The Lazarus Vault Part 8

'Mark sent him to Ireland to fetch his bride, Yseult the Blonde. Yseult was the fairest maid in all Britain.'

From the corner of my eye, I see Ada winding a lock of her golden hair around her finger. Is she seeing Yseult as I do, with soft blue eyes and a dimple on her chin, lying on a riverbank among the camomile?

'Yseult's mother was a sorceress. To ensure a happy marriage, she concocted a love potion and gave it to Yseult's maid for the wedding night. But on the ship from Ireland, Tristan grew thirsty. He found the bottle and thought it was wine; he drank it. Yseult found him in the cabin and asked to share his drink. She didn't know what it was.'

'Where was the maid?' Ada asks archly.

'The story doesn't say. Tristan and Yseult stared into each other's eyes, and at that moment they fell headlong in love. The walls of the boat seemed to melt away and all they knew was each other.'

I don't know where Ada's looking. At that moment, I am very deliberately not staring into her eyes. I'm dizzy; the sun is hot on my skin; I drank too much beer at lunchtime. I'm desperate to make her understand, to tear down the cautious walls of protocol and speak truthfully.

Ada pulls the petals off a daisy and tosses them onto the water. 'It must have been a strong potion.'

'When they reached Cornwall, Yseult was married to King Mark. But on her wedding night she crept away from the marriage bed to be with Tristan. She had her maid take her place with the King. In the dark, he didn't know the difference. Before dawn, Yseult stole back.'

'It sounds horrible. So dishonest.'

'She was in thrall to the potion. They both were.' I'm quick to defend them. In the stream, a brown trout noses against the current. He doesn't move; he barely twitches his fins. I'm the same, forcing myself to be still in the face of the vast currents swirling about me.

'Eventually, the lovers grew careless. Rumours circulated. King Mark's advisors went to the king and warned him he was being cuckolded by his nephew. So Mark set a trap. When Yseult went to bed, he had his servant scatter flour on the floor. He thought it would show up any footprints left in the night.'

'Clever.'

'Yseult saw the trap and warned Tristan. But his love was so strong he couldn't resist her. He leaped from the doorway and landed on Yseult's bed in a single bound.'

'Was that love?' Ada's sceptical. 'It sounds more like plain l.u.s.t.'

I blush. I'm furiously aware that she's far more experienced than I am in this area. Suddenly my story of the lovers seems false, like an ill-tuned harp. Embarra.s.sment ties my tongue. I turn away.

'Go on,' Ada says gently. 'I want to hear how it ends.'

'In his leap, Tristan had opened a wound he was carrying from his last battle. He cleared the flour, but three drops of blood fell and landed in it. When Mark found them next morning, he had the two lovers arrested for treason.

'He imprisoned Tristan in a tower on the edge of a high cliff. But Tristan managed to pull open the bars on the window and leap down onto the beach. Because he was innocent, G.o.d made sure he was unhurt.'

Ada raises an eyebrow. She doesn't think Tristan was innocent.

'His squire found him and fetched his horse. Just as Mark was about to set the pyre under Yseult, Tristan galloped into the courtyard. He cut Yseult free from the stake and pulled her onto his saddle. They rode away into the forest where King Mark's men couldn't find them.'

'And?'

'And they lived happily ever after.'

She throws a pebble at me. 'Cheat. That's not the ending I know.'

It's not the ending I know either. That has a poisoned wound; Tristan lying in agony waiting for a ship with white sails to announce Yseult has come to heal him; Yseult dying over his corpse as she arrives too late. But I don't want that ending on a summer's day that smells of honeysuckle.

I throw the pebble back at her. 'If you're the storyteller, you get to choose how it ends.'

XV.

London 'Talhouett Holdings SA owns a thirty-five per cent stake in a Romanian mining operator which is currently on trial accused of ma.s.sive a.r.s.enic spillages into the Danube basin.'

Ellie sipped her water. Her mouth felt dry as dust. In the conference room in front of her, a dozen men stared at her from around an oval table. These were the board of Monsalvat Bank: a monochrome conclave of white men and black suits, grey hair and hard grey faces. Blanchard's tie, deep crimson, was the only colour in the room, as if a vandal had splashed paint across an ancient photograph. Some watched from behind hooded lids, half closed; others pored over the table and wrote indecipherable notes. Several eyed her as if she were something on a menu.

'The stake doesn't appear anywhere in their published accounts because, under Luxembourg law, it isn't considered a controlling stake. But under Romanian law, as the largest shareholder, they're liable for any damages.'

