The Orpheus Trail (11 page)

His voice was very calm, and the tone a chilling matter-of-fact that seemed to leave no room for doubt. I was numb with fear and disbelief like those nightmares where you’re paralysed, unable to move or ward off the horror advancing towards you. ‘I’m sure there’s some simple explanation, mistaken identity, something of that sort.’

‘Well we shall find out. Meanwhile if you could drop by tomorrow at three…’

Was it just paranoia or did I detect an unspoken: ‘Or else…?’, barely disguised by the friendly Northern burr, an order not an invitation?

My first instinct was to ring Hilary, mentally crossing my fingers, against all my principles, that she would answer.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ I said when I’d told her what Hildreth had said.

‘I think I can see what he was up to.’

‘So you think it’s true.’

‘I think it’s possible, given the nature of what’s happened, that Jack might have been looking for any signs, just as he looked for evidence of the objects coming onto the black market.’

‘So how do I play it tomorrow?’

‘Don’t let him panic you. After all we don’t know and lots of quite innocent people are accused of all sorts of crimes they had nothing to do with.’

‘Should I try to get hold of Jack, warn him?’

‘No, they might have a phone tap on him and then you would look complicit.’

As long as I could hear her voice I could stay calm but as soon as I put the phone down, I was aware of my own vulnerability threatening to choke me. I got out the car and drove down to the front where I could struggle against the knife wind that flayed my face, and stare out across the leaden sea laced with white spume crests and with the dark crescents of gulls mewling above, and imagine the wave after wave of invaders that the millennia had brought, from those earliest hominids, heavy browed and thick necked, stepping tentatively across the land bridge, only to be overwhelmed by the first of the Ice Ages, to the latest incomers in flight from poverty or violence, and among them somewhere my unknown father.

It was a relief to find Caesar waiting when I got back. Somehow the evening passed with enough whisky and dry ginger to keep me under for the night and then it was morning. Now I had to get through the day. I decided the best idea was to busy myself at the museum until it was time for my interview with Hildreth.

‘Thank you for coming in, Mr Kish. We won’t keep you long. We’ve tracked down Professor Linden. He was looking for an old colleague in Oxford. We’ve had to caution him. He says he was investigating whether the dead boys’ pictures might have turned up on the internet.’

‘We wondered about that.’

‘We…?’

‘Dr Caistor and I.’

‘A dangerous game if so. People should leave that sort of thing to the police. It still constitutes an illegal access so we had to bring him in and obviously we shall continue to monitor the situation. So you believe that was his motive?’

‘Yes, yes I do.’

‘Would you know how to access such sites, Mr Kish?’

‘I wouldn’t even know how to begin. Presumably it’s not something
you can ask a search engine to find.’ I felt myself on the verge of a nervous giggle.

‘Presumably not. Well I don’t think we need to keep you any longer. We may need to talk to you again…’ He let the rest of the sentence hang unspoken in the air.

Unable to face going back to the office, I drove straight home. I needed to talk to Hilary but first there was a message from Jack asking me to ring him. I hesitated. It wasn’t a conversation I looked forward to. Had I betrayed him in some way? I dimly remembered a Chinese story about Confucius’s reply to the question whether a man should hide his son knowing he was a murderer. ‘He should hide him.’ And then wasn’t there something about ‘betraying my friend or betraying my country’? But Jack wasn’t a murderer and neither had he betrayed anyone or anything as far as I knew. I had to ask myself if I was the traitor. I’d given Hildreth his address even though I hadn’t realised that might be a mistake and I’d said I didn’t know how to access certain sites which could imply something about those who could.

‘Jack. It’s Alex.’

‘Hi there. You got my call?’

‘I tried you before. The police asked me to go in.’

‘Me too. Did they tell you what it was about?’

‘Yes, they did. I’m sorry: I may have dropped you in it. I gave them your address.’

‘Oh, they knew that already. I’m registered as a foreign resident here on a visa. I think they were just checking up on you. What else did they say?’

‘That you’d been looking at dodgy sites on the internet.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘Hilary and I both thought it might be something to do with the happenings here and so I told them.’

‘Thanks, Alex. They let me go with a caution. I think we should meet. All three, if you and Hilary can make it. There’s stuff I need to talk to you about.’

So the next day I found myself being whisked up to Hilary’s flat high above the city without the feeling of excited anticipation I had
expected on my next visit but instead a hollow sickness wherever the pit of my stomach was supposed to be, deep inside.

