The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox
The idea was absurd, yet also appalling. Jess stared at one long skeleton, probably male, judging by the narrowness of the pelvis. It certainly had no feet. It looked like a pretty tall skeleton for a slave.
Recalling her thorough lessons in forensic anthropology from Steve Venturi at UCLA, she knelt and examined the ankle bone where it had been severed. Something was not quite right about it. Jess steadied her torchlight over the bone, examining the angle of the blow, as a voice echoed above her.
‘Right. This way.’
It seemed she didn’t have time to linger. She was a guest on this trip, conspicuously the anthropologist amongst proper archaeologists, so she was lucky to be here at all, and in no position to ask for a delay.
They moved down the last length of darkened passage to the sealed tomb. The air grew hotter, the coarse mud walls even rougher: they had only recently been excavated. The weight of the great adobe pyramid above them was palpable, and oppressive.
‘There.’
Dan pointed. A slab of rock blocked the passage, illuminated by their collective headtorches; the slab was the height of the passage itself – maybe one and a half metres wide and tall.
Jess asked the obvious and probably stupid question. ‘How do we move that?’
‘Brute force,’ said Dan. ‘The mud is ancient, it gives way. It’s surprisingly simple, you can dislodge the portals by hand. The rocks aren’t thick, they’re more like large slates.’
‘But – the roof?’
‘These adobe pyramids are secure, they won’t collapse. They erode in the sun and rain, but they’ve lasted fifteen hundred years: they don’t collapse from the inside.’
Jess felt her excitement surging. What was beyond this ancient portal? Already they had found a trove of mutilated skeletons. This was an important tomb, from the mysterious end of the Moche Empire, the desperate time of the Muchika. They were headed for the dark heart, the airless core of the pyramid.
Jay was muttering behind, in the depths of the gloom. His colleague joined in, giving voice to his concerns. ‘You know. The air is, ah, pretty bad down here, Dan.’
‘But what can we do? We haven’t got any oxygen tanks at the lab, have we?’
‘Nope. We finished the last on Monday.’
The frustrating debate continued, then Dan lifted a hand. ‘So, either we call a halt and wait a week for a new delivery, or we advance. Guys?’ His headtorch illuminated their white faces one by one.
In turn, everyone nodded. The decision was made.
‘Then let’s do it!’
Reaching up, Dan began tugging at the door. There was just room for his fingers to grasp an edge, and pull. He pulled once. Nothing. He pulled again. No movement.
Jess came up beside him, kneeling in the dust, to help. Still nothing.
‘Another go, come on.’
As one they tugged, and then the door seemed to shift, a few millimetres; then decisively, with a cloud of soil and choking dust. But something was wrong. This dust was red—
It was pouring from somewhere, from some hidden channel, some broken vessel above; draining like a tipped-up load of vermillion sand over Jessica’s face and hair and mouth. She was being smothered in thick red dust with a weird smell. She screamed out loud, in terror.
It was a ghastly childhood dream – of being stifled at night, feeling cold hands that throttled; it was a dream of being her father in his last moments, in hospital, misting the oxygen mask, drowning in pain, staring hapless and terrified at the nurse and the kids and the oncoming darkness – until his own seven-year-old daughter had wanted to thrust a pillow right over his face and end it for him—
And then the scarlet dust filled her mouth, and she could scream no more.
8
The Bishops Avenue, London
There were murders and there were … murders. That was the unspoken agreement between Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen and his detective sergeant, Larkham. A plain old murder was just that: a murder. A robbery gone nasty, or a domestic gone awry.
But a … murder was different. It required a microsecond of hesitation before the word was enunciated, or a subtle drop in voice tone, barely half a note, a third of a note. ‘Sir, we have a … murder.’
This one was, by all accounts, very much a … murder. Ibsen could tell from his DS’s demeanour. DS Larkham had already seen the corpse, which had been discovered six hours previously: his already-pale English face was paler than ever, his voice subdued, his normal cheeriness quite dispelled.
Their large police car was slowly rolling down The Bishops Avenue, one of the richest streets in London. Ibsen gazed out at the enormous houses, the fake Grecian villas looking faintly surreal in the drizzle. One resembled a vast temple from Luxor, inexplicably transported to the wintry north of the capital and fitted with six burglar alarms. The next house appeared to have sentries.
‘Who the fuck lives in houses like this?’ said the driver, giving voice to all their thoughts.
‘Kuwaiti emirs,’ said Ibsen. ‘Billionaire Thai politicians. Nobody in winter.’
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Look – hardly any cars. A lot of these people have houses all over the world. They come here in summer, it’s dead in December. Makes it a good place to commit a crime. In winter.’
‘Well, our murder victim lived here.’ Larkham grimaced. ‘Even in winter.’
‘What do we know about him?’
‘Nephew of the Russian ambassador.’
‘Ouch.’ Ibsen winced at the complications. ‘This is an official residence?’
‘No, sir. Just a rich family. Father’s into oil and diamonds. Oligarch.’
‘Has someone told the Foreign Office?’
‘Already did it, sir.’
DCI Ibsen gazed, with a brief sense of pleasure, at Larkham’s keen face. Here was an ambitious policeman, a bright young man who had skipped university to go straight into the force, already a DS in his mid-twenties, with a very young family. He’d been Ibsen’s junior for just six months, and he was obviously itching for Ibsen’s job, but in a good way, just so he could move on up. Ibsen preferred to have someone nakedly and brazenly ambitious than a schemer who subtly politicked.
Larkham yawned; Ibsen grinned. ‘Nappies at dawn?’
‘And feeding at four a.m. Feel like I’ve done a shift already.’ He stifled his sleepiness and asked, ‘Does it get better?’
‘It gets better. When they reach the age of reason. About five or so.’
Larkham groaned; Ibsen chuckled. ‘OK. Tell me again. We’ve got statements?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Larkham repeated what information they had gathered so far. The first statement came from a passer-by, who had heard two raised male voices as he walked past the house at eleven p.m., though they didn’t sound violent …’
‘And the other statement?’
‘From a neighbour, an au pair in the house next door, at one a.m., approximately the time of death, according to Pathology’s very rough initial guess, sir. She also heard the raised voices of two men. She says these voices were shouting, aggressive, possibly violent, possibly drunk.’
‘But she did nothing?’
‘Very young