by James Becker
Choosing the doorway on the right-hand side, Angela walked straight into an Aladdin’s cave of relics. The room ran the entire length of that part of the house and had probably originally been intended as a formal reception room. There were two tall windows at the far end; half a dozen others along the right-hand wall looked out of the front of the building towards the gravelled car park. The long wall opposite them was dominated by a huge fireplace. You could burn an entire tree in it which, Angela reflected, you’d probably need to do in the winter if you wanted to keep the temperature of the room much above freezing. On either side of the fireplace, built-in bookcases extended in both directions, the shelves lined with leather-bound volumes. Just cataloguing those would be at least a week’s work for somebody. But it wasn’t the elegant proportions of the room or the books or the faded decoration, or even the fireplace, that caught her eye. It was the floor.
Almost the entire surface of the scuffed parquet was covered with boxes and bags and chests, a haphazard collection of containers, interspersed with occasional bronze and marble sculptures and other, unrecognizable, objects covered in white dust sheets or plastic sheeting.
‘Good God,’ Angela muttered to herself. ‘If every room’s like this, it’ll take months, not weeks, to sort out.’
‘Ah, there you are, Angela.’ Richard Mayhew’s voice boomed out from behind her, stating the obvious. A large — in all respects — and florid-faced man who specialized in objects made from silver and gold, he seemed incapable of ever speaking in anything less than a slightly moderated shout.
‘Richard,’ she said, shaking his hand. She pointed at the chaotic mass of containers in the room. ‘Are all the rooms as full as this?’
Mayhew shook his head. ‘No, not at all. This is the biggest room in the house, and it looks as if somebody — presumably the executors — decided to leave the furniture in situ, but bring almost everything else in here and the room on the opposite side of the hall. Personally, I’d have preferred to do it room by room, but there you are. Needs must, and all that.’
He looked round. ‘Now, we’ll be making a start in here first thing tomorrow morning. The other chaps are checking the rest of the house, making sure that we know what else there is to be assessed. The good news for you is that there’s a very large kitchen, and almost all of the china and ceramics we’ve found so far are already in there. I don’t think it’ll take you all that long to check them over. In the meantime, let me introduce you to the other chaps and give you the guided tour. It’s a fascinating old house with some very interesting features.’
He led the way back into the hall and across to the foot of the staircase.
‘What the devil happened here?’ Angela asked, stopping short when she saw a missing banister halfway up the staircase.
Mayhew coughed, and turned an alarming shade of puce. ‘That is where the old man. . er, died,’ he said. ‘Apparently he was found hanging from that piece of banister. Terrible business.’
Angela noticed a large brown stain on the flagstones near her feet, and looked away. There had obviously been a lot of blood. She decided it was time to change the subject.
‘Roger told me about the multiple wills Wendell-Carfax made.’
Mayhew smiled and relaxed a little. ‘Mischievous old sod. He was the last of the line, you know. Never married, no children. Just a few cousins who’re now all busily fighting each other over their share of the inheritance.’
He led the way up to a wide corridor on the first floor, spacious bedrooms opening up on both sides of it. ‘As you’ve probably guessed, Oliver was a quite a character, probably slightly mad. But his father — his name was Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax — was as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s him at the end of the corridor.’
Where the corridor ended was a small sitting area, tall windows offering a view of the parkland outside the house. Between the two windows was a painting, almost life-sized, that showed a middle-aged dark-haired man wearing what looked like a tweed suit. He was seated in a chair and looking slightly away from the painter, towards a roaring wood fire, a coat of arms cut into the wall above the inglenook.
‘He doesn’t look mad,’ Angela said, stopping in front of the painting and staring up at it. ‘In fact, he looks rather attractive, in a sort of avuncular, country-house kind of way. He reminds me of a character you’d find in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.’
‘Perhaps,’ Mayhew said, ‘but he was definitely odd. He had several portraits painted of himself and, even though he was running pretty low on funds, he commissioned four self-portraits from a very minor local artist named Edward Montgomery, and apparently paid quite a lot of money for them.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know how bad his financial situation was,’ Angela said.
‘Oh, he knew, all right, but that wasn’t what was odd — it was the subjects he chose. According to the guidebook we found in one of the boxes in the salon, two of the pictures were like this one, conventional portraits. But in the other two, Bartholomew was depicted as a young man, in one dressed like a Sioux chief, feathered headdress and all, and in the other like a member of Indian royalty. The artist had to work from photographs Bartholomew supplied of himself when he was about twenty-five. That’s what I mean by nutty — what was the point of having a portrait painted showing him when he was young when he was already well over seventy? And why was he wearing such extraordinary outfits?’
‘You know, that kind of thing was quite the fashion in the early part of the twentieth century,’ Angela said. ‘A lot of society figures had their portraits done in exotic outfits. So where are the paintings now? Somewhere here?’
‘The conventional portraits are in the house, but not the other two. Bartholomew managed to sell them soon after they were painted.’
‘Well, maybe it was just a money-making exercise after all. So why was he so short on funds?’
