by Simon Brett
‘Bengt Cøpper has already identified the location of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop’s tomb. If Corky has the old Lag outside the hotel on the ping of eleven, he’ll take us straight there.’
‘And poor old Corky won’t have to worry any more about Hail, Locusts, Darkness and the Death of the Firstborn.’
‘Bong on the nose, Blotters. Hopefully the poor old pineapple’s boils will clear up too.’
‘Has he still got ’em, Twinks?’
‘Had when I last asked.’
‘He’s a grade A foundation stone, isn’t he – Corky? Never complains about anything.’
‘Well, except about not having enough opportunities to lay down his life for us.’
‘True.’
Blotto stretched his tweed-clad arms above his head in a gesture of relief. ‘And then the whole clangdumble’ll be sorted and we can pongle back to Tawcester Towers as quick as a lizard’s lick.’
‘Larksissimo!’ But Twinks wasn’t actually cheerful enough for a real full-bodied ‘Larksissimo!’ Though her brother seemed conveniently to have forgotten the fact, she couldn’t be unaware of the situation that faced them on their return. The financial troubles of Tawcester Towers had not been resolved. The vultures were gathering and there was a very real threat that the estate might have to be sold and turned into an hotel.
What’s more, their trip to Egypt, though it would undoubtedly have been of benefit to Corky Froggett, in other respects would have made things worse rather than better. The sarcophagus of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop was the only thing of value that the Lyminster family possessed. The Dowager Duchess saw its sale as the route out of their pecuniary embarrassments. Twinks wasn’t looking forward to the interview in the Blue Morning Room when she and Blotto told their mother that they had left the precious object in Egypt.
Still, it wasn’t the moment for that kind of recrimination. Corky Froggett had to be released from his sentence of afflictions. Twinks turfed Blotto out of her suite, saying she needed to dress for their journey and agreeing to meet in the hotel foyer at ten to eleven.
Back in his own quarters Blotto also felt rather down, but the reasons for his gloom were different from his sister’s. The fact was that – an almost unprecedented event – he had woken up in the middle of the night. With a feeling. A different feeling from the limited range which usually illuminated his psyche. Had he been more familiar with it, he would have recognised something called yearning.
He was yearning for Christabel Whipple. A woman as big as he was, who liked cricket and bore an uncanny resemblance to his hunter Mephistopheles . . . what more could a boddo ask for?
He had decided back then in the middle of the night that he would go and visit Christabel the following morning at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. With that comforting thought in place, he had turned over in bed under his mosquito net and gone straight back to sleep.
So when the message had arrived in Twinks’s suite from Bengt Cøpper, Blotto had been considerably cast down. His visit to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities would have to wait. But he still did feel a very unBlottoish need to communicate with Christabel Whipple. And that led him to an even more unBlottoish decision: he would write a note to her.
Now Blotto had never been a whale on writing. Indeed, so reluctant was he to put pen to paper that some of his beaks at Eton had expressed the opinion that he couldn’t actually write. The situation wasn’t that bad but, generally speaking, he would go to considerable lengths to avoid any kind of written communication.
That, however, was before he had become afflicted with this new yearning. He just knew that he had to make contact with Christabel Whipple that very day.
The desk in his suite’s sitting room had a copious supply of Shepheard’s Hotel embossed writing paper and Blotto got through quite a few sheets as he drafted and redrafted a message whose tone would suggest the depth of his feelings without making him sound too abject or needy.
The task took a while and it was twenty to eleven before he had created a formula of words that satisfied him.
He read them for the final time: ‘Dear Christabel, Got to do business with Bengt Cøpper today. Hope your work at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is interesting. Hope we meet another day. Yours sincerely, Blotto.’
Though he said it himself, he was quite pleased with the result. It was the final sentence before the ‘Yours sincerely’ that had caused him most difficulty. Because that, he recognised, was the place where he was going to express the emotion that he felt for Christabel Whipple. He didn’t want that emotion to come across as disrespectful or presumptuous so he knew he should be wary of laying it on with a butter knife, but he did want her to be aware of it.
