Suddenly, he knew exactly what had to be in the small parcel, and saw clearly what the 'burglar' must have been doing in the house – he'd just broken in a couple of days too early.
Bronson knew it was wrong, knew he was tampering with evidence, and knew that what he was doing might easily be sufficient to get him kicked off the force, but he did it anyway. As DI Robbins turned round and walked back towards him, Bronson hunched down over the mat, reached out, seized the packet and slid it into his jacket pocket with his left hand. With his right, he collected the rest of the mail, then stood up and glanced behind him.
Robbins was approaching, his hand outstretched. Bronson gave him the post and turned to leave.
'Typical,' the DI muttered, flicking through the envelopes. 'All bloody junk mail, by the looks of it. OK, see you around, Chris.'
When Bronson sat down in the driving seat of his car he found that, despite the chill in the air, there was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. For a few seconds he wondered if he should take the package back, leave it outside the door or maybe put it on the carpet. But he told himself that the presence or absence of a two- thousand-year-old clay tablet at a crime scene in Canterbury would have no impact whatsoever on Robbins' success or failure in solving the murder. He also knew Angela would be delighted to get her hands on it.
Feeling a sudden jolt of pure adrenalin, he turned the key in the ignition and drove quickly away.
44
'I've got something for you,' Bronson said, walking into the lounge of his small house in Tunbridge Wells.
'What?' Angela asked, as he handed her the package.
She glanced at the unfamiliar stamps that plastered one end of it as she turned it over in her hands. 'Morocco,' she murmured, and ripped open the envelope. She peered inside it, shook out a small object covered in bubble-wrap and carefully unwrapped it.
'My God, Chris, you found it!' Angela said, her voice high with excitement. 'This is the missing tablet.'
'I should bloody well hope it is,' Bronson said, sitting down opposite her and looking curiously at the relic. It was much less impressive than he had expected, just a small, grubby, greyish-brown lump of fired clay, one surface covered in marks and squiggles that were completely meaningless to him.
Angela pulled a pair of latex gloves from her handbag before she touched the tablet itself. Then she picked it up and examined it carefully, almost reverently, her eyes sparkling.
'You were right,' she said, glancing at the address on the envelope. 'The O'Connors
'Yes, and I've just nicked it from a crime scene.'
'Well, I'm really glad you did, as long as you won't get into trouble over it.'
'It should be OK,' Bronson said, with a shrug of his shoulders. 'Nobody saw me take it, and the only people who know it exists probably think it's still somewhere in Morocco. I'll bet my pension that, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, this object has simply disappeared. As long as nobody actually
Angela spread a towel over the coffee table and gently laid the tablet on it.
'It doesn't look like much,' Bronson said.
'Agreed,' she replied, 'but it's not the relic itself that's important – it's what the inscription means.' Her latexcovered fingertips lightly traced the incised markings on the face of the tablet, then she looked up at her exhusband. 'Don't forget how many people have died already. The stall-holder, the O'Connors, probably Kirsty Philips, and even Yacoub and his thugs in Rabat – the reason they're all dead is
Bronson nodded. 'It's a bit different when you put it like that. So now what?'
Angela looked back at the tablet. 'This could be the biggest break of my career, Chris. If Yacoub was right, this inscription could lead us to the hiding place of the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant. If there's even the slightest chance of finding either relic, I'm determined to follow the trail, wherever it leads me.'
'So what are you going to do? Suggest that the museum mounts an expedition?'
'No way,' Angela said firmly. 'Don't forget I'm still a very junior member of staff. If I walk in and tell Roger Halliwell what I've found, he'll be absolutely delighted and no doubt he'll congratulate me. Then he'll politely push me to one side and in a couple of weeks the Halliwell–Baverstock expedition will arrive in Israel to follow the trail of the lost relics. If I managed to get involved at all, they might let me examine any bits of pottery they find.'
Bronson looked slightly quizzical. 'I thought you were all brothers – and sisters – in arms in the halls of academe? All striving together for the advancement of knowledge and a better understanding of human history?'
'Don't you believe it. Whenever there's a whiff of a major discovery, it's every man for himself in the scramble to be the one whose name is linked to it. All that brotherly support vanishes and the event turns into a high-class catfight. I know – I've seen it happen. I'll just tell Roger I'm taking a short-notice holiday in Israel to study some Aramaic texts and leave it at that.'
Angela gestured towards the clay tablet lying on the coffee table in front of her. 'Now we've got this tablet, it means we can read more than half of the original text, and that has to give us a good chance of working out the meaning of the whole of the inscription. I've got about a week of holiday owing, and I don't see any reason why I shouldn't take it in Israel, do you?'
'No, I suppose not. Are you sure Israel's the right place to start looking?'
'Yes, because of the reference to Qumran. After that, who knows?'
'Right,' Bronson nodded, 'I'll come with you.'
'You can't, Chris. You're in the middle of a murder investigation.'
'No, I'm not. I've finished the report about Morocco, I've got nothing to do with the investigation of Kirsty Philips's murder, and I'm owed at least ten days' leave. Dickie Byrd probably won't like it, but that's not my problem.' Bronson reached across the table and took Angela's hand. 'Look, I don't want you running off to Israel by yourself. I want to be close enough to take care of you.'
Angela gave his hand a squeeze. 'Are you sure? That would be wonderful, Chris. I wasn't looking forward to forging on by myself. And we do make a pretty good team, don't we?'
Bronson smiled at her. 'You bet,' he said. And we
'Right,' Angela said briskly. 'I'll get on the internet and try to sort out flights to Tel Aviv. Once I've done that, I'll do some more work on that tablet. With that Aramaic text and the other bits of translations, I'm sure we can work out where the clues are pointing. We must have got more information about these hidden relics than anyone else, so we can be sure we'll be there at the kill.'
'I hope that's just a figure of speech,' Bronson said.
45
Tony Baverstock looked at yet another list of clay tablets on the screen of his desktop computer and wondered, not for the first time, if there was any real point in continuing with the search. He must have studied pictures of hundreds of the things, and none of them – at least, none so far – had borne even the slightest resemblance to the one he was looking for.
To complicate matters, there were some half a million clay tablets sitting in museum vaults and storerooms that had never been translated. The information about this huge repository of tablets was usually limited to just one or two poor-quality photographs and perhaps a very brief description of the provenance of each object – where it was found, its approximate date, that kind of thing.
There were two reasons for his urgent search. First, Charlie Hoxton had called him the day before and told him to do it, which was in itself an entirely adequate incentive; second, his task had suddenly become even more crucial the previous afternoon, when he'd run into Roger Halliwell in the corridor outside his office. The head of
