At the same time that Annja was cutting a deal with her wannabe paparazzo, Detective Inspector Beresford was entering the morgue at New Scotland Yard, intent on checking the results of the autopsies that had been done that morning on the bodies of the two men recovered from the roadside ditch south of the dig site.
Clements had prepared a preliminary report after returning to the office earlier and Beresford had read it on the way over. Fingerprint analysis had identified the two men as Brian O’Donnell and Sean MacGuire. Both of them had records; they’d been in and out of prison several times over the past fifteen years. At first it was just small stuff—petty larceny, possession of stolen goods, assault and battery—but it wasn’t long before they graduated to more serious crimes. The last time they’d been pinched they ended up doing five years together in Swansea on an armed robbery charge. It was there, according to the file, that they’d been recruited into the Ulster Volunteer Force.
Beresford wasn’t surprised to see the notes to that effect. The UVF had been in need of men who didn’t shy away from violence, and O’Donnell and MacGuire had equally needed the protection and standing that membership in the UVF would have given them. It was practically a match made in heaven. The two men had kept their noses out of trouble and had been released within a month of each other in 2005. There were rumors that they were involved in the slaying of a Catholic alderman in the summer of 2007 and again in an attempted car bombing in London in 2009, but that’s all they were—rumors. CT Command didn’t have enough to haul them in as accomplices, never mind pin the jobs on them. The two men had dropped off the radar and that had been that.
Until they were found cast aside like so much trash on the side of the road south of the dig site.
It wasn’t a coincidence; that much was obvious. But how they fit into the bigger picture and what their roles had been in the massacre, Beresford didn’t know.
It seemed clear that they had met their end in a confrontation with the now-infamous Annja Creed. Beresford had watched the sideshow of a press conference that her producer had orchestrated the other day and while it primarily raised more questions than it answered, it did seem to confirm his reasoning with regard to her behavior. If she had been a witness to the events at the dig site, as her producer had indicated, then it would be natural for her to go into hiding, especially if she had already fought off a second attempt on her life. Twice was usually two times too many for most people; he didn’t blame her for wanting to avoid a third.
It still didn’t explain why she hadn’t come forward since then, and that bothered him.
What was he missing?
His musing ended, his question still unanswered, when he reached the guard posted outside the doors of the morgue. Given the importance of the evidence that passed through the morgue, access to the facility was carefully monitored and documented. Beresford had to show his identification and sign the log book before the guard would let him in for his appointment with the coroner, Jack Gibbons.
Gibbons had held the post for the past ten years and Beresford had worked with him on a number of cases. He found the man to be both highly dedicated and extremely skilled when it came to his job. He was also a very affable fellow, once you got through his carefully cultivated curmudgeonlike exterior. Beresford honestly liked the man and, as a result, it made this aspect of his job a little less upsetting than it might otherwise be.
“How are you, Jack?” Beresford asked as he stepped into the room and caught sight of the other man working at a nearby station.
Gibbons was in his early sixties, just a few years short of “put-him-out-to-pasture age,” as he liked to call it. He was a large man, but moved with a grace and surety of motion. He had a full head of gleaming white hair and often wore it in a ponytail to annoy those younger, but less fortunate, members of the staff who were already losing their hair at half his age.
“I’m just fine,” the other man replied, “but him,” he said, indicating the man on the table in front of him, “not so much.”
“What happened?” Beresford asked as he stepped up beside him and looked down at the body of a middleaged man that looked both oddly crushed and bloated at the same time.
“Idiot decided to test the law of gravity while drunk by taking a high dive off the Tower Bridge. He must have sobered up on the way down, though, because witnesses claim he started screaming about halfway to the bottom.”
Gibbons finished making notes on a chart that hung at the bottom of the vivisection table and then gave the detective his full attention.
“What can I do for you on this bleak and baleful day?” he asked with a smile.
“I heard you’d finished the postmortem on O’Donnell and MacGuire. Figured I’d get a jump on things by coming to see you rather than waiting for the official report.”
Gibbons had pulled the sheet up over the body in front of them and was already moving across the room toward the refrigerated drawers before Beresford had gotten half his sentence out. That was one of the things the detective liked about the man; he was good at anticipating a detective’s needs on a major case and didn’t mind going around the official paperwork to give a guy a head start when necessary.
The rear wall held three rows of refrigeration units, or storage drawers, with four to a row. The coroner moved directly to two drawers in the second row, pulling them open simultaneously.
Standing between them, he asked, “What do you need to know?”
Beresford looked down at the bodies before him, figured out who was who and pointed at O’Donnell first. “Cause of death?”
