“Suppose whoever built this house found the stone and tried to follow the directions to these ‘liars’—whatever they are—but couldn’t follow the map or work out the clues. They might have decided to split the stone and hide the map section somewhere for safekeeping, but leave a clue to its location for future generations. So one part of the stone indicates the location of the other section, which is a map to some sort of long-buried relics.
“If I’m right, maybe the ‘Hic’—the Latin word meaning ‘here’—is the most important part of the inscription. Could it be telling us exactly where the missing section of the stone has been hidden?”
“You mean ‘here’ as in ‘X marks the spot,’ that kind of thing?”
“Exactly.”
“But where is it, then?” Mark asked. “That’s a solid wall almost a meter thick. The other stones below that one are not only unmarked, but they’re also a different kind of rock, so what could the ‘Hic’ refer to?”
“Not something in the wall, necessarily, but perhaps below it. Maybe the hiding place is under the floor.”
But that looked unlikely. The fireplace in the old farmhouse was a collection of solid lumps of granite, and the floor in front of it was made of thick oak floorboards. If there was a hiding place either under the fireplace or below the floorboards, it would require major work—not to mention lifting gear—to find it.
“I don’t expect what we’re looking for will be under something as simple and obvious as a trapdoor in the floor,” Bronson said, “but equally I doubt if we’d need to demolish half the house to get at it.”
He looked at the wall again. “That’s about a meter thick, you said?”
Mark nodded.
“Well, maybe there’s something on the other side of the wall. Have you got a tape measure, something like that?”
Mark went out to the workshop at the back of the garage and returned a couple of minutes later with a carpenter’s steel tape. Bronson took it and, using the floor and the edge of the doorway leading into the dining room as datum points, measured the exact position of the center of the stone. Mark jotted down the coordinates on a sheet of paper, then they stepped through into the dining room itself.
This was much smaller than the living room, and the wall it shared with the living room was fully plastered. The furniture hadn’t been moved, though it was covered in the ubiquitous dust sheets. The Hamptons had planned to knock a large doorway through the southern wall of the dining room and build a conservatory, but they were still waiting for planning permission.
Using the coordinates and the tape measure, Bronson made a cross in the corresponding area on the dining-room wall. To confirm that they had the right place, they checked the measurements in the living room again, then repeated the process in the dining room.
Then Bronson picked up the hammer and chisel, climbed back up the stepladder and struck a single blow just below the cross he’d drawn. The plaster cracked, and after two more blows a large chunk fell off the wall. He wiped his hand across the exposed stone, trying to clear away some of the dust and debris.
“There’s something here,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “Not a map, but what looks like another inscription.”
Half a dozen more blows from the hammer and chisel shifted the rest of the old plaster and revealed the whole face of the stone.
“Here,” Mark said, and passed up a new three-inch paintbrush.
“Thanks,” Bronson muttered, and ran the brush briskly back and forth over the stone. A few sharp raps from the handle of the hammer cleared away the remaining pieces of plaster. They could both now see exactly what had been carved into the stone.
It was an inscription that hinted at the blood-soaked history of another country—an inscription that was worth killing for.
Rogan watched with interest as the man in the overalls stripped all the old plaster off the wall in the living room, and smiled at their total failure to find what they were looking for. At the very least, they were saving him a job.
At first, he hadn’t understood why they had taken such trouble to measure the exact position of the inscribed stone in the wall, though he realized they’d worked something out when the two men had walked through into the small dining room.
The moment they vanished from sight, Rogan dropped down into a crouch and scuttled along the wall until he was beyond the end of the first of the two dining-room windows. Then he eased up slowly until he could just see inside the room, though he guessed he could have cavorted naked outside the window and the chances were neither of the men would have seen him. Their attention was entirely directed at the dining-room wall.
As Rogan watched, his view slightly distorted through the thick old glass of the dining-room windows, he saw the man uncover something. It looked as if the missing section of the stone that Mandino had sent him to find had been in the house after all.
The stone didn’t appear to have a map carved on it—from Rogan’s viewpoint, and through the admittedly distorting glass of the window, it looked to him more like a couple of verses of poetry. But whatever the content of the carving on the stone, the simple fact that there was another inscription was enough for him to report back to Mandino. He wasn’t prepared to try to get inside the house himself, because he was outnumbered, plus one of them was probably armed with Alberti’s pistol. Mandino had promised to send another man from the Rome family to join him, but he hadn’t appeared so far.
The important thing, Rogan decided, was to let Mandino know what he’d seen, and then await instructions. He dropped down into a crouch, crept back along the wall of the house until he was well clear of the dining room and living room windows, then ran swiftly across the lawn to the break in the fence where he’d entered the property, and walked back to his car and the cell phone he’d locked in the glove box.
“What the hell is it, Chris?” Mark asked, as Bronson climbed down the stepladder and looked up at the inscribed stone.
Bronson shook his head. “I don’t know. If Jeremy Goldman’s deduction was right, and if our interpretation of the first stone was correct, this should be a map. I don’t know what it is, but a map it ain’t.”
“Hang on a minute,” Mark said. “Let me just check something.”
He walked into the living room and looked at the inscribed stone, then returned a few moments later. “I thought so. This stone’s a slightly different color. Are you sure the two are related?”
“I don’t know. All I am certain of is that this stone has been cemented into the wall directly behind the other one, to the inch, as far as I can see, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“It looks almost like a poem,” Mark observed.
Bronson nodded. “That’s my guess,” he said, looking up at ten lines of ornate cursive script arranged in two verses, underneath an incomprehensible title that consisted of three groups of capital letters, presumably all some kind of abbreviations. “Though why a stone with a poem carved into it should have been stuck in the wall at this exact spot beats me.”
“But the language isn’t Latin, is it?”
“No, definitely not. I think some of the words might have French roots. These three here— ben, dessu’s and perfècte, for example—aren’t that dissimilar to some modern French words. Some of the others, though, like calix, seem to be written in a completely different language.”
Bronson climbed back up the ladder and had a closer look at the inscription. There were several differences between the two, not just the languages used. Mark was right—the stones were different colors, but the form and shape of the letters in the verses was also unfamiliar, completely different from those in the other inscription, and in places the stone had been worn away, as if by the touch of many hands over countless years.