by Peter James
Frannie was uncertain whether Spode was addressing her or the room in general. He had been carrying on this way all morning, and she had tried to ignore him, the way she usually did when he was in a tetch. But she was finding it hard to concentrate on her work. She had taken some more aspirin an hour ago, but they seemed to have had little effect. She took another long pull on the can of Coca-Cola that sat on her desk; Coke sometimes worked for her as a hangover cure or when she just felt lousy.
It was ten-thirty. Two and a half hours to lunch. Her will-power broke and she pulled out of her handbag the Twix chocolate biscuit she had bought for her dessert. Spode stared disdainfully as she tore open the wrapping and bit a piece off one bar.
‘Yes, madam,’ Spode said, ‘I am well aware of that.’
The cursor on Frannie’s VDU blinked patiently, a small orange square on the black screen. There was a moment of quiet, as Spode listened without commenting. Some people walked down the corridor outside. She heard the jovial Irish accent of Declan O’Hare, the Deputy Keeper of Oriental Antiquities, and a guffaw of laughter from whomever he was with. The door opened and she turned round as O’Hare stuck his head into the room.
‘Ah, Frannie. Looking so smart today. Must have an important date, could it be?’
She smiled faintly, not in the mood for his jocularity. A man in a goatee beard and anorak hovered behind him.
O’Hare went on. ‘Frannie is about to be rescued from the eternal drudgery of the basements. The dawn of a new world is nigh. Might even include Penrose if he’s very good. Could you come to my office tomorrow at half nine? We’re planning a new exhibition and I’d like you to be involved from the ground up. How far have you got with the cataloguing?’
‘Nearly finished.’
‘Could you get it done today?’
‘I could try.’
‘Perhaps you could work late?’
‘I have to leave at quarter to seven. I’ll work through lunch.’
‘That’s my girl!’ He went out and shut the door, and she felt a beat of interest, pleased to have the possibility of a change from the monotony of her current work.
‘Madam,’ Spode said again into the receiver, ‘I think if you check your history books you’ll find that the Iceni were not Romans. And that Boadicea was in fact a woman, not a lost Indian princeling.’
Frannie adjusted the brightness of her screen, turning the glare down a little, and stared at her pad. Then her phone rang and she felt irrational panic that it was Oliver calling to cancel. She had an intense yearning to see him again. To hold him. To be reassured by him. She lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Frannie?’
It was another research assistant, Julian Egon. ‘Declan O’Hare said I was going to have to take over the cataloguing in the basements. Can you let me have a note of the ones you’ve covered – save me some rime.’
‘Sure. When do you need it?’
‘No rush. Next couple of days.’
‘I’ll do it later today.’ She replaced the receiver and stared at her unfinished Twix; the chocolate was making her feel queasy.
Penrose Spode hung up. ‘Really!’ he said.
Frannie raised her eyebrows.
‘Bloody female.’ He frowned as Frannie drained her Coke. ‘You know how much sugar’s in that stuff?’
‘Probably why it works,’ she said, and began to type in the next entry.
The phone rang again. But it was Carol Bolton, asking her if she would like to join a small crowd who were going to be taken around the excavations beneath a construction site after work, and then go on for a Chinese. She thanked her for the invite but said she was already going out. Carol said she could guess who with, giggled and rang off.
Frannie found her fingers and her brain were hopelessly unco-ordinated and she made constant mistakes. Penrose Spode was in a phoning mood and his icy sarcasm to the operators, librarians and archivists made her cringe. She took a break at eleven, asked Spode if he wanted anything, went along to the machine outside the canteen and bought them each a coffee. When she came back he was off the phone and twitching with indignation at some fresh injustice.
‘I gather you know someone I was at university with,’ she said as she set the plastic cup down on the barren neatness of his desk, and he warily eyed a drop that was trickling down the side.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Phoebe Hawkins.’
He looked at her suspiciously, as if she had made an unwelcome intrusion into his private life, his expression reminding her of a crow guarding its nest. ‘Yes,’ he said evasively, ‘I vaguely remember her. We were on a dig in Iran.’
