He was in no mood for her enthusiasm. ‘Tell me about it some other time,’ he muttered. ‘I’m thinking.’ He was–thinking about picking up his phone and telling Fairfax it was over. He’d wire him back his money, give up and go home to his beach.
‘Listen, this is important,’ she insisted. ‘Come on, let’s go outside. No, don’t finish that. You look like you’ve had enough already. I want you with a clear head.’
‘Go away, Roberta. I’m busy.’
‘Yeah, busy drinking yourself into a stupor with that gut-rot.’
‘Gut-rot is what happens to you when you drink it,’ he corrected her. He pointed at the glass. ‘This is rot-gut’, he said emphatically.
‘Either way,’ she grunted impatiently. ‘Look at you. Call yourself a professional?’
He shot her a ferocious look, slammed the glass down on the bar and slid down off the stool.
‘This had better be very, very good indeed,’ he warned her as they stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.
‘I think it is,’ she said, turning to face him with an earnest look as she got her thoughts in order. ‘OK, listen. What if the manuscript Klaus Rheinfeld stole hadn’t been destroyed?’
He shook his head, confused. ‘What are you raving about? Pascal saw it in pieces. It was ruined in the storm.’
‘Right. Now, remember the notebook, Rheinfeld’s notebook?’
‘What about it?’ he grunted. ‘This is what you drag me out here for?’
‘Well, maybe it’s more important than we thought.’
He furrowed his brow. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just listen, OK? Here’s my idea. What if the notebook was the same thing as the manuscript?’
‘Are you crazy? How could it be? They gave it to him at the hospital.’
‘I don’t mean the actual notebook, stupid. I mean what’s written in it. Maybe Rheinfeld copied the secrets down into it.’
‘Oh right. From inside a secure hospital, after he’d lost the original? What did he do, channel the information? I’m going back inside.’ He turned impatiently to go.
‘Shut up and listen to me for once!’ she shouted, grabbing his arm. ‘I’m trying to say something, you pigheaded bastard! I think Rheinfeld could have remembered it all and written it down later in his notebook.’
He stared at her. ‘Roberta, there were over thirty fucking pages of riddles and drawings, geometric shapes, jumbled-up numbers and bits of Latin and French and all kinds of stuff in there. It’s not possible to remember all that in perfect detail.’
‘He walked around with it for years,’ she protested. ‘Probably living rough, with no money. It was all he had. He was fixated on it.’
‘I still don’t buy that anyone could have that kind of memory. Especially a fucked-up alchemy nut,’ he added.
‘Ben, I did a year of neurobiology at Yale. Granted, it’s unusual–but it’s not impossible. It’s called eidectic memory, also known as photographic memory. It’s usually lost by adolescence, but some people retain it all their lives. Rheinfeld had an OCD, from what I can gather–’
‘OCD?’
‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,’ she said more patiently. ‘He had all the symptoms, kept repeating actions and words for no apparent reason–or for no reason that anyone could understand except him. Now, it’s been known for compulsive neurotics to have uncanny powers of memory. They can store huge amounts of detail that you and I would never be able to remember. Difficult mathematical equations, detailed pictures, enormous chunks of technical text. It’s all on scientific record going back almost a century.’
Ben sat on a bench. His mind was quickly clearing of the whisky fog.
‘Think about it, Ben,’ she went on, sitting next to him. ‘They gave Rheinfeld a notebook to write down his dreams–that’s a standard part of psychotherapy. But instead, he used it to preserve the memories he was holding inside, keep a written record of the information that he’d stolen and then lost. The psychiatrists couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing, where the stuff was coming from. They probably dismissed it as lunatic gibberish. But what if it was more than that?’
‘But he was crazy. How can we trust the mind of a madman?’
‘Sure, he was crazy,’ she agreed. ‘But mostly he was obsessive, and the thing about obsessives is, they’re crazy about details. As long as the detail he wrote down was close enough to the original, what matters isn’t his craziness but that the notebook might contain a perfect, or near-perfect, replica of the documents that Jacques Clément didn’t burn because they’d been passed to him by Fulcanelli.’
He was silent for a few moments. ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Of course I’m not sure. But I still think we should go back and check it out. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?’ She looked at him searchingly. ‘Well? What do you say?’
Anna couldn’t concentrate on her work. Still unable to come up with a satisfactory plot for her historical novel, she’d been reduced to sketching out a rough draft of the author’s introduction. It should have been easy–she knew the subject so intimately. But the words just wouldn’t flow. Now a new distraction had formed in her mind to add to the writer’s block that had been troubling her for so long. Each time she tried to focus on the page in front of her, after a couple of minutes her mind began to stray and she found herself thinking about Ben Hope.
Something was niggling her. Something buried at the back of her mind. What was it? It was distant, hazy, like a half-forgotten word hovering teasingly on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t crystallize into clear thought. She glanced down at Rheinfeld’s notebook, lying at her elbow on the desk, the dagger blade rubbing slipped between its pages. Maybe there was more to the notebook than she’d ever thought. The markings…
She reclined back in the swivel-chair, gazing out of the window. The stars were coming out, beginning to twinkle in the darkening blue sky above the black-silhouetted line of mountaintops. Her eye followed the string of Orion’s Belt. Rigel was a distant sun, over 900 light years away. The stars brought history alive to her. The light she was seeing now had started its journey through space almost 1,000 years ago; just to gaze up at it was to travel back in time, commune with the living past. What dark, terrible, beautiful secrets had the stars witnessed over medieval Languedoc? She sighed and tried to get back to her work.
The mountaintop castle of Montségur, March 1244. Eight thousand crusaders, paid with Catholic gold, surrounded a defenceless band of three hundred Cathar heretics. After eight months of siege and bombardment the Cathars were starving. All but four of them were to die, burned alive by the Inquisitors after the final storming of the ramparts. Before the massacre, four priests fled the besieged castle bearing an unknown cargo, and disappeared. Their story remains a mystery. What was their mission? Were they carrying the fabled treasure of the Cathars, attempting to hide its secret from their persecutors? Did this treasure really exist, and if so, what was it? These questions have remained un answered to this day.
She put down her pen. It was only just after nine, but she decided she’d have an early night. Her best ideas often came when she was relaxed in bed. She’d have a hot bath, make a drink and curl up with her thoughts. Maybe the morning would see her with