Hilary had given us all a drink to loosen our tongues but even so it was hard to know how to begin.

Finally after enquiries about Hilary’s holiday and praise for her apartment and its furnishings, Jack said:

‘There’s something I have to tell you guys that your busybody cop doesn’t know about yet but he soon will if he digs into the records back in the States, and it may, I realise, affect your own attitude.’ He paused and then went on: ‘I was sacked from my last project in the Middle East: that’s why I’m here. After the revolution in Iran cut off ties with the West our team moved to Egypt while we waited to see whether we’d be able to resume work at our old site. Apart from Crete, Egypt is the oldest territory for archaeological exploration; exploitation some would call it. Anyway because of that, a culture of exclusiveness has built up, an elitism that says ours, Egyptology, is the real thing. This is the cradle of civilisation, we’re the scholars who explain it to the world, and the rest of you are just treasure hunters and amateurs. One of their team took it very hard, became obsessed in fact with trying to prove our work was about as valid as any of the old Pitt-Rivers hands. So when, quite by chance, I stumbled on a previously unknown tomb with a particularly interesting hieroglyphic text, this guy transferred his obsession to me and was determined to bring me down and take over my site.’

He paused again and drained his glass with a quick gulp. Hilary refilled it without asking. ‘Thanks. A dig is very labour intensive, especially in countries where you don’t have the use of technology as you do in Europe or the States. A lot of kids hang round the sites looking for odd jobs to pick up some money. The older ones work as labourers, digging and shifting the soil. In the sun their skin glows like copper just as you see in the papyri and the wall paintings. They are a beautiful people, fine boned and featured. There was a boy called Fareed who ran errands for me, fetching drinks, changing the film in my camera, handing me the tools I needed: that sort of stuff. Then he started asking to be shown how to use the trowel and the brush, and the English words for things. Finally he picked up an English
language journal one day and asked me to teach him to read. It seemed a good idea. We take so much out of these countries. We use them for our own research and academic advancement, and then for cultural tourism. Of course they need all this. But then we go home.
Somewhere
else becomes the fashionable place to visit this year and they’re back where they were, unless they strike oil, literally that is.

‘So I took on teaching him to read and some elementary field
archaeology
. And suddenly I found I was involved, looking forward to seeing him each morning, moved by the way his gestures were so graceful, by his big smile when he saw me. What I didn’t know was that all this was being observed. When I was accused of abusing the boy, even though we both denied that anything had happened, which was true, I felt guilty as hell. It was almost a relief when I was suspended because the accusation had made me acknowledge to myself that I was in deeper than I’d known. The organisers gave me the option of resigning from the project or facing a criminal charge.’

‘How old was Fareed?’ Hilary asked.

‘About thirteen, he thought. People don’t take so much account of ages and birthdays in other cultures, and they grow up more quickly. Girls of thirteen or even twelve can marry. What we would consider children are young adults in many other countries. His father was dead and he thought of himself as the man of the family.’

‘But they’re still at an impressionable age, easily swayed by people they look up to?’

‘Wanting to please them? Even more so I’d say. I knew that if I’d wanted I could easily have had boys. Sex tourism isn’t new. Think of EM Forster, and all those English artists, writers, intellectuals who went off to North Africa every year, Morocco, Tunisia, to get their kicks. But that wasn’t what I wanted.’

‘You’d fallen in love,’ Hilary said.

‘What’s that line by Kingsley Amis: “Love never lets you go.” When I got back here I found I couldn’t forget him. I kept replaying
everything
in my head. And then I went looking for answers. That’s how I found out about the internet but of course that wasn’t what I wanted either.’

I’d been silent all this time, leaving Hilary to ask the questions and
trying to take my cue about what I should think from her. Now I said: ‘How do you feel about it, about the boy, since we’ve got involved in all this strange business?’

‘It’s brought it all back of course. I watched a replay of that old movie
Death in Venice
the other night and I was sickened, as you’re meant to be, at the end by Aschenbach’s attempts at youthfulness, the dribble of hair dye and smudged cosmetics but at the same time I understood his obsession. I know my own vulnerability. I also know that I can never get a teaching post, that somewhere my name is
probably
on a list of undesirables. It makes the title ‘Professor’ meaningless so I don’t quite know why I hang on to it.’

‘And did you find anything before the police stepped in?’

