The Moses Legacy (8 page)

Goliath was lying on the bed in his hotel room, thinking about how he had failed his mentor. Arthur Morris had told him to keep track of Daniel Klein. But he had lost sight of him, quite suddenly, and now he was feeling guilty.

When first given the task, he had asked if he was to kill Klein, but Morris told him not to ask questions. He would be told later if anything more was required of him. Right now all he had to do was keep tabs on Klein and report in regularly to tell Morris where he was.

And Senator Morris had always been good to Goliath – even giving him his nickname which he said was a sign of respect. Goliath was the more worthy opponent, the senator had told him once. In a fair fight he would have won against David. He was the victim of Jewish treachery. And contrary to popular mythology, the Philistines were culturally more developed than the Jews. Indeed, after becoming king, David had chosen a personal bodyguard of Philistines because he didn't trust his own people.

Goliath felt a debt of gratitude towards Senator Morris, because it was Morris who had saved his life – or rather stopped him from taking his own life. In the old days, when Goliath was plain old Wally Carter, his wife had left him for another man and had taken him to the cleaners with the aid
of her smooth-talking Jewish shyster. Between them they had played up his size and his occasional tendency to lash out when things did not go the way he wanted. And he had watched as the house was sold from under him and she took most of the money as well as the children. Watching them drive away in the car had been the most painful thing of all.

But when he was about to jump to his death, it was Senator Morris who had stumbled across him by chance and talked to him for three hours, persuading him not to. After he was hospitalized for mental illness, it was Arthur Morris who had provided him with the lawyer and the doctor's reports that secured his release. It had been Morris who had invited him to his home and treated him like a son and told him that God had a plan for him. It had been Morris who had trained him in various social skills that enabled him to get on with people better than he had in the past and without the former awkwardness that had plagued him. It was Morris who had explained that the social conventions and manners of the upper classes were just a form of acting and it could be learnt like any other role.

For that Wally Carter – now Goliath, the man who walked tall and held his head up high – would do anything to serve Arthur Morris, knowing that in so doing, he was serving God.

Yet now he was miserable, for the trace on Daniel's phone wasn't working. It was possible that the phone was switched off or that he was in a tunnel or underground; but whatever the reason, when he logged on to the website and tried to find the phone, it was showing ‘no signal'.

It was just then that Morris phoned. Goliath was fearful of the prospect of having to tell his mentor that he had failed. But he never got the chance, because instead of asking him about the whereabouts of Daniel Klein, Morris launched
into a set of rapid-fire instructions, telling Goliath that he was to go to the hospital attached to the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute, locate a patient called Joel Hirsch and get some of his clothes. He was to put them in a bag, seal it up to keep it dry and bring it back to the United States.

And he was not to let anyone see him.

Goliath was about to ask why when he remembered that he was not supposed to ask questions: he was just supposed to do what God requires.

‘So you admit that you were at the house that morning?' asked the Detective Chief Inspector.

‘
Yes!
' said Daniel for the umpteenth time. ‘I went there to speak to him just before I flew off to Egypt.'

‘And you flew off to Egypt at short notice, at the invitation of the Vice Minister of Culture.'

‘You can call him and verify that yourself.'

‘We will. But perhaps in the meantime you can tell us what you talked to Professor Carmichael about?'

‘It was just a bit of catching up on old times. Nothing special.'

Daniel was aware of how implausible this sounded.

‘You're about to leave the country at short notice, at the request of the Egyptian Vice Minister of Culture, and take a detour from your drive to the airport to stop off at your old professor's house for small talk?'

The DCI shot a sceptical glance at his colleague who shrugged his shoulders as if to express his own disbelief of Daniel's account.

‘He was my
mentor
,' Daniel continued. ‘I hadn't seen him in a while and I was quite surprised at Mansoor's invitation. So I wanted to ask for his advice.'

‘But how could he advise you, if you didn't know why you were being invited to Egypt?'

‘That was the point. I figured he might be able to tell me how to play it.'

‘And
did
he?'

Daniel looked away awkwardly. He had nothing to hide on this point, but the truth made him feel uncomfortable.

‘He was too far gone to help.'

‘Too far gone?' the DCI echoed.

‘Dementia. I could tell that he wasn't really with me.'

‘Is it possible that he had something on his mind? Something that might explain why someone would want to kill him?'

Again Daniel lapsed into thought. On this point he
did
have something to hide. For the next few seconds, he thought carefully about how much he wanted to share with the DCI. Did he want to mention Carmichael's paranoid claims about his unpublished paper? The belief that the plague of boils could make a resurgence? At the time it had seemed preposterous. But Harrison Carmichael was dead and there was no question that he had been murdered. Even if the fire could be dismissed as an accident, the injuries to Roksana and to Carmichael himself could not.

But did he want to share his suspicions with the police? Would they come over as credible? Did he really have anything to tell them? Certainly nothing that Carmichael had told him amounted to solid information. All Daniel had was a nagging suspicion, but what he really wanted was an explanation and he wasn't going to get that from the policeman.

Daniel saw no reason to stick his neck out by offering what might come over as a self-serving explanation. So he decided to hold his peace.

‘I can't think of anything.'

‘Okay, Professor Klein. Interview suspended at 5.45 p.m.'

‘Look, I know you have to investigate thoroughly. But I've told you all I know and I'm a very busy man. Is there any possibility that I could be released on bail?'

‘We're awaiting the results from the forensic team. If we can eliminate you – and assuming that we have no other grounds to hold you – you will be released at that time.'

Daniel didn't see how the forensic tests would eliminate him. If he
had
started the fire, he could have taken the clothes he was wearing to Egypt and disposed of them there. They would certainly find his fingerprints and DNA on the garden chair where he had sat and it was unlikely that they would find any of the killer's DNA in the house, because of the fire. Even if the forensic tests came up negative, he knew that a cloud of suspicion would hang over him until the case was solved.

