The Legend of the Black Monk Page 24

  ‘Indeed. So off they carted me and very cleverly managed to stop any of the family going to the hospital, where they would have discovered it was all a complete hoax, because I wasn’t there. Luckily, Werner helped me escape from the monastery to the wreck, where I hid out. That’s where I first saw their sub and realised how they were doing it. So, I radioed Harry here and we co-ordinated our little plan to catch them.’

  ‘What about Guy?’ Drew could not help himself asking. Rebecca kicked his ankle.

  ‘Blimey!’ said Rupert. ‘I’d clean forgotten! He’s probably still locked in the cowshed at the farm!’

  Drew looked at him for a moment as if they should go and do something, before sitting back. ‘Ah well,’ he said, a mischievous smile crossing his face.

  ‘You said there was more than one local?’ Von Krankl asked Harry.

  ‘Yes, the second one is rather better known to you.’ He looked uncertainly in Rachel’s direction. She gave a short, mirthless laugh and went over to the window. ‘You mean John, of course.’ She did not turn around.

  Harry Stanley nodded.

  ‘Yes. One big plus is that we have recovered a big haul of drugs. The monks were a front for an international drug-smuggling ring the coastguard has been after for some time. They’ve known they were getting the stuff into the country somehow, but never suspected either monks or a submarine.’

  ‘I think you will also find a link to the Nazi Komrades network,’ said Von Krankl.

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ Stanley replied. ‘Putting together what we knew from the Admiral and yourself about the SS General Himmel and the infiltration of the monastery, it was not hard to work out that the two were part of the same thing. Daedalus and his Nazi friends used smuggled drug profits to fund right wing extremist organisations in the hope that their Reich might rise up again one day.’

  ‘The Nazis again?’ asked a horrified Laura.

  Von Krankl shook his head sadly. ‘With the lessons of history, you would think human beings would learn. But there is always a fool out there, willing to fund other, more dangerous fools.’

  ‘Father Daedalus is better known as Jorg Himmel, the son of the General. And his son’ –

  ‘Is Johann Himmel … better known as John Sky,’ said Rupert, looking at his mother and seeing her shoulders shake. Still she did not turn round.

  ‘They came out of the woodwork like the Admiral said when the secret files were released on the U-821, to find the gold.’

  ‘And John Sky appeared a week later,’ said Rachel, finally turning round. Rebecca noticed that her eyes were red. ‘Well I have heard quite enough. Guin, Gaston? Come on, let’s see about some more tea for this horde, shall we?’

  She left the room, followed by an attentive Guinevere and Gaston.

  ‘Will this be on the news?’ asked Rebecca.

  Harry Stanley gave a hollow laugh. ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Yeah, unlikely,’ grimaced Drew. ‘Nazis aren’t the sort of thing our government wants broadcast.’

  ‘A conspiracy theorist in our midst?’ smiled Harry, looking at Drew.

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don’t pay him any mind. He’s from the Highlands and thinks England is still the enemy.’

  ‘He might have more than the bones of a point there,’ said the Admiral, enigmatically.

  The Admiral and the other men left the room at Harry Stanley’s request, leaving the four young friends alone.

  ‘Well, here we all are!’ smiled Drew. ‘First time for a few days we’ve all been in the same room!’

  Rupert flopped down onto the sofa next to Laura. ‘So, these bones we have, those of the woman he loved and their child. Are they the real treasure of the Black Monk, do you think?’

  ‘Unless the glass has something to do with it too,’ said Laura.

  Rebecca looked up, frowning at her friend. ‘Glass? What glass?’

  ‘Of course, you haven’t seen it, have you?’

  From her pocket, Laura produced the bundle of cloth and unwrapped it, handing the glass to Rebecca. Rebecca stood up and went over to the window, holding it up to the light. She let out a low whistle.

  ‘What is it, Holmes?’ Drew appeared at her shoulder. ‘Key to the mystery?’

  ‘Very possibly,’ said Rebecca enigmatically, heading the door, suddenly full of energy.

  ‘Come on!’

