The Age of Exodus E-Book

Gavin Scott

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Duncan Forrester Mysteries
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 473

Beschreibung

"A WONDERFUL BOOK" Monty Python's Terry Jones on The Age of TreacheryIt's 1947, and Duncan Forrester is called upon to investigate the bizarre killing in the British Museum of a Foreign Office official who had consulted him about an ancient Sumerian seal. Then terrorists target the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin himself, and Forrester is asked to join his security detail in New York, where the fate of British Palestine is to be decided at the newly founded United Nations. But as yet more diplomats die, and rumours grow of an occult conspiracy, Forrester begins to suspect the deaths are part of a much larger plan...

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Gavin Scott and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

  1: Conversation on A Sunlit Tower

  2: The Curse of the Chaldees

  3: This Jam Tastes Fishy

  4: The Lions of Ashurnasirpal

  5: Arthur and Angela

  6: The Great Beast

  7: A Cry for Help

  8: The Man from Down Under

  9: The Man from Palestine

10: Fog on the Atlantic Run

11: New York, New York

12: The Effigy

13: World’s Fair

14: The Listener in the Corner

15: Pier 751

16: President Garfield

17: Sète

18: Dead Man Running

19: Two Writing Desks

20: Sir Edward and Mr. Smith

21: Switzerland

22: Jet Propelled

23: The Summons

24: The Conversation of Angela Shearer

25: Automata

26: The Vote

Author’s Note

About the Author

THE AGE OF EXODUS

ALSO BY GAVIN SCOTT AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Age of Treachery

The Age of Olympus

The Age of Exodus

The Age of Exodus

Print edition ISBN: 9781783297849

E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297856

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© 2018 Gavin Scott

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

TO MARLOWE SKYE JACKSON

1

CONVERSATION ON A SUNLIT TOWER

Dr. Duncan Forrester, Fellow in Archaeology at Barnard College, watched as the trap door in the roof of the Lady Tower inched up, and wondered how best to kill the man coming through. Should he let him get halfway out and then slam the door back onto him, sending him stunned down the winding stone stairs before hurling himself down after him, or should he get behind him, put an armlock around his neck, and snap the spinal cord as his instructors had taught him?

For a long moment he gathered his energies together, ready to unleash them with maximum force in either of these strategies – and then made himself remember that he was not in wartime Prague or Bucharest or Hamburg, but in the midst of his beloved Oxford.

His once beloved Oxford. Shortly before the trap door began to rise Duncan Forrester had been leaning back against the sun-warmed stone balustrade looking out over the dreaming spires and smiling grimly to himself. The beatific vision which had sustained him through five years of war had failed, for the first time, to bring back peace to his soul.

It was not surprising: there were just too many unsatisfying elements in his life at present – chief among them, of course, the fact that he had lost Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig. For this, he knew, he had only himself to blame. The gods had brought him to her in the wilds of Norway and he had robbed himself of her forever in that wretched bar in Salonika.

He had believed he was doing the right thing; well, perhaps he had been doing the right thing, but there was little consolation in that. The act of self-denial had left him bereft, and now that he had reunited Sophie with the shell of a man who was her husband, Forrester looked out on a world that seemed to him bleak and pointless.

Nor was this the end of his self-inflicted troubles.

Take Kretzmer, the half-crazed German soldier who had tried to rob him of the Minoan inscriptions which they both hoped would solve the mystery of Linear B. When Forrester finally caught him, not only had he failed to hand Kretzmer over to the proper authorities, he had succumbed to pity, promised to let him work on the inscriptions as his collaborator, and as a final act of folly, brought him to England.

It was for people like Kretzmer, Forrester had now decided, that the saying “no good deed goes unpunished” had been invented. Kretzmer was now installed in a gamekeeper’s cottage near Woodstock, from which he fired sarcastic rebukes in green ink to every suggestion Forrester made for deciphering the stele’s markings. In the course of the process Forrester had become heartily sick not just of Kretzmer but of Linear B itself.

Worse, his recent sojourn in Greece and Crete, far from renewing his delight in the ancient world, had left him utterly out of sympathy with the civilisation which had once been his main source of spiritual healing. When he thought of Greece now, it was not the great philosophers and statesmen who came to mind, but the twisted egos and warped ideologies which were dragging the country inexorably towards civil war.

He had been briefly cheered by the arrival of an offer to give a lecture at the next Columbia Conference of Archaeology in New York, only to find that as a result of the dollar crisis foreign travel was now effectively forbidden to British citizens. As Britain’s remaining foreign reserves drained away the bread ration had been cut, beer supplies had been halved, and to reduce tobacco imports the government had officially asked people to “smoke your cigarettes down to the butts”. American movies were now too expensive to import, whale meat was being offered as a grim, oily alternative to beef and all over the country there were posters on bombed-out buildings urging people to work harder and longer.

The previous winter had been disastrous, the worst for centuries, blizzards leaving roads blocked by fifteen-foot high snowdrifts, power stations without coal, factories idle, and farmers trying to dig parsnips from the frozen ground with pneumatic drills. And now the weather was mocking the country again, as enervating sunshine dried up the reservoirs and parched the fields and in the sweltering cities, where ice was unobtainable, even the swimming pools were closed because of the polio scare. As tempers frayed, the divorce rate began to soar, and it seemed to Forrester the entire country was on edge.

Then there was his relationship with the newly elected Master of Barnard College.

Dr. Andrew Stephenson was one of Britain’s most distinguished metallurgists, a man of the left who had considerable influence with the new Labour government. He had got to know many of the key ministers during the war, when he had helped the novelist C. P. Snow to mobilise Britain’s scientific expertise against Hitler.

