Splintered Icon (16 page)

'Never mind that. Okay, here we go. I found this all written up in a book in Daddy's study, but I knew most of it already. I think there are lots of estate papers and family correspondence held in the University of Hull archives, though how they got there I have no idea. Are you ready?'

'Go.'

'Okay, we come from two large landed families, the Tebbits of Lincolnshire and the Maxwells of Scotland. We're really Tebbit-Maxwell but we dropped the double barrel in the 1920s, due to a great-great-grandpa wanting to be a socialist MP or something. There's also a small landed family, the Greenacres of Yorkshire.'

'So far so good,' I said encouragingly.

'I'll give you the Maxwell side first. I don't really think of myself as a Maxwell, maybe just because we dropped the name. It's really complicated, and mostly boring, with everyone marrying everyone else just to keep money in the family. The line nearly died out at the beginning of the last century, when there was only one daughter, Gwendoline. She had twenty thousand acres of land in East Riding and Lincolnshire and Dumfriesshire, with Caerlaverock Castle thrown in. But then she married the Fifteenth Duke of Norfolk in 1904, and that kept the line going and the money in the family.'

'Can you go farther back, Debbie?'

There was a rustling of paper. 'Well, the Maxwell side had problems about three hundred years ago when they backed the wrong team during the Jacobite rebellion. The Fourteenth Lord Maxwell escaped from prison dressed as a woman with clothes brought in by his wife. The poor things had to spend the rest of their lives exiled in Italy, along with Bonnie Prince Charlie. They lived in a big hill town called Frascati, just outside Rome.'

'It's a hard life,' I agreed. I wasn't making any connections.

'Still, the family's stuffed with barons and has estates all over Scotland.'

'Can you take them further back in time? Earlier than the Jacobites?'

'Sure. The Maxwells can trace themselves right back to Undwin and his son Maccus in the eleventh century. Maccus turned into Maccuswell who turned into de Maxwell of Caerlaverock castle, and so on.'

Still no connection, or none that I could see, with the Ogilvie journal. 'Okay, Debbie, what about the Tebbit side of the family? Are you sure it's still safe to talk?'

'What's Uncle Robert going to do?' She said it defiantly, but she was still whispering. 'The Tebbit connection with the Maxwells goes back to about 1600, when one of the Tebbits married Lady Joyce Maxwell. Let's see. Yes, here we are. Things were going wrong for them in the fifteenth century. There was a Sir Stephen Tebbit. He and two sons joined the Duke of Norfolk at Flodden in 1513 and they were all killed in battle. The youngest son inherited, but then he got his head chopped off for his part in the Lincolnshire uprisings. The estates and manors were forfeited, but Queen Elizabeth gave some of it back to the grandson. Hold on.'

The line went quiet for some moments. Then: 'It's all right, he's just gone to the loo. Right, there was another Stephen Tebbit who backed the wrong side during the English Civil War. Cromwell's parliament swiped their estates.'

'It seems to be a family custom, Debbie. Backing losers.'

'Thank you, Harry. So how come I'm living in Picardy House and you're in some hovel in Lincoln? The Tebbits only stayed afloat for the next hundred years through the generosity of the Greenacre branch. Then there was some smart intermarriage and the family fortunes grew again until we had five thousand acres in various counties, a couple of dozen palaces and an abbey. Not bad going for losers, I'd say.'

'Not bad going at all, Debbie. But can you take your family further back?'

'You mean really far back? Like to the dinosaurs? Let's see.'

More rustling paper. Then: 'Right. We can trace the Tebbit side as far as Baron Philip, son of Carr. He'd been given half of Cheshire by William the Conqueror. One of Philip's descendants married into a French family, StClair from Picardy, originally de Clari. That lot made a fortune out of the Crusades, and the family fortunes thereafter extended to Lincolnshire and York. They had sixty manors in total. I don't know what the heating bill must have been but I don't suppose they cared.'

The Crusades.

De Clari
the Crusader, who became
StClair
from Picardy.

Sinclair. Winston Sinclair,
the unknown relative who'd sent Ogilvie's journal to Picardy House, the Tebbit family home.

A bit of jigsaw clicking into place with beautiful precision.

Debbie was talking again. 'And that's about it. You see what a superior lot we are to you riffraff. Harry, are you there? Is this stuff any use to you?'

