The Age of Exodus Read online

  Perhaps inspired by its clandestine origins, from its earliest days Cecil Court had a distinctly raffish reputation. Snuff shop owners augmented their incomes by selling Jacobite tracts and books with titillating titles like A Voyage to the Isles of Love and Satan’s Harvest Home, and soon the Old Bailey was sentencing arsonists, highwaymen and forgers whose arrests had taken place in Cecil Court. Then Freemasons and atheists began holding secret meetings there and in the early years of the nineteenth century plotters gathered in Cecil Court to plan the assassination of George III. Today the alley was the home of Watkins Books, the oldest esoteric bookshop in London, devoted to theosophy, philosophy and spiritualism.

  Forrester had known he must come here the moment Arthur Koestler had casually suggested that whoever had been behind the threatening letters to Templar might well have been possessed by some ancient and evil spirit. Forrester did not believe in possession by evil spirits whether ancient or modern, but he was well aware of the power of suggestion, and the manipulation of people of weak mind by those convinced they had occult powers. And if there was one place in London where he could get in touch with such people, it was Watkins Books.

  The bell rang cheerily enough as Forrester entered the shop, but the sound was immediately swallowed up by the shelves of magic paraphernalia stretching away into the gloom. A stuffed raven looked beadily down at him from shelves where human skulls broke up the rows of books, and a mandala dangled down from the high ceiling. He paced up and down the shop for a moment, but it appeared to be empty.

  “Hello?” said Forrester. “Is anyone here?” Then something prompted him to lean over the counter – and behind it, to his astonishment, he saw a tiny man trying to make himself even smaller, his head covered in a blanket.

  “Hello,” Forrester repeated, more softly this time. For a moment nothing happened, and then like a tortoise peering out of its shell a head appeared.

  “Are you Mr. Smith?” whispered the man, and Forrester could see he was trembling with fear. He was the size of a child, but his features suggested he was in his twenties, and he wore smeary National Health glasses and a ragged jersey. Forrester felt a sudden pity for him, and spoke as gently as he could.

  “No, I’m not Mr. Smith,” he said. “I’m Dr. Forrester and I’ve come to see Mr. Watkins. He’s an old friend.”

  “Oh,” said the little man. “You haven’t come for me?”

  “Certainly not,” said Forrester, as if speaking to a child. “Why would you think I had?”

  “Because of the boots,” said the little man. Forrester glanced down at the army boots he had impatiently tugged on that morning.

  “He’s got big boots like that and you hear them coming after you, clump, clump, clump,” said the assistant. “But your head’s all right, now I look.”

  “My head?” asked Forrester.

  “They said he’s got a funny head. They said I’d die of fright if I saw it, and they’d set him on me if I was bad.”

  “I see,” said Forrester. “Well, I’m not Mr. Smith, and I’m sure you haven’t been bad. May I know your name?”

  “Oggy,” said the little man, “Oggy Pritchard.” He held out a slightly grubby hand, and when Forrester solemnly took it, it was like shaking hands with a small bird. “I lost me mam and dad in the Blitz, and I came here to see if I could find them.” Seeing Forrester’s look of puzzlement, he added, “On the other side, so to speak.”

  “And did you?” said Forrester, oddly moved by the idea of this poor lost soul reaching fruitlessly out via the occult to parents who had been blasted into infinity by German high explosive.

  “No,” said Oggy, “but I made myself useful and the Watkinses took me in. I sleep under the counter. Would you like to see?”

  And with some pride he showed Forrester an old cupboard drawer which had been lined with an army blanket and provided with a pillow. Primitive though the accommodation was, the bedding was folded neatly and someone had painted on the outside of the drawer OGGY’S BEDROOM: DO NOT DISTURB. Forrester glanced up at the raven and the books of magic.

