Grave Concerns (16 page)

Karen was decidedly dubious when Drew told her he was driving forty miles, there and back, to visit
a man about Gwen Absolon that evening. ‘Are you sure he’ll be in?’ she asked.

‘No, but I don’t want to phone first. I don’t want to give him the chance to turn me away. If I arrive on the doorstep, he’s far more likely to speak to me.’

‘Haven’t we been here before?’ she sighed.

‘You’re going to have to get used to it,’ he warned her. ‘I’m just not capable of letting these things slide by.’

‘Maybe you ought to join the police force. I don’t suppose you’re too old. And think of the pension!’

He shook his head. ‘I like to specialise.’

‘You’re just a child, Drew Slocombe. You want the icing but not the cake. I ought to stop you going off to see this man. For all you know, he’s the one who murdered the woman.’

Drew paused. ‘That never occurred to me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You should get together with Maggs. She invents new scenarios every two minutes.’

‘Oh, she knows all about this, does she? Is that wise? At this rate you’ll both be in trouble with the police.’

‘She sulked until I told her. So far we haven’t done anything illegal, anyway.’

‘Oh no. Just withheld important information concerning a murder enquiry, in full knowledge of what you’re doing.’

‘If I can just get a handle on what happened to the woman in our field, I’ll go straight to the police,’ he promised, wondering as he did so whether he could honour such a commitment. ‘I really feel I’m getting somewhere now. The burial isn’t till Friday – I’m giving myself until then to see if I can work out what’s happened to her. The thing is, we’re still not really sure it’s who we think it is.’

‘Sounds fairly definite to me,’ judged Karen, surprising Drew as she so often did. ‘From what you’ve said, which admittedly isn’t much, it’s all too neat to be anybody else.’

‘Well, if it is, and if she was murdered, then the police are going to be very glad of some definite leads, aren’t they?’ he said firmly.

Karen sighed and turned away. ‘I think you’re crazy,’ she said. ‘Just playing silly games.’

Karl Habergas answered his door five seconds after Drew rang the bell. He must have been standing in the hall, as if waiting for a visitor. Drew realised he’d been expecting a big blond Nordic type, with sturdy legs and direct blue eyes. Instead, he found himself looking down on a small man in his fifties, almost bald and wearing heavy-framed spectacles. He looked unnervingly intelligent.

Drew had worked intensively on his cover story during the drive to Hemlington. ‘Good evening,
sir,’ he began politely. ‘I’m really sorry to trouble you, but I’m looking for a lady by the name of Gwen Absolon, and I understand that you went on one of the tours she organised last year.’

‘She certainly isn’t here,’ said the little man shirtily. ‘And it’s a long time since that trip. What do you want her for, anyway?’

‘Well,’ Drew tried to appear expansive and confident, ‘I work for one of the larger tour companies, and Mrs Absolon has been highly recommended, as a leader of groups of older folk. We’re in very urgent need of a substitute guide, starting this weekend, and her name came to mind. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be able to find her.’

‘How did you find
me
?’ Habergas demanded.

Drew improvised quickly. ‘A Mrs Fletcher gave us your address. I understand she was in the same group as you. She and her husband have booked a tour with us, for July this year, and she overheard our dilemma when she was in the office this morning. She said Mrs Absolon was an expert guide. She also said that if anyone in the group would have kept in touch with her, you’d be the one.’

The man seemed to assimilate this with no sign of suspicion as to its veracity. Drew trembled inwardly at the ease with which the lies tripped off his tongue. Drew, the straight guy, who valued his own integrity above all else, turned out to be
as good a liar as they come.
But I’m not harming anyone by it
, he told himself.
It’s a necessary means to an end
.

‘I didn’t keep in touch with her,’ Habergas said, rather sadly. ‘Although I liked her. Very much. Didn’t the Fletcher woman tell you what happened to our group?’

‘She said there’d been a terrorist attack, which had tragic consequences, and that the tour leader behaved with absolute calm and efficiency. She couldn’t speak highly enough of her.’

‘Did she give you the details?’ Habergas asked, with an odd eagerness. ‘Because if not, I’d be more than happy to fill you in. It’s true that Gwen coped admirably. But to be honest, the Fletchers didn’t really witness much of what happened. Perhaps they weren’t so affected—’ He tailed off, staring down his quiet street as if gazing over the sand dunes of Egypt.

