Lies Sleeping

18 The Tea Committee

We held a meeting of the ‘Tea Committee’ in the upstairs reading room. The Tea Committee consisted of me, Nightingale and other interested parties – in this case Postmartin and Dr Walid – where we thrashed out any policy involving magic. This was part of our agreement with Seawoll to avoid ‘distracting’ his ‘normal’ officers from doing their jobs properly.

‘I have come to the conclusion,’ Seawoll had said during one of the initial planning meetings that set up Operation Jennifer, ‘that if we can’t ignore it we can at least paint it pink and make it somebody else’s problem.’

Dr Vaughan was off on a training course, but Abigail was allowed to be present as long as she kept her mouth shut and took notes.

We quickly reached the consensus that despite Lesley’s opinion – that it would make the world a better place – we didn’t think anything good was going to come of offing Mr Punch. Especially now we knew he was a god.

‘Although wouldn’t dealing with Punch in and of itself be a bonus?’ asked Dr Walid, who’d spent a gruesome six months working with what was left of his victims the last time the little hook-nosed bastard had made his presence known.

I pointed out that, according to Bev, half the ecological disasters in the world occurred when people removed ‘pests’ or predators without thinking through the consequences.

Nightingale asked for an example, but all I could think of offhand were snakes – which if eliminated lead to a massive increase in rats. Even as I said it, I had a horrible feeling that I’d read it in a fantasy book once – possibly a comical one.

I looked over at Abigail, who tilted her head to one side in a disturbingly Molly-like way and made a note.

‘You believe removing Punch might disrupt the . . .’ Dr Walid paused to dredge up his medical Greek. ‘Eidolonisphere.’

Nightingale smiled.

‘From Eidolon,’ explained Postmartin. ‘Greek for phantom or ghost – indeed quite apropos because it commonly refers to a phantasm or ghost that possessed the living.’

‘Eidolosphere scans better,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know what effect it will have, but in any complex system if you change one variable it can cause unpredictable effects throughout that system.’

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘But this doesn’t get us any closer to learning what Martin Chorley wants to happen.’

‘We need to find a way to turn Lesley,’ I said.

Nightingale sighed.

‘Our last attempt in that direction hardly went well,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘If anyone knows what Martin Chorley is up to, then it’s going to be her.’

Nobody round the table liked the idea, but nobody could argue with the logic.

‘How?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But perhaps when she next gets in touch with me I’ll just ask for a meeting.’

‘You seem very sure she’ll be in touch,’ said Postmartin.

‘Oh, she’ll be in touch,’ I said. ‘If only to complain about us arresting Zach.’

Nightingale gave me a long cool look, but didn’t insult me by saying that I shouldn’t do anything without checking with him first. After a moment he nodded gravely.

‘Yes, ee should make another attempt.’ He raised a finger. ‘If the opportunity arises.’

Dr Walid wanted to know if there was any literature relating to the death or killing of powerful genii locorum. We knew of a couple of incidents for sure – the River Lugg in Herefordshire – ‘Done in by Methodists’, apparently. And less powerful entities who vanished after their locus – pond, house, or in one well-documented case, ship-of-the-line – was destroyed or disrupted.

Postmartin admitted that there was plenty of material as yet uncatalogued, both in the Folly proper and back at the ‘special’ stacks in Oxford.

‘I believe there may be some relevant American material in the Library,’ said Nightingale.

‘I don’t suppose you remember where?’ I asked.

Nightingale frowned.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.

‘That’s going to be a slog.’

We all looked at Abigail, who was smiling a self-satisfied smile at her notebook.

So Postmartin returned to Oxford to rummage through his stacks while Abigail disappeared into the Magical Library, armed only with a notebook, a second-hand laptop and a look of cheerful determination.

I went back to the Outside Inquiry Office and found my in-tray full of actions that had been piling up while I’d been mucking around with metaphysics. The most urgent regarded one Camilla Turner, an archaeologist at MOLA, who had deleted her entire email archive the morning of the raid. One of the analysts in the Inside Inquiry Office had spotted this and flagged it as suspicious. Since wrangling the lost emails out of the ISP would probably involve further permission from the Home Office, it was suggested that I go and restatement Ms Turner in the hope she’d just give us permission to recover them ourselves. I wondered why I was being singled out for this job until I saw the photograph attached to her nominal file and realised that Ms Turner was the skeleton lady I’d met in the MOLA offices.

