The Moses Legacy

by Adam Palmer

  For that Wally Carter – now Goliath, the man who walked tall and held his head up high – would do anything to serve Arthur Morris, knowing that in so doing, he was serving God.

  Yet now he was miserable, for the trace on Daniel’s phone wasn’t working. It was possible that the phone was switched off or that he was in a tunnel or underground; but whatever the reason, when he logged on to the website and tried to find the phone, it was showing ‘no signal’.

  It was just then that Morris phoned. Goliath was fearful of the prospect of having to tell his mentor that he had failed. But he never got the chance, because instead of asking him about the whereabouts of Daniel Klein, Morris launched into a set of rapid-fire instructions, telling Goliath that he was to go to the hospital attached to the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute, locate a patient called Joel Hirsch and get some of his clothes. He was to put them in a bag, seal it up to keep it dry and bring it back to the United States.

  And he was not to let anyone see him.

  Goliath was about to ask why when he remembered that he was not supposed to ask questions: he was just supposed to do what God requires.

  Chapter 16

  ‘So you admit that you were at the house that morning?’ asked the Detective Chief Inspector.

  ‘Yes!’ said Daniel for the umpteenth time. ‘I went there to speak to him just before I flew off to Egypt.’

  ‘And you flew off to Egypt at short notice, at the invitation of the Vice Minister of Culture.’

  ‘You can call him and verify that yourself.’

  ‘We will. But perhaps in the meantime you can tell us what you talked to Professor Carmichael about?’

  ‘It was just a bit of catching up on old times. Nothing special.’

  Daniel was aware of how implausible this sounded.

  ‘You’re about to leave the country at short notice, at the request of the Egyptian Vice Minister of Culture, and take a detour from your drive to the airport to stop off at your old professor’s house for small talk?’

  The DCI shot a sceptical glance at his colleague who shrugged his shoulders as if to express his own disbelief of Daniel’s account.

  ‘He was my mentor,’ Daniel continued. ‘I hadn’t seen him in a while and I was quite surprised at Mansoor’s invitation. So I wanted to ask for his advice.’

  ‘But how could he advise you, if you didn’t know why you were being invited to Egypt?’

  ‘That was the point. I figured he might be able to tell me how to play it.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Daniel looked away awkwardly. He had nothing to hide on this point, but the truth made him feel uncomfortable.

  ‘He was too far gone to help.’

  ‘Too far gone?’ the DCI echoed.

  ‘Dementia. I could tell that he wasn’t really with me.’

  ‘Is it possible that he had something on his mind? Something that might explain why someone would want to kill him?’

  Again Daniel lapsed into thought. On this point he did have something to hide. For the next few seconds, he thought carefully about how much he wanted to share with the DCI. Did he want to mention Carmichael’s paranoid claims about his unpublished paper? The belief that the plague of boils could make a resurgence? At the time it had seemed preposterous. But Harrison Carmichael was dead and there was no question that he had been murdered. Even if the fire could be dismissed as an accident, the injuries to Roksana and to Carmichael himself could not.

  But did he want to share his suspicions with the police? Would they come over as credible? Did he really have anything to tell them? Certainly nothing that Carmichael had told him amounted to solid information. All Daniel had was a nagging suspicion, but what he really wanted was an explanation and he wasn’t going to get that from the policeman.

  Daniel saw no reason to stick his neck out by offering what might come over as a self-serving explanation. So he decided to hold his peace.

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Okay, Professor Klein. Interview suspended at 5.45 p.m.’

  ‘Look, I know you have to investigate thoroughly. But I’ve told you all I know and I’m a very busy man. Is there any possibility that I could be released on bail?’

  ‘We’re awaiting the results from the forensic team. If we can eliminate you – and assuming that we have no other grounds to hold you – you will be released at that time.’

  Daniel didn’t see how the forensic tests would eliminate him. If he had started the fire, he could have taken the clothes he was wearing to Egypt and disposed of them there. They would certainly find his fingerprints and DNA on the garden chair where he had sat and it was unlikely that they would find any of the killer’s DNA in the house, because of the fire. Even if the forensic tests came up negative, he knew that a cloud of suspicion would hang over him until the case was solved.

  In the meantime he was going right back to the police cells, to await his fate.

  Chapter 17

  ‘He was a friend of Lord Byron, you know,’ said the curator, a young Indian. ‘They met at Cambridge.’

  ‘Yes, he was actually two years ahead of Byron, at Trinity,’ said Gabrielle. ‘In many ways he was his mentor, until Byron’s fame left him behind. But they stayed friends.’

  Gabrielle was in an office on the top floor of the British Museum, sitting at a large work table with one of the curators of the Egyptian department. The police had told her that she wouldn’t be allowed any contact with Daniel before he was either released or charged. He had chosen not to take a lawyer, so she couldn’t even get a message to him indirectly.

  She faced a stark choice. She could either sit around doing nothing except brood about her uncle’s death and Daniel’s fate or she could keep herself occupied, following up on the trail that had started in Egypt. It was ironic that finding the Mosaic tablets had proved to be not the end of the trail, but the start, and had in fact opened the door to other discoveries.

