The Deceit (20 page)

Hanna pointed. ‘Here’s my contact.’

Albert’s ‘friend’ was a Coptic youth of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The boy’s expression was mute and defensive – but he led them through the shadows to a decrepit wooden door, set low in the perimeter walls.

‘Hurry,’ said Callum. ‘
Hurry up
.’

The boy fumbled nervily with an enormous set of keys. At last the door swung open and they slipped inside. Ryan stared around. The Coptic boy had brought them to a Christian graveyard behind the churches. Large marble angels stared at the crescent moon; columns and pilasters recessed down pathways; a faint scent of dead flowers perfumed the normal Cairo smells of sewage and pollution and cooking oil.

Their
protectors
stopped inside the gate. Callum snapped an order: ‘You guys go. We’ll wait here. Do what you have to do. But do it quick.’

Hunched low, Albert, Helen and Ryan followed the boy along a gravel path that slalomed between the tombs and mausoleum, to the old buildings of Coptic Cairo. Dead faces in monochrome photos, affixed to the more recent graves, stared at them in disappointment as they slunk past. Helen had her camera switched on, filming their progress. Ryan squinted ahead, trying to make out their direction. He’d been here once before, as a young man: he’d walked this labyrinth of ancient passages and cobbled lanes, bewildered but seduced; by night the ambience was more troubling.

‘
Asre! Onzor!
’

The Coptic youth was beckoning them into the very deepest shadows, between two high old walls: presumably the walls of monasteries. The moonlight was just sufficient for them to follow his progress, beyond another corner, past a brace of grim and shuttered tourist shops, where a more modern church rose up abruptly. It had no doubt been erected on the footings of a previous church, which was built on a synagogue, which was built on a Roman temple of Mithras, which was built on an Egyptian temple of Isis …

Ryan swooned a little in his thoughts as they approached this precipice of religious history, this vertiginous drop through time and faith. It was simultaneously marvellous and unnerving. Coptic Cairo was like an exposed fossil bed, showing the strata and the evolution: the fishes then the dinosaurs then the mammals. It gave him the same rhapsodic vertigo he’d felt in Saqqara, when he was happy, when he was a younger and better man, when his wife was pregnant, when they’d walked together in the sunset by the Djoser Pyramid, when they’d kissed—

‘Ryan!’

It was Helen, grasping his shoulder.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’ But was he?

‘Let’s get this done.’

They followed the boy once more until Albert pointed at a small but handsome stone building beyond a railing. ‘The synagogue of Ben Ezra.’

The boy unlocked the railing; they crept quietly along the path and slipped inside the synagogue. Scratching a match into flame, the boy lit some candles, his hands shaking. Ryan picked up and carried his candle in its little candle-tray like a Victorian rector roused from sleep in his nightshirt.

In the guttering candlelight he plodded the aisles, scrutinizing the bejewelled and evasive interior of Ben Ezra synagogue. The glow of his candle showed Ottoman carvings in cedarwood and marble, palmettos and lotus flowers, rich and sensuous and distantly sad; the Jews of Cairo had gone, all the Jews of Egypt fled, making this more of a mausoleum than a living building.

But why had Macarius
come here?

‘Albert?’

Hanna materialized from the shadows.

‘Albert, tell me, this place, the history, the synagogue.’

‘It is ninth century, but it is adapted from a church that is older, maybe eighth century.’

‘But our papyrus is probably sixth. So if he came here he didn’t see
this.
’

Hanna nodded. ‘
C’est vrai
.’

‘Where is the spring, where Moses was found?’

‘I’ll show you.’

The spring was behind the building. Outside, the candle in his hand guttered and died in a firm nocturnal breeze.

Ryan stared down. The great and famous spring, the place on the Nile where Moses was found, where Jesus was washed, where Jeremiah preached – was now a gurgling manhole with an orange gardening hose coiled at the side, and plastic rubbish stuffed in the grille.

Albert spoke. ‘You know … I believe there was an even earlier church here which was demolished, so the bulk of the, ah, most venerable antiquities, from that time, would now be found in the museum?’

Ryan paused, and thought it through. This made sense. What should he do?

Helen was inside the synagogue, still filming, but the lad was at the door, his face wrought with anxiety. Ryan brushed aside his own doubts, and asked the boy to open the museum door. He quailed visibly. Ryan insisted. The boy shook his head.

