The Seventh Scroll tes-2

by Wilbur Smith

As soon as she was alone in her single room she phoned British Airways

  reservations. There was a flight to Heathrow the following morning at

  ten 'clock. She booked a one-way economy seat and gave them the number

  of her Mastercard.

  It was after six 'clock by then, but the time difference between Egypt

  and the UK meant that it would still be office hours there. She looked

  up the number in her notebook. Leeds University was where she had

  completed her studies. Her call was answered on the third ring.

  "Archaeology Department. Professor Dixon's office," said a prim English

  schoolmarm voice.

  :Is that you, Miss Higgins?"

  Yes, it is. To whom am I speaking?"

  "It's Royan. Royan Al Simma, who used to be Royan Said :, Royan! We

  haven't heard from you for an absolute age. How are your They chatted

  for a short while, but Royan was aware of the cost of the call. "Is the

  Prof in?" she cut it short.

  Professor Percival Dixon was over seventy and should have retired years

  ago. "Royan, is it really you? My favourite student." She smiled. Even

  at his age he was still the randy old goat. All the pretty ones were his

  favourite students.

  "This is an international call, Prof. I just want to know if the offer

  is still open."

  "My goodness, I thought you said that you couldn't fit us in, whatr

  "Change of circumstances. I'll tell you about it when I see you, if I

  see you."

  "Of course, we' love to have you come and talk to us.

  When can you manage to get awayr

  "I'll be in England tomorrow."

  'my goodness, that's a bit sudden. Don't know if we can arrange it that

  quickly."

  "I will be staying with my mother near York. Put me back to Miss Higgins

  and I will give her the telephone number." He was one of the most

  brilliant men she knew, but she didn't trust him to write down a

  telephone number correctly. "I'll call you in a few days' time."

  She hung up and lay back on the bed. She was exhausted and her arm was

  still hurting, but she tried to lay her plans to cover all

  eventualities.

  Two months ago Prof Dixon had invited her to lecture on the discovery

  and excavation of the tomb of Queen Lostris,. and the discovery of the

  scrolls. It was that book, of course, and more especially the footnote

  at the end of it, that had alerted him. Its publication had caused a

  great deal of interest. They had received enquiries from Egyptologists,

  both amateur and professional, all around the world, some from as far

  afield as Tokyo and Nairobi, all of them questioning the authenticity of

  the novel and the factual basis behind it.

  At the time she had opposed letting a writer of fiction have access to

  the transcriptions, especially as they had not been completed. She felt

  that the whole thing had reduced what should have been an important and

  serious academic subject to the level of popular entertainment, rather

  like what Spielberg had done to palaeontology with his park full of

  dinosaurs.

  In the end her voice had been over-ruled. Even Duraid had sided against

  her. It had been the money, of course. The department was always short

  of funds to conduct its less spectacular work. When it came to some

  grandiose scheme like moving the entire Temple of Abu Simbel to a new

  site above the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam, then the nations of

  the world had poured in tens of millions of dollars. However, the

  day-to'day operational expenses of the department attracted no such

  support.

  Their half share of the royalties from River God, for that was the

  book's title, had financed almost a year of research and exploration,

  but that was not enough to allay Royan's personal misgivings. The author

  had taken too many liberties with the facts contained in the scrolls,

  and had embroidered historical characters with personalities and foibles

  for which there was not the least evidence. In particular she felt he

  had portrayed Taita, the ancient scribe, as a braggart and a

  vainglorious poseur. She resented that.

  in fairness she was forced to concede that the author's brief had been

  to make the facts as palatable and readable as possible to a wide lay

  public, and she reluctantly agreed that he had succeeded in doing so.

  However, all her scientific training revolted against such a

  popularization of something so unique and wonderful.

  But she sighed and put these thoughts out of her head.

  The damage was done, and thinking about it only served to irritate her.

  She turned her thoughts to more pressing problems. If she was to do the

  lecture that the Prof had invited her to deliver, then she would need

  her slides and these were still at her office in the museum. While she

  was still working out the best way to get hold of them without fetching

  them in Person, exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep, still fully

  clothed, on top of the bed.

  the end the solution to her problem was simplicity itself. She merely

  phoned the administration office and arranged for them to collect the

  box of slides from her office and send it out to the airport in a taxi

  with one of the secretaries.

  When the secretary handed them over to her at the British Airways

  check'in desk, he told her, "The police were at the Museum when we

  opened this morning. They wanted to speak to you, Doctor."

  Obviously they had traced the registration of the wrecked Renault. She

  was pleased that she had her British Passport. If she had tried to leave

  the country with her Egyptian papers she might have run into delays: the

  police would probably have placed a restriction order on all passport

  control points. As it was, she passed through the checkpoint with no

  difficulty and, once she was in.the final departure lounge, she went to

  the news-stand and studied the array of newspapers.

