Bronson glanced at Mark. “Do you know anything about that?”
His friend shook his head. “Nothing. As far as I know, Jackie was perfectly happy with these builders. If she wasn’t, I can guarantee she’d have told them so. She was always very forthright.”
That, Bronson thought, was an understatement. Jackie had never, to use an old expression, been backward in coming forward. It was one of the many things he’d found attractive about her. She always said exactly what she thought, politely but firmly.
Bronson turned back to the foreman. “We’re certain no other builders have been in here,” he said, “but you obviously know what stage you’d reached in the renovations. Tell me, when you removed the plaster, did you find anything unusual about the wall, apart from the crack in the lintel?”
The foreman shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, “apart from the inscribed stone, but that was just a curiosity.”
Bronson looked at Mark with a kind of triumph. “I think we’ve just traced what Jackie found,” he said, explaining what the builder had told him. And without waiting for Mark to respond, he switched back to Italian.
“Strip it,” he ordered, pointing at the wall. “Strip the new plaster off that wall right now.”
The builder looked puzzled, but issued instructions. Two of his men seized club hammers and broad-bladed masonry chisels, dragged a couple of stepladders over to the fireplace and set to work.
Thirty minutes later, the builders left in their old van, again promising to return early on Monday morning. Bronson and Mark walked back into the living room and stared at the Latin inscription on the wall. Bronson took several pictures of it with his digital camera.
“The first four letters are the same as those I found impressed on that piece of paper in the study,” Bronson said. “And it is a Latin inscription. I don’t know what it means, but that dictionary Jackie bought should help me decipher it.”
“You think she was searching for a translation of that—of those three words—on the Internet, and that was enough to get her killed? That’s just bloody ridiculous.”
“I don’t know it got her killed, Mark, or not deliberately, anyway. But this is the only scenario that makes sense. The builders exposed the inscription on Monday. Jackie wrote down the words—that’s confirmed by the paper in the study—and bought a Latin dictionary, probably on Tuesday, and if she did do a search on the Internet, she most likely did it that day. Whatever happened, somebody broke into the house—my guess is late on Tuesday night—and on Wednesday morning Jackie was found dead in the hall.
“Now, I know it probably seems stupid that anyone would care enough about a three-word Latin inscription carved into a stone, maybe two thousand years ago, to risk a burglary, far less a charge of manslaughter or murder, but the fact remains that somebody did. Those three words are vitally important to someone, somewhere, and I’m going to find out who and why.
“But I’m not,” he added, “going to use the Internet to do it.”
II
Alberti and Rogan reached the town early that evening, following telephoned instructions—this time from Gregori Mandino—to enter the property for the third—and what they both hoped would be the last—time. They cruised slowly past the house as soon as they arrived in Monti Sabini and saw lights shining from windows on both floors. That complicated things, because they had hoped to be able to get inside and complete their search for the missing section of the stone without detection. But, ultimately, it wouldn’t matter, because this time Mandino’s instructions gave them far more latitude than before.
“Looks like the husband’s home,” Alberti said, as Rogan accelerated away down the road. “So do we wait, or what?”
“We wait for a couple of hours,” his partner confirmed. “Maybe he’ll be asleep by then.”
Just more than two and a half hours later, Rogan drove their car up the lane that ran beside and behind the house, and continued climbing the hill until they were out of sight of the building. Then he turned the car around, pointed it down the slope and extinguished the headlights. He waited a couple of minutes for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, then allowed the vehicle to roll gently down the gradient, using only the parking lights to see his way, until they reached a section of the grass verge that offered a good view of the back and side of their target. There he eased the car to the side of the road and switched off the lights and engine. As a precaution, Rogan turned off the interior light, so that it wouldn’t come on when they opened the doors.
A light was still burning in one of the downstairs rooms of the old house, so they settled down to wait.
III
Chris Bronson closed the dictionary with a snap and sat back in the kitchen chair, rubbing his tired eyes.
“I think that’s the best translation,” he said. “ ‘Here are lying the liars,’ or the short version: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”
“Wonderful.” Mark sounded anything but impressed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve not the slightest idea,” Bronson confessed, “but it must be important to somebody. Look, we’re not getting anywhere with this, so let’s call it a night. You go on up. I’ll check the doors and windows.”
Mark stood up and stretched. “Good idea,” he murmured. “Your subconscious might have a flash of inspiration while you sleep. Good night—I’ll see you in the morning.”
As Mark left the kitchen, Bronson took one of the upright chairs and wedged it under the handle of the back door, then walked out of the room and switched off the light.
He checked that the front door was locked and bolted, and that all the ground-floor windows were closed and the outside shutters secured, then went up to his bedroom.
In the car parked on the hill road behind the house, Alberti nudged Rogan awake and pointed down the slope.
“The downstairs light just went out,” he announced.
As the two men watched, slivers of brightness appeared behind the closed shutters of one of the bedrooms, but after about ten minutes this light, too, was extinguished. A dull glow was still visible behind two other shutters, but the men guessed this was probably just the landing light.
“We’ll give it another hour,” Rogan said, closing his eyes and relaxing again in the car seat.
In the guest bedroom, Chris Bronson booted up his Sony Vaio laptop. He checked his e-mails, then turned his attention to the Internet. As he’d told Mark, he certainly wasn’t prepared to input the Latin phrase into a search engine or online dictionary, but there were other ways of trying to find out its significance.
First he ran a small program that generated a false IP address—the Internet protocol numbers that identified his geographical location. Then he made it look as if he was accessing the Web from a server based in South Korea, which, he thought with a smile, should be far enough away from Italy to throw anyone off the scent. Even so, he still wasn’t going to do a direct search. Instead, he began looking at sites that offered translations of Latin phrases in common use at the height of the Roman Empire.
After about forty minutes, Bronson had discovered two things. First, a surprising number of expressions he was already familiar with in both English and Italian had their roots in the dead language. And, second, the words Hic Vanidici Latitant were not recorded anywhere as being part of an aphorism or expression in common usage two thousand odd years ago. That wasn’t exactly a surprise—if the phrase had been well known, it would presumably have had no special significance for the people who had broken into the house—but at least it eliminated one possibility.
But he really wasn’t getting anywhere and eventually decided to give up. He shut down the laptop, then opened the shutters and one of the windows to provide fresh air, switched off the main light and got into bed.