Bone Gods

was relieved she was too tired to have to stop herself from crying, and that her mind was too cluttered to relive the touch of Jack’s hands against her bare skin. She curled up on the mattress, pulling the blankets over her head to shut out the daylight, and was asleep before she even realized she was falling.

CHAPTER 13
    Ollie met Pete at the freight entrance to the British Museum, and together they walked through the back hallways to the silent, dark exhibits. The head curator, boss of Carver’s boss, was a little woman named Matthews who giggled at everything Ollie said whether it was funny or not. She led them to Gerard Carver’s office, buried deep back in the maze of the museum not open to the public. It was a shabby little office that fit the shabby little man Carver had been in life. Pete shifted the journals and printouts around a bit, seeing if she could catch a glimpse of either of his other lives—fanatic witchfinder or sleazy necromancer—until Matthews cleared her throat and drew her bushy brows together.
    “Sorry,” Ollie told her. “Miss Caldecott sometimes forgets where she is.”
    “As I was telling you on the telephone,” Matthews said. “Now that we’ve examined the manifests Mr. Carver signed for more carefully, there are several glaring inconsistencies. It’s terrible. Really terrible. All of our employees pass a thorough background check.”
    “You think he was sellin’ the stuff?” Ollie said. Matthews put a hand to the collar of her fuzzy pink jumper, as if Ollie had asked what her sign was.
    “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, Chief Inspector. I don’t deal on the black market. I believe antiquities are for the world to appreciate, and they should be preserved.”
    “And nothing says preservation like hacking them off the side of the Pantheon, does it?” Pete said, shoving another stack of magazines just to take the piss.
    “The museum does a service for the entire world, ” Matthews snapped. “Our methods were not always sound but we take the greater good into consideration, and if Gerard was selling these items to private collectors, then he’s violated the most sacred trust a curator is given.”
    “It’s just Inspector,” Ollie injected. “I’m a DI. Can you account for what’s missing?”
    “Oh, yes.” Matthews brandished a printout as if she’d been challenged to a duel. “Here’s a complete list. Five items, mostly Babylonian funerary items. Nothing that was terribly valuable, which is how they were overlooked. Gerard signed them out for cleaning and simply never signed them back in.”
    Ollie skimmed the list and then handed it off to Pete. The manifests contained a few lines of description, a log of the object’s activity once it entered the museum, and who’d signed it out. “Idols?” she said.
    “Oh my, yes,” said Matthews. “The Babylonians in particular attached enormous importance to their idols. They believed their gods and heroes resided simultaneously in their stone and ethereal form. Great care was taken with them.”
    Pete pointed to the last item. “And this?”
    “A jar, I believe,” said Matthews. “Just a household item but very nice. We would have used it for the rotating exhibits—life in the Bronze Age, you know. The sort of thing schoolchildren enjoy.”
    “Yeah,” Ollie said. “Always liked that, at school. We got to go to a recreated Roman village once. Thought that was tops when I was a kid.”
    “The jar was the last thing to go missing,” Pete told him. Carver had signed it out one day before his death, in fact, and hadn’t bothered to jot down an excuse.
    “Maybe he fancied it,” Matthews said. “You do get attached to your objects, as a curator. They’re pieces of the world, the bones of history that we build on. You see?”
    “Think I’d rather have a cat,” Pete told her. “You got a picture?” If Carver was stealing antiquities, Pete would lay even money that it was only partially to fund his side activities of fiddling with the dead. Magic objects had a way of slipping between the cracks, turning up in junk shops and attics, until someone with the right radar happened on them. Jack’s flat was a prime example.
    “Somewhere in the database, of course,” Matthews agreed. “I’ll have to look it up via inventory number and then I could mail it to DI Heath, if he’d be so kind as to give me his e-mail address.”
    Ollie cleared his throat and scribbled on the back of one of his