The Orpheus Trail (8 page)

As I pushed open the café door I was surprised to see Jean and Harry Bates waving from a table. I waved back.

‘Some of our local amateurs: they’re the ones who found the grave. Fortunately their table’s full so we can be on our own without giving offence. You pick a spot and I’ll just go over and have a polite word.’

There were two others at the Bates’s table, a man and a woman in late middle age that I thought I’d seen at some of our lectures. The four of them had an air of intense but suppressed excitement like children with a secret.

‘Hallo, Alex,’ Jean said. ‘We’re glad you’ve come in. Harry’s got something to show you. Go on, Harry.’

‘You’ll have to come round here,’ Harry said, ‘and look over my shoulder.’

Obediently I moved to stand behind him. He was holding a
state-of-the-art
digital camera, at least four millimetre mega pixels. He pressed a button. The egg sprang onto the little screen. ‘Look at this,’ he said, focusing on a close-up of the floating boy. The image loomed larger, the screen homing in finally on the thing gleaming at the boy’s throat. A small bright square of golden light. ‘Now look at this.’ Another golden square filled the frame, etched with precise markings. ‘Now look at this again.’

The first bright object took its place but now I could see it was covered with similar marks.

‘Tell me what I’m looking at,’ I said.

‘This one,’ Harry flicked on the second picture, ‘is the square amulet you found in the buckle from the grave, and this,’ he brought up the
first one again, ‘is the pendant round the boy’s neck. They’re the same. Except that I think the boy is wearing only a part, not the whole thing.’

‘One leaf?’

‘That’s it.’

I felt a shiver run through me as if someone had poured icy water down my spine. In his clumsy way the chairman had been right. We were being haunted. The mayor had been right too. The press the next morning had a field day with child sacrifice and pictures of the ‘
floating
boy’. I waited for Jack Linden’s call.

Putative Restoration of a Missing Part of the Derveni Papyrus, discovered in a charred condition on a Thracian funeral pyre by workmen digging a road from Thessalonika to Kavala, January 15th, 16th 1962. The pyre also contained male human remains, weapons and horse accoutrements and was clearly that of a noble warrior. The extant scroll however begins with Zeus, having seized power, swallowing the severed genitals of his grandfather Uranus in order to recreate the entire universe from within his own belly. An attempt has therefore been made to reconstruct what must have been the beginning, describing creation according to the Orphic theogony with the help of the late Professor Guthrie, Fellow of Peterhouse and his groundbreaking
Orpheus and Greek Religion.

‘First was Enduring Time whom the Greeks call Chronos. Out of Chronos are born Aither or Air and Chaos and Erebos, the yawning gulf and darkness over all. In Aither Chronos fashioned the Cosmic Egg, which split in two to form the heavens and earth, and as it split there sprang from it the winged Phanes in a blaze of light, the beautiful one, creator of the sun and moon and of the men of the Golden Age. And of himself he bore a daughter, Night or wisdom, whom he took to himself. And the Greeks know him as Dionysus or Eros.’

If this is accepted as at least plausible then it will be immediately clear that the Orphic seems to owe much to the earlier Iranian theogony, a conclusion which gains considerable strength when we consider the occupation of Thrace by the Persians and that Hesiod himself, through his father, came from Lydia (another satrap of the Persian Empire), and whose own creation myth has many similar elements.

Paper delivered to the Symposium on The Influence of Middle Eastern and Classical Beliefs on Later Monotheisms

Universidad de Huelva, June 2003

But it was the chairman who rang me first. The press had continued their feeding frenzy. Normally we don’t take all the national papers at the museum. There’s no need. Today I sent Phoebe out to pick up the lot as soon as I opened my own daily rag.

‘Have you seen the papers, Kish?’ The chairman believed in going straight to the point. ‘I’ve had local councillors on to me already,
suggesting
it’s our fault for wasting residents’ money on dodgy modern art.’

As he spoke I was running through successive headlines from the pile in front of me. As usual those in red were the most hysterical in their prurient, self-righteous voyeurism. I saw where our local
broadcasters
had picked up their ideas. It was a chance that wasn’t to be missed to make political capital out of a grisly event and knock the council’s cultural budget at the same time. ‘It’s the effect on the town,’ he went on, ‘that has to be my concern. No one will want to come here.’

‘I think you might find just the opposite.’

‘A lot of ghouls. No, we want this cleared up as soon as possible We’ve got just over three months before the start of the season. Have you spoken to the police yet? What do they think?’

‘I was just about to ring them,’ I lied, ‘but you got me first.’

‘I’ll get off the line then. Keep me up to speed, Alex.’

Who should I ring? I looked up our usual liaison officer and dialled the number. ‘Inspector Hobbs? It’s Alex Kish from the museum. I thought I should make contact, or rather the chairman thinks so. I hope that isn’t a nuisance.’ I knew the notion of local political interest would do the trick.

