Blood Fever Page 20

  There’s nothing broken.

  There’ll just be a few more bruises to count in the morning.

  He got to his feet and shook his head, but when he looked back he saw the black shapes of his pursuers, hard behind him.

  He ran on.

  Behind him he heard a yell and a thud followed by a short scream.

  He glanced back.

  There was only one guard after him now.

  The other one had mistimed the jump.

  Up ahead he saw a wide gap between this building and the next one. He had no idea how wide it was and didn’t have time to find out; he would just have to risk it.

  He put on more speed, powering his body forward, urging his legs to work harder than they had ever done before.

  He reached the edge of the roof and there was a moment of sheer terror as he realised the gap was much wider than he’d thought. Much, much wider than anything he’d ever attempted at Eton. He’d somehow doubled back on himself and had got to the big crevasse between the folds of rock. There were buildings on the other side but they were an awfully long way away.

  It was too late to stop, though. He was going too fast. Instead, he sped up and launched himself across the void.

  He was briefly aware of a deep black fissure beneath him as he flew towards the roof on the far side.

  No…

  He wasn’t going to make it. It was far too wide. It was impossible. He was dropping down below the rim of the roof. Falling into that bottomless crevasse. He flung out his arms, wildly groping in the air for something to hold on to to stop his descent. And then there was a crunch. He’d hit something.

  He clung on with all his strength and wept with relief.

  The guard wisely didn’t attempt the jump.

  James was dangling from an iron support that stuck out from the wall and held a big unlit lamp at the end. Beneath the lamp was a window.

  Well. If he’d planned this it couldn’t have gone better. Except that he was now a sitting target if the remaining guard decided to fire at him.

  He let himself down, swung through the open window and dropped into the room.

  There was a shrill shriek and a babble of frightened Italian voices.

  He was in a bedroom with four narrow beds. Probably servants’ quarters.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, shuffling over to the door. ‘Don’t mind me. Go back to sleep.’

  He wrenched the door open and bolted down the corridor on the other side. Other doors opened as he went past and sleepy-eyed Sardinian women stuck their heads out. Soon there was a babble of voices behind him.

  He ran through the building and found a spiral staircase. He started up it. It seemed to go on forever, but at last he came to the top, pushed open a door and came out on to a small terrace.

  He stopped for a moment and leant against a wall. His legs felt like lead and his heart was pounding so hard his whole body was shaking.

  The palazzo was like a labyrinth. How could he ever hope to get away?

  For a few minutes he wandered aimlessly, listening to distant shouts and whistles as the guard gave the alarm. From somewhere high up in the mountain a searchlight was switched on and it began to rake the grounds.

  It nearly found James as he was scurrying across an open courtyard, but he ducked behind a fountain and watched it slide over the nearby buildings.

  And then it picked out a statue on the level above.

  A man on a horse with an outstretched arm.

  It was the equestrian statue of Ugo.

  James headed towards it. At least from there he would be able to work out where he was.

  He was soon by the temple, which was dark and deserted.

  There were the steps leading up to the alleyway. Would he be able to find the doorway and remember Stefano’s route to the railway tracks?

  It was worth trying.

  Wearily he trudged up the steps and then froze.

  Someone was coming, and there was nowhere for him to hide.

  ‘Bond?’

  He recognised that voice.

  It was Peter Love-Haight.

  ‘Sir…’ James sank down on to the steps as Haight stepped into the light.

  ‘James?’ he said. ‘You look awful. Whatever has happened to you?’

  ‘I’m all right, I think.’ James winced. He didn’t feel right at all.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ said Haight. ‘What are you doing up here? We’ve been terribly worried about you. Somebody said they’d seen you come up this way. We’ve got people searching everywhere for you…’ He stopped, a worried look on his handsome features. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘There’s a girl, sir,’ said James, not knowing where to start, his brain too tired to think clearly.

