Four Thousand Days, page 25
‘Margaret. May I call you Maggie? No, perhaps that’s a step too far. Margaret, I have here in my pocket the find of the century. Oh, hark at me! That’s not saying much, is it, in 1900? The find of the … the find of the for ever, if that’s a phrase. But you’ve interrupted me. I was telling you about Helen.’
It took a while for the four to rouse Jenkins. He had curled up in his booth and was faster asleep than usual, thanks to the half bottle of champagne that Rose had given him, courtesy of the engagement party. ‘No need to feel left out, Mr Jenkins,’ he had said. ‘You’re as much part of this college as we are.’ Jenkins was not a connoisseur, and had necked it out of a chipped china mug. Now, in his dreams, he could hear banging, but from very far away.
‘You killed her. What else do I need to know?’
‘Why, I suppose. She was in many ways, and you’ll think this odd, the love of my life. So far, at least. She was pretty, she was eager to learn and, most of all, she loved me. Totally and without question.’
‘And yet, she stole from you. Not as loving as all that.’ Margaret was done with being sympathetic. As she was likely to be shot in the next few minutes, she might as well speak her mind.
‘Well, that’s what I thought at the time. But since then, I have come to realize she was simply trying to save me from myself. What I have here’ – he patted his pocket and again Margaret noticed him wince – ‘won’t be to the taste of everyone. I will be hated in many quarters, I know. But …’ – his smile was beatific – ‘oh, the fame. The glory.’
‘The money?’
‘That too. I don’t deny the money will be nice. It’s worse, you know, to be brought up with money and then lose it than to never have it at all.’
‘Again, I would argue with that. But I can see that it drives you, so it’s important to your tale.’
‘My tale? My tale?’ Rose leaned forward and she felt a spray of angry spittle on her cheek. ‘This isn’t a tale, Margaret. This is world-changing. World-ending, for you, sadly, but you’ll at least die knowing why.’
‘True. That’s something, isn’t it, Mrs Plinlimmon? Pointless death is so … well’ – she gave a little chuckle though her throat was dry as dust – ‘pointless, isn’t it? Tell me, can I get you anything for the knife wound? It’s still giving you gyp, I can see.’
‘Knife wound? What do you know about that?’
‘Oh, come on, Mr Rose. Thomas isn’t just a waiter, chief cook and bottle washer, you know. He is a cracksman of some repute and he knows some of the most hardened criminals in London, if not the world. What he doesn’t know about knife fights can be written on the head of a pin. So if he says he caught someone with a knife, then he did indeed catch someone with a knife. But why Inspector Reid? What had he ever done to you?’
Rose sniffed dismissively. ‘Poked. Pried. He found Emmeline’s body, for God’s sake. If it wasn’t for him making a nuisance of himself, she’d still be in that dune. You wouldn’t know she went to King’s. You wouldn’t have had those stupid notes.’ He banged the arms of the chair. ‘I wouldn’t be here!’
‘Goodness,’ Margaret said, sitting up straight. ‘It was nothing to do with Inspector Reid finding the body that helped me find the King’s connection. No, it was the Herne Bay Decorum Society who helped me there. If you want to take them all on in your vendetta, you will have to go through Ethelfleda Charlton, and with that I can only wish you the very best of British luck.’
Rose frowned. This recital was beginning to get away from him.
‘You may be interested to know, by the way, that I have left a note, hidden somewhere only he will be able to find it, for Flinders Petrie. It is to be opened in the event of my death and it tells him that you are the murderer of me and the others. It gives my reasons, and I believe it will easily bring you to the gallows.’
Rose snorted. ‘That’s insane. You couldn’t possibly have known it was me. I left no clues.’
‘True. You were most meticulous. Or lucky, I’m not sure which. Because, Mr Rose, Manchester Grammar School and all the glittering prizes then and since cannot stop you being really rather stupid.’
Rose clutched his pocket. ‘And yet, I have this,’ he hissed. ‘And a gun, don’t forget.’
‘I haven’t. Do you want to know my reasoning?’
‘If I must.’
