The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  ‘This way!’ said Hanna, using his cellphone flashlight to illuminate the unpainted, unplastered, utilitarian tunnel with its ancient chisel marks showing on the walls. ‘And here, hurry, yes, along here.’

  ‘But they will follow us,’ Ryan panted.

  ‘No,’ Hanna said. He flashed the light left, then right, in an explanatory fashion: the light exposed more tunnels, branching off into silent darkness. He was right, it was an enormous labyrinth, and now Hanna was taking them on a mazy, zigzagging route – making them unfollowable, as long as Callum bought them just a few minutes. Probably with his life.

  There was no time for guilt.

  ‘Ryannn …’ Helen was moaning, her head lolling; she was semi-conscious with pain. Her blood dripped down Ryan’s shirt.

  He hoisted her close, feeling her heartbeat through her damp shirt.

  ‘These tunnels were built by the workmen who constructed the tombs,’ Hanna explained as they struggled on. ‘They were also used by thieves. Only the local guides really know them well. When I worked here we’d take a hundred dollars from the very bravest tourists—’

  Noises echoed, bouncing down the dark and indifferent corridors. Distant, yet menacing.

  ‘They’re in the tunnels,’ said Ryan. ‘They’re coming – Callum must be dead. They’re coming.’

  ‘They will not find us.’ Hanna calmed him with a gesture. ‘Trust me, please. I know this maze better than most. The most obvious routes go to Hatshepsut’s temple, and to Medinet Habu … we would have to be so very unlucky.’ He turned, his eyes dark in the darkness. ‘How is Helen?’

  Helen was a sagging weight around Ryan’s shoulders; almost a dead weight. He could sense her strength ebbing – she was being dragged under, by death. Ryan despaired. It was as if the Tomb of Ramose had infected her with death: all these mummies, all these coffins, all this Egyptian obsession with death, it was contagious.

  The Egyptians were right: life was just a factory for making souls. They were all like the cats of rancid Bubastis, bred specifically to die, so what was the point?

  The point was to live just one more hour. The point was to save Helen.

  Ryan Harper did this.

  He fought to focus so that he could help her. Once more he hoisted Helen, her limp arm over his shoulder, following the diminishing and barely illuminated figure of Albert Hanna. The noises echoed down the tunnels again. Faraway yet ominous. If death was caged in these rocks, so were they.

  ‘Here, my friend, mon brave, not far now.’

  The tunnel made another bewildering series of U-turns, junctions and dead ends, and then it switchbacked left and right and Helen groaned, and that was good, because it meant she was alive. But Ryan could feel the sweat from her body through his moist and bloodied shirt. A fever was rising inside her: they needed a hospital. If they escaped this labyrinth of cold stone, and bitter darkness, they’d need to get her proper medical care to have the bullet extracted. But how could they do that without alerting everyone – the authorities, the Israelis?

  ‘This is it.’ Hanna pointed to a wooden ladder, grey and ghostly in the dark. He climbed first, and pushed a trapdoor.

  Ryan gazed up earnestly, hoping to see sky above … but there was just more musty darkness. Where were they? He glimpsed dim hieroglyphs.

  Albert reached down as Ryan lifted Helen upwards; somehow they got her up and out, and Ryan quickly followed. He breathed the dank, clammy, unmistakeable air of what was surely another tomb; his life, it seemed, was now a series of tombs.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The Tomb of Ay, successor to Tutankhamun,’ Hanna said. ‘Most remote of the tombs in the Western Valley. Quickly now, I know a place we can take Helen. St Tawdros. No one ever goes there.’

  Ryan stared around at the stone chamber. The walls were decorated with scenes of hunting, and feasting, and the twelve baboons from the Book of Amduat. The centre of the chamber was dominated by a small, papery mummy, perfectly preserved in a glass box on a quartzite dais.

  He looked again at the mummy. ‘That’s not Ay.’

  Albert was already on the ramp that led out of the tomb.

  ‘No, it is Tiye. She was moved here some months ago because of the Akhmim connection. They are restoring her tomb in KV. Come, quick—’

  But Ryan didn’t respond. Momentarily, he was transfixed. The Akhmim connection? Ay was from Akhmim. Queen Tiye was from Akhmim. And Tiye was the mother of Akhenaten, maybe the mother of Tutankhamun. All from Akhmim? This heretic family of monotheists.