  Chapter 39

  Through the Rectangular Window

  Three black crows stalked the grass in front of the Smugglers’ Chapel, their raucous cries echoing through the trees as the four friends approached. To Rebecca’s surprise, they did not fly off when they approached them, standing eyeing them silently.

  ‘A murder of crows. Very Hitchcock,’ murmured Drew. He realised the others had not grasped his meaning. ‘The Birds? One of the scariest films ever!’

  Rebecca raised her eyebrows, looked at Laura and shook her head.

  ‘Why are we here, Becks?’ asked Laura, passing through the doorway.

  Rebecca indicated the stained-glass windows, the gesture suggesting that here was the answer. Rupert, Laura and Drew exchanged baffled looks as she ran her eyes over it from top to bottom, examining it minutely. She turned and looked all around the chapel, then back to the window. Her gaze alighted on something. Her eyes widened. She crouched down by a stone frieze on the opposite wall and ran her hands over the carved stone.

  She looked back to the window. With a quick intake of breath she ran over to the pulpit and clambered up the side of it. She reached up. In her hand she was holding the section of glass and she now slid it over a section of the window, jumped back down and came round in front of them.

  Drew, Laura and Rupert were completely mystified. ‘So … What now?’

  ‘Wait, wait!’ Rebecca held a hand up. ‘When the sun comes back out, I think you might just see.’

  ‘The sun?’ said Laura, shaking her head in bemusement.

  ‘You see how the window is casting coloured light into here. Well, that bit of glass being left in the casket was no accident. It is a clue left by Kraus.’

  ‘A clue to what, McOwan?’ asked Drew.

  At that moment, the sun reappeared and there was an immediate and dramatic illumination inside the chapel. Shafts of coloured light beamed from the window across the floor and walls of the little chapel.

  ‘Yes!’ she shouted in delight. ‘Look!’

  On the wall, an incredible transformation had taken place. What had previously resembled a simple carved decoration had now taken on a much more intricate and definite pattern.

  ‘A map!’ gasped Rupert.

  * * *

  ‘We know Kraus made this window, that he was a master craftsman. We know he knew the secret and we suspect he found the gold. Your grandfather and Von Krankl wondered what had become of the gold, what he had done with it and why there was no clue … well here it is.’ She gestured dramatically to the window, through which light was still pouring.

  ‘He hid all his secrets here, somewhere he thought nobody would ever think of looking.’

  ‘Except you!’ Laura regarded her admiringly.

  ‘So what is this telling us?’ Rupert was closely examining the frieze.

  ‘Well, we had already discovered the map reference in the flags there which gave us the submarine’s location. What we did not suspect was that instead of the treasure, Kraus had hidden the last piece of the jigsaw there, that pane of glass. It was pretty clearly something made to fit into something bigger. If you look up at Sir Lytton’ All heads turned to where Rebecca now pointed. ‘You will see he is pointing to something … but there was only a blank section of glass. We thought it was the monastery, because that is in the piece further over, but look! With the new piece over the blank piece, some ingenious trick of Kraus’, related to how light diffuses through layered glass, transforms it magically into what you now see.’

  ‘A gate, a tower? … ‘ Laura began, squinting. She stopped, making no sense of it.

  The others
crowded forward to look.

  ‘What do you make of it, Rebecca?’ asked Rupert.

  Rebecca was slowly nodding at the picture now laid out before them. ‘I have seen this in my dreams. I see the Monk, sometimes in a Tower beyond a gateway, bent over something and crying.’

  ‘Bent over a grave perhaps?’ said Drew. Rebecca nodded.

  ‘I think so … Emily’s grave.’

  ‘But Emily wasn’t buried? I thought that is what all this was about?’ said Laura.

  ‘Well she wasn’t buried on holy ground, and we think her bones are those in the casket. But they were put there in 1945. She died three hundred years before that and the Black Monk must have put her remains somewhere.’

  ‘Good point,’ nodded Rupert.

  Laura bent down to read some writing carved into the frieze. ‘The richness of my life lies here. Oh, he surely means Emily! What a beautiful thing to write about her!’

  ‘Hopeless romantic,’ murmured Rebecca into her ear.

