Jade Monkey

The Charnwood museum looked just as impressive by day as it did in the glare of lights the night I first arrived. But its gothic air seemed slightly out of place in daylight, the shadows nighttime lent it had hinted at the mysteries of history, forgotten things long hidden. By day all its secrets were caged behind glass and their mystery explained away by neat little plaques.

Heavy afternoon sunshine filtered in to the museum lobby through tall, narrow windows. Children and parents stood in two loud lines waiting to speak with one of a matched pair of smartly dressed women in front of old fashioned tills.

I waited in line at the counter, my eyes lost in the decoration of the lobby, a fan made of shining medieval broadswords with time dulled blades, a few pieces of the old town walls and a mock suit of roman armour. The queue thinned slowly as my memory started picking out details of my first visit here, the goons had been alert, waiting for something to happen, the sound of falling chains, the smell of gun smoke.

I awoke from my reverie and asked the stern looking women behind the counter for directions to the errant Miss Ferguson. Unfortunately Miss Ferguson was Not Here today as she was Unwell, but if I could leave a name and number a meeting would be arranged at the First Opportunity. I shook my head in a non-committal way, thanked her and paid for a ticket.

The museum bustled with people, the present crowding around the past, drinking it in. I gave most of the exhibits a cursory glance, a collection of roman broaches cleaned and pinned down dead in exhibition cases, black and white photographs of the old Charnwood forest swamped in explanations of boundary lines and figures. Slowly, carefully, I retraced my steps. I waited for a mother to marshal her two sons and march them on to the next exhibit before slipping through a side door marked ‘Staff Only’ to return to the scene of the crime.

I walked through the corridors towards where I remembered the storeroom to be, pausing only to take off my hat and coat and pick up some paperwork left on a small table. One of the powers of paperwork is invisibility. If you’re carrying some in an office and look like you know where you’re going, no one questions that you should be there. I walked past the room where the mayor was murdered, the heavy oak door criss-crossed with police tape. I checked down the corridor, gingerly pulled on a glove and pushed lightly against the door. Locked. Away in the distance another door closed and footsteps echoed down the corridor. I slid my gloved hand underneath my folded coat and carried on to the storeroom.

History piled high in crates and boxes stood in orderly rows, some crates open baring the antiquities of the ancient world to the warm air. The place was deserted and the packing crate that I’d flown in to Loughborough was gone. But the small truck that I’d arrived in was parked in front of a heavy steel slide door that made up one wall. It took me a few seconds to find the wire that linked it to an alarm, no repairs to the wire, so it hadn’t been cut. The small windows near the ceiling were heavily barred. This place was a fortress. A crowbar was left negligently against a row of shelves. I shook my head, a fortress where they left you a means of transportation and had an alarm a child could circumvent. Scary Anthony mustn’t have had a difficult time taking the Jade, it was just surprising that he had left the museum without taking anything else. I frowned as that thought took hold, had he taken anything else? I needed to talk to Miss Ferguson.

I took me a few moments more to find what I was looking for, a small office next to the door that smelt of oil and old paper. Dispatch logs lay strewn across a small desk, and bunches of keys hung on a rickety wooden rack. Shaking my head I lifted the keys labelled office, and left.

I slipped back into the murder room easily. It seemed much as it had been, a second door at the far end, the big mahogany desk. But some things had changed. I walked over to the small outline in masking tape on the floor, the brown red dried blood stood out clearly in the patterned carpet. The police had found the bullet, the edges of the bullet hole showed clearly the signs of the forceps they had used to pull it out. The room was large, probably of someone important. There was something wrong here, I turned over an explanation or two in my head. Perhaps there had been extra security that the gang couldn’t circumvent and they’d needed the Mayor? Perhaps he was supposed to leave with them as a hostage?

I looked the desk over quickly, but it was a photograph on the wall that caught my attention. A small framed print of the mayor and a second man with Miss Mills and Miss Michelle standing either side of them on the museum steps. The legend ‘Benefactors of Charnwood Museum and the Curator’ ran below it. The Museums curator? He had tousled light brown hair and a wide smile; it looked like he would be more at home on a sports pitch than in a museum. In fact both he and the mayor were smiling. Friends perhaps? I needed to find out more. I shook myself; I’d been here too long and being discovered back at the murder scene would be very uncomfortable. I left quickly, taking care to lock the door behind me.

I ghosted past the busy workshops, the offices and the clack of typewriters, back in to the museum. The Police had thought it strange that the Mayor hadn’t had his bodyguard with him, Miss Mills had reminded me about it this morning, and now I needed to know more about the museums curator too. Could the mayor have been waiting for him in his office? I left Pete’s number with the lady at the desk and walked back out into the present.