The Deceit

Hoisting his heavy bags, Victor stumbled across the road and under the arch. At once he was engulfed by the silence, the silence of silent worship, of punitive adoration, the silence of the endless Red Sea sun.

And then a monk came out from a darkened chamber, squinting at this sweating old man in his ludicrous blazer with his walking stick, and the young monk smiled quietly and said, in accented English, ‘Hi, I am Brother Basili. Andrew Basili. This way please. You are a pilgrim? You can stay here, no worries. There are no other visitors, they’re all too scared of the troubles. You must be pretty brave. This way. Over here. Guess you’ll want some refreshment? You are in time for breakfast.’

Breakfast turned out to be austere plates of olives and flatbread, and carafes of water, consumed at a long table in the refectory in almost total silence, apart from a monk intoning the psalms.

During the morning Victor was left to do as he pleased. In the central courtyard, the sun blazed. The monastery was mute. One youthful monk was hurrying about his business, keeping to the shade of the stumpy colonnades.

Victor approached. ‘Salaam—’

But the monk shook his head. When Victor tried again, the young monk blushed and fled.

Victor sat on a stone bench, rubbed his aching chest and read his guidebook.

‘The body of St Justus the monk is kept in a passage by the Church of the Apostles …’

In the afternoon he located the monastery library, domed and white, and delicately frescoed with images. A reverential hush pervaded the eight-hundred-year-old room: it felt wrong to talk. But Victor had to try, and Brother Andrew Basili was at the other end of the library, immersed in at least three open books.

‘Hello,’ said Victor.

Basili’s smile was brief and a little cold. He evidently didn’t want to be interrupted. But Victor had to try.

‘This is a fine library.’

Basili’s nod was terse. ‘Used to be better. Then the Bedouins raided it, in the eighteenth century. They burned many of our volumes as cooking fuel.’

Victor listened, finally placing the accent. Australian. This was not unexpected; Sassoon knew that many young men from the Coptic Diaspora – in Australia, Canada, America – were returning to Egypt to renew their church, in defiance of the troubles and the hostilities. Many Coptic monasteries were, paradoxically, flourishing for the first time in centuries.

‘You’re from Sydney?’

‘Nah. Brissie.’ Basili sighed. ‘Now, sorry, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got my studies.’

Supper was the same as breakfast, apart from a single beaker of vinegary wine.

The next day it became apparent that no one was going to speak to Victor, not properly, not ever. Most of the monks shrank at his approach. The few who did linger were so shy and kind and virginal it was emotionally impossible to ask about the Sokar Hoard. The only time he did mention the terrible phrase, to an elderly, English-speaking monk from Port Said, the man scowled and stalked away.

As the days passed and shortened in their repetitiveness, their mesmerizing and beautiful dullness, Victor found himself giving up. Wandering out of the monastery gate, into the sunburned desert, he sat under the thorn trees, and stared at his absurd leather shoes and his absurd twill trousers and he felt like a fraud, just a dying and childless narcissist. Maybe he was seeking mere glory, and he deserved to fail. Maybe it was all just spiritual vanity.

On the fifth day Victor was woken as usual by a softly tolling bell, even before the darkness had dispelled. Opening the thin cotton curtain, he gazed at the first tinge of the sun, still hiding behind Sinai, just a roseate rumour at the dark edge of heaven.

‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork.’

Crossing the silent square at the centre of the monastery, Victor creaked open the door to the church and joined the thrumming tranquil hubbub of the monks in their daily Matins: the Agbeia.

‘Khen efran em-efiout, nem Epshiri, nem Piepnevma ethowab ounouti en-owoat.’

The pew was painful to sit in for so long. Victor shifted and listened. The hour of prayer passed slowly, and hypnotically. And then the last of the prayer was intoned.

‘Doxa Patri, ke Eyo kai Agio epnevmati ounouti en-owoat. Amin.’

The words were bewildering, and lovely, in their strangeness, their syncretism. You could hear all of religious history in these Coptic words: maybe a touch of Aramaic, more than a hint of Greek, and certainly the very syllables of ancient Egyptian – it was like a Pharaoh sitting up in his tomb, and turning, in a nightmare, and talking to Victor. Blood seeping from his decaying mouth.

