Bryant & May 06 - The Victoria Vanishes Read online

  ‘I have a good reason for asking,’ said Bryant. ‘I thought if anybody knew, you would. Your arcane knowledge is more far-reaching than any other academic’s. We’ve known each other for so long, and yet I never really get to sound out your knowledge.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t pay me.’

  The grease-grey, soaking rain prevented students from sitting on the staircase, and the forecourt had the forlorn air of an abandoned temple. Only the man turning hot dogs on a griddle outside the museum gates seemed unfazed by the lousy weather. Masters was about to give a lecture on early London household gods, and was running late. He lowered his great emerald-panelled golfing umbrella to encompass Bryant.

  ‘It’s nothing new, you know, the attempt to trace the Scarlet Thread, the idea that man can only be brought into a covenant with God through the shedding of blood. My knowledge of haematology is of little help in such endeavours,’ he said hotly, as if defending himself. ‘Ever since all those books about the Knights Templars came out, I’ve been besieged by students with crackpot theories.’ The lanky lecturer tore off his tortoiseshell glasses with his free hand and wagged them at Bryant. ‘I tell them, “You think you’re the first person to go searching for hidden treasures in London? Why, you’re just the latest in a long line of would-be plunderers armed with an Ordnance Survey map and a few scraps of historically inaccurate data.” Really, Arthur, I would have expected something better from you.’ He stopped so suddenly that Bryant ran into him. ‘Do you know, I still have Bunthorne?’

  ‘Bunthorne?’ repeated Bryant, taken aback.

  ‘Don’t you remember? You came round to my house with a ginger kitten in your overcoat pocket, said you’d found him on Battersea Bridge and that his name was Bunthorne. You left him with me and never returned to pick him up. Popping in for half an hour, you said.’

  ‘My dear chap, I’m so frightfully sorry, I forgot all about—’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Masters waved the thought away with long pale fingers. ‘He’s been a great comfort to me since my wife died.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘Well, how could you? Honestly, this rain, hold on.’ He flapped the great umbrella as he closed it, showering them both. ‘I’m incredibly late. Want to sit in on my talk about Mithras and the Romans? Oh.’ He stopped suddenly again. This time he had been brought up short by a mounted sign at the top of the steps that read, ‘TODAY’S LECTURES HAVE BEEN CANCELLED’. Apparently a burst water pipe in the gents’ toilets had Caused camden’s Health and Safety Department to close the public-speaking room until further notice. ‘Well, it looks as though you have me all to yourself,’ said Masters. ‘what is it you want to know about the blood of Christ?’

  They queued for tea beneath the astonishing glass canopy of the Great Courtyard and seated themselves in a quiet, shadowed corner. Bryant dug into his overcoat and produced a sheaf of wrinkled paperwork.

  Dr Masters was the one man he knew who might be able to answer his questions. The ambitious academic belonged to a group of intellectual misfits who went by the nickname of the Insomnia Squad. They regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semiotics of old Superman comics. Most of them were barely able to hold down regular jobs, and tended to drift away from their target research like wisps of autumn smoke, but Masters was driven by obsessive curiosity and the desire to improve and repair the world, even if it killed everyone in the process. Academics could be so blind sometimes.

  ‘I was recently researching the city’s social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria, you know,’ he told Bryant. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t come to me when you were searching for the Highwayman. I’d have been able to give you some pointers.’ A few months earlier, the Peculiar Crimes Unit had conducted a search for a killer dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots who had caught the public’s imagination.

  ‘Actually, it was while we were conducting that investigation that I came across references to a local street gang known as the Saladins,’ Bryant explained, sipping his tea. ‘Extraordinary that a bunch of uneducated kids could name themselves after a nine-hundred-year-old legend.’ Over the years, Bryant had become an accidental expert on the arcane history of London.

  ‘So you know that after Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, his Knights Hospitallers survived in the district of Clerkenwell?’