All these factors had played into the college’s decision to elect him, and Forrester knew that politically, and in many ways intellectually, it was the right decision; but he had not been able to establish a real relationship with Stephenson – and Stephenson, perhaps not surprisingly in view of what had happened to his predecessor, seemed reluctant to get close to him.

But it was the stultifying heat that was affecting Forrester the most, even up here on the Lady Tower, and he cast his mind back nostalgically to the pale cool summers of his Humberside childhood.

It was in the midst of this thought that the trapdoor had begun to open and for a brief moment he was no longer a respectable academic in an Oxford college, but his old self, an agent of the Special Operations Executive in occupied Europe.

He forced himself to relax, to remember it was peacetime and assume this was not an enemy but simply a chance intruder on his sun-drugged solitude. And when the man emerged, silhouetted against the sky, Forrester let out a sigh of relief, because the newcomer had a distinctive army ammunition satchel over his shoulder.

“I thought I’d find you up here,” said Ken Harrison, cheerfully.

“Dammit,” said Forrester. “I forgot again, didn’t I?”

“Don’t mention it,” said Harrison, settling down on the roof beside him and leaning back comfortably against the balustrade. “I’d rather take my tutorial up here instead of your rooms anyway. If you’re up for it, of course. If not I can always just leave my essay behind.”

“I’m not so far gone as that,” said Forrester. “The Eleusinian Mysteries, if I recall rightly.”

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most sacred initiation rites in ancient Greece, assuring devotees of a place in the afterlife through dramatic re-enactments of the abduction of Persephone by the King of the Underworld, mirroring the annual progress of the seasons. Forrester was fairly certain that these rituals had involved significant quantities of hallucinogenic drugs.

“Yes, the Mysteries,” said Harrison, and removed a sheaf of much-amended papers from his ammunition bag. But instead of reading them, he glanced through the contents, pulled a face and hesitated. After a moment Forrester realised that Harrison was embarrassed about something, and given Harrison’s general insouciance about his lack of academic brilliance, it probably wasn’t the essay.

“Something on your mind?” asked Forrester. Visibly relieved, Harrison put the papers aside.

“Yes,” he said. “Frankly, we’re worried about you. All of us.”

“All of who?”

“All the people you tutor. You’re one of the most brilliant people any of us have ever encountered. You’re a fantastic teacher and we’re enormously lucky to have you. But you haven’t been the same since you got back from Greece, and I want to know if there’s anything we can do to help.”

Forrester stared at him, both touched and appalled at the intrusion; but it was impossible to be angry with as openhearted a soul as Harrison.

“Sadly, no,” he said decisively. “There is nothing you can do. I enormously appreciate your concern and take on board the fact that I haven’t been showing much enthusiasm lately, which I will strive to correct. But I’m feeling flat, and there is nothing you, I, or anybody else can do about it.”

“Flat,” said Harrison. “Yes, that’s the word. I think half the chaps who’ve come back from the war are feeling about as lively as a bottle of week-old orangeade. I suppose it’s only to be expected. All that saving the world tends to wind the nerves up a bit. And then when it all stops – well, you know as well as I do.”

“I do,” said Forrester. “It was probably just the Lyall case and what happened in Greece that postponed my reaction.”

Shortly after returning to Oxford from the war, Forrester had tried to save a colleague from a conviction for murder after a killing in the college grounds; then, during an archaeological expedition to Greece, he had become embroiled in the run-up to its current civil war.

“There is that,” said Harrison, “yes.” He paused, uncertainly, and Forrester began to realise that Harrison’s expressions of concern about his mental state were actually just his way of working round to what was really on his mind. Forrester waited for a moment before speaking.

“You believe I need something to prevent me sinking further into the Slough of Despond?”

“Well, possibly,” said Harrison, reluctantly. “Since you seem to thrive on challenges. But this one may not be entirely inappropriate.”

“What may not be entirely inappropriate?”

“What I’m about to tell you. Ask you about. Draw to your attention. It has nothing to do with the Eleusinian Mysteries.”

“I’d guessed that,” said Forrester.

“On the other hand, like the Mysteries, it does involve the supernatural. Or appears to. Probably not, of course.”

“Caveats noted,” said Forrester. “Now spit it out, before I throw you off the bloody roof.”

“Of course,” said Harrison, and proceeded in his customary leisurely way to light his pipe. When it was finally sending out puffs of not unpleasantly scented tobacco, he said, “Have you ever heard of a Sumerian demon called Asag?”

Forrester closed his eyes: he did not claim to have a photographic memory but with a moment’s thought he could usually bring to mind any name or concept he had ever read about. He didn’t see the page on which he had originally read it, but he could reconstruct the context; it felt like doing a jigsaw puzzle inside his head.

“I think he’s mentioned in a Sumerian mythological poem. ‘Lugal-e’ or something. He was supposed to be a demon so monstrous that if he walked alongside a river the fish swimming in it would be boiled alive. If I recall rightly he was usually accompanied by a troop of rock demons which he had created by making love to a mountain, which sounds like a very uncomfortable thing to do. All in all a fairly disagreeable-sounding fellow.”

“Very much so,” said Harrison. “And he seems to have it in for a friend of mine.”

Forrester raised an eyebrow.

“All right, you’ve hooked me,” he said. “Tell me who your friend is and what a Sumerian demon has got against him.”

“His name is Templar,” said Harrison, drawing happily on the pipe now. “Charles Templar. We went through Signals school together and then lost touch. I ended up, as you know, at Arnhem; Templar was at El Alamein with Monty. Got blown up by a German landmine, which I think between ourselves affected his nerves somewhat. One day, when he was recovering in Cairo, he came across some chap in a market selling antiquarian bits and pieces, including a cylinder seal the dealer claimed came from Ur of the Chaldees.”

