The Lost Testament

18

The souk never really closed, but as the heat of the afternoon sun diminished slightly and the shadows around the stalls deepened and lengthened, most of the tourists and serious buyers began to leave. And by the middle of the evening most of the stallholders and traders had followed their example, locking away their goods in their storerooms or chests or other secure locations, and leaving the area to enjoy their evening meal.

So when Abdul returned, a couple of hours before midnight, the souk was virtually deserted. Just a handful of traders were still in evidence as they locked up their shops or tried to interest any remaining tourists in some last-minute bargains. He ignored all their blandishments and strode swiftly along the narrow alleyways until he reached Mahmoud’s stall.

It was, as he had expected, deserted, the storeroom door closed and locked. But that wouldn’t be a problem. When he’d been talking to the Egyptian trader earlier that day, Abdul had glanced at the keyhole on the storeroom door and the bunch of keys that Mahmoud had placed casually on the stall itself. The ability to get inside a locked room was more or less one of the qualifications of his profession, and he knew this one wouldn’t be difficult. He knelt down in front of the door, virtually invisible to anyone passing unless they looked over the top of the stall, and removed an L-shaped lock pick, a tool known as a twirl, from his pocket. Then he set to work.

His expert probing fingers quickly identified the mortise lock as having only three levers — barely adequate for an interior door in a house, and certainly not sufficient for a storeroom that quite probably held valuable artefacts. One after the other, the levers fell prey to his twirl, and in a little over a minute he was able to stand up, glance around to ensure that he was still unobserved, then open the door and step inside.

He pulled the door to behind him and checked that the storeroom had no windows through which torch light could be seen. But the space was in total darkness.

Abdul took a slim pencil torch from his pocket and switched it on. He first looked all round to ensure that there were no signs of an alarm system, though the quality of the door and its lock suggested to him that this was unlikely. Satisfied, he then began searching the contents of the storeroom.

The search wasn’t easy because, although he knew exactly what he was looking for, he had no idea what it would be stored in. Some objects he knew he could ignore. His employer had explained that the parchment would be fairly fragile and certainly would not be rolled and placed inside a jar or anything of that sort. So Abdul could not even look at the contents of two of the shelves, because they only held pottery vessels of different sizes. But that still left a large number of boxes whose dimensions were large enough to contain the relic. Checking each of those took him a considerable length of time. In fact, it took him so long that he had to change the batteries on his torch halfway through.

He finally gave up just after midnight, stood for a few moments in the open space in the centre of the cramped and crowded storeroom and shone his torch methodically at everything in it. Then he nodded in satisfaction. He had checked every possible hiding place and container that was big enough to take the parchment, and his conclusion was obvious. If — and Abdul still wondered just how big an ‘if’ this was — the trader Mahmoud had the parchment, he hadn’t secreted it in either his storeroom or the stall itself, which was completely empty.

The only other place left to look was the target’s house, so that’s where he was going to go next.