Authors: Maureen Duffy
‘And I’ll bring some booze. What’s yours?’
‘Anything except gin.’ It sounded as if we were auditioning for a buddy movie.
‘I thought you and Hilary…’
‘She’s got family obligations.’
I let the police simmer for a couple of days then, before everything closed down for the holiday, I rang the mobile number Hildreth had given me.
‘Hilo.’
‘It’s Alex Kish,’ I said, ‘from the museum. I wondered if there were any developments.’
‘We’ve ascertained that the first boy was Asian, or rather Asiatic, Chinese in fact. The second is more difficult. From the DNA we think Eastern European.’ The Northern twang to his voice was more
distinctive
on the telephone, even against the background of other voices and the grind of London traffic.
‘And the egg?’
‘We’ve interviewed the manufacturers. They thought the artist had changed his mind and ordered a slightly different version.’
‘Where did they send it?’
‘It was collected, signed for with an illegible signature.’
‘And the real one? Have you found that?’
‘Not yet. Why are you asking, Alex?’
‘Someone will have to pay for it. I can’t see the artist, Reg North, footing the bill, or the makers. It looks like a hole in my budget, and the council’s, and nothing to show for it. What chance do you think there is of getting it back? It’s not an easy thing to conceal. Too big.’
‘The artist thinks it’s been smashed up and recycled. He’s pretty depressed about the whole thing. We offered him the other one when we’ve finished with it but he says it’s tainted.’
‘How did the boy die?’
‘Drugged and suffocated while asleep.’
That was why he had looked so calm and peaceful.
‘Let’s hope we can all have a quiet Christmas,’ Hildreth said, ‘but I wouldn’t bet on it.’
I had wondered how Jack and I would get along on our own together for two whole days but in the end it was surprisingly easy. We went for cold rambles along the front and out to Canvey so that I could show him where the second boy had appeared in the egg.
‘Do you know why the artist chose that shape?’ he asked as we stood beside the empty plinth.
‘He said something on local radio about it being the perfect
sculptural
form, and signifying hope and rebirth.’
‘That’s how it’s always been seen; why so many religions have adopted it as part of their mythology. The Iranians give each other symbolic eggs at the start of their new year in spring, roughly
corresponding
to our Easter. Nothing to do with a Christian crucifixion except that that’s another rebirth through a death. And our Easter eggs must go back to that same Indo-European root, along with the chicks and the bunnies who are really those magic animals, Mad March hares.’
‘So the answer to that old riddle about what came first the chicken or the egg is the cosmic egg.’
‘You could say that,’ Jack laughed and then was silent a moment. ‘What does your policeman think is going on?’
‘If he knows he isn’t saying. I haven’t told him too much because as we agreed it sounds so fanciful but I did tell him about the gold leaf round the boy’s neck and it turns out that the boy on the pier had one too. He is, or was, Chinese, they think.’
‘When will you tell him the rest?’
‘What could I say? That we think there’s somebody with a
knowledge
of ancient beliefs who’s killing boys in bizarre circumstances. He knows that already.’
‘We can’t just sit around waiting for the next death.’
‘You think there will be another?’
‘There were four gold leaves, Alex. I mean the sheet was folded into four. Two have been detached and used. That means there are two more to go.’
‘I don’t see what we can do about it. It’s a job for the police. It does explain why there was no sign of the stolen pieces being offered for sale on the internet. Someone had a use for them. They must have been taken with exactly this in mind.’
Hilary rang on Christmas morning. ‘We’re just setting off for my sister’s; back after Boxing Day. How are you two boys making out? Have you solved all the problems yet?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. Hearing her voice like that on Christmas morning was a message that there was something between us; I wasn’t forgotten.
‘Perhaps when the holiday’s over you’d like to come and see where I work. Then you could take in the rest of the king’s treasure.’
‘I would, very much.’ I knew I was responding stupidly, like a nervous teenager although of course they’re not nervous in the way we were back in the seventies. It was almost a relief when she rang off and I could stop making a fool of myself.
The rest of Jack’s stay passed quietly. Master Chef would have been proud of my turkey with all the trimmings and both Jack and Caesar tucked in to a flattering share. Caesar behaved immaculately, making up to Jack’s leg as he sat in the armchair, demanding to be fussed over until Jack gave in and stroked him.
