Death Beyond the Nile (Tamara Hoyland Book 5) Page 3

  ‘Nothing you say could change my masters’ minds,’ he told her.

  ‘And you can’t change mine,’ Janet said.

  ‘I, however, have the law on my side.’

  ‘I have never signed the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘It is the law none the less. It is equally applicable to those who are ignorant of it and to those who have admitted that they understand its provisions.’

  ‘If I accept the risk of being prosecuted you could never stop me publishing,’ Janet said.

  ‘I could. Easily.’

  ‘Abroad?’

  ‘Even abroad. Unless you become a traitor. Not a pretty thought.’

  Janet said that she would think about it. She was not left in much peace to do so. The Managing Director was as adamant as the civil servant.

  ‘The firm would rather you didn’t publish anyway. We ought to get a government contract that will be worth far more than we can make on the open market.’

  ‘But think of the good it could do,’ Janet pleaded.

  ‘Think of the harm it could do. You hadn’t considered that.’

  ‘I have. And I don’t believe it,’ Janet said.

  ‘You get the results. It’s my job to decide how to apply them.’ The Managing Director thought of his clever young research workers as, in a way, his children. It was for him to guard them against a predatory world.

  ‘I don’t think I can just leave it like that,’ Janet said.

  One had occasionally to be firm with children for their own good. He said, ‘I must remind you that all lab results belong to the firm. Read your contract.’

  ‘That is fair enough when it is a commercial matter. But this is an advancement of knowledge. It is a scientist’s duty—’

  ‘Don’t say anything you will regret. Go home and sleep on it.’ He patted Janet’s head, enjoying the sensation of her springy cushion of hair.

  She went, not home, but to a travel agency, where she specified the date and the tour she wanted and did not seem to care that it cost nearly twice as much as any other because so few other people would be on it, and because it would take them where none of the others could. She paid for the trip by credit card and left Cambridge after telling, not asking, her employer, on February 3.

  Chapter Four

  February 4

  The faces sort themselves into names and the names into personalities. So far they are relatively untroublesome. Miss Benson has lost her passport twice. Her brother cannot bear people who lose things. These groups always include the same mixture of types. Vanessa Papillon is the prima donna who knows that the other members of the party are gratified to get to know her. There is the passenger who thinks he is slumming—Mr Benson—and those, of whom there are several, who think themselves lucky to be here and (alas) lucky to be here with me. Soon one of them will start the conversation about the underpayment of serious writers.

  One of them does.

  We also have among us the inevitable know-all. Timothy Knipe, our bearded poet, wishes us to understand how much he could tell us about Egyptology, if he would.

  And, as usual, there are the foreign travellers determined to keep in touch with home. They oblige us to hear the BBC news broadcasts. Princess Mary is still missing. A ransom demand has been received. It is in the girl’s own handwriting. Three plane-loads of food and medical supplies must be sent to famine victims in the Sudan before the royal hostage is released.

  *

  We have seen the sights of Cairo and Giza, marvelled at the Pyramids and been disappointed by the Sphinx. We have set sail southwards. At dinner I am at a table with a group who perform the inevitable rite of comparing their medicaments. Two of the party are already laid low with diarrhoea. Everyone has brought an armoury of prophylactics and treatments. The doctor among us, whose wife tells us that he brought a fully stocked medical bag, is one of those already prostrated, conveniently early since he should be well enough by the time others fall ill to treat them.

  Numerous postcards have been bought and written. They are put in an open box for posting. The inquisitive flick through to see who has written to whom. ‘No secrets among friends,’ Lady Gentle says.

  Tentative friendships and alliances are being formed. Several of the men are clearly attracted by our lecturer, and no wonder. None dares to be tempted by our butterfly, ditto. Mr Bloom seems to be making up to Dr Macmillan. As they are two of those who have paid for the optional excursion into Lake Nasser to see the excavations at Qasr Samaan, he will have a chance to press his suit. I am glad that Osmond agreed that I could join that trip. Only eight of us are to go. The others will stay in the hotel at Aswan, jollity enforced upon them by our Egyptian guide, as it was by Pai Lee on the Yangtse, Dolores in Peru and the holiday-job Penny in Bali.

