The Devil's Moon (5 page)

Gilchrist looked down. She still welled up when she thought of the suffering of her friend and work partner during his life and his decision to drive off Beachy Head after he had lost his wife. When she looked up again Hewitt was still gazing intently at her.

‘As you know,' Hewitt continued, ‘Reg had been acting DI before his death. I had been intending to formalize that title shortly.'

Hewitt leaned into her desk. Gilchrist got a waft of her sickly sweet perfume. ‘His death has left a big hole in our lives but also in my service structure. In consequence, with effect from tomorrow, I'm making you Acting Detective Inspector, rank to be made an official promotion assuming satisfactory service after three months.'

Gilchrist was first startled, then suspicious. ‘Ma'am?'

‘Don't look so surprised. I don't need false modesty from my officers. If there hadn't been that other mess in Milldean you would have got the chance sooner – and you know it.'

‘Gender equality?'

Hewitt looked fierce for a moment, though still without her forehead creasing. Definitely Botox. ‘Don't you start, Sarah. I have enough trouble with our male colleagues assuming I'm going to advance women irrespective of their suitability. This is based entirely on merit. You passed your exam an age ago. You have talent. You are a good copper.' Hewitt leaned back and tapped her finger on her desk before she pointed it at Gilchrist. ‘Yes, you are an idiot sometimes but I like your grit and tenacity. Plus you're a thinker and thinkers are in short supply around here.'

‘Can I ask if Jack Lawrence is involved with the decision?'

Hewitt looked severe again. ‘That's none of your business. But, yes, I took advice from him on the possible public relations impact of your promotion. And, frankly, he believed it would play badly and recommended I promote someone else instead.'

‘Then . . .?'

‘However, the Metropolitan Police special crimes unit, not known for handing out compliments, especially to women, are very grateful for your help with Bernie Grimes. Not that I want to see that kind of vigilantism again from one of my police officers.'

Bernie Grimes was a notorious armed robber who had been tangentially involved with the so-called Milldean Massacre, in which armed police had shot innocent people in a house in the Milldean district of Brighton.

A little while ago, as part of Gilchrist's efforts to bring the crime lord Charlie Laker to book and find out exactly what had happened in Milldean, she had persuaded ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts to go with her to France to confront Bernie Grimes in his hideaway. Grimes had important information about Laker and the massacre but neither Watts nor Gilchrist, who was on suspension, had the right to confront him, especially in the vigorous manner they decided upon.

Gilchrist shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘Plus, I have a special project for you that even Jack agrees is a good fit.'

‘Thank you, ma'am,' Gilchrist said, curious but wary.

‘Don't thank me yet. I remember you were attacked on the beach by a group of teenage girls whilst trying to rescue Bernie Grimes' daughter from them.'

Gilchrist stiffened. ‘What about it?'

‘They are the tip of the iceberg in Brighton.'

Gilchrist got a sinking feeling. She thought she knew where this was going. ‘Ma'am . . .'

‘Because of your first-hand experience I want you to head up a special, multi-agency task force to deal with this problem of violently delinquent young teenagers.'

‘Ma'am . . .'

‘It's a problem that particularly predominates among teenage girls in the city. And that makes you an ideal head of this task force.'

‘Ma'am, I don't know anything about teenage girls.'

Hewitt stood. ‘That's agreed then.'

Gilchrist stood. ‘I don't have children. I'm no good with youngsters of any age.'

‘Tracy is already setting up the first meeting.' Hewitt stuck her hand out across the desk. Gilchrist looked at it for a moment then took it. ‘Congratulations on your inevitable promotion, Detective Inspector.'

Gilchrist sighed and shook Hewitt's hand. ‘Ma'am.'

B
ernard Rafferty was not happy, not happy at all. Hornby could see this and quite understood. Bit of a bummer when you spend thousands on security systems and somebody just walks in and chucks a brick at a display case. Then again, such things happened in all the biggest museums, however much they spent on security. No way of defending against the lone nutter.

