The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  But now Jackie was dead and Bronson's feelings had inevitably changed. He'd been trying – trying hard – to get closer to her, to spend more time with her, and so far Angela had done her best to keep him at arm's length. Before she would allow him to re-enter her life, she had to be absolutely sure that what had happened before would never be repeated, with anyone. And so far, she didn't feel she had that assurance.

  She shook her head and looked back at the photographs.

  'I was right,' she muttered to herself. 'It is Aramaic.'

  Angela could understand a little of the language, but there were several people working at the museum who were far better qualified than her to translate the ancient text. The obvious choice was Tony Baverstock, a senior member of staff and an ancient-language specialist, but he was far from being Angela's favourite colleague. She shrugged, picked up two of the printed photographs, and walked down the corridor to his office.

  'What do you want?' Baverstock demanded, as Angela knocked, walked in and stood in front of his extremely cluttered desk. He was a stocky, grizzled, bear-like individual in his late forties, who had the indefinably scruffy appearance common to bachelors everywhere.

  'And good morning to you, too, Tony,' Angela said sweetly. 'I'd like you to look at these two pictures.'

  'Why? What are they? I'm busy.'

  'This will only take you a few minutes. These are a couple of pretty poor photographs of a clay tablet. They're not good quality, and don't show the text – which is Aramaic, by the way – in enough detail to be fully translated. All I need from you is an indication of what the inscription is about. And if you could hazard a guess at its date, that could be useful.'

  Angela passed the pictures across the desk and, as Baverstock glanced at them, she thought she detected a glint of recognition in his eyes.

  'Have you seen it before?' she asked.

  'No,' he snapped, glancing up at her and then quickly dropping his gaze back to one of the images. 'You're right,' he said grudgingly. 'The text is a form of Aramaic. Leave these with me and I'll see what I can do.'

  Angela nodded and left the office.

  For a few minutes Baverstock just sat at his desk, staring at the two photographs. Then he glanced at his watch, opened a locked drawer and pulled out a small black notebook. He slipped it into his jacket pocket, left his office and walked out of the museum and down Great Russell Street until he came to a phone box.

  His call was answered on the fifth ring.

  'This is Tony,' Baverstock said. 'Another tablet's turned up.'

  16

  Alexander Dexter was reading a magazine article about antique clocks and didn't bother looking at his phone when the text came in. When he finally read it, he sat back and muttered a curse. It read: CH DML 13 CALL ME NOW.

  He noted the originating number, grabbed his car keys, bolted the shop door and spun round the sign so that 'CLOSED' was displayed. Then he took a pay-as-you-go mobile phone and its battery – he always removed the battery when he wasn't using it – from his desk drawer and walked out of the back door of his shop.

  Dexter ran a perfectly legitimate antiques business, one of several in the small Surrey town of Petworth, which had become known as something of a Mecca for antique dealers and buyers. He specialized in early clocks and chronometers, and small pieces of good furniture, though he would buy anything he thought he could make a profit on. His turnover was faithfully reported to the Inland Revenue on his tax return every year. His VAT returns were similarly accurate and he kept his books impeccably, recording every transaction, every purchase and every sale. The result of his meticulous care and attention to detail was that he'd never been audited by the Inland Revenue, and only once by a VAT inspector, and he didn't expect to receive a second visit any time soon.

  But Dexter had a second business, one that most of his customers – and certainly the tax authorities and the police – knew absolutely nothing about. He had assiduously built up an impressive list of wealthy clients who were always on the lookout for 'special' items, and who were unconcerned about their source, cost or provenance. These clients always paid in cash and never expected a receipt.

  He called himself a 'finder', although in truth Dexter was a handler of upmarket stolen property. Granted, the property was usually looted from unrecorded tombs and other rich sources of antiquities in Egypt, Africa, Asia and South America, rather than stolen from an individual, a private collection or a museum, but he was happy to handle those goods as well, if the price was right and the risk was sufficiently low.

  He walked round to the rear of his building, climbed into his 3-series BMW saloon and drove away. He stopped at a garage on the outskirts of Petworth, filled the tank and bought a copy of the Daily Mail, then drove about ten miles out of the town and pulled over in a lay-by.

  Dexter flipped through the newspaper until he reached page thirteen. He glanced at the slightly fuzzy picture and immediately began reading the article. Clay tablets were neither particularly rare nor very desirable, but that wasn't why he read what the Mail reporter had written with increasing excitement.

  He finished the article and shook his head. Clearly the family of the dead couple had been badly misinformed – or, more probably, not informed at all – about the likely value of the artefact. But this left one very obvious question: if the theory suggested by David Philips – the son-in-law – was correct, and the couple had been murdered as part of a robbery, why would the thieves leave such obviously juicy pickings as their cash and credit cards behind and just take an old clay tablet? It very much looked, Dexter mused, as if his client – a man named Charlie Hoxton, a brutal East End villain with a surprisingly sophisticated taste in antiques who had frankly terrified Dexter from the moment they'd first met – wasn't the only person who had recognized the possible significance of the tablet.

  He slipped the battery into place, switched on the mobile phone and dialled the number he'd written down.

