Lies Sleeping

20 A Slave’s Flattery

The next day I spent the morning going through Camilla Turner’s email archive. I started by identifying as many of her contacts as possible to add to her nominal file – I did a preliminary cross-check against her colleagues at MOLA and requested that the Inside Inquiry Office run them through the PNC to see if anything nefarious popped out. Then I checked through all the messages from John Chapman’s email address. There was no obvious difference in the writing style between the early emails and the ones sent after he was shot to death in Cleveland.

Then I went hunting with a variety of keyword searches: Dark Ages and various spellings of sub- and post-Roman, which turned up in three quarters of the emails – so no real help there. I had more luck with Excalibur. Here there were a couple of exchanges where Chapman was pushing the Saxon sword-in-the-lake theory. There were similar discussions around the historicity of Arthur and Merlin, but nothing about Lancelot. Presumably because he was too French.

And, probably because I was spooked by Abigail’s discovery the night before, I tried ‘Genius Loci’ and the names of the rivers. The results were sparse and mostly related to digs located near watercourses. But one exchange caught my eye.

>I’m curious did you ever find offerings to a tutelary spirt associated with the river walbrook

Nothing that indicates a specific religious ceremony but it can be hard to separate offerings from lost items and outright rubbish.

And then, on the next exchange, ‘John’ makes a point of asking Camilla to keep a look out for evidence. And again in the next email he offers a bonus if she can point him in the right direction. The overture is much more blatant than previous requests and since Chapman was dead by this point I had to assume that the request was coming, directly or indirectly, from Martin Chorley.

I tagged the exchange and linked it to the prep notes for Camilla’s upcoming interview. Guleed was taking it that afternoon, so she might find it a useful angle of approach. Multiple angles of approach being what we use nowadays as a replacement for proffered cigarettes and/or physical intimidation.

He liked to fling a wide net, did our Martin Chorley. From magically inclined lawyers to cash-strapped archaeologists. From predatory development firms to old-fashioned criminal gangs. But what the fuck was it all in aid of? Even Carey, who took a more results-orientated approach to policing, wanted to know that.

Kill Punch and use the released potential magic to . . . what? Take over the world? The city? The Tri-State area? Cover all the world in a second darkness?

I finished up a couple of minor actions that mostly involved phoning confused archaeologists and asking them whether they knew a certain John Chapman or the Paternoster Society. And had anyone approached them asking for details about the London Mithraeum dig? Which netted a ton of names, including journalists and a couple of ‘nutters’ – the archaeologist’s word not mine – who claimed to be practising Mithraists and wanted support to claim back their temple from Bloomberg.

‘Good luck with that,’ the archaeologist had told them. ‘Let me know how it works out.’

The mystery cultists had never come back but I got their names off the archaeologist and made a note. I also got a contact address which sparked my interest because it was on Carter Lane – right next to St Paul’s. So, after a couple of hours of mixed training and a shower I grabbed the Hyundai and headed for the City.

I let the City Police know I was prowling around on their patch and parked up in Dean’s Court. The address turned out to be the St Paul’s Youth Hostel, which sits in the Square Mile like an ideal from an earlier age. It’s a surprisingly large late Victorian building which takes up almost a block just south of the cathedral. That this potential exciting new retail and office development was currently occupied by the Youth Hostel Association was probably a source of psychic pain for every right-thinking developer that walked past it.

They hung the YHA flag from a short pole over the front door just to rub in.

Inside the walls were painted all cheerful reds and blues with sturdy modern fittings and corkboards smothered in flyers and personal messages.

At the reception desk was a cheerful Asian guy in a red sweatshirt who, once I’d made it clear I wasn’t there to arrest him, or anyone else, fell over himself to be helpful. Back when I was less experienced I’d have found that behaviour suspicious but now I know it’s actually how most of the public behaves when the constabulary drops unexpectedly into their lives.

He introduced me to his manager, a short white guy called Daniel, who explained that the Paternoster Society did indeed rent a section of the building known as the annexe.

‘I always thought it was a strange arrangement,’ he said. ‘We could have used that space to expand. But every time I brought up the subject I was told that there was an “arrangement”.’

He assumed that the rent was still being paid, because they hadn’t been evicted, but said that the whole thing was above his pay grade. I got him to give me the name of his supervisor – presumably the person at the correct pay grade – and mentally actioned a financial search to see where the money was coming from. According to Special Constable Nguyễn, the deliberate complexity that shields businesses from investigation can backfire.

‘They get so confusing that the perpetrators lose track of their own assets,’ she’d said over drinks after a training session. ‘All it takes is one forgotten string and you can unravel the whole scheme.’

