by Jessica Mann
‘It’s a Marvin Gaye tape,’ Tamara said, certain that it would not be the kind of sound Ann Benson would ask to borrow.
‘Oh, that’s your modern music. John says he won’t dignify it with the name. Noise, he says, not music. But I always say it’s in the ear of the beholder, if you know what I mean.’
Tamara could almost behold the face from which the voice in her ear had come, so vivid was it in her mind as she listened.
‘Perhaps I’ll try Hugo Bloom. He’s quite attractive in a wiry kind of way. He looks capable of most things. He might be interesting. I wonder what he does at the Bensons’ famous Fernley. I asked him whether he knew anything about that place next door that Olly once told me was a Safe House. He looked . . . what? Dangerous. Tough. I quite fancy him, and Tim’s becoming a bore. Silly Polly has no idea of the fuss there is about her back home. She came in a friend’s place and left a letter for the family to say she had gone. She did not know they never got it. I suppose the friend took advantage of the opportunity to do some altruistic extortion. I am going to have some fun with this.’
So Vanessa had not only recognised Polly but had let her know it. Polly cannot have been left in much doubt as to the use that she would make of the information. Would she have minded very much? And if she minded, how far would she have gone to do something about it? The motive, the opportunity, the means; murder would have been easy for any of them, and tempting to several, Tamara thought gloomily.
All the more reason to get the girl safely home. The mind boggled at the idea of a British princess incarcerated in an Egyptian or even a Sudanese gaol awaiting trial on a murder charge.
The cassette had ended, but the earpieces muffled any sounds from the outside. Tamara had every intention of listening to more of Vanessa’s aides memoires. She would just close her eyes for a tiny moment. Dreamlessly, she slept.
*
Shortly before dusk, when the lowering, reddening sun lay almost behind the rocky hills to the west, four of the workmen, wearing white galabiehs, brought Vanessa’s body upstairs, and lowered it down into a small dinghy. One man ferried it across to a party of his friends waiting on the lake-shore. He then returned to fetch two boats full of the Europeans.
The Nubians were intoning what sounded like a respectful dirge.
‘Are they Christians?’ John Benson asked sharply.
‘Several of them wear crucifixes,’ Hugo said.
Whether Christian or Muslim, all seemed willing to attend the unconventional cortège, standing at a little distance, with a dignity that came less naturally to Vanessa’s erstwhile companions, though all of them except Max Solomon were there.
Max was asleep across his bed, on top of, by now, five full notebooks. There had been a general, undiscussed agreement not to wake or interrupt him. Indeed, the respect for his revived muse was a far more strong and universal emotion among the Europeans than for the ceremony that they were now attending.
It was all too bizarre for the proper emotions. Only Polly cried, a childish sobbing that grated on adult nerves.
John Benson, who alone of the men present knew the words of the burial service, intoned in a High Church sing-song that seemed not imposing but absurd. When he reached the stage of dropping earth on a coffin he paused, suddenly at a loss; for the body was not below his feet in ashes and dust.
After an awkward pause the workmen came forward, and in unison swung forward to lift the white bundle into the stone cist where once a Roman soldier, hardly less distant from his home, had left his bones. The flat slab that had been its cover was heaved up to block the opening.
By now darkness had fallen, and as usual the wind had subsided. Nothing was to be heard but the slapping of the wavelets against the shore. It was not romantic but frightening and disorientating to be standing in as formal clothes as each person could muster, separated by two hundred yards of water from the barges moored at Qasr Samaan, in a threatening vastness of empty desert.
Everyone waited in an awkward silence. After a while Giles Needham said, ‘If the authorities let her remain here I’ll get Mahmoud to carve her name on it. He’s a wonderful stone mason.’
‘She was called Vera Pritchard,’ Tamara said.
‘How do you know?’ Ann Benson said.
‘Max mentioned it. His son Jonty worked with her. Naturally she didn’t want people to know. Vanessa Papillon, the butterfly, suited her better.’