'Do the other bidders know this?' demanded a balding man with liver spots on his skull. Flecks of spittle flew as he talked.

'I don't think so. The only reference I found was a letter in an unopened personnel file.'

'The letter is no longer there,' Blanchard added. Ellie cringed. She remembered the hard corners of the paper tucked in the waist of her skirt, the terror it would rustle or fall out as the data-room guard looked her over. If the men in the room guessed what she'd done, they didn't seem troubled by it.

'What are the chances of a conviction?' fired in a hatchet-faced man on the other side of the table.

'Romania's under a lot of pressure from Europe to prove that they're getting serious about environmental regulation. A high-level prosecution team from Germany have flown out to help them secure a conviction. If they find out Talhouett's involved it'll make a politically attractive target. It's not a local firm, and it'll send a message internationally.'

'How much?'

Ellie blinked. 'I'm sorry?'

'How much money?'

'Based on recent rulings, the fines might run to several hundred million euros.'

'And to make the problem go away?'

'I don't '

Blanchard stood, uncoiling like a snake. 'Thank you, Ellie. I think you have given us all the information we need.' He ushered her out into the corridor. 'You did very well. The board are hard men to impress.'

Did that mean she'd impressed them? It was hard to believe from those stony faces.

'We will take the Talhouett project from here. We need you on another job now. You'll find the files in your office.'

Ellie walked down the corridor and sank into her chair. New files had appeared like magic on her desk even the sight of them made her sick. She'd spent most of the last forty-eight hours preparing her presentation and she was exhausted. At least it had allowed her to put off thinking about the other questions hammering at her mind.

Her phone rang. She stared at the glowing numbers written like runes under the plastic sh.e.l.l. Why do you think they let you use your phone for personal calls?

'How did you get on?'

It was Delamere, the lawyer she'd met in the lift on her second day.

'I survived thanks to you.' It was Delamere who'd taken her through the intricacies of European corporate law, hour after hour until her head swam. 'I owe you.'

'How about lunch?'

Ellie glanced at her laptop. Thirty-eight new messages to add to the couple of hundred she'd barely read while she prepared her report. And those new files. She thought the pile might have got taller while she sat there, though of course it was impossible.

'When was the last time you ate?'

She tried to think. 'There was a pizza yesterday afternoon, I think ...'

'That does it. You're coming with me.'

He took her to an old-fashioned inn down an alley off Cornhill. A shield hung over the door: a black vulture emblazoned on a red cross. Inside, a marble bust watched possessively over the heavy tables and upholstered chairs that looked as if they hadn't been changed since the nineteenth century.

'Boarding-school food, I'm afraid,' said Delamere, and Ellie nodded as if she knew what they ate in boarding schools. She ordered fish and chips and a gla.s.s of water. Delamere ordered a steak and kidney pudding and a bottle of red wine. The waiter poured two gla.s.ses without asking.

'Cheers.' Delamere raised his gla.s.s. 'Ellie Stanton. There aren't many people who present to the board inside their first month here. Blanchard must see something pretty special in you.'

She blushed and sipped the wine, not wanting to look rude. 'How long have you been with the bank?'

'A year and a half. Halfway through my tour.' He saw Ellie's quizzical look. 'No gold watches in this company. Monsalvat only hires on three-year contracts. Pay you a fortune then turf you out on your ear or rather, into some plush job with one of the big boys. I a.s.sume Blanchard told you that?'

Ellie was pretty sure he hadn't. She gave a vague smile.

'So how are you finding it?'

'Hard work. But rewarding,' she added hastily, so as not to give a bad impression.

'It's hard all right.' He wasn't paying much attention. 'Monsalvat's a queer place. Rumour has it there's a vault under the building stuffed full of treasure. You know, until the seventeenth-century goldsmiths acted as bankers? They had to have strong vaults anyway, so they offered them as secure storage for their customers. You took your gold cup or plate or whatever to the goldsmith, and he'd lock it up for you.'

'You think it's still there?'

'Why not? The bank's been rebuilt umpteen times, but the foundations go way back. It was built on the ruins of an old Templar lodge. Who knows what's buried in the vaults?'

He raised his gla.s.s again, less steady this time. 'To the de Morgon family, our ill.u.s.trious founders.'

Ellie toasted them without enthusiasm.

'You know about the de Morgons? They were Normans, probably been around since the Conquest. They keep a tight grip. You know Michel Saint-Lazare?'

'I've heard the name.'

'He owns Groupe Saint-Lazare, our client. Apparently he's the umpteenth descendant of the original Saint-Lazare de Morgon still has a stake in the bank.'