I gave MOLA a call and found that Camilla Turner hadn’t turned up for work that morning, so I got her address off the Inside Inquiry Office and found myself heading for Dalston, where she had the top half of a terrace on Parkholme Road. She’d bought the place in the mid-eighties when it was half derelict and respectable people didn’t live in Hackney. As an early pioneer of gentrification she was sitting on a couple of million in housing equity, which she could liberate if only she was willing to move somewhere dire – like Bromley or somewhere outside the M25. Sensibly, she’d decided to stay put.

There was a silver intercom bolted onto the wall beside the front door with, as is usual, no actual names written on the tags by the buzzers. I guessed top button, waited, pressed again, waited, and repeated a couple of times before trying the bottom.

An elderly male voice with a distinctive Caribbean accent asked me what I wanted.

I told him I was the police and that I was concerned about the welfare of his neighbour and if he could just buzz me in I wouldn’t bother him any further.

The intercom cut off, then, half a minute later, I heard the front door being manually unlocked from the inside before opening about a quarter of the way to reveal an old black guy.

He was a touch shorter than me, with a cropped Afro that was mostly grey and a matching neatly trimmed beard. He was the light colour some old black guys go, with freckles across his cheeks, a strong jaw and dark suspicious eyes.

He was also strangely familiar.

‘What kind of concern exactly?’ he asked.

‘We think she might be in danger,’ I said.

‘From whom?’

‘Some quite serious criminals.’

‘Show me your identification.’

So I got out my warrant card and held it up while he peered at it.

‘How come a nice boy like you join the police?’

‘I didn’t join the police,’ I said. ‘They joined me.’

He gave this some consideration before nodding and opening the door to let me in.

Crudely carved out of the original Victorian hallway, the atrium was gloomy and overheated. The door to the ground floor flat was ajar while the second, presumably for upstairs, was firmly shut.

I asked the man if he knew whether Camilla Turner was in.

‘She came in last night,’ he said and then, without another word, retreated behind his own door.

I banged on Camilla’s door and yelled her name – no answer.

‘Ms Turner,’ I called again. ‘Camilla – this is Peter Grant from the police – I’m concerned for your safety. Are you in there?’

There was no answer, but I was sure I’d heard something moving on the other side.

I knocked and shouted a couple more times, just so I could write that I had at least tried that before breaking and entering.

Covertly, because I was pretty certain the neighbour was watching me through his peephole, I used an impello variant to shear off the latch bolt and swung the door open.

Beyond was a windowless staircase.

And halfway up sat Camilla Turner.

‘Hi,’ I said brightly.

Camilla stared down at me glumly.

‘I knew it was a mistake deleting those emails,’ she said. ‘That’s how you found me, isn’t it?’

I said it was, and she sighed and invited me in.

Once upstairs I gave her the caution plus two, sat her down with a cup of tea and let her incriminate herself.

The flat was pleasantly haphazard and free from the ravages of interior decoration. The collections of books that overran the other rooms had, in the living room, been constrained to a couple of antique glass-fronted bookcases. In between the bookcases, and over the genuine period fireplace, were framed sketches and watercolours, landscapes mostly, interspersed with old photographs of people, singly and in groups. The bay window overlooking the street sported that classic of 1970s interior design, the breezeblock and plank shelf with potted plants ranged across the top and stacks of magazines along the bottom.

I’d loitered in the kitchen doorway while the tea was made, but then let myself be ushered into a wing armchair upholstered in eye-watering orange and yellow swirls some time, judging from the worn patches on the arms, in the late eighties.

‘I used to live here when it was a squat,’ said Camilla. ‘Then a bunch of us bought it off the landlord. And then I bought them out one by one.’

It was a vaguely plausible scenario, but it wasn’t enough to stop one of our analysts going through her financial history with a nit comb. Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it’s one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.

I waited until she had a soothing cup of tea in her hand to ask why she’d deleted her emails.

