'I think your solution to the puzzle of the clay tablets has to be right. I wrote out everything we'd deciphered, but in the order you suggested, and now it does seem to make more sense. I just wish we had better pictures of the Cairo museum and the O'Connor tablets – it would be a great help if we could read a few more words of the inscriptions on those two.'
She looked down again at the papers in front of her. Bronson's idea was so simple that she, too, was amazed it hadn't occurred to her.
Aramaic, he'd said, was written from right to left, and they'd more or less agreed that there had originally been four tablets, arranged in a square. Why not, Bronson had proposed, read the text starting with the first word at the right-hand end of the top line of the top right tablet – which they didn't have, of course – and then read the word in the same position on the tablet at the top left of the square. Then move to the bottom left, then bottom right and back to the top right, and so on, in a kind of anticlockwise circle. That, at least, meant that the words Ir'Tzadok and B'Succaca could be read in the correct sequence.
But even that didn't produce anything that seemed totally coherent – it just formed very short and disjointed phrases – until they tried reading one word from each line and next the word from the line directly below it, instead of the next word on the same line. Then, and only then, did a kind of sense begin to emerge.
What they now had read:
----- by ----- ben ----- ----- perform the ----- task ----- the -----
----- ----- completed ----- ----- ----- now ----- ----- ----- last----- the
----- scroll ----- ----- took from ----- ----- ----- have ----- ----- -----
cave ----- ----- ----- place ----- ----- ----- of ----- ----- -----
settlement ----- ----- Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca ----- scroll ----- silver
----- ----- ----- we ----- ----- ------ cistern ----- ----- place of -----
end ----- days ----- the tablets of ----- temple ----- Jerusalem -----
----- ----- the ----- ----- ----- concealed ----- ----- ----- of ----- -----
----- a ----- ----- four stones ----- the ----- side ----- a ----- of -----
----- ----- height ----- ----- cubit to ----- ----- ----- within ----- -----
of our ----- and ----- now ----- ----- ----- we ----- ----- ----- our
----- ----- ----- invaders ----- our ----
'Have you tried filling in any of the blanks?' Bronson asked.
'Yes,' Angela nodded. 'It's not as easy as you might think, because you can easily end up tailoring the text to whatever it is you want it to say. I've tried, and a few of the missing words seem to be fairly obvious, like the end of the last line. The word "invaders" seems to stand out as being different to the rest of the inscription, so I think that's possibly a part of a political statement, something like "our fight against the invaders of our land". That would be a justification of their opposition to, most probably, the Romans, who were all over Judea during the first century AD.
'The rest of it is more difficult, but there are a couple of things we can be certain about. These tablets do refer to Qumran: the words Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca make that quite definite. And in the same sentence, or possibly at the beginning of the next one, I'm fairly sure that those three words mean the "scroll of silver", the Silver Scroll. That's what really excites me. The problem is that, if the author of this text did possess the scroll and then hid it somewhere, presumably in a cistern, which is what I'm hoping, we still don't know exactly where to start looking, apart from Qumran, obviously. And the country, of course, was full of wells and cisterns at this period. Every settlement, from a single house right up to large villages and towns, had to have a source of water close by. I've no idea how many cisterns there were in first-century Judea, but I guess the numbers would run into the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.'
She looked down at the deciphered text, studying the few words they'd managed to translate. If only they could fill one or two more of the blanks, they'd have some idea where to begin their search.
Bronson's next question echoed her thoughts. 'Assuming the museum will agree to let you go out to Israel, where do you think you should start looking?'
Angela sighed and rubbed her eyes. 'I've no idea. But the reference we've managed to decode is the first tangible clue to a relic whose existence has been suspected for over fifty years. Half the archaeologists in the field that I've talked to have spent some time searching for the Silver Scroll, and the other half have dismissed it out of hand as a myth. But the O'Connors' clay tablet is almost certainly contemporary with the relic, and I think the reference is a strong enough piece of evidence to follow up. And there's something else.'
'What?'
'I don't know that much about Israel and Jewish history, so I'm going to need some specialist help from somebody who speaks Hebrew, somebody who knows the country and its history.'
'You've got someone in mind?'
Angela nodded and smiled. 'Oh, yes. I know exactly who to talk to. And he's actually based in Israel – in Jerusalem, in fact – so he's right on the spot.'
43
Bronson felt drained. He seemed to have spent all the previous day sitting in an aircraft, and the damp, grey skies were an unpleasant reminder that he was back in Britain, in stark contrast to the few hot and sunny days he'd just spent down in Morocco. He punched the address Byrd had sent him by text into the unmarked car's satnav and headed towards Canterbury.
When he arrived at the house, there were two police vans parked in the driveway and a couple of cars on the road outside the property. The front door was standing slightly ajar, and he slipped under the 'crime scene' tape and stepped into the hall.
'You're Chris Bronson, right?' A beefy, red-faced man wearing a somewhat grubby grey suit greeted him.
Bronson nodded and showed his warrant card.
'Right, I'm Dave Robbins. Come through into the dining room to keep out of the way of the SOCOs – they're just finishing up in the lounge, and then we're out of here. Now,' he said, when they were both seated at the dining table, 'I gather from Dickie Byrd that you've had some contact with the victim?'
'I met her and her husband a couple of times in Morocco,' Bronson agreed, and explained what had happened to Kirsty Philips's parents.
'Do you think there's any connection between their deaths and her murder?' Robbins asked.
Bronson paused for a few moments before he replied. He was absolutely certain that the three deaths were connected, and that the missing clay tablet was at the heart of the matter, but he didn't see how explaining all that would help Robbins find Kirsty's killer.
'I don't know,' he said finally. 'It's a hell of a coincidence if they're unconnected, but I can't think what the connection could be. What actually happened here? How did she die?'
In a few short sentences, Robbins explained what the police had found when they arrived at the house.
As he listened, Bronson's mind span back to the hotel in Rabat, and to the way Kirsty had looked when he'd seen her there: bright and full of life, her natural vivacity subdued only because of the double tragedy that had decimated her family. Intellectually he accepted the truth of what Robbins had told him, but on an emotional level it was still difficult to believe what had happened.