Their food arrived. Ellie picked at her fish, while Delamere sawed into his steak and kidney pudding.

'I did my dissertation on the Normans. Scary people. They conquered Sicily before they conquered England, did you know that? There's a theory that the Mafia grew out of their feudal structures. It's just another racket.' He speared a kidney on the tip of his knife and waved it at her. 'You've got the king, the capo dei capi; his barons, who are like the captains, and then the knights and so forth who go around extorting protection money from the villagers so they can live high off the hog. The whole thing's steeped in violence; every so often it breaks out into a full-fledged war.'

He grabbed the bottle of wine and topped up her gla.s.s. Ellie was alarmed to see that she'd drunk most of it while he talked.

They're not what they seem. Ellie lowered her voice. 'Do you think Monsalvat's involved with the mob?'

'G.o.d no nothing so cra.s.s.' Delamere's face was flushed with the alcohol; he was speaking in an exaggerated whisper that only drew attention from the neighbouring diners. 'It's the att.i.tude I'm talking about. Droit de seigneur, the right to rule.'

Ellie drank her wine and tried not to make eye contact.

'We wear suits instead of suits of armour, and we go into battle with laptops instead of lances. But it's the same mentality. In their minds, people like Blanchard are still riding around the countryside sacking and pillaging. You and me, we're the squires. We run around fetching their armour, grooming the horses and sharpening the swords, and hope that one day we'll get tapped on the shoulder.'

He gave a rueful smile. 'Sorry. Shouldn't drink in the middle of the day. Listen, what are you doing this evening?'

Ellie was so tired she almost missed the subtext. She tried to frame a considerate smile and fought back the nausea rising in her throat.

'I'm afraid I have to call my boyfriend.'

But when she rang Doug that night, he didn't answer. She left a message and waited for him to call back. An autumn gale was blowing through, howling around the heights of her tower like a pack of wolves. Rain pelted the windows and made a mess of the view. She worked through some e-mails and watched TV, but she couldn't concentrate. At ten thirty, she tried again. Still no answer. There was a landline at the house which he never used: she dug out the number and tried that. It rang for what seemed an eternity. Then: 'h.e.l.lo?'

A woman's voice, soft and fragile, as if interrupted in the middle of some private tragedy.

'Is Doug there?'

'I'll just get him.'

A hundred questions boiled up inside her in the time it took Doug to come to the phone. She could hear murmured voices in the background, which quieted some of her questions and demanded others.

'Ellie?'

'Are you OK?' She could tell from his voice he wasn't.

'Fine. I was going to call you as soon as the police left but they're taking ages.'

Her heart took another lurch. 'What'

'I've been burgled. They took my laptop, my phone, the telly. Turned the place upside down. Must have thought I had something valuable squirreled away. They found my pa.s.sport, which is a real b.u.g.g.e.r. I was booked to go to France tomorrow.'

'France?' Ellie clutched the handset. She felt as if she'd dialled into a world she no longer recognised.

'Something's come up with that poem I told you about. There's a ma.n.u.script in Paris I want to look at.'

A voice in the background called something Ellie couldn't make out.

'They want me to sign the statement. I'd better go.'

'Who answered the phone?'

'Lucy. One of my students. She'd come round to drop off an essay and saw the broken window.'

I was one of your students, Ellie thought.

'I have to go.' More quietly, tinged with embarra.s.sment: 'I love you.'

'I love you too.'

For the next month, the walls of Ellie's world were rain and numbers. Numbers on paper, numbers on phones, numbers on screens as she worked and reworked the spreadsheets that Blanchard sent her. In the evenings, and in the pre-dawn darkness when she went to work, rain curtained off the windows through which she saw the world. It never seemed to stop. At night she dreamed of windows on screens and screens on windows, rivulets of numbers running down them and collecting in pools at the bottom. Sometimes she woke with tears on her face. In the 4 a.m. silence she imagined that the rain had drowned out all of London; that she, alone on the thirty-eighth floor, was the only person who had survived.

The weather put everyone on edge. Even Blanchard's impeccable good manners stretched to breaking. He snapped at her for minor mistakes; her reports came back covered in red ink. When she stumbled out of her nightly taxi she never walked any more it was all she could do to take her supper out of its packaging and collapse into bed. At least she saw nothing more of the man from the towpath. She puzzled over his warning until it grew so old she dismissed it. She didn't tell anyone, certainly not Doug. He didn't need any more reason to distrust Monsalvat.