‘I panicked,’ she said. ‘I heard that they’d given you access to the office intranet.’

‘They’ being MOLA management.

‘But why did that worry you?’

‘Because I told them when the New Change material was in the loading bay,’ she said.

I asked who ‘them’ was.

‘I thought . . . ’ she said, and sipped her tea, ‘I thought it was the Paternoster Society. But of course I probably knew it wasn’t. Really. Better to say it was somebody I met through the Paternoster Society.’

‘Does this person have a name?’

‘John Chapman,’ she said.

I made a note and confirmed that the emails had come from his address.

‘When did you get the last email?’

‘Tuesday week,’ she said. ‘That would be the thirtieth.’

I didn’t tell her that John Chapman had been dead for almost six months – that sort of stuff you save up if you can, the better to spook the witness later.

‘What was your first contact with the . . .’ I made a point of checking my notes. ‘The Paternoster Society, and who are they?’

‘They’re a . . . Well, I thought they were a historical society,’ she said. ‘There are thousands of them all over the country. Ordinary people with a keen interest in history or archaeology. They’ve been known to conduct some very useful digs – especially these days when funding is tight.’

They’d got in touch with her back when MOLA was still part of the Museum of London proper.

‘Originally they recruited me to identify their sword,’ she said.

‘Which sword was that?’ I asked, but was already busily guessing the answer.

‘An extraordinarily well-preserved Post-Roman sword that I easily identified as being of Saxon manufacture, possibly fifth or sixth century,’ she said. ‘Assuming it wasn’t a fake of course.’

‘What made you think it might be a fake?’

‘When I say it was extraordinarily well preserved, I mean it was practically pristine,’ she said, and held out her hands as if holding up an invisible sword for my inspection. ‘I’ve certainly never recovered anything myself that well preserved. And it didn’t help that the provenance was a bit dodgy. Dug up by an Enlightenment antiquarian – William Winston Galt.’

‘Where was it found?’

As if I didn’t know.

‘Allegedly, during the excavation of a cellar in Paternoster Row in the eighteenth century,’ she said.

‘Was it genuine?’ I asked. ‘Could you date it?’

‘Well, you can’t get a C-14 date from steel and the handle had been rebound – probably in the seventeen hundreds by Galt.’

Antiquarians being notorious romantics and, with some notable exceptions, prone to embellishing their finds to suit their narrative and generally making shit up to suit themselves.

‘And in any case leather is rarely used to bind hilts until the medieval period,’ said Camilla.

Fortunately our William had done a characteristically sloppy job, and some of the original handle material had been trapped underneath the new bindings. Antler in this case – from a red deer.

‘I know some people at the University of York who’ve developed a new technique called ZooMS,’ she said. ‘Stands for ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry. There was just enough to get a result.’

‘And what was the date?’

Camilla smiled. ‘Fifth century,’ she said. ‘I still think it’s possible it was a hoax, that somebody planted the sample to give a false reading, but I think the likelihood is low.’

Which is as close as you’re going to get to certainty from a modern archaeologist.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I dated the leather in the later binding and got a date in the seventeen hundreds,’ she said. ‘So either we must posit that old William Galt somehow anticipated modern carbon dating when assembling his hoax, or that the original binding, and by extension the sword, were authentically fifth century.’

‘Or both bindings were added recently using historical materials,’ I said.

‘Well, yes. As another remote possibility – this is why context is so important.’

But it had felt old to Camilla.

And I wondered about that sensation.

‘I expected it to get auctioned or be sold to a museum,’ said Camilla, ‘but John Chapman said they planned a museum of their own. An Arthurian museum, would you believe?’

This made total sense to Camilla because with the right marketing you’d hoover up a substantial portion of the fifteen million foreign tourists that visited London every year. Especially the Americans.

‘I read somewhere that two thirds of Americans believe Arthur was a real historical figure,’ she said. ‘Extraordinarily depressing on one level, but terribly good for business.’

‘So you think it’s Excalibur?’ I asked.

‘God, no. Most likely it was forged for a high status Anglo-Saxon and then “sacrificed” in a sacred pool.’

