by Jessica Mann
In the matter of her looks, if in nothing else, Polly was unlucky. She lived in an age which encouraged disguises; but which provided the camera lenses to penetrate them. She would only look like a pretty princess in the pictures that had been adjusted to make her so. Still, changed or not, her face must still be a well-known one.
Tamara said, ‘All the same, it might be more sensible if you kept your head down—literally. Don’t you agree?’
It was automatic for Polly to crush impertinence, and her eyebrows began to rise before she suddenly crumpled into tears. ‘I don’t know what to do. What are they going to say when I get home? I’m going to be in dead trouble.’
‘It could be a bit dicey.’
‘And it wasn’t even worth it in the end. If I’d come back engaged to Giles, they would have had to come round. Anyway, nobody was meant to know, except my family. Everything has gone wrong.’ Polly knuckled her eyes and sniffed like a child. ‘Whatever am I going to do?’
‘You’re safe enough here, anyway. Come on, we’ll get something to drink and make a plan.’
For want of anywhere better, Tamara and Polly sat on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms already allotted to other travellers. Hugo and Janet had gone out to see what there was to be seen in Abu Simbel. Ann Benson was sitting on a mock leather bench in the bar, her head back against the wall and her eyes closed.
Tamara opened her capacious bag to find the aspirin.
‘What’s that?’ Polly asked, pointing to a plastic bag.
‘Sand. Soil.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘My father’s garden. He sprinkles pieces of the world on the rockery. He’s got some of the Holy Land, and the Grand Canyon, and even the Great Wall of China. He’ll like this.’
‘How interesting,’ Polly said, with automatic warmth.
‘So tell me. Did you think nobody would notice you’d gone?’ Tamara prompted.
‘I never thought it would get out. I left a note for my family explaining where I was. I was perfectly safe. Paula’s family would never have let her go to Egypt if it hadn’t been. I thought they’d say I had some mild illness, glandular fever or something, until I got back. I can’t think what went wrong.’
‘Obviously, your friend Paula never delivered the note; or somebody intercepted it. Somebody who took advantage of your being safely out of the way to do a bit of Robin Hoodery.’
‘It must have been Paula. We were talking about it last term, what we could do to force the government to send some food. Someone had the idea of kidnapping me then. We all thought it was awfully funny.’
‘It may have had the desired effect, of course. Would that help?’
‘Nothing could help me now. But it is monstrous, you know; there are all those mountains of food that nobody wants being burnt or just thrown away while other people are starving. I spoke to the Prime Minister about it, actually.’
‘Really? What did she say?’
‘Just some waffle about it all being very dreadful. And then I got into trouble for talking about politics. But I don’t think it’s politics. It is simple humanity.’
‘Perhaps Paula was justified then,’ Tamara said.
‘That’s all very well.’ Saving herself had become more important to Polly than saving the starving.
Tamara said cautiously, ‘It might have come out even if Paula had delivered your letter as you arranged. Vanessa Papillon knew who you were.’
‘Oh, I know. I was simply desperate. I simply did not know what to do.’
‘What did you do?’
Polly looked at Tamara sideways, wondering whether to admit it. ‘I thought of killing myself.’
‘Not her?’
‘No. I’m afraid that never occurred to me.’ She sounded genuinely sorry. ‘I sort of thought, if I just went to sleep and never woke up . . . There are several things that would have done it in the photography store. I even thought of putting selenium into my mineral water. Everyone would have been so sorry. The last time one of my family died young was before the first world war, and he was mental.’
‘You changed your mind, did you?’ Tamara enquired delicately.
‘I wasn’t too sure about the selenium. I knew it was poisonous, but it might have hurt. Anyway, Giles was up there, he wanted to know what I was up to. So then I thought I’d use pills. I knew Vanessa had lots, and I heard her borrowing more from Mr Solomon, so I nipped down after dinner to find them. And then of course it turned out to be unnecessary.’
Tamara recalled the flash of green fabric she had seen when she came out into the corridor the night Vanessa died. ‘Do you mean you found her body before Timothy did?’
