the top of the vase. ‘Egyptian? He must have found it in the channel when the water was drained.’ Bryant bent closer. On one side, rows of blue-black Nubian slaves were depicted crying into the Nile. On the other, the same slaves were pouring the river into a vase of the same design, as though the pictogram might be infinitely repeated back into the past.
May’s eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me that’s not what Ubeda and Greenwood nearly lost their lives trying to find. Tell me it’s not the Vessel of All Counted Sorrows.’
Bryant ran his fingers over the figures, peering at them intently. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Even though there’s a figure of Anubis. You need Anubis to carry the sorrows from one vessel to another.’ He turned the vase over and studied the base in the torchlight. ‘Liberty’s. A mass-produced replica. I told you the Victorians were big on Egyptiana. I think if we took this to Rachel Ling, she’d tell us about the ritual involving the casting of such a vessel into the waters of the Fleet to protect and regenerate the City of London. Of symbolic value only, but a fitting souvenir of this whole business. I shall give it to Greenwood when his head’s better. Neither he nor Ubeda would ever have found it, because they didn’t know that the Fleet switched to another course in times of high flooding, something an ordinary Water Board employee like Wilton could have told them. Poor old Gareth: the curse of intellect without practical application. Let’s go and find some decent breatheable air.’
‘That’s King’s Cross above us,’ May pointed out, ‘not Hyde Park.’
‘Perhaps, but for once it will smell as sweet.’
As Bryant climbed on to the ladder, his foot missed a step and the vase slipped out of his hands. He tried to catch it, but was too slow, and could only watch in dismay as it fell, shattering to pieces on the wet stone floor below.
May reached down among the ceramic shards and held something aloft in his hand. ‘Actually, I think this may have been what Ubeda was searching for after all.’
The intricately carved emerald Anubis was the size of a duck’s egg, and would subsequently prove to be three thousand years old.
Bryant started laughing so hard that he nearly fell off the ladder. ‘Jackson Ubeda’s grandfather placed it inside the vessel as part of the ritual, and in their zeal the acolytes forgot to take it back out. I would love to have seen the look on his face after he tossed it into the river and then realized what he had done. I wonder how many years the family has been searching for it.’
‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked May.
‘Return it to the Cairo Museum, I think,’ said Bryant. ‘The British did quite enough pilfering for one dynasty. The irony is that now Ubeda has gone into hiding, he’ll never know that his familial duty has been performed.’
‘Although I imagine he would have kept the thing for himself, don’t you? Perhaps it took all of this to return it to the right hands.’
The Anubis was indeed returned, but it stayed—for three glorious days—on the shelf above Bryant’s desk in Mornington Crescent, where he could admire it at close quarters. It kept him in such a good mood that Raymond Land thought he had turned over a new leaf; a notion Bryant happily disabused him of once the jewel was returned to Egypt.
51
* * *
GEZELLIG
‘Alma told me I’d find you up here,’ said May, seating himself beside his partner on the bench at the top of Primrose Hill. Bryant was muffled up in the patched brown scarf and squashed trilby he had worn for over fifty years. The frost on the grass looked as artificial as Christmas-card snow. The distant city was soft and blue in the autumnal morning haze, the shade of ceanothus blossoms. It hummed softly, powered by batteries of working men and women.
‘I thought you’d join me. Here.’ He handed May a polystyrene cup filled with tea. ‘I was saving you a jam doughnut, but I ate it.’
May raised the lid and took a tentative sip. ‘I can’t believe you’re making your landlady move house, just to come and look after you.’
‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do. Everyone was going on about how upset she was. John, her great pleasure in life has always been to cater to my every whim. The lease on her