Secrets of the Dead

‘Did you see the body?’

‘I arrived and heard he was dead. There was no need for me to stay.’

‘You didn’t want to help?’

‘Christ said: Leave the dead to bury the dead. It’s no secret that Alexander and I had differences. If I’d stayed there crying crocodile tears, who would have believed me?’ And then, in case a quick show of contrition will make me go away, he adds, ‘I preferred to grieve in private.’

He’s telling the truth about one thing. If this is the best simulation of grief he can give, it wouldn’t have fooled anyone.

XIII

London – Present Day

ARCUMTRIUMPHISINSIGNEMDICAVIT. FRIDAY 17H. I can help.

She ran back into the reading room, barely stopping to show the guard her pass. She sat down at the computer and copied the words into a search engine.

Your search – arcumtriumphisinsignemdicavit – did not match any documents

She couldn’t believe it. The whole Internet, and this doesn’t appear once. And yet, in a perverse way, it gave her hope. Whoever sent it, they didn’t want it to be easy to understand. They knew it might be read be someone else.

It looked like Latin. She wrote it out in block capitals on a request form, then accosted the librarian at the Reference Enquiries desk.

‘Do you know what this means?’

The librarian, a tall black woman in an extravagantly patterned dress, pulled on her glasses.

‘“He dedicated the arch as a sign of triumph.”’

‘Do you know where it comes from?’

The glasses came off. ‘At a guess? From a triumphal arch.’

‘Is it possible to find out which one?’

‘You could try the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. It’s a catalogue of all the Latin inscriptions which survive from the Roman Empire. If it is Roman, of course. It could be a Second World War memorial.’ She saw Abby’s blank look and sighed. ‘People still wrote them in Latin.’

She scribbled a shelfmark number below the Latin and pointed Abby across the reading room. It wasn’t hard to find: the Corpus volumes took up most of a shelf, and probably weighed more than a human body. But they were well organised. In five minutes Abby found what she wanted. The full text of the inscription that ended with the line, ‘He dedicated this arch as a sign of his trumph.’ And underneath, the location.

Rome. Arch of Constantine.

Rome, Italy – Present Day

Once, voyagers bound for Rome landed at Ostia, the thriving port at the mouth of the Tiber river. But the harbour had silted up centuries ago, first burying the ancient city and then preserving it for future generations of tourists and archaeologists. Now, visitors landed three miles away on the other side of the river, at Fiumicino Airport. Abby took the train in to Rome and checked in to a small hotel in the Trastavere quarter. She could barely sit still.

It was only mid-afternoon. She had hours to kill before the meeting. She bought herself a guidebook and took a cab to the forum. On her right, across a bare excavation, a huge brick building rose up the hill in expanding concentric curves. Trajan’s Market, the guidebook called it, and when she went inside it was breathtakingly easy to imagine it as a shopping mall. She’d thought that most Roman ruins were either two- dimensional foundations, or hollowed-out shells like the Colosseum. But this seemed to be perfectly preserved: an open atrium overlooked by three full stories of galleries above. She was disappointed to learn that they’d probably housed government offices, rather than shops.

She wandered through galleries of sculpture and fragments recovered from the ruins of the Roman forum until she found the hall she wanted. Funerary Architecture. The exhibits were displayed in mock-stone cabinets that had been erected around the room to mimic tombs. You had to stoop to see inside.

Fragment of a grave plaque, 4th century AD said the placard. Her breath came faster as she read the inscription printed underneath. UT VIVENTES ADTIGATIS MORTUOS NAVIGATE. To reach the living, navigate the dead. She took Gruber’s piece of paper out of her pocket and compared it. Exactly the same.

But the tomb was empty – nothing but a blank, black wall. A forlorn card taped to the backing offered a meek apology in three languages: This item is temporarily unavailable.

A young security guard sat on a stool in the corner. Abby went over and forced a smile. ‘Do you speak English?’

A nod, and a warm smile in return.

‘Do you know what happened to this piece?’

A solemn look came over him. ‘It has been stolen. One night two months ago, a gang broke in and took it.’

Something tightened inside her. ‘That’s terrible.’ She looked around the room. Red lights blinked at her from the dark corners. ‘Aren’t there alarms?’

‘They were professional. The hill behind here is very steep – it is simple to come on the roof. They climbed