  He gazed at the mummy.

  Even in the darkness, her vile and preserved little corpse showed the same curious, extraterrestrial head shape of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The elongated cranium. Yet the corpse was tiny. Like the unexpected shortness of a movie star, encountered in the flesh. What were these people?

  ‘Aiii.’ Helen was moaning in pain.

  Ryan swore aloud at his selfishness: even as Helen was bleeding, he was trying to work out the puzzle. Hauling her dead weight, once again, he followed Albert as the Copt led them up the dark stone ramp. At last they pushed open a broken wooden door and he was breathing the fresh, dulcet air of the desert night.

  The landscape was nothing but rocks and sand, lit by stars; and a beaten-up road leading down an incline. Very distant city lights must surely be Luxor.

  Albert came close and lifted Helen’s face by her chin. Her eyes were shut and she was trembling with pain and fever. ‘It is very bad. But there are nuns there, they can help—’

  ‘We need a damn hospital, Albert.’

  His shrug was eloquent. ‘You know that is not a choice. They will have seen the blood – they will be well aware one of us is wounded. Every hospital and doctor for miles will be monitored.’ He sighed, and detached himself, and walked up the hill. ‘Come, my friends, let us throw ourselves at the mercy of St Didymus the Blind. It is only one or two miles – we must be mountaineers.’

  It was only one or two miles of hell. First, up the hill, out of the side-valley, an ascent of pure pain; then, down a rubbly road, carrying an almost comatose Helen, who was seeping blood all the while. Halfway there, Albert took Helen’s other arm, slung it over his neck, and together the two men helped her along, unspeaking and grim, until they reached a tiny crop of buildings, silent under the Pleiades.

  ‘I will speak with the abbot.’

  Hanna disappeared. Ryan leaned against a rock. Helen murmured, ‘Warum … Wo ist …’ Then she fell into a feverish sleep.

  They had arrived at the humblest of Coptic villages, just a tiny group of adobe houses surrounding a mud-brick monastery, lost in the starlit Theban desert. Albert was right: they were in the epicentre of nowhere. This was a good place to hide out, if Helen could survive without proper medical care.

  Hushed and worried voices disturbed the stillness. A trio of nuns emerged, in black habits, accompanied by Albert, hurrying from the wooden gate of the monastery, St Tawdros. The nuns approached Ryan with compassionate smiles, then they took Helen in their arms. One of them had a flashlight, which she shone on Helen’s face, then on her bleeding wound.

  This nun shook her head, and gazed at Ryan. Her Arabic was soft. ‘I fear we are too late, I am sorry.’

  33

  London

  The Incident Room at New Scotland Yard was deserted. Apart from Chief Superintendent David Boyle and Karen Trevithick.

  CS Boyle had guided Karen through her career and was certainly something of a father figure to her; Karen had lost her dad quite young. So she didn’t remotely mind when he put an arm around her shoulder. And he didn’t mind when she shed two or three quiet tears. Again.

  Throughout the day she had been sneaking off to do her crying – like Curtis taking cigarette breaks. Now the working day was over she could cry in the office.

  Luke will rape you. Luke will smell your fear.

  Grabbing a tissue from a box on the desk, she wiped and dabbed, angry at herself for giving in once more to emoti
on. She might be a mother with a disappeared child, that child might even have been kidnapped by a murderer, but she was also a police officer, a Detective Chief Inspector. She could solve this.

  But how? For the first time in her life the mysteries overwhelmed her. Maybe she should take CS Boyle’s offer and remove herself from the case?

  The idea was absurd. Wiping away the last tear, she said, ‘We’ve got nowhere, have we?’

  Boyle crossed to the whiteboard. He was nearly fifty, more grey than not, and she trusted him implicitly in almost every way; she trusted him to give her the unsugared truth.

  ‘No, we haven’t. It’s bizarre, frankly. Let’s try it one more time.’

  Picking up a marker-pen, he wrote the word ENTRY at the top, followed by a big, flourishing question mark. ‘If Rothley is responsible, how did he get into your flat? Your cousin Alan wouldn’t have opened the door to a stranger, would he?’

