Last Respects Part 8

"They have them cut into the metal so that they last."

"Well?" If Brian Ridgeford was any judge this one had had to last a long time.

"I was curious, you see," she said, looking him straight in the eye. "So I got out a piece of paper and a soft pencil..."

"You traced the name," finished the policeman for her.

"Not all of it. Some of it's too far gone."

"You traced some of it," said Ridgeford with heavy patience.

"That's right." Mrs. Hopton was above irony. "I traced some of it and came up with some letters."

"Did you then?" said Ridgeford expressionlessly.

She pulled out a drawer behind the counter. "Do you want to see them?"

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford bent over a piece of grubby paper and read aloud the letters that were discernible. "E...M...B...A...L...D. EMBALD? Is that what it says?"

She gave him a nod of barely suppressed excitement. "I know what the other letters are. Don't you?"

"No," he said. "Tell me." "C...L... A... R," she said. She was speaking in lowered tones now. "To make Clarembald."

"All right then," he conceded. "If you say so-The Clarembald. What about it?"

She tossed her head. "I'd forgotten you were new here, Mr. Ridgeford."

"Yes."

"You wouldn't know, I suppose?"

"No."

"Everyone else knows."

"Everyone else knows what?"

She delivered her punch line almost in a whisper. "The Clarembald was the name of the ship that went down off Marby all those years ago. Didn't you know that?"

8.

But at present keep your own secret.

Detective Inspector Sloan had not been inside the museum at Calleford since he was a boy.

It was situated inside an old castle that had started life under Edward III as a spanking new bastion against the nearest enemy, degenerated over the years into a prison, and in the twentieth century been revived as a museum. At first Sloan and Crosby followed the way of the ordinary visitor. This led them past gla.s.s cases of Romano-British pottery and Jutish finds. They turned left by the vast exhibition of stuffed birds willed by a worthy citizen of bygone days, and kept straight on to the main office through the Darrell Collection of nineteenth-century costume.

There was nothing out of date about the museum's curator.

Mr. Basil Jensen took a quick look at the lump of copper and immediately took over the questioning himself. "Where did you find this?" he demanded excitedly.

"The River Calle."

"The river?" squealed Jensen. "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure," said Sloan, "What is it?"

"A barbary head," said Basil Jensen impatiently. He was a little man who obviously found it hard to keep still. "Where did you say you found it?"

"The river," said Sloan.

"I know that." He danced from one leg to the other. "Whereabouts in the river?"

"Between Edsway and Collerton," said Sloan accurately. The police usually asked the questions but Sloan was content to let him go on. Sometimes questions were even more revealing than answers. "What's a barbary head?"

"I don't believe it," declared Mr. Jensen with academic ferocity. "Not between Edsway and Collerton."

"No," said Sloan consideringly, "I can see that you might not. What's a barbary head?"

"Now, if you'd said the sea, Inspector..."

"Yes?"

"That would have made more sense."

Anything that made sense suited Sloan. Crosby was concentrating more on his surroundings. The museum curator's room was stuffed with improbable objects standing in unlikely juxtaposition. Two vases stood on his desk-one clearly Chinese, one as clearly Indian. Even Sloan's untutored eye could see the difference between them-two whole civilisations summed up in the altered rake of the lip of a vase...

"What's a barbary head?" asked Sloan again. Crosby was staring at an oryx whose head-a triumph of the taxidermist's art-was at eye level on the wall. The oryx stared unblinkingly back at him.

"A single head of barbary copper," said Basil Jensen authoritatively, "moulded into a circular shape." He blinked. "Any the wiser?"

"No," said Sloan truthfully.

"An ingot, then."

"Ah."

"It was the way they used to transport copper in the old days."

"I see."

Mr. Jensen pointed to the copper object. "You'd get tons and tons of it like this. A man could move it with a shovel, you see. Easier than shifting great lumps that needed two men to lift them."

"What sort of old days?" asked Sloan cautiously.

"Let's not beat about the bush," said Mr. Jensen.

Sloan was all in favour of that.

"Mid-eighteenth century," said the museum curator impressively.

"Make a note of that, Crosby," said Sloan.

"Mid-eighteenth century," repeated Mr. Jensen.

