‘And what was the date?’
Camilla smiled. ‘Fifth century,’ she said. ‘I still think it’s possible it was a hoax, that somebody planted the sample to give a false reading, but I think the likelihood is low.’
Which is as close as you’re going to get to certainty from a modern archaeologist.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I dated the leather in the later binding and got a date in the seventeen hundreds,’ she said. ‘So either we must posit that old William Galt somehow anticipated modern carbon dating when assembling his hoax, or that the original binding, and by extension the sword, were authentically fifth century.’
‘Or both bindings were added recently using historical materials,’ I said.
‘Well, yes. As another remote possibility – this is why context is so important.’
But it had felt old to Camilla.
And I wondered about that sensation.
‘I expected it to get auctioned or be sold to a museum,’ said Camilla, ‘but John Chapman said they planned a museum of their own. An Arthurian museum, would you believe?’
This made total sense to Camilla because with the right marketing you’d hoover up a substantial portion of the fifteen million foreign tourists that visited London every year. Especially the Americans.
‘I read somewhere that two thirds of Americans believe Arthur was a real historical figure,’ she said. ‘Extraordinarily depressing on one level, but terribly good for business.’
‘So you think it’s Excalibur?’ I asked.
‘God, no. Most likely it was forged for a high status Anglo-Saxon and then “sacrificed” in a sacred pool.’
‘Once you’d dated the sword, did you continue your relationship with the Paternoster Society?’ I asked.
Camilla said that she had, but not in any regular fashion. They’d invite her out for drinks occasionally. John Chapman would seek her opinion on some historical question or other – mostly relating to late antiquity or the Post-Roman period. ‘“Keeping up with the field,” they said.’
‘They?’
‘Well, John mostly.’
‘John Chapman?’
‘That’s right.’
They’d met in the Rising Sun near Smithfield Market. It was just for a friendly chat, and God knew it was a relief to talk shop with someone who wasn’t going on and on about their lack of funding and the scarcity of resources.
‘Archaeologists can be tiresome about such things, I’m afraid,’ she said.
I nodded absently as I made a note of the pub. The Rising Sun drinking establishment exists right on the fringes of the demi-monde – not being nearly as antique or mysterious as it pretends to be. You wouldn’t catch Zach in there, even if he wasn’t barred. But it would be the logical watering hole for dilettante practitioners like John Chapman.
‘Were you romantically involved?’ I asked, which got a short little laugh.
‘Nothing like that,’ she said.
Which left revenge or money, and I wasn’t going to bet on revenge.
‘So just drinks then?’ I said. ‘Nothing else?’
‘A free drink is a free drink,’ she said. ‘And he used to commission work from me.’
I asked what kind of work and she hesitated, took a deep breath and, finally, we were there.
‘He wanted inside information about some of the digs.’ Camilla picked up her teacup, looked at it for a moment and then put it down. ‘Although I didn’t understand why he couldn’t wait for the reports – it’s not like our work is commercially sensitive.’
‘Did he seem interested in any particular topic?’
‘Late Roman, Post-Roman, early Saxon – Age of Arthur stuff. I assumed he wanted it for his museum.’
‘And in return?’
‘A bit of a retainer.’ She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Five hundred quid a month.’
Six grand a year – nice.
‘And you didn’t get suspicious?’
‘I do archaeological rescue work in the City of London. People there drop a grand on drinks – at lunchtime. So, no, I didn’t get suspicious until a bit later.’
‘How much later?’
‘When I arrived at work to find that someone had driven a truck into the front of the office and nicked the material I’d told John about two days beforehand.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘About then.’
One of the sacred pillars of police work is the timeline, ‘when’ being as important as ‘who’ and ‘how’ if you want to get a conviction. Thus the bulk of most interviews is spent nailing down, at the very least, what order events happened in, and at the very best, dates and times you can corroborate with physical evidence. So you can imagine that the police fell upon texting with cries of joy – ditto emails.
I spent some time, and a second cup of tea, getting a rough timeline off Camilla.
She’d dated the sword in 2010 and started her regular ‘chats’ with John Chapman in 2011, while I was still arresting drunks and chasing virtual flashers around Covent Garden. About the same time, Mr Chapman was vainly trying to persuade the top lawyers at Bock, Loupe and Stag that they needed to placate the spirit of riot and rebellion by sacrificing goats and spraying blood on each other.
John didn’t get back to her until the summer of 2012 – that’s when they first met at the Rising Sun and he offered her money for some ‘inside information’. That had been just after Covent Garden caught fire and then flooded during an unprecedentedly posh riot. It was also about the same time Patrick Gale was persuaded to take up the mantle of the High Priest of Bacchus/Dionysus/. . . Mr Punch?
I asked why she’d never connected the site thefts with the information she was handing over and she shrugged.
‘I don’t even remember those thefts being reported.’ she said.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but that detail could wait.
I asked when she’d last met Chapman and she said the spring of the previous year, which accorded with our records of his departure the following June. After that they’d communicated by email.
‘He said he’d got a new job that involved a lot of travelling,’ she said.
I wondered if John had continued the correspondence from Cleveland prior to his death or whether somebody else had taken over immediately.
Before I called Belgravia to send someone over to pick her up, I asked about the sword.
‘You said you felt something when you held the sword?’
‘Felt something?’
‘You said it felt old,’ I said. ‘Was that a powerful sensation? Did you feel anything else?
She frowned and gave it some thought.
‘Yes, there was a musical tone,’ she said. ‘Like the sword was singing.’
19
Taming the Wild Frontier
It was while I was helping Camilla into the local IRV for transport back to Belgravia that I realised who her neighbour was. Harry Acworth – who’d played bass guitar with the Clarke-Boland Big Band and had briefly formed a trio with my dad in the late nineties. I’d have to tell my dad when I got a moment, because I was pretty sure he thought Harry was dead.
I told Camilla Turner that everything was going to be fine as long as she co-operated, and sent her off to have Stephanopoulos turn her life inside out. My main worry was that Martin Chorley might take his usual ‘direct’ approach to operational security, but I had some hope that he might regard Camilla as too unimportant to take the risk. Especially if we kept her stashed at Belgravia.
I got back to the Folly that evening to find that Abigail had gone to sleep on the couch in the reading room – it wasn’t the first time.
She’d left her laptop open and around it a sprawl of papers. And, because I’m a nosy bastard, I sat down and had a good shufti. Judging from its position, the last thing she’d been working on was her notebook – open at a page with clusters of words written in Cyrillic.