The Orpheus Trail

by Maureen Duffy

  The house seemed extra cold and empty when I got back until I switched on the fire’s fake flames and, as if he’d been waiting for me, Caesar came flip-flopping in through his door. As usual I wanted him to tell me where he’d been. Maybe one day some urban wildlife Atten-borough will hang a mini video camera round a cat’s neck and film that mysterious life lived beyond our grasp.

  Overnight my own life had taken a seismic shift into very deep waters. We had more or less committed ourselves and each other to something that we couldn’t foresee, something I wasn’t good at and neither, I suspected, was Hilary. For different reasons we’d both had to narrow our lives to the immediately predictable, to getting up each day, knowing exactly what we had to do. I wanted to ring her as soon as I got back, to say… what? Instead I told myself I would go to the museum in the morning and pick up the stock-taking where I’d left off. After all I wasn’t a teenager. So why did I feel like one, like the one I’d once been for a brief time before the everyday closed irrevocably around me?

  By next morning I was desperate. I rang her mobile.

  ‘I was beginning to think you were one of the fuck-and-run brigade,’ Hilary said. ‘Anyway I couldn’t sleep so I read till quite late and I came across something that reminded me of how the second boy was set up. Apparently a Persian warlord about the first millennium BC called Gunbad-i-Kabus was buried, if you can call it that, suspended in a coffin of rock crystal so that a shaft of light would come through and light up the body. Do you think they knew about that?’

  ‘If they did we’re dealing with a very well informed set of weirdoes, someone well up in history and archaeology.’

  ‘Someone like Jack?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ And I remembered queasily how he had spoken of it himself.

  ‘Then there’s a chance he knows them or they know about him.’

  ‘We keep saying “they” but we don’t know there’s more than one person involved.’

  ‘Logistically, if you look at the complexity of the set-ups, I think it has to be more than one, even if there’s a directing hand.’

  We were on safe ground, not talking about ourselves or the future, but holding hands and stepping carefully from tussock to tussock through the emotional quagmire, in that English way I had absorbed with my mother’s milk. Suddenly I had a picture of the Chinese cockle pickers, the illegal immigrants left to drown in the quicksand of Morecombe Bay as the tide rushed in. I felt myself going down, grit filling my nose and mouth and silting up my eyes. The police had said the first boy was Asiatic. Or was it the second? Either way I couldn’t go down that road, a favourite expression of Lisa’s, when she thought I was being negative about a problem she would then solve with a: ‘How about if we were to, like…?’

  ‘Have you heard from Jack?’

  ‘Not since I put him on the train.’

  ‘Neither have I. Maybe he’s gone away on a dig somewhere.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have said something while he was with me?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I’ve known him disappear before, be off the map when I’ve wanted to consult him about something.’

  I felt a chill of unease akin to the sensation I had had alone that night with the finds in our own little exhibition that we had grandiosely called ‘the king’s room’. It was as if someone was watching and we were the exhibits.

  Each time the phone rang I expected to hear from Jack so at first I didn’t recognise the voice saying my name when I picked up the handset later that day. ‘Mr Alex Kish?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Hildreth.’

  ‘Oh. Happy New Year,’ I said stupidly and then wondered why.

  ‘I believe you’re a friend of a Professor Jack Linden.’

  ‘Yes, yes I am. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘We just need to get in touch with him. Do you have an address?’

  ‘I can give you that certainly.’ It crossed my mind that the police might want to consult Jack as an expert as we had done. I read out his address from my personal organiser. ‘I haven’t heard from him for a few days so he might be away. If I do, should I mention that you would like to talk to him?’

  ‘No, no thanks. We’ll do our own legwork when we’re ready. But I’d be glad if you could drop in for a chat too. Tomorrow at three suit you?’

  ‘Of course. We haven’t opened yet after the holiday so I’m fairly free.’

  ‘Good. We’ll see you then.’

