him, tearing the little chain out of his fingers before he could snap it. She hurled another stream of Neapolitan invective at him. ‘That’s it. I’m leaving this place right now. Who do you think you are, you piece of shit? Take me back to the boat!’
Penrose held his shaking hand up and stared at the blood running down his palm from where the chain had cut his fingers. The whore was screaming at him. She was crazy.
She was a bitch. A filthy, filthy, repulsive little—
Penrose’s eyes bulged. His jaws clamped tightly together so that the muscles bunched up in his cheeks. He thrust his bloody hand inside the folds of his dressing gown. It came out clutching his Coonan .357. The pistol gleamed under the lights. He’d been playing with it earlier, lovingly cycling rounds through its action and replacing them in the magazine, then oiling and polishing the stainless steel with a silk handkerchief, thinking of the power that he had, how he could do anything he wanted and nobody could ever stop him.
Daria screamed when she saw the gun in his fist and the madness in his eyes as he pointed it at her. She tried to run for the door, but even as she turned to get away from him, the blast of the gunshot filled her world and the impact of the bullet hurled her brutally against the wall. She tumbled to the floor, her whole body quaking. She screamed again as she saw the dark blood welling fast out of the ragged hole in her side.
It wasn’t a very good shot, Penrose thought, but then it was the first time he’d ever fired the gun. Now he knew what it felt like, and he decided he very much enjoyed the kickback of the recoil against his hand and up his arm. He’d like to feel that again. He stepped up to the screaming woman, held the gun closer this time so that he couldn’t miss, and pulled the trigger. The gun flashed and boomed. The spray of blood hit him in the face.
The point-blank shot had blown Daria’s throat apart. Suddenly the screaming was a tortured gurgle. Her eyes rolled whitely in the mask of blood. Penrose fired a third shot and her head snapped back against the floor with a clean round hole between her eyes.
Getting more accurate already. It just takes practice, he thought.
A high-pitched tinnitus whine was singing in his ears from the gunshots and he could smell cordite in the air. He leaned over the body and gazed down in fascination at the way the third bullet had crumpled in her whole skull. Wow. Incredible. He smacked his lips and tasted the salty tang of Daria Pignatelli’s warm blood.
Now, who was going to clean up this mess? Not him, that was for sure.
Rex O’Neill had just been talking on the phone to Steve Cutter, who’d called from Jerusalem to say, predictably, that they couldn’t find any trace of Hope and Arundel. ‘Just come back,’ O’Neill had told him resignedly. What a stupid mess. He’d stopped even trying to calculate the astronomical daily wastage of Trimble Group funds.
As he was putting down the phone he could hear shouting coming from the direction of Penrose’s office. ‘What is it now?’ he muttered to himself in exasperation. Then came the sound of a woman screaming. O’Neill tensed, listening.
It was the unmistakable and very loud noise of a gunshot that brought him running in a panic. What the hell was happening? He was racing along the corridor towards Penrose’s office when the second shot went off, and tearing through the door moments after the third deafening explosion erupted from inside the adjoining bedroom.
His mind awhirl, he crashed through into the bedroom. He stopped. Looked down and saw the blood pooling around his shoes. Looked across and saw the bloodied corpse of the beautiful young woman spread out on the floor. Looked up and saw Penrose Lucas standing there, eyes and hair wild, his face spattered red.
‘You …’ O’Neill began. ‘Oh, no. No.’ Words failed him. He backed away a step, feeling the slick blood under his feet.
‘It’s very simple,’ Penrose said, waving the gun in the air. ‘I told her to take it off and she refused. What else was I … Hey! O’Neill! Where are you going?’
Rex O’Neill stumbled out of the bedroom and across the office, fighting the urge to vomit. He slammed the door behind him and ran off down the corridor, leaving a trail of bloody shoeprints behind him. When he got back to his room, he leaned against the wall and breathed hard for a few moments. Then he locked the door. Took out his phone.
And this time he did dial that number.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Back at Zion Square, Hillel insisted on dragging Ben and Jude into the coffee shop to instruct his staff that these honoured visitors were to have anything they liked, any time they wanted it, and without charge. ‘It is the least I can do,’ he said.
Ben thanked him for his time and his help, warned him once again to be careful, and promised to call the moment he had news about Wesley Holland.
They watched Hillel roar off in his Land Cruiser, then headed back across the square to the hotel. Jude said something about taking a shower, and disappeared through the connecting door from Ben’s room into his own.
Ben threw open the windows and gazed out across the square. None of this made any sense to him, but maybe it was because he wasn’t thinking straight. He felt as if his brain was misfiring on one cylinder – or maybe a couple of cylinders, unable to focus properly. And he knew the reason why. He marched over to his bag, tore it open and took out the letter.
He slumped in an armchair to read it once more, as if somehow after a dozen readings it might now suddenly mean something completely different and he’d be released from the perturbing responsibility that weighed so heavily on him. But no, Michaela’s words told him the same incredible things as they had before. If it was all a dream, it was taking a hell of a long time to finish.
Ben felt quite lost.
He didn’t hear the connecting door open and Jude walk into the room.
‘What’s that?’ Jude asked.
With a jolt like an electric shock, Ben stuffed the letter away into the bag. ‘Just looking back at some of the stuff I found in Lalique’s place,’ he said as casually as he could, glancing at Jude out of the corner of his eye.
‘Right,’ Jude said uninterestedly. He flopped on the bed. ‘So what do we do now?’
Good question, Ben thought. He didn’t like to admit it even to himself, but he was running out of road. They’d just exhausted their last lead. Except for one. ‘If we knew who this Martha was, we’d be