The Moses Stone (24 page)
Robbins nodded. “Makes sense to me. And this is probably another bugger we’re never going to solve. We’ve found no useful forensic stuff here apart from a few fingerprints that might or might not belong to the intruder. As far as we can see the killer jimmied the door, walked in, hit Kirsty Philips on the side of the head and then walked out again. There might be some more trace evidence somewhere, but if there is, we haven’t found it yet. There’s no sign of anything having been taken, or disturbed in any way. No forensics, no witnesses, no suspects, no motives. And that means no nothing.”
“Yep,” Bronson agreed, “it’s every cop’s worst-case scenario. Look, unless there’s anything else I can tell you or help you with, I’ll get out of your way.”
“OK, Chris, thanks for that,” Robbins said and stood up. “Leave the front door open on your way out, would you?”
The two men shook hands and left the dining room, turning in opposite directions—Robbins right toward the back of the house where the SOCOs were still working, and Bronson left. As he stepped into the hall, Bronson glanced down at the rug just inside the front door and saw a scatter of envelopes lying there. Obviously the post had been delivered while they had been talking in the dining room, and the postman had placed everything on the mat rather than sliding it through the mailbox, simply because the door was still ajar.
“The post’s here,” Bronson called out, and automatically bent down to pick it up.
He noticed the package immediately, one end protruding slightly from under a white junk-mail envelope. It was bulkier than everything else there, and the Moroccan stamps were extremely distinctive.
Suddenly, he knew exactly what had to be in the small parcel, and saw clearly what the “burglar” must have been doing in the house—he’d just broken in a couple of days too early.
Bronson knew it was wrong, knew he was tampering with evidence, and knew that what he was doing might easily be sufficient to get him kicked off the force, but he did it anyway. As DI Robbins turned round and walked back toward him, Bronson hunched down over the mat, reached out, seized the packet and slid it into his jacket pocket with his left hand. With his right, he collected the rest of the mail, then stood up and glanced behind him.
Robbins was approaching, his hand outstretched. Bronson gave him the post and turned to leave.
“Typical,” the DI muttered, flicking through the envelopes. “All bloody junk mail, by the looks of it. OK, see you around, Chris.”
When Bronson sat down in the driving seat of his car he found that, despite the chill in the air, there was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. For a few seconds he wondered if he should take the package back, leave it outside the door or maybe put it on the carpet. But he told himself that the presence or absence of a two-thousand-year-old clay tablet at a crime scene in Canterbury would have no impact whatsoever on Robbins’ success or failure in solving the murder. He also knew Angela would be delighted to get her hands on it.
Feeling a sudden jolt of pure adrenaline, he turned the key in the ignition and drove quickly away.
44
“I’ve got something for you,” Bronson said, walking into the lounge of his small house in Tunbridge Wells.
“What?” Angela asked, as he handed her the package.
She glanced at the unfamiliar stamps that plastered one end of it as she turned it over in her hands. “Morocco,” she murmured, and ripped open the envelope. She peered inside it, shook out a small object covered in bubble-wrap and carefully unwrapped it.
“My God, Chris, you found it!” Angela said, her voice high with excitement. “This is the missing tablet.”
“I should bloody well hope it is,” Bronson said, sitting down opposite her and looking curiously at the relic. It was much less impressive than he had expected, just a small, grubby, grayish-brown lump of fired clay, one surface covered in marks and squiggles that were completely meaningless to him.
Angela pulled a pair of latex gloves from her handbag before she touched the tablet itself. Then she picked it up and examined it carefully, almost reverently, her eyes sparkling.
“You were right,” she said, glancing at the address on the envelope. “The O’Connors
did
post it to themselves.”
did
post it to themselves.”
“Yes, and I’ve just nicked it from a crime scene.”
“Well, I’m really glad you did, as long as you won’t get into trouble over it.”
“It should be OK,” Bronson said, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Nobody saw me take it, and the only people who know it exists probably think it’s still somewhere in Morocco. I’ll bet my pension that, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, this object has simply disappeared. As long as nobody actually
knows
we’ve got it, I don’t think we’re in any danger—and my meager pension should be safe as well.”
knows
we’ve got it, I don’t think we’re in any danger—and my meager pension should be safe as well.”
