She smiled a little bleakly. “Marks in the dust,” she answered. “Not just here and there, as he might have pulled books out himself since anyone last dusted. They were on every shelf, all recent. What does your bookshop deal in, Mr. Danforth? What would your most expensive item be?”
Now the cold ate through him and the taste of the coffee was bitter in his mouth. There was only one possible answer to that, unless he were to lie to her. That thought was born in his mind, and died.
“Usually just a rare book, sometimes a manuscript or original folio, quite a lot of first editions, of course. They can fetch thousands, even tens of thousands. Just occasionally we get an old manuscript, possibly illuminated.”
She looked at him steadily. “And at the moment?” she prompted.
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “At the moment we have an old manuscript which came in the bottom of a crate of pretty ordinary books, from an estate sale.”
“Old?” she asked. “What do you call ‘old’?”
What would she know about books? Probably nothing at all. World War II would be ancient history to her.
“Mr. Danforth?” she prompted.
“Possibly the time of Christ,” he answered, feeling a little melodramatic.
Her interest was instant and intense. “Really? In what language? Latin? Hebrew? Aramaic?”
“I think it’s Aramaic,” he replied. “It seems to be important, because I have had three people asking for it already, and I haven’t even had it authenticated yet.”
“But you advertised it?” she said with a quick note of criticism in her voice.
“No,” he answered. “No, I didn’t. I don’t know how anybody knew of it. And I don’t know whether it is Aramaic or not. I have a friend who knows a little, just words here and there, and that’s what he thinks it is. I still need an expert.”
“Have you any idea at all what it is about?” she pressed. “What is it written on? Parchment, vellum? How long is it?”
He withdrew a little bit. “Why do you want to know?”
She smiled, and her expression was gentle and full of pride. “My father is Eli Tobias. He is an expert in ancient Aramaic scripts. We think Mr. Williams was killed for a rare book of some sort. That is why they put me onto the case.”
He sighed. “You’re right. Three different men have come to me and offered anything I want if I will sell it to them. I can’t even photocopy the thing. It’s as if it were … possessed.”
“Then you need an expert to look at it,” she replied. “Perhaps more than one. Did any of these men suggest what it is, or why they want it so much?”
He repeated to her what each of the men had said and she listened to him without interrupting.
“Keep it safe, Mr. Danforth,” she said after he had finished and stared at her over the cold coffee. “We shall send two experts tomorrow, or the day after. I think we have found the reason poor Mr. Williams was burned to death. Please … please be very careful.”
Monty promised to do so, and went out into the street a little shakily. He drove back to Cambridge and worked in the shop until late afternoon. He finished cataloguing the last books of the Greville estate and decided to go home for supper, and then perhaps telephone Hank and tell him the latest news. It would be comforting to speak to him. His sanity was like a breath of clean air, blowing away the stale nonsense that had collected in his mind.
He was surprised to find when he went outside that it had been raining quite heavily, and he had not noticed. The gutters were full and in places slurping over. Thank goodness it had stopped now or he would have been soaked. The sky was darkening in the east, and the red sky to the west promised a good day tomorrow, if you believe the old tales of forecasting.
He turned the corner and the sunlight struck him in the face. He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. The shock took him like a physical blow. The whole tarmac surface was covered with blood. It lay in pools, shining and scarlet. It ran gurgling in the gutters.
He was paralyzed by the sheer horror of it.
A cyclist came racing around the corner, skidded, slewed across the road and hit him, knocking him over. He was bruised and his skin torn, his chest for a moment unable to move, to draw in breath. With difficulty he gasped in air at last and straightened very slowly to his knees, dizzy and aching.
An old lady was hurrying towards him, her face creased with concern.
“Are you alright?” she asked anxiously. “Stupid boys. They’re going much too fast. Didn’t even stop. Are you injured?” She offered her hand to help him up, but she looked too frail to take any of his weight.
He stood upright, surprised to find that apart from being thoroughly wet from the gutter, he was actually not damaged. His jacket sleeves and his shirt cuffs were sodden with rainwater, dirty grey, his trousers the same. There was a tiny red smear of blood on his palm where he had scratched it.
“Yes, I think I’m all right, thank you,” he replied. “I was standing in the way, I think. Just … staring …” There was nothing left of the images of blood, just an ordinary asphalt road with puddles of rain gleaming in the last of the sunset. He wouldn’t tell Hank about this. As he had always said, most supernatural phenomena were just over-excited imaginations painting very human fears onto perfectly normal situations.
Nevertheless when he saw Hank later on, having washed, changed his clothes and had a very good supper, he found him also unusually concerned.
“Can you work out why we can’t photograph this scroll yet?” Monty asked as they sat with late coffee and an indulgence of After Eight mints.
“No,” Hank said candidly. He gave a slightly rueful smile. “For once, logic eludes me. I can’t think of any reasonable answer. I imagine there’s an explanation as to how those three men knew of the scroll at all, when you didn’t advertise it. I suppose since they knew you had it, it wasn’t a great leap to track down poor Roger. Monty …”
“What?”
“We have to settle this issue straight away. I don’t think I’m being alarmist, but if they’d kill Roger for it, they aren’t going to accept a polite delay from you.”
The increasing darkness that had been growing in Monty’s mind now suddenly took a very specific shape. Heat raced through him as if he felt flames already.
“I’ve no idea what price to put on it,” he said desperately. “I wish I’d never found the thing. Sergeant Tobias said she’d have her father come and look at it some time this week. What if they won’t wait? Or won’t pay what he says it’s worth? I suppose I should tell the Greville Estate solicitors, shouldn’t I?”
“No,” Hank replied after a moment’s thought. “From what you told me, Roger bought the books as a job lot at auction. They belong to his estate, not the Grevilles. But you’re right, I don’t think you can wait until a valuation is put on the scroll. That could take quite a while, especially if it really is what the scholar claims it is. That would actually make it almost beyond price.”
“Then what the hell can I do?” Monty demanded. “Give it to the British Museum?”
Hank bit his lip. “Do you think the bishop, or Mr. Garrett will allow you to do that? Who do you think killed Roger?”
Monty shut his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “One of them, I suppose. Hank, what can I do?”
Hank sat for a long time without answering.
Monty waited.
Finally Hank spoke, slowly and very quietly. “I don’t believe we can wait, Monty. I don’t know what this scroll is, but I do know it has great power. Whatever is in the scroll itself, or in what various men believe of it, that power is real, and it is very dangerous. Roger is dead already. I believe that we need to end the matter long before any experts can run their tests and verify it. For a start, I don’t think the bishop, or whoever he is, is going to allow that to happen. His whole purpose in buying the scroll is to destroy it, to make sure that mankind never gets to know what is written in it—expert, scholar or ordinary man in the street, or more importantly to him, perhaps, man-in-the-pew.”