41

Bronson paid the two room bills at the desk, carried their bags out to the hire car, then took the road heading south out of Rabat towards Casablanca and the airport. They'd barely left the outskirts of the city when his mobile rang.

'You want me to answer that?' Angela asked, as Bronson fished in his pocket for the phone. He'd insisted she down a glass of brandy at the hotel, and he was surprised at how quickly she seemed to have recovered from her ordeal.

'No, thanks. It's probably work,' he said.

Bronson pulled the car in to the side of the road as soon as he saw an open space, then answered the call.

'I've been trying to reach you, Chris,' DCI Byrd said. 'Get on the first flight you can. There've been some developments in the case over here.'

'In England?' Bronson asked. 'What kind of developments?'

'Kirsty Philips has been found dead – murdered, in fact – at her parents' home in Canterbury.'

'Dear God, that's awful. What about her husband?'

'He's pretty much fallen to pieces. I've got a team working on the murder, but I need you here to liaise with them, just in case there are any connections between her death and what happened to her parents out in Morocco. How soon can you get back?'

Bronson glanced at his watch. 'I'm on the way to the airport right now,' he said, 'but I doubt if I'll be on the ground in London until late this afternoon. Do you want me to come in to the station tomorrow morning to check in with you, or go straight off to the crime scene?'

'You might as well go straight there to make your number with the inspector in charge – that's DI Dave Robbins. The SOCOs and forensic teams will probably still be at the house. I'll send you a text with the address. Come in and see me tomorrow afternoon.' Byrd paused. 'You sound a bit tense, Chris. Are you OK?'

'I've had a really traumatic night. I'll tell you about it when I see you.'

Bronson snapped the phone shut and turned to Angela. 'That was my boss,' he said, his face grim, 'and it wasn't good news. Kirsty Philips has been murdered.'

'Oh, God. It's got to be linked to that clay tablet, hasn't it?'

Bronson started the car again and pulled back on to the road. 'Yes,' he said. 'And we both know that the people who want it want it very badly indeed.' He paused. 'So what are you going to do now? I don't think you're in any danger now that the tall man – the one Talabani called Yacoub – is dead. But you can move into my house if you're worried about staying in your flat.'

Angela looked at him for a long moment, then sighed, pushing her hair back from her eyes. 'Thank you – I'd like to do that,' she said simply. 'But, you know, I've not finished with this hunt just yet. When his thug was getting ready to slice my face to ribbons, that man Yacoub said something to you that I simply can't ignore. He said that he believed the inscription on the tablets could provide the location of the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant.'

'You remember that?'

'Trust me, Chris, I can recall every second I spent in that cellar, and everything anybody said.'

'I've never even heard of the Silver Scroll,' Bronson said. 'And what the hell is the Mosaic Covenant?'

'OK. In 1952, archaeologists working at Qumran found a scroll made of copper, which was unusual enough. What made it simply astonishing was that, although almost every other Dead Sea Scroll contained religious texts, the Copper Scroll was simply a list of buried treasures. The trouble was that the locations didn't make any sense – they were just too vague. But one listing on it referred to a second scroll that had been hidden somewhere else, a scroll that provided more details of where the treasures were concealed. That document – which nobody's yet found – has become known as the Silver Scroll.'

'And the Mosaic Covenant?'

Angela nodded. 'The word "mosaic", with a small "m", has several different meanings, though they all include the concept of multiple colours or components. But when you spell the word with a capital letter, "Mosaic", it means only one thing: "relating to Moses".'

'That's "Moses" as in "Moses and the Ten Commandments", you mean?'

'Exactly. The Prophet Moses, the author of the Torah and leader of the Israelites. That Moses.'

'And what about the Covenant?' Bronson asked. 'You're not talking about the Ten Commandments?'

Angela nodded slowly. 'That's exactly what's meant by the Mosaic Covenant. I mean, forget about the Ark of the Covenant. That was simply a wooden box covered in gold leaf that was used to carry the Covenant around. The Ark probably rotted away to nothing centuries ago. But this is a possible clue to the location of the Covenant itself – the tablets the Ark was built to house.'

