The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  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.

  26

  London

  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.

  ‘So, Karen, er, it’s not a homicide yet?’

  Curtis always called her Karen. At the beginning of their working relationship they had experimented with his calling her ‘Ma’am’, but she’d decided that made her feel like an ancient dowager in a period drama, so they’d reverted to Karen.

  He said, ‘I’m not quite sure why we’re concentrating so much on this.’

  ‘I think it’s going to get worse. Maybe homicide.’

  ‘Why? How do you know?’

  ‘I have a feeling.’ She smiled. ‘In my waters.’

  ‘My nan used to say that, in Kilkenny. Turned out she had a bladder problem, from all the stout.’

  Karen clicked on her computer. ‘The suicide might be manslaughter, the guy might have been driven to do what he did, or drugged, we don’t know. But we do know there were seven other people in that cottage, burning the cats, staying at Trevelloe. Where are they? We need to trace them. They may be in serious trouble: of the only two we have located, one is dead and one is psychotic. What about the rest?’

  DS Curtis nodded. ‘OK, Ma’am!’

  ‘Yes, yes. Let’s start by chasing up Alicia Rothley. She had friends in London, we have a list. Get on that. OK? And I’ll do my homework.’

  The office was productively quiet for several hours. Lunch came and went with a flurry of supermarket sandwiches and hot coffee. At the end of it, Karen was decided: Aleister Crowley really was crucial.

  They knew that the gang members were re-enacting magic associated with Crowley: Taghairm and Abra-Melin, in particular. They also knew the gang was using properties linked to Aleister Crowley: Carn Cottage, Trevelloe Lodge. Where were they now? If they were still in the country – and Alicia Rothley in her madness had implied that her brother was still here – then possibly they were staying in some other property with Crowley connections.

  So who was Crowley? Karen had only read snippets, so far; now she needed the full works, all the details. They weren’t hard to source. The web was full of ‘Crowleyana’, an entire industry of speculation and rumour, and even some hard facts – dedicated to this strange man.

  One newspaper piece gave her almost all she needed to know:

  Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Leamington Spa in England in 1875, to a wealthy brewing family who were hardcore Protestant evangelicals: Plymouth Brethren. The future Satanist was named Edward, after the father he came to adore. But Edward Crowley Senior died of cancer when the youngster was eleven, an experience so traumatic that Crowley lost all interest in the family’s fierce religion.

  The boy hated his pious mother, who sent him to a series of private schools where he was mercilessly bullied because he was fat. Having persuaded her to remove him by claiming he was being sexually abused, he was given a home tutor who, despite being a former Bible Society missionary, introduced him to such worldly pursuits as card games and billiards.

  In 1895, Crowley, by now calling himself Aleister because of its Celtic overtones, went to Cambridge University to read moral sciences. Instead of studying, however, he boasted he spent his time on sexual experimentation.

  Leaving three years later without a degree, he used his considerable family inheritance to take a flat in a large building in Chancery Lane, London, signing the lease with one of the many aliases he loved to use, Count Vladimir Svaroff.

  The flat in Chancery Lane, in an area of London full of medieval resonances, was perfect for the budding Satanist, who was fast making it his mission to dispel Victorian hypocrisy by any means he could.

  Crowley had just been introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mysterious magical society which claimed to possess arcane truths handed down to the modern world from ancient Egypt.

  He soon became an initiate, taking the name of Brother Perdurabo, meaning: ‘I will endure’.

  But Crowley rapidly came to despise his fellow brethren – who included the Irish poet W B Yeats – because of their timid approach to magic. Determined to conduct bolder experiments into the supernatural, he took as his personal instructor an impoverished magician called Alan Bennett whom he invited to stay with him.

  And so a period of intense magical activity began, based on the invocations of a medieval Egyptian mage called Abra-Melin. Crowley and his followers believed that they could summon the spirits of the dead, and perhaps even the Devil himself, through animal sacrifice and pagan rituals.

  Piecing together Crowley’s writings and those of the impressionable acolytes that visited the place in Crowley’s day, we have a good idea what the flat looked like, not to mention the unsettling things that went on inside.

