Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(55)

‘And what was the date?’

Camilla smiled. ‘Fifth century,’ she said. ‘I still think it’s possible it was a hoax, that somebody planted the sample to give a false reading, but I think the likelihood is low.’

Which is as close as you’re going to get to certainty from a modern archaeologist.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I dated the leather in the later binding and got a date in the seventeen hundreds,’ she said. ‘So either we must posit that old William Galt somehow anticipated modern carbon dating when assembling his hoax, or that the original binding, and by extension the sword, were authentically fifth century.’

‘Or both bindings were added recently using historical materials,’ I said.

‘Well, yes. As another remote possibility – this is why context is so important.’

But it had felt old to Camilla.

And I wondered about that sensation.

‘I expected it to get auctioned or be sold to a museum,’ said Camilla, ‘but John Chapman said they planned a museum of their own. An Arthurian museum, would you believe?’

This made total sense to Camilla because with the right marketing you’d hoover up a substantial portion of the fifteen million foreign tourists that visited London every year. Especially the Americans.

‘I read somewhere that two thirds of Americans believe Arthur was a real historical figure,’ she said. ‘Extraordinarily depressing on one level, but terribly good for business.’

‘So you think it’s Excalibur?’ I asked.

‘God, no. Most likely it was forged for a high status Anglo-Saxon and then “sacrificed” in a sacred pool.’

‘Once you’d dated the sword, did you continue your relationship with the Paternoster Society?’ I asked.

Camilla said that she had, but not in any regular fashion. They’d invite her out for drinks occasionally. John Chapman would seek her opinion on some historical question or other – mostly relating to late antiquity or the Post-Roman period. ‘“Keeping up with the field,” they said.’

‘They?’

‘Well, John mostly.’

‘John Chapman?’

‘That’s right.’

They’d met in the Rising Sun near Smithfield Market. It was just for a friendly chat, and God knew it was a relief to talk shop with someone who wasn’t going on and on about their lack of funding and the scarcity of resources.

‘Archaeologists can be tiresome about such things, I’m afraid,’ she said.

I nodded absently as I made a note of the pub. The Rising Sun drinking establishment exists right on the fringes of the demi-monde – not being nearly as antique or mysterious as it pretends to be. You wouldn’t catch Zach in there, even if he wasn’t barred. But it would be the logical watering hole for dilettante practitioners like John Chapman.

‘Were you romantically involved?’ I asked, which got a short little laugh.

‘Nothing like that,’ she said.

Which left revenge or money, and I wasn’t going to bet on revenge.

‘So just drinks then?’ I said. ‘Nothing else?’

‘A free drink is a free drink,’ she said. ‘And he used to commission work from me.’

I asked what kind of work and she hesitated, took a deep breath and, finally, we were there.

‘He wanted inside information about some of the digs.’ Camilla picked up her teacup, looked at it for a moment and then put it down. ‘Although I didn’t understand why he couldn’t wait for the reports – it’s not like our work is commercially sensitive.’

‘Did he seem interested in any particular topic?’

‘Late Roman, Post-Roman, early Saxon – Age of Arthur stuff. I assumed he wanted it for his museum.’

‘And in return?’

‘A bit of a retainer.’ She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Five hundred quid a month.’

Six grand a year – nice.

‘And you didn’t get suspicious?’

‘I do archaeological rescue work in the City of London. People there drop a grand on drinks – at lunchtime. So, no, I didn’t get suspicious until a bit later.’

‘How much later?’

‘When I arrived at work to find that someone had driven a truck into the front of the office and nicked the material I’d told John about two days beforehand.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘About then.’

One of the sacred pillars of police work is the timeline, ‘when’ being as important as ‘who’ and ‘how’ if you want to get a conviction. Thus the bulk of most interviews is spent nailing down, at the very least, what order events happened in, and at the very best, dates and times you can corroborate with physical evidence. So you can imagine that the police fell upon texting with cries of joy – ditto emails.

I spent some time, and a second cup of tea, getting a rough timeline off Camilla.

She’d dated the sword in 2010 and started her regular ‘chats’ with John Chapman in 2011, while I was still arresting drunks and chasing virtual flashers around Covent Garden. About the same time, Mr Chapman was vainly trying to persuade the top lawyers at Bock, Loupe and Stag that they needed to placate the spirit of riot and rebellion by sacrificing goats and spraying blood on each other.