bright and smooth, each about twelve inches long and about four inches wide by three inches high. Solid, dense lumps of metal. Each weighed somewhere between six and eight kilos, making him straighten up and pivot his body weight slightly backwards to counter the tug on his arms. He put one of the bars down on the ground, rested the other on his knee as he reached into his pocket for the truck ignition key. Gripping the shaft of the key tightly, he dug its tip at an angle into the top of the bar. Steel was much harder than gold. The tip of the key easily left a jagged score mark as long as his thumb and maybe a millimetre deep.
Ben examined the scratch very closely. He was looking for dark grey underneath the gold. He’d heard of solid lead ingots, melted and moulded into the right shape out of wheel weights or roofing lead, being painted or even plated to fool the unwary.
But this was no lead ingot dressed up, and when he tested the second bar he got the same result. Apparently, they were the real thing. Which he had to presume meant they were pretty seriously valuable. At this moment, that was the absolute limit of his knowledge. Neither bar had any visible markings on it anywhere. Nothing to indicate their provenance, their age, or what the hell they were doing here.
That was just one more thing he was going to have to figure out.
Ben laid the two bars side by side in the dead man’s lap and covered them with the bag. He didn’t think the guy would be going anywhere with them. He stood up and walked on down the cloistered passage.
Soon afterwards, he picked up the blood trail. It started out of nowhere, the way blood trails so often did. Its source was marked with a splatter against a wall and a nearby spent nine-millimetre shell case. From there, a heavy line of spots, each the size of a large coin and serrated like a circular saw around its circumference where it had splashed to the ground, led through archways and down steps and along paved aisles for about fifty yards, until it disappeared through an open doorway. There was a russet-coloured partial palm print on the door from where the injured person had stumbled into it with their hand extended in front of them, crashing through in a hurry.
Ben meant to find out where it led. He might find another dead monk at the end of the trail, or he might find a second shooter. Preferably one who wasn’t yet expired, so that he could milk some information out of them before they were. Or before he made them that way.
But Ben knew he had to hurry. Whoever it was, they’d been losing a lot of blood.
The doorway was the one leading down to the cellars, along the same route Ben had travelled back and forth two days earlier with the work party bringing up the beer. He walked in and smelled the faintly musty odours that came up from below. It was full of shadows down here and his eyes were adjusted to the bright sunshine, but he could make out the regular spots of blood that dotted the way ahead. If anything, they were becoming more frequent. As if the bleeding had been getting worse, or the person had been slowing down, or both at once.
The trail led downwards into the maze of passages beneath the monastery. More handprints and smears, the colour of autumn leaves, appeared on the bare stone walls. Ben blinked to make his eyes reset themselves to the growing darkness. His footsteps began to echo more deeply around him as he ventured further underground. He wished he’d had a torch, then remembered that he had the dead man’s phone in his pocket. He paused to turn it on. It had a built-in light that he used as a torch, sweeping the weak beam ahead of him left and right as he made his way onwards.
Without the light there to guide him, he might have tripped over the heavy object that was lying in his path. He nudged it with his foot, then crouched down to examine it. It was another gold bar, apparently identical to the two he’d found on the dead man. He picked it up. Same weight. He brushed it all over with his fingertips. No markings, just plain smooth cool metal.
Ben laid the bar back down and moved on. Down, and down. Then the passage levelled out. He’d been here only once before, but he knew exactly where he was. The place seemed familiar to him, yet different. It wasn’t just the blood trail that hadn’t been here before. It was all the tracks in the dust. Lots of them, adding considerably to those that the work party had made trekking to and fro to shift the beer up from the cellars. It looked as if a whole procession of people had come this way, and back again. Perhaps several times, judging by the confusion of prints. One thing was for sure, these prints hadn’t been made by monks. Monks didn’t wear deep-tread combat boots.
He kept moving urgently forward. The light flicked this way and that, casting shadows on the rough walls and picking out more splashes of blood. And more. The dark passage curved left, then right, carving into the mountain like a mole tunnel. Ben moved quickly but cautiously, one eye on the ground. Any time soon, he’d be approaching the place where the walls opened up into the man-made cavern he’d discovered two days earlier. That seemed to be where both the blood trail and the multiple tracks were leading him.
Now he came to a fork in the path as the blood trail and the tracks diverged. The tracks kept moving straight ahead towards the cavern, while the blood trail veered off to the left, into the craggy entrance of the secondary passage Ben remembered from before. That was the direction he opted for, bowing his head to avoid the low, rough ceiling. The tracks could wait. This might not.
Just a few yards on, he came to the end of the trail.
Ben had thought he would find a dead monk there, or maybe a live bad guy. He found neither.
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
