The Orpheus Trail

by Maureen Duffy

  ‘I found some pretty nasty stuff, snuff movies and so on but nothing that seemed to relate to what’s happened your way.’

  A Roman Soldier Writes Home AD 52

  And here in these wild Northern parts of Thracia which we have annexed that our borders might be made safe against the barbarians, there are as many and strange religions as at home, such as those who worship the Egyptian Isis or follow Dionysius and his priest Orpheus who made many hymns to his lord in which he set down the way to follow if a man would go to the Blessed Isles after his death, which is the thing all men seek by whatever name they call it. And I carry with me always the instructions set down in immortal gold for my own safe passage when the time should come.

  But as well as these ancient gods hidden in the shadow of time, there are many sects among the Jews who are great merchants here. Hither this year came one Saul, a Jew but a Roman citizen and therefore having great freedom to travel, work and preach his new religion as I heard. But the Jews not having him, he turned to any who would listen and has persuaded some to follow his god, Jesus, who promises resurrection as others do. His following is chiefly among the poor who are deceived into worshipping this new god and neglecting their duty towards the Divine Claudius and the due ceremonies of the state and our gods.

  And this Saul taught that their god Jesus would return to judge the world and would lead the believers up to the sky and the others he would cast into Hades, so that some of them have ceased to work, daily expecting their god to appear.

  But as for the soldiers, we primarily follow the Lord Mithras, the warrior, bringer of light who sprang from the primal egg at the command of Ormuz, the mightiest, and are received into his mysteries, which binds us together when we must fight side by side, each relying on his comrade. May the Lord Mithras be with me wherever in the Empire I may serve.

  I didn’t stay over at Hilary’s flat that night. I think we both felt it wouldn’t work. A sword doesn’t have to be made of steel to lie between lovers. And we didn’t talk about what Jack had told us. When I put my arms around her to say goodnight, I felt not desire but intimacy, a shared comforting.

  It was different in the morning. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’

  ‘I’m certainly not going to shop him to Hildreth.’

  ‘I’m glad you said that. I don’t see what we can do except wait. Jack didn’t find anything. It all seems to have gone quiet. Presumably Hildreth would have told you if they’d identified the boys or if anyone had come forward with any information.’

  ‘Perhaps I should ask him directly?’

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ she said. So I rang him.

  ‘We’re, as the media believe we say, pursuing our enquiries, Mr Kish, but without much progress. These were foreigners so no one’s coming forward. The body in the pier fire we were able to identify as probably Chinese, but even his mother wouldn’t have recognised him if we’d circulated his photograph to their authorities and the DNA doesn’t help with precise identification. There are over a billion people in China. As for the other body, we are able to circulate these details but as yet there’s nothing. Do you have anything to tell us, anything more from your professor friend?’

  ‘No, no. It’s just that we were wondering…’

  ‘There’s a terminology for these things, Mr Kish. At the moment Professor Linden is simply classed as a downloader. It’s an offence in itself, of course, but in my experience such people aren’t necessarily dangerous. I mean they don’t always go on to do anything, like going into chat rooms, trying to set up meetings. Is your friend a collector?’

  ‘A collector?’

  ‘We often find paedophiles collect things – daleks, models, toys, photographs etc. Obsessive behaviour you see.’

  ‘Not as far as I know but I don’t know him very well. I’ve never visited where he lives.’

  ‘We have. We didn’t spot anything. But then if as you say, it was all in the course of helping the police with their enquiries there wouldn’t be, would there?’

  ‘I’m sure that’s what it was.’ I hoped I sounded convinced, and convincing. But when I put the phone down, my hand was shaking.

  ‘Hildreth doesn’t seem to know any more,’ I reported to Hilary. ‘He seems to be waiting for someone to make a wrong move.’

  ‘Like Jack?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell. He was also anxious to give the impression, to reassure me even, that Jack wasn’t necessarily dangerous. Or he might have been trying to lull me into a false sense of everything being alright in order to trip me up. But maybe I’m just getting paranoid.’