‘I found some pretty nasty stuff, snuff movies and so on but nothing that seemed to relate to what’s happened your way.’

A Roman Soldier Writes Home
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52

And here in these wild Northern parts of Thracia which we have annexed that our borders might be made safe against the barbarians, there are as many and strange religions as at home, such as those who worship the Egyptian Isis or follow Dionysius and his priest Orpheus who made many hymns to his lord in which he set down the way to follow if a man would go to the Blessed Isles after his death, which is the thing all men seek by whatever name they call it. And I carry with me always the instructions set down in immortal gold for my own safe passage when the time should come.

But as well as these ancient gods hidden in the shadow of time, there are many sects among the Jews who are great merchants here. Hither this year came one Saul, a Jew but a Roman citizen and therefore having great freedom to travel, work and preach his new religion as I heard. But the Jews not having him, he turned to any who would listen and has persuaded some to follow his god, Jesus, who promises resurrection as others do. His following is chiefly among the poor who are deceived into worshipping this new god and neglecting their duty towards the Divine Claudius and the due ceremonies of the state and our gods.

And this Saul taught that their god Jesus would return to judge the world and would lead the believers up to the sky and the others he would cast into Hades, so that some of them have ceased to work, daily expecting their god to appear.
 

But as for the soldiers, we primarily follow the Lord Mithras, the warrior, bringer of light who sprang from the primal egg at the command of Ormuz, the mightiest, and are received into his mysteries, which binds us together when we must fight side by side, each relying on his comrade. May the Lord Mithras be with me wherever in the Empire I may serve.

I didn’t stay over at Hilary’s flat that night. I think we both felt it wouldn’t work. A sword doesn’t have to be made of steel to lie between lovers. And we didn’t talk about what Jack had told us. When I put my arms around her to say goodnight, I felt not desire but intimacy, a shared comforting.

It was different in the morning. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’

‘I’m certainly not going to shop him to Hildreth.’

‘I’m glad you said that. I don’t see what we can do except wait. Jack didn’t find anything. It all seems to have gone quiet. Presumably
Hildreth
would have told you if they’d identified the boys or if anyone had come forward with any information.’

‘Perhaps I should ask him directly?’

‘Perhaps you should,’ she said. So I rang him.

‘We’re, as the media believe we say, pursuing our enquiries, Mr Kish, but without much progress. These were foreigners so no one’s coming forward. The body in the pier fire we were able to identify as probably Chinese, but even his mother wouldn’t have recognised him if we’d circulated his photograph to their authorities and the DNA doesn’t help with precise identification. There are over a billion people in China. As for the other body, we are able to circulate these details but as yet there’s nothing. Do you have anything to tell us,
anything
more from your professor friend?’

‘No, no. It’s just that we were wondering…’

‘There’s a terminology for these things, Mr Kish. At the moment Professor Linden is simply classed as a downloader. It’s an offence in itself, of course, but in my experience such people aren’t necessarily dangerous. I mean they don’t always go on to do anything, like going into chat rooms, trying to set up meetings. Is your friend a collector?’

‘A collector?’

‘We often find paedophiles collect things – daleks, models, toys, photographs etc. Obsessive behaviour you see.’

‘Not as far as I know but I don’t know him very well. I’ve never visited where he lives.’

‘We have. We didn’t spot anything. But then if as you say, it was all in the course of helping the police with their enquiries there wouldn’t be, would there?’

‘I’m sure that’s what it was.’ I hoped I sounded convinced, and convincing. But when I put the phone down, my hand was shaking.

‘Hildreth doesn’t seem to know any more,’ I reported to Hilary. ‘He seems to be waiting for someone to make a wrong move.’

‘Like Jack?’

‘It’s hard to tell. He was also anxious to give the impression, to
reassure
me even, that Jack wasn’t necessarily dangerous. Or he might have been trying to lull me into a false sense of everything being alright in order to trip me up. But maybe I’m just getting paranoid.’

If I was looking for sympathy, I wasn’t going to get it from Hilary. Ignoring my bid she said, ‘Didn’t your inspector friend say Jack had been to see a colleague in Oxford? I wonder who that was and what it was about?’

‘This time you can do the asking.’

‘Perhaps he’d like a tour of my museum. We’ve got a special
collection
on show at the moment that might interest him: what the Brits were up to while the Middle Eastern peoples were inventing writing and everything else. I’ll give him a call and see if I can arrange it. Can you get away easily? Could you meet us for lunch?’

