Author’s Note

The Deceit is a work of fiction. However, I have drawn on many real, historical, archaeological and cultural sources for this book. In particular:

The Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is a book of spells and curses, compiled by a Jewish Kabbalist, Abraham of Worms, in fifteenth-century Germany. Various versions of the text survive in libraries across Europe. In occult circles the magic of Abra-Melin is regarded as the most ‘dangerous’ of all hermetic rituals.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a British mountaineer, adventurer, drug-addict and black magician, and for a time a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, alongside artists such as the Irish poet, and Nobel laureate, W B Yeats. In 1924 a disciple of Crowley’s died in Crowley’s house in Cefalu, Sicily – allegedly after Crowley had fed him the blood of a cat.

The little town of Akhmim is possibly the oldest inhabited site in Egypt. Regarded as the cradle of alchemy, and as one of the birthplaces of Gnostic and Coptic Christianity, Akhmim also, in antiquity, enjoyed a reputation as being home to the greatest magicians in Egypt. Despite its extraordinary history, Akhmim has never been properly excavated by archaeologists.

‘And the LORD brought us FORTH out of EGYPT, with a mighty hand.’

Deuteronomy 26:8

Title Page

Author’s Note

Epigraph

1. Cairo, Egypt

2. The City of Garbage, Cairo

3. Zennor, Cornwall

4. La Bodega bistro, Zamalek, Cairo

5. The Monastery of St Anthony, the Red Sea, Egypt

6. Carnkie, Cornwall

7. Sohag, Egypt

8. Tahta, Middle Egypt

9. Zennor Hill, Cornwall, England

10. Morvah, Cornwall, England

11. Abydos, Egypt

12. Middle Egypt

13. Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle, Cornwall

14. Nazlet, Egypt

15. Tahta, Egypt

16. Carnkie, Cornwall, England

17. Sohag, Egypt

18. Sohag, Egypt

19. Bodmin, Cornwall, England

20. The Necropolis of Cats, Bubastis, Egypt

21. Bubastis, the city of cats, Egypt

22. Truro Police Headquarters, Cornwall

23. Chancery Lane, London, England

24. Dokki, Cairo, Egypt

25. Coptic Cairo

26. London

27. London

28. Luxor

29. Police Headquarters, Luxor

30. London

31. The Tomb of Ramose, Valley of the Nobles, Egypt

32. Theban Necropolis, Egypt

33. London

34. London

35. The Monastery of St Tawdros, Malkata, Egypt

36. New Scotland Yard

37. Tawdros, Egypt

38. London

39. Chancery Lane, London

40. Aswan, Egypt

41. London

42. London

43. Aswan, Egypt

44. The Nile

45. Upper Egypt

46. London

47. Egypt

48. Plymouth, England

49. The Clayzone, Cornwall

50. Cornwall

51. University College, London

52. Department of Parasitology, Imperial College, London

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Tom Knox

Copyright

About the Publisher

1
Cairo, Egypt

The taxi stopped in the City of the Dead. Victor Sassoon stared out of the dusty cab window, adjusting his spectacles, and cursing his seventy-five-year-old eyesight.

Ranked on either side of the unpaved road, that led directly through the cemetery, was a monumental parade of Mameluke shrines, yellow-painted mausoleums, and enormous white Fatimid graves; in front of the larger tombs, young children played obscure games in the ancient dirt.

Sassoon stared, a little deeper: he could glimpse shrouded Arab women in the unknowable interiors; he could also see the blue and orange of charcoal braziers: the women were cooking chicken claws and flatbreads amidst the corpse-dust.

The cab engine idled. The women gazed, from behind their veils. Sassoon wondered if the denizens of the City of the Dead could tell he was Jewish. Anglo-Jewish.

He leaned and tapped the cab driver on the shoulder.

‘Why have we stopped?’

Silence.

‘Why?’ he repeated.

The driver shrugged, not turning; the violet prayer-beads hanging from his rear-view mirror shivered in the breeze of the Cairene winter.

A kid in a grimy djellaba – the long Arabic robe worn across North Africa and beyond – wandered over to the taxi. The boy was smiling at Victor, as if he knew something Victor didn’t.

‘Why? Tell me.’ Victor raised his voice, a hint of panic therein. He didn’t want to be stuck here in the cemetery with the fellahin. The City of the Dead, one of Cairo’s direst slums, was a dangerous place to linger.

‘Aiiii.’ The cab driver squinted at Victor via the mirror. ‘Afwan, khlass, ntar—’

‘Stop!’ Victor snapped. ‘I know you speak English!’

Not for the first time, Victor condemned himself for his inability to speak much modern Arabic – despite speaking dead languages by the dozen.

The cab driver sighed.

‘You are from England, yes? Inglizi?’

Victor nodded once more.

‘So I see you do not understand.’ The driver smiled, patiently. ‘I will explain. You want to go to Manshiyat Naser?’

‘Yes, you know that. Moqqatam.’

‘Aiwa. Moqqatam.’

The wind was picking up as the winter sun weakened: it made Victor cough, and reach for his handkerchief. The breeze was carrying a hateful dust: the residue of the dead.

Victor wiped his mouth and spoke.

‘We agreed you’d take me there.’

The driver shook his head.

‘Look and see. Thief and drug-seller live here. In the tomb.’

‘So let us go. Please. Quickly.’

‘Ahlan sadiqi, you are not understanding. Even the people here, even the people in City of the Dead will not go to Moqqatam.’

‘I don’t care. You said—’

‘No.’

‘But—’

‘You walk now. Is just a walk? One or two kilometre. That way.’

The driver was pointing at a raised freeway thick with frenzied Cairo traffic, and beyond that a mighty cliff, grey and gloomy in the impending twilight.

Under that cliff, as Victor knew, was the abandoned quarry which was home to Cairo’s poorest of the poor: the Zabaleen.

The Zabaleen suburb, Garbage City, had a terrible reputation – worse, perhaps, than that of the City of the Dead. But Victor did not care. At the back of Moqqatam was, apparently, an ancient church, the Monastery of the Cave. And in that monastery was an old priest who could tell him whether the Sokar Hoard really existed. And whether it could be deciphered.

And right now the archaic documents that comprised the Sokar Hoard meant more to Victor than his own dwindling life. The faint but persistent rumours in London, in Egyptological circles, were too startling to ignore.

The Copts have discovered a cache of documents in Middle Egypt. Parts are written in Arabic and French, as well as the most ancient Coptic. The Arabic and French commentaries imply that the Coptic source texts are revolutionary: they could alter our entire understanding of religion.

Of course these rumours were probably exaggerated. But even if you stripped out the hyperbole, the prospect was extremely enticing. Not least because the supposed provenance of the Sokar Hoard – Coptic Middle Egypt – made it all the more plausible that someone had indeed found something.

Coptic Middle Egypt was one of the historically richest yet least explored areas of the Middle East. Middle Egypt was where, in 1945, two farmers had unearthed an old earthenware jar which turned out to contain the famous Gnostic Gospels: heretical Christian writings which had since radically altered the conception of Christianity’s evolution.

And yet this new prize, the Sokar Hoard, was said to be vastly more significant?

Victor had to find it. It was his final calling, his allotted task, his Jewish destiny. He was probably one of a handful of scholars who could translate the source text, the Ur text in old Coptic.

But right now he was stuck in a rusty Cairo taxi, surrounded by dirty kids who lived in tombs.

The cab driver sighed, again.

Belatedly, it dawned on Victor what the driver wanted. Baksheesh. More money. Of course.

He reached in the pocket of his blazer, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fold of new notes.

‘Two hundred Egyptian pounds. Now take me to Moqqatam!’

The driver stared at the money in Victor’s hand as if it was something utterly repugnant. Then he took the cash and jammed it in the sweat-stained pocket of his nylon shirt. And started the car.

The drive took merely ten minutes, past the last of the Fatimid ossuaries, past the final tombs of the Abbasid nobles, past an Ottoman mausoleum adapted into a car-repair workshop. They made a quick dash and a violent U-turn on the angry motorway with its angry taxis, and then the smell hit.

A smell of apocalyptic grime and aching misery.

This was it: Moqqatam. Ahead of them was a road which led to a kind of mock gate made of mud-bricks, old tyres and crushed metal.

The taxi stopped again. Victor reached reflexively for his wallet. But this time the driver waved a dismissive hand, and his frown was sincere.

‘La. You are here, mister. Manshiyat Naser.’

‘But—’

‘I am a Muslim. I cannot go in there … Not with …’ He nodded in the direction of the gate. ‘Not with the Christians.’

The last word was expressed with utter contempt, as if the driver was spitting on a rat.

There was no arguing for a second time. Victor Sassoon accepted his fate. He grabbed his walking stick and climbed stiffly out of the taxi, which reversed in a cumulus of dust, then accelerated back up the hill into real Cairo, where the Muslims lived.

Victor regarded the gate, and the suburb beyond.

Even the people in the City of the Dead will not come here.

Leaning on his walking stick, Victor said a quick Jewish prayer. This was his greatest scholarly adventure, the fitting culmination of a life spent untangling the truth of Jewish history and Jewish faith. This was the moment towards which his entire existence had been building. But he was ageing and ill, and time was short. Stick in hand, Victor Sassoon walked towards the City of Garbage.

2
The City of Garbage, Cairo

The first thing that he saw as he passed under the gate was quite unexpected: two beautiful, unveiled young Coptic women walking past in embroidered robes, laughing as they made their way through the mud and the stench. He glanced at them, warily, but they ignored him. Just another stooped old man.

Victor sighed stoically, and walked on. A plastic Christian icon, suspended above the road, swung in the chilly breeze.

The main street was lined on both sides by enormous sacks of rubbish. Faces gazed, perplexed and blank, from dark windows and doorways. These stares certainly weren’t friendly. Yet neither were they necessarily hostile. They possessed a kind of desperate inertness.

Victor advanced. He knew from his research that the Monastery of the Cave was somewhere at the other end of the suburb, right under Moqqatam Hill, carved out of the cliffs. He could be there in ten minutes. If he wasn’t stopped.

To quell his anxiety, he went over what he knew.

The name Zabaleen meant, literally, ‘the rubbish collectors’. But fifty years ago they were called the Zarraba, or the pig people, because that’s what they had once been: peasant swineherds dwelling in the region of Assyut and Sohag, two hundred miles south of Cairo. In essence, they were just another tribe from Egypt’s ancient Coptic communities – Christians who had been living in the Middle East since the second century AD, long before the Muslims arrived.

No one knew why the Zabaleen had suddenly decided to migrate to Cairo. Their lives in Middle Egypt had certainly been poor, and Assyut was a dusty and sometimes violent region: home to many Islamists, who had grown in power and audacity – and hostility to Christians – in the last fifty years. Yet, still, why did they move here? Victor Sassoon found it difficult to imagine that any peasant life in the sticks could be worse than that now endured by the Zabaleen in Cairo.

He’d reached the main street of the City of Garbage. Looming beyond the lofty and toppling houses of the township were the limestone cliffs that delimited Cairo’s eastern suburbs. Directly behind him was the vastness of the City of the Dead and the urban motorways.

The whole neighbourhood was cut off and excluded. It was also situated in a hollow – a great and disused quarry – which made it invisible to the rest of Cairo.

A young man stepped across the road towards Victor. He had a cheeky, Artful Dodger-ish grin.

‘Hey. Hello? Mister? You tourist? Take photo of us? Fuck you.’ The lad laughed, flicking his chin with his hand, and then sauntered away down a darkening alley.

Victor walked on. He was nearly there. He was trying not to look left or right but he couldn’t help it. The scene was so extraordinarily medieval. No, worse than medieval.

Groups of women were sitting on stinking heaps of rubbish inside their own homes. The women spent their days herein, picking over the rubbish brought into Moqqatam by the men with their donkey carts. The women were looking for rags, paper, glass and metal: anything that could be recycled. Because this was what the Zabaleen did, this was their daily toil, and the sum of their existence: they sifted and recycled the garbage of Cairo, in the City of Garbage.

Pigs and goats scuttled between the tenements. Children played among bales of hospital waste; a toddler had been placed on sacks of refuse. Her smiling face was covered with flies.

Compassion pounded in Victor’s heart. He wanted to help these people, shut away in their claustrophobic ghetto. Yet what could he do? He’d heard that some brave charity had opened a clinic here a few years ago, dispensing rudimentary medicine to deal with the wounds and infections the Zabaleen contracted from their repellent environment.

Yet some also said the Zabaleen mistrusted modern medicine and refused help, preferring their traditional solace: religion. It was God that made the lives of these people bearable. If the Zabaleen were notorious for their bellicosity, for their sad or drunken desperation, they were also famous for their religious fidelity and devotion. The churches around here were thronged every Saturday, the Coptic Sabbath.

