The Lost Testament

57

Bronson and Angela sat side by side and stared at the screen, their coffees forgotten beside them. What they were looking at wasn’t, to be honest, much of a website. The homepage had a simple title — ‘Ancient parchment for sale’ — and contained a single colour photograph of the relic itself. The second page contained slightly more in the way of illustrations, pictures which had clearly been cropped from those taken by Ali Mohammed. Each picture showed just a small section of the text which had been revealed by his sophisticated techniques.

The third page contained no pictures, and simply gave an email address — the same address that Angela had already used in communicating with the hitherto unidentified owner of the parchment — and a name. The mysterious owner was at last revealed to be a man called Anum Husani.

‘I don’t understand,’ Angela said. ‘The only thing this tells us that we didn’t know before is his name. I’ve already got copies of all these pictures, so why is he bothering to load them onto a website and then suggesting I view them?’

‘Let’s take another look at the email.’

Angela called it up again.

‘That’s what I thought he might have done,’ Bronson said, pointing at the top of the screen. ‘He didn’t just send this email to you. It looks as if he’s sent it to every museum in America and Western Europe. He created the website just to show people what he’s got for sale. He’s obviously trying to generate a kind of auction for the relic. Is that likely to happen?’

Angela shook her head.

‘That’s difficult to say, because there are two things he hasn’t mentioned. The first is what the text on the parchment actually says, so perhaps he doesn’t know. I certainly don’t, not fully. I doubt if any museum or collector would stump up much money without a full translation.’

‘And the other thing?’ Bronson asked.

‘In a word, provenance. A lot of museums won’t touch any object if they can’t establish full details of its history, because in the world of antiques and antiquities there are an awful lot of very accomplished counterfeiters. Some of them have managed to fool acknowledged experts in their fields, time and time again, like Tom Keating. He fooled almost everybody. He painted Old Masters, including Gainsborough, Renoir and Degas, as well as Samuel Palmer watercolours, and almost all of them were certified as genuine by art experts of the day.’

‘And nobody twigged?’

‘No. Or, at least, not for a long time, and they really should have been picked up right from the start, because Keating always left a clue in his forgeries, something so blatant that any competent art examiner should have detected it immediately.’

‘What sort of clues?’ Bronson asked.

‘Oh, he was quite fond of writing a vulgar remark in white lead on the canvas before he started painting. Obviously it would be invisible once the work was finished, but it would show up immediately with an X-ray. Or he would use a type of material in the painting that would simply have been unavailable to the genuine artist.’

‘I remember him now,’ Bronson said. ‘I think I saw something about him on television.’

Angela grinned at him.

‘You certainly did. Once he confessed to what he’d done, he had his own television series teaching people — believe it or not — how to paint like the Old Masters. He was a likeable old rogue.’

‘OK, this is all very interesting, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.’ Bronson knew that Angela could go on forever about one of her favourite topics. ‘Did the guy from the Cairo Museum know the provenance — where the parchment came from?’

‘If he did know, he didn’t tell me.’

‘So it’s possible that this relic was just found somewhere and has basically popped into existence now, and nobody has any idea where it’s been for the last two thousand years, or however old it is.’

‘That’s possible,’ Angela replied, ‘but I think — in fact, I’m certain — that somebody must have known exactly what the parchment is and where it’s been. The website we’re looking at is the only place where pictures of the relic have been posted, yet the first killing in Cairo happened almost a week ago.’

‘So somebody, somewhere, knew that the parchment had reappeared, and also how important it was,’ Bronson finished for her.

Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. And it looks to me as if this man Husani has realized that the best thing he can do to ensure his safety is to go public with details and photographs of the relic.’

‘So do you think that now he’s put the pictures of it onto the Internet he’ll be safe? Because I don’t. That website might be seen by a few dozen people at the most, and my guess is that whoever is after him will have enough clout to find out where he is and shut him up.’

Angela nodded again. ‘That’s why we have to find him first.’