In the meantime he was going right back to the police cells, to await his fate.

‘He was a friend of Lord Byron, you know,' said the curator, a young Indian. ‘They met at Cambridge.'

‘Yes, he was actually two years ahead of Byron, at Trinity,' said Gabrielle. ‘In many ways he was his mentor, until Byron's fame left him behind. But they stayed friends.'

Gabrielle was in an office on the top floor of the British Museum, sitting at a large work table with one of the curators of the Egyptian department. The police had told her that she wouldn't be allowed any contact with Daniel before he was either released or charged. He had chosen not to take a lawyer, so she couldn't even get a message to him indirectly.

She faced a stark choice. She could either sit around doing nothing except brood about her uncle's death and Daniel's fate or she could keep herself occupied, following up on the trail that had started in Egypt. It was ironic that finding the Mosaic tablets had proved to be not the end of the trail, but the start, and had in fact opened the door to other discoveries.

Having her name second or third on a paper about the discovery of the Mosaic tablets was prestigious enough. But after Mansoor had told them about the mysterious papyrus in the Egyptian Museum, it looked like there was a lot more to discover – especially as he had told them that the papyrus
was carbon-dated to 1600 BC. That would make it older than the Bible – yet written in the same script as the original Mosaic tablets.

A secret that pre-dated the Bible? And one that must have been
related
to the Bible because it was written in the same ancient script as the original Ten Commandments!

That was a find well worth pursuing. If the credit for finding the Mosaic tablets would be great, the prestige for revealing older documents relating to the Semitic peoples would be enormous.

But of the three of them, only Daniel could decipher the papyrus. He had made it clear that to have any chance of doing so, he needed some idea of its origins. So now Gabrielle was sitting here with the curator talking about William John Bankes, explorer, artist and Egyptologist. Between 1815 and 1819, Bankes travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria, meticulously recording many of the great sites and artefacts with notes and drawings with a skilled and practised hand in the days before photography.

Several huge ledger-sized folders with cardboard ‘pages' and heavy covers were stacked up on one side of the table. These were the Bankes archives. Pictures were held between the cardboard sheets, and many had clear plastic or cellophane over them to offer fuller protection of the drawing beneath. Gabrielle turned the pages in awe.

‘It's amazing,' she said with a shake of her head, admiring the skill and detail of the drawings.

Through his travels, Bankes had accumulated a substantial portfolio of manuscripts and illustrations of previously unknown historical sites in ancient Egypt and Sudan, preserving the details and imagery of sites that, in some cases, later became lost to vandalism and theft. For while the artefacts plundered by foreign explorers were still extant in Western
museums, the spoils taken by local thieves – who were usually looking for gold and didn't always appreciate the priceless value of knowledge – were in many cases gone for good.

‘So if I've understood you correctly,' said the curator, ‘you don't actually know
where
you're looking, only
what
you're looking for.'

‘Exactly,' said Gabrielle. ‘We have an ancient Egyptian jar that bears a symbol like the Rod of Asclepius. We think it may have some connection with the ancient Israelites, as well as the Egyptians. So what we're wondering is if there's anything in the Bankes archives that shows such a symbol in ancient Egypt.'

‘I do actually remember seeing a drawing with that symbol before, in the Bankes collection,' said the curator. ‘Now let me see.'

He selected one of the folders and started flicking through it.

‘Oh look,' he said.

He had just stopped at a picture engraved on a rock showing a snake coiled around a pole.

‘It's at Deir el-Medina,' said the curator. ‘Literally “monastery of the town”.'

‘The town where the stonemasons, carpenters and scribes who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. Of course in those days, they didn't speak Arabic.'

‘That's right,' said the curator. ‘They called it Set Maat.'

‘“The Place of Truth”.'

‘Precisely.'

Gabrielle was staring at the picture.

‘This would presumably have been
before
the place was excavated.'

‘Oh,
long
before,' the curator acknowledged. ‘The first archaeological excavation was by an Italian called Ernesto Schiaparelli from 1905 to 1909. The second, between
1922 and 1951, was by French archaeologists under the direction of Bernard Bruyère. That one was somewhat more extensive.'

‘That's about a hundred years after Bankes travelled in Egypt and Nubia,' said Gabrielle. ‘Why the long wait before they started digging?'

The curator scratched his chin. ‘Well, let me just put that into its proper historical context. The site was known about for some considerable time before that. Indeed, a large number of papyri were found there as far back as the 1840s.'

‘Papyri?'

‘Yes.'

‘Were any of them in Proto-Sinaitic script?'

‘Proto-Sinaitic?' The curator sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Not as far as I know. But not all the papyri are extant. Some of them were stolen.'

‘And never found?' asked Gabrielle.

‘Well, a few of them ended up in the village well. Actually, that's from the second excavation. The Schiaparelli excavation turned up loads of pottery and ostraca but no papyri. The Bruyère excavation, on the other hand, turned up many papyri. But unfortunately it wasn't administered or controlled all that well. Consequently, something like half the papyri were taken without Bruyère's consent or even his knowledge. Those were the ones that got stolen.'

‘And do we have any way of knowing how much of it ended up in private collections?' asked Gabrielle.

‘Probably not.'

‘And by the same token,' she pressed on, ‘we have no way of knowing what language or writing system they were written in?'

‘Not unless the heirs of those private collectors come forward,' the curator conceded.

Gabrielle's mind was racing ahead.

Could the papyrus Mansoor showed us be one of the missing Deir el-Medina papyri? If so, it could be part of a huge collection – and what a story THEY could tell!