A sudden coldness swept up his limbs, and into his heart, and Victor fell to the floor.

Darkness. Darkness.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

The next thing he realized, he was in some kind of kitchen staring at the kindly young faces of half a dozen monks. They were daubing his forehead with water.

‘I … What happened?’

‘You fainted.’ It was Andrew Basili. ‘Are ya OK? We can get a doctor … in a day or so.’

‘I am so very sorry,’ Victor said. He was acutely embarrassed, as if he had publicly soiled himself. ‘I am an old fool. I shouldn’t have come. I am so sorry.’

The other monks dispersed, black cloaks whispering, leaving him alone with Brother Andrew. The sun was up now.

‘So, why did you come?’

‘I came to find out something. Something very important to me. I want to know about Brother Wasef Qulta. A monk murdered in Cairo. He came here, about two weeks ago. And I want to know why.’

Andrew Basili said nothing. For a long, long time. Then he nodded. ‘Look, I don’t really know anything about that stuff. Sorry. If you are feeling better, maybe you should go back to Cairo?’

Once more, silence filled the sparse monastic kitchen.

In his desperation, Victor Sassoon decided to do something quite terrible. Something he had never done before in his life.

‘Brother Basili, the reason I ask all this is that I believe Brother Qulta was carrying documents which relate to the history of my Jewish faith. I am a scholar of this area. The texts may be written in a language few can understand. I may be one of those few.’

Brother Andrew said nothing. Victor went on,

‘The history of my faith is very important to me. Because … you see …’ Very slowly, Victor Sassoon pulled up the cuff of his blazer, unbuttoned his shirt and revealed the markings to the Australian.

The monk’s eyes widened. He gazed at the small, faded tattoo on Victor’s left arm. ‘You were in the camps?’

Victor nodded, suppressing the fierce rush of shame. How could he use this as blackmail, as emotional bribery? It was the worst of sins: the Shoah as a bargaining device.

But he didn’t care.

‘Auschwitz. I was a tiny boy, one of the last, from Holland, we were taken there in 1944, but the Russians saved us. Then … well, we had a British side to the family, they took me in after the war. My mother and father died in the … in the camp. All my Dutch family. They died. That’s when I resolved to keep my faith alive, my Jewishness.’

The ensuing silence was different. Brother Basili sighed, rubbed his face, shook his handsome young head. Then he pulled up his own wooden chair and sat next to Victor. For a moment, Basili stared at the wall.

Victor could see the confusion in his profile. Finally, Basili spoke. ‘I guess there is no harm in telling you what I know. ’Cause I don’t know much.’ He made a weary gesture. ‘Brother Qulta visited his mentor. Brother Kelada. A scholar, an anchorite. Qulta had documents on him, I have no idea what they said, I know they were old and valuable.’

‘How valuable?’

Basili turned, and his young face flushed with a tiny hint of pride.

‘Priceless! The Coptic church is the source of everything. We are the original church! The church founded by St Mark the Evangelist. The church of the gospel of St John.’ He shook his head, then continued, with real passion. ‘Even the very oldest copy of the Bible in the world is Coptic – the Codex Sinaiticus!’

Victor nodded.

‘I know the story. Stolen by a German from St Katherine’s in Sinai. Then given by Stalin to the British, yes?’

‘Yes!’ Basili said. ‘The Brits keep it in London, but it’s ours. We won’t let that happen again. Whatever these documents are, I am pretty sure we shall keep them. God has entrusted us to be the curators of the Christian faith, of the original church.’

‘So where are the documents now?’

Basili frowned. ‘Sohag, I think? Does it matter? Brother Kelada didn’t want them here, I don’t know why. So he told Qulta to take them back where they came from, where they were found – some cave in the desert. That’s what I heard. That’s all I know.’

Again, the frustration returned, but also the excitement. Sohag, Middle Egypt. The Red Monastery, or the White, or the Monastery of the Martyrs, the Monastery of the Seven Mountains. Which? But it made sense. Sohag was not far from Nag Hammadi, where the Gnostic gospels were found.

‘Where in Sohag? There are many monasteries. Please let me speak to Brother Kelada. He can tell me.’

