The Deceit (22 page)

Standing in the dank and chilly hallway, Karen frowned. Frustrated. Maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she was right. She remembered the newspaper piece: passing
from the cold stone dusk of the stairs
… ‘Let’s try the upper floors.’

Around the stairs the dust of old bricks, and old life, was thick. Karen went first this time, guiding them with her torchbeam, which pierced the dust as if it were sea-fog. The grand Victorian stairway led to an old stone landing, and then she saw in the darkness a large door, its size indicating that it led to a significant apartment.

The door was closed, but the smell hit them at once. Something fetid and dead, but recently dead: something
rotting.

‘Jesus,’ said Darren. ‘That’s disgusting. What the hell is in there?’

Karen walked to the silent, peeling door, and pushed. The door appeared to be locked. If Rothley had been here, how had he got hold of a key?

The affable site manager was now a lot less cheerful. ‘Do you think someone is in there?’

Someone, or something?
was the ludicrous thought that flashed across Karen’s mind.
What was she expecting, a demon?

Stupid.

She pushed against the door again but it did not give. Even so, the door was old, and ill-fitting: there were cracks at the bottom, spaces between the jamb and the warped and peeling panels. Enough spaces for that ghastly stench to escape.

Another unwarranted thought intruded. The girl, on the bed, growling like a dog.

He will kill you, bitch. Luke will smell your fear. He will kill you.

‘There’s a box of tools downstairs.’

Karen turned to Darren Glover, their torchbeams crossing in the dust. ‘Sorry?’

‘Right at the foot of the stairs, there might be a crowbar. Let me go and get it.’

He disappeared into the gloom and the murk, leaving Karen alone with whatever was inside and beyond that door.

Was that a noise? She pressed her ear to the panel. Some kind of scratching? A rat? A pigeon? Something else?

‘Darren?’ Karen whispered. ‘Mr Glover?’ She wasn’t sure why she was whispering but she didn’t seem able to shout.

He will kill you, bitch

‘OK, I got it.’

Glover re-emerged, illumined by his own torchlight, carrying a long black crowbar. He applied it boldly to the door, jemmying it behind the jamb. Just two savage tugs were sufficient, then the door snapped open and the full rotten scent flooded out: engulfing them.

Darren Glover pressed a sleeve to his nose. ‘Jesus Christ.
Yuk.
’

Karen recognized the smell now. It was mammalian decomposition, probably human. She’d experienced it often enough: rancid, pungent, sickening, with a faint and eerie top note of sweetness. But there was a lot more in that smell, too, something … churchy. Incense?

Her torchlight pierced the room. One quick sweep told her it was empty, apart from a rug on the bare floorboards – and here, some red smears on the grey, wallpaperless walls. She stepped inside, and looked closer. Almost certainly paint, as if someone had begun to decorate the room then stopped. Were they trying to recreate Crowley’s flat? The rose-coloured room? But then they’d abandoned the job for some reason?

Her shoes scrunched on something. She gazed down. She was walking on tiny dead birds. The floor was littered with little dead birds, and feathers. They really
were
repeating Crowley’s rituals.

‘What the fuck are they?’ Glover yelped. ‘Starlings? Sparrows? And this! What the … what’s going on?’

‘It’s black magic. This room used to belong to a famous Satanist, Aleister Crowley, a hundred odd years ago. He would feed little birds to a skeleton. They are copying him.’

So now she had her proof. Someone had been in here, recently, and that someone was surely Rothley. But what was that smell? And where was it coming from? It seemed to fill the room, but it had no obvious source. A dead rat lodged behind the walls?

But she recalled Donald Ryman’s words:
Some say the Abra-Melin ritual can only be successfully completed if several humans are sacrificed, culminating in the murder of a living child.

Karen shuddered. Once again, her torchlight illuminated something odd. A fat red disc, like a hockey puck, lying next to the birds. She took some gloves from her jacket pocket and snapped them on.

‘You think this is a crime scene.’

