Cassius Brown And The Nine Cauldrons

The paperwork occupied most of the table. The bronze, when Detective Sergeant Priya Desai finally brought it in, would have fitted inside one of the envelopes. Cassius Brown had been given a chair with a defective castor and a mug of tea bearing the Metropolitan Police crest. Both had apparently been issued as an expression of confidence in his discretion. He had been at the desk for twenty minutes, reading a succession of declarations that the object had belonged to people who were now conveniently dead, and he was beginning to wish somebody had offered him a biscuit. "How far back does this particular family go?" he asked. Desai looked up from the tablet balanced beside her elbow. "The Whitcombes?" "According to the last page, they owned it in 1934. According to the page before, it was acquired by a man named Edwin Farr in 1961. I can't find any point at which Farr gave it to a Whitcombe." "Perhaps he was generous." "Perhaps. He'd been dead for eleven years, though. That would make it unusually generous." She crossed to the filing cabinet, removed a blue folder and set it beside him. "We know about Farr. The person who supplied those documents apparently didn't." Cassius pushed his reading glasses higher. The folder contained photographs of a London showroom, screenshots from an online catalogue and a page of transactions with the amounts obscured. The showroom looked familiar: polished furniture, carefully isolated pools of light, small bronzes set on pale plinths. The descriptions attached to the objects were generous with claims about distinguished owners and considerably less informative about where anything had originally been found. "What are you hoping I can tell you?" "Whether the thing we've seized is old." "That's a rather large question." "I did try asking the first man we approached whether it was ancient. He told me it required a programme of comparative archaeometallurgical investigation and then sent us a fee proposal that would have paid for my kitchen." "What sort of kitchen?" "A very ordinary kitchen." "Then he was probably being reasonable." Desai's smile lasted just long enough to show she had heard the joke. She gathered two of the folders into a neater stack. "I need a view on whether this is worth treating as a genuine antiquity. The seller's claiming it's early Chinese, possibly royal, and that the records establish lawful ownership going back well before modern export controls. None of those records looks particularly healthy." "Who seized it?" "We did, with assistance from Border Force. It's part of a larger enquiry. There are people I can't discuss with you, and a few I shouldn't discuss with you even though I'd enjoy it." She opened the door for a civilian exhibits officer, who carried a shallow grey tray with both hands. Inside a clear lidded box lay a dark green piece of metal, cushioned by inert foam. A printed number was fixed to the lid. The officer checked the label against Desai's form, listened while she read the number back, and left them after making certain the seal was intact. The business of receiving evidence was reassuringly dull. Cassius had attended excavations at which a quarter of an hour could be spent establishing which person had moved a bag of soil two metres, only for someone else to complain about the handwriting on the tag. It was exactly the sort of dullness on which later conclusions depended. Desai took the lid off the outer tray but left the evidence container sealed. "There. That's our famous object." Cassius drew his chair closer to the table, stopping short of the numbered box. At first glance it resembled a damaged plate fitting. The surviving piece was perhaps eleven centimetres long, curved slightly along one edge and thicker at one end, where the metal rose into what might once have been a ridge or socket. Much of its surface was occupied by green and brown corrosion, though a series of fine raised lines remained visible beneath it. On one face were several characters, incomplete at the break, their strokes softened by age or deliberate treatment. "You were told it's imperial?" he asked. "That's how it was advertised." "China didn't have an emperor until the Qin unification. This looks as if it's supposed to be older." "So the seller used the wrong word?" "Sellers use the wrong words all the time. Sometimes because they don't know better. Sometimes because 'royal administrative bronze, possibly late Warring States' doesn't work terribly well on an auction listing." She gave him a look over the rim of her mug. "You do know how to make things sound less exciting." "It's been an important professional skill." He asked for photographs of the reverse and a close view of the broken edge. Desai found them on the tablet. One end bore a rounded projection interrupted by two small holes. The underside had a recessed channel, though corrosion concealed its depth. It was clearly part of something larger, but the obvious comparisons were too numerous to be useful. Tally, fitting, attachment, fragment of an inscribed plaque. It might have belonged to an object intended to be matched with another, or secured to a box, or carried by an authorised messenger. Each possibility required a different history. "Was it recovered like this?" "As far as we know. Wrapped in a cloth sleeve inside a box of decorative metalwork. It came in with four other objects, none of which appears to be what the invoices say it is." "And the corrosion?" "That is a question for you." "Not yet. I'd need it examined properly. The visible surface could tell us something, but people have been faking patina for centuries, and photographs can make a convincing case for almost anything." Cassius reached for the folder again. The sheet at the front bore a heading in a formal typeface: ASHBOURNE FAMILY COLLECTION, PRIVATE CATALOGUE, 1938. Below it was a blurred photograph of a bronze fragment, followed by a description that called its inscription a proclamation of a Chinese ruler. A later letter, supposedly written by an antiquities dealer in the 1950s, referred to the same catalogue number and confirmed the piece had never been outside Britain since the interwar years. The photograph bothered him more than the prose. A narrow crack showed on the pictured object's lower edge, while the background and the arrangement of light suggested a studio image of much more recent date. That could be innocent; reproductions were often pasted