The Orpheus Trail (24 page)

The phone rang. It was the man from
The Echo
I’d managed to dodge yesterday. ‘We think you owe us a statement, Mr Kish.’

‘You can tell your readers I’ve taken full responsibility for the
security
failure that made this grotesque happening possible, and have given in my resignation.’

‘Yes, but who was the kid? What’s it all about?’

‘You should ask your national colleagues. They seem to know more than I do, I’m only a local government agent not the police. Try them.’

‘I have. They’re not giving us anything.’

It was true. The press release Hildreth had emailed through to me was of the classic ‘No comment. We are continuing with our
investigations
’ order.

‘So why exactly are you resigning?’

‘I’ve told you. If you like, I’m old-fashioned. I believe in taking responsibility for what happens on my patch.’

‘Alex, are you alright?’ It was Hilary breaking our rule not to use our work phones.

‘You shouldn’t be ringing me; it’s not safe.’

‘I’ve seen the papers. I had to ring.’

‘I tried to get you last night to tell you but there was no answer. You must have been out. I didn’t leave a message.’ I hoped I didn’t sound petulant.

‘I was at the Lyttleton.
Coriolanus
is one of Beth’s set texts or one she’s chosen. Anyway she wanted to see it, so she came up and stayed the night. Can’t we meet?’

‘Hildreth thinks it isn’t a good idea.’

‘He seems to want to govern everything you do. And without getting any closer to solving anything. It’s just going on and on.’

‘I should tell you I’ve resigned. At least we’re calling it that. Actually I was effectively sacked, told to fall on my sword.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Find another job if I can. Maybe there’ll be a vacancy in your outfit or the V&A.’

‘Alex, I’m so sorry. I feel so inadequate…’

‘It’s a help to hear you. I’ll ring this evening. Will you be in?’

‘I’ll be at home. Let’s talk then.’

The museum still swarmed with police and was closed to the public. Hildreth turned up at the end of the morning. ‘Let’s go back to that pub where we can talk.’

‘When can we have the building back, and re-open?’

‘Shouldn’t be long now. I’ll tell them to get a move on. Will you go on with your exhibition?’

‘It’ll certainly pull in the crowds.’ I remembered the queues outside on the day after the break-in and the theft of the amulet. ‘They’ll
probably
come in busloads. We found the original Aunt Sally in a
cupboard
. As soon as your boys get out we can put it all back as if nothing had ever happened. Did you get to the boy’s parents first or was it the press?’

‘We tracked them down as soon as we found him on the Missing Persons Register.’

‘And nobody knows where he’s been all this time.’

‘The post-mortem showed he’d been fed before he died and then took or was given too big a shot of speed. We’ve got enquiries going on to find where he used to hang out. The homeless often have their own beat where they’re known and feel safer.’

‘But he wasn’t safe, was he. Someone got to him as they did to the others.’

‘The Ganymede site has closed down. They’ll start up again under another name of course. But they’re not the real villains. Some of us even question whether just looking should be a crime, or rather such a serious one, being banged up and put on the register, with all the
consequences
. Those who go in for grooming and trying to fix up
meetings
are the really dangerous crims. But there you are: it’s the law and we’re the grunts who have to enforce it.’

He was off on some crusade of his own where I couldn’t follow. ‘So what happens next?’

‘They’re getting desperate. They’ll make a mistake, that’s what I’m waiting, hoping for. They’ve lost a market. Presumably it was worth something to them. They must have had some pay-to-view system
going. We might find there was a credit fraud involved as well but of course their customers couldn’t come forward to complain without involving themselves, probably risk their jobs at least.

‘Anyway they’ll need to find another line. This wouldn’t have been their only business. The fact that the Scotch boy died of an overdose suggests an involvement with the drug trade. Who knows what else. The trouble is if they’re just able to switch tracks, to start again without being caught, then we’ll be searching blind.’

