The Orpheus Trail (14 page)

I put it down carefully on my desk. It seemed like a reproach, another haunting. My instinct was to ring Stalbridge and ask him for more details of how he had found it, and whether the gold plate or any part of it had been with it. One leaf was still unaccounted for after all.

If only there were some rite of divination I could use to get it to give up its secret, to tell its story of who had taken it and whose hands it had passed through. Suddenly I understood how our ancestors must have felt, confronted with mysteries that they couldn’t unravel, how they would have stood peering down at the bloody innards of a
sacrifice
looking for understanding or opened a holy text at random and stabbed at a verse blindfold, searching for guidance, or thrown the sacred wands to see what pattern they would make in the dust. Now
we had the unpicking of the human genome to tell us our fate but we were still crossing our fingers and reading our luck in the stars like an emotional appendix, a useless relic that could fester and infect us with a destructive septicaemia.

Jack had said that this small, innocuous-seeming, round of metal held the symbols of four religions, cults or sects, however you liked to call them. The wearer hedging his bets. Again I felt the impulse to ring Stalbridge and ask him what he knew about it, what he thought it all meant and what Jack had really wanted when he called on him in Oxford. But from my own experience of his evasiveness I knew he would tell me nothing. Perhaps he had sent me a clue in the medallion and expected me to tease it out. Perhaps it was just an excuse to warn me about the people ‘who play rough’. Or something he wanted to get rid of himself, a haunting he needed to exorcise.

There were no answers. The amulet was mute or if it spoke it was in a whisper I couldn’t catch, the sound of the sea in a shell. I wrapped it in its shroud of tissue paper again and locked it in the safe. Then I rang Hildreth, not because I had decided to tell him about Stalbridge but simply to be doing something and in the hope that he might have some news.

‘Ah, Alex, I was going to ring you. Not that there’s much to tell, more questions than answers. We know how they got into Dr
Caistor’s
museum. Contract cleaners for the windows. Started early to be finished before the public arrived, so they said. Obviously sussed out the security, how to knock out the alarm system and then in through the roof. But someone must have been there too during the day as a visitor, we think, and picked the spot to place the body. Unfortunately CCTV doesn’t show anyone behaving suspiciously among the
hundreds
who went through in the days before.

The boy was from somewhere in Eastern Europe or even as far away as the Middle East. Dead before he was put there, like the others. Not more than twenty-four hours. Rigor would have had to be over to arrange the body as it was. But decomposition had barely set in so forensics are pretty clear about the timing. So far they’re all foreign. No one knows about them. No one comes forward to claim them. Lost boys, you might say.’

Aren’t we all, I thought, in one way or the other. ‘I went to see
Stalbridge
,’ I said.

‘Stalbridge?’

‘Jack Linden’s sometime colleague he visited in Oxford.’

‘And did you find anything? Like why did your professor pay him a visit.’

‘Nothing. He talked about Jack and how they worked together in Egypt, but that was all.’

‘You have to be careful going off on your own like that, Alex. You could alert a suspect or even just muddy the waters for us.’

‘Yes, I see that. It’s just I felt I owed it to Jack. Nothing seemed to be happening. No answers as to why he was killed. Do you still think it wasn’t just a queer bashing, being in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

‘No, we don’t think it was that. But that’s all I can tell you because we’ve got no further ourselves. We believe, I believe, all these
happenings
are connected but we don’t know how. Anyway let me know next time if you feel like going off on your own, and I’ll tell you whether I think it’s a good idea.’

My wrist was being well and truly slapped though in a very gentle way. Yet it was clear that the police weren’t getting anywhere either. I hadn’t mentioned Stalbridge’s letter with its bizarre enclosure, partly because I would have been forced to give it up as possible evidence. So I was still withholding information; this time hard facts not just speculation. I wondered what Hilary would advise when, if, I told her.

I’d allowed myself to be distracted by Jack’s unsolved death. ‘Get back to the day job,’ I told myself. The chairman had said he wanted something light for the summer exhibition, ‘to lift people’s spirits’: candy floss and striped deckchairs. But all I could think of was the dark underbelly of Victorian life, Wilde’s stable boys, flower-girl prostitutes, Dickensian alleys, gaslight blaring through a broken mantle, the tattered lungs of consumptive seamstresses.

Post Adversus Haereses
C. AD
180 Lyons

For they allege that after Joseph of Arimathea had laid the body of the Lord in the tomb prepared for himself then he washed it and closed up the wounds and in the morning came Mary of Magdala and breathed into the Lord the breath that he had given her when he kissed her on the mouth.