into retrospective catalogues. But the paper itself had been represented as original. "Do you have the physical documents?" "Most of them. A few exist only as scans. Why?" "I'd like to see the reverse of this catalogue leaf, and whatever is supposed to have held the catalogue together. The image appears to have been taken on a flat, even light source. There are reasons it might be more recent than 1938." "Is that a nice way of saying somebody's made it up?" "It's a way of saying I haven't seen the paper." Desai made a note. He had given evidence often enough to know how a qualified observation could grow inconveniently definite by the time counsel repeated it in court. If she wanted an answer he could defend, he would have to leave some of her questions unanswered for now. "There's another thing," she said. "The sale was halted before completion. The buyer claims not to know where it came from. The intermediary says she was acting for a collector based overseas. And the collector has disappeared from every address we've been given." "That's either a very bad day in the antiques business or a fairly normal one." "I was hoping you'd know which." Cassius studied the fragment again. Its inscription had the tight, regular look of characters planned in the mould rather than cut into the finished metal. A modern maker could reproduce that, particularly from a good rubbing. The uneven corrosion along the fractured edge was more interesting, though still insufficient to establish antiquity. He had seen ingenious forgeries with convincing burial accretions and crude genuine objects ruined by enthusiastic restoration. Neither age nor dishonesty reliably announced itself. "Do you know what it says?" Desai asked. "No. I can recognise some broad script traditions, but this needs someone who works with the regional inscriptions of the period. Particularly if we're to distinguish an official formula from somebody copying a sequence of characters they don't understand." "You can't give us a translation?" "I can give you an unreliable one. That seems less helpful." Desai laughed before she could help it, then glanced at the call vibrating across her phone. She silenced it and pushed the handset beneath the folder. She returned to the paperwork. "We have a specialist request going through our Chinese counterparts," she said. "I wanted an independent archaeological opinion before I sent them the seller's description and nothing else." "Send the photographs first. Keep the claims separate. Whoever examines it shouldn't have to spend their first hour unlearning the catalogue." "That's what we thought." "Then you don't need me for that part." "I need you to tell me what the catalogue is pretending to be." They spent another hour at the table. Desai worked through the ownership statements while Cassius drew a provisional family tree of the alleged collectors on A4 paper. The story had clearly been assembled backwards. Once the object had been given a respectable pre-1970 owner, various letters and inventories had been manufactured to connect that person to every subsequent dealer. Some documents were careful about dates but inattentive to the relationships between the people involved. One identified a son as executor of his father's estate three years before the father's death. Another gave two different descriptions of the fragment's dimensions, a change of more than two centimetres that no photograph could explain. Cassius circled the earlier measurement, then put his pencil down. "That's the trouble with making up a long history," Cassius said. "You have to make everybody in it behave like they occupied the same world." Desai glanced at his untidy diagram. "You could say the same about half our witness statements." "Yes, but people are much better at being inconsistent than the documents written on their behalf." By lunchtime the evidence box had gone back to secure storage. Desai walked him to the lifts, carrying the drawings and his provisional notes in a transparent wallet. The corridor smelled of cleaning solution, and somebody had left a broken umbrella against the waste bin. Desai shifted the wallet to one hand so she could press the lift button. "How long for a report?" she asked. "A few days. I'll want to check the collection names and some of the cataloguing language. And I'd like a conservator's assessment of the bronze before I say anything about the material itself." "Can you at least tell me your working view?" "The provenance has been fabricated. Quite badly in places. As for the object, somebody wants us to believe it's an ancient administrative bronze. I'm not persuaded yet." "Because the seller's lying?" He considered that. "Partly. That's an unfair shortcut, I know. A stolen genuine object will come with lies attached just as readily as a forgery." Desai put her folder under one arm and pressed the lift button. "Good. That's the sort of sentence I can put in a report without my barrister having a nervous breakdown." On the pavement outside, Cassius checked his messages and discovered that an invitation to review an excavation report had acquired three increasingly apologetic follow-ups. He called the editor, who answered from what sounded like a kitchen containing either young children or exceptionally argumentative parrots. He promised to look at the proofs that evening and found himself discussing a misplaced figure caption for almost ten minutes. His phone rang again halfway to the station. Desai had apparently reached the point of trying to make sense of his handwritten diagram. "You left your diagram," she said. "You said you wanted it." "I want it. I also want to know what the arrows mean. There's one pointing from a man who died in 1950 to a woman whose date of birth you've written as 1962." "That one means he's a remarkably energetic posthumous collector." "I'll label it that, shall I?" "Perhaps leave the labelling to me." She asked him to email a cleaner version, then ended the call before he could promise. Cassius stopped at a small café for a sandwich and opened the photographs again while he waited for it. The inscription enlarged badly on his phone. Too much of it was missing, and the remaining strokes could be read in several ways. He put the phone away when his food arrived. There were more than enough people in Britain who could sell a convincing old bronze to somebody determined to buy a story. He had no intention of becoming the latest person to help them do it.