Angela spread a towel over the coffee table and gently laid the tablet on it.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Bronson said.
“Agreed,” she replied, “but it’s not the relic itself that’s important—it’s what the inscription means.” Her latex-covered fingertips lightly traced the incised markings on the face of the tablet; then she looked up at her ex-husband. “Don’t forget how many people have died already. The stall-holder, the O’Connors, probably Kirsty Philips, and even Yacoub and his thugs in Rabat—the reason they’re all dead is
something
to do with this rather dull-looking lump of two-thousand-year-old fired clay.”
something
to do with this rather dull-looking lump of two-thousand-year-old fired clay.”
Bronson nodded. “It’s a bit different when you put it like that. So now what?”
Angela looked back at the tablet. “This could be the biggest break of my career, Chris. If Yacoub was right, this inscription could lead us to the hiding place of the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant. If there’s even the slightest chance of finding either relic, I’m determined to follow the trail, wherever it leads me.”
“So what are you going to do? Suggest that the museum mounts an expedition?”
“No way,” Angela said firmly. “Don’t forget I’m still a very junior member of staff. If I walk in and tell Roger Halliwell what I’ve found, he’ll be absolutely delighted and no doubt he’ll congratulate me. Then he’ll politely push me to one side and in a couple of weeks the Halliwell-Baverstock expedition will arrive in Israel to follow the trail of the lost relics. If I managed to get involved at all, they might let me examine any bits of pottery they find.”
Bronson looked slightly quizzical. “I thought you were all brothers—and sisters—in arms in the halls of academe? All striving together for the advancement of knowledge and a better understanding of human history?”
“Don’t you believe it. Whenever there’s a whiff of a major discovery, it’s every man for himself in the scramble to be the one whose name is linked to it. All that brotherly support vanishes and the event turns into a high-class catfight. I know—I’ve seen it happen. I’ll just tell Roger I’m taking a short-notice holiday in Israel to study some Aramaic texts and leave it at that.”
Angela gestured toward the clay tablet lying on the coffee table in front of her. “Now we’ve got this tablet, it means we can read more than half of the original text, and that has to give us a good chance of working out the meaning of the whole of the inscription. I’ve got about a week of holiday owing, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t take it in Israel, do you?”
“No, I suppose not. Are you sure Israel’s the right place to start looking?”
“Yes, because of the reference to Qumran. After that, who knows?”
“Right.” Bronson. “I’ll come with you.”
“You can’t, Chris. You’re in the middle of a murder investigation.”
“No, I’m not. I’ve finished the report about Morocco, I’ve got nothing to do with the investigation of Kirsty Philips’s murder, and I’m owed at least ten days leave. Dickie Byrd probably won’t like it, but that’s not my problem.” Bronson reached across the table and took Angela’s hand. “Look, I don’t want you running off to Israel by yourself. I want to be close enough to take care of you.”
Angela gave his hand a squeeze. “Are you sure? That would be wonderful, Chris. I wasn’t looking forward to forging on by myself. And we do make a pretty good team, don’t we?”
Bronson smiled at her. “You bet,” he said. And we
do
, he thought contentedly, and not just as a pair of enthusiastic relic-hunters. But he knew he couldn’t rush things . . .
do
, he thought contentedly, and not just as a pair of enthusiastic relic-hunters. But he knew he couldn’t rush things . . .
“Right,” Angela said briskly. “I’ll get on the Internet and try to sort out flights to Tel Aviv. Once I’ve done that, I’ll do some more work on that tablet. With that Aramaic text and the other bits of translations, I’m sure we can work out where the clues are pointing. We must have got more information about these hidden relics than anyone else, so we can be sure we’ll be there at the kill.”
“I hope that’s just a figure of speech,” Bronson said.