  *

  ‘The jollity at that stage was more like a London cocktail party than anything enforced by some package-tour cheer leader,’ Tamara said. ‘Vanessa Papillon was a great one for a kind of flirtatious needling. The domestic version of what she did on her programme, I suppose. Somehow she knew what people were about—I’ve no idea how she discovered, though she had had more time for her preparatory research of course than I did. And of course it was being perceptive and witty that made her so successful. The unpleasantness was a by-product.’

  ‘You found her unpleasant?’

  ‘Uncomfortable. For example, she had heard of me—not as an archaeologist either. She said that some colleagues had mentioned meeting me on Forway. And she knew about Ian.’ The island that had been the home of Tamara’s dead lover had been the scene of her first assignment for Department E. Vanessa Papillon should have known of neither. ‘And she’d say things about writers and being published, pinpricks of malice, you know? Because it was such a long time since Max Solomon had written anything and of course Timothy Knipe hardly ever got into print at all. It all made for a certain tension on board.’

  ‘Max Solomon doesn’t seem to have noticed it,’ Mr Black pointed out.

  *

  February 5.

  We are cruising serenely up the Nile. Everything is going well. We are to leave the ship at dawn tomorrow to see Dendera before the crowds.

  *

  Tamara said, ‘Max Solomon was so sweet. He wandered round looking benevolent. Everyone said that he made the atmosphere of the journey pleasant. I heard people composing the letters they meant to write in his praise to Camisis. But he was not much better than I was at keeping track of his flock. At Dendera we lost Janet Macmillan.’

  The Camisis bus drew up at the entrance of the temple of Dendera before the sun was high or the air was warm, and before there were any other vehicles in the large park. Sayeed, the Egyptian guide, had told Tamara that at Dendera it was for him to explain everything. Union rules forbade foreign lecturers to speak on the site. Tamara took the opportunity to peel off from the group. She found that the custodians had not arrived at the temple. The lights were not turned on. She wandered around in the semi-darkness, going alone into small chambers and up shadowed stairways. Bats flew past her head, and lizards skittered away from her feet. She dimly discerned through small light-shafts, or in the gleam of her torch, carvings and bas reliefs, and silence, emptiness and mystery. It was awesome. She would not have been surprised to hear the voices of the gods themselves rebuking her trespass.

  She found a shallow flight of steps, so worn as to have almost become a ramp, that led to the roof, a flat rectangle, bounded by a low parapet on which earlier visitors had carved graffiti long enough ago for them to be not shocking, but poignant, a pathetic bid for immortality. Who had James Mangles and Charles Irby been, visitors of May 1817, who John Gordon or Ignatius Palme? When they saw Dendera its high chambers and columns were muffled by dunes of sand. Now, looking down from this roof one saw, far below, the passengers from the Camisis ship, still obediently concentrating on what Sayeed was telling them; the remains of a Coptic church, the mud brick fortifications, the sacred lake now filled with rustling
bosky palm trees—and with a red-haired woman, almost hidden between two flame trees, talking to a robed Arab and at this moment handing something to him.

  Tamara ran. She tore across the roof and down those smooth stairs, through the chambers, lit now each with its own bulb, all mystery banished, dodging the attendants, out onto the dusty forecourt and towards the only trees within miles. But Janet Macmillan was no longer among them. A man wearing a brown galabieh and head-dress was crouched there, and rose at Tamara’s approach ready to conduct her around. He did not understand, or would not answer, when she asked about the other lady. Walking casually Tamara rejoined the rest of the party. Janet Macmillan was not in it. As far as she could tell, everybody else was.

  Tamara edged close to Max Solomon. ‘Have you seen Dr Macmillan?’

  ‘Isn’t she with us? I believe she came from the boat.’

  ‘I know she did, because she borrowed my sun cream. I really want it now but I can’t see her.’

  ‘I wish I could lend you some but I don’t use it.’