  “Listen,” said Forrester, “perhaps you can help me. Someone’s been playing a cruel joke on a friend of mine, trying to scare him, make him think a demon is after him, ancient curses, that sort of thing. I was wondering if that person had been buying any books here to gen up on it.”

  Suddenly Oggy’s face was blank. “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  “This person would have been interested in very old magic, going right back in time to ancient Sumeria.” Oggy remained silent, but Forrester could see the effort that went into it. “Was it the same person who told you about Mr. Smith?” This time the little man’s eyes flicked towards the back of the shop – as the office door opened and three men emerged, one a slight scholarly man in his late forties, whom Forrester immediately recognised as Geoffrey Watkins, son of the founder. The second, a Merlin-like figure of about eighty-five with long white hair, was the founder himself, John Watkins, a protégé of Madame Blavatsky – and the third, his massive head shaven and his huge, staring eyes like Mussolini’s, was Aleister Crowley.

  The self-proclaimed Great Beast, and, for the newspaper-reading public, The Wickedest Man in the World.

  Trained in ceremonial magic as a youth by the high priests of an esoteric cult called the Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley had, according to legend, been recruited by British intelligence to spy on Tsarist Russia. Here his passion for discovering ancient knowledge provided the perfect cover for his espionage, and possibly official protection for his increasingly strange activities, which included founding a religion of his own, the Temple of Thelema, inspired by the Egyptian god Horus, and seducing innumerable men and women with something he called sexual magick.

  When details of the Great Beast’s practices were revealed in the press he fled to Italy, but even Mussolini’s fascists found his goings-on so abhorrent they threw him out.

  During the 1930s, Forrester knew, Crowley had spent some time in Norway, where he had recruited Sophie’s wayward husband, Count Arnfeldt-Laurvig, in his efforts to summon the devil. There were times when Forrester wondered, in view of the horrors which had descended on Europe afterwards, whether they had not succeeded. Now, ravaged by decades of drug addiction and debauchery, Crowley looked far older than his seventy-odd years, but still armoured by a carapace of voluptuous pride. He walked with the aid of a stick with a curious carved head, and in his other hand he held what Forrester first took for some sort of ceremonial mace. It was a second or two before he realised it was in fact a rolled-up copy of that day’s Evening Standard.

  But he could still make out the headline on the front page: DIPLOMAT MURDERED AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

  Without warning, Crowley placed the newspaper in Forrester’s hands and fixed him with his hypnotic eyes.

  “A terrible way to die,” he said, “at midnight, in the dark, surrounded by ancient idols thirsting for blood.”

  “How do you know it was midnight?” asked Forrester.

  Crowley smiled, as though genuinely amused. “Are you a policeman, hoping to trick me into a confession?” he said. “How funny. But no, the idea of midnight is already there, in the fervid imagination of the journalists.”

  “I’m not a policeman, and I’m not trying to trick you,” said Forrester. “But the man who died was a friend of mine, and I would like to know what happened to him.”

  “We know this gentleman, Aleister,” said the younger Watkins, eager, it seemed, to head off a confrontation. “He’s an Oxford man. Do go into the office, Forrester. We’ll be with you in a moment.”

  But Crowley did not seem to want to end the encounter. “Perhaps your friend deserved to die,” he said. “Perhaps he had committed sacrilege. Perhaps he had taken something that belonged not to him, but to the gods. The punishment for such crimes is often severe, and dictated by ancient ritual.”

  “What kind of ritual?” said Forrester, but Crowley was
too quick for him.

  “If you continue to hope, my friend, that I will reveal some detail of Mr. Templar’s murder known only to the murderer, your hopes will, I’m afraid, be dashed. This was a ritual killing, which, sadly, I was unable to witness. But if you ever have the opportunity to see another human being sacrificed on the altar of ancient gods I recommend that you take it. It is a most enlightening experience – and I think you would enjoy it.” Suddenly he swung round and fixed his terrifying gaze on Oggy. “Boo!” he said, and with a scream the little man sprang back under the counter and scrambled into his drawer.

