Episode 12 - Bottles and Dostoevsky

Thursday

Gary marched a puzzlingly unwilling Sloane to the excavation site at the priory. After it became clear that Sloane had been telling the truth about the smashed bottle, however farfetched it had seemed, he rang Chris and asked him to turn out and examine the spot. Sloane hung around looking agitated. His restiveness did not escape Gary's notice.

Uneasy about what seemed to be an improbable story, Gary dragged his fingers along the dry stone wall that had concealed the bottle. Why had that wall of the cavern not been examined more closely?

The bottle had been more or less hidden, plastered in with some kind of mortar.

Sloane stood back, leaning miserably against a priory wall. Gary realized that the mortar was still moist. He rescued a second bottle plastered into the wall before it could drop out and smash. It was a modern wine bottle.

“It must be some kind of prank,” said Gary, holding up the bottle.

Sloane averted his eyes. He did not want to look.

“We’d better not try to open it before Chris has taped it for fingerprints, Sloane. If it’s a recent addition to the wall, they will be visible.”

Sloane inhaled audibly.

“Will they?” he gasped.

Gary decided to call his bluff.

***

“You hid the bottles, didn’t you, Sloane?” he said and Sloane shrank. “Why the blazes did you do that and when?”

Sloane stood rooted to the spot.

“Shall I tell you why, Mr Sloane?” Gary said in time for Chris and Ned to hear his words.

“You wanted to make a splash with your archaeological project, didn’t you?”

“So finding the church ornaments was not going to be enough, was it?” said Chris, stepping forward. He had found Sloane’s behaviour odd from the start.

“You may not know that cement can take day or two to harden, especially if it was too soft in the first place and the air circulation was poor, which can be assumed since bottles were pushed between sandstone that had been chiselled away to make room,” said Gary. “You worked very hard, Mr Sloane. I’m surprised no one saw you.”

 “Where did you really find the parchments Gary mentioned on the phone?” said Chris.

Sloane’s little game was up and he knew it.

“Erm….In the crypt last year,” he improvised. “They were in a metal box.”

“Were they now?” said Gary. “Isn’t that where you went over every inch with a fine toothcomb, Chris?”

“Is it?” gasped Sloane.

“Where is the box now?” Ned asked. He had started his job at HQ after the crypt had been part of a previous crime case.

“If that is all true, do you really think you have a right to go mucking about with historical finds, Mr Sloane?” said Chris.

“But it’s all a fairy-tale, isn’t it?” said Gary.

“I f-f-found’ the first bottle and I would have ‘f-f-found’ the second one in a day or two,” said Sloane. “I did not want to come here again so soon.”

“And presumably you hammered room for them and stuck them in between the stones last night, didn’t you?” said Gary.

“It would have been more believable if your assistant had found the parchments,” said Ned, who had gathered up all the broken glass in a plastic bag. 

“Al couldn’t come,” said Sloane.

“I suppose you planned to become famous without him anyway,” said Gary.

“I’m writing a book on archaeological discoveries,” said Sloane.

"You really should have stuck with Egyptian relics," said Gary. "Or had a go at the Elgin Marbles. They are at least genuine even if they were stolen at the time. What about this second bottle, Ned? Can we open it now?”

Ned had taken photographs of the site and the bottle for the forensic report.

“If you want to, you can go ahead and smash it,” he said. “I bought one just like it at the supermarket the other day, only mine had white wine in it and the usual labels stuck on. This one has been prepared for its mission; you can see that from the traces of glue where the labels were stuck on. Very inventive, Mr Sloane.”

”I only decided what to do last night,” said Sloane in self-defence. He had obviously failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

“You’re quite a joker, aren’t you?” said Gary. “I’ll take the documents home in their supermarket wine bottle to show Cleo. Will that be OK, Chris?”

“We’ll come with you,” said Chris.

“I could use a coffee,” said Ned.

“The scrolls are genuine,” shouted Sloane.

“You don’t give up easily, do you?” said Gary.

“That’s how fakes work, of course. If they don’t look genuine they don’t stand a chance,” said Ned. “Presumably, one bottle was not big enough for 4 documents, so you had to use two. Am I right, Mr Sloane?”