  ‘I’ve been reading about it, yes. I presume the kids we interviewed had accidentally stumbled across some local history.’

  ‘I don’t know how you find the time to study this sort of thing when you’ve got a full-time job in the police. Well, the knights were stripped of their properties and income by Henry VIII, during the dissolution of the monasteries. But they stayed in the area. They based themselves near the gothic arch of St John’s Gate, a place of profound religious mystery. At the hospital and priory church of St John of Jerusalem, to be precise, where injured crusaders were cared for. You still find cafés and bars in Clerkenwell bearing their name.’

  Bryant unfurled his paperwork with a flourish. ‘I did a little research. Listen to this. On October the third, 1247, the leader of the Knights Templars presented King Henry III with a six-inch-long lead-crystal pot marked with the symbol of the knights, a red-and-white cross-hilt, said to contain the blood of Christ, the ultimate relic of the crucifixion. Its authenticity was confirmed by a separate scroll holding the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, signed by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The vial was held in a box carved with the chevron of the arms of the Prior Robert de Manneby, an ancient pattern taken from the priory window of St John, the first baron of England.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Masters coloured with impatience.

  ‘And all of the other tantalizing snippets, like the letters XPISK marked on the container, and the supposed decanting of the vial that resulted in the deaths of five prelates. Who’d have thought that the true heart of the crusades would lie in Clerkenwell, just up the road? Would you like a biscuit?’ Bryant produced a squashed packet of lemon puffs from his coat pocket and set it down between them.

  ‘I didn’t know they still made these,’ Masters remarked, pulling one from the packet. ‘It’s all unverifiable stuff, you know. I’ve heard the story many times before. Some students came to me insisting that the vial was lodged beneath the floorboards of the Jerusalem Tavern, Farringdon, which would be all very well if the pub hadn’t been built on the site of an eighteenth-century clockmaker’s shop. I told them then that even if it did exist, it would probably contain germs that would be potentially fatal to the city’s present-day citizens. I mean, good God, they had the Black Death back then. I’m not disputing the existence of a vial of blood, even if one ignores current thinking that suggests Jesus was most likely an invention of the Romans. Why are you so interested, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, I hate loose ends.’ It wasn’t much of an explanation, but it was the best Bryant could muster. ‘Sorry, I have a bit of a hangover. We laid our pathologist to rest yesterday. It’s funny that so many of the cases we’ve been asked to handle lately have involved historical artefacts.’

  ‘Of course, there was a time when you couldn’t move for religious relics,’ said Masters. ‘The Prior Roger de Vere gave the church of Clerkenwell one of the six pots Christ used to turn water into wine. It supposedly had transformational properties. This is the point where religion crosses into magic.’

  ‘There’s something I don’t understand about religious relics. I mean, there have been splinters and nails from the true cross knocking about for millennia, all of them fake. Even if the vial of blood had been “verified” – by what means we’ll never know – what made it so much more special?’

  Masters raised his bushy eyebrows knowingly. ‘If you’ll forgive the phrase, it’s considered to be the holy grail of relics. John 6:53–54, “Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in y
ou. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” The blood of Christ covers, cleanses and consecrates. It’s nothing less than the gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven, the elixir to the realm of the everlasting. And I suppose you want to know whether this fabled prize might still exist.’

  ‘Well, it would be rather interesting to find out, don’t you think?’ said Bryant, somewhat underestimating the case.

  ‘I daresay it would,’ Masters admitted, ‘although I think I can save you a lot of unnecessary pain by stating categorically right now that it vanished long ago.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Please, my dear Arthur, the priories and monasteries were all burned to the ground and their contents destroyed. Their basements were dug up, their tombs desecrated until nothing more than dust was left, and even that was carted off to King’s Cross for sale to the Russians. Don’t you think we’d have heard about something like this?’