We were able to open again the following week. As I’d predicted there were queues all day to see the reconstituted exhibition. Phoebe and Reg were kept busy moving the crowds through the displays in groups, and excreting them the other end. I shut myself in my office and concentrated on finishing the annual report, the inventory, and the financial statement that would show I had done a good job, and that the museum was in as good shape as the budget would allow.

The police did a safety check as part of their own enquiries and for good measure I got in a security firm to go over all our
precautions
. The verdict was the same. Nothing we could have put in place, or done, apart perhaps from employing a night watchman would have kept them out if they were determined, and even then they could easily have killed any guard since they obviously had no qualms about a body or two.

Hildreth himself seemed to have gone into limbo and I was glad of his absence. Hilary and I spoke often on the phone in the evenings, which helped, but I was aware that I was waiting, sure that this wasn’t the end, that they would strike again and that no one was safe until there were answers, a resolution. I had never asked for anything so much since the last weeks of Lucy’s life. And outside every day the sun shone and the sea glinted back its light as if in a mockery of human terror and disaster.

It was the second week after the aborted exhibition opening. I had only a fortnight to go before I had to clear my desk, say goodbye to everything that I had known for the best part of my working life and be out on my own. Something had prompted me to take the finds from the amulet out of the safe and lay them on my desk as if they were the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, if I could only fit them together,
would reveal the answer. I pushed them about with a forefinger trying to remember what Jack Linden had said. Jack had been able to read the script. He had said it contained instructions about what the soul should do after death, engraved on the gold by an Orphic priest and worn by a Christian convert hedging his bets with a good luck charm.

I picked up the little notebook too and began to look through it. I saw at once that it was some sort of sketchbook. Stalbridge had clearly been in the habit of making drawings of things just as I’d seen him doing at the Forgotten Empire exhibition. And there indeed, as I turned the page, was the winged disk. There were other sketches too that I recognised. The boy in the soft cap from the Museum of London, a flagon from the prince’s grave. I came to the last pages. A few were empty, intended for future use. Something made me turn to the very end. There was no picture, only what seemed a list. I stared at it.

I was looking at a list of the death scenes. There was nothing that suggested the fire on the pier. Perhaps that was what had given him the idea for the whole thing. Someone had wanted to get rid of the body and make it look like an accident. Stalbridge had refined on the
original
plan and gone on from there. But what was meant by ‘bull slaying?’

I picked up the phone and dialled Hilary’s number. ‘Does “bull slaying” mean anything to you?’

‘Mithras,’ she said at once.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s what he does, did, in the myth. He slew the primeval bull from which came life. Its death set life going if you like. We’ve got a sculpture of it that was found in the Walbrook. Why?’

‘It’s something in a notebook that belonged to Stalbridge, part of a list. I wondered what it meant.’

Someone came into the room and she rang off hastily. What did
it mean? Was it going to be Stalbridge’s next project if I hadn’t got in the way? Did I have anything I could usefully tell Hildreth?
Stalbridge
was dead and that was presumably the end of it. But they had wanted to threaten me or get their own back for meddling, as they would see it. There might still be a supply of dead boys they wanted to use to make more pornopics from or there might even be girls as well if they decided to expand into another market, as Hildreth had called it. Perhaps Stalbridge had given them a last set-up. Maybe they still wanted the religious element to give that added frisson. Judging by the previous installations it didn’t matter to the commissioners what the religion was. Or was that Stalbridge’s own input, reflecting his
interests
and the pieces from the amulet? Zoroastrian, Orphic, Bacchic, Christian. There were all the Christian virgin martyrs, some of whom must have been young girls, to choose from. There was the sacrifice of Abraham and Issac, Proserpina whose rape led down to Death, Kronos devouring his children. Oh, they’d got plenty to work their way through, endless depictions of lust and murder under the guise of art, art which was meant to achieve catharsis, resolution, but was being subverted to titillate. I was beginning to sound even to myself like ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’. Yet the alternative was the ‘woolly liberalism’ ridiculed by traditionalists.

