by Talbot, Luke
She struggled with her arms and legs, even wriggling her whole body, for several minutes before admitting defeat. She tried to lift her head but couldn’t. Peering along her nose and over her outstretched body, she understood why: thick belts were wrapped around her. She counted at least ten, tightly hugging her body and limbs which underneath were covered by a thin white sheet. Beyond her two wriggling feet, she could see the end of the bed, white-painted metal, with what looked like a flip-chart attached to it. Apart from that, her field of vision was clear – the room seemed empty. To her right, she could just see the top of a door and a window frame, but it was either night time or it was an internal window, because the only light she could see came from two long strips in the ceiling.
Gail had never stayed in hospital herself, but knew exactly what a hospital bed looked like. From what she saw at the foot of the bed, this was definitely one of those. The last time she had seen one had been when she had visited a friend after an operation. The doctors had said that they had got to her appendix just in time, and that another day without surgery may have been fatal. She could still remember the big grin on her face as they had told her she would have to take two weeks off school.
But her friend hadn’t been strapped to her bed. Simply thinking about her restriction made her develop an itch in the small of her back. Shortly after that, the back of her left knee started tickling, followed quickly by the sole of her right foot.
Within a minute, she was in mental anguish, writhing within her restraints, trying in vain to rub some cover or strap against the numerous itches that seemed to have attacked from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Arching her back, she pushed her chest tightly against the straps. Lifting herself half an inch from the mattress behind her, she involuntarily let out a long, pained moan. It was quickly followed by a more verbal complaint.
Then, she started screaming her head off; putting to full use the only part of her that had not been restrained.
All of a sudden she heard the door to her right open. A man in a white coat entered and stood at the end of the bed. She looked at him and abruptly stopped screaming, although she consciously kept a few choice words at the ready.
“You’re awake,” he said, matter-of-factly, as if his job was to go into rooms and make comments on such things.
She hadn’t expected him to say that, and had to make a few quick changes to her pre-chosen expletives. Nonetheless, her reply brought a touch of pink to the pale white cheeks of the young man.
“It’s good to see that you are feeling better, Dr Turner,” he replied, ignoring her verbal assault. “You certainly look much better than yesterday.”
American, she thought to herself. Or possibly Canadian? She widened the scope, not confident enough in her ability to distinguish between the accents of the two countries. He unclipped the flip-chart from the bottom of the bed and looked beyond her towards the bed’s headrest. She tried to tilt her head back to see what he was looking at, but gave up quickly, deciding it was probably some kind of medical monitoring equipment.
“I’ll let the kitchen know you’re able to eat again.” He turned and walked towards the door, taking the chart with him.
“Wait!” she exploded, following him with her eyes. “Wait!” It was painful to look down and to the right without being able to move her head, but she forced herself. “How long have I been here? Where am I?”
He stopped and went to the side of the bed. He was now looking down on her face. It was a more comfortable position for her eyes, but with his head silhouetted against the bright light from the ceiling, she felt far less at ease. She was suddenly much more aware of her own helplessness and vulnerability.
“Where am I?” she asked again, this time less defiantly.
He smiled widely, displaying almost all of his perfectly straight, peroxide-white teeth. “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” he grinned, as if sharing a private joke with her.
What the hell was that supposed to mean? She’d never been to Kansas before anyway, so did he mean to say that since meeting with the Professor she’d been there, too? And where did that leave her now?
The man saw the confusion on her face and frowned briefly. “You’re like Dorothy, see?” He could see she didn’t. “Yellow brick road? Toto? The Munchkins?” After each question he paused eagerly, as if they all held the key to his secret code. “Aw, Jesus,” he rolled his eyes. “Have you never seen the Wizard of Oz?”
How could she shake her head with it strapped down? Instead she curled her bottom lip out slightly – which she managed to accompany with a half shrug despite the restraints.
“Really old movie, before World War II,” he offered.
“Before World War II? You expect me to know quotes from a film that’s over a hundred years old?” she laughed bitterly. “Where am I?” she snapped.
His grin faded. “You’re in Florida. Flo-ri-da.” He broke the word down into syllables slowly, as if her not knowing the Wizard of Oz made it likely that she wouldn’t know what that was, either. “In the US.”
Again he turned and left, but no matter how much she shouted, this time he didn’t come back. Instead, the door closed behind him and she found herself alone.
She was still strapped to the bed, and she was supposedly in Florida, and not Egypt. But no matter how strange or unlikely all that seemed she now knew for sure that she wasn’t dreaming anymore.
Now she remembered what the Professor had told her in his office in Cairo: Dr Henry Patterson. And she also remembered where that Patterson worked: near Tampa, Florida. This could only mean that Patterson knew that the Professor had told her, or was going to tell her, the truth about the Amarna books, and was now seeking to ‘buy’ her silence as well; by abducting her and strapping her to a bed! She gritted her teeth and pulled against her restraints with added passion.
Gail couldn’t wait to meet Dr Henry Patterson.
