The Messiah Secret cb-3

by James Becker

  ‘So?’ Angela was busy packing more worthless china into her auction box.

  ‘Well, the crests in the paintings of Bartholomew are slightly different. Both of those have the head of a fox in the top right-hand quadrant of the shield. All the others have the head of a bird — I think it’s a hawk — in the same position.’

  ‘Maybe the painter made a mistake,’ Angela suggested.

  Bronson shook his head. ‘Both paintings were obviously done from life. Bartholomew was sitting in a chair in the salon and the artist was painting what he saw. Why would he get three of the four quadrants of the shield right, and then substitute an entirely different image for the fourth?’

  Angela stopped packing. ‘You’re very observant, Chris,’ she said, smiling. ‘For a man, anyway!’

  ‘I’m a policeman, remember? I’m supposed to notice things. They’re called clues.’

  ‘Well, I agree — the paintings are a bit odd.’ She explained about the two pictures showing Bartholomew as a young man in exotic dress, both of which had been sold shortly after they were completed. ‘And then there was the fiasco of his Folly.’

  Bronson poured himself a cup of instant coffee and sat down as Angela explained about Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax’s obsession with a lost treasure hidden somewhere in the Middle East, and how it had been sparked by the discovery of a piece of parchment he’d found in a sealed earthenware vessel, a parchment that had then vanished.

  ‘Maybe it didn’t vanish,’ Bronson said. ‘Maybe the old man hid it somewhere and Oliver couldn’t find it. Suppose Bartholomew had the paintings done as a sort of a last laugh, so Bartholomew could tell Oliver that the clues had been staring him in the face all along.’

  ‘A fox’s head instead of a hawk doesn’t seem a particularly helpful clue to me,’ Angela objected.

  ‘It could be really simple,’ Bronson said with a grin. ‘There’s a fox in the dining room. Stuffed, of course, and in a glass case. Maybe he just hid the parchment inside it.’

  Angela put down the plate she’d been wrapping. ‘Lead me to it,’ she instructed, her brown eyes shining — always a sign, in Bronson’s opinion, that she was excited.

  The fox was standing on a small mound, glassy eyes staring sightlessly across the dining room towards the tall windows on the opposite side, mouth open to reveal yellowish teeth and a thin pink tongue. It was clearly old and rather mangy, a few patches of fur missing on its sides and tail. It stood on a wooden base, under an oblong glass dome.

  ‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Angela commented.

  ‘Maybe that was the point. Bartholomew might have thought it was an ideal place to hide something.’

  He lifted off the glass dome. ‘The stitches don’t look as if they’ve been disturbed since the poor little sod was stuffed.’ He turned the fox around. ‘And I can’t see any slits or cuts anywhere, so I don’t think there can be anything hidden inside the body itself.’

  He ran his fingers around the base of the object, then stopped abruptly and bent down to look at the back of it.

  ‘This is more likely,’ he said. ‘I can see a line running along the base, just here, so it looks as if this section might open, and there are some scratches on the wood as well.’

  He tugged at the base, but nothing moved. Then he tilted the fox on to its side and looked at the underside. There were half a dozen brass screw-heads showing, presumably to hold the stuffed animal and the other parts of the tableau in place. One of them looked different to the others.

  ‘That could be a locking screw,’ Bronson said. He pulled out a folding pocket knife and selected the correct blade. Rotating the odd screw until it dropped out on to the sideboard, he grasped the edge of the base and pulled. One section of it moved slightly. He returned the fox to an upright position and looked at the back, where a section perhaps a foot wide had now slid clear of the rest of the base.

  He could hear Angela’s indrawn breath of excitement.

  The section of wood opened like a drawer and, as Bronson pulled it clear of the base, they both saw what looked like a small leather-bound book lying inside it. He picked it up as soon as he’d fully opened the drawer and passed it to Angela.

  ‘Don’t expect too much,’ he warned. ‘My guess is that Oliver found this some time ago — he was probably the one who tried to open it — so if the parchment was here, he’ll have removed it.’

