The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 30

“This really isn’t a good idea Daniel.”

“Why? If we use a mobile they can’t trace it.”

“They can.”

“Only if they know I’m going to call him, which I very much doubt.”

Daniel and Sarit were arguing. He was holding the mobile phone that he had found there. She wondered whether she could take it from him by force. She was well trained in Krav Maga. But he looked pretty fit and could probably fight too if he had to. Besides, it wasn’t her duty to protect him from himself. Now that he had given them the file, he had no further obligations towards them — or they to him. If he wanted to put himself in jeopardy, that was his right. Except of course, that she might then have to leave.

She decided to explain it to him more clearly.

“Look, if you call him, they can’t trace it now. But you don’t know how he’s going to react. If he tells the police then they’ll go round and get his phone details and then get the phone company to provide them with the records. Then they’ll go to the mobile phone company and do a trace to see which ground stations and relay stations the call went through.”

“Yes, but if I withhold the caller ID with 141 then they won’t be able to get the number of this phone. So they won’t know what to trace.”

“Trust me, they can.”

“Okay, but I need to contact him.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I’ll do… Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll arrange with Dovi to route a computer call through Israel.

Five minutes later he was making the call.

“Professor Hynds speaking.”

Edward Hynds, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge was leading the dig at the site in Arbury Banks.

“Hallo Professor Hynds, my name is Daniel Klein. I’m a Professor of Semitic Languages at UCL.”

“Yes,” said Hynds cautiously.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard of me but — ”

“Do you mean your ‘ancient’ Egyptian adventures or your more recent ones with the police?”

And with that the ice was broken.

“I guess that means you’ve heard of both.”

“It would have been very hard not to.”

“First of all, I should explain that I had nothing to do with the death of Martin Costa. I mean I was there when the fire started — I was lured into a trap — but I didn’t kill him.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you did. He was a boil on the backside of humanity and his death was no great loss to humanity in general or the academic community in particular.”

Daniel felt relieved.

“I assume then that he wasn’t part of the official dig team.”

“Lord no! I wouldn’t have let him come within a mile of the dig. And if I’d known that he had an interest in the subject, I would have taken out an injunction against him.”

“So he didn’t openly approach the site.”

“Again, certainly not.”

“How would he have been able to get his hands on an artefact from the site?”

“Well first of all, any potentially valuable items from the site are taken immediately under tight security back to Cambridge.”

Daniel interrupted to tell the professor about the picture of the manuscript Costa had sent by SMS. Hynds picked up the thread, speaking in a tone that Daniel noticed was quite slow and measured, as if he were a man to weigh up each word carefully before letting it pass his lips. There was also a kind of baritone depth to the professor’s vocal pitch.

“That’s what I’m coming to. A few days before the incident that you got caught up in, we had a night-time breach of security at the dig site. The ground had been disturbed and it was clear that one particular area was dug considerably deeper than the others. It appears that some one was looking for something very specific — and based on what you’ve just told me, it looks like they found it.”

“Can I ask you this professor: although the manuscript appears to have some Hebrew letters on it, I can’t be sure that it is actually Hebrew… or Aramaic. What I was wondering is what are the chances that the manuscript Costa found might have been written in some local British language and alphabet?”

Hynds thought about this for a few seconds before responding.

“The local Brythonic tribes — Iceni and Trinovantes — didn’t have any writing systems of their own. I mean not at the time when we believe this site dates to. We believe that the site may have started in the late bronze age, but continued into the early iron age about two thousand years ago. Local writing systems came later.”

“What about the priestly classes?”

“In due time, the Druids developed a writing system. But throughout the time period this site was used — as far as we know — they relied on their great oral tradition.”

“But surely the more educated among them would have developed some sort of writing skill. I mean in most societies, the political leaders, the kings and feudal overlords, would have needed a writing system for bureaucratic purposes.”

Again, Hynds held his tongue for a few seconds, to give a more considered answer.

“Well of course many of the people spoke Latin. Not just the leaders. Britannia been occupied since 43 AD. And within ten years of that, the more educated among the Britons — kings and leaders — could read and write in Latin as well. But it goes without saying that they used the Roman alphabet for that purpose. They would have had no reason to write Latin in any other alphabet, even if they’d had one.”

“And presumably they also didn’t write their own local languages in the Roman alphabet.”

“There’s never yet been a case of such writings being found. Now admittedly, we haven’t really discovered any writing dating back to that period — other than the writing on coins which is always in Latin. Anything written on papyrus or parchment hasn’t survived. And they didn’t write on stele like the Egyptians or clay tablets like the Sumerians and Akkadians.”

“So what sort of things do you discover at these digs?”

“Most of the archaeological finds in Romano-British sites were metallic, wood, ceramic or leather: coins, weapons, pottery and jewellery. In this case, we haven’t find any coins or jewellery thus far, just pottery fragments and some armour pieces — certainly no manuscripts.”

“So if a manuscript were to be found?”

“Well if it was ‘found’ by Martin I Costa, my first suspicion would be that it was a forgery.”

“But you said there had been an intruder at the dig site.”

“Yes. Which leads me to my second point. If it isn’t a forgery — and if it is in Hebrew script — then it would be the find of the century.”