The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  ‘You know a lot of the history.’

  ‘I was a history teacher, at the university, Sohag. But they closed the department. Islamists did not like us teaching Coptic history. Now I have three children to feed, so I do this. I make the sheep drink from the miracle water. Twice a day.’

  Victor paused. And daubed his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Tell me about the library.’

  ‘It was famous. The Codex Borgia came from here, and the Gospel of St Bartholomew, the Acts of Pilate, Gospel of the Twelve – many, many texts. But it was all scattered: Arabs burned some of the books; people stole them, Germans and French and English. Many times monks hid the books – in the caves in the hills. Now we are trying to rebuild the collection.’

  ‘What hills, Labib?’

  The young man pointed at the desert cliffs beyond the gate, to the west. ‘The Sokar cliffs.’

  Victor gazed at the wall of daunting rock.

  Labib muttered, ‘I think Sokar is the name of an Egyptian god? There are many caves.’

  Victor thought the puzzle through. There were probably a thousand places in Egypt named after Sokar: a god of the sands, of the western afterworld, of cemeteries and canals. But the coincidence of this and the library? He had surely found his goal. He stared at Labib. Gentle, sad, helpful Labib, a scared and unhappy young man, with a family he was desperate to feed.

  It was time. Victor Sassoon abandoned his last shred of morality. ‘Labib,’ he said, ‘do you ever think about emigrating?’

  The eyes of the young Copt glanced upwards, as if God might disapprove of his answer.

  ‘Yes, yes of course. Many Copt thinks of this. I want to go to Canada, take my wife and children … I have cousins there already. But I do not have any money.’

  ‘How much money would you need?’

  Labib laughed, long and bitterly, in the desert sun. ‘Five thousand dollars. Ten? It is just a dream.’

  Victor opened his arms as if offering the world.

  ‘I will give you ten thousand dollars if you do something very difficult for me.’

  The sun burned down on Labib’s astonished face. ‘Do what?’

  Victor took him by the arm and explained. Labib stared. And stared. And stared. And the plaster Jesus behind him lifted his mechanical hand, and blessed the miraculous waters.

  They arranged to meet the next evening, in Victor’s hotel, at nine p.m. Ten minutes before the designated time, Victor took the clattering hotel elevator down to the lobby, where he sat and gazed at the headscarved women drinking Lipton’s tea; then he looked at his watch, on and off, for two hours.

  Then he went to his room and drank whisky. Labib had not shown up.

  At midnight he got a cryptic text message:

  Cannot get in. I will try again one more time. If I succeed I see you in hotel tomorrow 21:00 at your room. Labib.

  Precisely twenty-one hours later, Victor heard a furtive knock at his hotel-room door.

  Labib.

  Labib was out there in the twenty-watt darkness of the landing, carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. Mutely, full of shame, the Copt handed it over.

  Victor grabbed the bag. An urgent glance inside gave him confidence. The contents looked authentic. Victor strained to contain his agitation, and his jubilation.

  Now it was his turn. From the inner pocket of his blazer he took a thick envelope.

  Labib didn’t even bother to count the thousands of dollars therein. Instead, he just smiled, very regretfully; then turned and walked away down the landing.

  Alone in his room Victor sat on the bed, trying to quell his excitement. But his hands were trembling as he opened the bag and gazed at the frail documents bound in even frailer goatskin.

  The call to prayer echoed across Sohag, across darkened Akhmim, across the moonlit reaches of the Nile, as Victor Sassoon took out the crumbling papyrus sheets of a very ancient document, and began to read.

  8

  Tahta, Middle Egypt

  ‘But where are we going, effendi?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I am not understanding?’

  ‘Please, just drive on.’

  Walid shook his head, and lit a Cleopatra cigarette. The smoke filled the taxi as they drove through yet another dusty, sunlit Egyptian village, with metal shacks selling palm oil and soap powder, and minarets soaring into the dusty sky. Dark-skinned boys played naked in the canals.

