The Assassin King

Anna gazed at Oliver in dismay. Gregory Scott had confessed to murdering Uncle Dun. Elias had told her so himself. How then could Oliver be guilty? She had no answer to that, yet he was involved somehow, she was certain of it, perhaps as Scott’s partner or simply by having stumbled across the scene. ‘We should probably get back,’ she said, doing her best to keep her voice flat. ‘We need to let people know about this place.’

Oliver lowered his camera to his side, its up-lighting making a devil of his face. Then he raised it back up again and pointed it at her eyes, making her blink and raise her forearm. He gazed at her for several moments. She could sense his mind at work, wondering what she knew and how to play it. He put on a disconcertingly bright smile that she’d likely have found charming a minute ago, but which now merely chilled her. All those years of childhood acting, equipping him with the skills he needed to pull off this monstrous deception. He held out his hand. ‘Could I have my phone back a moment, please?’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to check.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘It’s private.’ He stretched his hand out further. ‘Please.’

It was Anna’s turn to think. Should she disappear, his phone’s triangulation data would bring the police to this general area, even if its GPS was off. But give it back to him and he could maroon her down here and lay false trails elsewhere, making it far harder for her ever to be found. ‘It’s the only light I have,’ she said.

‘I’ll only be a sec. I’ll give it straight back.’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

A moment of stillness before Oliver gave the strangest and most unnerving snort, a combination of frustration, rage and laughter. Before she could move, he shot out a hand to grab her wrist and tug her towards him. She did the only thing she could, jabbing her other hand up at his precious camera, knocking it from his shoulder. He gave a cry and tried to save it. It slipped through his grasp and hit the floor anyway, extinguishing its lamp and plunging them into a darkness relieved only by the weakening light from her torch and the lamp’s firefly afterglow. But they were enough between them to give her a terrifying glimpse of his face, of murder written plain upon it. Then she turned off her torch and the firefly died and the darkness was complete.

She jumped backwards before he could grab her again, banging the marble tabletop with her hip. She scrambled across it then dropped down the other side. She felt for the edge of the dais with her foot, then leapt into the water, landing with a huge splash that threw out a faintly luminous foam in front of her. She stumbled but quickly found her feet and waded towards the aisle. But she got her angles wrong and hit a bench instead. She shuffled along it to the aisle then risked a look back. Oliver had given up trying to fix his lamp and was using the camera’s digital display screen instead, its moonlight glow just about bright enough for her to see him by, though thankfully not for him to see her. Not that that was such a help, for he could of course still hear her as she waded away from him up the aisle, and anyway there was only the one plausible route out of here. She turned her torch back on but kept a finger over it to keep it mostly hidden, while giving herself brief blinks of light to orient herself and stop herself from crashing into walls. She made it out of the chapel in this way, and back into the domed hall, intent only on beating Oliver to the ladder. If she could climb it and pull it up after herself, she’d be safe.

She followed the wall around to the fan of steps up into the crypts. She was halfway up them when Oliver arrived in the chamber behind her, his display screen illuminating her wake. He came marching across on an interception course, throwing up great foamy washes with each stride. But still she beat him into the labyrinth of Templar dead, guiding herself by memory as much as with her torch. There should be a short flight of steps to her right. She gave herself another blink of light to see it by, then hurried along a short passage before allowing herself another blink. But Oliver was closing fast. It wasn’t just his footsteps she could hear, it was his heavy breathing too. No way would she beat him to the ladder, at least not with enough time to—

A clatter behind her, a yelp of pain. ‘You bitch,’ he bellowed. ‘Come back.’

His words undid her. Or not his words alone, but rather the combination of words and voice, cutting through the haze that had fogged her since her abduction on that awful Nottinghamshire night, fleeing through pitch black woods from a man calling her a bitch and demanding she come back. Not Harry Kidd after all, but Oliver Merchant, his darkness voice imprinted forever upon her mind. And finally she saw him as the narcissistic monster he truly was, not as the charming, self-deprecating TV presenter he affected to be.

