Four Thousand Days, page 13
‘Operator,’ she warbled. ‘What number please?’
‘I’d like to be put through to the Tambour House Hotel, please,’ Margaret announced carefully. ‘It’s in—’
‘Putting you through, caller,’ carolled the telephonist, and after a number of clicks and whirrs and one ear-splitting whistle, another voice was heard.
‘Tambour House Hotel,’ a plummy gent intoned. ‘How may I help you?’
‘I’d like to speak to Mr Reid, please,’ she said. ‘I believe he’s in room—’
‘Putting you through.’
Margaret sighed. It was wrong to complain about efficiency, but really, this telephone business was making everyone forget the niceties of polite conversation.
‘Reid.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Margaret sighed. ‘Hello, Inspector Reid, it’s—’
‘Dr Murray! How lovely to hear from you.’
Margaret narrowed her eyes but this was no time to get testy. ‘I’m speaking from University College, Inspector. There’s been a murder and I think the police will be here shortly. I don’t trust them …’
‘… further than you could throw a sarcophagus,’ Reid said. ‘I don’t blame you. I’m on my way.’
The line went dead and Margaret jiggled the thingie.
‘Hello, caller. How may I—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Margaret muttered, and stomped off to find Flinders Petrie. If she didn’t have a proper conversation soon, she would burst.
Athelgar Blunt crossed the room in three strides. He had already lit his pipe on the stairs and now he blew smoke over the corpse of Professor Norman Minton. Crawford stood by the door, with strict instructions to let no one past him.
There was blood everywhere. It ran from the victim’s head on to his blotting pad and had sprayed in a wide arc across the glass-fronted bookcases to his right. There were spots on the floor, on the legs of the chair the dead man was still sitting in, a red mist on the wall. Lying on the desk near the victim’s head was a statue of Mercury, its wings crimson and sticky. Blunt reached for it.
‘I wouldn’t do that, Ethel,’ a voice called from the doorway.
The inspector’s head snapped upwards. ‘I said nobody was to come past you, Crawford,’ he said.
‘Technically, Eth,’ the arrival said, ‘I haven’t actually passed the constable yet.’ He looked up at the man under the helmet. ‘It is Mr Crawford, isn’t it?’
Crawford almost stood to attention. Then, realizing who the visitor was, he did stand to attention. ‘Inspector Reid,’ he half whispered.
‘Do you know me, boy?’ Reid asked him.
‘Yes, sir. I’d only just started before you retired, but …’
‘And that’s the magic word, isn’t it?’ Blunt had joined them in the doorway. ‘Retired. You’re a civilian now, Reid. A nobody. And you’re contaminating a crime scene.’
‘Not half as much as you are,’ Reid said. ‘And that’s Mr Reid to you. Cliché though it is, Ethel, I pay your wages. That’ – he pointed to the Mercury statuette – ‘may well be the murder weapon and you were about to put your greasy little dabs all over it.’
‘Oh, don’t give me that fingerprints bollocks,’ Blunt snarled, spinning back into the room. ‘It’s been years since you were on the job.’
‘Directly, yes,’ Reid agreed. ‘Indirectly, no. I’d give you my card as a private detective but I’m not sure you can read it.’
‘I haven’t got to arrest you, have I?’ Blunt drew himself up to his full height, slightly edging over Reid as he did so; it was only by an inch or two, but in the Met, size was everything.
‘Ooh,’ Reid frowned. ‘Wrongful arrest is so messy, isn’t it? So damaging to a man’s career. Talking of which, remember Lady Cadwallader?’
Crawford had never seen the blood drain from a man’s face so quickly. ‘You wouldn’t …’ Blunt began.
‘Is old Jephson still writing for Harmsworth’s rag?’ Reid asked him. ‘I always promised him the full Cadwallader story one day. Perhaps while I’m up in town …’ Reid pulled a small notebook and pencil from his pocket and made himself a note, with a very ostentatious full stop. He looked up with a smile and turned to go.
‘Just a minute,’ Blunt called out to the ex-inspector’s retreating figure. ‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘What do you want?’