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘Amy Goodenough, sir. Mark’s sister. She’s alive. She’s here. Locked in a room. Count Ugo has her prisoner.’

  ‘Amy Goodenough is here?’

  ‘Yes. We have to help her. It’s not safe here.’

  ‘You sound delirious, James,’ said Haight kindly, helping James to his feet. ‘Come with me. We’ll go back down.’

  Haight led him along the alleyway.

  ‘Count Ugo, sir,’ said James. ‘He’s not really a count. He’s a bandit, the biggest bandit on the island. He hopes one day to be the biggest bandit in the world. He’s the head of a secret organization called the Millenaria…’

  ‘Now I know you’re delirious,’ said Haight.

  ‘You have to believe me,’ said James. ‘I know it sounds crazy.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, James. I just want to get you down to the valley and safely into bed.’

  ‘No,’ James stopped walking. ‘Mister Cooper-ffrench, sir.’

  ‘Cooper-ffrench?’ said Haight, raising his eyebrows. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He works for Ugo,’ said James.

  Haight laughed. ‘What on earth are you talking about? He’s a humble Latin master.’

  ‘I saw him in Eton, sir,’ said James. ‘In a building full of Millenaria stuff. And Ugo’s man, Smiler, with a scar on his face, he was there. And that’s why Cooper-ffrench came out to Sardinia, sir, to meet up with Ugo. That’s why we’re all here.’

  Haight’s face showed growing concern.

  ‘This is a very serious claim, James,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said James.

  ‘But, whether it’s true or not, you really shouldn’t be here. We’ll go down to the town and you can tell me all about it on the way.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said James.

  Haight led James through the palazzo. As they walked, James told him all he could, in a rush of confused sentences. He told him all about that first night with the Danger Society, and Merriot’s letter, the cult of Mithras, Perry’s stolen painting, and he was just starting to tell him about Cooper-ffrench’s behaviour on the expedition when they arrived at a large, wooden door.

  James hadn’t really been paying attention to their route as he babbled on to Haight, and now he stopped to see where they were.

  ‘I don’t think this is right, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve come the wrong way.’

  Haight sighed. ‘You know your way around here better than I do.’

  ‘I’m lost now, though,’ said James.

  ‘We’ll try through here,’ said Haight. ‘I’m sure it’s the way I came.’

  Haight opened the door and led James down a wide corridor lined with statues towards another door.

  ‘But how did you find out about Amy?’ he said. ‘Who told you she was here?’

  Before he could reply, James stumbled as his frayed shirt tail caught on a statue, and, as he pulled it free, a grubby flap tore off and fell to the floor.

  Haight tutted and bent down.

  ‘Best not leave that there,’ he said, and grinned at James. ‘You know how Ugo hates mess.’

  As Haight picked it up James saw a flash of silver at his wrist as something slipped down on to
his hand. Haight quickly pushed it back up his sleeve but not before James had a chance to see that it was a silver bracelet. The same silver bracelet that he’d found on the floor after Haight and Cooper-ffrench collided in the Archaeological Society meeting.

  James had a sudden eerie feeling of vertigo. As if the whole world had turned upside down and nothing was as he had thought it was.

  He felt like he had done when he’d first looked underwater with Victor’s goggles and had been instantly snapped into a different place with a different way of seeing things.

  He had been utterly wrong about everything, and now he clearly saw the truth.

  What an idiot he’d been.

  Ugo’s associate wasn’t Cooper-ffrench. Of course it wasn’t.

  It was Haight.

  20

  The Penny Drops

  ‘James, you haven’t answered my question,’ said Haight, with a hint of irritation in his voice. ‘Who told you about Amy?’

  James was trying to suppress a rising tide of panic.

  It had been staring him right in the face from the start. So close and obvious that he hadn’t seen it.

  It was Haight’s bracelet that had dropped to the floor that evening, not Cooper-ffrench’s.

  ‘James?’ Haight was looking at him with a questioning expression on his face. Like when a teacher asks you something and you haven’t been listening.

