Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  “It’s looks pretty straightforward to me,” Rigby said.

  “That’s because you haven’t been down on the floor with me, lookin’ at the poor man’s face. Someone’s dealt him a couple of good punches. Help me roll him over please, Steve.”

  Steve obliged and between them they rolled the body onto its back.

  There was still no blood but the late Professor Marsden had a black left eye and a large purple bruise on his right jaw.

  “Injuries sustained during a fall following his stroke,” Rigby suggested.

  Baird, who was still on his hands and knees, was inspecting the bruises with a magnifying glass. “I don’t think so Jack. There’s a wee puncture mark at the centre of both bruises,” he announced. “I suspect the man was struck and poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Sam and Rigby chorused, looking at each other and then back at Baird.

  “I might be wrong,” Baird said doubtfully.

  “You’re never wrong,” Rigby moaned. “Though how you can tell that is beyond me.”

  “What’s that in his left hand?” Sam asked, squatting down to get a better look.

  Baird reached out with his gloved hand and picked up a small piece of paper which he carefully unfolded. His eyes widened, then squinted, then he held out the paper for Sam to read.

  “I hope he’s left us the name of his killer,” Rigby stated.

  “If that’s what it is,” Sam stated, “we’re going to need help deciphering it.”

  Unevenly scrawled, and probably with the pen Lloyd Marsden held in his other hand as his life left him, was the word:

  Chapter Two

  Melbourne, Thursday September 17, 1998

  “Oh my god! He was poisoned?” Daley Prescott sounded like all his worst fears and a couple of phobias had just invaded his personal space. He looked even worse. Sam was glad Rigby had waited till the man was sitting down before conveying Baird’s suspicions.

  “That’s just the pathologist’s preliminary report, Mr Prescott,” Rigby stated. “It is not for general publication. We’ll know more after the autopsy of course, but even if he wasn’t poisoned, the man was certainly beaten.”

  “To death,” Prescott snorted, almost as if Marsden’s death was more of an insult, to him, than a tragic end for the professor himself. Prescott swivelled his chair and stared blankly out the window.

  Sam and Rigby, having left the forensics team to finish the crime scene investigation, had agreed it was time to question Prescott about what sort of ‘ramifications’ the murder of one of his colleagues was going to have - apart from the obvious ones - and why he had seen fit to contact the Federal Minister for Cultural Affairs. They had walked the two city blocks from the Library to the Museum’s administrative headquarters on Exhibition Street and now sat with an agitated Daley Prescott in his office on the 18th floor.

  While the Assistant Director tried to collect his thoughts, apparently by rubbing his fingers vigorously across his forehead, Sam gazed jealously out the huge window at the jigsaw of building facades, rooftops and patches of blue sky.

  The view was a far cry from the windowless cubicle she shared with Ben Muldoon. A calendar of the world’s most famous tourist sites, none of which she’d seen in person (nor was she ever likely to given the pathetic state of her savings account), was the only non-work-related item on those dreary blue felt walls. September was the ‘Pyramids of Giza’ which, as far as Sam was concerned, couldn’t be further away if they’d been built on Mars.

  “This is dreadful,” Prescott finally said, stating the obvious.

  “Were you close?” Rigby asked, completely misunderstanding Prescott’s anxiety. Sam, however, could tell there was little, if anything, personal intruding on the man’s concern.

  “Close? No, not really. Not at all, in fact,” Prescott replied. “It’s just that the international repercussions of this are, they’re���”

  “You keep saying that,” Rigby interrupted. “What precisely are the repercussions or ramifications of Professor Marsden’s death?”

  “I can’t begin to imagine,” Prescott said, annoyingly, and then frowned. “Actually, I think I’m imagining the worst - in every possibly combination.”

  “Do you think you could be more specific,” Sam requested.

  “Marsden was on the ICOM committee,” Prescott stated, as if that explained everything.

  “Which is what?” Rigby asked.