‘Justice for this man.’ Reid pointed to the corpse. ‘Constable,’ he said, edging past Crawford. ‘There is an increasing crowd downstairs clamouring for answers. Get down and send them away. And’ – he held the man’s sleeve – ‘in common with the senior investigating officer in this case, you know nothing – understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Crawford smiled.
Reid focused on the room. ‘Do you want to take notes, Ethel? Or shall I ask Dr Murray in?’
‘Who?’
‘This man’s colleague. She found the body – not that you’ve ascertained that yet, have you? You’ve met her, though. She came to see you in connection with the Helen Richardson case.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, dear,’ Reid tutted, bending down to examine the corpse. ‘It’s not really your day, is it? Tell you what – you go downstairs and disperse the crowd. Send young Crawford up – I can’t help thinking he’d be more use.’
‘You’ve got a bloody nerve, Reid!’ Blunt snapped.
‘Yes, I know,’ Reid laughed, ‘but I also have a really interesting story about Lady Cadwallader and a certain detective … and that’s still Mr Reid, by the way. Dr Murray came to see you about a student of hers, known to you as Alice Groves, a whore.’
‘Oh, yes, her,’ Blunt finally remembered. ‘Suicide.’
‘There you go again.’ Reid shook his head. ‘Jumping to conclusions. This is suicide, too, I suppose.’
‘Come off it … Mr Reid.’
‘All right.’ Reid was suddenly serious. ‘I’ve had my bit of fun. Now, let’s get to work. Crawford called you in?’
‘That’s right. Somebody in the building had found a body.’
‘Margaret Murray.’ Reid nodded. ‘You’ll be talking to her in the fullness of time.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘I don’t know what you’ve touched before I got here, but Margaret won’t have touched anything.’
Reid whipped out a handkerchief from his pocket and tilted the dead man’s head. ‘Stiff as a board,’ he said, ‘which means he died sometime last evening. I don’t suppose you know what sort of security they’ve got here. Nightwatchman? That sort of thing?’
‘Er … no. Not yet.’ Blunt suddenly remembered regulations. ‘Scene of crime first, Mr Reid – you know that.’
‘Indeed I do.’ Reid was already tracing the blood spatters. ‘He was leaning over the desk and whoever hit him struck from behind.’ He swung his right arm through the air. ‘Right-handed, but the first blow didn’t finish him, so he did it again. And probably again.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s a man, Ethel and he’s a beginner.’
‘A beginner?’
‘He hasn’t killed before – at least not in this way. The place has clearly been turned over. Papers all over the shop, drawers ajar. So our boy was looking for something, either before or after he struck. After, probably.’ Reid was thinking aloud. ‘If the professor here caught a burglar in the act, he would hardly calmly sit at his desk, would he?’ Using the handkerchief again, he lifted Minton’s battered head. The eyes were open, wide and staring, dried blood covering his face like a ghastly mask. ‘There’s something missing here,’ he said. ‘Look, the pattern on the blotter and here, look, on the surface of the desk. Some are neat and some are smeared – pages have been removed. They’ll be covered in blood, but they may have been what our friend was looking for. That can’t have been all, though. He wanted something else, hence the drawers ransacked.’
Reid looked at Blunt. ‘Do you actually have a fingerprint department at the Yard yet?’ he asked.
‘Don’t talk rot,’ Blunt snapped. ‘All that’s fairy story stuff.’
‘I sat on the Belper Committee last summer,’ Reid told him, ‘right here in London, that decided it wasn’t. You’re about to get a new Assistant Commissioner, aren’t you? Edward Henry?’
‘That’s right,’ Blunt said, suspicious as ever when it came to outsiders. ‘Some bloody amateur from India or somesuch place. What he’s likely to know about police work can be etched on a bloody tealeaf, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Reid turned to go. ‘From what I’ve read of him,’ he said, ‘he at least knows his loops from his whorls. By the way …’
Blunt looked up, glad to see – almost – the back of the man.
‘That lad … Crawford.’
‘What about him?’
‘CID material, would you say?’
‘CID?’ Blunt guffawed. ‘Never in a month of Sundays. I’ve rostered him on traffic until 1926 at the earliest.’
