‘Bunthorne?’ repeated Bryant, taken aback.
‘Don’t you remember? You came round to my house with a ginger kitten in your overcoat pocket, said you’d found him on Battersea Bridge and that his name was Bunthorne. You left him with me and never returned to pick him up. Popping in for half an hour, you said.’
‘My dear chap, I’m so frightfully sorry, I forgot all about—’
‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Masters waved the thought away with long pale fingers. ‘He’s been a great comfort to me since my wife died.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know . . .’
‘Well, how could you? Honestly, this rain, hold on.’ He flapped the great umbrella as he closed it, showering them both. ‘I’m incredibly late. Want to sit in on my talk about Mithras and the Romans? Oh.’ He stopped suddenly again. This time he had been brought up short by a mounted sign at the top of the steps that read, ‘TODAY’S LECTURES HAVE BEEN CANCELLED’. Apparently a burst water pipe in the gents’ toilets had Caused camden’s Health and Safety Department to close the public-speaking room until further notice. ‘Well, it looks as though you have me all to yourself,’ said Masters. ‘what is it you want to know about the blood of Christ?’
They queued for tea beneath the astonishing glass canopy of the Great Courtyard and seated themselves in a quiet, shadowed corner. Bryant dug into his overcoat and produced a sheaf of wrinkled paperwork.
Dr Masters was the one man he knew who might be able to answer his questions. The ambitious academic belonged to a group of intellectual misfits who went by the nickname of the Insomnia Squad. They regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semiotics of old Superman comics. Most of them were barely able to hold down regular jobs, and tended to drift away from their target research like wisps of autumn smoke, but Masters was driven by obsessive curiosity and the desire to improve and repair the world, even if it killed everyone in the process. Academics could be so blind sometimes.
‘I was recently researching the city’s social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria, you know,’ he told Bryant. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t come to me when you were searching for the Highwayman. I’d have been able to give you some pointers.’ A few months earlier, the Peculiar Crimes Unit had conducted a search for a killer dressed in a tricorn hat and riding boots who had caught the public’s imagination.
‘Actually, it was while we were conducting that investigation that I came across references to a local street gang known as the Saladins,’ Bryant explained, sipping his tea. ‘Extraordinary that a bunch of uneducated kids could name themselves after a nine-hundred-year-old legend.’ Over the years, Bryant had become an accidental expert on the arcane history of London.
‘So you know that after Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, his Knights Hospitallers survived in the district of Clerkenwell?’
‘I’ve been reading about it, yes. I presume the kids we interviewed had accidentally stumbled across some local history.’
‘I don’t know how you find the time to study this sort of thing when you’ve got a full-time job in the police. Well, the knights were stripped of their properties and income by Henry VIII, during the dissolution of the monasteries. But they stayed in the area. They based themselves near the gothic arch of St John’s Gate, a place of profound religious mystery. At the hospital and priory church of St John of Jerusalem, to be precise, where injured crusaders were cared for. You still find cafés and bars in Clerkenwell bearing their name.’
Bryant unfurled his paperwork with a flourish. ‘I did a little research. Listen to this. On October the third, 1247, the leader of the Knights Templars presented King Henry III with a six-inch-long lead-crystal pot marked with the symbol of the knights, a red-and-white cross-hilt, said to contain the blood of Christ, the ultimate relic of the crucifixion. Its authenticity was confirmed by a separate scroll holding the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, signed by all the prelates of the Holy Land. The vial was held in a box carved with the chevron of the arms of the Prior Robert de Manneby, an ancient pattern taken from the priory window of St John, the first baron of England.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Masters coloured with impatience.
‘And all of the other tantalizing snippets, like the letters XPISK marked on the container, and the supposed decanting of the vial that resulted in the deaths of five prelates. Who’d have thought that the true heart of the crusades would lie in Clerkenwell, just up the road? Would you like a biscuit?’ Bryant produced a squashed packet of lemon puffs from his coat pocket and set it down between them.