Part One – The Skulls of St Olaves
I cleared the desk and placed the blow-up copies of the chapter heads from Wars that will Come After on its surface. I fired up the laptop and started studying the graphic for the first chapter, 'Of Sickness'.
Tabitha came in with a bowl of crisps for me and studied the illustration with me. 'What is it, Roman?'
'I wish I knew, Tabs. They're pictures from a book I'm researching for my work. I thought there might be clues in the illustrations, but I haven't found any yet.'
'Clues to what; treasure?'
'That's the problem. I don't know what I'm looking for.'
She disappeared and returned a moment later with two magnifying glasses. She handed one to me, pulled up a stool, knelt on it and started pouring over the artwork.
'Who's Uri?' she pointed at one of the crosses in the church graveyard behind the plague doctor.
Under the magnification it was possible to make out a name scrawled on the cross: 'Diminuto Uri.'
'That's a good spot, Tabs. Diminuto means small. I think Uri must be the name of a little boy who was killed by the plague.' I wrote it on the edge of the copy. 'That's my first clue. Let's make a list of anything else like that we see.'
'Hey, there are some squiggles on this gravestone,' she pointed.
'I think those are just squiggles.'
'An inscription on this cross,' the studied it under magnification before shaking her head, 'in French I think.'
'It's Spanish, we can translate it later.'
'And a date here on this cross,' she peered into her glass. '31 Aug 1665; is that a clue?'
'The plague was worst in Britain in the year 1665, so that...' I stalled. My eye kept stumbling over three skulls that could be made out on a tomb and Tabitha's reference to the date had just jogged something in my head.
I woke the laptop screen and typed: 'St Olaves skulls' into Google Images. A moment later the screen was filled with pictures of the same three skulls.
'They're the same,' Tabitha gripped my extended finger and gave me a grin. 'How did you know?'
'A man lived through the last plague in London and a great fire. He kept a diary and wrote it all down in there. His name was Samuel Pepys and St Olaves was his local church, at the end of his street. It survived the fire. When you said the date out loud it reminded me of Pepys and the church's skulls.'
The church was well known for having an inscription about Pepys worshipping there and a statue of him, but I remembered the skulls from an association with another London writer, Charles Dickens. The macabre entrance to the church beneath the three skulls and an arch of ferocious spikes led Dickens to nickname it: 'St Ghastly Grim'.
Charlie Fox's words came back to me: 'You have such unique knowledge. You're trained to focus on small details others would overlook.' It felt as if she had designed these graphics to create a set of clues that few people outside of my field of expertise could follow. If so, to what?
'But what does it mean, Roman?' Tabitha had arrived at the question at the same time I had.
'It means that my hunch about clues in these pictures was right. The date and the skulls in this image led us to Samuel Pepys. This man...' I entered Pepys's name was the screen flicked up the most well-known portrait of the diarist, John Hayls's 1666 oil study from the National Portrait Gallery. I showed it to Tabitha. 'It means we should keep looking.'
'Cool,' she pointed at the sheet of musical notes in the portrait 'More squiggles.'
'Yes, indeed.' I gave her a kiss on her forehead. 'You've just shown me the next clue, Tabs. Pepys wrote his diaries in a kind of shorthand – a code, made up of squiggles. I bet the marks on the gravestone in the picture are written in that code.' I googled my way to the website of Magdalene College Cambridge, which Pepys had attended. It showed an example of their original copy of Pepys's diary.
'Wow,' Tabitha stared, open-mouthed, 'the same sort of squiggles. Can you read them?'
I couldn't. I scrolled down to check the name of the speed-writing system Pepys had used. A Thomas Shelton had invented it, I discovered, and it had also been used by a more famous Cambridge student, Sir Isaac Newton. 'I can't read it, but I know a man who can.'
I took a picture of the gravestone on my phone. I would send it to Rio later.
'Is this book from your work?' asked Tabitha as she started lifting the copied sheets of the chapter headings to look at other images.
'The book was given to me by the woman who wrote it. I think she wanted me to find these clues.'
'Why didn't she just tell you what she knew.'
'Shortly after she gave me the book, she got into trouble and now she's missing.'
'Mum said you were involved with the filth.'
I grinned. 'A very pleasant police lady is looking for her. I've been helping.'
'I bet these clues will help you find her.' She flicked through to fourth chapter heading image alongside the Arabic script that I now knew meant 'Of Flood'. Tabitha pointed to it. 'Let's do this one next.'
Part Two – Black-Bellied Darter
'I'm helping Roman find a woman,' Tabitha's innocence was undone by a suggestion of mischievousness.
Bex stared at me with a forkful of gnocchi on the way to her mouth. The girls knew that Jules and I had agreed to live apart for a bit. Veterans of one divorce, they probably guessed what this would lead to. I think that they would preferred we stayed a family but, like so many modern children, they knew they could survive break-ups.
'That's lovely darling.' Jules turned from Tabitha to me, 'I hope it's not the woman you met yesterday.'
'No, I met this one a few days ago. The one who left me a book.'
'She's missing,' said Tabitha. 'Roman's helping a police woman to try to find her. I'm helping, we've got a stack of clues.'