‘Steamy Arabian nights?’
He bristled in silence as if a reply was beyond dignity and made a pretence of returning to his work for some moments. ‘As a matter of fact, no,’ he said, suddenly, and Frannie realized that Spode’s view of the friendship or relationship had been less happy than Phoebe’s. She wondered out of pure curiosity what the relationship really had been. From a comment he had once made, she got the impression he lived with his mother, but he always gave ambiguous answers to her questions. None of her other colleagues knew any more, either. In a year of sharing the office, she had found no chink in the armour around his private life.
‘Bit of a coincidence!’ she said.
He did not reply.
She ate an egg-and-tomato sandwich in the canteen, swallowed it down with an apple juice, bought another Twix, which she dropped into her handbag, and went straight down to the basement. She had two final cupboards to catalogue and she would have finished this storage room. If she worked fast she might just get it done today, as Declan O’Hare had requested. Although the cataloguing on Indian weaponry would not be complete, Julian Egon would have a clear starting-point when he took over from her.
She hurried down the long, gloomy corridor, deep underground, with its overhead fluorescents, rows of fire extinguishers and numbered storage doors packed with treasures. Some were antiquities that had been brought down for safety during the Blitz and never taken up again. Some were objects for which there was simply no room and which awaited a relevant exhibition. Others were items for which the records had been lost.
She opened the door marked 2(f), switched on the light and went into the windowless, airless room. A three-foot-high red marble gargoyle grinned at her, inches from her face. It squatted on top of a stone coffin, guarding it. Its face was hideous and gave her the creeps. Declan O’Hare had told Frannie with an evil gleam that the coffin had never been opened and carried a curse worse than Tutankhamun’s.
Artefacts were piled up to the high, vaulted ceiling all around: shelves of statuettes, death-masks, totems, vizors, helmets. A torture chair with upright nails sat in the gloom of the far corner and she eased her way past it to unlock the door of one of the two cedar-wood cupboards she had not yet touched. To her amazement, the cupboard was empty, except for one damaged and jagged brass sculpture of a tiger surrounded by curiously shaped symbols, right at the back. To make sure there was nothing else, she pulled out the steps, and climbed up. Each of the ten slatted shelves was bare.
She climbed down and put her hand around the figure. As she tightened her grip on it she felt a stab of pain in her finger. For a moment she thought she had been stung by another wasp, then she saw dark red blood welling out of the tiny puncture. She sucked it clean, and bound her handkerchief tightly around her finger.
When she turned the figure round, she saw what had cut her: it was the broken-off point of what looked like a sword. Frannie eased the figure to the front of the shelf, surprised how heavy it was, and looked at the old buff tag tied to it. She opened her notepad, and removed the top of her pen, settling down to the usual routine.
The writing on the tag had been done a long time ago, in ink that had discoloured to a watery brown, but it was still clearly legible: Damaged brass figure of a tiger found at the siege of Seringapatam, Mysore, 1799. Date: early 18th Cent. AD. Donated to Brit
ish Museum 1865 by William Halkin, 14th Marquess of Sherfield.
A smile pushed its way falteringly across her lips, like a crack through ice. She tried to convince herself that there was nothing sinister, that it did not mean anything, tried to push away the creeping doubts that had been stalking her since Meredith’s funeral. But she had the sudden eerie sensation that someone was in the room with her, watching her. She turned around. Nothing. She looked back at the tiger, read the label again. Then she heard the unmistakable scrape of a footstep. It came from the far side of the cupboard, near the door.
‘Hello?’ she called.
There was no reply.
‘Hello?’ she called louder.
Silence. But the ceiling was watching her. The walls seemed to move in a little towards her; her skin felt unseen fingers drawing it in, pleating it. She fought her panic. There was no one down here to hear her if she shouted. She stepped lightly between the shelves, looking for an object to hold, something heavy; the cupboards were full of weapons, hundreds of them. She moved round towards the door, then stopped, astounded. The red marble gargoyle that guarded the unopened coffin was no longer on the lid. It was standing on the floor beside it. Blocking her path.