“Severance of the third and fourth vertebrae.”
In other words, a broken neck, just as he’d suspected at the crime scene, Beresford thought. “Any idea what might have caused it?”
“From the force of the impact and the damage to the vertebrae that resulted, I’d say it was an automobile accident. Probably wasn’t buckled in.”
“That’s consistent with the scenario I’m putting together,” Beresford said. “Anything unusual I should know about?”
“You saw the tattoo?”
“Yeah, that’s why I caught the case.”
Gibbons shrugged. “That’s it for this one, then.”
Beresford moved over to the other drawer. “And him?”
“That’s where things get interesting. Timing wise, he was killed right around the same time as O’Donnell, give or take half an hour. In his case, though, death was the result of massive trauma associated with a sharp force injury that consisted of a severe stab wound in the upper left chest area.”
Gibbons pulled the sheet down farther to show the wound in the corpse’s chest. “The blade was close to three inches in width at its widest point and at least two and a half feet long.”
He rolled the body up on one shoulder so Beresford could see the exit wound in the man’s back.
“I suspect it might have even been longer,” he said as he let the body fall back into place on the gurney, “but I’ve got no way of confirming it at the moment.”
The detective did what he could to ignore the uncomfortable sound of the body slapping back against the steel table. “So what are we talking about? A combat knife, a machete, something like that?”
“A sword would be more likely, as the wound clearly shows that the weapon had a double edge.”
So far, Gary Anderson’s story was holding up. The first of the two victims had been killed in the crash, the second when the woman had rushed the other vehicle, weapon in hand.
Curiouser and curiouser, Beresford thought.
“A sword, huh? Old or new?” he asked.
Gibbons shrugged again. “No way to say for sure. Some older weapons will leave bits of particulate matter in the wound, tiny slivers of metal that break free of the blade when it strikes a hard surface like a bone, maybe flakes of rust if the weapon hasn’t been cared for all that much, but I didn’t find anything like that here.”
That wasn’t anything Beresford was happy to hear. It meant he’d have a hard time tying the weapon to the crime itself, even if he caught the Creed woman with the sword in hand. Gibbons would be able to say that a weapon of “similar make and style” had been used in the attack, but without additional forensic evidence like finding the blade stained with the blood of the victims, he couldn’t make a more definitive statement.
But Gibbons wasn’t finished.
“I recovered several different fibers from the exit wound, though. The first few matched the fabric from the shirt our victim had been wearing—the removal of the sword must have pulled them back into the wound. But there were also several slivers of a dark blue fabric that I couldn’t match and I sent those over to the lab for further analysis.”
“Want to hazard a guess?”
Gibbons didn’t hesitate. “The angle of the entry and exit wounds suggest that the weapon entered the body at a slight downward angle, so I’m guessing our victim was sitting down when it happened. I’d say the fabric is from the upholstery of whatever chair he was sitting in at the time.”
Wouldn’t that be nice, Beresford thought. Anderson’s testimony tied Creed to the vehicle and the deaths that occurred inside it, at least circumstantially. If the fabric turned out to be automobile upholstery, and he could match that to the vehicle itself, then he could put the body in the vehicle that was involved in the pursuit of Anderson’s car, thereby tying the bodies discovered at the side of the road with the events described by Anderson.
It wasn’t enough to secure a conviction, but it was a start. Successful investigations were like walls; they were built one brick at a time.
“Anything else?”
“Just that he was a member of the RHD, just like his partner there, but you probably already knew that.”
“Yep.”
“Looks like you’ve got a problem on your hands,” Gibbons said as he covered up the bodies again.
“Tell me about it. Losing two of their men is going to make the RHD bloody difficult to deal with.”
“Two? Try four.”
Beresford gave him a quizzical look. “Four?”
“You mean you haven’t heard?” Gibbons shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it. “Follow me.”
He led Beresford back across the room to where two bodies were resting on wheeled stretchers under crisp blue sheets. He pulled the sheets back on both of them, exposing them from the shoulders up.
The detective barely noticed their faces for he was too busy staring at the tattoos that were visible on each man’s shoulder.
Tattoos of a red hand.
“Bloody hell,” he said under his breath. Then, louder so that Gibbons could hear, “Where’d you get these two?”
“Hotel over in Peckham,” the other man answered. “Forensic Science Services just brought them in, after the responding detectives released the scene.”
Oh, for the love of… Beresford couldn’t believe that they’d cleared the scene without notifying him. Given that there was already an active investigation involving members of the RHD, standard protocol demanded that the bodies remain in place until the officers involved in the primary investigation, namely he and Clements, were given a chance to view the scene as it was found.
