The woman at the newsagent’s was apologetic: the national newspapers had yet to arrive. She couldn’t understand why they were so late; this had only happened once before in all the years that she had been running the shop etcetera, etcetera. But the Spalding Guardian had come, if Alex would like to buy a copy of that? She hadn’t managed to write the headlines up on the board yet, but Alex might like to know that it contained the full story of the poor lady who’d died at the level crossing in Holbeach yesterday. Alex had probably seen it on the news?
Alex shook her head. She was annoyed by the woman’s chit-chat and found her method of peddling this news distasteful. Nevertheless, she acknowledged to herself that she would like to know more about how Edmund’s wife had died. She scooped up the top newspaper from the pile and handed over the money.
There was a photograph of the level crossing on the front page. All it showed was the crossing itself, cordoned off with police tape, with a policeman standing in front of it. The actual story was reported on Page Eight, presumably because most of the paper had already been typeset when this fresh news had come in. There was no picture of Krystyna. Alex folded the paper so that she could read the article as she walked.
It did not tell her a great deal that she didn’t already know. Krystyna was described as a “fifty-nine-year-old retired teaching assistant and mother of two, originally from Denmark, whose husband was the well-known County Heritage Officer, Edmund Baker”. It said that Edmund had been with her when she died, that they had been waiting at the crossing when she got out of the car and that her death was ‘probably a tragic accident’, although there would be an inquest and the actual cause of death would be determined by the coroner. There was no mention of the place from which Krystyna and Edmund had been returning, nor any hint of her illness. One of Krystyna’s neighbours had been interviewed and said that she was a ‘pleasant, shy lady who kept herself to herself’. The article was quite short, and concluded with the information that police wished to talk to any witnesses who had either been waiting at the crossing or were passengers on board the 16.04 train to Spalding. There was a number to call for anyone who thought that they might be able to help.
Alex had slowed her pace as she read. She glanced to her right when she reached the turning into the road of the bus stop and saw that the bus was already bearing down upon her. She sprinted the three hundred yards or so to the stop and managed to arrive there just as the first of the two other people now waiting had boarded to pay his fare. The second, a kindly old man with bushy eyebrows, said: “You go first, ducky. You look as if you need a sit-down.”
Alex, breathless, smiled her thanks. She was fumbling in her purse for the exact change when she heard the old man, who had now mounted the platform behind her, exclaim.
“I’ll be blowed if it isn’t the third time that van’s gone by since I’ve been stood here. I can’t think what the feller is about. If he’s got lost, he only needs to ask me for directions.”
Alex raised her head sharply. The white van was just passing the bus. There was a female passenger sitting beside the driver and she caught the woman’s eye momentarily before they both looked away. Annoyed with herself, Alex looked again, but the van was already some distance beyond the bus; it disappeared at speed around the next bend. The passenger had seemed vaguely familiar. Had it been someone that she knew or not? Troubled, she took her ticket and hurried to find a seat. She was grateful for her visit to the newsagent’s. Instinctively she sensed that it had saved her from some kind of unpleasantness, possibly even from danger. All her anxieties from the previous day returned.
Chapter Forty-Three
Alex was still feeling ruffled and fearful when she arrived at the Archaeological Society. She was pleased when she remembered that Francis Codd had asked her if he could drop by later on to look at some documents relating to his latest research topic. Under normal circumstances she found his company exasperating, but today she dreaded the thought of having to spend the next eight hours alone in that sombre old building.
For a couple of hours she worked at adding to her notes for the summer programme, but her heart was not in it. Francis had said that he would arrive at about midday. She decided that she had better tidy up the nineteenth and early twentieth century issues of Fenland Notes and Queries before he arrived. She knew that she could count Francis among her supporters, but he was still one of the most punctilious and fussy members of the Society. Finding the journals out of sequence – as they inevitably were, because none of the members except Francis ever replaced them correctly – always infuriated him. Alex was often impatient of such tasks, but today she thought that routine work was just the panacea that her jangled nerves yearned for.
She started sifting through the volumes. The whole collection occupied one of the huge book-cases in the library. Each year’s four issues were bound together. As usual, some of the volumes had not been replaced in the correct order, though not as many as she had feared. Whole decades stood in line, impeccably regimented and chronologically ordered. The disorder belonged mostly to the 1860s publications. Several of the volumes were out of sequence and the one containing the issues for 1869 had apparently disappeared completely. Alex sighed as she tidied them. She would have a cursory look on the other shelves for the missing volume, but she knew from experience that it was likely to have been well hidden within the library itself or illicitly borrowed by a member who was working on a particular topic. If the former, the hiding-place was likely to be too ingenious for Alex to be able to seek it out successfully; if the latter, the tome would almost certainly be returned, though not in time for Francis Codd’s visit. Alex hoped that his quest today would not relate to the 1860s.