Albert emerged like a genie from the gloom, flourishing a handful of dollars.

In the silent movie of the moonlight, the boy’s smile was very white. ‘
La moshkelah!
’

The museum was apparently barely three hundred metres away, at the ancient centre of Roman Cairo.

The moonlight shone on the silent flagstones; the three of them kept to the shadows, until they emerged into an impressive courtyard. Hulking Roman watergates loomed above them, the path between led to a set of huge, intricately patterned doors. The museum itself, as Ryan recalled, had once been the Roman fort of Maser; the site had been lavishly reconstructed and restored, but the brooding quality of the military building remained.

It felt as if they were breaking into a prison.

Albert hurried the boy. At last the great wooden doors opened and Ryan stepped hastily inside. Echoes of darkness and nothingness answered him. He needed light: so this time he took the risk and used the flashlight in his phone. The boy shrank from the alarming and unexpected dazzle.

Ryan turned. Where was Helen?

Albert hissed at him from the shadows, ‘We must be expeditious, Ryan. It is dawn soon, and Cairo wakes early.’

‘Yes, yes, OK.’

He ran down the vast hall, from exhibit to exhibit, gazing in the sturdy glass cases: at ancient gold Coptic Bibles, at purple stoles of Akhmim weaving, at a pair of sultry Roman erotes – naked sex gods, carrying aloft the Virgin. It was all here. But what did it mean? Here was a truly strange icon: two dog-faced saints, Ahrauqus and Augan, approaching Jesus. Ryan recognized the iconography. Like the jackal-headed god Anubis? God of the mummy wrappings, baptizer of the dead.

And here was a tomb carved with
ankhs
, the Egyptian symbol of life, a cross with a head, next to the real cross. The
ankh
and the cross interchangeable. And over here was an entire wall painting. He turned his flashlight to read the explanatory text: ‘Only two of these are known to exist; the other can be found in the small church at the Monastery of St Tomas, at the mouth of Wadi Sarga, sixteen kilometres north of Akhmim.’

The painting showed a coronation of the Virgin Mary. She wore a blue robe decorated with lozenges; just like the Egyptian goddess Nut at the temple back in Abydos, a goddess spanning the vault of heaven, her dress spangled with delicate stars.

Akhmim?

‘Ryan!’

It was Albert, almost running.

‘We have to go, now. My boy says someone is in the graveyard – trouble – we must go!’

It was intensely frustrating: Ryan felt he was on the verge of something – a breakthrough – yet he was obliged to leave. Reluctantly, he followed the urgent steps of Albert Hanna. Helen joined them. They whispered as they walked quickly, sliding from shadow to shadow, fleeing the walled city, making for the cemetery, and the gate – and safety. ‘I filmed the spring, did you get anything in the museum?’

‘No – I—’

‘What?’

‘Jesus.’

Someone was indeed in the graveyard.

Wordlessly, Ryan pointed. Helen followed his gesture and her eyes widened.

An Egyptian peasant was sitting next to a gravestone, praying, or mumbling, but he was also hitting his head repeatedly against the gravestone: the noise of his skull impacting was audible and ghastly.
Clunk
. And again, he mumbled and butted the stone. Blood was now pouring down his face.
Slam
. And again. More blood. The sight was horrifying. The man was slowly killing himself.

‘Stop him!’ Helen cried, quite anguished. ‘Can we help him? Look—’

‘There is no time, he will attract others.
Come on!
’ Albert’s voice was fierce.

So they ran, openly and blatantly, to the gate where Simon was waiting, crouched, like a trooper in a street battle, keeping a low profile. ‘Get in the fucking motor!’ he spat.

The Hyundai was parked and revving and ready to go, Callum at the wheel. Ryan glanced across. Waiting placidly at the gate to the cemetery was a donkey cart, piled with rubbish. The road was otherwise deserted, in the pallid light of the Cairene dawn.

The garbage and timing meant it was surely a Zabaleen cart: that was what the Zabaleen did, go round Cairo at all hours, picking up rags, in their donkey carts. Ryan saw the logic. The cart must therefore belong to that peasant in the cemetery. Therefore, the man slamming his head against the stone, trying to injure or kill himself, was a Zabaleen.