Chapter 49
Cairo buzzed and hummed liked a beehive. Cars streamed constantly through the wide avenues, motorcycles flying between them, weaving their ways this way and that with effortless skill. On the pavements pedestrians swarmed, busy with their daily chores, idle gossip and sightseeing. The tourists were easy to tell apart from the locals, and as George made his way calmly across the road with the hundred or so people he had been waiting with for the little green man, he liked to think that he looked more like one of the locals.
For one thing, he didn’t have a camera grafted to his hand; most of what was worth photographing in Cairo was already on his computer. And for another, he wasn’t wearing insanely conspicuous khaki shorts, shirt and sandals. He shook his head in amusement at the group of visitors in front of him; probably their thinking had been that to visit Egypt, land of the pharaohs, you had to dress like an explorer. To him it was even funnier because that was exactly what the Spaniard Martín had been wearing, and it was exactly what he had been wearing on his first visit to the country, all those years ago. In Egypt, it stood out like a Hawaiian shirt at a wedding.
After crossing the road, he took a left turn and headed down a narrow alley, away from the main flow of the tourist crowd which was probably heading towards the walled compound of Old Cairo.
“Assif!” he said as he brushed past a man on a bicycle. George had managed to memorise a few words of Arabic, which he found added to his casual jeans and t-shirt in distancing him from the tourists. He was still unmistakably foreign – his pale skin soon went lobster-red in the sun.
He turned a corner and stopped in front of a small metal gate. He hovered his index finger over the column of buzzers. None were marked, and he suddenly realised that he couldn’t for the life of him remember which one he’d pressed on his last visit, a couple of years earlier: too much had happened since then. Each of the ten floors had two buttons, a total of eighteen flats, as the first floor was for maintenance and storage. He finally pressed the left button of the seventh floor; he knew it was at least a couple from the top; seven sounded about
right. After a short pause, a man’s voice came from the small speaker. George didn’t understand any of it.
“Ma esmouk Ben?” he said tentatively. He didn’t know how to say Is that Ben, and what is your name Ben was the closest he could come up with.
The reply came thick and fast. Obviously not, then, he thought pressing the next one down after a garbled apology.
“Ma esmouk Ben?” he repeated his question as the second person answered.
“La!”
“Hal tatakallum Inglesi?” he stumbled around the sentence. That was it, pretty much the end of his Arabic phrases: it was always suitable to end with Do you speak English. There was a shout from the speaker and the man laughed.
“Siix tooo, not waan; tooo,” came the heavily accented reply.
“Shukran!” Six-2, he thought. Even if he’d remembered that, without labels on the buttons it wouldn’t have helped him: he had no idea, in a country that spoke Arabic, if 2 would have been the button on the left, or on the right.
He pressed the only other button on the sixth row.
“Ben!” he exclaimed with relief as the familiar voice answered.
“Ha! George, yes it’s me! Come up!” Ben sounded ecstatic, and quickly buzzed him through the iron gate.
George remembered that the last time he had visited, the lift had been out of order; Gail and he had stood in it with the door open for a couple of minutes before one of Ben’s neighbours had walked past, laughing. This time, however, it seemed to be working, and the door slid closed silently. The lift’s soft female voice said something in Arabic as he pressed for the sixth floor.
At their first meeting ten years earlier, Ben and George had immediately clicked. His sense of humour matched George’s perfectly, and whilst there were a few years between them, they shared similar hobbies, namely sport, television and computers. Archaeology, it had turned out, wasn’t one of Ben’s strong points anyway.
Over the years, they had seen each other dozens of times. Ben even visited them in England and worked for a year in London, during which time his English had been perfected, which was more than George could say about his Arabic.
But this time was very different; George had never been to see Ben in Cairo without Gail.
When the lift door opened again, he was met by Ben’s familiar grin and wide open arms.
“George!” he exclaimed. “It’s been a long time!”
“A year or two,” George agreed. Instead of a hug, Ben clasped George’s outstretched hand, shaking it vigorously while at the same time gripping his shoulder. No matter how good friends they were, it always took George a moment to adjust to his enthusiasm.
“Sorry I missed your calls,” he said, leading him towards the door of his flat. “How are things? Did you just get here?”
George hesitated. As soon as he’d been told to go back to his hotel by Captain Kamal of the Cairo police, he had tried to call Ben. Unfortunately, there had been no response on the landline, and either Ben had changed his mobile number or it was turned off in a drawer somewhere.
Since then, he had tried once more, the previous evening, again with no success. It had been on his third attempt, leaving the café that morning, that Ben had picked up. In the briefest of conversations, they had agreed to meet at Ben’s flat later that morning.
“Actually, I landed on Tuesday.”
Ben stopped in his tracks. “I landed? Have you been married that long that you forgot your beautiful wife at home, George?” Ben was grinning, but his eyes betrayed genuine concern. “Where is Gail?”
George had honestly thought that they would have at least made it inside Ben’s home before the question came out. As it was, despite several days adjusting to Gail’s death, he hadn’t fully prepared himself for telling someone face-to-face about it. Telling his parents via the videophone had been hard enough, but somehow this was different. His bottom lip started to quiver and he fought to control it.
