what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’
‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’
She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’
Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.
Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.
She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’
‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’
‘Yup. Here, look.’
He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.
The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.
‘There he is.’
Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?
‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’
The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.
‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’
The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, you’re getting too close!
Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.
He jumped.
‘It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’
This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?
‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’
He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.
This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.
At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: ‘Half a billion? You’re joking, right?’
‘No.’ Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. ‘Remember the eternity of Egyptian life …’
Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didn’t add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.
‘Mr Harper—’
‘Sorry?’
It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.
‘Explain the figures, maybe?’
‘Sure.’
‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’
Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’
He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said way too much.
Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that,
