The Isis Covenant (9 page)

‘Hey, Dmitri, can’t you see I’m busy? They’ll be waiting for you at lunch.’

He handed the child back to the nanny, who led him away protesting in a high voice.

As they disappeared up the spiral staircase, the smile faded and for a moment the carefully tended mask slipped to reveal another man. The phone rang.

‘Dornberger.’

He listened for a few moments before replacing the receiver.

Another step forward.

XII

‘GOOD GOD, JAMIE
, what happened to you?’

Jamie Saintclair smiled, as well as he was able with a nose that felt like a burst football. He’d received a few more digs in the ribs for his trouble, but eventually his attackers had tired of their fun and run off, one of them with a satisfying hobble. On reflection he wished he’d broken the yob’s leg; then again it would probably have earned him a spell in casualty.

‘No real harm done,’ he winced. ‘I’ll look a lot better once I’ve had a chance to get cleaned up.’

It was only then that he noticed the tall figure silhouetted against the sunlight in the office window.

‘This is Detective Fisher, er, Danny. She’s here to see you … from America.’

Jamie had one of those moments of startling clarity that only occur on a few occasions in a man’s life. Like the moment the Emperor realized he was wearing no clothes. He had two options, he could go into babble
mode
, which was his natural inclination, or he could present her with the man she was expecting, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, only in a torn overcoat, with a battered face and a bloodied nose.

He chose option two and stepped forward to shake her hand. It would have worked better if he hadn’t tripped over the waste-paper basket.

‘So what did happen to you?’ Danny Fisher asked, after Gail had disappeared downstairs to fetch the coffees.

Since he had no idea why he’d been targeted, Jamie decided there wasn’t any point in giving her the details. Instead, he settled for brevity. ‘Muggers. I was just unlucky they picked on me.’

Shrewd, professional eyes evaluated his injuries, checked them against his explanation and then locked on his own to draw him in, mesmeric and slightly mocking. A warning bell inside told him now was the time to turn and run, but he had nowhere to go and in any case he was in no shape for flight. One step at a time.

‘Uhuh? Always better to give them what they want. Not that I tend to have too much trouble with that type of thing back home. These guys can tell a cop from a block away. What did they take?’

‘Nothing, actually. Some people came along while I was struggling with them.’

She reached out, her fingers not quite touching the bruise on his face. ‘Must have been quite a struggle. You’re a lucky guy, Mr Saintclair. I have a soft spot for
hero
types, but you coulda’ got yourself killed.’

He found himself smiling. Detective Danny Fisher gave the impression of being very tall and her body seemed to be composed entirely of sharp, knife-edged angles that made him think any kind of physical contact would probably tear him to ribbons. The face wasn’t what you’d call beautiful; actually, not even pretty. Mouth a little too wide, nose a little too long and blue eyes that were a little too hard, like glittering sapphires, but it was the kind of face you knew you’d always remember without seeing it twice. Her presence dominated the tiny space, but that had more to do with personality than physical stature.

She gave the matchbox office another survey, taking in the worn carpet and peeling paintwork, the managing director’s desk with the managing director’s exhibition catalogues heaped at one end and his secretary’s barren desert of pristine efficiency at the other. Between them a narrow no-man’s-land where untidy and tidy fought it out for supremacy. ‘You’re the guy who found the Raphael picture, huh? That Jamie Saintclair?’

He wished she’d tried a little harder to hide her disbelief. ‘That’s right.’

‘Only I expected something a little more …’

‘Spacious?’ He supplied the word she was looking for, but her reaction told him it wasn’t the right one.

‘Spacious, yeah. They said you got some kind of huge reward. Millions, even.’

‘They?’

‘These guys, the ones who recommended you.’

He shrugged. ‘They always say that.’

‘So you didn’t get a bean for tracking down a hundred-million-dollar painting? That seems a little harsh.’

A playfulness in her voice made him need to explain.