‘If you’d like to tell me, I’d be more than happy to listen,’ Drew offered gently, marvelling at how simple his task was turning out to be. The man was clearly still traumatised by what had happened, and evidently had nobody he could confide in. ‘Often it’s easier to tell a stranger about something like that,’ he ventured.

‘Come in, then,’ Habergas invited, as if he’d waited for this moment a long, long time.

He led the way into a stuffy back room, filled
with a large table and several chairs. Two cats occupied the chairs closest to a grimy Rayburn. There was a strange mix of smells: fried onions, damp washing, and something medical; the sweetish repulsive odour that Drew associated with chemotherapy patients, from the time he spent working as a nurse.

‘I’ll just go and tell Mother we’ve got a visitor,’ the man said. ‘Won’t be two ticks.’

‘Mother?’ echoed Drew.

‘She’s upstairs. I’m looking after her. They weren’t feeding her properly in hospital and nobody ever told her what was going on. She’s a lot happier here.’

Drew smiled weakly. Shades of
Psycho
were hovering at the back of his mind. Karen’s comment was also impossible to forget.
Perhaps he’s the one who murdered her
.

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ the man assured him. ‘She’s not going to die.’

We’re all going to die
, Drew wanted to tell him. And if Mother was having chemotherapy and had been allowed home, and must be at least in her mid-seventies, then her chances of surviving more than a few more months must be pretty minimal.

It took Mr Habergas a few minutes to settle into his story. ‘I’m not sure how it’s going to help you,’ he said. ‘Because I have absolutely no idea where Gwen is now.’

‘I expect we’ll soon find her,’ said Drew easily. ‘I don’t suppose she’s deliberately gone into hiding.’

‘No,’ said his host thoughtfully. ‘No, I don’t suppose she’s done that.’

Clearly Mr Habergas had harboured an affection for the woman, and Drew found himself feeling sorry for the little man, with his dying mother and his post-traumatic stress. He hoped the forthcoming debriefing would be therapeutic – and that he wasn’t being too irresponsible in inviting the story and then leaving Habergas with whatever stirred-up feelings were thereby invoked.
I can always come and see him again
, he promised himself guiltily.

The man cleared his throat, and leant forward in his chair. ‘I’ll tell you all I remember,’ he said. ‘I warn you, it could take some time. I hope it’ll show you what I mean about Gwen’s abilities, at any rate.’

Karl Habergas was an excellent storyteller. It took him more than half an hour to describe for Drew everything that happened that morning in Egypt, and when he’d finished, Drew almost felt he’d been there himself. At first he’d chafed at the wealth of detail, the seeming irrelevancies, but the force of the story gripped him, and he lost all sense of time. He was no longer an acute investigator searching for clues. He was simply a
listener, letting the tale unfurl as it would.

‘We were actually at North Saqqara, not Giza, as some of the papers reported. It’s all part of the same general area, and we never really bothered to correct the mistake. Gwen had arranged for us to have a minibus and a guide, and spend the whole day touring the pyramids. It’s a set itinerary, which was very tame after the adventures we’d had in the oases, where tourists hardly ever venture. The guide was on autopilot, diving into tombs and mastabas more or less at random and telling us a whole lot of garbage. We all knew more than he did, I think. Sarah had studied Egyptology, and knew the place inside out. But it was the last day, and none of us was in the mood to argue.

‘After a bit, the guide gave up, and went back to his vehicle, leaving us to explore on our own. I wanted to see Mereruka’s mastaba again – I remembered them from the first time I ever went to Egypt, as a new graduate. The carvings are wonderfully lively, and irreverent in some cases. I’ve always been attracted to the man. After all those vainglorious Pharoahs, he comes as a refreshing relief. I was there with Gwen – she likes the hunting scenes. We were mostly in different rooms, but bumped into each other now and then. The Fletchers were doing rubbings in King Teti’s tomb. That’s a nice little pyramid, by the way.
Anyhow, the thing is, you do have to spend quite a time in these places to do them justice. We had all day, and were determined to make the most of it. It was high noon, or just after, and hot. But we were all quite seasoned by then and not at all bothered by the climate. We also had the place more or less to ourselves. The tour parties are all rounded up at seven am, poor wretches, so they can be scooted out before the sun gets up steam.

