Dead as a Scone (18 page)

“Exactly! So I convince Felicity Adams to stash my cup in a bin full of other teacups that are not on display. King Tut’s teacup becomes one more unseen item in the museum’s collection.”

Conan raised a hand. “I see a hitch. All our antiquities are numbered and entered into our computer. We do a thorough inventory every year; I might discover the extra item.”

“Your accessions are computerized?”

“One of the virtues of being a rather small museum. Many of our larger cousins are still making the transition from accession ledgers to computer databases. We did it four years ago.”

“I suppose,” Flick said, “an easy way around that problem is simply to give the teacup its own official accession number.”

Conan countered, “But then anyone browsing through our catalog would find ‘King Tut’s Teacup’ listed among the other crockery.”

“Not if I entered it in the database as ‘Sam the Scribe’s Teacup.’ ”

“Well done!” Nicholas clapped. “By giving the stolen antiquity a false identity, one can hide it in plain sight, much like Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”

Trevor shook his head. “And here I thought a museum was a peaceful, crime-free zone.”

“Quite the contrary,” Conan said. “Even a small museum like ours is a treasure house. Valuable antiquities attract inventive thieves.”

“And also the occasional murderer,” Nicholas added.

“Really?”
Mirabelle half-shouted.

“Alas, yes. There have been killings in museums related to antiquity theft.”

Nigel winced. Of all the gratuitous comments an MI5 man might have made, Nicholas had accidentally chosen the one most likely to goose Felicity Adams into high gear. Nigel glanced warily at Flick and waited for her to say something illogical.

Much to his relief, Flick didn’t say anything. Instead, she stood up and carried her teacup to the tea trolley.

Nicholas spoke to Nigel. “On behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, let me thank you for sharing your valuable time. I’ll be off.”

Flick spun around. “Before you go, Nicholas, why not take a quick tour of the museum and our archives? We don’t open to the public until noon, so this is an ideal time.”

Nigel was caught off guard.
Why give a spook a guided tour?
He quickly recovered. “Yes, please do,” he said heartily. “In fact, I will join you.”

Nicholas smiled at them. “I’d like a tour very much.”

Nigel followed Flick and Nicholas out of his office. When he reached the door, he looked back and saw Mirabelle serving more tea and biscuits to Trevor and Conan.

Give tea fanciers an inch and they have a tea party.

As Nigel expected she would, Flick followed the itinerary she had once described as her “Fifty-Cent Visiting Fireman Tour” of the museum. It began on the third floor with a quick walk through the Hawker Library and a longer visit to the Conservation Laboratory. One of the cats came over to investigate. She sniffed Nicholas’s shoe, then ran away.

She must think he smells like James Bond,
Nigel thought. He passed a pleasant few seconds pondering why the arch villain in several of the movies owned a cat, but James himself did not.

Nicholas dutifully examined the microscopes, the fume hood, the drying chamber, and the photographic documentation station with its lights and digital camera.

“We photograph everything placed on display from lots of different angles,” Flick explained. “Should an antiquity ever be damaged, the restorers will have a set of photographs to work from.”

They traveled to the second floor, where Flick seemed to take longer than usual gushing about her favorites in the Tea in the Americas Room and delivering her “Did-you-know-that-tea-is-good-for-you?” lecture in the Tea and Health Gallery.

Does anybody drink tea because it’s a health food?
Nigel felt moved to ask, but he promptly quelled the temptation. Inviting Flick to embellish her presentation would merely extend his agony.

He felt his cell phone vibrate on his hip.

“Nigel Owen.”

“Can you come down to the ground floor, sir?” Margo McKendrick said. “There’s been a—an
incident
with the dog. As I understand the problem, he caught a squirrel in the greenhouse and is now in the tearoom eating it for breakfast.”

Nigel interrupted Flick’s lengthy discussion of the power of fluoride-rich tea to prevent caries in teeth. “Is it standard operating procedure for a Shiba Inu to kill and eat squirrels?”

“ ’Fraid so,” Flick replied. “Apparently they have a powerful instinct to hunt rodents. Why do you ask?”

“You carry on with the tour. I have a clean-up chore to supervise.”

Nigel left feeling invigorated. Dealing with a half-eaten squirrel seemed far less boring than following Flick Adams around the museum.

Flick made a snap decision. Cha-Cha had given her a few unexpected minutes alone with Nicholas Mitchell—an opportunity she would be silly to ignore. If she worked quickly, she could steer their conversation in the direction she wanted. With luck, she might gain enough information about British law enforcement to kick-start a real investigation into Elspeth Hawker’s murder.

She would have to bypass the local police, somehow reach higher-ups in British law enforcement who would be willing to listen to her ideas—who wouldn’t automatically accept Sir Simon Clowes’s diagnosis as gospel.

I need a name. A person to call.

As she guided Nicholas down the staircase to the first floor, Flick said, “I don’t know much about MI5, I’m afraid.”

“We have been responsible for British internal security since 1909.”

“Nigel told me that MI5 is roughly equivalent to America’s FBI.”

“We do many of the same things, but there are major differences. Our principal duty is to defend against covert threats to the United Kingdom, including espionage, terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. About ten years ago our charter was expanded to include serious crime—drugs, smuggling—”

“Antiquities theft,” Flick said with a smile. “And the occasional related murder.”

