The Deceit (24 page)

Albert gazed at the avenue of sphinxes, smiling their feline smiles in the afternoon sun, serene and inscrutable. ‘The story going around Cairo is that the Zabaleen have been bewitched by some archaic black magic, which has now been resurrected. The wilder rumours blame Wasef Qulta for bringing the Sokar Hoard to Moqqatam, the Hoard, with all its ancient spells. It seems the documents we carry with us, every day, may be the true and terrifying source of all this evil.’

Albert fell silent. A tourist
caleche
clip-clopped past them, chinkling and gangling. And entirely empty. Like a ghost of itself.

By the time Karen Trevithick had finished her business at Chancery Lane it was nearly eleven p.m. The Scene of Crime had been created, an SOC officer appointed, Pathology and Forensics had been alerted; the apartment was already being swept with infrared cameras and print-raising gels; the dead girl’s face and body was photographed so many times the image of her eerie smile – fixed and serene – captured in stark and dramatic camera flashlight – was burned onto Karen’s corneas, like a horror film you watch when you are too young that won’t leave you at night, no matter how hard you close your eyes.

Given the lateness of the hour and her total exhaustion, the Met police budget generously offered Karen the option of a taxi rather than the Tube. Or so Karen decided. The warmth and peace of the cab was blissful after the horrors of Crowley’s old apartment. Car lights flowed and ebbed, rather comfortingly, white and red and jewel-like in the cold.

‘Here.’ She tapped the cab driver on the shoulder as he religiously followed the instructions of his sat nav: like a minor Eastern king consulting an oracle. Karen tried again: ‘Stop! I’m already here.’

‘
Bear right after two hundred yards
,’ said the pompous, disembodied female voice on the sat nav.

The cabbie shrugged and switched off the hectoring voice and pulled over. Karen stepped out of the car into the freezing cold, and the streetlit darkness; the suburban pavements were slippery and cracked with a determined frost.

She stepped carefully to Alan’s front door and buzzed, trying to ignore the discordant chimes of guilt in her mind. First day back at school, and she dumps poor Ellie with the cousins, yet again.
That is poor, Karen, very poor.

The lights in the hallway were dark. Probably everyone was asleep: it was nearly midnight. Karen pressed the buzzer again, half-yawning, half-swaying with tiredness. And entirely guilty. She’d make it up to her daughter, somehow. Perhaps she could take Ellie to the Aquarium at the weekend, with the twins; or maybe the petting zoo. Or just the zoo. Certainly, she wouldn’t take her to the massive toy shop on the North Circular. No. That was bad. Karen was desperate not to become one of those hardworking professional
single
mothers who paid off the debt of guilt with endless gifts. Instead she would give Eleanor endless love. Hugs, not bribes.

The hallway light was finally switched on, and a shapeless monastic figure descended the stairs: Julie, Alan’s wife, wrapped in a dressing gown, obviously just woken. Karen mumbled her conscience-stricken speech. ‘Sorry, Julie, I’m so, so sorry. Did I wake you – the twins – I’m sorry. Thank you so much for taking Ellie.’

Julia stifled a yawn, her eyes deep-set with tiredness, and managed, just about, to answer. ‘S’OK, ah, mm, Alan took Ellie to your place. Ellie wanted to …’ Another enormous yawn. ‘She wanted to sleep at home – she’ll be there now.’

‘Ah. OK. Sorry!’

This had happened before, more than once. Alan had a spare set of keys for Karen’s garden flat and sometimes when he looked after Ellie he’d take her there, when she threw a tantrum because her mummy was late.

Guilt.

‘God, did she kick up a storm?’

‘Nnnno.’ Julie yawned again. ‘Well, a bit, anyway she’s there. Gonna go back sleep – twins – school run …’

‘OK, bye, Julie. Sorry. And thanks.’

Guilt.

The door shut in Karen’s face but Karen was already turning, and walking – almost running – the few hundred yards to her own house. Just round two corners, she’d be there in ten. Poor Alan, he was probably desperate to go to sleep himself; yet he’d taken Ellie home, and fed her and put her to bed, and now he was stuck in Karen’s flat watching late-night news or football on her crappy little TV, checking his watch and waiting.

Call him? She was only a few minutes from the door, but she could call him. Begin her apologies.

