Ryder

by Nick Pengelley

  “Deputy Prime Minister. What can I do for you?”

  “Acting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Acting Prime Minister.”

  “Of course.” How quickly the power went to their heads. Not that Imogen was surprised in Malcolm’s case. The man’s ambition was limitless. She’d known him for years; never thought he’d get to exercise ultimate authority. He wouldn’t have got there by way of the ballot box. His own party had seen to that, content with letting him be their éminence grise, knowing he wasn’t the man to front the party at a general election. The thought gave her pause. Malcolm. His thwarted ambition. Just how far would he go to realize his dreams?

  “Ayesha Ryder.”

  “Sir?”

  “I understand Ryder was with the PM tonight. That she was the last person to see her al—. To see her before she was poisoned.”

  “That’s not been—”

  “Find Ryder, Worsley. Fast!”

  “We are looking for her…sir. Naturally we want to question her.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “What do you mean?” Coffee, give me coffee. And get this moron off my back.

  “She’s taken something.”

  “You’re accusing Ayesha Ryder of theft?” From annoyed, Imogen moved to incredulous. “Of what, for heavens sake?”

  “A valuable antiquity. A statuette of a golden bird, studded with jewels. It was stolen from a Syrian museum and recovered recently. The prime minister was keeping it in her private study at Number 10. Until it could be returned to the rightful owners. If we don’t return it, they’re threatening reprisals against British citizens in Syria. The statuette went missing tonight. Ryder must have taken it after she poisoned the PM.”

  “That’s insane! Frankly I don’t believe Ayesha Ryder had anything to do with poisoning the prime minister. And she’s certainly no thief.”

  “I don’t care what you believe, Worsley. I’m giving you an order! Find Ryder, and find that antiquity! And Worsley?”

  “Sir?”

  “Take no chances with Ryder. Shoot to kill.”

  “You can’t be serious!” The man really had lost his mind.

  “Do as I say, Worsley. If you want to keep your job. My authority, as acting prime minister. I’m giving the same orders to Special Branch and Scotland Yard. The damned army, too, if necessary.”

  When Malcolm hung up, Imogen sat staring at the map of the United Kingdom on the wall opposite her desk. Ayesha, what have you done now? She needed to find her before the deputy—no acting—prime minister had her killed.

  Chapter 17

  Joram rummaged in his pockets and produced a cigarette lighter. “I don’t smoke, but it comes in handy.”

  Handy? Ayesha mentally conjured the iconic image of Bogart lighting a cigarette for Bacall’s cigarette in To Have and Have Not.

  Joram lit the centuries-old tallow candles that, other than his penlight, would be their only source of illumination in the chamber beneath St. Faith’s–under–St. Paul’s, to which they’d descended after eluding their pursuers.

  The candles, little more than thick stubs, were mounted in a wax-dripped black iron chandelier suspended from the stone vaulting above the tomb of King Ethelred. Tiled in an intricate patterned mosaic, the tomb was about five feet high, with open, arched sides, through which could be seen a sandstone sarcophagus.

  The tomb took up most of the available space in the chamber, allowing only a narrow aisle on each side for those who came to visit its occupant. There’d been very few of those in the last three and a half centuries.

  Ayesha wrinkled her nose at the pungent smell of the tallow. Then, as the candlelight grew and spread throughout the chamber, she crossed to the tomb, rested a hand on its cold stone, and contemplated the structure.

  “No X marks the spot. None I can see anyway.”

  “You know the story?” Joram asked her.

  “Hmm?”

  “When Ethelred was crowned king, the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Dunstan, prophesied that his line would be totally destroyed, and that the kingdom would be transferred to another nation, whose customs and language neither he nor his people would understand.”

  Ayesha thought rapidly, recalling dates. “Ethelred reigned from 968 to 1016. So Harold lost to William at Hastings and the Normans conquered England within a couple of generations of Dunstan’s prophecy. Good story. If it’s true and not something made up with hindsight—” She broke off as a sudden chill tingled her spine. Icy fingers stroked her flesh.