Even now Victor could see two women on a street corner kneeling to kiss the fat gold ring of a lavishly bearded Coptic priest. The black-cloaked priest smiled serenely at the purpling sky, while the women kneeled and kissed his jewellery, like supplicants in front of a Mafia godfather.

A priest? A priest meant a church. He needed to find the Monastery of the Cave.

Ahead, the main road, such as it was, forked left and right. On the left a man was butchering a pig in the gutter. The other lane led to a wall of distant rock. That was surely the route. And yes, through the dust and the bustle of Moqqatam, Victor could make out the arch of a monastic gate: probably the only noble piece of architecture for miles.

Victor Sassoon approached a wooden kiosk erected beside the gate. Inside, a badly shaven man sat scowling on a stool. The interior of the kiosk was decorated with lurid pictures of the Virgin Mary, with farcically huge eyes. Like a seal-pup.

‘Salaam,’ Victor said, as he leaned to the open window of the kiosk. ‘Ah. Salaam aleikum, ah – ah—’

‘I speak English.’ The middle-aged man spat the words. ‘What do you want?’

This was less than friendly.

‘I am a visiting scholar from London. I am keen to meet Brother Wasef Qulta, in the monastery.’

A definite sneer lifted the gatekeeper’s face.

‘Many peoples want to see Brother Qulta. You need permission.’

‘I have emailed and telephoned but I have been unable to get a response from the Coptic episcopate. Please. I only need a few minutes of his time. I have come a very long way.’

The gatekeeper shrugged. No.

Victor had expected this; and he had a plan.

‘Perhaps I can explain better. I am … happy to make a very considerable donation to the monastery. I will entrust it with you?’

This was the entirety of Victor’s plan: bribe his way in, bribe his way through every problem. It was crude but it was effective in a poor country like Egypt – especially in one of the poorest parts of Cairo. And Victor had plenty of money to spare.

Yet the gatekeeper was unmoved. He gazed at the dollar bills that Victor was discreetly flourishing and this time the sneer was angry. ‘La! No! Ila jahaim malik!’

But his anger was interrupted: by shouting. Victor turned. A slender, white-robed adolescent, perhaps a novice monk, was yelling from the steps of the monastery, yelling at no one – and everyone. The shouting was loud and wild. Victor could not translate the words, but the meaning was clear – something terrible had happened. Some kind of crime?

The gatekeeper was already out of the tatty little kiosk, running towards the porch of the monastery; others pursued. Victor took his chance and joined the anxious people. He strained to see over the shoulders and arms. What was going on?

The crowds were too thick. Shameless now, Victor used his stick to lever himself between the onlookers. There! The monastery door was open – and Victor brazenly stepped inside.

It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness within. There was a knot of people in the shadowy hallway: they were pointing at the stone stairs beyond. Victor caught the word ‘police’ – shurta – and then the word qalita.

Murder?

A noise came from the stairs, where a makeshift stretcher was being hauled along by sweating hands. The agitated Zabaleen stretcher-bearers lowered their burden, as they pressed towards the door. And then Victor gazed, quite appalled.

The man on the stretcher was pale and stiff. His robes had been wrenched open, revealing his white chest, where he had been stabbed brutally in the heart. The pools of blood were lurid. The crossguard of the dagger, still lodged between the ribs, gave the impression the monk had been stabbed with a crucifix.

Victor recognized the silent face of the victim. It was Brother Wasef Qulta. Maybe the only man who knew the truth about the Sokar Hoard. And now he was dead.

3
Zennor, Cornwall

The year was gone; the party was over. Malcolm Harding wandered, unsteadily, through the detritus of their New Year’s Eve merrymaking. He marvelled at how much booze ten people could manage to drink in seven hours.

The vodka bottles clinked at his feet; an entire army of empty beer cans stood to attention in the corner of the sitting room. Jojo was fast asleep on the sofa, cradling a wine bottle in her delicate hands.

He resisted the urge to look up her miniskirt.

She was so beautiful though. Even now, with her make-up mussed, sprawled dissolutely on the leather sofa, she was just lyrically pretty: perfect and blonde and twenty-one years old. Oh yes, he adored Jojo. Ever since they had arrived here on Christmas Eve in this grand and spooky old house, perched between enormous rocks in the wild west of Celtic Cornwall – which was itself the wild west of England – he had tried to hook up with her, in as subtle a fashion as he could manage.

And he had failed. Maybe he hadn’t been subtle enough? Maybe he had been too subtle? Maybe he could try again when they were all back at university. The holidays were nearly over. It was January the first, and it was – what? – three a.m.

Three a.m.!

Malcolm sat on a table and swigged from his bottle of beer. Amy Winehouse was still lamenting all the drugs that would kill her from the stereo. The music was so boomingly loud it was probably annoying the dead in Zennor churchyard, half a mile away.

Beer finished, Malcolm wondered vaguely, and groggily, where everyone else had gone. Rufus was presumably in one of the many bedrooms, with their amazing views of the sea, sleeping with Ally, as they had been doing ever since they had shared a bottle of vintage port on Boxing Day. Andrei had crashed with his girlfriend immediately after midnight. Josh and Paul were probably smoking upstairs, or chopping out a line. Or flaked out in their clothes.

Jojo turned over on the sofa, half-stirring, but still asleep. Her little denim skirt rode up as she did. Manfully, Malcolm resisted the temptation to linger; instead, he stood up, walked across the room, then wandered through the enormous mess that was the kitchen (they would have to hire some kids from the village to clear this up) and opened the kitchen door to the large gardens that surrounded this great old house, Eagle’s Nest.

The night was cold. The garden seemed empty. Then a dark and sudden figure loomed into view.

‘Jesus!’

Freddy laughed, and casually dropped his glowing cigarette onto the grass, not bothering to crush it underfoot.

‘Sorry, old boy. Did I frighten you?’

Malcolm was half-angry, yet half-relieved.

‘Yes you did. What the fuck are you doing, skulking out here?’

‘Well I came out to chuck up into the bushes, as is traditional on New Year’s Eve.’ Freddy smirked. ‘That last joint was a bit of a serial killer. But the air revived me.’

Now the two of them stood together in the cold, looking out to the distant waves. The house, Malcolm recalled, had once been owned by artists. You could see that its position might inspire.

‘So? Do tell. Did you manage to ravish Jojo yet?’

Malcolm sighed.

‘Not exactly.’

‘Ten days and not even a kiss? This is potentially worse than the Holocaust.’

‘Maybe. I’ll survive.’ Malcolm gazed down, once more taking in the magnificent view, the vast granite rocks and the moonlit fields below, which led down to the Atlantic. ‘Anyway, Freddy, mate, why are you still out here? You’ve been gone hours. It’s freezing.’

Freddy put a finger to his lips.

‘I wanted to sober up, as I said … and then …’

‘Then what?’

Even in the semi-darkness he could see the sly frown on Freddy Saunderson’s face.

‘Then I heard something.’

‘Duh?’

‘Something weird. And I keep hearing it.’

‘That’s Amy Winehouse. She’s dead.’

‘No. Not the music. Something else.’

‘But—’

‘There it is again! Listen.’

Freddy Saunderson was, for once, not joking. From way up on the moors there came a wild and very loud scream. No, not a scream – a feral chorus of screams; yet distorted and shrieking, mingling with the howl of the wind.

Malcolm felt an urge to step back: to physically retreat.

‘Jesus Christ. What is that?’

For a moment the noise abated, but then it returned. A distant choir, infantile and hideous. What the hell would make a sound like that?

At last, the noise ceased. The relative silence that followed seemed all the more oppressive. The thudding music in the house; the waves on the rocks below. Silence otherwise. Malcolm felt himself sobering up very fast.

Freddy pointed.

‘Up there.’

He was surely right. The noise appeared to be coming from the moors above them: from Zennor Hill, with its great granite carns and its brace of ruined cottages.

They’d walked around that forbidding landscape the day before, in the driving rain and blustering wind. The hilltop was druidic and malignant, even by day.

Freddy’s eyes flashed in the dark.

‘Shall we go and have a look?’

‘What? Are you nuts?’

‘No. Are you gay?’ Freddy laughed. ‘Oh come on. Let’s investigate. It’ll be fun.’

Malcolm hesitated: quite paralysed. He was seriously unkeen on investigating that noise, but he also didn’t want to appear a wuss in front of Freddy; he was wary of Freddy’s cruel sense of humour, his lacerating jokes. If he didn’t show he was up for this, Freddy might just humiliate him the next time he was feeling a little bored at the union bar.

Malcolm tried to smile.

‘All right then. Let’s see who’s the real gaylord.’

‘Excellent.’ Freddy rubbed his hands together. ‘We’d better get coats and stuff. This is like Enid Blyton, only with ritual murder.’

When they went back into the house, they found that Jojo had disappeared. Probably gone to bed? Malcolm was glad, in a protective sort of way. They turned off the music, grabbed their coats, boots and a pair of torches.

The path up to Zennor Hill began just outside the grounds. It had been treacherous the previous day; in the moonlight it was even trickier. Ferns and brambles dragged at them, tussocks of grass tripped every step. Above them, the imponderable carn glowered, framed by myriad stars.

But the horrible noise had stopped.

For five, ten minutes they ascended the silent, narrow path up the hill. The view of Zennor village below, its Christmas lights twinkling in the wind, was beautiful and sad. Malcolm began to wonder if they had imagined it. Maybe it had been some curious sound effect, perhaps the fierce January wind whistling through the rocks: there were many strange rock formations up here.

But then it came again, and this time it was even worse. The sound curdled the thoughts in his mind. This scathing and animalistic wailing was surely the sound of somebody – or something – in terrible and angry pain?

Freddy turned, just ahead, his face a blur in the gloom.

‘Pretty sure it’s coming from the ruined cottage, the big one, Carn Cottage. Is that a fire inside?’

Malcolm desperately wanted to go back now. This had been a daft idea; and yet he was still scared of Freddy’s put-downs. He was stuck.

The noise came, and went. This time it was so close it was like an exhalation – you could feel the scream on your face.

‘There, look!’ Freddy pointed his torch beam excitedly. ‘Scoundrels!’

Figures. There were people walking away – no, running away – down a lane across the top of the hill, dark shapes. How many? It was too difficult to see. Who were they? What were they?

Freddy was laughing.

‘Do you think it’s devil-worshippers? We might be turned into newts!’

The figures were already out of sight, swallowed by the darkness. Had they been spooked by the noise? Or by the fire? Or by Malcolm and Freddy?

Malcolm waved a desperate hand. ‘Look. Please. Can’t we just go? This is dangerous. Let’s just go, please. Call the cops.’

His protestations were futile; Freddy simply vaulted the low garden wall of the half-ruined cottage, and ran across the garden; he was followed by Malcolm, much less briskly.

As they neared the cottage, Malcolm could see there was indeed a fire burning inside the building. And it was a large fire, too, casting eerie orange shadows on the windows. The heat from within was palpable in the cold winter air.

‘Freddy – wait – don’t—’

It was too late. His friend was kicking at the old door; even as the infernal shrieking went on, and on.

‘C’mon – open up!’ Freddy laughed, ‘Open up, in the name of all that’s holy!’ Now Freddy stepped back and kicked even harder at the splintering door, and at last it succumbed. The lock snapped and the old door swung open, revealing a roar of heat and howls and things, strange black burning shapes, racing out at them, fleeing and burning—

A flaming creature leapt at Malcolm’s face, and its claws sank deep. Malcolm’s scream echoed down from the lonely carn, carried on the freezing wind.

4
La Bodega bistro, Zamalek, Cairo

Victor Sassoon sat in a darkened corner of the darkened bar, cradling a glass of Scotch and water, his fourth of the afternoon, and maybe his fortieth of the last four days. It was his last afternoon in Cairo. The whisky tasted like the bitter herbs of Seder: the taste of defeat.

The monk was dead. The Sokar Hoard, if it had ever existed, would probably never be found. His one last hope, that he might meet Albert Hanna, was about to come to nothing.

Hanna was a Coptic antiquities dealer. He was also notorious for his serpentine skills in fulfilling the desires of museum curators and billionaire collectors across the globe. The mummy of a concubine of a Rammeside Pharaoh? But of course. An intact and entire Fayum portrait rescued from the black mud of Antinopolis? Please allow me.

His methods were obscure, and probably illegal, but he got results. Albert Hanna knew every rumour of every new find from every sandy corner of Egypt. If anyone knew anything about the truth of the latest gossip – the whispers of the Sokar Hoard that had brought Sassoon to the polluted streets of the Egyptian capital – it would be Hanna.