“Yes, but MI5 is not a police department. We investigate serious crime in close consultation with other law-enforcement agencies.” Nicholas stopped. “Let me tell you something that many Brits don’t realize. MI5 doesn’t have the power to arrest people. We have to call in a local plod to do the actual arresting.”

“Plod?”

“Rozzer. Old Bill. Bobby. Copper.”

“A policeman, you mean?”

Nicholas seemed puzzled at Flick’s response. “Didn’t your mum ever read to you from one of Enid Blyton’s books?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“No wonder you haven’t heard of Britain’s most famous policeman, the redoubtable Police Constable Plod of Toy Town. A strict but fair local copper who is a great friend to little, wooden Noddy and is absolutely wizard at tracking down and arresting robbers.” He laughed. “Of course, the local plod I work with most often is a female plainclothes officer from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. She looks nothing like PC Plod.”

Flick led Nicholas into the Tea Processing Salon.

“What is the purpose of that peculiar-looking apparatus?” he asked.

“It’s a CTC—a cut, tear, and curl machine—typically used to process tea leaves that are destined for tea bags. It can transform the whole top of a tea plant, stems, twigs, and all, into small pieces.”

“What if I don’t want stems and twigs in my cuppa?”

“The alternative is the traditional ‘orthodox’ method. It’s a simple five-step manufacturing process.” Flick pointed at a wall-mounted exhibit. “First, you handpick the topmost leaves and buds on the tea plant. Second, you allow the leaves to wither. Third, you squeeze them between metal rollers to blend the naturally occurring chemicals. Four, you let the rolled leaves oxidize in the open air for a while. Finally, you heat the leaves to stop further oxidation and dehydrate them. Voila! Tea the way it’s been made for thousands of years.”

“The orthodox technique sounds more expensive.”

Flick nodded. “A tea picker needs to collect three hundred leaves to make one pound of tea. All that hand labor adds to the cost. Orthodox processing is usually reserved for the best grades of tea—the kind sold loose rather than in tea bags.” She added, “I have a question for you.”

“Fire away.”

“Does MI5 ever work with the police in Tunbridge Wells?”

“Ah, the celebrated Kent County constabulary, now known officially as the Kent police. Well, naturally I am forbidden to give you specific details, but anyone perusing a map of Kent will find Dover, one of the country’s major ports, and Folkstone, the English end of the Channel Tunnel, and Manston, which has a recently developed international airport.”

“In other words, one might safely reach the conclusion that MI5 has a well-established relationship with the Kent police.”

“Indeed one might.”

Flick guided Nicholas through the first-floor lobby into the Tea at Sea Gallery.

“These models are exquisite,” he said. “The tea clippers were beautiful ships.”

“And built purposely for speed. Their sleek lines and large sails represent the pinnacle of merchant sailing ship technology. A well-found tea clipper could go as fast as twenty knots if the wind was right.” She pointed to a painting on the far wall. “There’s
Taeping
arriving in London on the sixth of September 1866, with
Ariel
a short distance behind her. Both clippers left from Foochow, China, on the twenty-ninth of May. They traveled sixteen thousand miles in about a hundred days—a journey that used to take a full year in a traditional sailing ship.”

“Why did a ship meant to carry tea leaves have to be fast?”

“The usual answer: money. The first ships that arrived with the new tea crop from China could command much higher prices for their cargoes.”

“May I conduct an experiment?” Nicholas asked. He touched the hull of the closest model, a clipper named the
Fiery Cross.
He smiled at Flick and said, “Nothing happened.”

“What did you think might happen?”

“Bells. Flashing lights. Screaming security guards.” He gave a careless wave. “Conan Davies told me that individual items on display are not alarmed. Obviously he was right.”

“I know how to disable our security system when I enter the museum after hours and then turn it back on again when I leave—but I don’t understand the specific details of how the alarm works. That’s on my list of things to learn when I have more free time. Are we good or bad?”

“Quite good actually.” Nicholas looked around the room. “I can see three passive infrared motion detectors on the walls. Apparently there are a dozen on each floor. They switch on to provide secondary defense in depth when everyone has left the museum. As Conan explained to me, your primary alarm protects the perimeter of the museum proper—the main building and your tearoom. A network of magnetic switches on the windows and doors will detect any intruder imprudent enough to break in after hours. His trespass will trigger a silent alarm and bring the police here in minutes. Even your greenhouse has its own dedicated alarm system. In short, you have a top-of-the-line security system.”

Flick looked away from Nicholas to hide the frisson of annoyance she felt. In all her thinking about Elspeth’s discoveries, she had foolishly ignored the museum’s elaborate intruder alarm.

Why didn’t our “quite good” security system call the police when someone replaced several of the antiquities on display with fakes?

Not even Houdini could have made the exchanges during the day. The antiquities marked with big red Fs in Elspeth’s little black book were too large to smuggle under a coat or inside a bag. Each “swap” required a round-trip: bringing a counterfeit item in and taking a genuine item out. It had to have been done when the museum was closed, when the security system was armed and operating.

But that presented a new problem. Only a small group of museum staffers had personal access codes to arm and disarm the perimeter alarm: the acting director, the chief curator, the chief of security, and the four security guards. And the biometric sensor would recognize only their finger images. Only those individuals could disable the motion detectors that protected the museum.