‘Mr Connolly?’ A female voice suddenly rang out.
Archie swivelled round to see a short woman striding towards him purposefully, her lips shining in the gloom.
‘Yeah?’
‘Hannah Key.’ She thrust out her arm and grasped his hand firmly. ‘I’m the curator here.’
‘Nice to put a face to the voice,’ said Archie.
She was much younger and prettier than he had guessed from their phone conversation a few days ago, with a pale oval face and large, inky eyes that reminded him of a Vermeer painting. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was fixed in place with an elastic band, suggesting she was more concerned with the immediate practicalities of keeping her hair out of her eyes than she was with looking good. This impression was further confirmed by her simple blue dress, complete lack of jewellery and makeup, and the unsightly chips in the pearl varnish along the edges of her nails. What struck Archie most though were her shoes, which were new, clearly expensive and a startling shade of emerald green. Perhaps, he speculated, these revealed a rather more impulsive and indulgent character than the severe and forbidding persona she projected at work.
Then again, Archie knew he wasn’t without his contradictions either. His accent, for example, straddled a broad social divide, occasionally hinting at a wholesome middle-class education but more often suggesting a rough apprenticeship amidst the traders who operated at the sharp end of the Bermondsey and Portobello antiques markets. And while he wore an elegant handmade suit and bright Hermès tie that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Pall Mall club, his gold identity bracelet, square-shouldered physique and closely cropped blond hair suggested a journeyman boxer of some sort.
In a country that invested so much meaning in external markers of social class, he knew that people often struggled to reconcile these seemingly conflicting signs. Some even questioned whether this was, in fact, deliberate. Archie chose not to elaborate. He’d always found it paid to keep people guessing.
‘Not everyone who works in a museum is an antique,’ she remarked wryly, seemingly reading his thoughts. ‘Some of us even have a social life.’
‘Not many.’ Archie grinned. ‘At least not that I’ve seen over the years.’
‘Maybe things have changed since you got started?’
‘I’m forty-five. That’s thirty five years in the art game and counting,’ he said with a smile. ‘Everything’s changed since I got started.’
‘By art game you mean museum security?’
He paused before answering. Sometimes he had to remind himself that Tom and he were running a legitimate business. Museum security was certainly not how he would have described his years as a fence, although it was probably the best training he could ever have received for what he was doing now.
‘One way or another.’ He nodded. ‘Never been here before, though.’
‘So you said on the phone.’ She adopted a slightly disapproving tone.
‘Nice gaff. Perhaps you could show me round?’ he ventured. She wasn’t really his type, but there was no harm in chancing his hand.
‘Perhaps we should finish up here first,’ she replied curtly.
‘What’s worth seeing?’ She hadn’t said no. That was pretty much a green light as far as Archie was concerned.
‘Everything. But most people come for the paintings in the formal rooms on the first floor.’
‘Most people including your thieves?’
‘Thief, not thieves,’ she corrected him. ‘And no, he didn’t come for them. In fact that’s what’s most strange about this whole thing.’
She steered Archie over to a large rectangular room on the left side of the house that looked out on to a small walled garden.
‘This room contains some of the gifts bestowed on Wellington after Waterloo,’ she announced proudly. ‘The Waterloo Shield. His twelve Field Marshal batons. The Portuguese dinner service.’
She indicated the mahogany display cases that lined the walls, each brimming with porcelain, gold and silver and decorated, wherever space allowed, with swooping copperplate inscriptions extolling Wellington’s brilliance and the eternal gratitude of the piece’s donor.
Archie’s attention, however, was immediately drawn to the two-tier glass-sided cabinet positioned at the centre of the room. Dominating the space like a small boat, the lower level was filled with decorated plates while the upper level appeared to contain a twenty-foot-long scale model of an Egyptian temple complex, complete with gateways, seated figures, obelisks, three separate temple buildings and sixteen sets of matching sacred rams.
‘What’s that?’ It didn’t happen that often anymore, but he was impressed.
‘The Sèvres Egyptian dinner service,’ she explained. Archie noted how the cadence of her voice quickened whenever she spoke about any of the exhibits. ‘One of two sets made to commemorate Napoleon’s successful invasion of Egypt in 1798. Each plate shows a different archaeological site, while the centrepiece is made from biscuit porcelain and modelled on the temples of Luxor, Karnak, Dendera and Edfu. This particular example was a gift from the Emperor to the Empress Josephine after their divorce, although she rejected it. It was eventually gifted to Wellington by the newly restored King of France.’
‘And this is what your villain wanted? The centrepiece. Or part of it at least.’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed, her voice betraying her surprise. ‘How did you know…?’
‘This glass is new,’ Archie explained, pointing at the cracked varnish where an old pane had been removed and a new one inserted. ‘And someone has tried to pick the lock.’ He ran his finger across the small scratches at the edges of one of the cabinet’s brass locks.
‘Tried and failed. That’s why he smashed the glass.’
‘When was this?’
‘March thirtieth, so a couple of weeks ago now. One of the guards disturbed him before he could take anything. They chased him outside, but he had a car waiting.’
‘It don’t make no sense,’ Archie said with a frown, reasoning with himself as much as anyone. ‘The most he could have got away with would have been a couple of pieces. And what would they have been worth? A couple of grand, tops.’
‘Exactly. Any one of the swords or batons would have been worth a lot more.’
‘And been easier to flog,’ Archie added. ‘He certainly doesn’t sound like a pro.’
‘To be honest, I don’t care who he is,’ she retorted. ‘All I want to know is how we make sure nothing like this happens again.’
‘The bad news is you can’t,’ Archie said with a sigh. ‘Not for certain. But there are some things you can do to even the odds. Upgrade the locks, install security glass in all the cases, re-configure the patrol cycles, that sort of thing. Anything more will cost you. If you’re interested, I’ll pull something together laying the options out. Maybe we could run through them over dinner?’
‘Do you think there’s any chance he’ll try again?’ she persisted, ignoring his suggestion.
‘Normally I’d say no,’ Archie said with a shrug. ‘But this guy seems to be making it up as he goes along. It might be worth watching out for him, just in case.’
‘The problem is we don’t know what he looks like,’ she said. ‘The guard only saw the back of his head.’
‘What about the cameras outside?’
‘He had his head lowered in every