Having wasted a few hours with the real estate question, I then went after the remaining lead: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. I’d been advised that it would be easier to telephone than appear in person. Finding the correct office for the question you needed answered could be a right trial, the concierge had said. I paused for lunch in a prefab café sort of place called Pret before returning to my hotel to make the phone call at Edward’s expense.
It was the sort of phone call that causes some people to go to the government bureau in question with fully automatic weapons and a duffel bag full of ammunition. I lost track of how many offices I was bounced through before anyone was willing to talk to me at all, and the person I got was, just like an IRS agent in the US, a recent immigrant whose English was heavily colored with an accent.
“Look,” I said to the woman, who finally agreed to help, “we want to pay the duty, but I need to find out what my client is being billed for.”
She sighed. “Importation of six amphorae from Greece. Not considered historically significant pieces. It’s on your letter.”
“Yeah, a letter that’s been destroyed. When and where were these amphorae delivered? Because we don’t have them.” I certainly hadn’t seen anything like that at Purcell’s home.
“That might be because you’re over a year delinquent in paying the duty.”
“That was before my time, so fill me in. When were they delivered and to where?”
She heaved another sigh and I could hear her typing and shuffling papers before she answered. “On twelfth July 2007, the six amphorae were held in the Excise and Customs warehouse in the Docklands and shipped on later that week. As they weren’t bonded goods, they weren’t held pending duty. Your client was billed but never paid. I’ve notes indicating he challenged the billing several times—claimed they were not his goods. These challenges are still in the process of resolution. Although. this past April he agreed to pay, but he has not yet.”
“Where were the amphorae moved to? You must have a record of who picked them up, at least.”
“Oh, yes. I do have that. Sotheby’s—the auction house, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Will had told me Sotheby’s moved a tremendous volume of goods from all over the world every year, so the coincidence of the amphorae being sent to the place he worked wasn’t outrageous. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with Will: He handled western European furniture, not Mediterranean antiquities. I did wonder why Purcell had suddenly decided to pay the duty after a year of contention. I still wasn’t sure if he’d ever owed it or not.
I didn’t get much more out of the woman and hung up feeling slightly trampled. A trip to Sotheby’s was in order—the sooner the better—and it didn’t hurt that I’d have an excuse to check in on Will. The increasing frequency of my bad dreams and my vision about him was worrying. I wanted to see for myself that he was all right, and I wanted to know if my sudden dreams of him were somehow connected to my search for my father and the truth about my own Grey past.
It took a bit of flipping back and forth in my maps to work out a route to Sotheby’s on New Bond Street. It was longer than I could walk in a short time and I wanted to be there well before they closed up for the day. I’d have to take the Tube, and that seemed to mean walking to Embankment Station so I could get a train to Oxford Circus and walk on from there.
Since it was a classy business dealing in antiques and things most of us can’t afford, I dressed up, but I didn’t go out the front door. I was pretty certain that it had been Marsden who’d followed me the day before, but I wasn’t sure that others couldn’t find me now that I’d been rummaging about among Clerkenwell’s vampires. I slipped out the side door again and around the block to the Strand so I could join the crowds of students at King’s College next door before I exited the school on the water side.
The walk along the Embankment to the Underground station was lovely and busy enough to make losing a possible tail easy, though no one appeared to follow me. There were already plenty of students and workers heading for the trains, so I merged into the stream, just another businesswoman on the move.
The trip from Embankment to Oxford was hot and crowded, and I emerged into chaos.
Technically a circus in England is a traffic circle, but you could have thought of it as a big-top show just as well. The place was insanely busy, packed with workers, and tourists, and mothers chivvying children who had no interest in behaving, and I couldn’t tell which direction I was facing. The pedestrians were a lot less polite than those I’d encountered in Farringdon Station, pushing and scurrying to get to the street crossings since most of the curbs were fenced away from the motorized traffic by chest-high iron railings. The openings in those railings were narrow, the walk signals were short, and the vehicles in the road were aggressively oblivious. I had to stop short of being shoved in front of a truck and then dash with a group of young men in bankers’ suits to make it to the other side before the light changed. Then I wasn’t sure where I was or which direction I was facing, and the other people on the sidewalk seemed to resent my stopping to look at my map while trying to orient myself.
People in more casual clothes stood in the middle of the sidewalks offering free newspapers from hip-high piles in plywood frames and further bottlenecking the foot traffic flow. I tried to work into the lee of one of these news pushers, but there was no lee. Rushing pedestrians, tourists, and commuters filled every space and I had to back up against a stone wall to get even a tiny relief from their pressure to keep moving at all cost.
I turned my back to the traffic circle and tried to find a street sign. The nearest building had a white placard on it that seemed to read “John Prince’s Swallow.” A closer look showed it was two streets: John Prince’s Street to the right and Swallow Place to the left, which met as they joined Oxford Street. Regent Street was behind me, Oxford Street running past me. I looked at the map, twisted it around a few times, and finally got the gist of where I was: only three blocks from New Bond Street, straight ahead.
I walked, passing one shop after another jammed with clothes from the fashionable to the outrageous. The preoccupied commuters and the ogling sightseers were joined in their throng by shoppers weighted with bags that smacked into the legs and elbows of everyone nearby.
As soon as I turned onto New Bond, the foot traffic waned. Down a side street I saw a crowd gathering around the black-painted facade of a public house, the sidewalk and street choked impassably by their numbers. At first I thought the crowd was waiting for the pub to open, but then I noticed the glasses in hands, the clink and rattle of post-work social drinkers chattering like starlings and raising a fog of cigarette smoke.
The farther I walked, the lighter all traffic became until I could see little sign of the bustle at Oxford Circus and even the pubs had disappeared. The buildings were dignified and sat right at the edge of the wide sidewalks with no greenbelt or setbacks, putting up their predominately white fronts in an aloof row. The numbering system was not the orderly odds-on-one-side, evens-on-the-other of most US cities, and as I walked south I kept glancing across the street to be sure I hadn’t passed the building I sought on the wrong side.
A blue banner hanging over the sidewalk let me know when I’d found my destination. I stopped in front of the wide cream-colored building and looked it over. Two arch-topped plate glass windows flanked an arch-and-column doorway. In one window there was a photo display of Chinese ceramics and a sign giving information on their auction date. The other window showcased an upcoming auction of Asian metalware. Over the door a basalt bust of Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess of something, looked out at the street from her small shelf. The figure radiated spokes of white and red light.