“Mr Horniman set out to bring the whole world here,” Skinner needlessly told me. “It stands to reason that if there’s anything you want from anywhere in in the world, especially if it’s a bit hocus-pocus, it’s probably in there somewhere.”
The museum still looked like a fair-sized haystack to my eyes, and the baetyl was a small enough needle, but there was no sense in arguing with Skinner when he was in a cheerful mood.
“Maybe we were wrong about what sort of beetle it is,” said Skinner as we came into the first gallery.
Along the walls were hundreds and hundreds of glass display cases, and in them was every insect imaginable, so many that from a distance they looked like writing on the wall. The insect gallery was like framed collections of pinned butterflies but multiplied to infinity. Or perhaps multiplied to insanity.
There were butterflies of every colour of the rainbow and more than a few other insects, but mainly, there was a vaster profusion of beetles than I’d ever imagined existed. Many of them were extraordinary creatures, giants the size of a cricket balls or small monsters equipped with all manner of appendages and extrusions so that the row of them was a carpenter’s shop of tools for boring, sawing, or filing through wood. Many more were unremarkable brown beetles that were utterly indistinguishable to the naked eye. Somebody could tell them apart though, and each one had a neatly printed tag with its Latin name. Most of them never even had an English name.
“What’s it all for?”
“Collectors,” said Skinner. “They start out just collecting the fancy colourful ones. Then the collecting mania takes over, and look what happens.”
“They want the complete set.” But the complete set of beetles was… colossal. I wondered how anyone could even know if they had the same beetle twice—or how they could tell when they really had completed the set. If there was a reference guide, it was in the sole possession of the Creator. Dizzied by this vast multitude, I retreated to another gallery.
This one held West African artefacts. My eyes ranged over a bronze idol with straw for hair, a wooden statue of a man with the head of a crocodile, a woven straw mat, and a ceremonial staff with ornate bronze furniture. The descriptions on the printed cards were terse and uninformative.
Skinner had decided that rather than asking the staff directly, he would get assistance from the other visitors. He stubbed out his cigarette and straightened his tie. The first three people he approached knew nothing, but Skinner was persistent, and his eyes lit up when a likely prospect appeared. A gentleman was showing his son around the gemstone collection. The boy had slicked-back hair and a school blazer and seemed genuinely interested as his father explained the finer points. The father used Greek and Latin terms with a great deal of familiarity. Skinner approached them, speaking up in an accent that was a poor imitation of the man’s own rounded tones.
“Awf’ly sorry to bother you, but you don’t happen to know where the meteorite collection is displayed, do you?”
“Meteorites?” The amateur mineralogist turned to the boy. “I don’t think we’ve seen any, do you?”
The boy shook his head, and his father extracted a museum catalogue. I had not even seen them on sale.
“I understood there were some interesting specimens of meteorites,” said Skinner.
“I dare say,” replied the scholar. “But I’m afraid there’s nothing listed.”
“I must have been misinformed. Dashed sorry to trouble you and all that.”
“As I say, I’m sure they have got some interesting specimens,” said the other man. “But you’ll have a devil of a time finding them. I mean, look at this.”
The display case in front of him held an arrangement of yellow crystals from different parts of the world. Some were clear and pale and the size of my thumbnail, and others were the size and brilliant hue of egg yolks.
“They’ve arranged them by colour!” He laughed and looked to see if we understood the joke. Having different yellow stones next to each other gave a person a chance to compare them and tell them apart, but that was evidently not the way to do it at all.
“Bit of a shambles, eh?” said Skinner, still in his plummy accent.
“It’s a junk shop, an absolute junk shop. You see, this is what happens when you have an amateur collector with no sense of scientific organisation.” His conviction was total; I would not like to be an underling who misplaced something in that man’s business.
“Hopeless,” Skinner said.
A young couple joined us to listen; the scholar was holding forth, and they wanted to hear the free lecture.
“And then all these other collectors started offloading their collections on him, and Horniman just took everything,” said the mineral scholar. “So instead of having some sense of order, you have red-Indian feather headdresses, Mongolian snakes, and African bronzes with no rhyme or reason. I’m sure it’s all very entertaining for the public, but it’s worthless for educational purposes.”
“I suppose we’ll just have to forage for the meteorites,” said Skinner.
“I very much doubt that will do you any good,” said the other in the cheery tone of a railwayman telling you that the 7:15 had already left. “Nine-tenths of the collection isn’t on show; it’s packed away in storage.”
“The Horniman Museum has over two hundred thousand individual objects,” said the boy. “Most of them are in storage, but sometimes they lend them to other museums and galleries all over the world.”
“And they haven’t even catalogued it all properly yet,” said the scholar. “You see, I was talking to a friend of mine—friend of a colleague, actually, from South Africa—and he was visiting because his uncle had donated some very fine rhodochrisite—”
“Pink manganese carbonate,” said the boy as if providing footnotes. He was doubtless the class swot.
“We couldn’t find it on display, and when I made enquiries, they hadn’t even opened the boxes! Can you believe it?”
