‘Seven boxes were handled extensively,’ Sturdy chimed in. ‘These seven here, all sequential, all grouped together. The rest weren’t touched at all, except for this one, right next to the others — a broad palm-print, which I think might mean that it was pushed to one side, out of the way.’
She looked at Kennedy as she said this, a little nervously, as though hypothesising might be Kennedy’s prerogative. Kennedy nodded encouragement. ‘That’s what I’d have said. So?’
‘So he knew what he was looking for, but not exactly where it was.’
Because he was working from this list, Rush realised, suddenly. And it breaks the books down by room, but not by box. Maybe he started at a random point, or maybe he took a guess based on the length of the overall list and the position on the list of the thing he wanted.
Which meant …
It came to Rush, then, that he’d had the whole thing arse-backwards all this time. He’d been assuming that the intruder had passed through Room 37 on his way out of the building and that his real business had been conducted somewhere else. But the clustering was a smoking gun.
The intruder was after a book, or maybe several books.
‘And the fact that he stopped after seven boxes,’ Kennedy pointed out, their thoughts running on parallel tracks, ‘means that he got what he came for.’
‘In box seven.’
‘This one.’ Kennedy laid her hand on the lid of it. ‘Emil, do you mind?’
‘Of course, of course.’ Gassan had been absorbing all this in fascinated, perturbed silence. He waved her on hurriedly. Kennedy opened up the box and slid out the first volume. It wasn’t really a book: it was a slender pamphlet, the paper foxed with age and ragged along every edge, in a stiff Mylar sleeve.
She held it up and showed it to them all. It was hard to tell what the title was. Everything was in the same font, but in a wide variety of point sizes, with italics thrown in seemingly at random.
A New-yeers Gift
FOR THE
PARLIAMENT
AND
ARMIE:
SHEWING,
What the KINGLY Power is;
And that the CAUSE of those
They call
DIGGERS
Is the life and marrow of that Cause the Parliament hath Declared for, and the Army Fought for
‘A New Year’s gift for the Parliament,’ Kennedy read aloud.
‘By Gerrard Winstanley,’ Gassan finished.
Kennedy scanned down the cover. ‘Yeah,’ she confirmed. ‘That’s the one. Do you know him?’
‘Winstanley was a Digger. They were proto-communists, at the time of the English Civil War. They believed in shared ownership of the land.’
Rush consulted the list. He found the pamphlet reasonably quickly. ‘Middle of the seventeenth century,’ he confirmed. ‘Sixteen fifty-two, according to this.’
Kennedy went back to the box and fished out the next book. Another pamphlet, very similar to the first both in appearance and in general condition: The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Rush read over her shoulder. She slid it back and took out another book, square-bound and obviously a lot more modern, entitled Political and Religious Extremism in the Interregnum. She turned it sideways on to read the catalogue number on its spine.
‘We might be in luck,’ she said. ‘It looks as though the books were put in the box in catalogue order. Now that we’ve got the list to cross-reference against, we’ve got a good chance of figuring out if anything is missing.’
‘Then let’s continue,’ Gassan said. He took the list from Rush’s hands, laying claim to it.
Kennedy took the box, Gassan read aloud from the list, Rush, Price and Sturdy watched in solemn silence and John Partridge retired into a corner of the room to light up a strictly illegal cigarette. It only took them ten minutes to get to the first missing item.
Title:
A Trumpet Speaking Judgment, or God’s
Plan Revealed in Sundry
Signes
Author: Johann Toller
Catalogue number: 174583/762
Date: 1658
It was the only missing item. From there to the end of the box, everything was in apple-pie order.
Rush was amazed. Mostly at the power and versatility of the Kelvin probe, but underneath that, he was amazed that anyone would go to so much trouble for a book.
‘I suppose it’s valuable,’ Kennedy mused. ‘It’s getting on for four hundred years old.’
‘Which is nothing,’ Partridge said drily. ‘I don’t know very much about the antiques business, obviously — not my field at all — but at a generous estimate I’d say that a book from that time would be worth … well, no more than a hundred thousand pounds or so. Professor Gassan, would you agree?’
‘I’m hardly an expert on the market value of these things,’ Gassan protested. ‘But I’d be surprised if that book was insured for more than fifty or sixty thousand.’
Rush thought about that. There were any number of other books in the box whose worth was likely to be at least as great, and they didn’t weigh all that much, so it would have been easy for the intruder to grab a handful of them and hit the road.
But they all knew, from the evidence of the fingerprints, that that wasn’t what had happened. You search through seven boxes, take one item, then stop: obviously, that one item was what you came for.
And then what? You burn it? Because what Rush had seen in that other box, a couple of aisles over, was definitely ash.
Gassan was looking at Kennedy expectantly. Now that she’d brought off this miracle, his expectations of her were clearly running very high.
‘Very well, Heather,’ he said. ‘You’ve gathered your evidence. I presume you have a plan for how to use it?’
‘I think we’re ready to meet our suspect,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’ll need to use the boardroom again.’
‘The boardroom?’ Gassan frowned. ‘Perhaps my office would be more discreet?’
‘I bet it would,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But I don’t see any harm in having a little shock and awe on our side.’
11
‘You started here six months ago,’ Kennedy said.
She’d positioned Alex Wales so he’d get the full court-of-the-star-chamber effect, his chair facing theirs across the intimidating rampart of the boardroom table. Kennedy herself, Emil Gassan and the security guy, Thornedyke, sat in a row more or less at the centre of the long table. On Kennedy’s orders, Rush stood off to one side, right at Wales’s shoulder, to ram home how serious and official this all was. But Wales didn’t seem troubled. There was nothing in his bearing that suggested he had anything to hide. He stood erect, ignoring the chair, arms at his sides and head slightly lowered, like an actor at an audition.
‘Yes,’ he confirmed.
‘And prior to that, you were working at the British Library.’ Rush thought the ‘prior’ was a nice touch. Kennedy was going for a forensic style.
‘Yes,’ Wales said again.
‘But you didn’t say so on your application. You hid that connection, even though it might have been considered relevant experience. Why was that?’
‘I wasn’t there for very long,’ Wales said, with a shrug. ‘And I left for private reasons. Reasons that were nothing to do with my conditions of employment. I didn’t really want to answer questions about that.’