Besides, nobody was sure if anything had actually been stolen from the glass case. The curator was halfway up the Andes, finding herself on the Inca trail, and Rafferty, whilst he'd been director of the council's museum services for years, was not exactly hands-on. He preferred to swan, with a bit of preening thrown in. When he wasn't doing that, he rarely left his balconied, notoriously well-appointed office on the first floor of the Royal Pavilion. The story went that Rafferty hadn't set foot inside the Booth, the zoological museum up the back end of town, in five years.

In other words, the chances of him knowing what was inside a particular display case in a particular museum was as remote, Hornby wistfully recognized, as the security guard ever getting off with Rachel.

But, frankly, it didn't matter. Hornby had an analytical bent. He'd always reckoned he would have made a good copper with his combination of brains and, in his day, brawn. He'd been astounded when the force rejected him at the get-go for reasons that were, frankly, vague.

He'd figured out that unless the person who'd thrown the brick had very long arms, there was no way he could have stolen anything from the table inside the case.

His theory was that the perpetrator had intended a bit of smash and grab. He had expected the glass to shatter totally so he could grab the silver and make off with it.

‘Startled by the alarm,' he was saying now, under Rafferty's purse-lipped, hostile stare, ‘he didn't have time to do the job properly and left empty-handed.'

‘By the emergency exit at the far end of the gallery,' the policeman said.

‘I believe so,' Hornby said.

The policeman – Constable Heap, his name was – looked at Rachel. She and Hornby were sitting in the corner of the shop with Rafferty standing and occasionally pacing. Rachel kept tugging her short skirt down, although Hornby really wasn't looking at her legs.

‘Did you see anybody leave by the front exit at the time the alarm went off, who with hindsight might seem suspicious?'

‘Nobody left at all,' Rachel said. ‘Mr Hornby insisted the doors be locked almost the minute he saw the case had been attacked.'

Hornby sat a little straighter even when he saw Rafferty's scowl. Fuck Rafferty. Most staff in any job wondered what the big nebbies did all day. As far as Hornby could see, museum staff never wondered. They knew Rafferty did bugger all. Too busy writing his boring books about churchyards. Museum staff disregarded or discounted him whenever possible. And when it wasn't possible, he had heard one curator say, they ‘managed' him.

‘Shouldn't we be looking at the CCTV, Officer?' Rafferty said, trying for resolute and managing peevish. ‘The vandalism occurred right underneath a camera.'

‘We are focusing on that too,' the constable said mildly.

It was an hour after the incident. Witness statements had been taken from the half a dozen people in the gallery at the time. Nobody had noticed anything, which was quite remarkable since the perpetrator needed to go some fifty yards down the centre of the gallery to get to the fire exit whilst the alarm was blaring out.

Hornby looked across at Rachel's legs then quickly away as her head turned. The woman must have radar.

The policeman was tapping his teeth with his pencil. He was a funny little fellow. Short with pink cheeks and red ears. He looked like a schoolboy. It peeved Hornby that they'd let somebody that size in when they'd turned him down – what good was a pint-sized policeman?

‘Let's go and have a look at the scene, shall we?' the constable said.

He led the way through into the gallery. Another policeman had put tape around the glass case. Heap turned to Rafferty.

‘Anything missing?'

‘I told you – not that I can see.'

‘An attempt that failed,' Hornby said. The policeman gave him a steady look. ‘In my opinion.'

‘OK,' Heap said. ‘Let's take a look at the emergency exit.'

He led the way down the centre aisle, glancing from side to side at the paintings and the glass cases.

He paused at the end of the gallery, just before the emergency exit, and squinted at a small label on the bare wall to his left.

‘
The Devil's Altar
by Gluck,' he read out. ‘1932.'

Hornby's heart sank.

Above the label there was a faint rectangular line on the wall within which the paint was lighter than that on the rest of the wall. Constable Heap pointed to the rectangle. ‘How long has this painting been missing?'

‘Chief Constable Watts, how flattering.'

Watts turned. A woman in her mid-thirties smiled at him. Trim. Black hair tied back. Navy trouser suit.

‘Just plain Mister these days. Flattering?'

‘That you should come to search me out. Having scoured Brighton for me, I presume.'

