Donaldson gave a weak smile
“I suppose we can take another cast from the face before we cart this lot back to the museum?” said Hartley. “We’ll have some idea what the girl looked like.”
Dr Dunwell said there’d be no problem. “I’ll get a technician on to it straight away. It’ll be ready within the hour. Then we’ll put this back before anyone notices it’s gone. Fancy a cuppa - if not something stronger? You look as if you could do with it, Donaldson.”
“Never touch drink when I’m on duty,” said the superintendent self-righteously, but the pathologist read his white face aright.
“Then pretend it’s your day off,” he said, leading them to his office, while his technician got on with his work.
Donaldson felt as bad as Khan when he went in there. The place turned his stomach. A brace of badly beaten heads, their craniums shaved to show the wounds more clearly, stared down at them as they entered.
Dunwell poured the others coffee. By the time he’d glanced around, Donaldson was glad of the offer of a whisky, too. Dunwell didn’t help matters by going on at length about evisceration and mummification while they waited.
“Often thought that if ever I got the push from this job, I could always turn my hand to embalming. Something satisfying about pulling the guts from a body and dolling it up for the future. Y’know, the Ruskies kept old Lenin on ice for years by patching him up from time to time. Gave him I don’t know how many face-lifts. No wonder the poor bugger looked so miserable. He hardly knew who he was when they’d done. Not like your Gypos. They really knew their stuff. Their handiwork’s lasted millennia. It’s all wax and waffle at the Kremlin. No more old Lenin than…than Donaldson here. Begging your pardon, superintendent.”
He glanced across at the superintendent, but he was too pre-occupied with his drink to notice, so he continued, “But I suppose it all amounts to the same thing when you want to worship the dead.”
Then he got on to the topic of food. Now it’s one thing talking about food at a meal, at a party, or in a kitchen or wherever. But quite another discussing how to cook joints of meat in a pathology lab. Especially when you’re surrounded by bits of butchered human anatomy. Donaldson wasn’t impressed. He was near to throwing up by the time the technician came in and said he’d done.
The plastic he’d injected made the form uncannily lifelike. Before them lay the figure of a young woman with her arms crossed over her breast in the ritual position of the dead Pharaohs. Her eyes were closed, unlike those demonic eyes painted on the face of the mummy. She looked asleep. She’d been wearing an amulet on her forehead when they’d made the original cast and she’d been dolled up to look Egyptian, but there was no mistaking the features of the girl. They were Kathy Burton’s.
“Was she…was she dead when they did that to her?” asked Superintendent Donaldson.
“Yes. She was dead all right,” said Dr Dunwell. “The eyes are sunk. There are all the signs of rigor mortis. Been dead some time.”
Donaldson looked at his inspector. He was quite at a loss. The whole business in the path lab had unnerved him. He asked Hartley what their next move was.
“First we get this mock-up mummy back to the museum. If I read them aright. The killers of Kathy Burton will check it out. We don’t want to alert them. And when they return, we may catch them red-handed, eh?”
The Super agreed. He’d been thinking along similar lines, he lied. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be back at the office. He’d another appointment later that afternoon. Golf with his friend, the Chief Constable. Dr Dunwell and Hartley hoped the Super enjoyed himself.
When he’d gone and the mummy had been re-assembled, Waheeb and the inspector returned it to the museum then took off for Pithom Hall. Inspector Hartley felt sure it was there he’d find clues to the murdered girl.
They stopped for a coffee first at the Railway Tavern. It was too early for a drink, and anyway they were on duty. The landlord, Jock Swinford had his ear well and truly to the ground when it came to knowing who was new on Hartley’s patch. His pub was a popular one in Keighworth and a stopping-off point for anyone heading over the Pennines.
Swinford said two foreigners had been calling regularly at his pub. They were alone usually, but once or twice Whitcliff had met them there before taking them to his home. From what they said, he was sure they were Egyptian.
“Like my friend here,” said Hartley, introducing him to Waheeb. And Swinford surprised him by greeting Colonel Waheeb in Arabic.
“I’m impressed,” said Hartley. “I didn’t know you spoke the lingo.”
