by Bill Napier
'If a relic from Christ or the Virgin Mary was touched by a monarch it would authenticate that monarch's divine right to rule.'
Zola spoke carefully. 'So far so good. That's a matter of historical record.'
'Okay. Now, say that wood had been kissed by Mary Queen of Scots, and transported to seventy-seven west.'
Zola gave me a cautious nod.
I continued, 'Now say the Babington plot had worked. Say there was a punch-up between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, with Spanish troops invading England. Then Mary's right to North America would have been authenticated by the kissing of the Cross. It would have been a tremendous boost to the Catholic cause. And once Mary was safely on the throne, the Catholics would have had control of the magic longitude both north and south. Dee's calendar couldn't have been introduced by the Protestants. It even left Rome the option of introducing Dee's calendar and claiming the credit. Game, set and match to the true religion. The Protestant heresy would suffer a catastrophic blow, and might eventually collapse.'
'That's a nice theory, Harry. It's very neat, just like mine. But I have another one. I think maybe the knock on the head has done something to you. There's only one problem with it. To get your theory to work you need a piece of genuine wood from the Cross. Now how in hell's bells do you get hold of that?'
'The Crusaders had it, or believed they had. They called it the True Cross.'
'Harry, this is the twenty-first century. Stuff like that is just legend.'
'I know.'
Zola was looking straight at me. She stared at me for a moment, tilting her head to one side, and then spoke coolly. 'I respect you, Harry, I really do. The trouble is, you see yourself as some sort of superior creature, with idiots like me having to be coaxed up to your level of thinking. You're sitting there assuming I'm going to laugh you out of court.'
'You're right, Zola. I assume that an imaginative idea is beyond your grasp.'
'In fact, your theory explains a great deal. For example, it explains why people are prepared to commit murder to get hold of it. Think of the commercial value of a genuine piece of wood from the Cross. Think what a museum would pay for it. Think of the kudos of owning it.'
'Okay. But to test my theory, it looks as if we need to get hold of an expert on religious relics.'
Zola didn't blink. 'I know someone.'
'And if there's anything in my story there has to be some connection between Marmaduke StClair and the Tebbit family, a connection going back at least to the Crusades. All of a sudden we need to know the Tebbit family history.'
'Where do we get hold of that?'
'Debbie, of course. My teenage maneater.'
CHAPTER 20
'Debbie?'
'Harry!' She sounded as if she had been crying. She also sounded pathetically pleased to hear from me.
'I know this is a bad time to call. Any time is a bad time to call right now.'
'Not at all.' She sounded genuine. I wondered if she was rattling around in the big mausoleum on her own, or whether it was still stuffed with grieving relatives, or whether Uncle Robert had decided to esconce himself there and take over her affairs.
'It's about the journal. I think we may be on to something.'
'On to something?'
'I'm not sure, yet, but there's something in it needs chasing up. Look, Debbie, I would appreciate some help.'
I could practically feel her curiosity buzzing down the line. 'Of course. What can I do?'
I took a deep breath. 'I need to know something about your family history.'
'You mean, like what my grandfather did, stuff like that?'
'No, Debbie, I want to know about your family as far back as it goes. I mean, right back to the beginning.'
'Wow! We go back a very long way, Harry.' There was a hesitation, and then suddenly she adopted a cool, businesslike tone, as if she was speaking to the butcher: 'I'll ring you back—'
A male voice on the end of the line: 'Is that Blake?'
Uncle Robert. The tone had been harsh before, but this time it had an extra edge to it.
'Speaking,' I said, my stomach sinking.
'I will say this once again, Mr Blake. You are to have no further communication with my niece. If you do, you will hear from my lawyers. Have you understood that?'
Zola was standing at the end of the hall with coffee cup in hand and eyebrows raised. I jabbed a finger urgently towards the kitchen. It took her a second, but then she padded quickly through. I heard a faint click as she raised the kitchen receiver.
'Mr Tebbit, I'm a free citizen in a free country and I'll talk to anyone I damn well please.'
