Shadows on the Nile (31 page)

Until now.

Until this moment of happiness sitting on her chest. When she believed she had lost him to the bomb last night, she thought she was going to crack open with sorrow and bleed into the marbled floor alongside him. Something had happened to her the minute she set foot in Egypt, as though its hot wind and driving sand had stripped away the husk around her. A pulse vibrated under her ribs each time she thought of him. Her skin pressed tighter against him and her ankle hooked around his, weaving them together.

She opened her eyes. He was watching her in the darkness. She could see the glint of his eyes, but their expression was claimed by the shadows.

‘Hello,’ she whispered.

‘Hello.’

‘Can’t sleep?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

She rolled over to face him. ‘Sounds serious.’

‘It is. I think you should return to England and let me continue the search alone.’

‘No.’ She wrapped a leg over his hip. ‘I’m not leaving Egypt. And I’m not leaving you.’

His fingertips stroked her throat and she could barely swallow.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said.

‘I don’t want you hurt. You need me.’

‘To watch my back?’

‘Exactly.’

His fingertips were descending. ‘I need you far more than
that,’ he murmured so low that the words scarcely bridged the gap between them. ‘But I want you somewhere safe.’

‘I’m staying.’

Staying here. In Egypt. In your bed.

His breath trickled onto her lips, but he didn’t argue.

‘What we have to discover,’ he said, ‘is what Tim is doing out here.’

‘I don’t care what he’s doing. I just need to find him.’

His hand stroked her breast, tender touches. ‘The obvious answer is that he is dealing in antiquities from Ancient Egypt, given his area of expertise,’ he said.

‘I agree.’ His thumb brushed her nipple, a soft nudge that sent ripples of fire direct to her groin. ‘Legal or illegal, I don’t care. He has left a trail for me to follow. That can only mean that he wants me here, he needs my help. So … tomorrow we start at the Cairo museum where the king’s crown lies, where Tutankhamen’s death-mask is on …’

‘Hush.’ He kissed her eyelids. ‘Don’t think about tomorrow.’

His hand started to descend further with caressing circles and she felt the slow burn of his determination and desire. She caught herself uttering a moan she had never heard before and it startled her. Her hips bucked against him, as she let her tongue taste the salty skin of his chest. Her whole body was hungry for him, as though she had been starved of it all her life. They made love again, but gave themselves all the time in the world while the darkness stretched out around them. Their hands and their mouths touched and explored, learning the curves and intimate hollows of each other. Discovering the secret places, the ones that created delicious shock and ferocious need.

In the final raging heat of passion when he arched over her and her whole world narrowed to this one fragment of time, she felt the shield she had so carefully constructed around herself being scorched into ash. As she lay quietly in his arms afterwards,
their bodies slick with sweat and her heart flinging itself against her ribs, she knew something strong and vital had been forged between them. She wanted to call it love. She wanted to call it trust. But those words were too big. Too solid. They still frightened her. So instead she called it belief. She believed in this man. It would do. For now.

Jessie returned to her room just before dawn and tumbled into her own bed. She stretched her limbs, and smiled up at the ceiling where the mosquito net hung unseen on a metal hoop. For once she allowed her mind to drift, as effortlessly as one of the Nile’s feluccas, towards the possibilities that were opening up before her.

She closed her eyes, her hands restless as birds on the sheet. The hugeness of love was something that she had struggled all her life to outrun, but not now. Not this time. She tried to understand what had happened, what was different, but couldn’t. Except that Monty made her want to stop running.

What was it about Egypt? Why was it here that the dross and debris had suddenly been sifted from her mind, as though caught in one of Tim’s wire-mesh sieves? Did some force of the ancient gods still lie buried here? Or was it that the quality of time changed here? Somehow it took on a different dimension, lifting the veil between then and now, between the past and the present.

With no warning at all, it had shifted the sand beneath Jessie’s feet.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops rose up against the fiercely blue sky. Jessie stepped back from her window, stunned. The Great Pyramid, the oldest of the seven wonders of the world, seemed almost within touching distance of her balcony. It was immense. Disconcerting and incomprehensible. For thousands of years it was the tallest man-made object in the world, until the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889.

