The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  But that was what she’d wanted – blackness – or she wouldn’t have attempted suicide in the first place. Did she really want to die? Karen turned and gazed out of the hospital window. She could see bare winter trees, and a lightly toppling snow, falling on Highgate Hill.

  Snow.

  Always the snow, how Karen hated the snow. Because the snow equalled memories of snowmen and snowballs and laughing with Eleanor and the twins in the snow, and that equalled a sadness so intense it threatened, right now, right here, to turn Karen inside out with grief.

  Indeed it was as if she was being sucked into nothingness, as if she was in a tumbling, broken spaceship with a gashed hole in the side; and the grief was that devouring nothingness beyond, sucking everything out of the spaceship. Pulling everything into the blackness. She had so nearly let go. So nearly let herself spin away and outside and into the silent, black, infinite space. Where her daughter had already gone.

  Karen leaned the other way and grabbed a tissue from a plain little cardboard box. As she did, she noticed the bandage on her forefinger, the traces of dried blood on cotton. Now she recalled how she had gnawed at her knuckles. Consumed by anguish.

  How long could she cry for? How long could this go on? How many tears did she have? Maybe she should refuse liquids, nil by mouth, then she would at least be unable to cry.

  Eleanor.

  No more tears. She cried. No more tears. She cried and sobbed.

  Karen tried to sit up but she felt pinned to the bed by the grief: the terrible sadness was a rapist, lying on top of her, knife to her pulsing neck. It gets worse, bitch. You think this is it? It will get worse.

  Eleanor.

  He will kill you, bitch, he will smell the fear in you. The devil is in him.

  Maybe the mad girl in the Bodmin asylum had been right. Rothley was the devil. He had smelled the fear in her.

  ‘Good morning?’

  The voice was kindly, and authoritative. A doctor approached, with stethoscope and white coat, and sat on the end of the bed. His label read DR HEPWORTH.

  He gazed at her. ‘So you’re awake. You had us all very worried.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen mumbled. ‘I’m so sorry … stupid.’

  ‘Well, that is a bit harsh. But, anyway … We’ll need to do some tests – you’ve been, you know, elsewhere for two days now.’

  ‘Two days?’

  Hepworth nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Quite delirious. We had to restrain you at one point.’

  ‘God, I’m just … sorry.’ Karen stared at the shape of herself under the hospital bedsheets. Her legs. Her stupid body.

  The doctor strode across, and came close. He shone a torchlight in both of her eyes, tilting her head back. He checked her pulse with two fingers. Then he sat down on the visitor’s chair, and frowned, and asked her a question: the capital of England.

  Karen mumbled, ‘London.’

  ‘The name of the prime minister?’

  She told him that, too.

  Hepworth nodded and jotted something on a clipboard. ‘OK. Four times ten.’

  ‘Forty.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He tapped the pen against his chin. Then said, ‘Repeat after me, penny lion Paris bicycle.’

  ‘Penny lion … Paris bicycle.’

  He wrote something down on the clipboard, as if he was actually writing, PENNY LION PARIS BICYCLE. ‘OK. Well. There it is.’ He frowned ‘We’ll need to do more tests but you seem compos mentis. This is very unusual of course, though not entirely unique.’ His frown softened. ‘I’m sure you must be pretty keen to see your family.’ He walked to the door and signalled down the corridor.

  ‘No,’ said Karen, desperate. ‘I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t. I can’t. I’ve already seen Eleanor, that’s my family, I’ve seen the body, please, I can’t—’

  The doctor swivelled. ‘Body? What are you talking about?’

  Karen gazed at him.

  She could hear footsteps running down the corridor. Light footsteps, running footsteps, a child’s running, happy footsteps, a little girl’s running steps. She saw a glimpse of blonde hair through the glass of the door. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, it surely wasn’t, surely not, it mustn’t be, it couldn’t be; could it be?

  Could it be?

  Could it be?

  The time and space surrounding her dwindled to a nothingness, and all that Karen was and all that Karen could be and all that Karen could ever be was Karen at this moment staring at the door and seeing the blonde hair and the smiling face and the little girl who leapt onto the bed, smiling, and hugging her. Hugging her mummy.