  ‘Rupert, isn’t there a folly of some sort somewhere in the grounds?’

  ‘You mean the old Bell Tower? Down at the end of the orchard, all horribly overgrown.’

  ‘Might the tower in this frieze be that tower?’

  ‘Possible,’ nodded Rupert. ‘But it’s a folly. There’s no bell or anything.’

  ‘Only I know the true location … My life’s work, Saladin’s nemesis, where to look,’ said Laura. ‘Kraus’ message left on the wall in the crypt,’ she reminded everyone.

  ‘Well then, no time to waste. We’d better try and find this orchard,’ said Drew, clapping Rebecca on the shoulder and leading her towards the door.

  Chapter 40

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  Rebecca suddenly stopped in the doorway of the Chapel.

  ‘Wait. No … no … we may be getting this wrong.’ She went back inside and stared again at the window and the frieze.

  ‘So, Laura, how hopeless a romantic are you?’ She pointed at the inscription Laura had found.

  ‘The richness of my life lies here… Here, guys, here!’

  ‘But where?’

  Rebecca puffed out her cheeks. ‘This is called the Smugglers’ Chapel because it’s where smugglers used to hide out. So presumably where the Black Monk would hide out?’

  ‘Should we be expecting the Black Monk to appear?’ asked Drew, trying his best to sound nonchalant and unconcerned but not remotely convincing.

  Rebecca did not answer directly. ‘I am about to do something which may or may not be the right thing … Look, if Kraus made the piece of glass, which in turn reveals its secret by projecting onto this frieze … is it not likely that he also created the frieze?’

  Drew looked as if scales had suddenly been lifted from his eyes. ‘Of course!’

  ‘See how the light is still pointing to the same spot on the wall, despite the fact that the sun and shadows have moved elsewhere. I think he designed this glass to do just that. Not X marks the spot, but at any time of day, light marks the spot … that spot.’ She pointed to the place on the wall pinpointed by the beams of light.

  ‘So?’ said Drew, expectantly.

  Rebecca dropped to her knees and grasped the bottom of the frieze. ‘So … pull this away and see what lies behind.’

  ‘Becks, you can’t!’ cried Laura.

  ‘Wait!’ Drew thrust out an arm as if to stop her but too late. Rebecca pulled hard and a section of the plaster splintered away easily. Behind it was the bottom of a narrow wooden door.

  ‘I … you ... I don’t know if this makes you a vandal or a genius,’ said Drew, barely able to believe what he was seeing and what Rebecca had done.

  ‘No point in stopping now,’ grunted Rebecca and pulled another section away, revealing the rest of the door. There was a black iron handle. She gripped it. ‘Vandal or genius then – which is it?’

  She opened the door.

  Drew’s torch illuminated the top of a staircase.

  Unhesitating, Rebecca led the way down steps slippery with green algae. They emerged into a small, dank cloister, with burial crypts to either side. Rebecca saw something which made her clutch onto Drew for support. A gateway, just like the one in the frieze and from her waking dream! ‘Bricked up in the same way as the chamber we found the coffin in, where Kraus was imprisoned! Look, same sort of stone!’

  ‘So bricked up at the same time?’

  ‘By Kraus …’

  ‘We’ve found it, Campbell! Lytton was pointing to a tower … this chapel’s bell tower. And a gateway … right there!’

  As they stood there, a lone, solitary bell tolled in the chapel above. The sound was startling yet somehow inevitable.

  ‘It’s the bell,’ shuddered Drew.

  ‘Have to get up early to catch you out,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘I hate it when you’re right.’

  ‘You must have a lot of hate in you, then. Just be a man and knock that wall down for us, would you?’

  Drew and Rebecca set to work chipping and scrabbling at the wall. Whole lumps of masonry broke away easily in their hands. Laura and Rupert joined in and together they pushed with all their strength. The wall gave with a searing crack and dissolved into a cloud of rubble. There was now a hole large enough to climb through.

  Rebecca was first. When her eyes got used to the dim interior, she found herself somewhere even more familiar. Before them, in the middle of a floor, stood a solitary stone obelisk. She stood, transfixed.