Karen whipped out her phone as she walked very quickly down Elmwood Lane, counting the house numbers. And dialling Alan’s number.

The phone rang and rang, and then went to voicemail. Was it switched off to keep the peace? That was unlike Alan: he always had his phone on – he just set it to vibrate if he was in a house with sleeping children.

Karen dialled again to make sure she’d got the number right.

‘Hello, you’ve reached Alan Wrightley, guess I’m not available so please leave—’

Voicemail. Again. The first creeping fingers of anxiety clutched at Karen’s soul. No. This was insane. Maybe Alan had just fallen asleep on her sofa, lullabyed by some midnight football; with a newspaper fallen from his lap. Ellie would be safe and tucked in her little bed. That was it. Yes, that was it.

But Karen was running now. She ran the last few yards to her front door, her heart yammering like a Touretter,
worry worry worry worry stop stop stop stop. S
he fumbled with the key as if she was a soldier being gassed, reaching for her gasmask … There! She was in.

The flat was dark. No noise, no TV, no sounds; nothing.

She tried to quell her worries with some logic as she raced down the corridor. She opened Ellie’s bedroom door and snapped on the light, not caring if she woke her sleeping daughter. She was frightened now, stupidly frightened.

The bedroom was empty
. The little bed, with its Hello Kitty coverlet, was flat and unruffled. Eleanor had not used it.

Karen yelled. ‘Ellie! Eleanor! Alan!’ She didn’t give a fuck if she was waking Elmwood Lane, she didn’t give a fuck if she was waking all of North London. ‘
Ellie!!!
It’s Mummy – where are you?’

The flat answered with a contemptuous silence. Karen stood in the hallway, terrorized, yet trying to be rational.

Deep breath,
deep breath.
She approached her bedroom, the main bedroom. Perhaps Alan was here, in bed, with Ellie sleeping beside him. She opened the door and snapped on the light and gazed around: the bedroom was empty. Her bed was as she had left it this morning, down to the paperback book on the pillow, face down, halfway through.

Karen spun out of the bedroom and ran into the living room. This was her last hope. If they weren’t in here – Ellie and Alan on the sofa in the dark, with the TV off, asleep, but why would they be doing that? – if they weren’t in here, then she was gone, her daughter was gone, and the terrible
terrible
soundtracking nightmare of her every waking day, that something might happen to her daughter, had come true.

Luke will rape you. He will kill you.

The fear was so great, so chokingly huge and daunting that Karen actually didn’t want to open the living-room door and see. As long as she kept the door closed she had hope; if she opened the door and saw nothing, that hope was gone.

Summoning the angels of her courage, Karen pressed the living-room door and entered the darkened silent room and in her despairing agony she knew, she already knew … but she turned on the light anyway …

And surveyed the total emptiness. There was a glass of beer on the table. Half-drunk. Only Alan drank beer. So he
had
been here. Next to it was a plate of biscuits and an almost-finished glass of milk. Eleanor’s comfort food, when her mother was away. So they had been here, and now they were gone.

Taken?

The panic roared inside her. She dialled Julie’s mobile as she pointlessly checked the last possible places – the bathroom, empty, the toilet, empty, the kitchen, empty. Even the wardrobes in Karen’s bedroom. Empty. The phone answered.

‘She’s gone, Julia, and Alan too, they’ve gone – they’ve been taken—’

‘What?
What?
Alan’s with you!’

Karen was trying not to crack. She repeated, ‘No, he’s not. He’s not here. Are they with you? Have I missed them? Did they come back when I—’ Gulping air now, she only just managed to speak. ‘When I was coming here, did they come back?’

‘No. Christ, Karen, what are you saying.
Alan’s gone? And Ellie too?’
Her voice was strangled with anxiety, and fear. ‘You gotta call the police, Karen, I’m calling the police. Jesus, you’re the police! Where are they? Who would take them? What are you saying?’

Karen mumbled her replies as she stepped into Ellie’s bedroom once again. Hello Kitty smiled at her cheerily. A picture of Eeyore hung on the wall. Little pink socks lay balled on the floor. A toy that made a whirring noise sat next to her favourite books:
Mr Tickle, Russian Fairy Tales, Now We Are Six.

