Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(18)

“Thank you, ma’am,” he muttered.

“Anytime.”





CHAPTER 8


Ryan was a man of his word.

When he agreed to a course of action, or acquiesced to an order from a senior officer, it was only in rare circumstances that he deviated. As he made his way back to the conference room, Ryan comforted himself with the knowledge that he had not explicitly agreed that he would follow Morrison’s order to shut down Operation Bertie. It might be a technicality, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Slippery?

Most definitely.

Necessary?

“Abso-bloody-lutely,” he muttered, and resolved to follow the Chief Constable’s bidding just as soon as the day’s briefing was over, and all present lines of enquiry were exhausted.

“What have I missed?” Ryan asked, once he was back in the room.

“Nowt much,” Phillips said, eloquently. “But, never mind what we’ve been doing—what happened with Morrison?”

Ryan blew out a long breath and told the absolute truth.

“She told me to shut Operation Bertie down,” he said, conversationally. “Not enough progress, no real evidence, et cetera.”

There was a momentary silence while the others considered this, then Phillips pursed his lips.

“Well, now, usually, I’d have my lunch break around one o’clock,” he said, baffling them all for a moment. “But, since I’m on a bit of a health kick, I’d only be eating a quinoa salad at my desk while I try to forget the taste of bacon. Seems to me, I could do that a bit earlier, today—say, around now, since we’re just sittin’ around.”

MacKenzie gave her husband a knowing smile.

“Now you mention it, I didn’t have time for breakfast this morning,” she said. “I’d rather eat something a bit earlier today and now’s as good a time, as any. We could have something here and, if we happen to talk over a few things, it’d just be work colleagues chewing the fat, now, wouldn’t it?”

Ryan leaned back in his chair, a slow smile spreading across his face.

“It would,” he agreed.

“I could take an early lunch,” Lowerson said. “My caseload is manageable, and anything urgent I can get to in an hour, or so. How about you, Mel?”

“Funny enough, my stomach was rumbling, earlier,” she said, with a wink.

Ryan looked amongst them and felt like the most fortunate of men.

*

Ten minutes later, it became clear that Phillips hadn’t been joking about the quinoa, which he pushed around with a plastic fork while they continued their friendly ‘discussion’ about the cult of Saint Cuthbert.

“What about the other relics at Durham Cathedral?” Ryan asked. “Have we made any progress in finding out whether any more of them were switched?”

If they were right about the motivations behind the original theft during the renovation works three years prior, there was a strong possibility that other relics belonging to Cuthbert might have been taken at the same time.

Lowerson had been chiefly responsible for that element of their investigation, and was sorry to be the bearer of disappointing news.

“It would add a lot of weight to the investigation, if we could discover whether other relics had been taken,” he said. “The problem is, it’s difficult for us to investigate without alerting anybody at the Cathedral. We’d need to gain access to the relics, for one thing, and have their authenticity tested. But, as we’ve said before, there’s huge potential for an individual or a crew of people to have made a switch—especially if we’re dealing with a group that has cash to burn, and who could bribe somebody already working on the renovation works to swap the originals for forged replicas when the relics were being moved to their new display cases, for instance.”

“All right,” Ryan said, and ran a frustrated hand through his hair, which was long overdue for a trim. “Maybe we’ve been focusing too much on the relics in Durham. What about further afield? Over the centuries, Cuthbert’s bits and bobs must have travelled to different parts of the country, maybe for safekeeping—and what about other museum exhibitions? They often loan out important pieces like that, don’t they? Perhaps they’ve been targeted by the same perp.”

“I did a bit of digging around that,” Lowerson said, with more optimism. “And, actually, I think you may be on to something there, boss.”

Jack paused to reach for a cardboard file, rifling through the papers until he found what he was looking for.

“This is a picture of Cuthbert’s Gospel of Saint John,” he said, setting a colour print on the table. “It’s sometimes called the Stonyhurst Gospel, because it spent over two hundred years in the library at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school down in Lancashire.”

Ryan leaned forward to study the image of a tiny gospel book, its front cover made of distinctive red goatskin and which was, he would later learn, the earliest surviving Western book binding in the world.

“This was Cuthbert’s?” he asked.

Lowerson made a rocking motion with his hand.

“People used to think so, because it was made pretty close to the time Cuthbert was alive and it was stored inside Cuthbert’s coffin with his body for centuries, until around the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century,” he said. “Nowadays, people think it was made by the monks at the monastery in Monkwearmouth—”