  The cough came again, a hacking, savage cough; Victor Sassoon saw Walid checking him, anxiously, in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I sorry, effendi, I smoking, sorry, I stop.’

  Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.

  Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.

  Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?

  Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just couldn’t. Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.

  An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.

  Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’

  Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.

  ‘So we stop.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’

  Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’

  ‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’

  The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’

  ‘A few hours.’

  Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.

  As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.

  Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingnes
s.

  Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.

  But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.

  He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.

  When he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.

  Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.

  But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.

  Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.

  Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth, once again. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t. It was right to let God decide.

  If there was a God.

  The wind whirred outside, at the end of the long cavern. Victor thought of his wife and of the children they never had; he thought of her on that bicycle, that holiday, a spaniel puppy, a car journey somewhere, a cottage with a well in the garden, a photo of his dead parents, snow falling on the Polish camps, and then his wavering and failing mind considered one final thought: the blessed name of Jerusalem, derived from Shalim, the Canaanite God of Night; the God of the End.

  And here was that same spirit, coming into the cave like the cool desert wind: Shalim, the God of the End.

  9

  Zennor Hill, Cornwall, England

  Cats? The cottage was full of cats: or rather the corpses of cats. Some skinned, most of them charred. Charred and burned and scorched and roasted. Piles of dead cats in one corner. Piles of dead cats in another. The stench was intolerable. They had begun to rot.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  DI Sally Pascoe nodded, grimly. The white shirt of her police uniform was smeared with greasy soot. The stuff was everywhere. The burning fur and cat flesh had thickened the air and blackened the walls. The floor was actually sticky: Karen shuddered to think why that was, though she could guess – the heat must have been intense as the cats burned, so intense that the fat in their flesh had liquefied, had turned to oil or tallow, now congealing. Like candles.

  These cats had been burned like candles.

  She resisted the urge to vomit.

  Sally pointed, and Karen followed the gesture. ‘That must have been where some of them were burned. A spit roast, but others appear to have been doused in petrol, and burned alive. We found some petrol canisters at the back, and firelighters too, used for kindling.’

  ‘They stink. Are you going to move them?’

  Sally shrugged. ‘We don’t quite know what to do, I mean, who do we go to, Forensics, Pathology?’

  ‘Or a vet.’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  Karen gazed around the awful scene. One cat was only half-burned: so they hadn’t all been burned at the same time. They had been torched one after the other. Ritualistically. And this ritual had not been completed.

  Ritual?

  Ritual.

  She turned to Sally. ‘Maybe you should speak to an expert on witchcraft.’

  ‘Yes! That’s what I thought, some kind of terrible witchcraft. That’s one reason I asked you over, Kaz. Didn’t you handle a case in London, last year, African voodoo?’

  ‘Yes. A Congolese couple decided their kid was possessed, and they beat him to death.’

  Sally shuddered visibly. ‘OK, OK, so this is just amateur night here, just a house full of barbecued cats.’

  ‘It’s quite bad enough, Sally. Properly Satanic.’ She stooped to one sticky, charred heap of corpses. Using a pen, she flipped one small corpse upside down. The mouth of the cat was open, agonized and screaming. Karen shook her head. ‘The noise must have been unbelievable. Right? Dozens of cats, being burned alive. Through the night? You know how cats yowl. I get them outside my house in London. Caterwauling. Imagine the appalling noise if you … burned them like this.’

  ‘Yes, that’s how we were alerted, someone heard the noise.’ Sally was backing away to the door as if she wanted to flee. Her face was pale. ‘Sorry. I’ve had enough for the moment: the smell. Can we get out, and speak in the car?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The door was opened; the fresh air – cold and faintly drizzly – was unbelievably welcoming. Both women inhaled, greedily. Then they both laughed, very quietly.

  ‘Hey, I haven’t even said anything about your mum … Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Karen, I’m so, so sorry. Come here.’ She hugged her friend.

  Karen welcomed the embrace: human warmth. She missed her daughter; she missed her friends; at this moment, she missed her mum most of all.

