Crusaders were cared for. You still find cafes 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 the Third 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 Saint John, the first baron of England.”
“Yes, yes.” Masters coloured with impatience.
“And all of the other tantalising 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 involved with 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, and 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, chapter six, verses fifty-three to fifty-four:
“Well, it would be rather interesting to find out, don’t you think?” said Bryant, somewhat understating 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 the vial 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 under threat. We know that Catholicism survived dissolution. Surely an item such as that vial would have been protected by the most powerful holy men in the land.”
“You might as well conduct a search for Atlantis.” Masters sighed. “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 realise 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.
? The Victoria Vanishes ?
8
Introductions
Time-Out Guide to London’s Secret Buildings: Number 34
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 criticised the conduct of its eccentric senior detectives for their willingness to use illegal information-gathering procedures in the preparation of their cases.
Sergeant Janice Longbright threw the magazine onto her kitchen table.
She tapped the keyboard wedged on the corner of her sunflower-laminate breakfast table and stared gloomily at her computer’s empty mailbox. A month ago, she had posted her profile on an Internet dating Web site, 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.
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.