  After all, Haight was a teacher.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ James said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked you how you knew about Amy.’

  ‘Oh…’ James didn’t want to betray Stefano, but he had no other story prepared and his mind was blank. ‘Er, well, I was trying to find my way out of the palazzo and I sort of stumbled across her.’

  Haight gave him such a withering look that he knew that the game was up.

  They both knew the truth, and they both knew that the other person knew. The question was – how much longer where they going to play this game?

  ‘I think we’ve come the wrong way, sir,’ said James, backing towards the door they had come through.

  ‘James –’

  James turned and ran. But when he pulled the door open he found his way blocked by two of Ugo’s men. When he turned back round he saw that Haight hadn’t even moved.

  ‘This way,’ he said quietly, and James knew that he had no choice but to follow him.

  The door at the other end of the corridor opened into a large library. There were shelves of leather-bound books and many paintings and statues.

  Ugo sat at a vast mahogany desk, with Smiler at his side. Two uniformed officers stood guard.

  ‘Here he is,’ said Haight and he shoved James into the centre of the room.

  Ugo was pretending to read some papers. For a long while he didn’t look up. James could see the muscles moving under his pale skin as he ground his teeth.

  James took the opportunity to properly look around the room. He spotted a small bronze figure standing on an antique side table that exactly fitted the description of Amy’s stolen siren. On a stand right next to it was what looked like one of the Canalettos from his room at Casa Polipo.

  And then he saw, behind Ugo, the unfinished painting of a boy standing on a desolate beach. He looked half reptilian with webbed feet and goggle eyes. He was holding the number seven in one hand and a sea urchin in the other. There was something dreamlike and disturbing about the picture, as if the boy were dead, a ghost.

  And James recognised the boy. It was himself, wearing the swimming mask and flippers. Poliponi must have painted it just as he had said he would.

  Ugo finally looked up and spoke. ‘Do you like it?’ he said, noticing James staring at the picture.

  James shrugged.

  ‘I had it brought here from Signor Delacroix’s house, while you were all supposed to be out of the way,’ said Ugo. ‘These Canalettos are exquisite.’ He nodded towards the two scenes of Venice, then looked back at Poliponi’s picture. ‘But this thing I do not like. I do not care for modern art. It is degenerate, decadent, the product of a sick mind. Art must be pure.’

  So saying, he took a letter knife from his desk and slashed the canvas three times across the centre, destroying it.

  James felt furious, as if Ugo had slashed his own body.

  The Count walked over to him. ‘You have put us to a lot of trouble, James Bond,’ he lisped, his silver tooth glinting.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said James. He didn’t care any more. He felt numb.

  ‘Be quiet, Bond,’ said Haight and he slapped him around the back of the head. ‘You will show a little more respect.’

  James was suddenly roused from his slump and filled with a burning fury. He thought of Victor, and Mauro and Amy. ‘Respect?’ he said. ‘For him?’

  ‘You’re only making matters worse for yourself,’ said Haight. ‘I always thought you were quite a sensible boy.’

  ‘He’s a murderer and a thief,’ said James.

  ‘You do not know the first thing about me,’ said Ugo.

  ‘I know that you’re not really a count,’ said James. ‘That you’re just a goatherd from the Barbagia.’

  ‘Bond!’ shouted Haight. ‘Any more of this backchat and you are going to be in serious trouble. Count Ugo is a very great man.’

  James gave a little snort of laughter. Ugo was staring at him angrily, chewing his lower lip like a petulant child.

  ‘I may have been born in these mountains,’ he said ‘but I changed myself. I made myself better than these local scum.’ He thumped his chest. ‘One day the whole world will know of my glory.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ said James. ‘You’re going to build an empire, with the help of schoolmasters, criminals and shepherds in fancy dress, marching around in purple toy-soldier outfits.’