“And some forgers really believe in what they are doing – for the benefit of humanity dot dot dot” 

Chris continued.

"Where was your new girlfriend last night, Sloane?" Gary could not resist asking.

“Did you drink the wine or pour it down the sink, Mr Sloane?” said Chris.

The absurdity of Sloane's plan was obvious to them all, including Sloane.

“What a waste of good wine,” said Gary. “I hope my wife can see the funny side, Sloane.”

***

Back at the cottage, Ned put the ‘found’ bottle on the dining table.

“More vellum?” said Cleo. “Awesome!”

“Tell Cleo how the bottles came to be in that pile of stones, Sloane,” said Gary.

Sloane confessed in so many words.

“This is a joke, isn’t it?” said Cleo.

“I only wanted to help my book along,” said Sloane.

Anyone but Cleo would have been furious, but as Gary had anticipated, Cleo burst out laughing.

“I’m not often taken for a ride,” she said. “But you managed it, Mr Sloane. I should congratulate you.”

With those words she fetched a bottle of white wine and put it on the table next to the identical ‘found’ bottle. Then she put the ‘found’ bottle into a cotton shopping bag and smashed it energetically, causing Sloane to wince and the others to be highly amused at Cleo’s way of letting off steam. She then drew out the documents.

“That was taking a risk,” said Chris. “I would not have done it that way.”

“No problem, Chris. You haven’t seen the other documents yet. They are quite clever, but also forgeries,” said Cleo. “Am I right, Sloane?”

Sloane remained silent.

“I wanted to mention it, but had not received the information I needed from Chicago.”

“Does that mean you were suspicious from the start?” said Ned.

“I was born suspicious,” said Cleo, “but I must admit that Sloane had me for a moment.”

“So how the hell did he manage to fool me?” said Gary.

“Ask him what his main hobby could be apart from archaeology,” said Cleo.

“Well, Sloane, what is Cleo getting at?” said Gary.

“C-c-c-calligraphy. Speciality Cyrillic letters,” he said, his eyes shining as he traced the curves of one in the air.

“But the vellum,” said Ned, deciding that Sloane was a chump. “No one uses that now.”

“Calligraphers do,” said Cleo. “I did some research. It’s still made out of calfskin and supplied to calligraphers for very special documents.”

“I’ll get the coffee,” said Gary, thinking what a little rat Sloane was and how he had been made a fool of, if only briefly.

“You’ll be able to analyse the ink, Chris. It’ll be acrylic, I’m sure. Indian ink fades and Sloane did not want that to happen too soon, did you, Sloane?” said Cleo.

“This is all so far-fetched that it has to be true,” said Chris. “So let’s look at these fakes, shall we?”

“I’ll get some hot milk and then we’ll talk about the foreign message in the bottle with the Cyrillic quotes,” said Cleo. “The CEERES, that’s the language department in Chicago, will have identified and translated it and sent it back by now. The joke is really on me, you guys.”

“What triggered that research off, Cleo?” said Chris.

“I’m wondering about that, too,” said Gary.

“It was that list of monks on one of the documents,” said Cleo. “When I was researching the ghost tours ages ago, I looked for as much information as possible and noted down exactly what was said about the monks who were still at the priory until that stranger arrived, though to be honest I was far from sure that any of it was factual. I knew that Sloane had also looked at those documents and it was too much of a coincidence that the list of monks on his vellum was identical to the one I saved on my laptop for future reference.”

“But what about the stranger’s account in a foreign language?” said Gary. “That doesn’t really exist, does it?”

“I never found such a document and still think it could be a myth. I decided that if I sent a copy to my colleagues in Chicago they would recognize it as a quote or quotes from somewhere. Let’s take a look. I tipped on Dostoevsky.”

“Why?”

“Instinct,” said Cleo.

“Awesome!” said Ned.

“Pretty ironic seeing that he wrote “Crime and Punishment,” said Gary and declaimed “To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”

I had to write that out 100 times at school was a punishment for some transgression or other and later I realized that it was a clue to what motivated crime, though it was totally inappropriate to set before a 15 year old.”

