Aage Nielsen opened the frosted glass door of his office.
“Thank you, Coatsworth,” he said to the sergeant who’d led me from the front desk. “That will be all.” His accent was thickly Scandinavian. The officer nodded and left as Nielsen extended his hand to me. “You are Mr Haye, I presume. I am Detective Sergeant Aage Nielsen.”
Nielsen’s grip was firm. He was a tall, lean man in his late fifties, with striking blue eyes and combed silver hair. I noticed that he seemed modestly dressed except for his shoes, which were good quality, and polished to a high sheen.
The detective’s office was immaculate. Half a dozen grey filing cabinets lined one wall, and his oak desk was clear except for a folder and a calendar thoroughly annotated in the same small hand as the back of his calling card. The windows onto Crawford Road were spotless on both sides. Even the floor was clean.
“Have a seat, sir,” Nielsen said, walking slowly to one of the windows. He stood at ease, military style, and looked out onto the street.
“It will be a hot night, won’t it?” said the detective vaguely. He had the foreigner’s tendency to use fuller, more formal turns of phrase.
“Yes …” I said. There was momentary silence. I hoped he wouldn’t mention Claude or the stolen jet wolf.
“Now, you are no doubt wondering why I’ve called you in here, sir.”
“I am, Mr Nielsen.”
The detective turned and looked at me. He said: “It is nothing to do with your good friend, Mr Claude Pownall, I assure you.”
Nielsen made it sound as though Claude was in some sort of trouble. I hesitated; what did he want with me, then? “So how can I help you, Mr Nielsen?”
“You work at St Matthew’s College, Mr Haye. You are an English History don.”
I was guarded. “Yes, I’m an Anglo-Saxon history specialist …”
“The fifth to eleventh centuries, is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you speak Latin, sir?”
“I can lecture in Latin if required.” I paused for a moment, conscious of my hasty overconfidence. “I’ve studied the language since I was eight, and it’s the language that much of the material relevant to my field is written in.”
“Very good. Please bear with me a moment, sir.”
The detective went to one of the filing cabinets and opened its bottom drawer. Painstakingly, he removed the hanging folders and put them in a neat pile on the floor. He then carefully took out a folded oilskin roughly two feet wide by two long. From his gentle treatment of the cloth, it appeared to me that there was something delicate inside. A familiar odour reached my nose: the stink of rotting parchment …
Nielsen spread the dark brown oilskin on his desk and waved his hand over it, once more looking at me directly with those brilliant eyes. “I have here some things written in Latin. Can you translate them into English for me?”
I went over for a quick look. There were seven or eight sheets of parchment, each about one and a half by two feet, covered in tiny writing. The script was still quite legible, and definitely Latin. Suddenly I felt much surer that my being here might not have anything to do with Claude.
“Yes, of course, Mr Nielsen,” I told him. “It’ll probably take a couple of hours, though.” Looking around the detective’s office, I noticed something else. “Those windows are pretty small, and the light here’s not good. Can you arrange a lamp for me, please?”
“You can use the interview room. It has very bright lights.”
“All right. And I’ll need some things from my office: my Latin dictionary, a couple of textbooks.”
Nielsen frowned, as though I’d overstepped a mark. “I have a Latin dictionary here. You are welcome to make use of it if you must.”
He took it from a shelf behind him. It was appallingly basic, a beginner’s guide. How could I work with that? “I’ll at least need a better dictionary, sir -”
“I am sorry,” Nielsen interrupted, “there is simply no time. Please, let us go to the room. Whatever you can manage will be sufficient.” He wrapped the parchment again in the oilskin.
Suppressing considerable agitation, I left the room with him. What was the point of calling me in to translate something if I couldn’t even access a decent dictionary? And why wouldn’t he properly explain the context of my summons?
We walked down the linoleum-tiled corridor, past the dozen other frosted doors that I had passed on my way from the front desk. They had names and titles painted on them in black. Detective Inspector Bernard Kraay … Superintendent M. K. Joyce … Motor Division … Armoury … The station was busy. Telephones rang shrilly, typewriters clacked, uniformed and non-uniformed policemen scurried back and forth with papers, folders, cups of tea. I smelled stale tobacco smoke, disinfectant and sweat.
Through an open door marked Operations, I glimpsed a wall-sized map of Allminstershire. The city looked as though it were a giant ink-splash, centred on the snaking River Moore, studded with numbered pins that I supposed marked scenes of interest to the police. There were few pins in the outer suburbs of the city, and fewer in its quiet hinterlands. The pins stopped altogether at the boundaries of the shire, as though my city were a cell of ugly crime, and our quarantining neighbours - Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey - were utopias of law-abiding men and women.
The interview room was bare except for a broad table and two hard-looking chairs. Nielsen peered out of the bank of windows that faced onto the corridor, as if ensuring we had not been followed, then drew some heavy blinds down across them. Above me a high wattage bulb burned fiercely.
“Is this bright enough for your work, Mr Haye?”
My eyes closed against the intense light.
“It’s bright enough for surgery, thank you, Mr Nielsen,” I replied, sitting down. Nielsen put paper, pencils and the oilskin in front of me and sat down opposite. “You know, I can easily work on this alone, Mr Nielsen, if you’ve got other work to do.”
“I would prefer to remain here and see to it that you are not disturbed, sir.”
Despite his perfect politeness, I felt annoyed with him again. If these documents were so important that he had to stand guard, why wouldn’t they warrant my being allowed a good dictionary? But I said nothing and opened the oilskin.
There were eight vellum sheets. Clearly, there were two distinct hands, which probably meant two separate documents. The first document - the neater of the two -comprised five sheets of smooth, cream-coloured calf-skin, once heavily folded into eighths, but now spread flat, one on top of the other. Most of the sheets’ edges were dark and brittle, flaking in some parts, but they were generally very well preserved, and I could tell from the undamaged sections of the documents that the vellum was of good quality.
The script had faded somewhat, but was still definitely legible, even along the folds. This was half-uncial calligraphy, where the “g”s resemble modern 5s, and the “b”s and “d”s are identical to those we use today. I perked up. An English half-uncial manuscript would probably date to no later than about 800 AD, smack-bang in the middle of my field.
I straightened the documents on the table, and started reading.
3
To his friend and lord, bishop Ecgwulf; Ohthere, priest, sends love and greetings.
My lord, I thought it best to relate to you the details of my escape from Barking. You need the truth from me, and not some liar such as Sigeheard. I will start at the beginning.
Before I joined the monastery, and was a