  The town decorations were still up but the chains of light swinging in a cold wind from the grey edgy sea looked exhausted and forlorn. The party was over. The millennium that had begun with such optimism in a glittering firework of hope and energy, of relief that the bloody twentieth century was behind us, had been eclipsed almost at once by the choking fumes of despair as the juggernaut rolled out again in all its trappings of torn flesh and bloodied wounds.

  ‘How long have you known Professor Linden?’ Hildreth’s next question took me by surprise.

  ‘Not long. A few months.’

  ‘And where did you meet?’

  ‘Dr Caistor introduced us.’

  ‘Dr Caistor? How do you spell that?’

  I spelled out Hilary’s name. ‘And where would I find him?’

  ‘She works at the Museum of London.’

  ‘And what was the purpose of your meeting?’

  ‘Jack’s an expert on Middle Eastern civilisations. Dr Caistor thought he might be able to help with some finds we’d made locally.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘He deciphered the symbols and the scripts and set them in their historical context. It’s all a bit above me, I’m afraid. Not my period.’

  ‘And after?’

  ‘After the objects were stolen he tried to track them down on the antiques black market.’

  ‘And when did you last speak to him?’

  ‘Boxing Day, when I dropped him off at the station.’

  ‘Which station was that?’

  ‘Here. He’d been staying with me over Christmas.’

  ‘I see. And what did you talk about?’

  ‘The Middle East and his time there. The American attitude to history. He feels very badly about the war. Really I don’t see where all this is leading.’

  ‘Bear with me a bit longer, Mr Kish. You say he was looking for your stolen property on the antiques black market. Would that be using the internet?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘You see we’ve been informed that he’s been accessing child pornography sites.’

  I felt my gorge rise as if he had calmly kicked me in the gut, and suddenly I saw the drift of all his questions and that I might be suspect too. Jack had stayed at my house, perhaps even in my bed. How long had I known him? What had we talked about? Maybe he thought that we had sat there watching porn videos together. What had I said to Hilary about feeling as if I was in a buddy movie? How do you prove there’s nothing suspicious without beginning to stammer guiltily? If I said, ‘the night before last I was in bed with a mature woman,’ would he or anyone else except Hilary believe me? And anyway what did it prove? There were known precedents for predatory, even murderous, couples: Brady and Hindley, the Wests. Ian Huntley had a live-in partner. What better cover than to appear an ordinary straight taxpaying citizen?

  I was like the proverbial drowning man with all his life passing before him, only it was my future I saw unreeling, not my past. I could be judged unfit to be around children which would mean the end of my job.

  ‘As far as I know they were illegal antique dealing sites: nothing to do with children or pornography.’

  ‘We were contacted by colleagues in the States. They’d been doing a sweep, drawing up lists. Your Professor was on one. We’ve managed to close down any UK-based sites but they have a much bigger problem over there, and in Russia, for different reasons. They keep us informed of any UK residents that turn up. So then we go after them.’

  His voice was very calm, and the tone a chilli
ng matter-of-fact that seemed to leave no room for doubt. I was numb with fear and disbelief like those nightmares where you’re paralysed, unable to move or ward off the horror advancing towards you. ‘I’m sure there’s some simple explanation, mistaken identity, something of that sort.’

  ‘Well we shall find out. Meanwhile if you could drop by tomorrow at three…’

  Was it just paranoia or did I detect an unspoken: ‘Or else…?’, barely disguised by the friendly Northern burr, an order not an invitation?

  My first instinct was to ring Hilary, mentally crossing my fingers, against all my principles, that she would answer.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ I said when I’d told her what Hildreth had said.

  ‘I think I can see what he was up to.’

  ‘So you think it’s true.’

  ‘I think it’s possible, given the nature of what’s happened, that Jack might have been looking for any signs, just as he looked for evidence of the objects coming onto the black market.’

  ‘So how do I play it tomorrow?’

  ‘Don’t let him panic you. After all we don’t know and lots of quite innocent people are accused of all sorts of crimes they had nothing to do with.’