‘We’d like you to come in, sir, and discuss it with us. There seem to be some factors that might be more in your field than ours.
Incidentally
we’ve called in the Met. Had to. We think this goes much farther
than our patch. Certainly the victims weren’t from round here. That much we know.’

‘Of course. I’ll come whenever you say. Our chairman is worried about the town’s image. He’s anxious the thing should be out of the public mind by Easter.’

I heard the inspector give a short satirical laugh. ‘He’ll be lucky. So will we.’

The next call was Jack. ‘What took you so long?’ I said, determined to seize the initiative.

‘You’ve been engaged for hours.’

‘I know: the chairman, the police. You’re lucky to have got in now. So what’s your theory, Jack?’

‘Hang on. What about: “Sorry, Jack, you were right”?’

‘Sorry, Jack, you were right. So? I have to go and talk to the police. The locals have called in the Met, probably Interpol, or whatever it’s called these days, by now. Anything you can suggest I can feed through if…’

‘If you don’t think it’s too nutty?’

‘We don’t want to lose their confidence. So what can you tell me?’

‘I’ve seen a reference to a Persian lord who was suspended in a crystal coffin so that the sun’s rays would light him up.’

‘Okay. Let’s leave that out for the moment. This is something even the police don’t know yet.’ I quickly filled him in about the gold leaf, seeming to be from our amulet, round the boy’s neck. ‘From what you told me before that could be inscribed with instructions on how to behave after death.’

‘That’s what I could read. But that was only one facet because of the way the sheet was folded in four. The others may have, will have, different bits of text.

‘If I emailed you a photograph of this leaf could you tell if it’s what you saw before?’

‘I can try. Depends on the definition in the photograph.’

‘I think it’s a different bit but as you know I don’t read Greek.’

‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’

It would be good to go to the police with something they didn’t know, something I could contribute as an expert, even if only at second hand.

Jack’s answer came quickly. ‘It’s Greek, alright. But there’s
something
weird. I thought I’d seen it before and then I remembered. It’s in a book on the Derveni papyrus.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s something the Greeks found when they were building a road.’

‘Which Greeks? When are we talking about?’

‘In the sixties, as far as I recall. Anyway the whole text was
published
in 2005. There’d been a gap because the academic who’d ended up with it didn’t want to let go. Then a samizdat version began to
circulate
and finally the whole thing went public.

‘How does this fit in with our text round the boy’s neck?’

‘It’s part of it and, as I said at first, it’s an Orphic text.’

‘Instructions for the dead?’

‘Not this one. This bit is all about creation. Zeus swallowing “the glorious firstborn of the egg”. It isn’t exactly the same but it’s close enough for me to recognise where it comes from. There’s a later, fuller version of the creation story according to Orpheus in something called
The Rhapsodies
in English.’

‘Where do we go from there?’

‘That I don’t know. I’ll have to dig around some more. But what’s clear is that someone is mixed up in this who knows the whole field, maybe even better than I do. Didn’t I say that if there was more to this than just a game being played with the toys of Dionysus, that
something
else would happen to confirm it? Well this is it.’

‘What do I say to the police?’

‘You’ll have to play it by ear, tell them what you can without them thinking we’ve all completely lost it. Crazy professors: that sort of thing.’

As I made my way to the police station that afternoon I felt less and less sure. All I had to offer was some mad conspiracy theory, maybe involving ancient cults. I was shown into an interview room, and left kicking my heels for ten minutes by the clock on the wall, time enough to begin to feel that I was the criminal. I became convinced that I was being observed and tried to sit looking relaxed and dignified, resisting the impulse to keep shifting on the hard chair or crossing or
uncrossing
my legs. Finally the door opened and Inspector Hobbs came in,
followed by a uniformed policeman, and a man I judged to be in his forties, with short black curly hair and very blue eyes.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Kish. This is Detective Chief
Inspector
Hildreth of the Met and our own Constable Jenkins.’

I stood up to shake hands with the man from the Met while the constable positioned himself at the table beside some kind of
recording
equipment.

‘Peter Hildreth but I’m usually called Hilo,’ the detective said. The voice was strong with a north of Watford accent I couldn’t identify. Brought up on the south suburban fringes of London I was bad at
differentiating
anything other than refined estuary or cockney.

‘You don’t mind if we take a record of this do you, sir?’ Hobbs asked.

‘No, no, go ahead.’ We all sat down.

‘Gerald here says you run the local museum.’

‘I’m the director,’ I said rather stiffly. ‘My chairman has given me the job of liaising with the police.’

‘But why, if you don’t mind me asking, does he, or you, come into it? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not doubting your legitimate interest. I’m just trying to understand the set-up.’

