There was a silver intercom bolted onto the wall beside the front door with, as is usual, no actual names written on the tags by the buzzers. I guessed top button, waited, pressed again, waited, and repeated a couple of times before trying the bottom.
An elderly male voice with a distinctive Caribbean accent asked me what I wanted.
I told him I was the police and that I was concerned about the welfare of his neighbour and if he could just buzz me in I wouldn’t bother him any further.
The intercom cut off, then, half a minute later, I heard the front door being manually unlocked from the inside before opening about a quarter of the way to reveal an old black guy.
He was a touch shorter than me, with a cropped Afro that was mostly grey and a matching neatly trimmed beard. He was the light colour some old black guys go, with freckles across his cheeks, a strong jaw and dark suspicious eyes.
He was also strangely familiar.
‘What kind of concern exactly?’ he asked.
‘We think she might be in danger,’ I said.
‘From whom?’
‘Some quite serious criminals.’
‘Show me your identification.’
So I got out my warrant card and held it up while he peered at it.
‘How come a nice boy like you join the police?’
‘I didn’t join the police,’ I said. ‘They joined me.’
He gave this some consideration before nodding and opening the door to let me in.
Crudely carved out of the original Victorian hallway, the atrium was gloomy and overheated. The door to the ground floor flat was ajar while the second, presumably for upstairs, was firmly shut.
I asked the man if he knew whether Camilla Turner was in.
‘She came in last night,’ he said and then, without another word, retreated behind his own door.
I banged on Camilla’s door and yelled her name – no answer.
‘Ms Turner,’ I called again. ‘Camilla – this is Peter Grant from the police – I’m concerned for your safety. Are you in there?’
There was no answer, but I was sure I’d heard something moving on the other side.
I knocked and shouted a couple more times, just so I could write that I had at least tried that before breaking and entering.
Covertly, because I was pretty certain the neighbour was watching me through his peephole, I used an impello variant to shear off the latch bolt and swung the door open.
Beyond was a windowless staircase.
And halfway up sat Camilla Turner.
‘Hi,’ I said brightly.
Camilla stared down at me glumly.
‘I knew it was a mistake deleting those emails,’ she said. ‘That’s how you found me, isn’t it?’
I said it was, and she sighed and invited me in.
Once upstairs I gave her the caution plus two, sat her down with a cup of tea and let her incriminate herself.
The flat was pleasantly haphazard and free from the ravages of interior decoration. The collections of books that overran the other rooms had, in the living room, been constrained to a couple of antique glass-fronted bookcases. In between the bookcases, and over the genuine period fireplace, were framed sketches and watercolours, landscapes mostly, interspersed with old photographs of people, singly and in groups. The bay window overlooking the street sported that classic of 1970s interior design, the breezeblock and plank shelf with potted plants ranged across the top and stacks of magazines along the bottom.
I’d loitered in the kitchen doorway while the tea was made, but then let myself be ushered into a wing armchair upholstered in eye-watering orange and yellow swirls some time, judging from the worn patches on the arms, in the late eighties.
‘I used to live here when it was a squat,’ said Camilla. ‘Then a bunch of us bought it off the landlord. And then I bought them out one by one.’
It was a vaguely plausible scenario, but it wasn’t enough to stop one of our analysts going through her financial history with a nit comb. Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it’s one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.
I waited until she had a soothing cup of tea in her hand to ask why she’d deleted her emails.
‘I panicked,’ she said. ‘I heard that they’d given you access to the office intranet.’
‘They’ being MOLA management.
‘But why did that worry you?’
‘Because I told them when the New Change material was in the loading bay,’ she said.
I asked who ‘them’ was.
‘I thought . . . ’ she said, and sipped her tea, ‘I thought it was the Paternoster Society. But of course I probably knew it wasn’t. Really. Better to say it was somebody I met through the Paternoster Society.’
‘Does this person have a name?’
‘John Chapman,’ she said.
I made a note and confirmed that the emails had come from his address.
‘When did you get the last email?’
‘Tuesday week,’ she said. ‘That would be the thirtieth.’
I didn’t tell her that John Chapman had been dead for almost six months – that sort of stuff you save up if you can, the better to spook the witness later.
‘What was your first contact with the . . .’ I made a point of checking my notes. ‘The Paternoster Society, and who are they?’
‘They’re a . . . Well, I thought they were a historical society,’ she said. ‘There are thousands of them all over the country. Ordinary people with a keen interest in history or archaeology. They’ve been known to conduct some very useful digs – especially these days when funding is tight.’
They’d got in touch with her back when MOLA was still part of the Museum of London proper.
‘Originally they recruited me to identify their sword,’ she said.
‘Which sword was that?’ I asked, but was already busily guessing the answer.
‘An extraordinarily well-preserved Post-Roman sword that I easily identified as being of Saxon manufacture, possibly fifth or sixth century,’ she said. ‘Assuming it wasn’t a fake of course.’
‘What made you think it might be a fake?’
‘When I say it was extraordinarily well preserved, I mean it was practically pristine,’ she said, and held out her hands as if holding up an invisible sword for my inspection. ‘I’ve certainly never recovered anything myself that well preserved. And it didn’t help that the provenance was a bit dodgy. Dug up by an Enlightenment antiquarian – William Winston Galt.’
‘Where was it found?’
As if I didn’t know.
‘Allegedly, during the excavation of a cellar in Paternoster Row in the eighteenth century,’ she said.
‘Was it genuine?’ I asked. ‘Could you date it?’
‘Well, you can’t get a C-14 date from steel and the handle had been rebound – probably in the seventeen hundreds by Galt.’
Antiquarians being notorious romantics and, with some notable exceptions, prone to embellishing their finds to suit their narrative and generally making shit up to suit themselves.
‘And in any case leather is rarely used to bind hilts until the medieval period,’ said Camilla.
Fortunately our William had done a characteristically sloppy job, and some of the original handle material had been trapped underneath the new bindings. Antler in this case – from a red deer.
‘I know some people at the University of York who’ve developed a new technique called ZooMS,’ she said. ‘Stands for ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry. There was just enough to get a result.’