  'You took your time.'

  'Sorry,' Dexter replied shortly. 'So what do you want me to do?'

  'You read the article?' Hoxton asked.

  'Yes.'

  'Then it should be obvious. Get that tablet for me.'

  'That could be difficult, but I might be able to get a picture of the inscription for you.'

  'Do that anyway, but I want the tablet itself. There might be something on the back or the sides, something the photographs don't show. You told me you had good contacts in Morocco, Dexter. Now's your chance to prove it.'

  'It'll be expensive.'

  'I don't care what it costs. Just do it.'

  Dexter switched off the mobile, started the BMW's engine, drove about five miles south to a pub and stopped in the far corner of the large car park. From his jacket pocket he removed a small notebook containing telephone numbers and the first names of people he occasionally employed, specialists in various fields. None of these numbers would ever have been found in any trade directory and all were disposable mobiles, their owners regularly updating him with their new numbers.

  He switched on the mobile again and opened his notebook.

  The moment he had a good signal, he dialled one of the numbers.

  'Yup.'

  'I've got a job for you,' Dexter said.

  'Keep talking.'

  'David and Kirsty Philips. They live somewhere in Canterbury, and they should be on the electoral roll or in the phone book. I need their computer.'

  'OK. How soon?'

  'As quickly as you can. Today, if possible. You're happy with the usual terms?'

  'Rates have gone up a bit,' the gruff voice at the other end said. 'It'll cost you a grand.'

  'Agreed,' Dexter said. 'And make it look good, will you?'

  Once he'd ended that call, Dexter drove another couple of miles before stopping the car and again consulting his notebook. He switched on the mobile and dialled another number, this one with a '212' prefix.

  'As-Salaam alaykum, Izzat. Kef halak?'


  Dexter's Arabic was workable, though not fluent, and his greeting was formal – 'peace be upon you' – followed by a more conversational 'how are you?' He'd learnt the language mainly because a lot of his 'special' customers wanted the kind of relics that were most often found in the Arab world, and it helped to be able to converse with sellers in their own tongue.

  'What do you want, Dexter?' The voice was deep and heavily accented, but the man's English was fluent.

  'How did you know it was me?'

  'Only one person in Britain knows this telephone number.'

  'Right. Listen, I've got a job for you.'

  For just over three minutes Dexter explained to Izzat Zebari what had happened and what he wanted him to do.

  'It won't be easy,' Zebari said.

  His reply was almost precisely what Dexter had anticipated. In fact, every job he could ever remember giving the man had produced exactly the same response from him.

  'I know. But can you do it?'

  'Well,' Zebari sounded doubtful, 'I suppose I could try my police contacts, see if they have any information.'

  'Izzat, I don't need to know how you're going to do it, only whether or not you can do it. I'll call you tonight, OK?'

  'Very well.'

  'Ma'a Salaama.'

  'Alla ysalmak. Goodbye.'

  * * *

  On the way back to Petworth, Dexter worked out what he would have to do next. He'd need to close his shop and fly out to Morocco as soon as he could. Zebari was fairly competent, but Dexter trusted almost nobody, and if the Moroccan did manage to find and recover the tablet, he wanted to be right there when it happened.

  To Dexter, the slightly blurred picture in the Mail was very familiar, because he'd sold an almost identical tablet to Charlie Hoxton about two years before. That tablet, if his recollection was correct, had been part of a box of relics one of his suppliers had 'liberated' from the storeroom of a museum in Cairo. Hoxton, he remembered, had been very keen to acquire any other tablets of the same type, because he believed that the tablet he had purchased had been part of a set.

  And it looked as if Hoxton had been right.

  17

  The two men in the scruffy white Ford Transit looked pretty much like delivery men anywhere. They were casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets, with grubby trainers on their feet, and they both looked fit and quite strong. In fact, they actually were delivery men for a small Kent company, but they had a second line of employment that provided the bulk of their income.

  In front of the driver, a satnav unit was attached to the windscreen with a sucker, which made the town plan that the man in the passenger seat was studying largely redundant. But while their first job was finding the right address in Canterbury, they also needed to identify their best route out of the housing estate and back on to a main road, and both men preferred to see the layout of the roads on a map rather than rely only on the satnav's small colour screen.

  'That's it,' the passenger said, pointing. 'The one on the left, with the Golf parked outside.'

  The driver pulled the van in to the side of the road and stopped about a hundred yards short of the property. 'Call the number again,' he instructed.

  The passenger pulled out a mobile phone, keyed a number and pressed a button. He listened for perhaps twenty seconds, then ended the call. 'Still no answer,' he said.

  'Right. We'll do it now.'

  The driver slipped the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. A few seconds later, he stopped directly outside the semi-detached house on the left and switched off the Ford's engine. The two men pulled on baseball caps, walked round to the back of the vehicle, opened the doors and picked up a large cardboard box from inside.

  They carried it between them up the path, past the Volkswagen in the drive, to the back door, and lowered it to the ground. Although a casual observer would have assumed the box was heavy, it was actually completely empty.

