Daniel was aware of how implausible this sounded.
‘You’re about to leave the country at short notice, at the request of the Egyptian Vice Minister of Culture, and take a detour from your drive to the airport to stop off at your old professor’s house for small talk?’
The DCI shot a sceptical glance at his colleague who shrugged his shoulders as if to express his own disbelief of Daniel’s account.
‘He was my mentor,’ Daniel continued. ‘I hadn’t seen him in a while and I was quite surprised at Mansoor’s invitation. So I wanted to ask for his advice.’
‘But how could he advise you, if you didn’t know why you were being invited to Egypt?’
‘That was the point. I figured he might be able to tell me how to play it.’
‘And did he?’
Daniel looked away awkwardly. He had nothing to hide on this point, but the truth made him feel uncomfortable.
‘He was too far gone to help.’
‘Too far gone?’ the DCI echoed.
‘Dementia. I could tell that he wasn’t really with me.’
‘Is it possible that he had something on his mind? Something that might explain why someone would want to kill him?’
Again Daniel lapsed into thought. On this point he did have something to hide. For the next few seconds, he thought carefully about how much he wanted to share with the DCI. Did he want to mention Carmichael’s paranoid claims about his unpublished paper? The belief that the plague of boils could make a resurgence? At the time it had seemed preposterous. But Harrison Carmichael was dead and there was no question that he had been murdered. Even if the fire could be dismissed as an accident, the injuries to Roksana and to Carmichael himself could not.
But did he want to share his suspicions with the police? Would they come over as credible? Did he really have anything to tell them? Certainly nothing that Carmichael had told him amounted to solid information. All Daniel had was a nagging suspicion, but what he really wanted was an explanation and he wasn’t going to get that from the policeman.
Daniel saw no reason to stick his neck out by offering what might come over as a self-serving explanation. So he decided to hold his peace.
‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘Okay, Professor Klein. Interview suspended at 5.45 p.m.’
‘Look, I know you have to investigate thoroughly. But I’ve told you all I know and I’m a very busy man. Is there any possibility that I could be released on bail?’
‘We’re awaiting the results from the forensic team. If we can eliminate you – and assuming that we have no other grounds to hold you – you will be released at that time.’
Daniel didn’t see how the forensic tests would eliminate him. If he had started the fire, he could have taken the clothes he was wearing to Egypt and disposed of them there. They would certainly find his fingerprints and DNA on the garden chair where he had sat and it was unlikely that they would find any of the killer’s DNA in the house, because of the fire. Even if the forensic tests came up negative, he knew that a cloud of suspicion would hang over him until the case was solved.
In the meantime he was going right back to the police cells, to await his fate.
Chapter 17
‘He was a friend of Lord Byron, you know,’ said the curator, a young Indian. ‘They met at Cambridge.’
‘Yes, he was actually two years ahead of Byron, at Trinity,’ said Gabrielle. ‘In many ways he was his mentor, until Byron’s fame left him behind. But they stayed friends.’
Gabrielle was in an office on the top floor of the British Museum, sitting at a large work table with one of the curators of the Egyptian department. The police had told her that she wouldn’t be allowed any contact with Daniel before he was either released or charged. He had chosen not to take a lawyer, so she couldn’t even get a message to him indirectly.
She faced a stark choice. She could either sit around doing nothing except brood about her uncle’s death and Daniel’s fate or she could keep herself occupied, following up on the trail that had started in Egypt. It was ironic that finding the Mosaic tablets had proved to be not the end of the trail, but the start, and had in fact opened the door to other discoveries.
Having her name second or third on a paper about the discovery of the Mosaic tablets was prestigious enough. But after Mansoor had told them about the mysterious papyrus in the Egyptian Museum, it looked like there was a lot more to discover – especially as he had told them that the papyrus was carbon-dated to 1600 BC. That would make it older than the Bible – yet written in the same script as the original Mosaic tablets.
A secret that pre-dated the Bible? And one that must have been related to the Bible because it was written in the same ancient script as the original Ten Commandments!
That was a find well worth pursuing. If the credit for finding the Mosaic tablets would be great, the prestige for revealing older documents relating to the Semitic peoples would be enormous.
But of the three of them, only Daniel could decipher the papyrus. He had made it clear that to have any chance of doing so, he needed some idea of its origins. So now Gabrielle was sitting here with the curator talking about William John Bankes, explorer, artist and Egyptologist. Between 1815 and 1819, Bankes travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria, meticulously recording many of the great sites and artefacts with notes and drawings with a skilled and practised hand in the days before photography.
Several huge ledger-sized folders with cardboard ‘pages’ and heavy covers were stacked up on one side of the table. These were the Bankes archives. Pictures were held between the cardboard sheets, and many had clear plastic or cellophane over them to offer fuller protection of the drawing beneath. Gabrielle turned the pages in awe.
‘It’s amazing,’ she said with a shake of her head, admiring the skill and detail of the drawings.
Through his travels, Bankes had accumulated a substantial portfolio of manuscripts and illustrations of previously unknown historical sites in ancient Egypt and Sudan, preserving the details and imagery of sites that, in some cases, later became lost to vandalism and theft. For while the artefacts plundered by foreign explorers were still extant in Western museums, the spoils taken by local thieves – who were usually looking for gold and didn’t always appreciate the priceless value of knowledge – were in many cases gone for good.
‘So if I’ve understood you correctly,’ said the curator, ‘you don’t actually know where you’re looking, only what you’re looking for.’
‘Exactly,’ said Gabrielle. ‘We have an ancient Egyptian jar that bears a symbol like the Rod of Asclepius. We think it may have some connection with the ancient Israelites, as well as the Egyptians. So what we’re wondering is if there’s anything in the Bankes archives that shows such a symbol in ancient Egypt.’
‘I do actually remember seeing a drawing with that symbol before, in the Bankes collection,’ said the curator. ‘Now let me see.’
He selected one of the folders and started flicking through it.
‘Oh look,’ he said.
He had just stopped at a picture engraved on a rock showing a snake coiled around a pole.
‘It’s at Deir el-Medina,’ said the curator. ‘Literally “monastery of the town”.’
‘The town where the stonemasons, carpenters and scribes who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. Of course in those days, they didn’t speak Arabic.’
‘That’s right,’ said the curator. ‘They called it Set Maat.’
‘“The Place of Truth”.’