No longer could she doubt that he’d stalked Elias’s wife in that supermarket, wrecking his marriage in revenge for Elias having humiliated him in front of his crew by challenging him to a fight that he’d chickened out of. It transformed their own previous encounter at Bolingbroke Castle too, when she’d twice made people laugh in his face. His unhinged need to get his own back had driven him to snatch her off that Nottingham street, while letting the blame fall upon the hapless Harry Kidd. Forgive me, that poor man had written. I saw you in the library and you were so beautiful. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Not a suicide note at all, but rather an apology for his stalking, perhaps coaxed out of him by Oliver himself, visiting him under the protection of his TV fame, only to hang him in his stairwell. But his stung pride had needed yet more salve, so he’d used her uncle’s book to inveigle his way back into their lives and try again.

What joy that must have given him! What power!

The shock of it left her disoriented. She forgot about the steps down into the final crypt. She planted her foot only to find nothing there, spilling heavily onto the floor below, throwing out her hands to brace her fall, ripping open her palm and sending such a jolt through her shoulder that she feared for a moment she’d dislocated or even broken it. She was pushing herself back up when she heard Oliver close behind and she looked around to see the pale glow of his arrival. She did the only thing she could, covering her torch even as she rolled out of the aisle between a pair of the raised tombs. Her clothes and hair were dark but her skin was pale, so, as on that other night, she turned her back and averted her face then drew her legs up to her chest and clasped her arms around them.

He came down the steps a moment later, his discordant footsteps suggesting he was limping, and muttering darkly to himself, though too incoherently for Anna to make out. Her back was turned so that she couldn’t see him directly, only gauge his position from the faint sundial shadow cast by his display screen. He passed so close behind her that she was sure he’d see her – but he was in too great a hurry, or perhaps his night vision was simply too degraded, for he strode on by, still muttering, out of the crypt then up the steps to the ambulatory and her uncle’s ladder.

She turned around as his light dimmed, listened to the fading echo of his footsteps. Her heart slowed from its dangerous hammering. She felt nauseous. She let out a breath she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding then stretched her legs back out in front of her. Her ankle throbbed. She must have turned it when she’d fallen. She rose unsteadily to her feet anyway, her movements clumsy and confused, as when woken too abruptly at night. She had to force herself to think. Oliver would soon realise that she hadn’t made it up the ladder and out, meaning that she was still trapped down here with him. He’d make sure that she hadn’t hidden at the far end of the ambulatory, then he’d come hunting.

A high-pitched squeaking noise. It baffled her for a moment until she realised it was two different sections of her uncle’s ladder scraping against one another. Either Oliver had climbed out and was pulling it up after himself, or he was pushing it up from beneath to put it out of her reach, while making sure that he himself could still grab it back down. But which? She held her breath as she waited for the answer. Then she heard his footsteps again and knew.

His intent was obvious. He’d come back this way, chamber by chamber, corralling her into an ever smaller space. And then what? Perhaps he’d simply kill her and lay false trails elsewhere. Smarter, though, to make her death look like an accident. Brain her with a brick, sling her over his shoulder, carry her up the ladder then drop her back down onto her head before calling the emergency services and putting on the performance of his life.

‘I’m sorry about your uncle,’ he shouted suddenly, his voice echoing through the chambers, loud yet incongruously calm, an effort to communicate rather than scare. ‘Truly I am. I liked the guy. But he asked for it, you know. He tried to cheat me.’ His words got under Anna’s skin, almost provoking her into retort, even though she knew that was what he wanted. ‘He’d worked out about this place,’ continued Oliver, once he realised he needed to toss more chum into the water. ‘I could tell it from his voice when we spoke last Sunday. All excited, but trying not to show it.’ Light flared suddenly. He’d fixed his lamp. She hurried the other way, up into the grandee’s vault, her ankle paining her with each step. ‘He’d never have found it without me. It was my discovery as much as his. We were partners, for Christ’s sake. Yet still he tried to cheat me.’ His voice hardened as he remembered this betrayal. ‘Sorry, mate. No one does that. Not gonna happen. I drove halfway across the fucking country to make that clear to him. He wasn’t even home. Your uncle, the famous hermit. That was when I knew for sure. I sat there half the fucking night until I had to leave for my Ludlow Castle interview. Only his van was right there as I headed out, parked by that damned field. And there he was too, standing beside his pit with his spade and a bagful of fucking jewels. You should have heard him trying to justify himself. Pathetic.’

