Shadows on the Nile

by Kate Furnivall

  The brown bundle beside them shivered.

  ‘I don’t trust Pa.’ Tim lowered his voice. ‘All it would take is an extra syringe in the hands of Dr Churchward. No questions asked.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Tim, Pa wouldn’t do such a terrible thing.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he? How well do you know him now?’

  Jessie’s stomach churned. ‘Not well.’ She studied the black leather briefcase at Tim’s feet. It had Dr Scott’s initials on it in brass lettering. ‘You told me how you found the address of the clinic in Pa’s safe, but why didn’t Dr Churchward tell Pa about your visits?’

  Tim laughed without humour and prodded at a sand beetle that bumped into his boot. ‘That’s easy. The first couple of tiµmes I visited Georgie, Churchward was on holiday in Germany, so he had no idea that his staff had let me in. When he returned, he learned how much better Georgie was behaving,’ he patted the brown lump between them. ‘Whenever Georgie got out of hand, the attendants threatened to stop my visits, and that kept him under control. So Churchward decided to let the visits continue. Unknown to me, I was their secret weapon. It made life easier for Churchward, but he knew Pa would put a stop to it if he was informed, so he kept it secret. Probably he thought I would soon give up anyway.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not? It couldn’t have been easy for a young boy.’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  A camel walked past, kicking up sand in its wake, as men loaded the crates into the truck.

  ‘So why?’ Jessie urged gently.

  Tim hesitated. He glanced up at the hills and she knew he was thinking of Fareed somewhere out there, searching for them. Beside him lay Scott’s revolver and Jessie wanted to hurl it behind the rocks. It had done too much damage for one day.

  ‘I felt responsible. If our parents hadn’t found me, they might have kept Georgie.’

  Jessie shook her head. ‘That would never have happened.’

  ‘But also,’ he paused and thought about his choice of words, ‘I felt Georgie and I were, in an odd way, the same person. I stepped into his shoes, literally.’

  She stared at the blanket. ‘And into his pyjamas, I recall.’

  ‘Yes, into everything that was his. We even looked alike. And you loved him so much. I wanted you to love me like that.’

  ‘Oh Tim, I quickly learned to love you too.’

  ‘I couldn’t walk away from Georgie. It would have been like walking away from myself.’ He nodded at the blanket. ‘I love the blasted idiot.’

  ‘It’s obvious he loves you.’ Jessie felt a huge wrench in her chest. ‘I’m so happy he’s had you for company all those years that I wasn’t there. He wasn’t alone. But why didn’t you tell me? I could have …’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me. He didn’t want you to see him so … damaged.’

  ‘Oh, Georgie!’

  For a while neither spoke. A sudden gust of wind swirled sand into their faces and they covered their eyes. It made it easier to say what she had to say.

  ‘Tim, Anippe Kalim is here.’

  He swung to face her. ‘Anippe? In Luxor? Have you seen her?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve spoken to her.’

  ‘Here in Egypt. I can’t believe she came looking for me too. Did she …’

  ‘Tim, she’s with Fareed. She’s been working for him and his cause all along to get information from you.’

  His face looked as if she’d slapped him. It took on a fixed expression, as though something of importance had just been squeezed out of him.

  ‘I see,’ he said. Nothing more.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tim. Maybe when she knows you are not really working with Scott, she will …’

  He shook his head. ‘No. It all makes sense now. I was stupid to think there was a chance.’

  His gaze swept across the hills, as though he still hoped he might spot Anippe’s dark figure in the distance, but then he shook himself and looked away. He lowered his eyelids, almost closing his eyes in the way she recognised. It meant he had something to confess.

  ‘What is it, Tim?’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  She waited. She could feel an uneasy anger stirring inside her but she didn’t know exactly why or at whom.

  ‘I should have told you years ago,’ Tim said. ‘When I found the papers in the safe about the clinic where Georgie was kept, there were other papers too.’

  She sat forward. ‘What papers?’

  ‘My adoption papers.’

