Tom Knox - The Deceit

‘I sorry, effendi , I smoking, sorry, I stop.’

Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.

Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.

Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?

Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just couldn’t . Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.

An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.

Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’

‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’

Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.

‘So we stop.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’

Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’

‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’

The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’

‘A few hours.’

Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.

As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.

Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingness.

Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.

But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.

He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.

When he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.

Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.

But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.

Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.

Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth, once again. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t. It was right to let God decide.

If there was a God.

The wind whirred outside, at the end of the long cavern. Victor thought of his wife and of the children they never had; he thought of her on that bicycle, that holiday, a spaniel puppy, a car journey somewhere, a cottage with a well in the garden, a photo of his dead parents, snow falling on the Polish camps, and then his wavering and failing mind considered one final thought: the blessed name of Jerusalem, derived from Shalim, the Canaanite God of Night; the God of the End.

And here was that same spirit, coming into the cave like the cool desert wind: Shalim, the God of the End.

Cats? The cottage was full of cats: or rather the corpses of cats. Some skinned, most of them charred. Charred and burned and scorched and roasted. Piles of dead cats in one corner. Piles of dead cats in another. The stench was intolerable. They had begun to rot.

‘Jesus Christ.’

DI Sally Pascoe nodded, grimly. The white shirt of her police uniform was smeared with greasy soot. The stuff was everywhere. The burning fur and cat flesh had thickened the air and blackened the walls. The floor was actually sticky: Karen shuddered to think why that was, though she could guess – the heat must have been intense as the cats burned, so intense that the fat in their flesh had liquefied, had turned to oil or tallow, now congealing. Like candles.

These cats had been burned like candles.

She resisted the urge to vomit.

Sally pointed, and Karen followed the gesture. ‘That must have been where some of them were burned. A spit roast, but others appear to have been doused in petrol, and burned alive. We found some petrol canisters at the back, and firelighters too, used for kindling.’