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“I understand your problem, Agent Coffey. The prisoner must be shown the value of respect. I’ll see to it personally.”
Chapter 8
On the morning appointed for opening the sealed Tomb of Senef, Nora arrived in Menzies’s capacious office to find him sitting in his usual wing chair, in conversation with a young man. They both rose as she came in.
“Nora,” he said. “This is Dr. Adrian Wicherly, the Egyptologist I mentioned to you. Adrian, this is Dr. Nora Kelly.”
Wicherly turned to her with a smile, a thatch of untidy brown hair the only eccentricity in his otherwise perfectly dressed and groomed person. At a glance, Nora took in the understated Savile Row suit, the fine wing tips, the club tie. Her sweep came to rest on an extraordinarily handsome face: dimpled cheeks, flashing blue eyes, and perfect white teeth. He was, she thought, no more than thirty.
“Delighted to meet you, Dr. Kelly,” he said in an elegant Oxbridge accent. He clasped her hand gently, blessing her with another dazzling smile.
“A pleasure. And please call me Nora.”
“Of course. Nora. Forgive my formality-my stuffy upbringing has left me rather hamstrung this side of the pond. I just want to say how smashing it is to be here, working on this project.”
Smashing. Nora suppressed a smile-Adrian Wicherly was almost a caricature of the dashing young Brit, of a type she didn’t think even existed outside P. G. Wodehouse novels.
“Adrian comes to us with some impressive credentials,” Menzies said. “D.Phil. from Oxford, directed the excavation of the tomb KV 42 in the Valley of the Kings, university professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, author of the monograph Pharaohs of the XX Dynasty.”
Nora looked at Wicherly with fresh respect. He was amazingly young for an archaeologist of such stature. “Very impressive.”
Wicherly put on a self-deprecating face. “A lot of academic rubbish, really.”
“It’s hardly that.” Menzies glanced at his watch. “We’re meeting someone from the Maintenance Department at ten. As I understand it, nobody knows quite precisely where the Tomb of Senef is anymore. The one certainty is that it was bricked up and has been inaccessible ever since. We’re going to have to break our way in.”
“How intriguing,” said Wicherly. “I feel rather like Howard Carter.”
They descended in an old brass elevator, which creaked and groaned its way to the basement. They emerged in the Maintenance Section and threaded a complex path through the machine shop and carpentry, at last arriving at the open door of a small office. Inside, a small man sat at a desk, poring over a thick press of blueprints. He rose as Menzies rapped on the door frame.
“I’d like to introduce you both to Mr. Seamus McCorkle,” said Menzies. “He probably knows more about the layout of the museum than anyone alive.”
“Which still isn’t saying much,” said McCorkle. He was an elvish man in his early fifties with a fine Celtic face and a high, whistling voice. He pronounced the final word mitch.
After completing the introductions, Menzies turned back to McCorkle. “Have you found our tomb?”
“I believe so.” McCorkle nodded at the slab of old blueprints. “It’s not easy, finding things in this old pile.”
“Why ever not?” Wicherly asked.
McCorkle began rolling up the top blueprint. “The museum consists of thirty-four interco
“But surely they couldn’t lose an entire Egyptian tomb!” said Wicherly.
McCorkle laughed. “That would be difficult, even for this museum. It’s finding the entrance that might be tricky. It was bricked up in 1935 when they built the co
“Lead the way,” said Menzies.
They set off along a puke-green corridor, past maintenance rooms and storage areas, through a heavily trafficked section of the basement. As they went along, McCorkle gave a ru
The storage areas gave way to laboratories, their shiny, stainless-steel doors in contrast to the dingy corridors, lit with caged lightbulbs and lined with rumbling steam pipes.
They passed through so many locked doors Nora lost count. Some were old and required keys, which McCorkle selected from a large ring. Other doors, part of the museum’s new security system, he opened by swiping a magnetic card. As they moved deeper into the fabric of the building, the corridors became progressively empty and silent.
“I daresay this place is as vast as the British Museum,” said Wicherly.
McCorkle snorted in contempt. “Bigger. Much bigger.”
They came to an ancient set of riveted metal doors, which McCorkle opened with a large iron key. Darkness yawned beyond. He hit a switch and illuminated a long, once-elegant corridor lined with dingy frescoes. Nora squinted: they were paintings of a New Mexico landscape, with mountains, deserts, and a multistoried Indian ruin she recognized as Taos Pueblo.
“Fremont Ellis,” said Menzies. “This was once the Hall of the Southwest. Shut down since the forties.”
“These are extraordinary,” said Nora.
“Indeed. And very valuable.”
“They’re rather in need of curation,” said Wicherly. “That’s a rather nasty stain, there.”
“It’s a question of money,” Menzies said. “If our count hadn’t stepped forward with the necessary grant, the Tomb of Senef would probably have been left to sleep for another seventy years.”
McCorkle opened another door, revealing another dim hall turned into storage, full of shelves covered with beautifully painted pots. Old oaken cabinets stood against the walls, fronted with rippled glass, revealing a profusion of dim artifacts.
“The Southwest collections,” McCorkle said.
“I had no idea,” said Nora, amazed. “These should be available for study.”
“As Adrian pointed out, they need to be curated first,” Menzies said. “Once again, a question of money.”
“It’s not only money,” McCorkle added, with a strange, pinched expression on his face.
Nora exchanged glances with Wicherly. “I’m sorry?” she asked.
Menzies cleared his throat. “I think what Seamus means is that the, ah, first Museum Beast killings happened in the vicinity of the Hall of the Southwest.”
In the silence that followed, Nora made a mental note to have a look at these collections later-preferably, in the company of a large group. Maybe she could write a grant to see them moved to updated storage.
Another door gave way to a smaller room, lined floor-to-ceiling with black metal drawers. Half hidden behind the drawers were ancient posters and a