Christmas on the Nile
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CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE
A SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERY
THE SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERIES
The Last Moriarty
The Wilhelm Conspiracy
Remember, Remember
The Crown Jewel Mystery
The Jubilee Problem
Death at the Diogenes Club
The Return of the Ripper
Die Again, Mr. Holmes
Watson on the Orient Express
THE SHERLOCK AND LUCY SHORT STORIES
Flynn’s Christmas
The Clown on the High Wire
The Cobra in the Monkey Cage
A Fancy-Dress Death
The Sons of Helios
The Vanishing Medium
Christmas at Baskerville Hall
Kidnapped at the Tower
Five Pink Ladies
The Solitary Witness
The Body in the Bookseller’s
The Curse of Cleopatra’s Needle
The Coded Blue Envelope
Christmas on the Nile
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CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE
A SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERY
BY ANNA ELLIOTT AND CHARLES VELEY
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2020 by Charles Veley and Anna Elliott. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Sherlock and Lucy series website: http://sherlockandlucy.com
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: LUCY
CHAPTER 2: ZOE
CHAPTER 3: FLYNN
CHAPTER 4: ZOE
CHAPTER 5: ZOE
CHAPTER 6: ZOE
CHAPTER 7: WATSON
CHAPTER 8: WATSON
CHAPTER 9: FLYNN
CHAPTER 10: LUCY
CHAPTER 11: FLYNN
CHAPTER 12: WATSON
CHAPTER 13: LUCY
CHAPTER 14: FLYNN
CHAPTER 15: ZOE
CHAPTER 16: FLYNN
CHAPTER 17: ZOE
CHAPTER 18: FLYNN
CHAPTER 19: ZOE
CHAPTER 20: FLYNN
CHAPTER 21: WATSON
CHAPTER 22: FLYNN
CHAPTER 23: FLYNN
CHAPTER 24: ZOE
CHAPTER 25: FLYNN
CHAPTER 26: ZOE
CHAPTER 27: FLYNN
CHAPTER 28: ZOE
CHAPTER 29: FLYNN
CHAPTER 30: ZOE
CHAPTER 31: WATSON
CHAPTER 32: ZOE
CHAPTER 33: WATSON
CHAPTER 34: WATSON
CHAPTER 35: WATSON
CHAPTER 36: WATSON
HISTORICAL NOTES
A NOTE TO READERS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHAPTER 1: LUCY
Piccadilly Circus was always crowded: aristocratic chariots and barouches vied for space on the road with shabby growlers and double-decker omnibuses blazoned with advertisements for Lipton Teas. And now, with Christmas only a few weeks away, the streets surrounding the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain at the centre of the circus were even more crammed with traffic than usual.
Pedestrians hurried to and fro, laden with parcels as they rushed to buy the toys and ladies’ watches and new handkerchiefs prominently displayed with boughs of holly in the shop windows. A band of French horns, flutes, oboes, and trombones had gathered on the street corner nearest the Geological Museum and were working their way doggedly through Handel’s Messiah, despite the din of street noise. A grocer’s cart had tipped over in the road, creating a snarl of carriages and curricles whose drivers—with a good many shouted oaths and insults—were trying to find a path around the blockage.
The helmeted policeman who was valiantly struggling to direct the traffic looked as though he would just as soon have given up in disgust.
Watson glanced out through the rear window of our own vehicle.
“Do you think we were followed?”
“If we were, our followers deserve an award for sheer persistence, if nothing else.”
We had traversed what felt like a circuit around the whole of the city in an effort to shake off any pursuit, changed carriages more than once, and were now parked just outside the sham-antique gate of St. James’s Church. I had been keeping a watch on both the cabs and the pedestrians who passed us by, but I hadn’t been able to spot anyone taking more than a passing interest in our presence.
I couldn’t dispel the hard knot of uneasiness inside me, though, and the fog wasn’t helping. Far from offering a white Christmas, London seemed determined that its citizens would spend all of December battling the thick pea-soupers for which the city was famed. Bilious curls of yellow-green mist clung to the rooftops and drifted sullenly along the muddied streets, growing thicker by the minute.
“We’ll be lucky to see our hands in front of our faces in another hour,” Watson muttered.
Watson was usually an unshakable source of steady dependability and calm, but now he shifted in his seat, a deep furrow etching his brows.
“It will be all right,” I said. I spoke as much to myself as I did to Watson. “Holmes has thought all of this through.”
Watson, despite appearing somewhat gullible in his own written accounts of Holmes’s cases, was not at all an easy man to deceive. The look he gave me now said that he was no more convinced than I was myself.
“We have had this identical conversation more than once, at the outset of one of Holmes’s plans.”
“And all of those have come right in the end.”
Although a nasty voice in the back of my mind commented that everyone’s luck had to run out eventually, and that fortune had decidedly not been on our side during the past several days.
Watson opened his mouth—likely to point that fact out—then stopped, stiffening.