Forrester smiled: the phrase took him back to the Hull pier on the edge of the Humber, where he had sat one Saturday afternoon, lulled by the hooting of the ferry and the cries of the seagulls, hypnotised by a book he had just taken out from the Central Library. Ur of the Chaldees by Sir Leonard Woolley, which was an account of the seven years the archaeologist had just spent excavating Tell el-Muqayyar, the Mound of Pitch, halfway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, to prove that it was indeed the city described in Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham, founding father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Now the Lord had said unto Abram,

Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,

and from thy father’s house,

unto a land that I will shew thee:

And I will make of thee a great nation,

and I will bless thee, and make thy name great;

and thou shalt be a blessing.

He heard the words in his mother’s flat Yorkshire voice, as she had read them aloud from the Bible on Sunday evenings, and they still resonated.

“Very shrewd of the dealer,” said Forrester. “I’m sure he found Ur of the Chaldees a very good sales pitch.”

“It certainly worked on Templar,” said Harrison. “He bought the seal and managed to keep it with him all through the war as a sort of talisman.”

“Good for him,” said Forrester. “And now?”

“Now he’s back with the Foreign Office and he’s been getting threatening messages about it.”

“Threatening messages?”

“In cuneiform.”

“Cuneiform?” said Forrester. “Don’t tell me somebody’s been sending him clay tablets?”

“Not quite,” said Harrison. “Photographs of clay tablets, inscribed with curses in ancient Sumerian, all demanding that he gives up the seal.”

“And has Asag explained exactly how your friend is supposed to get the seal back to him?”

“Not yet,” said Harrison. “I told Templar he should talk to you.”

“Well, he certainly needs to talk to somebody, starting with the police,” said Forrester. “But what on earth made you feel I could be of the slightest use to him?”

“Instinct,” said Harrison. He puffed his pipe again for a moment. “And the fact that you did pretty well when your friend Gordon Clark was up against it.”

Forrester inclined his head in acknowledgement. Both men knew perfectly well that Harrison had volunteered his help when Gordon Clark was accused of murder, and that without him Forrester might never have saved him from the gallows. Now one of Harrison’s friends was in trouble there was no way Forrester could refuse to at least discuss the case.

“Of course, I’d be perfectly happy to talk to Templar,” he said. “But I meant what I said about the police. Has he already been to them?”

“Oh, yes,” said Harrison, “and got the kind of dusty answer you might expect. Scotland Yard has many virtues, but an open mind about the supernatural isn’t one of them.”

“I don’t have an open mind about the supernatural either,” said Forrester, “and I’m damn sure neither Asag nor any other utukku is behind this.”

“Utukku?” said Harrison.

“Asag was an utukku,” said Forrester as the facts reassembled themselves, unbidden in his mind. “Utukkus were a kind of spirit that had escaped from the Sumerian underworld. They’re mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh.”

“You do see, don’t you,” said Harrison, “why I felt you’re exactly the chap Charles needs to talk to?”

“Except there must be at least twenty people in Oxford who know vastly more than I do about Ur. And cylinder seals for that matter.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Harrison, “but few of them have your record in dealing with murderers.”

Forrester grinned: it was a fair cop.

“All right, I’ll talk to him. But I won’t be going up to London until next week.”

“Not a problem,” said Harrison. “Templar’s coming up here himself the day after tomorrow with Ernie Bevin.”

“The Foreign Secretary?” said Forrester.

“The man himself,” said Harrison. “Apparently the Master’s persuaded him to come to High Table as part of our rehabilitation, and Templar’s part of his entourage.”

And for the first time in a long time Forrester smiled with genuine anticipation, because ever since he was a boy, Ernest Bevin, creator of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had been one of his greatest heroes.

2

THE CURSE OF THE CHALDEES

The Foreign Secretary arrived at Barnard College, took in the manicured lawns, glanced up at the ancient buildings – and glowered. To Ernest Bevin an Oxford college was enemy territory.

It was not surprising. Bevin had been born into poverty and for a long time his job had been delivering mineral water from a horse-drawn cart. Then he had joined the union movement and risen, purely on the strength of dynamic personality and organising skill, to become Britain’s leading trade unionist. He had been recruited to the coalition government by Churchill to organise Britain’s industrial manpower, and for five years had directed the lives of every adult in the kingdom who was not in the armed forces.

Since Labour’s landslide victory in the election of 1945, he had been one of the most powerful figures in one of the most activist governments Britain had ever elected, a government which had seized the commanding heights of the economy, nationalised much of British industry, created the National Health Service, and developed the Welfare State. As head of the Foreign Office, Bevin was now responsible for keeping Britain safe in an increasingly uncertain world.

But, despite the heights he had reached, Bevin never forgot that his education had ended at thirteen, and as Forrester watched from his window, he felt a pang of sympathy as the Master of Barnard came out to usher him into the Lodge. It was as much as Forrester could do not to hurry down to greet Bevin himself – but he knew he must wait until the appointed hour.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on his door and Ken Harrison ushered in Charles Templar, a dark-haired, worried-looking man of about thirty. Templar shook Forrester by the hand.

“I’m enormously grateful that you agreed to see me, Dr. Forrester, and in some ways I feel the most frightful fool for bothering you. On one level this is obviously some kind of hoax, but on another it feels deadly serious.”

“It’s almost certainly both,” said Forrester. “The attempt to convince you that there is some sort of supernatural element behind the threat is obviously bogus, but that doesn’t mean the threat itself isn’t real. Have you any idea who might want this seal badly enough to try to frighten you into handing it over?”

“None at all. Only a few people even know I have it.”

“A few? Who, for example?”

“Well, my wife Angela, for a start. And one or two members of the family of course. Other people who were in the service with me. Perhaps some people at work.”

“You often mentioned it, then?”