  But it wasn’t a book. What they’d actually found was a slim and shallow wooden box, covered with leather, that opened like a box-file. The inside was stuffed with loose papers of various sorts and a couple of large photographs, each of them folded twice so they’d fit into the box.

  Angela flicked through the contents briskly, then shook her head. ‘No lost parchment,’ she said sadly. ‘That would have been too easy, I suppose. This seems to be a collection of old bills and invoices, and also some of Bartholomew’s expedition notes.’ She held up several sheets of paper covered in small and neat handwriting. ‘I’ve spotted a couple of references to Egypt already.’

  ‘What about the photographs?’

  ‘Just pictures of the two paintings Bartholomew sold. Interesting, but not helpful.’ She shrugged. ‘Back to work for me, I’m afraid. But do keep poking around. You never know what you might find.’

  It was early afternoon, and Bronson and Angela had just finished their sandwich lunch. There was an extra sandwich in the fridge, and this would be Bronson’s lonely dinner after the rest of the team had left him in the house at the end of the day.

  ‘Look what I’ve found in one of the attics,’ Bronson said, walking back into the kitchen carrying a dusty cardboard box. The label says “First C Corinth”, with a question mark after it.’

  Angela walked across to where Bronson was standing.

  ‘If that label actually relates to the contents of the box, it could be quite interesting,’ she said. ‘A first-century Corinthian piece would be a lot more exciting than most of the stuff I’ve seen so far. Let me have a look.’ She lifted the newspaper-wrapped object out of the box. The pot was shaped like a tall water jug, and Angela stood it on its base while she cut the string and removed the wrappings.

  ‘Coffee or tea?’ Bronson asked, but got no response. When he turned round to look, Angela was staring at a tall, wide-necked, blue-green vessel with a single handle and some kind of animal images inscribed in horizontal bands around it. There was a scatter of paper and bits of string lying on the table nearby.

  ‘If I had champagne here, I’d drink that,’ Angela said at last. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘I’m just a simple copper, remember? What is it?’

  ‘I think — in fact, I’m almost sure — it’s a proto-Corinthian olpe.’

  ‘Really? It just looks like a big green jug to me.’

  Angela came over and gave him a hug. ‘What you’ve just found is very rare, especially in such excellent condition. I’ve seen one similar one, but it’s in the Louvre in Paris. An olpe is a wine vessel. This one’s decorated with registers — these horizontal bands — of what I think are lions and bears, and it probably dates from around six hundred and fifty BC.’

  ‘Not first century, then, like it says on the box?’

  Angela shook her head decisively. ‘Definitely not. It’s over half a millennium older than that.’

  ‘So it’s valuable, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m not an appraiser, but this could be almost priceless!’

  ‘So do you want me to bring the others down?’

  ‘Others?’ Angela went white. ‘There are others?’

  Bronson smiled at her. It felt great to be working together again. ‘I’ve no idea. There are a few more cardboard boxes up in the attic. I’ll go up and have another look, if you like.’

  Bronson returned about fifteen minutes later carrying another dusty box.

  ‘No other jugs, I’m afraid,’ he announced, ‘but I did find some bits of a broken pot.’

  He placed the box on the table,
opened it and pulled out a number of shards of reddish pottery which he spread out in front of Angela.

  She dragged her attention away from the olpe with apparent difficulty and glanced at the fragments.

  ‘Now those probably are first century,’ she said, ‘and most likely Middle Eastern in origin.’

  She picked up a couple of the pieces and fitted them together in her hands. They matched exactly.

  ‘It looks like these might all be part of the same vessel,’ Bronson suggested.

  Angela nodded and picked up a fragment that looked as if it had formed the neck of the broken vessel. In it was a small hole, and in a band around it was a dark brown deposit. Angela picked at this with her thumbnail thoughtfully, then picked up another couple of the broken shards, piecing them together in her hands to reform the neck of the vessel.