But Hanna was an elusive quarry. He didn’t answer his phone; he didn’t answer emails; like many Christian businesses, his office in central Cairo was closed because of the recent and ongoing riots.

So, La Bodega bistro was Sassoon’s rather desperate and concluding bid. Many of Cairo’s antiquities dealers were middle-class Copts like Hanna, and nearly all of them liked to drink discreetly – and many of them were regulars at the Bodega, not least because it was increasingly dangerous to drink everywhere else. Some of the bars near the Coptic quarter were getting trashed and gutted by Islamists. Christian grocers who still dared to sell beer were being forcibly closed.

Pensively, Sassoon inhaled the aroma of his Scotch, and remembered a time when it had been much easier to drink in this city. He remembered drinking good German beer in Shepheard’s Hotel, with that keen young American Egyptologist, Ryan Harper.

Victor wondered what had happened to Harper. But then, he wondered that about many people these days. Friends died like flies when you reached your seventies, as if there was an Old Testament plague, the Great Pestilence of Egypt. Now, which book of the Bible was that?

His aged thoughts were wandering, again. Sassoon sipped the solacing bitterness of his Johnnie Walker, walked to the heavy velvet curtains, and gazed down at Zamalek.

The street outside was a parodic vision of its own history: this part of Cairo, situated on an island in the Nile, had been built in the early twentieth century as a place of European elegance, with boulevards and plane trees, and chic apartment blocks – even a palace for Princess Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. But now all the trees had been chopped down, the apartment blocks had been turned into tatty shops and crowded flats, and the traffic was, of course, endless and polluting.

Yes, the smoke and scuzz of Cairo disgusted Sassoon. It was time to go home, and to give up. It was never going to happen; it had all been a foolish dream.

‘You can positively smell the smoke from the TV centre. N’est ce pas?’

Sassoon swivelled, letting the velvet curtains fall.

Standing behind him was a slightly paunchy man in his mid-forties, wearing a perfect yet worn Savile Row suit, with a beautiful faded Milanese silk tie, and a moustache that curved down to a goatee.

It was Albert Hanna.

The man was unmistakeable. Sassoon had seen this face in Egyptological websites. It was his first stroke of luck: five tedious days of patient waiting had paid off. At the very last moment.

‘The Islamic students, in their vulgar fury, are burning everything. One can only pray that the Sphinx is inflammable.’ The man sighed, and pulled himself a seat. ‘You know the Arabic name for the Sphinx, Mister Sassoon? It is Abu al-Hol, the Father of Terror.’ The dealer smiled, politely. ‘And yes, of course I know who you are. You are quite famous.’

Sassoon slumped into his own chair, and set down his Scotch. He realized his demeanour probably seemed defeated, yet inside he was secretly delighted.

‘I also know, Mr Sassoon, that you have been searching for me. My apologies if my delay in contacting you seems rude: I have been distracted by the troubles. Soon the fundamentalists may make it impossible for us Copts to live, let alone drink.’ Hanna swirled his glass of cognac. ‘You know Egypt was once renowned for its wines? Tutankhamun was buried with several jars of a fine dry white. But now, ahhh, où sont les vins d’antan?’

He stroked his dyed goatee, which had indubitably been dyed pitch-black, and added, ‘There is no hope for us, there is no hope for the drinkers, for the Copts. But we will stay here anyway! We are the true descendants of ancient Egypt, after all. Now tell me. Why are you in Egypt? A famous Anglo-Jewish scholar like you, visiting Egypt amidst this turmoil, when Tahrir is engulfed in flames? Why do you want to talk to me?’

This was Victor’s chance. ‘The Sokar Hoard.’

Hanna looked at Victor, darkly, and his eyes flashed with thought. ‘Why did you not mention this in your emails? I might have responded sooner.’

‘Because …’ Victor paused. ‘Because this is a delicate issue. I know there are severe laws regarding antiquities. If the Sokar Hoard exists it belongs to the Egyptian state and people.’

‘You were being discreet? That is well advised.’ Hanna picked up his balloon glass of cognac and swirled it again. ‘So. The Sokar Hoard. Hmm. The rumours are ripe, are they not? Exuding a heady perfume of promise? Just imagine: a cache of ancient documents that make Nag Hammadi look like …’ Hanna closed his small and sparkling brown eyes while he summoned the words ‘… like a cheap photocopy of Harold Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Yes, the Sokar Hoard, if it exists, would be an unexampled prize. If you could decipher such a thing, this would eclipse your spectacular work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. You would finally have your statue in the sunlit plaza of greatness, for pigeons to soil.’

Was he trying to insult? Or merely provoke? Sassoon didn’t care. ‘I’m not hunting for academic glory, Mr Hanna. As I understand it, the Sokar Hoard contains evidence that alters our perception of Jewish history. The exploration of Jewish history and theology has been my life’s calling. As such, if there is a deeper truth, I want to know it – before …’

‘It is too late?’

‘What do you know, Mr Hanna?’

‘Call me Albert. Like the German–English prince. You know he used to couple with Queen Victoria three or four times a day? It is a surprise she looks so grumpy in her photos.’

‘Please. What do you know of the Sokar Hoard?’

Hanna smiled his moist and thoughtful smile. ‘First tell me what you know of the Hoard.’

Victor Sassoon finished his whisky, and impatiently recounted his own story. ‘It all derives from Wasef Qulta. Brother Wasef Qulta was something of a fixture in circles of Egyptology and biblical history. For instance he corresponded, occasionally, with a colleague of mine in London, a professor at the Flinders Petrie collection.’

‘Ah yes, one of the finest, the Flinders Petrie, a very excellent museum – I always loved that adorable faience cat from Amarna. I have sold similar.’

‘Last month my London friend got a rather emotional email from Qulta. Telling him that the Coptic church was in possession of an astonishing discovery of crucial early Christian texts which had been unearthed in Middle Egypt. Qulta claimed the texts were comparable to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Oxyrhynchus papyri: maybe even more important, more exciting. My friend told others, and the rumours and speculations spread.’

‘Indeed. I have also heard these rumours. The late Wasef Qulta started quite a fracas.’

‘A week later Qulta emailed again. He told my friend the Coptic church was keeping the Hoard close and hidden, and that he was being told to say no more, and stay silent. And then the emails stopped.’

Hanna was quiet.

Victor concluded, ‘I felt I had no choice but to come to Cairo and seek out Qulta for myself. Last week I went to the Monastery of the Cave in Moqqatam.’

‘You went alone to Moqqatam?’

‘Yes.’

Hanna tittered. A couple of ex-pats – white businessmen – glanced over. ‘Well, well. How did you deal with the Zabaleen, Mr Sassoon? Did you fight them off with your walking stick?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The Zabaleen are perfectly mad. The poorest of our Coptic brethren. They brawl and they fornicate and they live in their palaces of swine and rubbish. They say life there is getting worse, the madness and the diseases, the mental afflictions, the suicides, all that horrible trash.’

‘I saw Qulta. I saw his body. I know he was murdered.’

Hanna stroked his goatee. Patiently waiting, like a cat that is confident of being fed.

Victor went on, ‘Do you know why he was killed, Mr Hanna? Albert? I know you have intimate connections across Coptic society. Was the Hoard stolen, is that why he was killed? Was it a violent robbery? The papers say nothing.’

The ex-pat white men were telling coarse jokes; and chortling.

At last Hanna spoke, leaning close. ‘Ah, but Mr Sassoon, does the Hoard even exist? What can I say? I can barely speak. My throat is quite dry. Parched as the Qattara Depression.’ Hanna looked at his empty glass, then at Victor.

The message was clear. Sassoon ordered the most expensive cognac for his companion.

Hanna accepted the glass, and sniffed the liquor, and tasted it with a wince of pleasure. Then he gazed around the quiet old bar. ‘God bless the old Bodega. One of the very last oases of civilization in Cairo,’ he said. ‘You know the British Satanist Aleister Crowley had his famous thelemic revelation here?’

‘In 1904, the Book of the Law.’

‘Quite so! You really are the scholar of your reputation. Crowley’s wife saw the so-called stele of revealing, the stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, in the Bulaq Museum.’

‘Item number 666.’

‘Then she began raving, and he repaired to his apartment, probably in this building, and had his moment of intimacy with the divine, his theophany – or perhaps some more opium? Crowley was so very fond of opium. My grandfather knew him. Apparently he liked to be sodomised by Nubians. But this is true of many.’

‘I don’t have much time, Mr Hanna. Please tell me: how much do you know about Qulta and the Sokar Hoard? I can pay, and I have a lot of money.’

The correct switch had evidently been thrown. Hanna’s evasive smile disappeared and he gazed directly at Sassoon. ‘Five thousand dollars and I will tell you all I know.’

Sassoon didn’t even bother to haggle. The sum was large, but he was too old and tired, and too eager and excited, to haggle. And he had enough money. A lifetime’s savings.

‘I have it here. In cash.’ He reached in his blazer pocket, opened his calfskin wallet and took out a wad of new, one-hundred dollar bills. He briskly counted out twenty notes and arranged them in a neat and tempting stack. ‘Two thousand now. Three thousand if your assistance is as valuable as I hope.’

Benjamin Franklin stared at the ceiling.

Hanna snatched up the notes and thrust them in his pocket, his expression businesslike.

‘From what I understand, Monsieur Sassoon – and this may or may not be true, but my half-brother is quite senior in the Coptic church, and he knew Qulta – yes, the Sokar Hoard does exist. And yes the documents are said to be, potentially, a revelation. Some of them are in French and Arabic and quite legible, but the oldest, most crucial and, unfortunately, most incomprehensible, documents are in Akhmimic. Qulta was a scholar of Akhmimic, so it was hoped he could translate these most opaque Coptic documents. And so he was allowed to take the Hoard to his monastery in Moqqatam for further scrutiny.’

‘That’s why he was killed, someone stole it? Theref—’

‘Wait.’ Hanna frowned. ‘Brother Qulta’s indiscretion did not meet with the approval of his superiors. The emails to your friend, the rumours he allowed to spread – they were attracting unwelcome attention. He was ordered to shut his foolish mouth.’

‘The Hoard?’

‘Furthermore … when the latest troubles began in Cairo, the riots, the strife, the threats against Coptic communities, the Pope himself – our own Coptic pope – decided that the Hoard should be taken somewhere safer. So it is alleged.’

‘But where? Where did it go?’

The bar was getting even darker, as the winter evening finally descended on Cairo’s grimy streets. Hanna shook his head gravely. ‘Who can say? These things are occult. But I have heard this: a few days before his death, Brother Qulta took a trip to the Monastery of St Anthony.’

‘The oldest monastery! By the Red Sea. Yes. Of course. Remote, untouched. A perfect place to keep a treasure.’

‘And a tiresome journey across the eastern sands. Why did Qulta do that? Why do that if not for some serious reason? He must have taken the Hoard with him, to hand it over. That is what I believe.’

Sassoon was confused. ‘But if the Hoard was not in Qulta’s possession, why was he killed? You mean it wasn’t a robbery?’

Hanna picked up his glass, and swirled the cognac. ‘Perhaps he was killed because of what he knew, perhaps because of what he said. Perhaps he was secretly canoodling with the belly-dancer mistress of a major-general in Heliopolis. It is a mystery. And there it is. C’est tout. Would you like something else while we are? Here. Look. I have a precious jar of Mummy Violet.’ Like a cardsharp, Hanna flourished a small silvery, seemingly antique steel jar from a pocket of his suit jacket, and carefully unscrewed the top. ‘It is a pigment used by painters, made from the decayed corpses of the Egyptian dead, from mummies, mummiya, hence its name: Mummy Violet. I believe the Pre-Raphaelite artists were very fond of it, the hue it offers is intense, though of course some find the concept, eheu, politically incorrect, and a touch Hitlerite, like those lampshades. Consequently it is very rare, I can sell it for two thousand US dollars – a pigment made from the desiccated flesh of the ancient dead – imagine what your exciting London artists could do with that!’

Sassoon stood up. He had his information.

Hanna raised a hand, looking up at him. ‘Please, Monsieur Sassoon, I did not wish to offend. The Jews are a great people, and I know you are a great believer, as well as a great scholar. Allow me to say one more thing.’

‘What?’ Sassoon was impatient to get going.

‘Mr Sassoon, please be careful.’

‘You mean it is dangerous? The journey?’

‘No. Yes. A little. But it is more that … you might be careful of what you wish for. My half-brother told me that when he saw Qulta …’ Hanna’s face was almost invisible, the velvet-draped bar was now so dark. ‘The poor monk was quite deranged. It seems the contents of the Hoard are, in some form, sincerely devastating. Really quite calamitous.’

