Secrets of the Dead

  Sure enough, there was a game show on television. Luckily, there was no one else in the room. Micky noticed a desk with a computer. There were charts on the wall with a list of rooms that either had the words ‘let’ or ‘not let’ beside them. Ah, so Micky had clobbered the landlord. He quickly checked a cork board on which were pinned notes, picture postcards, unpaid bills, and a list of students boycotted by other landlords for not paying their rent or smashing up their rooms.

  Then … BINGO! A square of paper had the name ‘Ben Darrington’ printed neatly across the top. Below that was this message: ‘Mr Oates. If you need to contact Ben he’s stopping with his dad throughout August.’ An address in Devon followed.

  Groans sounded from the hall. Mr Oates was waking up. Micky checked the drawers in the desk. He found a wallet containing cash; the wallet went into Micky’s pocket. Then he left the room, pausing only to stamp on Mr Oates’ head.

  He had the address. His spirits were rising. He’d get those drugs back, and Gurrick would be pleased with him. There’d be no more torture. In fact, Gurrick might be so pleased that he’d invite Micky to join his gang of mobsters. There’d be a chance of earning some big money, at last, being part of a drugs cartel.

  The thug grunted with satisfaction. ‘Watch out, Ben. I’m coming to get you.’

  ‘I’m going insane!’

  John Tolworth glanced up as the woman strode into the lab where he’d been carefully placing shreds of papyrus on to a sheet of glass. ‘Good morning, Samantha,’ he said. ‘Have the CAT scan people turned you down again?’

  ‘No – worse! Far worse!’

  ‘Oh?’ He put another sheet of glass over the papyrus fragments to hold them in place. ‘So you’re insane,’ he said cheerfully, in an attempt to raise a smile on that worried face of hers. ‘Are you going to tell me what drove you insane, or are you going to keep me in suspense?’

  ‘The mummies!’

  ‘You’ve not been dreaming about them walking past your house again?’

  ‘No, worse. This is real life.’ She held out a bare wrist that extended from beneath her blouse sleeve. ‘Pinch me, John. Give me a good, hard nip.’

  ‘You’re not turning into a masochist, too?’

  ‘Nope. I just wanted to check that I wasn’t dreaming.’

  He gave the back of her wrist a gentle nip. ‘Are you awake? Or am I in your dreams?’

  ‘I wish. Well, I’m awake and haven’t dreamt the weird thing that’s happened to me.’

  ‘So, what’s wrong?’

  Samantha folded her arms and scowled. ‘Am I, or am I not, an osteoarchaeologist?’

  ‘A bone expert? Yes, unless you forged your credentials.’

  ‘My God, I worked so bloody hard for my qualifications. I can name every bone in the human body. Give me a femur and I can identify the anchor points for muscles and tendons. Put a human skull into my hand, and I will give you the person’s age at death, their sex, their lifestyle. I can read teeth like you read a book. And now this happens.’

  ‘What happens?’

  ‘Oh, heck, better to show than tell. Wait, I’ll be right back.’

  John watched Samantha stride out of the room – she looked like a beautiful blond huntress in pursuit of prey. Her body language radiated ferocity and purpose. Still puzzled by her outburst, he picked up the papyrus fragments, in their sandwich of glass panes, and put them on the bed of the scanner. He double checked that the hieroglyphs on the scraps of ancient paper faced downwards. Satisfied, he closed the lid of the scanner, returned to his computer and initiated the scan. Through the castle window he saw Oliver and Fletcher. They were flying a kite on the meadow that stretched between here and the gatehouse. John was pleased that Oliver seemed to have recovered from the fainting fit a couple of nights ago. Ingrid was right after all; Oliver must have picked up one of these twenty-four-hour bugs. The boy seemed perfectly fine now. He watched as his son laughed when the kite plunged from the sky, nearly hitting Fletcher on the head. John laughed too, taking pleasure from the fact that Oliver was enjoying himself. Come to think of it, all his family were in a good mood. John now automatically included Ben as part of the family. He liked Ben a lot. That’s a hell of thing, isn’t it? John told himself. A son I’ve never met before arrives just days ago and already I feel as if I’ve known him all my life. There must be something in that saying about ‘blood being thicker than water’. Ben is my son, and it feels right to call him my son. John sincerely hoped that Ben would stay in touch when his leg had healed and he was back at university. John wanted to be Ben’s father. He wanted shared times together. Maybe holidays, birthdays, and to be there in the audience when Ben graduated from university. OK, that won’t be for some time yet, and there will be—

  Samantha’s voice crashed into his train of thought: ‘John? Can you spare a couple of minutes?’