The woman looked familiar but Watts had no real clue who she was. She grinned at his discomfort.

‘Nicola Travis. I used to work in the Brighton tourist office and the Royal Pavilion.'

Watts remembered her now. He'd met her just once. She'd been flirting with him at a dinner at the Royal Pavilion, had pushed her card on him with her home number written on the back. Bernard Rafferty had been boring for Britain in a speech. No change there then. Watts' beeper had gone off and he'd excused himself to take the call in the long corridor outside the banqueting hall. The call that told him about the Milldean Massacre, the event that brought his career crashing down around his ears. He had not seen her since.

‘You never called, but I guess in the circumstances . . .'

He smiled. ‘Exactly. But what are you doing here?'

He'd arrived at the British Museum a little early for his meeting with Daubney so had been looking idly around the room containing the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon treasure. He remembered his father telling him the Sutton Hoo helmet had originally been reconstructed incorrectly. It had looked odd for years before the error had been corrected. He'd told the story as an object lesson in the fallibility of deductive reasoning.

‘I work here – on the Friends of the Museum team.'

‘A promotion?'

‘A step up, certainly.'

‘So you live in London now?'

She shook her head. ‘I commute. And you?'

‘Theoretically living in Brighton but I'm clearing out my father's house in Barnes. He died some weeks ago.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Watts shrugged. ‘He was a good age. Packed a lot into his life.'

‘And why are you here?'

‘Picasso prints then lunch with a friend.'

She smiled. ‘The Picassos are on the top floor but near the back entrance of the museum – I'll walk you down there if you like.'

She led the way into a long gallery stocked with a mix of objects from different ages and countries. It looked vaguely like the enormous library of a country house, with books stacked high up on a balcony above long wall cases filled with everything from African masks and Etruscan funerary urns to fourteenth-century swords and Egyptian jewellery.

‘This is my favourite room,' she said. ‘I like the eclecticism of it.'

Two-thirds of the way down she paused at a large case and leaned in. ‘Your ex-colleagues are probably going to be called about this.'

Watts looked into the case. A large card stated that two John Dee artefacts had been removed from display to form part of the Shakespeare and His World exhibition.

‘About John Dee's artefacts being moved?'

‘About them possibly being stolen. They went missing at the end of the Shakespeare exhibition during the transfer from one display back to this one.'

‘What were they?' Watts asked.

‘Magic stuff from the Elizabethan age.'

‘Magic?'

‘Have you heard of John Dee?'

‘Just yesterday, actually.'

‘One of the most learned men of his day. Expert mathematician and astronomer. Typical for the time, he was also interested in the occult as a means of learning more about the universe. The Shakespeare exhibition borrowed a big wax disc with magic signs and symbols on them and a black obsidian mirror that was originally Aztec.' She pointed at the display. ‘You can see the mirror's leather case there. They came to the museum in Sir Robert Cotton's collection – one of the museum's founding collections.'

‘You know your stuff.'

She smiled. ‘I should but I'm still learning, believe me. We know the disc was his because there's a drawing of it in one of his manuscripts. It was used to support one of his shew-stones.'

‘What's a shew-stone?'

‘Like the Aztec mirror or some other reflecting object or a crystal ball you can see into. The magician sees things in it.' She pointed to what looked like a small glass ball. ‘That's Dee's crystal ball there – at least it probably belonged to him. We know he used one. We're more certain about the mirror. Later, it was owned by Sir Horace Walpole and he put a note inside the leather case stating that it had belonged to Dee and his medium, Edward Kelly.'

‘But only two of these objects have gone missing?' Watts said. He pointed at an engraved gold disc. ‘I would have thought that would be worth nicking.'

‘Beautiful, isn't it? It's the “vision of the four castles” – something Dee experienced in Krakow in 1584. The museum got that during the Second World War – in 1942, I think. There's another of his crystals on a pendant in the Science Museum. Dee used that one to cure diseases and see into the future by looking for the ghosts of people in the stone. Dee's son Arthur gave it to the medical astrologer, Nicholas Culpeper, as thanks for curing his liver complaint.'