The Heretic Scroll by Will Adams

Author:Will Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

Cesco hit heavy traffic on his way out to Herculaneum. So many of the cars he passed had heavily loaded roof racks or trailers that he came to suspect word of an evacuation had leaked, and these people were getting out ahead of the rush. Numerous pleasure boats were fleeing the town’s marina too, their sails glowing brightly from the low-dipping sun.

He parked outside the police station, then buzzed to be let in. The front desk alerted Valentina to his arrival, then sent him up two floors to Serious Crimes. Messana was deep in conference with Izzo. She showed him to a stand-alone computer in the basement, handed him Raff’s memory cards, excused herself with urgent business and left him to it. It puzzled him that she no longer wanted to go through the disks together, but he shrugged it off and settled in.

The chair kept rocking whenever he shifted his weight. He folded up a sheet of paper to set beneath its foot. The third memory card was blank, as if never used. He popped it back out. A different make from the others too. He bit his teeth together at the obvious implication. Messana had gone through the disks herself and had found something interesting too. So she’d kept that disk for herself, then had made up numbers with a new one.

He marched back upstairs to Serious Crimes. Its lights were off and its door locked. He asked next door. Messana had gone off with Romeo Izzo some twenty minutes earlier. He thought dark thoughts of her, then took out his phone to protest. But what was the point? She’d only deny it. And maybe he was wrong anyway. He returned downstairs and carried on, just in case. One of the disks was full of pictures of artefacts taken at a museum warehouse. He remembered the day well, an ill-fated experiment at shooting on-site rather than in the studio, only for it to prove too cramped and the light too poor. It had been early in his time with Raff, so he’d been trusted only to lug equipment and sit in the van while…

He frowned, stopped, went back a page. Yes. A broken funerary stele depicting the robed shoulder and bearded chin of a man with a long staff. He’d seen it recently, he was sure of it. Not that day at the warehouse or at the studio either. Where then? He enlarged it on screen then rocked back in his chair, the better to contemplate. And so it was that, when he finally realised, the answer so convulsed him that he had to grab the edge of the desk to stop from toppling backward.

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