by Knox, Tom
‘Yes!’ Basili said. ‘The Brits keep it in London, but it’s ours. We won’t let that happen again. Whatever these documents are, I am pretty sure we shall keep them. God has entrusted us to be the curators of the Christian faith, of the original church.’
‘So where are the documents now?’
Basili frowned. ‘Sohag, I think? Does it matter? Brother Kelada didn’t want them here, I don’t know why. So he told Qulta to take them back where they came from, where they were found – some cave in the desert. That’s what I heard. That’s all I know.’
Again, the frustration returned, but also the excitement. Sohag, Middle Egypt. The Red Monastery, or the White, or the Monastery of the Martyrs, the Monastery of the Seven Mountains. Which? But it made sense. Sohag was not far from Nag Hammadi, where the Gnostic gospels were found.
‘Where in Sohag? There are many monasteries. Please let me speak to Brother Kelada. He can tell me.’
The Australian monk shook his head. ‘Impossible.’
‘What?’
‘He died three days ago.’
‘But how?’
Basili looked faintly contemptuous.
‘We had to bury him outside, near the trees. Suicide is the worst of sins.’
6
Carnkie, Cornwall
The walk to the Methodist chapel for her mother’s funeral took Karen Trevithick past grey, pinched, tin-miners’ houses that probably once belonged to her extended family. She was descended from generations of Cornish tinners. And Cornish wreckers, smugglers and fishermen, for that matter.
Cornwall was her homeland, this was her home. Carnkie was the hearth of that home.
Yet she didn’t feel at home. Not at all.
‘All right, Karen, my dear? So sorry to hear about Mavis.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘How is the littl’un?’
‘Ellie is OK, staying with Julie, my cousin’s wife in London – they have kids.’
‘Ah yes, nice for her to have playmates. ’Specially now.’
‘Yes. Yes it is.’
Who was this polite elderly Cornish gentleman who had stopped her in the street? Karen ransacked her memory. She couldn’t place him: some distant third cousin? A friend of her mother’s? The man smiled at her, kind and gracious, and laid a consoling hand on her elbow. She thanked the nice old gent once again, and walked on, around the drizzly corner, to the chapel, a dour grey granite pile, a building of deliberate and penitent ugliness.
Karen’s mother, a widow since her fifties, had returned to this old village, Carnkie, a few years back: retreating from an increasingly lonely London to the emotional comforts of Cornwall.
At the time, Karen had confessed mixed feelings about this. She was glad her mum was retiring to the country she loved, but she was selfishly sad her mother was leaving as that meant less free childcare for Ellie; she couldn’t work out why her mother chose Carnkie of all places, even if it was the ancestral hamlet.
Much of Cornwall was lovely, from the sheltered yachting harbours and languid creeks of the south, to the rawly beautiful cliff-and-thrift coasts of the north; but Carnkie was in the brutal, ugly middle of Cornwall, a place of wind-scraped moorland – and dormant, decaying mining townships. Like Carnkie.
The mourners were gathered at the gate that led to the chapel door.
‘Hello Karen.’
‘So sad, so very sad. So young as well.’
‘I tell ’ee, sixty-two?’
Barely listening, Karen took one last look at the view. A typical Cornish fog, half-drizzle, half-mist, was rolling down from old Carn Brea, shrouding the rocky moorland above the village. It murked between the granite-built tin-mine stacks, making them look, even more than usual, like classical ruins.
Karen turned, and entered. The interior of the chapel was notably better than the façade: it was airy and spacious. But the spaciousness underlined the fact there were so few people here. At least she could see her cousin Alan at the front, in a pew; he saw her, too, and waved her over.
‘All right, Kaz?’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, sitting down next to her cousin. ‘Fine. I mean. Ish.’
Apart from Alan there were maybe ten or eleven people, their paltry numbers exaggerated by the vastness of the chapel. This was a place built for hundreds of lustily singing miners and their ruddy-faced wives and many, many kids, a place built at the height of the tinning boom in the nineteenth century, when places like Carnkie were churning out more copper and tin than anywhere else on earth, when places like Redruth, Carnkie and St Just were allegedly the richest square miles on the planet, though all the real money disappeared to London with the owners and the landlords.
