The Martyr’s Curse. Scott Mariani

Chapter Fifteen

      Up ahead in the tight passage, the blood spots terminated in a pool that had spread and gathered in the recesses of the uneven floor. Ben’s light flicked from side to side and settled on what looked like a heap of old sack-cloth dumped against the rough stone wall.

      The heap moved. Only very slightly, but it moved.

      Ben hurried forward, shining his light. He’d realised who it was.

      He said, ‘Roby.’

      Falling to his knees next to the slumped figure, he saw he was right. Roby’s eyes were shut and his face was ghastly white and slick with sweat. A fringe of dark hair was plastered across his brow.

      Ben understood what the boy was doing here. Pure animal instinct. When any creature, small or large, was frightened or hurt, it was nature’s way for it to return to the burrow. This had been Roby’s little hideaway out of habit, the place he knew his fellow monks wouldn’t come looking. Except that on this occasion, he hadn’t come here to get away from the monks. He’d come here to get away from the men who’d shot him.

      Ben shone his phone light over the boy’s robe. The blood was soaked everywhere, the thick material saturated with it. It was a stomach wound. One of the cruellest and slowest and most painful ways to die from a bullet.

      Roby stirred. His eyes flickered open, then closed again, then reopened. They were dull, bloodshot and unfocused. He seemed to sense the presence next to him and tried to move his head, but didn’t have the strength. He whispered, ‘Benoît?’ His voice was just a shadow of a breath.

      ‘It’s me, Roby. I’m right here with you.’

      The tiniest of smiles curled the corner of the boy’s mouth and then it drooped, as if even that effort was too much. His energy was almost gone.

      ‘I knew you’d come back,’ Roby breathed. He tried to reach out his hand. His fingers were thick with blood, some of it dried, most of it fresh.

      Ben swallowed. ‘Stay still. You’re going to be okay.’ Which he knew was a lie. Roby was not going to be okay at all. He was going to die. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Or maybe it was just a cruel prolongation of his agony. Ben knew he couldn’t move him and that nothing could save him. They could have been within yards of a hospital, and the outcome would still have been the same.

      But Roby was fighting it. He hadn’t had sixty years of serene devotional meditation to help him calmly accept, even embrace, death. He was as terrified as most other people would have been. With a supreme effort that must have used up nearly all his fading reserves, he gripped Ben’s hand in his bloodstained fingers. The movement shot a bolt of pain through him that sent a ripple of shock across his face. The agony was awful, Ben could see that. Roby gasped and a stream of garbled words hissed out of him. Ben strained to listen and caught none of it.

      ‘What happened here, Roby?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing, fighting his emotions.

      Roby’s eyes rolled back and the lids fluttered. His head lolled, and for a bad second Ben thought he’d lost him. But then the boy fought his eyes back open and mouthed more words, almost soundlessly. ‘They came … it was before dawn … I was …’ The whisper trailed off to nothing.

      ‘Who? Who did this?’

      The effort was killing Roby. But he had nothing to lose any more. His breath was coming in gasps and his hand was trembling in Ben’s. Sweat beaded all over his pallid face and pooled in the hollow of his throat. His eyes opened a little wider, and the terror in them flashed brightly for an instant, a gleam that caught the light from the phone Ben was shining over him.

      ‘Benoît … I saw … I saw demons.’

      Ben looked at him. The young man was raving, that was all. His brain was closing down. Random neurochemical impulses firing off as the nerve endings died and the mist of darkness rose up to take him away. People at the very point of death often talked gibberish or seemed to experience hallucinations, for the same reason. ‘It’s all right, Roby,’ was all Ben could say.

      But whatever it was that Roby was trying to say, he was desperate to get it out. ‘No … not demons. Ghosts. I saw … they were … all white …’

      And then the boy could say no more. His chest heaved with his last breath. His spine arched. A juddering spasm, and then Ben felt the life go out of him and his body go rigid and then relax and become limp.

      Ben closed his eyes and held Roby for a few seconds. Then he let go of the dead boy’s hand and let his body slump gently to the floor. He stood up, said a silent goodbye and moved on.

      From the mouth of the secondary passage he turned left again, in the direction of the tracks. It was virtually a thoroughfare along here. Twice, he kneeled down to inspect footprints that hadn’t been obliterated by others overlaid on top of them. One set of prints was distinctly smaller than the rest. Which was clear enough evidence that the tracks had been made by at least two people, as opposed to one person doubling back and forth many times. The smaller print had the same kind of large tread as the others, indicating some kind of standardisation of their footwear. Ben thought about the combat boots the dead shooter in the cloister had on. They’d come down here. Why? He thought of the two gold bars in the dead guy’s bag, and of the third one he’d nearly tripped over in the passage. Had there been a treasure buried beneath the monastery? Had the killers come here to raid it?

      That would have explained the hours they’d hung around after the killings. Any kind of a sizeable haul of gold would take as long to lug up to ground level as a truckload of beer. Maybe even longer, depending on how much of it there was to shift. Maybe there’d been so much gold that one bar dropped here or there didn’t make any difference.

      Maybe so much of it that the killers had begun to argue among themselves. Hence the dead guy in the cloister. There wasn’t always honour among thieves.

      Ben moved on a few more yards towards the carved-out cavern he’d visited two days ago with Roby. Two days ago wasn’t a long time for someone who tended to notice small details the way Ben did. And while he could have sworn that the passage walls and ceiling had been smooth and undamaged before, now he was noticing a widespread lacework of cracks and fissures, some only hairline, others wide enough to stick his thumb into, on both sides and above his head. The dust underfoot was deeper and his boots crunched on small pieces of stone that had been dislodged from gaps that hadn’t been there before. Ben might have been worried about it, if he hadn’t had worse things to worry about.

      Now the passage opened out into the cavern that had been dug out of the rock. The place Père Antoine hadn’t wanted to talk about. Where Ben had found the skull, and the section of brickwork that walled off the way ahead. The skull was still there, crushed from the rock Ben had dumped on it. It lay half-buried in fresh dust, from the cracks that had opened up everywhere. Next to it lay a fourth gold bar, apparently dropped in the same careless way as the last, gleaming dully in the light from Ben’s torch-phone. But he paid it only a moment’s attention, because he was distracted by a far bigger discovery.

      The partition wall blocking off the cavern wasn’t there any more. It had been blown away.