But Sassoon didn’t care to listen; he was already walking to the door. The idea had entirely seized him with its romance, its intense biblicality. To find his prize, his promised treasure, he had to cross the Egyptian wilderness, to the very shores of the Red Sea.

Like Moses.

5
The Monastery of St Anthony, the Red Sea, Egypt

It took Sassoon two days to find a taxi driver who was willing to make the journey. The driver who finally agreed was fifty, and shifty, and hungry, and desperate, and he said he would charge Sassoon five hundred dollars for the job. He spoke a slangy Arabic so accented it sounded like a different language, but Sassoon certainly understood the figure ‘500’ when the man wrote it with a stubby pencil on his tattered map of Egypt.

They left at dawn to avoid the rush hour but got caught in traffic anyway. It took two hours for them to crawl out of the final dreary suburbs of Cairo, past the last shuttered Coptic grocer, with its defaced sign advertising Stella beer; and then they headed into the grey austerity of the Eastern Desert, the rolling dunes and stony flats, stretched out beneath an overcast sky.

The driver played loud quartertoned Arab music all the way, music that sent Sassoon half crazy. It felt like the music of delirium. But he was also glad that he didn’t have to talk to the driver. Talking would be pointless anyway: they couldn’t understand each other.

Six hours later they attained the outskirts of Suez, and the driver made an extensive detour, avoiding the centre of the city entirely. Sassoon guessed why: the Al Jazeera English news had told him last night. Central Suez was in uproar. Riots were wracking the city, several youths had died and, even worse somehow, several people had been blinded by plastic bullets aimed deliberately at their eyes. The televised image of one protestor, his sockets empty yet filled with blood, had stayed with Sassoon for half the night.

The hours droned past. The wailing music droned on. The desert became emptier and dustier. It was now clear they weren’t going to make it in a day, so the driver pulled into a scruffy truckstop with a village attached.

What looked from the distance like a public lavatory turned out to be their designated resting place. A ‘hotel’ with cracked windows, five rusting beds, and one shared and fetid bathroom. Sassoon drank whisky, alone, in his bare cement room, to force himself to sleep. The mosquitoes danced around his face, drunkenly, as he nodded out.

Morning cracked blue. The sun of the desert had won. And Sassoon’s spirits rose as the driver slowed, and turned the music down, and Sassoon caught his first glimpse of the Monastery of St Anthony, lost in the fathomless depths of the desert.

It looked enchanting: a complex of spires and tiled arches and archaic chapels, tucked into a fold of red desert rocks. This was it, the oldest monastery in the world, founded by St Anthony in 250 AD.

The car stopped; Victor disembarked. ‘Shukran,’ he said, handing over the dollars.

The driver took the cash, shrugged, gave Victor a faint smile of pity; then he turned on the hollering music, and sped away.

Hoisting his heavy bags, Victor stumbled across the road and under the arch. At once he was engulfed by the silence, the silence of silent worship, of punitive adoration, the silence of the endless Red Sea sun.

And then a monk came out from a darkened chamber, squinting at this sweating old man in his ludicrous blazer with his walking stick, and the young monk smiled quietly and said, in accented English, ‘Hi, I am Brother Basili. Andrew Basili. This way please. You are a pilgrim? You can stay here, no worries. There are no other visitors, they’re all too scared of the troubles. You must be pretty brave. This way. Over here. Guess you’ll want some refreshment? You are in time for breakfast.’

Breakfast turned out to be austere plates of olives and flatbread, and carafes of water, consumed at a long table in the refectory in almost total silence, apart from a monk intoning the psalms.

During the morning Victor was left to do as he pleased. In the central courtyard, the sun blazed. The monastery was mute. One youthful monk was hurrying about his business, keeping to the shade of the stumpy colonnades.

Victor approached. ‘Salaam—’

But the monk shook his head. When Victor tried again, the young monk blushed and fled.

Victor sat on a stone bench, rubbed his aching chest and read his guidebook.

‘The body of St Justus the monk is kept in a passage by the Church of the Apostles …’

In the afternoon he located the monastery library, domed and white, and delicately frescoed with images. A reverential hush pervaded the eight-hundred-year-old room: it felt wrong to talk. But Victor had to try, and Brother Andrew Basili was at the other end of the library, immersed in at least three open books.

‘Hello,’ said Victor.

Basili’s smile was brief and a little cold. He evidently didn’t want to be interrupted. But Victor had to try.

‘This is a fine library.’

Basili’s nod was terse. ‘Used to be better. Then the Bedouins raided it, in the eighteenth century. They burned many of our volumes as cooking fuel.’

Victor listened, finally placing the accent. Australian. This was not unexpected; Sassoon knew that many young men from the Coptic Diaspora – in Australia, Canada, America – were returning to Egypt to renew their church, in defiance of the troubles and the hostilities. Many Coptic monasteries were, paradoxically, flourishing for the first time in centuries.

‘You’re from Sydney?’

‘Nah. Brissie.’ Basili sighed. ‘Now, sorry, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got my studies.’

Supper was the same as breakfast, apart from a single beaker of vinegary wine.

The next day it became apparent that no one was going to speak to Victor, not properly, not ever. Most of the monks shrank at his approach. The few who did linger were so shy and kind and virginal it was emotionally impossible to ask about the Sokar Hoard. The only time he did mention the terrible phrase, to an elderly, English-speaking monk from Port Said, the man scowled and stalked away.

As the days passed and shortened in their repetitiveness, their mesmerizing and beautiful dullness, Victor found himself giving up. Wandering out of the monastery gate, into the sunburned desert, he sat under the thorn trees, and stared at his absurd leather shoes and his absurd twill trousers and he felt like a fraud, just a dying and childless narcissist. Maybe he was seeking mere glory, and he deserved to fail. Maybe it was all just spiritual vanity.

On the fifth day Victor was woken as usual by a softly tolling bell, even before the darkness had dispelled. Opening the thin cotton curtain, he gazed at the first tinge of the sun, still hiding behind Sinai, just a roseate rumour at the dark edge of heaven.

‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork.’

Crossing the silent square at the centre of the monastery, Victor creaked open the door to the church and joined the thrumming tranquil hubbub of the monks in their daily Matins: the Agbeia.

‘Khen efran em-efiout, nem Epshiri, nem Piepnevma ethowab ounouti en-owoat.’

The pew was painful to sit in for so long. Victor shifted and listened. The hour of prayer passed slowly, and hypnotically. And then the last of the prayer was intoned.

‘Doxa Patri, ke Eyo kai Agio epnevmati ounouti en-owoat. Amin.’

The words were bewildering, and lovely, in their strangeness, their syncretism. You could hear all of religious history in these Coptic words: maybe a touch of Aramaic, more than a hint of Greek, and certainly the very syllables of ancient Egyptian – it was like a Pharaoh sitting up in his tomb, and turning, in a nightmare, and talking to Victor. Blood seeping from his decaying mouth.

A sudden coldness swept up his limbs, and into his heart, and Victor fell to the floor.

Darkness. Darkness.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

The next thing he realized, he was in some kind of kitchen staring at the kindly young faces of half a dozen monks. They were daubing his forehead with water.

‘I … What happened?’

‘You fainted.’ It was Andrew Basili. ‘Are ya OK? We can get a doctor … in a day or so.’

‘I am so very sorry,’ Victor said. He was acutely embarrassed, as if he had publicly soiled himself. ‘I am an old fool. I shouldn’t have come. I am so sorry.’

The other monks dispersed, black cloaks whispering, leaving him alone with Brother Andrew. The sun was up now.

‘So, why did you come?’

‘I came to find out something. Something very important to me. I want to know about Brother Wasef Qulta. A monk murdered in Cairo. He came here, about two weeks ago. And I want to know why.’

Andrew Basili said nothing. For a long, long time. Then he nodded. ‘Look, I don’t really know anything about that stuff. Sorry. If you are feeling better, maybe you should go back to Cairo?’

Once more, silence filled the sparse monastic kitchen.

In his desperation, Victor Sassoon decided to do something quite terrible. Something he had never done before in his life.

‘Brother Basili, the reason I ask all this is that I believe Brother Qulta was carrying documents which relate to the history of my Jewish faith. I am a scholar of this area. The texts may be written in a language few can understand. I may be one of those few.’

Brother Andrew said nothing. Victor went on,

‘The history of my faith is very important to me. Because … you see …’ Very slowly, Victor Sassoon pulled up the cuff of his blazer, unbuttoned his shirt and revealed the markings to the Australian.

The monk’s eyes widened. He gazed at the small, faded tattoo on Victor’s left arm. ‘You were in the camps?’

Victor nodded, suppressing the fierce rush of shame. How could he use this as blackmail, as emotional bribery? It was the worst of sins: the Shoah as a bargaining device.

But he didn’t care.

‘Auschwitz. I was a tiny boy, one of the last, from Holland, we were taken there in 1944, but the Russians saved us. Then … well, we had a British side to the family, they took me in after the war. My mother and father died in the … in the camp. All my Dutch family. They died. That’s when I resolved to keep my faith alive, my Jewishness.’

The ensuing silence was different. Brother Basili sighed, rubbed his face, shook his handsome young head. Then he pulled up his own wooden chair and sat next to Victor. For a moment, Basili stared at the wall.

Victor could see the confusion in his profile. Finally, Basili spoke. ‘I guess there is no harm in telling you what I know. ’Cause I don’t know much.’ He made a weary gesture. ‘Brother Qulta visited his mentor. Brother Kelada. A scholar, an anchorite. Qulta had documents on him, I have no idea what they said, I know they were old and valuable.’

‘How valuable?’

Basili turned, and his young face flushed with a tiny hint of pride.

‘Priceless! The Coptic church is the source of everything. We are the original church! The church founded by St Mark the Evangelist. The church of the gospel of St John.’ He shook his head, then continued, with real passion. ‘Even the very oldest copy of the Bible in the world is Coptic – the Codex Sinaiticus!’

Victor nodded.

‘I know the story. Stolen by a German from St Katherine’s in Sinai. Then given by Stalin to the British, yes?’

‘Yes!’ Basili said. ‘The Brits keep it in London, but it’s ours. We won’t let that happen again. Whatever these documents are, I am pretty sure we shall keep them. God has entrusted us to be the curators of the Christian faith, of the original church.’

‘So where are the documents now?’

Basili frowned. ‘Sohag, I think? Does it matter? Brother Kelada didn’t want them here, I don’t know why. So he told Qulta to take them back where they came from, where they were found – some cave in the desert. That’s what I heard. That’s all I know.’

Again, the frustration returned, but also the excitement. Sohag, Middle Egypt. The Red Monastery, or the White, or the Monastery of the Martyrs, the Monastery of the Seven Mountains. Which? But it made sense. Sohag was not far from Nag Hammadi, where the Gnostic gospels were found.

‘Where in Sohag? There are many monasteries. Please let me speak to Brother Kelada. He can tell me.’

The Australian monk shook his head. ‘Impossible.’

‘What?’

‘He died three days ago.’

‘But how?’

Basili looked faintly contemptuous.

‘We had to bury him outside, near the trees. Suicide is the worst of sins.’

6
Carnkie, Cornwall

The walk to the Methodist chapel for her mother’s funeral took Karen Trevithick past grey, pinched, tin-miners’ houses that probably once belonged to her extended family. She was descended from generations of Cornish tinners. And Cornish wreckers, smugglers and fishermen, for that matter.

Cornwall was her homeland, this was her home. Carnkie was the hearth of that home.

Yet she didn’t feel at home. Not at all.

‘All right, Karen, my dear? So sorry to hear about Mavis.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘How is the littl’un?’

‘Ellie is OK, staying with Julie, my cousin’s wife in London – they have kids.’

‘Ah yes, nice for her to have playmates. ’Specially now.’

‘Yes. Yes it is.’

Who was this polite elderly Cornish gentleman who had stopped her in the street? Karen ransacked her memory. She couldn’t place him: some distant third cousin? A friend of her mother’s? The man smiled at her, kind and gracious, and laid a consoling hand on her elbow. She thanked the nice old gent once again, and walked on, around the drizzly corner, to the chapel, a dour grey granite pile, a building of deliberate and penitent ugliness.

Karen’s mother, a widow since her fifties, had returned to this old village, Carnkie, a few years back: retreating from an increasingly lonely London to the emotional comforts of Cornwall.

At the time, Karen had confessed mixed feelings about this. She was glad her mum was retiring to the country she loved, but she was selfishly sad her mother was leaving as that meant less free childcare for Ellie; she couldn’t work out why her mother chose Carnkie of all places, even if it was the ancestral hamlet.

Much of Cornwall was lovely, from the sheltered yachting harbours and languid creeks of the south, to the rawly beautiful cliff-and-thrift coasts of the north; but Carnkie was in the brutal, ugly middle of Cornwall, a place of wind-scraped moorland – and dormant, decaying mining townships. Like Carnkie.