‘It’s one of the few advantages of being the boss.’

By the time I joined them in the Barbican restaurant they were chatting like old friends. It was Jack himself who brought up the real reason for our meeting.’

‘I’ve heard no more from the police, have you?’

‘Hildreth called me in the other day,’ I said.

‘Uhuh. What did he want?’

‘He asked me if you collected daleks.’

‘Daleks?’

‘Toys, photographs. He has some theory that people who
download
certain kinds of material are often collectors.’

‘Wow!’ Jack laughed. ‘I’d better get rid of… let me see… Do
Mesopotamian
figurines count?’

‘Depends how many you’ve got. He said you’d been to see
somebody
in Oxford.’ Even as I said it I was aware of my own use of the half lie and how easy it was to fall into.

‘Did he say who?’

‘Just a colleague.’

He laughed again. ‘That’s what I told him. I went to try and track down the guy who got me fired. Unfinished business, I suppose. I’d found out that he was teaching in Oxford, St Julian’s Hall.’

‘And did you find him?’ Hilary asked.

‘We had a brief encounter in his room. We didn’t come to blows; luckily, for both of us, I think. He said he’d been expecting me.’

‘So he knew you were here?’

‘I think he’s known more about me than I’ve known about him all along.’

‘And does he have a name?’ Hilary asked, anticipating my next question.

‘James, Jim Stalbridge.’

Hilary looked at her watch. ‘I must get back to my work. What will you two do?’

‘I’ve got some stuff on order at the British Library,’ Jack said. So there was nothing for me to do but to take myself back to Liverpool Street Station and home, trying to resist the pall of gloom that was settling on me. We seemed to be tainted by events only half
understood
and not yet complete, ‘unfinished business’ as Jack had said. Yet nothing had really happened for several weeks. Perhaps it was all over.

In the morning I felt more cheerful. At the office early I began to sketch out the ‘History of the Seaside Holiday’ exhibition for the summer. ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.’ And then the phone rang.

‘Alex, I thought I ought to tell you there’s been another incident. Someone must have broken into our place last night. It’s horrible,
grotesque. The cleaner who found it had to be sent home in shock. We’ve had to close the museum of course and the police are here.’

‘Is it another boy?’

‘It was.’

Then it was Hildreth on the line. ‘I’ve suppose you’ve heard, Mr Kish? Bad news travels fast.’

‘Dr Caistor has just rung me.’

‘I’m on my way but I’d like you there as soon as possible.
Similarities
. It looks like the same hand but if so he’s moved his patch.’

‘I don’t know if I can get away.’

‘I’m sorry but you’re involved and so is Dr Caistor now. You can’t simply refuse to help us. This isn’t our usual sort of thing, this mix of history and religion or ancient cults with murder. And the boy was dressed up with another bit of your gold leaf. That puts you right in the centre of things.’

I suddenly realised my reluctance could make me a possible suspect. ‘I’ll have to square it with my staff.’

‘You do that.’

So for the second day running I was on the train to Liverpool Street, taking the now familiar route to St Paul’s and hurrying up Aldersgate Street to arrive only a few minutes after Hildreth who had been driven up in an unmarked police car. I took the escalator from street level and scurried across the walkway in a sudden shower, past the
monument
to John Wesley and the great bronze figure of a horse between two round shields or wheels. ‘Boudicca?’ my mind asked itself as the automatic doors slid open and I stated my name and business to a watchful policeman.

‘You’ll find the Detective Chief Inspector over there, sir.’

A little knot of people was gathered beside the central reception desk: Hilary and Hildreth with, I suppose, an assistant at his elbow, a Lewis to his Morse, a man I didn’t recognise in a striped shirt and tie, and Jack Linden.

‘This is our director,’ Hilary introduced the striped shirt.

‘Nothing’s been touched, I hope,’ Hildreth said.

‘Everything’s exactly as it was found.’

‘Let’s get started then.’

Hilary led the way to the right of the atrium under a sign marked ‘Galleries’. We passed through ‘Britain before London’, the horns and tusks of long dead mammals, mammoths, oryx, rhinoceros jutting at us out of their glass coffins, the rictus grin of a lemur’s skull, small as a cat’s, staring from its empty eye sockets, and then the row upon row of weapons and tools, painfully hammered from rock, knapped and
polished
beyond necessity into art. Down the millennia we went, carving and weaving, baking pots, flighting arrows, making temples for gods until we passed into Roman London, conquest and the building of the first city.

