The Messiah Secret - James Becker [46]
‘And the second reason?’
‘From everything I’ve read, Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax had no real idea of where to look. He might not even have been searching in the right country. The only clue to the location was the “valley of the flowers”, and I suspect that that would have been a fairly common-place name in many cultures around that time. Unless, of course, the remainder of the fragment Bartholomew found contained some other information that we don’t have.’
‘You mean what’s printed in that guidebook isn’t the whole translation?’
‘No.’ Mayhew struggled briefly against his restraints. It was no good – he was held fast. ‘If you read the section, you can see that what’s contained is only the part of the text that Bartholomew showed to Oliver. He must have kept the rest of it hidden somewhere. Oliver spent quite a lot of his time in later life looking for the original, and that’s the reason for all the damaged walls in the house. He was certain there was a hidden passage or panel somewhere that held the Persian parchment.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’ve no idea. It’s well established that Bartholomew did find a piece of parchment, and that it subsequently vanished. But whether it’s hidden somewhere here in the house or locked away in a bank safety deposit box we know nothing about, or even got destroyed in the last eighty-odd years, is another matter entirely.’
The man tightened the grip on the scourge. ‘Give me your best guess.’
‘I think it’s probably hidden here somewhere. Bartholomew was planning another expedition when he died, apparently, and he would have wanted the entire text available to him. He might have thought that there were still clues hidden in it, and he would probably have studied the text regularly.’
‘If it was parchment, handling it all the time wouldn’t have been such a sharp idea, though, would it?’
Mayhew took a breath that sounded – even to him – like a sob. ‘But if he sealed the parchment in a plastic bag or mounted it between a couple of sheets of glass, and kept it away from moisture and sunlight, it would have lasted quite well. And he would also have made a copy of the text and kept that to hand. And I still think he would have kept it here, somewhere. It wouldn’t have been convenient to keep it in a bank, and it was a very precious and important relic for Bartholomew.’ Mayhew sighed. ‘But I’ve no idea where you’d start looking.’
‘That’s not bad,’ the man said, looking at Mayhew keenly. ‘Oliver told me the parchment did fall apart, several years ago. He also told me his father made a copy of the text before that happened.’
‘Oliver Wendell-Carfax told you?’ Mayhew whispered, an appalling realization suddenly crowding into his brain.
The man nodded, a slight smile playing over his lips. Then he picked up the whip and walked across to the chair Mayhew was sitting in. This time he stepped behind the chair. The wooden back was tall and reached almost up to Mayhew’s neck.
‘Bend forward,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll whip you twice.’
Mayhew muttered something inaudible, then bent forward, his whole body trembling in anticipation of the agony to come.
Instantly, the man swung the scourge down, opening up a line of new wounds on his prisoner’s back.
Mayhew screamed again, as the man lashed his back a second time.
‘You said you’d only hit me once,’ Mayhew protested, between sobs of pain.
‘I make the rules,’ the man said simply, sitting down again, his voice still calm and controlled. ‘Now I need to know what else you found here. You’ve had all week to explore this place. What did you discover?’
Mayhew shook his head, the pain of the lashes across his chest and back still clouding his mind. ‘We didn’t—’ he began, but the stranger again picked up the whip.
‘Wait, wait,’ Mayhew stammered desperately. ‘We did find something. It wasn’t much, but—’
‘I’ll be the judge of its value. Just tell