“I’m impressed,” said Cleo. “You can still quote it, so it has come in useful today.”

“What had you done at school?”

“I probably argued with the teacher, a nasty sod of a guy. As mean as hell and there to teach ethics. He had none and I told him so.”

***

When they had examined the quotes that Sloane had in fact painstakingly copied from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Chris commented that it sounded authentic to the situation; like a confession.

“It would fit in with the stranger theory,” said Cleo.

By now Cleo had opened up her laptop and was looking up Dostoevsky quotes.

“It this where you got them, Sloane?” she said, but Sloane was too mortified to pay attention.

“We’ll look at the mail from Chicago again, shall we?”

“But why go to all that trouble?” said Gary.

“Calligraphers are always looking for interesting images, aren’t they?” Cleo said, looking at Sloane in a way that made him squirm.

“You really are awesome, Cleo,” said Gary.

“I used Dostoevsky quotes in various essays. Sociology requires you to get into the minds of other sociologists, and his books are full of what Russia was like in the 19^th century. On that basis, I looked at that selection of quotes this morning and decided that I would have used Dostoyevsky quotes rather than Pushkin poetry, though he is quite concerned with death. The rest is coincidence.”

“I have a Russian soul,” said Sloane. “My mother was Russian. She read Dostoevsky to me when I was a child.”

“That’s not children’s literature!” said Cleo.

“It was mine, and writing those words made me breathe Dostoevsky all over again; I felt akin to what that stranger must have felt.”

“You are making this up as you go along, Mr Sloane,” said Gary.

“I doubt it,” said Cleo.

***

The e-mail from the CEERES language institute in Chicago confirmed what Cleo had said. The text on the document was indeed Dostoevsky and consisted of a compilation of quotes out of the Brothers Karamazov, starting off with ‘The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for’ and went on in that vein.

They all felt the power of those words, none more so than Sloane,

***

“You are a very creative forger,” said Chris.

“Kissed by the muse at our expense,” said Gary.

“It’s what I think the stranger would have written,” said Sloane in self-defence.

“But it’s a blatant forgery, Sloane,” said Gary. “You can’t possibly have thought you could get away with it, quite apart from when Dostoevsky lived.”

“Of course, the story about the stranger might only be a myth,” said Cleo. “We will never know, and nobody can produce forged documents to prove something you can’t prove.”

“You’d have to be gullible enough to believe that scientists would take any discovery at face value,” said Gary. “Isn’t that so, Sloane?”

“No way,” said Chris. “We would have examined everything and found out that the vellum and the ink are recent and the quotes nineteenth century, thanks to Cleo’s research.”

“What about the two new documents. What’s on them?” said Gary.

Cleo took a few minutes to peruse them.

“Unbelievable,” she said finally. “Seeing these documents would have confirmed that they are forged, for one of them is to the Pope in Rome, in modern English, not even in Latin, and he is supposed to have received it asking for help against Henry though it’s still here.”

“I admit that was not thought through,” said Sloane.

“Don’t you do Latin, Sloane?” said Gary.

Sloane did not answer.

“And the other document?”

“It’s a letter written in antiquated English, signed by the Pope and addressed to the townspeople thanking them for all they were doing for the priory. It pleads with them to look after the remaining monks.”

“The text is genuine,” said Sloane proudly, as if ‘borrowing’ it for a forgery was in order.

“Which Pope was that?” Ned asked.

“When Henry VIII was getting rid of the Roman Catholic institutions, Clement VII was on the papal throne,” Sloane expounded.

“What were you hoping to achieve, Sloane?” said Chris.

“I did not intend the scrolls to be found just yet,” said Sloane.

“Come off it,” said Ned. “You could expect that big cavity was to be filled in for safety reasons.”

“I would have found them somewhere else. My hand was forced.”

***

Gary reflected on the absurdity of the situation. Sloane was a fantasist. He had got himself into the excavation at the priory because he had read about the place in a book and believed he could get fame and make a fortune. The discovery of recently interred bones was not what he had in mind and that find had probably shocked him as much as it shocked everyone else. He was hoping for ecclesiastical ornaments  and they had – to everyone’s amazement – turned up, but in his absence, since he was more enthusiastic about getting into Joyce’s bed than waiting around in the dark.