The society’s hundred-and-fifty-plus years’ collection of Fenland Notes and Queries had been uniformly and anonymously bound, first in red morocco, and then, from about the turn of the twentieth century, in cheaper dark red boards. Each volume was labelled only on the spine and only with the dates of the issues that it contained. However, the same enterprising librarian who had first raised the funds for and then meticulously catalogued the materials in the archive had also placed a postcard in each of these volumes that summarised its contents. Thinking that it might help her to understand what attractions the 1869 volume could hold for a library cheat, Alex drew out the card from the book of 1868.
Many of the subjects listed represented the perennial fare of this publication – theories about the provenance of ancient roads and ditches, linking surnames to place-names, the everlasting arguments about how to date accurately early artefacts of flint and bone which, she thought ironically, were still rumbling on today. Alex turned the card over. The summaries continued on the reverse side. The last one of all caught her eye. It was entitled An Account of a Recent Meeting with Mr Charles Darwin, to Explore his Thoughts and Views on Natural Selection. The contributor was identified as the Reverend Jacob Sparham.
The Reverend Sparham, she knew, was one of Oliver Sparham’s ancestors. He had been quite a renowned antiquary in his day. She had discussed him with Oliver more than once. Oliver had said that he was still celebrated in the Sparham family for sticking to his less than orthodox views. The church had taken a dim view of some of these and had threatened to defrock him more than once. At this point in his narrative Oliver, a born raconteur, usually chuckled, but left the rest of the story mysteriously untold. So far, therefore, Alex had not discovered the nature of the reverend’s unorthodox opinions. She decided to read the article to see if she could find it out.
She quickly became absorbed in the clergyman’s account of his meeting with Darwin. It had probably been encouraged by the great sage in the hope that it would help him to sell his forthcoming book. As the article mentioned at every possible opportunity, The Origin of Species was scheduled for publication the following year. Most of the piece took the form of an interview with Darwin in which he expounded the key conclusions of his seminal work
and described some of the observations that had caused him to arrive at them. None of this interchange contained material of which Alex was unaware, though she suspected that the Reverend Sparham had simplified and therefore blunted some of the finer points of Darwin’s argument.
It was the author’s postscript to his account of the interview that arrested her attention. Jacob Sparham’s main antiquarian interests, as his readers were evidently expected to know, lay with the history of the early Christian church and how it both compared with and deviated from the early history of other major religions. Although the postscript contained a very condensed version of his deliberations on this subject, it was apparent that he considered that early Christians possessed not only a moral, but also an intellectual, superiority to those who practised other religions. In short, he argued that, by virtue of their beliefs, Christians were likely to be physically stronger and mentally more agile than those of other faiths and he annexed Darwin’s observations and theories as further proof of this. Alex was puzzled; the irony that similar arguments had caused Darwin himself to lose his faith was not lost on her. She also saw that as the reverend’s exegesis continued, his thinking became at once more muddled and more fanatical. Despite his ardent, not to say shrill, expressions of the superiority of the Christian religion, he also celebrated the ‘totemic power’ of certain artefacts belonging to other religions. By this point, he had deviated completely from any discernible reference to Darwin, though he was still invoking the evolutionary sage’s name, presumably to give authority to his own eccentric viewpoint.
Jacob Sparham’s final paragraphs railed at the Spalding Archaeological Society itself, berating it for some real or imagined insult connected with a donation that he said that he had made. As a young man, he had travelled widely and had visited churches, shrines and temples dedicated to many different religions. He had collected various artefacts during this time and had donated some of them to the Archaeological Society. Of these, there was one that he claimed to be beyond price, but the trustees of the day, although they had accepted the gift, had chosen not to display it, because it did not ‘fit’ with their criteria. The collections on display had always to consist of artefacts or documents that had been discovered, created or produced in East Anglia. In the opinion of the reverend, only those of a narrow-minded, culturally-impoverished outlook could adopt such a philistine stance. Alex smiled grimly. The man might have been unbalanced in some ways, but he had hit the nail on the head there. It was a situation that still persisted, perhaps the most robust of all the Society’s customs and legacies.
Tantalisingly, the Reverend Sparham’s ‘account’ concluded with this statement. Beneath it, in italics, the editor, or perhaps the author himself, noted that his proposed gift would be the subject of a more extensive article in the next issue. The article would have appeared in the journal published in the first quarter of 1869: it was therefore contained within the missing volume.
Alex was at once fearful and fascinated. She began to make connections. What was it that the policeman had said? That he didn’t believe in coincidences. Alex was rapidly coming to the conclusion that she didn’t believe in them, either. If the 1869 volume of Notes and Queries didn’t turn up – and she would send out a stiff notice to all members asking for its immediate return once she had searched the library properly – she would borrow the article from another library. In the meantime, although the key to the archive was not yet back in her possession, she did have the inventory. She also had the slip that Edmund had signed for the file that he had taken.
She was on her way back to her desk when the doorbell rang. She hesitated before she went to answer it. Still cautious, Alex opened the spy-hole in the door. Through the grille she could see Francis Codd standing on the step, looking disgruntled.