  ‘Eleanor?’ Karen’s voice had never been so cracked. Cracked with sadness, and a terrifying happiness. ‘Eleanor?’

  Her daughter was lying on the bed, hugging her mother. Karen could smell her hair. It was Eleanor. She was alive. Karen had no idea how, but she was alive.

  Now the tears came again, in their hundreds and thousands, and Karen didn’t care. For ten minutes she rocked her daughter in her arms, weeping with happiness, crying and laughing so loud that nurses from the next ward came to stand and stare, and smile, and one of the nurses cried as well, and Eleanor didn’t understand, and Karen didn’t want to tell her. She just stroked her daughter’s lovely, lovely, lovely blonde hair, and cried.

  Three hours later Dr Hepworth pronounced her fit and well – as far as he was able. Karen barely let go of Eleanor’s hand throughout the procedure. It was only when Julie and Alan and the twins had been in and out, and more tears had been shed, that she let Eleanor go and play with the twins. Even then Karen grimaced with anxiety. At the memory of her imagined yet very real terror.

  As soon as they had left the room, she turned to Boyle and Curtis, who had been waiting patiently. ‘So what happened to me, when did I start hallucinating?’

  DS Curtis shook his head, as if he didn’t know the answer, though he clearly did. ‘Soon after the discovery of the girl’s body in Chancery Lane, maybe ten minutes later. According to the site manager.’

  ‘Glover?’

  ‘Yeah, him: according to Glover you just dropped to the floor, like you had been drugged.’

  ‘Yet I haven’t been drugged, the tests show it.’ Karen frowned. She wanted to get going, get out of bed, get back to the case. Get back to living. ‘But … but the hallucinations were intense, just intense. Like the most lucid dream. Vivid detail. I imagined the abduction, I imagined case meetings, everything. I imagined Eleanor talking Latin. Yet it’s not a drug … What could do that?’

  Boyle was sitting on a chair in the far corner, but his voice filled the room. Confident and calm. ‘We think it is a mental parasite, that induces hallucinations. One of the symptoms is, as you know, biting the fingers.’

  Karen stared down at her bandaged finger. Then she looked at Boyle. ‘But I dreamed that I did this. So … I really did this – but in my sleep? In my coma?’

  ‘You really did it.’ Boyle nodded. ‘You had to be restrained.’

  ‘That’s what the girl did, in Chancery Lane, bite her fingers …’

  ‘Yes. Clearly she was suffering the same – what is the word? The scientists told me, the same parasitogenic delusions. Remember the strange red cake you found at Chancery Lane?’

  ‘Oh my God. I sniffed it.’

  ‘We don’t know if Rothley intended you to find it, or just left it by accident.’

  Karen worked it through. ‘So you had the cake examined, Pathology, right?’

  ‘Wait.’ Boyle came and looked her up and down, like a relieved but still-worried father. ‘We have discovered more.’

  ‘More?’

  The confusion was back. Karen gripped the bedsheets. A sudden terror that she might tip once more into hallucination, psychosis, overwhelmed her; but then she thought: Psychosis – that’s what happened to the girl at Bodmin. Except that Alicia Rothley’s psychosis was much worse, and more prolonged. She had never come round, never recovered.

  DS Curtis interr
upted her thoughts. ‘Karen, remember you told us to search every site that had ever been connected to Crowley? You were adamant: you said even if it’s been turned into a bloody car park, search it?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, we did. And your hunch was right, you were bang on. We searched and searched and eventually, yesterday, while you were in here, when you were, uh …’

  ‘Raving mad. And strapped to the bed?’

  Curtis smiled. ‘Yeah. When you were tripping out we finally found that there had been a Golden Dawn temple—’

  ‘Crowley’s cult.’

  ‘They had a temple, just off Howland Street, Fitzrovia, in an old Georgian townhouse. But it was bombed in the war and then it was shops and then last year they demolished that and built a brand-new office block, unoccupied for a year – economic conditions and all that – but of course, it wasn’t unoccupied.’

  ‘Rothley was there.’

  ‘He was in there all right.’

  The snow had stopped falling outside. A winter sun glimmered, feebly.