The Australian monk shook his head. ‘Impossible.’

‘What?’

‘He died three days ago.’

‘But how?’

Basili looked faintly contemptuous.

‘We had to bury him outside, near the trees. Suicide is the worst of sins.’

6

Carnkie, Cornwall

The walk to the Methodist chapel for her mother’s funeral took Karen Trevithick past grey, pinched, tin-miners’ houses that probably once belonged to her extended family. She was descended from generations of Cornish tinners. And Cornish wreckers, smugglers and fishermen, for that matter.

Cornwall was her homeland, this was her home. Carnkie was the hearth of that home.

Yet she didn’t feel at home. Not at all.

‘All right, Karen, my dear? So sorry to hear about Mavis.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘How is the littl’un?’

‘Ellie is OK, staying with Julie, my cousin’s wife in London – they have kids.’

‘Ah yes, nice for her to have playmates. ’Specially now.’

‘Yes. Yes it is.’

Who was this polite elderly Cornish gentleman who had stopped her in the street? Karen ransacked her memory. She couldn’t place him: some distant third cousin? A friend of her mother’s? The man smiled at her, kind and gracious, and laid a consoling hand on her elbow. She thanked the nice old gent once again, and walked on, around the drizzly corner, to the chapel, a dour grey granite pile, a building of deliberate and penitent ugliness.

Karen’s mother, a widow since her fifties, had returned to this old village, Carnkie, a few years back: retreating from an increasingly lonely London to the emotional comforts of Cornwall.

At the time, Karen had confessed mixed feelings about this. She was glad her mum was retiring to the country she loved, but she was selfishly sad her mother was leaving as that meant less free childcare for Ellie; she couldn’t work out why her mother chose Carnkie of all places, even if it was the ancestral hamlet.

Much of Cornwall was lovely, from the sheltered yachting harbours and languid creeks of the south, to the rawly beautiful cliff-and-thrift coasts of the north; but Carnkie was in the brutal, ugly middle of Cornwall, a place of wind-scraped moorland – and dormant, decaying mining townships. Like Carnkie.

The mourners were gathered at the gate that led to the chapel door.

‘Hello Karen.’

‘So sad, so very sad. So young as well.’

‘I tell ’ee, sixty-two?’

Barely listening, Karen took one last look at the view. A typical Cornish fog, half-drizzle, half-mist, was rolling down from old Carn Brea, shrouding the rocky moorland above the village. It murked between the granite-built tin-mine stacks, making them look, even more than usual, like classical ruins.

Karen turned, and entered. The interior of the chapel was notably better than the façade: it was airy and spacious. But the spaciousness underlined the fact there were so few people here. At least she could see her cousin Alan at the front, in a pew; he saw her, too, and waved her over.

‘All right, Kaz?’

‘Yes,’ she sighed, sitting down next to her cousin. ‘Fine. I mean. Ish.’

Apart from Alan there were maybe ten or eleven people, their paltry numbers exaggerated by the vastness of the chapel. This was a place built for hundreds of lustily singing miners and their ruddy-faced wives and many, many kids, a place built at the height of the tinning boom in the nineteenth century, when places like Carnkie were churning out more copper and tin than anywhere else on earth, when places like Redruth, Carnkie and St Just were allegedly the richest square miles on the planet, though all the real money disappeared to London with the owners and the landlords.

Now it was all dead. The chapels were empty, the mines were closed, the people were old and the children had gone. And now even her mother had been taken and swallowed by the mizzle, reducing her immediate family to just two people: herself and her six-year-old daughter.

She realized, with a kind of surprise, that she was crying.

‘Hey now, come on.’ Alan handed her a tissue.

‘Sorry. Look at me. Train wreck.’

‘No need to apologize. Just remember, you’re nearly through. The crem is usually the worst bit.’

‘I’m glad we did it first.’

‘Yes.’

The cremation had been yesterday: this was the service. Karen already had her mother’s ashes in her car, sealed in a faintly farcical pot, itself in a supermarket carrier bag. She had no idea what to do with them. Scatter them at sea? But her mother had distrusted the sea. Like many older Cornish people she had never even learned to swim, even though she lived in a peninsula surrounded by the churning Atlantic.