I'd rustled up a bachelor dinner and Zola had appeared from upstairs in a stunning red dress which almost matched the colour of the wine I was pouring. Candlelight – from power-cut candles, not romantic dinner ones - was reflecting off her earrings and a mock-diamond necklace. The puttanesca sauce had come out of a jar but it was surprisingly good, and I was looking forward to my zabaglione improvised from a sweet sherry rather than
marsala al'uovo.

She sipped at the wine, looked at me curiously over the top of her glass. 'I think Debbie has a teenage crush on you.'

'Nonsense. I'm just a big cuddly teddy bear. I think she sees me as a surrogate uncle.' I sat down and started to twirl spaghetti. 'Look, Zola, I ought to move out of here once we've eaten. I can stay in a hotel in the village. We can't have Mrs Murgatroyd ruining your reputation.'

Her eyes widened incredulously, and then she giggled. 'And all these years I thought the dinosaurs were extinct. I happen to be a Capricorn, Harry. I'm impulsive, loving and passionate. What about you?'

'I'm a Leo, I think.'

She pulled a face. 'You're loyal, but cold and analytical. No risk to my virginity, dammit.'

I thought,
the room's getting hot.
I said, 'The Sinclair connection.'

'The Sinclair connection,' Zola repeated thoughtfully. 'Coincidence?'

'Neither of us believes that. This Crusader, de Clari. I'd like to find out what he got up to.'

Zola nodded thoughtfully. She said again, 'I know someone.'

CHAPTER 21

The 'someone' Zola knew turned out to own the Oxford Museum of Antiquities, amongst a few other toys of that ilk, including, I'd read, islands in the Aegean and the Caribbean. At my suggestion we'd arranged to meet in a pub, one of a large number I knew in the area from my Oxford days. It was just off Parks Road and was run by the Paczynskis, a retired Polish couple. Zola gurgled her Scimitar into the car park at ten o'clock precisely. He was already waiting.

The pub had once been used briefly in the Inspector Morse TV series, and black-and-white photographs of the grey-haired landlords in the company of the principal actors, happily reflecting their glory, were scattered here and there on the dull panelled walls. Mrs Paczynski was looking much the same, except that her hair was now white.

Zola's 'someone' was fiftyish, with thin, balding hair and thick spectacles. He was dressed in an open-necked yellow shirt and a blue windcheater; I found it hard to reconcile his Oxfam cast-offs with the fact that he regularly hovered around the fringes of the
Sunday Times
rich list. His face lit up at the sight of Zola, the embrace was rather intimate, and I wondered just how well they knew each other.

We sat around a circular table. It was too early for alcohol but I ordered a lager anyway. Zola's friend had a companion: the man opposite me was in his early thirties, black Jamaican, with short, neat hair and a round, smooth face. He was dressed in a grey suit and the only hint of something lurking underneath the conservative exterior was a silver tiepin in the shape of a guitar. He spoke in a shy, hesitant manner which fooled me completely at this meeting.

Each of us had a photocopy of Ogilvie's journal and we all kept referring to it as I talked. I talked so much that my mouth almost dried up, and when I'd finished I quickly sank half of my pint.

There was a thoughtful silence. It was a lot for them to take in.

The Oxfam man turned to his companion. 'What do you think, Dalton?' He was looking for a confidence trick.

The Jamaican gave me a shy glance before addressing his companion. 'I suppose the first thing, Sir Joseph, is to be sure that the document is authentic. Think of Hitler's diaries.'

Sir Joseph looked at me impassively. 'How do you respond to that?'

He knew Zola, and he'd have checked up on me: he would know that if there was a confidence trick we'd be victims, not perpetrators. 'I'm convinced of its authenticity. The micro-cracks around the ink would be impossible to forge. Likewise the paper. And it's been looked at by Fred Sweet not a couple of miles from here.'

Zola was on my left with a red Martini. She said, 'There are several inconsistencies with the accepted record of the Roanoke voyage.'

Sir Joseph raised his eyebrows. 'What are you saying?'

'That no forger would make such mistakes, Joe. They're too easily checked. The historians have been getting it wrong. Another thing. The Roanoke expedition was in 1585, but Ogilvie's writing his account in a form of shorthand which wasn't published until 1588. Now he might just have written his journal years after the events, but it has an immediacy about it which suggests he was usually writing things up a few days after they happened. Again, a forger wouldn't have made such a mistake.'

