The Tainted Relic

EPILOGUE

Greenwich, London, 2005

The turbid waters of the Thames swirled around the bend in the river, like dirty cocoa in some gigantic drainpipe. Half a dozen workmen in their yellow hard hats fussed over the unloading of steel girders from a barge that was moored to a landing stage on the south shore. A telescopic crane mounted on the back of a huge truck was swinging the two-ton girders around in a wide arc to deposit them on the ground behind the wharf. The Millennium Dome was undergoing yet another facelift to try to establish some enterprise that might at last allow the place to start making a profit.

The foreman looked back at the unlovely hemisphere as he took out a narrow tin to roll himself a skinny cigarette. ‘Waste of time, this job. The bloody place is cursed!’ he muttered pessimistically.

Yelling ‘Take five!’ to the other men, he gestured to the crane driver. Stefan Kozlowski locked his controls and left a girder swaying gently twenty feet above the ground. Clambering down, he gratefully arched his aching back and, lighting a cigarette, ambled along the debris-strewn foreshore beyond the landing stage to stretch his legs. After he had walked a few yards, a glint of yellow caught his eye, and he bent to pick up what he hoped was a gold coin.

It was embedded in the old mud well above the high-tide mark, and when he pulled it, a small glass tube slid reluctantly from the filth with a sucking sound. When he wiped the top, it glistened, but when he scratched it with a fingernail, Stefan saw that what shone in the sunlight was just the peeling remains of gold leaf.

Idly, he pulled out the tight-fitting bung from the mud-smeared tube and shook out what was inside. To his disgust, it was just a piece of rotted wood, sodden and crumbling. He poked it around his palm with a finger, then shrugged and put it back in the vial. Just above him on the bank was one of the large rubbish skips that dotted the construction site around the Dome, and with an overarm toss that would have done credit to a Test cricketer, he sent the disappointing object sailing up into the skip.

Soon there was another yell from the foreman, ordering everyone back to work, and with a sigh Stefan trudged back towards his crane. He didn’t much like his job, but it was better than being unemployed in Cracow. As he passed under the load he had left suspended, disdaining all those stupid British Health and Safety Regulations, there was another frantic scream from his foreman.

Later, when the ambulances, the police cars and the duty undertaker’s van had left, a battered truck came to remove the skip, taking its load of hard core to add to the foundations of a new Church of the Holy Cross which was being built in Bromley.