Lucia knew she had to hurry. She couldn’t stop thinking about Pablo, and the terrible thing that had happened to him. But she knew she was strong enough to get herself through this nightmare. She might be a highly-respected scientist on the outside, but inside she wore the scars of a troubled and dangerous past, carved into her when she was young and living on the streets of Seville. She had run away from home when she was still young, leaving her abusive and alcoholic father. He was a failed entrepreneur-turned-embezzler who drank himself to death with nothing but the memory of his failed marriage and the sunset view of the Gulf of Cadiz for company.
Life on the streets had been tough. The city was ancient, inhabited since Phoenician times three thousand years ago. It was also sublimely beautiful with examples of Moorish and Gothic architecture and everything in between. But Lucia Serrano knew a different city from the one that amazed the legions of tourists coming every year to see the cathedral and the Alcázar.
Her Seville life was in the other half, the half made of the back alleys and seasonal sex workers flocking in like swallows from Brazil and north Africa. The city tried hard to hide its dark side, its sex clubs and crimes zones, crawling with preying pickpockets and abused chica.
In time she herself almost turned to this, but there was a difference between Lucia and the other girls, and that was her intelligence. She had always known she was different, and when she was at school she’d excelled at maths and physics to the point she quickly became the top of every class and amazed her teachers with her equation-solving abilities, which seemed almost to be intuitive in their execution. But with her genius came trouble, and her incapacity to submit to authority and follow instruction soon made her an outcast, and her grades began to drop, not climb.
She left school with nothing, walking out before her exams, and soon after left home for life on the streets where she developed a hardened attitude to the inequalities of life that she swore she would never forget. But her life changed forever the day she sprayed graffiti on the side of the university. This was no ordinary graffiti, but the Riemann zeta function.
Part of the Riemann Hypothesis, this was a one hundred and fifty-five year-old unprovable mathematical conjecture. Lucia thought it would be funny to spray this on the side of the Physics department — to express how unfair and degraded this world was, where a woman with her knowledge could so easily find herself eating fast food out of bins every night. But all that ended when a professor there took her under his wing, and within a few short months she had gone from back streets to universities.
But that was then, and this was now. Now she was walking along a corridor with a man she had known in another life, in a frantic search for her lover’s mysterious research.
Staring at his phone one last time, the tall Englishman stopped in front of a series of three large panels painted by Sandro Botticelli in the 1480s.
“Botticelli?” Harry asked, almost of himself.
Lucia stood beside him and sighed. “You think this is where Pablo was sending us?”
Harry nodded. “I don’t think he was trying to send us, or anyone else, anywhere. I think he was trying to conceal something that only this mysterious Andrej Liška would be able to find. That’s why he left this trail of breadcrumbs. So yeah, this part of the museum is the right location for sure — the coordinates he encoded in the pages of the Epistola are for around here, and the only painting in here with any reference to woods or forests is this one — or all three of them, at least.”
“They’re beautiful, but I don’t see what they could have to do with his research. What are they?”
Before she had even finished talking, Harry had taken his phone out again and was making a Skype call.
“Who are you calling?”
“The CEO of Bonham’s. They’re an auction house.”
“Bonham’s?” Lucia said, taking a step back. “I know who Bonham’s are, Harry — I told you Pablo bought his painting there. They’re one of the most famous auction houses on the planet!”
“Are they indeed?”
“Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonham’s — are there any others?”
He shrugged. “Means nothing to me… come on Hattie, wake up!”
“And this Hattie will be able to help us?”
“She knows more about art and antiquities than most experts have forgotten.”
“How do you know her?”
“She’s my twin sister.”
Lucia took a step back, astonished. “You never told me you had a sister! Wait a minute — your family business is Bonham’s?”
Harry nodded reluctantly. “Guilty as charged.”
“But they’re one of the biggest auction houses on Earth. I saw a television program about them once. It’s the oldest in the world.”
“Not quite. Sotherby’s beat us to it by eleven years.”
“But your name is Bane.”
“Bonham was my grandmother’s maiden name. The business came down to us from that part of the family.”
“Ah…well, I’m impressed.”
“I’m not,” Harry said bluntly, and cursed as the phone kept on ringing. “After my father’s death, my sister took it all over. Personally I couldn’t give a damn about art. That upset Dad. He expected me to follow him into it. When I joined the army he didn’t talk to me for a year. When I left the army and joined MI6 he didn’t talk to me for two years, and when I dropped out of that and became a professional gambler he never talked to me again.”
“What about Hattie — does she talk to you?”
He nodded and smiled. “Yes… unfortunately.”
“You don't get on?”
“Yes and no — we’re twins. Come on Hattie!”
Then Harriet Bane answered the phone. After a few moments of waiting and then a few more of muttering and cursing, he flipped the phone around and pointed it at the panels. Lucia saw a dark silhouette of a woman with messy hair on the other end of the call.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” the woman said.
“Of course, but I need your help.”
The silhouette rubbed her face and sighed. “Finally doing something useful with your life?”
“Lucia, meet my sister Harriet, Harriet meet Lucia Serrano.”
“Oh, just get on with it, Harry. I only just got back to London after a twelve hour flight from Tokyo.”
“Then blow us away with your greatness Hattie,” he said sarcastically. “What are these?”
A few seconds passed while Harriet took in the grainy image on the Skype call, and then she spoke. “Botticelli. They’re the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, tempera on panel. Quite priceless of course, and an absolute masterpiece of renaissance art.”
As his sister spoke, Harry stood back and surveyed the three large panels. Then Harriet sighed again and continued. “There are actually four, but the fourth is in a private collection.”
“Not yours, is it?” Harry joked.
“No,” came the humorless reply. “Can I go to bed now?”
“Not yet, like I said — we need your help.”
“I know that, Harry. The only time you ever call is when you need my help.”
“Not this again.”
“What trouble are you in this time?”
“We don’t know. We were left a clue by a dead man to come and see this painting.” Harry explained the situation to his sister, including the strange Latin clues Pablo had left behind in the Epistola.
“So what does any of this mean?” Harriet asked, her voice thin now as the signal cracked up a little.
Harry sighed. “Search me.”