I guessed that Tebbit, like his brother, wasn't used to being contradicted. At any rate, he could hardly control the anger in his voice. 'You, sir, are working some sort of scam. Your sole interest in my niece is to extract as much money from her as you can. You are also in possession of a journal which belongs to our family. I want it delivered to me by registered post within twenty-four hours. If it is not, I will take action to have it returned and hold you responsible for the legal costs. Apart from the return of the journal, you are to have no further contact with this family.'
* * *
'Do you want some brandy in that?' Zola was nodding at my coffee cup. She had her feet up on the kitchen table and was teetering dangerously back, balancing a chair on two legs. I don't usually feel intimidated, but the unexpected confrontation had left me a little shaky. 'Are you going to do what he says? Stop any more contact with Debbie?'
'Are you serious?' I said. 'Stuff that.' Spoken with more bravado than I felt.
Zola frowned. 'Has it occurred to you that Uncle Robert seems remarkably keen to get his hands on Ogilvie's journal? And to keep you from looking into it?'
I sipped at the coffee. 'You bet it has. But what good would it do him? Would he recognise Elizabethan shorthand if it punched him on the nose?'
'Don't be stupid, Harry. He'd just hire his own expert. And he knows his own family history. If there's something in there, he could beat you to it.'
'Maybe depriving Debbie of something which is rightfully hers,' I speculated. 'By the way, where do your parents keep their brandy?'
I telephoned Janice later that afternoon and asked her nicely to look after the shop on her own for the next couple of weeks.
'There's a message,' she said, a little mischief in her voice. 'It came in a fax.' She read:' "You can't phone me at home with Uncle Robert prowling around. Where can I reach you? Debbie." Who's Debbie?'
'We're just good friends,' I explained. I gave Janice Zola's number and told her to give it to Debbie in confidence next time she phoned. Now all I had to do was wait. The phone rang at 7 o'clock, just when I was thinking it was time I treated Zola to a dinner out. I gave her time to pick up the kitchen extension before I lifted it up.
'Harry?'
'Debbie, hi.'
'I'm in the study.' She was speaking quietly. 'I can't find my mobile phone. I'll bet Uncle Robert has taken it away. He's been hanging around all day. I feel like I'm the Prisoner of Zenda or something.'
'Can you be overheard, Debbie? Are there extension phones?'
'Yes, in one of the upstairs bedrooms. But Uncle Robert's playing snooker with one of his cronies.'
'You mean the house is empty?'
'No, Harry, he's in the snooker room. It's overhead.'
'It doesn't sound safe.' Unconsciously, I was beginning to whisper myself.
'Never mind that. Okay, here we go. I found this all written up in a book in Daddy's study, but I knew most of it already. I think there are lots of estate papers and family correspondence held in the University of Hull archives, though how they got there I have no idea. Are you ready?'
'Go.'
'Okay, we come from two large landed families, the Tebbits of Lincolnshire and the Maxwells of Scotland. We're really Tebbit-Maxwell but we dropped the double barrel in the 1920s, due to a great-great-grandpa wanting to be a socialist MP or something.
There's also a small landed family, the Greenacres of Yorkshire.'
'So far so good,' I said encouragingly.
'I'll give you the Maxwell side first. I don't really think of myself as a Maxwell, maybe just because we dropped the name. It's really complicated, and mostly boring, with everyone marrying everyone else just to keep money in the family. The line nearly died out at the beginning of the last century, when there was only one daughter, Gwendoline. She had twenty thousand acres of land in East Riding and Lincolnshire and Dumfriesshire, with Caerlaverock Castle thrown in. But then she married the Fifteenth Duke of Norfolk in 1904, and that kept the line going and the money in the family.'
'Can you go farther back, Debbie?'
There was a rustling of paper. 'Well, the Maxwell side had problems about three hundred years ago when they backed the wrong team during the Jacobite rebellion. The Fourteenth Lord Maxwell escaped from prison dressed as a woman with clothes brought in by his wife. The poor things had to spend the rest of their lives exiled in Italy, along with Bonnie Prince Charlie. They lived in a big hill town called Frascati, just outside Rome.'
'It's a hard life,' I agreed. I wasn't making any connections.
'Still, the family's stuffed with barons and has estates all over Scotland.'
'Can you take them further back in time? Earlier than the Jacobites?'
