The Deceit (12 page)

‘Smart, very smart.’

She ignored his remark. ‘I waited for a while, to make sure they were gone, but then the Egyptian police came. Suddenly it was like a rush hour. And still I hid. I had to stay there. For hours. I thought I was going to die. I had one bottle of water. Then at last they left with the body. And I got on my bike and drove back to Nazlet in the dark.’

Ryan gazed at her with admiration. She had real courage; it was quite a story.

She didn’t seem to notice, or care. ‘But the next morning the police did a sweep. Arresting anyone foreign or suspicious in Nazlet. Like you. Of course the Israelis were long gone. But they did it anyway. They took me too. I was getting ready to leave town. I told them I was a tourist, an academic on holiday.’

‘In Nazlet?’

‘A decade ago they found some ancient bones here, thirty thousand years old. In the caves. So I pretended I had an interest in palaeontology.’

‘OK …’

‘My story made sense. To them. They do get the occasional scientist. So they questioned me for a while, then held me. In that room where we met.’

The last corner of the puzzle was revealed.

‘They never searched you. Wow.’

‘They did not search me. They had no suspicions. So, I still have them in here, the pages I collected. The Sokar Hoard, or part of it. Here. Let us go outside. And now you can see. I think I need your help to decipher the texts.’

The hitherto silent Mr Hanna waved over the tea-boy, and paid the minuscule bill. As he did so, Ryan clocked his accent: middle-class, Cairo, probably Coptic. What was he doing here? But that question was swamped by the bigger desire, the impending revelation.
The Sokar Hoard.

Together and in silence they walked to a discreet street corner, deserted apart from a water-seller sleeping in the dusk, his back to a bare unplastered wall. The nocturnal traffic of Tahta buzzed in the background.

Reaching into her rucksack, Helen Fassbinder pulled out a file. She opened it in the mosquito-ridden streetlight, and showed the first precious page to Ryan.

He took it, his fingers slightly trembling.

It was unquestionably old. It was written on papyrus, fragmented at the edges but still essentially intact. The calligraphy was faded yet legible; the script looked like ancient Coptic demotic, Akhmimic, certainly extremely archaic. Dating from maybe the sixth or seventh centuries.

With a juddering sense of bitter defeat, Ryan Harper realized that he couldn’t understand a single word.

‘Look, Mummy, I can do the giraffe dance!’

Karen stared at the laptop screen, and the image of her six-year-old daughter twirling. ‘That’s brilliant, sweetheart.’

‘And the llama dance. Like a llama. We’re doing llamas at school, Miss Everest says.’

‘I love it. So how
was
your first day at school? … Ellie?’

No answer.

Her daughter had disappeared. All Karen could see was the wall of her cousin’s spare bedroom back in London. She waited for her daughter to realize that her mother was still here, at the other end of this video call, at the other end of the internet, at the other end of the country. But nothing.

‘Ellie … darling. Eleanor? Sweetheart? Hello?’

Suddenly her cousin Alan appeared on the screen. ‘Sorry, Karen, she’s run off with the twins. They’re counting how many cracks we have in the ceiling. I think we may have to decorate. But at least they’re having fun. Lots and
lots
of fun.’

Karen smiled even as she felt the fierce pang of separation from her daughter. She was pleased that, as an only child, Eleanor had somewhere close to go, with cousins the same age; but selfishly, ludicrously, she didn’t want Eleanor to have
too
much fun, not without her.

‘How did her first day at school go?

Alan shrugged. ‘Oh fine, fine. She’s got some party invitation, and a gold star for reading about the Fire of London. She’s absolutely fine, Kaz.’

Karen shook her head. ‘God I feel guilty. Her first day back at school and I wasn’t there. I’m a terrible mother.’

The kind eyes of her cousin stared at her, unblinking. ‘No, you’re a
single
mother, Kaz. And it’s
tough.
And you have an important job and you just lost
your
mother; don’t beat yourself up.’

‘I should be back in a few days, it’s just that I’ve been assigned to this case – they reckon I have some expertise, after the Muti killing in London. But if we—’

‘Karen! Shush. Ellie can stay here as long as she likes, the twins love her, they go to the same damn school, it’s not an issue, please don’t stress. But look, I have to go.’ He was gazing away from the camera, but laughing. ‘Ah. I think they’re trying to climb in the tumble dryer. That’s not good. Skype you soon!’