The mourners were gathered at the gate that led to the chapel door.

‘Hello Karen.’

‘So sad, so very sad. So young as well.’

‘I tell ’ee, sixty-two?’

Barely listening, Karen took one last look at the view. A typical Cornish fog, half-drizzle, half-mist, was rolling down from old Carn Brea, shrouding the rocky moorland above the village. It murked between the granite-built tin-mine stacks, making them look, even more than usual, like classical ruins.

Karen turned, and entered. The interior of the chapel was notably better than the façade: it was airy and spacious. But the spaciousness underlined the fact there were so few people here. At least she could see her cousin Alan at the front, in a pew; he saw her, too, and waved her over.

‘All right, Kaz?’

‘Yes,’ she sighed, sitting down next to her cousin. ‘Fine. I mean. Ish.’

Apart from Alan there were maybe ten or eleven people, their paltry numbers exaggerated by the vastness of the chapel. This was a place built for hundreds of lustily singing miners and their ruddy-faced wives and many, many kids, a place built at the height of the tinning boom in the nineteenth century, when places like Carnkie were churning out more copper and tin than anywhere else on earth, when places like Redruth, Carnkie and St Just were allegedly the richest square miles on the planet, though all the real money disappeared to London with the owners and the landlords.

Now it was all dead. The chapels were empty, the mines were closed, the people were old and the children had gone. And now even her mother had been taken and swallowed by the mizzle, reducing her immediate family to just two people: herself and her six-year-old daughter.

She realized, with a kind of surprise, that she was crying.

‘Hey now, come on.’ Alan handed her a tissue.

‘Sorry. Look at me. Train wreck.’

‘No need to apologize. Just remember, you’re nearly through. The crem is usually the worst bit.’

‘I’m glad we did it first.’

‘Yes.’

The cremation had been yesterday: this was the service. Karen already had her mother’s ashes in her car, sealed in a faintly farcical pot, itself in a supermarket carrier bag. She had no idea what to do with them. Scatter them at sea? But her mother had distrusted the sea. Like many older Cornish people she had never even learned to swim, even though she lived in a peninsula surrounded by the churning Atlantic.

Where then? Up on Carn Brea, next to the castle? That was better – the view across to St Agnes Beacon, and the sea beyond, was immense and glorious; but the grieving wind hardly ever stopped.

Incongruously, Karen considered the disaster that might ensue if she scattered the ashes in a typical blowy Carn Brea morning.

‘We are gathered here to celebrate the life of Mavis Trevithick.’

The vicar was doing his thing. Karen barely listened. She imagined her mother’s reaction to the news that her mortal remains had been ritually distributed across a bank of Lidl shopping trolleys.

She’d surely have laughed. Like many Cornish people, her mum had possessed, or inherited, a wry and salty sense of humour: that kind of wit was the only way to deal with tough lives down the mines, or on bitter moortop farms.

‘Can we all sing Hymn 72, “Abide with Me”?’

Oh God. ‘Abide with Me’? Karen was entirely immune to religion; she believed none of it – that’s why she’d left Alan to arrange the service – but this one hymn always got her. Something in the tune – it mined her soul, found the motherlode of human grief, every time.

The organ hummed, the frail voices joined in. Karen put the scrunched-up tissue in her fist to her trembling mouth and closed her eyes. Hard.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

It didn’t work, the tears were falling lavishly now. Along with the memories of her mum, before Dad died, making jokes and pasties, with flour on her fingers, when everyone was alive, when she had cousins and uncles and parents, but so many were gone, all gone—

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;

Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Karen stifled her sobs. If only she could believe that was true, that there was something beyond, a loving God for all, a brother for the lonely, a father for the orphaned, an embracing and eternal Lord, gathering the anguished. But whatever Nonconformist fire had once filled this big ugly chapel was long ago extinguished; all the tin was mined out. She certainly hadn’t inherited any faith.

The grave was victorious, after all. And yes, death stung.

Thankfully, the next hymns were more bearable. A few prayers were mumbled, the vicar talked of Mavis’s vivacity and gardening. Then everyone – all twelve or so of them – filed out of the chapel, and repaired to her Uncle Ken’s house for Cornish bread, saffron cakes and pots and pots of tea, thick protection against the cold and drizzle outside. There was no alcohol. The Nonconformist tradition of teetotalism lived on, even as the religion itself had expired.

At three o’clock Karen got a call. She stepped out of her uncle’s front room into the hall to take it. The number flashing on her phone was unknown.

‘Hello?’

‘Karen?’

‘Hello – is this …? Is this …?’

‘Yes. Sally Pascoe. Your second cousin! Remember?’

‘Sally!’

Karen was genuinely pleased to hear her voice, and also a little perplexed. She and Sally had been great friends as kids, during those childhood Cornish holidays they spent hours hopscotching in Trelissick or building sandcastles at Hayle. Later on, their adult lives had diverged, yet continued in parallel: Karen had become a detective chief inspector in London, Sally a policewoman; but she had stayed in Cornwall. Busy careers and lively kids meant they hadn’t met in years.

‘Karen, I’m so sorry I couldn’t make your mum’s … you know. So sorry.’

‘Sal, it’s OK.’

‘But work is, well, it’s very busy. I’m sure it’s a lot more hectic up in London, but we have crimes down here too.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s fine.’

‘Anyway I just wondered if you might … well, I mean, you have quite a reputation in London, as a DCI … I wondered if you …’

‘Sally, spit it out!’

‘Do you want to drive over to Zennor, maybe later, or tomorrow? I mean, if you have the chance, it might, uh, distract you. You see, we have a strange case, a cottage on the hill.’

‘I can come over right now. To be honest I’d like an excuse. The funeral was … intense. And now my Uncle Ken is trying to overdose me with scones.’

Sally laughed gently. ‘We like our carbohydrates down here.’

‘I’m on my way. Meet you there in forty minutes?’

The drive took less than forty minutes. Karen drove fast, with her mum in the back, in a carrier bag. She parked at Zennor church and followed the winding path up to the hill to the ruined cottage. Her destination was obvious: there were two police Range Rovers parked next to the derelict building, their yellow-and-blue insignia garishly conspicuous on top of the grey-green, stony hill. The drizzle had abated but the January wind was keen.

A constable greeted her. ‘You must be DI Pascoe’s friend?’ He opened the door of the cottage.

Karen stepped inside. Her reaction was reflexive.

‘Oh my God!’

7
Sohag, Egypt

Victor Sassoon saw the smoke of the second small bomb from his hotel window. The fifteenth-floor balcony of his hideous 1970s concrete tower gazed across the Nile, from the dense and frazzled streets of Muslim Sohag, to the smaller, ancient, more Coptic, west-bank town of Akhmim. The smoke from this latest bomb rose like a long-stemmed lotus flower above the dense medieval streets.

Then came the sirens, harsh and plaintive in the noonday heat. Had the Muslims attacked the Copts again? Or was it the Copts attacking the Muslims in return? The only thing anyone knew for sure was that the violence was worsening. The papers had informed him this morning that the Zabaleen were also rioting in Cairo. Egypt was truly roiled.

Yet this very morning the poor people from the countryside had tethered their shallow boats to gather reeds from the side of the Nile, much as they must have done in Pharaonic times. This was Egypt, turbulent and tumultuous, and also unchanging.

Turning from the balcony, Sassoon sat on his bed and unscrewed his precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and filled a tooth mug with half an inch, slugging it in one go. It gave him courage for the day ahead, and it dulled the pain. The pain in his lungs and in his legs; and in his heart.

Lifting up the bottle, Sassoon examined the liquor that remained. Five inches maybe. And it would be hard to buy more: Sohag was a dry city. Islamist.

Everything was running out. Time and whisky, and life.

He rose, buttoned his blazer and picked up his stick. In the street he hailed an old, pale blue fifties Ford taxi and got in the back seat to negotiate the day. The driver, Walid, spoke a little English and asked Victor if he knew his brother Anwar who lived in Manchester and worked in a car showroom.

Victor confessed that he had never met Anwar, despite living in the same country. Walid seemed very disappointed by this, until Victor told him what he wanted: to be driven to all the nearby ancient Coptic monasteries, for the next two days; and then Victor added that he would pay a hundred dollars for his time and gasoline.

This was an absurdly generous offer, but Victor was infinitely beyond caring. He had tens of thousands of dollars in his account – the product of a lifetime of academic salaries and scholarly frugality – and he had no family. What better use could he find for the money than discovering a great and final truth?

But he needed to be quick. The pain in his lungs was like a murderer had stabbed a sharpened crucifix in his chest.

‘Please.’ Victor gestured at the donkey cart blocking their way. ‘Let’s go.’

Walid smiled a tobacco-stained smile and slammed his horn, frightening the donkey, as they screeched out into the Sohag traffic.

They talked about the bomb as they made their slow way through the chaos of trucks and cabs, and old Mercedes minibuses full of Egyptian matrons, in vividly coloured headscarves.

‘Much bad,’ said Walid. ‘Very bad. Soon they will make the Coptic leave Egypt. Sadat, Mubarak, they protect the Copt. But now … No good. No good.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand.

Sassoon gazed at the rear-view mirror, and the absence of dangling prayer-beads. ‘You are a Christian?’

‘La.’ Walid shook his head and ignited his third Cleopatra-brand cigarette of the morning. ‘Muslim. But I having many Coptic friend. We are all Egyptian, all People of the Book. The bad men want to … make hate. You smoke?’

Victor demurred. He had once been a smoker. Forty years a smoker, then he’d stopped. Evidently he had given up too late: the lung cancer was very advanced. He listened placidly as Walid smoked and sighed and cursed and swore at the politicians and chattered away about his eight children, and his annoying new wife, until at last they reached the desert.

The transition was sudden, as always in Middle and Upper Egypt. The fertile valley of the Nile was a vivid and glorious sash of green across the ochre of the Saharan wilderness, but when the desert began it did so with a painful severity: in a second one travelled from emerald to grey, or from city to nothingness.

Ahead of them, in the first desert sands, was the White Monastery. In truth it looked quite unprepossessing, like an ugly and very humble pile of mud bricks and cracked pillars, yet it was one of the oldest church buildings in the world.

‘I wait here. You take time. Plenty time.’ Walid parked, with a brisk spin of the wheel, at the steel gates of the monastery complex.

Victor ejected himself from the taxi, his chest and his knees complaining at the effort. Two bored-looking Coptic men greeted him, and frisked him, then allowed the harmless old man beyond the gates. He was instantly greeted by a young, anxious-eyed Copt called Labib – a ‘server’, not a monk. Labib spoke good English and wore badly-fitting jeans and poignantly cheap shoes; he carried a large bunch of keys. It seemed he single-handedly ran the White Monastery complex.

First, Victor made a generous offering to the monastery coffers, and then Labib spent the next tedious hour showing Victor the remnants of the old monastery, the Armenian brickwork, the fifth-century apse and the huge monastic graveyard, and then he showed his visitor all the exciting new buildings: the grotesquely ugly new church with its glass elevator, the bizarrely fresh murals of Adam and Eve painted in red and green on the perimeter wall, and then, the greatest triumph of all, a six-metre-wide animatronic statue-fountain of Christ’s Miracle of the Watered Sheep.

‘Look,’ said Labib, sighing slightly. ‘I can show you the miracle.’ He stepped behind the huge, cement-and-plaster sculpture. Victor leaned on his stick with a grasping sense of despair. He heard the squeak of a metal tap being turned.

The water duly cascaded from a fake cement rock and ran past the smiling plaster Jesus who lifted his holy plaster hand and the animatronic sheep bent their animatronic heads in the manner of sheep drinking at a miraculous stream in the desert.

Victor flushed with faint embarrassment, and looked away. He had at least five more monasteries to visit. And then what? Victor felt the full futility of the exercise. Even if he found the right monastery, how was he going to get into the archives? Was he going to burgle them at night? Climb through the mud-brick windows? Hire a tractor and smash the walls down?

Labib emerged from the back of the automated Jesus, and gestured at the sheep. ‘It is a good miracle. Do you think?’

‘Yes. Ah. It’s marvellous.’

Labib gazed at Victor, and smiled forlornly, and shook his head. ‘No it is not … It is stupid. You know this.’

‘Erm …’

‘I can see you are intelligent man.’ Labib turned, and gestured at the wide-eyed Jesus. ‘Look. This is what we are reduced to, the Copts, making stupid miracles out of toys. But what can we do? We are in prison.’ He exhaled, with enormous weariness.

