The Messiah Secret

The Mini bounced down the drive, which curved around to the right behind a low hill. As she straightened up the car, Angela could see the hall itself for the first time. She knew from what Roger Halliwell had told her that it dated from the late nineteenth century, a Gothic-revival structure built on the remains of a much older building.

From a distance, the house looked mellow and comfortable in the landscape. Set on a slight rise and overlooking a small ornamental lake, which was a somewhat bilious green in the mid-afternoon sunlight, it featured spires on the corners and a profusion of arched windows, the whole building constructed of what looked like the same type of grey stone as the pillars at the end of the drive.

‘Nice,’ Angela murmured.

Three cars were parked on the oval gravel area in front of the house, so she assumed the other members of the British Museum team had already arrived. These cars were some distance from the house, which at first puzzled her, but when she pulled up next to one of them and switched off the engine, she saw why.

Along the façade of the property was a temporary fence, just a line of steel posts driven into the gravel surface of the drive and linked by plastic-coated wire, and behind that were several quite substantial lumps of masonry. And when she looked up at the old house itself, she realized that it was in a very poor condition indeed, with large gaps in the stonework where pieces had fallen out over the years. Several of the window panes were broken, and what paint there was had flaked badly.

She left her overnight bag in the boot of the car, but took her laptop case with her, and walked across to the main door of the house which was standing wide open.

She stepped into a large square wood-panelled hall filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests. On one side stood a mounted suit of armour, that to Angela’s inexpert eyes looked genuinely medieval, and on the other a life-size wooden carving of an erect bear, one paw raised high, the other held out at about waist height, a wooden plate clutched in its claws, possibly intended to be a receptacle for mail or perhaps keys. Avoiding the bear’s glassy eyes, she looked around. At the far end of the hall, beyond the bear and the suit of armour, a massive stone staircase ascended to the first floor of the house. On both sides of the hall were large double doors, open wide.

Choosing the doorway on the right-hand side, Angela walked straight into an Aladdin’s cave of relics. The room ran the entire length of that part of the house and had probably originally been intended as a formal reception room. There were two tall windows at the far end; half a dozen others along the right-hand wall looked out of the front of the building towards the gravelled car park. The long wall opposite them was dominated by a huge fireplace. You could burn an entire tree in it which, Angela reflected, you’d probably need to do in the winter if you wanted to keep the temperature of the room much above freezing. On either side of the fireplace, built-in bookcases extended in both directions, the shelves lined with leather-bound volumes. Just cataloguing those would be at least a week’s work for somebody. But it wasn’t the elegant proportions of the room or the books or the faded decoration, or even the fireplace, that caught her eye. It was the floor.

Almost the entire surface of the scuffed parquet was covered with boxes and bags and chests, a haphazard collection of containers, interspersed with occasional bronze and marble sculptures and other, unrecognizable, objects covered in white dust sheets or plastic sheeting.

‘Good God,’ Angela muttered to herself. ‘If every room’s like this, it’ll take months, not weeks, to sort out.’

‘Ah, there you are, Angela.’ Richard Mayhew’s voice boomed out from behind her, stating the obvious. A large – in all respects – and florid-faced man who specialized in objects made from silver and gold, he seemed incapable of ever speaking in anything less than a slightly moderated shout.

‘Richard,’ she said, shaking his hand. She pointed at the chaotic mass of containers in the room. ‘Are all the rooms as full as this?’

Mayhew shook his head. ‘No, not at all. This is the biggest room in the house, and it looks as if somebody – presumably the executors – decided to leave the furniture in situ, but bring almost everything else in here and the room on the opposite side of the hall. Personally, I’d have preferred to do it room by room, but there you are. Needs must, and all that.’