‘It’s our responsibility. His because his committee commissioned the sculpture under their tourism brief which includes entertainment, culture, town improvement, anything that might be thought to bring the punters in. But also,’ I was choosing my words carefully, ‘because there seem to be certain unusual elements to recent events connected with our discovery of the Prince’s grave which make it my concern.’

Hildreth nodded. ‘Ah yes. I read about that in the press.
Archaeology
, armchair archaeology, is by way of being a hobby of mine. So you think there’s some connection between what happened yesterday and that grave?’

I took a deep breath and tried to speak as calmly and factually as possible. ‘An amulet was found in the grave and was subsequently stolen from the museum. It consisted of a thin sheet of gold inscribed with a Greek text and folded up very small to the size of a matchbox. Part of that was round the neck of the child in the glass egg.’

Hobbs shifted in his seat. ‘What you don’t know, Mr Kish, is that a similar thing was found with the remains of the body burnt in the
pier fire. We didn’t tell the public because we didn’t see it had any
significance
and anyway it’d been so badly warped by the heat as to be unrecognisable, at least to us, then, but from what you say now, I’m in no doubt it’s the same kind of thing.’

‘So it looks like we have two similar killings and therefore a serial killer. Let’s see what other similarities there are. Both young boys for a start.’ Hildreth counted the points off on a well-manicured hand. ‘Both in bizarre circumstances. The boy on the pier didn’t go there of his own accord and start a fire playing with matches. He was taken there, possibly, probably, already dead.’

‘The boys weren’t local,’ Hobbs said. ‘We’ve no reported missing persons of their description. Anyway if there had been there would have been a national manhunt. We would all have known about it. Essex people don’t take things quietly, especially anything to do with children.’

I realised the local police would have their own problems.
Negligence
or incompetence accusations would start to fly and I knew how that felt. I wondered how much I could add to the list and still keep a reputation for credibility with these two hard-headed enforcers of the law. I decided to keep quiet unless asked a direct question. I wasn’t let off the hook for long.

‘Anything to add, Mr Kish?’ Hildreth asked. I had decided in my own mind that he was a black Celt with all that implied of imagination, what I remembered from somewhere as ‘the lovely gift of the gab,’ not at all the stereotype PC Plod. I felt he sensed I was holding something back with an almost traditionally feminine intuition or even a touch of the magician but with no whiff of charlatan that I could detect.

‘The bizarre circumstances you listed both show elements of some ancient cult.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m not sure because I’m not an expert. It’s not my field.’

‘Speculation?’

‘At this stage, yes.’

‘Let me know if you come up with anything more concrete. What’s happened twice can happen again and I imagine none of us want that. The public will want to know why we’re faffing about.’

I was dismissed. I wanted to ask what they would do next ‘to pursue their inquiries’ but supposed that would be classified
information
. Should I have told them about the real expert, sicked them on to Jack? I’d held back and I didn’t quite know why, except that I had the impression that he wasn’t comfortable being publicly quizzed or handling that kind of interrogation.

And I was right. ‘I hope you managed to keep me out of it,’ he said later when I rang to fill him in on my interview with the police. ‘
Officialdom
makes me nervous.’

‘It’s okay. I didn’t need to involve you. But I don’t know if I can keep you out forever unless I pretend that what you tell me I thought of for myself.’

‘That’s fine by me.’

‘It may not work. Remember you were quoted in the press.’

‘I know. I just hope everyone else has forgotten or doesn’t make the connection.’

I had to wonder why he was so averse to publicity when most people, including archaeologists, can’t wait to be picked out by the media spotlight.

‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ I asked Hilary as the fatal day loomed closer.

‘Beth will be home and we’ll probably go to my sister’s.’

‘Beth?’

‘My daughter at uni in Durham. Honestly, Alex, your face! You didn’t think I was still a virgin, did you? I warned you that you know nothing about me.’

Up until now I had existed in a kind of time capsule, a bubble of the present in my head. I realised I had asked her nothing and in turn told her almost nothing. And now I didn’t know how to begin. Beth must be about nineteen. What had happened to her father? Obviously he wasn’t around.

‘Beth’s father and I split up when she was ten. He lives in the States. She goes to stay with him from time to time. He’s quite a distinguished anthropologist in his own field.

I felt a rush of envy, or was it jealousy, of this unknown man who had just come into my life as fertile husband and no doubt brilliant academic.

‘What will you do?’ Hilary asked.

‘I might see if Jack Linden wants to get out of London for a couple of days. I don’t get the impression he’s overburdened with friends and family.’

‘What will Caesar say to that?’ she laughed.

‘He’ll have to mind his manners if he wants any turkey.’

‘Who’ll do the cooking?’

‘I will. I’ve got rather good at it since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to.’

Jack seemed delighted at the invitation. ‘I never know quite what to do with myself when the city empties and everything’s closed,
libraries
, museums and so on. Thanks, Alex, thanks a lot.’

‘Bracing walks along the front,’ I said. ‘Bring warm clothes.’