‘There was a suggestion of a finder’s fee, but the German government didn’t take too kindly to the small matter of withholding evidence in a murder investigation, so there’s a delay.’ The British government hadn’t taken too kindly, either, but that was another story. ‘We have ten experts who say the Raphael is what it says on the tin, but two – there’s always two – who want to get their name in the papers by proving it isn’t. One of them believes, or says he believes, it’s a fake, the other says it’s by one of Raphael’s apprentices, but then you could say the
Mona Lisa
was by one of Leonardo’s apprentices and you wouldn’t be far wrong. It should all be worked out quickly enough, but quickly in the art world means about thirty years. You’re American?’

She gave him a look that said ‘Are you kidding?’ only in capital letters.

‘It’s just the last American I met turned out to be an Israeli.’

‘Didn’t work out, huh?’

He found himself saying more than he’d intended: ‘She wasn’t certain who she really was, and I was more
in
love with the person I thought she was than the one she turned out to be.’

‘Story of my life.’

He blinked. Danny Fisher had a way of keeping people off balance that was going to take a bit of getting used to. Fortunately, Gail gave him the chance to recover when she barged through the door juggling two coffees and a substantial parcel.

‘You had a delivery,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Feels like another one of your picture books. Do you mind if I head off, Jamie? Remember I said I was meeting my mum?’

‘Picture books?’ Fisher asked when the other woman had left.

‘When I can afford them, I collect books on Rembrandt,’ he explained. ‘This is probably from the research foundation.’ He pushed it to one side. ‘I, um, didn’t …’

‘Expect to find me here?’

‘Yes, that’s right. I didn’t … It was a surprise.’

‘Well, things were a little slow back in Brooklyn and I had vacation time coming.’ Now it was her turn to shrug. ‘I’ve never been to London, so … it seemed like a good idea to drop in.’

‘Drop in?’ He didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.

She turned to look out of the window. If you craned your neck you could just see the far side of the narrow street four floors below. ‘Guy out there’s been standing opposite your entryway taking a real keen interest in
some
expensive jewellery for more than thirty minutes. Only he doesn’t look the type to be buying a wedding ring. You seen him before?’

Jamie squeezed past the desk to her side. The man was dressed in what used to be called a donkey jacket, a rough workman’s coat that for some inexplicable reason was now back in style. A black ski hat hid most of his head. He might have been in his thirties. Jamie was certain it wasn’t one of his attackers and that he hadn’t seen him in his life. ‘No.’ He became acutely aware of her perfume, and a scent below the perfume, a kind of earthy purity mixed with the wool of her sweater.

‘When I see a guy like that, my hand starts twitching. Being without a piece.’ She saw his look of mystification. ‘A gun … it takes a little getting used to. That wasn’t exactly true, what I said before. Truth is we’ve kinda run out of places to go with the Hartmann investigation Stateside, so I decided to come to London. Officially I’m liaising with your Scotland Yard, but on my own time, which they don’t particularly like. Unofficially, I’m hoping the key to the Hartmann case is here. After all, this is where the second killings took place.’

He leaned back against the desk. ‘That seems above and beyond the call of duty and, if I might venture an opinion, quite a long shot.’

She stared at him, the blue eyes simultaneously calculating and evaluating.

‘There were four Hartmann children. Just babies really.’ Her lips twitched in a melancholy smile. ‘Blond hair, pretty, must have been full of life. I have nieces just like the girls. The killer had smashed their heads in one by one with a hammer, but even though her hands were tied, the eldest had tried to fight him right to the end. One way or the other I will find that man, Mr Saintclair, if it takes till hell freezes over. You believe that?’

Their faces were three feet apart.

‘Yes, I do. Call me Jamie.’

She nodded slowly.

‘All right … Jamie. This is your territory. Where do we go from here?’

He took his time.

‘I think we have two options. Either we follow the Hartmann trail or we follow the eye.’

‘The eye?’

‘At first it seemed simple enough. There are two culturally significant symbols depicting the eye in Egyptian iconography. The Eye of Horus and the Eye of Hathor, also known as the Eye of Ra. These are copies I took of the symbols.’ He spread out two sheets of paper on Gail’s end of the desk and placed the printout of the eye Danny had sent beside them. ‘They’re common on temple friezes and on amulets; what are known as
wadjets
and which were believed in ancient times to have special healing powers.’

