Free Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright Page A

to Canada.’
    ‘I don’t know what to say.’
    ‘When are you going back to London?’
    ‘Soon. I have research to do.’
    ‘If she calls you, try to get her to come back from Egypt immediately. And when you go to London, I want you to call my brother and give him a message. At this moment I cannot call him or even email him or use social media. Everybody is watching us. Richard, I believe Noor is in danger. Will you do it?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘I will send my driver to the École Biblique with the message for you to give my brother, with his phone number.’
    The term ‘social media’ is discordant here in the thickening biblical light. We settle down with Turkish coffee. I ask her about the art of the Crusaders.
    ‘Yes, Prosper told me and I have some suggestions for you about where to look. Let me give you an example. Have you heard of the Chinon Parchments?’
    ‘No. I haven’t.’
    ‘Well in 2001 an academic, Barbara Frale, a palaeographer working in the Vatican Secret Archives, found parchments which had never been catalogued, or a copy of the originals anyway, which gave new information about Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, who, as you know, were very prominent in Jerusalem and particularly in Acre. The Templars were actually founded to aid the pilgrims but became knights and fought with the Crusaders. They were very popular in France. De Molay was excommunicated and burnt at the stake on the grounds of heresy and sodomy and many of his people were killed in the power struggle. It led, really, to the end of the Templars in France. There is still a rue du Temple in the Marais in Paris. This parchment, Frale says, proves that in 1308 Pope Clement V pardoned de Molay in Chinon, and refuted all the charges against him brought by the inquisition. The Vatican has an authenticated copy of this document, and I can even give you the document number if you want it. This is the sort of thing you must look for. You may just find a hint here or a misunderstood letter there, which will lead you to the lost art. I hear that you were in Jordan looking for documents. Forget it. They are all forged. If you are looking for something unusual, the best start is to look at the collections. Some of these are wrongly assigned or catalogued, or not catalogued at all. You have to look in the records for the sort of thing you want.’
    ‘Do you know everything that is going on?’
    ‘I do my best.’
    I recognise Haneen as a prototype that I have only read about: the strong-minded, grand, intelligent woman who has outlived, and outdone, the men in her life. Richard the Lionheart’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was one of these too.
    ‘Who are you writing this paper for?’
    ‘I have a postgraduate grant from my college in Oxford.’
    As I speak it – Oxford helps my cause – my project sounds sonorous and important when in fact it may be flim-flam, just like my father’s endeavours.
    The lands dropping away down to the Dead Sea are achingly beautiful now; in the deepening darkness the folds in the hills and the clefts of the wadis have turned this landscape into a chiaroscuro. Above, as on a painter’s palette, there are smears of pink, of sherbet and of burnt umber in the sky.
    ‘Your dear father was always looking for revelation. He was convinced that there was secret stuff out there that the powers above didn’t want us to see. And here we are plagued by this kind of thing.’
    ‘Yes, I had a conversation with a taxi driver who told me that there was incontrovertible, but secret, evidence that Mossad bombed the Twin Towers.’
    ‘Oh, we all believe that. That’s a given. The one I love is the story that Mossad released trained Great White sharks to kill tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh. Absolutely true.’
    She laughs, apparently forgetting her earlier caution.
    ‘You should try to find out where the Patriarch Heraclius took the treasures in 1187. There were caravans of them. I would guess