  The visitor passed from the cold stone dusk of the stairs to a palace of rose and gold that has long since vanished. Gold-black Japanese wallpaper covered the rooms and the place was lit like a brothel by an ancient silver lamp with a red bulb. The floor was covered with leopard skins and on the wall there was a huge crucifix in ivory and ebony.

  There were two temples, one to good, the other to evil. In Crowley’s ‘Black Temple’, actually more of a cupboard, a bloodstained skeleton sat before a sinister altar, made of a round table supported by the figure of an ebony Negro standing on his hands.

  On the altar, a sickening perfume smouldered in a container and one visitor claimed the stench of previous blood sacrifices filled the air. In his delusions, Crowley used to feed the skeleton blood, small birds and beef tea in the hope of reviving it.

  No wonder people were afraid of him. It was said that in the streets he could make himself invisible; others claimed that he was throbbing with so much magical power that his coat once burst into flames. Horses were generally frightened of him. However, despite these ‘gifts’, and in order to create real magic, Crowley believed he needed the use of a large remote country house with a terrace at the door facing north: the best direction in which to create a spell.

  In Boleskine, in northern Scotland, he found the perfect house. He fell in love with it, and having inherited nearly five million pounds in today’s money immediately bought it. There he claimed he invoked at least a hundred spirits. But he soon began to disturb his neighbours: villagers accused him of summoning ghosts from Boleskine churchyard, and a local butcher accidentally chopped off his fingers when he inadvertently handled a word square – a written spell – associated with the Abra-Melin ritual.

  It was time to move on. Still honing his evil persona, Crowley travelled to Egypt with a young bride – whom he liked to string up naked in a cupboard. In Cairo, he claimed to have had a vision of himself as the new Messiah, saying he had received a message from an angel called Aiwass who told him he was the herald of a cult which would have its own Bible, the Book of Thelema, the Greek word for will …

  Karen read on, amazed. From Egypt, Crowley had gone to America, India, Sri Lanka, China, then back to England, then Germany – apparently he went everywhere, spending the last of his inheritance from his ironically God-fearing parents. And the debaucheries got worse: whoring, heroin, cocaine, pederasty, coprophagy. The sentences blurred in front of Karen’s eyes: ‘he liked to bite the hand of his mistress until she bled’; ‘at least five of his gi
rlfriends committed suicide’; ‘in Sicily, he fatally poisoned his friend by making him drink a glass of cat’s blood’.

  Karen googled a picture of Crowley. Fat, bald and unprepossessing. Apparently he seldom bathed. When Karen found a recording of his voice, online, it was impossibly reedy and unsexy, like a castrated Anglican vicar intoning the Acts of the Apostles.

  Yet this man must have had some immense mesmeric potency. Despite his increasing corpulence and horrible demeanour he attracted followers and lovers – male and female – well into his sixties. And his cult was powerful to this day. What was it that he possessed? What hypnotic power? Was there really something in his magic that worked? Most importantly, had Rothley tapped into the same Crowleyan magic?

  For another hour she researched the Abra-Melin ritual. As she did, she recalled the words of Donald Ryman: ‘the rite of Abra-Melin is the only magic in history that, for whatever reason, and in some terrifying way, actually appears to work’.

  ‘How’s it going, Karen?’

  Curtis had returned from the cold outside, bringing with him the faint smell of cigarette smoke. She didn’t envy him these little smoking breaks: it was freezing out there. Minus two. A very cold January.

  ‘I’m getting there, I think. I’m sure the key is wherever Crowley stayed.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We know Rothley likes to use properties associated with Crowley. Right?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘So I’m going through the main ones first, surviving apartments, hotels, et cetera. But we mustn’t stop there. Remember Crowley was around a hundred years ago, and he moved constantly. We need to check out every possible address. Even if the site where he stayed has been demolished, and rebuilt, it might still attract – God knows – the vibrations Rothley likes. The spirits. That is what he believes.’

  DS Curtis smiled.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Karen said. ‘Make a list, and go there, even if it’s been turned into a bloody car park. We need to get into Rothley’s head.’

  Her junior officer nodded, and sat down at his desk.