Losing four of their soldiers in less than forty-eight hours was not going to sit well with those in command of the RHD. There were sure to be reprisals. The trouble was there were far too many soft targets the RHD could take advantage of and there was no way for CT Command to cover them all.
It looked like things were going to get bloody very quickly unless he could get to the bottom of it.
“You happen to have the address of that hotel?” he asked.
Annja and Mike returned to the upper deck, where, by unspoken agreement, they stayed in eyesight of each other until the boat docked in Cherbourg. Gilmore’s word had been good, for there wasn’t a horde of police officers waiting to arrest her on the other side.
She used her fake passport to slip through customs without being stopped. Half an hour after arriving in France, she was on board a train bound for Paris.
She slept as soon as she was settled on the train, trying to catch up on what she had missed the nights before. It was an uneasy sleep, however, full of phantom figures chasing her through the streets and she felt no more rested when she awoke. Grabbing a cup of coffee at a café in the train station, she decided she’d be safest staying at the train station until it was time to head for the museum.
A
GLANCE AT
her watch as she climbed the steps told her she was right on time. A badge was waiting for her at the information desk, as promised, and a well-dressed young woman of Asian descent led her through the maze of hallways in the restricted part of the museum until they reached Dr. de Chance’s office.
Annja knocked, then opened the door at the muffled, “Come in,” from the other side.
Dr. de Chance was tall and thin, reminding Annja of a scarecrow that climbed down off his pole and learned to walk. He had a narrow, lined face that gave his mouth a pinched look, but his eyes were sparkling and full of life. She put his age at somewhere around sixty-five.
“Ah, you must be Miss Creed,” he said with a smile, coming around his desk to shake Annja’s hand. “Please come in, sit down.”
He indicated the chair in front of his desk with the wave of a hand and returned to his chair.
“Thank you for taking the time to see me,” Annja began, but de Chance waved the social chitchat aside.
“Skip the formalities, please. I’m too old to waste time on such nonsense. Let’s talk one colleague to another. Tell me about this black torc you found,” he suggested.
Surprised by his abruptness, but interested in learning what he knew nonetheless, Annja did so, explaining about the recent dig in the West Midlands. She kept waiting for him to interrupt and tell her he knew all of this from the newscasts but he did not; apparently Dr. de Chance was one of the few people who had not heard about the recent tragedy. She explained how the torc had been found around the neck of the Iceni chieftain they’d pulled from the bog’s clutches, though she conveniently left out the part about how they’d known were to dig. When it came time to describe the torc, she simply handed over the copies of the photographs she’d had made the day before.
De Chance studied them for several minutes. Annja could feel the tension in the room rise as he did so, though she didn’t understand why. When he was finished looking at the pictures, de Chance leaned forward in his seat, his gaze intense. “Do you have the torc with you, by chance?”
Annja shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t able to obtain permission in time to remove it from the site.”
There was something about the way de Chance had asked the question that made Annja a little uneasy and she didn’t think twice about lying to him.
“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, putting the photos on his desk for the moment. “It would have been interesting to see it.”
A frown crossed his face for a second, there and gone so quickly Annja wasn’t even certain she’d seen it.
“So, how can I help you?”
“Well,” she began, “you didn’t sound surprised to hear there was a torc like this out there, so I’m assuming you’ve heard of it?”
He nodded. “Yes. There are one or two stories that mention a black torc, but they generally refer to it by its given name, the Tear of the Gods.”
“The Tear of the Gods?” She hadn’t come across that name in her research.
De Chance leaned back and got comfortable. “You’ve heard of Boudica and her rebellion against Rome?”
“Yes. Like most of those who tried to throw off the yoke of the empire, it failed.”
“Quite right. But there are some who say that the failure was not due to her lack of intelligence or tactical know-how, but rather a result of the fact that she gave up her most prized possession.”
“Let me guess. The Tear of the Gods?”
“The very same. According to the legend, a lowly blacksmith, his name now lost to history, was present when the Roman governor ordered his troops to rape Boudica and her daughters in punishment for the fact that her deceased husband, the previous ruler of the area, insulted the emperor by leaving the region to Boudica in his will. Enraged at the Roman treatment of his queen the blacksmith called upon the gods to help him fashion a weapon of mighty power, one that would overthrow the empire and keep this from ever happening again.”