  If I was looking for sympathy, I wasn’t going to get it from Hilary. Ignoring my bid she said, ‘Didn’t your inspector friend say Jack had been to see a colleague in Oxford? I wonder who that was and what it was about?’

  ‘This time you can do the asking.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d like a tour of my museum. We’ve got a special collection on show at the moment that might interest him: what the Brits were up to while the Middle Eastern peoples were inventing writing and everything else. I’ll give him a call and see if I can arrange it. Can you get away easily? Could you meet us for lunch?’

  ‘It’s one of the few advantages of being the boss.’

  By the time I joined them in the Barbican restaurant they were chatting like old friends. It was Jack himself who brought up the real reason for our meeting.’

  ‘I’ve heard no more from the police, have you?’

  ‘Hildreth called me in the other day,’ I said.

  ‘Uhuh. What did he want?’

  ‘He asked me if you collected daleks.’

  ‘Daleks?’

  ‘Toys, photographs. He has some theory that people who download certain kinds of material are often collectors.’

  ‘Wow!’ Jack laughed. ‘I’d better get rid of… let me see… Do Mesopotamian figurines count?’

  ‘Depends how many you’ve got. He said you’d been to see somebody in Oxford.’ Even as I said it I was aware of my own use of the half lie and how easy it was to fall into.

  ‘Did he say who?’

  ‘Just a colleague.’

  He laughed again. ‘That’s what I told him. I went to try and track down the guy who got me fired. Unfinished business, I suppose. I’d found out that he was teaching in Oxford, St Julian’s Hall.’

  ‘And did you find him?’ Hilary asked.

  ‘We had a brief encounter in his room. We didn’t come to blows; luckily, for both of us, I think. He said he’d been expecting me.’

  ‘So he knew you were here?’

  ‘I think he’s known more about me than I’ve known about him all along.’

  ‘And does he have a name?’ Hilary asked, anticipating my next question.

  ‘James, Jim Stalbridge.’

  Hilary looked at her watch. ‘I must get back to my work. What will you two do?’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff on order at the British Library,’ Jack said. So there was nothing for me to do but to take myself back to Liverpool Street Station and home, trying to resist the pall of gloom that was settling on me. We seemed to be tainted by events only half understood and not yet complete, ‘unfinished business’ as Jack had said. Yet nothing had really happened for several weeks. Perhaps it was all over.

  In the morning I felt more cheerful. At the office early I began to sketch out the ‘History of the Seaside Holiday’ exhibition for the summer. ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.’ And then the phone rang.

  ‘Alex, I thought I ought to tell you there’s been another incident. Someone must have broken into our place last night. It’s horrible, grotesque. The cleaner who found it had to be sent home in shock. We’ve had to close the museum of course and the police are here.’

  ‘Is it another boy?’

  ‘It was.’

  Then it was Hildreth on the line. ‘I’ve suppose you’ve heard, Mr Kish? Bad news travels fast.’

  ‘Dr Caistor has just rung me.’

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bsp; ‘I’m on my way but I’d like you there as soon as possible. Similarities. It looks like the same hand but if so he’s moved his patch.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can get away.’

  ‘I’m sorry but you’re involved and so is Dr Caistor now. You can’t simply refuse to help us. This isn’t our usual sort of thing, this mix of history and religion or ancient cults with murder. And the boy was dressed up with another bit of your gold leaf. That puts you right in the centre of things.’

  I suddenly realised my reluctance could make me a possible suspect. ‘I’ll have to square it with my staff.’

  ‘You do that.’

  So for the second day running I was on the train to Liverpool Street, taking the now familiar route to St Paul’s and hurrying up Aldersgate Street to arrive only a few minutes after Hildreth who had been driven up in an unmarked police car. I took the escalator from street level and scurried across the walkway in a sudden shower, past the monument to John Wesley and the great bronze figure of a horse between two round shields or wheels. ‘Boudicca?’ my mind asked itself as the automatic doors slid open and I stated my name and business to a watchful policeman.

