The Victoria Vanishes (6 page)

C

hrist's blood,' said Dr Harold Masters testily, making the phrase sound like an oath.
'Be honest with me, that's what you're looking for, isn't it? You're after information on some new pet hobby of yours.
What was it last time—the where
abouts of some Egyptian sacrificial urn you thought was still floating about in the London canal system—'

Arthur Bryant had not expected the doctor to discern his purpose quite so quickly.
'Could you slow down a bit? I'm not a marathon runner,' he begged,
hopping along beside the impos
sibly tall academic as they climbed the steps of the British Museum.

'I lecture on ancient mythologies these days, Arthur; I'm not in haematology anymore, unless you count the Athenian. Christ's blood is one of those things like the Ark of the Covenant. It's largely a Judeo-Christian habit, you know, ven
e
rating bits of wood and stains on cloths. Henry the Eighth supposedly owned the left leg of St George. I don't suppose you'd catch Buddhists flogging each other bits of Gautama Buddha's sandals in order to assuage their suffering.'

'I have a good reason for asking,' said Bryant. 'I thought if anybody knew, you would. Your arcane knowledge is more far-reaching than any other academic's. We've known each other for so long, and yet I never rea
lly get to sound out your knowl
edge.'

'That's because you don't pay me.'

The grease-grey, soaking Tuesday morning prevented stu-dents from sitting on the staircase, and the forecourt had the forlorn air of an abandoned temple. Only the man turning hot dogs on a griddle outside the museum gates seemed unfazed by the lousy weather. Masters was about to give a lecture on early London household gods, and was
running late. He low
ered his great emerald-panelled golfing umbrella to encompass Bryant.

'It's nothing new, you know, the attempt to trace the Scarlet Thread, the idea that man can only be brought into a covenant with God through the shedding of blood. My knowledge of haematology is of little help in such endeavours,' he said hotly, as if defending himself. 'Ever since all those books about the Knights Templars came out, I've been besieged by students with crackpot theories.' The
lanky lecturer tore off his tor
toiseshell glasses with his free hand and wagged them at Bryant. 'I tell them, you think you're the first person to go searching for hidden treasures in London? Why, you're just the latest in a long line of would-
be plunderers armed with an ord
nance survey map and a few scraps of historically inaccurate data. Really, Arthur, I would have expected something better from you.' He stopped so suddenly that Bryant ran into him. 'Do you know, I still have Bunthorne?'

'Bunthorne?' repeated Bryant, taken aback.

'Don't you remember, you came around to my house with a ginger kitten in your overcoat pocket, said you'd found it on

Battersea Bridge and that its name was Bunthorne. You left it
with me and never returned to pick it up. Popping in for half
an hour, you said.'

'My dear chap, I'm so frightfully sorry, I forgot all about—' 'Oh, don't worry.' Masters waved the thought away with
long pale fingers. 'He's been a great comfort to me since my
wife died.'

'Oh, I didn't know—'

'Well, how could you? Honestly, this rain, hold on.' He flapped the great umbrella as he closed it, drenching them both. 'I'm incredibly late. Want to sit in on my talk about Mithras and the Romans? Oh.' He stopped abruptly again. This time he had been brought up short by a mounted sign at the top of the steps that read
Today's Lectures Have Been Cancelled.
Apparently a burst water pipe in the gents' toilets had caused Camden's Health & Safety Department to close the public speaking room until further notice.
'Well, it looks as though you have me all to yourself,' said Masters. 'What is it you want to know about the blood of
Christ?'

They queued for tea beneath the astonishing glass canopy of the Great Courtyard and seated themselves in a quiet, shad-owed corner. Bryant dug into his overcoat and produced a sheaf of wrinkled paperwork.

Dr Masters was the one man he knew who might be able to answer his questions. The ambitious academic belonged to a group of intellectual misfits who went by the nickname of the Insomnia Squad. They regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semiotics of old Superman comics. Most of them were barely able to hold down regular jobs, and tended to drift away from their target research like wisps of autumn smoke, but Masters was driven by obsessive curiosity and the desire to improve and repair the world, even if it killed every-one in the process. Academics could be so blind sometimes.

'I was recently researching the city's social panics and out-breaks of mass hysteria,' he told Bryant. 'I'm surprised you didn't come to me when
you were searching for the High
wayman. I'd have been able to give you some pointers.' A few months earlier, the Peculiar Crimes Unit had conducted a search for a killer dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots who had caught the public's imagination.

'Actually, it was while we were conducting that investigation that I came across references to a local street gang known as the Saladins,' Bryant explained, sipping his tea.
'Extraordinary that a bunch of uneducated kids could name themselves after a nine-hundred-year-old legend.' Over the years, Bryant had become an accidental expert on the arcane history of London.

'So you know that after Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, his Knights Hospitallers survived in the district of Clerkenwell?'

'I've been reading about it, yes. I presume the kids we inter-viewed had accidentally stumbled across some local history.'

'I don't know how you find the time to study this sort of thing when you've got a full-time job in the police. Well, the knights were stripped of their properties and income by Henry the Eighth, during the dissolution of the monasteries. But they stayed in the area. They based themselves near the Gothic arch of St John's Gate, a place of profound religious mystery. At the hospital and priory church of St John of Jerusalem, to be precise, where injured Crusaders were cared for. You still find cafes and bars in Clerkenwell bearing their name.'

