could be cajoled into lending a hand in what appeared to be a gang confrontation. Amir insisted that they could get everyone out within five minutes, but would need extra time to disperse from the torn-up backstreets of the Cross.
May watched as they gathered up plastic-wrapped bundles of belongings containing their only possessions- photographs, religious artefacts, a few items of clothing-and milled around the fractured iron staircase at the far end of the basin. The need to hold out hope made them trusting; for all they knew, unscrupulous traffickers could have been rounding them up for mass execution. Amir spoke to each man as he passed, explaining something about the detectives. Several came over and grabbed their hands, murmuring thanks. May shot his partner a disapproving look.
One old man was wrapped in yards of chequered scarfing. He looked like an Arabic version of Bryant. Shuffling to a stop before them, he held out a Sainsbury’s shopping bag in his arms.
‘He says you are kind men,’ Amir translated. ‘He wishes to give you a gift.’
The old man grinned back, revealing thin pink gums. The boy by his side could have been a son or a grandson; denied a healthy diet, he had already lost the immunity of youth. Bryant could only accept the bag and bow his head in thanks. He watched as they filed to the ladder, patiently awaiting their turn to reach the surface, and saw why such people accepted their fate: they were too weary to do anything else.
‘Wait,’ Bryant called, summoning Amir. He held out a small blue card. ‘I almost forgot. Tell your friends to call this number when they reach Birmingham.’ The card read:
The detectives watched as the last of the immigrants climbed toward the patch of liverish light that was the sky above King’s Cross.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said May, checking his watch. ‘That should be long enough for them to get a head start. If this ever gets back-’
‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss about helping people. You should be glad it’s not you going out there. It could have been, you know. You’re a quarter foreign, after all.’
‘My grandfather was Welsh, Arthur, not East European.’
‘That’s worse. They wanted home rule once. They could have invaded us. They might have put checkpoints along Hadrian’s Wall.’
Bryant sniffed and peered into the Sainsbury’s bag. ‘Pass the torch, would you?’ He shone it inside, then carefully pulled the plastic away to reveal a chipped white vase, six inches high and covered with patches of dried mud.
‘What is that?’ asked May suspiciously. ‘It looks. .’
They studied the heads of Horus and Anubis painted in black and gold around the top of the vase. ‘Egyptian? He must have found it in the channel when the water was drained.’ Bryant bent closer. On one side, rows of blue- black Nubian slaves were depicted crying into the Nile. On the other, the same slaves were pouring the river into a vase of the same design, as though the pictogram might be infinitely repeated back into the past.
May’s eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me that’s not what Ubeda and Greenwood nearly lost their lives trying to find. Tell me it’s not the Vessel of All Counted Sorrows.’
Bryant ran his fingers over the figures, peering at them intently. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Even though there’s a figure of Anubis. You need Anubis to carry the sorrows from one vessel to another.’ He turned the vase over and studied the base in the torchlight. ‘Liberty’s. A mass-produced replica. I told you the Victorians were big on Egyptiana. I think if we took this to Rachel Ling, she’d tell us about the ritual involving the casting of such a vessel into the waters of the Fleet to protect and regenerate the City of London. Of symbolic value only, but a fitting souvenir of this whole business. I shall give it to Greenwood when his head’s better. Neither he nor Ubeda would ever have found it, because they didn’t know that the Fleet switched to another course in times of high flooding, something an ordinary Water Board employee like Wilton could have told them. Poor old Gareth: the curse of intellect without practical application. Let’s go and find some decent breatheable air.’
‘That’s King’s Cross above us,’ May pointed out, ‘not Hyde Park.’
‘Perhaps, but for once it will smell as sweet.’
As Bryant climbed on to the ladder, his foot missed a step and the vase slipped out of his hands. He tried to catch it, but was too slow, and could only watch in dismay as it fell, shattering to pieces on the wet stone floor below.
May reached down among the ceramic shards and held something aloft in his hand. ‘Actually, I think this may have been what Ubeda was searching for after all.’
The intricately carved emerald Anubis was the size of a duck’s egg, and would subsequently prove to be three thousand years old.
Bryant started laughing so hard that he nearly fell off the ladder. ‘Jackson Ubeda’s grandfather placed it inside the vessel as part of the ritual, and in their zeal the acolytes forgot to take it back out. I would love to have seen the look on his face after he tossed it into the river and then realized what he had done. I wonder how many years the family has been searching for it.’
‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked May.
‘Return it to the Cairo Museum, I think,’ said Bryant. ‘The British did quite enough pilfering for one dynasty. The irony is that now Ubeda has gone into hiding, he’ll never know that his familial duty has been performed.’
‘Although I imagine he would have kept the thing for himself, don’t you? Perhaps it took all of this to return it to the right hands.’
The Anubis was indeed returned, but it stayed-for three glorious days-on the shelf above Bryant’s desk in Mornington Crescent, where he could admire it at close quarters. It kept him in such a good mood that Raymond Land thought he had turned over a new leaf; a notion Bryant happily disabused him of once the jewel was returned to Egypt.
51. GEZELLIG
‘Alma told me I’d find you up here,’ said May, seating himself beside his partner on the bench at the top of Primrose Hill. Bryant was muffled up in the patched brown scarf and squashed trilby he had worn for over fifty years. The frost on the grass looked as artificial as Christmas-card snow. The distant city was soft and blue in the autumnal morning haze, the shade of ceanothus blossoms. It hummed softly, powered by batteries of working men and women.
‘I thought you’d join me. Here.’ He handed May a polystyrene cup filled with tea. ‘I was saving you a jam doughnut, but I ate it.’
May raised the lid and took a tentative sip. ‘I can’t believe you’re making your landlady move house, just to come and look after you.’
‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do. Everyone was going on about how upset she was. John, her great pleasure in life has always been to cater to my every whim. The lease on her house in Battersea is running out, and there’s enough room in the new place. Perhaps it’s a bit bigger than I thought. It makes sense for her to move where she can keep an eye on me. I’ve been very nice to her, I bought her a new iron.’
The converted workshop behind Chalk Farm Tube station had proven too much for him to keep clean, and although Bryant would have been the last person to admit that he hated the idea of living alone, he did, and Alma was one of the few women left in the world who would put up with him.
‘I meant to tell you, Raymond Land is talking of expanding the unit after our success in Balaklava Street. He wants us to take on cases for the whole of the south of England, with another unit set up in Manchester to handle the north. He’s really upbeat about the idea.’
‘Typical. The one case we’re forbidden from pursuing provides a partially fruitful outcome, and suddenly he wants to franchise the policing equivalent of Starbucks.’
‘Just think of it, Arthur. With a decent infrastructure in place we could finally retire.’ The second he spoke, May realized it was the wrong thing to say.
‘Does he really think we were successful?’ Bryant gave a disdainful grunt. ‘What about Ruth Singh, and the