‘I just thought she was ill. Honestly, I didn’t know she was dying. I couldn’t have known.’ More sobs, more tears; Polly’s heaves and gulps verged on the hysterical. She had let go of the rigid control suitable to her calling, which she had quite creditably maintained throughout the last few days. Polly had never been one to do things by half. Tamara shook her quite hard, and then, wondering whether it counted as lèse majesté, slapped her as she had slapped Tim Knipe on the night they were talking about. She said sharply:
‘What do you mean? You had better tell me properly. I can’t help you otherwise.’
The girl sobbed on, more quietly, beginning to control herself. Tamara hoped nobody would interrupt them. She waited, wishing that she were old enough to feel motherly or young enough to have fellow feeling for the girl’s mixture of arrogance and immaturity. Eventually Polly gulped, ‘I looked into her cabin, just to see if she was there, that was all, and she was being sick, and clutching her tummy, and I just thought it served her right. I was quite pleased. I thought she had Tutankhamun’s revenge, you know? Honestly, if I had known she was seriously ill I would have . . .’
‘I’m sure you would,’ Tamara lied.
‘Tamara, you won’t tell anyone, will you? Can I count on you?’
‘What did you do then?’
‘The bell rang and I went up because it always seemed rude to be late when Giles and I were kind of host and hostess.’ Having been foiled in her plan to poison herself, Polly went to preside at and eat a large dinner.
Tamara said, ‘Was Giles the only one who saw you fiddling with the poisons and the mineral water bottle?’
‘You know how everyone came up and down all the time.’
‘Did anyone say anything? I don’t remember because I wasn’t there myself that night.’
‘Of course, you were laid low, I was so sorry,’ Polly said with the practised graciousness that she would never be able to disguise. But it was skin deep. It was impossible to believe that Polly could have seen Vanessa in her last agonies and really supposed her to be simply having an attack of gyppy tummy.
Was it possible to believe that she had caused it? Had she actually mixed her suicidal potion? Was she telling this story because Giles had told her that Tamara had the bottle that had been in Vanessa’s room? Mercifully, Tamara thought, it is not my job to find out. But someone, somewhere, had better do so, before this mini-juggernaut is released into the world to enforce her will on other people and things.
Max Solomon was standing in the lobby, clapping his hands to awaken Ann and to attract the others. He looked pleased with himself. He had managed to lay on a bus. ‘Well, I call it a bus. It won’t be air-conditioned, and I have grave doubts of its springs. But it should get us to Aswan by morning. The first stage of our journey home.’
Chapter Eighteen
The full horror of their last few days hit the survivors of Qasr Samaan when they told someone else about them.
Sayeed had realised that the members of the Camisis party who had stayed in Aswan should not wait for their mysteriously delayed companions but catch their intended flight back to Cairo and from there home to London. He had escorted them to the International Airport, and seen them safely out of his country. He had then flown back to Aswan to await, with increasing mystification, the others’ return.
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‘Miss Papillon? And Mr Benson too? Both? But this is dreadful news. More dreadful than I could have imagined. Naturally I was most anxious. I guessed, a strike perhaps; alas we have many strikes in my country. Also mechanical failures, though this, of course, you indeed experienced. But such tragedy, such disaster, that I did not picture. What grief!’ He seemed genuinely sad; more so than those who had better reason to be. His elegant profile, the exact modern parallel of those so often depicted on tomb walls, his moist, large eyes, expressed emotions that in the others had been swallowed by impatience. ‘I take it personally,’ he said, ‘that these accidents should have happened in my country!’
Tamara looked at the laden feluccas, tipped almost into the water by the fierce wind, and at the crowded terraces of the Old Cataract Hotel where she, along with far too many other foreigners, was waiting for news of reservations, flights and escape routes from the resort, and was only surprised that so few accidents happened in Sayeed’s country.
