He slipped the battery into place, switched on the mobile phone and dialled the number he'd written down.
'You took your time.'
'Sorry,' Dexter replied shortly. 'So what do you want me to do?'
'You read the article?' Hoxton asked.
'Yes.'
'Then it should be obvious. Get that tablet for me.'
'That could be difficult, but I might be able to get a picture of the inscription for you.'
'Do that anyway, but I want the tablet itself. There might be something on the back or the sides, something the photographs don't show. You told me you had good contacts in Morocco, Dexter. Now's your chance to prove it.'
'It'll be expensive.'
'I don't care what it costs. Just do it.'
Dexter switched off the mobile, started the BMW's engine, drove about five miles south to a pub and stopped in the far corner of the large car park. From his jacket pocket he removed a small notebook containing telephone numbers and the first names of people he occasionally employed, specialists in various fields. None of these numbers would ever have been found in any trade directory and all were disposable mobiles, their owners regularly updating him with their new numbers.
He switched on the mobile again and opened his notebook.
The moment he had a good signal, he dialled one of the numbers.
'Yup.'
'I've got a job for you,' Dexter said.
'Keep talking.'
'David and Kirsty Philips. They live somewhere in Canterbury, and they should be on the electoral roll or in the phone book. I need their computer.'
'OK. How soon?'
'As quickly as you can. Today, if possible. You're happy with the usual terms?'
'Rates have gone up a bit,' the gruff voice at the other end said. 'It'll cost you a grand.'
'Agreed,' Dexter said. 'And make it look good, will you?'
Once he'd ended that call, Dexter drove another couple of miles before stopping the car and again consulting his notebook. He switched on the mobile and dialled another number, this one with a '212' prefix.
'As-Salaam alaykum, Izzat. Kef halak?'
Dexter's Arabic was workable, though not fluent, and his greeting was formal – 'peace be upon you' – followed by a more conversational 'how are you?' He'd learnt the language mainly because a lot of his 'special' customers wanted the kind of relics that were most often found in the Arab world, and it helped to be able to converse with sellers in their own tongue.
'What do you want, Dexter?' The voice was deep and heavily accented, but the man's English was fluent.
'How did you know it was me?'
'Only one person in Britain knows this telephone number.'
'Right. Listen, I've got a job for you.'
For just over three minutes Dexter explained to Izzat Zebari what had happened and what he wanted him to do.
'It won't be easy,' Zebari said.
His reply was almost precisely what Dexter had anticipated. In fact, every job he could ever remember giving the man had produced exactly the same response from him.
'I know. But can you do it?'
'Well,' Zebari sounded doubtful, 'I suppose I could try my police contacts, see if they have any information.'
'Izzat, I don't need to know how you're going to do it, only whether or not you can do it. I'll call you tonight, OK?'
'Very well.'
'Ma'a Salaama.'
'Alla ysalmak. Goodbye.'
* * *
On the way back to Petworth, Dexter worked out what he would have to do next. He'd need to close his shop and fly out to Morocco as soon as he could. Zebari was fairly competent, but Dexter trusted almost nobody, and if the Moroccan did manage to find and recover the tablet, he wanted to be right there when it happened.
To Dexter, the slightly blurred picture in the Mail was very familiar, because he'd sold an almost identical tablet to Charlie Hoxton about two years before. That tablet, if his recollection was correct, had been part of a box of relics one of his suppliers had 'liberated' from the storeroom of a museum in Cairo. Hoxton, he remembered, had been very keen to acquire any other tablets of the same type, because he believed that the tablet he had purchased had been part of a set.
And it looked as if Hoxton had been right.
17
The two men in the scruffy white Ford Transit looked pretty much like delivery men anywhere. They were casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets, with grubby trainers on their feet, and they both looked fit and quite strong. In fact, they actually were delivery men for a small Kent company, but they had a second line of employment that provided the bulk of their income.
In front of the driver, a satnav unit was attached to the windscreen with a sucker, which made the town plan that the man in the passenger seat was studying largely redundant. But while their first job was finding the right address in Canterbury, they also needed to identify their best route out of the housing estate and back on to a main road, and both men preferred to see the layout of the roads on a map rather than rely only on the satnav's small colour screen.
'That's it,' the passenger said, pointing. 'The one on the left, with the Golf parked outside.'
The driver pulled the van in to the side of the road and stopped about a hundred yards short of the property. 'Call the number again,' he instructed.
The passenger pulled out a mobile phone, keyed a number and pressed a button. He listened for perhaps twenty seconds, then ended the call. 'Still no answer,' he said.
'Right. We'll do it now.'
The driver slipped the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. A few seconds later, he stopped directly outside the semi-detached house on the left and switched off the Ford's engine. The two men pulled on baseball caps, walked round to the back of the vehicle, opened the doors and picked up a large cardboard box from inside.
They carried it between them up the path, past the Volkswagen in the drive, to the back door, and lowered it to the ground. Although a casual observer would have assumed the box was heavy, it was actually completely empty.
The two men looked back towards the road, then glanced all round them. There was no bell, so the driver rapped on the glass panel in the back door. As he expected, there was no sound from inside the house, just as there'd been no response to their telephone call a couple of minutes earlier. After a moment he slipped a jemmy out of his jacket pocket, inserted the point between the door and the jamb beside the lock and levered firmly. With a sharp cracking sound, the lock gave and the door swung open.
They picked up the cardboard box and stepped inside, then immediately split up, the driver going up the stairs while the other man began searching through the groundfloor rooms.
'Up here. Give me a hand.'
The second man ran up the stairs as his companion walked out of the study carrying the system unit of a desktop computer. 'Get the screen and keyboard and stuff,' the driver instructed.