  ‘Oh, Tim, what did …?’

  ‘And Georgie’s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Georgie is also adopted.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her intently. ‘And yours.’

  Jessie leaned back against the truck. Closed her eyes. Her throat was tight, her mouth dry. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. It looks as if we were all part of an experiment. Blond, blue eyes, good bones and presumably good head measurements to fit the theories of human improvement and eugenics. All from different families, in case there were any mistakes.’

  He didn’t sound bitter. It amazed her that he didn’t sound bitter.

  ‘It explains a lot, Jessie,’ he said gently. ‘And when you think about it, it shows Pa has been generous in his care of Georgie all these years.’

  ‘Generous?’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Georgie is his son, adopted or not. You don’t put your son in a cage,’ she said fiercely.

  But he was right. It explained so much. The disappointment in her that she’d always seen on her father’s face but never understood. For the first time she realised that he had married the same template of a human being too, and she wondered if her mother felt the same crushing weight of his disappointment, never able to live up to the ideal.

  All of them adopted.

  It shifted something fundamental inside her and when she looked down at Tim, crouched so protectively next to the brown hump that was Georgie on the sand, she felt the connection between herself and her brothers deepen into something different, into something more binding. As though their roots had locked together. She understood them better, suddenly. She felt their weaknesses were her weaknesses and their strengths were her strengths. She would be much slower to pass judgement in future when …

  In future? What future?

  ‘Tim,’ she said urgently, ‘what’s the matter with me? I’ve been asking all the wrong questions. I should be giving you hell about this camp of yours. You, of all people, pillaging Egypt’s history.’ Her voice was rising in the still air. ‘I’d never have believed it of you. That’s why I came – to get you out of trouble because I believed in you. But what do I find? You’ve been organising the whole scheme with Dr Scott.’

  ‘Jessie, I—’

  ‘Tim, you wretch. You are a criminal.’

  The blanket flew across the sand as Georgie scrambled to his feet, his limbs jerking in all directions, his mouth alarming in its contortions.

  ‘He is not a criminal,’ he shouted.

  Tim was gratified by his unexpected champion, Jessie could see it in his face.

  ‘You tell her, Georgie!’

  Georgie swung towards her. ‘Tim is not a criminal because he is committing no crime.’

  ‘Look at those.’ She gestured angrily at the crates.

  ‘No, no, no. He’s working with the police.’

  ‘That’s right, Georgie boy,’ Tim hissed. ‘Shout it out loud, why don’t you? That way everyone can know.’

  52

  Georgie

  Egypt 1932

  I am a murderer.

  I watch the Tall Man – the one Jessie calls Monty – bury the dead body under the sand. Big hands on a big shovel. It is dead meat, nothing more. It isn’t the Fat Man now. His Ba – his soul – has flown to the underworld of Osiris and when I look at the flesh left behind, I feel nothing for it. But I hurt inside. I think his Ba has torn mine from my chest. Is that w
hat happens when you kill a person? You kill part of yourself as well and it can never come back to life. I walk around wrapped in my blanket to try to keep my Ba inside but I fear it is too late.

  You hurry me. You move fast. You talk loud.

  You speak with the Egyptians but I try not to listen because I do not want to know that you offer them double money or that one of Fareed’s men has been seen. I don’t know where and I don’t care. But you do. You care so much that you forget who I am. You flap me away with the same impatient hand that you use to flap away a fly that torments you, and it is Jessie who tells me you are the boss now and have much to do.

  I hear the truck driver say to the Tall Man, ‘Fareed kill Mister Tim quick, if he catch him.’

  Suddenly I am in a hurry too. I run around throwing anything I can pick up into the back of the truck until you tell me to stop. You throw my things back in the sand. It is Jessie who stays. She doesn’t leave me or shout at me. She is still and quiet and picks up my blanket when it falls off.

  ‘Don’t blame Tim,’ she says in the low voice that I remember from when we used to hide under the bed. ‘He has a lot on his mind.’

  He doesn’t have me on his mind.