Reid turned to face him. ‘Arrange a transfer, Blunt. And do it today. I know a natural when I see one.’
‘You can’t just dictate …’
‘I wonder how old Jephson’s dictation speed is these days? I remember now, he is still at the Mail. He’s probably got some perky little secretary to do the scribbling now – he’s quite senior, I believe. Gets all his stories printed, no questions asked. I expect the type writers’ pool will love to hear about Lady Cadwallader, don’t you? Some of it was quite …’
Blunt clenched his fist, but his heart wasn’t in it.
‘… unusual, as I recall.’ Reid smiled innocently.
‘All right!’ Blunt shouted. And he was still shouting it down the stairs as Reid clattered down them. ‘All right, you’ve made your point. Crawford!’
At the bottom, Reid turned and looked up at the man.
‘Detective Constable Crawford,’ Blunt said.
Mrs Plinlimmon looked down from her perch. Below her, Margaret Murray sat surrounded by papers. She had loosened her stays and unpinned her hair – the correct attire, she believed, for serious thinking.
‘Whoever killed poor old Norman,’ the lecturer said to the owl, ‘was looking for something. Drawers had been ransacked, papers overturned, books strewn around.’ Margaret looked up at those penetrating glass eyes and laughed. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘Not unlike my own dear study as we speak. But Norman was neater than I am though that’s not saying much; he tried to keep everything just so. Whoever smashed his head …’ – and she shuddered at the memory – ‘wanted something from his room. What was he working on?’ She tapped her fingers on the desk rim, then moved the oil lamp that was shining in her face. ‘Poor old Norman,’ she said again, as if the man had, in death, acquired two more Christian names. ‘He hadn’t worked on anything new for years. Oh, his Latin was impeccable, his knowledge of Rome’s catacombs second to none. But field work?’ She sighed. ‘That was so then.’
She got up, stretched, felt her back click and ferreted out the decanter of port she had stashed away for critical thinking. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Mrs Plinlimmon,’ she said, without glancing at the owl. ‘The sun is definitely over the yardarm, whatever that is. And I need to focus.’ She took a sip and sat down again. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ she said, ‘that all this has something to do with that veiled Latin I showed him.’ She suddenly sat bold upright. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I have inadvertently contributed to the poor man’s death, Mrs Plinlimmon!’ And she downed the rest of her glass in one. She held up her hand. ‘No, no, nothing you can say will placate me. I am involved.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And so, it’s up to me to sort this whole wretched business out. Now,’ she moved her papers around, as though a magical answer would be lying there under the pile of undergraduate piffle. ‘What was that phrase that Norman read out? It seemed to stop him in his tracks. “Turbator Josephus” – the troublemaker Josephus.’ She got up again and walked around the room. The owl watched her go. ‘Josephus. Josephus …’ She clicked her fingers. ‘The other reference was to the II Augusta Legion, wasn’t it? And Vespasian. That’s it!’ She began humming to herself as her fingers trailed along the spines of her books. It was here somewhere, she knew. Oh, damn the tune, she thought – it was ‘Goodbye, Dolly Grey’ again.
‘Aha!’ She winkled a leather-bound tome out from the shelf just above her head and flicked through its pages. ‘Here he is – Titus Flavius Josephus, 37–100. Historian, of noble family, son of Matthias. Spent three years in the wilderness with Bannus the hermit. Sent to Rome from Judea in 64 and … oh, got on rather well with Poppaea …’ Margaret glanced up at the owl. ‘No better than she should be, Mrs Plinlimmon, wife of the emperor Nero – and it’s probably best you don’t know any more. Led the rebellion in Galilee in 66. Captured by the Romans and prophesied that Vespasian would become emperor, which, of course, he did. Well, that’s fascinating …’ Margaret’s smile faded. ‘And wrong. Not this entry.’ She glanced at the spine of the book to check the author and nodded approvingly. ‘This entry is no doubt accurate. But look at the dates, Mrs Plinlimmon. Born in 37. Emma’s notes imply she is talking about 42 or 43 – Norman didn’t argue with any of that, so we must assume she was right. Josephus may have been an annoying five- or six-year-old, but why would he be called a troublemaker by officials in Britain, best part of two and a half thousand miles away from where he lived?’