“What kept you?” he said as she let him in. “It’s bloody freezing out there.” He certainly looked windswept. Strands of grey-white hair were sticking out from the sides of his freckled pate. Alex’s spirits lifted. She rejoiced in the fact that Francis’s behaviour was, for Francis, perfectly normal.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“I suppose so. I can’t stop and chat, though. I’ve got to get on.”
Alex’s smile broadened. Francis had been retired for at least fifteen years. Months went by when his archaeological interests lay completely dormant; then he would conceive of a new ‘project’ and immerse himself in it as if there were no tomorrow. He had been a member of the society since he was a schoolboy; he knew the publications that it owned and the possessions that it housed better than any other living person.
“If you’re going to work in the library, I’ll bring your tea to you there. You haven’t by any chance borrowed one of the bindings of Fenland Notes and Queries, have you?” said Alex as conversationally as she could, while Francis divested himself of his ancient duffle coat. He bristled immediately.
“What? Of course not. You know that I observe the rules scrupulously. Has one of them gone missing? We must be more vigilant. Install security cameras, perhaps.” Despite his final comment, Alex knew that his intention was to reproach her for what he perceived as her too lax guardianship.
“I expect that someone’s working with it at the moment and they’ve concealed it in the library so that it’ll be there next time they come,” she said soothingly. “A childish trick, but there’s no harm done as long as they put it back. The members don’t usually thieve; in fact, never, in my experience.”
“I disagree that there’s no harm done. A collection of papers such as Notes and Queries is quite spoilt if it’s incomplete, even temporarily. I hope it’s not in the sequence that I want to look at,” he added fiercely.
“It’s the volume for 1869.”
“Well, that’s some consolation. My period is much later than that – I’m interested in the Edwardian archaeologists – the immediate predecessors to men like Howard Carter. It’s my view that it was their work – done for the most part before the First World War – that paved the way for the modern professional. Of course, most people would disagree,” he added combatively. “Received opinion suggests that there weren’t any real professionals until Mortimer Wheeler, perhaps even later than him. But I beg to differ. As you know, I’ve carried out an extensive survey of the Victorian gentleman archaeologists, and my research has led me to observe that . . .”
“Have you come across the writings of a cleric and antiquarian called Jacob Sparham?”
“Yes, of course. If I hadn’t read about him, I’d still have heard of him, because Oliver Sparham bores the pants off everyone talking about the man. I’m surprised you haven’t heard him. He pretends there was some great mystery about the fellow, who was an ancestor of his; but actually the reverend was just a charlatan or, to take a more charitable view, a crackpot rural clergyman in search of infamy.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Fellow was a proto-fascist. He also wrote a lot of disconnected drivel about comparative religion, about which he knew less than you would expect of a man of the cloth. But the stuff was inflammatory – and became more so. Sparham achieved some kind of posthumous fame in the 1930s among archaeologists who doctored accounts of their finds to tie in with the racist ideas of Oswald Mosley. Of course, by calling him a fascist, I’m guilty of an anachronism: the term hadn’t been invented then. But like many crackpots, he tried to affiliate his work to that of the great thinkers of the day, which in his case meant Charles Darwin. His writing achieved brief fame – or notoriety, depending on your point of view – after he met Darwin. All the stuff that he wrote before that – and there were reams of it – was pure drivel. Is there something by him in the volume that’s gone missing?”
“There may be. I’m not certain, but there’s an article by him in the final 1868 issue of Notes and Queries that ends with a note suggesting that there will be a more substantial offering from him at the beginning of 1869.�
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“That’s round about the time he met Darwin – fortuitous, you might think, just as Darwin was about to become famous. Sparham was an unashamed sycophant. But he died soon after they met. If you’re interested in what he wrote, have a look at some of the earlier Notes and Queries. He was prolific in the 1850s and 60s. You’ll soon tire of it, though. Half-baked pseudo-religious drivel.” Francis sniffed contemptuously. “Now, I must get on.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Alex had only just ushered Francis Codd off the premises when the doorbell of the Archaeological Society rang again. She was astounded to see Edmund standing on the step.
“Edmund! I didn’t expect you to come here again until after . . .”
“Thank God Codd has gone at last,” said Edmund brusquely, pushing past her into the entrance hall. He made no attempt at a greeting, far less any sign of affection. He spoke rapidly. “I’ve brought back the key, and the papers that I borrowed. I have another favour to ask: would you mind keeping the papers here in the library until I’ve finished with them? It’s more convenient than my keeping on going back to Broad Street – it’s very difficult to work there. And,” he added, with a trace of sarcasm, “I’m sure you won’t run foul of the trustees as long as the documents are at one of the Society’s premises; especially at its headquarters, where they will be safeguarded most tenderly by its appointed châtelaine.”
Alex chose to ignore the jibe.
“I suppose that will be all right, unless someone else wants to look at them. But, Edmund, you must be exhausted. I’m so sorry about . . . what’s happened.” She laid her hand gently on his arm. “Won’t you sit down for a few minutes?”
“I don’t have time. The boys will be at the house in a couple of hours to help me to organise the funeral. I need to get this business with the papers sorted out now.” He paused, and gave her a suspicious look. “Who would want these papers, anyway?”
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