I found Nel inside the Starbucks on the high street. On her phone, of course.
‘How’d it go?’ she asked immediately.
I considered the question as I slid into the seat opposite her. ‘I genuinely don’t know. I bullshitted my way through most of it. But I got this really uncomfortable feeling.’
‘What kind of feeling?’
‘That she was kind of … steering me to see something. Or to say something.’
‘And did you?’
‘I don’t know. She did ask me to read this Jonson play. Twice actually; Remember, Remember, she said. And she really seemed to like my dissertation idea.’ I left out the part when she said it was similar to what the Abbot had done. I didn’t want to set Nel off – good to let sleeping dogs lie.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘no point trying to second guess what will happen. They must know what they are looking for. I bet you did better than you think.’
‘Hmm.’ Then, ‘We don’t have to rush back, do we? I mean, we can’t see Shafeen till tonight because of the STAGS Club’s very enlightened no-women policy.’
Nel checked her phone – the Gen. Z version of a watch. ‘I guess we could hang out for a bit.’
‘OK, great, because the Ashmolean is just round the corner. The Prof said it wasn’t to be missed.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Really cool museum apparently.’ I fiddled with the little corrugated cardboard jacket they’d given Nel for her takeaway cup. I still felt oddly unsettled, like I hadn’t given the best of myself in the interview, like I’d missed something out, or missed something I had been told. I shook it off. Professor Nashe wouldn’t be recommending museums, and plays, to someone she thought was a drop-kick, would she?
‘Yeah,’ said Nel to the museum idea. ‘Why not?’
It started to snow as we walked up the high street, not loads, and certainly not enough for me to fear that we’d get stuck getting home. Just pretty, Christmassy snow, which went with the pretty, Christmassy lights. Time and again since that day I’ve asked myself if the snow was enough to fool our eyesight or to conjure up what we saw, but I don’t think so.
It was just as we turned the corner and first caught sight of the museum. It had a beautiful frontage with marble steps and lofty pillars, and these two modern metal dog sculptures kind of guarding the entrance. But they weren’t the startling thing. The startling thing was coming down the steps.
It was a man, tall and slim, with brown curls blowing in the bitter wind. His stubbly cheeks were flushed and his green eyes bright with cold. He wore a leather jacket and a chunky charcoal scarf wound round his neck. He could have been a movie star, but he wasn’t.
He was Abbot Ridley.
It took me a split second to recognise him because he wasn’t wearing his abbot’s robes. But Nel was way ahead of me. She screamed out, ‘Nathaniel!’
I’m ninety-nine per cent sure he saw us because I am sure there was the briefest of pauses before he jogged down the steps and away down the street, shrugging himself down into his scarf as he went. Of course we followed him. But he’d vanished into this Dickensian-looking street in a swirl of snow – almost as if he was the Ghost of Christmas Present. Nel and I stopped, breathing hard, and looked at each other. The snowflakes had settled on her lashes and lips, her blue eyes blazed. Oh God, I thought. She really loves him. ‘Now what?’
‘He must not have seen me,’ she wailed. ‘I know he’d have stopped if he had.’
‘Nel,’ I warned, ‘you’ve got to admit that thinking you guys have a future together is pretty crazy.’
‘Crazier than thinking that Henry is alive somewhere, hanging out with Elvis and Tupac?’
She had me there.
‘I just wish I had his number is all,’ she lamented.
‘If he’s a proper Medieval, he won’t have one,’ I said. ‘I wonder what the hell he’s doing here.’
‘It’s not that weird, is it? I mean, he used to be at Christ Church. Maybe he’s still got buddies living here. Or maybe he came to visit her, you know, Whatsherface.’
‘Professor Nashe. Yes. Yes, I suppose teachers have to go somewhere in the holidays.’ I remember, when I was little, seeing one of my primary-school teachers in Sainsbury’s and being properly freaked out and hiding behind my dad. Back then I still thought on some level that teachers just got packed away in a box outside of school hours. It was certainly strange seeing the Abbot out of context like that. ‘I suppose it was him, wasn’t it?’