Margaret put the book down and sighed. ‘Nobody said, Mrs Plinlimmon, that archaeology was easy.’
‘Rudyard Kipling!’ The little woman stood on the path of the house at Rottingdean with open arms.
‘Margaret Murray!’ The man followed suit and they squeezed each other, laughing like maniacs.
‘Margaret Murray!’ an American voice rang out from behind the great man.
‘Caroline!’ Margaret hugged her too. ‘I am so sorry to call unannounced,’ she said, ‘but I needed to pick your husband’s brains.’
‘Come in, come in.’ Kipling ushered her over the threshold. ‘Carrie; tea, cakes, the contents of your larder! It isn’t every day we are honoured by a visit from the world’s foremost archaeologist.’
Carrie Kipling laughed and went off to organize the maids.
‘You’re looking well, Ruddy,’ Margaret said. ‘The tan is from the Veldt, I assume?’
‘Ah, you know about that?’
‘My dear Ruddy, the whole world knows about it.’ She accepted his offer of the sofa. ‘I’ve followed your exploits in The Times. Was it all as wretched as they say, our brave boys in the hospitals, I mean?’
‘Worse,’ Kipling scowled. ‘You know how the British press clean things up for the public. But that’s enough about the world and its woes; tell me, has that old deviant Flinders Petrie taken you to Egypt yet?’
‘He assures me he is going to on his next dig,’ she said, ‘though I’ll believe it when it happens.’
‘Ah, a woman’s touch.’ Kipling smiled. ‘I have to admit, I’d be lost without Carrie. She handles all my paperwork, bullies publishers and even fires the cannon for me when we have any local troops coming home.’
‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘I heard about that, too. I’m sure the locals love you, Ruddy.’ There was a pained expression on her face and Kipling burst out laughing. The eyes were bright under the bushy eyebrows and the jaw strong. He and Margaret were of an age, both of them brought up – she more so than him – in India. He was a household name in literary circles, a champion of the empire. But she knew that the firm jaw and bright eyes hid an unhappy child who had grown into a man oddly unsure of himself. And what Margaret knew, and what the papers had not said, was that Ruddy and Carrie had just lost their darling little girl, Josephine, and the archaeologist could not know how that felt. She would not raise it unless he did. And he would not raise it because the pain was still too raw.
Instead, ‘I have a problem,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with poetry. And, I’m ashamed to admit, you’re the only poet I know.’
‘Well, any port in a storm.’ He shrugged.
She passed him a copy of the page she’d found in Emmeline Barker’s box, the one that Norman Minton had so spectacularly – and mystifyingly – failed to translate.
Kipling fixed his thick-lensed glasses to his nose and peered at it. ‘It’s in Latin, Em-em,’ he told her solemnly.
She leaned back in mock astonishment. ‘And some people say you’ll never be Poet Laureate,’ she said.
He swiped at her with the paper, then tried to pick out individual words. ‘“Essedum”,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’
‘Chariot,’ she translated.
‘Is this something military, then?’ he asked her. ‘Did I send you a copy of Song to Mithras, by the way? I know I meant to.’
‘You did,’ she said, ‘and very good it is, too.’ She almost told him how the final line, ‘Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright!’ had reduced her to tears, but perhaps now was not the moment. Some other time. ‘Is it published yet? You got the Romans on the Wall just right.’
‘Hmmm … I’m gathering some things together, some jottings, you know, some ideas. I have in mind something a bit … otherworldly.’ His eyes misted. ‘Something for the children …’ He coughed. ‘I’m glad you liked it, I really am. But Latin, Em-em. You know I never actually went to university.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you’d get some sort of … I don’t know … rhythm. Or resonance, or … I’m completely out of my depth.’
‘What’s the importance of this?’ Kipling asked.
‘I don’t even know that,’ she told him. ‘Oh, look, Ruddy, I’m sorry. I turn up, out of the blue, interrupting like this and talking gibberish.’
