“Let me get in and start the engine first,” said Angel, climbing into the boat. “Can you grab that backpack, then cast the painter off?”
“A bit difficult with this,” I said, holding up my crutch and wondering once again why Angel was so keen to take me boating.
“Sorry, Mr Sangster. Just throw it in then do the rope.”
I duly threw the pack, thinking by the weight she’d brought enough Coca-Cola for a long trip, with the cans inside clanking as it landed on a seat, then undid the mooring line from a hook on the jetty, threw in the crutch and slid myself into the boat after it. Angel, meanwhile, began pumping at a plastic bulb on the fuel line then pulled the engine cord, which caught after three attempts, the outboard springing to life with an ear-splitting buzz.
“Better when we get outside,” Angel shouted, turning the tiller hard so that the gig pointed towards the double boathouse doors.
“Have you enough fuel?” I shouted back.
“Filled it up this afternoon, remember?”
“Shouldn’t we take oars or paddles, just in case?”
“They get in the way, we’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, and without giving me a chance to argue further, opened up the engine throttle and took us out into the main channel where the water was green and calm, and the sun shone safe and bright against a cloudless sky as the gig, now riding the swell at some speed, cut its way towards the harbour mouth.
“Coke?” she asked, reaching into the backpack and passing me a can and an opener.
“Thanks.”
“Can you do one for me?” She passed me another can, and I punched two triangular holes in the top (‘one for me to drink from, one for the displaced air’ as Angel observed), then passed it back. Doing the same with my own can, I then raised it to make a toast.
“To a newly recovered lady. Good as new, in fact even better.”
“Do you mean—”
“I mean the Igraine, Angel.”
“She’s what Runtle called a ‘real treffy’.” Angel stroked the side of the boat.
“Not sure what a treffy is, but she really is a lady.”
“Lady, how ?”
“Ah,” I laughed. “Something you don’t know.” Angel shrugged. “A lady’s what sailors call a boat when everything’s just right.” I remembered seeing the gig laid up on the roof rafters, Spider standing underneath. “You say you did this boat up yourself?”
“Jonny, Spider and I mended the Igraine, but with quite a lot of help from Runtle.”
“And that?” I asked, pointing to a stylised fish symbol painted on the bow planking.
“Ichthys, the fish. Two arcs, crossing to make a tail, with a single dot for the eye.”
“What’s that got to do with Igraine. Surely she was—”
“Yes, yes, King Arthur’s mother. The fish has nothing to do with her, I just…” Angel suddenly seemed distracted, uncharacteristically lost for words. “I needed to paint that on the boat, I don’t really know why.” She looked at the fish symbol for a few seconds, then laughed, and we both drank. The Igraine, which must have been listening, suddenly sped up, passing the headland and coming close in by the lighthouse, which stood white and tall above us, its glass top looking down with what felt at that moment like a benevolent gaze.
“It’s lovely and calm,” said Angel, squinting out to sea. “Let’s go towards the Helford River, okay?”
“Alright,” I said, looking at my watch. “But not too far, it’s getting on.”
Angel turned the Igraine west and headed out to sea.
*
“Engine doesn’t normally sound like that, Angel.”
The boat jolted a few times before the outboard shuddered to a complete halt, and I cursed myself for not having personally checked the fuel before we left. A quick check in the petrol tank confirmed my worst fears.
“It’s alright, Mr Sangster, you haven’t lost your nautical touch.”
“How do you mean?”
“I made sure there was just enough petrol to get us here, and I left the oars back in the boathouse on purpose as well. Now we won’t be bothered for a while.”
“That could get us into real trouble,” I shouted, almost standing up before remembering the narrow gig might tip over. “We’ve no way of getting to the shore.”
“There’ll be a boat along soon.” I looked around to see sails in the distance, in front of us and behind us. She was almost certainly right, I thought, we would be picked up before too long.
“Bothered by who?” I then asked. “And about what, Angel?”
“I want to tell you some things.”
“Better have another coke then.” I opened her a new can from the sack.
“None of them really understood, Pengelly, Slevin and so on. Didn’t matter what they were shown, staring them in the face. People like that scrabble around, but they’ve no vision.”