  All the local newspapers carried the story of the bombing of her car,

  and most of them had resurrected the story of Duraid's murder and linked

  the two events. One of them hinted at fundamentalist religious

  involvement. El Arab had a front-page photograph of herself and Duraid,

  which had been taken the previous month at a reception for a group of

  visiting French tour operators.

  It gave her a pang to see the photograph of her husband looking so

  handsome and distinguished, with herself on his arm smiling up at him.

  She purchased copies of all the papers and took them on board the

  British Airways flight.

  During the flight she passed the time by writing down in her notebook

  everything she could remember from what Duraid had told her of the man

  that she was going to find..

  She headed the page: "Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper (Bart)." Duraid had

  told her that Nicholas's great-grand, father had been awarded the title

  of baronet for his work as a career officer in the British colonial

  service. For three generations the family had maintained the strongest

  of ties with Africa, and especially with the British colonies and

  spheres of influence in North Africa: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and

  Keny
a.

  According to Duraid, Sir Nicholas himself had served in Africa and the

  Gulf States with the British army. He was a fluent Arabic and Swahili

  speaker and a noted amateur archaeologist and zoologist. Like his

  father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had made

  numerous expeditions to North Africa to collect specimens and to explore

  the more remote regions. He had written a number of articles for various

  scientific journals and had even lectured at the Royal Geographical

  Society.

  When his elder brother died childless, Sir Nicholas had inherited the

  title and the family estate at Quenton Park. He had resigned from the

  army to run the estate, but more especially to supervise the family

  museum that had been started in 1885 by his great-grandfather, the first

  baronet. It housed one of the largest collections of African fauna in

  private hands, and its ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collection of

  artefacts was equally famous.

  However, from Duraid's accounts she concluded that there must be a wild,

  and even lawless, streak in Sir Nicholas's nature. It was obvious that

  he was not afraid to take some extraordinary risks to add to the

  collection at Quenton Park.

  Duraid had first met him a number of years previously, when Sir Nicholas

  had recruited him to act as an intelligence officer for an illicit

  expedition to "liberate' a number of Punic bronze castings from

  Gadaffi's Libya. Sir Nicholas had sold some of these to defray the

  expenses of the expedition, but had kept the best of them for his

  private collection.

  More recently there had been another expedition, this time involving an

  illegal crossing of the Iraqi border to bring out a pair of stone

  has-relief friezes from under Saddam Hussein's nose. Duraid had told her

  that Sir Nicholas had sold one of the pair for a huge amount of money;

  he had mentioned the sum of five million US dollars. Duraid said that he

  had used the money for the running of the museum, but that the second

  frieze, the finest of the pair, was still in Sir Nicholas's possession.

  Both these expeditions had taken place years before Royan had met

  Duraid, and she wondered idly at Duraid's readiness to commit himself to

  the Englishman in this way.

  Sir Nicholas must have had unique powers of persuasion, for if they had

  been apprehended in the act there was no doubt that it would have meant

  summary execution for both of them.

  As Duraid had explained to her, on each occasion it was only Nicholas's

  resourcefulness and his network of friends and admirers across the

  Middle East and North Africa, which he had been able to call on for

  help, that had seen them through.

  "He is a bit of a devil," Duraid had shaken his head with evident

  nostalgia at the memory, "but the man to have with you when things are

  tough. Those days were all very exciting, but when I look back on it now

  I shudder at the risks we took."

  She had often pondered on the risks that a true inthe-blood collector

  was prepared to take to slake his passion. The risk seemed to be out of

  proportion to the reward, when it came to adding to his accumulations;

  and then she smiled at her own pious sentiments. The venture that she

  hoped to lead Sir Nicholas into was not exactly without risk, and she

  supposed that a circumlocution of lawyers might debate the legality of

  it endlessly.

  Still smiling, she fell asleep, for the strain of these last few days

  had taken their toll. The air hostess woke her with an admonition to

  fasten her seat-belt for the landing at Heathrow.

  an phoned her mother from the airport.

  ello, Mummy. It's me."

  "Yes, I know that. Where are you, love?" Her mother sounded as

  unflappable as ever. -'At Heathrow. I am coming up to stay with you for

  a while. Is that all right?"

  "Lumley's and ," her mother chuckled. "I'll go and make your bed. What

  train will you be coming up on?"

  "I had a look at the timetable. There is one from King's Cross that will

  get me into York at seven this evening."

  "I'll meet you at the station. What happened? Did you and Duraid have a

  tiff? Old enough to be your father. I said it wouldn't work."

