The Cross

Chapter Fifteen

Oxford

A cold, thin morning drizzle was falling over the city centre as Chloe Dempsey got off the Oxford Park and Ride bus, pulled her coat collar up around her ears and set off at a brisk walk towards the museum where her father worked. In the duffel bag over her shoulder were the broken stone fragments she’d found, each piece carefully bundled up in tissue and bubble-wrap.

As the church-like facade of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on South Parks Road came into view, Chloe smiled to herself. One of the benefits of having taken the plunge and come to study in England was that she could zap down the motorway to see her dad as often as she wanted. She treasured the chance to catch up on the lost years every bit as much as he did. He was a little fatter now, a little greyer, possibly a little scattier, but still the same old dad she’d loved and missed. The quirk that had most exasperated her mom was the thing that most endeared him to Chloe — the way he could just lose himself in his work, passionately absorbed for hours on end. Sometimes Chloe thought that if nobody ever disturbed him, dear old Dad could sit staring at some historic relic until he died of hunger.

The inevitable divorce had come when Chloe had been fourteen. It still hurt her, the way her mother had treated him back then. The kindly, gentle New Jersey academic had never been quite ambitious enough for his wife; dusty, half-forgotten books held infinitely more appeal for Professor Emeritus Matt Dempsey than aspiring to membership of the country club.

That was where Chloe’s mother had first met Bernie Silberman, the millionaire cosmetic dentist. Within six months she’d packed her bags, moved out of the cluttered, rambling old family home and traded the life of a professor’s wife for the glamour of Bernie’s high-society circles and the house in the Hamptons, dragging the reluctant teenage Chloe with her.

The sudden split had plunged Matt Dempsey into a bout of depression that had cost him his job and, if he’d carried on drinking the way he had been in those days, almost his life. It was his passion for history, the thing that had driven his ex-wife so crazy, that had saved him. When Chloe was sixteen, her father had cleaned himself up and taken the radical step of emigrating to England and settling in Oxford. With his academic record he’d had no problem in getting a job as curator at the prestigious Pitt Rivers Museum, the home of one of Britain’s most extensive and valuable collections of antiquities from across the world.

Chloe had detested living with her mom and Bernie, and it would have been easy for her to slip into a disaffected teen rebel rut — not that either of them would have noticed. Instead, she’d poured her angst and frustration into her school work, excelling in academic subjects but especially at sports. When she’d announced that she’d gained a place at the University of Bedfordshire in England to take a degree in Sports Studies, her mother — whose life now orbited solely around her teeth, her tan, her wardrobe and her golfing buddies — had barely batted a Botoxed eyelid.

Entering the Natural History Museum, Chloe took the familiar path across the ground floor to the Pitt Rivers entrance on the far wall. Walking into the small, cluttered, somewhat musty museum was like stepping back into the past. Chloe skirted around the display cabinets filled with ancient model ships and the giant carved totem pole and headed towards the workshops and staff section. Her father could usually be found at his desk, utterly absorbed in some old artifact. Today it was a sheaf of yellowed documents in a forgotten language Chloe wasn’t even going to try to identify. As ever, the small office was a crazy clutter, papers everywhere, bookshelves threatening to split from the sheer weight of the volumes stuffed into and piled on top of them, more books piled on chairs, on the floor.

‘Hi, Dad.’

‘It’s great to see you again.’ Matt Dempsey rose up quickly to hug her, then started clearing a space for her to sit down. ‘When did you get back from Romania?’

‘Just last night.’

‘I was about to make a coffee. Want one?’

‘From your third-century BC percolator? Love one.’

‘How’s the course?’ he asked as he fiddled with the battered machine.

‘Loving it. Did I tell you — I’m starting training for next year’s national inter-college pentathlon championships?’

‘Ah, the noble pentathlon, sport of the mythological Jason, lauded by Aristotle. The magnificent discus of Perseus. The venerable art of wrestling.’ Matt paused. ‘Though that sounds a little rough, I have to say. Are you sure—’

She laughed. ‘Things have moved on a little since Ancient Greece, Dad. They dropped the wrestling, discus and javelin centuries ago. Nowadays we do cross-country running, swimming, horse-riding, fencing and shooting.’

Matt’s face fell. ‘They let you handle firearms?’

‘Just an air pistol.’

‘Honey, why did it have to be guns? Guns never did any good in this world. History tells us that.’

Chloe sighed. ‘If you saw it, you’d see it’s just a competition target pistol. Nothing too dangerous, I promise. Unless you happen to be a flimsy paper target. Then you’re in real trouble, especially when I’m on the other end. I’ll show it to you sometime.’

‘I just don’t want you getting hurt.’

‘Don’t sweat it, Dad.’

He handed her a coffee. ‘Anyway. Sounds like you’re having a great time. No regrets, then.’

‘About coming over here to study? Not a shred of a regret. And I get to come here and see you, don’t I?’

