The Deceit (13 page)

Karen felt a tremor of excitement; she was so close to the screen she could almost kiss the computer. Tapping briskly on the laptop keys she expanded the map.

‘OK, so let’s see – here’s the halo – and what’s in the centre, here … just north of Penzance, Mousehole, the B3315. There’s a wood right at the middle, Trevelloe … and here, Trevelloe Lodge. Looks like a big house. Or rather, a big
lodge
?’

Karen dived for her book.
The Tregerthen Horror
. She found the bookmarked page and read it out to Sally: ‘“Before the First World War, Crowley allegedly stayed in a large hunting lodge in the Penzance district, and conducted black magic rituals in the adjoining woods.”’

‘Well there are certainly woods, right next door, could be, could be … let’s see, I’m googling it now.’

Sally Pascoe brought up an image on the screen. It showed a rather handsome Victorian hunting lodge. She clicked a key. ‘
And it’s a holiday let
, Karen, look – it says the owners rent it out: “Available for rent on a monthly or weekly basis, with extensive gardens, in the beautiful district of Kerris.”’

‘Where do they live? The owners?’

‘Here, in Truro, there’s a number. We can call first thing tomorrow.’

‘No. Let’s wake them up.’

‘Kaz, it’s midnight!’

But Karen was already out of the door, racing down to her car. The drive took three minutes. They pulled up in front of a large expensive Georgian townhouse on Lemon Street with a fine view of the cathedral.

The second long buzz of the bell summoned the late middle-aged householder. He opened the door warily, dressed in silk pyjamas and a paisley dressing gown, looking shocked to see two women, and even more shocked when Sally showed him her ID.

‘Devon and Cornwall Police, and this is Karen Trevithick, a detective with Scotland Yard.’

The man paled. ‘Has something happened? My daughter?’

Karen realized belatedly how terrifying this must be, a police visit at midnight: obviously awful news. ‘No, please, it’s nothing serious, we hope. We just want to know about Trevelloe Lodge. You own it, yes?’

‘Yes, we do, but, ah, we don’t live there, we live here in town, we lease it.’

‘You rent it out?’

‘Well, yes, is that—’

‘Who were the last people to stay there?’

The man frowned, anxious and maybe scared. ‘A group of, er, young people. They rented it for the whole month, all of December. They left on New Year’s Day.’

Sally asked, ‘Do you have a list of the names?’

‘No, not all of them. The booking was made in one name, we’re not a hotel.’

Karen reached in her pocket and pulled out a photo of the dead kid from the mine. ‘Do you recognise this face? Was this young man one of the party that rented your property?’

The flustered householder reached in the pocket of his dressing gown, and extracted some spectacles. He looped them over his ears, and examined the photo for half a minute. Then he said, very quietly, his voice quavering, ‘I think so. Yes. He’s the young chap that collected the keys. What is going on? What is this terrible wound on his face?’

Karen ignored the question.

‘Was there anything odd about him, his manner – anything? Please think.’

‘Ah …’

‘Depressed, distracted, anything?’

‘No, he seemed perfectly happy, ah, cheerful even.’ The householder looked as if he yearned to shut the door on the cold night and these intrusive and pointless questions. ‘Look, ladies, can’t this wait until—’

‘No,’ Karen replied abruptly. ‘Who was he with? You said you have the name of the one who booked the house. You recall it?’

The dressing-gown cord was tightened, defensively. ‘Yes, it was Rothley, um, Mark Lucas Rothley.’

‘Describe him.’

‘Late twenties and intelligent, well spoken, presentable. I remember the name because he said it with such certitude. Yes. When we first spoke on the phone, and when he signed the rental agreement, he was the same.’

‘What?’

‘The way he stared at me, was … it was odd.’

‘Odd? Odd how?’

The man was blushing. Sally was suddenly using her phone to browse the internet.

‘Well. This is a little foolish. But, yes, it was the way he stared into my eyes. Rather rude in truth. I almost cancelled their rental. I was quite unsettled.’

Karen started to speak but Sally nudged her, brandishing her smartphone.

‘There. I knew I’d heard the name. Rothley. I was cc’d an email from Bodmin police yesterday.’

‘And?’