“You don’t suffer fools gladly, do you?” Angel shrugged. “I mean, they had their own weaknesses, but both were well-educated men of the church.”
“Perhaps, but they couldn’t see. Things are simple, you just have to look.” I smiled at Angel’s complete confidence, that confidence only the very young and very old possess.
“Prinny doesn’t understand how you do what you do.”
“Do you?”
“I think so. You soak it all up then put it all together. But then again…”
She looked at me, wide eyed. “Yes?”
“You can do things others can’t, or you wouldn’t be who you are, wouldn’t be at the academy, would you?” She didn’t answer, gazing away from me across the water. “I know you don’t think much of Pengelly, Angel, but he put it well.”
“How?” she said distantly.
“Said you’re just quicker.”
“Maybe I am.” Her gaze was still distant as she spoke, but then she suddenly turned to me. “The dagger’s genuine.”
“But Polkinghorne thought it was modern, I—”
“I know, they all did.”
“Look,” I said, “We’re not going anywhere, so just tell me about what you think happened, from the beginning.”
“That’s why I brought you out here,” she grinned.
“And there was me thinking you wanted to show off the boat. Anyway, tell me everything but in words my little mind can understand. Okay?”
“I did want to show you the boat, Mr Sangster,” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “And your mind is anything but little, but yes, I will try and tell you everything.”
And so began a most remarkable hour.
*
“I found the lessons at the academy tedious,” Angel began by saying. “So, one of the first things I did was to look around for something else to do. I was brought up on sailing in Essex, and that’s why I volunteered for boathouse duty. Mending the holes in the canoes, painting them up, things like that. Jonny and Spider joined in as well, and we worked on my canoe first, then Jonny’s.”
“Why didn’t Spider have a canoe?”
“Can’t swim,” she laughed. “I named my canoe for Morgawr, after reading about the Falmouth Bay monster in an old newspaper.”
“Monster’s suddenly in the news again.”
“Soviet submarine, K222 class?”
“How on earth did you know that?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it does matter, so don’t tell anyone.” I remembered Smith’s warnings. “Anyone at all, understand?”
“I do,” she nodded. “Anyway, I began exploring the creeks of the Fal estuary in Morgawr, starting with the Percuil River. It really dries out at low tide though, and the first evening I went up there I got stuck, high and dry. Then this old man came from nowhere, waded out knee deep into the mud and pushed me back into the channel.”
“The tramp?”
“Yes and, as he pushed me, I saw something glinting in the mud, and lifted out the dagger. I guessed how old it was straight away.”
“How?”
“Oh, I saw Aramaic script once.”
“Just once?”
“Yes, so I cleaned the dagger, looked it all up and made the translation. Aramaic follows rules, just like anything else.”
“Then?”
“It made sense that there was a link with Jesus, the Holy Land and so on.”
“Again, how?”
“Just putting together things I’d read, and the writing on the knife. Aramaic was a street language, not just for priests.”
“Was it?”
“Yes, so that told me the dagger wasn’t just some religious thing but had a practical message for anyone who could read it. It was after the talk on Jesus in Cornwall by Pengelly that the penny dropped.”
“So what did you do?”
“I learned everything I could from him, got access to the cathedral library.”
“You found that old monks’ map of ferry crossings there?”
“You know about that?” she laughed. “Well yes, and it told me where the tomb would be, the name Joseph’s Pill and the angle of the crossing from St Mawes.”
“And you told Pengelly?” She nodded. “And then he introduced you to Slevin?”
“Yes,” she said, looking downwards, and at that moment I thought perhaps there was a slight tear in her eye. “I didn’t want boys, I wanted a man who could, oh, I don’t know… keep up. More than keep up, do you know what I mean?”
“You’re a woman, Angel, a young one but a woman, nevertheless.”
“And I fell for him from the start, even though our meeting wasn’t too romantic. I was looking at some books on the old trading links between Palestine and Cornwall when he spoke to me, and, well… that was that. Slevin bought me a coffee that day in London while Pengelly was busy and I just opened up to him, told him about my family, being at school in Essex, the academy, and even the dagger. He seemed to understand. I now know Pengelly set it all up.”