Mayhew stepped over beside Angela and they both looked out over the acres of peaceful parkland, so much in contrast, Angela thought, to the chaos of the house.
‘According to the guidebook — which is quite a good read, by the way — Bartholomew’s parents were very comfortably off. They owned huge tranches of land in East Anglia and had a couple of hundred tenant farmers, plus stock market investments, all that kind of thing. After that, the family fortune shrunk considerably, for all the usual reasons — the First World War and the Depression, plus Bartholomew’s Folly. And that’s another reason for the damage you saw. There are bits of panelling torn off in various areas of the house, and even a few holes dug through some of the walls.’
Mayhew paused, clearly waiting for Angela to ask the obvious question. She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He sighed.
‘Anyway, just after the end of the Great War, Bartholomew went off on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. At the time, that was still a very fashionable way for a wealthy young man to finish off his education, and lucky for us that he did, because a lot of the relics Oliver has now bequeathed to the museum were bought by Bartholomew on that Grand Tour. I gather he went as far east as Syria, and into what was then Persia, and acted as a bit of a shopaholic everywhere. He must have spent thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of pounds, and at that time a thousand pounds was serious money.’
‘And Bartholomew’s Folly?’
‘One of the things Bartholomew brought back from his grand shopping tour of Europe was a wooden crate of mixed antiquities from Cairo. Apparently it was a kind of job lot. He only actually wanted a couple of ornamented vases — which we haven’t found so far, by the way, so they were probably sold some time later — but ended up having to take the whole crate, at an inflated price, naturally. Anyway, when he got the stuff back here, he opened the crate, took out the vases he wanted and stuck the box with all the rest of the bits in one of the attics.
‘A few years later, he dragged it down again and for the first time actually took a good look at what he’d bought. Most of it was rubbish, as he’d expected, but
down at the bottom of the crate he found an earthenware jar. Bartholomew believed it was probably first century AD, but the guidebook doesn’t say what type of jar it was, or how he came to that conclusion. What attracted his attention wasn’t the age of the jar, but the fact that the stopper was pinned and wired through the neck of the vessel and the whole thing sealed with wax.’
Mayhew turned and led the way back down the corridor. Angela followed him, stepping over the occasional missing floorboard.
‘So, as you might have guessed, Bartholomew grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the jar. He broke the seal and ripped out the stopper, expecting to find something valuable inside.’
‘And did he?’
‘According to the guidebook, at first he thought the vase was empty, but then he saw a piece of parchment, or maybe papyrus, inside it — the account I read uses both words to describe it. He broke the jar and got it out, convinced it had to be some kind of priceless ancient text.’
‘But presumably it wasn’t?’
‘No. It was written in a language he didn’t recognize — not that that meant much, because the only language Bartholomew spoke or read was English. So he decided to get it translated, but was terrified of anyone else finding out what the text meant, so he copied out each line as best he could, then sent off the individual lines to half a dozen different linguists.’
Angela stopped, interested now in spite of herself. She touched Mayhew on the shoulder to make him turn round. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense, Richard. What was it — Aramaic? Hebrew? And what did it say?’
Mayhew shook his head. ‘The text was an early type of Persian script.’
‘Persian? Oh, the Silk Road, I suppose. There was already a lot of interchange between the Middle East and the other eastern nations by the first century AD. But why was it in a sealed jar?’
‘No one knows. As for what it said, when Bartholomew received the various bits of translated text and tried to assemble them into a whole, he discovered that it was part of a much larger text that described a journey in an unnamed part of the world called the “Valley of the Flowers”, which was presumably somewhere in Persia or modern-day Iran.’
‘Because of the language the writer used?’
‘Yes. But what also caught Bartholomew’s attention was a phrase. Something the writer referred to as “the treasure of the world”.’
‘Of course,’ Angela said. ‘Roger Halliwell told me there was a kind of lost treasure story attached to this family, I presume this is it?’
Mayhew laughed. ‘Yes. And because Bartholomew was such a nutter, it was enough to send him off on a whole series of expeditions to the Middle East that-’
‘Whereabouts in the Middle East?’
‘Iran, obviously, because of the Persian text, but quite possibly Iraq and God knows where else in the region. All his expeditions were completely fruitless, of course. Anyway, that’s what became known as “Bartholomew’s Folly”, because he ran through most of the family’s fortune searching for this so-called treasure. When he finally popped his clogs, he left his son with massive debts, and Oliver had to sell off a whole lot of antiques and most of the land he’d inherited just to stave off bankruptcy. The couple of hundred acres around the house is all that’s left of the estate now.’
‘But how does that relate to the damage here in the house?’
‘Bartholomew told his son that he’d fashioned a secure hiding place for the parchment he’d found. According to what Oliver wrote — he supplied the text for the guidebook, of course — his father had promised to tell him where the hiding place was, and also to give him a complete translation of the text, but he never did because he died suddenly of a massive heart attack, here in the house.’
‘So I presume Oliver made the holes in the wall and ripped off the panelling?’ Angela asked. ‘Looking for this piece of parchment or papyrus?’