Others say that Christ did not die but Simon who carried the cross was crucified in his place because God cannot die, being immortal and all spirit. Yet others that the human flesh clothing the Lord perished but the spirit flew up.

Those first say too that Joseph of Arimathea, after the Lord was gone away, came to Saul with that Mary and after went to the Cassiterides, and that therefore he was the founder of the Christian church here but the truth is that, when he was very old and on his way to his death, the blessed Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who had known the
Apostles
, Peter and Paul, stopped at Smyrna where he was met by St Polycarp, then a young man. And it seems to me most certain that from thereabouts the word was carried to the West, following the example of St Paul to the places where the Greeks had settled or Greek Jews, and thence to the Greeks of Massilia, so that in the persecution of the Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, there were already some forty-eight persons here who died for their Lord, including their bishop Pothinus, to whom I have succeeded. And I too was born in Smyrna and hold the memory of St Polycarp ever in my heart. So I say with the Apostle Paul ‘If Christ is not risen our faith is in vain.’

I warn you therefore, beloved, against those heretics who would lead you astray with their false gospels and thegonies that claim a divine mother, sometimes called Sophia, as the source of creation and of the Christ, who is not, they say falsely, the Lord born of Mary but only enters into him at baptism. And these teachings come in part from the heathen philosophers who lived before the Lord and did not know him or from the stories of the gods of the pagans.

And so our people suffer because they are forced to worship these gods or perish by decree of the emperors, who claim to be god themselves, or to eat the meat that has been sacrificed to idols. Then the people cry out against them when they see them refuse saying: ‘Give us back our gods who preserve us, not just this Jesus who, you teach, died like a felon on the cross
.’

 The names of the false teachers are Cerinthus, Basilides, Valentinus whom the Romans refused to make a bishop, Ptolemaeus and many others who write and teach contrary to the evidence of the true church, not in the name of the Lord and his truth but for their own glory, making congregations of followers under their own names. But the truth will be revealed when he comes in his glory. So my brethren hold fast and the gates of hell shall not prevail against you nor any suffering cause you to falter.

There was a note from Doris Shepherd on the kitchen table when I went through to make myself some tea.

‘Caesar hadn’t ate much so I left it.’

I stared down at the desiccated plates of food I had put out for him yesterday morning. A numb sickness punched me in the stomach. Usually he would be waiting when I came back; reproachful,
demanding
attention before I could be forgiven. Today the house was silent, empty. I went to the foot of the stairs and called. Often, when I was out, he slept on my bed. Perhaps he was ill. I climbed to the top landing but my bedroom was empty. I went down and opened the back door calling into the garden. Sometimes he waited for me on the strip of front lawn but I would have seen him as I came in.

The back gardens were his stalking ground. The house fronted onto a busy road and he was afraid of traffic, usually going no further than the front porch or the few feet of grass inside the gate. I called again. Often he would come clambering over the fence with a little cry of recognition, but of chastisement too. A blackbird sang briefly. Then a gull wheeled overhead with a long ululating cry. I turned back indoors.

All evening I waited for the sound of the cat flap dropping back into place, with only half an ear for the television or the phone. He hadn’t stayed away like this since he was a kitten and had fallen through the open skylight of a neighbour’s greenhouse. I saw him savaged by the pit bull a few doors away and lying under a bush, broken and
bleeding
, and blamed myself for going straight to work instead of coming home first.

In the end, after too much whisky, I fell asleep in front of the screen to wake thickly and stagger to bed trying to believe he would be back in the morning but daylight came and no Caesar.

I wanted to howl and yet part of my mind knew this would be
condemned as a totally disproportionate response by most people. I tried to think of the dead boys, the welter of grief and pain, an
envelope
of violence and despair blanketing the earth with its burden of living creatures but my own pain was too sharp. Was there something wrong with me that I could feel like this for a non-human animal when the suffering of my own species could leave me unmoved? Men, especially, aren’t supposed to feel like this or not to admit to it, even to themselves.

I rang the RSPCA, the police and Caesar’s vet. Then I set up a poster on the computer with his picture and printed off twenty copies. At the last moment I added:
Reward
. Where I live the houses are constantly changing owner so that there were few friendly neighbours I could call on and ask them to search garden sheds and greenhouses.

Looking at Caesar’s black-and-white photograph I realised there was nothing to distinguish him in most people’s eyes from any other black-and-white cat. Once you leave out colour and size, the other animals appear deceptively homogenous within their type and species. An Alsatian is an Alsatian first, an individual second and often only perceived to be so by the doting owner, looking for difference within similarity. Whereas, we wear our hearts on our faces unless we’re trying to hide something.