“Out in Egypt during my army service. I picked it up then. Had to,” said Jock. “Enough to get around, but I couldn’t follow what Mr Whitcliff and his friends said. I’m a bit rusty on the lingo now and they spoke too fast.”
“Pity,” said Blake Hartley. “We might have learned something. If they come in again, please let me know.”
He asked what the Egyptians looked like. The landlord’s description tallied exactly with Sgt Khan and DWC Anwar’s. They were Dr Riad and Dr Mukhtar. But all the while, as Swinford spoke, Colonel Waheeb remained silent. It didn’t escape Hartley’s notice. He was sure Waheeb knew those two and furthermore knew something he wasn’t divulging - yet.
They finished their coffee and continued up the valley to the moors, heading towards Beckets Well. It was mid-afternoon, a good time to be on the moors for the land sensed Spring wasn’t far away and seas of burgeoning heather cascaded down the road either side of them. A few weeks hence they’d walk through corridors of purple.
They reached the summit where quarrying a century earlier had ripped the guts out of the land. Huge abandoned rocks lay strewn everywhere and where quarrying had ceased, the ling and heather had grown back into the great hollows, leaving the landscape pitted and scarred.
Behind them, to the west, the moors fell to Lancashire and the mill-towns. Ahead eastwards lay the road to Halifax and beyond that Huddersfield and another conglomeration of textile towns. On the distant horizon south the great television mast of Holme Moss stabbed at the sky. Blake Hartley looked on and breathed deeply. Such views never ceased to affect him, born and bred as he was in these parts.
The land fell away to their left on one side of the road. Below it, ragged intakes, fields clawed from the bracken by earlier generations, hugged the hillside. Black millstone dry-walls snaked down to a solitary farm with its usual rag-taggle of discarded machinery and old cars, job lots bought at sales, and a clutter of fencing and wire. On the other side, the heather and peat came down to the roadside, waiting their time to leap the flimsy barrier of tarmac and re-claim both it and the intakes the other side.
Raw-boned cattle and dirty grey sheep browsed the fields. A scrawny hawthorn poked over the wall, cuffed sideways by the prevailing winds. No other trees were in sight, except a few sycamores clustered round the farm. It, too, leaned into the wind with its long sloping roof capped with heavy stone slabs. Anything lighter would have been blown away in the first gale. The only life there was a string of washing fluttering outside the door.
The air was fresh, springlike, and Inspector Hartley began humming to himself as they drove along, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time with his humming. Mordecai Waheeb smiled quietly. The scent was warming up and the two detectives were in full cry.
They passed a series of abandoned quarries which strung along the road. They pocked the hills for miles, as far as the eye could see and Colonel Waheeb asked about them.
“Armies of men worked here a hundred years ago,” explained Hartley. “All the towns and cities you passed through on the way to Keighworth, and Keighworth itself, were built from stone quarried here.”
“Do they still quarry?” asked Waheeb.
“Oh, yes,” said Hartley. “But not on the scale they once did. It’s like another planet now they’ve gone. A lost world.” He nodded at the great waste-heaps of rock and weather-stained quarry faces which had
not yet been grown over. They stood like sullen giants glowering on all who passed by. At their feet lay crumbling machinery, abandoned cranes and winches, bits of rusting cable, forlorn workmen’s cabins falling apart.
They parked their car in one of these old quarries just off the road, not far from Pithom Hall. As he got out of his car and looked around, Inspector Hartley wondered, as he’d wondered long before, why old Whitcliff had built his family seat in this wilderness. There were far better places in the valley. Better places still down south where any sensible mill-magnate migrated once he’d made his pile. As the case unfolded he began to understand. The moors were as much a mysterious wilderness as those distant parts of Egypt where the Pharaohs buried their dead.
The quarry face lowered over them. At intervals, grass and tufts of heather sprouted, clinging tenaciously to the ledges and cracks. Birdlime stippled the wider ledges where jackdaws nested. A flight of them took wing, flying round the men and cawing noisily as they climbed laboriously up the path running up the quarry side. Hartley had brought his binoculars for from the top they’d have a good view of the hall yet remain unseen.
