There were also several sheets of A4 paper that he presumed Jackie had used to write herself notes, as he found shopping lists and to-do lists on a few of them. One of these interested him, and he put that piece of paper to one side, together with another, apparently blank, sheet.
When the computer was ready for use, Bronson checked what programs were installed and then scanned through the “My documents” folder, looking for anything unusual, but found nothing. Then he checked the e-mail client, looking in both the “Inbox” and “Sent items,” again without result. Finally, he opened the Web browser—like most people, the Hamptons had used Internet Explorer—and looked at the Web sites Jackie had visited recently. Or rather, he tried to. There were no sites listed in the history, so he checked the program settings. That puzzled him, and he leaned back in the black leather office chair with a frown.
“What is it?” Mark asked, closing the door of the cupboard they used to store their stationery.
“I don’t know that it’s anything, really. Was Jackie an experienced computer user? I mean, would she have fiddled about with program settings, that kind of thing?”
Mark shook his head. “Not a chance. She used the word processor and the spreadsheet, sent and received e-mails and did a bit of surfing on the Internet.
Nothing else. Why?”
“I’ve just checked the settings for Internet Explorer, and pretty much everything uses the default values, including the history, which is set for twenty days.”
“So?”
“Despite the default setting, there are no sites at all listed in the program’s history, so somebody must have deleted them. Could Jackie have done that?”
“No,” Mark said firmly. “She would have had no idea how to do it and, in any case, why would she have wanted to?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Back in the kitchen, Mark made coffee while Bronson sat down at the table, the papers in front of him.
“Right, then,” Mark said, carrying two mugs across the room. “What have you found?”
“Apart from the anomaly with the computer, I picked up a shopping list and what looks like a blank piece of paper.”
“That doesn’t sound promising—or even very interesting.”
Bronson shrugged. “It might be nothing, but it’s a bit odd. The shopping list, for example. It’s got the usual kinds of things you’d expect to find on it, like groceries and stuff, but right at the bottom is ‘Latin dictionary.’ There’s a line through the words, so either Jackie changed her mind or she went out and bought one and then crossed out the entry when she’d done so.”
“She bought it,” Mark said. “I saw a Latin-Italian dictionary on the bookshelf in the study. I didn’t bother mentioning it, because it didn’t seem important. But why would she want a Latin dictionary?”
“Maybe because of this,” Bronson said, holding up the blank sheet of paper. “There’s no writing on either side of this sheet, but when I looked at it I saw faint indentations, as if Jackie had written something on another piece of paper on top of this one. There are four letters altogether, printed in block capitals, and they’re reasonably clear. The letters are ‘H,’ ‘I,’ ‘C’ and ‘V.’ Those letters, in that order, are not a part of any word I can think of in English.”
“ ‘CV’ could refer to someone’s curriculum vitae,” Mark suggested.
“But what about the ‘HI’?”
“Apart from the obvious, I’ve no idea.”
“I think the dictionary Jackie bought might be a clue. I studied Latin, believe it or not, and
“Are you serious? Jackie had enough trouble with Italian. Why would she be messing about with Latin?”
“I’m guessing here. Apart from this piece of paper, I’ve seen nothing anywhere in this house that looks like a Latin text, but I suspect Jackie found or was given something that had a Latin phrase written on it. That would certainly explain the dictionary.”
Bronson paused for a few seconds, because what he was about to suggest was less a leap of logic than a quantum leap.
“What is it?” Mark asked, seeing the uncertainty on Bronson’s face.
“I’m trying to make some sense of this. We’ve got a newly bought Latin dictionary, and the impression of what could be a Latin word on a sheet of paper, but no sign of the top sheet. That means somebody’s definitely been into the study, unless Jackie herself removed the top sheet and then destroyed it. But what worries me most of all is the deletion of the browsing history from Internet Explorer.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I don’t want to make too much of this, but suppose Jackie found something, here in the house or maybe in the grounds, something with a Latin expression written on it.
She didn’t understand what it meant, so she bought a Latin dictionary. She’d probably have preferred a Latin-English version, but couldn’t find one. She tried to translate the text, but found she couldn’t make sense of it with the Italian dictionary.
“So Jackie did what most people in that situation would do. She logged on to a search engine, found a Latin translation service and input the phrase. Now,”
Bronson said, “the next stage is pure conjecture, but it does make sense, to me at least.
“Maybe some organization, somewhere, put a form of Internet-monitoring service in place, watching for any requests to translate certain expressions from ancient languages. Technically, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to set up, as long as the translation service Web sites were willing to cooperate. When Jackie input the Latin phrase into the search engine, it raised a flag, and perhaps even identified the address where the computer that generated the query was located—”
“Hang on a minute,” Mark interrupted. “Why the hell would anyone today have the slightest interest in somebody trying to translate a two-thousand-year-old—or whatever—bit of Latin?”
“I’ve not the slightest idea, but nothing else seems to make sense. If I’m right, whoever put the monitoring service in place then came here, to this house, to search for whatever Jackie had found. It was
“And, in the process,” Bronson finished sadly, “I think Jackie just got in their way.”
III
Pierro reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a brown envelope. He looked around the cafe’, checking that nobody else was in earshot—a superfluous precaution with Gregori Mandino’s two men acting as watchdogs— and placed several photographs on the table in front of Vertutti.
He recognized the images immediately: they were close-up views of the inscribed stone.
“When I’d concluded that there was no secret message hidden in the inscription,”
Pierro went on, “I started looking at the stone itself, and there are two obvious clues in its shape. First, look at the four edges of the slab.”
Vertutti bent forward over the table and stared at two of the pictures, side by side, but saw nothing he hadn’t previously noticed. He shook his head.
“The edges,” Pierro prompted gently. He took a short ruler out of his pocket, placed it on one of the photographs and aligned it with the top of the stone. He repeated the process with the left and right sides of the image.
“You see now?” he asked. “The top edge and both sides of the slab are absolutely straight. But now do the same to the bottom of the stone.”
Vertutti took the ruler and positioned it carefully. And then he saw what the academic was driving at: with the ruler in place, it was obvious that the bottom edge of the stone was very slightly out of true.
“That’s the first point,” Pierro said. “If the Romans—or whoever prepared this slab—could get three of the edges straight, why couldn’t they do the same with the fourth? And the second clue is related to the first. Look closely at the position of the carving. If you study it, you’ll see that the words are centered on the stone from left to