  Having her name second or third on a paper about the discovery of the Mosaic tablets was prestigious enough. But after Mansoor had told them about the mysterious papyrus in the Egyptian Museum, it looked like there was a lot more to discover – especially as he had told them that the papyrus was carbon-dated to 1600 BC. That would make it older than the Bible – yet written in the same script as the original Mosaic tablets.

  A secret that pre-dated the Bible? And one that must have been related to the Bible because it was written in the same ancient script as the original Ten Commandments!

  That was a find well worth pursuing. If the credit for finding the Mosaic tablets would be great, the prestige for revealing older documents relating to the Semitic peoples would be enormous.

  But of the three of them, only Daniel could decipher the papyrus. He had made it clear that to have any chance of doing so, he needed some idea of its origins. So now Gabrielle was sitting here with the curator talking about William John Bankes, explorer, artist and Egyptologist. Between 1815 and 1819, Bankes travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria, meticulously recording many of the great sites and artefacts with notes and drawings with a skilled and practised hand in the days before photography.

  Several huge ledger-sized folders with cardboard ‘pages’ and heavy covers were stacked up on one side of the table. These were the Bankes archives. Pictures were held between the cardboard sheets, and many had clear plastic or cellophane over them to offer fuller protection of the drawing beneath. Gabrielle turned the pages in awe.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ she said with a shake of her head, admiring the skill and detail of the drawings.

  Through his travels, Bankes had accumulated a substantial portfolio of manuscripts and illustrations of previously unknown historical sites in ancient Egypt and Sudan, preserving the details and imagery of sites that, in some cases, later became lost to vandalism and theft. For while the artefacts plundered by foreign explorers were still extant in Western museums, the spoils taken by local thieves – who were usually l
ooking for gold and didn’t always appreciate the priceless value of knowledge – were in many cases gone for good.

  ‘So if I’ve understood you correctly,’ said the curator, ‘you don’t actually know where you’re looking, only what you’re looking for.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gabrielle. ‘We have an ancient Egyptian jar that bears a symbol like the Rod of Asclepius. We think it may have some connection with the ancient Israelites, as well as the Egyptians. So what we’re wondering is if there’s anything in the Bankes archives that shows such a symbol in ancient Egypt.’

  ‘I do actually remember seeing a drawing with that symbol before, in the Bankes collection,’ said the curator. ‘Now let me see.’

  He selected one of the folders and started flicking through it.

  ‘Oh look,’ he said.

  He had just stopped at a picture engraved on a rock showing a snake coiled around a pole.

  ‘It’s at Deir el-Medina,’ said the curator. ‘Literally “monastery of the town”.’

  ‘The town where the stonemasons, carpenters and scribes who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. Of course in those days, they didn’t speak Arabic.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the curator. ‘They called it Set Maat.’

  ‘“The Place of Truth”.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Gabrielle was staring at the picture.

  ‘This would presumably have been before the place was excavated.’

  ‘Oh, long before,’ the curator acknowledged. ‘The first archaeological excavation was by an Italian called Ernesto Schiaparelli from 1905 to 1909. The second, between 1922 and 1951, was by French archaeologists under the direction of Bernard Bruyère. That one was somewhat more extensive.’

  ‘That’s about a hundred years after Bankes travelled in Egypt and Nubia,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Why the long wait before they started digging?’

  The curator scratched his chin. ‘Well, let me just put that into its proper historical context. The site was known about for some considerable time before that. Indeed, a large number of papyri were found there as far back as the 1840s.’

  ‘Papyri?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were any of them in Proto-Sinaitic script?’

  ‘Proto-Sinaitic?’ The curator sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Not as far as I know. But not all the papyri are extant. Some of them were stolen.’

  ‘And never found?’ asked Gabrielle.

  ‘Well, a few of them ended up in the village well. Actually, that’s from the second excavation. The Schiaparelli excavation turned up loads of pottery and ostraca but no papyri. The Bruyère excavation, on the other hand, turned up many papyri. But unfortunately it wasn’t administered or controlled all that well. Consequently, something like half the papyri were taken without Bruyère’s consent or even his knowledge. Those were the ones that got stolen.’

  ‘And do we have any way of knowing how much of it ended up in private collections?’ asked Gabrielle.

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘And by the same token,’ she pressed on, ‘we have no way of knowing what language or writing system they were written in?’

  ‘Not unless the heirs of those private collectors come forward,’ the curator conceded.

  Gabrielle’s mind was racing ahead.

  Could the papyrus Mansoor showed us be one of the missing Deir el-Medina papyri? If so, it could be part of a huge collection – and what a story THEY could tell!

  Chapter 18

  Goliath hardly noticed the streets of Cairo sweep by as he drove his rented car to the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute Hospital. In his head he was turning over the mantra about doing God’s work that gave him solace when times were hard. It was the same thought that had kept him going in prison.

