The Isis Covenant

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.’

Danny didn’t need to look at the printout.

‘That mark in the corner.’ Her voice took on an extra urgency. ‘The coroner was of the opinion it was caused by the perp being hurried or over-enthusiastic while he was carving it into the victim’s forehead, or maybe as she struggled. But it could be a tear, huh?’

‘That’s what it looked like to me.’

She shook her head. ‘This is all great, but I still don’t see where it takes us. Unless we can link the dead folks to some sort of weird cult, or this Geistjaeger bunch to Cleopatra’s grandma and a little Egyptian hocus-pocus, we’re no further forward.’

‘That’s true,’ he admitted. ‘But what if I told you the Eye of Isis may not be just a pretty picture on a Pharaoh’s wall?’

Danny Fisher didn’t try to hide her disbelief when they met for breakfast next morning at the British Museum. ‘Come on, Jamie, this is a book of fairytales.’

‘Not fairytales, Detective, myths. Myths and Legends of the Ancient World, to be precise; except it’s in the original German.’

Mythen und Legenden der Alten Welt was something of an anachronism amongst the thousands of scholarly tomes that lined the shelves. Written before the First World War, it must have been unashamedly populist, with half a golden sun at the centre of its red cloth frontispiece above the title, the gold-leaf rays reaching out to the margins. He scanned the pages, taking in a collection of stories that included Britain’s Arthur legend and the Holy Grail, the fate of Atlantis and the lost city of Eldorado; but the bulk, and what would have been its greatest attraction, featured stories of lost treasures: wrecked Spanish gold ships, pirate hoards, the accumulated riches of the Knights Templar, buried in the crypt of some twelfth-century baron.

‘This is the one we’re looking for.’

‘I can’t read German.’ Her tight smile told him she wasn’t a morning person.

‘I didn’t have time to copy it out properly yesterday,’ he explained. ‘So the quickest way would be for me to translate and you to take notes. Okay?’

She reached into a cavernous handbag and came out with a digital recorder, which she placed on the desk beside them. ‘Notes, huh?’

No, definitely not a morning person.

‘The odd thing is that the English version of the book was stolen three weeks ago.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose it could be just a coincidence.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that before? When you’re investigating a murder there’s no such thing as coincidence. So what does it say?’

‘It tells the story of the legendary and supposedly mythical Queen Dido’s Treasure. It’s a tale that first surfaced in Virgil’s Aeneid.’ He looked at her for confirmation that he didn’t have to repeat the story of Rome’s original founder and his flight from Troy and was rewarded by a dangerous narrowing of the eyes. ‘But it must have had a much earlier provenance. The treasure was amassed by Dido’s husband Sychaeus, a Phoenician priest, who had gathered it from all over the Orient. But her brother, Pygmalion, King of Tyre, decided he wanted it, and in short order he slaughtered old Sychaeus. But in Dido, Pygmalion had an adversary as cunning and ruthless as he was. Before he could do anything about it, she’d loaded the treasure onto ships and sailed into the sunset, first to Cyprus and then to Carthage, where, very conveniently, she was made Queen.’ He grinned. ‘So she’s royalty and she’s rich, but is she happy? Not our Dido. Because she knows that somewhere out there in the Med, Pygmalion is still on the prowl and beyond the Atlas Mountains a host of gold-hungry Numidians were stirring. So what does she do with it? She buries it for all time away from the eyes of man.’ He paused and Danny gave him a ‘So far, so what?’ look. ‘And that would have been that, except that around sixty-five AD a man called Caecilius Bassus appeared at Emperor Nero’s court in Rome with tales of a vast cave filled with gold. Bassus even described the way it was stacked and the size of the bars. Nero, whose excesses had all but bankrupted the Roman Empire, badly needed cash and decided to send an expedition to collect it. Now, if he wasn’t as mad as Bassus, Nero might have stopped to ask himself why his benefactor hadn’t brought a lot more of the evidence with him. As far as we know, the expedition was never seen again.’

‘Maybe I’m missing something, but what has this to do with my murder investigation?’

‘The visit of Bassus and the dispatching of the expedition are recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus, and repeated by a later author, Suetonius. The reason this is interesting is that, as far as I know, the surviving texts describe Dido’s treasure purely in general terms. This is the only version of the story I’ve ever seen that goes into any real detail.’

‘So?’

‘Of all the treasures, the greatest was the Gold Crown of Isis, wondrously wrought by craftsmen of old, and at its centre, the great gemstone known as the Eye of Isis.’