  Her heart hammering, Ayesha swept the penlight around the chamber, expecting to see…What? A pair of vivid blue eyes? Not Joram’s. The same eyes she thought she’d seen in a long-forgotten chamber beneath another of England’s great cathedrals. Although she couldn’t have seen them. Because their owner—T. E. Lawrence—was long dead. She drew a deep breath. Let it out, slowly. Nothing. Nobody was there.

  “What is it?” Joram eyed her from the other side of the tomb.

  “Nothing. Just…Nothing.” She’d almost asked Joram if he believed in ghosts. She didn’t—or hadn’t—until her experience with what she’d partially convinced herself, despite a lifetime of unbelief in any kind of afterlife, was the shade of T. E. Lawrence. That had been back in June, beneath Salisbury Cathedral, in the chamber where she’d discovered the Ark of the Covenant.

  “Nothing,” she repeated. She was glad of the dim light; Joram wouldn’t be able to see the blush that had risen in her cheeks. She forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She scrutinized the tomb inch by inch. Ran her hands over the tiles. Once, twice, three times she circumnavigated the sepulchre while Joram concentrated his attention on the latticework of stone carving at its head, which got the best of the candlelight.

  “Are we going to have to open it?” She watched as Joram examined a carved lion. Or perhaps it was a gryphon. She couldn’t imagine how they’d undertake any kind of internal examination of the tomb without the aid of heavy equipment. That was impossible without revealing its existence to the world. Which was the last thing she wanted. Presumably Joram felt the same. Else the secret would have been revealed long ago.

  “I wouldn’t think so.” Joram sounded confident. “Ethelred died and was interred here generations before the dissolution of the Templars in 1312. If a clue to their treasure was secreted in or about his tomb, whoever did so would have had no better access than we do now.” He probed a crack in one of the tiles.

  “Whoever hid the clue here would have employed a master mason,” Joram continued, finding nothing in the crack. “One skilled in secreting objects their owners did not want found—it was practically an industry in those days. Or a craft, rather. The secret will not easily be discovered, although it will most likely be simple when we do find it. Look for anything that might be turned, or pushed.”

  Perhaps twenty minutes passed, by which time one of the tallow candles was guttering, causing wild shadows to dance about the chamber. Ayesha did her best to ignore them, although her imagination conjured up fanciful shapes in the darkness. She had squeezed inside each of the arches at the base of the sarcophagus. It was impossible to see much, even with the aid of the penlight she held between her teeth. She relied on her hands, feeling for anything out of the ordinary.

  She was inside the last arch, her hair, face, and clothing liberally smeared in dirt and cobwebs, probing the inner stonework and on the verge of giving up, when her fingers encountered something that seemed out of place.

  She twisted to get into a better position. Hardly daring to hope, Ayesha felt with her fingers. Her heart leaped. There was something. A knob, ridged. Holding her breath, she pulled. Nothing. She tried twisting it, in both directions. Still nothing. She pushed it. The knob sank into the stone. Yes! Nothing happened. She exhaled, excitement ebbed.

  “Aha!” Joram’s exclamation was muffled by the stonework, but it was enough to give Ayesha fresh hope.

  When she had levered herself ou
t of the arch, Joram pointed to the stone-carved latticework. Where before there had been solid stone, a dark space had appeared.

  The librarian eased a hand inside the opening and felt around. When he withdrew his hand, he held a small, intricately carved ivory casket. He placed this, almost reverently, on top of the tomb. It gleamed in the candlelight.

  Ayesha reached out, intending to open the box. Joram caught her wrist.

  “Not here,” he said. “Whatever’s inside the casket is bound to be fragile. We need better light.” He coughed. “And less dust.”

  “Where then?” Her wrist tingled where Joram had touched it. “We can’t go back to the library, or Lady Madrigal’s. They’re bound to be watching my apartment.”

  “My place is not far. We should be safe there.” Joram studied her with narrowed eyes, clearly making up his mind. “There’s something I’d like to show you on the way.”

