The Queen's Cipher (27 page)

“That’s a cheap shot,” she said reprovingly. “You should remember Pope’s famous dictum, ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’”

The shrieking of young voices heralded the departure of the schoolchildren, freeing up Shakespeare’s marble monument for closer inspection. He was carved standing on a high plinth in a somewhat ungainly cross-legged pose. His right elbow was resting on a stack of books on a pulpit and the forefinger of his left-hand pointed to a scroll.

Sam gasped with surprise. “Do you see the word he’s pointing to? It’s ‘Temples’! They had twenty thousand words to choose from and selected this one. But then again, they were Masons.”

He stared intently at the scroll. “What’s more remarkable is the way they’ve altered Prospero’s ‘cloud-capped towers’ speech from the Tempest. Temples comes in the middle of a line, not at the end of it. Artistic licence I suppose.”

A line of poetry came into her head. “And now the Bard in living marble speaks.”

“But what’s he saying?” Freddie blurted out. “That is the question.”

Why was Shakespeare standing like that? Was it a Masonic puzzle? The left hand symbolised the rejection of orthodox faith. Left-hand-path religions were based on individualism and free thought.

“He’s pointing with his forefinger,” Sam said. “You use the index finger to issue an intellectual challenge. Then there’s the triangular pulpit on which he is leaning. That’s deliberate too. An expression of the sacred geometry embedded in Masonic ritual.”

They were walking away when he remembered that some eighteenth-century sculptors had revived the ancient Greek tradition of inscribing a statue’s base.

By standing on tiptoes he could touch the marble beneath Shakespeare’s feet. There was some kind of indentation. Unable to see what he was doing, he followed the groove with his middle finger. It ran upwards and across. The letter T. Moving his hand to the right he encountered an identical incision. The Double T, a Rosicrucian emblem!

And something else had been gouged out of the stone. He traced the impression with his finger. It was a date. 1787.

“Why did the graffiti artist want to chisel in a date?” he wondered.

“Don’t you recognise its significance,” she asked. “1787 is the year when the American Constitution was drawn up and the first states ratified it and the year in which the French Revolution began to rumble. It’s a historical watershed, the dawning of the democratic age.”

“So it’s not graffiti at all. It’s a cry of joy.”

10 MAY 2014

It was shirt-sleeve weather in London. Yet even on a hot day people were bustling around. Venerable ladies with wrinkled necks loaded with jewellery, women swathed in black from head to toe holding heavy shopping bags and backpacking students carrying placards to the American Embassy; each of them weighed down by their cares and concerns.

On leaving Berkeley Square Freddie craned his neck to see the fifth floor office where the global financial crisis began with an avalanche of credit defaults. Not that Mayfair had suffered much. It still offered the highest priced real estate in Britain; much of it owned by the investment bankers and hedge fund managers who had done their best to undermine our market economy. Welcome to Mayfair, home of the capitalist conspiracy.

Conspiracies were very much on his mind as he wandered through Hyde Park. Time was a never-ending circle, bending back on itself, to unite buried information about the writing of Shakespeare’s plays with a cleverly orchestrated campaign to derail his own career. All conspiracy theories had one thing in common: they required causal agents, puppet masters to pull the strings. Four hundred years ago the manipulating may have been done by Francis Bacon and his Masonic friends. In Freddie’s case, Cleaver was the controlling force with Cartwright and Dawkins acting as his agents. But they had both been killed before they could cause him real trouble. Who had got rid of them and why?

A cool breeze was coming off the Serpentine as he walked along the water’s edge. Ahead of him, a young boy offered bread to an inquisitive goose. This harmless gesture reminded him of something his mother had once said. When you shudder it’s because a goose has crossed your grave.

Windows and doors opened inside of him, hazy spinning images swinging wildly on insecure latches. Memories of the silence in the family home whenever his father was preparing a sermon and of his mother washing a white linen surplice while trying to do the crossword; of wet Lake District holidays spent in boarding houses where breakfast was rationed out in tiny pots of jam and foil-wrapped butter, miniaturised hospitality for a family that couldn’t afford better, and that fateful Irish walking trip on which the protective love of his parents had been wiped away in a single second.

