The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Fanshawe smiled tightly. “Probably not.”

  “It seems like you may have had a wasted journey. Sorry about that.”

  Fanshawe stood up and shrugged. His shirt was still stuck unpleasantly to his skin. “It’s a week until the next BA flight back to London, which gives me time to take a look around. Perhaps check his files. Just to be sure.”

  Clift nodded. “Of course. Anything I can do to help just let me know.”

  “I’m going to want a full report on his death and this . . . irregular burial procedure.” He paused. “Where did you bury him? The cemetery?”

  Under Fanshawe’s superior tone, Clift lost a little of his laid-back manner. “Urn, no. It takes forever to get the paperwork for a foreign national to get a plot there, and in this heat and with the power cuts we’ve been having . . .” he paused. “Well, you just can’t keep a body in it for long.”

  “So, where did you bury him?”

  As he fed a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter before answering, Fanshawe noted that at least Clift had the decency not to look up as he spoke.

  “Out on the edge of the desert near where he lived. Like the locals do. There are bodies in unmarked graves all along the border of Omdurman and the Sahara.”

  Unmarked. Fanshawe reconsidered the cigarette.

  The first time Cartwright had telexed back to London they’d had the whole team working for ten hours trying to unscramble the message. He wasn’t supposed to be in any kind of contact while lying low in Khartoum let alone sending encrypted sentences at two o’clock in the morning local time. Fanshawe had smoked a lot that night. Cartwright was one of the best. It wasn’t unfeasible, if a little against the unwritten rules of play, for one of his opposite number to have tracked him down.

  Eventually, a very tired young woman knocked on his office door, shaking her head. “We’ve been through all the codes, sir. It doesn’t make sense in any of them.” She shrugged and Fanshawe waved her away. He looked down at the original sheet of telex paper with the single sentence printed out on it:

  IT’S ALL IN THE SAND.

  What the hell could Cartwright mean?

  As it was, Cartwright was silent for just over a month before the next telex landed on Fanshawe’s desk. It had been a long five weeks at the London end, during which Fanshawe maintained the protocol of radio silence to protect his hidden man. If Cartwright had something to tell them, he was going to have to get in touch again. In the meantime, all the encryptions were frantically being re-written. Perhaps they were compromised. Perhaps that’s why Cartwright had chosen an ambiguous statement instead of using his allocated code. When the next message came it was as indecipherable as the first:

  I CAN HEAR THE THUNDER OF HOOVES;

  THE SCREAMING OF THE DYING BEASTS.

  After staring at both messages side by side for far too long for sanity, Fanshawe was ready to scream himself. He felt as if he were stuck on the last clue of The Times crossword with no hope of getting the answer. The sentences were imprinted on the back of his eyes. He carried them everywhere with him.

  He waited for Cartwright to get in contact again. But there was nothing. Instead, two months later came the Telex that said he’d been found dead in his house in Khartoum. And so here Fanshawe was. Hot, bothered and no closer to being able to solve the puzzle.

  “I think I might go back to the hotel for a while. Catch up on some sleep.”

  Clift nodded, and Fanshawe was sure there was just a touch of relief in the way the younger man’s shoulders dropped slightly.

  “The driver downstairs will take you, sir. Call me if you need anything. Otherwise I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning on my way into the office.”

  By the third day when Clift picked him up from the Hilton, Fanshawe had given up on the shirt and tie completely, settling in favour of an aertex collared T-shirt over cream slacks. His eyes burned from lack of sleep. It seemed that no one in the building had been capable of fixing the air-conditioning beyond the ground floor level. Fanshawe had stopped asking when that might be rectified. This was primarily because he was mildly concerned that he might commit an act of murder if anyone else was foolish enough to give him the answer “Bukrah, in sh’Allah.” Tomorrow, if Allah wills it. So far, Allah was very much against the idea.

  As the Land Rover bounced across the uneven, rocky and pot-holed dusty tracks that served as roads, Fanshawe squinted out through the open window. Beyond the shallow ditches that ran along each side of the street, old women sat on low stools hawking their piles of paper bread and watermelons to any passers-by. Their skin was as cracked as the ground they came from, eyes black suspicious raisins in a desert of wrinkles as they watched the two white men drive by.