There was nothing to be said. Sassoon gazed at some crumbling, pitiful heaps of mud brick as they began the trudge back to the gates. He tried to change the subject to something more fruitful. ‘The White Monastery was much bigger once?’

‘Yes it was,’ Labib answered. ‘Many times bigger. We had kitchen and churches, and the great library. A thousand monks lived here in Saint Shenouda’s time. Fourth century.’

‘You know a lot of the history.’

‘I was a history teacher, at the university, Sohag. But they closed the department. Islamists did not like us teaching Coptic history. Now I have three children to feed, so I do this. I make the sheep drink from the miracle water. Twice a day.’

Victor paused. And daubed his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Tell me about the library.’

‘It was famous. The Codex Borgia came from here, and the Gospel of St Bartholomew, the Acts of Pilate, Gospel of the Twelve – many, many texts. But it was all scattered: Arabs burned some of the books; people stole them, Germans and French and English. Many times monks hid the books – in the caves in the hills. Now we are trying to rebuild the collection.’

‘What hills, Labib?’

The young man pointed at the desert cliffs beyond the gate, to the west. ‘The Sokar cliffs.’

Victor gazed at the wall of daunting rock.

Labib muttered, ‘I think Sokar is the name of an Egyptian god? There are many caves.’

Victor thought the puzzle through. There were probably a thousand places in Egypt named after Sokar: a god of the sands, of the western afterworld, of cemeteries and canals. But the coincidence of this and the library? He had surely found his goal. He stared at Labib. Gentle, sad, helpful Labib, a scared and unhappy young man, with a family he was desperate to feed.

It was time. Victor Sassoon abandoned his last shred of morality. ‘Labib,’ he said, ‘do you ever think about emigrating?’

The eyes of the young Copt glanced upwards, as if God might disapprove of his answer.

‘Yes, yes of course. Many Copt thinks of this. I want to go to Canada, take my wife and children … I have cousins there already. But I do not have any money.’

‘How much money would you need?’

Labib laughed, long and bitterly, in the desert sun. ‘Five thousand dollars. Ten? It is just a dream.’

Victor opened his arms as if offering the world.

‘I will give you ten thousand dollars if you do something very difficult for me.’

The sun burned down on Labib’s astonished face. ‘Do what?’

Victor took him by the arm and explained. Labib stared. And stared. And stared. And the plaster Jesus behind him lifted his mechanical hand, and blessed the miraculous waters.

They arranged to meet the next evening, in Victor’s hotel, at nine p.m. Ten minutes before the designated time, Victor took the clattering hotel elevator down to the lobby, where he sat and gazed at the headscarved women drinking Lipton’s tea; then he looked at his watch, on and off, for two hours.

Then he went to his room and drank whisky. Labib had not shown up.

At midnight he got a cryptic text message:

Cannot get in. I will try again one more time. If I succeed I see you in hotel tomorrow 21:00 at your room. Labib.

Precisely twenty-one hours later, Victor heard a furtive knock at his hotel-room door.

Labib.

Labib was out there in the twenty-watt darkness of the landing, carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. Mutely, full of shame, the Copt handed it over.

Victor grabbed the bag. An urgent glance inside gave him confidence. The contents looked authentic. Victor strained to contain his agitation, and his jubilation.

Now it was his turn. From the inner pocket of his blazer he took a thick envelope.

Labib didn’t even bother to count the thousands of dollars therein. Instead, he just smiled, very regretfully; then turned and walked away down the landing.

Alone in his room Victor sat on the bed, trying to quell his excitement. But his hands were trembling as he opened the bag and gazed at the frail documents bound in even frailer goatskin.

The call to prayer echoed across Sohag, across darkened Akhmim, across the moonlit reaches of the Nile, as Victor Sassoon took out the crumbling papyrus sheets of a very ancient document, and began to read.

8
Tahta, Middle Egypt

‘But where are we going, effendi?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I am not understanding?’

‘Please, just drive on.’

Walid shook his head, and lit a Cleopatra cigarette. The smoke filled the taxi as they drove through yet another dusty, sunlit Egyptian village, with metal shacks selling palm oil and soap powder, and minarets soaring into the dusty sky. Dark-skinned boys played naked in the canals.

The cough came again, a hacking, savage cough; Victor Sassoon saw Walid checking him, anxiously, in the rear-view mirror.

‘I sorry, effendi, I smoking, sorry, I stop.’

Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.

Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.

Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?

Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just couldn’t. Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.

An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.

Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’

‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’

Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.

‘So we stop.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’

Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’

‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’

The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’

‘A few hours.’

Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.

As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.

Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingness.

Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.

But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.

He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.

When he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.

Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.

But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.

Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.

Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth, once again. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t. It was right to let God decide.

If there was a God.

The wind whirred outside, at the end of the long cavern. Victor thought of his wife and of the children they never had; he thought of her on that bicycle, that holiday, a spaniel puppy, a car journey somewhere, a cottage with a well in the garden, a photo of his dead parents, snow falling on the Polish camps, and then his wavering and failing mind considered one final thought: the blessed name of Jerusalem, derived from Shalim, the Canaanite God of Night; the God of the End.

And here was that same spirit, coming into the cave like the cool desert wind: Shalim, the God of the End.

9
Zennor Hill, Cornwall, England

Cats? The cottage was full of cats: or rather the corpses of cats. Some skinned, most of them charred. Charred and burned and scorched and roasted. Piles of dead cats in one corner. Piles of dead cats in another. The stench was intolerable. They had begun to rot.

‘Jesus Christ.’

DI Sally Pascoe nodded, grimly. The white shirt of her police uniform was smeared with greasy soot. The stuff was everywhere. The burning fur and cat flesh had thickened the air and blackened the walls. The floor was actually sticky: Karen shuddered to think why that was, though she could guess – the heat must have been intense as the cats burned, so intense that the fat in their flesh had liquefied, had turned to oil or tallow, now congealing. Like candles.

These cats had been burned like candles.

She resisted the urge to vomit.

Sally pointed, and Karen followed the gesture. ‘That must have been where some of them were burned. A spit roast, but others appear to have been doused in petrol, and burned alive. We found some petrol canisters at the back, and firelighters too, used for kindling.’

‘They stink. Are you going to move them?’

Sally shrugged. ‘We don’t quite know what to do, I mean, who do we go to, Forensics, Pathology?’

‘Or a vet.’

‘Yes, maybe.’

Karen gazed around the awful scene. One cat was only half-burned: so they hadn’t all been burned at the same time. They had been torched one after the other. Ritualistically. And this ritual had not been completed.

Ritual?

Ritual.

She turned to Sally. ‘Maybe you should speak to an expert on witchcraft.’

‘Yes! That’s what I thought, some kind of terrible witchcraft. That’s one reason I asked you over, Kaz. Didn’t you handle a case in London, last year, African voodoo?’

‘Yes. A Congolese couple decided their kid was possessed, and they beat him to death.’

Sally shuddered visibly. ‘OK, OK, so this is just amateur night here, just a house full of barbecued cats.’

‘It’s quite bad enough, Sally. Properly Satanic.’ She stooped to one sticky, charred heap of corpses. Using a pen, she flipped one small corpse upside down. The mouth of the cat was open, agonized and screaming. Karen shook her head. ‘The noise must have been unbelievable. Right? Dozens of cats, being burned alive. Through the night? You know how cats yowl. I get them outside my house in London. Caterwauling. Imagine the appalling noise if you … burned them like this.’

‘Yes, that’s how we were alerted, someone heard the noise.’ Sally was backing away to the door as if she wanted to flee. Her face was pale. ‘Sorry. I’ve had enough for the moment: the smell. Can we get out, and speak in the car?’

‘Sure.’

The door was opened; the fresh air – cold and faintly drizzly – was unbelievably welcoming. Both women inhaled, greedily. Then they both laughed, very quietly.

‘Hey, I haven’t even said anything about your mum … Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Karen, I’m so, so sorry. Come here.’ She hugged her friend.

Karen welcomed the embrace: human warmth. She missed her daughter; she missed her friends; at this moment, she missed her mum most of all.

A silent constable standing at the door watched them, perhaps slightly embarrassed by their open emotion.

Karen and Sally walked to the Range Rover and got in. Sally spoke first. ‘Look at us, two important policewomen. Or one slightly important and one really important. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector at the Met? What happened to little Karen Trevithick? A DCI at thirty-two? Go girl!’

Karen waved away the compliment. ‘It’s easier for women in some ways. We have a different way of looking at things. Changes perspective.’

‘Yes I find that too … Sometimes.’

‘Hard work too though; and it’s pretty tough on Ellie.’

‘Your daughter must be, like, six?’ Sally’s smile faded. ‘The father—’

‘Still isn’t really involved. But that’s my choice.’

‘You were never one to get married and bake scones, Kaz.’

‘No. I guess not. Not like Mum.’ She looked out of the car window, at the distant, yearning sea, way down the hill, beyond Zennor. ‘You know we used to come here, to Zennor. On holidays. We’d take a picnic and sit on the cliffs. Dad would always say the same thing – the same bit of history. He loved Cornish history. You see them? Those little fields, down there?’ Karen gestured towards the intricate labyrinth of tiny, vivid green fields, surrounding the granite village. ‘You see the stone hedges dividing them? The big boulders. They’re Neolithic. My dad told me those were the oldest human artefacts in the world still being used for their original purpose.’

Sally peered down Zennor Hill. ‘OK … Not a history fanatic, how old is that? Neo … lithic?’

‘We’re talking 3000 BC – five thousand years old. The first farmers moved the huge stones they found in the fields to make hedges. And they’re still using them now.’

Sally nodded, absently. ‘I never liked it here. Penwith, I mean – this part of Cornwall. Creeps me out a bit, the tin mines and the standing stones, it’s all so brooding.’

‘Which is why people come here, right? Hippies and druids. Bohemians and artists. And Satanists. Which brings us back to the cats. You said the noise alerted someone, so you have a witness?’

Sally shook her head. ‘There was a bunch of rich kids, uni students, staying for Christmas and New Year. They rented Eagle’s Nest.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That big house down there.’

Karen stretched to see: a large handsome building, with extensive gardens, in a spectacular position hard by the highest sea-cliffs. ‘Must be rich, to rent that place. So they heard the noise? Of the cats being tortured?’

‘Yep, in the middle of the night, and they came up to have a look.’ Sally Pascoe frowned, expressively. ‘I guess they were drunk. They kicked open the door – and got way more of a fright than they expected. One of them was badly clawed by a cat, a burning cat, trying to escape. Must have been terrifying.’

‘They saw no one?’

Sally reached for a stick of Nicorette chewing gum. ‘I’ve given up for New Year,’ she explained, unwrapping. ‘So, yeah, where was I … yes, the two boys – Malcolm Harding and Freddy Saunderson – they both say they saw people running away, but it was dark. That’s all we know at the moment. No other witnesses, nothing. But it must have been those people who burned the cats.’

‘The kids aren’t involved?’

‘No.’ Sally’s negative was firm. ‘I’m convinced they have nothing to do with it.’ She chewed the gum methodically. ‘So we’re maybe looking for a gang of Satanists out on the moors of Penwith who like to torment cats by the hundred. How sweet.’

Sally’s phone rang. Karen raised a hand to say I’ll be outside and opened the Range Rover’s door. The wind was so gusty it almost slammed it shut against her fingers. Raising the collar of her raincoat, Karen walked around the cottage.

It was half-ruined. A shed of some kind, with a clear plastic roof, was attached to the rear. Most of the windows were broken. It obviously hadn’t been inhabited for many years, maybe decades. That in itself was odd, Karen thought: the cottage was spectacularly situated. It had the kind of view that you could rent to summer holidaymakers for two thousand a month. Even in winter it would attract arty types, who liked the rawness, the stern and brutal beauty of the West Penwith landscape. Why let it fall into ruin?

She turned a further corner and peered in through one of the few unbroken windows. The interior was dark, but there was still enough light to see the piles of contorted and tormented little corpses. What a ghastly thing. She shivered in the wind. Her mother had loved cats …

‘Karen, come over here!’

Stepping over tumbled bricks and shattered window-glass she saw Sally, in the Range Rover, gesturing.

‘Get in the car and shut the door. Listen to this!’

Karen obeyed. Sally could be a little bossy; she hadn’t changed all that much. But that was fine, it was actually reassuring.

‘What?’

Sally’s face was stern. She lifted up the phone, significantly, pointing it Karen’s way. ‘I just got another call, from my Detective Sergeant, Jones.’

‘And?’

‘They found a body.’

‘Where? Here? Zennor?’

‘No, down a mine, Botallack, you know that one, on the coast, over Morvah way.’

Karen’s thoughts whirled into confusion. She wondered aloud, ‘An accident? Falling down a mine shaft? I don’t see the connexion. How …?’