  “The International Council of Museums,” Sam said, volunteering most of the information she’d been given by her boss. “Melbourne is hosting the triennial Conference - next month.”

  “Now perhaps you’ll understand why I’m in such a state,” Prescott explained. “We’ve got close to 2000 delegates arriving in just over three weeks. They’re coming from around the country and all over the world. This is a disaster.”

  “All over the world? That explains the ‘international’ aspect of the ramifications,” Rigby noted. He looked at Sam. “Probably explains why you’re here too.”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m here because the Assistant Director called the Minister. Why exactly did you do that, Mr Prescott?”

  Prescott started rubbing his forehead again. “I took one look at Lloyd’s body and realised a thing like this would send the media into a frenzy. I felt I had to act quickly to contain any possible fallout,” he explained. “And the best way to do that, was to go right to the top. To the Minister. If Lloyd had died from a stroke, as first thought, then I would simply have apologised for wasting your time. On the other hand if it was murder, which we now know to be the case, then my actions would have been, and in fact are, the right ones to ensure that a lid is kept on this whole affair.”

  Rigby looked unimpressed by Prescott’s logic. “Why the Federal Minister?” he asked.

  “This is an international conference, Detective. While it is being hosted by the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, its success reflects on the entire nation. At the very least this will have a disastrous PR effect on the final preparations, and anything detrimental to the success of this Conference is, in my opinion, of federal concern. Also, Jim Pilger is a friend of mine.” Prescott held up his hand to forestall any snide remarks about nepotism and turned to Sam.

  “You are here, Special Detective Diamond. Whatever you may think, that says less about my ‘connections’ than it does about the fact that the Minister shares my concerns in this matter enough to send his representative. And you already know about ICOM ‘98, so I assume you have been briefed.”

  “Brief being the operative word, Mr Prescott,” Sam admitted. “I do, however, understand your concerns about the likelihood of the media turning this incident into a three ring circus.

  I am authorised to work with both you and the police,” Sam said, glancing at Rigby, “to exercise damage control and minimise the fallout. We can’t make this go away, Mr Prescott, but we may be able to obfuscate matters so the media takes little or no interest.”

  “Un-bloody-likely,” Rigby declared.

  “I’m afraid I agree with Detective Rigby on that point,” Prescott’s defeated tone seemed to be saying more than he was.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” Sam asked.

  “I believe that Lloyd Marsden’s murder may have been a deliberate act of sabotage,” Prescott announced.

  “Sabotage? Why?” Rigby was incredulous.

  “I don’t know,” Prescott replied, searching his desk drawer for something. “But there are a lot of sick individuals out there.”

  And paranoid ones, Sam thought, leaning forward to inspect the postcard of the Museum that Prescott passed across the desk. Typewritten on the back was a limerick:

  You’re failure will be my success

  The confrence will be such a mess

  One by one you will fall

  Till theirs none left at all

  And the hole thing will cause you distress.

  “I received that last Wednesday,” Prescott said.

  �
��And you didn’t call the police?” Rigby asked, raising an eyebrow. “Or ring the Minister?”

  Prescott smiled humourlessly. “It is a dreadful limerick with atrocious spelling, but until this morning I thought it was merely a joke in extremely poor taste.”

  “They may not be connected,” Sam said.

  Prescott looked at her as if she was daft. “You don’t think ‘one by one you will fall’ is a threat now made manifest by the body of one of my curators lying down there in the Library?”

  “I’d like to ask you about that,” Rigby said, changing the subject. “I’ll have this analysed,” he added, picking the card up by the corner and slipping into his inside jacket pocket.

  “Ask me what?”

  “What was Marsden doing in the Library? Wasn’t the Museum closed over a year ago?”

  “Closed to the public yes, but the task of moving the collections is monumental and we have many staff, and that included Lloyd, who still spend much of their time in the old building. Our Collection Relocation Department is responsible for the move, but they have to liaise with the curators and collection managers to ensure the safe packing, labelling and cataloguing of all the items. So Lloyd has an office here, but his work is, was, there.”