"That would be about 1750, wouldn't it, sir?" said Sloan. "Give or take a year or two."

"Or five," said Mr. Jensen obscurely. He tapped the barbary head. "And at a guess..."

"Yes?"

"This has been in the water since then." He thrust his chin forward. "If you don't believe me, Inspector, take it to Greenwich. They'll know there." He suddenly looked immensely cunning. "There's something else they'll be able to tell you, too."

"What's that, sir?"

"Whether it's been in salt water or fresh all these years."

Sloan said, "I think I may know the answer to that, sir."

The museum curator nodded and pointed to the piece of copper. "And I think, Inspector, that I know the answer to this."

"You do, sir?"

"Someone's found The Clarembald." He spoke almost conversationally now. "She was an East Indiaman, you know..."

Across the years Sloan caught the sudden whiff of blackboard chalk at the back of his nostrils and he was once again in the cla.s.sroom of a long-ago schoolmaster. The man-a rather precise, dry man-had been trying to convey to a cla.s.s of boys that strange admixture of trade, empire-building and corruption that had made the East India Company what it was. He'd been a "chalk and talk" schoolmaster but one rainy afternoon he'd made John Company and the investigation of Robert Clive and the impeachment of Warren Hastings all come alive to his cla.s.s.

"Someone's found her," said Jensen.

They'd been all ears, those boys, especially when the teacher had come to that macabre incident in British history that everybody knows. It was strange, thought Sloan, that out of a crowded historical past "when all else be forgot" everyone always remembered the Black Hole of Calcutta.

"We knew it would happen one day," said the museum curator. "In fact," he admitted, "we'd heard a rumour. Nothing you could put your finger on, you know...''

"Ah."

"And people have been in making enquiries," said Jensen.

Sloan leaned forward. "You wouldn't happen to know which people, sir, would you?"

"They don't leave their names," said Jensen drily. "And we get a lot of casual enquirers, you know."

"Short, dark and young?" said Sloan.

Jensen shook his head. "Tallish, brown hair and not as young as all that."

"This ship," said Sloan. "You know all about it then?"

"Bless you, Inspector, yes." Jensen started to pace up and down. "It's perfectly well doc.u.mented. And it's all here in the museum for anyone to look up. She was lured to her doom by wreckers in the winter of 1755..."

"The evil that men do lives after them," murmured Sloan profoundly.

Jensen's response was immediate. "Yes, indeed, Inspector. We see a lot of that in the museum world."

Sloan hadn't thought of that.

Jensen waved a hand. "I daresay that I can tell you what The Clarembald was carrying too..."

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir...

"We have a copy of the ship's manifest here," said Jensen, jerking to a standstill. "I daresay the East India Office will have something about it too." He pointed to the barbary head and went on enthusiastically, "And if she wasn't carrying a load of copper ingots I'll eat my hat. Mind you, Inspector, that won't have been all her cargo by a long chalk. She'll have had a great many other good things on board."

Sloan motioned to Crosby to take a note.

"A great many other things," said the museum curator, "that certain people would like to have today."

"Gold?" suggested Sloan simply.

Topazes and cinnamon, and gold moidores, it had been in the poem.

Mr. Jensen gave a quick frown. "Gold, certainly. Don't forget it was used as currency then. But it won't be so much the gold as the guns that they'll be going for today."

"Guns?" said Sloan. "Guns before gold?" He was faintly disappointed. Pieces of eight had a swashbuckling ring to them.

"They're easier to find underwater," said Jensen. "And if I remember rightly she had a pair of Demi-Culverin on board and some twelve pounders."

Sloan was struck by a different thought. "Armed merchantmen were nothing new, then?"

"If you worked in a museum, Inspector, you'd realise that there is nothing new under the sun."

"Quite so," said Sloan.

Mr. Jensen came back very quickly to the matter in hand. "There are treasure-seekers, Inspector, who would blow her out of the water for her guns and not care that they were destroying priceless marine archeology. Do you realise that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept underwater?"

"She doesn't," observed Sloan moderately, "appear to have been blown out of the water yet."

"Matter of time," said Jensen, resuming his restless pacing. "Only a matter of time. Depends entirely on who knows she's been found and how quickly they act."