  ‘Sure, just give me a moment to start running the program on this latest scan.’

  ‘OK, meet me in the mummy chamber in five minutes.’

  Samantha wore an odd expression – one of triumph, as if she’d suddenly realized someone had been duping her, but now she’d rumbled their nefarious scheme. Strange, he thought. What on earth has she discovered? John opened the program and set it to work on the latest scan. Immediately, the scanned images of the jagged pieces of papyrus began a spinning dance on-screen as the software attempted to match up the edges. This was like watching the invisible hands of a jigsaw genius at work. The software analysed the uneven edges, rips, and protrusions of the fragments, then attempted to match up the thousands of scanned pieces. It successfully connected three pieces in less than ten seconds. A hieroglyph symbol representing a wide open eye appeared. The program was working its magic. All being well, he’d be able to email another section of Egyptian document to the translator this morning. They were making headway at last. The library of documents and letters found in the Gold Tomb had, finally, begun to reveal their secrets.

  Leaving the program running, he headed to the mummy chamber, wondering just what Samantha had discovered that would have such a powerful effect on the woman.

  Samantha stood by the seated mummy, the adult male that had been given the name Kadesh by the conservation team. She brandished a transparent sheet of plastic that was perhaps twelve inches by eighteen inches.

  ‘This is what has sent me insane,’ she declared furiously. ‘This bloody … stupid … bewildering X-ray.’

  John tried to appear unperturbed by her anger. ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Just take a look.’ She pushed the top part of the X-ray under a clip on a light box on the wall. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘You’re the bones expert, Samantha.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Humour me, John. Please … now, what do you see?’

  ‘OK.’ John looked closer. ‘The X-ray of the mid-section of a body. Lower ribs, arms, hands, spine, pelvis, hip bones.’

  ‘Hands plural.’

  ‘Yes, I can see arms ending in a right hand and a left hand. Is this an X-ray of one of our mummies?’

  ‘Yup. Do you know which mummy?’

  John read what was written at the bottom of the X-ray transparency. ‘Kadesh. It can’t be.’ He turned to look back at the seated mummy. ‘You told me that one of Kadesh’s hands had been amputated before he died.’

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? Because the X-ray I showed you clearly revealed that one of the hands is missing.’

  ‘So when was this X-ray taken?’

  ‘Back in 1955.’

  John looked again at the mummy sitting on the chair. He could see the left hand clearly enough, because that had been unwrapped. The arm with the missing hand remained heavily bandaged, making the end of the arm appear bulbous; what’s more, the ancient Egyptian embalmers had covered the end of the arm with a black substance. It wasn’t at all easy to tell, simply by looking at the limb, if there was a hand under there or not. Until the body was X-rayed, archaeologists must have assu
med that the mummy possessed two hands. John turned back to the X-ray. ‘So which X-ray is the correct one?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I might be going crazy, John, but don’t call me ridiculous.’ She laughed to make her riposte appear light-hearted, yet there was real tension in her voice. ‘We have recent X-rays and CT scans, which clearly show that Mummy Kadesh is missing his right hand. Furthermore, the stump where the hand was severed reveals clear signs of a long period of healing before death took place.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. The 1955 X-ray reveals that Kadesh had two hands. Later X-rays and scans show he only has one?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman was angry as well as mystified. ‘How can a three-thousand-year-old corpse simply shed a hand that was wrapped in strips of linen then coated in bitumen? Who could reach through those wrappings –’ she pointed at the bulbous end of the arm where the stump was concealed under fabric and thick, black tar – ‘and not only reach inside the mummy’s bandages, and remove the hand that existed in 1955, but also make it appear as if the bone, where the hand had been severed, had begun to heal?’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m going out of my bloody mind.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is – it’s a bloody mistake.’ He smiled. ‘Those are old X-rays; the labels will have got mixed up. This one with the two hands must be another mummy.’