  ‘I’ll go and see whether she left it in the bus.’

  A few other buses and cars had parked outside the temple now. Vendors were setting up their stalls of cottons and leather goods. Tamara brushed aside offers of mummy beads, guided tours or small straw dolls.

  There was no sign of Janet Macmillan here. Tamara used her smattering of Arabic and the Camisis bus driver’s smattering of English to discover that he had seen none of his party since they entered the temple compound. She doubted whether he would recognise any.

  What on earth should she do now? She was damned if she would reproach herself. The idea was risible that she could stick like a limpet to any single passenger for the hundreds of miles of cruise, through the numerous sites they went to see, in a strange country where she had no official standing and whose language she hardly spoke.

  Tamara had been half-hearted from the outset of this assignment and had accepted it more because she wanted to see Egypt than because she thought it was worth doing. If the authorities were so determined to prevent Janet Macmillan from passing on the details of her invention they should have persuaded her by rational argument. The woman was hardly a fool, after all, and there was no reason to think that she was a traitor. What was more, if she was convinced that the scientific world had the right to know of her discovery, whatever it was, and that humanity would benefit from it, she was as likely to be right as the baboons who, in Tamara’s experience, staffed the ministries where such assessments were made.

  Tamara was just deciding to quit when she saw a gleam of orange behind the temple parapet. Janet Macmillan’s startling hair brought a sense of relief for her watcher, who had almost persuaded herself that she did not give a damn. She pulled her tiny binoculars from the breast pocket of her denim shirt. Yes, it was Janet. She was talking, seriously and apparently not unhappily, to Timothy Knipe. He held out his hand. She shook her head and stepped back, out of sight; it looked as though Tim was about to follow her when Vanessa Papillon appeared beside him. She stood magnificently at the edge of the roof. If the ancients had not placed a woman’s statue there, they should have done. Tamara snapped a quick photograph, though she would have had time for others. Vanessa must have known quite well what she would look like standing in that prominent position, and from it must have seen that not only the main group of her own party but many other visitors were by now gazing at her. Happily, she posed.

  *

  February 6, Luxor.

  Another invariable aspect of these journeys is that one member of the party will lose something and suspect theft. Usually it is an item of electronic hardware. Our doctor, recovered from his stomach upset, is convinced that his medical bag has been interfered with. I offer to inform the tourist police, at which he changes his mind. ‘Perhaps I was delirious when I was ill,’ he says. ‘Or maybe someone was desperate for a sleeping pill. It doesn’t matter.’ There is a general feeling of unease at the thought of the local police or civic authorities. The passengers tell each other horror stories of people who have been flung into foreign gaols without trial for minimal driving offences or on unfounded suspicion of drug dealing. Nobody wants to get involved with officialdom.

  Before dinner Sayeed, our Egyptian guide, delivers a severe lecture about the smuggling of antiquities. It is his patriotic duty to make sure that no part of the local heritage, no matter how insignificant, is removed by a greedy tourist. In any case, he says, anything vendors offer them will be faked.

  Vanessa Papillon has done a programme about fakes. She speaks of them knowledgeably, and of the art market. ‘Nothing easier than to fake the rather inferior antiques and pictures that sell so well these days,’ she says. ‘There’s money in the Newlyn School, and Victorian genre pictures. Not to mention Egyptian antiquities. Isn’t that right, John?’

  Not as much money as he would like, Mr Benson says. He quite clearly cannot bear people who claim to know as much as he does about his own subject.

  ‘Oh yes I forgot, you’re an art dealer, aren’t you?’ the poet says, and Mr Benson mutters that he cannot bear people who ask what one does.

  Vanessa says that Mr Benson deals in moderately modern pictures and moderately ancient antiques. It is remarkable to me how much she has already found out about us all. Journalistic training, no doubt.

  *

  Tamara said, ‘The dossier you had organised for me was quite imaginative about the Bensons, and rather inadequate about Hugo Bloom. There was nothing that explained why those two always behaved as though they were doing him a favour by associating with him.’