  Royan was silent for a moment. This was hardly the time for

  explanations. "I'll tell you all about it when I see you this evening."

  Georgina Lumley, her mother, was waiting on the platform in the gloom

  and cold of the November evening, bulky and solid in her old green

  Barbour coat with Magic, her cocker spaniel, sitting obediently at her

  feet. The two of them made an inseparable pair, even when they were not

  winning field trials cups. For Royan they painted a comforting and

  familiar picture of the English side of her lineage.

  Georgina kissed Royan's cheek in a perfunctory manner. "Never was one

  for all that sentimental fiddle, faddle," she often said with

  satisfaction, and she took one of Royan's bags and led the way to the

  old mud-splattered Land Rover in the car park.

  Magic sniffed Royan's hand and wagged his tail in recognition. Then in a

  dignified and condescending manner he allowed her to pat his head, but

  like his mistress he was no great sentimentalist either.

  . They drove in silence for a while and Georgina lit a cigarette. "So

  what happened to Duraid, then?"

  For a minute Royan could not reply, and then the floodgates within her

  burst and she let it all come pouring out. It was a twenty-minute drive

  north of York to the little village of Brandsbury, and Royan talked all

  the way.

  Her mother made only small sounds of encouragement and comfort, and when

  Royan wept as she related the details of Duraid's death and funeral,

  Georgina reached across and patted her daughter's hand.

  It was all over by the time they reached her mother's cottage in the

  village. Royan had cried it out and was dryeyed and rational again as

  they ate the dinner that her mother had prepared and left in the oven

  for them. Royan could not remember when last she had tasted steak and

  kidney pie.

  "So what are you going to do now?" Georgina asked as she poured what

  remained in the black bottle of Guinness into her own glass.

  "To tell the truth, I don't know." As she said it, Royan wondered

  ruefully why so many people used that particular phrase to introduce a

  lie. "I have six months' leave from the museum, and Prof Dixon has

  arranged for me to give a lecture at the university. That is as far as

  it goes for the moment."

  "Well," said Georgina as she stood up, "there is a hotwater bottle in

  your bed and your room is there for as long as you wish to stay." From

  her that was as good as a passionate declaration of maternal love.

  Over the next few days Royan arranged her slides and notes for the

  lectures, and each afternoon she accompanied Georgina and Magic on their

  long walks over the surrounding countryside.

  "Do you know Quenton Park?" she asked her mother during one of these

  rambles.

  "Rather," Georgina replied enthusiastically. "Magic and I pick up there

  fou
r or five times a season. First-class shoot. Some of the best

  pheasant and woodcock in Yorkshire. One drive there called the High

  Larches which is notorious. Birds so high they baffle the best shots in

  England."

  "Do you know the owner, Sir Nicholas Quenton Harper?" Royan asked.

  "Seen him at the shoots. Don't know him. Good shot, though," Georgina

  replied. "Knew his papa in the old days before I married your father."

  She smiled in a suggestive way that startled Royan. "Good dancer. We

  danced a few jigs together, not only on the dance floor."

  "Mummy, you are outrageous!'Royan laughed.

  "Used to be," Georgina agreed readily. "Don't get many opportunities

  these days."

  "When are you and Magic going to Quenton Park again?"

  "Two weeks' time."

  "May I come with you?"

  "Of course - the keeper is always looking for beaters.

  Twenty quid and lunch with a bottle of beer for the day." She stopped

  and looked at her daughter quizzically. "What is all this about, then?"

  "I hear there is a private museum on the estate. They have a

  world-renowned Egyptian collection. I wanted to get a look at it."

  "Not open to the public any more. Invitation only. Sir Nicholas is an

  odd chap, secretive and all that."

  "Couldn't you get an invitation for me?" Royan asked, but Georgina shook

  her head.

  "Why don't you ask Prof Dixon? He is often one of the guns at Quenton

  Park. Great chum of Quenton-Harper."

  It was ten days before Prof Dixon was ready for her. She borrowed her

  mother's Land Rover and drove to Leeds. The Prof folded her in a bear

  hug and then took her through to his office for tea.

  It was nostalgic of her days as a student to be back in the cluttered

  room filled with books and papers and ancient artefacts. Royan told him

  about Duraid's murder, and Dixon was shocked and distressed, but she

  quickly changed the subject to the slides that she had prepared for the

  lecture. He was fascinated by'everything she had to show him.

  It was almost time for her to leave before she had an opportunity to

  broach the subject of the Quenton Park museum, but he responded

  immediately.

  "I am amazed that you never visited it while you were a student here.

  It's a very impressive collection. The family has been at it for over a

  hundred years. As a matter of fact, I am shooting on the estate next

  Thursday. I'll have a word with Nicholas. However, the poor chap isn't