Hilary quickened the pace. Hundreds of years passed. I caught sight of a label, the Temple of Mithras, a stone boy in a soft pointed cap that wouldn’t have been out of place on the piste, and then we turned a corner. I was aware of a strange incongruous sound and we all stopped to stare at the scene in front of us.

For it was a deliberately contrived scene. The label above, the museum’s own sign, read ‘The End of Roman London’. There on open display were the fallen remains of temples, walls, and monumental buildings: a fluted drum that had once held up a Basilican roof, a stone soldier with a long oval shield, the bottom halves of two statues of the mother goddesses, their pleated skirts and sandaled feet, and over this broken masonry of a lost civilisation was draped the
headless
body of a boy. Between his open legs lay a small statue of a youth, naked except for a cloak, also missing his head, lower right leg and left foot.

To the right on a kind of plinth made of a shattered column rested what must be the head of the dead boy, mouth open with the strange noise seeming to come from it. A little square of gold leaf was bound round his forehead. I had no doubt what it was.

‘What’s the noise?’ Hildreth asked.

‘I imagine it’s meant to be singing. Some sort of battery driven device I think we’ll find,’ Jack said.

‘I’m almost sure I recognise it,’ Hilary said, ‘even though it’s very garbled. The thing must be running down but I believe it’s something we used to sing at school:

‘That’s it,’ Jack said. ‘It’s Orpheus after he’d been torn to pieces by the Bacchae. His head, still singing, floated down the river with his lyre and then over the sea to Lesbos.’

Now I could see that the boy’s body was gashed in places as if by the claws of a lion or a bear.

‘Okay,’ said Hildreth to his sidekick. ‘Call in the forensics and the rest of the boys. Put up the scene of crime screens. Is there somewhere we can talk?’ he asked the director.

‘My office,’ the director said

‘Now then,’ Hildreth began when we were all seated, ‘what’s all this about? Stones and bones I can cope with but fairy tales are beyond me. Who’s this Orpheus?’

‘He’s a character from Greek myth,’ Jack said. ‘A priest and poet kind of, who might, just might have really existed.’

‘So we’re talking about a long time ago.’

‘Two and a half thousand years at least.’

‘And how do you think he fits in.’

‘He was a teacher of a mystery religion of death and the afterlife. His story is that he was such a great poet, in those days, poetry was sung or chanted not written down, but anyway he could calm the wind and waves with his song and any kind of wild or human thing. When his wife was carried off to the underworld he went after her and charmed the king of darkness to let her go, on the condition that she would follow him up and he didn’t look back.’

‘So?’

‘He looked back and she sank from his sight. Then he was killed himself by a pack of frenzied women, some say because he wouldn’t look at another woman after Eurydice. His followers were male; women weren’t welcome in the cult. There’s a lot more…’

‘I think that gives me the picture. So what have we got? Whoever did this knows as much as you. Some sort of specialist?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Hilary said. ‘Parts of his story are well known. At
least two operas, lots of paintings, and to anyone who had myths read to them as a child or studied the classics or English literature.’

‘There was no blood from the wounds,’ Hildreth said. ‘The
pathology
people will tell us but it looks as if he was dead before they were made. More like ritual markings. Post-mortem mutilation. Kinky. But then so is this whole thing. It certainly looks like the same hand or hands.’

‘And then there’s the gold square from our find; just like the other two,’ I said.

‘That’s right, and that clinches it.’ Hildreth leant back in his chair with a kind of satisfaction as if the whole messy business was clear and solved. ‘He’s changed the venue but only by fifty miles and all the other hallmarks are the same. But why move this time to London?’

‘Because the original finds are all here,’ I heard myself saying, ‘the grave goods of the Prittlewell Prince.’

‘How does he know that?’

‘It was in the press. If he’s been following all this he’ll know,
especially
if he took the things from our museum in the first place.’

Suddenly Hilary put her hands over her face. ‘We’re talking about this as if these children weren’t dead.’

‘It’s the only way to get at the truth. It’s not that I don’t care: I’ve got two kids myself,’ Hildreth said. ‘But you have to think clearly, try to understand what’s going on, not be confused by your own emotions. Now, we have to let forensics do their job, then see what we’ve got. That’s all we can do here for now. Thank you all for coming in.’