  Chuckling, Crowley stepped through the open door of the shop and hobbled out into the street.

  “I’m surprised you let that swine in the shop,” said Forrester.

  Geoffrey Watkins swallowed. “He’s very hard to say no to,” he said.

  Under the counter, Oggy whimpered.

  7

  A CRY FOR HELP

  Ten minutes later Forrester was striding along the east side of Trafalgar Square past St. Martin in the Fields, before turning off Whitehall into the redbrick shadows of Great Scotland Yard. In the wake of the morning’s assassination attempt on Ernest Bevin, he had expected it to be hard to secure a meeting with Detective Inspector Bell. To his surprise, as soon as he mentioned his name there was a distinct sense of satisfaction from the officer on duty, and he swiftly found himself being escorted up narrow staircases and through labyrinths of dimly lit corridors to Bell’s small but oddly cosy office, its walls covered with grainy blown-up photographs of London’s most notorious villains.

  In short, the room reflected the same energy and purpose that Bell himself exuded. If he had been an East End barrow boy instead of a Scotland Yard detective, thought Forrester, he would quickly have sold everything on his cart. And he was clearly pleased to see Forrester.

  “I thought I was going to have to scour the entire city to find you again, chum,” he said, shaking hands. “You seem to be the man of the hour.”

  “In what way? I thought all anybody here would be thinking about was the Foreign Secretary.”

  “Panic over on that score,” said the detective. “The buggers missed, as you’ve probably heard; they’re on the run and it’s a matter of hunting them down. But Mr. Bevin is why we were trying to get hold of you.”

  “Meaning?” said Forrester, but Bell shook his head.

  “All in good time,” he said. “While I’ve got you to myself, I’d like to know what went on when you took Miss Shearer back to her flat. I got the impression from the policewoman who finally came after you that you’d had a bit of a barney there with one of our leading intellectuals.”

  “That was just the start of it,” said Forrester. “I then had a bit of a barney with one of our leading industrialists, followed by a sharp encounter with our premier national practitioner of black magic.”

  “Let’s have it,” said Bell, and Forrester told him what had happened since he had left the museum with Templar’s wife, including his meeting with Aleister Crowley at Watkins Books.

  “I should reprimand you for intruding on police business,” said Bell, “but since you’ve come right round to tell me about it, I’ll let it pass.” He thought for a moment. “On the other hand, why should a geriatric degenerate like Aleister Crowley want to kill some rising star in the Foreign Office? What has he got to gain?”

  “Perhaps that cylinder seal of Templar’s has some real magical significance for him,” said Forrester. “Certainly that would explain all the mumbo jumbo about ancient Sumerian curses. It’s exactly the sort of nonsense I’d expect Crowley to get up to. By the way, I’m assuming you didn’t find the seal on the body?”

  “We did not, so the murderer may well have taken it,” said Bell. “But unless Crowley’s taken some magic potion, I can’t see him having the strength to crush the chest of a fit young man like Charles Templar and throw him on the top of an Assyrian statue.”

  “So he was crushed to death? The doctor confirmed that?”

  “The ribs weren’t just cracked – they were shattered. It was as if somebody had put him in a vice.”

  “Mr. Smith, perhaps?” said Forrester. “Oggy Pritchard’s nemesis?”

  Bell pulled a face. “He sounds like just the kind of bogeyman Crowley would invent to frighten the poor soul,” he said. “Especially the thing about the big boots.” He glanced at Forrester’s footwear. “Which aren’t all that uncommon, are they? I’ll send somebody round to talk to them, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope. I’ve had dealings with those occultists before, and there’s nobody better for wasting police time. And then there’s this key business.” He threw the latest edition of the Evening Standard across the desk to Forrester. The subheading read: DID SUMERIAN DEMON PASS THROUGH LOCKED DOORS? beside a picture, clearly taken from the files, of the Assyrian lamassu – side by side with a glamour shot of Angela Shearer.

