The Shape of Sand (30 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: The Shape of Sand
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“Will you pour?”
Harriet dispensed the tea, passed the scones. Having enquired about Vita and Daisy (of course, Daisy was born to espouse causes — hadn't she been a suffragette once? And Vita - clever girl! – had always known which side her bread was buttered. Quite a catch, Wycombe – despite his age, but what did that signify?) Millie came straight to the point. “First let me say again how sorry I am about your mother – what a dreadful thing! Oh, my dear, when I read in the papers that she'd been found! My dearest friend, Bea! I thought my heart might not stand the shock. It isn't often, at my age, that I find I have cause to be ashamed, but I have to confess I was. That my first thought was of myself and my bad heart.” Millie heaped jam on to a scone. “Do have some more of this. There's plenty more where it came from. I don't believe in rationing. All very well during the war, but what are they thinking of now? Mr Churchill would never have allowed it to go on. Too many of those dreadful Labourites around – you take my advice and keep your eye on them!” She passed the cut glass jam dish across. “All these years, I've been condemning her – and now!”
The jam was stiff with fruit, rich and red on the silver spoon. Harriet deposited some carefully on her plate and then looked up, to find Millie's bright, intelligent eyes on her face.
“My mother? Condemning her? So you too believed that she'd run away with Iskander?”
“Frankly, yes. What else was there to believe? Despite evidence to the contrary. I'm sorry, perhaps you don't think it's proper for me to say that of your mama.”
“The time for being proper has long past. But … what do you mean by evidence to the contrary?”
“Ah, well, now–” Millie looked a little put out, as if she'd said more than she meant.
“I
have
read what she wrote in what she called her Egyptian journal,” Harriet prompted, unwisely, because it allowed Millie to avoid an answer to her question.
“So that's what you've come to see me about. You want to know about that trip up the Nile.”
“Yes. I believe what happened there must have had some bearing on her murder. If you're sure it won't tire you–”
“Tire me? Harriet, I used to be the greatest gossip in London and it isn't often I get the chance nowadays! And I've always thought that was where it all started – your mother and father were never the same afterwards.” Millie's hand went to her gold chains. The loose rings on her fingers slipped about and winked in the firelight. “He filled her head with silly nonsense.”
“My father did?”
“Amory?” Millie laughed, not quite kindly. “Can you imagine him having the imagination to fill anyone's head with nonsense? Nor the sense of humour, if you'll forgive me. No, I mean the Egyptian, of course. He was besotted with her.”
Harriet sipped her tea. “He must have been very young at the time.”
“Well, that's hardly anything new, is it? A young man's infatuation for a beautiful, older woman? Especially when she encourages it. Oh, don't look like that! It was quite the thing, you know, in our day, not frowned upon at all – or not much, in certain circles. Rather romantic – courtly love, and all that, a knight and his lady. And Bea – well, she was never averse to being – admired – by anyone.” She cocked a bright eye at Harriet. There was a sense of more being meant than was actually being said.
Harriet was silent. Needing time to absorb and accept this not very acceptable view of her mother, although it merely endorsed what Kit had written, she dived into her bag and brought out some of the photographs taken at the birthday celebrations that she had thought might be needed to jog an old woman's memory. She needn't have been afraid of that, but she handed them over just the same.
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Millie, immediately diverted by the one of herself. “What a mistake it is to look at oneself forty years ago – how very ageing that outfit was!” She threw a complacent look at Harriet, as if expecting a comment that she now looked younger than ever. And perhaps compliments are due, Harriet thought, if only on the way she was managing to live. Here she was, having survived those terrible wartime years, as surely only someone like Millie could, living on black market food and what must have been hoarded perfume and cosmetics and the clothes her clever, expensive dressmaker had designed for her in better days. Looked after by that dragon. Hallam. But let's not approach the subject of Hallam just yet.
Harriet declined another scone, and obediently poured more tea for both of them.
“That journey up the Nile was a mistake, you know,” went on Millie. “Nothing to do, day after day, but watch the scenery - which I must say all looked the same, after a while — unless you took trips to visit those boring ruins. I think Glendinning had it right – use the trip to get in some fishing and shooting. He had a wonderful time at the Turf Club, too. Boring, did I say? Well, not always. Intimidating, sometimes. Some of those places frightened the life out of Bea, and no mistake.”
“Like the temple at Luxor?”
“Yes,” said Millie shortly, casting her a quick sidelong look. She glanced again at the photos she'd placed on her lap and picked out the one showing Iskander. “He didn't look like that in Egypt. Mostly wore one of those nightshirt things, like a native, though I must admit he was a cut above that. But it wasn't calculated to make one regard him as an equal, though Bea never seemed to see it that way.”
Harriet was becoming accustomed to Millie's jumpy, inconsequential
conversation and determined not to be thrown off the subject. “When you say she was frightened, you must have been meaning the experience in the temple at Luxor?”
Millie said, after a pause. “Must I? Perhaps. Well, I don't know if I can explain that. You haven't, by any chance, been to Egypt?”
“Regretfully, no.”
Millie fell silent again, crumbling a morsel of scone on her plate. “Those old tombs – I'm not a very imaginative person, Harriet, but I have to say there was definitely something creepy about them. It doesn't take much to credit those tales about the curse on the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb – though of course that wasn't discovered then. But those dim torch lights, the silence and the stifling heat … there were bats.” She shuddered, remembering. “So many dead people – no matter they'd been dead thousands of years. There was something unnatural, uncanny about those sarcophagi – and those mummies–” She stopped abruptly. “Forgive me. I'm an insensitive old woman.”
