by Jessica Mann
‘I don’t suppose any of you know about medicine?’ Giles Needham said. ‘I shouldn’t have let our quack go off with the others.’
‘My sister has her first-aid certificate,’ John Benson said.
‘We don’t need a doctor to tell us Vanessa’s dead,’ Janet said, her voice high and shaking.
Hugo Bloom took her arm. He said, ‘I have some valium.’
John Benson followed them up the stairs. Left alone with the corpse, Giles and Tamara glanced at each other. She thought about the dynamics of group organisation. Somebody was going to have to take charge, and it looked as though that somebody was going to be Giles if only because they were on his territory.
He picked up the fallen glass and carefully put it exactly on the damp ring it had earlier left on the table top.
‘I’m not sure what happens next,’ he said.
‘We get out of here and shut the door,’ she replied.
‘Yes of course. The smell . . .’
Someone was being sick in one of the lavatory cubicles. It was John Benson; he interspersed his spasms with imprecations. Tamara realised that the emergency had settled her own stomach; a drastic cure.
‘Let’s go on deck. Some fresh air . . .’ she said. Giles followed her up the two narrow flights of stairs. The others were huddled in the saloon. Up on deck the wind blew the clinging odours from her, and replaced it with the acrid smell of the workmen’s dung fires and the food they grilled on them.
‘I wonder what the formalities will be,’ Tamara said.
‘God knows. Do the Egyptians have coroners and inquests, would you suppose? And post mortems and—?’ He halted, shocked by his train of thought. ‘I suppose it was a natural death.’
‘Natural?’ Tamara said, thinking of the anguished, filthy figure down below.
‘I mean . . . nobody else involved.’
‘She could have taken too many sleeping pills.’
‘Suicide?’
‘Or accident. This was on the floor.’ Tamara held out a small plastic container. In the erratic light of the one kerosene lantern, Giles read the label.
‘Seconal, one to be taken at—but these are Max Solomon’s. Were they in her room?’
‘I should think Vanessa helped herself to them.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’ His voice trailed away. ‘Sorry. That sounds pretty tasteless.’
‘There’s no denying that it is the sort of thing she’d do.’
‘But not taking too many on purpose?’
‘I hardly knew her any better than you,’ Tamara said. ‘Less well probably. I did not interest her.’
‘I only wish I hadn’t. Then she’d never have come here in the first place.’
‘The penalty of fame.’
‘Fame!’ Giles sounded embarrassed. ‘That wasn’t why. She was famous enough not to need me. Oh God, I’m making it sound even worse. What I mean is, I made a temporary hit with those TV programmes. It seemed to be what people were in the mood for. But fame like that is easy come, easy go, and I never wanted it anyway. All I did it for was to raise some money for another season here. You know how difficult it is to get archaeology properly funded nowadays.’
‘I do indeed,’ Tamara agreed.
‘I mean, I didn’t take Vanessa seriously. She asked me on her silly show and I obviously wasn’t interested. But she simply wouldn’t give up.’
‘I don’t suppose she was used to being turned down.’
‘So it seemed. She took it as some sort of personal affront. She . . . well, honestly, she pursued me.’
‘And you think that’s why she came on the Camisis tour?’
‘I’d guess so. There are plenty of others to choose from. Swans, Bales, Serenissima . . . it’s not as though she was interested in what we are doing here, and you really need to be, to put up with the conditions. Or so some of your party have been telling me, in no uncertain terms.’
‘Yes,’ Tamara said thoughtfully. ‘And they were warned. The brochure was very explicit about it. Step out of the twentieth century to Qasr Samaan, and don’t expect twentieth-century amenities. Vanessa must have known what she’d find here.’
‘Yes. Me.’
‘It sounds a bit exaggerated,’ Tamara said, though she could understand a woman going overboard for this man.
‘Well, so it was. She was. I’ve never met anyone so exaggerated. She simply wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted, and she wanted me. I’m sorry, Tamara, it isn’t the sort of thing one ought to say or even think, but if you’d heard her . . . She cornered me last night.’