A low croaking voice beyond the door said: ‘I’m just going out for a stroll. You can come out of the coffin whilst I’m gone if you promise to be good.’
Then her boss appeared in the doorway, grinning imbecilically.
‘Declan O’Hare! You bastard!’ Frannie said.
He rocked his head from side to side and slid his hands into his blazer pockets. ‘I always said this room was spooky, didn’t I?’
She pressed her hand over her heart. ‘God, you frightened me!’ Her relief was tinged with anger. ‘That really freaked me!’
He grinned again. ‘Fear is one of the spices of life, Frannie. How can you respect the past if you don’t fear it? You can’t love anything in life without being afraid of it. Did you not know that?’
She wondered if he was becoming unhinged. ‘No, I didn’t know that; there are a lot of things I love without fearing them.’
He stroked the gargoyle’s head as if it were a cat. ‘Oh yes? Tell me one?’
‘My parents.’
He shook his head. ‘No, you only love them because the first thing you learned was to fear them. It’s the difference between like and love, Frannie. You can like all sorts of things – a pretty view, a nice vase – but you can only love something you respect. And if you respect it, you’re afraid of it in some way.’ He bent down and with some difficulty lifted the gargoyle back on to the coffin. ‘Cesare Lombroso said that the ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand. Do you?’
‘What is this? Twenty questions?’
‘Tell me, do you?’
‘Adore what I can’t understand? I don’t know. What are you getting at?’ She wondered suddenly if there was some connection between Declan O’Hare and Oliver Halkin of which she was unaware. The wording on the tag she’d just read was giving her ideas. Maybe the Halkins were patrons of the Museum or something. Was Declan trying to warn her off? Put her off Oliver? Ridiculous.
He was wandering through the room with his normal, slightly swaggering walk. In his early forties, passionately in love with his work, he had the smooth good looks of a television presenter. He paused to tap a ferocious mask. ‘Know why warriors used to wear these in battle?’
‘To frighten their enemies.’
He smiled his television presenter’s smile. ‘No, Frannie. To hide their fear from their enemies.’
‘This isn’t a very good day to talk to me about fear, Declan.’
‘Oh?’ he looked at her quizzically. ‘Are you OK? What have you done to your finger?’
‘Nothing. Just a prick.’
‘You look a little peaky. Ah, of course. I’d forgotten. The funeral. Bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Western way of death always is. But that’s another story. So, freedom from fear you want today?’
She nodded.
He stared at a death-mask. ‘You’re a good girl, Frannie. A good researcher – you have a great future ahead of you. Just don’t get blasé about the past, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t think I was.’
He gave a brief shake of his head. ‘No, no, I don’t think you are.’ He ran his hand over a crocodile shield. ‘Don’t you think it would be wonderful if you could access the past? If you could run a machine over something like this and pick up the energy field of the man who once carried it into battle, find out all about him, his thoughts, his emotions, how he lived?’
‘Yes, it would be.’
‘That’s what antiquities do for me, Frannie. Do they do it for you?’
‘You mean you can really read the past in them?’
His expressive blue eyes widened. ‘Unfortunately not. I wish I was psychic, then maybe I could. There are people who can. Or so they claim. You should talk to Penrose, he knows about these things.’
‘Penrose?’ she said, surprised.
He rolled his eyes in a rather sceptical affirmation. ‘But I’ll tell you what I think: we humans can remember everything that’s ever happened to us, everything we’ve ever seen and done. A lot of it we can’t access unless we go under hypnosis. It’s there, but it’s buried. I believe objects and places remember things too; their atoms, their subatomic particles, whatever, are affected by everything that happens close to them. It must be possible to access them somehow.’
‘Is that what you want to do? Find a way how? Invent a machine that can read them?’