Gasping, they reached the crest and crouched behind a spoil-heap to survey the hall and its Mausoleum. Inspector Hartley was in for a surprise. Since his last visit, the entire area round the hall had been fenced in and all the windows boarded. A high barbed-wire fence ran along its perimeter, and at intervals new notices warned off any trespassers. No tramps would spend the night there again.
From their viewing-point high above the hall, they could observe the grounds. A solitary figure with two guard-dogs was patrolling inside the fence. Hartley focused his glasses on them. One of the dogs was a large white Alsatian. Trotting beside it was a terrier. The man with them was Silas Blackwell.
Inspector Hartley grunted. “Looks like he’s got company for his terrier,” he murmured.
He swung his glasses to the Mausoleum, where the security guards had been. There was no one there. Blackwell was doing his rounds alone.
Handing his binoculars to Colonel Waheeb, Hartley explained the lay-out of the hall, and what information he’d picked up about the place on his last visit. He was curious about the absent security guards. The notices advertising their company had been taken down. Had they been paid off? And if so, why? The only notices there now were those newly put up, warning folk about the electric fence round the grounds.
When he traversed the grounds again with his glasses, Blackwell had gone, doubtless inside, for a plume of smoke trickled from one of the chimneys. Hartley said they’d move in closer while Blackwell was indoors.
They scrambled down the hillside hidden by a high wall, one of several leading down to the hall and an old cottage. It screened their approach completely and led to the rear of the Mausoleum. The electric fence ran along the top of the wall round the Mausoleum, then onto posts newly erected round the building.
As they peered over the wall, Colonel Waheeb whispered there didn’t seem much chance of getting in unobserved. They’d alert Blackwell as soon as they touched the fence - if they didn’t get electrocuted first.
But Blake Hartley looked along the length of the old drystone wall. A short distance further on was a stone slab green with lichen. It hadn’t been moved for years and slotted flush with the course-stones.
“They forgot about that when they put up their fence,” he said, nodding at the slab.
“What is it?” asked Mordecai
“A cripple hole, a place for sheep to creep through to reach new pastures,” he explained. “Or to keep them t’other side of the fence. Come on, Let’s see if it still works.”
They crept along the wall till they reached the slab. It was embedded in thick grass. Together they rocked it loose then heaved it to one side. There was a sizeable hole right through the wall. When they peered through, they could see the base of the Mausoleum.
“Come on,” said Blake, and eased himself into the hole. It was a tight fit, but he managed to get through. Mordecai Waheeb followed, and once through they made for some laurels planted all around the great building.
The windows were too high to see into, and Colonel Waheeb, by far the smaller of the two, had to stand on Hartley’s shoulders to look inside. It was magnificently built. No expense had been spared in its construction. But it was weird. Modelled exactly on an Ancient Egyptian temple.
Tall obelisks guarded by massive sphinxes stood in front of the pillars by the entrance. A heavy canopy shielded the heavy bronze doors from the weather, which had already eroded away the sphinxes’ faces and the tympanum above. Hieroglyphics, once ornately gilded across the base of the tympanum, had peeled away in the Pennine gales. Hidden beneath them were cameras but the detectives didn’t see these till too late.
Colonel Waheeb managed to get a good look inside, perched on Blake Hartley’s shoulders. The Mausoleum was decorated like the room in the hall which Inspector Hartley had seen. Those grotesque deities with bird and animal heads stared back at him from the walls. In the middle of the vast room stood a statue of Amon, father of the gods. Surrounding it were statues of lesser gods. A frieze depicting the Judgement of the Dead ran round the top of the walls.
When he’d revived the old religion of Egypt, Sir Joshua had done his damnest a century earlier to make the place a copy of the temples he’d excavated. Hathor, the sky-goddess, was the patron of this macabre place, and stood next to Amon. Her incarnated form in the body of the museum mummy was somewhere in there. Of that Hartley and Waheeb felt sure.
