Bryant & May 06; The Victoria Vanishes

A single pedestrian coasted the corner ahead of him. Bryant narrowed his eyes and conducted the same observational survey on her. She was between forty-five and fifty, and would once have seemed old, branded invisible and treated brusquely by the inhabitants of the Victorian buildings around them. “She could very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her,” W.S. Gilbert had written of an attorney’s daughter in Trial by Jury. An unmemorable face, rounded and fattened by time, lined a little by care, or what was now termed stress. Mousey hair cropped close to her jaw-line, makeup a little too thick, small eyes downcast, head lost in thought. Her raincoat had seen better days, but her shoes were polished and of good quality. The heels suggested that she was conscious of her height, for she was small and broad-hipped. She looked like a council official. A bag on her shoulder, brown and shapeless, bulging with – what did women take with them these days? Documents, most likely, if she was returning from working late in an office. A drink after work, or rather drinks, for she appeared a little unsteady on those heels. Somebody’s going-away party, a birthday celebration. A mother, a wife, going home late and alone after a hard day, heading in the wrong direction for King’s Cross station.

Bryant watched as she stopped and looked up at the pub sign, then negotiated the kerb to the entrance. He slowed to watch through the window as she headed to the counter, and a barman emerged to greet her, appearing like an actor catching his cue on a stage set.

There was nothing more to be noted here. It crossed his mind that he was becoming less observant because there was less of interest to see in London these days. He needed the lights and noise of the station, where one could witness meetings and farewells, the discovered, the lost and the confounded. That was the best way to check whether his powers were truly waning. But he was tired, and as he passed into the covered alley that led out onto Euston Road, he decided to find a cab. It had been a long, exhausting day, one that marked an end, and a new beginning that would not involve him. Appointments, resignations, speeches and arguments. And on top of all this, he had been entrusted with the ashes of his old colleague.

The ashes. Only now did he realise that he had no idea what had happened to the aluminium urn containing the remains of Oswald Finch.

? The Victoria Vanishes ?

7

Reliquary

“Christ’s blood,” said Dr Harold Masters testily, making the phrase sound like an oath. “Be honest with me, that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? You’re after information on some new pet hobby of yours. What was it last time – the whereabouts of some Egyptian sacrificial urn you thought was still floating about in the London canal system – ”

Arthur Bryant had not expected the doctor to discern his purpose quite so quickly. “Could you slow down a bit? I’m not a marathon runner,” he begged, hopping along beside the impossibly tall academic as they climbed the steps of the British Museum.

“I lecture on ancient mythologies these days, Arthur; I’m not in haematology anymore, unless you count the Athenian. Christ’s blood is one of those things like the Ark of the Covenant. It’s largely a Judeo-Christian habit, you know, venerating bits of wood and stains on cloths. Henry the Eighth supposedly owned the left leg of St George. I don’t suppose you’d catch Buddhists flogging each other bits of Gautama Buddha’s sandals in order to assuage their suffering.”

“I have a good reason for asking,” said Bryant. “I thought if anybody knew, you would. Your arcane knowledge is more farreaching than any other academic’s. We’ve known each other for so long, and yet I never really get to sound out your knowledge.”

“That’s because you don’t pay me.”

The grease-grey, soaking Tuesday morning prevented students from sitting on the staircase, and the forecourt had the forlorn air of an abandoned temple. Only the man turning hot dogs on a griddle outside the museum gates seemed unfazed by the lousy weather. Masters was about to give a lecture on early London household gods, and was running late. He lowered his great emerald-panelled golfing umbrella to encompass Bryant.

“It’s nothing new, you know, the attempt to trace the Scarlet Thread, the idea that man can only be brought into a covenant with God through the shedding of blood. My knowledge of haematology is of little help in such endeavours,” he said hotly, as if defending himself. “Ever since all those books about the Knights Templars came out, I’ve been besieged by students with crackpot theories.” The lanky lecturer tore off his tortoiseshell glasses with his free hand and wagged them at Bryant. “I tell them, you think you’re the first person to go searching for hidden treasures in London? Why, you’re just the latest in a long line of would-be plunderers armed with an ordnance survey map and a few scraps of historically inaccurate data. Really, Arthur, I would have expected something better from you.” He stopped so suddenly that Bryant ran into him. “Do you know, I still have Bunthorne?”

“Bunthorne?” repeated Bryant, taken aback.

“Don’t you remember, you came around to my house with a ginger kitten in your overcoat pocket, said you’d found it on Battersea Bridge and that its name was Bunthorne. You left it with me and never returned to pick it up. Popping in for half an hour, you said.”

“My dear chap, I’m so frightfully sorry, I forgot all about – ”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Masters waved the thought away with long pale fingers. “He’s been a great comfort to me since my wife died.”

“Oh, I didn’t know – ”

“Well, how could you? Honestly, this rain, hold on.” He flapped the great umbrella as he closed it, drenching them both. “I’m incredibly late. Want to sit in on my talk about Mithras and the Romans? Oh.” He stopped abruptly again. This time he had been brought up short by a mounted sign at the top of the steps that read Today’s Lectures Have Been Cancelled. Apparently a burst water pipe in the gents’ toilets had caused Camden’s Health & Safety Department to close the public speaking room until further notice. “Well, it looks as though you have me all to yourself,” said Masters. “What is it you want to know about the blood of Christ?”

They queued for tea beneath the astonishing glass canopy of the Great Courtyard and seated themselves in a quiet, shadowed corner. Bryant dug into his overcoat and produced a sheaf of wrinkled paperwork.

Dr Masters was the one man he knew who might be able to answer his questions. The ambitious academic belonged to a group of intellectual misfits who went by the nickname of the Insomnia Squad. They regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semiotics of old Superman comics. Most of them were barely able to hold down regular jobs, and tended to drift away from their target research like wisps of autumn smoke, but Masters was driven by obsessive curiosity and the desire to improve and repair the world, even if it killed everyone in the process. Academics could be so blind sometimes.

“I was recently researching the city’s social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria,” he told Bryant. “I’m surprised you didn’t come to me when you were searching for the Highwayman. I’d have been able to give you some pointers.” A few months earlier, the Peculiar Crimes Unit had conducted a search for a killer dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots who had caught the public’s imagination.

“Actually, it was while we were conducting that investigation that I came across references to a local street gang known as the Saladins,” Bryant explained, sipping his tea. “Extraordinary that a bunch of uneducated kids could name themselves after a nine-hundred-year-old legend.” Over the years, Bryant had become an accidental expert on the arcane history of London.

“So you know that after Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, his Knights Hospitallers survived in the district of Clerkenwell?”

“I’ve been reading about it, yes. I presume the kids we interviewed had accidentally stumbled across some local history.”

“I don’t know how you find the time to study this sort of thing when you’ve got a full-time job in the police. Well, the knights were stripped of their properties and income by Henry the Eighth, during the dissolution of the monasteries. But they stayed in the area. They based themselves near the Gothic arch of St John’s Gate, a place of profound religious mystery. At the hospital and priory church of St John of Jerusalem, to be precise, where injured