A tall man dressed in a hound’s-tooth cloak and deerstalker cap had just appeared through the swirling fog and was making his way towards us, coming from the direction of Hyde Park.
The man looked neither to the right nor the left, but simply plunged headlong into the oncoming traffic. The driver of one hansom cab hauled on the reins of his horse with one hand and shook the other, fist upraised, cursing the tall man soundly.
And behind the hansom, another carriage driver lost control of his animal altogether. The horse reared with a frightened whinny, then bolted, the carriage swayed dangerously—and somehow, in the confusion, the man in the deerstalker was knocked to the ground and flung under the rolling carriage wheels.
Watson sucked in a quick breath, and even I felt my pulse skitter to a momentary halt as a crowd gathered around the fallen man.
The policeman was first to bend down beside him, dragging him out of the muddied road. We were near enough that I could near the suggestions shouted out by the various onlookers.
“Get ’im to St. George’s!”
“No, don’t move ’im, ’e might have sommat bust up inside!”
The runaway horse and carriage were gone, vanished into the thickening fog that shrouded Shaftesbury Avenue.
“Someone fetch a doctor!” one of the onlookers shouted out.
“There’s no need.” The policema
n straightened up from where he’d been standing over the fallen man’s body. “Poor chap’s dead.”
There was a collective gasp, and then one of the crowd—a young man in his thirties with dark brown skin and a tan suit—pushed his way to the front.
“I am a doctor.” He spoke English clearly, but with a marked accent. “Perhaps I might be able to help. It may be that the man has only been knocked unconscious.”
The policeman put his hand out to stop the newcomer. “Sorry, sir, but I can’t let you—”
The young man ignored him, crouching down beside the tall man’s body and reaching for one limp wrist.
Watson drew in another sharp breath and made an instinctive movement towards the door of our vehicle.
“No.” I held his arm. “There’s nothing we can do.” Although I still had to dig my nails into my palms to quell the urge to go out there.
The man in the tan suit was now standing up. “You are correct. He has no pulse.”
“I see there’s an ambulance from St. George’s Hospital right over there.” The police constable gestured. “If someone will give me a hand, we can see he’s taken to the morgue.”
The dark-skinned young man had melted away, disappearing into the crowd, but a pair of beefy-looking tradesmen from amongst the rest of the onlookers stepped forward, and together they carried the fallen man.
I straightened my nurse’s uniform, and Watson—dressed in the uniform of a hospital orderly—sat up in his seat as the rear doors of our vehicle were flung open and the tall man’s body was hefted inside.
The young constable who had stood directing traffic got in beside him, and the doors swung closed again in the face of the remaining gawkers outside. Watson eased himself out by way of the side door, and climbed quickly into the driver’s seat.
With a flick of the reins, Watson started the four-wheeled ambulance carriage rolling at a rapid clip.
We travelled several bone-rattling miles, heading West over the rough cobblestones and through a dozen or more twists and turns—and then the formerly dead man cleared his throat and sat up with a grimace.
“Sherlock Holmes is dead; long live Sherlock Holmes.” He turned to Jack, who had taken off his police constable’s helmet and was watching out the rear window.
“Were we followed?”
Jack shook his head. “Not a sign of anyone. Although Farooq tried to follow for a block or two. If we’re assuming that was Farooq?”
“Oh, I think so.” I recalled the smooth, darkly handsome face of the man who had identified himself as a doctor.
Farooq led a group of young radical Egyptian students who called themselves the Sons of Ra, and were committed to winning independence for Egypt by any means possible, the more violent and bloody the better. Or rather, Farooq purported to lead them. Holmes’s investigations had shown that Farooq was in point of fact merely a paid mercenary, a puppet who danced on the strings of a far larger—and far more ruthless and deadly—organisation than the Sons of Ra.
“I suppose we’re lucky that Farooq is more proficient at extortion and inciting violence than he is at surveillance,” I said.
“Indeed,” Holmes agreed.
Watson had drawn the carriage to a halt, and now turned back to look at us over the driver’s seat.
“That was a fraught moment, Holmes,” he said, “when the fellow insisted on checking for your pulse.”
Holmes made a dismissive gesture. “I must credit our enemies with having made themselves familiar with my past history. And anyone who has fabricated reports of his own death as frequently as I have done must expect yet another fatal accident to be met with some skepticism. I therefore took the precaution of applying a tight rubber tourniquet to my arm.” He rolled up his sleeve, releasing the rubber band with a grimace. “Uncomfortable, but effective in suppressing the pulse in one’s wrist. Now.” He looked around us. “Watson, if you would be so good as to take the next left-hand turn? That will bring us to the bolt hole I have selected for today’s purposes.”
The safe houses, or bolt holes, which Holmes maintained across London were many and ranged from dank, filthy cellar rooms in East End tenement houses to hidden apartments in the most luxurious hotels the city could provide.