He had rejected various other versions of that sentence. First he’d gone boldly for: ‘You remind me of my hunter Mephistopheles’, but he thought that might be too meaty for a well-brought-up English rose to cope with. ‘I really want to see you again’ also seemed a bit too raw. And ‘I hope you feel the same for me as I do for you’ was just asking for trouble.
No, he was very pleased with: ‘Hope we meet another day.’ If Christabel Whipple couldn’t gauge the depth of his emotion from that, then she wasn’t the sensitive creature that he had marked her down as.
He rang for a uniformed flunkey to organise delivery of the note. When the man had had his task explained to him, he said that of course he would need a baksheesh to do it. Baksheesh would also be required for the hotel’s concierge, the other uniformed flunkey who actually took the message, the doorman who let that uniformed flunkey out of Shepheard’s Hotel, the driver in whose cab he would travel, the doorman at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, the porter at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities who would take the note to Christabel Whipple, the driver in whose cab the other uniformed flunkey would drive back to Shepheard’s Hotel, the doorman who would let him back inside, the concierge to whom he would report his mission accomplished, and the further uniformed flunkey who would pass that news on to the writer of the note.
Blotto handed across the money.
He and Twinks met in the foyer as arranged. When they stepped out into the surprising heat of the day, Blotto wished there had been time to visit Les Grands Magasins Cicurel and stock up on a summer wardrobe. Bengt Cøpper looked a lot more comfortable than Blotto felt, in his dusty brown shirt, cotton trousers and leather hat.
Corky Froggett, standing beside the gleaming blue of the Lagonda, must have been feeling similar stickiness in his thick blue uniform, but of course he betrayed no signs of it. ‘Have you still got the boils?’ Twinks murmured to him as he opened the car door for her.
‘Oh yes, milady,’ replied the chauffeur as though they were a badge of honour.
It was agreed that Corky should drive, and Bengt Cøpper should sit beside him to give directions, with Blotto and Twinks in the back.
‘Right,’ said the archaeologist as the chauffeur pressed the self-starter and nosed his way gingerly through the floods of street children, ‘let us return Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop to his rightful home.’
24
The Return of the Sarcophagus
The road which took them out through the suburbs of Cairo was better than the one Blotto had driven down from Alexandria. It was almost clear of sand, so Corky Froggett did not have to go as fast as the young master had done on their previous journey. There was something almost sedate about the Lagonda’s progress, fitting, Twinks thought, for the final journey of a pharaoh to his place of reburial.
Bengt Cøpper had a couple of maps open on his lap. The larger one, with many folds, was a commercially printed large-scale representation of Cairo and its environs. The smaller had been scratched out in pen on a scrap of paper. It was almost transparent along the folds and the Indian ink had faded to sepia.
‘Are we going to the Valley of the Kings?’ asked Twinks, a little breathlessly. The idea of actually being in that fabled location gave her quite a frisson.
‘Of course, milady,’ repl
ied Bengt Cøpper, with the suave assurance of someone who had been there many times.
The greenness of the Nile-irrigated suburbs gave way surprisingly quickly to the sands of the desert, but still the road surface remained good and clear. Blotto didn’t take much notice of the landscape through which they were driving. He just kept looking covertly at his watch, wondering whether Christabel Whipple would have received his note yet. And wondering how she would react when she did receive it. Had he been too forward with that ‘Hope we meet another day’ line?
He was pleased that he’d extracted his cricket bat from his valise back at Shepheard’s Hotel and brought it with him. He stroked its battered, linseed-oiled surface, but it didn’t bring the same quality of reassurance as it usually did.
They didn’t seem to have been driving very long when Bengt Cøpper instructed Corky Froggett to take a minor road off the main one up into a craggy hillside. The surface of the road here was naked rock, but it seemed to have been much used and did not give them too bumpy a ride. A lot of red dust flew up around them, though.