‘How did she manage it? There isn’t much privacy.’
‘Everyone else had turned in already. Tim was talking to Janet Macmillan. They were having some sort of row, you could hear him shouting from up here.’
‘Oh yes. I heard that.’
‘You couldn’t have avoided it. Anyway, I was up here having a sly smoke.’ Giles tamped down his tobacco and struck a match. He sucked in a draught of soothing nicotine, and said, ‘I thought some of your party would make a fuss if I lit up down there. My own colleagues don’t like it either. So I’ve got into the habit of coming on deck last thing. And Vanessa came up after me and . . .’
‘Made a pass at you?’
‘That’s putting it mildly. She was making the sort of offer it is embarrassing to refuse.’
‘But you did refuse?’
‘We were interrupted before I had to.’
‘Polly?’
‘Yes.’
‘I expect she was jealous of Vanessa,’ Tamara said.
‘I don’t know about jealous. But Vanessa had been needling her from the moment she got here. Perhaps you didn’t notice it.’
‘She needled everybody.’
‘That’s true. More likely to be murdered than to commit suicide, in fact.’
Tamara did not answer, and after a moment’s silence Giles said quietly, ‘I don’t know what made me say that.’
‘Could anyone else have come on board?’
A faint mist was rising from the water; it looked luminous in the glow of the moon, which was nearly full. A murmur of voices came across from the workmen’s barge. Nobody on it seemed to have noticed the disturbance. On the muddy patch of shore where the gangplanks rested, a white-robed man squatted beside his glowing brazier, an immobile, timeless watchman. ‘Not without him noticing,’ Giles said.
‘What is he guarding us from?’ Tamara asked.
‘Assassins.’
Giles called out in the man’s language, and the crouched figure stood slowly and turned so that the faint light glinted on his eyes. He answered briefly, and a second question at greater length. ‘Nobody came on board tonight,’ Giles said.
‘You believe him?’
‘As far as one can believe a man from a strange culture, speaking a strange language, with strange prejudices and loyalties that I could never hope to comprehend, yes, I believe him. I have not known him lie to me in my four seasons here. He says that nobody except Abdullah the waiter and Hassan the chamber man have come on board this evening.’
‘And he’s always there?’
‘He and his mate take turns, twenty-four hours a day. It’s a custom one doesn’t interfere with. He sleeps later, sitting up like a log. He’d wake up for a stranger, but somehow sleeps through if anyone he knows passes by.’
‘Like a dog?’
Giles said coldly, ‘I’d stake my own life on none of them having anything to do with this.’
‘I’d almost stake my life on Vanessa not realising they were people at all.’
‘Servants would have been furniture to her,’ he agreed. He knocked his pipe against the rail, emptying its contents, and took an envelope of tobacco from his pocket to re-fill it. He said, ‘It’s ridiculous, I know. I spend my life studying dead societies; dead people; and everything about the Egyptian past reminds one of it. Death obsessed them. I must have excavated dozens of graves in my time. You probably have yours
elf. But now I feel completely thrown. Why do we find a contemporary corpse so shocking?’
‘Because it is a shock to see it,’ Tamara said calmly.
‘I suppose it will be the end of this season’s work. It might be the end of the whole dig. It’s more difficult every year to get a permit as it is. The Egyptians are increasingly sticky about having foreigners poking around their antiquities. You can’t blame them. And until you have seen officialdom at work in this country you have never seen it properly. Don’t forget their ancestors invented bureaucracy. They controlled an empire with it for five millennia.’
‘Probably worse the further from the centre you are,’ Tamara said sympathetically.
‘And we are so close to the border. What the Sudanese would say . . .’
‘Has nobody else ever died here?’
‘Not in my time. And not foreigners. But I took over from old Fred Harper, do you know who I mean?’
‘I heard him lecture once.’