‘A constable in Bodmin town centre arrested a girl yesterday, Alicia Rothley. There
must
be a connection.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Nothing much, apart from frightening shoppers. It wasn’t an arrest as such. She was taken into custody
for her own protection
. She’s up at Bodmin Secure Unit.’ A pause. ‘The old lunatic asylum.’

‘It has often occurred to me that the women of Arabian Egypt have evolved so as to resemble the camel – the preferred sexual partners of their menfolk.’ Albert Hanna gestured towards the end of the lobby, at a matronly woman swathed in a black niqab sipping tea with a young, similarly-shrouded woman. ‘I mean, look at that poor mother, is she not camel-like? Isn’t there something faintly Bactrian about her, the undulation, the humps—’

‘Albert, shut the hell up.’

The beautifully suited Hanna turned and tightened the tiny knot of his exquisite silk tie. ‘I am just whistling in the dark, Ryan. And, believe me, for Copts in Egypt now it is very, very dark.’

Ryan Harper grunted his ambivalence to this remark. Hanna was right, in a sense, of course: the news coming out of Cairo, and Assyut, and the Delta, was increasingly grim: Egypt’s troubles were taking a sectarian turn – Muslim versus Christian – and with eighty million Arabs outnumbering eight million Copts there could only be one loser if everything really kicked off. But Ryan had very good Muslim friends and very good Coptic friends, many friends on both sides of the divide: the ordinary people, the workers, the real Egyptians who wanted nothing but peace. And casual, offensive bigotry like Hanna’s was not going to help.

Moreover, what the hell was he doing here anyway? All through their train journey to Sohag, Ryan had been wondering this. He wondered it this morning, again, after a welcome night’s sleep in the hotel that smelled of toilets.

He understood that Hanna was an expert in Coptic history and in Egyptian antiquities; he also understood that Hanna was one of the last people to see Victor Sassoon alive. But was that reason enough to recruit this annoyingly loquacious and faintly sinister man to the cause? Perhaps his barbed wit would play well on camera. Perhaps he could be a fixer, as Helen said. But he had fixed nothing yet.

A female voice interrupted his thoughts.

‘OK, guys. I am ready. We will try again? Now?’ Helen Fassbinder had returned from the rest room. She picked up her tiny movie-camera and raised a questioning glance at Ryan. He sighed but stood up: he had agreed to help make her movie.

Besides, they were all pooling resources so as to solve the puzzle: they got to use his Egyptological talents, he got access to the Sokar documents.

But how were they going to solve the puzzle? The Sokar Hoard – or the small parts of it that Helen had retrieved from the cave – were opaque when they weren’t bizarrely inconsequential.

Picking up the file of documents, Ryan followed Helen into a little room adjoining the lobby, which they had secured for its privacy. Albert Hanna remained in the hotel foyer.

After adjusting her digicam, Helen looked up, with an expectant gaze. Quietly and obediently, Ryan spoke to the camera, clutching the first sheet of papyrus.

‘This is the most cryptic and perhaps significant of the Sokar documents that we possess. Unfortunately at the moment we are unable to translate it.’ He paused, waiting.

Helen asked him, off-camera, ‘Why? Tell us
why
. I can edit out the questions later. Do not speak to me, speak to the lens. Now.’

He stared at her, half-smiling. ‘Are you always like this?’

She gazed back, unblinking. ‘Yes. I am always like this. When I am working. Why waste time saying please and thank you? The lens, look in the lens.’

Ryan smiled, and faced the camera. ‘Coptic is a very ancient language. The most archaic forms of it stretch directly back to the tongues of ancient Egyptian, that is to say, the language of the Pharaohs. This is because the Copts
are
the ancient Egyptians, to all intents and purposes; the word Copt is cognate with the word Egypt, hence the similarity. Both derive from the name Ptah, the founding deity of Egypt, first named in history perhaps five or six thousand years ago.’

He lifted up the papyrus, to show it to the camera.

‘Coptic is, in a sense, ancient Egyptian simply written in a new alphabet, incorporating some Greek characters, and retaining, fascinatingly, a few hieroglyphs. Therefore the great age and venerability of Coptic makes it of serious interest to scholars. But it also makes it fairly impenetrable. It is essentially a dead language: perhaps only three hundred people speak it these days, mainly monks in the more remote areas of the country, who use it liturgically.’

Helen circled a hand, from behind the camera. A
hurry-up
gesture
.

