Death Beyond the Nile (Tamara Hoyland Book 5)

  DEATH BEYOND THE NILE

  Jessica Mann

  © Jessica Mann 1988

  Jessica Mann has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 by Macmillan.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PROLOGUE

  When the sun disappeared with an abruptness to which the Europeans could not get accustomed, darkness fell immediately and the air became very cold. On the rocky shore a row of little fires flickered. Beside each of them two or three Nubians crouched by the warmth as they prepared their evening food. The diesel generator on the Europeans’ barge began its laboured chugging and the lights flickered on. Very briefly the pestering wind slackened, and the sounds of flapping ropes and tarpaulins, of water against the metal sides of the barge, of whistling air through awkward crannies, mercifully ceased. The cacophony would return with the dawn.

  Nobody had expected the noise. Everyone except Tamara Hoyland had expected to be laid low by what the others called Tutankhamun’s revenge. She, who believed that you were only ill if you allowed yourself to be, crouched suffering in an unlovely lavatory cubicle.

  In the saloon on the covered deck her companions were assembled, she supposed, to give the imported whisky and the local wine their nightly chance to loosen tongues. There was to have been fresh fish for dinner. One of the Nubians had brought his catch for them to admire before delivering it to the galley, a basket full of strange pewter-coloured creatures with predatory teeth.

  Tamara shuddered at the thought. Discomfort and intermittent waves of real pain rippled through her intestines. She hoped that she would be able to leave this, one of only two water closets on board, before an impatient queue built up outside it.

  Footsteps were coming downstairs. Was dinner finished already? But the feet trod gently past the locked door, and along the passage off which all the cabins led. She could not tell which one they entered but it could only have been to fetch something for in a little while they came back and went upstairs again.

  Cloacina, prayed Tamara, little goddess of the sewers and of those who use them, what name did the Egyptians give you? For surely in the country for which the expression ‘gyppy tummy’ had been invented, some deity received the prayers of all who suffered it. Roman goddess, local version, guardian angel, you must have made your point by now. My pride went before this fall, Tamara had to admit to herself, wondering whether to say to Miss Benson that she would use some of her much vaunted homeopathic cure-alls, or whether she could bring herself to beg one of Vanessa Papillon’s miracles of modern pharmacology.

  Other footsteps. It sounded like old Solomon, slightly shuffling. He went straight past into his cabin.

  The spasms did seem to be passing. Tamara waited a moment, braced against the craft’s swaying on the water. She decided that the worst was over and opened the door into the dim corridor.

  A third person had been down, someone whose footsteps she had not heard, for a flash of green fabric disappeared from view up the stairs. None of the servants wore green, a colour reserved by Moslems for those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and avoided, perhaps from tact, by the local Christians.

  The boy had already turned the sheets down and brought back the washed and pressed laundry. A night shirt was folded on Tamara’s bed and she put it on before lying down. But she was thirsty and the bottle of mineral water was empty. With a peevish sigh she got up and padded barefoot to the pile of crates under the stairs. At least she could not blame her indisposition on the water supply, for like everyone else in her party she was careful to drink and clean her teeth in the water that had been sealed into its plastic bottles somewhere in Greece. Only Giles Needham and his staff arrogantly dared to swallow what the lake provided and even to swim in its waters.

  Tamara turned back towards her room. It was at that moment that she heard the scream, a rough, harsh, awkward sound that seemed infinitely shocking.

  It was Timothy Knipe. He was standing in the open doorway of Vanessa Papillon’s cabin. She was lying dead on her bed.

  Chapter One

  ‘So there I was,’ Tamara Hoyland said. ‘About as far as one could be on this earth from help or authority, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dead TV star, an hysterical poet, a catatonic novelist—not to mention my charges; the one I’d come with and the one I left with.’

  ‘And convinced that it was murder,’ her employer said. She wondered whether he felt remorseful at having sent her into that fray, but dismissed the notion.

  Mr Black was not one for regrets. A man who was could never perform his secret role, that of running a branch of the government service known as Department E, so secret as not even to have a secret name. Even Tamara herself, who had worked for Department E for several years, could hardly define its duties; and would not try. Her relationship was with Tom Black alone. She satisfied herself that what he asked her to do was what she thought should be done, and what, in various esoteric lessons, she had learnt to do. Further recognition or justification had never seemed necessary.

  Mr Black had asked Tamara to go to Egypt with Camisis Tours. The assignment had not turned out as he expected—but the unexpected was exactly what Department E existed to control; and its agents were men and women of curious skills and unpredictable intuitions.

  For some time Tamara Hoyland had simultaneously been employed by Department E, and been a member of the staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments from which she had resigned just before Christmas. That had been her first job after finishing her doctorate at Cambridge, and she had been in it for seven years; long enough to know that she could stay there for the rest of her career, gradually ascending the promotion ladder; making a contribution in her chosen speciality; respectable, respected, increasingly expert at recognising and describing the material remains of the past. It was what she had wanted to do and she had enjoyed doing it, but enough was enough. Moonlighting had spoilt her for real life.