When they crested the brow of the first hill, they saw spread before them an area that looked for all the world like a building site. Deep parallel trenches had been cut into the rock. Wooden scaffolding stood against unfinished walls. Primitive cranes, also made of wood, posed like giant wading birds. There were piles of gravel, sand, cement, with discarded tools lying beside them. Though the work appeared only recently to have been abandoned, they saw no sign of any labourers.
But, alerted by the sound of the Lagonda, two men in dark blue uniforms eased themselves up from the shade of a wall where they had been sitting and moved towards the approaching vehicle.
‘Ahmet! Mustapha!’ Bengt Cøpper called out as soon as they were in earshot. ‘Salaam! I am here as promised.’
He pointed out a flat area on the edge of the workings where Corky Froggett should park the Lagonda and they all decanted onto the bare rock. Without the motion of the car to cool them, they were aware of the sudden rush of heat. Blotto felt sweat trickling down his tweed-clad back. He still held his cricket bat, swishing it aimlessly at imaginary bouncers.
The two men in uniform appeared to know the archaeologist, but their manner was hardly welcoming. Prominent on their belts were revolvers in heavy leather holsters. Prominent on their faces were the expressions of me who wouldn’t think twice about using them.
‘Before we can proceed,’ said Bengt Cøpper, ‘these two will require baksheesh.’
Twinks duly paid them from the dwindling stock of Egyptian pounds in her sequinned reticule. Then she looked around at the landscape in which they had arrived. ‘Great whiffling water rats!’ she said. ‘So this is the Valley of the Kings?’
Bengt Cøpper smiled a harsh smile. ‘You sound almost disappointed, milady.’
‘Well, it wasn’t quite what I’d imagined.’
‘In what way?’
‘I suppose I was expecting something more . . . I don’t know . . . splendid.’
‘All the splendour is buried underground,’ said Bengt Cøpper. ‘You were expecting rows of sarcophagi on display like in a museum, were you, milady?’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ Twinks replied quite shortly. She was finding a little of the archaeologist’s insolent confidence went a long way. ‘It’s just to me this looks more like the foundations of a spoffing great building rather than an excavation site.’
‘And have you ever seen an excavation site, milady?’
Twinks was forced to admit that she hadn’t.
‘Then I think you should give me the benefit of the doubt on this one,’ said Bengt Cøpper, only just on the right side of rudeness. ‘I have spent my entire adult life in archaeology. And I can tell you this is a very typical excavation site. What may look to you like new building is in fact work to shore up the walls of the ancient burial tombs. The fabric of some of them is much degenerated, affected by centuries of flash floods which have filled the chambers with debris. If you will be so good as to accept my expert view on the matter . . . ?’
Twinks bridled at his sarcasm, but she had no other arguments to put up against him, so instead she said, ‘Well, for the love of strawberries, let’s get on with replacing the sarcophagus, shall we?’
‘Of course, milady. That is, after all, the reason for our presence here in the Valley of the Kings.’
‘Yes.’ Twinks looked around and observed something that seemed strange to her. ‘I thought there were lots of tombs and excavations in the Valley of the Kings.’
‘There are indeed, milady.’
She gazed across the reddish rocky outcrops towards the distant horizon. ‘Well, I can’t see any others.’
‘Milady,’ said the archaeologist with patronising patience, ‘are you aware of the size of the Valley of the Kings?’ Once again Twinks was forced to admit ignorance. ‘Well, I can assure you it’s massive.’ He gestured to the highest ridge of rock. ‘From the top of there you’d be able to see any number of excavations.’
Twinks didn’t argue any more. She and Blotto watched disconsolately as Bengt Cøpper, closely consulting his worn handwritten map and a small compass, moved along the rows of cement-lined trenches. The sun stood directly overhead. Blotto’s tweed suit was distinctly soggy. He had the sensation of being in a steam bath . . . and the equally uncomfortable sensation of being apart from Christabel Whipple.