  ‘No.’

  Boyle nodded, and lifted the pen. The buttons on his uniform, unusually, needed polishing. He was recently divorced. Karen idly wondered if the two things were connected. She was doing a lot of idle wondering today, anything to keep her mind off the girl buried alive under the floorboards. Would that happen to Eleanor? What could this guy do to her? Put her in a coffin and …

  To her great relief, Boyle interrupted her meditations. ‘So he didn’t break in, and your cousin Alan wouldn’t let him in, and yet he was in there, judging by the little birds.’

  ‘That’s about it. Yes.’

  ‘Doesn’t add up, Karen, just doesn’t add up.’ Boyle vigorously crossed out the word ENTRY.

  Now he wrote underneath it, KIDNAP.

  ‘Very well. Let’s move on. Let’s say he got in somehow. Now what? He’s in the flat, and he is intending to – we presume …’ Boyle’s eyes were full of pity, but determination, too. ‘His intention is to kidnap Alan and your daughter Eleanor.’

  Karen resisted the urge to speak. In case she wailed.

  ‘Yet we have no signs of struggle in your house. No upturned furniture, no evidence of resistance, no noises reported by the neighbours. Alan is, as I understand it, hardly the sort of guy to just give up and calmly let a stranger take him, and his niece.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Therefore?’

  ‘Rothley had a weapon.’

  Boyle nodded. ‘Either a gun, or a big knife at least. Probably a gun. Or Alan would have fought. He plays rugby, right? But there is a further mystery here.’ Boyle put brackets around the word KIDNAP, and then a big question mark after it.

  ‘We have not even the slightest trace evidence of Rothley being in your flat: no prints, no footprints, nil. Apart from, as I say, the birds.’

  Karen gazed at the whiteboard, eyes blurred. In her mind she could see Eleanor running into her arms, she could smell her daughter’s hair, see the toys she played with in the bath. She could taste the soup she made and they shared; she could see Eleanor laughing and jumping on the bed, seeing how high she could jump, with the twins.

  The sobs came suddenly and this time were staggering in their ferocity. Doubling her over like a punch to the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. This was something new: it was the reality that gripped her, the terrible reality that this evening when she went home, Eleanor wouldn’t be there. The flat would be silent. The little bedroom unoccupied. Karen would sit there alone in her living room, staring at a switched-off TV.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said, plucking uselessly at a tissue, as if paper could staunch her grief. ‘I’m sorry.’

  David Boyle came over and gave Karen another fatherly pat on the back.

  Karen wished, right now, that she had a husband. She desperately wished she had a husband. She should have married. It was all her fault. If she’d married the father like a normal woman, none of this would have happened: but she’d had a fling, and she’d known it was a fling, and it was her idea not to use anything because she wanted a baby, but she didn’t want a husband, and the guy was sweet and funny and smart and Australian. It was all perfect, if you wanted to be a single mother: the father existed and he was nice but he was elsewhere. That meant she could be Karen Trevithick, she could keep her name, and her career, but also have a baby, and be a mother, and yet remain independent: she could have it all. And now, because she had wanted it all, because she had refused to get married, she had lost everything.

  Karen was so deep into despair and self-loathing and guilt she didn’t realize Boyle was talking, but when she came back to herself, he was writing on the whiteboard again.

  SUSPECT.

  ‘What do we know about Rothley?’ Boyle put a question mark next to the word.

  SUSPECT?

  ‘Not much,’ Karen mumbled.

  CS Boyle nodded. ‘That’s putting it mildly. Again, there is a striking lack of evidence. We know he was in Israel, then he apparently turns up in England, but we don’t know how or why. He has money, but we don’t know how or where he got it. He got a group of people to burn a truckload of cats. Where? How? Why?’ Boyle was pacing now, back and forth. ‘One of his accomplices kills himself. We don’t know why, or who he is. He kills a young woman in Chancery Lane. We don’t know how, or who she is. She even bites off her own fingers, and we don’t know why: if he somehow persuaded her to do it, or what. Again, with no struggle at all. We know nothing. We don’t even know how and why he got your address. It’s absurd.’

