Herring on the Nile

by L. C. Tyler

  I’m not sure what I’d hoped she’d do. Breaking down and confessing that she was conspiring with Professor Campion to murder one of the passengers was perhaps a bit much to hope for.

  ‘No,’ was actually what she chose to say. But there was quite a lot of contempt packed into that one short word. She opened her book and resumed reading at the place she had marked.

  I had to concede that I had not been riveting company – leading questions fired at her in a staccato fashion, enlivened only by tacit accusations of mendacity. After a while she said she would go and get herself a coffee. She did not offer to get me one. She did not come back.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  We were likely to be playing this sort of game of musical chairs all the way to Luxor, but I’d hoped it would be a while before cruel fate landed me next to Herbie Proctor. Cruel fate had clearly decided that I’d avoided Herbie long enough.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually I do mind, Mr Proctor. There are plenty of other tables. Go and sit at one of those.’

  I’m normally quite good at making my views clear to authors, publishers, trick-or-treaters and the like; but I was obviously a bit out of practice with private detectives, because Proctor simply dumped himself in the chair, grinning crookedly, and stretched out his pale skinny legs. I noticed that they were covered with soft, almost white, hairs. They were the sort of legs that went well with long trousers. I wondered if the pink shorts were the only ones that he had. He would not have wasted money on a second pair without good reason.

  ‘Close shave this morning in that temple,’ he said. ‘If I’d been stood a couple of feet to the left, I wouldn’t be here now talking to you. You could say I bear a charmed life, Elsie.’

  He was right. I could. But I decided, under the circumstances, not to bother.

  ‘They can’t kill me that easy,’ he added, in case I didn’t know what a charmed life was.

  ‘Or Ethelred,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Him too, though obviously he wasn’t the target.’

  ‘You think the rock was aimed at you? You think it was the same people that you claim are after your client?’

  ‘That sounds the most likely explanation, doesn’t it? You see, anybody who wanted to kill a client of mine would have to get me out of the way first. That stands to reason. I thought nobody on board this boat except Ethelred – and you apparently – knew I was here to protect Raffles. The two things that I am really good at, Elsie, are client confidentiality and maintaining my cover. But when you’ve got something of a reputation as a private detective – well, people put two and two together. I obviously considered the possibility that the business this morning was due to a badly maintained roof – that’sthe problem with the ancient Egyptians, they just didn’t know anything about building – but on reflection I think I can safely say that somebody was trying to get at my client by putting me out of the picture.’

  So, Proctor not only thought that the rock was aimed at him, but seemed prepared to accept it as a well-judged compliment. Perhaps he felt that it was a good cause.

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill your client, Mr Proctor?’ I asked.

  ‘Like I said, powerful people make enemies, Elsie.’

  ‘Businessmen don’t habitually get rocks lobbed at them – in person or by proxy.’

  ‘You never can tell who might decide to bump you off. Could be a total stranger. Could be some left-wing nutter. Could be a member of your own family.’

  ‘Your own family? Hang on . . . Raffles . . . Didn’t somebody of that name murder his wife a while back? No, he must still be in prison.’

  ‘The jury found him not guilty, Elsie. He left the court without a stain on his character.’

  ‘In the strict technical sense I’m sure that’s true but, if that’s the man, he sounded a complete shit. Didn’t he have links with organized crime?’

  ‘The judge instructed the jury that any alleged links were irrelevant to the murder charge. And he still deserves the protection of the law . . . or me in this case.’

  ‘I’m sure you are exactly what he deserves,’ I said.

  Proctor smiled, as though I could not have paid him a greater compliment.

  Ten

  I was not sure what Annabelle was doing in Egypt, but the text message she had sent gave a hint as to how she currently felt about me. I had a hunch that it would be best to stay out of her way for a bit.

  I did however want to talk to Elsie’s two ‘policemen’ and see why they had chosen to pull her leg so cruelly. From what I had seen of them so far, there seemed little to justify either Elsie’s expectations or Purbright’s concerns.

  They proved to be in the saloon, drinking Egyptian coffee and watching the river from their comfortable, well-upholstered seats. I had not really talked to them properly up to that point, so we introduced ourselves. Elsie had referred to them almost interchangeably as Mahmoud and Majid as if, for all practical purposes, they were slightly differently branded versions of the same product. This was not entirely unfair. They were both, as far as I could judge, in their mid-thirties, both dressed in long-sleeved shirts with open collars, both clean-shaven. Quite ordinary-looking. Mahmoud was the taller, darker and perhaps somewhat the older of the two – when speaking English he had no perceptible accent of either class or region; only an occasional oddity of stress or vocabulary suggested something more exotic than the Home Counties. Majid was more slightly built and showed the first signs of losing his hair – his voice was that of somebody who had spent their entire life in London or its easterly semi-rural extensions.

  That at least was how I saw them then. It was only later, as I got a chance to study them (and they me), that I realized that the similarities between them were fewer and the differences greater.

  ‘We seem to be making better time now,’ I observed. There had apparently been some temporary repairs done to the engines while we were at Edfu and we had speeded up a little.