Ignoring Glover’s nervous assertion, she knelt and picked up the disc. It was soft, and organic: the shape and consistency of fishcake, but purplish red. Karen sniffed at the disc. It smelled strongly of incense: myrrh, copal, storax, whatever they used in churches. It was also a little crumbly. They’d get no fingerprints from this; but it was worth analysing. She took out a ziplocked evidence bag from her other pocket and dropped it in.

She picked up one of the birds, and bagged it, too. And these, what were these? Dead wasps? A dead little lizard? They also went in the bags.

And these: rats’ feet. Severed, and scattered beyond the birds. She remembered the moles’ feet in the museum in Boscastle
.
Repressing her revulsion, Karen went across the floor on her hands and knees, methodically gathering all this evidence.

Glover said, again, ‘You think there’s been a crime here. Right? Those are evidence bags.’

Karen said nothing. Now that she was closer to the ground the smell was even more intense. She realized
it was coming from under the rug. From under the floorboards …

She stood up, abruptly, and whisked away the rug. The smell surged out. Her torchbeam revealed that several planks had been recently and crudely hammered over a hole in the original floorboards.

‘Help me,’ she said, gesturing at Darren’s crowbar. ‘Let’s get these floorboards up.’

His expression showed his absolute reluctance, but he obeyed nonetheless. Grunting, and tugging, he jemmied up the new boards one by one.

First Karen saw the legs: bare feet, bare human legs, dead and grey, gnawed a little by rats: the corpse had been here a few days. Then the middle planks came away and she saw the midriff. A young woman, naked, smeared with blood.

Glover yelped. ‘Fuck. Look at the hands!’

The hands and arms were covered with bite marks. Two of the fingers had been severed, messily: as if
chewed
off. Tourniquets had been applied to the upper arms, which now hung loose and leathery. Dark purple patches in the cement underneath showed where the blood had soaked.

Glover backed away. But Karen pointed to the last plank. Covering the face. ‘Please?’

He swore, in a low voice, but he applied himself. The final plank came away with little effort, the nails lifted, the wood cracked, and the woman’s face was revealed.

Karen stared, shocked.

She had expected to see a face contorted with horror, or grimacing, or simply rigid with fear – as she normally found in murder cases.

But the dead girl was calm and open-mouthed. The open mouth was clogged with drying red blood – and something else. Something raw and strange. What was it? Karen stooped close, to look, then she recoiled.

The girl’s mouth was choked with her own severed fingers.

They sat in the sad little garden behind the Luxor temple. The distant
feluccas
twinkled on the Nile like silver-winged insects come to feed on nectar; the river breeze carried scents of jasmine and donkey dung.

The city was awakening, the shop owners unshuttering their stalls of bogus antiquities and phoney papyri, the horse-carriages –
caleches
– waiting, brasses jangling, for tourists who would never show up.

Ryan felt a little empty himself, translucent with tiredness. They were all exhausted – Helen and himself, their two protectors Callum and Simon – all of them yawned and drooped – all apart from Albert Hanna.

He
had fuelled himself, during their manic desert drive from Cairo, with copious amounts of Scotch. And still he was as ebullient as ever.

Picking up a stick, Albert gestured at a scowling Arab shopkeeper. ‘They’re really quite moody in the morning, the Mussulman. I’ve noticed this, but can’t explain it. Surely they should all be in a good mood, because they are so clear-headed. “Another morning without a hangover!
Allahu Akhbar!
”’ He grinned. ‘And yet I am in a better mood than them. And I got
exceptionally
drunk last night.’

‘Albert, they are all going bankrupt: their industry is dying.’

The Copt smoothed his goatee and ignored Helen’s remark. ‘This proves the superiority of the Christian West. You people get so much
done
, despite being alcoholics.’ He smirked at Ryan. ‘That said, one simply
has
to wonder what the West might have achieved without the crippling effects of gin. The British would probably have invaded the moon.’

Callum interrupted. ‘Guys. This isn’t good. No tourists at all. Not even a Jap with a cameraphone.’ He gestured at the square, and the empty
caleches
with the bored horses. ‘We’re way too conspicuous.’ He turned to Ryan, who was once more poring over the Macarius papyrus. ‘Any joy?’