A pair of Egyptian geese hissed at a young mother who had almost squashed their baby gosling under the wheels of her pram. A single swan glided by to remind him of Sam and their first night together in Stratford; how he had learned to decode not only ancient ciphers but the more important mysteries of the human heart.

The squawking geese mocked his lechery. Not that he was entirely blind. Her refusal to publish had badly shaken him, making him aware of how ambitious she was and how her future was tied up with being in America. He stopped himself from thinking about this. His happiness depended on sidestepping such painful truths. He looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock in the morning East Coast time. After a good night’s sleep she should be back at the airport. He would text her. Tell her how much he loved her.

Only she wasn’t in the Dulles departure lounge when the text arrived. She was in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln waiting for the lights to change at one of Washington’s many intersections, which gave her plenty of time to consider what she was doing. Sam had spent a restless night in the Hyatt Regency agonising over the summons she had received from her departmental head.

Milton Cleaver was much more than a boss – he was a father figure and her long-time lover. He had looked after her materially and emotionally, massaging away her insecurities as she raced up the academic ladder. A low key affair had suited both of them: he was a married man with a discreet mistress and she had a mentor to help her career. But no sexual relationship could be without issues, conflicting impulses, and her infatuation for Freddie had brought them to a head.

Previously Milton had viewed her peccadilloes in a benign way – he was far from monogamous himself – but once she stayed on in Oxford to be with Freddie his attitude had changed. The urbane charm gave way to harsh threats about loss of tenure if she continued to ‘fuck that English half-wit.’ She had said she wouldn’t be blackmailed. He had promised her an extended leave of absence to do research in England and must keep his word. So Milton changed tack, dangling a juicy carrot under her nose. His friend Elliott Manley, the Folger Director, had decided to update a Shakespeare classic, the
Bell’s Acting Edition
, and she could take charge of the project – if she played her cards right.

So here she was, Samantha Dilworth, consumed by ambition and little better than a whore, being whisked off in a luxury limousine to Milton’s latest love nest in Alexandria Old Town. She settled back in her seat, trying to lose herself in the car’s soft leather upholstery. The air-conditioning system was switched on yet she still felt sweaty and short of breath. How could she be so counterintuitive?

Of course Freddie was gauche and frighteningly intense, but he really loved her and, deep down, she knew he was a better man than Milton Cleaver. Yet knowing this, she was about to betray him by having sex with her surrogate father. The answer lay in the hold Milton had on her. He was no common or garden seducer, more of a Svengali figure mesmerising her with talk of a dynamic future she couldn’t achieve on her own, marbled as she was with self-doubt, and if this didn’t conform to male ideas of how a woman should behave – all sentimental and submissive – then screw them.

Their first meeting had been on an equally warm summer’s day. She was taking tea in the university’s Caroline Club garden when he suddenly appeared sprinkling stardust, strolling easily between the tables with his whip-taut body and deft movements, stopping for a word here and there. That had been eight years ago when she was a graduate student; a thin, androgynous looking girl wearing baggy pants and a waistcoat. Recognising the Annie Hall outfit, Milton had sauntered up and said, “Hey listen, gimme a kiss.” It was Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer talking. “Really,” she replied, playing up to him. “Yeah, we’ll kiss now and get it over with, and then we’ll go eat. We’ll digest our food better.”

That had been the first of many dates during which Milton made everything seem acceptable: even his reasons for staying with the third Mrs Cleaver, a woman of immense wealth and deep nervous disorders who couldn’t live without him. Flattered by his attentions, Sam had allowed herself to be reinvented. Initially the changes were cosmetic. Tailored skirts, fitted jackets and shorter layered hair replaced the urban hippie look. With that went expensive dental work and a smooth and supple body honed by regular gym work and massages.

The psychological makeover took much longer. She had needed a lot of convincing that anyone could fill the emotional void created by her father’s desertion. As the Lincoln sped past Alexandria’s high-end boutiques, Sam remembered the first time they slept together. At least that was something she could smile about. They had signed the hotel register as Mr and Mrs Touchstone from the Forest of Arden.

