For the four remaining members of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad it was more personal; they would miss her deeply, and the person who would miss her the most was Detective Constable Clio Spicer. She stood quietly at the edge of the group, sipping fizzy water. Lillian had mentored her since she joined the squad two years ago. Now Clio would no longer enjoy her protection, and it left her feeling as if she’d lost a layer of skin.
The wine bar’s basement resembled a subterranean encampment, carved out through centuries of use, a warren of small rooms and cellars, some vaulted and so low a grown man could hardly stand. If the corners were cobwebbed, it was too velvety dark to see them. Flickering candlelight brought the place partly to life, exaggerating facial expressions and revealing the uneven cellar walls and theframed yellowed newspaper cuttings and old playbills hanging near the bar. Chairs were liver-brown wood, tables upturned barrels. In the door’s draft a white-haired man in a three-piece suit and an expensive greatcoat was asleep in his chair, cradling his walking stick like a bishop’s crozier.
If the ghosts of London’s past roamed the city seeking familiar spaces, then they surely met down here sometimes, Clio thought. And if they did, they surely traded information in whispers, the way people always have done and always would do, the sort of whispers that detectives made it their business to hear, which was precisely why she loved her job.
She stood with her back against the wall and sipped her drink, sober and watchful as a judge while her colleagues got drunker. When she started in the squad, Lillian had advised her either to drink like a man and make sure she could keep up or to stay sober at events like these. Clio chose the latter.
She could feel that the evening was at its tipping point. Most of her colleagues had drunk enough alcohol that tongues were loosening and inhibitions were evanescing, sizzling to nothing in the candle flames or falling to be trampled underfoot on the sticky floor. Soon, the hands of one or two of the men would wander—they all knew who—and there weren’t many female targets. It was time for Clio to leave.
She pushed through the crowd to find Lillian and say goodbye but Lillian was nowhere to be seen. Clio headed to the ladies’ bathroom and found her there, washing her hands. Their eyes met in the mirror. Clio opened her mouth to say goodbye, but something serious in Lillian’s expression made her hesitate.
“You off?” Lillian asked. Her eyes were the same steel blue as the River Thames.
Clio nodded.
“I’ll come with you.”
“But it’s your party.”
“They don’t need me anymore. It’s been a feat of endurance to stay here this long, and there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Outside, Villiers Street was crowded with pedestrians, but the air was fresher, and the temperature bit just hard enough to be invigorating. The slice of night sky visible between the buildings was artificially brightened, the city’s lights turning it from black to gray. Shop windows and streetlamps made the wet paving stones glow golden and threw long shadows between the strides of commuters and nightlife seekers who passed each other without a glance.
“Walk with me,” Lillian said. It sounded more like an order than a request, even though she no longer had authority over Clio, hadn’t since five that evening. Clio owed her far too much to care.
At the bottom of the street, beside the railway arches, the entrance to Embankment Station glowed. Above and behind it, the white struts of Hungerford Bridge were lit blue and pink. Clio and Lillian cut through the station and climbed the steps onto the bridge. Trains rumbled back and forth across it in a blur of lit windows and squealing brakes. On the opposite bank, the London Eye was turning slowly, lit cerise. The river ran fast and dark below the bridge, offering the city a choppy reflection of itself. As they walked toward the middle of the bridge, a sharp wind tugged at their hair, at the ends of Clio’s scarf, at the belt and lapels of Lillian’s coat. It felt good to be out there after the stuffy bar. Clio didn’t think she would ever tire of London.
Lillian stopped halfway across, and she and Clio stood close, but not touching, facing east, toward the City. A lump sat in Clio’s throat and she felt a little hollow. Missing Lillian was going to be hard.
“For a while now, I’ve been agonizing over whether to tell you something,” Lillian said. “There’s a mystery I’ve been investigating—unofficially—for years.”
Clio glanced at her in surprise, because Lillian did everythingby the book, in fact she insisted on it, but Lillian didn’t meet her gaze; she stared out at the river as if there was something out there, on the wind, in the water, or veiled by the bright lights. She said, “If I’m honest, it’s become an obsession. If I’mreallyhonest, it’s been an obsession for decades, and I thought I’d got to a place where I could let it go, but something happened very recently, and I’ve realized that I can’t.”
Clio wasn’t sure how to respond, so she did what Lillian herself had trained her to do: kept her mouth shut and waited for the other person to fill the silence until she understood more. Her heart beat a little faster than usual.
“Do you remember the famous British Museum theft of 1968?” Lillian asked.
It was impossible for Clio to remember every one of the seven hundred thousand entries in the national database of stolen or lost works of art and antiquities, but Lillian knew she had an exceptional memory for the unusual cases, and it didn’t take Clio long to recall it.
“Was it an ambush? A van loaded with treasures that had been bequeathed to the British Museum was held up on Russell Square when it was on its way to deliver them to the museum.”
“Do you remember what they stole?”
Clio frowned. “A collection of gemstones? And wasn’t there something else, something obscure? A piece of fabric, maybe?”
“Yes. It was a very old fragment of embroidery that had been in possession of one family for over a century. Before it was shipped to the museum it was briefly examined by one of the curators, who thought it was likely to be part of an old bookbinding, probably the front cover. From the Middle Ages onward you can find examples of manuscripts and books that have fabric glued onto the outside of their covers. They’re pretty rare, because textiles are so vulnerable to damage, so we see very few of them. The curator’s notes are brief, because he was chiefly a gemstone specialist, but he described it as intricate and beautiful, depicting portraits of five women with foliatedecoration, some geometric patterning, and heraldry motifs that he didn’t identify. He guesstimated the date as sometime during the fifteenth century.”
Clio remembered more details about the case. “Wasn’t the embroidery damaged during the ambush?”
“A piece of it was ripped away. The van driver had been hit on the head, but he regained consciousness as the thief was taking the embroidery out of its storage box, and he lunged for it. He got hold of it, but of course it was fragile, and it ripped into two pieces. The thief ran off with the bigger bit and disappeared without a trace. The piece that the driver was left holding is just under a third of the original and is on display today in the Medieval Europe gallery at the British Museum. It’s known as the Everly Binding, because the bequest came from the Everly family, but, disappointingly, it’s not much to look at. To quote Lord Everly’s daughter, ‘That bastard thief took the interesting part.’”
Clio stared down the river, toward the glittering lights of the City of London, where many of their investigations started or finished. The work of the Art and Antiques Squad was mostly focused on fraud. They tracked money and artworks around the world, encountering extraordinary wealth belonging to powerful, secretive, and dangerous people, uncovering, if they were lucky and dogged enough, layers of deceit. The stakes were always high.
The embroidery seemed like small fry by comparison.
“Why are you interested in this?” Clio asked.
“Because I just heard that a woman called Eleanor Bruton died.”