“George, what’s wrong?” he asked, the long pause too much for him. Before waiting for an answer, he pushed the door to his flat open and ushered his friend through. Closing the door behind them, he took George to the living-room and sat him on a long, black-leather sofa before repeating his question.
In front of the sofa, a large flat-screen television showed four different feeds simultaneously. Ben reached for the remote and turned the screen off.
Apart from the noise of Cairo, which still managed to filter through the closed windows, and the low hum of the air conditioning unit, silence descended on the room. “George, what’s wrong?” Ben asked again.
“Gail came here on Monday,” he began. It wouldn’t be so hard if he just told the story as it was; simply a series of facts. “She came to visit the Professor, because of the finding of the Stickman on Mars.” Ben’s eyes lit up at this. He was going to interrupt when George asked: “I take it you know about the Professor?”
“How could I not,” he gestured towards the television. “Apparently he was murdered by some petty thief on Monday. I kind of assumed that was why you came: to pay your respects.” He lifted his head suddenly. “And Gail? If she went to see him on Monday, was she hurt, too? Is she alright?”
The emotional nosedive that George had been in since seeing Gail’s body three days earlier had pretty much levelled out. From having been told that his wife was missing, to being confronted by the unwelcome news that she was dead, and then being informed by the police that not only was she the only suspect in the murder of the Professor but that her motive was the theft of a few books, he thought he had reached the end of the week with fairly thick skin. He had even managed to discuss funeral arrangements with Captain Kamal as if the punch in the face had never happened, and had looked into transporting Gail’s urn on his return flight. But now he realised that he had not yet fully opened up to anyone; the only person in whom he could normally confide was now gone, and he was a widower.
She was dead.
He was as low as he could get. Meeting face to face with a common friend, someone he had met with Gail and who had only known them as a couple, made it painfully obvious that a large part of him was missing. And now he had to tell this friend that Gail was dead, and that according to the police, she murdered the Professor, another common, if not so close, friend. He looked at Ben and tried to speak, but his lips and throat were too dry for the words to slide out, so instead he croaked.
As if reading his mind, Ben got up and returned seconds later with a glass of ice-cold water. He sat down again sombrely. “She was there, wasn’t she?” he asked. “She was with the Professor?”
George gulped down a mouthful of the water and nodded. It was easier like this, he thought briefly; easier for Ben to guess than for him to say the words.
“Was she hurt also?”
He nodded again.
“Is she alright?”
He shook his head slowly; tears welled up in his eyes. He’d shed so many over the last few days; quiet, private tears. But now they were building up in front of Ben, he tried to fight the urge to cry.
This was no easier than just coming out with it. So he told Ben everything. He told him about Gail’s cold body in the morgue, about how he’d punched a captain of Cairo’s police force on the chin, and about the alleged theft of books from the Professor’s office. He told him about the Amarna stickman on Mars, about how it had upset Gail, and how the Professor had asked her to come to Cairo as soon as possible to discuss it.
And he told him about Martín Antunez, the Spanish ESA employee who had been trying to get hold of Gail on Monday, and who on Wednesday had met George in Cairo and had been with him ever since. He even mentioned Martín’s short-lived abduction theory. He finished repeating himself, going over in disbelief his identification of Gail’s body, and how he had punched Captain Kamal in the head.
When he’d finished he felt drained, his soul empty like a reservoir after the breaking of a dam. He’d let his tears come out in floods, without holding back, for the first
time since Gail’s death. He could easily have felt quite foolish at his emotional outbreak. Instead, he simply didn’t care; what had to come out had come out, and he sat limply on the sofa.
Ben sat rigidly next to him, stunned by the barrage of unwelcome news. After a while, George blew his nose with a tissue from a box that Ben had passed to him subconsciously during his outburst. As if waking him from his trance, Ben looked up with a look not just of sadness but also bewilderment.
George looked at his friend as he finished wiping his nose.
“What?” he asked, querying Ben’s puzzled look.
“George. I am devastated by this news, but I’m also confused. This policeman said Gail murdered the Professor?”
George hesitated. “Yes.”
Ben raised both eyebrows and looked to his feet. “I cannot believe that the Gail I know would kill anyone, let alone the Professor, to steal a few books, no matter how valuable.” He shook his head slowly. “There is more to this story, George, I am sure of it.”
George didn’t know what to make of Ben’s reaction. What had he expected? Tears, screams, breaking down and beating the floor with his fists? He didn’t know, but he was sure it wasn’t this. “What are you trying to say?” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry, I know this isn’t what you need to hear,” Ben said. “But there are parts of your story that don’t add up. Firstly, was Gail so upset by the news of the Amarna stickman that she was concerned about your financial security?” George shook his head. “And assuming that she was worried about money, and did steal the books, why would she then run across town with them under her arm, aimlessly? Why didn’t she get a Taxi? There are hundreds of Taxis on those streets.”
“Because she panicked?” George suggested.