  The two men looked back towards the road, then glanced all round them. There was no bell, so the driver rapped on the glass panel in the back door. As he expected, there was no sound from inside the house, just as there'd been no response to their telephone call a couple of minutes earlier. After a moment he slipped a jemmy out of his jacket pocket, inserted the point between the door and the jamb beside the lock and levered firmly. With a sharp cracking sound, the lock gave and the door swung open.

  They picked up the cardboard box and stepped inside, then immediately split up, the driver going up the stairs while the other man began searching through the groundfloor rooms.

  'Up here. Give me a hand.'

  The second man ran up the stairs as his companion walked out of the study carrying the system unit of a desktop computer. 'Get the screen and keyboard and stuff,' the driver instructed.

  They placed the computer in the cardboard box, then trashed the place, ripping the covers off the beds, emptying all the wardrobes and drawers, and generally wrecking the house.

  'That should do it,' the driver said, looking around the chaos of the lounge.

  The two men walked back down the driveway to the road, again carrying the large cardboard box between them. They slid it into the load compartment of the Transit and climbed back into the cab. They'd just earned a total of five hundred pounds. Not bad for less than ten minutes' work, thought the driver as he turned the key in the ignition.

  Not bad at all.

  18

  'Angela? My office.'

  The summons from Tony Baverstock was, Angela thought, typical of the man: short to the point of being brusque, and completely lacking any of the usual social graces. When she went in, he was leaning comfortably back in his swivel chair, his feet up on one corner of the desk. The two photographs she'd given him were in front of him.

  'Any progress?' Angela asked.

  'Well, yes and no, really.'

  That was also typical Baverstock, Angela thought. He was an acknowledged expert at giving curved answers to straight questions.

  'In English, please,' she said, sitting down in one of his visitor's chairs.

  Baverstock grunted and leant forward. 'Right. As you guessed, the text is Aramaic, which is slightly unusual in itself. As you ought to know' – Angela's hackles rose at his thinly veiled implication of her lack of knowledge – 'the use of this type of tablet declined after the sixth century BC, simply because it was a lot easier to write cursive Aramaic on papyrus or parchment than inscribe the individual characters into clay. The even more unusual feature is that it's gibberish.'

  'Oh, for heaven's sake, Tony. In English, please.'

  'That is English. The stupid woman – I presume it was a female behind the camera – who took these pictures was clearly incompetent as a photographer. She's somehow managed to take two photographs of the upper surface of the tablet without ever managing to get more than about half of one line of the inscription actually in focus. A translation of the whole tablet is absolutely impossible and, from what I have been able to decipher, it would probably be a waste of time.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'What's on the tablet seems to be a series of Aramaic words. Their individual meanings are perfectly clear, but taken together they make no sense.' He pointed at the second of the six lines of characters on one of the pictures. 'This is the only line of the inscription that's anything like readable, and even then there's one word that's unclear. This word here – 'ar b 'a h – is the number four, which is simple enough. The word after it means "of", and three of the words that precede it translate as "tablets", "took" and "perform", so the sentence reads "perform took" another word, then "tablets four of". That's what I mean by gibberish. The words make sense, but the sentence doesn't. It's almost as if this was a piece of homework for a child, just a list of words selected at random.'

  'Is that what you think it is?'

  Baverstock shook his head. 'I didn't say that. I've seen a lot of Aramaic texts, and this looks to me like an adult hand because the letters are formed
with short, confident strokes. In my opinion, this was written by an educated adult male – don't forget, in this period women were usually illiterate, much like many of them are today,' he added waspishly.

  'Tony,' Angela warned.

  'Just a joke,' Baverstock said, though Angela knew that there was always an edge to his remarks about women. In her opinion, he was arrogant and pompous but essentially harmless, a closet misogynist who made little secret of the fact that he resented high-achieving women, and especially high-achieving women who were inconsiderate enough to combine beauty with their brains. Angela remembered a couple of occasions when he'd even had a pop at her, though both times she'd verbally slapped him down.

  Angela knew she wasn't beautiful in the classical sense, but her blonde hair and hazel eyes – and lips that Bronson always used to describe as 'lucky' – gave her a striking appearance. She almost invariably made an impression on men, an impression that tended to linger, and she knew Baverstock had resented her from day one.

  'What date are we talking about?' she asked.

  'This is Old Aramaic, which covers the period between about 1100 BC and AD 200.'

  'Come on, Tony. That's well over a thousand years. Can't you narrow it down a bit more than that?'

  Baverstock shook his head. 'Do you know anything about Aramaic?' he asked.

  'Not very much,' Angela admitted. 'I work with pottery and ceramics. I can recognize most ancient languages and read a few words in them but the only one I can translate or understand properly is Latin.'

  'Right, then. Let me give you a short lesson. Aramaic first appeared around 1,200 BC when a people later known as the Aramaeans first settled in an area called Aram, in upper Mesopotamia and Syria. It was apparently derived from Phoenician, and, like that language, it was read from right to left. Phoenician didn't have any letters for vowels, but the Aramaeans began using certain letters – principally 'aleph, he, waw and yodh – to indicate vowel sounds.