  ‘London’s greatest treasures have always been carefully hidden whenever the city has been placed under threat. We know that Catholicism survived dissolution, and surely an item such as this would have been protected by the most powerful holy men in the land.’

  ‘You might as well conduct a search for Atlantis,’ sighed Masters. ‘When it comes to the lost icons of antiquity, you have a gullible buyers’ market and plenty of unscrupulous salesmen willing to feed it. We all want to believe. Look at the experts’ willingness to ignore the implausibilities in the forged diaries of Hitler and Jack the Ripper. These days it’s easier to manufacture something more recent, like a missing session from a rock band or the diary of a dead celebrity. They won’t add much to the comprehension of the human condition, but they’ll make someone’s fortune on the grey market. Trust me, Arthur, the trail has had eight centuries to grow cold. Ask yourself where such an item could have been kept without disturbance and you’ll realize the absurdity of it. There are plenty of easier things to find in London than Christ’s blood, and even if it did survive, it wouldn’t still be in Clerkenwell.’

  ‘Well, thanks for the advice,’ said Bryant, pinching his hat from the table. ‘I’d better go and find Oswald.’

  ‘Call me sometime, we’ll go out for a spot of lunch,’ said Masters, who had become more reclusive since the death of his wife. ‘There are all sorts of things we should talk about.’

  Bryant gave a little wave as he stumped out of the Great Courtyard. In the long winter months of his retirement, there would be plenty of time for old men to sit and set the world to rights.

  8

  * * *

  INTRODUCTIONS

  Time Out Guide to London’s Secret Buildings: Number 34

  Peculiar Crimes Unit

  Camden Road, North London

  Housed behind the arched, scarlet-tiled windows above Mornington Crescent Tube station, this specialist murder investigation unit has been instrumental in solving many of the capital’s most notorious crimes. Founded during the Second World War to handle cases that could prove embarrassing to the government, it has continued operation right up to the present day. The unit now falls under the jurisdiction of the Home Office, which is attempting to make it more publicly accountable, and so its days are probably numbered. The PCU’s unorthodox operating methods were highlighted in a recent BBC documentary that criticized the conduct of its eccentric senior detectives for their willingness to use illegal information-gathering procedures in the preparation of their cases.

  Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright threw the magazine on to her kitchen table. More unwarranted publicity, she thought. At least this time the journalist had not gone into detail about the kind of informants Mr Bryant sporadically pressed into service at the PCU. No mention of the pollen-readers and water-diviners, the necromancers and psychics, the conspiracy theorists and eco-warriors, the mentally estranged, socially disenfranchised, delusional, disturbed and merely very odd people he asked to help out on pet cases, which was a blessing. How many times had they been threatened with closure before? She realized now that instead of the axe suddenly falling, they were to be slowly strangled to death with red tape.

  She tapped the keyboard wedged on the corner of her sunflower-laminate-topped breakfast table and stared gloomily at her computer’s empty mailbox. A month ago, she had posted her profile on an internet dating website, but so far there had not been a single taker. She wondered if she had been too honest, her tastes too quirky. Surely there were others whose interests coincided with hers, men who liked criminology, burlesque and film stars of the 1950s? She bent down and scuffed Crippen behind his nicked, floppy ear. The little black-and-white cat purred, coughed, then hacked up a hairball. Great, Longbright thought, everyone’s a critic. She only brought the unit’s cat home when she was feeling particularly lonely, but this morning even Crippen’s presence had not helped.

  Going into the hall, she found her doormat similarly bare of letters. She thought someone might have remembered that it was her birthday, but it was half past ten, and the postman had been and gone. This is the world I’ve created for myself, she thought, looking about the patchily painted Highgate flat. Three rented rooms above a charity shop, overlooking a roundabout. No partner, no family still on speaking terms, hardly any friends, only a manky old cat that no one else wants to look after. Her former boyfriend was about to get married to someone else, but for her there was no love interest even remotely on the horizon.