  Joram’s place. Ayesha took a deep breath; brushed aside the carnal images that pulled at her psyche. Then, knowing she’d need both hands free for the journey ahead of them, and to keep it safe, she tucked the casket inside her leather jacket and zipped it up. They doused the candles and left the chamber. Not back the way they’d come, up the stairs to St. Faith’s, but through a low archway that opened on the farther side of Ethelred’s tomb.

  Stone steps led down to another chamber. This, too, was a sepulchre, but not a royal one, and no carved and tiled sarcophagi housed those interred there. Not that interred was really the word for the vast piles of browned bones, the mortal remains of thousands who died during the last Great Plague to devastate London’s population—that of 1660. St. Paul’s Cathedral—Old St. Paul’s—had served as both a hospital and charnel house during that terrible time. The dead had been thrown into hastily dug pits around the cathedral. Their remains had been left undisturbed during the great rebuilding after the fire, and forgotten in the intervening centuries. Ayesha had discovered them while exploring the tunnels that opened from the cellars of the Walsingham Institute. It seemed that Joram had known about them for much longer.

  Their route took them through three plague pits. The browned bones, remnants of cloth adhering to them here and there, were piled high, in a crazed jumble that would have taken an army of forensic anthropologists decades to catalog. Ayesha could never look at them without confronting her own mortality. The thought that only three hundred and fifty years—say four human lifetimes—separated her from these people and their normal lives, their daily routines and loves, was something she found difficult to accept. Soon she would join them. Her bones, too, would turn brown and perhaps serve as a curiosity for future generations.

  Joram worked his way slowly along the narrow passage between the piled bones in the last of the plague pits. At one point, despite his care, he dislodged a shinbone. It crushed under his shoe. Ayesha winced; the sound cut through her like chalk scraping on a blackboard. Her nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of the pulverized bone. Then she saw the opening low down in the wall ahead of them.

  Joram shone his light on her. “All right?”

  “Of course.” She was annoyed he’d felt the need to ask.

  The librarian lowered himself to his hands and knees. He beamed his light into the hole and wormed his way after it. Ayesha was left in inky darkness. Her heart pounded in her ears. The smell flooded her nostrils. Was that a clicking sound? Were the bones stirring? Coming to life? Something brushed her forehead. She flinched back against the wall. Sweat dripped from her hair, down her spine. Her clothing stuck to her back. Her nails ground into her palms. Then the hole glowed with light. Her breathing slowed.

  “Come on,” Joram whispered. Why? Ayesha wondered, as she lowered herself to follow the librarian through the hole, like Alice after the White Rabbit. Only the dead would hear.

  The hole opened into a grave niche, or shelf. The ancient Romans called it a loculus. It, and thousands like it, were where they’d buried their dead, from the settlement they’d called Londinium. No one knew they existed, these Roman catacombs below London. Almost no one.

  Ayesha rolled from the loculus and got to her feet, taking care to protect her precious cargo from bumps and scrapes. She was also concerned not to disturb the bones of the ancient Roman Londoner who occupied the grave niche.

  “Do you think it’s different?” she asked Joram, as she straightened up. “The smell, I mean.” The plague pits had a particular odor, like the smell of a fertilizer plant, but the dead of the catacombs had their own mustier, somehow denser, smell—something she didn’t understand; bones were bones, after all.

  “Maybe it’s the difference of twelve hundred years in the age of the bones. Maybe it’s something in the earth.” Joram shrugged and led the way into the darkness; into the network of Roman catacombs.

  Ayesha had taken two others into the secret of the catacombs in the last year. They were both dead. Lady Madrigal knew, too, of course; Ayesha had told her all about her explorations, but the centenarian wasn’t up to the trip beneath London, nor would she tell anyone. And Dame Imogen must know. Some of her people had pursued Ayesha into the catacombs, thinking she was going to expose a terrible secret from the 1930s with the potential to do terrible harm to the Crown. Dame Imogen had never said anything. Ayesha could only think she’d decided to sit on the secret, with the idea that it might come in useful in some future MI5 operation.