  ‘You’ll find the Detective Chief Inspector over there, sir.’

  A little knot of people was gathered beside the central reception desk: Hilary and Hildreth with, I suppose, an assistant at his elbow, a Lewis to his Morse, a man I didn’t recognise in a striped shirt and tie, and Jack Linden.

  ‘This is our director,’ Hilary introduced the striped shirt.

  ‘Nothing’s been touched, I hope,’ Hildreth said.

  ‘Everything’s exactly as it was found.’

  ‘Let’s get started then.’

  Hilary led the way to the right of the atrium under a sign marked ‘Galleries’. We passed through ‘Britain before London’, the horns and tusks of long dead mammals, mammoths, oryx, rhinoceros jutting at us out of their glass coffins, the rictus grin of a lemur’s skull, small as a cat’s, staring from its empty eye sockets, and then the row upon row of weapons and tools, painfully hammered from rock, knapped and polished beyond necessity into art. Down the millennia we went, carving and weaving, baking pots, flighting arrows, making temples for gods until we passed into Roman London, conquest and the building of the first city.

  Hilary quickened the pace. Hundreds of years passed. I caught sight of a label, the Temple of Mithras, a stone boy in a soft pointed cap that wouldn’t have been out of place on the piste, and then we turned a corner. I was aware of a strange incongruous sound and we all stopped to stare at the scene in front of us.

  For it was a deliberately contrived scene. The label above, the museum’s own sign, read ‘The End of Roman London’. There on open display were the fallen remains of temples, walls, and monumental buildings: a fluted drum that had once held up a Basilican roof, a stone soldier with a long oval shield, the bottom halves of two statues of the mother goddesses, their pleated skirts and sandaled feet, and over this broken masonry of a lost civilisation was draped the headless body of a boy. Between his open legs lay a small statue of a youth, naked except for a cloak, also missing his head, lower right leg and left foot.

  To the right on a kind of plinth made of a shattered column rested what must be the head of the dead boy, mouth open with the strange noise seeming to come from it. A little square of gold leaf was bound round his forehead. I had no doubt what it was.

  ‘What’s the noise?’ Hildreth asked.

  ‘I imagine it’s meant to be singing. Some sort of battery driven device I think we’ll find,’ Jack said.

  ‘I’m almost sure I recognise it,’ Hilary said, ‘even though it’s very garbled. The thing must be running down but I believe it’s something we used to sing at school:

  ‘Orpheus with his lute made trees

  And the mountain tops that freeze

  Bow their heads when he did sing…’

  ‘That’s it,’ Jack said. ‘It’s Orpheus after he’d been torn to pieces by the Bacchae. His head, still singing, floated down the river with his lyre and then over the sea to Lesbos.’

  Now I could see that the boy’s body was gashed in places as if by the claws of a lion or a bear.

  ‘Okay,’ said Hildreth to his sidekick. ‘Call in the forensics and the rest of the boys. Put up the scene of crime screens. Is there somewhere we can talk?’ he asked the director.

  ‘My office,’ the director said

  ‘Now then,’ Hildreth began when we were all seated, ‘what’s all this about? Stones and bones I can cope with but fairy tales are beyond me. Who’s this Orpheus?’

  ‘He’s a character from Greek myth,’ Jack said. ‘A priest and poet kind of, who might, just might have really existed.’

  ‘So we’re talking about a long time ago.’

  ‘Two and a half thousand years at least.’

  ‘And how do you think he fits in.’

