The Moses Stone (10 page)

Read The Moses Stone Online

Authors: James Becker

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adventure

The British Museum is simply huge: it has to be to accommodate the one thousand permanent staff who work there and the five
million
visitors who pass through the doors every year. The structure covers about seventy-five thousand square meters—that’s four times larger than the Colosseum in Rome, or the equivalent of nine football pitches—and contains three thousand five hundred doors. It’s one of the most spectacular public buildings in London, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Angela stared at the photographs she’d printed, then shook her head. The quality of the images was nothing like as good as she’d hoped and expected. The object in the pictures was clearly some kind of clay tablet, and she was reasonably sure she could identify the language used, but transcribing it was going to be difficult because all four photographs were so badly blurred.
After a minute or so, she replaced the pictures on her desk and sat in thought for a few seconds. Looking at the images had inevitably started her thinking about Chris and that, as usual, revived all the confusion and uncertainty she felt about him. Their marriage had been brief but it hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful. They had at least remained friends, which was more than a lot of divorced couples could say. The problem had always been the unacknowledged third person in their relationship—the shadowy presence of Jackie Hampton, the wife of Bronson’s best friend. And that was almost a cliché, she realized, a wry smile playing across her lips.
Bronson’s problem had been his unrequited desire for Jackie, a desire that she knew he had never expressed, and that Jackie had been blissfully unaware of. There had never been any question of his being unfaithful to her—Bronson was far too loyal and decent for anything like that—and in one way the failure of the marriage had been Angela’s fault. Once she’d realized where his real affections lay, she had found she simply couldn’t cope with playing second fiddle to anyone.
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 reenter 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 favorite 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, bearlike 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 up-market 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 sedan 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 turnout.
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 likely, not informed at all—about the likely value of the artifact. 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 dialed 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 parking lot. 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 dialed 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 dialed 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 learned 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.

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