‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Kish. This is Detective Chief Inspector Hildreth of the Met and our own Constable Jenkins.’
I stood up to shake hands with the man from the Met while the constable positioned himself at the table beside some kind of recording equipment.
‘Peter Hildreth but I’m usually called Hilo,’ the detective said. The voice was strong with a north of Watford accent I couldn’t identify. Brought up on the south suburban fringes of London I was bad at differentiating anything other than refined estuary or cockney.
‘You don’t mind if we take a record of this do you, sir?’ Hobbs asked.
‘No, no, go ahead.’ We all sat down.
‘Gerald here says you run the local museum.’
‘I’m the director,’ I said rather stiffly. ‘My chairman has given me the job of liaising with the police.’
‘But why, if you don’t mind me asking, does he, or you, come into it? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not doubting your legitimate interest. I’m just trying to understand the set-up.’
‘It’s our responsibility. His because his committee commissioned the sculpture under their tourism brief which includes entertainment, culture, town improvement, anything that might be thought to bring the punters in. But also,’ I was choosing my words carefully, ‘because there seem to be certain unusual elements to recent events connected with our discovery of the Prince’s grave which make it my concern.’
Hildreth nodded. ‘Ah yes. I read about that in the press. Archaeology, armchair archaeology, is by way of being a hobby of mine. So you think there’s some connection between what happened yesterday and that grave?’
I took a deep breath and tried to speak as calmly and factually as possible. ‘An amulet was found in the grave and was subsequently stolen from the museum. It consisted of a thin sheet of gold inscribed with a Greek text and folded up very small to the size of a matchbox. Part of that was round the neck of the child in the glass egg.’
Hobbs shifted in his seat. ‘What you don’t know, Mr Kish, is that a similar thing was found with the remains of the body burnt in the pier fire. We didn’t tell the public because we didn’t see it had any significance and anyway it’d been so badly warped by the heat as to be unrecognisable, at least to us, then, but from what you say now, I’m in no doubt it’s the same kind of thing.’
‘So it looks like we have two similar killings and therefore a serial killer. Let’s see what other similarities there are. Both young boys for a start.’ Hildreth counted the points off on a well-manicured hand. ‘Both in bizarre circumstances. The boy on the pier didn’t go there of his own accord and start a fire playing with matches. He was taken there, possibly, probably, already dead.’
‘The boys weren’t local,’ Hobbs said. ‘We’ve no reported missing persons of their description. Anyway if there had been there would have been a national manhunt. We would all have known about it. Essex people don’t take things quietly, especially anything to do with children.’
I realised the local police would have their own problems. Negligence or incompetence accusations would start to fly and I knew how that felt. I wondered how much I could add to the list and still keep a reputation for credibility with these two hard-headed enforcers of the law. I decided to keep quiet unless asked a direct question. I wasn’t let off the hook for long.
‘Anything to add, Mr Kish?’ Hildreth asked. I had decided in my own mind that he was a black Celt with all that implied of imagination, what I remembered from somewhere as ‘the lovely gift of the gab,’ not at all the stereotype PC Plod. I felt he sensed I was holding something back with an almost traditionally feminine intuition or even a touch of the magician but with no whiff of charlatan that I could detect.
‘The bizarre circumstances you listed both show elements of some ancient cult.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m not sure because I’m not an expert. It’s not my field.’
‘Speculation?’
‘At this stage, yes.’
‘Let me know if you come up with anything more concrete. What’s happened twice can happen again and I imagine none of us want that. The public will want to know why we’re faffing about.’
I was dismissed. I wanted to ask what they would do next ‘to pursue their inquiries’ but supposed that would be classified information. Should I have told them about the real expert, sicked them on to Jack? I’d held back and I didn’t quite know why, except that I had the impression that he wasn’t comfortable being publicly quizzed or handling that kind of interrogation.
And I was right. ‘I hope you managed to keep me out of it,’ he said later when I rang to fill him in on my interview with the police. ‘Officialdom makes me nervous.’
‘It’s okay. I didn’t need to involve you. But I don’t know if I can keep you out forever unless I pretend that what you tell me I thought of for myself.’
‘That’s fine by me.’
‘It may not work. Remember you were quoted in the press.’
‘I know. I just hope everyone else has forgotten or doesn’t make the connection.’
I had to wonder why he was so averse to publicity when most people, including archaeologists, can’t wait to be picked out by the media spotlight.
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ I asked Hilary as the fatal day loomed closer.
‘Beth will be home and we’ll probably go to my sister’s.’
‘Beth?’
‘My daughter at uni in Durham. Honestly, Alex, your face! You didn’t think I was still a virgin, did you? I warned you that you know nothing about me.’
Up until now I had existed in a kind of time capsule, a bubble of the present in my head. I realised I had asked her nothing and in turn told her almost nothing. And now I didn’t know how to begin. Beth must be about nineteen. What had happened to her father? Obviously he wasn’t around.
‘Beth’s father and I split up when she was ten. He lives in the States. She goes to stay with him from time to time. He’s quite a distinguished anthropologist in his own field.