‘Exactly. Oliver spent the last few years trying to discover where his old man had hidden it. And as far as I know, he never did find it.’
By now, they were downstairs again in the hall. Angela looked around her, at the bloodstained flagstones and the missing banister, and shivered. The house felt sad and lonely, there was no doubt about that. But there was something else — an air of lurking evil — that she didn’t like at all.
7
‘Where did this come from?’ JJ Donovan asked, pointing at his system display.
Jesse McLeod barely glanced at the screen. He knew exactly which of the twenty or so search results his boss would be most interested in.
‘The on-line version of a local newspaper.’
‘Not encrypted or protected, then?’
McLeod shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s a town news-sheet — you know, births, deaths, marriages, all that sort of stuff, strictly local news. It’s entirely open-source and terminally boring if you don’t know any of the names, and pretty boring even if you do. The whole thing’s a waste of time and in my opinion a total misuse of space on the web.’
He paused for a second or two, then again voiced a suggestion he’d made to Donovan a couple of times before. ‘Look, JJ, I know what keywords you gave me, but it was a real broad search and I’ve still got no idea what you’re looking for. If you could tell me why this stuff’s so important, I’d be able to get you more targeted results.’
Donovan shook his head. ‘Right now, I don’t even know if it is important. It’s just an idea I’ve got, a possibility of something that could change everything. But I’ll tell you this. If I am right about what I’m looking for, it could be the single most significant discovery in the history of science. After this, nothing would ever be the same again.’
McLeod was thoughtful as he rode the elevator back down to the computer suite on the first floor. It sounded like Donovan had flipped, and that was a real worry. The company ran so well because Donovan was a genius when it came to genetic manipulation. If he’d lost the plot, it was definitely time to start thinking about finding employment somewhere else. When he got back to his office, he thought, he’d put out a few feelers, just in case.
And he also needed to make a call, because JJ Donovan wasn’t the only person he was working for. And his other contact would be a lot more interested in the story he had to tell him.
8
It was late afternoon before Mayhew finally led Angela into the kitchen at Carfax Hall. Like the rest of the house, it was constructed and equipped on a grand, albeit late nineteenth-century, scale. A huge oblong solid-wood table sat squarely in the centre of the floor, most of its surface covered with china and ceramics of various types.
A Victorian cooking range, traces of wood or coal ash visible in the fire grate, was built into one wall, and old steel and copper pans and cooking utensils hung from hooks in the walls on either side of it. Incongruously, on the counter-top to the right of the range stood a grubby white microwave oven, and next to that an electric kettle, about half a dozen modern mugs in different colours, a jar of instant coffee, a box of tea bags and an open bag of sugar. Below the counter-top, an ancient fridge emitted a constant clattering and wheezing noise.
Clustered around a cleared area at one end of the table were the other four members of the assessment team, steaming mugs in front of them. Angela had met them all individually as she and Richard Mayhew had walked around the property, and she knew them all by sight from her work at the British Museum.
Angela and Mayhew made themselves coffee, Mayhew adding milk from a one-litre plastic carton he took from the elderly fridge, then sat down.
‘You’ve inspected this old pile, then, Angela,’ said David Hughes, a thin, balding and bespectacled expert on English furniture. ‘What do you think?’
Angela shrugged. ‘Mainly, I think it’s a shame. If Bartholomew had spent less of his time and effort chasing rainbows and collecting antiques that he just locked away, and a bit more money keeping the place properly maintained and repaired, this would still be a great estate. As it is, I guess that as soon as
the dust has settled Oliver’s heirs will bring in the bulldozers, flatten the house and outbuildings and a modern housing estate will spring up.’
‘They might find getting planning permission difficult though,’ Mayhew said. ‘This is firmly in the green belt, I understand.’
‘Seen any decent china yet?’ Hughes asked.
Angela shook her head. ‘I’ll make a start first thing tomorrow morning. Is this everything?’ she asked, pointing at the cluttered table.
‘That’s most of it, yes. There are a few trunks and boxes we’ve got to check up in the attics, and we’ve only had a quick look around the cellars, but it doesn’t look as if there’s anything much down there.’
‘Is there anything else you need before you start work, Angela?’ Mayhew asked.
‘Yes. I might just as well pack the stuff away as soon as I’ve looked at it, so can somebody find me a couple of crates or boxes, one for the good stuff and the other for the rest? Oh, and tape and bubble-wrap to protect the bits of china?’
‘There are about half a dozen tea chests in one of the attics,’ Hughes said, ‘and we brought a couple of rolls of bubble-wrap with us. I’ll bring everything you need in the morning.’
‘Right, people,’ Richard Mayhew said, glancing at his watch, ‘let’s call it a day.’
Silence had fallen over Carfax Hall.
About ten minutes after Richard Mayhew turned the key in the lock on the front door, a faint scraping sound became audible in one of the attic rooms, a pile of cardboard boxes was moved slowly to one side and a grubby, sweat-lined face peered out from behind it.