All in all, it had been a surprising night; sitting on the edge of the bed drinking bourbon from the mini bar, listening to his theories on regenerative medicine. The skin, apparently, was an organ and like other organs it responded to dietary habits and lifestyle. By eating well and having regular glycolic acid chemical peels he had renewed his epidermis. And it had done him good. When they finally undressed the gap in years was hardly apparent. There were some signs of aging, tiny folds of flesh and the odd wrinkle here and there, but not enough to put her off. And being much older than her previous boyfriends, he proved a more knowledgeable and considerate lover.

The car stopped outside a red brick townhouse in Prince Street. Milton answered the door, coolly elegant in cashmere sweater and slacks, and ushered her into a large living room full of Cubist furniture and Persian rugs, kissing her lightly on the lips before disappearing into the kitchen to fetch dry Martinis. With drink in hand, he inquired politely about her stay in England. The unspoken subtext was that he would overlook the fact that she had behaved like a silly, immature girl.

She found his patronising manner infuriating. How dare he treat her with condescension when he himself could be so shallow? What did he know about her feelings? In her confused state Sam barely registered the ensuing argument until a comment about the illogicality of the female mind provoked her into throwing her drink over him.

“Of course women are capable of rational though,” said Milton wiping down his expensive sweater. “But you weren’t thinking clearly, honey, when you hooked up with that Brett guy.”

“So it’s logical to sleep with older, married men and irrational to go to bed with younger, single ones?”

“You can be amazingly obtuse sometimes.”

“Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that.”

“No, you’ve got to work it out for yourself.”

And she could work it out. Freddie wasn’t right for her. Not because he was young and vulnerable but because she didn’t know how to manage her emotions when he was around. She had kept everyone at arm’s length until he burrowed his way into her heart. Marry him and she would have to deal with his demons as well as her own. Her career would suffer.

“You must think about the future, particularly now you’ve got this terrific opportunity. Would you like to see the original
Bell’s Acting Edition
? I’ve got all fourteen volumes.”

“I’d like to see the first volume, the one introduced by Francis Gentleman”

“Oh, you know about him.” Milton sounded surprised. “Gentleman claimed to have removed ‘glaring indecencies’ from Shakespeare’s text to make the author’s work acceptable to the refined sensitivities of Georgian Britain.”

“A Gentleman by name and nature,” she said dryly.

Milton extracted an olive morocco leather volume from his modular bookcase and handed it to Sam. “Why don’t you sit down, darling, while I get us another drink?”

She sank into the angular comfort of a Vladimir Kagan designed Cubist chair and was soon engrossed in eighteenth-century stage settings. She did not hear his return.

“I’ve really missed you,” he said huskily, leaning over the chair to kiss her neck.

She could feel him caressing her breast and stiffened. He had always been able to release her sexuality by touch but this time was different.

“You’re very tense today,” he murmured. “I’ll stop if you want me to.”

Sam saw her future in the vanishing moment. She shook her head.

He took her hand and led her upstairs.

12 MAY 2014

Freddie slumped back on the pillows feeling drained, mouth parched and skin covered in sweat. He closed his eyes to lessen the pain in his pounding forehead. Was this a genuine virus or a psychosomatic illness brought on by Sam’s failure to keep in touch? The weekend had gone by without a word from her. Her mobile was switched off and she hadn’t replied to his texts.

Overcoming his dizziness he stumbled into the kitchen in search of painkillers, finding them on the draining board next to the empty beer cans and the unopened ready-meal of a reluctantly resumed bachelor existence. He swallowed a couple of tablets. If only his heart could behave as mechanically as the dish washer, restricting itself to pumping blood to the brain.

A loud knocking saved him the trouble of unloading the machine. His caller was the tall, dark-haired police officer from the Counter Terrorism Squad.

“Might I have a word, sir?” DI Owen spoke with a pronounced adenoidal accent.

He ushered the inspector into his untidy kitchen. “Sorry to be like this inspector but I’m not feeling well,” he mumbled, fastening his pyjama top.