  Haight’s face was pale with fury. ‘This is not acceptable behaviour, James,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll write it out a hundred times, shall I, sir?’ said James. ‘“I shall not be rude to murderers.”’

  ‘I warn you, Bond,’ said Haight. ‘Any more of your insolence and you’ll regret it.’

  ‘This is worse than school,’ said James and Haight slapped him hard in the face. James started to bleed from a wound he’d got falling face first on to the roof. He put a hand up to stop the flow.

  ‘I used to quite like you, Mister Haight,’ he said.

  ‘Look here,’ said Haight, softening his voice. ‘There’s no need for all this unpleasantness. We don’t have to punish you. If you’ll just tell us who helped you tonight, we can forget all about this. What do you say, hmm?’

  ‘Nobody helped me,’ said James, and Smiler rasped something in Latin.

  James obviously wasn’t meant to understand any of it, but he recognised one word – occide, meaning kill.

  Haight replied, also in Latin, and the two of them argued for a while.

  James shivered. These were the two voices he’d heard in Eton that night, as he hung in the ivy. Smiler and Haight. Smiler with his harsh, fluent delivery and Haight with his stiff English pronunciation.

  It was Ugo who brought the argument to a halt, deliberately speaking English so that James would understand. ‘You cannot kill him yet, Smiler,’ he said. ‘We must first find out who helped him and how he knew where the girl was.’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ said James wearily. ‘Nobody helped me.’

  ‘James Bond,’ said Ugo, ‘I am a reasonable man. But I do not like things to be… messy.’

  James pictured Mauro, carefully picking urchin spines out of his foot and his temper flared up again.

  ‘You can give orders to kill people,’ he said angrily, ‘but maybe you’ve forgotten what a person’s blood looks like.’

  He flicked his hand towards Ugo’s desk. Blood spattered across it and up the front of Ugo’s white suit.

  ‘Human blood,’ said James. ‘Not bull’s blood. That’s what this is all about. People dying.’

  Ugo stood the
re for a moment trembling, paralysed with disgust, then he tore off his stained jacket and looked at Haight. Haight blushed and looked at the floor.

  ‘Peter,’ said Ugo, rubbing madly at a spot of blood on his shirt, ‘this is your fault. You should have been more careful.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Count,’ said Haight.

  ‘Sorry is not good enough,’ said Ugo. ‘Make sure there are no more mistakes, or it will not be good for you.’

  ‘There will be no more mistakes,’ said Haight. ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘Trust you?’ said Ugo. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I can trust no one. I am a criminal and everyone who works for me is a criminal. How can I possibly trust anyone? Do not talk to me about trust. In my world power is built on fear. If there is a problem I fix it with a gun or with a knife. I hope you are not going to be a problem for me, Peter. And I hope you know how to solve your own problems.’

  So saying he rattled off a string of instructions to his guards and they dragged James out of the room.

  Mr Cooper-ffrench was tired and jittery and not a little bit worried. It was gone midnight and he was in the funicular railway car travelling up the side of the cliff towards the dam. Peter Haight was still not back from looking for James Bond and he had had to leave the boys down at the camp in the care of their Italian guide, Quintino.

  The sleepy Sardinian guard watched him impassively as he nervously fiddled with his bristly moustache and looked out of the window. He could see very little except the rim of the dam cutting across the night sky. He checked his watch for the twentieth time since he’d been woken up and given the message that had thrown him into such a panic.

  At last the car arrived and came to a bumpy halt against the buffers. The guard opened the door and Cooper-ffrench stepped out. Two more guards looked him over, but seemed uninterested in what he was doing here and retreated into the winch-house to play cards and smoke cigarettes.

  He looked out across the black waters of the lake and saw the bulky shape of the flying boat sitting at the jetty.

  The air was much cooler and fresher up here than down in the valley, which was a relief. His heavy suit itched terribly and he could do little to stop himself sweating all the time. Also there were no mosquitoes at this altitude. He hated the damned things and they made his life a misery.