The sun was rising on a cool but lovely London morning. Jones turned down a treelined street and parked the van in front of a thoroughly modern block of office buildings. He turned off the engine and double-checked the GPS and nodded. “Yup, we’re here.”
Everyone poured out of the car and stood on the sidewalk. An old church was close by, but the cornerstone said it had been built in the late 1600s, long after Kemp had died—and Shakespeare, for that matter.
Cars and buses sped by on a circular and newly paved road.
“And that’s the bad news. Your chance of finding a four-hundred-year-old clue here? Zero,” Jones said.
Rose put her hands on her hips and frowned.
“You are always such a pessimist.”
“Realist.”
“Pessimist.”
“Realist.”
“Duck season, rabbit season,” Larry said. “Can we possibly get back to some actual detective work?”
“Well, Sherlock, where would you suggest we start?” Rose said.
Larry whispered to Neil. “See, even Rose thinks I’m the Sherlock here.”
Neil just rolled his eyes. “So this is where Clement’s Inn used to stand.”
Jones nodded. “Now it’s the London School of Economics.”
Isabella took out her phone and read from the screen. “It was a place for lawyers to stay and work when they were in London. It had lots of beds and books.”
Larry chuckled. “Sort of like having your office and the hotel wrapped into one.”
Isabella nodded. “It was also apparently renowned for the wild parties they would throw.”
“So what happened to it?” Neil asked.
Rose sighed. “Burned, I’ll wager. That’s what happened to the original church over there. That’s why they rebuilt it.”
“The Great Fire of London,” Isabella said.
Rose nodded. “A huge fire in 1666. It burned down almost all of the city.”
“Realist,” Jones said.
“That was a short investigation,” Larry said. “Well, let’s go get a coffee and start looking for Lord Lane again.”
Isabella scrolled down on the article she was reading. “Actually, it looks like Clement’s Inn survived the great fire.”
“So where is it?” Neil said, looking around. “I don’t see anything looking like a five-hundred-year-old hotel.”
“Well, it was actually renovated in the nineteenth century . . .”
“Great!”
“Then torn down about a hundred years ago.”
Neil’s shoulders sagged. “Argh,” he said.
“No! This is good news!” Rose said. “I know a thing or two hundred about record keeping and lawyers.”
They all stared at her blankly.
“They keep good records, and they don’t get rid of them just because a building gets torn down. If the records survived the fire, then they’re somewhere. We just have to figure out where.”
“And how do we do that?”
Isabella continued to search on her phone. “Well. There are a few options. Clement’s Inn was one of the Inner Temple law courts. There’s a library for the courts just a block away.”
“We could walk!” Larry said. “With all these economics students around, there’s got to be a coffee shop somewhere.”
But Jones was already behind the wheel of the SUV, revving the engine.
“Or maybe driving in a stripped-down tank isn’t such a bad idea.”
Just as they got back in the car, Neil thought he smelled something. A faint hint of . . . ancient honey. He looked around, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Just people walking busily to or from school, a few cleaners picking up garbage in the street, and some professors on bikes.
The breeze shifted and the smell was gone, if it had been there at all.
“C’mon, chef boy, time is wasting,” Rose said. “Get in.”
Neil closed the door and was quickly lost in thought. “I’ve got to make a call to Nakamura.”
“You do realize it’s the middle of the night there?”
“I’ll speak loudly to make sure he’s awake,” Neil said, dialing the number.
A clearly groggy Nakamura answered the phone.
“Nose, if you were here, I’d strangle you. But you’re not, so I’m just going to hang up.”
“No, wait! I need you to do a little digging for us!”
“From Vancouver? Are you nuts? Wait, don’t answer that; I know you’re nuts.”
“I’m not nuts. Oddly enough I don’t have a direct number for the Queen, so I can’t ask her what’s going on.”
“And the local police?”
“The Queen said she wanted this all done on the hush-hush. And I’m still not a hundred percent sure they didn’t shoot at me yesterday.”
There was a pause. “I’d say I’m surprised, but I’ve known you too long.”
“Ha-ha. Look, we think Lord Lane might be dead.”
“Go on,” Nakamura said, all business now.
“I found his clothes covered in blood at a theater, but Jones read the papers this morning. He says there was nothing in there.”
“That’s very strange.”
“It was a lot of blood.” Neil shuddered at the memory. “But we don’t know anything else. Was it his blood? Is he just hurt but is being held hostage? We need more info to find Lane or the jewel. Can you talk to your contacts?”
“I can think of any number of reasons to say no, like the numbers on my alarm clock. But—”
“Thanks, Nakamura!” Neil said, hanging up. “All right, Jones, let’s go!”
“Got your seat belt on?” Jones asked.
“Um, no,” he said.
Jones laughed and gunned the engine.