I felt a rush of envy, or was it jealousy, of this unknown man who had just come into my life as fertile husband and no doubt brilliant academic.
‘What will you do?’ Hilary asked.
‘I might see if Jack Linden wants to get out of London for a couple of days. I don’t get the impression he’s overburdened with friends and family.’
‘What will Caesar say to that?’ she laughed.
‘He’ll have to mind his manners if he wants any turkey.’
‘Who’ll do the cooking?’
‘I will. I’ve got rather good at it since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to.’
Jack seemed delighted at the invitation. ‘I never know quite what to do with myself when the city empties and everything’s closed, libraries, museums and so on. Thanks, Alex, thanks a lot.’
‘Bracing walks along the front,’ I said. ‘Bring warm clothes.’
‘And I’ll bring some booze. What’s yours?’
‘Anything except gin.’ It sounded as if we were auditioning for a buddy movie.
‘I thought you and Hilary…’
‘She’s got family obligations.’
I let the police simmer for a couple of days then, before everything closed down for the holiday, I rang the mobile number Hildreth had given me.
‘Hilo.’
‘It’s Alex Kish,’ I said, ‘from the museum. I wondered if there were any developments.’
‘We’ve ascertained that the first boy was Asian, or rather Asiatic, Chinese in fact. The second is more difficult. From the DNA we think Eastern European.’ The Northern twang to his voice was more distinctive on the telephone, even against the background of other voices and the grind of London traffic.
‘And the egg?’
‘We’ve interviewed the manufacturers. They thought the artist had changed his mind and ordered a slightly different version.’
‘Where did they send it?’
‘It was collected, signed for with an illegible signature.’
‘And the real one? Have you found that?’
‘Not yet. Why are you asking, Alex?’
‘Someone will have to pay for it. I can’t see the artist, Reg North, footing the bill, or the makers. It looks like a hole in my budget, and the council’s, and nothing to show for it. What chance do you think there is of getting it back? It’s not an easy thing to conceal. Too big.’
‘The artist thinks it’s been smashed up and recycled. He’s pretty depressed about the whole thing. We offered him the other one when we’ve finished with it but he says it’s tainted.’
‘How did the boy die?’
‘Drugged and suffocated while asleep.’
That was why he had looked so calm and peaceful.
‘Let’s hope we can all have a quiet Christmas,’ Hildreth said, ‘but I wouldn’t bet on it.’
I had wondered how Jack and I would get along on our own together for two whole days but in the end it was surprisingly easy. We went for cold rambles along the front and out to Canvey so that I could show him where the second boy had appeared in the egg.
‘Do you know why the artist chose that shape?’ he asked as we stood beside the empty plinth.
‘He said something on local radio about it being the perfect sculptural form, and signifying hope and rebirth.’
‘That’s how it’s always been seen; why so many religions have adopted it as part of their mythology. The Iranians give each other symbolic eggs at the start of their new year in spring, roughly corresponding to our Easter. Nothing to do with a Christian crucifixion except that that’s another rebirth through a death. And our Easter eggs must go back to that same Indo-European root, along with the chicks and the bunnies who are really those magic animals, Mad March hares.’
‘So the answer to that old riddle about what came first the chicken or the egg is the cosmic egg.’
‘You could say that,’ Jack laughed and then was silent a moment. ‘What does your policeman think is going on?’
‘If he knows he isn’t saying. I haven’t told him too much because as we agreed it sounds so fanciful but I did tell him about the gold leaf round the boy’s neck and it turns out that the boy on the pier had one too. He is, or was, Chinese, they think.’
‘When will you tell him the rest?’
‘What could I say? That we think there’s somebody with a knowledge of ancient beliefs who’s killing boys in bizarre circumstances. He knows that already.’
‘We can’t just sit around waiting for the next death.’
‘You think there will be another?’
‘There were four gold leaves, Alex. I mean the sheet was folded into four. Two have been detached and used. That means there are two more to go.’
‘I don’t see what we can do about it. It’s a job for the police. It does explain why there was no sign of the stolen pieces being offered for sale on the internet. Someone had a use for them. They must have been taken with exactly this in mind.’
Hilary rang on Christmas morning. ‘We’re just setting off for my sister’s; back after Boxing Day. How are you two boys making out? Have you solved all the problems yet?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. Hearing her voice like that on Christmas morning was a message that there was something between us; I wasn’t forgotten.
‘Perhaps when the holiday’s over you’d like to come and see where I work. Then you could take in the rest of the king’s treasure.’
‘I would, very much.’ I knew I was responding stupidly, like a nervous teenager although of course they’re not nervous in the way we were back in the seventies. It was almost a relief when she rang off and I could stop making a fool of myself.
The rest of Jack’s stay passed quietly. Master Chef would have been proud of my turkey with all the trimmings and both Jack and Caesar tucked in to a flattering share. Caesar behaved immaculately, making up to Jack’s leg as he sat in the armchair, demanding to be fussed over until Jack gave in and stroked him.
‘He knows you’re harmless,’ I laughed, ‘or else he’s just a tart. I thought Hilary had won his heart.’
