Charles Westman grinned in acknowledgement at her words. His particular speciality was ancient weaponry, which only rarely involved the reassembly of anything. In fact, he was only in the laboratory to check that a Saxon sword that had recently been found in a field in East Anglia was being properly cleaned before preservation work started on the metal.
‘I thought you’d have had enough of gallivanting around the world tracking down ancient relics with that ex-husband of yours.’
‘I don’t think I’m away from the museum as much as you are, Charles. This is really only a part-time job for you, isn’t it?’
Westman nodded.
‘I’m fortunate in that respect, yes, my dear. I don’t actually have to work, but the job here is still useful for all sorts of reasons. But I think Chris Bronson — that is his name, isn’t it? — is a bad influence on you. Whenever he comes into the picture, things always seem to take a turn for the worse and you end up running for your life. Surely a bit of normality is a welcome change?’
Angela bridled slightly.
‘That’s as may be,’ she replied, ‘but one thing you can say about Chris is that time spent with him is never boring. Life-threatening, yes, occasionally, but boring, never. And this’ — she pointed again at the boxes of potsherds awaiting her attention — ‘is very definitely boring.’
Westman smiled at her. When Angela was in this kind of mood, he knew exactly which buttons to press to get a rise from her.
‘But you have to look on the bright side,’ he said. ‘Just think how pleased the museum will be when you’ve assembled another anonymous pot which they can put on a display alongside dozens of other anonymous pots. Every time you walk past it you’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling of tremendous satisfaction.’
Angela lowered the fragments of pottery to the workbench and glared at him.
‘If this relic wasn’t almost two thousand years old, and I hadn’t signed for the blasted thing, I’d be very much inclined to throw it at you,’ she snapped.
Westman’s smile grew broader.
‘Just winding you up, my dear, doing my bit to keep up your spirits. In fact, I really think you could do with a break before you start throwing things around and hurting people. Now, I’ve got nothing much to do for a while, so do you fancy a cup of coffee?’
‘Canteen or proper coffee out in the streets somewhere?’
Westman looked slightly insulted.
‘Proper, obviously. What kind of a man do you take me for?’
Angela snapped off the desk lights, stood up and eased her aching back.
‘You really don’t want me to answer that, do you, Charles? I’ve known you for too long,’ she teased, wondering, and not for the first time, about Westman’s personal circumstances.
He was unlike most of her other colleagues at the museum, who tended to be casually and comfortably scruffy. Westman was about six feet tall and slightly overweight, carrying just a few extra pounds, but always clean-shaven and immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and his shoes buffed to a high shine. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense, his nose a little too big and slightly crooked, but with friendly grey eyes and a ready smile, and he had always been pleasant company.
In fact, Angela had a sneaking suspicion that he fancied her, which presumably meant he wasn’t gay as she’d first suspected, but he’d never made any overt move that could confirm this.
She took a last glance at the pottery crowded together on her workbench and shook her head.
‘At times like this,’ she said, ‘I almost wish I’d become a palaeontologist. At least they get to spend some of their time out in the field.’
Charles Westman shuddered elaborately.
‘Far too crude, my dear, all those bones and teeth and fossilized poo. And sunburn — if you’re lucky — and too much dirt under your fingernails. No, not really your style at all, I think.’
Just after they’d left the laboratory, Angela’s laptop computer emitted a musical tone. She’d received an email.
18
The souk never really closed, but as the heat of the afternoon sun diminished slightly and the shadows around the stalls deepened and lengthened, most of the tourists and serious buyers began to leave. And by the middle of the evening most of the stallholders and traders had followed their example, locking away their goods in their storerooms or chests or other secure locations, and leaving the area to enjoy their evening meal.
So when Abdul returned, a couple of hours before midnight, the souk was virtually deserted. Just a handful of traders were still in evidence as they locked up their shops or tried to interest any remaining tourists in some last-minute bargains. He ignored all their blandishments and strode swiftly along the narrow alleyways until he reached Mahmoud’s stall.
It was, as he had expected, deserted, the storeroom door closed and locked. But that wouldn’t be a problem. When he’d been talking to the Egyptian trader earlier that day, Abdul had glanced at the keyhole on the storeroom door and the bunch of keys that Mahmoud had placed casually on the stall itself. The ability to get inside a locked room was more or less one of the qualifications of his profession, and he knew this one wouldn’t be difficult. He knelt down in front of the door, virtually invisible to anyone passing unless they looked over the top of the stall, and removed an L-shaped lock pick, a tool known as a twirl, from his pocket. Then he set to work.
His expert probing fingers quickly identified the mortise lock as having only three levers — barely adequate for an interior door in a house, and certainly not sufficient for a storeroom that quite probably held valuable artefacts. One after the other, the levers fell prey to his twirl, and in a little over a minute he was able to stand up, glance around to ensure that he was still unobserved, then open the door and step inside.
He pulled the door to behind him and checked that the storeroom had no windows through which torch light could be seen. But the space was in total darkness.
Abdul took a slim pencil torch from his pocket and switched it on. He first looked all round to ensure that there were no signs of an alarm system, though the quality of the door and its lock suggested to him that this was unlikely. Satisfied, he then began searching the contents of the storeroom.
The search wasn’t easy because, although he knew exactly what he was looking for, he had no idea what it would be stored in. Some objects he knew he could ignore. His employer had explained that the parchment would be fairly fragile and certainly would not be rolled and placed inside a jar or anything of that sort. So Abdul could not even look at the contents of two of the shelves, because they only held pottery vessels of different sizes. But that still left a large number of boxes whose dimensions were large enough to contain the relic. Checking each of those took him a considerable length of time. In fact, it took him so long that he had to change the batteries on his torch halfway through.
He finally gave up just after midnight, stood for a few moments in the open space in the centre of the cramped and crowded storeroom and shone his torch methodically at everything in it. Then he nodded in satisfaction. He had checked every possible hiding place and container that was big enough to take the parchment, and his conclusion was obvious. If — and Abdul still wondered just how big an ‘if’ this was — the trader Mahmoud had the parchment, he hadn’t secreted it in either his storeroom or the stall itself, which was completely empty.