“Then what?”
“I kept in touch with Slevin, via telegrams from the post office.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them.”
“Course you have. WPC Woon’s mum took them down.” It was impossible to surprise Angel. “Pengelly was always badgering me after our trip to London, but I kept my distance. Anyway, in a few weeks I’d figured out what I needed to know.”
“Which was?”
“Jesus came to Cornwall as a boy with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea. Then, immediately after the crucifixion, that same uncle removed Jesus’ body from the tomb in Jerusalem, taking it far away, to Cornwall, safe from the Romans, or so he thought.”
“Why wouldn’t the body be safe from the Romans here?”
“Because the Romans invaded about ten years later.”
“I thought it was Julius Caesar, before Christ, veni vidi vici and all that.”
“No, proper invasion was much later. Plus, Joseph had a good reason to come back here, and that’s the big thing neither Slevin, Pengelly or any of the others have understood.”
The boat rocked a little as she said this, the surface of the sea totally calm, but with a slight Atlantic swell. Looking at Angel in front of me, blonde hair and green eyes shining, I felt that everything made sense.
“This chat wouldn’t work if we were ashore, would it, Mr Sangster?”
“Stop reading my mind.”
“Alright,” she laughed. “Anyway, Joseph’s reason for coming back here, it’s all about the metal in the dagger. Bronze, but harder than we can make now.”
“You said that same thing in the tomb.”
“Did I? Anyway, the key lay in the copper, bronze is mainly made with tin and copper.”
“That fallen bell in the chapel’s made of the same stuff?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “And you’ll know that Polkinghorne found the copper in the knife to be American, highest grade in the world. That’s what I expected.”
“But he said to me—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted. “And that meant the dagger should have been modern, but it wasn’t. That blade was made two thousand years ago, using European smelting methods and American copper. You see, Joseph of Arimathea and his forebears sailed to America long before Christopher Columbus.”
“How on earth can you know that?”
“The symbols on the dagger. They tell you where Joseph went, and how to get there. A place in Lake Superior.”
“And how on earth can you know that?”
“You say ‘how on earth’ quite a lot, don’t you,” she laughed. “But look, those ancients were better sailors than we give them credit for. Dead reckoning, stars, trade winds, ocean currents, lode stones for compasses, you should know about all that, being in the navy.”
“That might not be enough to cross the Atlantic.”
“Ah, but they had a secret device, something they called by a weird name. Nearest I could think of in English was a ‘Star Sailor’.”
“That thing you sketched in your notebook?” I said, remembering the carefully drawn diagram of interlinking cogwheels. “Looked like modern clockwork to me.”
“No, it’s very old.”
“Can you be sure?”
“One was found in a Greek shipwreck from before the time of Christ. Predicted movement of the moon, stars, even tides.”
“Okay, say these people did cross the ocean, how would they manage the overland trip, I mean, Lake Superior’s hundreds of miles from the sea?”
“They sailed up the Mississippi, like the copper traders that went before them.”
“How on earth…” I stopped to laugh. “Sorry, I mean, how can you be sure of that?”
“Maps from an Ottoman Admiral.”
“Piri Reis?”
“You know of Piri Reis?”
“You had a book on him in your room.”
“I did, didn’t I,” she laughed. “Well, his maps of the New World were based on much older ones I’m sure, and they show the river that led the European copper traders all the way to the Great Lakes and let them carry their heavy-metal cargo all the way home by boat.”
“So, you’re saying people from Palestine already knew all about America?”
“The ones who sailed with the Phoenicians did, and when the time came, Joseph took the body of Christ to this far off land, to lie in peace, safe from the Romans or anyone else, for all eternity.”
“And will it be, safe I mean?”
“If I read the dagger right, the body was hidden deep in an abandoned mine under a lake on an island in another lake.”
“Isle Royale?”
“Well done. Did you get that from the book on Indian copper in my room?”
“Yes. And what of the old woman’s body in the tomb?”
“Do you read the Bible?”
“No.”
“Jesus wasn’t the only one who disappeared from a tomb in Jerusalem and was assumed to have ascended to Heaven.”
