Secrets of the Dead

In the armchair, Connie looked up from her BlackBerry. ‘It doesn’t matter. If Dragovic thinks it leads somewhere, he’ll go there. We just have to plant the idea in his mind.’

Mark shook his head. ‘It’s got to be watertight. If he’s going to show up, he has to be convinced 100 per cent it’s genuine. He has to see it for himself.’

He went back into the bathroom. Abby leaned forward again and studied the poem. Whether as a child with a riddle, or a UN investigator wading through witness testimony by the light of a wind-up torch, she’d never been able to leave a puzzle.

She tried to clear her mind of everything that had happened in the last two days and focus on what was relevant.

All his surviving poems contain secret messages.

OK. If you traced the shape of the monogram over the letters, it gave you Constantine’s name and titles. That was pretty clever – she could only imagine the patience it must have taken to arrange the words to make that happen.

But for a man with that kind of mind, why stop there? Why go to all that effort just to spell out a name?

Around 326 Porfyrius was pardoned and came home.

So maybe he was grateful. But then there was the awkward question of the substance of the poem. The grieving father gave his son. If Constantine had just had his son Crispus murdered, you wouldn’t write a poem pointing it out, however clever you were. Not if you’d just come back from exile and didn’t want to go back.

There had to be something else.

She picked up the necklace and examined it. Connie looked up, but didn’t say anything. Barry watched from behind his dark glasses. Mark stayed locked in the bathroom.

Though, actually, this is not a true Christogram. This one is called a staurogram. From the Greek word stavros, meaning ‘cross’.

Now that he’d said it, she could see it clearly. A simple cross, with the extra loop connecting the top point and the right arm. And at each of the four points of the cross, and in its centre, a red glass bead that showed the letter underneath.

Some scholars think the poems might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters.

Five beads, five letters. She’d marked them on the piece of paper in the cafe toilet, but she’d been so rushed she hadn’t even had time to think, let alone read them. She laid the necklace over the poem and squinted through the cloudy red glass.

S S S S S.

The same letter under each of the beads.

It couldn’t be a coincidence – but then what did it mean?

She lifted the necklace off and studied the placement of the letters in the poem. Unsurprisingly, they made the same shape as they did on the necklace: a cross.

Gemstones underneath the key letters. But the letters were all the same. She frowned; she felt her headache coming back.

And then an idea. What if it isn’t the key letters, but the key words? She picked out the five words that contained the S’s and wrote them out, then swung herself off the bed and knocked on the bathroom door. Barry followed the movement with his head; his hand moved closer to his jacket pocket.

Mark unlocked the door and jerked it open, his phone pressed to his ear. He scowled when he saw her.

‘What is it?’

‘Is your Oxford professor still on the line?’

‘Why?’

‘Ask him what this means.’ She handed him the paper with five words written on it. SIGNUM INVICTUS SEPELIVIT SUB SEPULCHRO.

Mark’s eyes widened. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said to whoever was on the other end of the phone. He pressed some buttons and put it back against his ear. Abby waited while he read out the phrase, then spelled it letter by letter. Jamming the phone against his shoulder, he leaned over the bathroom counter top so he could write down the reply.

‘Thanks.’ He rung off and stared in the bathroom mirror for a moment. Over his shoulder, Abby could see total confusion wrapping his face.

‘A basic translation is, “The unconquered one buried the sign under the grave.” My man Nigel says that it’s not too much of stretch to say, “The unconquered one – i.e., the Emperor Constantine – buried the standard – i.e., the labarum – beneath his tomb.”’

‘Do we know where his tomb is?’ It was Connie, who had come up behind Abby and was staring past her at Mark.

But Abby knew the answer. She remembered Nikolic telling her.

When the Turks conquered Constantinople, they destroyed Constantine’s mausoleum, which was the Church of the Holy Apostles, and built their own mosque on the site.

‘It’s in Constantinople.’

‘Istanbul,’ said Connie. ‘Constantinople got the works.’