“Not often – but I made no particular secret of it when it came up in conversation.”

“Did you show it to people?”

“Only if they asked.”

“And had you recently shown it to anyone before these threatening messages started to arrive?”

“I’ve racked my brains about that, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t shown it to anyone for months. In fact I’d mislaid it and only recently found it again.”

“Mislaid it where?”

“I finally found it in the back of a drawer in my office desk.”

“When you did show it to people, did you just show them the seal itself or did you roll it out to reveal the complete image?”

“Generally the former, but I must admit that once or twice when there was a suitable medium, I would show how it worked.”

“Do you have it with you now?”

“I do.”

“May I look at it?”

“Of course,” said Templar. “I keep it in the box where my wife’s engagement ring used to be.” He took from his pocket a small leather case bearing the inscription of a Bond Street jewellers.

Forrester opened the box carefully and saw, nestled inside on the silk, a small black cylinder about an inch and a quarter long and a quarter inch in diameter. At first glance it appeared to be entirely blank, and might have been mistaken, Forrester thought, for a small twist of liquorice.

“Obsidian?”

“I believe so.”

“Which means it’s very hard to make out the markings.”

“I can’t see any markings at all,” said Harrison. Forrester took out a magnifying glass.

“Take a look through this,” he said. Harrison took the tiny object between his big fingers and peered at it for a moment.

“All I can see is scratches.”

“Scratches containing a vast amount of information, which we can elicit with the aid of this,” said Forrester, bringing out the lid of an oblong tin, which had once contained a pound of Needler’s Toffee. Upside down, the lid provided a flat surface with a quarter-inch lip all around it into which Forrester, in preparation for this meeting, had packed a small amount of plasticine.

He now took the little cylinder, held it loosely between thumb and forefinger, and rolled it firmly but steadily along the surface of the clay.

“Good Lord,” said Harrison, as a complete miniature landscape unfolded before his eyes. “It’s an engraving.”

“In Sumer people used cylinder seals the way signature rings were used in the Middle Ages,” said Forrester. “They were a perfect way of authenticating something that had been written in wet clay, which, as paper hadn’t yet been invented, was their chief medium.”

“Using cuneiform, of course,” said Harrison.

“Exactly,” said Forrester. “The Sumerians came up with the idea of cuneiform script and cylinder seals at about the same time. But the seals weren’t just for authentication: they were sometimes regarded as magical objects in themselves. Let’s look a little closer to see what your one depicts, Mr. Templar.”

And he took the magnifying glass back from Harrison and leant close to the little rectangle of indented clay. It was as if, he felt, he was looking through a keyhole directly into the dawn of civilisation.

The cylinder had rolled out an image of an eerie, almost surreal landscape. In stylised form, there were two mountains, each with a tree on it. Between them ran a river teeming with tiny fish. Hovering above the mountains was a winged, goat-like figure, with curious ladder-like markings on its chest, almost like the frogging on a hussar’s jacket. Emerging from the river was an equally bizarre creature that seemed to be half man, half bird, with something in its mouth. On closer examination Forrester saw that the object was the head of a man. The artist had even succeeded in giving that grisly trophy an expression of blind terror.

“I think the figure coming out of the river must be Asag,” said Templar. “Am I right?”

“I believe so,” said Forrester. “The winged goat overhead is almost certainly Narak of the seven seals. The Sumerians were fascinated by the number seven: there were groups of seven gods, seven demons, seven sages. See those indentations in Narak’s chest, like the rungs of a ladder? That’s where the seals are secreted as he collects them. When he has all seven, according to the mythology, he will hold the fate of the world in his hands. The tree on the left is the tree of life, later to feature, of course, in the story of the Garden of Eden. Note the crescent moon up above: that’s a reference to Sin, the moon god.”

Harrison had retrieved the magnifying glass again. “I have to say it’s a pretty sinister-looking little scene,” he said. “You don’t get the impression these people felt the gods were there to look after them.”

“I quite agree,” said Forrester. “The Sumerians feared the great gods rather than loved them, and they feared their demons even more. Which was what the priests intended, of course. What better way to ensure people do what they’re told?”

“So, is this seal of mine particularly unusual?” asked Templar. “Is there anything here which would explain why somebody is going to desperate lengths to get hold of it?”

“On one level, no,” said Forrester. “These things were produced in great numbers. They were frequently buried with their owners, so they’re often found in excavations, and the stone doesn’t easily disintegrate, so they tend to survive. If a collector wanted something similar I’m sure he could get hold of it by perfectly legitimate means.”

“So why threaten me with a terrible death unless I hand it over?” asked Templar. His tone was light, and there was the ghost of an ironic smile on his face as he spoke, but Forrester knew that, beneath the bravado, the man was afraid.

And though he did not say so, Forrester was certain he had reason to be. He could sense the malice that lay behind this veneer of ancient superstition.

“As I said, cylinder seals were sometimes held to have magical properties,” said Forrester. “That may be the case with this one. It could be that its original owner believed it gave him – or her – the power to cast a spell over a victim.”

“Or unleash an utukku on him,” said Harrison.

“Exactly,” said Forrester. “May I see the documents that contain the threats?”

Templar opened his briefcase and took out a buff envelope. He unwound the string that held the clasp closed and withdrew two eight-by-ten black and white photographs of cuneiform tablets, which he laid out on the desk beside the clay.

“Do you have the original envelopes?” said Forrester.

“I do,” said Templar, bringing out a folder. “The police have already checked them for fingerprints, but whoever posted them must have been wearing gloves.” Forrester opened the folder and examined the envelopes without touching them. The postmarks indicated they had all been sent from different locations, but he noted they were all in central London.

“The address is typed. Did the police see anything distinctive about the typeface?”

