Read Online The Messiah Secret by James Becker - Free Book Online Page B

the way and clear space on the table as quickly as possible.
    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 alreadyhalf-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’snot 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