Shadows on the Nile (47 page)

I want you to look away from the hill. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that he’s easy to like.’

I think about that as I fold a thick layer of cotton wool around the tissue-paper. ‘You are engaging.’

‘Ah,’ you say. That is all.

But you come across the sand until you are standing close and I know you are staring at me, though I don’t look up from my work. Against all the rules you place your arm across my shoulders. You know and I know that it makes me nervous and can tip me into an
episode
, but we both let it lie there.

‘Thank you, Georgie.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Your manners are impeccable today.’ You squeeze my shoulder and it takes all my strength not to beg you to stop.

I glance sideways at you. The sun is behind you, turning your hair into a halo, and you are wearing your usual shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. I always dress in full-length trousers and long-sleeved shirts, whatever the heat, because I cannot bear this burning sun on my limbs. It makes them shrivel inside. I want to say something to you. To thank you for telling the Fat Man I am not an imbecile.

‘I am proud,’ I say, looking down at the silver figure of Anubis with his handsome jackal’s head lying on my palm, ‘proud that you are my brother.’

You withdraw your arm abruptly. I try not to show my relief. I glance at you again and your eyes have gone small, your mouth is a strange shape and you are shaking your head from side to side. I have no idea what it means and I feel the edge of panic. I squeeze Anubis tight.

‘Georgie,’ you say in an odd voice, ‘how is it that you have the
power to undo me?’

‘I know I am not engaging.’

You start to laugh, great billows of sound that buffet the canvas awning, and I don’t know why but I laugh with you.

The truck is filthy. I don’t like it. I refuse to climb in. We are meant to be loading more crates on board but I walk away and squat down in the cooler air of its shadow on the sand. I feel sick again.

I know why. It’s because the Fat Man won’t leave me alone. He goads me. With insults and with kicks every time your back is turned, the way a matador goads a wounded silent stupid bull. I want to trample him in the dirt and rip open his belly with sharp horns. Maybe beautiful Isis will lend me hers.

In front of him I remain silent and stupid.

You stand beside me, smoking a cigarette. You don’t offer me one, so I know you are cross with me.

‘Not helping us?’ you ask.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

You don’t bother to argue but you exhale heavily. We don’t speak. I am thinking of the tent I must sleep in tonight and the insects that will share it with me. I grit my teeth together, so that no noise will crawl out. Suddenly you grip my shoulder and haul me to my feet so roughly that my knees are unsteady.

‘Look!’ you say.

I look at your hand.

‘No.’ You point. ‘Look at the side of the truck.’

I stare wildly. See nothing but dirt.

‘Look there.’

You indicate a patch of dirt that has been disturbed near the rear wheel arch. I squint at it. It is a snake. Someone has drawn a short snake in the filth on the truck. My mouth drops open and a weird whooping noise comes out. You prod me in the ribs and I clamp
my jaw shut.

‘Hush, Georgie!’

But you are grinning. We are both grinning. Because in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs a snake is the letter ‘J’. and ‘J’ stands for only one person.

Jessie.

Monty stood in a doorway in the dark street.
He waited.

Nothing.

He listened for the soft footfalls.

Nothing.

Minutes passed. The night air grew colder. But still there was no sound, not even a match being struck or a smothered cough. Nothing. Whoever it was who was following him, he had the patience of the devil.

Monty had moved through the streets, treading with care because there were few lamps to show the way, just the lacy light of the moon, and you never knew what might be lying underfoot. He’d headed across town to the square in front of Luxor Temple where the ruins of the columns with their papyrus-form carvings rose eerie and unearthly into the darkness. The nearby souk was closed at this hour, but Monty had spotted a bar further down the road, its spill of yellow light picking out the rats that skulked along the wall.

The coffee houses in the streets of Luxor – the ones used by Egyptians, that is, not the smart cafés frequented by westerners – were not unwelcoming, but neither were they exactly welcoming. As soon as he set foot in one he became the focus of attention.
Dark faces and darker eyes fixed on him with interest and curiosity, but he sensed little hostility and he took his time drifting from one place to another. Calling for a coffee here, a
shisha
pipe there until his brain was turning cartwheels. He fell into conversations. One with an old man who possessed only one eye and had fought fifty years earlier in the Battle of Tel-El-Keber, when General Sir Garnet Wolseley’s British victory had opened up the whole of Egypt to British occupation.