‘At Angela and Constable Crawford’s party, I noticed that you didn’t use your left arm any more than you had to. You are not a sportsman, so I knew it wasn’t an injury sustained in a game of any sort. Also, you named the first victim as Emmeline. When she was known to all and sundry, except her family and occasionally, in jest her lover, as Emma.’
Rose’s eyes goggled. ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘I don’t think that will hang anyone, Margaret, do you?’
‘But look at the bind you’re in, Mr Rose. You have in your pocket something incredible. There will be four dead bodies, all with a link to archaeology. Even the Metropolitan Police aren’t so stupid as to miss that connection. Especially when it is pointed out to them by the great Flinders Petrie.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I can talk my way out of it. Always have. Always will.’
Margaret stood up and held out her hand. ‘If so,’ she said, ‘why not shoot me? But I would quite like to at least see this fabulous thing. If you would let me hold it, that would be a kindness to a dead woman.’
Rose looked at her suspiciously. Then, with infinite slowness, he took a revolver out of his pocket and levelled it at her. With the other hand, he reached inside his coat.
‘Jenkins!’ Angela screamed. ‘Jenkins, for the love of God, let us in!’
‘Is he even there?’ Tom asked. ‘He does rounds or something, doesn’t he?’
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Angela said. ‘I fell asleep in the library one night and he didn’t find me. Said he hadn’t liked to disturb me when he was questioned about it by the principal. But it was obvious he had spent the night in that horrible pit he has made for himself in the hall.’ She beat on the door again. ‘Jenkins!’ The pitch and volume made the men cover their ears and Tom and Reid looked at Crawford with some sympathy.
Finally, they heard shuffling steps across the marble floor and bolts were drawn back one by one. Eventually, the great door swung open and the four barrelled through, knocking Jenkins over like a ninepin. In his champagne confusion, he could never remember how many people had entered, but using the same general rule as Tom always did, by the following afternoon it was at least two dozen, accompanied by a couple of dogs and a horse.
Jeremy Bentham sat in his glass case, watching the chaos with his imperturbable glass eyes. A trick of the light – or was it a trick of the light? – made him seem to follow their progress up the stairs, his neck cricking silently to see them pass. Jenkins decided to put the whole thing down as a nightmare and tottered off back to his noisome bed. He heard the grandfather clock in the principal’s office down the hall strike the half hour. But which hour he neither knew nor cared.
Margaret Murray was no stranger to guns. Being brought up in India, she never went outside without her ayah and a havildar beside her, a gun on his hip. She had never known him fire it, but simply having it there, on a level with her bouncing curls, let her know she was safe, was protected from the unknown and fearsome creatures that her ayah assured her lurked in every doorway. Then, at her uncle’s parsonage in Rugby, she had gone along with the other girls and women to follow the autumn shooting parties, when men with far too much rum punch inside them blew innocent feathered creatures to smithereens. But this gun was not like anything she had seen. It fitted in Rose’s palm as if made to measure and she could almost see down the barrel, where the bullet with her name on it rested mutely in the chamber, ready to be sent on its deadly task.
Rose extended his other hand and opened it with a theatrical flourish. It seemed churlish at such a dramatic moment to be disappointed, but she was, nonetheless.
‘That’s it?’
‘Not what you were expecting, perhaps?’ he sneered, and moved his hand nearer so she could see just what it was. In his hand was a box, about five inches long and two in diameter. Its cross section was roughly octagonal, for the simple reason that it had been made of eight slivers of olive wood, roughly stapled together to make a container. There was no lid, though it was possible there had been once.
‘I was expecting olive wood, yes,’ she said. ‘There were tiny fragments in the wrapping paper you left behind.’
He nodded, impressed. ‘The thing with you, Margaret,’ he said, poking the gun nearer so she could see the blued metal of the barrel gleaming with oil in the firelight, ‘you do know who to ask when you have a conundrum. And look where that got poor old Norman.’
‘But really, Andrew,’ she said softly. ‘Have three people …?’
‘Four people,’ he said, smiling.