“Wasn’t he?”
“His mother.”
“Mary?”
“Joseph brought her to Cornwall when her time came,” said Angel, in a dreamy voice while gazing out to sea. “Laid her in the tomb that her son had occupied.”
“You know this?”
She nodded.
“And I think that somehow, others knew as well. You can’t ever really keep a secret, so perhaps this one echoed down the centuries. Those carvings on the arch in the chapel at the academy, they’re eleventh century or older.”
“Very old then.”
“Old yes, but how did they know about Jesus a thousand years after he was brought to St Anthony? And what about the cathedral?”
“Truro?”
“Yes, the cathedral name for a start.”
“Lots of churches are dedicated to the Virgin Mary.”
“Not so many Anglican ones, and if you take the halfway angle between the transept and the chancel, you get a bearing that points directly to the tomb.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. What compelled someone to go to all the trouble of building Truro Cathedral as cruciform, and at that angle, if not a memory of where its patron saint lay buried?”
I said nothing and she said nothing for a time, both of us looking out over the water.
“Nobody else knows all this, Mr Sangster.”
“Are you sure?” I tried to think who else might know.
“Slevin is caught, Pengelly hasn’t a clue, the Russians don’t have any evidence, and the establishment, including the government, the Church of England and the Vatican, are all probably breathing a sigh of relief, so I think…”
“Yes?”
“We’re safe.”
“What about Smith?”
“I put him off the scent I think.”
I wasn’t so sure.
“Smith has Slevin in custody now,” I said slowly. “And he’s no fool.”
“Maybe, but I’m pretty sure Smith’ll just think it was all a dreadful mistake by Slevin and, anyway, with all those notes burned, the dagger’s the only real proof now.”
“Not the writing around the rim of the chapel bell?”
“No, that script’s Aramaic alright, but it doesn’t tell you anything.”
I still felt a niggling doubt, suddenly remembering the police Polaroid photo of the dagger etching, and WPC Woon’s comment.
‘Oh, all these papers will get stored somewhere and forgotten about, but we never throw anything away.’
“Then let’s leave it at that, Angel,” I eventually said. “There’s no evidence and nobody else knows.”
“Except the tramp of course.”
“What does he know?”
“You said you didn’t read the Bible, Mr Sangster.”
“That’s right.”
“Then you won’t know that it tells of a man who mocked Jesus as he carried the cross to Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion, and for that was cursed to wander the Earth for eternity, and to limp as he went. Perhaps it was this man you call the tramp, and he was then sent to protect the last resting place of Christ, and of his mother.”
“Is that what you think, really?” I struggled to square such ideas with Angel’s excessive faculty for logic.
“I don’t just think, I know. He’s the…” She lowered her voice, almost to a whisper. “Wandering Jew, the Fisher King, the—”
“Whoa, Angel, what are all these names?”
“Just that,” she snapped back. “Names, but whatever we call him, perhaps the tramp chose me, put me in the way of finding the dagger that evening in the mud of the dried-out creek. And…” She looked at me with wide green eyes and that same piercing gaze I’d seen when I first shone the lamp on her face in the tomb. “Perhaps he chose you as well, Mr Sangster.”
“This is crazy.”
“Is there nothing about the tramp that tells you I might be right?”
I remembered the grainy photograph in the saloon bar at the Cassandra Arms, one hundred and twenty years old, and the tramp being so often inexplicably there when I needed him. I also remembered his comment…
‘Here, and in America. Wherever I’m needed to protect the righteous.’
…and as I remembered I wondered, just for a moment, if she might be right.
“Do you believe in the supernatural then, Angel?”
“No.”
“Not even when it’s dressed up as religion?”
“No.”
“Then how can you explain all this stuff about the tramp?”
“It’s just a part of things, Mr Sangster. I can’t say it better than that.”
We lapsed into silence again, and I wondered again about Angel’s theories (which is surely all that they were, the ideas of a supremely gifted but also young and naïve girl).
“What do we do now?” I finally asked her.
“Drift and wait to be picked up, Mr Sangster. Drift and wait.”