‘But—’

The screen went dead.

Karen stared at the blackness, then shut the laptop and shivered. A window was open across the room: she was airing out her mother’s old house, getting ready to sell it. She had spent the last two days packing away her mother’s things: binning most of them, with pangs of guilt. The paraphernalia of an entire life. Tipped into a black plastic bag.

The job had been painful and troubling, and Karen had distracted herself by working the case in her mind. But she hadn’t got far.

As Karen made one last sweep of the house, closing the windows, picking up the last knick-knacks, throwing away the final detritus, she did the sums again. Maybe this time an answer would miraculously evolve.

As she locked the kitchen window, she thought about a story her dad once told her, of miners in their thirties, even twenties, dying of silicosis: they would stand at these same windows in Carnkie and suck at the fresh air, desperately trying to fill their dying lungs. Killed by just a decade of drilling hard rock.

Mining was so tragic.

Mining. Yes.
Mining.
She focussed on Botallack mine, once again.

The boy in the main Botallack shaft had yet to be identified. He’d had nothing on his person that could name him. He matched no missing person on the Scotland Yard files.

They also believed, now, that the cat-burning on Zennor Hill had probably been some Satanic rite, Taghairm, but this guess was just about
all
they had to go on.

So who were the people glimpsed running away from the scene? Maybe a group of in-comers: people who had rented a house, or stayed in Cornwall for Christmas, or longer – blow-ins, as the locals called them. The Truro police were right now asking every owner of every hotel and apartment and holiday cottage in western Cornwall for the identities of every tourist and visitor on the books for the last two weeks.

But this was a long shot, and an arduous task. There were thousands of hotel beds and thousands of holiday lets in West Cornwall: the region lived off tourism. And the cat-burners could have stayed in various different addresses, to hide their traces, or they could have used a base just over the River Tamar. Or maybe they had driven in from Dorset, or London, or France, or China.

No, they needed more than this dragnet to find these cat-burners, and to unravel the reason for the boy’s suicide in Botallack. That’s if it
was
suicide. Maybe something he’d seen had driven him to kill himself? They appeared, after all, to have been trying to summon the Devil. By burning cats.

Of course the Devil had not appeared on windy Zennor Hill, on New Year’s Eve, but to go to those lengths meant these people believed they could do it, which meant they could believe anything. So maybe the victim in Botallack jumped because of some terror, of something he had seen – or
imagined
he’d seen?
Alternatively, the horror of that night might have tipped an already unbalanced mind to suicide.

Karen shuddered, feeling the absence of something, like a faint ache. Something hidden from view, like her daughter hiding behind the sofa, laughing.

She went into her mother’s old bedroom. The wardrobes were empty, the bed was stripped, the life had gone. She bit her lip to scare the tears away, and checked the chest of drawers for anything left behind. Nothing there. It was all gone. Just one framed photo, of her mother and father, on their honeymoon, stared back at her. She’d saved this for last: it was so symbolic of the past. The past now gone.

Picking up the photo, Karen stared at her mother. She could see the obvious resemblance with herself: slightly pretty, perhaps, but certainly no beauty. Someone had once said Karen’s mum was ‘sturdy and determined’, and it was true – and true of Karen, too. They were, after all, descended from those bal maidens who worked the deads at South Crofty. All those generations of tough women.

Slipping the photo in a bag, Karen turned away.

Focus on the case. Sort the deads.

She walked back into the living room and sat at the table. Next to the laptop was the book Donald Ryman had sold her.
The Tregerthen Horror
. She picked it up and squinted at the pages as the winter daylight faded outside.

She’d spent the last two days reading the book between bouts of house-cleaning; reading it with increasing frustration. It told a complex story of links between the Satanist Aleister Crowley and Cornwall, but the links, however interesting, were tenuous.

The title itself referred to a mildly notorious death that had occurred at Carn Cottage, in the 1930s.

