Technically that would be an act of gross sacrilege, but it wouldn’t half have been a comfort when my governor practically stood her on two wheels turning off the City Road just by the drive-through McDonald’s. At least we had a couple of modern light-bars fitted either side of the windscreen so we no longer had to worry about the spinner flying off the roof on the corners.
MOLA HQ was one of a string of old warehouse/factory units built in the functional brick shithouse style made popular in the Victorian era, when the main safety criterion for an industrial building was that it didn’t fall down when the steam boiler exploded. Since those happy days of light touch regulation such fripperies as fire exits and safety ladders have been added, but it still showed a stern yellow brick face both front and back.
Its recessed loading bay was guarded by a sturdy metal gate and the roll-up door to the main warehousing was solid, durable and fastened down with heavy-duty padlocks.
We were expecting devious and subtle. We weren’t expecting our perpetrators to tool up with a bin lorry to wrench the gates off, a JCB to clear a way through the interior yard and smash down the roll-up door, and a fucking skip lorry to carry away just over a ton and a quarter of archaeological material.
‘Lesley’s behind this,’ I said, as we watched forensics futilely checking for trace evidence. ‘She guessed we’d be primed for subtle, and she knows we’re don’t have the resources to guard against this kind of direct approach.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Nightingale.
A heavy fog had rolled in just as the sun rose – the rubbish truck was a grey shadow halfway up the Eagle Wharf Road, where it had been abandoned. The heavy-duty chain was still trailing behind it, with the gate attached. Later we learned it had been stolen the previous evening in Walthamstow. There weren’t any matching theft reports for the JCB, so we might have to trace that through its serial numbers. The skip lorry was nowhere to be found.
Guleed arrived with coffee and word that Stephanopoulos had turned up at the Folly and was getting people in early. She was wearing a brand new black silk bomber jacket with a white tiger and Chinese writing embroidered on the back and sleeves in white and gold, and black jeans. Not her normal work wear – I wondered if she hadn’t had a chance to change.
‘Were you out last night?’ I asked.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she said.
I would like to know, but I knew better than to ask intrusive personal questions of colleagues – especially when I also knew that Beverley would ferret out the latest gossip before the end of the week.
‘Ah, Sahra, excellent,’ said Nightingale when he saw her. ‘I think they’re ready for us to go in.’
Like the building site with the goat sacrifice, it was generally considered forensically sufficient for us to wear booties and gloves. Although Guleed obviously didn’t want to risk her nice new jacket, and left it in the Jag. And not on the back seat, either – where Toby tends to ride.
‘This is not what I expected from a museum,’ she said, as we followed the forensically cleared path through the space where the gates had been.
The covered loading area beyond had been crowded with red plastic picking bins full of rubble and those heavy-duty white PVC buckets with safe-seal lids. Some of them had burst as they were pushed aside, to spray sand and water across the dirty cement floor.
‘If you find something perishable under water,’ I told Guleed when she asked, ‘you temporarily keep it submerged until you can find a way to permanently store it. Otherwise it starts to decay really quickly.’
Guleed was stunned into silence by my erudition, or at least didn’t ask any more questions.
As far as we could reconstruct it later, Lesley used the leading digging edge of the JCB’s bucket to smash the locks at the base of the sliding inner door and then roll it up. Beyond was a high-ceilinged corridor lined with workrooms on the left and metal shelving down the right. The place had the school art room smell of wet clay and turpentine. The space was far too narrow to manoeuvre a JCB down its length, but unluckily for MOLA the target material had all been at the loading bay end of the corridor.
Although, us being police, we all doubted it had anything to do with luck.
‘We need to re-interview everyone,’ said Guleed.
Somebody must have told somebody, even if they didn’t know why that somebody wanted to know.
The stolen material had been stored in large containers like outsized shoeboxes made of heavy-duty brown cardboard. There was a stack of them left untouched against one wall. I looked at a couple of the labels – it was marked with a site and context number, a period P/MED and identified as HUMAN SKELETON. Most of the pile were P/MED human skeletons and I couldn’t help wondering who they were and whether they’d be pleased to know that their remains had ended up in boxes in a warehouse in Islington.
‘So skeletons aren’t particularly magical?’ asked Guleed.
‘Not intrinsically so,’ said Nightingale. ‘It depends on context.’
What had been stolen, according to MOLA’s records, was a thousand kilograms of assorted bits of masonry and approximately three hundred clay pipes excavated from a site off New Change.
‘Right next to St Paul’s,’ I said.
‘You’d better talk to the archaeologist involved,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sahra and I will split the interviews with the staff here between us. Carey can join us when he comes on shift.’
Upstairs, MOLA’s offices had the same open-plan cubicle based workspace that has been the delight of code monkeys and low-level paper pushers since one time and motion consultant said to another, ‘Hey, you know, I don’t think we’ve really dehumanised these white collar drones enough’.
The big difference is that in the average office you don’t walk into a cubicle area and find someone reconstructing a skeleton.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked the tiny white woman with grey hair and pince-nez, who was holding a small bone fragment like someone with a bit of sky from a jigsaw puzzle.
‘Not sure,’ she said without looking up – she had an accent like a well-bred pirate. ‘Found him last month.’
‘Where was he?’
‘Downstairs in storage,’ she said distractedly. ‘Mislabelled.’ She straightened suddenly. ‘Aha!’ she cried. ‘This doesn’t belong to you at all.’ Then she looked at me properly. ‘Can I help you?’
I told her I was looking for Robert Skene.
‘He should be about somewhere,’ she said. ‘Are you with the police?’
I said I was, and asked what she was up to.
‘It wasn’t me, guv,’ she said. ‘He was dead when I found him – honest.’
I gave the joke the consideration it deserved.
‘There’s been some very good results recently extracting DNA from teeth,’ she said, as she carefully placed the bone fragment down on a clean sheet of paper. ‘So we’ve been hunting out any skulls that might have been mislaid to see what we can find.’ She looked down at her nearly complete skeleton. ‘I’m afraid I got a little bit distracted.’
I asked how old the body was.
‘We’re still waiting on the C-14 results,’ she said. ‘But my money’s on Roman – possibly related to that lot over there.’ She gestured at a row of brown cardboard boxes on a nearby work surface – each carefully labelled ‘Human Skull’.
‘That’s a lot of heads,’ I said.
‘Oh, Crossrail can’t sink an access shaft these days without finding skulls. We’re trying to work out what these ones were doing in the Walbrook.’