Timothy Knipe began to laugh. ‘Bogus to the very last. They’ll call the wrong name for her on Judgement Day.’ He giggled and snorted until Janet Macmillan shook him sharply and said, ‘Shut up, damn you. Shut up.’
Disconsolate, the small group of marooned travellers returned for another night in the immobile barge.
Chapter Twelve
Tamara Hoyland as Hercule Poirot. She could not help feeling that there had been a mistake in the casting.
Stir it a bit, she thought, and said, ‘It reminds me of Death on the Nile.’ Except, she did not say aloud, that the dramatis personae looked so very much less glamorous than those in the film. Without Vanessa to lend elegance, those present could more plausibly have been acting in a drama of modern realism. Only Giles and Hugo had properly acclimatised to the sun and were smoothly brown; Polly’s skin was speckled with pale patches grown over sunburn and insect bites.
Janet Macmillan was polka-dotted with freckles. The thick bones of her large face seemed to jut under the skin as though she had lost weight very quickly. She had the kind of head that might have been sculpted in stone, with angular planes and what Tamara thought would once have been called a chiselled nose. Beside her Tamara felt puny. She wondered how their skeletons would compare.
Ann Benson’s hands and face had erupted in a rash, while John was pinkly sunburnt. Exposure neither tanned nor burnt Tim Knipe who, always pale, hardly looked more so at this moment, and would have been welcomed on the set of an escapist film. He still contrived to look both piratical and poetical.
Max Solomon, of course, was not with the rest of the party. He had not joined them for any meal since Vanessa’s death, though he seemed to have nibbled something from the trays of food his Nubian steward carried down. The servants had decided that he was a wise and possibly a holy man, Giles said.
Tamara went on, ‘If this were Agatha Christie, Vanessa would have been murdered.’
‘By Tim,’ Janet said.
‘You don’t expect me to have read that muck,’ Tim said. He was on his third glass of brandy and two full ashtrays were on the table in front of him. The others had left a little space on either side as they all sat around the long table so that Tim could sprawl and stretch, or simply rest his shaggy head on his folded arms in front of him. He was at once restless and dazed. But then everybody seemed to be not changed, but more noticeably what they normally were, watchful like Hugo Bloom or Polly (though her attention was focused on Giles alone) or abstracted, like Janet, or babbling, like Ann Benson.
‘It made such a wonderful film,’ she said, bravely ignoring a contemptuous glance from her brother. ‘The scenery!’
‘In the story, as far as I recall,’ Tamara said, ‘two people had conspired together to murder someone who was the wife of one and the former friend of the other.’
‘The man had married the wrong woman, don’t you remember?’ Ann Benson said. ‘She’d fallen for her best friend’s young man. Stolen him really.’
Her brother said, ‘I cannot bear people who speak of people as though they were property.’
‘Haven’t you all read it, or seen the film at least?’ Ann Benson asked. ‘It was what made me want to come. Well, not this so much, but the river steamer. It looked so lovely. They showed it last winter, it was cold outside and the kitchen roof was leaking, and then that lovely sight . . . blue water and sky and everyone wearing thin clothes with sun hats, it looked like Heaven. Don’t you remember, John? You must do. He pretends not to be watching,’ she confided to the assembled company. ‘He always sits there, straight in
front of the set with a book on his lap, and says he doesn’t hear a thing. But I see him looking at the screen really. Come on, John, admit it.’ Her face was flushed, perhaps with the excitement of liberty, for her brother looked at her as though she had never spoken to him so openly before. ‘And then there was the temple. The one where the baddy pushed a rock down to try to kill someone. Or was that a different film? I forget. But it was all hot and dusty and windy and sort of frightening, like where you and Mr Bloom were today, Janet, when you went off together and I was up above you on the hill and I thought how easily I could just roll one of those boulders down . . .’
‘Perhaps it was a mistake to give her brandy,’ Giles muttered to Tamara.
