The Deceit (8 page)

She shook his hand. ‘Can we go inside?’

The peace inside the great, cold, stone-built engine house was almost a shock after the stormy noise of the wind.

‘Hell of a day! Yes, I’m DCI Trevithick, from Scotland Yard.’

The man looked her up and down. Karen didn’t know whether to feel patronized, or flattered, and didn’t particularly care either way: she was just eager to crack on. She’d had to fight for permission to be assigned to a case so far from London; indeed, she’d had to use a little emotional blackmail with her senior officer at the Yard, expend some capital. But this strange case intrigued her, and distracted her from gloomy and interior thoughts.

She was also distracted by the great void just a few metres from her walking boots.
The shaft.
It dominated the stone chamber. A black circle of nothingness, much bigger than she had expected: a great mouth that swallowed men daily, with a gullet that went down for miles.

‘In the old days, when they were tinning,’ Penrose said, as if he sensed her thoughts, ‘you would see steam coming out of that shaft.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Steam, from all the men, the miners breathing deep underground, the steam from their exhalations, would rise up the shaft.’

It was another jarring concept.

‘Have you ever been down a mine, Miss Trevithick?’

‘No.’

He tutted, sympathetically. ‘With a good Cornish name like Trevithick?’

‘The stories put me off,’ she said, staring at the shaft. ‘My dad would tell me stories of my family. Working in these places. One of them died when the man-engine collapsed at that mine, along the cliffs: Levant. And my great-grandmother was a bal maiden at South Crofty.’

‘Ah yes, the girls, breaking the rocks and sifting the deads, standing in the wind. What a job that must’ve been.’

‘They were tough women.’

‘Very true, Miss Trevithick, very true. Here. You’ll need this.’

She took the hard hat, put it on, strapped it under her chin and smiled briskly. ‘So, where is the body?’

‘Right at the bottom of the shaft. You’ll need this overall too. ’Tis very wet down there.’

Karen slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nun’s habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.

‘Who found the body?’

‘I did, yesterday.’

‘What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.’

He shrugged.

‘We’re exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. We’ve just finished draining the main tunnels. That’s one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century.’ He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.

It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers – the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.

‘OK, here it is. Watch your step.’

The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.

Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.

Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. ‘Nasty, isn’t it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him … Soot and grease and … cat fur, right?’

‘How did you know it was cat fur?’

‘I didn’t. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be –’ he pointed – ‘scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff …’ Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. ‘This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because she’d already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didn’t like to be too near the corpse. ‘What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? That’s what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like
that
, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’

‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’

She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had
melted
into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’

Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.

In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’

Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.

Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also
above
them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.

She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’

‘What?’

‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’

‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’

‘Yup. Here, look.’

He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.

The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.

‘There he is.’

Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable.
And he was alone.
So this was no murder?

‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’

The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.

‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’

The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out:
Stop, you’re getting too close!

Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.

He
jumped.

‘It is estimated there are maybe
half a billion
mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’

This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?

‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’

He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.

This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.

At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: ‘Half a billion? You’re joking, right?’

‘No.’ Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. ‘Remember the eternity of Egyptian life …’

Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didn’t add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.

‘Mr Harper—’

‘Sorry?’

It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.

‘Explain the figures, maybe?’

‘Sure.’

‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’

Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’

He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said
way
too much.

Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking
shisha
outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.

Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.

‘Two hundred and fifty years.’

He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.

‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’

Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’

Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’

At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a
political
entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘
ten times as long.
Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200
BC
.’

‘But half a
billion
mummies?’

‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200
BC
, when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’

Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say,
half a billion mummies
. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’