“No. They said it was probably done on a Remington Noiseless, as used in a thousand homes and government departments, which doesn’t get us very far. Here are the translations I had done.” He handed Forrester a set of typed sheets.

“By whom?”

“A pal at the FCO who makes a hobby of these things.”

“Name?”

“Crispin Priestley. He’s on the Middle East desk.”

Forrester cast an eye over the translations to check they had not been typed on the same machine which had been used to address the envelopes, and was satisfied that was not the case.

“By the way, I assume you’ve reported all this to whoever’s in charge of security at King Charles Street?”

“Of course. Toby Lanchester went into it all very thoroughly. Like the police he thinks someone’s pulling my leg.”

Forrester began to read.

The seal thief will be found

The seal thief will be found by Asag

He will come for him in the night

Unless it is given up

“This is from the Samana Tablets,” said Forrester. “In St. John Townsend’s translation, I think.”

“Sinjun Townsend?” said Harrison, looking puzzled.

“Spelt St. John,” said Forrester. “Pronounced Sinjun. I assume your friend Priestley was using Townsend’s text as a guide.”

“Possibly; I know he used a book,” said Templar. “Priestley’s an enthusiast, not an expert.”

Forrester laid the typed translation beside the photographs and compared them. Then he nodded and Templar handed him the second typed sheet.

He who sleeps on the roof,

Will die on the roof,

He who sleeps in the house,

Will have no burial,

There is no hiding place from Asag

For he who has the seal.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” said Templar, “but I’ve been wondering whether I didn’t bring down some ancient curse on myself when I bought the damned thing. Sumerian magic was quite real to the Sumerians. Who’s to say it hasn’t lasted five thousand years?”

“Sumerian belief in magic was quite real,” said Forrester. “The actual magic itself was about as real as a conjuring trick. You know they used water pipes and echo chambers to try and convince people that the statues of the gods actually spoke? They even pretended to feed them, which was why the poor bloody peasants kept having to bring food offerings. The whole thing was a con trick, Templar, and so is this.”

“On one level of course I accept that,” said Templar. “But in the early hours of the morning, when you’re lying there in the dark…” His voice trailed off. Forrester put a hand on his arm.

“Remember that Sumerian demons do not know how to take photographs of ancient cuneiform tablets. This is from someone who knows you and has it in for you, and our task is to work out who that is and make him stop. Or her, of course. You haven’t offended any lovers lately, have you? Or stolen any other men’s wives?”

“Absolutely not,” said Templar firmly. “I’ve been faithful to Angela since the day we met, and I’d never do anything to hurt her. We married before I was sent to North Africa, and I feel damn grateful she waited for me all those years. Plenty didn’t – you know what the theatre’s like.”

“The theatre?”

“Templar’s married to the beautiful Angela Shearer,” said Harrison. “The sweetheart of Shaftesbury Avenue.”

“You’re a lucky man,” said Forrester, noting how quickly Templar had pivoted from the possibility of his infidelity to the question of his wife’s continued faithfulness.

“What about this chap Priestley? I know you called him in to translate, but have you considered the possibility that he was the one who sent the photographs in the first place?”

“I hadn’t,” said Templar. “He just saw me looking at the pictures and offered to help.”

“He made a good job of scaring the hell out of you,” said Harrison. “Might he have planned that all along?”

“I really don’t think so,” said Templar. “When you meet Crispin, you’ll see why: he’s a fat little chap who looks like Billy Bunter and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Besides, if he’d really wanted the seal he could have swiped it from my desk any time he wanted. Why go to all this trouble?”

“All right, let’s put Priestley to one side for the time being and consider other people in your life. Because it is somebody in your life, you know, not some imaginary Mesopotamian monster.” And for the next half hour Forrester conscientiously created lists of Templar’s family, work colleagues, fellow soldiers and acquaintances to try to jog his memory about slights and rivalries, of which there seemed to be remarkably few. In fact, according to Templar, colleagues like Crispin Priestley and his friend Richard Thornham wished him only the best, and his sole complaint about the Foreign Office as a whole was that the messenger service was not all it might be. As for his wife Angela, it seemed she was a paragon among women. Beautiful, loving, and talented, she had waited patiently for him to return from the war and was now eager to put her career on hold and begin a family. Forrester felt a faint touch of envy as he listened, but before he could enquire further the bell in the Lady Tower began to ring and it was time to go over to the Master’s Lodge.

3

THIS JAM TASTES FISHY

It was strange to be back in the Lodge again, with its worn, handsome Turkish rugs, carved beams and minstrels’ gallery, and Forrester could not prevent himself visualising the scene the previous year when Winters had staged the reading of the Norse saga and David Lyall had died. But if anything the room was more crowded than it had been that night. All the Fellows were there, and the Masters of several other colleges, drawn irresistibly by the fame of Ernest Bevin.

He stood foursquare in the middle of the room, looking as if he had been carved out of a granite boulder over which had been draped a suit created in haste by a distracted tailor. The combination of Bevin’s flattish nose and thick glasses gave him an oddly innocent, almost cherubic air, and the West Country burr in his voice was strangely endearing. As Forrester arrived he was in full flow, watched with some pride by his host, the Master, who was clearly imagining the college’s prestige rising with every moment Bevin was in the room. Stephenson was a striking contrast to the stocky Bevin: a tall, square-jawed figure born to command, only his thick, dark, bushy eyebrows hinting at what Forrester suspected was the animal ferocity lurking beneath.

“So halfway through the talks Mowlertoff took us to see the Bolshy bally, and there I was with ’im in one of those velvet boxes looking right down on the stage.”

It was a moment before Forrester realised that Bevin had been in Moscow in the Christmas of 1945, negotiating with the Soviets, and that because he had a tendency to make short shrift of foreign names he considered too ridiculous to try to pronounce correctly, the Russian foreign minister Molotov had become Mowlertoff.