  “But it’s been 12 months, surely you don’t have that much stuff to shift,” Rigby said.

  Prescott laughed. “You have to understand that, historically speaking, the curatorial staff of this institution have, primarily, been ‘collectors’ and they have been collecting for 150 years. We have about 16 million pieces of ‘stuff’, Detective. Moving them is not something that can be done overnight. It is a logistical nightmare, although it has provided us with a unique opportunity to assess, reorganise, catalogue and even photograph the entire collection. Everything is being moved in sequence to our storage facilities, and each transit lot is barcoded and the information scanned into a database so we know exactly where it is.”

  “Storage facilities,” Sam noted. “That’s something I don’t understand. Why close the old Museum before the new one is finished if it means everything is going into storage?”

  “For the same logistical reasons. The new Melbourne Museum is not due for completion until the year 2000. Preparation for this move actually began over two years ago, long before we closed the doors on Swanston Street, and it will take another two. It’s not simply a case of wrapping everything in old newspapers, packing them into cardboard boxes and wheeling them a couple of blocks across town.”

  “I realise that���” Sam started to say, but Prescott was obviously on a roll.

  “A great proportion of our collection is extremely fragile and irreplaceable. We have something like three million spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites, butterflies, beetles and other insects; over 30,000 mammal skins, mounts and skeletons; 70,000 reptiles, and the same number of birds including thousands of eggs and nests. They all require completely different handling and even the packing material itself has to be non-abrasive and acid free. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, we can’t pack and move the ornithological or insect specimens in the same way we pack and relocate the dinosaur skeletons or a three tonne meteorite.”

  “Naturally,” Sam managed to say, noticing that Rigby, who had given up trying to get a word in edgewise, was sitting there with his mouth half open.

  “And, of course,” Prescott continued, “before any actual moving happens, we have to tackle the problem of pest management - to ensure that the new storage areas, and ultimately the new Museum, are not contaminated by things like borers and moths from the relocated items. So as you can see it is not a simple procedure.”

  “Besides, the Library wanted the floor space, so you had to go somewhere,” Sam stated.

  “That is true,” Prescott agreed, “but even so, it would never have been a case of closing the old Museum doors on a Friday and reopening in the new building after a quick move on the weekend.”

  A knock on the door brought Prescott’s lecture on removal practices to a halt. “Enter.”

  Prescott’s personal assistant, a very personable young man with a large ruby stud in his ear who had earlier introduced himself to Sam and Rigby as ‘call me Anton’, now ushered Constable Rivers into the Assistant Director’s office.

  “Excuse me sir,” Rivers addressed Rigby. “I’ve got a shortlist of people known to have had contact with, or who were seen talking to the deceased at some time yesterday. There may be others but you said you wanted something to go on as soon as possible.”

  “Good work Constable,” Rigby said, taking the sheet of paper.

  “Anton,” Prescott recalled his assistant. “Did you manage to get in touch with Maggie?”

  “Maggie has apparently been in Paris for the last two weeks for a conference on new technologies and, I believe, she was involved in that Inca trinket fiasco. She is now on her way home, to Sydney I mean.”

  “A simple yes or no would have done, Anton.”

  “Then yes and no, Mr Prescott,” Anton stated calmly. “I left a message at Sydney University for her to call you the moment she returns.”

  Sam watched Anton and Prescott as the latter tugged his earlobe then laced his fingers across his chest. Anton turned and left the room, so Sam figured that one of those gestures had meant ‘that will be all’, or ‘thank you Anton, and I’m sorry for snapping at you’.

  “Who can we talk to now?” Rigby was asking.

  “These four - Robert Ellington, Haddon Gould, Sarah Collins and Trevor Brownie - are all in this building,” Rivers said. “Andrew Barstoc and Adrienne Douglas have allegedly gone sightseeing, and this guy, Enrico Vasquez, is over at the Exhibition Buildings in Carlton - so I sent a car to bring him back here. Vasquez was actually seen arguing with the deceased.”

