The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani

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СКАЧАТЬ one too. OK, here we go again…that’s it…enjoying it?’

      ‘I don’t know…maybe.’

      ‘I think you could be good at this, if you could relax a bit more. Ouch, my foot.’

      ‘Sorry. I did warn you.’

      ‘You’re thinking about it too much.’

      From a simple dance he could feel a million conflicting emotions. It was the strangest sensation, and he couldn’t decide whether it was pleasant or not. A warm and inviting world seemed to beckon to him. He wanted to embrace the warmth, let it into his heart again after so many years alone in the cold. Yet the moment he began to feel himself giving in to it, he stiffened, and a barrier seemed to come crashing down somewhere inside him.

      ‘Thought you had it for a moment there.’

      He pulled away. It was too much for him. It was as though his space had been invaded, his comfort zone breached after years of being alone. He threw a sidelong glance at the mini-bar.

      She saw his eye. ‘Don’t, Ben, please.’ She laid a warm hand on his.

      He looked at his watch. ‘Hey,’ he laughed nervously. ‘It’s getting late. We’ve got an early start in the morning.’

      ‘Don’t stop. It’s nice,’ she murmured. ‘Come on, we’ve had such a rotten day of it. We both need this.’

      They danced a little longer. He felt her body close to his. He ran his hand up her arm to her shoulder and caressed it. His heart was beating faster. Their heads began to move closer to one another.

      The song came to an end, and the voice of the radio presenter spoilt their moment. They stepped apart, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

      There was silence between them for a few minutes. They both knew what had come close to happening and they both, in their different ways, felt a sadness descending on them.

      Ben went over to his makeshift bed on the couch and, too tired to undress, he got into it. Roberta climbed into the vast nuptial bed and lay looking up at the canopy above. ‘I’ve never slept in one of these before,’ she said after a while.

      Silence again as they lay there on opposite sides of the dark room.

      ‘How’s the couch?’ she said.

      ‘Fine.’

      ‘Comfortable?’

      ‘I’ve slept in worse places.’

      ‘There’s room in this bed for about six people.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘I just thought.’

      He raised his head off the pillow and gazed at where she lay in the dark. ‘You’re asking me to get in the bed with you?’

      ‘O…On the bed, then,’ she stammered, embarrassed. ‘It wasn’t a come-on, if that’s what you think. I’m just a bit nervous. I could use a little company.’

      He hesitated for a few moments. Then he got up and pulled the blankets off the couch. He felt his way over to the bed, groping blindly about in the un familiar room. He moved to the far side of the bed and lay down beside her. He pulled the spare blankets over him.

      They lay there in the darkness, a wide space between them. She turned towards him, wanting to reach out to him, feeling awkward. She could hear his breathing next to her.

      ‘Ben?’ she whispered.

      ‘Yeah?’

      She hesitated before saying it. ‘Who’s the little girl in the picture?’

      He raised himself up on one elbow and looked at her. Her face was a pale blur in the moonlight.

      She yearned to put her hand out and touch him, hold him tight.

      ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ he said quietly, lying back down.

      Around two, he woke up to find her slender arm draped over his chest. She was asleep. He lay there for a time, staring upwards at the dim play of the moonlight on the canopy of the bed, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her warm body as she slept.

      The touch of her arm was a curious feeling. It was strangely electrifying, unnerving and yet deeply comforting. He let himself relax into the feel of it, closed his eyes and dozed off with a smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

43

      Ben slept less than an hour before his dreaming thoughts jerked him guiltily awake and he kicked his legs from the bed. He carefully lifted Roberta’s sleeping arm off his chest and rolled out from under it. He got up, lifted the Browning from the table and grabbed his bag.

      Finding his way by moonlight he padded quietly into the ante-room. He clicked the door softly shut behind him and flicked on a side-lamp.

      The rules of the game had changed. Suddenly it was clearer that these people, whoever they were, were after the manuscript too. He had work to do.

      The plain black jacket he’d taken from Anna’s house was still in his bag. He pulled it out and went through the pockets again. Apart from Rheinfeld’s notebook and the fake scroll that her attacker had torn out of its frame, they were empty. There wasn’t a scrap of a clue as to its owner’s identity. Who was he? A contract killer, maybe. He’d come across those people before, but never one like this, never a sick maniac who tortured women.

      He wondered about the fake scroll. Why had the man taken it down from Anna’s wall? Just like its previous owner who had passed it on to Anna, he must have been fooled by its carefully forged antiquated style and appearance. That could only mean that whoever else was looking for the manuscript had no better idea than he did exactly what it was or looked like. But certainly it was important to them. Important enough to kill for.

      He took out Rheinfeld’s notebook, pulled it from its plastic wrapping and sat down with it on a couch near the lamp. Until now, he hadn’t had a good chance to study it up close. Was Roberta right about it? Was it possible that Rheinfeld had transcribed from memory the secrets that he’d stolen from Gaston Clément? He hoped so. There was nothing else to go on.

      He turned the filthy pages slowly, scrutinizing the text and drawings. So much of it seemed like nonsense. Scattered apparently at random throughout, appearing on the corners and margins of some of the pages, were scribbled alternating combinations of letters and numbers. Some of the combinations were long, some short. He flipped back and forth and counted nine of these scribbles. They reminded him a little of Klaus Rheinfeld’s ravings on Anna’s dictaphone recording.

      N 18 N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15 22 R 20 R 15

       U 11 R 9 E 11 E 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A 13 A 18 E 23 A 22 R 15 O

      What to make of them? To his eye they looked like a code of some kind. Perhaps a set of alchemical formulae. None of them seemed to relate to anything else on whatever page they appeared. Whatever significance they had, it was impenetrable.

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