  Ayesha had both wanted and not wanted to share her discovery. As long as no one else knew, it was hers alone, to explore and revisit as she wished. Once the authorities were informed, that would all end. She’d only get to visit on purchase of a ticket, with crowds of tourists and schoolchildren. Now she had a friend to share it with. She thought about that. Was Joram a friend? Could he, perhaps, be something more? She shied away from the thought. Then she allowed it to creep back. It had been a long time. Too long.

  “This way.” Joram’s voice jerked her back to the present. She hadn’t realized he’d stopped. Had almost walked into him.

  Ayesha thought she’d explored most of the catacombs, but the narrow branch passage Joram now turned into was one she was sure she’d never visited. It ended, after about fifty yards, in a cubicula—a cavelike family tomb, the same sort of idea as the more modern family vault or crypt.

  “What on earth…” An ordinary wooden door was set into the wall of the cubicula, opposite the opening through which they had just entered. Clearly it was of much more recent vintage than the Roman occupation of Britain.

  “I thought you might be surprised.” Joram pushed the door wide and stepped through the opening. Bright light flooded it.

  “Ohh!” The sound was dragged from Ayesha’s throat. Expecting another smallish space, something like the cubicula, or another tunnel, she was stunned to find herself in a vast warehouse. So vast that she could not make out how far it extended, although this was partially because of the bookcases—wood, metal, a miscellany of all materials, shapes and sizes—that stretched into the distance, all of them crammed with books.

  “What…How…” We’re not in Kansas anymore. She turned in desperation to Joram.

  “My grandfather.” His mouth was set in a wide, boyish grin that reminded her of the Cheshire Cat. Appropriate.

  “The fire watcher?”

  “Yes. When he wasn’t guarding the roof of St. Paul’s from German bombs, he was managing editor at George Newnes.”

  “The publishing house?”

  “That’s right. Their main office was in Covent Garden, but they had another building, mainly a warehouse for their stock, right above us. In fact most of the major British publishers had their warehouses in this area. They were all destroyed in Hitler’s Blitz. A vast collection of books went up in flames, including the plates for a lot of classics. Works by Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gray’s Anatomy. Draft manuscripts. Correspondence files. A treasure trove of history was lost. Or so it was thought.”

  “Your grandfather’s motto wasn’t ‘be prepared,’ was it?”


  Joram chuckled. “If it wasn’t, it should have been. He knew about the catacombs and had this space excavated in great secrecy. It’s actually a sub-basement level of what was George Newnes’s warehouse. Grandfather arranged for most of their stock to be moved down here, files, too. He persuaded his friends in the other publishing houses to move a lot of their most valuable holdings here as well.” He rested a hand on the nearest bookcase. “As you can see, it survived the bombing.”

  “I presume it’s the source of your magical ability to find rare books for Lady Madrigal?”

  Joram nodded. “Her, and others. Not for personal gain, I assure you. This collection has provided a vital source of income to supplement the budget and the holdings of the Walsingham Institute for decades now. I’ve also funded certain…projects. I think you’d approve of them.”

  Ayesha decided to let that go. For the present. She was damned well going to come back to it.

  “Why wasn’t it all reclaimed at the end of the war?”

  “My grandfather wasn’t always prepared.” Joram looked grim. “He and his friends—everyone who knew about this place—were in the Goat and Compasses on the night when the Germans hammered the East End for almost the last time. They were in the cellar, but the pub took a direct hit. They were all killed.”

  “How do you know about this place then?”

  “My grandfather told my father before he was killed. My father told me. No one else knows. Except you.”

  Ayesha let that knowledge percolate. She surveyed the acres of bookcases; thrilling at the idea that she could explore them whenever she chose. Once they’d got out of their current predicament. She frowned as a more mundane thought occurred. “Where does the electricity come from?”

  “I’ll show you.” With more than a hint of another Cheshire Cat grin, Joram led the way deeper into the warehouse.

  They walked past bookcase after bookcase, all of them crammed to bursting. More books were stacked in piles on the floor. Others spilled from boxes and packing cases. Ayesha scanned spines, titles, as she walked. She halted by a huge partner-type desk. A rubber gas mask and white painted metal helmet lay on top next to a collection of metal fragments.