A Crowded Coffin(35)

‘She’ll calm down,’ Harriet reassured him. ‘Part of it is guilt because she wasn’t here when Walter was injured. Absolute nonsense, of course, and he’s told her so more than once, but it’s hard to be rational where the people you love are concerned.’ She cursed herself when a brief spasm of misery crossed Rory’s face. Poor lad, he was singularly short of people to love, by all accounts. She rushed into the latest development.

‘Sam rang to tell me about a conversation he’s just had on the plane to Belfast. It’s yet another bit of information that somehow seems to be related to all the peculiar goings-on round here lately.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Seems to me there are far too many things that don’t add up. Oh well, this is what Sam had to say.

‘He was sitting next to an old colleague on the plane, someone he’d not seen for ages, and they fell into shop talk, as you do. Then the other man asked if he’d been involved in the inquiry into missing documents at the Stanton Resingham archive. Sam said no, he’d not heard anything about that, so his friend, who sounds a bit of a gossip, told him it had all been kept very hush-hush, on a need-to-know basis, very cops and robbers. It seems a rare manuscript turned up at auction abroad late last year and sold for a pretty impressive sum. The trouble was, some very similar pages turned up a few months later at the archive and there was a bit of a panic because some academic recognized them as being from the same manuscript. Unfortunately the vendor had insisted on anonymity and had disappeared by then, along with the cash.’

Rory looked bewildered. ‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m not sure where this is taking us, but go on.’

‘The subsequent inquiries,’ said Harriet, ‘revealed that about half the documents in the archive had so far been examined over the previous year, so it was decided to go through them again – fine-tooth comb stuff – and see if they could work out what, if anything, was missing. Not an easy job, as you can imagine. The whole archive was just a mass of documents collected by this old antiquarian, and his notion of collating was impressionistic to say the least, but he’d left a lot of money in cash to finance the whole thing so they’d got it under way.

‘Anyway,’ she stopped suddenly, with a slightly shamefaced grin. ‘Oops, sorry, Rory, I’m slipping back into Miss Q mode. Stop me if I start lecturing or giving you order marks for running in the corridors or smoking behind the bike sheds. Where was I? Ah yes. They soon realized from various references that there were other things missing; some whole manuscripts, in some cases, in others just the odd page. The galling thing was that they could tell that the missing items must have been wonderful, not just from their historical perspective, but in some cases as objects of astonishing beauty. There was apparently a note referring to a mediaeval breviary, with scribbled descriptions of the illuminations, a work of art from the sound of it – and not a trace of the actual item to be found.’

‘God, that’s a tragedy.’ Rory was horrified and Harriet remembered belatedly that he was an artist himself. ‘Did Sam say if they’d got any clues?’

‘Apparently they had a pretty good security system including individual key codes, which are swiped in. You know how it works: when the card is swiped, the time, date and ID are recorded, and when the codes were checked there were no discrepancies. The only person whose card came up was the researcher who was employed to work in the archive. He’d been vetted and passed as honest and well qualified, references panned out okay, no reason to doubt his credentials.’

She paused. ‘The only trouble is, his name was Colin Price, and he’s been missing since the beginning of January this year.’ Rory glanced at her and was struck by the gravity of her expression. ‘The last known sighting of him was on the fifth of January when he had a couple of pints at The Angel in Locksley. While he was there he was very interested in the village and particularly asked about the church, the vicar and the history of the Attlin family up at Locksley Farm Place.’

She looked down at her folded hands and then at Rory, her blue eyes shadowed and anxious. ‘He hasn’t been seen since.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Rory stared at her. ‘I heard about that, Edith’s convinced his disappearance has got something to do with her grandfather’s accident and with this midnight poking-about by the angel stone.’ He finished his coffee and nodded abstractedly as Harriet offered a refill. ‘I thought she was imagining things but then, I don’t really know her very well.’