Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  Sam tried to remove the bracelet from Bridger’s hand. His whole body was soaked in sweat, he was dying a slow painful death, but he would not relinquish his prize.

  “It’s done, Sam,” Maggie stated.

  “Marcus, let go you stupid bastard.” Sam slapped him in the face, caught the bracelet as it fell from his hand, and placed it in front, and to the south, of the rest of the Hand of God. Marcus Bridger, the idiot son of William Sanchez, fell backwards and didn’t move again.

  Melbourne, Sunday October 11, 1998

  Sam, Maggie, Pavel, Ben and Vasquez sat staring at each other over the box in which the real and now complete Hand of God lay - with the thumb facing west, just in case. After Sam had been officially re-introduced to Miguel Richer, the Peruvian Ambassador, everyone had agreed that Vasquez deserved an explanation.

  “Well, that is some story,” he exclaimed. “And you said my imagination was fertile.”

  “What I want to know,” Rigby demanded, as he and Rivers joined them at the table in the Regency bar, “is how you worked out it was Bridger.”

  “It occurred to me,” Sam explained, “that a man who plays golf at Sunningdale, as Daniel Bridger does, would not be the sort of man who would organise a protest to stop a golf course being built, which is what Marcus boasted that his ‘archaeologist’ father had done. I knew my hunch was right when Ben confirmed that Marcus had also been adopted, and Pavel verified that the golf course protest was one of William Sanchez’s annoying stories of his exploits on previous digs.”

  “Very clever, Sam.”

  “Thank you, Maggie. But even so, at the time, I still thought that Barstoc was the main culprit; that he was, I don’t know, using Marcus.”

  “But it was the other way around,” Rivers stated.

  “It was,” Sam agreed. “Marcus, or should I say Paolo Sanchez, is truly convinced he is Tupac Amaru. And Barstoc, for some unfathomable reason, honestly believes that Marcus is the Sapa Inca and that they are spiritual brothers. He’s quite obsessed by the notion. He claimed last night he would do anything to serve and protect him and, in fact, has done everything that Marcus asked of him.”

  “And Marcus was using his precious phallic collection to conceal the pieces of the Hand he’d already collected?” Vasquez asked.

  “Yeah,” Ben snarled. “Which is why he was so insistent on unpacking them himself when we searched your stuff at the airport. And probably why he was so pissed off with Barstoc.”

  “That and the fact that Marcus returned from Paris to discover that Professor Marsden was dead,” Sam added. “Barstoc claims it was an accident that he killed Lloyd when he did. It was ‘premature’ he said, because they hadn’t yet found the golden thumb.”

  “Why is Andrew admitting to so much?” Maggie asked.

  “He’s whacko if you ask me,” Rigby said. “But he seems to be admitting to anything he thinks we can prove.”

  “Including anything he thinks we can prove against Marcus,” Sam stated. “It’s the Sapa Inca spiritual brotherhood thing. Andrew Barstoc is prepared to go down for everything just to keep Marcus out of prison.”

  “By the way,” Ben said, “our colleagues in Sydney had a little chat with those antique dealers that Barstoc visited. According to one of these gentleman, who is now negotiating a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation, Barstoc was actually holding an auction.”

  “What for?” Pavel asked.

  “An Aztec dagger, some little statues and a gold mask.”

  “The other artefacts from the Paris hijacking,” Maggie exclaimed.

  “Which also explains why Marcus organised for the second lot of exhibits to get here a day early,” Sam said. “He had to get out of Paris straight after the hijacking.”

  “Will Andrew and Marcus be brought to justice for Noel, Barbara and the others?” Pavel asked.

  “There’s a lot they’ll never be charged with Pavel, because it would be too hard to prove,” Sam said. “But no doubt a couple of unsolved hit and run cases can be reopened once the relevant authorities have been informed,” Sam said.

  “But Barstoc will be charged with Professor Marsden’s murder,” she added. “And if Marcus ever regains consciousness he’ll be charged as an accessory, and for the theft of the various pieces of the Hand of God, including the hijacking of the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet.”

  “Which is finally back where it belongs,” Vasquez stated, patting the box.

  “Yes, Enrico,” Pavel said, “and tomorrow I will be formally handing back it to Peru. If you are agreeable and feel you are capable of such a responsibility, I will suggest you are appointed as the official Guardian of the Hand of the Sun God.”

  “I would be honoured,” Vasquez asserted.

  “Well, I don’t know about you lot, but I am exhausted,” Sam exclaimed.

  “I need a holiday,” Pavel agreed.

  “I think I’m going to retire to Queensland,” Maggie laughed. “I don’t care if I never see another museum, or archaeological site, or jungle, or precious artefact of any kind. And, Pavel, if you find any more cursed relics, do not tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Maggie, my love,” Pavel laughed. “You will never retire. It’s not in you to be idle.”

  “I agree with Pavel,” Sam said. “You’ve got more energy than I’ve ever had, Maggie. I doubt you’ll stop until someone forces your dead body to lie down and be quiet.”

  “That’s charming,” Maggie chuckled.