  ‘No. The position of the leg bones show that the mummy is in a sitting position. The only mummy sitting down is Kadesh. The others are laid flat.’

  ‘This old X-ray is smaller than recent ones. Perhaps those aren’t hand bones and finger bones. Might they be just random marks on the negative?’

  ‘John, give me some credit. I earn my living studying skeletons. Those are hand bones! I can identify individual components of the hand. See? Those parallel white lines in the image are the metacarpal bones, and the little white dots are the triquetral, lunate and scaphoid, just where they should be near the wrist. All the phalanx bones of the fingers and thumb are intact. In short, the X-ray clearly reveals both a left hand and a right hand.’

  John shook his head. ‘Samantha, think about what you’re saying here. You are claiming that Kadesh is undergoing internal transformations: impossible ones at that.’

  ‘I could prove that Kadesh lacks a right hand today, but it would mean taking a scalpel to the coverings on the stump and cutting away the bitumen and the bandages. It would be like opening up a walnut to see the kernel inside.’ She gave a shrill laugh. Tension again. ‘Of course, the owners would never allow it. Too destructive.’

  ‘Couldn’t the addition of an extra hand in the old X-ray be a practical joke?’

  ‘Who would do that, John? Moreover, why would they do that?’

  John shrugged. ‘Here’s another possibility: the mummies have been lying in the castle for years. Visitors probably stole bits of them for souvenirs.’

  ‘But the stump is encased in a hard shell of bitumen and linen. It would be like stealing the kernel out of the walnut without breaking the shell.’

  John shrugged again. ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way.’

  ‘Even if they could extract the hand without damaging its coverings, how could they fake the signs we see on CAT scans of the stump naturally healing when Kadesh here was still alive?’

  ‘There’ll be a simple explanation. A prank, or a mistake. Perhaps there was a fault with the CAT scan.’

  ‘A simple explanation, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then find me a simple explanation for this.’ Samantha gently eased back the sheet that covered the mummy called Amber. This was the corpse of the teenage girl.

  John looked into that dead face, which seemed so serene. Though whether she was serene at the moment of death was debatable.

  Samantha picked up a pencil. ‘After I identified the discrepancy between the 1955 X-ray of Kadesh and later X-rays and scans, I took a closer look at our mummy family.’ She pointed with the pencil. ‘Look here. What do you see?’

  John found the process of examining the corpse’s head unsettling. He could smell the spicy aroma it gave off. In ancient Egypt, spices were used to mask the odour of death.

  ‘What am I looking for?’ he asked.

  ‘There, at the hairline, a small nick in the skin.’

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘It wasn’t there before.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘John, these mummies have been scanned, mapped, photographed, you name it. There are meticulous records going back decades that describe their physical appearance and their state of preservation.’

  ‘I don’t see what you’re driving at.’

  ‘That nick in the skin would have been recorded, just like her amber earrings were recorded, and there is a list of every mole, freckle, and mark on the body.’

  ‘Mummified corpses still deteriorate. That split could have happened recently. Decay and nothing more.’

  She took a magnifying glass from a drawer. ‘Look closer. The cut on the scalp occurred just before death. There are remains of a scab in the cut.’

  ‘You’re saying that Amber suffered that wound just hours before she died?’

  ‘Yes. What’s more, I’m stating categorically that the cut on the scalp doesn’t appear in any photograph or forensic drawing of the head and face.’

  ‘Samantha, you are starting to worry me.’

  ‘I’m worried, too, John.’

  ‘What you are suggesting sounds crazy to me, and it will sound crazy to other people too if you decide to repeat those claims.’