Just like the boy on the balcony in Sohag.

What did it mean?

Callum cracked the gears as they sped downtown. Ryan stared pensively out of the window. The traffic was light but growing, shop owners were yawning and stirring. They had rejoined the angry and eternal chaos of al-Misr, the Mother of Cities.

By the time Karen was buzzing her cousin’s front door, in the frosty darkness of a January evening in suburban Muswell Hill, she realized she was nervous, like someone going on a date with someone very nice. Her heartbeat was raised, she was caffeinated by anxiety: the idea of seeing her daughter after two solid weeks of separation was exciting and disruptive.

That was one of the many things that surprised her about parenting: the way you loved your kids
and
missed them
.
She had, theoretically, expected to love her daughter when she arrived, but she hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming rush of conflicting emotions when she’d taken little baby Eleanor home from hospital, the overpowering sense of gratitude and sudden vulnerability, the desperate happiness tinged with fear, the hallucinatory levels of paranoia: my God, my baby is choking on a grape; my God, she’s blind; my God, she’s like her father. Or her mother.

And as Eleanor had grown up Karen had learned that she actually
liked
her daughter, too. At six Eleanor was bubbly, good-natured and funny; sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. She could also be infuriating, and definitely headstrong. But she was a proper personality, a vibrant if tiny personality, and when Karen went to work she found she missed her daughter’s
presence
even as she breathed a sigh of relief that she could get on with business.

‘Hello?’

Karen pressed the buzzer for a third time. She could hear noises inside, the sounds of kids. Now the hallway light came on, the door was opened, and a tiny blonde tornado of love came shooting out of the door and jumped into Karen’s arms.

‘Mummy Mummy Mummy Mummy!’ Eleanor squeezed her so tightly Karen felt as if she was choking.

Alan stood in the door with the twins at his feet, smiling. ‘I see she missed you then.’

‘Didn’t!’ said Eleanor, as Karen laboriously unwrapped her daughter’s arms from her neck and set her down. As soon as Ellie was on the ground she wrapped her arms around her mother’s legs instead and said, ‘Mummy is cold, she needs some soup.’

Alan laughed, handing over several tons of kit. ‘Here’s her bags, and her clothes, they’re mostly washed.’

Karen thanked her cousin several times; he waved away her gratitude. ‘It’s been great, I told you: the twins love her.’

For several minutes the six-year-olds said goodbye to each other, mainly by lifting up their shirts and comparing the fake mermaid tattoos on their stomachs, then Karen kissed Alan, and Ellie kissed her cousins, Jake and Daisy, and mother and daughter got in the car and drove the few hundred yards to their smaller home, a garden flat, where Eleanor flung herself at her wooden toy train and the doll that said, ‘Hell’s bells’.

It was good to be home. With her daughter. In her pyjamas, reading
Winnie the Pooh
. When it was midnight, after two glasses of wine, Karen went into her daughter’s room and listened to her daughter’s breathing.

The sound was gratifying. Karen recalled an old Buddhist saying that her Detective Sergeant, Curtis, had once intoned to her:

‘What is the definition of happiness? Grandmother dies, mother dies, daughter dies,
in that order.
’

There was a profundity there. So Karen’s mother had died, but that was how it was meant to be; it wasn’t a tragedy, it was the way the world turned, it was sad but it was right. Feeling angered by it was like feeling angry at the arrival of autumn, or taking rainfall personally.

And children were the purest solace. Karen brushed her daughter’s hair from her frownless, worryless, six-year-old forehead, and wondered if she could give her only child a brother or sister. But doing that probably meant a man in her house, and something in her found that difficult. She liked the independence, she
liked
the need for self-reliance.
I can do this. I don’t need anyone.

‘Goodnight, sweetheart.’ Karen kissed her sleeping daughter in the darkness and shut the door.

For the first time since her mother’s funeral, Karen slept properly and dreamlessly; and when she took her bonny daughter to school in the morning, Karen smiled at the other mums, and made a joke with the teacher, and when she arrived at work, in the busy offices of New Scotland Yard, she was very rested, and very eager to get on with the case.

DS Curtis was an affable red-haired Irishman of about her age, not entirely ambitious, but not lacking talent, either. He listened attentively as she went through the narrative. The cats, the suicide, the girl in the psych ward.