Tom Knox - The Deceit

For two hours he stood in the vestibule between the toilet and the broken carriage door, waiting, nervously, for the collector, dollars for baksheesh in hand. Yet the collector didn’t even show up.

The chaos of Egypt could sometimes be beneficial.

Only the tea-boy interrupted the rattling journey down the Nile valley, carrying a silver tray of little glasses as he patrolled the carriages, calling out, ‘ Shay, shay, shay! ’

Harper bought a cup of black tea, heavily sugared.

‘ Sefr, men fadlak …’

Gratefully, he sank the tea, then chased it with mineral water, as he opened his notebook and examined the scribbled document that Hassan had given him before he’d departed Abydos. The name was written in Latin letters as well as Arabic:

MOHAMMAD KHATTAB.

The head of police in Nazlet, and a cousin of Hassan’s. The fact he was related to Hassan came as no surprise to Ryan. Everyone who ascended through the bureaucracy of provincial Egypt – from the police to the army to the civil service – did so because they were related in some complex manner to someone else.

‘ Shukran .’ He handed the tea-glass back to the tea-boy, who had returned to collect the empties. The drained glasses chinked on their steel tray as the train switchbacked, closing in on Sohag. The boy steadied himself, and his tray, and pressed on.

‘ Shay! Shay! Shay! ’

Harper looked at the note again. The rest of it was in Arabic, which he could barely read, even though he spoke it pretty well. But Harper knew the contents: Hassan had already explained. It told the director of the Nazlet police that Ryan was mightily important and a great friend of Egypt, and Hassan of Abydos would be lavishly grateful if any assistance could be offered to his VIP American acquaintance.

Exactly what that assistance might be, how the hell he was going to get his hands on the Sokar documents, and how he was going to stop others from doing the same, Ryan did not know. But he was going to give it his best shot. His last shot. Late in the day, he’d been offered a break and he was going to take it. For his wife. For Victor. But mainly for himself. After ten years of giving everything to Egypt, a little selfish ambition was excusable. Wasn’t it?

The train hooted in the dark, and this was accompanied by the squeal of its brakes: the dusty yellow stain in the midnight sky confirmed that Sohag was near. He’d made it as quickly as he could in the circumstances. Would this be the crucial factor?

Quite possibly. The body of his old tutor had only been discovered yesterday. Harper might just be the first person on the scene with a real sense of what treasures could be contained in the bag found on Sassoon’s body.

A row of shuttered shops flickered under dirty streetlights. The train clattered, and then halted, with a juddering wrench.

The station forecourt was chaotic. This time Ryan gave up any pretence at politeness and shunted his way through the mêlée. And as soon as he reached the street, he accepted the first offer of a cab – Jayed! – chucked his rucksack in the back seat, and sat in the front, like an Egyptian, alongside the driver.

Another half a mile brought them to the biggest hotel in town: an ugly concrete tower that loomed over the elegant eternity of the Nile in a forbidding manner. As he checked in, Ryan wondered if Sassoon had stayed here, during his final nights alive on this earth.

The night passed fitfully. Barges hooted on the Nile. His room smelled of toilet but the toilet smelled of woodsmoke. He tried to sleep but had bad dreams, for the first time in years. Dreams of his dead wife mixed with dreams of dogs, headless dogs, running down canal towpaths. Endless, sweaty, malarial dreams that made Ryan all too ready for morning: he rose before his alarm.

As the first pink intimation of day tinted the horizon he was already dressed and hailing another taxi.

The drive to Nazlet took several hours. By the time he reached the impossibly rural remoteness of the desolate town on the very edge of very serious desert, it was noon and fiercely hot. Dogs lay whimpering in the shade of the biblical palm trees.

He had to find the police station.

A handsome youth in a clean djellaba , riding a Japanese dirt-bike, was negotiating his way down the rutted road, avoiding heaps of camel dung. Ryan waved him over. The lad pulled up and stared, in blatant astonishment, at a Western face. Presumably Nazlet saw very few Euro-American visitors: maybe none. This was about as remote as settlements got on the frontiers of Middle and Upper Egypt.

Ryan asked in his clearest, slowest Arabic where the police station could be found.

The boy paused. Then he answered, in Arabic, ‘Not far, half a kilometre past the old houses. Just up there.’

‘Thank you.’

The youth nodded, and smiled his handsome white smile, then kick-started his bike again. As he drove off he shouted, ‘But be careful. They are arresting everyone!’

This gave Ryan serious pause. Arrests? What could he do? Maybe he should go back to Sohag and wait. But that was absurd: he had come this far, and he was so near. The Sokar Hoard was within his grasp: he could sense it.

Resolved, Ryan turned. And saw a policeman.

The cop was standing three metres away. With a gun. Pointing at Ryan’s chest.

‘ Come with me. ’

‘Roasted cats?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmmm.’

The owner of the museum paused, staring thoughtfully into space. Above him was a decorative wooden sign saying: THE MOST FAMOUS MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT IN THE WORLD.

Karen Trevithick would normally have dismissed this as tourist-attracting whimsy, or indeed as bullshit, but everyone she had spoken to had assured her: No, go there, the guy who owns the place really knows his stuff. The museum is serious.

So she had made the long drive to the beautiful stormy cliffs of far-north Cornwall and the fishing village of Boscastle, sequestered in a cove between those cliffs, staring out at the furious waves that attacked the stone harbour. The day was blustery and bright, and very cold. The village still had its Christmas lights dangling across the wet and narrow cobbled roads; they looked melancholy now Christmas was over.

Karen was glad when Donald Ryman, the late-middle-aged owner, closed the door to the salt-scented air, silencing the seagulls.

Again he stared at nothing, then he turned. ‘Let’s go into the museum, and think about cats. Roasted cats, yes, a little strange.’

Another door led into the museum proper; a series of small, low ceilinged rooms: fishermen’s cottages knocked together. There was a big glass box in front of Karen: inside was a perpendicular stuffed goat wearing a dark scarlet robe.

‘The goat of Mendes,’ said Donald. ‘An avatar of Satan, the Horned God, worshipped for thousands of years.’ He pointed at a large rack of little glass jars, some full of vegetable matter, some containing ghastly wax dolls; naked, grimacing figurines. ‘These are herbs for witchcraft, the real thing. Gerald Gardner collected them decades ago. The wax figurines are poppets, little models of people for sticking pins in, to cause injury or death.’

She waited for an explanation but Donald’s eyes were now fixed on something over her shoulder. She turned to see what he was looking at. The exhibits were many: a dried old stoat, a hag stone for cursing, a rabbit’s heart pierced with a thorn – and a stuffed cat, chasing a stuffed rat.

He gestured at the mangy old stuffed cat. ‘Taghairm! Yes, yes. Taghairm!’

‘What?’

‘I believe what you witnessed was Taghairm! A truly ghastly ritual, often associated with the Celts, especially in Scotland.’