‘He had a season when the natives were going down like flies. They thought the place was cursed, but it all turned out to be due to some kid’s disease. Measles, I think.’
‘So what happened?’
‘They carried on throughout. It’s all in the site notebooks. Five of them died in the end, and of course you couldn’t keep the bodies hanging round too long in this climate. They put them in the Roman sarcophagi.’
‘On the shore over there?’
‘No, this was before the flooding. They’ll be fathoms deep by now.’
‘Well,’ Tamara said, deliberately flippant. ‘That means that there are some spare spaces in case we need them. And if the tug isn’t mended by tomorrow, my prediction is that we are very likely to.’
Chapter Ten
Timothy Knipe was asleep, as one could easily hear, and nobody else at Qasr Samaan had any personal reason to regret the death of Vanessa Papillon. All the same, the universally self-regarding reaction was noticeable.
How is this going to affect me? was clearly the thought in everybody’s head, not least Tamara’s own, or as he had admitted, Giles’s. For the others, Tamara supposed there might be silver linings to the cloud, if it was cloud and not the sun bursting from behind them. Giles had said that Vanessa needled people. Tamara would have used a far stronger word. Tormented, perhaps.
Janet Macmillan, of course, had walked straight into Vanessa’s line of fire by choosing to take the same Egyptian tour. And yet she had chosen it because Vanessa would be there; that had become clear enough—unless she had forgotten Vanessa in following Tim. Did she love Tim so desperately that she wanted to be in his company no matter how painfully? Had she hoped to make him suffer? Had she wanted to spoil Vanessa’s enjoyment of her new acquisition? Had she at last done so, in the most drastic of ways?
Tamara was sure of one thing at least. Janet had come to Qasr Samaan, come on this trip, from personal motives, not for any reason that would, or would once, have interested Mr Black.
Tamara had always doubted that Janet was likely to betray her country or that publicising her discovery would have been a betrayal.
‘Just because she comes from Cambridge,’ Tamara had said to Mr Black who had been at Oxford. ‘Having the Cambridge traitors on the brain is your occupational hazard.’
Mr Black was the sort of man that high-spirited young women tended to address with mild impertinence. It was not flirting. To Tamara, and she always assumed to others like her, he exuded sexlessness, quite apart from the fact that he was a friend and a contemporary of her father. It seemed necessary to choose between subservience and cheek; and the sort of person who became a secret agent was unlikely to be humble. The sort of man who became a spy master was not likely to take cheek amiss.
‘Two points,’ he had replied. ‘Firstly, that treachery from families like Janet’s is not unknown. Secondly, that she is a woman scorned.’
‘An old-fashioned view,’ the young feminist had said. But she thought about it all the same. Women have died and worms have eaten them, and even for love. Women have betrayed, and their countries have reviled them, also for love. Or, in this case, she thought, for altruism.
Tamara had no idea how Janet’s equations reached the results she had wished to broadcast. Tamara did not need to know the researcher’s progress or process, merely what she had found she could do. In searching for and, she believed, finding a treatment for epilepsy, she had discovered a way of inducing it.
It was to do with the frequencies of subsonic waves, the speed of flashing lights and something known as alpha rhythms or theta waves in the brain. The explanation seemed to involve a good many of the letters in the Greek alphabet, and they were the only part that was not Greek to Tamara. She felt, not for the first time, the old shame of an arts graduate obliged to confess innumeracy.
No scientific education was required to know that it was desirable to discover a method of warding off epileptic attacks that did not bring the side-effects of drug-based treatments. Janet had found a way to provide such a thing. She had been working on a method of enabling a sufferer to alter mechanically the electrical rhythms of the brain. It had started off from a technique in which the patient watched an electrogram of his or her own brainwaves and adjusted them by an act of will alone.
In order to study the elimination of the stimuli that caused epileptic seizures, Janet had been working on a way of causing them. After all, Mr Black explained, weapons defence systems can only be made by someone who knows how to make weapons, and laboratories making antidotes to poisons have to analyse the poisons first.