Sweat, trickling from among the upright white hairs on Corky Froggett’s head down his face, dripped from the promontories of his nose and chin. But he was too much of an old soldier to show any signs of discomfort (even with the boils).
‘Here it is!’ came a cry from Bengt Cøpper and he gestured the other three to join him. They moved across, shadowed by the two men in dark blue uniforms, and stood at the edge of a rectangular hole in the ground. Its floor and walls were of smoothly rendered cement. A cement-lined doorway led off to a smaller inner chamber. On the ground nearby lay a large rectangle of steel, clearly designed as a cover for the main chamber. Rings were welded into its sides to fit, presumably with padlocks, onto other rings around the rim of the chamber. When locked in place, the cover would frustrate any potential intruders.
‘So this is the ancient burial chamber of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop?’ asked Twinks, her voice full of patrician scepticism. It looked to her more like a half-built wine cellar.
‘Yes,’ the archaeologist replied and waved the piece of paper in his hand. ‘This map was copied directly from the papyrus of a notorious grave-robber of the first century BC. He knew where all the bodies were buried.’
‘So why is this place encased in cement which looks not more than a week old?’
Bengt Cøpper sighed a long-suffering sigh. ‘Milady, you have admitted to me that you have never been to an archaeological site, and here I regret you are just once again showing your ignorance. What were you expecting from the burial chamber? Walls richly painted with images of Egyptian gods and goddesses?’
‘My researches into the subject have led me to expect something along those lines, yes.’
Another exasperated sigh. ‘Of course such images are there. But when the debris of the tomb’s caved-in roof had been removed, along with the rocks and alluvial silt that filled the chamber, those paintings were open to the burning Egyptian sunlight for the first time in over two thousand years. It is common archaeological practice to cover such treasures with a thin coating of a special mortar as a means of preservation. When the roof of the chamber is rebuilt, the mortar will be removed and then the underlying paintings can be subjected to serious academic analysis.’
Something about this still didn’t ring true for Twinks, but Bengt Cøpper was the expert – and he’d come with the recommendation of Rollo Tewkes-Prudely – so she grudgingly supposed he must be right. And she did get a charge from being so close to the fulfilment of their mission. Once that fumacious sarcophagus was reinstalled in its rightful place, the Curse of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop would be cancelled out. Corky
Froggett would lose his boils and the threat of further afflictions, and the Tawcester Towers party could return home . . . to face the wrath of the Dowager Duchess. She tried not to think about the last bit.
‘Now we’re going to need some help,’ Bengt Cøpper announced. He turned to the uniformed men and asked, ‘I don’t suppose you would like to give us a hand, would you?’
They agreed that they wouldn’t. ‘But we can find you workers . . . for of course a small baksheesh.’
More Egyptian pounds were produced from Twinks’s sequinned reticule. Then one of the uniformed men put his fingers into his mouth and produced an ear-splitting whistle.
For a moment Twinks couldn’t imagine where they had materialised from, but she quickly rationalised that the horde of white-clad workers who appeared at the summons must have been hiding from the midday sun in the shade of the trenches. They surrounded the group of Europeans, eagerly offering guided tours and the services of family members, as well, of course, as demanding baksheesh.
The uniformed men quietened them down by the simple expedient of waving their revolvers around. Then they selected six of the strongest-looking and sent the rest grumbling back to their trenches.
The final achievement of Blotto and Twinks’s quest – the actual return of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop’s sarcophagus to its ancient resting ground – happened with a speed that was almost bathetic.
Corky Froggett drove the Lagonda as close as he could get to the chamber. The panels were slid back to reveal the car’s hidden compartment. Exposed to the sun of its homeland, the human figure painted on the stone cover of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop’s remains seemed to glow with a new brightness.
Two of the primitive wooden cranes were brought up and proved surprisingly effective in lifting the sarcophagus out of its hiding place. Then, directed by Bengt Cøpper, Blotto, Corky and the six Arab workers acted as pallbearers and carried the ancient artefact to the edge of its chamber.