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I’d know him anywhere. I just wish we knew where he was going.’
She sounded very downcast, and I was sorry – she’d done me a real solid driving me here for my interview, and I’d wanted her to enjoy our day in Oxford. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we don’t know where he’s going, but we do know where he’s been.’
She looked up.
‘The museum, remember? We might as well have a look.’ I suddenly had a burning desire to know what the Abbot had been looking at, and I knew how to sell it to Nel. ‘Then you guys can chat about it when we get back to school.’
That seemed to lift her spirits. ‘True.’
We drifted back to the museum, past the metal dogs and into the atrium. Swerving, as I always did, the ‘Suggested Donation of £5’ boxes, we found a floor map. ‘Where would the Abbot have gone?’ I asked, trying to cheer her up. ‘You know him best.’
She looked at the dates on the floorplan. ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘Got to be Tudor and Stuart. Downstairs.’
‘And look,’ I said, ‘there’s even a guy pointing the way.’ It was true. In the atrium stood a marble statue, holding his arm out as if indicating the right direction, urging us with the blank gaze of his white eyes. We followed the arm into a basement gallery.
And that’s when it got weird.
There was this little gallery off to the right, full of the usual standard-issue museum glass cases. But over the entrance of the gallery itself, in a case of its own, was a huge set of stag’s antlers.
I suddenly went cold. Somewhere in this gallery, the one marked by the antlers just like our school, was something we were meant to see.
We walked under the antlers, and for the second time that day I was reminded of first walking into STAGS. My flesh tingled. The room was reasonably quiet, with only a few knots of tourists milling around, using those muted library voices that also seem to double up for museums. We glanced at the cases – there was one called ‘Rarities of the University’, collected by one Elias Ashmole, who I supposed had given his name to the museum. There was the usual collection of swords and pots and jewellery and little explanatory signs.
‘Yes,’ said Nel fondly. I don’t think she’d noticed the antlers. ‘This looks like his kind of thing.’
My skin was still prickling. I was convinced the Abbot had been here for a reason. Something was here, some clue. But how could we possibly know what?
And that’s when I saw it.
A thumbprint, planted squarely on the glass, so clear that the CSI whorls were clearly visible. A thumbprint on a glass case was not so unusual, but this one had something particular about it that turned my blood to ice.
A letter M was missed out neatly from the middle.
I held onto Nel and pointed, because I couldn’t actually speak.
‘What?’ she asked, then clocked the print. ‘Well, it’s yours obviously.’ She peered in close. ‘The little M shows up perfectly, doesn’t it? Presumably your thumbprint will be different forever now. I guess that rules out a life of crime, unless you –’
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s not mine.’
‘Are you sure?’
Just for a nanosecond, my brain spun into a mess of time-slice conspiracies. Had I been here before, touched the glass and left my unique mark, just like I had done in the frosty car this morning? Had we come round this way once already and walked back on ourselves? Or had another version of me from another moment in time visited this place, Avengers: Endgame-style, and rested her thumb on the glass? But in the next moment my thoughts ordered themselves. That was all impossible. We’d just come down the stairs and this was the first gallery we’d visited. ‘I haven’t been near that case. I swear it.’
And that meant only one thing.
I bent and breathed on the glass so we could see the print even more clearly. Then I planted my own thumbprint right next to the other one. The Ms were the same but that was it. Even Dr Watson would have seen that the whorls were entirely different, and even if they weren’t, this was a much bigger print.
A man’s print.
‘It’s not mine,’ I said. ‘It’s his. The Abbot’s.’
Nel flushed, as she pretty much always did when anyone mentioned him. ‘I would have noticed if he had a brand.’
‘Would you?’
‘I know him pretty well, Greer. And we acted together a lot.’
‘Yes, but would you notice a brand on someone’s thumb? I never did. And when I first met him I looked at his hands a lot, believe me.’
‘Why were you looking at his hands?’ She sounded almost jealous.