Perhaps
mummy
had not been a well-chosen word in the circumstances, but Millie was not as insensitive as all that, thought Harriet, and a good deal sharper than anyone had ever given her credit for. She began to wonder if her mother had not perhaps been quite fair to her friend in that journal of hers. “What
about
the Luxor temple?”
Millie's expression showed she wasn't eager to reopen the subject, but since that was why Harriet was here, she wasn't going to let it go willingly. And after a while, Millie sighed. “Something happened to her there – some weird experience that I, for one, didn't feel, though I was there. She said afterwards she felt some sort of horror that she couldn't explain, someone close behind her who actually touched her intimately. At which point, she turned and ran – bumping her head on the door lintel and passing out for a few minutes. We got her back to the hotel and into bed. She was perfectly all right afterwards.”
“She described all that in her journal. Do you think she could have imagined it?”
“Wishful thinking, more like. Oh dear, I'm sorry – whatever
it was, it simply terrified her. But it didn't excuse–”
“Go on. Please.”
“No, I've said enough.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I'm too old for all this.”
“You know that's not true! Go on – what happened next?”
Millie continued to be evasive. “Nothing. Amory arrived the next day, then we went on to Assuan, and Abu Simbel, that's all.”
“She was well enough to go with you?”
“Oh yes, we all went, then we returned to Luxor. Your father had found he could spend a little more time there than he'd originally thought, so the men spent several days exploring the temples on the west bank. Neither Bea nor I went with them. She'd already been there once, and I'd no desire to go. The crew took the boat back to Cairo, but we'd decided to return by train. We stayed in the hotel meanwhile. Lovely hotel,” she added reminiscently, “I believe it's called the Winter Palace now.”
“And that's all? That's all that happened? What about Iskander?”
“Oh,” Millie said vaguely. “He'd suddenly decided to go back to Cairo. He left us before Amory arrived. They were all like that, you know, the Egyptians. Unpredictable.”
Harriet said, with sudden insight, “It wasn't what happened to my mother in the temple that was important, was it? It was what happened afterwards. Was it something to do with Iskander – and why he left so unexpectedly?”
“Your mother always said that you were too sharp for your own good, Harriet!” Relapsing into silence, Millie closed her eyes for so long that Harriet thought she might have dropped off to sleep. But then she opened them and they were sharp and bright as ever. “Let it be,” she said, “No good will come of stirring mischief up at this stage.”
“It's a little more than mischief! Somebody
killed
my mother, strangled her. It's a matter of trying to find out who did.”
“Does it matter now? Iskander's probably dead himself by now. It's only old dinosaurs like me who are still alive. And Myles Randolph, or so I hear.”
Harriet said, “Iskander is, too. He's a respected professor of Egyptology at the university in Cairo.” There was a silence. A lump of coal fell into the heart of the fire. Ash feathered around it and then the flames burned brighter.
“That cross you're wearing – he gave it to her. An ankh, it's called – supposed to be the symbol of life. Ironic, isn't it?”
Harriet had forgotten she had been wearing it, like a talisman, ever since coming across it. “She was fascinated by him, wasn't she?”
“Iskander? Yes, in a way. He intrigued her. So much so that I began to think she might do something very silly, that she might have regretted, but we arrived in Luxor quite soon and that put a stop to that.”
“My father arriving, you mean?”
“No,” Millie said quickly, “I simply meant that we were back with civilised company.”
Her tongue still ran away with her as, according to Amory, it always had. A rattle-pate he'd called her, perhaps not without reason. Had she been referring to
Wycombe?
That meeting him again in Luxor had provided opportunity for clandestine meetings with Beatrice? Had the affair started then? Or had it started earlier, in Cairo perhaps? And had Amory found out — either then, or later? Or suspected – and then, on Beatrice's birthday night many years later, found them together – and killed her? Insupportable thought – and in that case … why had he spared Wycombe? Perhaps a more subtle revenge had been exacted in taking his own – to him now worthless – life, and leaving Wycombe with a lifetime of guilt. It was a picture Harriet could all too easily envisage – the nightmare she had been afraid of all along, the alternative to Kit having killed Beatrice. People, perhaps Beatrice most of all, had always underestimated Amory, looked at his surface sobriety and failed to see the underlying depth of feeling and emotion.
Where did Iskander, then, fit into this? “What bothers me,” Harriet said, “is why my mother invited Valery Iskander to Charnley. She didn't seem to like him very much, as I remember, whatever she'd once thought of him.”
“Unfinished business? To make amends? Who knows? Whatever the reason, she made the biggest mistake of her life.”
“You do believe he killed her, don't you?”
But Millie, having planted her barb of suspicion, shrugged and was not to be drawn further. She shook her head and helped herself to another slice of walnut cake, dabbing at the crumbs of coffee icing with her finger.
“You know,” she said at last, unexpectedly, “I used to envy Bea her beauty, the way men fell at her feet, but beauty's a burden. Your mother couldn't cope with it.”
Thinking of the way Beatrice had always seemed to accept compliments as her due, so graciously, this sounded to Harriet very much like a contradiction. But then Millie added, “She had to live up to it all the time, seeking reassurances, because it was all she had, in the end.”
This was shrewd of her. It was the first time anyone else had ventured to remark on it. Harriet herself had always secretly felt that Beatrice might have had few inner resources to fall back on, but recent events had shown that was too easy a judgement, too superficial. Beatrice had been a more complex character than that. She – and Millie – could both have been cruelly underestimating her. “Didn't she ever worry that sort of thing might distress my father, I wonder?”

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