  She pressed the pieces together firmly. A few slivers were still missing but she’d found enough of the neck of the ancient pottery jar to see that the hole on one side of it was exactly matched by a second hole opposite. That, and the band of darker material, told her all she needed to know.

  ‘There’s a hole driven through both sides of the neck where it’s narrowest,’ she said, ‘and this darker material seems to be some kind of sealing putty or resin. According to Richard Mayhew, who seems to have taken quite a keen interest in the Wendell-Carfax history, the vessel Bartholomew found was secured with a pin driven through the neck, a pin that went right through the wooden stopper, and the outside was then sealed with some sort of putty. And this,’ she finished, ‘could well be the remains of that first-century pot.’ She paused. ‘There was nothing else up there, was there?’

  ‘Just the usual sort of rubbish that seems to migrate to any attic. Look, I’ll need to stay awake tonight, so I should get my head down this afternoon. The first bedroom on the left at the top of the stairs still has a bed and mattress in it. Can you come up and wake me about half an hour before you all leave?’

  Angela looked troubled. Although she’d eagerly embraced the idea of Bronson staying at the property overnight when he’d first suggested it, now that the evening was approaching she was feeling markedly less certain that it was really such a good idea.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Chris? I mean, suppose there are half a dozen intruders, all armed?’

  ‘Then I’ll lock myself in the loo and dial triple nine on my mobile,’ Bronson said. ‘But most burglars operate alone, and they almost never carry weapons, because the penalties for being caught with a knife or a gun are so severe.’ He put his hands on Angela’s shoulders and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘If I think I’m in danger, I promise I’ll put on that suit of armour that’s standing in the hall.’

  17

  6 p.m. Angela and her museum colleagues had left, and Carfax Hall was completely silent.

  Chris Bronson walked through to the kitchen and clicked the switch on the electric kettle. Coffee, he knew, would help him keep alert. He’d have no trouble staying awake until well after midnight — he’d always been a late bird — but staving off boredom and sleep in the early hours of the morning would be more difficult.

  He’d establish a routine, and prepare the house for his coming vigil. At night, sound travels further and more clearly than during the day because of the absence of other noises to interfere, so there were things he needed to do. The first was to go round the entire house and open every door to allow him to enter any room as silently as possible — a creaking hinge would be an obvious giveaway.

  He started on the ground floor, checking that both the front and back doors of the house were securely locked. Then he walked through each room in turn and opened all the internal doors wide. Some he had to prop open because they were fitted with self-closing hinges, but there were plenty of boxes he could use.

  He walked up the wide staircase and repeated the process on the first floor, and then on the attic floor above that. Back on the ground floor, he checked that the cellar doors were also open. There were two doors, one leading to a wine cellar that appeared to have been emptied of its contents, and the other to a general-purpose cellar full of various sorts of household junk, and which also housed a large and clearly elderly central-heating boiler.

  Finally, because he hadn’t got a torch, he switched on the hall, staircase and main upper corridor lights so he’d be able to move around without walking into doors or tripping over things. Those lights would be enough to let him see where he was going, but hopefully wouldn’t raise the suspicions of anyone who’d tried to force the rear windows.

  That done, he walked back into the kitchen, made a mug of coffee and sat in the armchair in a corner of the room. He’d found a handful of paperback novels in the library, hidden away amongst the collection of weighty and dull-looking leather-bound tomes. He picked a thriller and started to read.

  He’d barely got beyond the first page when he felt his mobile start to vibrate in his pocket.

  ‘I’m in my room at the pub,’ Angela announced. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course I am. Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I do — that’s the trouble,’ Angela said with a sigh, and Bronson couldn’t help but feel a little bit pleased. ‘We agreed you’ll call every hour, on the hour. If I’ve not heard from you by five past each hour, I’ll call you. And if I can’t get through to you by ten past, I’ll be calling the cavalry, so make sure you answer — OK?’