  ‘I’m a scientist. I observe. I am morally and professionally obliged to reveal the truth of my findings.’ She nodded at the mummies. ‘And what I have discovered is that at some point since 1955, the mummy known as Kadesh has lost a hand, even though the wrappings haven’t been disturbed. And, recently, the mummified female called Amber has acquired an injury to her scalp, which must have occurred just a few hours before her death.’

  ‘I’ll pretend we never had this conversation, Samantha. Repeat what you’ve told me to any other member of staff and they’ll report you to our bosses. They’ll fire you.’

  ‘I repeat, I am a scientist. I’d stake my professional reputation on this fact: the mummies are undergoing a physical transformation. And it’s nothing to do with decay. These corpses are acquiring physical characteristics they NEVER had when they were alive.’

  The drive to Baverstock Castle in Devon would take four hours, if he didn’t stop en route. The address of his destination lay there on the passenger seat. Already, boredom drove Micky Dunt to begin talking to himself. ‘I’m coming to get you, Ben Bastard Darrington,’ he muttered as he sped along a motorway flanked by fields of corn. ‘I’m going to make you suffer for messing me around. Oh yes, suffer you shall, old son.’

  Micky had left the car’s radio on; he’d already heard news reports of a Mr Jonathon Oates being left in a coma after being attacked in his own house.

  ‘Good. If you’re sleeping you ain’t talking, Mr Jonathon Oates.’ Micky pictured Oates lying in the hospital bed with a tube up his nose, and the beep … beep … beep of monitors. The mental image encouraged Micky to feel even more optimistic. The cops couldn’t link Micky to the attack on the guy. ‘I wore gloves,’ he told his reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘So, no fingerprints. Mr Oates never saw my face, either, before I bashed his bloody head in. Even if he wakes up he can’t describe me. Nice one, Micky, you are a genius.’ He grinned at the mirror. Straight away, he saw that the blisters on the end of his tongue had filled up with pus again. ‘Ack! Like grapes they are … like a bunch of green grapes. Pus grapes. Bastard.’

  Karl Gurrick had caused those – the sadist had burnt Micky’s tongue with an electric cable. He didn’t blame Gurrick though; who he really blamed for his injuries was Ben Darrington. If Ben had got one of his student mates to hand ba
ck the drugs to Micky when he’d broken his leg then none of this would have happened. Gurrick would have got the drugs he’d paid for. There’d have been none of that torture in the basement. Micky snarled at his reflection in the mirror, ‘But no, it’s that cretin, Ben Darrington, that got me into trouble with Gurrick. And who wants trouble with a mobster? Ben thinks he’s better than me. Always looks down his nose like I’m shit on his shoe.’ Micky got angry with his own reflection; this was developing into an argument. He drove even faster as his temper flared, sounding the horn at any other motorist that got in his way. ‘Let me tell you, Ben Darrington, you student snob, I’m not some low-life crap. I studied the viola for six years. Six years! Not the violin, mind, but the viola. My mother played flute in an orchestra. Mozart, Mussorgsky, Bach, Wagner – the whole bloody lot. I could have played in an orchestra, too. There I’d be, in a suit and tie, with a viola tucked under my chin, bowing the strings, making music. Ha!’ He stabbed his finger at his reflection. ‘You didn’t think I went to a posh school, did you, Ben Darrington?’ And now he really did see Ben’s face in the mirror, not his own bruised features. ‘I’d got what it takes to be a brilliant viola player, but I didn’t want to do what Mother told me. I’m a free spirit. I do what I want! OK?’ He lashed at the mirror, breaking it.

  Micky had got into drugs when he was fourteen. He’d sold his viola and bought enough gear to take him to the freaking Moon and back. Micky laughed. He remembered when he was that shy and polite boy in a school uniform. That had all changed in his teens. He fell in love with those magic chemicals. He found great friends in a gang that bought and sold drugs, and smashed up stuff for a laugh. Michael Dunt’s life changed. He became Micky – hellraiser, drug-taker, jailbird. ‘But it was all my choice. Now Ben Darrington has caused me a lot of inconvenience. Inconvenience? He’s been taking the piss. I’ll get my coke back. Then I’m going to make him suffer, the way he made me suffer.’