45
Tony Baverstock looked at yet another list of clay tablets on the screen of his desktop computer and wondered, not for the first time, if there was any real point in continuing with the search. He must have studied pictures of hundreds of the things, and none of them—at least, none so far—had borne even the slightest resemblance to the one he was looking for.
To complicate matters, there were some half a million clay tablets sitting in museum vaults and storerooms that had never been translated. The information about this huge repository of tablets was usually limited to just one or two poor-quality photographs and perhaps a very brief description of the provenance of each object—where it was found, its approximate date, that kind of thing.
There were two reasons for his urgent search. First, Charlie Hoxton had called him the day before and told him to do it, which was in itself an entirely adequate incentive; second, his task had suddenly become even more crucial the previous afternoon, when he’d run into Roger Halliwell in the corridor outside his office. The head of department had looked more irritated that usual.
“Something wrong, Roger?” Baverstock had asked.
“It’s Angela. She’s gone off on another bloody wild-goose chase,” Halliwell had snapped. “I’ve only just found out she’s been in Morocco for the last couple of days, and now she’s taken more leave to run off to Israel to study some Aramaic text. It’s not her field, for God’s sake. She should stick to what she’s good at.”
Baverstock hadn’t commented, but suddenly felt sure that somehow Angela must have either found the missing clay tablet or at least got hold of a decent picture of the inscription on it. That had been enough for him to redouble his efforts.
But despite his exhaustive research, he hadn’t got his first “hit” until the next morning. The picture of the tablet was of fairly poor quality, and he spent almost twenty minutes studying the Aramaic inscription before he finally realized that he was looking at the tablet Charlie Hoxton already owned, and which Dexter had “sourced” from a museum in Cairo.
With a snort of disgust, he closed the window on his computer screen and returned to his search. Two hours later, having changed his search parameters five times in an effort to reduce the sheer number of relics he was having to check out, he found himself looking at the Paris tablet. He printed all the images available in the database on the color laser in his office, and spent a few minutes studying each of them with his desk magnifier before finally closing the connection to the museum intranet.
Then he locked his office and left the building, telling his assistant he was going away for a few days unexpectedly. He walked down Great Russell Street, stopped at the same public phone he’d used before, and called Hoxton.
“I’ve spent the last twelve hours looking for these bloody tablets,” he began.
“Did you find anything?” Hoxton demanded.
“I spent half an hour studying
your
tablet—the one you got me to translate—before I twigged what it was, the photographs were such poor quality. But eventually I got lucky. There’s a clay tablet sitting in a storeroom in a museum in Paris that’s definitely a part of the set. From the mark in one corner of it, it’s the one that goes on the bottom right of the block.”
your
tablet—the one you got me to translate—before I twigged what it was, the photographs were such poor quality. But eventually I got lucky. There’s a clay tablet sitting in a storeroom in a museum in Paris that’s definitely a part of the set. From the mark in one corner of it, it’s the one that goes on the bottom right of the block.”
“Can you translate the text from the pictures?” Hoxton asked.
“There’s no need,” Baverstock replied. “The French have helpfully already translated the Aramaic for us. They translated it into French, of course, but obviously that’s not going to be much of a problem. It’ll just take me a little while to work out the best equivalent English words.”
“Good,” Hoxton said. “You’re packed, I hope?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss this trip for the world. We’re still booked on the flight this afternoon?”
“Yes. I’ll see you at Heathrow as we agreed. Bring all the pictures of the Paris tablet, and the French translation of the Aramaic, as well as your English version. This is going to be the trip of your lifetime.”
PART THREE
ISRAEL
46
The flight was no problem, but actually getting into Israel took Bronson and Angela several hours, and that was
after
they’d disembarked from the aircraft. The problem was the small blue square they each had stamped in their passports with the word “sortie” printed in a vertical line down the left-hand side, a date in the center and Arabic script across the top and down the right side—their exit stamps from Morocco.
after
they’d disembarked from the aircraft. The problem was the small blue square they each had stamped in their passports with the word “sortie” printed in a vertical line down the left-hand side, a date in the center and Arabic script across the top and down the right side—their exit stamps from Morocco.
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