Free Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire by Alex Archer Page B

drawing them to this isolated place, but Roux did.
    “Quite right. Well, the second reason is that one of these treasures is buried with Gerald’s remains in St. Davids. Believe me, this is not something we want falling into the wrong hands.”
    Annja nodded, taking his warning at face value. The older man knew things, but coupled with that he wasn’t prone to dire prognostications for the fun of it. If he was worried, then they should all be worried. “How do you know that it’s there?” she asked, turning to face him and taking her gaze from the road ahead for the first time.
    “I know, because I put it there.”

Chapter 12
    The old curate looked peaceful.
    His skin had turned a pallid, bloodless gray. His hair and beard looked as if it had been combed more in death than it ever had in life.
    Annja had no idea how Roux had been able to pull the strings to get them into the mortuary to see the man on the slab. Garin had stayed outside in the car.
    “He was a friend,” Roux said at last. That changed everything. Roux almost never displayed emotion. It wasn’t that he was hard so much as inured to death of all of his friends by the sheer longevity of his own life. The morgue attendant left them alone. Roux didn’t need to say any more than those four words for her to understand. In fact, it made perfect sense. It explained why he had been prepared to leave his home, why he’d summoned her, knowing she’d drop everything to be with him, and why he looked like death warmed over.
    “How long have you known him?”
    “Past tense, dear. Past tense. We’d been friends for forty years, give or take. Long enough for him to decide that I’d stashed Dorian Gray’s portrait in the attic, at any rate. He’d worked himself up through the church over the last twenty or so of them, and was a curate at the cathedral here, but my first thought now that he’s gone is that I never really paid enough attention to him. I used to come here and see him once a year, but I guess that’s what happens in life—you start to take the good things, the good people, for granted.”
    “He must have been a good friend for you to come to see him every year.”
    “Good? Yes, but more than that he was a reliable friend. He even helped me secure one of the fragments of Joan’s sword. He knew of my obsession, and now it may well be my fault that he is dead.”
    “Your fault? How could it be your fault?”
    “He was doing a job for me. I’d asked him to keep watch over the tomb of Gerald of Wales, make sure it remained undisturbed. I should have known we couldn’t keep it a secret forever. I should have done more...I should have taken it away from here and put it in a safer place. The police might have this chalked up as a mugging, but he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was exactly where he was supposed to be, watching over the sword of Giraldus Cambrensis. The police are simply looking for an easy explanation.”
    “But what about the tramp hanging around the cathedral? Do you think there’s something in that?” Annja asked. On the way in, they’d talked to the mortuary assistant, who had told them the little gossip he’d picked up during the autopsy. That a suspicious vagrant had been seen several times over the past week in the cemetery grounds around the cathedral. It was a straw, but was it one worth clutching at?
    She watched Roux tenderly pull back the sheet to reveal the Y-shaped incision that had been stitched postautopsy. “You see those?” He pointed out several burns that had gouged deep into the dead man’s flesh and the mess of melted subcutaneous fat. She did, and in truth she’d never seen anything quite like them.
    “Those are all the evidence we need to know he wasn’t killed by some hungry vagrant,” Roux said, then covered his friend up again. Annja couldn’t really argue with that. “And there is only one thing I know of that could have inflicted that wound. It is all the proof I