In front of Hathor stood a black marble altar; and behind it a stairway leading down to a vault, where the Whitcliffs lay buried. On the altar was a bronze snake and two black candles. They were lit and glowed dully in the sunlight filtering through the windows. It was less like light. More like an evil glow.
“Can you see owt?” grunted Hartley.
“Like something from Hollywood in there,” said Colonel Waheeb, jumping down.
He brushed off the mud from Inspector Hartley’s shoulders as he told him what he’d seen. “It’s a replica of the tomb Sir Joshua was excavating when he died,” he explained.
“Then you know all about him?” said Hartley, surprised.
“Oh, yes,” said Waheeb. “We know all about the Whitcliffs. They pirated many of our treasures to feed their crazy idea of reviving the old religion. I bet what they stole is all in there somewhere. They claimed they were descended from the Pharaohs and that’s why they all married Egyptian wives. That’s why they were able to get so much stuff out of the country.”
“All except Jason Whitcliff,” said Hartley.
“And he’s the craziest of them all,” said Colonel Waheeb.
They looked for a side entrance. The main entrance looked directly onto the hall and they would be seen going in there. Not far away was a small door at the bottom of some overgrown steps. No one had gone down there in years. The lock was rusted and the door wormy.
They began to go down, when a huge white Alsatian dog came round the corner and flung itself at Mordecai Waheeb, forcing him to the wall. Another guard dog came round the opposite of the building and pinned Hartley against the wall, too, snarling like crazy. A moment later Silas Blackwell and another man appeared. Blackwell wore a sneer. His companion carried a handgun.
Colonel Waheeb made the mistake of moving towards the two men. The Alsatian was on him at once, seizing his sleeve and pulling him to the ground. Hartley was going to help him when Blackwell called the dogs off and hurried up to them.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, feigning surprise. “An’ who’s yer mate?”
Inspector Hartley ignored his question. Instead he pointed to the gun the other guard carried. “Don’t you know it’s illegal to carry a handgun in public?”
Blackwell spat on the floor before he answered. “An’ it’s also illegal to go nosin’ round folks’ property without their permission. Especially a copper. You ought to know better than that. You might have got hurt. Anyhow, what yer
doin’ here and where did yer get in? We picked yer up on the monitors.” He jerked his head at the cameras overhead.
“I was curious, that’s all,” said Hartley. “Like I told you last time, this place fascinates me. Always has done. But I see you’ve been doing a few alterations. Turning it into a guest-house or summat?”
The other scowled more. “That’s none of your business, inspector. What Mr Whitcliff does is nobody else’s business but his. There’s nowt illegal here - ‘cept you two coppers trespassing. Unless you’ve a search warrant,” he added sarcastically.
“We will have before we’ve done,” said Hartley, eyeing him steadily. “Anybody carrying guns like him needs investigating. I hope it’s licensed. I should put it away if I were you, mate, before it goes off. What’s your name?”
“Smith,” the other replied, sliding his gun into a holster under his jacket. He grinned insolently at the inspector.
“Smith?” echoed Hartley. “An unusual nsame,” he added wryly.
“Aye,” said the other. “Jack Smith. There’s a lot of us about, boss. An’ just in case you’ve got the wrong idea, I’m in a gun-club. I have a licence for this,” he patted his side, “an’ I know how to use it - properly. I was practising with it when you two came up on the screen. Didn’t have time to put it away, so to speak.”
Blackwell had been staring at Colonel Waheeb all the while. “Who’s he? Foreign isn’t he?” he asked.
“Mr Fahid is from Bradford. He’s in business there,” said Hartley.
“Couldn’t be from anywhere else round here, could he?” said Blackwell, mockingly.
Inspector Hartley wouldn’t be drawn. He said Mr Fahid was interested in the Mausoleum. It was unusual, and he was interested in it, like Hartley.
“You should have got permission first,” said Blackwell. “If you an’ your friend had gone the right way about it, there’d have been no need for all this palaver, would there? No need for the dogs.”
He was right and he knew it. They should have got Whitcliff’s permission. If Donaldson got wind of it they’d have their ears bent.
1 The Museum Mystery Page 10