‘No,’ he said with a smile, and walked back to the door. ‘No, not at all. I’m just a simple archaeologist who digs around in dust for old bones and pots and garden gnomes.’ He departed silently on his rubber-soled shoes and she shook her head, bemused by his typical eccentricity.
‘Declan!’ she called after him.
He stopped by the door at the end. ‘Yes?’
‘There’s a small bronze in one of the cupboards – eighteenth-century Indian, donated in 1865 by William Halkin, fourteenth Marquess of Sherfield. Is there any family connection with the Museum and that family?’
He looked at the ground, clasped his hands behind his back and frowned. ‘I seem to think there’s some connection between them and the East India Company. And they were quite big patrons of the arts at one time.’
As she reached him he started walking again, through the door and up the staircase. She kept pace with him.
‘Strange lot, the Halkins, mad as hatters, half of them. But so are most of the aristocracy,’ he said.
‘Why are the Halkins strange?’
‘Oh – I can’t remember which one of them it was – in the eighteenth century, I think – the eleventh or twelfth Marquess’s wife died, but he totally ignored it, carried on as usual, had the servants continue to dress her for dinner and bring her down every night. He dined with her for years after her death. Half the servants left because they couldn’t bear the charade.’ He held the door at the top of the stairs for her. ‘And of course there was the old second Marquess in the seventeenth century up to all sorts of occult tricks. Very involved in numerology.’
‘You seem to know a lot about them.’
‘No, not really. I’m interested in English history, that’s all. They were a significant family, in a minor way. A few MPs and soldiers, that sort of thing. I’m not even sure if the line isn’t extinct now.’
‘It isn’t,’ Frannie said.
‘Ah,’ he said without much interest. ‘If you want to know more you could try looking them up in the library.’
‘Yes, I was planning to.’
‘There’s a whole section on genealogy. They’re bound to be in it. Debrett’s would be the place to start.’
When she went back into her office, just before five, Penrose Spode was not there; she glanced up at the back of the door and saw that his crash-helmet and fluorescent strap had gone, indicating he had left for
the day. Then she saw the note in his neat handwriting as she sat down: ‘2.35p.m. Phoebe Hawkins telephoned. Very urgent that you call her back ASAP. She is in a meeting but they will put you through.’
She wondered, as she dialled, whether speaking to Phoebe had prompted Spode’s unusually early departure. Whatever the reason, she was quite glad that he wasn’t there to listen in.
‘Frannie?’ Phoebe sounded edgy.
‘Sorry, I only just got your message.’
‘Look, I can’t talk at the moment. Can we meet up this evening?’
‘I can’t,’ Frannie said. ‘Impossible. What about lunchtime tomorrow?’
‘No good, I have a meeting – could we meet tomorrow evening? Come round to my flat and have supper?’
‘Yes – I – I suppose so,’ Frannie said, reluctant to commit herself to an evening in case she and Oliver wanted to meet up. ‘Where do you live?’
‘In Clapham. Thetford Avenue.’
‘I know it. You’re only a few streets away from me.’
Phoebe did not react to that. ‘It’s really important, Frannie, I mean it.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll come. What time?’
‘About seven?’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s number thirty-eight. Flat Three.’
Frannie jotted it down.
‘Does the number twenty-six mean anything to you, Frannie?’
As Frannie thought for a moment, she said, ‘Why?’ She could hear someone calling Phoebe impatiently.
‘Look, I’ve got to go. Just be careful of that number.’
‘Careful? What do you mean?’ She heard the impatient shout again.
‘See you tomorrow. Seven o’clock.’ Then Phoebe hung up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The rain had stopped some time during the afternoon, and the streets were slicked and shiny beneath the dusk sky. It was five to seven. Frannie waited outside the Museum in her mackintosh. The rush-hour traffic had thinned down now, but the fumes still hung heavily over Great Russell Street. There was a sharp toot, and Oliver roared up in his Renault.
As she climbed in the car he apologized for being late, saying he had been stuck in a meeting, then greeted her with a long kiss that left her breathless and flushed. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he said.