Free Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth

lamps outside came through on the north side of the church, but Raikes remembered that the floor was up on that side and kept clear.
    He proceeded up the south aisle, his heart beating quickly, torch and eyes directed downwards at his uneasy feet. He caught the flesh tones of guilt and sorrow from the Tintorettos as he went by, the ghastly sprawl of dead Abel; Adam’s ribcage; Eve’s long flowing hair. In the sacristy he was obliged to negotiate once again the rollers, the trestles, the litter of objects everywhere. He caught sight of saints Dominic and Benedict looking severely at him. In the hush of the chapel he stopped to caution his heart before moving to where the files and cardboard boxes lay stacked on top of the cupboards and against the wall, below a painting by Vivarini, he noticed now, no mistaking that style. Birth of the Virgin. Be still, he told his heart. You are not a thief, you have a key.
    He knelt down below the mummy-swaddled, stunned-looking infant Mary, and began to look through the files on the floor. These contained papers of various kinds jumbled together without apparent order and not seeming to offer anything of interest: receipts for the most part or handwritten notes of expenditure without any signature on them, records of payment for oil, candles, repairs of various sorts, none of them going back earlier than the 1930s.
    Raikes looked through them quickly, with a gathering chill of disappointment. What he had been expecting to find he could not have said, but he had assumed it would be somehow immediately significant, that his hands would fall on it, just as his ears had caught the intelligence that files of paper were on view here.
    The folders were fairly new, he noticed. So was the tape. Someone had simply bundled the papers into them, tied them up and shoved them in the cupboards, probably in the course of preparing the church for the restoration. It looked as if they had been lying about loose before this – but somewhere dry, there was no mould on them though many were frayed and discoloured. Certainly they could not have been long in the chapterhouse, where it was very damp indeed. There were loose papers stacked against the wall, programmes of regattas and concerts of sacred music, yellow with age.
    He was looking, not very hopefully, in the cardboard boxes, when he came across a batch of papers with dates in the mid-nineteenth century: the same type of thing as before, small financial records, faded and difficult to read. Below this were some old account books. There were more account books in the next box, and several smaller notebooks with stiff black covers. Raikes fished one of these out at random, opened it, and found himself looking at details of small sums of money paid, for reasons he could not make out, to one Andrea Carpello, in October 1759. With revived excitement, a sudden prescience of success, he began to turn back the pages. There was no entry for June 1743, but there was one for the twenty-eighth of April. Two ducats had been paid out on that day it seemed, in payment for services, though these were not specified. There was an address written against the sum, of which Raikes could make out only that it was in the San Giovanni Crisostomo district.
    He was kneeling on the hard floor, looking earnestly at this and trying to see some connection with the Madonna, when he heard – and it was quite distinct in the silence of the church – the grating sound of the side door being unlocked. He heard the door creak open and he heard steps and some moments later voices, a man’s and a woman’s, cautious and low.
    In two simultaneous movements Raikes seized the notebook and switched off his torch. He was dreadfully startled. He stood in the not quite complete darkness of the chapel, his heart loud in his ears, more breath to expel than his lungs seemed able to deal with. His first thought, and it was a very disagreeable one, was that the light of his torch had been seen and