‘Weapons?’ Tamara had interrupted.
‘Unfortunately,’ Mr Black replied, ‘the silly girl has discovered a universal method of synchronisation without even realising it.’
Janet had worked out a system to measure the specific amplitude and intensity of brainwave patterns, and the exact arrangement of stimuli that could cause major fits.
A major fit, Mr Black explained, often called grand mal, caused muscular spasms followed by total amnesia about the period during which the fit took place.
A minor fit, petit mal, was known by the boffins (Mr Black’s expression and voice were gently disdainful) as sense-specific fits. The body is temporarily paralysed, or the power of sight momentarily disappears, but the sufferer remains conscious. Even a minor fit would incapacitate an enemy.
‘An enemy?’ Tamara exclaimed.
The technique could keep the human brain from epilepsy. But it could induce epilepsy too. It could do so not only in people known to be susceptible, but in anybody; in, for example, an opposing army.
‘It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t blinded by the intellectual delight of pure research. Janet Macmillan’s boss tried to make her see why she couldn’t publish.’
‘One can sympathise with her,’ Tamara said. ‘Especially as it sounds most unlikely. It sounds so specific. So individual. How could one use it on a mass of people?’
‘It is neither individual nor universal. It would work over short distances only. For instance across fortified borders—over a front line. But if you could knock out, say, every tenth man . . .’
‘But if you could cure every epileptic . . .’
‘That was what Dr Macmillan said too. You and she ought to get on quite well.’
*
Tamara and Janet had got on quite well. Two clever, well-educated, successful women, much of an age, from similar backgrounds, they had immediately spoken the same language and identified numerous shared acquaintances, including Tamara’s elder sister Alexandra. They had not exactly become friends. Both were too preoccupied by their separate, secret considerations. In other circumstances, they might have done so. But Tamara now accepted that this was a voyage of unrealisable possibilities; friendship with Janet, something more than friendship with Giles Needham, who was quite as attractive a man and quite as worth pursuing as poor Vanessa Papillon had made no secret of thinking. And now both were under suspicion, even if only by Tamara who
se function did not include wondering about murder.
It was hard to put the possibility out of her mind down on the sleeping deck, kept awake by snores and the drifting smell, or perhaps its memory or its possibility—Tamara could not tell whether the smell was in her nose or in the air outside the cubicle where Vanessa lay dead in her mess.
There was aural evidence that at least three of the party were asleep. The others were silent, and none were upstairs. The generator had ceased its hum.
Tamara had more than one flashlight and an ample supply of batteries. But she lay still in a darkness relieved only by a faint oblong of lesser blackness. The nightly mist obscured the light of the stars that earlier had been so brilliant.
It isn’t anything to do with me, she thought rebelliously, fearing, knowing that fate had chosen her to volunteer as remorselessly as an old-style sergeant major would pick on some unwilling soldier with the cruel phrase.
The bottle she had taken from Vanessa’s side was wrapped in some of her underwear. It was in her suitcase. Even by torchlight Tamara could see that the water was a little cloudy. She dipped her finger into the liquid and tasted it, being careful not to swallow, and spitting and wiping her tongue with a paper tissue afterwards.
She could not tell. Was she imagining a bitter flavour? And if not, what good would it do her to know it? The intensive course that she had been put through before going onto Mr Black’s staff had not included rapid identifications of poisons, only advice as to how to avoid having any forced upon her.
If anyone had put poison into Vanessa’s water there must have been a strong motive for it. With deep reluctance, Tamara realised that there might be some evidence of that motive in Vanessa’s belongings.
Tamara groped under her bed for a pair of locally acquired sandals with hard leather soles. They made an audible click as she went along the passage to the toilet cubicles. There, she stepped out of them, and padded barefoot and silently to the door of Vanessa’s room. She eased it open. In all the dreadful detail the cabin was as they had left it earlier in the evening. Perhaps everyone had idiotically thought, hoped, that some other hand would put things to rights or could undo disaster.