The moral of that story being never run a game of Hide the Lady if you can’t remember where you’ve put the queen, because some people embrace forensic accounting as a blood sport.

The supervisor showed me around to a side door which opened to reveal a staircase going straight up two floors. The lack of a hallway was a key indicator that it had been retrofitted into the original building, but the high quality hardwood skirting board and the finished quality of the riser suggested that the refit dated from the 1930s. The energy saving bulb that dangled from a cord overhead was still warming up, so the blue painted walls looked faded and grey.

I asked the supervisor to give me the keys and stay at the bottom of the stairs.

The youth hostel, according to its website, had been built as a school for St Paul’s choirboys. Which might explain the faint sense of soprano singing and nervous wee that I got when I brushed the walls of the staircase with my hand on the way up. At the top was another exterior style panelled door with a Chubb lock – fortunately one of the keys fitted, so I didn’t have to cut that.

Just to be on the safe side I pushed the door open with my extendable baton and checked the threshold for tripwires, light cells and demon traps. The floor was a scuffed herringbone parquet that desperately needed polishing. The wood was a light brown and there were no obvious patterns of discolouration or stains to mark where a booby trap might go. Once I was sure the floor wasn’t going to kill me, I paused in the doorway to have a look around.

It looked old, but felt off. And at first I couldn’t tell why. It was a high-ceilinged first floor room with large sash windows sealed with internal wooden shutters. I cautiously left the lights off as I crossed the shadowy room, lifted the latch and opened the first of the shutters. The furniture was antique, nineteenth century and early twentieth century walnut tables and the sort of overstuffed armchairs that littered the Folly. A series of glass-fronted bookshelves lined two walls while the remaining wall space was taken up with a random collection of prints and paintings, mostly views of St Paul’s and surrounding streets and a big reproduction of Sir James Thornhill’s 1712 portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. I recognised it because we have a reproduction of the same painting in the lecture room back at the Folly. The great man is wearing his own hair for a change and without his wig he looks scrawny, vexed and a dead ringer for Ian McDiarmid in Revenge of the Sith – just before Samuel L. Jackson rearranges his face for him. Underneath was a plaque inscribed with the words:

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Which was when I realised what was troubling me. The room was like a bad copy of the Folly, done up by somebody who’d been there a couple of times and fancied the ambience.

I noticed a glass-fronted case mounted on the wall opposite the Newton portrait. It was made of dark mahogany varnished to a warm glow. The sort of thing where you might display a large fish. I looked inside. It was empty and there was a silver strip with the words IN CASE OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST NEED – BREAK GLASS.

Not a fish, then – a sword. And three guesses which one.

I pulled on my evidence gloves and did a quick rummage through the drawers and bookcases. There wasn’t much in the way of dust; the corners had been swept regularly and there were no spiderwebs in the corners or between the bookcases and the walls. Somebody, and I doubted it was the people who thought that an Excalibur joke was funny, had cleaned the place regularly.

We did track her down later – a Romanian woman who insisted her name was Lana Stacey – but she’d had her own key and always cleaned first thing Saturday morning. She’d never met any of the members of the Paternoster Society. Neither had any of the youth hostel staff.

There were obvious gaps on the shelves where books had been removed, either singly or in groups. There was a lot of archaeology and history. Mostly what Postmartin calls the ‘barbarian wave’ school of historiography. I called him in Oxford and sent him some pictures – he said he would be down that afternoon. Then I contacted Nightingale and the Inside Inquiry Office in case they thought it worth sending a forensic team over. I doubted it, but you never know.

I cautiously touched the case where the sword had probably been kept.

I couldn’t sense anything, but wood is terrible at retaining vestigia.

Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that Arthur would return.

What if he needed a bit of help?

Was that what Martin Chorley was about?

I kept my eye on the case and phoned Isis.

‘Peter,’ she said when she picked up. ‘What a lovely surprise. You’re not phoning to cancel tomorrow, are you? Oxley would be devastated – you know how he likes to tell you his stories. Especially now that he’s worn them out up here.’

‘Nah, we’re still on,’ I said. ‘Barring emergencies. I wondered whether you’d had a chance to talk to the Old Man yet?’

‘Oh,’ said Isis, sounding surprised. ‘That. Has that become important?’

I looked over at the empty sword case and the inscription below it and said that I thought it might have done.

‘I’ll pop over and have a chat before we head down to meet you,’ she said.

After the call I opened the shutters on one of the windows. They looked north over a courtyard and beyond that, rearing over the roofs opposite, was the white dome of St Paul’s.