by Simon Brett
The sarcophagus, with four men each side taking the strain on the ropes, was lifted up and gently lowered into the chamber where it landed on wooden rollers. It was then guided into the inner chamber, where the rollers were removed from under it. The moment the sarcophagus found its resting place, the Arab workers burst into a rousing cheer, before demanding further baksheesh for a job well done.
After she had paid them off, Twinks turned to their chauffeur. ‘Still got boils, have you?’
‘Oh yes, milady,’ Corky Froggett replied with pride.
25
Christabel Whipple Smells a Rat
Bengt Cøpper decreed that the cover should not be put over the chamber until the day cooled down a bit. The sun-heated steel rectangle would have burnt even the hardened hands of the Egyptian labourers. He sent the six helpers back to their trenches.
‘And now, milady,’ he said with something like complacency, ‘we must return to Cairo, where you will pay my fee and we will raise a glass to a job well done.’
‘Good ticket,’ said Twinks.
Corky Froggett closed the secret panels of the Lagonda and reversed it back to a place where it would be easier for the passengers to get in.
‘Handles like a dream!’ he cried gleefully to Blotto, ‘now it’s got rid of all that weight.’
‘Maybe I should drive back to Cairo?’
‘Whatever you wish, milord.’
And Blotto did wish it. The way he drove, in contrast to Corky Froggett’s more sedate style, would speed up their arrival in Cairo. And his arrival at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.
It was while they were getting into the Lagonda that Corky noticed the approach of a small cloud of dust from the direction of the capital. As it got closer, the cloud resolved itself into a dusty, barefooted, white-clad Egyptian on a dusty motorcycle. He brought his bike to a gravel-scattering halt beside the Lagonda. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘is there someone here named Blotto?’
‘That’s my name-tag,’ said Blotto.
‘Well, Mr Blotto effendi . . .’ The man removed a brown envelope from the folds of his robe. ‘I have a message for you.’
‘Well, put a jumping cracker under it! Hand the thing over!’ Blotto felt very anxious. The message had to be from Christabel Whipple. Would she be telling him to take a long jump from a short pier? Had his sentence ‘Hope we meet another day’ been too raunchy for her delicate English sensibilities?
The motorcyclist was holding the envelope in one hand, but it was the other, empty one that was thrust forward. He didn’t have to ask for baksheesh; Blotto just thrust the money into his hand.
Safely in possession of the message, Blotto moved away from the curiosity of the others to read it: ‘Whatever you do, stay where Bengt Cøpper has taken you. I will join you as soon as I can. Christabel.’
Toad-in-the-hole, though Blotto. Suddenly he was rolling in camomile lawns. He hadn’t felt this excited since he had been about to go out to bat at number three in the Eton and Harrow match.
‘You lot go back to Cairo!’ he called out. ‘I’m going to stay around here for a while.’
‘Why do you wish to stay?’ asked Bengt Cøpper suspiciously.
‘Oh, just fancy a bit of air,’ replied Blotto fatuously.
The archaeologist grunted. ‘Well, I wouldn’t advise you to be too curious. This is a very valuable site.’ He barked out some words in Arabic to the uniformed men. ‘If you stray too far, milord, from where you should be, these two gentlemen have orders to bring you back. And if their orders are not obeyed, they are not afraid to use their guns.’
‘Tickey-tockey,’ said Blotto.
He was aware of the puzzlement in Twinks’s eyes as the Lagonda started its journey back to Cairo. He would have liked to explain the situation to her, but he didn’t want to shout it out in front of Corky Froggett and Bengt Cøpper.
Besides, though he normally shared everything with his sister, there were some things so important that they had to remain secret. And he had a feeling that Christabel Whipple might be one of them.
Blotto was bored. And excitement made his boredom more oppressive. Though he was sitting up against one of the walls, with the sun so high it afforded little shade. His tweed suit was as wet as a facecloth in a bath.
He wasn’t a man of many resources in this kind of situation. Some people of course would have read a book, but given that Blotto was into his sixth year of reading The Hand of Fu Manchu, that wouldn’t work for him. Even if he’d had the book with him, which he hadn’t.