  Bronson glanced at his watch. ‘Agreed. It’s six fifty now, so let’s consider the seven o’clock call made. I’ll talk to you at eight.’

  ‘Take care, Chris.’ There was a brief, rather strained pause, and Angela rang off.

  Bronson drained the rest of his coffee and stood up. It was time to check the house. He wandered through all the downstairs rooms, his feet making almost no sound on the mainly stone floors, and looked out of the windows. Then he climbed the stairs and did the same thing on the first floor, looking inside each bedroom and making sure that the various paintings and pieces of furniture were still there. Apart from a few rabbits hopping around in the long grass at the back of the house, the estate seemed to be deserted. Bronson hoped it would stay that way.

  His evening soon settled into a routine. At quarter past and quarter to the hour, he walked all the way through the house, checking every room, which took him about ten minutes. And on the hour, he rang Angela’s mobile.

  At ten he called Angela, made another cup of coffee, drank it, and then began his usual patrol. He saw nothing until he looked out of one of the windows in the bedroom at the end of the house, a window that offered a good view of the woodland that ran alongside the estate’s fence.

  Then, in the soft darkness that surrounded the house, a sudden movement caught his eye.

  Jonathan Carfax stopped just inside the tree-line at the edge of the wood, panting slightly from his exertions. He’d had to bring a long ladder — it needed to be able to reach the first floor of the house — and it was a lot heavier than he’d expected. In fact, he would have to make two journeys — once he’d carried the ladder to the house he would have to go back for his bag of tools and a couple of other bags to hold his booty.

  He rested the ladder against a tree, well out of sight of the house, then moved forward a few feet. There were no cars parked in front of the property, which presumably meant that the British Museum people had all gone for the day. Then he looked more closely at the house itself, and spotted a dim glow in both the upstairs and downstairs windows. Somebody had obviously left a light — maybe two or three lights — switched on.

  He wasn’t going to go near the house if there was anyone still inside and there was one way he could check this out. He still had the telephone number of Carfax Hall, a hangover from the days when he’d been a welcome guest there, before Oliver had turned against him.

  Pulling his mobile from his pocket, he dialled the number. Faintly, across the intervening distance, he could hear the sound of the house phone ringing. If anyone was in the
property, he was sure they’d pick it up.

  Watching from the upstairs bedroom window, Bronson jumped slightly as the unexpected sound of a ringing phone echoed from the hall downstairs. The only person likely to phone him was Angela, and she’d call his mobile, not the house phone. Just to check, he pulled out his Nokia and looked at the display. His battery showed a full charge, and the signal strength was near maximum.

  It was most likely a wrong number or a cold call, he decided. He’d let it ring. He looked again to the edge of the wood, where he’d seen the movement.

  A minute later, the ringing stopped and the house fell silent.

  18

  Bronson had been standing in the same spot for perhaps ten minutes, and the movement he’d seen hadn’t been repeated. He was just beginning to think he’d imagined it, maybe it had been an animal — a fox or a deer, perhaps — when he saw it again.

  This time there was absolutely no doubt about it. From the undergrowth an object emerged horizontally, about four feet above the ground, and for an instant Bronson couldn’t work out what it was. Then he recognized the end of a ladder and smiled to himself.

  ‘Cheeky bastard,’ he muttered, easing forward slightly, the better to see the man as he approached the property. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, and was walking steadily across the uncut grass towards the back of the house, the ladder slung on his shoulder, looking for all the world like a workman arriving to do a job. Perhaps his lack of haste was a measure of his confidence that the house was empty — or maybe, more prosaically, it was just that the ladder was so heavy that he couldn’t run or trot with it. In any case, he seemed to know exactly where he was going, and in a few moments vanished from Bronson’s line of sight, moving around to the rear of the property.

  Bronson stepped back out of the bedroom, and waited, listening intently for the sound of the top of the ladder being placed against the wall of the house. But he heard nothing, and after a few seconds he walked back to the bedroom at the end of the corridor and peered out of the window.