‘C’mon, Nel, why d’you think? Because I was looking for a ring. Either a signet ring like the STAGS wear – Rollo’s got one, did you see? – or a kiss-my-hand ring like the Old Abbot had. But just because I didn’t notice a brand, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.’
Nel screwed up her eyes at all those negatives in one sentence.
I clarified. ‘I definitely think it’s his.’
We both stared at the print. ‘But why? Why would he have a brand like yours?’
‘There can only be one reason,’ I said. ‘He must have been tried like me. He must have caused the death of one of the STAGS. Why else would he be branded M for Manslayer?’
‘All right, then explain this. Why put a thumbprint here? It can’t be accidental. You don’t lean on the glass with your thumb. If you lean on glass, you use your whole hand.’ She demonstrated.
‘Unless you’re sending a message.’
‘Who to?’
‘Maybe to us.’
‘How could he possibly know we’d come here?’ she scoffed.
Then it dawned on me. ‘She told me to,’ I said slowly. ‘Professor Nashe. His old tutor.’ I looked around at the innocent-seeming tourists and drew Nel closer to me. ‘We’re being played. They want us to see something.’
‘See what, though?’
‘This, I guess.’ The dark shape of a single exhibit, squatting in the corner of the glass case as a silent witness to our conversation, aligned itself exactly behind the thumbprint.
We both shifted focus and stared, not at the glass now, but through it to the object it contained. It was about a foot high, dark, leathery and slightly forbidding.
‘Is it a helmet?’ asked Nel uncertainly.
‘Too narrow,’ I said. ‘You’d have to be a real pencil-head to fit that. What’s the number? There must be a card.’
Nel peered into the case. ‘Two.’
‘Two, two, two …’ I scanned the labels beneath the objects. ‘Here we go: Guy Fawkes’s Lantern. Presented by Robert Heywood to the University of Oxford in 1641. Around 1600.’
‘Really?’ said Nel in surprise. ‘Guy Fawkes? As in the Bonfire Night dude?’
Yes. I read aloud the museum text on the little card.
Guy Fawkes was reportedly carrying this lantern when he was captured on the night of 4–5th November 1605 in the cellar of the Palace of Westminster. The Gunpowder Plot aimed to blow up James I and the Members of Parliament and the House of Lords at the State Opening of Parliament the next day. Robert Heywood’s brother, Peter Heywood, was a magistrate in Westminster and one of the men who discovered the plotters in the cellar. Peter reportedly took the lantern from Guy Fawkes, and so prevented him from lighting the fuse.
‘Wow.’ We both stared at the lantern. It looked different now. It was no longer a rather sad-looking leather cylinder. It was an instrument of terrorism, as surely as a suicide vest. I pictured Guy Fawkes, his fingers slippery with sweat, opening the little lantern door to expose the flame to the gunpowder. Then Peter Heywood snatching the thing from his hand. The flame kindling, instead of the gunpowder, the faces of the guards; their expressions telling Guy Fawkes that the game was up, and he was a dead man. ‘Imagine how many people would have died if he’d succeeded,’ I breathed. ‘Both houses of Parliament, and King James I.’ Suddenly I felt all goosebumpy. ‘Quite spooky to think that Guy Fawkes was trying to blow up the very institution we were sitting in yesterday.’
Nel shivered prettily. ‘Don’t.’
‘I mean,’ I said of the lantern, ‘it’s pretty cool once you know what it is. But I don’t know why the Abbot would have been looking at this exhibit particularly. Much less why he would have wanted us to see it.’
‘Maybe it’s less to do with who owned it and more about what it represents.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well …’ she said, piecing the thought together. ‘Maybe the Abbot was trying to shed light on something? Like a lantern.’
‘Then why not just tell us?’
‘Got me.’
I looked back at the black lantern, squatting on its little white plinth. Suddenly it seemed malign, evil. I wanted to be away from it. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Don’t you want to see anything else?’
‘No, no.’ The thumbprint had thoroughly spooked me. ‘I think we should go.’
And when we returned to the car, I could see that my own M thumbprint, on the passenger-side window, was still there, a ghost of a smear on the cold glass.