  ‘Not quite nothing,’ Karen said. ‘We have tracked down one of Alicia Rothley’s friends, who said Alicia was acting very strangely in the last few months. Going off on her own, seeing someone unknown.’

  ‘Presumably her brother, yes. Preparing the ritual, the month in Cornwall.’

  ‘The magical stuff. We also know Rothley was apparently re-enacting everything Crowley did.’

  Not quite everything, came the voice in Karen’s mind. He is trying to complete the magic by doing the one thing Crowley didn’t: sacrifice a child.

  The sob choked in her throat. Boyle gazed at the whiteboard, apparently thinking along the same lines, but unable to articulate it. ‘If he has … ah …’ He coughed. ‘We … we know he is trying to do this Crowley magic – this could be our way in.’

  Boyle wrote the word CROWLEY on the whiteboard, and drew a large circle around it. The pen squealed against the board in the empty evening silence of the office.

  ‘Crowley is our way in. We need to go back to the internet. Rothley must have recruited on the internet.’

  ‘But there are dozens of sites dedicated to Crowley, and his world. The occult, Thelema, sex-magic, Crowleyana. All that.’

  Boyle shook his head. ‘So we check them all. I know your team have gone through this, but we need to go through it again.’

  CS Boyle gazed past her shoulder, as if seeing the solution written on the wall behind, among the photos of the dead girl in Chancery Lane, the gashed face of the suicide in Cornwall.

  ‘We’re missing something. Tomorrow morning, hell, tonight maybe, we get the best bloody expert on this Crowley lunatic in here, and we give him seventeen coffees, and we threaten him with a brick over his head, and we find the forums or sites where Rothley must have got his disciples. We will find it, Karen. We will find this bastard.’ Boyle walked to the coffee machine and poured two cups of overstewed coffee. ‘You know, if I was an idiot I’d say there is something, rather … well, haunting about this. The way Rothley magics himself into the flat, and spirits your daughter off. The way he appears and disappears. It’s unworldly. But I don’t believe in spells and witches. He has some shtick. Let’s pin it down.’ He handed one coffee to Karen, then sipped his own, wincing at the heat of the drink. ‘That said, we know that he believes in this ludicrous magic. The Abra …’

  ‘Abra-Melin ritual.’

  ‘Yes. And it’s complex, yes? Challenging and very complex?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So. If he is preparing some ghastly ritual, Karen, with … uh, with your daughter, i
t is going to take him time, it must take him time, which means we have time, we have time to find Eleanor.’

  For maybe two minutes Karen felt a sliver of optimism, but once Boyle had left the office and she was alone in the room, the shuddering fear and guilt came dancing back in, mocking her.

  Atha atha atharim.

  Karen needed to get out. She was staying with Julie tonight, but she had to go back to her flat first. But there was no way she was lingering in that flat, not without Eleanor. And, moreover, she and Julie shared this misery: Julie’s husband was also missing.

  Out on the cold London streets a few infant flakes of snow were falling. Eleanor loved snow.

  Karen made for the bustle of the Tube and the last of the rush hour; she wanted the crowds and the crush, she wanted to be just a normal person on a Northern Line train, reading a paper, nodding to sleep, chatting with a friend. Not a mother with a stolen child.

  But on the Tube, people looked at her. At her red eyes. Could they tell? Karen exited the Tube at East Finchley with a small sense of relief and began the freezing walk home. As she did, her mobile shivered in her pocket. A message. Voicemail.

  Her hopes leapt. A breakthrough? They’d found the house? They’d found Rothley? She clamped the phone to her ear. The voice was unmistakeable and it sent a spear of polluted ice into her heart.

  ‘Mummy Mummy Mummy he is going to hurt me Mummy Mummy he is he is I’m scared Mummy Mummy please he is he is hurting me Mummy!’

  The voice of her daughter ended there. Abruptly. How had he silenced her? Then, in the background, she heard a man’s voice. Like a serene growling. An arrogant incantation.

  ‘Ananias, Azarias, Lazarius.’

  Then Eleanor screamed, and the voicemail ended.

  Karen fell to her knees, then crumpled to the freezing pavement, quite broken. Snowflakes dissolved on her face, and in her mouth; she could taste their sad and silvery melting.