The Moses Stone

28

The calm, measured voice on his mobile was instantly recognizable to Jalal Talabani.

'How can I help you?' he asked, checking that none of his colleagues in the Rabat police station were within earshot.

'Two of my men followed the English detective – the man Bronson – to Casablanca airport yesterday evening. He met a woman who had arrived on a flight from London. We assumed she might be his wife, but one of my associates ran a check on her and her name is Angela Lewis. But she is staying with him at his new hotel in Rabat. Find out who she is and get back to me.'

There was a pause, and Talabani waited. He knew his caller didn't like to be hurried.

'You have three hours,' the voice said, and the line went dead.

Bronson had had enough. They'd spent the last hour and a half staring at drawings and translations and pictures of tablets from museums around the world. Some of the images were sharp and clear, some were so blurred and out of focus as to be almost useless, but after ninety minutes of looking at the never-ending sequence of pictures on the computer screen, he was about ready to quit.

'God, I need a drink,' he muttered, leaning back and stretching his arms above his head. 'I really don't know how you do it, Angela. Doesn't this just bore you rigid?'

She glanced at him and grinned. 'This is how I spend my life. I'm not bored – I'm fascinated. And particularly by this tablet,' she added.

'What?' Bronson said, returning his gaze to the Vaio's screen.

The picture showed a tablet that looked almost identical to the one Margaret O'Connor had picked up in the souk. But this one was listed as being stolen, along with a number of other relics, from a storeroom at a museum in Cairo. There'd been no trace of it since then. The tablet had been photographed as a matter of routine when the museum had acquired it, but no translation of the inscription – again a piece of Aramaic text – had been attempted either at the time or since.

'I wonder if that's the tablet Margaret O'Connor found in the souk,' Bronson muttered, rubbing his eyes and sitting up straighter. 'If it was stolen, that might explain why the owner – whoever it is – was so keen to get it back.'

'Hang on a second,' Angela said. She selected one of the pictures from the CD Bronson had given her, and then displayed the photograph of the stolen tablet right beside it on the screen.

'It's different,' Bronson said. 'I don't read Aramaic – obviously – but even I can see that the top lines are different lengths on those two tablets.'

Angela nodded agreement. 'Yes,' she said, 'and there's something else I've just noticed. I think there are only four tablets in the set.'

'How do you work that out?'

'Here.' Angela pointed at the right-hand image. 'See that short diagonal line, right at the corner of the tablet?'

Bronson nodded.

'Now look at the other photograph. There's a similar line in the corner of that one as well.' She flicked rapidly back to the picture of the tablet held in the Paris museum. 'And on this one, just there.'

Angela sat back from the laptop and looked at Bronson with a kind of triumph. 'I still don't know what the hell this is all about, but I think I can tell you how these tablets were made. Whoever prepared these inscribed a small diagonal cross in the centre of an oblong block of clay, then they cut that block into four quarters and fired them. What we've been looking at are three of those four quarters. Each of the lines in the corners of the tablets is one arm of that original cross.'

'And the idea of the cross is to tell us exactly how the four tablets are supposed to line up,' Bronson said, 'so that we can read the words in the correct order.'

Discovering Angela Lewis's identity took less time than Jalal Talabani had expected. First, he called the hotel where the two English guests were staying and talked to the manager. The man had actually been behind the reception desk both when Bronson made the booking for her, and when Angela Lewis had checked in the previous evening.

'She's his former wife,' the manager said, 'and I think she works in London at a museum.'

'Which one?' Talabani asked.

'I don't know,' the manager replied. 'It was just that when she checked in she was talking to Mr Bronson about her work and mentioned a museum. Is it important?'

'No, not really. Thank you for that,' Talabani said, and ended the call.

He turned to his computer, input a search string into Google and opened the 'Britain Express' website's list of the museums of London. The sheer number both surprised and dismayed him, but he printed the list and started at the top. He put a line through the details of the small and highly specialized establishments, but began calling each of the others in turn and asking to speak to Angela Lewis.

The seventh number he tried was the switchboard at the British Museum. Two minutes later he not only knew that Angela Lewis was employed there, but also which department she worked in, and that she was away on leave.

And five minutes after that, the man with the calm, measured voice knew this too.