  It was after her lover, Ian Barnes, had been killed in the service of his secret department that Tamara had been recruited to work for it. She had never intended to do so for long. Her self-image was not that of a spy, nor was she sure that she entirely approved of the aims, still less of the methods, of her second, unadmitted employers. She was ashamed to recognise that she loved the work. But she was hooked on the excitement that went with it. Using the dangerous skills that she had acquired was thrilling.

  And of course, Department E, unlike other more open branches of the civil service of which it was part, paid its employees extraordinarily well. That had come as a surprise to Tamara. She had not considered the financial aspect of the work at all, and queried the unexpected addition to her bank account after her first assignment. She earned a retainer, and large sums afte
r active work.

  To keep on working at the Royal Commission in a job that was worth doing for its own sake, simply for the valuable cover it provided for secret activities, was too cynical for Tamara. In any case, in telling everyone that she was leaving to get on with her own work, she was truthful. Her former professor, Thea Crawford, had repeatedly told her to publish in academic journals. Mr Black, that reserved, disguised man, saw another side to Tamara’s nature. His suggestion that she might turn to writing fiction was infuriating. Tamara had hardly admitted even to herself that it was something she would like to do. This was by no means the first proof of his omniscience. All his young people had to resign themselves to the fact that Mr Black knew everything that research could uncover about them. But Tamara had never mentioned this slightly embarrassing and completely private ambition to him or anyone else. He had said:

  ‘You know as well as anyone that insight is what our profession requires. We construct convincing models from incomplete evidence just as you do when you jump from a few potsherds to a whole theory of prehistoric economy. We think, but we also feel—the attributes of a creator.’ Tom Black himself was the author of pessimistic, anonymous verses.

  ‘I am not sure that I have the imagination required,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Call it clear-sighted intuition, then,’ the poet said to the archaeologist and added, as spy master to agent, ‘I require you to speculate and to observe.’

  But for spies as for archaeologists speculation can only be useful when based on information. Discreet researchers had been detailed to produce dossiers on her travelling companions, while Tamara Hoyland, thanking her stars that she was a quick study, taught herself something of the Egyptian past in the intervals of sorting out her thin clothes and taking a rapid course of inoculations—and of pitying the professor, who had undergone the same discomfort only to withdraw on mendacious pretexts from the journey after patriotic persuasion, so that Department E’s emissary could take his place.

  The Egyptology was easier to understand than the contemporary problems that were on Tamara’s hidden agenda. It was an aspect of archaeology that had never especially appealed to her. Magnificent though its remains were, they were the result of millennia of absolute control by an invincible governmental organisation. It was remarkable that such autocrats and bureaucrats should have held sway in a period when the people on whose material remains Tamara usually concentrated were illiterate peasants; but not attractive. Nor, being as it were tone-deaf to religious speculation, was Tamara inspired by the idea of a people for whom the whole of life had been a preparation for death. All the same, even someone lacking what a modern atheist once called ‘a God-shaped hole in his consciousness’ could not fail to be excited by the chance to see the stupendous remains of that priest-ridden civilisation.

  ‘You were right about one thing at least,’ Tamara told Mr Black. ‘By the time we were near the southern end of our voyage, I found ideas jumping about in my head. Ideas that I’d suppressed for years. It must have been the result of reclining on the deck, floating past real life that never touched us. We were in a kind of capsule, protected, out—literally—out of this world.’

  ‘And then your great novel turned into a crime story,’ Tom Black said. ‘One of your characters had committed a murder.’

  ‘Every single one had the means and the opportunity,’ she said. ‘The whole lot of them could have done it.’

  ‘You were sure it was poison?’

  ‘That much, yes. But what poison, or where it had come from . . . It was like a nightmare. And as for opportunity, we all had it. It made me wonder which of them had come there specifically to get an opportunity. Was it mere chance that gathered these particular people in that particular place at that particular time?’

  ‘Your mind turned to the occult?’ he said sceptically.

  ‘It would certainly have fitted into any fictional version. Not to mention the sex, snobbery and violence; the murder, mystery and romance, with a touch of the supernatural, and The Curse of the Mummy.’

  But Tamara knew that it was not, in fact, the beckoning finger of a mummified ghost that had drawn these people together. It was the appeal of Giles Needham himself. His series of programmes had appeared on British television during an especially nasty patch of winter weather. The tropical landscapes before which he appeared were attraction enough without the need to postulate supernatural influences on those who vowed to be somewhere sunny this time next year. All the travel companies that offered warm winter holidays increased their profits that season.