  Clift paused at a crossroads, waiting for the melee of trucks and buses so over-loaded with people hanging from the sides that they looked like they might tip right over to stop blaring horns and figure out whose right of way it really was. Fanshawe was so busy trying to decide which potential accident was going to happen first that he didn’t see the man approaching and jumped when he appeared at the window, waving the necklace at him.

  “Jesus Christ.” He pulled in a little, away from the leathery hand intruding his space trying to force him to touch the jewellery as if perhaps that would oblige Fanshawe to buy it. The metal and ivory pendant dangling from the shoelace strap looked tarnished and battered.

  “Y’ella,” he muttered in disgust at the skinny man on the other side of the car door, whose free arm below the hem of the well-worn Adidas T-shirt, was loaded with necklaces and bracelets all with the same charm attached. The man’s response was to lean in closer, words rushing in thick guttural Arabic, too fast for Fanshawe to follow.

  Clift revved the engine and pulled the Land Rover forward, leaving the man standing in the street behind them, still waving and shouting at the dust trails of their tyres.

  “Sorry about that,” Clift said. “Seems they’ve been selling those bloody things everywhere. Must be the latest local fashion.”

  Winding the window up a little to prevent further intrusion, but to still allow in whatever hot breeze the car’s motion could create, Fanshawe shook off the unsettled feeling and stared at the strange dips at the side of the road.

  “What are the ditches for?” he asked Clift. Around them the huts and corrugated iron shacks slowly turned into rows of low, one-story buildings that made up the houses and shops as they came nearer into the centre of the capital city. They looked like they’d been forged from the sand around them. Maybe there was brick and plaster somewhere under their creamy surfaces, but it was well-hidden. The dust had claimed them, as it seemed the dust claimed and coated everything.

  “There’s your answer,” Clift nodded over to the right. A thin man who could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty lifted the folds of his white djellabah and squatted at the edge. Fanshawe frowned.

  “Is he . . .?”

  “Yes, ’fraid so.” The car bounced past the man. “The ditches are the closest you’ll come to public lavatories in Khartoum. Damned health hazard, but there’s no telling the locals.” Clift continued, swerving to get past a battered truck that pulled out without even pausing. “The German that died? That was because of those ditches. We had the first of the big rains. Came out of nowhere and flooded the roads. The German’s jeep got stuck in a pothole and he got out to try and clear the wheel. Found himself knee deep in sewage. He must have had a cut that got infected, because it was dysentery and then blood poisoning and then all over. Poor chap.”

  Fanshawe said nothing for a while. He couldn’t imagine water in these streets. The ground must devour it within a day; no amount of rain could be enough to quench the thirst of this parched land. The car made its way through the increasingly busier streets. Wild brown dogs panted under parked cars, ready to dart out to claim dropped food or to snarl at anyone that got too close. Men and women talked and laughed and sat outside shops or on the wrecked pavements in dusty mixes of tatty
western clothes, Arab djellabahs and bright tribal dresses; a melange of fabric and dark skin. Flies settled unnoticed on dark flesh.

  Somewhere in the distance a Muezzin began a call to prayer. Slowly all activity ceased and prayer mats were unfurled, for a few moments the majority of the city on their knees, facing Mecca. Fanshawe wondered if the man crouching by the ditch had finished in time. Turning into the Embassy car park, they passed three exceptionally tall and ebony black men who stood frozen on the corner, staring impassively in at Clift and Fanshawe. They carried long sticks, which for a moment Fanshawe thought might be spears. Tribal men, not Arab men.

  He sighed as the Land Rover came to a halt. “It’s not quite Bonne, is it?” he said, eventually.

  “No, sir.” Clift stepped out into the heat. “It’s not quite Bonne.”

  By midday, Fanshawe had finished his second sweep of Cartwright’s office. He’d taken the phone apart, checked the light sockets and even the air-conditioning vent and there was no sign of any bugs. Sweating and fed up, he sat back in the desk chair. Maybe Clift was right. Maybe it was too damned hot out here for spying games. Maybe Cartwright had just got a touch of sunstroke and then died of a heart attack. These things did happen.