‘Once you’d dated the sword, did you continue your relationship with the Paternoster Society?’ I asked.

Camilla said that she had, but not in any regular fashion. They’d invite her out for drinks occasionally. John Chapman would seek her opinion on some historical question or other – mostly relating to late antiquity or the Post-Roman period. ‘“Keeping up with the field,” they said.’

‘They?’

‘Well, John mostly.’

‘John Chapman?’

‘That’s right.’

They’d met in the Rising Sun near Smithfield Market. It was just for a friendly chat, and God knew it was a relief to talk shop with someone who wasn’t going on and on about their lack of funding and the scarcity of resources.

‘Archaeologists can be tiresome about such things, I’m afraid,’ she said.

I nodded absently as I made a note of the pub. The Rising Sun drinking establishment exists right on the fringes of the demi-monde – not being nearly as antique or mysterious as it pretends to be. You wouldn’t catch Zach in there, even if he wasn’t barred. But it would be the logical watering hole for dilettante practitioners like John Chapman.

‘Were you romantically involved?’ I asked, which got a short little laugh.

‘Nothing like that,’ she said.

Which left revenge or money, and I wasn’t going to bet on revenge.

‘So just drinks then?’ I said. ‘Nothing else?’

‘A free drink is a free drink,’ she said. ‘And he used to commission work from me.’

I asked what kind of work and she hesitated, took a deep breath and, finally, we were there.

‘He wanted inside information about some of the digs.’ Camilla picked up her teacup, looked at it for a moment and then put it down. ‘Although I didn’t understand why he couldn’t wait for the reports – it’s not like our work is commercially sensitive.’

‘Did he seem interested in any particular topic?’

‘Late Roman, Post-Roman, early Saxon – Age of Arthur stuff. I assumed he wanted it for his museum.’

‘And in return?’

‘A bit of a retainer.’ She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Five hundred quid a month.’

Six grand a year – nice.

‘And you didn’t get suspicious?’

‘I do archaeological rescue work in the City of London. People there drop a grand on drinks – at lunchtime. So, no, I didn’t get suspicious until a bit later.’

‘How much later?’

‘When I arrived at work to find that someone had driven a truck into the front of the office and nicked the material I’d told John about two days beforehand.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘About then.’

One of the sacred pillars of police work is the timeline, ‘when’ being as important as ‘who’ and ‘how’ if you want to get a conviction. Thus the bulk of most interviews is spent nailing down, at the very least, what order events happened in, and at the very best, dates and times you can corroborate with physical evidence. So you can imagine that the police fell upon texting with cries of joy – ditto emails.

I spent some time, and a second cup of tea, getting a rough timeline off Camilla.

She’d dated the sword in 2010 and started her regular ‘chats’ with John Chapman in 2011, while I was still arresting drunks and chasing virtual flashers around Covent Garden. About the same time, Mr Chapman was vainly trying to persuade the top lawyers at Bock, Loupe and Stag that they needed to placate the spirit of riot and rebellion by sacrificing goats and spraying blood on each other.

John didn’t get back to her until the summer of 2012 – that’s when they first met at the Rising Sun and he offered her money for some ‘inside information’. That had been just after Covent Garden caught fire and then flooded during an unprecedentedly posh riot. It was also about the same time Patrick Gale was persuaded to take up the mantle of the High Priest of Bacchus/Dionysus/. . . Mr Punch?

I asked why she’d never connected the site thefts with the information she was handing over and she shrugged.

‘I don’t even remember those thefts being reported.’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but that detail could wait.

I asked when she’d last met Chapman and she said the spring of the previous year, which accorded with our records of his departure the following June. After that they’d communicated by email.

‘He said he’d got a new job that involved a lot of travelling,’ she said.

I wondered if John had continued the correspondence from Cleveland prior to his death or whether somebody else had taken over immediately.

Before I called Belgravia to send someone over to pick her up, I asked about the sword.

‘You said you felt something when you held the sword?’

‘Felt something?’

‘You said it felt old,’ I said. ‘Was that a powerful sensation? Did you feel anything else?

She frowned and gave it some thought.

‘Yes, there was a musical tone,’ she said. ‘Like the sword was singing.’