It consisted of an almost solid mass of limestone that covered thirteen
acres, and it loomed up on the Giza plateau, just a short walk away from the hotel up a ramp of scree. It was a vast bleached construction that defied belief and belittled all else. At this hour while the air was cool, human beings crawled over it like ants scaling Everest. Tiny insignificant creatures. Only the desert itself, with its endless wastes of sun-scorched sand and rock stretching to the horizon and beyond, could dwarf the great monolith.

Yet it was the scent of the desert, rather than the sight of the pyramid, that captivated Jessie. It was a scent that would haunt her dreams and whisper ancient secrets close in her ear. The air on the plateau tasted clear and sparkling as it swept into her lungs and she paused to watch the fingers of the morning sun slap what looked like gold paint all down one side of the pyramid. On the opposite side a massive purple shadow lay hunched at the foot of the slope like a sleeping guard-dog. For a split second it made Jessie shiver.

‘Breakfast,’ she told herself.

‘Well, young madam, decided to come outside and sniff the roses at last, have you?’

It was the London woman, the tall one from the train. The one staying at Shepheard’s. But here she was at Mena House breakfasting with Monty.

‘What a nice surprise, Mrs Randall.’

‘Call me Maisie, love. There’s no Mr Randall on the scene any more, God rest his dog-eared soul, but I ain’t letting that get in my way.’ She chuckled and sipped her coffee, little finger extended like a flagpole in true ladylike fashion. ‘Me and your Sir Montague here been chewing on what to see first. It’s like a bun-fight up there.’ She gestured towards the pyramids.

But Jessie looked at Monty. His eyes didn’t move from hers.

‘Sleep well?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Very well. And you?’

‘A bit restless.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Pardon?’

‘For
breakfast, I mean.’

Colour raced to her cheeks. ‘Of course.’

She ordered tea and watermelon with yogurt and honey. They were sitting on the hotel’s terrace which was already crowded with other guests. It was a popular watering hole among the thousands of tourists visiting the pyramids each season, ever since Howard Carter had triggered a world-wide passion for all things Egyptian and the Thomas Cook travel agency had commenced regular trips to the Middle East, turning Cairo into a fashionable winter resort.

‘Nice place you landed in,’ Maisie observed, eyeing the hotel’s luxurious gardens and incongruous golf course in the middle of the parched desert. Everywhere they looked, Egyptian men in turbans and striped robes were busy directing garden hoses at acacia bushes and at abundant riots of bougainvillea and mimosa. It was an island of greenery in a harsh sea of brown.

‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ Jessie agreed. She had to force herself not to stare at Monty as he calmly smoked a cigarette, his hair glinting coppery in the sunlight. She wanted to reach across and unhook his shirt buttons. ‘I believe this hotel started life as the Khedive Ismail Pasha’s hunting lodge in the nineteenth century and is named after King Menes of Memphis.’ The words filled up the crystal clear air that separated her from Monty. ‘He was the founding father of the first Egyptian dynasty.’ She gestured off to one side, past the towering eucalyptus trees. ‘Its swimming pool is the first and the largest ever built in Egypt.’

She stopped, her cheeks warm.

Maisie put down her cup. ‘Blow me, if you don’t know some weird stuff.’

Jessie shrugged self-consciously. ‘My brother is an archaeologist. He tells me things. Some of them stick.’

‘He must be bleedin’ clever, then.’

‘He is.’

‘That’s nice for you.’

Jessie changed the
subject. ‘Are you off to see the pyramid this morning?’

‘Good grief, I’ve done that already. An early bird, that’s me. Always on the go, that’s why I’m thin as a stick-insect.’ She laughed good naturedly at herself and glanced over at the pyramid. ‘Crikey, it’s a monster, isn’t it?’ Her face grew serious. ‘I wouldn’t want to be buried in there. Trapped for ever under all that rock.’ She shuddered dramatically. ‘That Pharaoh Khufu must have been a glutton for the dark.’

‘It was intended as a gateway to the afterlife,’ Jessie pointed out.

‘Huh! The afterlife. Over four thousand years later and we still don’t know any better.’ She looked back at Jessie. ‘We’re useless at learning from the past.’