The victim – a local artist, Ka Cox – had previously been linked with bohemian circles, including Crowley, before the Great War. In her middle age she seemed to have renewed some of those links – she got to know a couple performing Crowleyan magic. This couple had then come to stay at Carn Cottage, near Cox’s own house, Eagle’s Nest. And it was at Carn Cottage, one dark winter’s night, that Ka Cox suffered a fatal and unexplained seizure.

But what did all this add up to? The story was tantalising enough. But there was no
real
proof of anything. It was all gossip, and supposition.

Karen flicked through the pages of the book, one more time. Since Cox’s death the cottage had housed artists and writers. In the sixties a man had gone mad there after taking mescaline, ending up in Bodmin asylum. Ghosts had supposedly been seen in the vicinity. The local consensus was, unsurprisingly, that the cottage was haunted, or hexed in some way. Hence its ruinous state. You could therefore see why someone might select it as a venue for summoning the Devil, with all its morbid history, and that spectacularly brooding location.

But the direct Crowley connection with Carn Cottage was weak. If anything the links between this strange man and Cornwall were stronger a few miles across the moors, on the
south
coast: he had definitely stayed in the old fishing town of Newlyn in the thirties, but he had also stayed in lots of other places, some of them with the vaguest of descriptions: a ‘seaside inn’, a ‘Victorian hunting lodge’, a ‘guest house in Penzance’. It was a maze of seemingly pointless information, with no exit.

The room was very dark now; it was time to go. Karen didn’t want to linger: the sadness was too much. She had a hotel room booked in Truro.

Turning to leave, she realized there was one last thing she had to do. Kneeling on the worn grey carpet she checked under the leather sofa. Something was there, among the dustballs. Straining and squeezing, Karen reached and pulled it out.

A tiny little china cat. Her mother collected them.

Jesus!

Karen cursed in the silence of the house. Jesus Christ. The cats!

She swooped on her mobile, and called Sally Pascoe.

‘Hello? Karen?’

‘Cats, Sally. The cats!’

‘What?’

Karen was excited, almost babbling. ‘You’ve checked for missing cats?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Sal, they needed
hundreds
of cats for this: where would they get them? You wouldn’t transport them far, not if you could help it. A van-load of cats!’

‘Of course we checked, across Cornwall, took us days – we were hoping for some witnesses, suspicious characters, someone seen taking a cat, but we didn’t get very far. Cats are lost all the time, the pattern is random.’

‘We need to map them properly, and this time we need to
look for houses.
’

‘What?’

‘I’m coming over. Thirty minutes.’

Karen grabbed her bag and stuffed the book and photo inside. She was leaving her mother’s lonely house for maybe the last time. She had to do it quickly, like this, or she would burst into tears. Determined and firm, she shut the lights, and marched to the door; the latch clicked behind her and she practically ran to her car. Fleeing the past.

A faint drizzle was falling: a regular Cornish mizzle. The windscreen wipers whirred and washed with her urgent thoughts as she sped into Truro, the pretty little cathedral city – the capital of the county. And the home of the big, grey, concrete Duchy of Cornwall Police HQ.

Four hours. It took four long hours and six bitter black coffees for Sally and Karen to re-analyse the records: to note every missing cat from the last six months in West Cornwall, and then to pin those locations onto Google Maps.

Finally, the two policewomen examined the completed map. The only noise was the late-night traffic, the hiss of cars on wet streets. Sally spoke first, stating the obvious.

‘There’s nothing, no pattern, it’s really just … random. As I said.’

She was right: it was a chaotic mess of virtual pins.

‘Bollocks.’ Karen said, reaching for her coffee, and walking away from the desk in frustration. It was horribly cold. ‘Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.’

‘Except …’

She turned. ‘What?’

‘Here.’ Sally said. ‘Look, see, there is a bit of a concentration here,
but it’s a circle
. Inside it there are fewer
pins.’ She gestured at the centre of the screen. ‘See – Kaz – here. Like a kind of halo effect. Hmm. Is that something?’

Karen leaned close to the laptop. As she scrutinized, she listened to her friend, explaining her thoughts.

‘If they were stealing cats, they would have tried to disguise it by
not
stealing cats close to where they were holed up, so … so they’d maybe drive a few miles, in every direction –
then steal the cats
. No? So that might explain why there is a concentric circle, like a halo. And the centre of that circle … is where they were staying?’