  “And even then,” Sam continued, “I’m sure you’ll arrange to be buried somewhere significant so archaeologists of the 24th century can dig you up and announce a remarkable find.”

  “Ah, now there’s a thought,” Maggie said. “Perhaps I’ll have my thigh bone inscribed with an enigmatic message, for just such an occasion.”

  “What for?” Sam laughed.

  “To confound them, my dear. To confound them.”

  THE END

  The After Words

  Late last century - before every household had the Internet, DVD recorders and plasma screens, long before Facebook and YouTube, and before every teenager was iPodded and iPhoned to the wider world - I wrote a murder mystery.

  While that makes me sound older than Agatha, I’m talking last century; as in the late 1990s - you know when there were still phone boxes on some street corners, mobiles were the size of bricks and the only Internet was dial-up with a lot of drop-out.

  That mystery was Golden Relic, the book you’ve just read. But what I wrote it for, back in 1997, made me a pioneer of the World Wide Web.

  Yes I - Lindy Cameron, Australian crime writer - was an Internet Pioneer. I believe I was the first person in the world to be commissioned to write fiction specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. I boldly went where none had gone before.

  Three years before the turn of the Millennium, I was paid actual money to write a novel for this new-fangled thing that, in terms of home-use, was more un than usual.

  I was commissioned by the Museum of Victoria to write a novel to help promote Melbourne and its museums in the lead-up to ICOM ‘98 - the most important international gathering of museologists, museum professionals and other learned types that Australia had ever seen.

  The Triennial Conference of the International Council of Museums (whose HQ is in Paris) is a really big deal. In the museum world, scoring the hosting of this prestigious conference is akin to a city hosting the Olympics.

  In 1998 the honour went to Melbourne, Victoria. It was the first time the conference had been held in Australia and only the second time it had travelled south of the equator.

  Despite the seriously high-profile nature of the thing, some wacky person on the Melbourne ICOM committee decided that a ‘novel’ way to let all the potential delegates - museum folk from all over the world - know about ‘our part’ of the world was to commission a murder mystery.

  The ICOM ‘98 committee approached Sisters in Crime Australia looking for some likely writers to
submit ideas for a murder mystery set in the Melbourne Museum but focusing on the conference’s 1998 theme of the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

  That’s where I came into it - although there were four of us to start with.

  Four excited, but bemused, crime writers turned up for a briefing session to face a boardroom full of semi-informed museum staff. That was the funniest part. Some of these folk - these professionals from various departments of the Museum - learnt of the ‘murder mystery PR concept’ at that same meeting. And many of them looked horrified at the thought of using a murder mystery to promote their professions, their institution and their city - to the international museum community.

  By the end of the session however, they had not only warmed to the idea, but were suggesting likely candidates and telling us just how, and why he, she or they should be bumped-off.

  We writers left with our brief. We came up with our individual story ideas and submitted them to the ICOM committee for selection.

  It still amazes me that it was I who got this incredibly cool opportunity.

  Why? Partly because of who I was back then. But also because - as we cross into the second decade the 21st century - both the Internet and I have come so far in that short time that I realise just how totally awesome what I did was. For then.

  So, who was I back then?I was an unpublished crime writer whose knowledge of, and love for, museums was limited to visiting them. While Blood Guilt, my first-written crime novel, had been accepted by HarperCollins Australia it was not due out until early1999.

  But, in 1997 a public institution commissioned me to make up a story, titled Stolen Property, to help promote their conference.

  Their International Conference. On their website. On the Internet.

  What I did predated Stephen King’s pay-as-you-get-it serial foray of the year 2000. The bonus with Stolen Property was that, because I was commissioned to write it, readers got the whole book - all of it - over a 10 month period, for free.

  This happens all the time now, but as recently as the late 90s this was not usual.

  When Stolen Property went up on the ICOM ‘98 website, personal computers were still newish, and the proverbial ‘they’ were still talking about a time when ‘one in four homes’ might eventually have PCs; when one in 20 might get, not have, ‘get’ dial-up internet.

  This was the olden days.

  So much so, that even though the whole reason for me writing the story was to promote a conference through the conference’s own website, I had to do most of my book’s research at libraries. As in physically leave home and walk into a library building, search for actual books and borrow them.

  Why? Because in 1997 BG - Before Google - there still weren’t that many ‘websites’ you could just go visit to get your facts.

  Even in this novel designed for serialisation on the Internet, you will note I made few references to the Internet itself. This was because it was technology so ‘new’ to me, and most people I knew, that I could not even ‘guess’ where it would be in six months - let alone the following year when Stolen Property went ‘online’.

  There were a few other odd things I had to tackle in the writing of Stolen Property that were a twist on the skills we writers use everyday.

  First, I had to create an intriguing mystery, accessible to all/any readers, while avoiding telling granny how to suck eggs - or in this case without bashing the museologists about their own stuff, in order to ‘explain’ it to readers who were less in-the-know. Readers who were, in fact, more like me.