  He pulled at the top drawer of the desk, tugging it open even though it was stiff. He wasn’t convinced by his own argument though. Cartwright had undergone a full medical after the fiasco in Moscow and passed it with flying colours. His heart had been in perfect working order.

  He yanked the drawer open and checked its contents again. Pens, paper, a stapler. All basic and ordinary and as expected. He pushed the drawer and it caught again. Something was stopping it running smoothly. He frowned as he slid a hand over the rough surface of the drawer’s base. An envelope was cellotaped there. Fanshawe ripped it free and emptied the contents onto the desk.

  Photographs. At least twenty. Spreading them carefully out so he could study each one, Fanshawe clenched his teeth slightly. They were pictures of the desert. There wasn’t a single soul in any of them, just the endless sand and occasional black rocky outcrop under the bright cloudless sky. He searched their edges to see if maybe they lined up, like some kind of jigsaw puzzle, but it was a fruitless task. To all intents and purposes, they were just random images, holiday snaps. So why had Cartwright felt the need to hide them? Were the Russians or East Germans planning to use part of the desert in some way? It didn’t seem likely. So what the hell had the man been playing at?

  The office door opened and a trolley appeared, carrying white mugs and a large urn, and pushed by a grinning Sudanese man, the darkness of whose skin was emphasized by the crisp cleanliness of his white djellabah.

  “Tea, sir?” There was surprisingly only a hint of the thick Arab accent in his intonation; a far cry from the dusty Sudanese who had thrust his arm so rudely into the Land Rover that morning. The second surprise was that Fanshawe did indeed feel like a cup of tea, despite the acrid heat.

  “Yes please. With milk if there is any.”

  “Certainly, sir.” With one hand he poured a splash of milk into a cup and then placed it under the urn. The tea poured, hot steam rising up from it, and then with the same hand the man carefully placed it on the desk. He looked at the pictures and smiled.

  “Interesting photographs. Deceptive, aren’t they?”

  Fanshawe had been about to sip his tea, and he paused. “How do you mean?”

  “When you see the desert like that it looks flat. But of course, it is not.”

  Fanshawe stared at the images spread out in front of him. The ground looked level to him.

  “Look there,” the tea wallah pointed to a slight undulation in the sand. “It looks just like a ripple on the surface, yes?”

  Fanshawe nodded in agreement.

  “But,” the local continued, “it is not. Just beyond that is the drop of a dune, maybe six feet or more. The desert is full of them.” He shook his head slightly. “But to those that do not know the Sahara, it appears flat.”

  Fanshawe stared at the picture more closely and thought he could just see, in the hint of the shadows on the golden ground, what the man meant. “Tell me,” he said. “Are there such drops in all of these photos?”

  The man’s eyes scanned the display and nodded. “Yes, I think so. When the Mahdi fought the British at Omdurman, they used the land’s deception as part of a battle strategy. While some stood and lured the British forward on the flat sand, others would wait in the drops between the dunes with their swords ready. As the cavalry charged at the enemy they didn’t see the drop until it was too late. The Mahdi’s men would hack at the surprised horses’ feet with their swords as they galloped and both beast and man would fall screaming into the pit.” He smiled at Fanshawe. “Not bad for native thinking, eh, sir?”

  Fanshawe nodded. “Not bad, at all.”

  Looking at the clean cups, the perfect whiteness of the man’s outfit and the way he stood tall and with dignity, Fanshawe’s curiosity got the better of him. “You seem a little over-educated for your current position. And your English is perfect. Surely you could be better employed elsewhere.”

  The man shook his head sadly and then revealed the stump at his right wrist. “Like many others, I’ve moved up from the South. I was a teacher of Politics at the university in Juba.” He shrugged. “But then, apparently I stole a small item from the market and despite my protests of innocence . . .” His words drifted off, and Fanshawe stared again at the man’s missing right hand.

  “A man with a criminal record finds it hard to get good employment, even here in the north. But I can’t complain. I have good pay and conditions.” The tea man smiled. “God save the Queen.”

  “Yes, quite,” Fanshawe muttered, but any slight empathy he’d felt for the man disappeared as something else he’d said gripped his thoughts. He sipped his tea as Cartwright’s second telex typed itself out in his head.