“Well, the bally went on and on as these things tend to do and to be perfectly honest with you I’d ’ave much rather been in bed with a hot water bottle, but I stuck it out till the end and when the curtain came down we stood up in the box and clapped as if it was the best thing we’d ever seen. But blow me down, when we finally finished clapping them all the blooming dancers started clapping us. So I took a bit of a bow, and finally they stop clapping. But what does Mowlertoff do? ’E starts clapping them again, and everybody in the theatre joins in, and it goes on for a very long time, and then all the dancers start up clapping us one more time. And so the long night wore on. Finally I’d had enough of it, so I gave ’em the clenched fist salute and that was that. Clem Attlee didn’t ’alf give me a bollocking for doing that – ’e said it was beneath the dignity of a British Foreign Secretary – but I reckon if I ’adn’t we’d still be there now.” Ripples of laughter rang through the room; everyone within earshot knew they were in the presence of an authentic English hero. But not everyone was satisfied with anecdotes.

“I gather you had several meetings with Marshal Stalin himself,” said Alan Norton, the bursar who, Forrester knew, was very much a man of the left.

“I did an’all,” said Bevin.

“Do you hope to return to the good relations we had with Russia during the war?” asked Norton. “After all, we defeated Hitler together. It would seem a great shame if we became enemies now.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Bevin. “I’d like us and the Americans and the Russians to work together as the United Nations to keep the peace, and concentrate on getting food into people’s mouths and clothes on their backs and roofs over their ’eads all over the world.”

“And what’s preventing our working with the Soviet Union to achieve that?” persisted Norton. Forrester noted that Stephenson gave the bursar a warning look, but Bevin seemed to have no objection to being pressed.

“The fact that the Russians look at things a bit different from the way we do,” he said, “which is not surprising. I’ve seen with me own eyes the mess the Germans made when they marched into Russia. Twenty million people dead and everything the Soviets had achieved in the last twenty-five years smashed to pieces. But that doesn’t excuse what Stalin’s been up to ever since we won.”

“Up to?” asked Norton.

“Turning democratic countries into communist ones,” said Bevin. “Trying it on in Iran. Bullying Turkey. Asking for a big chunk of North Africa, of all places. They’re like burglars kicking on doors to see if any of them are unlocked. It’s my job to make sure them doors stay firmly closed.”

“Yours and the Americans, of course, Foreign Secretary,” said Stephenson, ensuring that Norton could not continue his interrogation.

“Well, up to a point,” said Bevin. “But not all Americans see things straight yet. They still want to believe the Russians can be bosom buddies. It’ll take Truman a while yet to get the country to see just how dangerous Stalin is.”

“So you think we’ll have to take on the Russians ourselves, Foreign Secretary?” said Gordon Clark. “And chance on another war?” Always highly strung, it was as if Bevin’s words had wound the senior tutor up to yet another level of intensity – and the Foreign Secretary, sensing this, put a reassuring hand on Clark’s arm.

“Good God no, Dr. Clark,” he said. “It’s my job to make sure there won’t be another war. If we can keep Stalin in check until President Truman understands what’s going on and backs us up, everything’ll be all right. And I think we can – because the Russians don’t want to start fighting again any more than we do. They’ve ’ad a bellyful of it, same as we ’ave.”

Forrester could almost feel the tension in the room decrease, and his admiration for this rough-hewn figure, once described as the only British statesman who had begun as a working man and remained one, went up once more. He had first heard about him from his parents, who had told him the story about when there was a judicial enquiry into dock-worker’s wages back in the 1920s, and the employers had said it was perfectly possible for a man to do a full day’s hard physical work and survive, with his family, on such and such an amount of food.

Ernie Bevin had bought the specified foods, and cooked them, and brought them into court and put the plates on the table as evidence – alongside a single meal that the dock owners had treated themselves to at the Savoy hotel the night before. The contrast was so shaming to the employers that Bevin won the case there and then and had become a national hero for the working classes overnight.

Which he had then consolidated by building Britain’s largest trade union.

“He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” said Templar. “I can’t tell you how much scepticism there was in the Foreign Office when he was given the job. At least half the people there were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and those who didn’t go to Eton went to Rugby, and here was this unskilled labourer coming in to replace Sir Anthony Eden. Well, he won us over in about a week. He may not be an intellectual, but by God is he intelligent. He sees through to the heart of the problem in five minutes, comes up with ideas nobody else has ever thought of, and works harder than any man I’ve ever met.”

“Also, he gives us wonderful entertainment,” said another voice, and Forrester looked up to see a tall, thin man whose languid, diffident manner and floppy fair hair reminded him of the late film star Leslie Howard. “I was there when he asked a waiter at the Guildhall for a nice glass of newts.”

“Thornham loves to tell this story,” said Templar. “I think he dines out on it.”

“Certainly I do,” said Thornham, flicking his hair, “because people always ask what on earth he meant, and I take great pleasure in explaining that he had once read a wine label for Nuits-Saint-Georges, and was convinced newts was the correct pronunciation.” Forrester could not help but laugh: there was a self-deprecating twinkle in Thornham’s eyes that belied his aristocratic languor.

“I can top that,” said a third man, who Forrester knew immediately was Templar’s helpful translator, Crispin Priestley: he did indeed look exactly like Billy Bunter. “One night when we were at a state dinner in Russia, Bevin turned to Molotov and pointed to what was on his toast and said, ‘This jam tastes fishy.’ It was of course the finest Beluga caviar.”

There was more laughter, but Templar punched the fat man on the arm and said, “I’m sure you made that up, Priestley, it’s too good to be true.”

