Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Kris Alexandros: A Friend's Story

I said I didn't know if I would have time to help them, with the time taken by my studies. And Uncle Sal, the guy I'd always known as firm but fair, the one you didn't cross, told me straight. He said the Circle's money had paid for me to be here, and their influence had made my application get accepted even though it wasn't normally possible to take a foundation year having already failed a course elsewhere. It hadn't been a failure in communication between Greek and English universities, or some fortuitous loophole. It had been my uncle, who had faith in me, throwing his power around. I had established a debt to them before I even realised.

Then he told me that one of his friends – that was a code word that could mean almost anyone – had a little problem. Some documents with regard to a certain type of work which is certainly illegal in many parts of the world had gone astray. For whatever reason, they had sent paper documents regarding a certain job. Possibly not describing the actual events, but papers which could reveal to certain international authorities one of the bases of Mr Friend's operations. But Mr Friend also owed money to another gentleman, and had considered offering not to speak to the police about certain other matters if his debt was wiped off. The story sounds like one of those soap operas after a while, and there were too many characters in this one with the same name. It seemed to me that nearly all of the Greek protagonists were friends, while every foreigner was euphemistically dubbed a Mr Steve.

So I ended up knowing I was doing a job for a friend of a friend of a client's uncle's friend's dealer's cousin, and without the faintest clue about the complex web of debts, favours, memberships, and relations that connected us. One thing I did know was that I was the only person they could ask to do this job, because they needed a person inside the university.

Mr Friend had lost some paperwork. Customs paperwork, making an incorrect declaration about what was in a certain trunk. It had gone missing somewhere around a certain airport, and now he couldn't get his box released into his custody. I couldn't take in the reasoning, but I gathered that painstaking investigation had yielded that their trunk's paperwork had somehow been switched with another container. It wasn't clear whether the trunk being held by customs at the airport was the one they wanted, or the other one. It was entirely possible that someone else had Mr Friend's trunk, and that would be a very bad thing. He didn't say there was a body in it, but in that strange way of constructing sentences that made it very clear what he wasn't saying.

They had traced the owner of the other container to England. To the history department at this university, in fact. It was supposed to be an antique traveller's trunk which had been sent to an expert who lived in the same town as Mr Friend, for restoration and repairs. Then somehow the documents for the two cargoes had been switched, and possibly the actual items had as well, and now Mr Friend could not get his bones, or maybe could not get them out of the country, until he could produce the trunk that had been sent to Lanchester University History Department.

It was very distinctive, he said. All I would need to do was find the cargo, retrieve the customs documents if they were still attached, and ensure that the trunk did not actually contain the unspecified cargo that Sal's Circle's friend was looking for. I'd know it if I saw it, he said. And if I saw it, then I could call in some of his other friends. Men with special skills, who would help to remove the cargo from campus. The way he said it, I got the impression this was a last resort, and everyone would be happier if those men didn't find anyone in their way to use those special skills on.

Then he told me about the trunk. The two trunks were the same size, he said, the size of a man, and packed in wooden crates to ensure they weren't scratched in transit. They were valuable, and he guessed they would be some kind of polished wood but he wasn't sure. One very old, for the academic historians, and one made to look old for reasons of style. Easy to get confused. The one I was looking for here, and I should hope that it would be the box that the history department had wanted cleaned, just with the documents for another trunk attached to it. It should be relatively easy to find once I spoke to anyone in the history department, he assured me. It was probably around three hundred years old, and the university considered themselves very lucky to have it bequeathed to them. It had a complex Latin name, and could once have been a reliquary. But to some members of the department, and certainly to the university's security staff, it was known simply as Mister Hook's Box.