Golden Relic (15 page)

"Gas lighting?" Sam said, inspecting the lamp on the wall nearest her.

"Oh yes, Lloyd's got all the mod cons."

"Oh my god," Sam breathed, facing the room. "We could be here for weeks. This isn't a tomb, it's
the long lost repository of some legendary bibliophile." She stared open-mouthed at thousands of
books which were crammed into the shelves that lined the room and overflowed into piles that covered
the floor.

The room was large but even without the books would have been crowded. A huge desk, filing
cabinet, a small table with an old Remington typewriter, and a large free-standing globe were
arranged in a semi-circle in front of a small bay window with drawn curtains. A few steps away, two
raggedy armchairs, a couch and a coffee table were set up in front of a huge open fireplace. Between
them and where Sam was still standing near the door was a cedar dinning table with eight chairs and,
against the wall behind them, an antique dresser and a wardrobe.

"I'm afraid to ask how many rooms there are," Sam said.

"This one, two bedrooms, a bathroom, an enclosed veranda out the back, and the kitchen through
there," Maggie pointed to a door behind her. "But the books are mostly in here."

"Thank heaven for small mercies," Sam stated. "Pick your spot, Maggie. I'll start here," she
added, taking a seat at the dining table to go through the books that covered it.

"You know, the more I think about your smuggling theory, Sam," Maggie said, sitting down at the
desk, "the more far-fetched it seems."

"I know it's far fetched. My so-called clue was icing sugar and the search at the airport was an
embarrassing waste of time but the coincidences are just too…"

"Coincidental?" Maggie suggested.

"Yes," Sam agreed testily. "But the timing of the Exhibition and the influx of cocaine in
Melbourne and those other cities has to be more than coincidence."

"Perhaps," Maggie agreed, rifling through the desk drawers, "but you keep adding two and two
together and then try to justify the fact that your answer keeps coming out at five."

"That's because I haven't found the missing 'one' yet," Sam said defensively.

"Think about it, Sam. You already knew about the cocaine, then you found a suspicious substance
that turned out to be innocent and you carried out a search that found nothing yet you're still
trying to fit the facts of these two unrelated cases together. Are you sure you're not trying to
make too much out of a simple murder?" Maggie rolled her chair across to the nearest bookshelf and
began checking the titles on the spines.

"I don't think so, besides a 'simple' murder is a very rare thing," Sam said. "Bingo! A copy of
Macbeth," she exclaimed. She flicked through the pages, shook the book, started from the beginning
again to look more carefully and found nothing.

"What I mean, Sam," Maggie said resuming the conversation, "is that, logically, there is no
reason to believe that Marcus's show has anything to do with smuggling. If you forget the cocaine
thing and take the investigation of the itinerary in a different direction you'd probably find it
also coincides with archaeological symposiums, touring rock concerts or strange weather
patterns."

"Or hit and run accidents, gallery fires, museum robberies and hijackings," Sam reminded her.

"Exactly. Odd things indeed, but they happen all the time. I'm sure young Hercules could search
the internet and match the itinerary with mysterious crop circles or alien abductions."

Sam laughed. "I get your point, Maggie. But if Professor Marsden's death is so simple why did he
ask you to check the odyssey of Ouroboros and, more to the point, why are we here?" Sam moved over
to tackle the books on the coffee table and the floor around the couch.

"Given the circumstances I admit it's unlikely, but perhaps we should consider that his murder is
not related to this, this, whatever it is we're looking for here."

"Now that is far-fetched. 'If you are reading this my fears have been realised. I am no more',"
Sam quoted.

"Yes yes," Maggie acknowledged. "But tell me what you know about Lloyd."

"He was dedicated, professional, generous, argumentative, not very social and obviously loved a
good mystery," Sam stated. "And I've found a 'complete works'."

"Me too." Maggie sat down on the floor to reach the leather bound book on the bottom shelf.

"Find anything yet?" asked Sam, turning the pages carefully.

"No. Getting back to Lloyd; he was also practical, analytical, and usually quite down to earth,
except that he believed strongly in premonitions, of which he claimed to have had more than a few,"
Maggie continued, as she too flicked through the pages. "He was also scared of flying. He may have
had a premonition that he wouldn't make it home from Peru."