‘Four people died for that?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘And I think more will follow. Look inside. Go on.’ He proffered it to her. ‘I don’t mind you looking. After all, you won’t be telling anyone, will you?’ He clicked back the hammer and flexed his finger on the trigger.
Moving slowly, she took the rough box from his hand and turned it up over her own, so that the contents slid out. Inside was a lead sheet, rolled into a cylinder. It had clearly once been wrapped in something and tied with a string, but the fabric and hemp had rotted away. She looked at him, wondering what he would allow her to do next before putting a bullet in her head.
‘Go on. Unroll it. Carefully – but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’
With infinite care, she put the side of her thumb under the opening of the roll and eased it open. Writing on the inside began to emerge, as crisp and clear as the day the scribe’s stylus had taken the dictation from the Senate in Rome.
‘Read it,’ he breathed. ‘Read it out to me.’
She took a step nearer to the fire, to get the best of the light from the lamp on the mantel. ‘Turbator Josephus, ex Judea, hic est. Et turbator Jesus …’
She looked at him, her eyes wide. ‘But … this … this will ruin lives,’ she said. ‘People will be devastated. It flies in the face of … well, everything.’ She thought of her uncle, perhaps not the most devout vicar in the church at large, but a staunch believer in every word of the Bible. Of the millions of people who lived their lives as though in the image of the Son of God. If the words on this tablet were true – what of them?
‘Now do you see why I did what I did?’ he said, his eyes gleaming in the firelight. ‘Now do you see?’
Before Margaret could answer, the door of the study crashed back and Crawford filled the space. Behind him, two indistinct figures pushed forward, eager for the fray.
‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake,’ Rose hissed, and Margaret couldn’t help thinking that it would take people a long time to stop saying that. ‘The bloody cavalry, as I live and breathe.’
‘You can’t kill us all,’ Crawford said, surging forward.
‘He can, y’know,’ Tom muttered, surging forward nonetheless. ‘That’s a Bull Dog in his hand. Five shots.’
Rose took aim and squeezed the trigger, just as Margaret knocked his arm up with a swing of the poker. Rose wasn’t the only one to see the benefits in a good sturdy companion set. The shot went wild and after that, for quite some minutes, Margaret wasn’t sure quite who was doing what to whom. What she did know was that Edmund Reid was by her side, asking in his quiet way if she was all right. What she did not know was that a monumental tussle had gone on in her normally quiet inner sanctum. Crawford had grabbed the gun and Tom had driven his knee into Rose’s groin as the quickest way he knew of disabling anybody, short of killing him. The rest was a Metropolitan Police standard procedure movement in which Crawford wrenched Rose’s arms behind his back and snapped on the cuffs.
And Margaret didn’t hear Crawford say, ‘Now then, Mr Rose, come along quietly, there’s a good gentleman.’
And Andrew Rose did.
And then, suddenly, Margaret was alone and it was all over. She sat in her chair and reached for her glass of port, miraculously still intact, and knocked back the remainder in one. Only then did she remember what she held in her hand and she put the glass down and straightened it out again.
‘The troublemaker Josephus,’ she translated aloud, ‘from Judea is here. And the troublemaker Jesus, called the Christ. This Jesus was sentenced to death by the order of the governor Pontius Pilate, but Josephus engineered his escape, and a thief, Barabbas, died in his place. There is a price on his head and he has been in hiding in parts of the empire for ten years. He is now believed to be in Britannia. Find him and end it.’
She sat there for a while, stroking the surface of the ancient furl of lead, imagining what it had seen. It had been created in Rome, a Rome that Norman would have been able to walk around like a native. It had gone overland and over sea, to warn the new fort on the coast of Kent who was coming their way. Did they get there? Who knew? But from the date inscribed at the top – Claudius IV, the fourth year of the reign of Claudius – Jesus of Nazareth was in his forties when he had set the empire in a stir. Ten years, she thought. Four thousand days. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? Who knew? She put the lead sheet between her palms and pressed it between them, making herself remember the feel of it, the smoothness, the very years seeping into her skin. Then, with a flick of the wrist, she threw it into the flames. It bubbled for a moment in the hottest part of the fire and then dripped down and away.