“How can you doubt my word,” said Priestley cheerfully, “when the king himself has the best Bevin quote of all? Not a malapropism, but just a perfect summary of the man who, as Templar says, we have come in the last year to love and cherish.”

“So what was it,” asked Thornham, “that so tickled our monarch?”

Priestley smiled gleefully. “As he so often does, without being aware he’s doing it, the Foreign Secretary had said something which demonstrated how astonishingly well informed he is, and His Majesty asked him, bearing in mind that he had finished school at thirteen, how he knew so much. And our Ernie replied, ‘I gathered it up, Your Majesty, from the ’edgerows of experience.’”

“That is poetry,” said Templar, “pure, natural born English poetry.” And as Forrester glanced across the faces of the three officials he saw in each one of them a look of pure affection for their political master. And then Ernest Bevin came towards them with his odd, rolling sailor’s gait, and spoke directly to Forrester.

“Are you the man who threw the last Master off the roof?” Bevin was peering up at him through the thick lenses of his spectacles, with Andrew Stephenson behind him, grinning at Forrester’s discomfiture.

“I was there when he fell, Mr. Bevin,” said Forrester. “And I suppose you could say I was responsible for the fact that he did fall.” Bevin glanced over his shoulder at Stephenson.

“You’d better watch your step then, Andrew, or he’ll have you going off like the man on the flying trapeze, but without the trapeze.” He put his hand on Forrester’s upper arm and guided him away from the rest of the crowd, speaking more softly now.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Dr. Forrester. I gather you’re from ’ull.”

“I am,” said Forrester. “Hessle Road.”

“Not many people from ’ull in this place. Even fewer from ’essle Road. And even fewer that’s done me a good turn.”

“I hadn’t realised I had,” said Forrester.

“Two good turns, really,” said Bevin. “You got rid of a traitor from this college, and I ’ate traitors worse than poison, and in Greece you stopped a good man from going wrong. You put a spoke in the communists’ wheel and probably saved a fair number of British soldiers’ lives. I appreciate that.”

“I’m amazed you knew about it,” said Forrester.

“Well, that’s what diplomatic bags are for,” said Bevin. “Reports get passed on, and I read ’em. Well done, young man. You may be ’earing from me again.” And with a final pat on Forrester’s arm he turned back to the Master and allowed himself to be drawn once again into the throng.

As Forrester watched him being swallowed up he felt as much pride as he had when he received his commission.

* * *

The formal dinner at High Table in the Great Hall was a success for all concerned, from the students looking up at the great man from the body of the hall, to the Fellows and guests, who all felt they were part of a historic moment. The fact that Ernest Bevin was here, that he was Foreign Secretary, and that Britain had a Labour government, was extraordinary. And Forrester, like all the ordinary men and women who had fought in the war and worked in the factories for victory, knew that it was their efforts in the past five years that had made it possible. The old power structures based on wealth and privilege had failed to resist Hitler and Mussolini and the working classes had had to do the job themselves. Now those same people wanted their reward and the Labour government was determined to make sure they had it – and nobody symbolised that better than Ernie Bevin. Even if they were doing it on short rations and eating whale meat. But there was no whale meat tonight: despite austerity, the college had pulled out all the stops, and its ancient cellar provided delights which even put Nuits-Saint-Georges in the shade.

Forrester found himself seated next to Crispin Priestley. “Templar has consulted me about these threatening messages he’s been getting,” he said. “I gather you’ve helped with the translations.”

“Up to a point,” said Priestley. “I knew enough to help me identify the passages, and then I cribbed from one of the published versions.”

“St. John Townsend’s?”

“Well spotted,” said Priestley. “What do you think it’s all about?”

“Someone is clearly trying to frighten the poor chap out of his wits and get him to hand over this seal. But I’ve seen the wretched thing, and it doesn’t seem particularly valuable. What do you think is behind it?”

“Professional rivalry,” said Priestley. “Templar has been doing very well since he came back from the services and he’s certain to have put any number of backs up.”

“It seems a very roundabout way of trying to do someone down.”

“What else would you expect in the Foreign Office?” asked Priestley. He glanced around: Templar was some distance down the table. “And the problem is – he’s the nervous type. I think he was affected by what happened to him at El Alamein.”

“Is there anyone in particular who might regard him as a threat?”

“Well, Priestley might, or I myself, for that matter,” said Thornham. Forrester hadn’t realised that the Leslie Howard lookalike was listening. “But hopefully if you know anything about either of us, you’ll count us out. I’m as ambitious as the next man, but I’m sure both Priestley and I are confident enough in our abilities not to need to resort to this kind of thing. So Charles has asked for your help?”

“He has,” said Forrester.

“Very shrewd of him,” said Thornham. “How did he know about you?”

“Through a mutual friend,” said Forrester. “But, present company excepted, who else in King Charles Street might have it in for Templar?”

There was a brief moment of hesitation, which in view of the present company Forrester felt might duly be called a diplomatic pause. Then Thornham spoke.

“Did Templar tell you about his wife?”

“The famous Angela Shearer, I understand.”

“One of the luminaries of the London stage,” said Thornham.

“Extraordinarily popular,” said Priestley.

“Am I to read something into that?” said Forrester.

“Good God, no,” said Priestley. “It’s just that, well – she’s been the darling of Drury Lane all the time Templar was off serving king and country.”

“You think she’s been unfaithful to him?”

“Well,” said Thornham, “there have been rumours.”

“I’m not quite sure how that would lead to anyone threatening Templar with a Sumerian demon,” said Forrester.

“I don’t think that’s exactly what Thornham is saying,” said Priestley. “I think he’s pointing out, and I would endorse this, that marital relations between our colleague and his very talented wife are probably fairly complicated.”

“You’re implying that she may have a lover who feels threatened by Templar now he’s come back from the war?”