‘No,’ Ryan confessed. He’d spent most of the arduous, checkpoint-avoiding desert drive from Cairo desperately trying to decipher the next part of the papyrus. They had hoped to go to Amarna, but it had proved too dangerous, sealed off from all visitors by the troubles; so they had come straight to Luxor, doubling their journey. Yet even this extra time had not been sufficient for him to crack this part of the text.

In his thoughts, Ryan could see Sassoon shaking his wise and teacherly head; he could see Rhiannon, disappointed. Had he given it all up for nothing?

Helen gently nudged his arm. Sympathetic and half-smiling. Her attitude to him seemed to have changed over the days: she was warmer. She smiled more, despite the anxiety and fear. ‘Tell us again, what exactly it does say.’

She was filming him, discreetly. Ryan was too exhausted to feel self-conscious. He gazed down at the papyrus. And spoke.

‘The beginning is clear enough. “I travelled for many days, along the river, arriving at the Temple of Amun at Diospolis.” But where is Diospolis? Well, the Greeks had a pretty logical system for renaming Egyptian cities: they simply said, this is the city where such-and-such a god was worshipped. Consequently, Diospolis means the city where Zeus – or Dios – was worshipped.’ Ryan stood – and Helen’s camera followed him. ‘But when the Greeks said Dios they meant the supreme god Amun-Ra, worshipped here at the great Temple of the Sun at Thebes. The city now known as Luxor.’

He stretched his arm and Helen panned the camera, taking in the mighty stone pylons and the enormous, lotus-headed pillars of the Luxor temple. The whole place was glowing in the hot morning sun. The colossus of Rameses stared at Ryan, indifferent and supreme, and hiding its enormous secret. Behind them the avenue of sphinxes stretched for miles along the Nile, all the way to Karnak. A parade of royal cats, with human faces. What was the Egyptian obsession with the cat? Did it fit in somehow?

Ryan focussed. Face towards the lens. ‘The question is obvious. What did our scholar Macarius find here? In his own words he says he went inside the temple, “and there I found the great secret … which I took with me up the river”. But after the word “secret”, Macarius reverts to obscure symbols, which I have transcribed here.’ Helen focussed the lens on a sheet of paper in Ryan’s other hand. Ryan had drawn the symbols double-sized, not that this had helped him interpret their meaning.

He showed them to the camera.

‘What language is this? What alphabet? The symbols are basic, simplistic, almost runic, the kind of symbols you would cut into stone. We cannot translate them. Whatever secret Macarius found here remains concealed.’ Ryan stopped talking. A policeman was staring at them from the square, beyond the temple forecourt.

Albert Hanna muttered, ‘That’s it,
monsieur
? You don’t know? You’ve given up?’

‘I just … can’t translate. Helen can’t work it out, you can’t work it out – we’re stuck.’

‘Let me, if you will, have one more attempt.’ Albert took the sheet of paper and traced the symbols with his finger. ‘Hmm …’ The goatee-stroking implied that he was thinking hard
.
But then, abruptly, he handed the paper back to Ryan. ‘
Pff.
As you say, they look faintly runic. But they aren’t Viking runes. I have seen the runes carved by the Varangian guards in the marble of Hagia Sophia, and these aren’t runes. Perhaps we should just move on to the Cataracts of Philae: we are starting to attract attention from
les gendarmes.
’ He nodded in the direction of the
caleches
, where three policemen were now staring at them.

‘We do not have permission to film,’ said Helen. ‘It would not matter normally because there would be so many tourists. But we are standing out now. They might want a bribe.’

‘Or they might have been asked to watch out for people like us,’ said Callum. ‘The Israelis have satellites. They could have followed us across the desert. Who knows? They are certainly
baksheeshing
half the fucking cops between Aswan and Alexandria. We’re wanted. Dead or alive. Mainly dead. This is not a joke. What’s more, we can’t help you against the cops. We can protect you from the Israelis, but if you get in trouble with the Egyptians, in Egypt, that’s different. We can’t fight the fucking army. If you go in the temple and the cops stop you, you’re on your own. If anything happens we’ll meet at the next place on the list. What is it?’