James Becker - The Messiah Secret

She photographed each piece from different angles with her digital camera before enveloping it in bubble-wrap and storing it in one of the wooden tea chests from the attics. It was soon apparent that almost everything on the table was going to end up in the ‘auction’ tea chest, because most of the china in front of her was worth only a few pounds — some even less than that. Periodically, she attached the camera to her laptop and transferred the pictures she’d taken to a new folder on her hard drive.

The other members of the team drifted into the kitchen at intervals to make coffee or tea, or just to chat while they took a break from their own cataloguing activity elsewhere in the old house.

When the team stopped for lunch, Angela had already half-filled the ‘auction’ tea chest and in the process had cleared perhaps a quarter of the pieces of china off the table.

‘Have you found anything interesting?’ David Hughes asked, his spectacles glinting in the sun that shone through the large kitchen window.

Angela shook her head. ‘Not really. There’s some English slipware and a few bits of early Wedgwood, but nothing that you couldn’t pick up in almost any halfway decent antique shop. It doesn’t look to me as if Oliver or Bartholomew were really into collecting ceramics. What about you?’

‘Actually, quite a few nice pieces. There’s a good octagonal Regency rosewood centre table, but my most exciting find so far is a really nice Jacobean wainscot chair, in beautiful condition.’

‘Are you sure it’s not a mid-nineteenth century repro?’ Mayhew had just come in, looking more florid than usual. ‘They made a lot of them around that period.’

‘You just stick to your specialization, Richard,’ Hughes replied, looking at him over his glasses in what Angela thought was a teacher-ish sort of way, ‘and I’ll stick to mine.’

‘You’re very quiet, Owen,’ Mayhew said, turning to a grey-haired man wearing bifocals who was sitting on the opposite side of the long table. ‘Anything to report?’

Owen Reynolds, one of the British Museum’s arms and militaria experts, leaned forwards. ‘I’m not sure. There’s not much here that’s obviously within my remit, apart from that suit of armour in the hall, so-’

‘Is that the real thing?’ Mayhew asked.

‘Definitely. It’s a particularly nice example of Gotischer Plattenpanzer , Gothic plate armour, dating from the fifteenth century. I’ll need to research it, but I think it might be Maximilian, which is really exciting. And I’ve found a couple of 1796-pattern heavy cavalry swords, one an Austrian pallasch and the other a British version. But apart from those, I haven’t found very much, so I’ve been checking the contents of the boxes in the salon or whatever that big room is called.’

Mayhew looked at him expectantly. ‘And?’ he asked.

Reynolds looked round the room. ‘Well, I’m not absolutely sure, but I think somebody’s been searching through them. Not one of us, I mean. In several of the chests the contents have been unwrapped and, as far as I can recall, everything in them was properly wrapped when we first inspected the boxes.’

There was a brief silence.

‘A burglar, you mean?’ Mayhew asked.

Reynolds spread his hands. ‘The problem is that we don’t know what there was in the boxes to start with. I mean, we don’t have a full inventory of their contents, do we? That’s what we’re here for.’

‘Do you think somebody has been pilfering?’

Reynolds shook his head. ‘I don’t know. There are a lot of valuable pieces on display in this house — silverware, that kind of thing — that any burglar would immediately realize were worth a lot of money, and I think one or two of those might be missing as well. But because there is no inventory I can’t be sure.’

Angela stood up. ‘Look, if Owen is right, and somebody has been here, the first thing we need to find out is how this burglar — or whatever he is — is getting inside. God,’ she lowered her voice, ‘you don’t suppose he’s in the house now , do you?’

Richard Mayhew shook his head. ‘No. But we have been leaving the front door open while we’ve been in here, so I suppose it is just possible somebody could have snuck in. We’d better keep it locked from now on.’

Angela nodded decisively. ‘I also want a complete sweep of the entire house, right now, just in case there is anyone lurking in the cellar or attic or somewhere.’ She was aware of how fast her heart was beating and took some deep breaths. She had narrowly escaped death the last time she’d been away and didn’t want to take any chances here.

‘OK, OK,’ Mayhew agreed, with a heavy sigh. ‘As soon as we’ve finished lunch we’ll search the place from top to bottom. Will that do?’

Ninety minutes later, hot and dusty from poking around at the top and bottom of the old house and everywhere in between, the team re-assembled somewhat grumpily in the kitchen. They’d found absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody else had been in the house recently, apart from an unfastened ground-floor window at the back of the house, which they’d now closed and locked, and which Angela had then jammed with a screw to ensure it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

‘Happy now?’ Richard Mayhew snapped.

Angela sighed. She still felt very uneasy. ‘I’d rather be back in London, thank you. But at least now I’m sure that there isn’t someone watching us.’

‘OK, now that we’ve finally got that cleared up, let’s get some useful work done, shall we?’ Mayhew hurried out of the kitchen.

Angela picked up another piece of china from the table to assess and catalogue. She had just opened up her laptop when she heard a startled gasp from David Hughes.

‘What is it?’ She spun round to look behind her.

‘I thought I saw something outside, some movement.’

He strode across the kitchen to the window and stared through the somewhat grubby panes of glass at the unkempt grassland outside.

Angela put down the china plate she’d been examining and stood up, joining him at the window moments later. The land in front of them sloped gently downwards, away from the house, dotted with clumps of shrubs and bushes, many of them easily big enough to conceal a person. And there was something else Angela noticed as well.

‘You might be right,’ she said slowly. ‘Every time I’ve looked out of this window since we got here, I’ve seen at least two or three rabbits hopping about out there. Right now, I don’t see any. Rabbits are extremely nervous animals. Because they’ve vanished, it could mean there is somebody out there.’ She shivered slightly. ‘God, I’ll be pleased when we’re finished and back in London. This place gives me the creeps.’

Jonathan Carfax stared through a pair of compact binoculars as the last of the cars drove away from the front of Carfax Hall. He knew he was invisible to the museum people, because he was standing in the shelter of a group of trees just outside the boundary of the property, but with a clear view of the house.

Earlier that afternoon, he’d crept closer to the house, approaching it from the rear and making use of the cover provided by various small groups of bushes, but he’d obviously been seen by somebody. As he’d moved towards the building, two faces had appeared at the kitchen window and looked out, but by that time he’d already run down the slope away from the house, and ducked down into a hollow behind a large rhododendron bush, where he’d lain and fumed. Jonathan was one of Oliver’s cousins, and like the rest of his family had only recently discovered that he’d been disinherited. Well, he’d told himself, as he became gradually colder and damper, he was going to do something about that.