  Drew’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Dear romantic Laura thinks Nathan carved that legend the richness of my life lies here into the wall because it was where he had buried Emily … I suspect something more material is involved.’

  ‘The gold? No way. It would have been found before.’

  ‘Remember Laura told us Jimmy Hendricks said it was the first time since the War it had been opened up, due to subsidence or something. You said yourself this wall is just the same as the other one which was bricked up in 1955. Nobody has been down here.’

  ‘Give me a hand to shift the lid off this thing, then.’

  Grunting and heaving, they slid the lid of the obelisk to one side and peered inside.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ gasped Drew.

  Rebecca smiled, shaking her head in disbelief.

  ‘The richness of his life…’

  In the dim half-light of the chamber, the glint of gold was unmistakeable.

  Chapter 41

  The Richness of His Life

  I don’t believe it!’ squealed Laura. ‘What do we do with all this? What do we tell your Grandpa, Rupert?’

  Rupert leaned against the wall for support. ‘Blimey!’ was all he could croak.

  ‘It’s all here,’ said Drew, as Laura pulled out a gold ingot.

  ‘It’s amazing!’ She ran her hand over it, awestruck.

  ‘No, McOwan, I mean it’s all here.’

  Rebecca looked up quickly. Drew pulled out a fistful of gold coins.

  ‘This isn’t just Himmel’s bullion, look!’

  Beneath a layer of the Swastika-embossed ingots were more of the gold coins.

  ‘Hundreds of them!’

  ‘Thousands!’

  ‘Millions,’ corrected Rupert, ‘in today’s terms.’

  ‘The Black Monk’s treasure,’ said Rebecca slowly.

  Drew sat back, stunned. He looked at Rebecca, uncomprehending. ‘But how?’

  Rebecca picked up a coin and examined it under a torch.

  ‘This would explain the bones in the casket. Kraus finds the Black Monk’s gold on the Horns of Lucifer. He disturbs something and the spirits of Emily and Nathan are woken. The Black Monk demands the price of the gold is burying Emily and the baby. So Kraus takes the bones. He intends to bury the gold on the submarine, but when Himmel appears, he throws the casket with the bones overboard to throw him off the scent. He returns, retrieves all the gold and brings it back here. He buries Himmel’s body in the other cham
ber and hides all the gold here, before bricking this up too and then plastering over the entrance and creating the frieze.’

  ‘Just what have you done to my church?’ A familiar voice interrupted them from the top of the staircase.

  Chapter 42

  Last Respects

  ‘They found General Himmel’s gold bullion!’

  Jimmy Hendricks stood by the fireplace in the drawing room, shaking his head in disbelief, smiling benevolently at Rebecca and the others. The damage to the chapel had clearly been forgiven.

  ‘I knew it!’ said the Admiral. ‘I knew Jurgen would not have taken it! Werner! Werner!’

  He turned to go out into the hallway.

  ‘That’s not all, Gramps.’

  ‘Not all?’ the Admiral turned.

  ‘No,’ said Rebecca. ‘We found more gold. This insignia suggests it is from the Mercantile Royal, owned by Ebeneezer Trevelyan and plundered in 1641 by the Black Monk.’

  Admiral Dewhurst-Hobb stared at her in astonishment, as the other adults joined them. Rebecca held up a small piece of gold.

  ‘But I thought … we all thought that was just a legend … The Black Monk’s treasure.’

  ‘My dear, are you certain?’ An equally flabbergasted Guppy Baverstock almost snatched the gold piece from her in his eagerness to inspect it. ‘Do forgive me, I didn’t mean to, er, snatch. You do know the Mercantile Royal is one of the most valuable undiscovered fortunes in the world?’

  ‘I hadn’t really quite thought of it quite like that …’ The implication of this registered with Rebecca. ‘Kraus must have found this too and buried it all together.’

  ‘Who gets all the loot then?’ asked Drew brightly. He did a double-take as Rebecca rolled her eyes at him. ‘And you weren’t even thinking about it?’

  ‘It is a question,’ said the Admiral, distracted.

  ‘This could indeed be the insignia of the Mercantile Company of Launceston.’