  It is Jessie who makes a safe corner for me in the back of the truck when the crates are all roped in and it is Jessie who sits in it with me in the dark when the doors are shut. Just before the doors close completely, I see the desert reduced to a thin beige strip behind the truck and I breathe a sigh of relief. I prefer the desert that way, no wider than my hand, too small to hurt me any more.

  ‘Georgie,’ Jessie tells me, ‘I didn’t want you to leave when you were a child. I tried to find you.’

  But I don’t want to talk about it because the memory of that night turns my lungs inside out and I can’t breathe. Instead I say, ‘I liked Hatherley.’

  She laughs and says, ‘So did I.’

  She remembers the fish in the pond. She does not talk much, which I like, and while we wait for the engine to start, my mind drifts in the darkness through a room with green curtains and a proper bookcase and a cricket bat against the wall. You and the Tall Man are going to ride in the front with the driver and the guard and I know you will have guns on your lap, which makes me nervous. Only then does it occur to me that Jessie may be silent in the truck because she thinks I am going to kill her because I am a murderer.

  ‘Jessie,’ I say. I don’t know what to say next.

  Quietly she says, ‘Shall we name all the characters in The Adventure of the Creeping Man?’

  I smile. That’s easy.

  53

  Monty was angry. He kept one hand on the gun at his waist while his eyes scoured the rocky ridges ahead of where he stood, away from the truck. The heat and the dust shifted shapes, so that nothing was ever what you thought it was and that did strange things to the mind.

  He was angry about Jessie. He didn’t want her to ride in the back of the truck and it wasn’t just her arm he was worried about. He wasn’t happy that she was shut alone in there with that strange brother of hers, but she had insisted. Monty was impatient to be on the move, eager to whisk her out of this place just as fast as he could, but the driver was taking an age to top up the radiator water, and all the time the sun was growing hotter. At Monty’s elbow stood Timothy Kenton, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare as he kept alert for signs of movement.

  ‘Tim, is Georgie safe to be with?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He is violent.’

  Tim glanced at him quickly and considered what Monty was saying. ‘Don’t worry. He’d never hurt Jessie. He worships her.’

  Monty was not sure he believed him but now was not the time to argue the point. The relationship between the three siblings was clearly unusual and complex in a way that he didn’t totally understand, but his only aim now was to get Jessie to safety.

  ‘You should never have brought them out here,’ he said in a quiet undertone. ‘It wasn’t right.’

  Tim jerked round, eyes wide. ‘They’re family,’ he said fiercely. ‘I couldn’t abandon Georgie. Of course it wasn’t right to bring him here. Don’t you think I am well aware of that? It’s been hard for both of us but …’ He stopped and stared down at the desert sand on his boots for a long moment. ‘He’s with me,’ he continued softly, ‘and he’s alive. It’s the best I could give him. I had no other option.’

  ‘And Jessie? Why drag her out here? Why all the clues?’

  Tim stepped away from him, stiff-legged, like a dog preparing to defend its territory. ‘It was a risk, I know that. I love my sister and brother. To put them in danger is the last thing I would ever want to do, but I ran out of choices. I had to leave the Sherlock clues. I needed Jessie and I knew she wouldn’t let me down. We’re family – it’s that simple.’

  But he must have seen Monty’s frown and sensed his anger because he continued rapidly, ‘When Scott first asked me to take part in this scheme of his, I refused. But when I reported it to the museum’s directors they called in the police. It was the police who asked me to go along with it. They wanted to discover the whole network that Scott was using in Egypt for transport and the illegal export of the ancient treasures, not just to arrest Scott himself.’

  ‘So you said yes.’

  He nodded. ‘I couldn’t bear what Scott was doing.’

  ‘I sympathise with you there,’ Monty replied grimly.

  ‘So I went along with it, but Scott didn’t trust my change of heart. He drugged my drink at a séance to make sure that I complied, and insisted on bundling me out of the country quickly with no contact with anyone at all.’

  ‘Except Georgie.’