‘You were talking about science. You’re so clever to be a scientist. I couldn’t understand a word you said, all those letters and numbers. But you wrote them all down, didn’t you, Mr Bloom? I watched you. In your notebook. And then Janet tried to take it off you and you wouldn’t let her. But we know what that sort of scuffle leads to, don’t we?’ She giggled. If she had known the phrase she would have said ‘nudge nudge wink wink’, and Janet Macmillan blushed as though she had.
‘Have another drink and shut up,’ Timothy Knipe growled. Ann Benson gasped, giggled some more and held out her glass.
‘Not for my sister, thank you,’ John Benson said.
‘Not? Perhaps I am just the least little bit squiffy,’ she admitted. ‘It was seeing it . . . her . . . Vanessa. So unexpected. I mean, I have seen people in dreadful states before, dead even, but not like that. Not suddenly like that. And when it’s in a film it doesn’t look so horrible somehow. Or you can just close your eyes, or think about something else. I mean, the murder is just a part of the fun, like a game or something. Not a real person, vomiting and smelling so horrible and then being . . . I’m going to be sick myself.’ She lurched away from the table and they heard her clattering down the stairs and along the passage.
‘I should apologise for my sister. She isn’t herself. That’s what I can’t bear about modern entertainment like television. It allows the deluded viewer to suppose that horrors can always be sanitised.’
‘But this is a rather different event in any case,’ Tamara said. ‘I mean, Vanessa was not actually murdered, was she?’
Giles Needham looked at her very sharply, and then said, ‘What would we do if she had been?’
‘Ask the usual questions, I suppose. How, when, where, why—and, of course, who. Whom is all we do know.’
‘How,’ Giles said, holding up his first finger. ‘How did she die?’
‘Luckily the answer is obvious enough to make proceeding with the other questions either unnecessary or undesirable,’ John Benson said. He pushed his chair sharply backwards, its metal legs screeching against the deck. ‘I see no point in this distasteful conversation. I shall retire to bed.’ He followed his sister down the stairs. Tim Knipe was already asleep and snoring at the table, and Polly had slid onto the floor, where she reclined at Giles Needham’s feet, her cheek against his knee. Her mouth had fallen unbecomingly open, and she was dribbling slightly.
‘How, then?’ Hugo Bloom said, looking from Giles to Tamara and back. ‘I at least am interested.’
‘Food poisoning, surely,’ Giles Needham said. He shifted Polly’s head without waking her, to reach his pipe from his pocket. The match flame, sucked in and out through the tobacco, fitfully illuminated his down-turned face. The single hanging, unshaded bulb that lit the whole long living deck, threw an ugly and inadequate light on the people who remained up there. By this time on the previous two evenings everybody had already been in bed.
There was something indefinably sinister about sitting in this comfortless enclosure, its chill emphasised by the few attempts that had been made since the excavation season began to make it less unhomely. A large calendar showing a carthorse in a snow-covered field, and some picture postcards of the Alps, were tacked onto the wall. A striped durry covered a small fraction of the floorboards.
Tamara shivered and pulled her cardigan more closely around herself.
‘It does get cold at night,’ Giles Needham said.
‘You feel it if you aren’t well,’ Hugo said.
‘Yes, I have had a sort of tummy upset myself,’ Tamara said.
‘Better now?’
‘Yes thanks, the worst is over.’
‘Not for Vanessa.’
‘Hers was something much more serious.’
‘Brought on by what, I wonder,’ Giles said. ‘It would be just as well to know. If she had an allergy that’s one thing, very dreadful, but nobody else will be at risk. But if she ate something that one of the others might try . . .’
Hugo said, ‘You raise a very terrifying prospect. The angel of death stalking through our little party.’
‘That is assuming that she didn’t take it on purpose,’ Giles said.
‘Suicide,’ Hugo murmured. His fleshy, intelligent face was thoughtful, almost, Tamara thought, wary. She said:
‘Not necessarily. She could have thought she was simply treating herself. She travelled with a whole pharmacopoeia, after all.’
‘Self-administered,’ Giles said. He sounded relieved.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Hugo Bloom said.
‘After all,’ Tamara said, ‘how else? I mean, simply for the sake of argument, could any one of us have given her medicine that might have harmed her? Who had the chance?’
