'What about the object itself?'
'I've been fairly accurate with that, because we do have a pretty good idea what we're looking for. Here' – she pointed at two fields at the bottom of the screen – 'I've listed the material it's made from and the fact that it bears an inscription in Aramaic.'
'So now you just start the search?'
'Exactly.' Angela moved the mouse pointer over a button labelled 'Search' and gave it a single click.
The wi-fi network at the hotel was obviously quite fast, because the first results appeared on the screen within a few seconds.
'It looks like there are hundreds of them,' Bronson muttered.
'Thousands, more likely,' Angela said. 'I told you clay tablets were really common. I'll have to do a bit of filtering or we'll never get anywhere.'
She scanned the listings that were scrolling down the screen. 'A lot of these are quite early,' she said, 'so if I reduce the date range that will eliminate a large percentage. And if we don't find what we're looking for, I can always expand it again.'
She changed the search parameters and restricted the date to the first and second centuries AD, but that still produced several hundred results, far too many to trawl through quickly.
'Right,' she muttered, 'clay tablets were found in all sorts of shapes and sizes – square, oblong, round. There were even tablets shaped like drums or cones, with the inscription running around the outside. I've restricted the search to flat tablets, but it would help if I could put in the approximate dimensions of the one Margaret O'Connor acquired.'
Bronson handed her the CD that Kirsty had prepared for him, and she flipped through the images on the laptop's screen until she found the first one showing the clay tablet. Margaret O'Connor had obviously placed the tablet on a chest of drawers in her hotel room, and had then photographed it from several different angles. In most of the pictures, the tablet was quite badly out of focus, probably caused by the camera's autofocus facility choosing a different object in the frame. In three photographs a part of a telephone was visible, including a section of the keypad.
'That'll do,' Angela said. 'I can work out the rough size from that.'
She studied the best of the pictures closely, then jotted down a couple of figures.
'I reckon it's about six inches by four,' she said, and typed those numbers into the correct box on the search screen.
This time, with the much tighter parameters, there were only twenty-three results of the search on the museum intranet, and they both leant closer to the laptop to study each in turn.
The first dozen or so were clearly very different to the picture of the tablet Margaret O'Connor had picked up, but the fifteenth picture showed one that was remarkably similar.
'That looks just like it,' Angela said.
'What about the inscription?' Bronson asked.
Angela studied the image carefully and saved a copy on the hard disk of her laptop. 'It could be Aramaic,' she said. 'I'll check the description.'
She clicked one of the options on the screen, and a halfpage of text appeared, replacing the photograph of the tablet.
Angela took one look at it, turned the laptop further to face Bronson and leant back. 'It's in French,' she announced. 'Over to you, Chris.'
'OK. The tablet's in a museum in France, so no surprise there. It's in Paris, in fact. It was bought from a dealer of antiquities in Jerusalem as part of a job lot of relics about twenty years ago. The inscription is Aramaic, and the tablet's labelled as a curio, because the text is just a series of apparently random words – so you're right, Angela. This is another one.'
'Does it say what the museum thinks the tablet was used for?'
Bronson nodded. 'This description suggests it might have been used for teaching people how to write Aramaic or possibly was somebody's homework, which is pretty much the same as Baverstock thought, isn't it? In either case, the museum suggests that the tablet was fired accidentally, either because it was mixed up with tablets that were being fired deliberately or because there was an actual fire in the building where it was kept.'
'That makes sense. Clay tablets were intended to be reused many times. Once an inscription had served its purpose, the tablet could be wiped just by running a knife blade or something similar over its surface to obliterate the existing inscription. The only tablets that would normally be fired were those recording something of real importance – financial accounts, property details, that kind of thing. And a fired clay tablet is virtually indestructible, unless it's broken up with a hammer or something.'
'There's something else.' Bronson looked at the bottom of the entry on the screen. He reached over and clicked on another link. 'This is the original Aramaic inscription,' he said, as the screen changed to show two blocks of text, 'and below that is the French translation of what it says. We should make a copy of this.'
'Absolutely,' Angela replied, and swiftly copied an image of the web page on her hard drive. 'What does the French translation say? A lot of those words look like they're repeated to me.'
'They are. There are some duplicates, and the words look as if they've been selected almost at random. It has to be part of the same set. Is it worth going to the museum to see it?'
'Hang on a second,' Angela said, and clicked the mouse button to return to the 'description' page. 'Let's see if it's actually on display. What does that say?'
Bronson peered at the screen. 'It says: "In storage. May be accessed by accredited and approved researchers upon submission of written requests giving a minimum of two weeks' notice." Then it tells you who to write to if you're interested and what credentials are acceptable to the museum.' He sighed. 'Well, that's it then, isn't it? I guess we won't be going to Paris any time soon.'
28
The calm, measured voice on his mobile was instantly recognizable to Jalal Talabani.
'How can I help you?' he asked, checking that none of his colleagues in the Rabat police station were within earshot.
'Two of my men followed the English detective – the man Bronson – to Casablanca airport yesterday evening. He met a woman who had arrived on a flight from London. We assumed she might be his wife, but one of my associates ran a check on her and her name is Angela Lewis. But she is staying with him at his new hotel in Rabat. Find out who she is and get back to me.'
There was a pause, and Talabani waited. He knew his caller didn't like to be hurried.
'You have three hours,' the voice said, and the line went dead.
Bronson had had enough. They'd spent the last hour and a half staring at drawings and translations and pictures of tablets from museums around the world. Some of the images were sharp and clear, some were so blurred and out of focus as to be almost useless, but after ninety minutes of looking at the never-ending sequence of pictures on the computer screen, he was about ready to quit.
'God, I need a drink,' he muttered, leaning back and stretching his arms above his head. 'I really don't know how you do it, Angela. Doesn't this just bore you rigid?'
She glanced at him and grinned. 'This is how I spend my life. I'm not bored – I'm fascinated. And particularly by this tablet,' she added.
'What?' Bronson said, returning his gaze to the Vaio's screen.
The picture showed a tablet that looked almost identical to the one Margaret O'Connor had picked up in the souk. But this one was listed as being stolen, along with a number of other relics, from a storeroom at a museum in Cairo. There'd been no trace of it since then. The tablet had been photographed as a matter of routine when the museum had acquired it, but no translation of the inscription – again a piece of Aramaic text – had been attempted either at the time or since.