  Curtis went on. ‘We broke in straightaway, but we were too late, just a few minutes too late. Rothley must have had CCTV or something. He got out just in time to save his own sorry arse, but …’

  The new horror evolved. ‘He’d killed a child?’

  Boyle came back, crisp and emotionless. ‘Not yet. He’s abducted her. Zara Parkinson, eight years old. Daughter of Nick Parkinson. We found him, still alive, just about. He told us everything. Rothley had kidnapped them both, and tortured them.’ Boyle sighed. ‘It’s more of his so-called magic, I fear. Of course we are searching for the girl right now. We are hopeful we can save her. Rothley made mistakes, in his panic to escape with the girl. He left lots of evidence behind.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘For a start, his notes. He wrote everything down. He talks a lot about his – what do you call it? His grimoire. His book of magic, Abra-Melin. Apparently he believes that his version of Abra-Melin is the version. It’s from a town called Araki, somewhere in Egypt. Seems he bought it at auction a couple of years ago.’ Boyle frowned. ‘We’re having it translated, but we’ve already got a handle on these blood-cakes, the cake you sniffed. They are apparently called “incense of tears”.’

  Karen flinched.

  ‘That’s the term used in his notes. It appears Rothley makes these blood-cakes from all kinds of organic compounds. We found various test tubes and samples. And we know that parasites must be in the example of incense that you found, in Chancery Lane.’ Boyle put his police cap back on, getting ready to go. ‘Because, after you flaked out, we got the evidence straight to Pathology. So far they have isolated one organism which closely resembles Toxoplasma gondii, the feline parasite which attacks the brain and causes visions and delusions. So we’re pretty sure that your brief inhalation of the incense of tears was the culprit. That’s what pitched you into delirium for a few days.’

  ‘Kaz, if you’d actually eaten some,’ added Curtis, ‘you might have gone entirely nuts. Forever.’

  ‘Like the girl in Bodmin.’

  ‘Yeah.’ A brief silence ensued. Then Boyle showed her a photograph of a late-middle-aged man, suave and suntanned, and wearing the smile of discreet wealth. He looked like a Silicon Valley software mogul. Jeans in the office, but a yacht at Malibu.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Samuel Rani Herzog.’

  ‘He’s Jewish.’

  ‘You guessed. We found lots more of these photos in Rothley’s grim little factory of magic. Rothley even wrote the name of the man, in what appears to be rat’s blood, on the wall. With lots of curses.’

  ‘So who is Herzog?’

  ‘Lives in Israel. And London. A billionaire, made his money out of weapons – Israel has a thriving defence industry. In the last decade Herzog has developed an interest in bio-weaponry. Five years ago he was recruiting parasitologists and neurobiologists. An odd mix. Since then his research has become more secretive, or at least low profile. This jars with his social image: he is a man with good friends in high places.’

  Karen looked away. The snow had started again. Gentle, fairy-tale flakes. Settling on the near-dead branches of the winterbound trees. ‘Rothley was in Israel?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the connection. So now we’re looking for Herzog as well as Rothley. And of course the girl, Zara Parkinson.’ Boyle glanced at Curtis, and hurried on. ‘Herzog was last heard of in Israel, but he has many properties in England, and France and Egypt. A complex web. If he lands at any airport in the EU we’re going to trail him. We suspect he is doing experiments, using parasites. He must have recruited Rothley. But Rothley went rogue, and now Rothley hates Herzog. That is our best guess. What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Getting out of bed, what does it look like?’

  ‘But, Karen, you’ve just—’

  ‘What? I’ve just woken up. Now I want some coffee. And then I want to get back to work. We have to save this girl, right?’

  47

  Egypt

  Ryan’s sickness and blindness worsened: by the evening he was slipping in and out of delirium. Sometimes he was lucid and calm, sometimes the parasite bit deep into his soul and the madness surged.

  And the worst of it was that he enjoyed the madness. Because when he was mad he believed. As he stared through the porthole at the shining, hazy waters of the Nile he felt an influx of something, something greater than himself, a brilliance in the singing air, a surging oceanic beauty, supporting him. He felt the absolute conviction that God existed. It was all so true. It all made sense. Parasite or not, there was potent and emotional meaning to everything. It all mattered, it was all part of a plan, impossible to know yet irresistibly true. And death was a subtext. Just part of the whole, a mere petal of the rose.