The trees were in fresh green leaf or sprinkled with small white flowers clinging like wet confetti. Soon the petals would fall and the pavement be deep in their post-wedding drift. Tacking up the posters at head height on their bark I suddenly hoped the trees didn’t feel the pins going in but I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. There was nothing more I could do but before I set off to the museum I had to share my ache with somebody. I rang Hilary.

‘Where are you?’ she asked when I said her name. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I’m just going to work. Caesar’s missing. He wasn’t here when I got back and he didn’t come in this morning. He hadn’t eaten anything either so that means he’s been gone two days. I’ve rung everybody and put up posters. I can’t think what else to do.’

‘You’ve done everything you can. We just have to hope someone finds him. I’m so sorry, Alex.’

‘Do you think I’m – well wet to be so…? I just want to howl.’

‘Of course not. It shows you’re human. But don’t be alone. Go to work and try not to think about it.’

Of course she was right. But the moment would come when I had to go home again, hoping to find him here and dreading the
disappointment
of the empty house. Trying not to think of him shut in somewhere without food or water, or worse, I took the bus down into town. The ornate façade of what had once been the library, and was now the museum, endowed by Andrew Carnegie, was solid and comforting in its late Victorian dress, echoed all over the country, of red brick and carved stone trimmings.

There was an unfamiliar envelope among the usual pile of
circulars
and official communications on my desk. Wary of the unknown I picked it up and weighed it in the palm of my head. By now I could recognise Stalbridge’s writing and the address wasn’t in his script. The envelope was a plain long white A3 one, slightly stiff suggesting a folded sheet of A4 with a small lump in the middle. There must be an enclosure. And suddenly I didn’t care if I died, was blown to bits or poisoned. I was tired of being suspicious, afraid. I tore open the envelope, putting a forefinger under the loose end of the flap and ripping along the seam. At least it would be quick. Nothing happened. I found, in spite of my brave or foolhardy action, I’d been holding my breath and let it out in a gusty sigh. Then I took out a single sheet of white paper folded into three. A small mound of black fur fell onto the table. When I opened the sheet I found a single sentence in that device of anonymous letter writers that’s such a cliché, words cut from newsprint:

So I had been right to be apprehensive. Caesar hadn’t just run off on an adventure or been shut in. He’d been catnapped. Even as I thought it I knew that wasn’t the right word. Stolen, made off with, kidnapped. There was no other word for it. It was meant to be a warning. It told me I was being watched, that they knew my comings and goings and even those of my cat. It had to be the people Stalbridge had described as
liking ‘to play rough’, who had seen me at his house in Oxford and
concluded
, wrongly, that I had been following him at the British Museum.

How far had they taken him? How could he possibly find his way back from wherever, over unknown territory, perhaps having to cross twenty roads, Caesar who was so easily frightened by traffic? If they’d killed him as a warning, and sent me the black fur as proof, it would have been easier to resign myself. But they had known me well enough or made a fortunate guess that this not knowing was more painful and therefore, in their terms, a more effective warning. Reason told me I would never see him again but there was still the worm of hope and the fear that he might be suffering, at the very least terrified.

Should I involve Hildreth now? I’d already asked the local police about strays and they’d put me on to a cat rescue organisation. But Hildreth was a different matter. I imagined myself saying: ‘I’ve lost my cat,’ and his complete bewilderment and then contempt. I wasn’t even sure about telling Hilary. She might think I’d lost it completely if I suggested he’d been kidnapped. There seemed nothing I could do but ring the vet and the cat rescue people and say I thought he had been driven off in some car or van by mistake and ask them to keep an eye out for a black-and-white cat, possibly missing some fur. I emailed them his picture.

‘We’ve got one in but it’s got more white than yours and anyway she’s a female. We’ll keep looking. Let us know if he comes back. Not everyone bothers and it clutters up the records. By the way there’s been a lot of pet napping recently. Have you thought of that? You wouldn’t think there’d be a market when so many animals are just abandoned but there you are.’

Her matter-of-factness was reassuring. She didn’t think I was wet or mad. She still had hope. I could imagine her easily from her voice: greying, perhaps a retired schoolteacher, firm but kind, used to the
idiosyncrasies
of pet owners but more concerned for the animals
themselves
, probably saying to an assistant: ‘Why can’t people look after their pets properly?’

