The Lost Testament - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора James Becker (33) #35

33

Before she continued with the jigsaw reassembly of what seemed like a million broken pottery vessels, Angela made herself a cup of coffee. She’d decided a while ago that the only way she could guarantee a decent cup, apart from visiting one of the cafés in and around Great Russell Street, was to have her own coffee-maker and buy her own beans.

The routine of grinding the beans in the small electrical gadget beside the filter machine and the pleasurable aroma the whole operation created were things she really looked forward to. The process helped her unwind each morning after the usually fraught journey on the packed Central and Northern lines from Ealing Broadway into central London.

As usual, she ground the beans — that day she had chosen a Blue Mountain roast — and started the water dripping through the loaded filter as soon as she’d closed her office door. Then she opened up her laptop and plugged it in. While she sipped her coffee, she wrote an email to Ali Mohammed, explaining what she thought was the significance of the fragment of the Hebrew name, and asking him to confirm the provenance of the parchment he was working on. She also suggested that the British Museum would probably be interested in acquiring it, should it bear up to expert analysis.

Before she sent the message, she checked the local time in Cairo. Because of the two-hour difference, in Egypt it was just after eleven thirty, so Ali Mohammed should certainly be in his office by that time. She sent the email, then savoured the rest of her drink, made herself another cup, and walked out of her office and into the workroom where the boxes of potsherds awaited her attention.

* * *

Trying to assemble broken sections of pottery was both mentally and physically tiring. The edges of the fragments only rarely matched exactly because of other damage and there was, of course, never any guarantee that all the parts of a particular vessel were present in the box of bits, so a search for one missing piece could easily be a complete waste of time. She found that her eyes ached if she did the work for more than about two hours at a stretch, so at eleven thirty London time she abandoned her bench for a while and returned to her office, hoping that Ali would already have replied.

He had, but the contents of the message he’d sent were nothing like what she’d expected. The email was short, but she read it twice, with increasing confusion and irritation.

Good morning, Angela

I am so sorry about the parchment. It was a mistake to have contacted you and the owner has now taken it away from me. Please do not concern yourself any more with the matter.

Regards, Ali

What was going on? She looked again at the message she had sent to Cairo, to ensure that she had made her position clear, that she had emphasized the possible importance of the text on the piece of parchment. Had Ali conveyed any of that to the owner of the relic?

She certainly wasn’t going to simply let it go.

She composed another message to the Egyptian, marked it high priority and sent it immediately. Then she made herself another cup of coffee and sat in her chair while she waited for him to reply.

It didn’t take long.

Hullo again, Angela

I will not get the chance to explain to the owner what you told me, because I had already returned the relic to him before I read your email. But I doubt if it would have made any difference. There are other forces at work here, and already one man has been killed over this parchment. I am only telling you this so that you will appreciate the seriousness of the matter and please, I beg of you, do not pursue this any further. I have been sworn to secrecy, and I dare not continue this correspondence. Both the owner of the relic and I myself fear for our lives if our involvement becomes known.

Ali

That was hardly the response Angela had been expecting.

She opened up her web browser and typed ‘Cairo murder’ in the search field. That produced over eighteen million results, but the news item she was looking for occurred right at the top of the list. There were five different reports from a selection of English-language newspapers, and she glanced at all of them before reading the longest and most comprehensive article in full, though the information supplied even by that report was noticeably sparse.

Brutal slaying in Cairo suburb

Yesterday police were called to a house on the outskirts of the city in response to an emergency call. A cleaner who worked at the property, owned by a dealer in antiquities named Mahmoud Kassim, had discovered the dead body of her employer when she arrived there that morning.

The property was immediately sealed off by the police while the scene was examined for clues to the perpetrator of the crime. In an initial statement, the chief investigating officer, Inspector Malanwi, explained that they had found one body in the property and that they were treating the death as suspicious.

In an exclusive interview for this newspaper, the cleaner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporters that she had found the body of Mr Kassim in the bedroom. The corpse was lying in the bed, and he had apparently been attacked during the night. The cleaner stated that he had the most appalling wounds, and she believed they had been inflicted with a knife.

Mr Kassim was a well-known dealer in antiques and antiquities, and operated his business from a shop in the Khan el-Khalili souk.

That was little enough to go on, but if nothing else the man’s profession suggested that at least Angela was reading the right news item. She looked back at the other reports, but they added little fresh information.

As she read it again, she realized one other fact: Ali said that he’d returned the parchment to the owner on the day after the killing, so it can’t have been this Mahmoud Kassim. The relic was still out there, somewhere.

There was one more thing she could do. She knew a bit about Ali Mohammed’s work, and she could guess exactly how he’d handled the parchment when it had been given to him.

She thought carefully for a few minutes, then wrote another email to the Egyptian scientist, read it through to ensure she’d got the right tone, and then sent it.

Five minutes after that, she was back among the potsherds, her actions mechanical and slow, her thoughts thousands of miles and two millennia away.