  Ryan nearly cried. Tears sprang to his eyes as he thought of his wife and their dead child and for the first time ever this did not make him sad. Rhiannon. He knew it was the parasite but it didn’t matter. Helen stared at him and he loved her too, but it didn’t matter.

  ‘Lie back, Ryan. Lie down. Please.’ She pressed a T-shirt, soaked in cold water, to his sweating forehead, as he collapsed onto the bed again.

  The hours of darkness passed, in sweated madness, and then in calm. When the lucid hours arrived he thought the problem through. It was obvious that he and Albert had been infected by the same brain parasite that induced religious fervour: therefore he pillaged his memories of the last weeks to work out where. Luxor? Aswan? Philae? Bubastis?

  Bubastis seemed the most likely. All those revolting cat mummies. But then he remembered Albert hadn’t been down into the tunnels.

  Helen had drifted into asleep, next to him. A frown darkened her beautiful face, as she dreamed. Gently, he stroked the pale curve of her neck. He loved her. He knew that. And if he loved her he had to let her go: he’d already worked that out, as well. If she stayed with him she was doomed.

  By dawn, or maybe sooner, before the next attack of madness, he had to decide how they’d separate. Probably his only option was to take himself to a hospital, which meant certain arrest by the Egyptians, and possible murder by the Israelis: it meant the End. And there was no guarantee Helen would survive even when they did split.

  ‘Mr Harper?’

  An American voice? Outside the cabin?

  Ryan stood, and grabbed a Swiss Army knife. Unjacking the little blade, he opened the door.

  A white-toothed, rich-looking, middle-aged man stood there. He had a tiny diamond stud in his ear. Gazing down at the pitiful little pocket knife in Ryan’s hand, he said, ‘Not sure that’s going to liberate you from the entire Egyptian army.’

  Behind him stood two other men, types Ryan now recognized: the surfer-dude soldier. Military boots, pricey tattoos, evident muscles, sunglasses at night. And beyond them all was the purser, wearing the nervous-yet-contented smile of a man who has been recently and lavishly bribed.

  The rich guy spoke. ‘I am Samuel Herzog. And that
is …’ He peered over Ryan’s shoulder. ‘That’s Helen Fassbinder, isn’t it? And one of you is infected? Or both?’

  Ryan shook his head, but the lie was evidently feeble. He wasn’t even sure why he was lying.

  ‘Ah. It’s you isn’t it? You are infected?’ The man smiled quietly. ‘Then we better be quick. The cycling between mental states is increasingly rapid as the illness takes hold. You are clear-headed now?’

  Ryan nodded. Mute but truthful.

  ‘Good. We need to be good and honest friends – we really need each other. I have a car on the dock, and a private plane at Luxor Airport; there are two nurses on the plane.’ His smile was dazzling: quite perfect. ‘Come to England with me and we can save your life. You can’t really go to Sohag Hospital, can you? They’d have no idea what to do. They’d probably feed you Tylenol and let you die like a toilet rat.’

  Ryan looked from Herzog to Helen, sleeping on the cabin bed. He didn’t trust this man, but he was also dying; what could he do? Perhaps the man could save them both. ‘I need to know more.’

  ‘Let’s go on deck. My guys will watch over Helen.’

  Ryan followed him to the deck of the boat. Where the eternal stars admired their faint reflection in the dark Nile waters. The river-haze was there, but it hadn’t worsened. His blindness had plateaued; the fever of faith had abated. But he knew it would return.

  Herzog spoke first. ‘Here’s what I do. I make weapons, and I sell them. I have always been interested in new weapons, especially bio-weaponry: the future. I have excellent resources. And I have been following your situation for a while. Very closely. And that is why I sent my soldiers to protect you.’

  ‘Soldiers?’

  Herzog nodded. ‘My soldiers of fortune. Ex-SAS, ex-Navy Seals. They take big risks, because they need the money. I choose guys with debts and problems, and I pay them Homeric bucks. I told them to watch your back because I wanted to see if you, Ryan Harper, probably the globe’s most gifted Egyptologist after Sassoon, despite your early retirement, could decode the Sokar documents. And prove my thesis.’