Free The Bosch Deception by Alex Connor

involved.
    â€˜Suspicious?’ Honor had queried. ‘In what way?’
    â€˜Claude was stabbed, but the killer had set fire to his body to try to cover his tracks … the pathologist took a while to determine the cause of death … Claude was burnt alive. He was still alive.’
    The words had reverberated in Honor’s brain. Another murder. Another victim of fire.
    â€˜Why would anyone want to kill him? Did he have any enemies?’
    â€˜He was a landscape gardener,’ Eloise had replied, almost laughing at the absurdity. ‘No one kills gardeners. Everyone liked him, got on with him. Claude was kind, considerate … But that didn’t stop someone killing him, did it?’ She had grabbed at a breath as though simply living was an effort. ‘It’s only been two days. Two days, and it feels like he’s been gone for a lifetime.’
    Honor had made a mental note to ring the French police and find out what she could about the case – or whatever they would tell her. The rest she would search for herself. The internet would have the death listed, and it would have been reported in the French newspapers. Moments later she had ended the phone conversation with Eloise Devereux, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the death of her husband.
    Getting to her feet, Honor left the cloakroom, bumping into Mark Spencer as she did so. She had the unpleasant feeling that he had been waiting for her.
    â€˜What d’you want, Mark?’
    â€˜You all right?’
    She frowned. ‘What?’
    â€˜You looked pale in the meeting,’ he smarmed. ‘I was just wondering if you were OK.’
    â€˜I’m fine.’
    â€˜Well, if there’s anything worrying you, you can always talk to me. You know, if you’re unsure about anything.’ He was flustered. ‘Like I say, if there’s anything I can do—’
    â€˜Actually there is,’ Honor replied. ‘At the next meeting, stop trying to look down the front of my blouse.’

Sixteen
    Lloyds Bank, Chelsea, London
    Hurrying out of the rain, Nicholas walked into the bank and requested his safe deposit box. A few moments later, the manager showed him into a side room and then left him alone. After he had locked the door, Nicholas sat down at the table and drew the steel box towards him. Inserting the key he carried on a chain round his neck, he unlocked it and took out twenty-eight small envelopes, each barely two inches square.
    They were numbered 1 to 28.
    He stared at them for a long time, remembering the moment he had discovered the first one. How he had drawn the tiny piece of paper out of the crack in the gold connector and smoothed it down, intrigued by the faint writing in a Gothic script. In a language he couldn’t decipher at first. All he had recognised had been the name Hieronymus Bosch, and the date 1470. With intricate care he had levered open the joins of all the other connectors, finding – as he hadexpected and hoped – twenty-seven further tiny pieces of paper with writing on them. In the same hand and apparently in the same language.
    So Sabine Monette had – on a whim – stolen a chain that turned out to be holding a secret. It hadn’t taken a genius to work out that anything concealed so carefully must be important. The question had been simple – what did the writing say? Without telling Sabine anything about his discovery, Nicholas had set about getting the words translated.
    His instinct prompted him to secrecy. He knew from the reactions of Gerrit der Keyser and Philip Preston that the chain was valuable, so how much more valuable would the writing turn out to be?
    Using a different name, he had gone online and sought help from three different university scholars, one in Cambridge, one in Holland and a third in Boston. His cover story had been simple: he was a journalist trying to translate some old copy from a