“Scarcely,” said Skinner, bowing and withdrawing before the man could continue. “Very glad for your assistance.”
I carried on down the aisle, studiously reading the little labels like an explorer searching for tracks in the wasteland. Skinner followed but looked around in wider arcs.
“Hello,” he muttered. “Don’t look now, but you see that cove with the bowed legs?”
I had noticed the man before. He had the face of a ferret and wore a jacket that showed its age and scuffed brown shoes. He kept about half a hall away, but he was always there. He looked shifty and out of place, glancing from exhibit to exhibit or staring for too long at some dull display. The museum was not his natural habitat. Whichever way he looked, he never looked in our direction.
“Is he following us?” I asked.
“We’ll soon find out. Let’s nab him.”
Skinner and I wandered around until we found a gallery of Asian art with no other visitors. When the ferret-faced man followed us in a minute later, we ambushed him from either side of the doorway. I took his right arm and bent it behind him in a half nelson. He was a powerful enough man for his size, but breaking a hold like that required more than strength.
I had not seen Skinner draw his knife, but it was at the man’s cheek in an instant. A thin line of blood appeared where the sharp blade touched the skin.
“What’s your game?”
The man said nothing but glared with mute hostility.
“What do you think you’re doing in a museum?” Skinner jeered. “You stand out like a sore thumb.”
He glared at us silently.
“You got anything to say for yourself, or shall I cut your ear to match Mr Stubbs’s?”
I was fairly certain Skinner was bluffing. He sounded convincing, though.
“There’s no law against following someone,” the ferret-faced man burst out. “I haven’t done anything to you.”
“Why don’t you go back to Miss Granger,” said Skinner, voice low and silky with menace, “and give her
our best compliments. Because if we ever catch you in a quiet place again, she’ll get you back by instalments. You have my word on that.”
Skinner withdrew the blade and nodded; I threw the man down the aisle between cabinets so that he fetched up against the wooden panelling. I was terrified he would smash into something glass and break it, but I bowled him cleanly.
“Poor bleeder,” said Skinner, half-scornful and half-pitying, as the man slunk out. He had the awkward, limping gait of one who had survived rickets as a boy. Evidently, Elsie Granger had not given up her interest in the beetle and still thought there was a chance of profit.
“He’s like us only not as well paid,” I said.
“Clever, though. If a man’s unemployed and loitering anyway, he must be very cheap to hire. And she can pay them in watered-down beer. I thought I saw someone loitering outside the office yesterday.”
“There might have been one in the library,” I said, recalling the man in the ragged shirt. “Perhaps he knows that we’re here after the beetle. But he doesn’t know what sort of a beetle it is.”
Even as I said it, I wondered whether our shadow might have been close enough to overhear Skinner’s enquiry about meteorites.
“It’s got to be in here somewhere,” said Skinner, scanning the rows of cabinets.
“That note was a clue. The one I found in the book in Mabel Brown’s room—’Janitor, archivist, master key held where?’”
“She had to get a key to wherever it was in here.”
“Or in the archive storage,” I said.
“Why couldn’t she leave a note saying where it was?” Skinner grumbled.
The museum was not even as well organised as Higgs’s warehouse, where all the men’s shoes were on one table. If only the museum had been as neatly ordered as Mr Hoade’s library shelves, all sorted and classified and numbered according to the guiding principles of the Dewey Decimal System and drawn up in parade-ground order on the shelves for inspection.
“We need help from an expert,” I said.
Chapter Eleven: On Streatham Common
Hoade smoothed his beard contemplatively. I was lucky to find him free, Saturday morning being a busy time for any library. But he had granted me a minute in a quiet corner, and we were deep in conference.
I had doubled back on myself a couple of times on the way to the library to make sure I had not been followed. Skinner might sneer at my correspondence course, but it does give some handy tips on avoiding surveillance.
“It beggars belief that Mabel Brown should have found this baetyl fortuitously.” Hoade chewed on an unlit pipe. “Given how soon she found it and succeeded in abstracting a sample, I’d incline to the view that she knew what she was looking for when she joined the museum. Moreover, she must have had some idea of how to find it.”
“But how?” I asked.
“We must assume that the item is in one box among ten thousand other boxes. Either she had some means of sniffing it out, or she had some inside information on where to look.”
“The baetyl does have unique physical properties. That may well include smell, so perhaps a dog would be able to smell it—”
“I was speaking metaphorically,” said Hoade with that tight smile of his. Another man would have laughed. “I was thinking more in terms of magnetic or electric properties. If the baetyl draws lightning, then it may have some characteristic effect on a compass needle or similar. But of course you are correct. It might indeed also have a characteristic smell.”
I also wondered whether radiation might be involved and if that could be detected. There was nothing in Mabel Brown’s room that suggested a scientific instrument or even an interest in it.
“As for inside information,” he went on, “there are only a finite number of people with any knowledge of the contents of those boxes and a finite number of places where they might have broadcast the information and where she might have encountered it. Only certain academic researchers would be permitted to browse through the collection, and there are only a few journals that publish their papers.”