***

As Gary understood it, the scrolls were to have been a sensational follow-up. The hastily prepared  bottles containing them were ‘found’ because Sloane had stopped believing the ornaments would be found because he had started believing in himself instead. His priority had shifted, but he wanted to get something out of his excavation after all that effort.

What bothered Gary most of all was that Sloane had not even waited to see if the ornaments really were in that hole. He had left the Gates brothers to their own devices. He must have organized the scrolls while Joyce was in school. He was desperate for some sort of success, so he was not relying on finding the ornaments, always assuming the guy was capable of any joined-up thinking, which Gary was starting to doubt.

***

“What are go going to do now,” Chris said, feeling sorry for Sloane. “Put him in an arrest cell?”

Sloane gasped.

“I’ve forgotten Joyce,” he announced with more emotion than the discovery of his duplicity had provoked. “I was to pick her up at 4.”

“Phone her!” said Gary. “We won’t keep you.”

“Aren’t you going to arrest me?”

“I’ll think about it,” said Gary. “You certainly deserve it.”

“In that case I’d better go and look for her.”

Sloane departed not knowing how he would explain his duplicity to Joyce, let alone his unpunctuality. Chris and Ned soon left with the forgeries.

***

The rest of Gary’s day was taken up with his children until they were all in  bed and their exhausted parents could enjoy their nightcap coffee sitting on the sofa in front of the crackling log fire.

***

“What really appals me is that I fell for his act.”

“So did I,” said Gary. “I should have put tabs on him from the start.”

“I think he’d planned it all well in advance, and based his scheme on those reports in the library. He probably thought of the scrolls as a back-up, since there was no evidence that the ornaments even existed,” said Cleo. “I expect he had a stock of vellum for his calligraphy long before the excavation plan. He must have written them before the dig. It takes ages to do that ornamental writing.”

“He may have wanted to exhibit them as finds from the dig site if nothing else turned up,” said Gary. “I don’t think it had occurred to him that such ‘finds’ would be scrutinized for authenticity.”

“I thought he was eccentric, but not dumb,” said Cleo,

“Only a twit would do what he did,” said Gary. “I find that amazingly awesome.”

“Definitely awesome. What can you charge him with?”

“I can’t think of anything a public prosecutor would not reject. He made fools of us. I can’t get him on that. Forgery is a crime, but in the end he didn’t fool anyone, so he could put it down to experimentation by a calligrapher; simply testing us yokels.”

“Could I sue him?” said Cleo. “I have a mind to. He took my money under false pretences.”

“Think back,” said Gary. “He never actually said he wanted your money. He told you he had a fund supporting him and later you even took him on as an agency employee, so any money he got from you could be interpreted as back payment.”

“But he lied to me. He told me he a fund for the dig.”

“And you deduced that that was a bluff and put him on your books!”

“So I did.”

“If you tried to get him on that, he would produce a fund from somewhere, Cleo. Forget it!”

“He has shaken my belief that I could tell if someone is faking. I put everything down to his eccentricity and wanted to help him! I wonder what Dorothy would say.”

“Don’t tell her anything that puts you down, Cleo. Sloane fooled all of us.”

“Awesome,” said Cleo.

“I wonder where he actually came from,” Gary mused.

“Does it matter?”

“He has a lot of criminal energy, Cleo. I’ll get Nigel to look around. He’s good at sniffing things out. Sloane may be repeating a previous action. One of those digs he went on might have been the poorer for his participation.”

“He probably got away with it, so used the same plan again. Maybe there’s list of ghost or treasure hunts after which the organizers discovered they’d been conned and reported it.”

2I think you’re over-estimating him, Cleo.”

“Just a thought. More coffee?”

“Bed,” said Gary, getting up to shake the embers and position the fire screen before pulling Cleo up from the sofa and slipping an arm round her waist.

“That’s escapism,” said Cleo.

“I don’t mind what you call it….”