‘What happened to it?’ Ben said.
‘When Klaus died, the director of the Institut, Edouard Legrand, offered it to me. He thought I might be interested in it. Klaus had no family, and in any case it wouldn’t have been much of an heirloom. I have it upstairs.’
‘Can we see it?’ Roberta said eagerly.
Anna smiled. ‘Of course.’ She went to fetch it from her study. A minute later she returned, filling the room again with her fresh perfume, holding a small polythene bag. ‘I put it in here because it was so filthy and smelly,’ she said, laying the bag gently on the table.
Ben took the notebook out of the bag. It was frayed and crumpled and looked like it had been soaked in blood and urine a hundred times. It gave off a sharp musty smell. He flipped through it. Most of the pages were blank, apart from the first thirty or so which were heavily stained with grubby fingerprints and reddish-brown smears of old dried blood that made it difficult in places to read the handwriting.
The bits he could make out were just about the strangest thing he’d ever seen. The pages were filled with snatches of bizarre verse. Obscure and apparently meaningless arrangements of letters and numbers. Scrawled notes in Latin, English and French. Rheinfeld had obviously been an educated man, as well as a competent artist. Here and there were drawings, some of them simple sketches and others drawn in painstaking detail. They looked to Ben like the kind of alchemical images he’d seen in ancient texts.
One of the most grubby and well-thumbed pages in the notebook had a drawing on it that was familiar. It was the diagram from the dagger blade, the twin intersecting star-circles that Rheinfeld had been so obsessed with.
He picked up the dagger and compared them. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘They’re slightly different from one another.’
Rheinfeld’s version was identical except for one small extra detail. It was hard to make out, but it looked like a tiny heraldic emblem of a bird with outstretched wings and a long beak. It was positioned at the dead centre of the twin-circle motif.
‘It’s a raven,’ Ben said. ‘And I think I’ve seen it before.’ It was the symbol he’d seen carved in the central porch at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
But why had Rheinfeld altered the design from the blade?
‘Does any of this mean anything to you?’ he asked Anna.
She shrugged. ‘Not really. Who knows what was in his mind?’
‘Can I have a look?’ Roberta asked. Ben passed the notebook to her. ‘God, it’s gross,’ she said, turning the pages with revulsion.
Ben’s heart was sinking again. ‘Did you learn anything at all from Rheinfeld?’ he asked Anna, hoping he might be able to salvage at least something of value.
‘I wish I could say yes,’ she replied. ‘When Dr. Legrand first mentioned this strange, intriguing character to me I thought he might help to inspire me for my new book. I was suffering from writer’s block. I still am,’ she added unhappily. ‘But as I got to know him I felt so sorry for him. My visits were more for his comfort than for my own inspiration. I can’t say I learned anything from him. All I have is this notebook. Oh, and there is one other thing…’
‘What?’ Ben asked.
Anna blushed. ‘I did something a little…what’s the word…naughty. On my last visit to the Institut I smuggled in with me the little gadget I use for dictating my book ideas. I recorded my conversation with Klaus.’
‘Could I hear that?’
‘I don’t think it could be of any use,’ Anna said. ‘But you’re welcome to listen to it.’ She reached behind her and picked up a miniature digital recorder from a sideboard. She set it down in the middle of the table and pressed PLAY. Through the tinny speaker they could hear Rheinfeld’s low, muttering voice.
It put a chill down Roberta’s spine.
‘Did he always speak in German?’ asked Ben.
‘Only when he was repeating these numbers,’ Anna said.
Ben listened intently. Rheinfeld’s mumbling tone started low, mantra-like. ‘N-sechs; E-vier; I-sechs-und-zwanzig…’ As he went on his voice rose higher, beginning to sound frenzied: ‘A-elf; E-funfzehn…N-sechs; E-vier…‘and the sequence repeated itself again as Ben scribbled it down in his pad. They heard Anna softly saying ‘Klaus, calm down.’
Rheinfeld paused for a moment, and then his voice started again: ‘Igne Natura Renovatur Integra–Igne Natura Renovatur Integra–Igne Natura Renovatur Integra…’ He chanted the phrase over and over, faster and louder until his voice rose into a scream that distorted the speaker. The recording ended with a flurry of other voices.
Anna turned the machine off with a sad look. She shook her head. ‘They had to sedate him at that point. He was strangely agitated that day. Nothing seemed to calm him. It was just before he killed himself.’
‘That was creepy,’ said Roberta. ‘What was that Latin phrase?’
Ben had already found it in the notebook. He was looking at a sketch of a cauldron, in which some mysterious liquid was bubbling. A bearded alchemist in a smock stood watching over it. The Latin words IGNE NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA were printed on the side of the cauldron. ‘My Latin’s rusty,’ he said. ‘Something about fire…nature…’
‘By fire nature is renewed whole,’ Anna translated for him. An old alchemical saying, relating to the processes they used to transform base matter. He was fixated on that phrase, and when he repeated it he would count his fingers, like this.’ She imitated Rheinfeld’s twitchy, urgent gestures. ‘I have no idea why he did that.’
Roberta leaned across to see the picture in the notebook. Her hair brushed over Ben’s hand as she moved up close. She pointed to the image. Beneath the cauldron, the alchemist had lit a raging fire. Under the flames was the label ANBO, printed clearly in capitals. ‘Anbo– what language is that?’ she asked.
‘None that I know,’ Anna said.
‘So the notebook and this recording are all you have?’ Ben asked her.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘That is all.’
Then it was a waste of time coming here, he thought bitterly. That was my last chance.
Anna was gazing thoughtfully at the rubbing of the dagger blade. An idea was forming in her mind. She couldn’t be sure, but…
The phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and went to answer it.
‘So what do you think, Ben?’ Roberta said quietly.
‘I don’t think this is leading anywhere.’
They could hear Anna on the phone in the next room, talking in a low voice. She sounded a little flustered. ‘Edouard, I asked you not to call me any more…No, you can’t come here tonight. I have guests…no, not tomorrow night either.’
‘Me neither,’ Roberta said. ‘Shit.’ She sighed and got up from her chair, started pacing aimlessly across the room. Then something caught her eye.
Anna finished her call and returned to join them. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said.
‘Problems?’ Ben said.
Anna shook her head and smiled. ‘Nothing import ant.’
‘Anna, what’s this?’ Roberta said. She was examining a magnificent medieval text hanging in a glass frame on the wall near the fireplace. The cracked, browned parchment depicted an early map of the Languedoc, scattered with old towns and castles. Around the edges of the map, blocks of old Latin and medieval