'I wonder if that's the tablet Margaret O'Connor found in the souk,' Bronson muttered, rubbing his eyes and sitting up straighter. 'If it was stolen, that might explain why the owner – whoever it is – was so keen to get it back.'
'Hang on a second,' Angela said. She selected one of the pictures from the CD Bronson had given her, and then displayed the photograph of the stolen tablet right beside it on the screen.
'It's different,' Bronson said. 'I don't read Aramaic – obviously – but even I can see that the top lines are different lengths on those two tablets.'
Angela nodded agreement. 'Yes,' she said, 'and there's something else I've just noticed. I think there are only four tablets in the set.'
'How do you work that out?'
'Here.' Angela pointed at the right-hand image. 'See that short diagonal line, right at the corner of the tablet?'
Bronson nodded.
'Now look at the other photograph. There's a similar line in the corner of that one as well.' She flicked rapidly back to the picture of the tablet held in the Paris museum. 'And on this one, just there.'
Angela sat back from the laptop and looked at Bronson with a kind of triumph. 'I still don't know what the hell this is all about, but I think I can tell you how these tablets were made. Whoever prepared these inscribed a small diagonal cross in the centre of an oblong block of clay, then they cut that block into four quarters and fired them. What we've been looking at are three of those four quarters. Each of the lines in the corners of the tablets is one arm of that original cross.'
'And the idea of the cross is to tell us exactly how the four tablets are supposed to line up,' Bronson said, 'so that we can read the words in the correct order.'
Discovering Angela Lewis's identity took less time than Jalal Talabani had expected. First, he called the hotel where the two English guests were staying and talked to the manager. The man had actually been behind the reception desk both when Bronson made the booking for her, and when Angela Lewis had checked in the previous evening.
'She's his former wife,' the manager said, 'and I think she works in London at a museum.'
'Which one?' Talabani asked.
'I don't know,' the manager replied. 'It was just that when she checked in she was talking to Mr Bronson about her work and mentioned a museum. Is it important?'
'No, not really. Thank you for that,' Talabani said, and ended the call.
He turned to his computer, input a search string into Google and opened the 'Britain Express' website's list of the museums of London. The sheer number both surprised and dismayed him, but he printed the list and started at the top. He put a line through the details of the small and highly specialized establishments, but began calling each of the others in turn and asking to speak to Angela Lewis.
The seventh number he tried was the switchboard at the British Museum. Two minutes later he not only knew that Angela Lewis was employed there, but also which department she worked in, and that she was away on leave.
And five minutes after that, the man with the calm, measured voice knew this too.
29
Tony Baverstock had been at work for a little over an hour when he took a call from the switchboard. A member of the public had telephoned the museum with a question about a piece of pottery they'd found, apparently bearing part of an inscription.
It was the kind of call the museum got all the time, and almost invariably the object turned out to be completely worthless. Baverstock vividly remembered one elderly lady from Kent who'd actually brought along the alleged relic for inspection. It was the grubby remains of a small china cup she'd dug up in her garden, and had borne the partial inscription '1066' and 'le of Hastin' in a kind of Gothic script on one side.
The woman had been convinced she'd found something of national importance, a relic dating from nearly a thousand years earlier and a crucial reminder of one of the most significant events in England's turbulent past, and refused to believe it when Baverstock told her it was rubbish. It was only when he turned the cup over, cleaned the dirt off it and pointed to the other, complete, inscription on the base of the vessel that he'd been able to convince her that she was mistaken. That piece of text, in very small letters, had read 'Dishwasher safe'.
'Not my field,' Baverstock snapped, when the switchboard girl described what the caller had apparently found. 'Try Angela Lewis.'
'I already have,' the telephonist replied, just as irritated, 'but she's taken some leave.'
Five minutes later he had convinced the caller, who lived in Suffolk, that the best place to have his find examined was the local museum in Bury St Edmunds. Let somebody else have their time wasted, Baverstock thought. Then he placed an internal call to Angela Lewis's superior.
'Roger, it's Tony. I was just looking for Angela, but she doesn't seem to be at work. Any idea where she is?'
'Yes.' Roger Halliwell sounded somewhat harassed.
'She's taken some leave. At pretty short notice, actually.
She rang yesterday afternoon – some domestic crisis, I gather.'
'When will she be back?'
'She didn't say – which is all pretty inconvenient. Anything I can help you with?'
Baverstock thanked him and replaced the receiver. Now that's interesting, he thought. Very interesting indeed.
30
'So there were originally four tablets, and together they formed a larger oblong?'
'Exactly,' Angela said. 'And we've identified three of them, but we've only got a clear photographic image of one – an image clear enough to read the inscription on it, I mean. The other problem is that we don't have the fourth tablet, and that means we're completely missing a quarter of the inscription.'
'You can't do anything with the three we've located?'
'Not a lot,' Angela replied. 'We'll need to buy or maybe download an Aramaic–English dictionary before we can even start doing any work on the inscriptions. The bigger problem is that the pictures of these two tablets' – she pointed – 'simply aren't good enough to allow us to translate more than the odd word. Most of them are blurred and out of focus, and to translate Aramaic you need a clear image of the original, because several of the letters are very similar in appearance.'
'But it's still worth trying, especially as we've got a complete translation of the Paris tablet.'
Angela nodded. 'Yes, assuming I can find a suitable dictionary. Let's see what the web can offer.'
She opened Google, typed 'Aramaic dictionary' in the search field and hit the return key.
The two of them leant forward and peered at the screen of Angela's laptop.
'Over a hundred thousand hits,' Bronson muttered. 'Somewhere in that lot there must be a dictionary that we can use.'
'There is,' Angela said. 'The very first entry, in fact.' She double-clicked the listing in Google and checked the screen. 'This site offers translations both ways – to and from Aramaic – for single words. And it even includes a downloadable font that we'll need to use for the Aramaic text. Aramaic is an abjad, a consonantal alphabet, with only twenty-two letters, and in appearance it's very similar to Hebrew. So we need a font like this one – this is called Estrangelo – to display it, so that the dictionary can recognize the words.'
Angela downloaded and installed the font, then opened a new document in her word processor, selected the Estrangelo font and carefully wrote out one of the words from the clay tablet Margaret O'Connor had found in the souk.