Matt smiled. ‘Have you heard from your mother recently?’

‘Not since the last facelift.’

He grimaced. ‘Heavens. How many is that now?’

‘Put it this way, I think Bernie started making secret calls to his accountant. She keeps on like this, she’ll bankrupt the sonofabitch. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.’ Chloe started unzipping her bag. ‘Listen, Dad, I actually came over here specially to bring you something I found in Romania. Here it is. It’s kind of in pieces, but I think you’ll find it interesting.’

Her father was already carefully unwrapping the fragments. He cleared a space on the desk, angled a bright lamp and examined them closely as Chloe quickly described how she’d stumbled over them at the foot of the mountain. ‘What they are,’ she said, ‘I have no idea.’

Matt started arranging the stone pieces into different patterns on his desk. ‘Well, they obviously all belong to the same object. Fascinating. It’s old, that’s for sure. Very old.’

‘I figured, if anyone could make sense of it, it’d be you.’

‘I don’t know about that. It’ll take me some time to put it all together properly. But I’d hazard a guess that this is a cross of some kind. Look at this fragment here. See how the crosspiece seems to join up with part of an outer circle? Typical of the Celtic style.’ He jumped up suddenly and went over to one of the crammed bookcases, gazed along a row of spines and plucked out a book. Chloe smiled as she watched him flicking eagerly through the pages. Hooked already, she thought.

‘Like this one,’ he said, turning the book round so she could see the drawing.

Chloe nodded. ‘Beautiful.’ She pointed at the pieces on the desk, running her fingertip along the faded inscriptions. ‘What about these markings? Rebecca thought they were some kind of ancient runes.’

‘Ancient carvings of a sort, certainly. Strictly speaking, all known examples of so-called “Celtic” runes were in fact either Scandinavian or Germanic in origin, so whether …’ His voice trailed off and he paused with a frown, stroking the cool, smooth, creamy stone with his fingertips. ‘As for the material it’s made from — it’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. A type of quartz, perhaps? Moonstone, maybe. No, moonstone doesn’t have these tiny coloured flecks. It’s something else.’

‘Well, it’s yours now, so you can take all the time you need.’

‘Really? Are you sure?’

‘I told you,’ she smiled. ‘I brought it back for you.’

‘That was very thoughtful of you,’ he said, looking touched. Before he could start getting all emotional on her, Chloe knocked back the last of her coffee and stood up.

‘I have a lecture after lunch. Should just make it if I hit the road now.’

‘I’m sorry to see you leave so soon.’

‘The hectic life of the ambitious young student,’ she laughed.

‘What are you doing the day after tomorrow? I could make us dinner, that meatball thing you like. You could stay overnight and drive back in the morning. Unless you have an early lecture.’

‘That’d be great. I’m going to be on my own anyway. Rebecca and Lindsey are going to some crappy gig.’

He beamed at her. ‘Then it’s a date.’

When she was gone, Matt Dempsey went over to his desk and spent the next hour piecing the strange stone fragments together. He’d been right — the object that gradually formed on his desk was a Celtic cross, probably the oldest example he’d ever seen. Thankfully it seemed as though Chloe had managed to find all the pieces. Their broken edges were sharp and fresh, not worn smooth with the passage of time, telling him that the cross had only very recently been damaged.

What a terrible shame, he thought. To have survived so long, only to be broken like that. Chloe had said she’d found it at the foot of a cliff, far below the battlements of an old abandoned castle: maybe it had fallen from there. Or been dropped. Matt was fully aware that, even today, there were self-appointed treasure hunters still ransacking every corner of Europe for items of historic value. This one had evidently — and perhaps literally — slipped through their fingers.

Matt rooted through a box of odd bits in the corner of the office until he found what he was looking for, some lengths of thin wire. With great care, he wrapped the wire around the reconstructed cross and twisted its ends together to form a cage-like casing that would hold the pieces firmly in place. Once it was reassembled, he used a digital caliper gauge to note its exact dimensions, and then spent another half hour making a careful, detailed sketch.

The more he studied the cross, the more fascinated he became. Nothing quite like it had ever come his way before. Those markings: what could they mean? He prided himself on his knowledge of ancient languages, but this defeated him. ‘Damn,’ he muttered, scanning his bookshelves. He could think of a couple of titles that might conceivably help him puzzle this mystery out, but they were at home.

He thought guiltily about the Etruscan vase restoration project that was going on across the hall, and of the arrangements for the party of Japanese historians who were arriving tomorrow. But his capable assistant Mrs Clark had all that under control, didn’t she? It was nothing he couldn’t leave until the morning, was it? Matt hesitated.

It was no use. He simply had to know more. He picked up the phone and told Janet Clark he was going home early. Then, after carefully packing the wired-together cross into a box of shredded paper along with the sketch he’d made of it, he hurried off to catch the bus.