  I CAN HEAR THE THUNDER OF HOOVES;

  THE SCREAMING OF THE DYING BEASTS.

  “Tell me,” he was surprised to find the tea was good; strong and hot and not even a hint of sourness in the milk. “Did you know the man in this office? The man that died?”

  The tea wallah’s eyes slipped away and he shrugged. “A little.” He paused. “Did he take these pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  Fanshawe frowned. “How did you know they were his?”

  The man sighed. “They say we all walked out of Africa in those first days of mankind and then spread to the four corners of the globe. Perhaps the desert calls some of us back. I think maybe your friend was one of those people.” He started to wheel his trolley out. “I think he became fascinated with the desert. The sand was in his eyes from his first haboob. He became different.”

  The Sudan Club was a small oasis of green in the middle of the dry city. Sprinklers turned on the vast lawns and from where he sat in the bar, Fanshawe could see the swimming pool glinting blue under the floodlights that kept the dark away. Perhaps somewhere else, people would notice the tattiness of some of the paintwork and the chips in the floor tiles, but after four days of African dust and heat, even to Fanshawe, the private club whose membership was only open to those with British passports seemed like an idyll; a visit back to the glory days of the British Empire.

  And at least the air was cool, fuelled by a generator that ran somewhere out at the back of the building, its throb like gentle background music. It seemed that the city danced to the beat of the generator drum, always one or two roaring somewhere, so that in the end you barely heard them. Maybe the silence of bare feet on sand would be more disturbing.

  He leant on the marble bar and sipped his drink. It was the perfect mix of gin and tonic, just a large enough splash of the first, poured over huge rocks of ice, before being topped up with mixer. Enough of these and he wouldn’t need his anti-malaria pills. Still, it felt like it had been a long day.

  He’d spent the afternoon at Cartwright’s house
across on the western side of the wide muddy Nile, out past the edge of the town of Omdurman. He’d hoped to find an answer there for why the agent had moved from the centre of Khartoum, to the dustier, disappeared streets that bordered the desert, where only scrubby dry grasses and bare-footed goat herders lined what should be the pavements. At least in the capital Cartwright could have gone to the hubbub of Street 15 and bartered for eggs, sure that at least two or three of them wouldn’t have been broken on the uneven journey by the time he got home. Instead he’d moved to the back end of the back end of beyond. It didn’t make sense.

  Impressive as the Omdurman house appeared – rising up on two levels, with a balcony that ran all round the top floor and three gates to get in – there was a sense that it was unfinished. Where there should have been gardens surrounding the building, there was only dirt, the lawns never having been laid, and although at the front of the property there was a high, metal gate and impressive walk up to the double fronted heavy wooden door, it seemed that Cartwright favoured the low gate at the back that squealed open onto a short path leading up to the servant’s quarters on the right, and the door into the kitchen, straight ahead. It was by that gate that his car was parked.

  The servant’s quarters were empty, although there was evidence that Mahmood, the boy, was still living there even though Clift claimed not to have seen him since Cartwright’s death. A small jar of coffee and a pot of rice sat on a low chipped Formica table by the narrow camping bed, above which, on the uneven walls that looked made of mud, hung an amulet of ivory and tarnished metal. Its diamond shape was less regular than the one that had been thrust so rudely through the Land Rover window that morning. This one looked older. The symbols or letters that were battered into its surface made no sense to Fanshawe and he left it where it was and headed to the main house.

  In the spotless kitchen, the fridge was empty apart from a bottle of Gordon’s gin. A case of Schweppes tonic sat on the clean tiles alongside it and for a moment Fanshawe stared at them. The city of Omdurman, unlike Khartoum and the Nile Hilton, seemed to be fine for electricity. The gin was cold and smooth blocks of ice filled the trays in the small freezer section. Tempted as he was to pour himself a drink, as much to fight his frustration as cool himself down, he resisted, and instead methodically did as he was trained to do, and worked his way through the various electrical appliances, searching for cameras and bugs, sweeping each room. It was painstaking and slow work, but as with Cartwright’s office at the Embassy there was nothing.