Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(59)
It looked old, but felt off. And at first I couldn’t tell why. It was a high-ceilinged first floor room with large sash windows sealed with internal wooden shutters. I cautiously left the lights off as I crossed the shadowy room, lifted the latch and opened the first of the shutters. The furniture was antique, nineteenth century and early twentieth century walnut tables and the sort of overstuffed armchairs that littered the Folly. A series of glass-fronted bookshelves lined two walls while the remaining wall space was taken up with a random collection of prints and paintings, mostly views of St Paul’s and surrounding streets and a big reproduction of Sir James Thornhill’s 1712 portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. I recognised it because we have a reproduction of the same painting in the lecture room back at the Folly. The great man is wearing his own hair for a change and without his wig he looks scrawny, vexed and a dead ringer for Ian McDiarmid in Revenge of the Sith – just before Samuel L. Jackson rearranges his face for him. Underneath was a plaque inscribed with the words:
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.
Which was when I realised what was troubling me. The room was like a bad copy of the Folly, done up by somebody who’d been there a couple of times and fancied the ambience.
I noticed a glass-fronted case mounted on the wall opposite the Newton portrait. It was made of dark mahogany varnished to a warm glow. The sort of thing where you might display a large fish. I looked inside. It was empty and there was a silver strip with the words IN CASE OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST NEED – BREAK GLASS.
Not a fish, then – a sword. And three guesses which one.
I pulled on my evidence gloves and did a quick rummage through the drawers and bookcases. There wasn’t much in the way of dust; the corners had been swept regularly and there were no spiderwebs in the corners or between the bookcases and the walls. Somebody, and I doubted it was the people who thought that an Excalibur joke was funny, had cleaned the place regularly.
We did track her down later – a Romanian woman who insisted her name was Lana Stacey – but she’d had her own key and always cleaned first thing Saturday morning. She’d never met any of the members of the Paternoster Society. Neither had any of the youth hostel staff.
There were obvious gaps on the shelves where books had been removed, either singly or in groups. There was a lot of archaeology and history. Mostly what Postmartin calls the ‘barbarian wave’ school of historiography. I called him in Oxford and sent him some pictures – he said he would be down that afternoon. Then I contacted Nightingale and the Inside Inquiry Office in case they thought it worth sending a forensic team over. I doubted it, but you never know.
I cautiously touched the case where the sword had probably been kept.
I couldn’t sense anything, but wood is terrible at retaining vestigia.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that Arthur would return.
What if he needed a bit of help?
Was that what Martin Chorley was about?
I kept my eye on the case and phoned Isis.
‘Peter,’ she said when she picked up. ‘What a lovely surprise. You’re not phoning to cancel tomorrow, are you? Oxley would be devastated – you know how he likes to tell you his stories. Especially now that he’s worn them out up here.’
‘Nah, we’re still on,’ I said. ‘Barring emergencies. I wondered whether you’d had a chance to talk to the Old Man yet?’
‘Oh,’ said Isis, sounding surprised. ‘That. Has that become important?’
I looked over at the empty sword case and the inscription below it and said that I thought it might have done.
‘I’ll pop over and have a chat before we head down to meet you,’ she said.
After the call I opened the shutters on one of the windows. They looked north over a courtyard and beyond that, rearing over the roofs opposite, was the white dome of St Paul’s.
21
A l’ombre des jeunes rivières en crue
The next day Isis and Oxley were coming down to London for an evening performance of La Bohème at the Royal Opera House. We’d decided ages ago that we’d meet up for drinks beforehand and for some reason we ended up in the Punch and Judy Tavern in Covent Garden Market.
‘It’s amazing how little damage the fire did,’ said Oxley.
The balcony ran along the middle of the west end of the market building and faced the east portico of St Paul’s Church where, incidentally, I had met my first ghost. It’s also famously the last resting place of many celebrated luvvies, and is thus known as the Actors’ Church. Which serves to distinguish it from its larger, more famous, namesake.
‘That’s because Beverley here put it out,’ said Isis.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The water damage was worse than the fire damage.’ Beverley kicked me under the table. ‘Also, this is a solid brick building. So the structure remained intact.’
Half the shops had changed, though.
Apple had taken the opportunity to put in their iBar and the new money had scrubbed away some of the character.
Isis frowned.
‘You don’t mind coming here, do you?’
I assured her I didn’t and explained that this was where I’d done my probation, arrested my first drunk and solved my first investigation. Kissed Beverley for the first time, too – well, that was up the road at Seven Dials, but still.