Bryant unfurled his paperwork with a flourish.
'I did a little research. Listen to this. On October the third, 1247, the leader of the Knights Templars presented King Henry the Third with a six-inch-long lead-crystal pot marked with the symbol of the knights, a red-and-white cross-hilt, said to contain the blood of Christ, the ultimate relic of the Crucifixion. Its authenticity was confirmed by a separate scroll holding the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, signed by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The vial was held in a box carved with the chevron of the arms of the Prior Robert De Manneby, an ancient pattern taken from the priory window of Saint John, the first baron of England.'

'Yes, yes.' Masters coloured with impatience.

'And all of the other tantalising snippets, like the letters
xpisk
marked on the container, and the supposed decanting of the vial that resulted in the deaths of five prelates. Who'd have thought that the true heart of the Crusades would lie in Clerkenwell, just up the road? Would you like a biscuit?' Bryant produced a squashed packet of lemon puffs from his coat pocket and set it down between them.

'I didn't know they still made these,' Masters remarked, pulling one from the packet. 'It's all unverifiable stuff, you know. I've heard the story many times before. Some students came to me insisting that the vial was lodged beneath the floorboards of the Jerusalem Tavern, Farringdon, which would be all very well if the pub hadn't been built on the site of an eighteenth-century clockmaker's shop. I told them then that even if it did exist, it would probably contain germs that would be potentially fatal to the city's present-day citizens. I mean good God, they had the Bla
ck Death back then. I'm not dis
puting the existence of a vial of blood, even if one ignores cur-rent thinking that suggests Jesus was most likely an invention of the Romans. Why are you so interested, anyway?'

'Oh, I hate loose ends.' It wasn't much of an explanation, but it was the best Bryant could muster. 'Sorry, I have a bit of a hangover. We laid our pathologist to rest yesterday. It's funny that so many of the cases we've been involved with lately have involved historical artefacts.'

'Of course there was a tim
e when you couldn't move for re
ligious relics,' said Masters.
'The prior Roger De Vere gave the church of Clerkenwell one of the six pots Christ used to turn water into wine. It suppose
dly had transformational proper
ties. This is the point where religion crosses into magic.'

'There's something I don't understand about religious relics. I mean, there have been splinters and nails from the true cross knocking about for millennia, all of them fake, and even if the vial of blood had been "verified"—by what means we'll never know—what made it so much more special?'

Masters raised his bushy eyebrows knowingly.
'If you'll for-give the phrase, it's considered to be the holy grail of relics. John, chapter six, verses fifty-three to fifty-four:
Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
The blood of Chr
ist covers, cleanses and con
secrates. It's nothing less than the gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven, the elixir to the real
m of the everlasting. And I sup
pose you want to know whether this fabled prize might still exist.'

'Well, it would be rather interesting to find out, don't you think?' said Bryant, somewhat understating the case.

'I daresay it would,' Masters admitted, 'although I think I can save you a lot of unnecessary pain by stating categorically right now that the vial vanished long ago.'

'How can you be sure?'

'Please, my dear Arthur, the priories and monasteries were all burned to the ground and their contents destroyed. Their basements were dug up, their tombs desecrated until nothing more than dust was left, and even that was carted off to King's Cross for sale to the Russians. Don't you think we'd have heard about something like this?'

'London's greatest treasures
have always been carefully hid
den whenever the city has been under threat. We know that Catholicism survived dissolution. Surely an item such as that vial would have been protected by the most powerful holy men in the land.'

'You might as well conduct a search for Atlantis.' Masters sighed.
'When it comes to the lost icons of antiquity, you have a gullible buyers' market and plenty of unscrupulous salesmen willing to feed it. We all want to believe. Look at the experts' willingness to ignore the implausibilities in the forged diaries of Hitler and Jack the Ripper.
These days it's easier to manu
facture something more recent, like a missing session from a rock band or the diary of a dead celebrity. They won't add much to the comprehension of the human condition, but they'll make someone's fortune on the grey market. Trust me, Arthur, the trail has had eight centuries to grow cold. Ask yourself where such an item could have been kept without disturbance and you'll realise the absurdity of it. There are plenty of easier things to find in London than Christ's blood, and even if it did survive, it wouldn't still be in Clerkenwell.'

'Well, thanks for the advice,' said Bryant, pinching his hat from the table.'I'd better go and find Oswald.'

'Call me sometime, we'll go out for a spot of lunch,' said Masters, who had become more reclusive since the death ofhis wife.
'There are all sorts of things we should talk about.'

Bryant gave a little wave as he stumped out of the Great Courtyard. In the long winter months of his retirement, there would be plenty of time for old men to sit and set the world to rights.

8

INTRODUCTIONS

Time-Out Guide to London's Secret Buildings: Number 34

Peculiar Crimes Unit Camden Road, North London

H
oused behind the arched, scarlet-tiled windows above Mornington Crescent tube station, this specialist murder investigation unit has been instrumental in solving many of the capital's most notorious crimes. Founded during the Second World War to handle cases that could prove embarrassing to the government, it has continued operation right up to the present day. The unit now falls under the jurisdiction of the Home Office, which is attempting to make it more publicly accountable, a
nd so its days are probably num
bered. The PCU's unorthodox operating methods were highlighted in a recent BBC documentary that criticised the conduct of its eccentric senior de
tectives for their willing
ness to use illegal information-gathering procedures in the preparation of their cases.