  After he had gone to work for Senator Morris, he had been given a difficult assignment. It involved killing a rabbi whom the senator said was part of the Jewish conspiracy to create a New World Order. Goliath had felt uncomfortable about killing. But, as Arthur Morris had told him, it was the will of God.

  Only it had gone wrong – horribly wrong. He accomplished the killing all right, but he had got caught. However, Arthur Morris had not abandoned him. He had got him a lawyer who managed to get him off with manslaughter. He learnt an important lesson at the trial, namely that securing the right verdict had less to do with the law or the facts than with getting a sympathetic jury. The lawyer had managed to get the trial relocated to a different venue and had used a lot of so-called ‘peremptory challenges’ to get undesirables off the jury.

  However, the judge was angered by the verdict and sentenced him to seven years in prison, of which he had served three and a half. It was a strange experience. He had always heard that prison was a tough place. But most prisoners stayed away from him, especially after he had killed one who tried to steal money off him. Amazingly, although there were several witnesses, they all told the prison guards that they had seen nothing. He was told by one old prisoner that he should do the same if ever he were asked if he had seen anything.

  When he arrived at the hospital, he set about finding the patient, Joel Hirsch. Morris had told him not to draw attention to himself so he couldn’t ask at the main desk. Instead, he started walking down the corridor towards the intensive care unit, where Morris had told him Joel would be. He found it by following the path marked on the map at the entrance. When he walked in there was only one nurse on duty. That was good.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said in slow English, to make sure that he was understood. ‘I’m looking for a patient called Joel Hirsch.’

  The nurse appeared to respond to the name and pointed to a glass-encased unit. Goliath started to walk towards it, but the nurse signalled him to stop with a gesture and the word ‘Lah’.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m his uncle.’

  She made a sign with her hand and said something in Arabic. Then she reached for the phone.

  He knew what was happening. She didn’t speak English and she was going to call someone else. If only she had gone to fetch someone, that would have given him time. But instead she was going to stay here and wait until help came. That was no good. He didn’t want to be seen.

  There was only one thing to do. He reached out and grabbed her, clamping one hand over her mouth to stop her screaming and encircling her neck with the other. And then with that technique that he was so good at, he snapped her neck and let her body slump to the floor.

  But now he was in a panic. If this was the intensive care unit then there would normally be several people on duty and that meant that someone could come back at any minute. He knew that he had to find a sample of Joel’s clothes, but he didn’t know where to look. A patient’s clothes would normally be in a cabinet beside the bed, but in this case, the bed was in an isolated unit. And it was probably locked or at least alarmed.

  He looked for some sign on a cabinet or unit next to the room that housed the bed, but there was none. They might have destroyed his clothes or taken them for analysis – he simply had no way of knowing. All he knew was that he could hear voices. That meant that people were approaching. He didn’t want to fail his mentor, especially after he had lost track of that Daniel Klein character. But what other choice did he have?

  It was now too late to go back into the main corridor. Instead, he made his way across the unit to the emergency exit and slipped out just as he heard a woman scream.

  They had discovered the body.

  He broke into a sweat and started sprinting.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Well, I’m pleased to tell you, Professor Klein, that you are free to go. For now. You’re being released on bail as we may have some more questions for you. However, one of your bail conditions is that you remain in the country, so we’ll be retaining your passport for the time being.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Daniel, not sure what he was thanking the DCI for.

  Ten minutes later, back in possession of his other personal
items, Gaby was driving him back to his place in North London.

  ‘So let’s assume that it was one of the papyri from Deir el-Medina, it could be the key to unlocking a sizeable chunk of Jewish history. I mean, it could open up the whole history of the Israelites in Egypt from the arrival of Joseph to the exodus of Moses.’

  ‘Look, Gaby, I don’t mean to be rude, but this isn’t really what you want to talk about, is it?’

  ‘What else would I want to talk about?’

  ‘Your uncle.’

  ‘I do not want to talk about my uncle!’ she snapped. ‘And it’s Gabrielle.’

  ‘Look… I’m sorry. I know this is painful—’

  ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it! My uncle’s death is a tragedy, but there’s not much we can do about it. Some burglar who doesn’t like to leave evidence behind… some disgruntled former student… some rival academic… some local lunatic… Whoever it was, we’re in no position to catch them. That’s the job of the police.’

  An uncomfortable few seconds went by. Daniel knew that any further attempts to comfort her would only backfire, that much was certain. So he returned to the subject of the mysterious papyrus and its origins.

  ‘Okay. Well, let’s consider your theory, Professor Gusack,’ he said with a forced smile. ‘The scribes who worked at the necropolis were fully literate in the various writing systems of the day, including hieroglyphics. Indeed, most if not all of the workers there were fully literate.’

  ‘I know. They were skilled workers – paid workers, not slaves. In fact, the Deir el-Medina papyri even contain the first known record of a strike, when they downed tools after going unpaid for too long.’

  ‘Which just goes to prove my point. The stonemasons had to be literate in order to carve the hieroglyphic characters into the rock.’

  ‘Your point being?’

  ‘My point being that Proto-Sinaitic script was used by the uneducated. Why would the literate, skilled workers at the necropolis bother with it?’