Now it was all dead. The chapels were empty, the mines were closed, the people were old and the children had gone. And now even her mother had been taken and swallowed by the mizzle, reducing her immediate family to just two people: herself and her six-year-old daughter.
She realized, with a kind of surprise, that she was crying.
‘Hey now, come on.’ Alan handed her a tissue.
‘Sorry. Look at me. Train wreck.’
‘No need to apologize. Just remember, you’re nearly through. The crem is usually the worst bit.’
‘I’m glad we did it first.’
‘Yes.’
The cremation had been yesterday: this was the service. Karen already had her mother’s ashes in her car, sealed in a faintly farcical pot, itself in a supermarket carrier bag. She had no idea what to do with them. Scatter them at sea? But her mother had distrusted the sea. Like many older Cornish people she had never even learned to swim, even though she lived in a peninsula surrounded by the churning Atlantic.
Where then? Up on Carn Brea, next to the castle? That was better – the view across to St Agnes Beacon, and the sea beyond, was immense and glorious; but the grieving wind hardly ever stopped.
Incongruously, Karen considered the disaster that might ensue if she scattered the ashes in a typical blowy Carn Brea morning.
‘We are gathered here to celebrate the life of Mavis Trevithick.’
The vicar was doing his thing. Karen barely listened. She imagined her mother’s reaction to the news that her mortal remains had been ritually distributed across a bank of Lidl shopping trolleys.
She’d surely have laughed. Like many Cornish people, her mum had possessed, or inherited, a wry and salty sense of humour: that kind of wit was the only way to deal with tough lives down the mines, or on bitter moortop farms.
‘Can we all sing Hymn 72, “Abide with Me”?’
Oh God. ‘Abide with Me’? Karen was entirely immune to religion; she believed none of it – that’s why she’d left Alan to arrange the service – but this one hymn always got her. Something in the tune – it mined her soul, found the motherlode of human grief, every time.
The organ hummed, the frail voices joined in. Karen put the scrunched-up tissue in her fist to her trembling mouth and closed her eyes. Hard.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
It didn’t work, the tears were falling lavishly now. Along with the memories of her mum, before Dad died, making jokes and pasties, with flour on her fingers, when everyone was alive, when she had cousins and uncles and parents, but so many were gone, all gone—
I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.
Karen stifled her sobs. If only she could believe that was true, that there was something beyond, a loving God for all, a brother for the lonely, a father for the orphaned, an embracing and eternal Lord, gathering the anguished. But whatever Nonconformist fire had once filled this big ugly chapel was long ago extinguished; all the tin
was mined out. She certainly hadn’t inherited any faith.
The grave was victorious, after all. And yes, death stung.
Thankfully, the next hymns were more bearable. A few prayers were mumbled, the vicar talked of Mavis’s vivacity and gardening. Then everyone – all twelve or so of them – filed out of the chapel, and repaired to her Uncle Ken’s house for Cornish bread, saffron cakes and pots and pots of tea, thick protection against the cold and drizzle outside. There was no alcohol. The Nonconformist tradition of teetotalism lived on, even as the religion itself had expired.
At three o’clock Karen got a call. She stepped out of her uncle’s front room into the hall to take it. The number flashing on her phone was unknown.
‘Hello?’
‘Karen?’
‘Hello – is this …? Is this …?’
‘Yes. Sally Pascoe. Your second cousin! Remember?’
‘Sally!’
Karen was genuinely pleased to hear her voice, and also a little perplexed. She and Sally had been great friends as kids, during those childhood Cornish holidays they spent hours hopscotching in Trelissick or building sandcastles at Hayle. Later on, their adult lives had diverged, yet continued in parallel: Karen had become a detective chief inspector in London, Sally a policewoman; but she had stayed in Cornwall. Busy careers and lively kids meant they hadn’t met in years.