  A silent constable standing at the door watched them, perhaps slightly embarrassed by their open emotion.

  Karen and Sally walked to the Range Rover and got in. Sally spoke first. ‘Look at us, two important policewomen. Or one slightly important and one really important. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector at the Met? What happened to little Karen Trevithick? A DCI at thirty-two? Go girl!’

  Karen waved away the compliment. ‘It’s easier for women in some ways. We have a different way of looking at things. Changes perspective.’

  ‘Yes I find that too … Sometimes.’

  ‘Hard work too though; and it’s pretty tough on Ellie.’

  ‘Your daughter must be, like, six?’ Sally’s smile faded. ‘The father—’

  ‘Still isn’t really involved. But that’s my choice.’

  ‘You were never one to get married and bake scones, Kaz.’

  ‘No. I guess not. Not like Mum.’ She looked out of the car window, at the distant, yearning sea, way down the hill, beyond Zennor. ‘You know we used to come here, to Zennor. On holidays. We’d take a picnic and sit on the cliffs. Dad would always say the same thing – the same bit of history. He loved Cornish history. You see them? Those little fields, down there?’ Karen gestured towards the intricate labyrinth of tiny, vivid green fields, surrounding the granite village. ‘You see the stone hedges dividing them? The big boulders. They’re Neolithic. My dad told me those were the oldest human artefacts in the world still being used for their original purpose.’

  Sally peered down Zennor Hill. ‘OK … Not a history fanatic, how old is that? Neo … lithic?’

  ‘We’re talking 3000 BC – five thousand years old. The first farmers moved the huge stones they found in the fields to make hedges. And they’re still using them now.’

  Sall
y nodded, absently. ‘I never liked it here. Penwith, I mean – this part of Cornwall. Creeps me out a bit, the tin mines and the standing stones, it’s all so brooding.’

  ‘Which is why people come here, right? Hippies and druids. Bohemians and artists. And Satanists. Which brings us back to the cats. You said the noise alerted someone, so you have a witness?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘There was a bunch of rich kids, uni students, staying for Christmas and New Year. They rented Eagle’s Nest.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That big house down there.’

  Karen stretched to see: a large handsome building, with extensive gardens, in a spectacular position hard by the highest sea-cliffs. ‘Must be rich, to rent that place. So they heard the noise? Of the cats being tortured?’

  ‘Yep, in the middle of the night, and they came up to have a look.’ Sally Pascoe frowned, expressively. ‘I guess they were drunk. They kicked open the door – and got way more of a fright than they expected. One of them was badly clawed by a cat, a burning cat, trying to escape. Must have been terrifying.’

  ‘They saw no one?’

  Sally reached for a stick of Nicorette chewing gum. ‘I’ve given up for New Year,’ she explained, unwrapping. ‘So, yeah, where was I … yes, the two boys – Malcolm Harding and Freddy Saunderson – they both say they saw people running away, but it was dark. That’s all we know at the moment. No other witnesses, nothing. But it must have been those people who burned the cats.’

  ‘The kids aren’t involved?’

  ‘No.’ Sally’s negative was firm. ‘I’m convinced they have nothing to do with it.’ She chewed the gum methodically. ‘So we’re maybe looking for a gang of Satanists out on the moors of Penwith who like to torment cats by the hundred. How sweet.’

  Sally’s phone rang. Karen raised a hand to say I’ll be outside and opened the Range Rover’s door. The wind was so gusty it almost slammed it shut against her fingers. Raising the collar of her raincoat, Karen walked around the cottage.

  It was half-ruined. A shed of some kind, with a clear plastic roof, was attached to the rear. Most of the windows were broken. It obviously hadn’t been inhabited for many years, maybe decades. That in itself was odd, Karen thought: the cottage was spectacularly situated. It had the kind of view that you could rent to summer holidaymakers for two thousand a month. Even in winter it would attract arty types, who liked the rawness, the stern and brutal beauty of the West Penwith landscape. Why let it fall into ruin?