Monty immediately became animated. ‘I disagree. Look at my Chamford ancestors. They thought nothing of charging around on horseback, lopping off the heads of their enemies during the crusades or our civil war.’

‘So what do you do now?’ Maisie grinned. ‘To those poor ducks who make an enemy of a Chamford?’

Monty raised an eyebrow. ‘I am at least civilised about it.’

‘What? You mean you ask their permission first,’ Jessie teased, ‘before you lop off their heads?’

Monty let his gaze rest on the shadow that sprawled at the base of the pyramid, where even in the heat of the day it would be chill.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I sit down and discuss any disagreement calmly with them first. Only then do I lop off their heads.’

They rattled their way into Cairo on the tram.

A special line had been constructed along the rough seven-mile stretch of Pyramid Road, designed to carry tourists to and from the Giza plateau. At the Giza end a queue of morose camels and brightly bedecked donkeys with long eyelashes waited to transport visitors to the pyramids themselves. The trams ran every forty minutes from outside the Mena House Hotel to the Pont des Anglais in the city, and theirs was packed with a multi-lingual mix of French, English and Germans, red-faced from their exertions. Many had attempted to scale the zigzag line of ascent to the pyramid summit, but not all succeeded. Egyptian guides – dragomen, as they were called – scampered like mountain goats over the face of the pyramid, making it look easy, the wind billowing out their
galabayas
like sails as they hauled the more adventurous tourists with them up the four-foot limestone blocks that formed each step. The overweight Frenchman sitting behind Jessie was less than enthusiastic about the experience.

‘The panorama
from her summit is … poof!’ He flicked his fingers. ‘
C’est très décevant
. Very disappointing. Just more sand out to the west, and the city to the east.’ He shrugged Gallic shoulders.

‘Crikey Moses!’ Maisie jeered. ‘What do you expect in a desert? Roses and honeysuckle?’ She prodded his seat with her furled black umbrella. ‘You saw the Nile and the minarets, didn’t you? Anyway, a bit more climbing and a bit less of your fancy French eating would get rid of some of that …’

Jessie stopped listening. She was impatient. Her mind was focused on the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. In the Conan Doyle story of
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
it was the crown of King Charles I that was found. Well, there was no Charles I here in Cairo, but there were plenty of kings, including their mummified remains.

Somewhere there must be something, some sign from Tim.

She gazed out through the dust-speckled window at the passing landscape. The vivid green cultivation of the irrigated fields along the banks of the Nile was outlined in sharp contrast to the bleak and arid expanse beyond, and it struck Jessie that this was a land of three colours. The sumptuous sapphire blue of the sky that enchanted the eyes. The shimmering emerald green of the patchwork of fields of sugar-cane and of berseem, the Egyptian clover that was grown everywhere for fodder. But overwhelming all else were the soft muted shades of the sand and the rocks, of the dirt and the mudbrick houses, of the men’s
galabayas
and their warm sun-baked skin. Even the westerners’ clothes tended towards creams and fawns, as well as white or khaki drill shorts, all non-colours that were effortlessly swallowed by the landscape.

She spotted an
egret rising from the river and watched it spread its ragged white wings as it swooped up into the branches of a tree. Such timeless motion. It lay at the heart of this country. The turn of a waterwheel, the soft thud of a
shaduf
as it emptied its bucket into an irrigation ditch, the rise and fall of the hoes in the fields or the kneading of the dough for
eesh baladi
. All were unchanged from the days of the pharaohs. No wonder Egypt had cast such a heavy spell on her brother, but Jessie would not let it have him.

She intended to find him. To bring him home, even if she had to wrestle him from the grip of Osiris himself.

The centre of Cairo preened itself on its elegance. Broad tree-lined boulevards boasted graceful mansion blocks in French style with wrought-iron balconies and luscious spills of bougainvillea or flame spikes of canna lilies.

To Jessie it felt European to its core. But no European capital saw donkeys plodding down its main streets, knees buckling, piled to breaking point with gigantic loads of fodder or firewood. Paris was not plagued by
gharries
, the horse-drawn cabs that jostled and shouted at each other for business; London remained free from the ill-temper of camel-trains, and no one paraded in Berlin in a scarlet tarboosh worn with a trim three-piece suit and a dead chicken under one arm.