  ‘Should I try to get hold of Jack, warn him?’

  ‘No, they might have a phone tap on him and then you would look complicit.’

  As long as I could hear her voice I could stay calm but as soon as I put the phone down, I was aware of my own vulnerability threatening to choke me. I got out the car and drove down to the front where I could struggle against the knife wind that flayed my face, and stare out across the leaden sea laced with white spume crests and with the dark crescents of gulls mewling above, and imagine the wave after wave of invaders that the millennia had brought, from those earliest hominids, heavy browed and thick necked, stepping tentatively across the land bridge, only to be overwhelmed by the first of the Ice Ages, to the latest incomers in flight from poverty or violence, and among them somewhere my unknown father.

  It was a relief to find Caesar waiting when I got back. Somehow the evening passed with enough whisky and dry ginger to keep me under for the night and then it was morning. Now I had to get through the day. I decided the best idea was to busy myself at the museum until it was time for my interview with Hildreth.

  ‘Thank you for coming in, Mr Kish. We won’t keep you long. We’ve tracked down Professor Linden. He was looking for an old colleague in Oxford. We’ve had to caution him. He says he was investigating whether the dead boys’ pictures might have turned up on the internet.’

  ‘We wondered about that.’

  ‘We…?’

  ‘Dr Caistor and I.’

  ‘A dangerous game if so. People should leave that sort of thing to the police. It still constitutes an illegal access so we had to bring him in and obviously we shall continue to monitor the situation. So you believe that was his motive?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do.’

  ‘Would you know how to access such sites, Mr Kish?’

  ‘I wouldn’t even know how to begin. Presumably it’s not something you can ask a search engine to find.’ I felt myself on the verge of a nervous giggle.

  ‘Presumably not. Well I don’t think we need to keep you any longer. We may need to talk to you again…’ He let the rest of the sentence hang unspoken in the air.

  Unable to face going back to the office, I drove straight home. I needed to talk to Hilary but first there was a message from Jack asking me to ring him. I hesitated. It wasn’t a conversation I looked forward to. Had I betrayed him in some way? I dimly remembered a Chinese story about Confucius’s reply to the question whether a man should hide his son knowing he was a murderer. ‘He should hide him.’ And then wasn’t there something about ‘betraying my friend or betraying my country’? But Jack wasn’t a murderer and neither had he betrayed anyone or anything as far as I knew. I had to ask myself if I was the traitor. I’d given Hildreth his address even though I hadn’t realised that might be a mistake and I’d said I didn’t know how to access certain sites which could imply something about those who could.

  ‘Jack. It’s Alex.’

  ‘Hi there. You got my call?’

  ‘I tried you before. The police asked me to go in.’

  ‘Me too. Did they tell you what it was about?’

  ‘Yes, they did. I’m sorry: I may have dropped you in it. I gave them your address.’

  ‘Oh, they knew that already. I’m registered as a foreign resident here on a visa. I think they were just checking up on you. What else did they say?’

  ‘That you’d been looking at dodgy sites on the internet.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘Hilary and I both thought it might be something to do with the happenings here and so I told them.’

  ‘Thanks, Alex. They let me go with a caution. I think we should meet. All three, if you and Hilary can make it. There’s stuff I need to talk to you about.’

  So the next day I found myself being whisked up to Hilary’s flat high above the city without the feeling of excited anticipation I had expected on my next visit but instead a hollow sickness wherever the pit of my stomach was supposed to be, deep inside.

  Hilary had given us all a drink to loosen our tongues but even so it was hard to know how to begin.