De Chance warmed to his subject. “Andraste, goddess of victory, heard his plea. But being a woman, and a beautiful one at that, she appeared to the blacksmith in a dream and convinced him to make a necklace instead of a sword. When the blacksmith agreed, Andraste wept bitter tears over the queen’s plight. As her tears fell to earth, they were collected by the blacksmith and mixed with the other ingredients he had chosen at the goddess’s suggestion. From that mixture the torc was formed.”
De Chance paused, checking to be certain Annja was following the story, which she was.
“Some versions claim that the goddess was Agrona, goddess of war, instead of Andraste,” he went on, “but that’s not really all that important.” He waved a hand to show his dismissal of the issue.
“The key here is that the Celts believed that the material used to make the torc had come from the gods themselves and was therefore imbued with mystical powers. Both Agrona and Andraste are gods associated with war, so a legend sprang up that anyone wearing the black torc would be invincible in combat, that they couldn’t be defeated, by man or gods.”
“Why haven’t I heard of this legend before?” Annja asked. She considered herself pretty well informed when it came to the beliefs and mythology of ancient cultures.
De Chance shrugged. “Aside from the fact that Celtic mythology isn’t the most likely cocktail party conversation?” he asked. “The legend is a very minor one and it died out fairly quickly given what happened to Boudica.”
Annja could understand that. It was hard to claim that the necklace made the bearer unbeatable in battle when the Romans had crushed Boudica’s rebellion so handily.
Of course, she might have given the torc to someone else before the big battle.
With thoughts of Big Red in the back of her mind, she suggested as much to de Chance, more to see what he would say than anything else.
“It’s certainly possible,” the professor replied, “but I tend to doubt it.”
“Why’s that?”
“If she had given it to another, say her most trusted lieutenant or someone like that, the legend would have lived on. We would have heard additional stories of the torc’s existence. Instead, it disappears from history shortly after Boudica’s death.”
Unless the person to whom it was given was himself killed shortly thereafter and no one knew he carried it.
“In fact,” he went on, “until your call the other day, I would have said that the black torc was nothing more than a myth. It would appear that you’ll have the chance to prove me wrong.”
He picked up one of the photos again, giving it a closer look. “This certainly isn’t gold,” he said, almost to himself. “Could it be iron?”
“I don’t think so,” Annja replied, “or, if it is, it’s iron mixed with something else I don’t recognize.”
“It’s not all that often that you stumble on the tears of a goddess, now is it?” de Chance joked.
“Hardly. One of my next steps is to have it analyzed.”
De Chance put the photo back with the others and then handed the whole stack back to Annja. “I think that’s an excellent idea. Do you have anyone in mind for the work?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Annja replied.
“Would you object to a suggestion?”
“Not at all.”
“The best geologist in town is Sebastian Cartier. If I was in charge of the torc, he’s the one I’d take it to. The trouble is that with all the work he does for the oil and mineral companies, he’s usually booked for months in advance.” De Chance gave a wolfish smile. “Thankfully he owes me a favor. A big one. Would you like me to give him a call?”
Annja smiled back at him. “I’d appreciate that very much.”
De Chance picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Sebastian? It’s Harry. I need some help…”
A few minutes later it was all arranged. Annja was to drop by Cartier’s office at nine the next morning, supposedly after having the torc sent via overnight courier to her address, after which the geologist would do a series of tests aimed at identifying exactly what the torc was made of and how old it might actually be. In return, Annja promised to have a copy of the results sent over to de Chance’s office and to arrange for him to view the piece at a later date.
Given the hoops she would have been forced to jump through to accomplish that on her own, Annja felt very lucky indeed to have made the trip to Paris to meet de Chance.
After a few more minutes of polite discussion, Annja thanked the professor one more time and then took her leave, anxious to get to her hotel and to be certain the torc had arrived without incident.
N
O SOONER HAD
the American woman left his office than de Chance picked up his phone again and dialed another number. To de Chance’s surprise, it was answered after only a few rings by Shaw himself.
“She just left,” de Chance told his sometime partner.
The two men had met years earlier at a conference and recognized in each other a certain mutual interest in seeing the occasional archaeological artifact get rerouted into the hands of a private individual from time to time. The association had made de Chance a very rich man, and the opportunity before him at this moment made all the other transactions they’d conducted pale in comparison.
He had no intention of missing it.
“Does she have the torc?” Shaw asked.
“No, not yet. But she is having it sent to her via overnight courier so that she can have it dated and chemically analyzed tomorrow,” de Chance said, and then proceeded to tell Shaw exactly where the elusive Miss Creed would be at nine the next morning.
It was a piece of information he knew Shaw would be more than happy to compensate him for at a later date.