"That might be a workable theory if he'd left the package for you with his lawyer six months or
10 years ago and not, coincidentally, in the same week he turned up murdered."

"I suppose so," Maggie muttered, fiddling with some pages that appeared to be stuck together.
Prising the top corner away she discovered the entire mid-section of the book had been glued to
conceal the cut-out hiding place of a long narrow, black box.

Maggie silently lifted the hinged lid and stared in disbelief at the contents. She glanced over
at Sam and, making what she hoped was the right decision for the time being, Maggie removed the long
and heavy object, slipped it into her pocket and closed the box again.

"I've found something, Sam," she said excitedly. "A secret compartment, with a box."

"What's in the box?" Sam asked leaping up to join her.

"Oh. Nothing," Maggie lied dejectedly, standing to place the heavy book on the desk.

The box, about 16 centimetres long by six wide and lined with red velvet, was indeed very empty.
So Sam reached over and removed it from the cavity in the book. Underneath was a small printed card.
It read:

Talk to Hamlet's late messengers.

"Bloody hell," Sam complained. "This is never ending."

"I wonder what the box was for," Maggie said, trying to sound innocently curious.

"Well, unless someone beat us to it," Sam said, "it's my guess the box is a decoy to hide this
latest clue. We are now, I think, looking for a copy of
Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead
."

"Oh great," Maggie said, turning back to the shelves. She felt awful but it was obvious there was
a hell of a lot more to all of this than just Lloyd's murder.

"You know," Sam said, returning to the couch, "what with the murder, exotic poisons, sabotage
fantasies, and all this literary legerdemain I really feel like I'm being dragged into a
cliché."

"A what?" Maggie asked. "Found it," she added, waving a copy of Stoppard's play.

"A B-grade movie cliché; you know one of those dangerous webs of murder, deception and
intrigue."

"Well," Maggie laughed, "I think it just became an international cliché." She collapsed onto the
couch next to Sam before adding, "unless of course this three-month-old bit of mail is just a
bookmark." She handed Sam an envelope, addressed to Marsden and posted from Cairo on the 28th of
May, 1998.

Sam lifted the flap and removed a piece of cardboard, on which was taped a key. "It looks like a
safety deposit box key," she said. "Oh, and this is useful," she added, removing the only other
thing in the envelope. "A postcard of the Nile Hilton. Just what we need." She turned it over to
find yet another enigmatic message, this time scrawled in purple ink:

Safe no more. Inform MM.

Am going to seek the finder. N.W.

"This is getting really tedious," Sam growled. "Who the hell are MM and the finder?
Marsden's other note said 'safe no more' and 'return to the finder'.

Maggie shook her head. "I don't know, but N.W. could be Noel Winslow. He's a mystery writer and
an old friend of ours. He lives in Cairo but it could take a bit to track him down."

"Where do we start?" Sam asked.

"The telephone. There is one here, somewhere. Lloyd could do without power but not a phone."

Sam glanced around the room and then stood up. "The phone plug," she said, following the cord
along the wall, under one of the armchairs, around the leg of the desk to the window seat, where she
found the phone buried under a pile of magazines. "Who do I call first?"

"The international operator for the number of the Cairo Museum," Maggie said, wandering over to
sit in the desk chair. "You'd better check what time it is there too."

Sam did as suggested and wrote the number on a notepad by the lamp. "It's 5 am today. It's a bit
early to be calling anyone. But if this guy's a writer why are you calling the museum?" Sam pushed
some of the piles aside so she could sit down on the window seat but then had to cope with a
landslide of magazines as she tried to move something hard that was jabbing her in the leg.

"Noel is also an anthropologist but he found he was a much better fiction writer than he was a
scientist. So he combined the two passions of his life into a series of anthropological detective
novels. The last time I saw him he was still doing some consultancy work at the Cairo Museum; so
Ahmed Kamel, one of the curators, may know where to find him. Noel might, however, be off
researching his next book, so he could be in Turkey or South America or god knows where."

"Manco City," Sam said.

"Never heard of it," Maggie said absently, as she flicked through Marsden's address book. "But
then I suppose Noel is writing fiction so anything is possible. What made you suggest that?" she
asked, finally looking up to find Sam holding a picture frame.