Here, where Roman ladies once dreamed of recall to the hub of the fashionable empire, where nineteenth-century consumptives had breathed the dry and curative air, where diarists had rhapsodised over peace and beauty, an ill-assorted variety of world citizens elbowed through self-centred crowds. The wind that aggravated their irritability, swirled dust into their eyes and sun-hats from their heads. It dulled and darkened the fast-flowing Nile.
Giles had gone off on his own, saying that he would find the members of his team who must be waiting somewhere in Aswan for their return to Qasr Samaan.
Hugo, still indefatigable, said he was going to buy an early print of Philae that he had seen in an antique shop when they were in Aswan before. In the hotel lounge Polly, Timothy, Janet and Ann settled down in a corner and were soon asleep, their heads awkwardly propped against the wicker chair-backs.
They were politely ignored by the servants, who were dressed and behaved as though this were the set for a film about the old empire. Above the plants in their copper and brass pots, fans slowly turned, shifting the dusty air but hardly cooling it.
The previous night had been, by any standards, gruesome. The journey from Abu Simbel to Aswan had reduced the European passengers to fury, self-pity or dumb resignation in the mêlée of goats, chickens in coops, babies, cheerful but veiled women, disdainful and observant men, all clouded in a miasma of dust, diesel fumes and pungent snacks.
It had been left to Ann Benson to say, ‘John wouldn’t have been able to bear this.’
‘If we know what you mean,’ prompted Timothy Knipe. His own developing mannerisms were also secondhand, those of the star Vanessa had been. In public now he was ostentatiously bereaved. He carried Vanessa’s hand luggage, and wore one of her filmy scarves. Tamara was not quite sure that he had not sprayed himself with her scent.
‘Do you want to put that up on the rack?’ Giles had asked, putting out his hand for the snakeskin case.
‘I shall hang onto it. Vanessa’s things are mine now. I am her heir.’
Could that be true? Or could Tim believe it to be true? He had not mentioned it before. If Vanessa had made a will in his favour he would have had a powerful motive to . . . But it was not Tamara’s business. She shook her head, and then smiled at the dejected Nubian who had thought her gesture was directed at him. His company on the long drive was less demanding than Tim’s would have been, and she woke at dawn, near Aswan, to find her own head on his striped cotton shoulder.
Sayeed laid his comforting hand on hers. ‘You are tired. You are all tired,’ he said. ‘I go now to arrange a coach to take you northwards and you shall all sleep.’
There was no hope of getting on any flight. Numerous tourists who had been decanted from their hotel rooms to make way for a king were now queueing furiously at the airport for any conveyance that would get them away from Aswan.
More crowds besieged the telephones and telex machines. Max Solomon was in the queue. It had been agreed that he would do his utmost to get his party safely out of the country before Giles told the authorities of the two deaths at Qasr Samaan.
‘We all know that they were accidents and you would be free to go in the end. But the bureaucracy, the hold-ups . . . you make a clean get-away. I’ll carry the can.’ Even those who did not realise that Giles’s priority was to get Polly safely and secretly home, were only too eager to encourage his self-sacrifice.
‘Not a word from us,’ Timothy said firmly. ‘Buttoned mouths, chaps, agreed?’
Tamara doubted whether discretion would be maintained for very long. If Max could not manage to get flights from Cairo there might be trouble. Nor would it be fair to Giles. He might plausibly be able to say that he had tried and failed to keep his guests available for questioning but that they had left before the police could get to them. If he was shown to have delayed while material witnesses were still in Egypt, things would be very tough for him, though Tamara did not doubt that he would get away with it. Where his work was concerned, Giles had a tenacity that was probably invincible. There was only one thing in which he was interested and monomaniacs tended to get their way in the end.
But the immediate question was whether Max Solomon would be sufficiently single-minded. His plan had been to send messages to Camisis and leave Mr Osmond to pull what strings he could. He was going to try Egyptair and the British Embassy in Cairo too, but without optimism.
Tamara found that he was near the front of the telex queue. He was waiting between a robed Nigerian and a uniformed Japanese courier. She scribbled down some letters and numbers. ‘It is a priority code. If you read it to the people at the Embassy it might help.’