The urge to crumple, to fall to the floor and give in to despair, was almost irresistible. Karen resisted and stepped forward, to look at the little pink Hello Kitty duvet, but as she did something scrunched, underfoot. She looked down.

It was a little bird. She’d stepped on the skull of a tiny little dead bird, and crushed its minuscule skull. There were several more of them distributed across the carpet, their eyes blank and white.

Rothley had been here. And he’d taken her daughter. And now Ryman’s words tolled in her mind, like a bell:
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 gazed downwards, momentarily transfixed by pure horror. One of the little birds had a broken wing. She must have stepped on the bird, and snapped its little wing.

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF. What did they signify? And the birth scene at the Luxor temple … how did they fit in? Somehow these random concepts, these shattered words, must form a beautiful poem.
Just put them in order.

In the shadowy hallway Helen crouched in the archaic dust, slotting batteries in her camera. Albert Hanna leaned against a tubby Egyptian pillar, one of many in this wide, airy and rather beautiful old tomb.

Callum came in from the blazing daylight outside. ‘You guys done?’

‘Nearly,’ Helen lied, looking up from her camera.

‘OK, get to it.’ The blond-haired Brit swept the room with his gaze. ‘We’re outside. The light is going, another hour maybe. We do
not
want to be here after dark. Got that?’

‘
Jawohl!
’ said Hanna, like an obedient Wehrmacht corporal.

Callum didn’t laugh. Or smile. He looked at Hanna, and sighed. Then he spoke:

‘You know, we’ve all got families, guys. We all want to go home. Please hurry the fuck up and find what you need to find.’

The speech was unexpected. For the first time Ryan felt a kind of empathy, maybe even pity for these men: their protectors. They were risking their lives to protect their wards; or protect the secret in the Sokar Hoard, if they found it. Ryan watched Callum as he strode determinedly into the sunshine, now slanting along the Valley of the Nobles. Ryan wondered how much these ‘soldiers’ were being paid by the voice at the end of those discreet phone calls. Paid to take these terrible risks. He presumed it was a lot.

Callum was also correct about the dwindling time available. Judging by the angle of light slanting into the tomb through the open door, the day was indeed expiring.

During his Egyptological career Ryan had been to this place several times. The Valley of the Nobles was a couple of miles down the West Bank of the Nile from the Valley of the Kings, where all the Pharaohs were buried. This particular cul-de-sac of dust and crumbling stone was notable for concealed tombs – like this one – constructed for the viziers and chancellors of ancient Egypt. There was also a workmen’s village at the end of the Valley, where the keen traveller could find the footings and walls of mud houses: the poignantly humble accommodation of the men who built the tombs.

The Valley of the Nobles was less famous than the Valley of the Kings, or the mighty Ramesseum, or the Stalinist grandeur of the Temple of Hatshepsut, which were all just a few miles distant, across the desert that adjoined the Nile valley, yet it still, usually, saw plenty of visitors. Albert had told them that he also used to conduct tours here: tours in which he would escort hundreds of people a day through these very halls.

Yet today there was literally no one in the Valley. The little wooden ticket booths were padlocked. The empty car parks were patrolled by a lonely rock pigeon. Even the relentless hucksters with their cheap sunglasses, and bogus Books of the Dead, and chunks of Middle Kingdom Coffin Text made in China, had actually thrown up their arms to Allah, and returned to their homes in the ramshackle villages along the Nile. To fish, and smoke
shisha
, and talk of poverty and despair.

And so the echoing valleys of the Theban Necropolis had returned to their proper and immemorial silence, the silence that had been stolen from them so many centuries ago.

Ryan listened to that silence; he leaned against a pillar in the tomb and closed his eyes. And the silence rang in his ears. Nothingness. Nothingness, and death. Yes, Death was here, in these rocks. These valleys of secretive tombs, just like the Great Pyramids of Giza, were the jailhouse of Death, a place where death could be imprisoned: while the soul escaped.

And how would you escape a jail? By turning a lock with the key of life.

The
ankh
.

Ryan kept his eyes closed. The
ankhs
in the Coptic museum, that looked so much like crosses, that were used as crosses, could it be?

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.

‘I am ready now.’

He was snapped out of his reverie by Helen. She repeated, ‘Ryan, I am ready now.’