  ‘You liked him?’

  ‘He was highly intelligent. Very successful—even I had heard of Blooms of Belfast, and you know how ignorant I am about business. He’d been in Egypt before, as a soldier doing his national service, stationed in the canal zone. He said he was so ashamed to remember how he and his mates had treated the natives that he had to make up for it this time. He still had some phrases of Arabic, and of course the attendants on the boat were charmed. Not many of the hordes of tourists can say a single word. And so many of them think the empire never ended. The Bensons behaved like old India hands, and whenever Hugo Bloom did the opposite they looked down their horse-like noses at him.’

  ‘My dear Tamara. What uncharacteristic zeal. And so unprofessional.’

  ‘Well, if you had met them you’d know what I mean. So would whoever it was that you sent snooping around their place. Plenty of dirt to pick up there, in every sense of the word.’

  *

  Regular weekend parties were held at Fernley. Several of the paying guests had heard Hugo Bloom mention his snap decision to seek the Egyptian sunshine.

  Everyone in the room (all of them ostensibly sketching or doing their embroidery with unbroken concentration) expected one of John Benson’s unpredictable anathemas. ‘I cannot bear women with streaked hair,’ he would announce, or ‘giant pandas,’ or ‘people who read the Financial Times.’ He never gave reasons or discussed his prejudices but when the prohibition issued in his high, refined drawl, it was immutable. Listeners would look at his and his sister’s faces, alike in angles and in attitude, and know that whatever was named would henceforth be banned from Fernley; and because the Bensons were so special, so original, so perfect a survival from a world where taste and culture reigned, of which the Weekend Book and the Society of Italic Handwriting, the Omega workshops and the Sesame Club were symbols, because theirs was a world in which the carefully chosen details of daily life all added up to, quite simply, civilisation, their peculiarities were all acceptable.

  Hugo Bloom had read every published word about the lives of the Bloomsbury group. He said that he cherished a vision of the good life led by the Woolfs at Rodmell and the Bells at Charleston. He thought that Fernley provided the closest contemporary approach and was humbly grateful that he could participate in it. He was both a benefactor (for his presents went far beyond mere politeness) and a customer.

 
John Benson dealt in small antiques (which he called bibelots) and Victorian genre paintings; a series of them temporarily adorned Fernley and were the focus of John’s lectures to the paying guests.

  When Hugo got back from his holiday he wanted to bring some American friends who might be in a position to do John a bit of good. John Benson’s lip curled at the expression. ‘Holiday? Are you going away?’ he said.

  Hugo Bloom was going to Egypt. He had retained fond memories of the place from his army days. (‘I cannot bear people who talk about their military prowess,’ John Benson sometimes said.)

  ‘It will be difficult to appreciate the antiquities without your guidance,’ Hugo complained.

  ‘But they provide specialist lecturers,’ Ann said, finding the small print in the glossy brochures Hugo had brought with him.

  All the tour operators offered instruction for holiday-makers from Professor this or Doctor that. ‘One wonders whether there are any dons left in our universities. The archaeology departments will be denuded,’ John Benson said.

  ‘This one looks lovely,’ Ann said, pulling her knitted jacket more closely round her. She held out a picture of a cruise liner with a swimming pool on the top deck surrounded by sun worshippers on reclining chairs.

  ‘I could not bear the thought of a gin palace on the Nile,’ John exclaimed, his fastidious hands turning over the photographs of temples, pyramids, death masks and tourists on camels.

  ‘I wonder what made you think of Egypt, Hugo? Why not China? Porcelain . . . silk . . . the terracotta army . . .’ Ann rose to wipe some dangling cobwebs from a cornice. Hugo, who had arrived unexpectedly, had found everyone gathered in what was once the servants’ hall where they could huddle over a small cast-iron stove. The drawing room was decorated, though not heated, by a polished steel basket grate. Hugo had not offered to install central heating. The Bensons wished he would.

  ‘Hieroglyphics and temples. A little monotonous perhaps,’ John Benson remarked.

  ‘Not if we see things other tourists never get to.’