'Sure. The Maxwells can trace themselves right back to Undwin and his son Maccus in the eleventh century. Maccus turned into Maccuswell who turned into de Maxwell of Caerlaverock castle, and so on.'
Still no connection, or none that I could see, with the Ogilvie journal. 'Okay, Debbie, what about the Tebbit side of the family? Are you sure it's still safe to talk?'
'What's Uncle Robert going to do?' She said it defiantly, but she was still whispering. 'The Tebbit connection with the Maxwells goes back to about 1600, when one of the Tebbits married Lady Joyce Maxwell. Let's see. Yes, here we are. Things were going wrong for them in the fifteenth century. There was a Sir Stephen Tebbit. He and two sons joined the Duke of Norfolk at Flodden in 1513 and they were all killed in battle. The youngest son inherited, but then he got his head chopped off for his part in the Lincolnshire uprisings. The estates and manors were forfeited, but Queen Elizabeth gave some of it back to the grandson. Hold on.'
The line went quiet for some moments. Then: 'It's all right, he's just gone to the loo. Right, there was another Stephen Tebbit who backed the wrong side during the English Civil War. Cromwell's parliament swiped their estates.'
'It seems to be a family custom, Debbie. Backing losers.'
'Thank you, Harry. So how come I'm living in Picardy House and you're in some hovel in Lincoln? The Tebbits only stayed afloat for the next hundred years through the generosity of the Greenacre branch. Then there was some smart intermarriage and the family fortunes grew again until we had five thousand acres in various counties, a couple of dozen palaces and an abbey. Not bad going for losers, I'd say.'
'Not bad going at all, Debbie. But can you take your family further back?'
'You mean really far back? Like to the dinosaurs? Let's see.'
More rustling paper. Then: 'Right. We can trace the Tebbit side as far as Baron Philip, son of Carr. He'd been given half of Cheshire by William the Conqueror. One of Philip's descendants married into a French family, StClair from Picardy, originally de Clari. That lot made a fortune out of the Crusades, and the family fortunes thereafter extended to Lincolnshire and York. They had sixty manors in total. I don't know what the heating bill must have been but I don't suppose they cared.'
The Crusades.
De Clari the Crusader, who became StClair from Picardy.
Sinclair. Winston Sinclair, the unknown relative who'd sent Ogilvie's journal to Picardy House, the Tebbit family home.
A bit of jigsaw clicking into place with beautiful precision.
Debbie was talking again. 'And that's about it. You see what a superior lot we are to you riffraff. Harry, are you there? Is this stuff any use to you?'
I'd rustled up a bachelor dinner and Zola had appeared from upstairs in a stunning red dress which almost matched the colour of the wine I was pouring. Candlelight – from power-cut candles, not romantic dinner ones - was reflecting off her earrings and a mock-diamond necklace. The puttanesca sauce had come out of a jar but it was surprisingly good, and I was looking forward to my zabaglione improvised from a sweet sherry rather than marsala al'uovo.
She sipped at the wine, looked at me curiously over the top of her glass. 'I think Debbie has a teenage crush on you.'
'Nonsense. I'm just a big cuddly teddy bear. I think she sees me as a surrogate uncle.' I sat down and started to twirl spaghetti. 'Look, Zola, I ought to move out of here once we've eaten. I can stay in a hotel in the village. We can't have Mrs Murgatroyd ruining your reputation.'
Her eyes widened incredulously, and then she giggled. 'And all these years I thought the dinosaurs were extinct. I happen to be a Capricorn, Harry. I'm impulsive, loving and passionate. What about you?'
'I'm a Leo, I think.'
She pulled a face. 'You're loyal, but cold and analytical. No risk to my virginity, dammit.'
I thought, the room's getting hot. I said, 'The Sinclair connection.'
'The Sinclair connection,' Zola repeated thoughtfully. 'Coincidence?'
'Neither of us believes that. This Crusader, de Clari. I'd like to find out what he got up to.'
Zola nodded thoughtfully. She said again, 'I know someone.'