‘Karen, I’m so sorry I couldn’t make your mum’s … you know. So sorry.’
‘Sal, it’s OK.’
‘But work is, well, it’s very busy. I’m sure it’s a lot more hectic up in London, but we have crimes down here too.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s fine.’
‘Anyway I just wondered if you might … well, I mean, you have quite a reputation in London, as a DCI … I wondered if you …’
‘Sally, spit it out!’
‘Do you want to drive over to Zennor, maybe later, or tomorrow? I mean, if you have the chance, it might, uh, distract you. You see, we have a strange case, a cottage on the hill.’
‘I can come over right now. To be honest I’d like an excuse. The funeral was … intense. And now my Uncle Ken is trying to overdose me with scones.’
Sally laughed gently. ‘We like our carbohydrates down here.’
‘I’m on my way. Meet you there in forty minutes?’
The drive took less than forty minutes. Karen drove fast, with her mum in the back, in a carrier bag. She parked at Zennor church and followed the winding path up to the hill to the ruined cottage. Her destination was obvious: there were two police Range Rovers parked next to the derelict building, their yellow-and-blue insignia garishly conspicuous on top of the grey-green, stony hill. The drizzle had abated but the January wind was keen.
A constable greeted her. ‘You must be DI Pascoe’s friend?’ He opened the door of the cottage.
Karen stepped inside. Her reaction was reflexive.
‘Oh my God!’
7
Sohag, Egypt
Victor Sassoon saw the smoke of the second small bomb from his hotel window. The fifteenth-floor balcony of his hideous 1970s concrete tower gazed across the Nile, from the dense and frazzled streets of Muslim Sohag, to the smaller, ancient, more Coptic, west-bank town of Akhmim. The smoke from this latest bomb rose like a long-stemmed lotus flower above the dense medieval streets.
Then came the sirens, harsh and plaintive in the noonday heat. Had the Muslims attacked the Copts again? Or was it the Copts attacking the Muslims in return? The only thing anyone knew for sure was that the violence was worsening. The papers had informed him this morning that the Zabaleen were also rioting in Cairo. Egypt was truly roiled.
Yet this very morning the poor people from the countryside had tethered their shallow boats to gather reeds from the side of the Nile, much as they must have done in Pharaonic times. This was Egypt, turbulent and tumultuous, and also unchanging.
Turning from the balcony, Sassoon sat on his bed and unscrewed his precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and filled a tooth mug with half an inch, slugging it in one go. It gave him courage for the day ahead, and it dulled the pain. The pain in his lungs and in his legs; and in his heart.
Lifting up the bottle, Sassoon examined the liquor that remained. Five inches maybe. And it would be hard to buy more: Sohag was a dry city. Islamist.
Everything was running out. Time and whisky, and life.
He rose, buttoned his blazer and picked up his stick. In the street he hailed an old, pale blue fifties Ford taxi and got in the back seat to negotiate the day. The driver, Walid, spoke a little English and asked Victor if he knew his brother Anwar who lived in Manchester and worked in a car showroom.
Victor confessed that he had never met Anwar, despite living in the same country. Walid seemed very disappointed by this, until Victor told him what he wanted: to be driven to all the nearby ancient Coptic monasteries, for the next two days; and then Victor added that he would pay a hundred dollars for his time and gasoline.
This was an absurdly generous offer, but Victor was infinitely beyond caring. He had tens of thousands of dollars in his account – the product of a lifetime of academic salaries and scholarly frugality – and he had no family. What better use could he find for the money than discovering a great and final truth?
But he needed to be quick. The pain in his lungs was like a murderer had stabbed a sharpened crucifix in his chest.
‘Please.’ Victor gestured at the donkey cart blocking their way. ‘Let’s go.’
Walid smiled a tobacco-stained smile and slammed his horn, frightening the donkey, as they screeched out into the Sohag traffic.
They talked about the bomb as they made their slow way through the chaos of trucks and cabs, and old Mercedes minibuses full of Egyptian matrons, in vividly coloured headscarves.