"This. It seems to be a picture of a bunch of people standing in a place you've never heard of,"
Sam stated, turning the frame around. "It says Manco City 1962. There was one of these in the
Professor's office but the picture was missing."

"How very odd," Maggie said, studying the photograph in which 16 people, men and women, had posed
to record what was apparently a significant event. They were standing or kneeling, in three rows, in
front of a stone archway through which could be seen the overgrown ruins of a multitude of
buildings. The camera had captured a variety of expressions in that moment in time, but there was no
doubt they were all extremely pleased with themselves.

"Do you know any of them?" Sam asked.

"Yes. I worked with some of them the year before this was taken, and with various combinations of
them at other times since." Maggie pointed to a young man standing in the back row. "That's Lloyd.
He would have been 29-years-old then. Good looking wasn't he? Next to him is Noel Winslow, the
writer I was just talking about; in front of them is Jean McBride, who recently retired from the
museum in Edinburgh. Beside her is Alistair Nash, the friend I told you about who died in the car
crash; and that bear of a man looking so smug on the end there is Pavel Mercier. He's…"

"Author of
Anthropomorphic Entities and the Andean Supernatural Realm
," Sam stated. "I saw
it in the Professor's office," she added, in answer to Maggie's questioning look.

"The weird thing," Maggie continued, "is that I don't know where this photo was taken. There
really is no such place as Manco City. Unless…1962?" she asked herself. "Unless they thought
they'd found Vilcabamba."

"What's that?"

"Do you know anything about the Inca?"

Sam shrugged. "Just what I learnt in primary school."

"Ah well, make yourself comfortable Sam, but do tell me if you think I'm just rambling on like
Daley Prescott," Maggie smiled.

"In 1532 the Spanish led by Pizarro conquered the Incas at Cajamarca, held the thirteenth and
reigning king, Atahualpa, to ransom for a room full of gold and then executed him anyway on the
spurious charge of treason. Their conquest succeeded for two reasons. One was horses and superior
weaponry, the other was the fact that Tahuantinsuyu itself was in political turmoil."

"Tahuantinsuyu?" Sam queried.

"The Incas called their empire Tahuantinsuyu or 'Land of the Four Quarters'. It was an
administrative name referring to four huge sectors, aligned to the cardinal points and arranged
around Cuzco, the capital. The word was also symbolic of the immense size of the empire which
included modern-day Peru and vast areas of what is now Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

"Prior to his death Huayna Capac, the eleventh Inca, divided the empire between his two sons,
giving the north around Quito, which is now in Ecuador, to his bastard son Atahualpa, and the south
around Cuzco to the rightful heir, Huascar. The sibling rivalry of the two kings degenerated into a
fratricidal civil war of which Atahualpa emerged victorious, after drowning his half-brother, just
before the arrival of the conquistadors. So although Atahualpa had reunited Tahuantinsuyu, there was
resentment amongst the Incas of Cuzco who believed Huascar was the rightful king.

"Pizarro took advantage of that, and enlisted the support of Indian tribes who had been
subjugated by the Inca, so that when he and his tiny army of 168 Spanish soldiers marched on
Cajamarca they were actually accompanied by a great many Indian auxiliaries.

"As I said before Atahualpa was put to death but Pizarro recognised the advantages of having an
Inca ruler under Spanish control, to ensure the obedience of the native people, so he enthroned one
of Atahualpa's younger brothers as Sapa Inca. When this child king was poisoned, Pizarro appointed
Manco Capac, the brother of Huascar, as fifteenth Sapa Inca. This was a smart move because the Incas
of Cuzco opened their gates to the invading Spaniards believing them to be liberators because they
had defeated Atahualpa and restored the rightful Inca line.

"Manco Capac, who by the way is the father of that dude Tupac Amaru that Hercules mentioned last
night, was given his own palace, the conquistadors took over most of the other Inca palaces in Cuzco
and things were relatively peaceful in the empire for about three years. In fact when Quisquis, one
of Atahualpa's surviving loyal generals, tried to invade Cuzco the Spanish and Manco Capac's Inca
warriors fought side by side to drive him back beyond Quito. Am I boring you yet, Sam?"