‘The owners found the body this morning, at the bottom of the shaft. They say it was covered in a weird grease, black soot and stuff.’

The Atlantic wind buffeted the window of the Range Rover. Karen looked at the charred and open door of Carn Cottage. It was covered with grease and soot.

10
Morvah, Cornwall, England

What was that line of poetry her father used to quote, about the West Penwith countryside?

This is a hideous and a wicked country,

Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time,

Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite …

The poet was right.

DCI Trevithick steered her Toyota carefully along the narrow Penwith roads; to her left, the moors rose abruptly, scattered with enormous rocks, oddly deformed. To the right, the pounding and merciless sea, assaulting the cliffs. And in the narrow strip of flat land between, there lay the wind-battered farms and the grey mining villages. Ex-mining villages.

Just ahead was Morvah. Morvah. Karen mouthed the vowels, silently, as she slowed the car. There was another line, by some writer, her dad would quote: ‘the fearsome scenery reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. It was so very true.

And yet people loved this country, too, which was why it got so many artistic visitors who adorned it with these famous quotes. Even on a raw and hostile January day, like today, it had a powerful and hypnotic quality that made you want to linger.

Who killed the cats? She had to find out. The case was starting to obsess her.

At Botallack Karen took the last turning, onto a winding, rutted track that seemed to lead past a farm, directly over the cliffs and straight down to the crushing sea three hundred feet below. But at the last moment the track veered right and opened up to a tarmacked car park at the very edge of the precipice.

And there below was Botallack Mine. Just seeing it made Karen shiver.

It was one of the oldest mines in Cornwall, three or four centuries old at least, though tin streaming and tin mining had been happening here for three thousand years. That was why the entire Penwith coast was riddled with tunnels and shafts and adits, like a honeycomb under the sea-salted grass. There were so many mine-workings that people occasionally fell down unsuspected shafts to their deaths; dogs disappeared quite frequently.

Yet within this ominous world Botallack had an especially sinister quality, not because of its age, but because of its position: right by the sea, halfway up an almost-vertical cliff. The mine had been built here to exploit the tin and copper under the ocean. The shafts were famously deep and the tunnels famously long: extending out under the Atlantic.

Imagine the life of the men who worked here every day …

Karen got out of the car and cringed from the cold fierce wind.

Yet, working here every day is precisely what her ancestors had done. Her father’s family ultimately came from St Just, and her great-great-grandfather, and no doubt the men before him, had been miners right here. At Botallack.

It must have been a horrible existence: they would have risen before dawn, often in a ferocious Atlantic gale, then walked in the wintry dark from their cottages along the coast and down the cliffside to the minehead, where they descended deep underground. In Victorian times they would have had to climb down half-mile-long ladders, deeper and deeper into the darkness. And after an hour, when they reached the bottom, they had to crawl for a mile under the sad and booming sea in terrifyingly narrow tunnels to the rockface.

Only then did their shift officially begin, hewing and drilling the vile, wet rocks to get at the precious black tin; only then did they begin to earn the pittance that paid for their families’ subsistence. When did they find the time or energy to live and pray and sing and make love to their wives? No wonder they died so young: at thirty or thirty-five. Apart from Sundays, they wouldn’t have seen the sun from October to March.

Karen locked the car, thinking. The word Sunday must have had a special resonance then. The only day they saw the sun. Sunday.

An image of her father flashed before her. They had come here once and he had told her all this mining history, trying to make her proud of her Cornish heritage. In reality, the sight of awesome Botallack had just made seven-year-old Karen rather scared.

Slowly, she made her way down the perilous cliffside path, towards the handsome stone stacks of Botallack engine house, and the small cabins surrounding it.

She was greeted by a tall dark-haired man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis jacket. He extended a firm handshake and shouted above the buffeting sea-wind, ‘Stephen Penrose. You must be Karen Trevithick?’

She shook his hand. ‘Can we go inside?’

The peace inside the great, cold, stone-built engine house was almost a shock after the stormy noise of the wind.

‘Hell of a day! Yes, I’m DCI Trevithick, from Scotland Yard.’

The man looked her up and down. Karen didn’t know whether to feel patronized, or flattered, and didn’t particularly care either way: she was just eager to crack on. She’d had to fight for permission to be assigned to a case so far from London; indeed, she’d had to use a little emotional blackmail with her senior officer at the Yard, expend some capital. But this strange case intrigued her, and distracted her from gloomy and interior thoughts.

She was also distracted by the great void just a few metres from her walking boots. The shaft. It dominated the stone chamber. A black circle of nothingness, much bigger than she had expected: a great mouth that swallowed men daily, with a gullet that went down for miles.

‘In the old days, when they were tinning,’ Penrose said, as if he sensed her thoughts, ‘you would see steam coming out of that shaft.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Steam, from all the men, the miners breathing deep underground, the steam from their exhalations, would rise up the shaft.’

It was another jarring concept.

‘Have you ever been down a mine, Miss Trevithick?’

‘No.’

He tutted, sympathetically. ‘With a good Cornish name like Trevithick?’

‘The stories put me off,’ she said, staring at the shaft. ‘My dad would tell me stories of my family. Working in these places. One of them died when the man-engine collapsed at that mine, along the cliffs: Levant. And my great-grandmother was a bal maiden at South Crofty.’

‘Ah yes, the girls, breaking the rocks and sifting the deads, standing in the wind. What a job that must’ve been.’

‘They were tough women.’

‘Very true, Miss Trevithick, very true. Here. You’ll need this.’

She took the hard hat, put it on, strapped it under her chin and smiled briskly. ‘So, where is the body?’

‘Right at the bottom of the shaft. You’ll need this overall too. ’Tis very wet down there.’

Karen slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nun’s habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.

‘Who found the body?’

‘I did, yesterday.’

‘What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.’

He shrugged.

‘We’re exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. We’ve just finished draining the main tunnels. That’s one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century.’ He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.

It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers – the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.

‘OK, here it is. Watch your step.’

The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.

Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.

Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. ‘Nasty, isn’t it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him … Soot and grease and … cat fur, right?’

‘How did you know it was cat fur?’

‘I didn’t. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be –’ he pointed – ‘scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff …’ Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. ‘This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because she’d already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didn’t like to be too near the corpse. ‘What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? That’s what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’

‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’

She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’

Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.

In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’

Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.

Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.

She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’

‘What?’

‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’

‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’

‘Yup. Here, look.’

He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.

The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.

‘There he is.’

Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?

‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’

The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.

‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’

The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, you’re getting too close!

Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.

He jumped.

11
Abydos, Egypt

‘It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’

This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?

‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’

He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.

This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.

At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: ‘Half a billion? You’re joking, right?’

‘No.’ Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. ‘Remember the eternity of Egyptian life …’

Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didn’t add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.

‘Mr Harper—’

‘Sorry?’

It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.

‘Explain the figures, maybe?’

‘Sure.’

‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’

Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’

He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said way too much.

Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking shisha outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.

Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.

‘Two hundred and fifty years.’

He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.

‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’

Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’

Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’

At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a political entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘ten times as long. Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC.’

‘But half a billion mummies?’

‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200 BC, when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’

Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say, half a billion mummies. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’

Lopez looked up. ‘Eww.’

Harper laughed. ‘Yes. Maybe I won’t mention the way we have used human and animal mummies in the past: as fertiliser, medicine, machine oil, pigment and fuel.’

‘Medicine?’

‘OK, we’re done, guys.’ Harper liked to end the day with a question hanging in the air. Politely he dismissed the tiny study group, who seemed just a bit too keen to get back to their rented apartments and have a clandestine beer. But then he shrugged. So what? Good for them. They were young.

Ryan’s walk home was agreeable in the cooling twilight: this was his favourite hour of the day. Boys played football under ragged, sun-bleached posters of a long-deposed president. Little girls skipped happily next to their mothers, carrying wicker shopping baskets way too big for their tiny hands; their mothers were shrouded entirely in black niqabs.

And of course the old men with the white keffiyehs were smoking their shisha pipes outside the dusty tea-house. One or two raised a hand or an eyebrow in greeting, as Ryan keyed his latch. But then he saw an even more familiar face. It was Hassan, sitting outside on the terrace.

Ryan waved hello. ‘Hassan. Ahlan! I’ll be down in a minute.’

His apartment was welcomingly cool and dark. As he splashed water on his face, Ryan considered Hassan. Their revolving lives.

There was a time when Hassan Elgammal had been Ryan’s assistant: a keen young student aiding the rising young American Egyptologist. Now, fifteen years later, Hassan was in charge of all Egyptian antiquities in the Abydos region, and he was therefore, by a distance, Ryan’s superior.

Ryan didn’t much care about this inversion in their roles. Ambition had left him when his wife had died in childbirth. It had literally flown his soul, like the living spirit – the ka – that fled the corpse of an ancient Egyptian when they died. And when he had finally given up his Egyptological career altogether, and taken on the charity job, he had felt a sincere moral relief.

His employers – the Abydos Project – were dedicated to saving Egyptian antiquities, such as the Abydos temple complex, from flooding and decay. This meant that Ryan spent his days giving something back to Egyptians, rather than always taking stuff away, as Westerners had done for centuries. That was a good feeling.

And Ryan also enjoyed the sheer physical labour: he often spent entire days down there in the Oseirion with the Egyptian workers, rebuilding walls, shifting rubble, digging new drainage canals; toiling in the Egyptian sun, like a mindless slave building a pyramid. Then in the evening he quenched a mighty thirst with sweet hibiscus juice. And he slept soundly. And didn’t dream. And the days went by. And the years went by.

Towelling his hands dry, Ryan descended the stairs, opened the door, and took a seat besides Hassan. His friend’s affable face was grave, yet also excited. ‘They found him, Ryan.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A goatherd found the body yesterday. Your old tutor Sassoon. In the desert, north of Sohag.’

Ryan blinked. Emotion surged.

Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of documents.’

12
Middle Egypt

Ryan resisted the idea, at first.

‘What has it got to do with me?’ He shook his head. ‘I work for you guys now, I’m not an Egyptologist. That was a decade ago.’

‘Please.’ Hassan gently raised a hand in protest. ‘You have done enough here. At least take some proper time off, a month at least, three months better.’

‘But—’

‘When did you last have a holiday?’

Ryan watched the café owner drop a glass of tea on their table. The smell of apple shisha hung in the frowzy air. ‘Six years ago.’

Hassan smiled. ‘Exactly. This is too much: you have done Egypt great service. We owe you money! And really –’ another languid gesture – ‘are you going to spend the rest of your life carrying bricks, like a peasant? Is this all that is left? Sassoon was your great friend.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know the rumours of what he found.’

‘Yes.’

Everyone in Egyptology, anyone remotely connected to Egyptology, had heard or read these rumours. Ryan’s heart had secretly raced at the notion. The Sokar Hoard! And then, the absurd thought had occurred: what if he, Ryan Harper, found the Sokar Hoard once again, and deciphered it? Of course he had crushed this outbreak of ambition as soon as it was born; but here was his boss telling him to seize the moment.

Again, Hassan smiled. His dark suit looked expensive on the terrace of the shabby Tetisheri tea-house; Ryan’s jeans were still covered in dust.

‘So. Ryan. Please will you go? I will make the arrangements. Give you letters. Holiday pay. Go now. Go and find the Hoard. Go and be an Egyptologist again.’

‘Hassan—’

‘This is an order! I am your boss, Ryan. Remember I can have you shot at dawn, under the temple of Nectanebo, if you disobey.’

This was a joke, of course. But there was a steeliness in Hassan’s voice. And the sternness of the order was answered by a corresponding yearning in Ryan to obey. He wanted to go: maybe there was still a scientist inside him, despite the calluses on his hands and the sand in his sun-bleached hair.

Hassan pressed his point. ‘There is no teaching work here any more. Maybe even the charity will have to close, because of the disturbances.’

‘Really?’

Hassan frowned, heavily. ‘Really. It is very bad, very bad …’ He sighed. ‘But at least I can help a friend come to his senses. Your dear wife would have wanted you to do this. To be the Ryan Harper she knew, once more. After ten years, I think, it is time. No?’

The moment was tense. Ryan drank his tea, and said nothing, and watched the moon rise over the Temple of Seti. He remembered Rhiannon. Her fever, the last days, the terrifying and inundating sadness. Maybe it was time to let this go.

The moon stared at him. Shocked at his decision. But the decision felt entirely right.

He took leave of absence that very night, hastily packing a bag, then jogging straight to the teeming Abydos railway station.

Time was strictly limited. Ryan was very aware that others would be on the trail. He had to get to Nazlet as quickly as possible. But quickly as possible was not an Egyptian state of mind.