‘I see.’ Max looked at the scrap of paper, and then up to meet Tamara’s non-committal gaze. ‘So my friend Professor Thomas is not in domestic trouble after all? That is good news.’
‘I haven’t said a word.’
‘It is not necessary. But I will dictate your signal.’
‘Let’s just hope it works.’
Another busload of tourists was being unloaded at the front of the hotel. They pushed each other aside to get to their luggage. Some Italians were getting into a coach, chattering cheerfully. A miscellaneous group was standing around their courier; all carried bags that matched her identifying pennant. Between them cars backed and edged, their turning space obstructed.
The large, but not large enough, parking space of the hotel was edged by flowering bushes and trees, from which blossoms were being stripped by the relentless wind. By the jacaranda tree on the way through the swimming pool, Janet was standing with Hugo Bloom. He put his arm round her and kissed her cheek. He pointed down towards the town. Then he turned to enter the hotel, and Janet began to walk down the sloping driveway.
I had better go with her, Tamara thought.
Two men were coming towards Janet. They parted to let her pass between them. She seemed to stumble, and one of them caught her by the shoulder. A taxi whose engine had been running, swooped beside them, and the two men dragged Janet Macmillan into the rear seat between them. By the time Tamara had dodged through the buses and the tourists, and run across the forecourt, the taxi, and its passengers, had disappeared from view.
Chapter Nineteen
There were no empty taxis. There were no cars to commandeer, only buses and ignorant visitors. No help was at hand. Nor could Tamara be certain that she needed it. She suddenly felt utterly weary, the sleepless night of travel catching up with her, and she wondered whether she was imagining or even dreaming what she had seen—or what she thought she saw. Had Janet really been bundled unwillingly, perhaps even unconsciously, into a car, here, of all places? It is idiotic, Tamara thought, my mind runs on melodrama. I see a peaceful event and introduce poisoned umbrella tips, or knock-out jabs. It is a professional deformity, and I only gave way to it because I didn’t have enough sleep.
But then, where had Janet gone? Who had she gone with? Tamara played the scene through her memory again. Janet had been greeted by Hugo. He kissed her. Why had he
done that? They had been together for days, would be for more days—what had that deliberate salute, not the kiss of a lover but a formal, quick cheek-to-cheek been for? It was as though he were marking her out, saying ‘this is my woman’; or perhaps, ‘this is the woman’. An identification, pre-arranged, for fellow conspirators who needed to be certain that they got the right person.
Janet had said that she was almost afraid of Hugo. What else, apart from the fact that he found her physically attractive, could interest him in her? Only her work. Only the work that she had discussed with Hugo; about which he had questioned her; which he had offered to publish for her.
Max Solomon was no longer in the telex room. Giles Needham had not come back to the hotel. Sayeed had disappeared. Ann Benson, Polly and Timothy Knipe were still dozing, lucky to be able to sleep their waiting time away among the pierced screens and old colonial furniture of the cool-tiled hotel.
Hugo Bloom was at a curlicued white table beside the swimming pool. A waiter, barefoot and wearing a red fez, had just brought him a tall glass, frosted with ice, and he took a long swig.
Tamara went to sit with him. He waved at the waiter. ‘Fruit juice? No? One mineral water for the lady please. Look, Tamara, I have found this print of Philae. Charming, don’t you think?’ It was a mass-produced reproduction of one of David Roberts’s watercolours. Except for being on thicker paper, it could have been torn from a Sunday newspaper’s colour supplement. John Benson would not have approved. His own fake would have been more convincing.
‘I was looking for Janet. Have you seen her?’
‘Isn’t she asleep up on the terrace?’
The moment of revelation was as exciting as stout Cortés’s on that peak in Darien. It was for this heady surge of triumph that Tamara did her secret work. But her face was not the mirror of her mind.
‘Is she? I didn’t look. What a bad night they must all have had in that bus. I slept quite well myself.’