‘Four thousand days too much,’ she muttered and dropped her head into her hands. And she was still like that when Angela found her.
‘I wouldn’t have minded so much, William,’ Margaret said, the next evening. ‘But the madman shot Mrs Plinlimmon. There were feathers everywhere and they can’t find her beak at all.’
‘Great Scott, Margaret.’ Petrie turned to her. ‘You could have died and all you worry about is an owl!’
‘But I didn’t die, William, did I? And Mrs Plinlimmon is often the only person I speak to from one day’s end to the next who makes any sense at all.’
‘Can she …’ He felt very stupid saying the next thing, but she had had a narrow squeak and deserved to be cut a little slack. ‘Can she be saved?’
‘As a matter of fact, Walter Inkester came to her rescue. He happens to have whole drawers of oddments and there was a barn owl’s beak in there, which he has donated to the cause. She is with his best taxidermist as we speak.’
‘Walter has a lot to be grateful to you for. A beak and a handful of straw for stuffing is a small price to pay, isn’t it?’
‘The police would have seen sense in the end,’ she said, sounding less certain than was her usual habit.
‘Can you hear yourself, woman? He’s lucky to have escaped hanging. As is Andrew Rose, by the way.’
‘Well, he is clearly unhinged, William.’ Margaret moved to a more comfortable position. She had pretended she was unaffected by her brush with death, but since it had happened she had felt the need for pampering and mollycoddling, if only for a while.
‘No one can understand why he did what he did. Can we really have taught him so inadequately that he killed three people …’
‘… and severely beat one, and disembowelled an innocent owl …’
‘Yes, let’s not forget that. Done all that evil, for an olive wood container with nothing in it?’
‘It is early first century, William. A remarkable survival.’
Petrie shrugged. ‘If it had proper provenance. He says it was found in Kent, but how do we know that? Emmeline … what was her name …?’
Margaret gave a sad smile that Petrie missed in the dim light. ‘Barker. Emmeline Barker.’
‘Yes. Well, Miss Barker may have claimed she found it at her dig, but we only have her word for that, and that word is silent now. No, Margaret, for my money that box comes from Libya, somewhere like that. They’re always finding survivals there. Scraps of fabric. Wood. Rope. He killed for nothing.’
‘Isn’t that sad, William?’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘So sad for them all.’
‘I found your note, by the way,’ he said. ‘Not to be opened except in the event of your death. How did you know?’
‘Did you read it?’ she asked.
‘Well, no. You’re not dead.’
‘Oh, William. You’re so literal. That’s perhaps your best attribute.’
He grunted. He wasn’t an easy man to compliment.
‘What’s my best attribute, William? Humour me, I’m a woman in shock.’
‘It’s hard to choose,’ he said, ever the diplomat. ‘But it’s easy to choose your worst.’
‘Oh.’ She bridled. ‘And what’s that?’
‘You will hog the bedclothes. Now, shut up and blow that candle out!’
THE REAL MARGARET MURRAY
Margaret Murray was born in India in 1863, in what was then the Bengal Presidency. Her father ran a paper mill and her mother was a missionary. Her education was sporadic, largely because women of her social class were not expected to work for a living. She did train as a nurse, however, during India’s cholera epidemic and carried out social work in England.
From 1894, despite having no qualifications, she enrolled in the newly opened Egyptology department at University College, London. Here she stayed for many years, lecturing and encouraging the students of her ‘gang’ and working with William Flinders Petrie, one of the foremost archaeologists of his generation. The work took her to Egypt and led to her publishing a number of works.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret volunteered as a nurse in France. Exhausted by this, she went to Glastonbury in Somerset and became immersed in the Arthurian/Holy Grail legends and her archaeology morphed into folklore and anthropology. She was given an honorary doctorate in 1927 and she travelled extensively before retiring seven years later.
As president of the Folklore Society, she fascinated thousands and shocked several with her publications on witchcraft and demonology, on which she had controversial views. She remained alert, adept and still writing into extreme old age, publishing her autobiography My First Hundred Years in 1963, the year of her death in Welwyn, Hertfordshire.