‘Some of them fought in skirts,’ the old man said, baying with laughter and wiping his good eye on the sleeve of his
galabaya
. ‘Soldiers in short skirts. Like girls.’

‘They would be Highlanders,’ Monty remarked.

‘One took my eye on his bayonet as a souvenir.’

Monty bought him a pipe of
shisha
. ‘It was war, my friend. Bad things happen.’

Comrades with half their brains blown out. Horses blind and screaming. Men hanging from barbed-wire, dripping blood for the rats to devour. A no-man’s land that was everyman’s hell. Yes, bad things happen
.

With another he discussed the price of cotton and the disease brucellosis which had decimated his flock of goats, while another wanted to enthuse over the films of Mary Pickford and the greatness of King Fuad. Each coffee house brought new understanding to Monty and each bar a fresh perspective on Egyptian life, but no one wanted to talk about the caves in the hills or knew the first thing about a man called Fareed who wore black. Or so they said.

It was when he entered the bar near the souk that he glanced in the large mirror on the opposite wall, pitted and grainy but framing a perfect image of an Egyptian man standing on the opposite pavement. Behind Monty’s back he was staring hard at him. Then he was gone. Monty ordered a beer and tried to conjure up the man again – a slight figure in a white
galabaya
and dark jacket, an earnest-looking face and the soft movements of a cat.

This time he didn’t linger. He passed his beer to a man receiving a haircut by the door and strode up the street, past the shuttered shops and around the next corner.
A tent-maker’s tiny establishment was still open, the owner seated on the floor and stitching a sheet of canvas held between his bare feet, but just beyond it was a deep-set doorway that lay in darkness.

Monty stepped into it. Anyone following him would have to pass through the patch of yellow light from the tent-maker’s workshop. So now he stood there, thinking and waiting. Listening for the devil on cat’s feet. From here he could smell the river odour of the Nile and caught the steady chug of a paddle-steamer manoeuvring to a new berth, preparing for its next day’s cargo of tourists. He breathed softly, stilling the clamour in his chest and letting his eyes focus on the shadows in the darkness. He could feel his feet eager to move, his head curious to peek out around the corner of the doorway, but he denied them both. His muscles remained tense and in his hand, flat against his leg, he carried a knife.

Bad things happen
.

The white
galabaya
was not hard to spot when it crossed his field of vision in the doorway. It took barely a second to step out and put a blade to the man’s throat from behind. Instantly he froze and wisely offered no resistance.

Monty drew him into the doorway.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am nobody, sir.’

‘Why are you following me?’

‘I am not following. I am going home. I mean no harm to you, sir.’

Monty hesitated. ‘Turn around.’

Slowly the Egyptian turned and Monty stepped back to inspect him. He was small-boned, his skin dark, with calm intelligent black eyes and a quiet inoffensive manner. ‘I mean no harm to you, sir,’ he said again. He turned his palms out to show he held no weapon.

Monty almost apologised, almost put away the knife with a respectful salaam. But in the split second that the words took to travel from his brain to his tongue, he drew breath, and that
was when he smelt the warm and woody scent of cinnamon. It seemed to emanate from the man’s clothing, as if he ground up the spicy bark each day and its dust filtered into the material of his
galabaya
or into the creases of his skin. Instantly it brought back a memory. For a moment it hovered tantalisingly out of reach but Monty shook his head to jog it loose and abruptly it came to him.

‘The tomb,’ he said sharply. ‘King Tutankhamen’s tomb. You were there. You put a wrist-watch in Miss Kenton’s handbag.’

The dark eyes assessed him seriously. ‘Yes, I did. The watch was to show that she could trust me, though I didn’t risk telling her my name there.’

‘So who are you? What are you doing here – with the wrist-watch of Miss Kenton’s brother?’

The man nodded, as though debating with himself. ‘Come, let us drink tea.’

‘I am Ahmed Rashid. I am based in Cairo but I have travelled down to Luxor because I am interested in you and in Miss Kenton.’

