Beneath his tan, Mohammed had turned pale, and almost immediately glanced nervously around him, as if expecting to see knife-wielding murderers emerging from the crowd on all sides.
‘I knew nothing of this when I handed you the relic,’ Husani insisted, ‘and I only heard about the killing this morning. I will tell nobody that you have had anything to do with it, but please be careful and watch your back for the next few days. I’m getting out of the city as quickly as I can.’
Mohammed suddenly looked extremely uncomfortable, his glance sliding past his companion rather than looking him in the face, and Husani picked up on it immediately.
‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Who have you told?’
‘It was just a professional inquiry,’ Mohammed stammered. ‘I sent an email to somebody I know at the British Museum in London, just asking about the proper names I could read.’
‘Did you tell him what the relic was, that it was an ancient parchment?’
‘It’s a “her”, actually, not a “him”, and I did explain something about it. I don’t think it’s important, though, and when Angela replied she said that the names didn’t mean anything to her.’
Husani nodded.
‘If this woman contacts you again, I suggest you tell her nothing, just say the relic was removed by the owner, or that you could read nothing else on it, something like that. The fewer people who know about this object the better, at least until I find out what’s really going on.’
‘And how will you achieve that?’ Mohammed asked.
‘That should be easy,’ Husani replied. ‘It’s not the parchment itself that is important. That’s just an old piece of animal skin. It has to be what’s written on it, and thanks to you I should now be able to read a lot more of it. Once I’ve managed to decipher and translate the text, I’ll have a much better idea of why somebody decided poor Mohammed had to die.’
33
Before she continued with the jigsaw reassembly of what seemed like a million broken pottery vessels, Angela made herself a cup of coffee. She’d decided a while ago that the only way she could guarantee a decent cup, apart from visiting one of the cafés in and around Great Russell Street, was to have her own coffee-maker and buy her own beans.
The routine of grinding the beans in the small electrical gadget beside the filter machine and the pleasurable aroma the whole operation created were things she really looked forward to. The process helped her unwind each morning after the usually fraught journey on the packed Central and Northern lines from Ealing Broadway into central London.
As usual, she ground the beans — that day she had chosen a Blue Mountain roast — and started the water dripping through the loaded filter as soon as she’d closed her office door. Then she opened up her laptop and plugged it in. While she sipped her coffee, she wrote an email to Ali Mohammed, explaining what she thought was the significance of the fragment of the Hebrew name, and asking him to confirm the provenance of the parchment he was working on. She also suggested that the British Museum would probably be interested in acquiring it, should it bear up to expert analysis.
Before she sent the message, she checked the local time in Cairo. Because of the two-hour difference, in Egypt it was just after eleven thirty, so Ali Mohammed should certainly be in his office by that time. She sent the email, then savoured the rest of her drink, made herself another cup, and walked out of her office and into the workroom where the boxes of potsherds awaited her attention.
Trying to assemble broken sections of pottery was both mentally and physically tiring. The edges of the fragments only rarely matched exactly because of other damage and there was, of course, never any guarantee that all the parts of a particular vessel were present in the box of bits, so a search for one missing piece could easily be a complete waste of time. She found that her eyes ached if she did the work for more than about two hours at a stretch, so at eleven thirty London time she abandoned her bench for a while and returned to her office, hoping that Ali would already have replied.
He had, but the contents of the message he’d sent were nothing like what she’d expected. The email was short, but she read it twice, with increasing confusion and irritation.
Good morning, Angela
I am so sorry about the parchment. It was a mistake to have contacted you and the owner has now taken it away from me. Please do not concern yourself any more with the matter.
Regards, Ali
What was going on? She looked again at the message she had sent to Cairo, to ensure that she had made her position clear, that she had emphasized the possible importance of the text on the piece of parchment. Had Ali conveyed any of that to the owner of the relic?
She certainly wasn’t going to simply let it go.
She composed another message to the Egyptian, marked it high priority and sent it immediately. Then she made herself another cup of coffee and sat in her chair while she waited for him to reply.
It didn’t take long.
Hullo again, Angela
I will not get the chance to explain to the owner what you told me, because I had already returned the relic to him before I read your email. But I doubt if it would have made any difference. There are other forces at work here, and already one man has been killed over this parchment. I am only telling you this so that you will appreciate the seriousness of the matter and please, I beg of you, do not pursue this any further. I have been sworn to secrecy, and I dare not continue this correspondence. Both the owner of the relic and I myself fear for our lives if our involvement becomes known.
Ali
That was hardly the response Angela had been expecting.
She opened up her web browser and typed ‘Cairo murder’ in the search field. That produced over eighteen million results, but the news item she was looking for occurred right at the top of the list. There were five different reports from a selection of English-language newspapers, and she glanced at all of them before reading the longest and most comprehensive article in full, though the information supplied even by that report was noticeably sparse.
Brutal slaying in Cairo suburb
Yesterday police were called to a house on the outskirts of the city in response to an emergency call. A cleaner who worked at the property, owned by a dealer in antiquities named Mahmoud Kassim, had discovered the dead body of her employer when she arrived there that morning.
The property was immediately sealed off by the police while the scene was examined for clues to the perpetrator of the crime. In an initial statement, the chief investigating officer, Inspector Malanwi, explained that they had found one body in the property and that they were treating the death as suspicious.
In an exclusive interview for this newspaper, the cleaner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporters that she had found the body of Mr Kassim in the bedroom. The corpse was lying in the bed, and he had apparently been attacked during the night. The cleaner stated that he had the most appalling wounds, and she believed they had been inflicted with a knife.
Mr Kassim was a well-known dealer in antiques and antiquities, and operated his business from a shop in the Khan el-Khalili souk.
That was little enough to go on, but if nothing else the man’s profession suggested that at least Angela was reading the right news item. She looked back at the other reports, but they added little fresh information.