Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(54)

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.’