‘Maggie and Janet were off somewhere with Sarah. There’s such a lot to see – mastabas galore. Sarah liked Ti, for some reason. We didn’t worry about them. Gwen was a perfectly competent guide – she knew when to let people do their own thing, and when they needed help. She knew the importance of free time. And she insisted, over and over, that Egypt was as safe as anywhere, once you understood the basic rules.

‘Maggie and Janet are a couple. They’ve lived together for twenty-five years, and are great value. Very funny, scholarly, self-deprecating. I’d never spent time with lesbians before, and they were a real eye-opener. They could read each other’s minds. They took to Sarah, and she was grateful to them for their company. In some of the remoter spots, a woman alone is likely to be regarded with disapproval, so she usually teamed up with them, and they went to several places as a threesome.

‘Gwen and I didn’t even hear the gunshots when they came. Neither did the Fletchers. Steven and Felicity – rather a depressing couple, to be honest. Always hinting at disappointment and criticism. She got tummy trouble at the Farafra Oasis and was rather limp after that. I must admit, it surprises me a little that she speaks so highly of Gwen now. I suppose she’s had time to reconsider.’

‘That must be it,’ agreed Drew, inwardly wincing at his near-mistake.

‘Anyway, the first we knew, our guide came running in shouting “Madam! Madam! Come quickly. There is very bad trouble.”

‘We came out into the sunshine, having no idea what to expect. There were about ten tourist policemen clustered round, guns bristling, some of them kneeling on the ground. You could smell cordite or whatever it is, and there was an awful silence. Everything seemed very small and far away. We ran up the sandy path to where we could see Maggie and Janet, arms round each other.

‘When we got there, with the guide, one or two of the policemen turned their guns on us, their faces terribly tense and pale. Vehicles were rushing towards us – all sorts of officials coming out of the woodwork. I didn’t know where to look, and still had no idea what had happened.
Finally, I saw the two bodies, first one then the other, about fifteen feet apart. Sarah was in a sort of heap, her bottom in the air. I recognised her shorts first. Her head was pressed into the sand, sideways, – just a mass of blood and hair. They said afterwards that three bullets had hit her in rapid succession. One in the top of her head, one in the neck and one somewhere lower down. He must have been swinging his gun as he fired. We talked about it obsessively afterwards, of course. The other body was a man, still holding a heavy-looking gun. He was not quite dead – his chest was heaving, and one hand was opening and shutting. I think he died as I watched him – the breathing slowed and then stopped.

‘Nobody said anything. It was all over in seconds, the story spoke for itself, and everyone was just so frightened and shocked, they couldn’t find words. Gwen went very shaky for a minute or two, and held onto me for support. The Fletchers were still down in Teti’s tomb, and a handful of other tourists were beginning to assemble a little way away, shepherded by some of the police. I don’t think any of us imagined there’d be any more shooting, although the police were obviously extremely sensitive to any sudden movement. They’d failed, you see. They were there, at all the big sites, to prevent precisely this from happening. But you can’t prevent terrorism.
The man probably had the gun in an innocent-looking bag. He would have looked the same as a tour guide, or a souvenir-seller. They’re supposed to check everybody on the site, but after months or years when nothing happens, they inevitably get slack. But they were onto him very quickly. He only fired those three bullets, straight at Sarah. They claimed afterwards that he singled her out deliberately, though we’ll never have any idea why.  

‘Gwen was desperately upset by what had happened. She must have felt it would do enormous harm to her reputation. One of the first things she said was, “Well, that’s the end of my career as a tour guide.” We all kept assuring her there was nothing she could have done, but we couldn’t convince her. I suspect she also felt rather bad because she hadn’t liked Sarah.’

‘Oh?’ Drew interrupted for the first time. The story had him spellbound until then, but this was clearly important.

‘Just one of those things between women, I imagine. Sarah did nothing to make herself likeable, I must say. She was rather stolid, unsmiling and intense. Rather demanding, too – always making sure Gwen knew what she expected from the trip. Gwen seemed to resent her at times.’ He shrugged, as if animosity between women was just another of life’s many mysteries.