  ‘He was a teacher of a mystery religion of death and the afterlife. His story is that he was such a great poet, in those days, poetry was sung or chanted not written down, but anyway he could calm the wind and waves with his song and any kind of wild or human thing. When his wife was carried off to the underworld he went after her and charmed the king of darkness to let her go, on the condition that she would follow him up and he didn’t look back.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He looked back and she sank from his sight. Then he was killed himself by a pack of frenzied women, some say because he wouldn’t look at another woman after Eurydice. His followers were male; women weren’t welcome in the cult. There’s a lot more…’

  ‘I think that gives me the picture. So what have we got? Whoever did this knows as much as you. Some sort of specialist?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Hilary said. ‘Parts of his story are well known. At least two operas, lots of paintings, and to anyone who had myths read to them as a child or studied the classics or English literature.’

  ‘There was no blood from the wounds,’ Hildreth said. ‘The pathology people will tell us but it looks as if he was dead before they were made. More like ritual markings. Post-mortem mutilation. Kinky. But then so is this whole thing. It certainly looks like the same hand or hands.’

  ‘And then there’s the gold square from our find; just like the other two,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, and that clinches it.’ Hildreth leant back in his chair with a kind of satisfaction as if the whole messy business was clear and solved. ‘He’s changed the venue but only by fifty miles and all the other hallmarks are the same. But why move this time to London?’

  ‘Because the original finds are all here,’ I heard myself saying, ‘the grave goods of the Prittlewell Prince.’

  ‘How does he know that?’

  ‘It was in the press. If he’s been following all this he’ll know, especially if he took the things from our museum in the first place.’

  Suddenly Hilary put her hands over her face. ‘We’re talking about this as if these children weren’t dead.’

  ‘It’s the only way to get at the truth. It’s not that I don’t care: I’ve got two kids myself,’ Hildreth said. ‘But you have to think clearly, try to understand what’s going on, not be confused by your own emotions. Now, we have to let forensics do their job, then see what we’ve got. That’s all we can do here for now. Thank you all for coming in.’

  ‘When will we be able to open to the public again?’ Hilary’s director asked.

  ‘Not for several days at least, I’m afraid, sir. I’ll be in touch. Of course we’ll make it as quick as we can. We want the answers as soon as possible but we don’t want to miss anything through too much haste. This guy is playing with us but it’s a deadly sort of game.’

  As we got up to leave the director called Hilary back.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, and Jack and I made our way to the entrance, past the policeman on guard. Hildreth had returned to the Roman gallery and the scene of the crime. I didn’t feel in the mood for lengthy post-mor
tems so I said goodbye to Jack and walked quickly down Aldersgate Street to start my journey home. I felt numb, almost dead and in some kind of limbo myself. My mind refused to take on what I had just seen or to try to make sense of it. Hildreth was right. We were the victims of a deadly game where we didn’t know the rules. No, that was wrong. The boys were the victims. We were just what the press would no doubt call ‘helpless bystanders’. Yet I felt it was more than that. Whoever it was had involved us by putting the stolen objects from the Prittlewell grave on the boys’ bodies, he or they, knew something at least about us. Perhaps we were being watched. To Hildreth it was just a job but we were being subtly drawn into the game.

  The chairman rang the next day when the news hit the media. ‘A terrible thing, Kish. Thank God it wasn’t in our baileywick this time. Do you know what’s happening up there?’

  ‘I was at the museum yesterday. The police called me in to see whether I could help them decide if the three deaths were linked.’

  ‘I suppose they’ve had to close to the public, just as we did. Anyway let’s hope it means the end of our troubles.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ I said, irritated by his naked relief. ‘After all a part of one of our missing artefacts was found on the boy, just like the others.’

  ‘That wasn’t in the papers.’

  ‘I imagine the police didn’t want it broadcast.’

  ‘And neither do we. It looks bad for us. I don’t think you should put it about.’

  ‘I don’t intend to. I just thought you ought to be informed.’

  ‘Quite so. Quite so.’

  Hildreth was the next to call. ‘We’ve had an email from some of our colleagues overseas, sending us some pictures from a new site they’ve tracked down. I’m afraid you would recognise them at once: the boy in the egg, and this latest one.’

  ‘So Professor Linden was right.’

  ‘It looks like it. It’s from a site called Nursery Crimes. How do they think these things up, Mr Kish?’