The moment they sat down in the small chess café in a side-alleyway where the customers were too absorbed in their own ardent chess games to pay much attention to the newcomers, Monty noticed that Ahmed Rashid had shed his diffident manner. Though still polite, he became much more businesslike, the edges of his face somehow sharper. Monty had a grim sense of the situation slipping from bad to worse, and he kept a close eye on the door.

‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘that you want from us?’

The man smiled courteously and sipped his mint tea, refusing to be hurried.

Monty changed tack. ‘Who are you and what is your business?’

More success this time. Ahmed Rashid leaned forward across the small wooden table, so that his voice need be no more than a whisper. Monty could smell the mint on his breath.

‘I am an officer with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.’ He paused. ‘A police officer.’

Monty felt the ground slide under his feet. His hand gripped
his tea-glass tighter, but he did not react with anything more than a raised eyebrow. ‘Is that a fact, Mr Rashid?’

‘Captain Rashid.’

‘So why are you here?’

Rashid leaned back in his seat, eyes fixed on Monty’s face, watching for any telltale tic or twitch. ‘Come now, Mr Chamford.’ Monty noted the error with his name. Either this man did not know as much as he implied or it was a deliberate insult. ‘We both know why I am here.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘I am here because of Timothy Kenton.’

Oh, Christ! Tim was about to be arrested and chucked into prison. Digging up Egyptian treasures without a licence. Stealing valuable antiquities. Exporting them without a licence. Travelling on a false passport. The list was horribly impressive.

Monty smiled engagingly. ‘Well, that makes two of us. Do you know where he is to be found?’

Rashid started to shake his head. He opened his mouth to speak, just as the ear-splitting sound of a gunshot crashed through the quiet room, deafening everyone in it and leaving a neat red flower on the white sleeve of Rashid’s
galabaya
. Monty dived to the floor, dragging the bleeding Egyptian with him, while others screamed and one man fell to his knees in loud prayer to Allah.

Only then did Monty see the four men looming in the doorway. They wore black robes and the one in front held a gun in his hand. It was a very old Browning semi-automatic but Monty knew it was none the less deadly for all that. He tipped the table on to the floor for protection for Rashid and himself. Not much, but something. His knife was in his hand and he prepared to rush forward. If he was going to die, he would die fighting.

Jessie
. It was the only word in his head.

The four men came for him. Him alone. Not Rashid. Nor anyone else in the café. He swung the knife. Cut twice. Saw blood. But they overpowered him with their numbers and hauled him out into the street, threw him on the ground where the
one who carried a stick beat his back. The blows were well aimed.

They left him. In the dirt. Alive.

‘Open door! Open door, please, Mr Monty sir
bey
. Quick, yes please.’

Monty shuddered. He was standing under the shower taking the full force of the cold water on his back. He flinched as he stooped to pick up a towel and wrap it around his waist. Malak’s fist was banging on the door, waking up the whole damn corridor, otherwise Monty might have ignored the boy and stayed in the shower.

‘All right! Quiet down.’ He swung open the door. Outside in the corridor Malak looked small and frightened. ‘Get in here, boy.’

‘I did it, sir
bey
, I did it, yes.’

‘Did what?’

‘Found special dead place, big secret, I did.’ His words were tumbling over each other and his eyes were darting all around the room, as if he feared to find someone else there.

Monty stood, stunned. He stared at the boy, disbelieving. ‘You found the tomb?’

Malak puffed out his skinny chest. ‘Yes sir.’

‘How?’

‘I find your Dr Scott, so clever I am.’

‘You spoke to him?’

A nod for reply.

‘We told you not to because he—’

‘Oh but I so clever, I help him much loading boat. I know him from Missie’s picture and I carry much I strong.’ He waved a puny arm at Monty to prove it. ‘I say I want much good work. He laugh at me, sir
bey
.’ He flashed his disarming smile around the room but was clearly jumpy.

‘What is it, Malak? What’s the problem?’

The boy’s face crumpled unexpectedly and his huge black eyes filled with tears. ‘I go with Dr Scott, yes
bey
, to camp and tonight he kill a man I see yes. I see it.’