Lesley’s verdict and Nightingale gave me the same long-suffering look he gives me when I accidentally blow up fire extinguishers, fall asleep while he’s talking, or fail to conjugate my Latin verbs.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when one cold dark morning, a fortnight after my visit to Swindon, I spotted my first find. I always start with the rare books and I almost missed it because it was in German; Über Die Grundlagen Dass Die Praxis Der Magie Zugrunde Léigen but fortunately it had been translated as About the Basics that the Practice of Magic Reference Lies probably by Google Translate. There was a picture of the frontispiece listing the author as Reinhard Maller, published in 1799 in Weimar. I checked for Maller in the mundane library’s card index but found nothing.
I made a note of the case number, printed the description and showed it to Nightingale later that morning during practice. He translated the title as On the Fundamentals that Underlie the Practice of Magic.
‘Show off,’ I said.
‘I think you had better secure this,’ he said. ‘And see if you can track down where it came from.’
‘Is it something to do with Ettersberg?’ I asked.
‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘Not everything German relates back to the Nazis.’
‘Is it a translation of the Principia Artis Magicae?’ I asked.
‘I can’t tell without having a look.’
‘I’ll get onto Arts and Antiques,’ I said.
‘Later,’ said Nightingale. ‘After practice.’
Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn’t secure enough. For those items they rent space at the auction house Christie’s where they laugh at cat burglars, tweak the nose of international art thieves and have some of the most serious, and rumoured to be illegal, security measures in the world. That’s why the following morning I found myself down on King Street in St James’s where even a miserable icy rain couldn’t wash away the smell of money.
Nor could a stick of incendiary bombs, back in April 1941, when it destroyed everything except the façade of number 8 King Street, the London home of Christie’s since 1823. They rebuilt in the 1950s, which was why the foyer was disappointingly shapeless and low ceilinged, albeit in an expensive air-conditioned and marble-floored way.
The Folly doesn’t generate the gigabytes of paperwork that the rest of the Met does but what we do produce tends to be a bit too esoteric to be outsourced to an IT company in Inverness. Instead, we have one elderly guy in a basement in Oxford, although admittedly the basement’s under the Bodleian library and the guy is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
I found Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil. F.R.S. B.Mon hunched over the book in a viewing room upstairs. Designed, I learnt later, to be deliberately neutral and not distract from whatever it was you were supposed to be viewing, the room was all beige carpet, white walls and aluminium and black canvas faux Bauhaus chairs. Postmartin was examining his prize on an unornamented lectern. He was wearing white gloves and using a plastic spatula to turn the pages.
‘Peter,’ he said when I entered. ‘You have surpassed yourself this time. Truly surpassed yourself.’
‘Is it kosher?’ I asked.
‘I should say so,’ said Postmartin. ‘A proper German grimoire. I haven’t seen one of these since 1991.’
‘I thought it might be a copy of the Principia.’
Postmartin glanced at me over the top of his reading glasses and grinned. ‘It’s certainly based on Newtonian principles but I think it’s more than a copy. My German is somewhat rusty but I believe I’m right in saying that it looks like it came out of the Weiße Bibliothek in Cologne.’
My German’s worse than my Latin, but even I thought I could translate
So you can imagine how pleased I was when one cold dark morning, a fortnight after my visit to Swindon, I spotted my first find. I always start with the rare books and I almost missed it because it was in German; Über Die Grundlagen Dass Die Praxis Der Magie Zugrunde Léigen but fortunately it had been translated as About the Basics that the Practice of Magic Reference Lies probably by Google Translate. There was a picture of the frontispiece listing the author as Reinhard Maller, published in 1799 in Weimar. I checked for Maller in the mundane library’s card index but found nothing.
I made a note of the case number, printed the description and showed it to Nightingale later that morning during practice. He translated the title as On the Fundamentals that Underlie the Practice of Magic.
‘Show off,’ I said.
‘I think you had better secure this,’ he said. ‘And see if you can track down where it came from.’
‘Is it something to do with Ettersberg?’ I asked.
‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘Not everything German relates back to the Nazis.’
‘Is it a translation of the Principia Artis Magicae?’ I asked.
‘I can’t tell without having a look.’
‘I’ll get onto Arts and Antiques,’ I said.
‘Later,’ said Nightingale. ‘After practice.’
Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn’t secure enough. For those items they rent space at the auction house Christie’s where they laugh at cat burglars, tweak the nose of international art thieves and have some of the most serious, and rumoured to be illegal, security measures in the world. That’s why the following morning I found myself down on King Street in St James’s where even a miserable icy rain couldn’t wash away the smell of money.
Nor could a stick of incendiary bombs, back in April 1941, when it destroyed everything except the façade of number 8 King Street, the London home of Christie’s since 1823. They rebuilt in the 1950s, which was why the foyer was disappointingly shapeless and low ceilinged, albeit in an expensive air-conditioned and marble-floored way.
The Folly doesn’t generate the gigabytes of paperwork that the rest of the Met does but what we do produce tends to be a bit too esoteric to be outsourced to an IT company in Inverness. Instead, we have one elderly guy in a basement in Oxford, although admittedly the basement’s under the Bodleian library and the guy is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
I found Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil. F.R.S. B.Mon hunched over the book in a viewing room upstairs. Designed, I learnt later, to be deliberately neutral and not distract from whatever it was you were supposed to be viewing, the room was all beige carpet, white walls and aluminium and black canvas faux Bauhaus chairs. Postmartin was examining his prize on an unornamented lectern. He was wearing white gloves and using a plastic spatula to turn the pages.
‘Peter,’ he said when I entered. ‘You have surpassed yourself this time. Truly surpassed yourself.’
‘Is it kosher?’ I asked.
‘I should say so,’ said Postmartin. ‘A proper German grimoire. I haven’t seen one of these since 1991.’
‘I thought it might be a copy of the Principia.’
Postmartin glanced at me over the top of his reading glasses and grinned. ‘It’s certainly based on Newtonian principles but I think it’s more than a copy. My German is somewhat rusty but I believe I’m right in saying that it looks like it came out of the Weiße Bibliothek in Cologne.’
My German’s worse than my Latin, but even I thought I could translate
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