  ‘Yes, by the look of it,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We are nevertheless rather behind our original schedule.’

  ‘You are in Egypt on holiday?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. This is the country of my birth, but my family moved to Romford when I was two. When I speak Arabic, nobody here can work out my funny accent,’ said Mahmoud. He laughed.

  Majid’s family had come to Britain from Morocco before he was born. They both worked in a bank in London and had decided to take a break in Egypt to get some sun. There was nothing about them to suggest they were policemen of any sort. Still, I thought that I should ensure there was no doubt.

  ‘Have you always worked for a bank?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Majid. ‘It pays the bills. Know what I mean? And you? Somebody said you are a writer?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I write crime novels. I doubt you would have heard of me unless you read a lot of crime. Maybe not even then.’

  ‘On the contrary – we were told you are most well known,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘I’m not Paul Fielder,’ I said quickly. I still needed to clear that up with Purbright and had no wish to repeat the error with Mahmoud. On the other hand I liked to think that, as Peter Fielding, I had some small claim to fame. And I was aware that I had done little, if anything, since boarding the boat, that Elsie would classify as selling myself. I tried to think how I might ‘big myself up’, as I believe the phrase is. ‘Of course, I do get invited onto panels at most of the crime conventions,’ I added cautiously. On reflection, it didn’t seem much of a selling point.

  ‘So, folk back in the UK would have heard of you?’ The question was posed in such a way as to suggest that, for Majid, I was at least as obscure as I had initially claimed.

  ‘I’d like to think so,’ I said. ‘Well, crime fiction fans anyway . . .’

  Mahmoud looked at Majid and nodded as if something was decided.

  ‘We are indeed honoured to have a famous author on board with us,’ said Mahmoud.

  I looked at them to see if this too was j
ust a leg-pull, but they seemed serious. I tried to look eminent but modest while I waited for them to ask me more about my writing.

  ‘You weren’t at the temple this morning?’ I said after quite a long silence.

  ‘Overslept, didn’t we?’ said Majid. ‘They start these tours well early. We went for a walk round the market instead. There was something we needed to pick up. We’ll be raring to go bright and early tomorrow for Kom Ombo.’

  ‘It must have given you quite a shock,’ said Tom.

  ‘Not the sort of thing that happens every day,’ said John. ‘You must have upset somebody very much indeed. Did the police catch that woman?’

  ‘Woman?’ I asked.

  Tom shrugged apologetically in response. ‘John saw a woman climbing up the stairs to the roof a bit before the rock came down. He told the police, but since he couldn’t give them much of a description, I don’t think they took it too seriously.’

  ‘You mean somebody from the boat?’ I asked.

  ‘Could be,’ said John. ‘I just saw a glimpse of somebody in a floppy hat nipping under the rope and haring off up the stairs.’

  ‘You will see why the police took this piece of evidence so seriously,’ said Tom. ‘Three-quarters of the women there, and half the men, were sporting hats that would get you arrested by the fashion police if you tried wearing them on Seventh Avenue.’

  ‘They’d be fine in Kansas, though,’ said John.

  ‘True,’ said Tom.

  We seemed to be drifting away from the idea of identifying the person who, arguably, might have tried to kill me – unless it actually was the Wicked Witch of the West. I vaguely remembered that she too had a floppy hat.

  ‘But you saw somebody?’ I persisted.

  ‘Yes . . .’ he said slowly. ‘But there were people going all over the temple the whole time. Even if somebody up on the roof did knock that stone down, it may have been accidental. Or are there any women in floppy hats you know for certain you’ve upset lately?’

  It was a good question. How many women currently wanted to kill me? I could only think of one – one who was, admittedly, now on the boat with me. But, if Annabelle was going to kill me, why would she have forewarned me of the fact?

  ‘I don’t think the stone was aimed at me,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Pretty fine shot if it was, though,’ said Tom. ‘For a girl leastways.’

  Eleven

  All day we had splashed happily along, while more untidy villages, date groves and rocky outcrops faded into the distance behind us. Sometimes the houses were the same shade of drab brown as the desert beyond; sometimes, for presumably good but ultimately unknowable reasons, their walls shone with yellow, green and blue paint. Sometimes the road and houses clung to the bank of the river, and trucks and motorbikes rattled past us, throwing up clouds of dust; in other places all signs of dwellings and transportation were discreetly concealed somewhere beyond the fields, where water pumps chugged and men in blue or grey jellabiyas hacked fitfully at the soil. Here and there solitary donkeys stood, like small allegories of sorrow, stiller than the quietly moving fronds above them; everything about their demeanour told you that they did not expect things to get better any time soon. Sometimes, for several miles, we would see nothing except the reedy bank and the date palms and the beige hills beyond. The one constant was the vast cloudless blue sky.

