Yet the gatekeeper was unmoved. He gazed at the dollar bills that Victor was discreetly flourishing and this time the sneer was angry. ‘La! No! Ila jahaim malik!’
But his anger was interrupted: by shouting. Victor turned. A slender, white-robed adolescent, perhaps a novice monk, was yelling from the steps of the monastery, yelling at no one – and everyone. The shouting was loud and wild. Victor could not translate the words, but the meaning was clear – something terrible had happened. Some kind of crime?
The gatekeeper was already out of the tatty little kiosk, running towards the porch of the monastery; others pursued. Victor took his chance and joined the anxious people. He strained to see over the shoulders and arms. What was going on?
The crowds were too thick. Shameless now, Victor used his stick to lever himself between the onlookers. There! The monastery door was open – and Victor brazenly stepped inside.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness within. There was a knot of people in the shadowy hallway: they were pointing at the stone stairs beyond. Victor caught the word ‘police’ – shurta – and then the word qalita.
Murder?
A noise came from the stairs, where a makeshift stretcher was being hauled along by sweating hands. The agitated Zabaleen stretcher-bearers lowered their burden, as they pressed towards the door. And then Victor gazed, quite appalled.
The man on the stretcher was pale and stiff. His robes had been wrenched open, revealing his white chest, where he had been stabbed brutally in the heart. The pools of blood were lurid. The crossguard of the dagger, still lodged between the ribs, gave the impression the monk had been stabbed with a crucifix.
Victor recognized the silent face of the victim. It was Brother Wasef Qulta. Maybe the only man who knew the truth about the Sokar Hoard. And now he was dead.
The year was gone; the party was over. Malcolm Harding wandered, unsteadily, through the detritus of their New Year’s Eve merrymaking. He marvelled at how much booze ten people could manage to drink in seven hours.
The vodka bottles clinked at his feet; an entire army of empty beer cans stood to attention in the corner of the sitting room. Jojo was fast asleep on the sofa, cradling a wine bottle in her delicate hands.
He resisted the urge to look up her miniskirt.
She was so beautiful though. Even now, with her make-up mussed, sprawled dissolutely on the leather sofa, she was just lyrically pretty: perfect and blonde and twenty-one years old. Oh yes, he adored Jojo. Ever since they had arrived here on Christmas Eve in this grand and spooky old house, perched between enormous rocks in the wild west of Celtic Cornwall – which was itself the wild west of England – he had tried to hook up with her, in as subtle a fashion as he could manage.
And he had failed. Maybe he hadn’t been subtle enough? Maybe he had been too subtle? Maybe he could try again when they were all back at university. The holidays were nearly over. It was January the first, and it was – what? – three a.m.
Three a.m.!
Malcolm sat on a table and swigged from his bottle of beer. Amy Winehouse was still lamenting all the drugs that would kill her from the stereo. The music was so boomingly loud it was probably annoying the dead in Zennor churchyard, half a mile away.
Beer finished, Malcolm wondered vaguely, and groggily, where everyone else had gone. Rufus was presumably in one of the many bedrooms, with their amazing views of the sea, sleeping with Ally, as they had been doing ever since they had shared a bottle of vintage port on Boxing Day. Andrei had crashed with his girlfriend immediately after midnight. Josh and Paul were probably smoking upstairs, or chopping out a line. Or flaked out in their clothes.
Jojo turned over on the sofa, half-stirring, but still asleep. Her little denim skirt rode up as she did. Manfully, Malcolm resisted the temptation to linger; instead, he stood up, walked across the room, then wandered through the enormous mess that was the kitchen (they would have to hire some kids from the village to clear this up) and opened the kitchen door to the large gardens that surrounded this great old house, Eagle’s Nest.
The night was cold. The garden seemed empty. Then a dark and sudden figure loomed into view.
‘Jesus!’
Freddy laughed, and casually dropped his glowing cigarette onto the grass, not bothering to crush it underfoot.
‘Sorry, old boy. Did I frighten you?’
Malcolm was half-angry, yet half-relieved.
‘Yes you did. What the fuck are you doing, skulking out here?’
‘Well I came out to chuck up into the bushes, as is traditional on New Year’s Eve.’ Freddy smirked. ‘That last joint was a bit of a serial killer. But the air revived me.’
Now the two of them stood together in the cold, looking out to the distant waves. The house, Malcolm recalled, had once been owned by artists. You could see that its position might inspire.
‘So? Do tell. Did you manage to ravish Jojo yet?’
Malcolm sighed.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Ten days and not even a kiss? This is potentially worse than the Holocaust.’
‘Maybe. I’ll survive.’ Malcolm gazed down, once more taking in the magnificent view, the vast granite rocks and the moonlit fields below, which led down to the Atlantic. ‘Anyway, Freddy, mate, why are you still out here? You’ve been gone hours. It’s freezing.’
Freddy put a finger to his lips.
‘I wanted to sober up, as I said … and then …’
‘Then what?’
Even in the semi-darkness he could see the sly frown on Freddy Saunderson’s face.
‘Then I heard something.’
‘Duh?’
‘Something weird. And I keep hearing it.’
‘That’s Amy Winehouse. She’s dead.’
‘No. Not the music. Something else.’
‘But—’
‘There it is again! Listen.’
Freddy Saunderson was, for once, not joking. From way up on the moors there came a wild and very loud scream. No, not a scream – a feral chorus of screams; yet distorted and shrieking, mingling with the howl of the wind.
Malcolm felt an urge to step back: to physically retreat.
‘Jesus Christ. What is that?’
For a moment the noise abated, but then it returned. A distant choir, infantile and hideous. What the hell would make a sound like that?
At last, the noise ceased. The relative silence that followed seemed all the more oppressive. The thudding music in the house; the waves on the rocks below. Silence otherwise. Malcolm felt himself sobering up very fast.
Freddy pointed.
‘Up there.’
He was surely right. The noise appeared to be coming from the moors above them: from Zennor Hill, with its great granite carns and its brace of ruined cottages.
They’d walked around that forbidding landscape the day before, in the driving rain and blustering wind. The hilltop was druidic and malignant,