'You can't be serious, Angela. Is there any credible evidence that Moses even existed?'

'We've been down this route before, Chris,' she said with a slight smile, 'and I think you know my views. Like Jesus, there's no physical evidence that Moses was a real person but, unlike Jesus, he does appear in more than one ancient source, so he's got more credibility for that reason alone. He's mentioned in the writings of numerous Greek and Roman historians, as well as in the Torah, and even in the Qur'an.

'But whether or not there's any historical reality to Moses as a person rather misses the point. If that man Yacoub was right, the people who hid the relics and prepared the tablets two thousand years ago did believe they possessed something that had belonged to Moses. That means whatever the relic actually was, it was already ancient even then. And any kind of stone tablet dating from well over two millennia ago would be an extremely important archaeological find.'

'So you're going to start looking for it?'

'Yes, I am. I simply can't pass up a chance like this. It's the opportunity of a lifetime.'

Bronson looked at her face. No longer pale, it was flushed with excitement and her beautiful hazel eyes sparkled with anticipation. 'Despite all you've gone through today? You nearly got killed in that cellar.'

'You don't have to remind me. But Yacoub is dead, and whatever his gang gets up to now, I doubt if chasing us to try to recover that clay tablet is going to be high on their list of priorities. In any case, we'll be leaving the country within a couple of hours, and I don't think that either the Silver Scroll or the Mosaic Covenant is in Morocco. The reference to Qumran is clear enough, and I have a feeling that – whatever was hidden by the people who wrote these tablets – they were buried in Judea or somewhere in that general area. The clay tablet the O'Connors found must tell us their whereabouts.'

Bronson nodded. 'Well, if you want to do any more investigating, I'm afraid you'll have to do it by yourself. I've got to get back to Maidstone to write up my report, and I might even get sucked into the investigation into Kirsty Philips's murder. I certainly don't think I'll be able to convince Dickie Byrd that I suddenly need to head off to Israel. Are you sure that this is worth following up?'

Angela looked at him. 'Definitely,' she said. She opened her handbag, extracted a few folded sheets of paper and began looking at them.

'Is that the Aramaic text?' Bronson asked.

Angela nodded. 'Yes. I still can't work out how the coding system could have worked. I was so sure there were four tablets in the set, but the position of those two Aramaic words Ir-Tzadok and B'Succaca screws up that idea.'

Bronson glanced down at the sheets of paper, then looked back at the road ahead.

'Tell me again how you think they'd have prepared the tablets,' he suggested.

'We've been through this, Chris.'

'Humour me,' Bronson said. 'Tell me again.'

Patiently, Angela explained her theory that the small diagonal line she'd observed on the pictures of each of the tablets meant there had originally been a single slab of clay that had then been cut into four quarters, and that each diagonal line was one part of a cross, cut into the clay at the centre of the slab to indicate the original positions of those quarters.

'So you've got four tablets, each covered in Aramaic script that's always read from right to left, but on the bottom two the only way that Ir-Tzadok and B'Succaca appear in the right order is if you read the two words backwards, from left to right?'

'Exactly,' Angela replied, 'which is why I must have got it wrong. The only thing that makes sense is that the tablets must be read in a line from right to left. But if that is the case, then what's the purpose of the diagonal lines?'

Bronson was silent for a couple of minutes, staring at the ribbon of tarmac unrolling in front of the car, while his brain considered and then rejected possibilities. Then he smiled slightly, and then laughed aloud.

'What?' Angela asked, looking irritated.

'It's obvious, blindingly obvious,' he said. 'There's one simple way that you could position the tablets in a square, as you've suggested, and still read those two words in the right order. In fact,' Bronson added, 'it's so obvious I'm really surprised you didn't see it yourself.'

Angela stared at the paper and shook her head. Then she looked across at Bronson.

'OK, genius,' she said, 'tell me.'