Where then? Up on Carn Brea, next to the castle? That was better – the view across to St Agnes Beacon, and the sea beyond, was immense and glorious; but the grieving wind hardly ever stopped.

Incongruously, Karen considered the disaster that might ensue if she scattered the ashes in a typical blowy Carn Brea morning.

‘We are gathered here to celebrate the life of Mavis Trevithick.’

The vicar was doing his thing. Karen barely listened. She imagined her mother’s reaction to the news that her mortal remains had been ritually distributed across a bank of Lidl shopping trolleys.

She’d surely have laughed. Like many Cornish people, her mum had possessed, or inherited, a wry and salty sense of humour: that kind of wit was the only way to deal with tough lives down the mines, or on bitter moortop farms.

‘Can we all sing Hymn 72, “Abide with Me”?’

Oh God. ‘Abide with Me’? Karen was entirely immune to religion; she believed none of it – that’s why she’d left Alan to arrange the service – but this one hymn always got her. Something in the tune – it mined her soul, found the motherlode of human grief, every time.

The organ hummed, the frail voices joined in. Karen put the scrunched-up tissue in her fist to her trembling mouth and closed her eyes. Hard.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

It didn’t work, the tears were falling lavishly now. Along with the memories of her mum, before Dad died, making jokes and pasties, with flour on her fingers, when everyone was alive, when she had cousins and uncles and parents, but so many were gone, all gone—

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;

Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Karen stifled her sobs. If only she could believe that was true, that there was something beyond, a loving God for all, a brother for the lonely, a father for the orphaned, an embracing and eternal Lord, gathering the anguished. But whatever Nonconformist fire had once filled this big ugly chapel was long ago extinguished; all the tin was mined out. She certainly hadn’t inherited any faith.

The grave was victorious, after all. And yes, death stung.

Thankfully, the next hymns were more bearable. A few prayers were mumbled, the vicar talked of Mavis’s vivacity and gardening. Then everyone – all twelve or so of them – filed out of the chapel, and repaired to her Uncle Ken’s house for Cornish bread, saffron cakes and pots and pots of tea, thick protection against the cold and drizzle outside. There was no alcohol. The Nonconformist tradition of teetotalism lived on, even as the religion itself had expired.

At three o’clock Karen got a call. She stepped out of her uncle’s front room into the hall to take it. The number flashing on her phone was unknown.

‘Hello?’

‘Karen?’

‘Hello – is this …? Is this …?’

‘Yes. Sally Pascoe. Your second cousin! Remember?’

‘Sally!’

Karen was genuinely pleased to hear her voice, and also a little perplexed. She and Sally had been great friends as kids, during those childhood Cornish holidays they spent hours hopscotching in Trelissick or building sandcastles at Hayle. Later on, their adult lives had diverged, yet continued in parallel: Karen had become a detective chief inspector in London, Sally a policewoman; but she had stayed in Cornwall. Busy careers and lively kids meant they hadn’t met in years.

‘Karen, I’m so sorry I couldn’t make your mum’s … you know. So sorry.’

‘Sal, it’s OK.’

‘But work is, well, it’s very busy. I’m sure it’s a lot more hectic up in London, but we have crimes down here too.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s fine.’

‘Anyway I just wondered if you might … well, I mean, you have quite a reputation in London, as a DCI … I wondered if you …’

‘Sally, spit it out!’

‘Do you want to drive over to Zennor, maybe later, or tomorrow? I mean, if you have the chance, it might, uh, distract you. You see, we have a strange case, a cottage on the hill.’

‘I can come over right now. To be honest I’d like an excuse. The funeral was … intense. And now my Uncle Ken is trying to overdose me with scones.’

Sally laughed gently. ‘We like our carbohydrates down here.’

‘I’m on my way. Meet you there in forty minutes?’

The drive took less than forty minutes. Karen drove fast, with her mum in the back, in a carrier bag. She parked at Zennor church and followed the winding path up to the hill to the ruined cottage. Her destination was obvious: there were two police Range Rovers parked next to the derelict building, their yellow-and-blue insignia garishly conspicuous on top of the grey-green, stony hill. The drizzle had abated but the January wind was keen.