The ticket queue was full of sweating men in djellabas, all shouting angrily at the narrow-eyed man behind the cracked-glass reservations window. The man behind the glass was dispensing his tickets with a reluctant and painful slowness, as if they were his personal inheritance of Treasury bonds. Harper growled with impatience. They’d found the body of Victor Sassoon!

Sassoon was his old tutor, his mentor, a man Harper had once admired and revered: the great Jewish scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest men in his field. What had happened that he should be found dead, alone, in a cave? What could have driven him to do that? To walk into the wilderness, alone, two months ago? Poor Victor.

It had to have been something extraordinary to invoke such a response. That meant the bag found with Sassoon’s body must contain the Sokar Hoard, the great cache: the cache Victor had illegally bought in his final days of life, or so the lurid rumours had it. Sassoon had, it seemed, read these documents, then killed himself. Or been murdered. Why? What had Sassoon retrieved at the White Monastery? What was in those texts?

The mysteries were arousing, energizing, tantalizing. They pumped the blood in Harper’s heart. Hassan was right. All these years the keen and ambitious scientist in Ryan Harper hadn’t entirely gone away, but had merely slumbered. And now the long-buried Egyptologist was being resurrected.

If Ryan could find the Sokar Hoard, then he would have done something with the scholarly skills he had disregarded for a decade. Something amazing.

Did you hear about old Ryan Harper? Oh, he found the Sokar Hoard.

Ryan Harper?

‘Effendi!’

‘Maljadeed!’

The queue in front of him seemed to be getting longer as half of Abydos barged in. Harper resisted the urge to punch his way to the kiosk. But it was hard. Trying to buy a ticket in an Egyptian railway station was always a hassle – like trying to change nationality during a hurricane – and he knew he had to exercise patience. But he couldn’t exercise patience tonight of all nights. The next Sohag train – the last Sohag train of the day – was leaving in fifteen minutes.

‘La – ibqa!’

‘Jagal – almaderah – incheb!’

What could he do instead? He crunched the equations, frantically. Perhaps he could hire a car and driver and just take the road? But no. That might be possible by day, but at night – not a chance. Security was tightening up and down the Nile; a Westerner in a cab without a very special permit would be immediately halted at the edge of town and summarily returned whence he came – that or detained and questioned. Or worse.

No, a train was the only way to get to Sohag tonight. Then he could head on to Nazlet tomorrow. And he needed to get there tonight. Because, if the reports of Sassoon’s body being rediscovered had reached Abydos, then they would have reached elsewhere, too; and other people would have reached precisely the same conclusion.

‘Haiwan!’

‘La! La!’

There were men apparently fighting at the front of the queue.

Harper abandoned any hope of getting a ticket in time. Instead he reached in the zipped pocket of his fleecy climber’s jacket – the desert night was cool, even down here in southern Egypt – and pulled out a wad of US dollars. Baksheesh might just work where patience was exhausted. He had to try, or his quest would be finished before it began.

Ryan sauntered over to the concrete arch that led onto the platforms. Like almost every official threshold in Egypt it was barred by an airport-style detector, a boxy doorway of metal: a detector that served no purpose as it wasn’t plugged in.

But the security guard was real enough. He eyed Harper. ‘Men fethlek? Aiwa? Tick-et!’

The voice was curt; this was far from promising. But Harper had no choice. Subtly as he could, he offered a twenty-buck note – a day’s wage – to the security guard, folded between his fingers.

The guard glanced for a moment at the money, then clasped the cash with a practised grace, like a concierge at the Carlyle, and ushered Ryan through.

He was on the platform. Now the train.

There!

The train was pulling out. Barging past some smoking soldiers, he reached for the receding metal handle, but it slipped from his grasp.

Now the train was really grinding into life – and speeding up. He wasn’t going to make it; but this was the last train of the night so he had to make it! Breaking into a sprint, he jumped and tried again, and at the edge of his strength he grabbed the escaping handle, swung himself violently in through the open door, and with all the strength of a decade of carrying rocks, somehow tugged himself and his rucksack safely inside.

He was in the train. He was in. He’d done it! There was an advantage to being a peasant who hodded mud bricks in the sun. It made you fit and strong.

The Nileside express hooted merrily, as if in appreciation of Ryan’s gymnastic achievement. Then it accelerated out of Abydos, past a straggling Muslim cemetery, past the last neon-lit minarets, spearing the darkness, and then the cooler air told him he was inthe Nilotic countryside.

For two hours he stood in the vestibule between the toilet and the broken carriage door, waiting, nervously, for the collector, dollars for baksheesh in hand. Yet the collector didn’t even show up.

The chaos of Egypt could sometimes be beneficial.

Only the tea-boy interrupted the rattling journey down the Nile valley, carrying a silver tray of little glasses as he patrolled the carriages, calling out, ‘Shay, shay, shay!’

Harper bought a cup of black tea, heavily sugared.

‘Sefr, men fadlak …’

Gratefully, he sank the tea, then chased it with mineral water, as he opened his notebook and examined the scribbled document that Hassan had given him before he’d departed Abydos. The name was written in Latin letters as well as Arabic:

MOHAMMAD KHATTAB.

The head of police in Nazlet, and a cousin of Hassan’s. The fact he was related to Hassan came as no surprise to Ryan. Everyone who ascended through the bureaucracy of provincial Egypt – from the police to the army to the civil service – did so because they were related in some complex manner to someone else.

‘Shukran.’ He handed the tea-glass back to the tea-boy, who had returned to collect the empties. The drained glasses chinked on their steel tray as the train switchbacked, closing in on Sohag. The boy steadied himself, and his tray, and pressed on.

‘Shay! Shay! Shay!’

Harper looked at the note again. The rest of it was in Arabic, which he could barely read, even though he spoke it pretty well. But Harper knew the contents: Hassan had already explained. It told the director of the Nazlet police that Ryan was mightily important and a great friend of Egypt, and Hassan of Abydos would be lavishly grateful if any assistance could be offered to his VIP American acquaintance.

Exactly what that assistance might be, how the hell he was going to get his hands on the Sokar documents, and how he was going to stop others from doing the same, Ryan did not know. But he was going to give it his best shot. His last shot. Late in the day, he’d been offered a break and he was going to take it. For his wife. For Victor. But mainly for himself. After ten years of giving everything to Egypt, a little selfish ambition was excusable. Wasn’t it?

The train hooted in the dark, and this was accompanied by the squeal of its brakes: the dusty yellow stain in the midnight sky confirmed that Sohag was near. He’d made it as quickly as he could in the circumstances. Would this be the crucial factor?

Quite possibly. The body of his old tutor had only been discovered yesterday. Harper might just be the first person on the scene with a real sense of what treasures could be contained in the bag found on Sassoon’s body.

A row of shuttered shops flickered under dirty streetlights. The train clattered, and then halted, with a juddering wrench.

The station forecourt was chaotic. This time Ryan gave up any pretence at politeness and shunted his way through the mêlée. And as soon as he reached the street, he accepted the first offer of a cab – Jayed! – chucked his rucksack in the back seat, and sat in the front, like an Egyptian, alongside the driver.

Another half a mile brought them to the biggest hotel in town: an ugly concrete tower that loomed over the elegant eternity of the Nile in a forbidding manner. As he checked in, Ryan wondered if Sassoon had stayed here, during his final nights alive on this earth.

The night passed fitfully. Barges hooted on the Nile. His room smelled of toilet but the toilet smelled of woodsmoke. He tried to sleep but had bad dreams, for the first time in years. Dreams of his dead wife mixed with dreams of dogs, headless dogs, running down canal towpaths. Endless, sweaty, malarial dreams that made Ryan all too ready for morning: he rose before his alarm.

As the first pink intimation of day tinted the horizon he was already dressed and hailing another taxi.

The drive to Nazlet took several hours. By the time he reached the impossibly rural remoteness of the desolate town on the very edge of very serious desert, it was noon and fiercely hot. Dogs lay whimpering in the shade of the biblical palm trees.

He had to find the police station.

A handsome youth in a clean djellaba, riding a Japanese dirt-bike, was negotiating his way down the rutted road, avoiding heaps of camel dung. Ryan waved him over. The lad pulled up and stared, in blatant astonishment, at a Western face. Presumably Nazlet saw very few Euro-American visitors: maybe none. This was about as remote as settlements got on the frontiers of Middle and Upper Egypt.

Ryan asked in his clearest, slowest Arabic where the police station could be found.

The boy paused. Then he answered, in Arabic, ‘Not far, half a kilometre past the old houses. Just up there.’

‘Thank you.’

The youth nodded, and smiled his handsome white smile, then kick-started his bike again. As he drove off he shouted, ‘But be careful. They are arresting everyone!’

This gave Ryan serious pause. Arrests? What could he do? Maybe he should go back to Sohag and wait. But that was absurd: he had come this far, and he was so near. The Sokar Hoard was within his grasp: he could sense it.

Resolved, Ryan turned. And saw a policeman.

The cop was standing three metres away. With a gun. Pointing at Ryan’s chest.

‘Come with me.’

13
Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle, Cornwall

‘Roasted cats?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmmm.’

The owner of the museum paused, staring thoughtfully into space. Above him was a decorative wooden sign saying: THE MOST FAMOUS MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT IN THE WORLD.

Karen Trevithick would normally have dismissed this as tourist-attracting whimsy, or indeed as bullshit, but everyone she had spoken to had assured her: No, go there, the guy who owns the place really knows his stuff. The museum is serious.

So she had made the long drive to the beautiful stormy cliffs of far-north Cornwall and the fishing village of Boscastle, sequestered in a cove between those cliffs, staring out at the furious waves that attacked the stone harbour. The day was blustery and bright, and very cold. The village still had its Christmas lights dangling across the wet and narrow cobbled roads; they looked melancholy now Christmas was over.

Karen was glad when Donald Ryman, the late-middle-aged owner, closed the door to the salt-scented air, silencing the seagulls.

Again he stared at nothing, then he turned. ‘Let’s go into the museum, and think about cats. Roasted cats, yes, a little strange.’

Another door led into the museum proper; a series of small, low ceilinged rooms: fishermen’s cottages knocked together. There was a big glass box in front of Karen: inside was a perpendicular stuffed goat wearing a dark scarlet robe.

‘The goat of Mendes,’ said Donald. ‘An avatar of Satan, the Horned God, worshipped for thousands of years.’ He pointed at a large rack of little glass jars, some full of vegetable matter, some containing ghastly wax dolls; naked, grimacing figurines. ‘These are herbs for witchcraft, the real thing. Gerald Gardner collected them decades ago. The wax figurines are poppets, little models of people for sticking pins in, to cause injury or death.’

She waited for an explanation but Donald’s eyes were now fixed on something over her shoulder. She turned to see what he was looking at. The exhibits were many: a dried old stoat, a hag stone for cursing, a rabbit’s heart pierced with a thorn – and a stuffed cat, chasing a stuffed rat.

He gestured at the mangy old stuffed cat. ‘Taghairm! Yes, yes. Taghairm!’

‘What?’

‘I believe what you witnessed was Taghairm! A truly ghastly ritual, often associated with the Celts, especially in Scotland.’

Karen gazed at the cat, as Donald went on, ‘Cats, why didn’t I think of this before? Yes! Cats are so important to magic. In medieval England cats would be buried alive in walls, as charms against rats or mice. These are surprisingly common – they come as a nasty surprise to homeowners, ah, renovating their lovely period cottage. A dead cat in the walls!’ He chuckled. ‘Cats are intrinsic to magical ritual. The idea of them as creatures of supernatural power dates back to Egyptian times, of course. The Egyptians worshipped the cat. The fear and veneration of cats has continued ever since.’

‘Taghairm? What is that?’

He was interesting but her time was short: they had a suicide now, a dead body, linked to the atrocious ritual on Zennor Hill. Speed the case.

‘Sorry, witchcraft is my passion, I can be a little discursive. Taghairm is a Celtic rite also known as “giving the Devil his supper”. It’s a ceremony where a series of cats is burned alive, one after the other, sometimes over a period of days. The animals would be roasted on, ah, spits, or drenched in liquors and oils and burned that way.’

‘But why?’

‘To summon the Devil! Or least a highly important demon. It was believed that the horrendous shrieking of the cats would disturb the Devil, and invoke him, and eventually he would be forced to reveal himself and do the bidding, at least temporarily, of the coven or the wizard.’

A ritual for summoning the Devil? Karen walked around the darkened rooms with their glass cabinets and their morbid contents: a naked mandrake in a jar, inscribed with a screaming face; a knitted poppet woven with real human hair and stuck with a vicious pin; a medieval wooden carving of a woman tearing open her vagina, leering. The silence was claustrophobic. She turned to look at Donald, who was sorting through some keys.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.