  Occasionally the river split into strands around islands or broad mud flats. The Khedive steered well clear of both. In plotting my own personal course around the boat, I too steered clear, as far as possible, of the obvious hazards. Even if Annabelle was not working on my death, I was concerned that she might nevertheless have a certain amount of unpleasantness planned, if and when we should find ourselves alone together. I was relieved that she seemed happy for the moment to keep her distance. Later that afternoon she appeared on the sun deck in a very brief (and I suspect expensive) bikini and occupied a lounger at the far end from where I was sitting. I glanced in her direction once or twice, but she gave no indication that she had noticed me. For a while she engaged in conversation with Purbright and, I must admit, as her laughter reached my end of the boat, I did feel just a slight twinge of jealousy. But eventually she wrapped herself in a towel, pulling it tight round her waist in a way that emphasized her slender figure, and went back to her cabin, looking straight ahead. I don’t think she had even noticed me.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, we were offered a tour of the boat. Most of the passengers accepted, the only ones to decline being Proctor and Campion, each claiming some task that would necessarily take priority. We first assembled amid the spotless stainless steel of the kitchen. Here we were reassured about hygiene and related matters. From there we proceeded to the surprisingly large and airy engine room, where an engineer stood in a sort of pit, oilcan in hand, nursing the ancient engines. He looked worried and was not talkative. Mahmoud and Majid were surprisingly attentive throughout, though I could not quite escape the idea that they were there mainly to watch Purbright and that Purbright was there mainly to watch them.

  One small detail that we did pick up from the engine room during the tour was that the captain was not expecting to reach Kom Ombo that evening and that further emergency work on the engines would be required when we did. We were assured that we could still make up time afterwards and reach Aswan more or less as planned.

  The landscape underwent subtle changes as the day drew to a close. At noon the river had sparkled with constantly dancing points of light and the horizon was lost in haze. Now the sun was about to set again and the river assumed a drab and mournful flatness. From competing minarets, gaudily lit with many coloured lights, the call to prayer sounded over the darkening, gently rippling water.

  ‘I like it best in the evening, don’t you?’

  I had been joined at the ship’s rail by Miss Watson. She had discarded the floppy hat, revealing her short hair – greyer than I had thought, but I doubted she would ever feel the need to dye it. In putting aside her hat she had also lost her rather vague manner. Her words were firm and precise.

  ‘It’s certainly a lot less exciting than this morning,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I was sorry to hear that you had come so close to being squashed.’ She paused, aware that this choice of words had been less than tactful. Then, perhaps deciding that she didn’t much care what I thought, she added: ‘Do you know if anyone saw who was up on the roof?’

  ‘Was there somebody up there?’ I asked.

  ‘I understood that’s what the police had been told.’

  ‘Tom or John thought they saw somebody,’ I said.

  ‘That’s who saw the person, was it?’

  ‘One or the other. John, I think.’

  ‘But he couldn’t identify them?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I wondered whether to mention the floppy hat, but decided that that too would be tactless in view of her own choice of headgear. There had, as John said, been many floppy hats in the temple that morning, some more criminal than others.

  ‘Elsie seemed to think that the new passenger – Lady Muntham, is it? – might have been up on the roof.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I hoped that Elsie had not been deliberately making trouble.

  ‘Elsie said that Lady Muntham was formerly a pole dancer. Can that be true?’ asked Miss Watson.

  ‘Annabelle used to work as a model. Before her first marriage anyway. I don’t believe she has ever been a pole dancer.’

  ‘I suppose that Elsie could have made a genuine mistake about that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she could have done,’ I said.

  ‘And what about you? I hear you’re a writer,’ said Miss Watson, thankfully moving the conversation on.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you write under your own name?’

  ‘I write crime novels as Peter Fielding.’

  ‘Paul Fielder?’

  ‘No, Peter Fielding.’

  She paused no longer than politeness di
ctated. Slightly less, actually. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It still doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘I also write as J. R. Elliot.’

  ‘Crime as well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She shook her head. I decided not to ask whether she read romantic fiction. She didn’t look the type.

  ‘And what do you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I teach physical education.’ She named a girl’s boarding school on the south coast. It was well known and not far from where I live, though it was not one of the handful of schools that had seen fit to invite me to talk to small and rather reluctant groups of teenagers about crime writing. Judging by its reputation for sportiness, the status of a teacher of physical education there would have been quite high. ‘There’s not much call for my own sport, but I teach hockey and netball, and I organize the sailing.’

  ‘You clearly have a range of talents,’ I said.

  ‘I was pretty good when I was younger. I represented Great Britain at the Olympics once, and twice at the Commonwealth Games. Almost got a medal at the Olympics. Probably would have got one if it hadn’t been for that bloody letter.’

  ‘Letter?’

  ‘The one kindly telling me what my husband was up to while I had been spending my time training. Friends thought it better that I knew. No mobiles in those far-off days – it was a letter sent to my home address and then kindly forwarded, unopened, by my dear husband to the athletes’ village, along with other bits and pieces. If he’d just left it for me to read on my return, I really think I might have got Silver . . . well, an outside chance of a Bronze, let’s say. But you don’t perform at your best when your mind is focusing on how best to cut off somebody’s dick.’

  I thought back to when my first, indeed my only, wife had walked out on me. Strangely I had never been able to be angry with her – or with my best friend, who had been the ostensible cause of Geraldine’s departure. On the other hand, while I had understood and perhaps even sympathized with her inability to remain with me, I could not say that it had left me completely untouched.