She switched off the light, and the altarpiece was once again in shadow.
Gris Marsala climbed back up the scaffolding while Quart left through the vestry. Instead of going straight out, he took a look around. A very dark, damaged painting, an unsigned Annunciation, hung on one of the walls. There was also a battered carving of Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus, a crucifix, two dented brass candelabra, an enormous mahogany chest of drawers and a cupboard. He stood in the middle of the room, looking, then went and opened drawers at random. They contained missals, liturgical objects, vestments. In the cupboard he found a pair of chalices, a monstrance, an ancient brass ciborium, and half a dozen chasubles. Quart closed the drawers without touching anything. The parish was obviously not prosperous.
The vestry had two doors. One of them gave access to the church via the small chapel with the confessional through which Quart had entered. The other door led out into the square through a narrow hall that was also the entrance to the priest's living quarters. A staircase led to a landing lit by a skylight. Quart glanced at his watch. He knew that Father Ferro and Father Oscar were at the archbishop's palace attending an administrative meeting which had been conveniently suggested by Quart himself. If all went well, he had about half an hour.
He walked slowly up the creaking wooden stairs. The door at the top was locked; but finding a way round such obstacles was part of the job. The most difficult lock Quart had ever come across in his career was at the Dublin home of a certain Irish bishop. It had an alphanumeric combination, and he had to crack the code at the door itself, by the light of his Maglite, using a scanner connected to his laptop. The bishop, a rosy-cheeked red-haired little man named Mulcahy, was later summoned urgently to Rome. There, the prelate's cheeks turned pale when he was presented with a copy of the correspondence between himself and members of the IRA by a stern Monsignor Spada letters that the bishop had been unwise enough to keep, filed in chronological order, behind the volumes of the Summa Teologica lined up on his library shelves. This curbed Monsignor Mulcahy's nationalist fervour and convinced the special units of the SAS that it was no longer necessary to eliminate the man physically. According
to information obtained by IEA informers, this rather drastic step had been planned -at a cost of ten thousand pounds charged to the secret funds of the Foreign Office for the upcoming visit of the bishop to his colleague in Londonderry. An operation for which the British intended Loyalist paramilitaries to be blamed.
The lock on Don Priamo Ferro's door, an old-fashioned, conventional type, was no problem. Examining it briefly, Quart took a slim metal strip from his pocket and inserted it into the hole. He moved the strip gently, without forcing it, until he felt several small clicks. Then he turned the knob and opened the door.
He walked along the corridor, looking around. The accommodation was modest, consisting of two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom and small sitting room. Quart started with the sitting room but found nothing of interest other than a photograph in one of the sideboard drawers. It was a poor-quality Polaroid snapshot of an Andalusian patio. The floor of the patio was decorated with a mosaic, and there were pots of flowers and a tiled fountain. It showed Don Priamo Ferro, as ever in his long black cassock, sitting at a table set for breakfast, or possibly tea. There were two women beside him: an old lady, dressed in light, summery, slightly dated clothes, and the other one was Macarena Bruner. They were all three smiling at the camera. It was the first time Quart had seen Father Ferro smile, and the old priest looked quite different from the man Quart had met at the church and in the archbishop's office. The smile made him seem younger, softening the hard expression of his black eyes and stubborn chin, unshaven as always. It made him look gentle and sad. More innocent, more human.
Quart put the photograph in his pocket and shut the drawer. He went over to a portable typewriter on a small desk and took off the cover. By professional reflex, he inserted a sheet of paper in the roller and tapped several keys. That way he'd have a sample, in case he ever needed to identify anything typed on the machine. He folded the sheet and put it in his pocket with the photograph. There were about twenty books lined up on the sideboard. He glanced over them, opening some and checking to see if anything was hidden behind them. They were all on religious themes, well-thumbed volumes the liturgy, a 1992 edition of the Catechism, two volumes of Latin quotations, the Dictionary of the Ecclesiastical History of Spain, Urdanoz's History of Philosophy, and Menendez y Pelayo's three volume History of Spanish Heterodoxy. Not the kind of book Quart would have expected. He was surprised, too, to find several books on astronomy. He leafed through them curiously but found nothing significant. The rest of the books were of no interest, except, possibly, the only novel there: a very old, battered paperback copy of The Devil's Advocate; Quart detested Morris West's bestsellers with their tormented priests. A paragraph was underlined in ballpoint pen.