Jack had brought wine as well as whisky with him and in the evening we sat companionably in front of the artificial flame of the gas fire, rather, I suddenly thought, like an old married queer couple.
‘It must be easy for the few remaining Zoroastrians,’ Jack said, rolling the wine around his glass, ‘to carry the sacred fire around with them nowadays. Just a little Calor gas bottle and stove. I wonder if they do?’
‘How long since you were in the Middle East?’
‘For any length of time? Not since the early eighties. I’ve paid various flying visits but I haven’t been able to work there. Fortunately I’ve got some private money or I’d be trying to get a job with you or Hilary.’
‘Would you ever go back to the States?’
‘I have a house there at Ann Arbour that I rent out. But I’m too much at odds with the administration’s foreign policy. However, decrepitude might force me back as it’s done with the old lion, Vidal, who’s spent most of his life in Europe worrying the sheep from a distance as long as he could. I miss those places badly. The countries, the people, the work, the night skies where the stars are so bright they seem to be falling down to earth. So many lost civilisations while we were still in diapers: Egypt, Babylon, the Hittites, Persians, Greeks. The Romans were only yesterday.’
‘So our little bits of Saxon tat were last night. I don’t know where that leaves my Victorians.’ He laughed. ‘About half an hour ago.’
‘And the present?’
‘Fleeting minutes made up of even more fleeting seconds. You know Omar Khyam: “the moving finger writes and having writ/Moves on”.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Khyam’s was to get drunk. Like the kids today. Only he knew he was drowning the sorrows of the human condition. Theirs is the pursuit of pleasure, just something to do… I don’t know. Let’s have another bottle and we can toast Khyam’
‘Who was he?’ Jack had lost me again.
‘Persian poet. Twelfth century. When Europe was having its first renaissance. There’s a brilliant, because entirely convincing as a poem, nineteenth-century translation into English by Edward Fitzgerald. I learnt chunks of it when I was a kid and used to chant it aloud in my room. No wonder my father, who was a strict Methodist, was convinced I’d go to the bad.’
‘If he lived in the twelfth century he must have been a Muslim. I thought they didn’t drink.’
‘They did then. The Puritanism came later as it did for Christianity. Shiraz,’ he picked up the bottle of red wine, ‘is a Persian name, after the place where some of their finest grapes were grown.’
‘Here’s to… what did you say his name was?’
‘Omar Khyam’
‘Here’s to Omar then. Jack, how come you know so much about so many things? For you all knowledge seems to hang together. Am I right?’
‘I guess I do see it that way. What a French existentialist philosopher called the nousphere, an envelope of knowledge like an intellectual atmosphere. The original of the worldwide web that has now given it the dubious benefit of a physical manifestation. Click the mouse, press the button and hey presto, you’ve rubbed Al Adin’s lamp and let the genie out of the bottle. Now we’re starting to wonder how to get him back in again. I had the best education you could buy in the States at that time. I was a great disappointment to my Pa because the only sports that interested me were swimming and cross-country running, fairly solitary. Then I got the chance as a student to join a dig in Mesopotamia during the long vacation and I was hooked. Everything seemed to fit together. One civilisation giving way to another; the evolution of writing and technical know-how, rather than how I’d been taught; a few battles and conquests, our war of independence, our civil war, our Great Depression. We Americans don’t have a natural sense of history so when it does hit us we get it bad from having n
o built-in immunity. I got the whole works: the rise and fall of empires, religions, because I saw that was civilisation’s cradle I’d landed in. History I could hold in my hand in a bit of bone or a pottery shard. It was like falling in love.’
I drove Jack to the station after Boxing Day. The museum was closed until the beginning of January but we always took the opportunity to do some housekeeping while the public was away, including the annual inventory to make sure none of our artefacts had gone astray. I had to come up with something novel that would draw the summer tourists in and please the chairman. I’d also set myself a course of reading and research, so that I could try to make some sense of the events we had become involved in. Bede’s History and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle had been ticked off from the top of my list but now I had begun to stretch out farther back into the past and across the continents to see if I could catch the panoramic view that had so dazzled Jack. Echoes came back to me from my university days as if from a distant galaxy. So much I must have studied then had become submerged, an Atlantis sunk under waves of the everyday, of management, finance, admin, until the passion I had once felt, that had driven me to my career, had been lost and I might as well have been selling real estate or clerking in an office.
I had become immersed in, drowned by the appearance of things and forgotten the people who made them, the myriad multicoloured lives, the hands and brains of their creators, the belief that had shaped them so that they weren’t just artefacts, divorced from a way of thinking, even though they were often rich and shapely in themselves. Standing in the empty museum, looking around me at the parade of civilisations, I almost laughed out loud at myself and the belated epiphany I was having on my Damascus road, sparked off by Jack’s account of his own youthful awakening in the land of the Phoenicians, among the tumbled columns half buried in sand or in rose-red Petra, Babylon’s hanging gardens, the library at Alexandria, the old seven wonders of the world, and then on through our own latter days, seeing it as one unfolding narrative, tracking down to the last shot that was only another beginning.
The Orpheus Trail Page 7