‘I bet you think you’re innocent in all this, don’t you?’ he called out. ‘Like hell. You brought it on yourself. Your uncle would still be alive if you hadn’t been such a bitch that day at Bolingbroke. Think about that for a moment.’ He fell silent to let her respond. She glared back through the darkness. ‘One lunch, for fuck’s sake! One sodding lunch and none of this would have happened. Your uncle would still be with us. But nooooo. You had to make fun of me instead. Pretend I was some kind of cradle-snatcher. Saying I had a face like an arse. Don’t you realise how hurtful that was?’

Despite his feigned indignation, Anna could sense the relish beneath. All she’d done was give him an excuse to inflict the horrors his heart had yearned for. She reached the fan of steps down into the flooded chamber. There was nowhere to hide here either, not knee deep in water as it was, and with the slightest ripple likely to give her away. The chapel would be no better. By default, then, she headed for the storerooms, though those too offered precious little cover.

‘And poor Harry Kidd,’ shouted Oliver, switching tack. ‘Such a nice, sweet, gentle guy. You’d have liked him if you’d met him, honest you would. So he had a crush on you, and he didn’t handle it very well. Big deal. He never meant you a lick of harm. Yet three times you went to the police about him. Three times, for god’s sake.’

‘He was mortified about your abduction,’ said Oliver. ‘He hated you thinking it was him. He’d have told you so himself if you’d let him anywhere near you.’

She reached the end of the passage, as she’d somehow known she would. The antechamber was small and bare and offered nowhere to hide. The treasure chamber then. She clambered through the hole her uncle had torn, landing painfully on her elbow and hip. She found places for her feet between the tubs and chests and caskets then stood up and shone her torch around in search of a dagger or something else that she might wield. She tried one of the dislodged bricks, but it was lighter and softer than she’d have liked, closer to pumice than flint, and cumbersome too. Even if Oliver was foolish enough to give her a shot, she lacked the power to do him the necessary damage.

‘I’m getting cloh-ser.’

She needed something harder and heavier. A casket filled with rings and brooches had handles on either side and a clasp lid. She lifted it above her head but its thin handles cut into her fingers and made it too unwieldy. She set it back down and looked around once more. There was nothing. Despair filled her. She felt helpless. Almost by accident, as she turned this way and that, her weakening beam fell upon William Marshal as he sat astride his chestnut charger, his squared shoulders and broad chest and purposeful expression.

Anna had never intended to write her thesis on Marshal. She’d wanted to write instead about Eleanor of Aquitaine, celebrated wife of Henry II. But Eleanor had been done to death; she hadn’t been able to find anything new to say. She’d been looking for another idea at the time of her abduction, which episode had left her dreadfully depressed, longing to believe that not all men were like that, that some were good and brave and noble. And so she’d settled on Marshal, in large part because of an incident early in his career, when, as an obscure young knight errant, he’d escorted Eleanor herself through hostile territory, only to be ambushed by a party of Poitevin knights seeking to take her hostage.

Despite the fearful odds against him, Marshal had stayed behind to hold them off, buying Eleanor the time she’d needed to make good her escape. The wound he’d taken that day had almost killed him, but his courage and loyalty had also brought him to her notice, so that she’d not only secured his freedom, she’d also persuaded her husband to appoint him mentor to their son the Young King, putting him on the first rung of his long climb to the regency. For that was the thing about Marshal. He’d never backed down. He’d always faced danger head-on, and he’d almost always triumphed too.

Her failing torchlight shrank until it lit up only his face. Poison was no weapon for such a man. It was the choice of cowards, and no one had ever accused Marshal of that. No. She refused to believe it of him. His charmed life had been the result of who he was, an extraordinary man touched by the gods, the kind who went through life with a kind of aura about them.