  She knew what the trouble was: she had given her best years to the Peculiar Crimes Unit. While other women of her age were presumably still enjoying romantic dinners and illicit weekends, she was usually to be found working late at the offices above Mornington Crescent Tube station, correlating the case histories of violent killers. It wasn’t very appealing to have to tell a date you’d meet him at the restaurant because you were waiting for fingerprints to come in from a severed hand. She sighed, pushing back a thick coil of bleached hair, and was heading for the kitchen to wash up her single breakfast dish when the doorbell rang.

  The courier looked far too young to be allowed near a motorcycle, but he was holding the largest bunch of yellow roses she had ever seen. A silver-edged card read:

  Happy birthday from your greatest admirers

  – Arthur Bryant & John May

  It was the first time the detectives had ever sent her something on her birthday. Her colleagues remained her oldest and closest friends. She smiled at the thought, but as she unwrapped the roses and placed them in water, a green thorn plucked at the flesh of her thumb, and a single crimson droplet fell on to a silky yellow petal.

  Raymond Land had assembled them all in the unit’s main briefing room. His staff were gathered before him in two untidy rows. Nobody wanted to sit on the garish orange Ikea sofa because Crippen had been sick on it, and the velour was still damp. Renfield stood beside his new boss like a Christian missionary waiting to deliver a sermon before a tribe of delinquent heathens.

  ‘I thought we could take this opportunity of introducing ourselves to Sergeant Renfield,’ said Land jovially. ‘Perhaps each of us would like to say something in turn about who we are and what we do, just to break the ice.’

  Bimsley turned a snort of derision into a wet cough.

  ‘Starting with you, Colin. Stand up, please.’ Land glared at him. Bimsley’s pupils shrank at the prospect of conjuring something to say. As the silence lengthened, Meera poked him sharply below the ribs.

  ‘Colin Bimsley,’ said Colin Bimsley. ‘Detective Constable, which means I do the heavy lifting around here. I requested the posting to the PCU because my dad was in the unit and taught me all about the place when I was a nipper. I’ve still got his old uniform. I also inherited his balance problem, which has now been diagnosed as DSA, that’s Diminished Spatial Awareness, which means I occasionally misjudge distances and bash into things. Mr Bryant and Mr May offered me a desk job, but I didn’t want to let them down.’

  ‘So instead he falls down
steps and off roofs, and runs into lampposts when he’s chasing criminals,’ said Meera, not without a hint of affection.

  ‘I’ve got four major topics of conversation – law enforcement, football, amateur dramatics and science fiction. And that’s me for you.’ Bimsley sat back down.

  ‘Mangeshkar, you’re next.’ Land’s glare intensified.

  ‘I grew up on the Peckham Estate back when it was really a mess,’ Meera told Renfield. ‘I got into the force and was packed off to dumping grounds like Dagenham, Kilburn and Deptford. They figured I knew the territory, and I was as tough as anyone on the estates. It wasn’t working with junkies and nutters that got to me so much as the endless self-deception. Kids who thought they were going to turn their lives around, parents who insisted their kids could do no wrong, social workers who completely misread situations. If I’d just wanted to work with the poor I’d have joined a charity organization. I wasn’t there to change lives, I was a copper, not an evangelist. Does it make sense to say that I came here looking for a more productive form of police work?’ She stared down at her hands, as if expecting to find the answer there. ‘I thought I could learn more in criminal investigation. Maybe I am, I don’t know.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Land had been hoping for more of a career précis, but now it felt as though he was taking confession. ‘April, I hope you can explain what you do here, because I’m buggered if I know.’

  April glanced guiltily at her boss. She was aware that her grandfather had petitioned Land to hire her, and despite showing great promise at the unit, still felt as though she did not belong among professional criminologists. ‘Well,’ she began softly, ‘I’m just here to help out. I’m good at putting things together.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Renfield. ‘What field of expertise did you train in?’