My next but one caller, after a difficult conversation with the
chairman
wanting to know whether the jolly seaside exhibition would be
ready on time as if it was Wembley Stadium and he was the Queen cutting the ribbon, was Hildreth himself almost as if he could read my thoughts.

‘Ah, Alex. I’m coming down to your neck of the woods. Can you meet me for a trip up the coast? There’s been a development. I’d like your input.’

Perhaps this was my chance to tell him about Caesar and
Stalbridge’s
‘people who play rough’. ‘I was going to phone you anyway about something… I don’t, didn’t know how important it is,’ I said to give myself an opening.

‘We can talk in the car. I’ll pick you up… let me see: it’s ten thirty now, around twelve thirty, at work.’

‘How long will we be away? I need to tell my staff.’

‘It’s hard to say. I’ll probably stay on and send you back in the ear. We’re going to Bradwell. To some chapel by the sea. There’s been another body found. It looks like the same lot.’

No, my mind said, leave me out. I don’t want to be involved but I knew it was useless. I would go with Hildreth and be made party to more violence and death. Now I couldn’t tell him about Caesar, not without a lot of editing.

‘Does Dr Caistor know?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Shall I tell her?’

‘You do that. It’ll come better from you. I don’t pretend to have a gentle touch.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘are you sure you need me? It’s out of your way to come here first.’

‘You’re my talisman, Alex. You have to see this through.’

I hoped he couldn’t hear me sigh. ‘Okay. But I’ll meet you there. Same time: twelve thirty.’

‘Don’t be late.’

‘Is it another boy?’ Hilary asked.

‘I suppose so. He didn’t say. Just that it looked like the same lot.’

‘Jack must have been involved in some way.’

‘We’ll never know that for sure.’

‘I don’t want to believe it.’

‘I know. Neither do I. I’ll ring you as soon as I’m back. My chairman won’t like this. It’s much too close to home again.’

So I set out up the A127 towards London, passing the prince’s grave site and the end of my own road. Had Caesar come home yet? I couldn’t stop to find out. Leaving the old London arterial I turned north through Rayleigh to cross the River Crouch at Battlesbridge, and then drove north-east towards the Blackwater and the sea. By now I knew Bede’s history almost by heart and the
Anglo Saxon Chronicle
since the prince had so clearly become part of my life, so that even I knew that this is an old landscape stamped with the footprints of the dead Saxons and Vikings battling it out at Maldon.

The exhortation of Byrtnoth, the Saxon commander, as his
remaining
warriors rallied round him for a last stand, could have inspired a Henry V or a Churchill. This time though it hadn’t been enough. They were all cut down.

Now I was driving through the saltings of the Essex marshes where Mehalah was drowned by her lover in the bestselling romance by the local vicar, Sabine Baring Gould, collector of folksongs, author of such religious hits as
Onward Christian Soldiers
and
Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow
, and contemporary of Thomas Hardy, an Essex Tess of the D’Urbervilles. ‘One of your lot,’ Hilary would say. Bradwell is on a hunched back of land between the Blackwater and the cold North Sea, a place of wheeling gulls and solitude, apart from the
pilgrims
and picnickers.

The entrance for the car park was blocked by a police barrier, manned on either side by officers in luminous yellow jackets. I pulled up and wound down my window as one of them stepped forward.

‘The chapel is closed to the public, sir.’

‘Yes, I know. Chief Inspector Hildreth asked me to meet him here.’

‘I see.’ He thought for a moment, staring hard at my face as if he could see through to my black heart and lying tongue. ‘Do you have some ID with you sir?’

‘Driving licence?’

‘That would help.’

I fished in the glove compartment and handed over the green form in its plastic jacket.

‘Alex Kish?’

‘That’s right.’ The other officer had been busy on his mobile phone. Now he came over.

‘Alex Kish?’ The first one said.

‘That tallies with the number plate.’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Hildreth hasn’t arrived yet. I suggest you pull over there in the car park and someone will let you know when he’s ready for you.’

‘Thank you, officer.’ He handed back my driving licence.

‘I expect the traffic is bad getting out of London,’ I said, feeling some need to prove I was a normal, rational citizen. Then I drove
carefully
to a corner of the car park where they could keep an eye on me from the barrier and switched the engine off. It wouldn’t be seemly to play the radio I decided, so I got out the leaflets on the chapel that I had picked up from our display shelves, which included material on all the local places of interest tourists and natives might want to visit: Colchester Castle, Thaxted Windmill, Ingatestone Hall: the tangible fabric of Essex history.