‘We all had the chance,’ Giles said gloomily. ‘Do you two have to produce these nightmarish ideas? Next thing, you’ll be saying there’s a murderer among us.’
‘Murderer!’ Polly looked like a child awaking from a nightmare. She knelt up beside Giles, absent-mindedly wiping her chin with the back of her hand.
‘No, of course there’s no murderer. You were dreaming. I wish you’d go to bed, Polly,’ Giles told her.
‘I will. I’m on my way.’ She moved lazily slowly round the room picking up the belongings she had spent the day scattering round it. A scarf, a sandal, a notebook, a comb and a tube of face cream. ‘I can’t think why I stayed up so late anyway. Not quite the most scintillating evening of one’s whole life.’
Tossing her head she went down the stairs. Hugo sketched a bow as she passed, and then followed after her. He knows, Tamara thought, and so must Giles. She said:
‘How does Polly come to be here in the middle of term?’
‘It is part of her practical experience.’
‘Much more exciting than mine ever was at Edinburgh,’ Tamara aid. ‘I was always bottom up in muddy ditches at road-widening schemes.’
‘I agreed to take her as a favour to Thea Crawford.’
The academic world, as Tamara knew very well herself, was criss-crossed with networks of mutual obligation between adults collecting debts on behalf on their children. Queen’s Counsels, deans of teaching hospitals, heads of colleges and film producers would find themselves importuned on behalf of some don’s daughter. But not, Tamara thought, on behalf of Polly.
Tamara stared hard at Giles, who gave all the signs of being a deeply embarrassed man. Clearing his throat he said:
‘Actually I was wondering . . .’
‘How much to admit?’
‘No, no, absolutely not, just whether you might give Polly a lift back home. Now that there will be a spare place, without Vanessa, that’s to say.’
‘There will be questions asked, you know. No getting away from it.’
Giles groaned. He ran his hands through his hair. He got up, and sat down again, and clenched and stretched his fingers.
‘Oh, God,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose they all know.’
‘I doubt it. They haven’t said anything. And most of them have other things to think about.’
‘Vanessa knew.’
‘She was going to get a scoop, presumably.’
‘She tried to con Polly into talking frankly. Said she’d keep it to herself if there was a good reason. That’s a laugh. Good reason
!’
‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ Tamara invited him.
The circumstances were encouraging for confidences. The night was chilly but clear, so that they sat in moon and starlight, listening to the agreeable lapping of the water against the barge, and the background crackle of the watchman’s fire. It was just the right place for fairy tales. And Giles’s story used fairy-tale ingredients; or perhaps, Tamara thought, those of the modern version of the fairy tale, which must be the gossip column.
Giles Needham was embarrassed by the episode from its very start. ‘Dances are really not in my line, but if your own supporters’ club lay on a fund-raiser . . .’ He had not felt able to stay away, however alien to his personality and his commitment he felt a ballroom to be. ‘Why they can’t simply hand over the money instead of having to dress up like Christmas trees and over-eat and be deafened . . .’
One of the grandest London houses; royalty in the person of Princess Mary to add lustre; jewellery to dazzle, clothes to crush. Giles had felt both dazzled and crushed himself. He was out of place and ill at ease and least of all at ease with the Princess herself who, in compliment to the cause for which the event was raising money, wore a dress reminiscent of a pharaoh’s mummy case, and had her eyes outlined in kohl. The room was decorated with swathes of gold and bronze, touched in turquoise. He likened it to being inside a cigarette advertisement, luxurious, unnecessary and in slightly bad taste. There were television cameras and gossip columnists and a whole page of pictures in Jennifer’s Diary, Tamara recalled, but did not mention it because Giles would despise her for reading a meretricious rag.
‘They had made it all so personal. You know, concentrating on me, myself, not my work at all. I had to dance with her.’ His tone betrayed the irritation he had felt at the time, forced to shuffle publicly around a dance floor, clutching so public a partner. ‘And then . . .’