‘Much bad,’ said Walid. ‘Very bad. Soon they will make the Coptic leave Egypt. Sadat, Mubarak, they protect the Copt. But now … No good. No good.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand.
Sassoon gazed at the rear-view mirror, and the absence of dangling prayer-beads. ‘You are a Christian?’
‘La.’ Walid shook his head and ignited his third Cleopatra-brand cigarette of the morning. ‘Muslim. But I having many Coptic friend. We are all Egyptian, all People of the Book. The bad men want to … make hate. You smoke?’
Victor demurred. He had once been a smoker. Forty years a smoker, then he’d stopped. Evidently he had given up too late: the lung cancer was very advanced. He listened placidly as Walid smoked and sighed and cursed and swore at the politicians and chattered away about his eight children, and his annoying new wife, until at last they reached the desert.
The transition was sudden, as always in Middle and Upper Egypt. The fertile valley of the Nile was a vivid and glorious sash of green across the ochre of the Saharan wilderness, but when the desert began it did so with a painful severity: in a second one travelled from emerald to grey, or from city to nothingness.
Ahead of them, in the first desert sands, was the White Monastery. In truth it looked quite unprepossessing, like an ugly and very humble pile of mud bricks and cracked pillars, yet it was one of the oldest church buildings in the world.
‘I wait here. You take time. Plenty time.’ Walid parked, with a brisk spin of the wheel, at the steel gates of the monastery complex.
Victor ejected himself from the taxi, his chest and his knees complaining at the effort. Two bored-looking Coptic men greeted him, and frisked him, then allowed the harmless old man beyond the gates. He was instantly greeted by a young, anxious-eyed Copt called Labib – a ‘server’, not a monk. Labib spoke good English and wore badly-fitting jeans and poignantly cheap shoes; he carried a large bunch of keys. It seemed he single-handedly ran the White Monastery complex.
First, Victor made a generous offering to the monastery coffers, and then Labib spent the next tedious hour showing Victor the remnants of the old monastery, the Armenian brickwork, the fifth-century apse and the huge monastic graveya
rd, and then he showed his visitor all the exciting new buildings: the grotesquely ugly new church with its glass elevator, the bizarrely fresh murals of Adam and Eve painted in red and green on the perimeter wall, and then, the greatest triumph of all, a six-metre-wide animatronic statue-fountain of Christ’s Miracle of the Watered Sheep.
‘Look,’ said Labib, sighing slightly. ‘I can show you the miracle.’ He stepped behind the huge, cement-and-plaster sculpture. Victor leaned on his stick with a grasping sense of despair. He heard the squeak of a metal tap being turned.
The water duly cascaded from a fake cement rock and ran past the smiling plaster Jesus who lifted his holy plaster hand and the animatronic sheep bent their animatronic heads in the manner of sheep drinking at a miraculous stream in the desert.
Victor flushed with faint embarrassment, and looked away. He had at least five more monasteries to visit. And then what? Victor felt the full futility of the exercise. Even if he found the right monastery, how was he going to get into the archives? Was he going to burgle them at night? Climb through the mud-brick windows? Hire a tractor and smash the walls down?
Labib emerged from the back of the automated Jesus, and gestured at the sheep. ‘It is a good miracle. Do you think?’
‘Yes. Ah. It’s marvellous.’
Labib gazed at Victor, and smiled forlornly, and shook his head. ‘No it is not … It is stupid. You know this.’
‘Erm …’
‘I can see you are intelligent man.’ Labib turned, and gestured at the wide-eyed Jesus. ‘Look. This is what we are reduced to, the Copts, making stupid miracles out of toys. But what can we do? We are in prison.’ He exhaled, with enormous weariness.
There was nothing to be said. Sassoon gazed at some crumbling, pitiful heaps of mud brick as they began the trudge back to the gates. He tried to change the subject to something more fruitful. ‘The White Monastery was much bigger once?’
‘Yes it was,’ Labib answered. ‘Many times bigger. We had kitchen and churches, and the great library. A thousand monks lived here in Saint Shenouda’s time. Fourth century.’