‘He knows you’re harmless,’ I laughed, ‘or else he’s just a tart. I thought Hilary had won his heart.’
Jack had brought wine as well as whisky with him and in the evening we sat companionably in front of the artificial flame of the gas fire, rather, I suddenly thought, like an old married queer couple.
‘It must be easy for the few remaining Zoroastrians,’ Jack said,
rolling the wine around his glass, ‘to carry the sacred fire around with them nowadays. Just a little Calor gas bottle and stove. I wonder if they do?’
‘How long since you were in the Middle East?’
‘For any length of time? Not since the early eighties. I’ve paid various flying visits but I haven’t been able to work there. Fortunately I’ve got some private money or I’d be trying to get a job with you or Hilary.’
‘Would you ever go back to the States?’
‘I have a house there at Ann Arbour that I rent out. But I’m too much at odds with the administration’s foreign policy. However, decrepitude might force me back as it’s done with the old lion, Vidal, who’s spent most of his life in Europe worrying the sheep from a
distance
as long as he could. I miss those places badly. The countries, the people, the work, the night skies where the stars are so bright they seem to be falling down to earth. So many lost civilisations while we were still in diapers: Egypt, Babylon, the Hittites, Persians, Greeks. The Romans were only yesterday.’
‘So our little bits of Saxon tat were last night. I don’t know where that leaves my Victorians.’ He laughed. ‘About half an hour ago.’
‘And the present?’
‘Fleeting minutes made up of even more fleeting seconds. You know Omar Khyam: “the moving finger writes and having writ/Moves on”.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Khyam’s was to get drunk. Like the kids today. Only he knew he was drowning the sorrows of the human condition. Theirs is the pursuit of pleasure, just something to do… I don’t know. Let’s have another bottle and we can toast Khyam’
‘Who was he?’ Jack had lost me again.
‘Persian poet. Twelfth century. When Europe was having its first renaissance. There’s a brilliant, because entirely convincing as a poem, nineteenth-century translation into English by Edward Fitzgerald. I learnt chunks of it when I was a kid and used to chant it aloud in my room. No wonder my father, who was a strict Methodist, was
convinced
I’d go to the bad.’
‘If he lived in the twelfth century he must have been a Muslim. I thought they didn’t drink.’
‘They did then. The Puritanism came later as it did for Christianity. Shiraz,’ he picked up the bottle of red wine, ‘is a Persian name, after the place where some of their finest grapes were grown.’
‘Here’s to… what did you say his name was?’
‘Omar Khyam’
‘Here’s to Omar then. Jack, how come you know so much about so many things? For you all knowledge seems to hang together. Am I right?’
‘I guess I do see it that way. What a French existentialist
philosopher
called the nousphere, an envelope of knowledge like an
intellectual
atmosphere. The original of the worldwide web that has now given it the dubious benefit of a physical manifestation. Click the mouse, press the button and hey presto, you’ve rubbed Al Adin’s lamp and let the genie out of the bottle. Now we’re starting to wonder how to get him back in again. I had the best education you could buy in the States at that time. I was a great disappointment to my Pa because the only sports that interested me were swimming and cross-country running, fairly solitary. Then I got the chance as a student to join a dig in Mesopotamia during the long vacation and I was hooked.
Everything
seemed to fit together. One civilisation giving way to another; the evolution of writing and technical know-how, rather than how I’d been taught; a few battles and conquests, our war of
independence
, our civil war, our Great Depression. We Americans don’t have a natural sense of history so when it does hit us we get it bad from having no built-in immunity. I got the whole works: the rise and fall of empires, religions, because I saw that was civilisation’s cradle I’d landed in. History I could hold in my hand in a bit of bone or a pottery shard. It was like falling in love.’