  Finally after enquiries about Hilary’s holiday and praise for her apartment and its furnishings, Jack said:

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you guys that your busybody cop doesn’t know about yet but he soon will if he digs into the records back in the States, and it may, I realise, affect your own attitude.’ He paused and then went on: ‘I was sacked from my last project in the Middle East: that’s why I’m here. After the revolution in Iran cut off ties with the West our team moved to Egypt while we waited to see whether we’d be able to resume work at our old site. Apart from Crete, Egypt is the oldest territory for archaeological exploration; exploitation some would call it. Anyway because of that, a culture of exclusiveness has built up, an elitism that says ours, Egyptology, is the real thing. This is the cradle of civilisation, we’re the scholars who explain it to the world, and the rest of you are just treasure hunters and amateurs. One of their team took it very hard, became obsessed in fact with trying to prove our work was about as valid as any of the old Pitt-Rivers hands. So when, quite by chance, I stumbled on a previously unknown tomb with a particularly interesting hieroglyphic text, this guy transferred his obsession to me and was determined to bring me down and take over my site.’

  He paused again and drained his glass with a quick gulp. Hilary refilled it without asking. ‘Thanks. A dig is very labour intensive, especially in countries where you don’t have the use of technology as you do in Europe or the States. A lot of kids hang round the sites looking for odd jobs to pick up some money. The older ones work as labourers, digging and shifting the soil. In the sun their skin glows like copper just as you see in the papyri and the wall paintings. They are a beautiful people, fine boned and featured. There was a boy called Fareed who ran errands for me, fetching drinks, changing the film in my camera, handing me the tools I needed: that sort of stuff. Then he started asking to be shown how to use the trowel and the brush, and the English words for things. Finally he picked up an English language journal one day and asked me to teach him to read. It seemed a good idea. We take so much out of these countries. We use them for our own research and academic advancement, and then for cultural tourism. Of course they need all this. But then we go home. Somewhere else becomes the fashionable place to visit this year and they’re back where they were, unless they strike oil, literally that is.

  ‘So I took on teaching him to read and some elementary field archaeology. And suddenly I found I was involved, looking forward to seeing him each morning, moved by the way his gestures were so graceful, by his big smile when he saw me. What I didn’t know was that all this was being observed. When I was accused of abusing the boy, even though we both denied that anything
had happened, which was true, I felt guilty as hell. It was almost a relief when I was suspended because the accusation had made me acknowledge to myself that I was in deeper than I’d known. The organisers gave me the option of resigning from the project or facing a criminal charge.’

  ‘How old was Fareed?’ Hilary asked.

  ‘About thirteen, he thought. People don’t take so much account of ages and birthdays in other cultures, and they grow up more quickly. Girls of thirteen or even twelve can marry. What we would consider children are young adults in many other countries. His father was dead and he thought of himself as the man of the family.’

  ‘But they’re still at an impressionable age, easily swayed by people they look up to?’

  ‘Wanting to please them? Even more so I’d say. I knew that if I’d wanted I could easily have had boys. Sex tourism isn’t new. Think of EM Forster, and all those English artists, writers, intellectuals who went off to North Africa every year, Morocco, Tunisia, to get their kicks. But that wasn’t what I wanted.’

  ‘You’d fallen in love,’ Hilary said.

  ‘What’s that line by Kingsley Amis: “Love never lets you go.” When I got back here I found I couldn’t forget him. I kept replaying everything in my head. And then I went looking for answers. That’s how I found out about the internet but of course that wasn’t what I wanted either.’

  I’d been silent all this time, leaving Hilary to ask the questions and trying to take my cue about what I should think from her. Now I said: ‘How do you feel about it, about the boy, since we’ve got involved in all this strange business?’

  ‘It’s brought it all back of course. I watched a replay of that old movie Death in Venice the other night and I was sickened, as you’re meant to be, at the end by Aschenbach’s attempts at youthfulness, the dribble of hair dye and smudged cosmetics but at the same time I understood his obsession. I know my own vulnerability. I also know that I can never get a teaching post, that somewhere my name is probably on a list of undesirables. It makes the title ‘Professor’ meaningless so I don’t quite know why I hang on to it.’

  ‘And did you find anything before the police stepped in?’