  One of the reasons for this was that when HarperCollins, my soon-to-be first-time publishers, learnt of what I was doing for ICOM ‘98, they came up with an incredibly awesome plan. They would publish the end result of my serialised mystery as an actual paperback. In time for the opening of the actual ICOM Conference in 1998. This book would actually come out before the one I had already contracted with them.

  Hence my desire to make Stolen Property a novel for a much wider readership than the online international museum community.

  Another aspect of having to make things up, based on fact, was a couple of minor real-world details.

  When I started writing Stolen Property in 1997 the (old) Museum of Victoria was still in Swanston Street with the State Library of Victoria, in the heart of Melbourne.

  Stolen Property, however, was set a year later, between September and October 1998 when - if things went according to plan - the Museum as we had known it for 150 years would be closed to the public. Its curators and staff would be working to finish the packing, for storage, of the entire humongous collection - in preparation for the opening of the new museum sometime in 2000.

  When I started writing in ‘97, the space beside the famous Royal Exhibition Building in the Carlton Gardens was just that, space - lawn and trees and space.

  When my hero Sam Diamond stands there, in what was my future but the book’s present, I had to imagine what she might be seeing - a year later in real time and in the midst of three or so years’ work on a huge construction site.

  Would Sam see half-dug foundations for a mighty new museum? Would part of the building itself be up? Or would ‘the site’ still be lovely lawn and trees, because something had gone awfully wrong and not a single sod had yet been turned?

  It was part of my brief to talk up Melbourne; introduce our city as great place, in its own right, for the conference delegates to visit, to enjoy, to look at. But what if I couldn’t get that little detail about the new museum right? No pressure at all.

  Not to mention having to rabbit on about museums, and museum practice, and how it was all changing, and the whole repatriation of cultural artefacts concept, and��� all for the ‘entertainment’ of people who chatted about such things over coffee. Did I mention, no pressure.

  Righto. Blah-blah, Lindy. I had the best time. Of course I did.

  The serialisation of Stolen Property on the ICOM ‘98 website between February and October of 1998 did exactly what it was supposed to do. HarperCollins Australia published my story as a paperback in October 1998. Retitled Golden Relic my book was launched on the opening night of the ICOM ‘98 Conference.

  And now my little murder mystery has come full circle back to a wider audience on the World Wide Web. Stolen Property, the serialised internet novel, which became Golden Relic the paperback, is now Golden Relic the ebook.

  It not only stands proudly as a quirky bit of Internet History, but Golden Relic is also a rollicking good yarn - if I do say so myself - and the first in the Sam Diamond / Maggie Tremaine archaeological mystery series. There will be more.

  One last thing about the original paperback. The day that I received my advance copies of Golden Relic in the mail had it’s own spooky coincidence. Apart from the sheer thrill of opening the parcel, taking out my first published book, smelling it, fondling it, going all wackadoo about holding a real novel with my name on the cover and filled with pages of words that I had put into the right order��� Um, as I said, apart from all that, that ‘day’ was also significant.

  Remember, I wrote the thing the year before, in 1997. Allowing for the fact that I was actually using the real conference as a backdrop to the mystery, and that I wanted to have the denouement of that mystery happening at the official opening of ICOM ‘98 (well, my fictional version of that opening, obviously) I had a timeline that my characters had to meet. I was also writing a serial - so I needed a lot of ‘racing around’ and end-of-chapter cliffhangers.

  So I set up my plot, then worked the timeline backwards from the real official opening date of the real conference, and then picked a day/date at random to start the mystery.

  A murder in the Melbourne Museum launches Special Detective Sam Diamond and archaeologist Dr Maggie Tremaine off on an adventure around the world and back to Melbourne - in time for the October 10 opening of the ICOM ‘98 conference.

  That random start date - which I chose back in about July of ‘97 - was Wednesday September 16, 1998
.

  On that day, in fiction, Professor Lloyd Marsden of the Museum of Victoria was found murdered in the old museum.

  On that date in the real world - 18 months after it was plucked from the air - I, Lindy Cameron received my advance copy of Golden Relic.

  Yes - do-do-de-do - on Wednesday 16 September 1998, I opened my first-published novel, for the first time, and read:

  Chapter One

  Melbourne, Wednesday September 16, 1998

  The hands tore at Professor Lloyd Marden’s flesh with a surprising savagery. It was hardly fair, he thought, that in his last moments of life he was also being tormented by a gathering of avenging gods���

  CLAN DESTINE PRESS

  is proud to release

  this ebook

  and hopes you enjoyed the story.

  http://www.clandestinepress.com.au

  If you enjoyed this selection from our catalogue, you might like:

  First published in eBook form by Clan Destine Press in 2013

  First commissioned 1997 for publication on the Internet in 1998, by Museum Victoria, Australia

  First Published in paperback in 1998 by HarperCollins Australia

  PO Box 121, Bittern

  Victoria 3918 Australia

  Copyright �� Lindy Cameron

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (The Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of any book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:

  Cameron, Lindy

  Golden Relic

  ISBN 978-0-9924925-2-6

  Cover Design �� Lindy Cameron