'What then?' Sir Joseph asked.

'Almost certainly, Ogilvie had access to the shorthand system before it was published. Some of the best brains in England were on that ship, and they probably knew about the system from Thomas Bright before he wrote it up. There was no copyright in those days.'

Sir Joseph nodded. 'And, as you say, we have an independent authority in the form of Mr Sweet.'

'And I'm holding the original manuscript,' I said. 'Forensic tests on the ink and paper can be carried out any time, subject to the owner's approval.'

Sir Joseph seemed to come to a decision. 'Very well then. I'm inclined to believe that the journal is genuine and the diarist, this young man from darkest Scotland, is giving a straightforward account.' He played with his glass of orange juice. 'And you think the intense interest in getting hold of the journal has something to do with the relic described in it?'

'There's nothing else. And "intense interest" is an understatement.'

'Yes, that's quite a bruise. Dalton, what's your assessment of the artefact?'

Dalton's voice was soft, almost gentle. It had a slight Jamaican twang. There were the rounded vowels of the standard Oxbridge accent, but I thought I detected a slight tinge of something else: French perhaps, even Parisian? 'If this journal is genuine, it's telling us about something I can hardly take in.' He fingered his tie and then began speaking in a low, enthusiastic voice. 'The artefact which James Ogilvie describes is a perfect match to a relic which has been missing for almost a thousand years. Part of the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. The True Cross.'

I felt an electric tingle in my spine. We waited. Dalton sipped at a glass of Coca-Cola, cleared his throat and continued. 'The True Cross has caused more death and destruction than any other relic in history. Regaining the cross from the Moslems was one of the prime motivations for the Fifth Crusade. If it really exists, if a piece of the genuine Cross of Christ were to turn up' - Dalton glanced at his companion - 'I imagine museums, rich individuals or even religious groups would pay a fortune to have it in their possession.'

'A fortune?' Zola interrupted.

Sir Joseph said, 'As a ballpark figure, my museum would pay ten million dollars.'

I said, 'Nice try, Sir Joseph, but what would the Getty Museum pay? Or a rich American preacher? Or even the Vatican? I was thinking more of fifty million.' He gave me an oblique look.

Zola said, 'Think of a genuine piece of the Cross of Jesus in the possession of some right-wing American evangelist. It would confer tremendous authenticity on him. These guys sell religion like soap and the bigger their flock the more cash they rake in. He'd corner the whole evangelical market in the States. There's big money in this.'

'If it's seen to be genuine,' I said. 'But I understand that most relics are fakes.'

Dalton nodded. 'That's absolutely right, Mr Blake. In medieval times there were fifteen foreskins from Jesus, three heads of John the Baptist and enough bones from saints and apostles to fill a warehouse, not to mention phials of blood from Christ, and so on. A European king with a piece of material touched by Jesus or Mary had something which conferred his divine right to rule. Also, relics were used to cure diseases and suchlike. It was a tremendous commercial thing. They were the focus for a lot of robbery and murder. Which was one motivation for the Iconoclasts.'

'Iconoclasts?'

'Literally, icon shatterers. People who fought against religious images. But even they made an exception for the Cross.'

'But if the relics are nearly all fakes,' I asked, 'what makes the True Cross any different? Presumably there's enough wood around from the supposed fragments to make dozens of crosses?'

Dalton smiled faintly. 'Actually, no. The definitive work on the relics of the True Cross was written by Rohault de Fleury in 1870. He chased up and catalogued all the claimed fragments of the Cross and added up their volume. It came to about four litres, which is probably just two or three kilograms since wood is lighter than water. The real Cross would weigh, say, seventy-five kilograms.'

'But we're still dealing with medieval fakes, surely.' I was beginning to sound like a broken record.

'Almost certainly, in my opinion. Except for this one. I think this particular one is authentic'

'Come on.' Blake the sceptic.

'I'm very serious, Mr Blake.' Spoken quietly and confidently.

'You have my undivided attention, Dalton.'

'The discovery of the Cross goes back to about 327 AD. After the Emperor Constantine guaranteed there would be no further persecution of Christians, the Bishop of Jerusalem - a man called Makarius - carried out excavations to find the location of various holy sites, like the tomb of Christ and the location of Calvary.'