  Rigby looked up at Rivers. “You sent a car?”

  “Um, I thought it’d be easier to have everyone in the one place,” Rivers replied hesitantly.

  “That’s fine, good thinking. You can go back���” Rigby stopped and took another long look at the constable. “On second thoughts, don’t go anywhere. Half my crew are on leave so I’ve just seconded you to my team for this investigation. Get you out of that uniform for the duration, what do you say?”

  “That’d be cool sir,” Rivers grinned.

  “Cool?” Rigby repeated, suddenly feeling his age or rather feeling his youth repeating on him. “Does that mean okay or groovy?”

  “Both sir.”

  “Cool it is then,” Rigby agreed, then returned his attention to Prescott, to whom he passed the list of names. “Can you fill us in on these people?”

  “Let me see,” Prescott peered at the paper, “Trevor Brownie���Brownie. Oh yes, he’s one of our bean counters.”

  “An accountant?” Sam asked, wondering how many of his staff Prescott actually knew. “Financial administrator. Assistant,” Prescott replied. “Sarah Collins is one of our public relations people and Haddon Gould is an Environment curator. Robert Ellington is senior curator in our Australian Society Program and shares, sorry shared, an office with Lloyd.”

  “Which department did Mr Marsden work in?” Sam asked.

  “Well, Lloyd was sort of his own man, really. His speciality was pre-Columbian Andean antiquities, but he was our only full-time authority on Central and South America so he was in charge of overseeing the resettlement of the whole collection. That’s what he was doing in the old building. He was also, as I mentioned earlier, on the ICOM ‘98 committee and he had been assigned, as the Museum’s representative, to assist Dr Marcus Bridger with his international travelling exhibition that is due to open in six days time.

  “Which actually brings me to the other people on your list. Enrico Vasquez, Adrienne Douglas and Andrew Barstoc are all visiting Melbourne with that exhibition. I can’t recall their titles, I’m afraid, as I only met them briefly over dinner last week.”

  “Who is Dr Marcus Bridger?” Sam asked.

  “He’s not on your list,” Prescott b
egan and then realised he had mentioned the name. “This touring exhibition, the ‘Rites of Life and Death’, is his project. It explores the fertility symbols and funerary rites of cultures and societies from around the world and across time, from ancient civilisations to the present day. It’s a splendid collection.”

  “But who is Dr Bridger?” Rigby asked.

  “He is a renowned English archaeologist, primarily attached to the British Museum but who, through a variety of personal research projects and lecturing posts, also has affiliations with several other museums and universities in Britain, the Middle East and the United States. He arrived back in Melbourne this morning with the second shipment of artefacts for his exhibition.”

  “Arrived from where?” Rigby asked.

  “Paris. The ‘Rites of Life and Death’ ended its run there at the end of August.”

  “What do you mean ‘back’ in Melbourne?” Sam queried.

  “He arrived with his colleagues and the first shipment last week; then returned to Paris so he could travel with the remainder of the exhibits.”

  “Why two shipments? And why did Dr Bridger accompany both?” Sam asked.

  “What does this have to do with Lloyd?” Prescott looked worried.

  “Just background information,” Rigby replied casually. “We never know what may be useful in an investigation of this kind. And you did bring it up.”

  Prescott nodded. “Firstly, this travelling exhibition grew out of a smaller one that Marcus put together from the existing collection at the British Museum. When he thought about taking it on tour he decided to broaden the scope and make it truly international. So, as well as the original collection, there are many artefacts on loan from museums and cultural institutions all over the world; brought together for the first time. Marcus is responsible for all of them, hence he insists on riding shotgun for both shipments.”

  “He thinks someone is going to try and steal funeral relics?” Rigby asked, his tone implying there was no accounting for taste.