  Altogether, thought Forrester, the kind of story for which an ambitious newspaperman would make a pact with the devil.

  “I think the explanation for somebody having an unauthorised key is pretty simple,” said Forrester. “They’re shifting tons of museum objects back into the galleries from where they were hidden during the war. That’s got to involve haulage companies, removals experts, possibly even Army transport units. I’ll bet you’ll find plenty of extra keys have been cut in the last few months, whatever the keeper of Near Eastern Antiquities said this morning.”

  “You think he was lying?” said Bell.

  “No, I think he was in shock,” said Forrester, “and trying to prove he was in control. I bet if you go back and ask him again he’ll remember the extra keys.” Even as he said this he realised there was another question that should be asked of Horace Darlington. “By the way, you know those photos of the tablets with the threatening messages I gave you this morning?”

  Bell rummaged on his desk and pulled out the folder. “I’m not letting you have them back,” he said.

  “I don’t need them back – but it might be a good idea to ask Darlington if he can identify the tablets in the photos. They may even be part of the BM collection.”

  “You think it might be somebody in the British Museum?”

  “I’m not saying that. But if they do have the tablets, are they on display? Could any member of the public have taken a photograph? Or are they in the storerooms, and only scholars can get access? Could help narrow the field.”

  “Good thinking,” said Bell. “But what’s bothering me now is how did Templar come to be in the blooming museum at all at midnight?”

  “It was midnight, was it? The doctor confirmed that?”

  “Then or thereabouts,” said Bell. “In fact he says it could have been as early as eleven. But the point is the place was still deserted. Do you think he might have been lured there by whoever was sending him the messages?”

  “It seems unlikely,” said Forrester. “I know for a fact he was genuinely spooked by them and his nerves had been bad since the war. Even if someone suggested a rendezvous at the British Museum I can’t see him just turning up.”

  “Neither can I. And yet he did turn up – and it cost him his life.”

  “There is one possible explanation,” said Forrester. “He was supposed to collect his wife from the theatre after her show, and of course he never did. She says she went on to a party and left a note for him, and she told me she sometimes sent notes back to the flat when she didn’t need him to collect her at the usual time.”

  “She could be making all that up to establish an alibi.”

  “She didn’t need an alibi: you know as well as I do she couldn’t physically have killed Templar in the way he was killed, much less got his body to the top of the lamassu.”

  “She could have hired someone to do it for her. Or seduced them into it.”

  “She could, but if she wasn’t going to be there herself, why go to all that trouble to create an alibi? No, I think someone faked a note from her to Templar, say
ing she’d gone to meet someone at the British Museum to put an end to all the threats.”

  “That would be bloody ridiculous!”

  “But it was exactly the kind of impulsive thing she would have done. If someone had said, ‘Bring the seal to the back entrance of the British Museum and we’ll stop bothering Charles,’ she might have fallen for it.”

  “Even she’s not that daft, surely?”

  “Maybe not, but Templar might have panicked that she was, and gone haring off there after her.”

  “Only to find whoever it was waiting for him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where is this note?”

  “In the murderer’s pocket, almost certainly. Or a rubbish bin anywhere in Central London. He wouldn’t have left it with Templar, anyway.”

  “It would have needed somebody who could fake Miss Shearer’s handwriting.”

  “It would. But if it’s the same chap who’s been faking Sumerian curses, I imagine this would be child’s play to him.”

  Bell made a note.

  “All right, let’s put that to one side for the time being. Did the people at Watkins Books tell you why Crowley had come to see them?”

  “Yes, there seems to be some kind of division in the ranks of the occult and he wanted them to help him reimpose his authority.”

  “There’re always divisions in the ranks of the blooming occult,” said Bell. “They’re constantly falling out and threatening one another, and all too often they come to us and tell on each other. Anything specific this time?”