“Is there a journal of baetyl studies?” I was thinking that perhaps some small monograph on, for example, the discovery of an unusual baetyl in Arctic Russia would point the way. Being the subject of an obscure study should be enough for the find to merit its own display case at least.
“I think it’s something more rarefied than that,” Hoade said. “Perhaps some reference in a paper on something else—a hint that would point the way for the informed student.”
“But how would you even start to look for such a thing?”
The rows and rows of books and the mass of bound copies of magazines stretching down shelf after shelf, each packed with pages of dense text, seemed to grow around me into a vast and impenetrable forest in which I had to find one particular acorn—an acorn I would not even be able to recognise when I found it.
“The modern librarian has many tools at his disposal,” said Hoade, a kindly wizard ready to assist an awed petitioner. “Systematic searching is a now scientific process, not merely a matter of intuition. But we will need to gather all the clues and decide which trail offers the most promise.”
I dutifully wrote about all the pieces of evidence, and Hoade promptly rearranged them according to some scheme of his own. He ended up with six points, which he frowned at critically as he drew lines and arrows between them. It might have been scientific, or he might have been casting runes, but after a minute, he seemed decided.
“I would say the history of the Horniman Museum offers the best prospects,” he said. “Being local, we probably have as good a collection of books on the Horniman as anyone.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I’m afraid I will have to defer my answer until Monday,” Hoade said, looking up at the big clock over the reception desk. “I have a few things to attend to before we close up. But you need not despair, Stubbs. We will find the track—I’m sure of that—even if we don’t make it to the destination in one go.”
“It’s very good of you.” I hesitated. I needed to warn him. “But I do feel that I should warn you… this is a dangerous business to get caught up in. Even the books themselves might turn against you.”
“How so?”
I shuffled awkwardly. I had not thought properly about how I was going to put this. “I don’t rightly understand the process, but some minds—some educated minds—are vulnerable to certain occult things. They’d pass right by someone like me, but they could be swallowed like a fishhook to someone who was susceptible.”
I did not know what drove people like Stafford or Harcourt or Roslyn D’Onston, but it always seemed to start with people reading books and letting ideas get lodged in their brains. And there was something of that type of temperament in Hoade.
“Like becoming addicted to cross-words,” Hoade said lightly. “Only more so.”
“I suppose so,” I said, but I saw from his sober expression that he understood me. Perhaps he already understood more than I would have given him credit for. Hoade was a man who knew things.
“Thank you for your concern. Forewarned is forearmed. I will shun the snares of the occult and see you on Monday morning. Have a pleasant weekend, Stubbs.”
“And yourself.”
“In-laws,” he said with a brief, resigned smile.
My heart was lightened considerably by his optimism that we would find something. I was inclined to trust Hoade when he was dealing with matters that he understood better than me.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I had promised to join my family for a promenade around Streatham Common. There were seven of us all told: my pa and ma, my brother and his wife, little George, aged three, and the baby in a perambulator. Skinner had taken himself off to Tooting Bec Lido, where he would meet some friends to ogle the season’s bathing belles.
On days when the sun beat down, all London went out of doors. The footpaths were crowded with throngs of pale-skinned folks, looking like
underground creatures let out into the light of day for the first time in their summer clothes, all smelling of mothballs. The young men got spruced up in their straw hats and striped blazers and thought they were terrific sports. They’d walk four or five abreast, the formation opening and all hats swept off when they met their female counterparts coming the other way, who were all floral and dainty and trying to stay aloof behind fans and parasols. Then they’d burst into fits of giggles when they were ten paces past the boys.
Streatham Common was a cheerful sight that summer’s day. The kids were all shouting and running around and being organised into games of cricket by proud fathers. The mothers looked after the little ones and spread out tartan blankets and unpacked wicker baskets full of provender. Here and there, if you looked for them, young couples were finding shady arbours and quiet corners or just walking holding hands and looking soppy.
It was all so green at this time of year—the vast expanse of grass, the rows of hedges, and the fine oaks at the top of the common—that I had to stop and wonder what colour it had been a few weeks previously. The same green, I supposed, but it did not show it without the sunshine. The whole surface of the ground was covered in green, vegetation spreading like a liquid that filled every nook and cranny with fresh verdant growth. It was the sort of day that made me think I spent too much time indoors.
A team of workmen were driving in posts, roping off the bottom end of the common by the fountain, preparing the area for the summer fair that would set up there in the coming week. We sauntered along, taking it in, talking about nothing much at all. Pa was content to be flanked by his sons and surrounded by the rest of his family. My brother was also more cheerful of late. Being a die-hard fan of Crystal Palace Football Club, he had spent his Saturday afternoons watching them endure a string of losses ending in relegation. The season had ended, and my brother could break loose from being part of the great collective of Crystal Palace fans and spend time with his family. Sport in the summer months meant Jack Hobbs knocking out endless centuries, which held no interest.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 10