Again, he obeyed, feeling irritated. He’d never done this before; he didn’t know what to do. But he tried. ‘The problem with
this
text is that it is written in a very ancient and obscure form of Coptic. The Coptic language is divided into several dialects, like Fayyumic, Bohairic, Sahidic. This text is written in a form of Coptic known as Akhmimic, which makes sense, as the ancient, historically important city of Akhmim is just here, just across the Nile from where we are now, in Sohag, Middle Egypt.’ Ryan pointed to his left, as if the camera could zoom in on Akhmim, through the hotel walls. ‘The Gnostic gospels, famously discovered in a sealed jar in a cave in the desert a hundred miles from here, were written in Akhmimic. They shed new and amazing light on the origins of Christianity at its inception. They tell us how some strange ideas were excluded from the Christian faith, and how certain heresies in turn became accepted beliefs. They provoked, and are still provoking, enormous arguments among historians and theologians, and great interest around the world.’

Ryan gestured at the papyrus sheet, in a way he hoped was eloquent.

‘There is a strong chance this text, from the Sokar Hoard, could be
even more
explosive. But at the moment we cannot read it. Why? Because this codex has been inscribed using a peculiar form of sub-Akhmimic, also known as Lycopolitan, a form so ancient and difficult there have been just a few people in modern times who could decipher it. One such man was, of course, Victor Sassoon. But when he finished reading what is in this document, and those that were compiled alongside it, he walked out into the desert, and took his own life. Why? Was it something to do with what he read here, on this papyrus? That is what we are going to find out.’

He finished. Helen Fassbinder lifted her camera again, and instructed, ‘Now go on to the other papers. The ones we
can
read.’

‘Yes. OK.’

Ryan cleared his throat and picked up the newer pages, the only other documents Helen had retrieved. ‘These more robust papyrus documents are maybe a little less intriguing, yet we
can
read them. They probably date from the eighth century. The Coptic is newer: mostly Sahidic, the standard form. These brief pages seem to be a list of Coptic spells and curses. Early Coptic Christianity was a peculiar mix of beliefs, doctrines and ancient traditions, strongly coloured with what we would call magic or sorcery. For instance, Copts and Gnostics thought nothing of citing Jesus as a kind of avenging demon, who could be summoned at will by the magician or spell-caster. At the same time, they would pray for aid from Egyptian gods, or Hebrew angels, or Assyrian djinns. Here, for instance, is a Gnostic fire baptism, citing Jesus, but also the demonic names of God.’ Ryan turned the papyrus to show the camera, then returned it to his gaze, and read: ‘“
Yo Yo Yo, Amen Amen, Yaoth Yaoth Yaoth
… Come secretly Jesus and Melchidesek, come secretly and bring the water of the baptism of fire, of the virgin of the light.”’

He shrugged, to camera.

‘To us it sounds a little ominous, and strange, like a black-magic spell mixed with Christian prayer; the way the names of power – the names of demons – are liberally sprinkled with biblical references is unsettling. But that is because, in a sense, it is
meant
to be unsettling: black magic and Christianity mixed. Here is another spell which actually threatens an archangel if he doesn’t bend to the will of the magician: “If you do not do my bidding, Angel Gabriel, I shall always despise you, and loathe you, ask God to condemn you,
atha atha atharim, atha atha atharim
.”’

He gestured at the words on the papyrus. ‘Notice how this spell concludes with another one of those repetitive, menacing incantations that the early Copts believed embodied supernatural power in themselves.’

Ryan picked up the second sheet of Coptic spells. ‘Coptic magic could also be very strange, and brilliantly mad; here is a final example, written in Mesokemic. It is a love spell, or sexual enchantment, “Catch a blue-green iridescent fly. Write it with the first name of the prayer: you must prepare it on the sixth of the month. Make it full of vinegar. Throw it in the oven.”’

Ryan laid the sheet on the table in front. ‘What does it all mean? Why were these spells and curses included with the other older papyri? Again, that’s a mystery we hope to unravel.’

His speech finished, Ryan looked to Helen for affirmation. She nodded briefly, and turned off the camera. The pause gave Ryan more time to think. He picked up the second sheet of spells, and spoke.

‘Actually, Helen, there is something else. But I wasn’t sure whether to mention it on camera.’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever heard of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin?’