“Excuse me, am I in the right place for Professor Polkinghorne’s office?” I asked a young woman sitting behind the reception desk at the mining school.
“D’you have an appointment… ah yes, Mr Sangster, is it?”
“It is,” I nodded.
“We spoke earlier on the phone.”
“You’d be Miss Trimble then?”
“That’s right my ’andsome,” she grinned. “Now just go through those double doors and along the corridor there, on the right,”
“Thanks.” I walked as instructed, entering the first door I came to.
“Good Afternoon,” I said to the young man sitting inside, who was poring over documents on his desk. He had long, dark brown hair and wore a white t-shirt and jeans. One of the professor’s students I guessed.
“Hi,” he said without raising his head. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, sorry wrong door, was looking for Professor Polkinghorne, I—” The young man looked up at me, and I saw that he was older than I’d first thought, perhaps mid to late thirties.
“You’ve found him. You’d be Sangster, from the Granville Institute?”
“Jack.” I held out my hand. “Sorry, I was, er… expecting—”
“An older man?” he asked, shaking with a firm grip.
“Well yes, you don’t look like a professor.”
“Not sure what a professor looks like,” he said, in a more grammatically correct but otherwise identical way of speaking to Pasco, with long a’s, ‘o’ pronounced as ‘u’ or ‘a’ depending on the word, and ‘I’ as ‘oy’. “But call me Jos.”
‘Camborne born and bred’ Pasco had said when I asked where he was from.
“Your call today intrigued me, Jack. I’d seen on the news that girl Angel was missing, and I already had a call from the police about it this morning. Not sure how they knew I’d seen her though.”
“Me, I’m afraid. Found your card in her desk.”
“No problem, and I’ll give them a full statement sooner or later. I was in Bristol last weekend by the way. You got an alibi?”
“Ahem, er… yes I do.”
“Anyway, when Miss Trimble told me you mentioned the dagger, I wanted to see you pronto.” He opened a draw in his desk and brought out a copy of a printed form. ‘Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London – Earth Sciences Laboratory Requisition Slip’ the title stated, followed by several boxes filled with what to me was mainly illegible scribble. It was signed and dated by Polkinghorne himself, with the stamp of the Camborne mining school over his signature. The date was April 27th.
“This is what I’m waiting for.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Analysis of the bronze in that dagger the girl brought. I tried, but I’ve not got the equipment to do the job here.” I felt myself getting confused to the point of losing the conversation, and decided to slow things down.
“Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” I leaned backwards in the chair. “Let me explain who I am and what I’m doing, then perhaps you could let me know more about Angel’s visit and the dagger.
“Alright then, Mr Sangster, go on.”
I told him about the institute, the academy, and my role in setting it up and as a special investigator. Professor Polkinghorne then explained that Angel had seen an article in the West Briton telling his story (‘“Son of a miner from Camborne turned world’s foremost expert in copper,” went a bit over the top without asking, the journalist did, embarrassing’). She had telephoned the mining school and asked if she could bring an interesting artefact for appraisal (‘she didn’t say exactly what, Sangster, but she let out a few hints about the thing that told me it would be worth my while’). When Angel brought her ‘artefact’, he immediately suspected the dagger might be very old (‘but how old I didn’t know, I’m a metallurgist, not an archaeologist’). Angel claimed she found it in the mud of the Percuil River at very low tide and had recognised the dagger as likely Phoenician. But, he said, it was the metal itself, not the dagger, that had really seemed to interest her.
“The bronze was of a hardness I hadn’t seen before, around Mohs eight point five to nine.”
“Mohs?”
“Ah, sorry, that’s a one to ten scale we use to determine mineral hardness. One is soft, like talc, ten is hardest, like diamond. To get an idea, a tooth is around seven, so this thing was much harder than that even. Maybe even up to the hardness of a corundum.”
“A corun… what?”
“Amethyst.”
“Okay.”
“And that dagger looked almost die-cast, rather than beaten into shape as I’d have expected. But it was the sharpness that truly shocked me.”
“Aren’t knives supposed to be sharp?”
“Not bronze ones, not knives that have lain in mud for centuries. Why, I cut my myself just running my fingertip lightly along the blade, and it took a diamond drill bit before I could get a proper sample.” He then pointed to a bench in the corner of the room, where various items of laboratory apparatus were laid out, including Bunsen burners and complex glass tubing erections I couldn’t have begun to identify, along with a large binocular microscope. “That’s a petrological microscope, also good for viewing most metals. Plane polarised light, you know?”
“No,” I laughed. “But I suppose I get the idea.”
“I asked Angel if she only wanted non-destructive tests, but the girl said no. ‘Do whatever you like,’ she said, ‘to get the best result’.”
“What’s non-destructive test mean?”
“X-ray fluorescence and so on if you don’t want to damage the artefact. Cutting out an actual physical sample is much more effective, hence the diamond drill, but it’s also destructive to the specimen.”
Polkinghorne then went on to say that once he’d finally managed to collect some of the metal from the blade, he ran a few chemical tests as well as looking at the sample in the ’scope. With all that information he would typically be able to tell not only the component parts of the alloy, but probably where they came from as well (‘I know I said that article in the West Briton went too far, but I’m not boasting when I say I know as much about copper as anyone in England or around the world, Mr Sangster’). The bronze in the dagger, he discovered, was only made of two metals, tin, from Cornwall and, most importantly to Angel it seemed, copper, whereas he had expected more trace metals, like zinc and lead.
“Like I said, she wanted to know where that copper came from,” he said. “And that girl knew an awful lot.”
“I bet she did.”
“Did Angel study metallurgy at your Granville Academy then?”
“Not especially.”
“Well,” he said whistling. “She’s better than any of my post-grads, that’s for sure.”
“And what did you tell Angel?”
“That’s the problem, with all my experience I still couldn’t say where the copper was from. And that’s me, with Cousin Jacks all around the globe.”
“Sorry?” I said, wondering if he was talking about me in some way.
“Oh, that’s what we call Cornishmen who’ve gone out of the county, maybe even the country looking for work, especially mining engineers. You’re not Cornish, are you, Jack?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Sorry for that, but anyway, we get samples from all over. I can tell Cornish copper from, say, South African, Australian, and so on. But,” he said, shaking his head, “this stuff, it was the purest I’d seen and new to me.”
“So, you sent it up to London.”
“That’s right,” he said, holding up the form. “To my old alma mater, Imperial College. If they couldn’t say where it came from, I thought, nobody could.”
“Hmmm… so they’re your last resort.”
“’Fraid so.” He folded his arms in resignation.
“And when do you expect an answer?”
“They should have come back last week, so literally any time now.”
“Okay,” I said, handing him my card, and going through my now familiar ritual of writing the Watersmeet number on the back. “If you hear anything, please do let me know. This is a serious situation.”
“Of course.” He stood up and offered his hand. “Well, thanks for coming, and I’ll be in touch. In fact, I’ll ask Miss Trimble to chase the Imperial lab up today.”
“Goodbye then, and thanks for your time, Jos.”
“Oh, Jack,” he called to me as I got to the door.
“Yes.”
“This girl, Angel. What are the chances d’you reckon?”
“Slim. It’s been four days.”
“Shame. Pretty little thing, and I never met a brighter one.”