‘Soooo …’ Danny Fisher chewed the end of her right
thumb
as she pondered the pictures. She noticed immediately what it had taken Jamie an hour to work out. ‘Looks like we can forget about Hathor and concentrate on this Horus guy?’

‘Possibly.’

‘But Hathor is depicted as the right eye. Horus, is the left, like ours.’

‘That’s true, but I’ll come back to that later. Let’s say you’re right. Where’s the link to the killings? What makes Horus special?’

‘You’re the expert, Jamie Saintclair. I’m just tagging along on this one.’

The words were accompanied by a grin and he grinned back. ‘Hardly, but I do know a few things about him. He was the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis.’ Danny looked up. Ears trained to pick up a suspect’s every nuance had detected
something
there. ‘According to legend, his father was given the throne of Egypt rather than his older brother, Set, Horus’s uncle. Set, as you’d expect, wasn’t too happy about this, so he tricked his brother into climbing into a wooden chest, sealed it and threw it into the Nile.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

Jamie nodded. ‘Just your average Egyptian family row.’

‘But Set had underestimated the determination of Isis.’ There it was again, she thought. ‘Somehow she recovered her husband’s body and along with another god called Thoth, came up with a ritual that would
bring
him back to life. Set had other ideas. He stole back the body, chopped it into fourteen pieces and scattered them all over Egypt.’

A memory of two days of hell amongst Brooklyn’s landfill made her cough. ‘Jesus, Saintclair, I came over here to get away from all that. What does this have to do with Horus?’

‘Patience, ma’am, I’m getting there. The long and the short of it is that Isis eventually brought Osiris back to life and he became King of the Otherworld. That’s the Land of the Dead, so life is possibly the wrong word. It was Horus’s fate to avenge his father and kill Set. While they were fighting, Set tore out Horus’s right eye, but since he’d been a good son, the gods gave him it back. Thus, the Eye of Horus, a gift from the gods.’

Danny walked to the window and looked out into the silver-grey mist of the falling gloom and the first faint lights that heralded dusk. ‘So, we have a link to a family feud. Brothers falling out and a son’s revenge. That could be interesting. It’s not a line of investigation we’ve considered so far. I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.’

‘But?’

‘But I think unless there’s a real psychopath in the family – which I admit we can’t rule out – the manner of the deaths make it unlikely. Someone took pleasure in those killings, especially the wife and kids. It just doesn’t seem like a revenge attack by a relative. Anyway, if you were going to make a point about Set
and
Osiris wouldn’t you cut the husband into fourteen pieces and scatter him from Brooklyn Bridge?’

‘There may be another possibility.’

She turned from the window to face him. ‘I had a feeling you were teasing me, Saintclair. I’m beginning to like you.’

Something in her voice gave him an inward shiver. ‘Which takes us back to Hathor. This lady is a bit of a puzzle. She was a sky goddess and celestial nurse, which makes her a force for good. But as the Eye of Ra she was the goddess of destruction and slaughter.’

‘So? We’ve already agreed that the Eye of Ra isn’t our eye.’

‘That’s true, but Hathor is sometimes depicted as a cow, or wearing a headdress of a cow’s horns with a sun disk between them, like this.’ He drew a rough sketch, the horns first curving out, with the circle between them. ‘The problem is that she’s not the only goddess associated with the cow, and there’s a suggestion that Hathor might be a mix of, or have been mixed up with, another goddess.’

‘Let me guess, Isis?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Don’t ever play poker with a cop, Jamie, you got more twitches than a gopher with an itch.’

‘Thanks for the advice.’ He grinned. ‘So Hathor and Isis have a lot in common and I decided to do a bit of digging. Their filing system was a bit chaotic, but I found this in a back copy of the
Journal of Egyptian
Studies
from the early nineteen hundreds. It’s only one academic, but … see for yourself.’

He handed her the note he’d taken and she read: ‘
From a study of fragmentary evidence discovered at a number of significant sites, I believe I can postulate with some degree of certainty, that Isis, in her guise as the Mother Goddess, was at some point portrayed in Pharaonic friezes by a single eye. The Eye of Isis, although in the style of the Eye of Horus, differed from it by the addition of a blood-red tear in the right corner
.’