CHAPTER 21
The 'someone' Zola knew turned out to own the Oxford Museum of Antiquities, amongst a few other toys of that ilk, including, I'd read, islands in the Aegean and the Caribbean. At my suggestion we'd arranged to meet in a pub, one of a large number I knew in the area from my Oxford days. It was just off Parks Road and was run by the Paczynskis, a retired Polish couple. Zola gurgled her Scimitar into the car park at ten o'clock precisely. He was already waiting.
The pub had once been used briefly in the Inspector Morse TV series, and black-and-white photographs of the grey-haired landlords in the company of the principal actors, happily reflecting their glory, were scattered here and there on the dull panelled walls. Mrs Paczynski was looking much the same, except that her hair was now white.
Zola's 'someone' was fiftyish, with thin, balding hair and thick spectacles. He was dressed in an open-necked yellow shirt and a blue windcheater; I found it hard to reconcile his Oxfam cast-offs with the fact that he regularly hovered around the fringes of the Sunday Times rich list. His face lit up at the sight of Zola, the embrace was rather intimate, and I wondered just how well they knew each other.
We sat around a circular table. It was too early for alcohol but I ordered a lager anyway. Zola's friend had a companion: the man opposite me was in his early thirties, black Jamaican, with short, neat hair and a round, smooth face. He was dressed in a grey suit and the only hint of something lurking underneath the conservative exterior was a silver tiepin in the shape of a guitar. He spoke in a shy, hesitant manner which fooled me completely at this meeting.
Each of us had a photocopy of Ogilvie's journal and we all kept referring to it as I talked. I talked so much that my mouth almost dried up, and when I'd finished I quickly sank half of my pint.
There was a thoughtful silence. It was a lot for them to take in.
The Oxfam man turned to his companion. 'What do you think, Dalton?' He was looking for a confidence trick.
The Jamaican gave me a shy glance before addressing his companion. 'I suppose the first thing, Sir Joseph, is to be sure that the document is authentic. Think of Hitler's diaries.'
Sir Joseph looked at me impassively. 'How do you respond to that?'
He knew Zola, and he'd have checked up on me: he would know that if there was a confidence trick we'd be victims, not perpetrators. 'I'm convinced of its authenticity. The micro-cracks around the ink would be impossible to forge. Likewise the paper. And it's been looked at by Fred Sweet not a couple of miles from
here.'
Zola was on my left with a red Martini. She said, 'There are several inconsistencies with the accepted record of the Roanoke voyage.'
Sir Joseph raised his eyebrows. 'What are you saying?'
'That no forger would make such mistakes, Joe. They're too easily checked. The historians have been getting it wrong. Another thing. The Roanoke expedition was in 1585, but Ogilvie's writing his account in a form of shorthand which wasn't published until 1588. Now he might just have written his journal years after the events, but it has an immediacy about it which suggests he was usually writing things up a few days after they happened. Again, a forger wouldn't have made such a mistake.'
'What then?' Sir Joseph asked.
'Almost certainly, Ogilvie had access to the shorthand system before it was published. Some of the best brains in England were on that ship, and they probably knew about the system from Thomas Bright before he wrote it up. There was no copyright in those days.'
Sir Joseph nodded. 'And, as you say, we have an independent authority in the form of Mr Sweet.'
'And I'm holding the original manuscript,' I said. 'Forensic tests on the ink and paper can be carried out any time, subject to the owner's approval.'
Sir Joseph seemed to come to a decision. 'Very well then. I'm inclined to believe that the journal is genuine and the diarist, this young man from darkest Scotland, is giving a straightforward account.' He played with his glass of orange juice. 'And you think the intense interest in getting hold of the journal has something to do with the relic described in it?'
'There's nothing else. And "intense interest" is an understatement.'
'Yes, that's quite a bruise. Dalton, what's your assessment of the artefact?'
Dalton's voice was soft, almost gentle. It had a slight Jamaican twang. There were the rounded vowels of the standard Oxbridge accent, but I thought I detected a slight tinge of something else: French perhaps, even Parisian? 'If this journal is genuine, it's telling us about something I can hardly take in.' He fingered his tie and then began speaking in a low, enthusiastic voice. 'The artefact which James Ogilvie describes is a perfect match to a relic which has been missing for almost a thousand years. Part of the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The True Cross.'