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” said Thornham.

“Although it’s hard to imagine some stage-door Johnny being sophisticated enough to use ancient Sumerian literature to put his rival off his stride,” said Forrester. But Priestley downed the last of his port and shook his head.

“The problem is,” he said, “the kind of men who are attracted to Angela Shearer aren’t any stage-door Johnnies. Have you read Darkness at Noon?”

Forrester nodded. He had devoured the book between missions in 1942, and like many others had felt the visceral force of Arthur Koestler’s disillusionment with communism in his story of an old guard Bolshevik caught up in Stalin’s show trials.

“Are you suggesting Koestler is one of Angela’s lovers?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Priestley.

“Not that Priestley is accusing Koestler of sending threatening photographs of cuneiform tablets to our esteemed colleague,” said Thornham.

“Of course not,” said Priestley.

“It’s just that it’s a possibility you shouldn’t ignore.”

“Thank you,” said Forrester. “I’ll bear it in mind.” But he made a note of the fact that the two diplomats had immediately shifted the conversation from office rivalries to the state of Templar’s marriage.

4

THE LIONS OF ASHURNASIRPAL

It was three days later, and Forrester had risen early to work on a paper on income distribution and class structure in sixth-century Athens, read a monograph by Donald Moss at Magdalen on social structures at Mycenae, and go through Kretzmer’s latest green-inked missive dismissing all Forrester’s suggestions about the monophones of Linear B, and complaining bitterly about the heat.

But hovering in the background, as he worked his way through these tasks, was the face of Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig, as if she was sitting quietly on the other side of the room, willing him to meet her gaze. Finally, he permitted himself to close his eyes and picture her, and was immediately overwhelmed. He remembered the feel of her head against his as he held her close to him, and the simultaneous solidity and fragility of her body in his arms, and a pulse of pure unrequited longing ran through him, so intense that for a moment he could not breathe.

He remembered the look she had given him when he told her what he had done to free her long-lost husband from the Gulag. For a moment her eyes had expressed nothing but sheer disbelief, followed swiftly by pity as she recognised what the decision had cost him.

Because, as Forrester should have known from the beginning, once the poor, broken count had been released from Stalin’s clutches, Sophie would have no option but to take him back and care for him, however long ago her love for him had died. And that meant she would have to give up Forrester. She had come to him when she believed her husband was dead. Now he had returned that would be the end of the affair: she was not a woman who could live a lie.

She had written to him since they had parted, matter-of-fact letters describing their return to the estate above the fjord, her efforts to restore the family’s fortunes in the wake of the occupation, to revive the district’s farms, and to bring her husband back to life. Between the lines Forrester could read the truth: that Sophie was throwing herself into her duties to keep at bay the same pain that threatened to overwhelm him.

With these thoughts running through his head it was almost a relief to turn to the little strip of indented clay and project himself mentally once more into the world as it had been on the banks of the Euphrates River five thousand years ago.

When he had first begun to read about the rise of civilisation between the two rivers, he had thought of early Mesopotamia as Eden, a time before the bloody catalogue of conquest and enslavement had begun to characterise the human story. A time when man had only just discovered how to irrigate the fields and raise enough crops to pay for a life above the subsistence level, when everything was still possible and a mysterious unexplored world lay around them, full of infinite possibilities.

But subsequent study of just how civilisation had arisen there had revised his view, and now, as he looked again at the monstrous creature emerging from the river in the image left by the cylinder seal, and the threatening figure of Narak overhead, he knew that no such bright future ever had a chance: the demons were already there inside people’s heads, and oppression and injustice were just about to establish their long rule.

“To think those poor people had three thousand years to wait before the coming of our Lord,” said a voice close to him, and Forrester realised with a start that the Reverend Robert Glastonbury, the vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, had slipped unnoticed through the open door into his rooms.

“I’m so sorry,” said Glastonbury. “I shouldn’t have startled you. But the door was open and you were so absorbed in what you were looking at I couldn’t resist finding out what it was. Mesopotamian – am I right?”

Forrester smiled wryly. For all his gentle, unassuming manner, Robert Glastonbury had a sharp mind and a good eye for detail.

“Absolutely right,” said Forrester. “Specifically, Sumerian.” Glastonbury picked up the magnifying glass and looked at the image of the gods.

“You realise that Abraham himself might have made his living by making effigies of those gods,” he said.

“I did not,” said Forrester. “That’s not in the Bible, surely?”

“In fact not,” said Glastonbury. “But there is a strong Jewish tradition that Abraham was a maker of idols before his realisation that Yahweh was the one true God. You know the Sumerians kept effigies of the gods inside their homes as well as in the temples, and clothed them and fed them and put them to bed just as if they were living creatures? So someone would have had to make those effigies – and what better profession for Abraham before he ultimately decided that none of them were the real thing?”

“I hadn’t heard that before,” admitted Forrester. “But I sometimes wonder if Yahweh was himself originally one of those Sumerian gods, perhaps the personal household guardian of Abraham’s family that he decided to elevate above all the rest. Perhaps that was why he had to leave Ur: for heresy.”

“Ever the iconoclast, Duncan,” said Glastonbury. “No, I prefer to think that our Creator chose to reveal himself to Abraham as he sat making those effigies, knowing he had found a man of sufficient strength to found a great religion; effectively of course, three great religions, for both Christianity and Islam emerged from the chrysalis of Judaism.”

“Not that the Jews would regard Judaism as a mere chrysalis,” said Forrester.

“Ah, the Jews,” said Glastonbury, with real sadness. “How those poor people have suffered.”

“And go on suffering, of course,” said Forrester, “while governments make up their minds what to do about them.”

“Did Mr. Bevin discuss that subject the other night? I gather his visit was quite a success.”