Somehow you have to cling on to ‘No man is an island’, with all its consequences, even if you go down pinioned to the great white whale, and drown in your own failure. I had to risk being thought a fool by Hildreth.

I rang Hilary again. ‘Any news?’ she asked at once. ‘I’m sorry I had to ring off like that before.’

‘If you were thinking of staging something to do with Mithras, another scene, where would you do it?’

‘Not us again! I don’t think I could bear it.’

‘I don’t think so. At least they’ve never repeated themselves before. Where else might it be? Somewhere within what you might call their catchment area.’

‘Do be careful, Alex. Don’t get too involved. Let the police get on with it. It’s their job, not yours.’

‘I can’t refuse to help if Hildreth asks me.’

‘You’re all like little boys playing cops and robbers, and dressing it up in duty or idealising’.

I thought of the last of the great Victorians, Kipling:

I knew that Hilary was right. I felt myself carried along on the wave of Hildreth’s enthusiasm, the energy that emanated from him, in a game of follow my leader, even while I was sick with a complex fear I couldn’t share with anyone.

The next day passed uneventfully. Unable to believe that in a week I would have cleared my desk and left, I went about the building like a sleepwalker, knowing the chairman and board were already
interviewing
the shortlist for my job but unable to apply for any new post myself.

The house was lonely without Caesar. Every few days I went to see him in his comfortable prison, climbing the steps to the row of cages, stepping into the obligatory tray of evil-smelling disinfectant and opening his individual meshed door, under the supervision of Jane or Alice who ran the cattery. Sometimes he would come out to see me with a little cry of recognition; at others he would stay sullenly inside the wire hut with its cushioned ledge, bowls of food and water and litter tray. Those days I knew I was being punished. I couldn’t even explain to him or his minders why his incarceration was necessary since I was clearly around and not on a world cruise or away at an archival conference.

Then Hilary rang. ‘There’s a place called the Roman Bath. I think people once thought it was something to do with Mithraic rites. Now it’s generally accepted that it’s neither Roman nor a bath but some sort of Tudor water tank with a spring under it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Surrey Street, I think. In a little alleyway, leading down to the Embankment and the Thames.’

‘Where does the bull slaying come in?’

‘It seems to have been part of the initiation rite for young boys. Symbolically they went down to the underworld, rather the same idea as going under in Christian baptism. The real Temple of Mithras is by the Walbrook, the stream under Victoria Street but there’s nothing left except the outlines of walls. You’ve seen all the artefacts they found in our display here. You remember…’

‘The singing head. But wasn’t that Orpheus? He’s in the list I found at the back of the notebook.’

‘The two were very closely linked.’

‘Like on the coin from the amulet.’

‘That’s it.’

‘You know I’m leaving next week.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Write my memoirs. No, honestly I don’t know. I don’t seem to have the will to start sending off my CV and filling in forms. Something will turn up, I suppose.’

Hildreth rang the next morning while I was on my second piece of toast. ‘Any luck, Alex?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I was going to ring you. We might be on to something. I found a list at the back of that book. It seems to refer to the scenes. They’re all listed except the first, the fire. I suspect that was what gave them, or Stalbridge himself, the idea for the rest. But there’s a fourth. It looks as if they were intending to stage at least one more. Suppose they are? Hilary thinks she knows where and what it might be.’

‘Go on.’ His voice, which had been rather flat, lifted.

‘The last entry says “bull slaying”. It’s a long shot but she thinks it might refer to some kind of initiation ceremony. And she thinks she might know where it could be.’

‘Go on.’

‘Apparently there’s something called the Roman Bath in Surrey Street that was once thought to be connected to Mithras, the god who went in for bull slaying. I know it all sounds very hypothetical…’

‘It’s all we’ve got. We’ll check it out. I only hope you’re both right. The lack of progress is beginning to get to our chief.’