I drove Jack to the station after Boxing Day. The museum was closed until the beginning of January but we always took the opportunity to do some housekeeping while the public was away, including the annual inventory to make sure none of our artefacts had gone astray. I had to come up with something novel that would draw the summer tourists
in and please the chairman. I’d also set myself a course of reading and research, so that I could try to make some sense of the events we had become involved in. Bede’s
History
and the
Anglo Saxon
Chronicle
had been ticked off from the top of my list but now I had begun to stretch out farther back into the past and across the continents to see if I could catch the panoramic view that had so dazzled Jack. Echoes came back to me from my university days as if from a distant galaxy. So much I must have studied then had become submerged, an Atlantis sunk under waves of the everyday, of management, finance, admin, until the passion I had once felt, that had driven me to my career, had been lost and I might as well have been selling real estate or clerking in an office.
I had become immersed in, drowned by the appearance of things and forgotten the people who made them, the myriad multicoloured lives, the hands and brains of their creators, the belief that had shaped them so that they weren’t just artefacts, divorced from a way of
thinking
, even though they were often rich and shapely in themselves. Standing in the empty museum, looking around me at the parade of civilisations, I almost laughed out loud at myself and the belated epiphany I was having on my Damascus road, sparked off by Jack’s account of his own youthful awakening in the land of the Phoenicians, among the tumbled columns half buried in sand or in rose-red Petra, Babylon’s hanging gardens, the library at Alexandria, the old seven wonders of the world, and then on through our own latter days, seeing it as one unfolding narrative, tracking down to the last shot that was only another beginning.
I felt myself going under again but now it was time ‘like an ever rolling stream’ that was bearing me away, as I clutched at bits of flotsam going past, remembered scenes: the school hall in assembly with a thousand voices thundering out the morning hymn, and even those who could barely read the words moving their lips in order not to be spotted by the head’s darting eyes, and then a form outing to Colchester museum with its spears, shield bosses, horse gear that might have belonged to our first rebel, Boudicca and old Latham who taught us history reciting at some inattentive boy: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, Wilkins,’ as he handed back a red scored exam paper.
‘History is more or less bunk.’ Discuss. ‘The only history that is worth a damn is what we make today.’ I opened the office safe, took out the inventory and went down to the storeroom to check out hidden treasures not on display. What could have been an annual chore was something I found stimulating, that gave me ideas for exhibitions, new angles, even, if there was room in the budget, new acquisitions. After a couple of hours I closed the book and went up to the little kitchen where the staff made their cups of tea and coffee.
Armed with a steaming mug and a feeling of satisfaction that nothing more than the contents of the prince’s buckle had gone adrift in the last year, and with some idea of ‘I do Like to be Beside the Seaside’ as the theme for a summer exhibition, the history of the ice-cream cone or the bathing costume, something light but themed through like a stick of rock, I went back to the office and dialled Hilary’s number.
‘Has Jack gone?’
‘I put him on the train this morning. I’m in the office doing the annual stock-taking.’
‘That sounds like fun. Very festive.’
‘And you?’
‘Beth’s gone to stay with a friend, having done her daughterly duty. At least she’s over the Boxing Day panto age which is a bit of a relief. But it’s probably only been displaced by sex, drugs and booze: a mother’s worst fear. How did it go with Jack?’
‘I did sometimes wonder if we were rehearsing for a buddy movie.’
‘Why don’t you have a trip to London? We could go to the theatre or something. It doesn’t have to be the panto. Bring your toothbrush.’
‘Tomorrow a possibility?’ I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart hammering.
‘Why not? Come to the museum. We’re not open yet either. You know where it is. I’m in the basement at the back: Conservation. They keep us away from the masses. If you come about one, we’ll go out and find some lunch.’
Next morning I put out two extra dishes for Caesar who watched me balefully from the arm of his favourite chair, left a note exhorting Mrs Shepherd to feed him some more from the tins in the fridge and the rattling packet of dried nodules, not forgetting to refill the saucer
of special cat milk, and set off to drive to the station. What to pack had been a problem, as well as what bag. Hilary’s throwaway remark about the toothbrush might have been just that, meaning everything or nothing. I didn’t want my expectations, hopes, to be too obvious in case I was wildly misinterpreting or she had simply changed her mind overnight. So I took as little as was decently possible. Should I put in a packet of Featherlite? I hadn’t any in the house; it had been so long since I’d needed or even wanted them. At the station, leaving my car in the car park I found the nearest chemist’s just in case. As the train rattled its way through the seaside, rural and finally urban Essex, I tried to think of other things in order not to disgrace myself in front of my fellow travellers.