A constable greeted her. ‘You must be DI Pascoe’s friend?’ He opened the door of the cottage.

Karen stepped inside. Her reaction was reflexive.

‘Oh my God!’

7

Sohag, Egypt

Victor Sassoon saw the smoke of the second small bomb from his hotel window. The fifteenth-floor balcony of his hideous 1970s concrete tower gazed across the Nile, from the dense and frazzled streets of Muslim Sohag, to the smaller, ancient, more Coptic, west-bank town of Akhmim. The smoke from this latest bomb rose like a long-stemmed lotus flower above the dense medieval streets.

Then came the sirens, harsh and plaintive in the noonday heat. Had the Muslims attacked the Copts again? Or was it the Copts attacking the Muslims in return? The only thing anyone knew for sure was that the violence was worsening. The papers had informed him this morning that the Zabaleen were also rioting in Cairo. Egypt was truly roiled.

Yet this very morning the poor people from the countryside had tethered their shallow boats to gather reeds from the side of the Nile, much as they must have done in Pharaonic times. This was Egypt, turbulent and tumultuous, and also unchanging.

Turning from the balcony, Sassoon sat on his bed and unscrewed his precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and filled a tooth mug with half an inch, slugging it in one go. It gave him courage for the day ahead, and it dulled the pain. The pain in his lungs and in his legs; and in his heart.

Lifting up the bottle, Sassoon examined the liquor that remained. Five inches maybe. And it would be hard to buy more: Sohag was a dry city. Islamist.

Everything was running out. Time and whisky, and life.

He rose, buttoned his blazer and picked up his stick. In the street he hailed an old, pale blue fifties Ford taxi and got in the back seat to negotiate the day. The driver, Walid, spoke a little English and asked Victor if he knew his brother Anwar who lived in Manchester and worked in a car showroom.

Victor confessed that he had never met Anwar, despite living in the same country. Walid seemed very disappointed by this, until Victor told him what he wanted: to be driven to all the nearby ancient Coptic monasteries, for the next two days; and then Victor added that he would pay a hundred dollars for his time and gasoline.

This was an absurdly generous offer, but Victor was infinitely beyond caring. He had tens of thousands of dollars in his account – the product of a lifetime of academic salaries and scholarly frugality – and he had no family. What better use could he find for the money than discovering a great and final truth?

But he needed to be quick. The pain in his lungs was like a murderer had stabbed a sharpened crucifix in his chest.

‘Please.’ Victor gestured at the donkey cart blocking their way. ‘Let’s go.’

Walid smiled a tobacco-stained smile and slammed his horn, frightening the donkey, as they screeched out into the Sohag traffic.

They talked about the bomb as they made their slow way through the chaos of trucks and cabs, and old Mercedes minibuses full of Egyptian matrons, in vividly coloured headscarves.

‘Much bad,’ said Walid. ‘Very bad. Soon they will make the Coptic leave Egypt. Sadat, Mubarak, they protect the Copt. But now … No good. No good.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand.

Sassoon gazed at the rear-view mirror, and the absence of dangling prayer-beads. ‘You are a Christian?’

‘La.’ Walid shook his head and ignited his third Cleopatra-brand cigarette of the morning. ‘Muslim. But I having many Coptic friend. We are all Egyptian, all People of the Book. The bad men want to … make hate. You smoke?’

Victor demurred. He had once been a smoker. Forty years a smoker, then he’d stopped. Evidently he had given up too late: the lung cancer was very advanced. He listened placidly as Walid smoked and sighed and cursed and swore at the politicians and chattered away about his eight children, and his annoying new wife, until at last they reached the desert.

The transition was sudden, as always in Middle and Upper Egypt. The fertile valley of the Nile was a vivid and glorious sash of green across the ochre of the Saharan wilderness, but when the desert began it did so with a painful severity: in a second one travelled from emerald to grey, or from city to nothingness.

Ahead of them, in the first desert sands, was the White Monastery. In truth it looked quite unprepossessing, like an ugly and very humble pile of mud bricks and cracked pillars, yet it was one of the oldest church buildings in the world.