  ‘Georgie was my one condition.’

  ‘How did you manage to bring him here?’

  ‘On that Friday night after the séance I was in no fit state to travel, so Scott kept me under close guard, but the next day he had his men drive me to snatch Georgie from the clinic. After that, we set off for Egypt. The journey was a nightmare for poor Georgie.’ He shook his head at the memory of it and said again, ‘I couldn’t abandon him.’

  Monty was touched by the intensity of his statement: We’re family – it’s that simple. Part of him began to understand and he recognised in this young man’s passion for Egypt the same emotions he felt himself for Chamford.

  ‘So why the clues?’ he asked again, more warmly this time.

  ‘I didn’t trust Scott and I didn’t know how much I could rely on the Egyptian police. So Jessie was my lifeline. There was no one else who would come to get Georgie and myself out of trouble if things turned nasty with Scott. I knew she would come looking.’

  My lifeline.

  Tim turned to look at Monty, his face tense. ‘That’s why I told Scott about McPherson, Hatherley, Hosmer and Phelps when I woke and found myself at his place on the Saturday morning. I pretended that I needed to inform them that I was leaving. Made a great fuss about it, so that he wouldn’t forget their names in a hurry.’

  ‘Scott told us that it was at the séance that you mentioned them.’

  ‘Well, Scott was lying. He couldn’t very well tell you the truth, could he? But I knew that when Jessie tracked him down, he would be eager to know who this foursome was and would ask her. Then she’d work it out.’

  ‘All fictional.’

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t know that, and it gave Jessie the clue for the Nile.’

  They were clever, this pair.

  Monty heard the slam of the truck’s bonnet behind them and he said quickly, ‘The Egyptian policeman, Ahmed Rashid, contacted me, and asked if I had any idea where you were. He claimed he didn’t know.’

  Tim shrugged. ‘It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve got Scott’s briefcase now with all his contacts. I just hope Captain Rashid has put his men in place when I take this lot downriver to—’

  A bullet smacked into the windscreen of the truck.

  The attack came out of nowhere. Bullets spat into the sand and ricoch
eted with a high-pitched whine off rocks, sending the workmen racing for cover, but there was none. They cowered behind the camels. Monty dragged Tim under the truck, his heart kicking damn great holes in his ribs, where they lay flat on their stomachs behind the shelter of the wheels. Gun in hand, he sought out the attackers.

  A flash of black. He took precise aim. Pulled the trigger and heard a scream. Beside him Tim was firing off shots at random from Scott’s gun. Wasting bullets. It occurred to Monty that Tim had never been shot at before. Moving swiftly on his elbows and stomach, Monty shifted towards the back, determined to put a bullet smack in the middle of anyone who attempted to open the rear doors.

  ‘Save your bullets!’ he yelled at Tim.

  The wild firing ceased. The sudden silence was worse. It felt like the silence in the tombs, a silence that sapped your strength and seeped through your eyes and your ears, deadening your brain. He scanned the bleak horizon, as much of it as he could make out from under the truck, and waited.

  A thin eerie sound rose into the silence. It stopped his breath and made his skin crawl. It was as if the desert itself had cracked open and was screaming. But Tim, who had been so panicked by the bullets, showed no surprise at this.

  ‘Georgie!’ he roared. ‘Georgie, stop that noise!’

  Georgie.

  That noise was coming from Georgie? It didn’t even sound human. Monty glanced at the truck above him and thought of Jessie in the darkness up there with that noise. He banged his fist on the underside of the truck to let her know he was here.

  ‘Timothy Kenton!’ The voice echoed bleakly across the sands.

  Tim looked at Monty. ‘Fareed.’

  ‘Is that you, Fareed?’ he shouted out.

  ‘It is.’

  Another bullet cracked through the air and Monty caught sight of one of the bearded guards. He was huddled behind a kneeling camel and his rifle was firing at a fall of rocks over to the right of the truck, but at the sound of the sudden shot, the unearthly wailing grew louder and more piercing.