'What a lot of women you have in your life, Roman,' said Jules later as we filled the dish-washer. Tabitha had roped Bex into the clue hunt and were at the desk in the lounge studying images.
'Except one's a missing author, one's a police inspector, and...' I paused as the absurdity hit me, 'the threatening one's a nun. That must be a pretty unique set.'
'A nun nun?'
'Apparently. She works at a convent in the Essex-Cambs borders. Any idea where or what that might be.'
'Hardly my field,' said Jules, 'although there isn't a long border between Essex and Cambs, so the evil nun should be avoidable. Roman, if you're mixed up in threats, missing people and street shootings, these are the kind of women you can expect to attract – well maybe not nuns. I don't think you should involve the girls in your mystery women though.'
'I hadn't meant to. Tabs just sat down and inserted herself in the process.'
'If you reach a point in anything where you are forced to weaponise stairwell doors, it's time to re-evaluate,' Jules smiled, probably at the image now lodged in her head. 'I thought you were extracting yourself from this affair, leaving it to the police.'
'I know, but I'm wondering if the author didn't leave me her book because it contains clues that will mean something to me and possibly only to me.'
'I know you're smart, Roman, but that sounds plain egotistical. A woman who's never met you goes to the trouble of creating a book, aimed at just you. Doesn't seem a smart publishing strategy.'
'Well she does claim to be Carla Raposo, so we have a connection.'
A plate hovered above the dishwasher as Jules' eyes lifted to me. 'Ah la femme Raposo. I couldn't compete with her when she was dead. Now she's alive.'
'She may not be alive any more,' I said. 'She was shot remember.'
'Exactly. You seem to be involved in more skirmishes than Ollie and he's in the army. Roman, do your things, solve your clue, tell the police then leave well alone. It's good to have you back here, messing around with our daughters.' I couldn't detect any stress on the 'our'. She took a saucepan out of my hands. 'I'll finish these, go and find out what they want us to watch tonight.'
'Mum says we have to choose a film or TV series,' I said to Tabitha and Bex when I returned to the lounge.
'Bex knows this bird,' said Tabitha from the desk, where the pair of them were sprawled over the printouts. 'It's a snake bird. That must be a clue.'
'Probably,' I went over to view the image of the bird perched above the swirling water, wings outstretched. It hunted in the background of the Arabic chapter heading, 'Of Flood'. It's long neck and forked bill did give it a snake-like appearance. 'Is it an American bird, Bex?'
'African I think.' She lifted up her phone and, fingers flying, corrected herself after a moment. 'It's also in America it's called the anhinga or darter there.'
'See if you can find an image of it drawn by John James Audubon,' I said.
'There,' within moments the screen was placed where Tabitha and I could see it. 'That's it. The male bird here is in the exact same pose.'
'Another book clue,' said Tabitha.
'Audubon was a naturalist and artist around one hundred and eighty years ago' I said. 'He produced and illustrated a book called Birds of America. It's a rare book, copies sell for millions.'
'You know a lot of weird stuff?' Tabitha had put in enough time is musty corners of museums, display cabinets of stately homes and the racks of second hand book shops to know the importance of weird stuff. We fist pumped.
'I don't understand. Where are the clues leading us?' said Bex.
'I don't know either, but it seems each of these pictures is linked to a famous historical book. Maybe it's just as simple as that, yet...' Perhaps it was a sign that I too had been been seduced by the wild promises of the NFTs but I felt it was more than that.
'What?' said Tabitha.
'They could be clues to finding two books so rare that everyone believes they no longer exist.'
Part Three – The Church
After the girls went to bed, Jules and I shared a small liqueur and her gossip about the university. Before any awkwardness about where I would be sleeping arose, I said I had to do some work and headed for the spare bedroom. The bed was always made up for me there. I'd never know what Jules had intended.
I did have work though. I sent Rio a picture of Tabitha's scribbles and my certainty that it was the same short-hand script used by Samuel Pepys. I also gave him the St Olaves connection and the relevant date 31st August 1665.
'Better and better,' he messaged back, confirming that it was Shelton's shorthand and that he could translate it. He said the date was significant because in that day's diary entry Pepys wrote about the plague numbers in London. He assumed the entry was from 'Of Sickness'.
I then found myself hunting Google-maps for nunneries and convents in the Cambs-Essex borders. Nothing obvious presented itself. But perseverance provided a school called the Our Church of the Reborn Martyr College. Further research showed it was some kind of charitable organisation that was also a girl's finishing school. It had been a convent but around the turn of the previous century.
It seemed as far removed from shootings, threats and NFT artworks as you could imagine. Just as I was about to move on I found an online brochure. The school itself was based in a rambling baroque country house, but close by, half-hidden behind a copse of trees, was a church – a small stumpy church.
I filled my screen with images of the college buildings until I spotted the angle I wanted. Without the connection to Charlie Fox's book I'm not sure I'd have made much of it, but given the faux threats and attempted hijack perpetrated by Sister Innocent, it seemed too much of a coincidence.
I concluded this was the same church that presided over the graveyard in the background of the 'Of Sickness' chapter heading.