  It seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that the party on the Camisis tour had been collected together by no more irresistible force than chance. At the time they made their bookings, ‘Egypt was in the air’.

  Giles Needham was not the only leader of this fashion. Even before he joined other scholars unexpectedly bounced into notoriety by a television appearance, fashion magazines had been sending undernourished girls to pose in foolish garments on camels beside pyramids; boutiques were selling clothes on which the mask of Tutankhamun stared, distorted by the curved flesh beneath; and the best-selling board game of the season had been based on hieroglyphics.

  Not even his most envious colleagues could have accused Giles Needham of jumping on a bandwagon. He had already directed three seasons of excavation at Qasr Samaan and had published numerous articles about Egyptology. It was pure fluke that the place of work were he was filmed with his classic profile silhouetted against a vermilion sunset should have seemed like paradise to so many people.

  ‘I was pretty keen on the idea myself,’ Tamara recalled. She had not been immune to the charm that enthralled so many gawpers on successive winter Wednesdays.

  ‘I’, said Tom Black, ‘would have been pretty keen to go on any excursion accompanied by Max Solomon.’

  Tamara said, ‘I can’t help feeling that reading his journal is . . . I don’t know what. A privilege. A sacrilege.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ Mr Black said, ‘I have no such inhibitions. I found it a fascinating document. It only seems a pity that it broke off so abruptly. You could have used this man’s perceptions.’

  ‘But he stopped perceiving anything after Vanessa died. He turned entirely in upon himself.’

  ‘Up to that point, he was a camera.’

  ‘As, until then, he had been for the whole of his life.’

  Chapter Two

  From Max Solomon’s Diary: February 1.

  Osmond of Camisis Tours greets the members of my party as they arrive at Heathrow. They are wary and peer at other travellers’ luggage labels to see what company they have let themselves in for during the next three weeks. I am apprehensive too. A courier’s journey can be hell or heaven depending on his charges’ attributes.

  I lurk in the bookstall. Like everyone else in the departure lounge, I see Vanessa Papillon. She sweeps by with an undirected smile. She is not only recognisable, but in some way more alive than anyone else. In her wake other women take out their compacts or glance at themselves in reflective surfaces.

  I read the front pages of all the daily papers. They blazon the disappearance of Princess Mary. A small paragraph in Private Eye last week hinted at the girl’s absence without leave from her college. It seems that the fact, if not the imputed motive, is true. Princess Mary has been kidnapped from the holiday cottage of the girl friend with whom she was staying.

  The girl is not important in politics or ceremony. She is a long way from the throne. But she has attracted attention all his life. Now her abduction has become an affair of state. Her personality and appearance are discussed as though she were a film starlet. Old tales are repeated and new ones are invented (or so I suppose) of her wilfulness, arrogance and determination to get her own way. I think the implication is that she has brought her fate upon herself.

  Osmond of Camisis joins me in my discreet corner. With him is our lecturer. It is not Professor Thomas. A family emergency has forced him to back out at the last minute.
Dr Hoyland has stepped into the breach, Osmond says. She is small and brightly coloured, I think by nature not art. She must be older than she looks. She treats me respectfully, but we rapidly form the usual alliance against the rest of the group. It is the paid against the paying passengers, us against them.

  I ask if all of them have turned up. Osmond has ticked everyone off. ‘Dr Macmillan is in the loo,’ Tamara Hoyland says. ‘I read the name on her luggage label.’

  Osmond goes off to charm the others. Tamara Hoyland and I lurk behind the racks of paperbacks. From the front page of each newspaper the same face stares up: Princess Mary. The most recent picture was taken at an undergraduate dance. She has untidy hair half across her face and her eyes are screwed up against the flashlight. Her dress is slipping from her large breasts and she holds it up with one hand.

  Where is she now?

  What would I do if it were my Jonty?

  I turn the page of the paper I have bought, and expose a photograph of starving children in the Sudan. Brutalised by habit, I am less affected by it.

  I do not introduce myself to my party until we are in the aeroplane and have had lunch. I do not eat much. I cannot dispel a certain horror at the Daedalian hubris of modern travel.

  They have chosen seats in widely separated rows of our aeroplane. Dr Macmillan, who is on her own, is at the back, where she chain-smokes. Vanessa Papillon and her companion, who is, it seems, a poet and has greeted me as a colleague, have paid a supplement to travel first class. Mr and Miss Benson, with Mr Bloom, have won the row of seats by the emergency exit, and sit in greater comfort than I do.

  I observe the new lecturer. She has a sheaf of papers on which I recognise the Camisis monogram. I have seen the instructions that Osmond gives his scholars. He advises on clothes (casual) and medicines (numerous) as well as the standard of the lectures (popular) and the nature of the response to queries from the paying passengers, which must be polite at all times and in all circumstances. The duration of each talk is specified. Five minutes at Esna, ten at Edfu.