We had now passed into the suburb of Chiswick, a waterside district far enough from the centre of London that it still retained a hint of a rural flavour. To my surprise, the bolt hole Holmes had chosen for today’s venture appeared to be a quaint half-timbered cottage with a thatched roof and a square of neat garden in the front, the whole surrounded by a picket fence.
If the goal was to elude and confound our enemies, we were likely to be successful. No one who knew the first thing about Sherlock Holmes would dream of looking for him in the midst of so much snug domesticity.
“Ah, Selim has already arrived, I see.” Holmes’s gaze lighted on the horse and the cart—the same ones that had so nearly run him down—which were now tethered outside the cottage’s front gate.
“He played his part quite well, I thought,” Watson said.
Holmes swung himself down through the ambulance’s rear doors. “Let us hope that our friend Farooq found his performance equally convincing.”
“And that Farooq has not noticed Flynn,” Lucy said.
Selim must have been waiting and watching for our arrival, because the instant Holmes alighted, the door to the cottage opened and a young man emerged.
Selim was Egyptian by birth, a handsome fellow with a head of curling, closely cropped dark hair and long-lashed dark eyes. As he came to meet Holmes now, though, I saw how strained he looked, his features tight with anxiety and his gaze shadowed.
Months ago, Selim had agreed to serve as our informant on the activities of the Sons of Ra. And a week ago, he had come to us with the unwelcome news that Farooq had begun to question his loyalties. His sister, Safiya, had been taken hostage, and Selim had been given the assignment of killing Sherlock Holmes in such a way that it could not be brought home to the Sons. Otherwise, Safiya would die.
Jack jumped down from the carriage after Holmes, then turned to offer me a hand. He had been watching me during the drive, and now gave me a searching look. “Worrying about your mother?”
“No—well, of course I am.” I was worried about my mother. A week ago, she and Safiya had been kidnapped and taken out of England by Lord Sonnebourne, the man who in reality gave the orders that controlled both Farooq and the Sons of Ra. The thought of where she was now and what she might be enduring was an ever-present lump of dread in my mind.
“Lord Lansdowne’s got all the available ships in the British Navy out looking for them,” Jack said.
“I know.”
As far as we’d been able to determine, my mother and Safiya had been spirited away from London on a private yacht belonging to Mr. Ashe, the criminal bank manager who had been arrested at the close of our last case, but had vanished after being freed on bail.
The yacht must either have docked at some small coastal town, to be hastily re-named and repainted, or else they had soon changed ships. Because all the considerable resources of Lord Lansdowne—England’s Secretary of State for War—had been unable to track them down.
“It’s not just finding her that worries me.” I looked over to where Holmes and Selim were now speaking together. “I’m afraid of the risks he might run.”
Both Watson and I had seen Holmes in this state before—and no one looking at him could miss the tension that vibrated through him like a constant electric current. The air inside the Baker Street flat was thick with tobacco fumes from all the pipes he had smoked, and if he’d had more than a handful of hours’ sleep since my mother had gone missing, I would be shocked. The sitting room floor was heaped even higher than usual with untidily-discarded newspapers, most of them opened to accounts of British activity in Egypt, and in particular, news of the great construction project British engineers had undertaken at the Nile port city of Aswan.
Holmes had been p
articularly interested in that enterprise, though he had not said what connection it may have had with the Sons of Ra. He had been reticent, as was his habit during a case, and barely touched any food in the past days. And today, he might easily have been actually trampled by the runaway horse.
“He’ll do whatever it takes,” Jack said. “He’s sure that Sonnebourne has something big and evil in the works.”
“And he blames himself,” I said quietly, “for not preventing my mother’s being taken captive.”
For that matter, I blamed myself, too. My mother was a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions, and she had wanted—no, insisted—on taking part in the investigation that had led to her kidnapping. But Holmes and I were experienced in the dangers involved in detective work, and my mother was not. I should have tried harder to persuade her not to run any risks.
As though reading my thoughts—which he probably had; Jack was every bit as skilled an observer as Holmes, and he knew me even better than my father did—Jack took my hand, joining our fingers together.
“The only one who’s responsible for this is the man who gave the order for your mother to be taken prisoner.”
“Lord Sonnebourne, in other words.”
I’m not afraid. Those had been my mother’s final words, in the hastily scribbled note to me that she had managed to hide for us to find. I haven’t the least doubt that the two of you will somehow find me.
Jack’s hand tightened around mine. “We’ll find her. And a few months from now, Sonnebourne will be just one more criminal we’ve put behind bars.”
I drew in a breath. “Then we’d better move on to the next stage in our plan.”
And hope that wherever she was, my mother was still able to face the dangers of her captivity unafraid.
CHAPTER 2: ZOE
It was raining in Brindisi. Not that Zoe was surprised. Torrential downpours had lashed their train carriage all the way through France. At the station in Nîmes, she overheard a passenger on the platform comment with morose satisfaction to one of his fellow travellers that it had been raining without stop for an entire month.