Dr Pleas­ant is intro­duced; Pren­tiss chases a burglar.

Played

18^th Novem­ber 2010.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat.
• Cap­tain Ben­son Cur­ruth­ers – a Mil­it­ary Police­man.
• Doc­tor Zephaniah Pleas­ant – a Sin­is­ter Sur­geon.
• Miss April Sharpe – a Self-taught Invent­or.
• Jack Pren­tiss – a Dodgy Ped­es­tri­an.
• The Chief Ver­ger of St Paul’s Cathed­ral.
• The Fore­man of Burland’s Con­tract­ors.
• Mrs Gef­fey, a Wor­ried Wife.
• Mrs Bod­ie, an Uncon­cerned Wife.
• The Very Rev­er­end Green­field’s Valet.

Plot

The team des­cen­ded to the cent­ral area under the dome, where they found a tall, dark fig­ure wait­ing some­what impa­tiently. Intro­du­cing him­self as Dr Zephaniah Pleas­ant, anoth­er Min­istry agent, he deman­ded to know why he had been dragged out of bed at such an ungodly hour. While Marsh ducked out into the streets to pur­sue some leads of his own, Cur­ruth­ers brought him up to date on the mys­tery and their dis­cov­er­ies so far. Pleas­ant reques­ted access to the body and pro­ceeded to carry out a more thor­ough exam­in­a­tion; although he was able to learn little new, he was able to con­firm the oth­ers’ suspicions.

The team decided it would be help­ful to exam­ine the Dean’s office. Taken upstairs to the west wing of the build­ing, they found a smart but some­what sterile room. A detailed exam­in­a­tion of the fur­niture and win­dow frames and a search for secret pan­els dis­covered little of interest. Mus­ing that he would have kept any­thing of interest at home, Cur­ruth­ers real­ised that the key in the pock­et book was for the front door of a house. Decid­ing to invest­ig­ate this later, they asked the Chief Ver­ger about the works in the roof.

The Ver­ger took them to the Records Office, situ­ated in the Chapter­house nearby, where he pulled out a ledger and tracked down the works order for the job. As the office of the con­tract­or was close by, they headed there first. Upon arriv­ing, they found the fore­man look­ing rather annoyed: it seemed three of his work­men had failed to report in this morn­ing, and while he expec­ted this kind of beha­viour from Bill and Charlie Bod­ie, he thought bet­ter of the seni­or mason, Mar­tin Gef­fey. It didn’t take long for the team, pos­ing as a Met­ro­pol­it­an Police invest­ig­at­ive team, to dis­cov­er that these were the work­ers from the Cathed­ral pro­ject and to obtain their addresses. They moved on to Geffey’s address, a decent, if small, ter­raced house in the East End, where they found his wife beside her­self with worry: he had failed to return home last night and she was wor­ried some­thing had happened to him. Asked if he ever stayed late at the pub, she told them that he was not a heavy drink­er and was devoted to his fam­ily. Mrs Bod­ie, mean­while, wife of Charlie and daugh­ter-in-law of Wil­li­am, was com­pletely unwor­ried; while both men had failed to come home, this was hardly unusu­al and she was much hap­pi­er when they wer­en’t clut­ter­ing the place up.

The team decided to move on and invest­ig­ate the victim’s private res­id­ence in Isling­ton. Once more present­ing them­selves as mem­bers of the Met, they were admit­ted by his valet, who they ques­tioned with care, dis­cov­er­ing that the staff were very upset by the news. He agreed to let them exam­ine the Dean’s study, leav­ing them to take their time. Car­ry­ing out a thor­ough search of the room, they turned up a bundle of per­son­al let­ters, a series of per­son­al journ­als, a col­lec­tion of ref­er­ence works on the study of the angel­ic hier­arch­ies (from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions) and a pair of hefty look­ing tomes in Hebrew. Miss Sharpe tried her Detecter­onatron again, detect­ing a faint aura around the Hebrew works, which Dr Pleas­ant now took an interest in.

After they had searched for half an hour or so, sev­er­al of them heard noises from upstairs, not unlike fur­niture being moved. Cur­ruth­ers reacted imme­di­ately, head­ing out and up the stairs at the double. He found the door to the room above closed and knocked, listen­ing for a response. He heard the sound of foot­falls, mov­ing away from the door, and tried to open the door, plan­ning to give chase. Unfor­tu­nately, the door was locked but Pren­tiss, cur­rently stand­ing idle, was look­ing out of the win­dow and saw a pair of boots des­cend­ing from above. Wrench­ing the win­dow open as their own­er dropped past him, he sprang out to give chase…