Anyway, Blotto wasn’t the kind of person who could lose himself in a book. He tried to think what in his life calmed him, what took his mind off things that were worrying him. It was hard to come up with an answer because in his blessed life he had so rarely been worried. But at that moment he was feeling distinctly twitchy, uncharacteristically nervous about seeing Christabel Whipple again.
Cricket! Of course – cricket! Whole days of his life had vanished when he’d been playing cricket. During a four-day match he thought of nothing else every waking hour. A game of cricket would stop him thinking about Christabel!
He looked across the reddish rock of the desert. There was a flat area a little way away from the excavations which could have been designed to be a cricket pitch. Be a bit hard certainly. Ball would bounce rather more than it might at Lord’s, but Blotto could adjust his batting and bowling to accommodate the difference.
Yes, what a beezer wheeze! Thank goodness he’d kept his cricket bat with him. And as he reached randomly into his damp suit pocket, he was ecstatic to find a cricket ball. Couldn’t think how it had got there. Maybe he’d found it walking through one of the copses near the Tawcester Towers cricket pitch and popped it in his pocket. Always a lot of lost balls from the sixes he skied in there.
So . . . got a bat, got a ball. There were enough scrap bits of wood around to improvise stumps and bails. All he needed was twenty-one other players.
Caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment, Blotto almost gambolled across to the trench into which the sarcophagus’s pall-bearers had disappeared. He also was feeling the warm glow that came from doing a good deed. These poor Egyptian pineapples had actually had to grow up without any knowledge of cricket. How impoverished their lives must have been! How much richer their existence would be once they had been introduced to the game. (Blotto was also confident playing cricket would raise their moral standards. Boddos with the prospect of spending a day at silly mid-off had better things to do with their time than just lie around, constantly asking for baksheesh.)
The six labourers were lying in the shade in various degrees of wakefulness. A couple were smoking cigarettes, others chewing something, as Blotto began his call to arms. ‘Listen, you chaps, I’ve just had a buzzbanger of an idea! Now you lot probably didn’t do cricket at the schools you went to, but don’t you get crabwhacked about that. It’s the kind of game you can pick up at any stage, and you’ll then spend the rest of your life wondering why you didn’t see the light earlier. And once you’ve mastered the laws of cricket, it’s all creamy eclair. And once you start playing I guarantee you’ll find it exactly your size of pyjamas. So come on, me old poached eggs, what say we give it a go?’
There was a silence. Six pairs of lethargic brown eyes fixed on him. ‘Baksheesh,’ said one hopefully; then all the others joined in.
After he had paid them, Blotto returned rather disconsolately to his wall. He leant against it and moodily bounced the cricket ball on the horizontal surface of his bat. Was there any wonder the world was in the mess it was? So far as he could see, only when the people of every nation under the sun played cricket could there be any hope of improvement, any hope of a decent long-term future for the planet.
His uncharacteristic gloom was fortunately not allowed to last for long. Because he saw that a large cloud of red dust was moving towards the excavations from the Cairo direction. It wasn’t moving as fast as the motorcycle had and when Blotto could discern its out
line he could see why. The approaching mode of transport was a camel. And on its back, resplendent in dishevelled khaki, with a veil over her face against the dust, was Christabel Whipple.
He moved towards her across the desert rock. When they met, she slipped down off the camel, the halter still in her hand, and announced, ‘Blotto, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re still here.’
An expression of total bliss spread across his handsome features.
* * *
They were in the inner chamber with the remains of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop. After her wonderful first sentence, Christabel’s next had been an enquiry as to the whereabouts of the sarcophagus. And immediately she wanted to see it.
There was little light in the inner chamber, but Christabel Whipple, being almost as resourceful a young woman as Twinks, produced a large electric torch from her knapsack and ran it with interest over the surface of the sarcophagus.
Then she turned to Blotto and announced, ‘Bengt Cøpper is a crook.’
‘Is he, by Denzil?’
‘Had I known he was the other archaeologist Rollo Tewkes-Prudely was introducing you to last night I would have warned you off straight away.’
‘Does that mean the Major’s a crook too?’
‘I don’t think so. I think Rollo’s just a bit thick. In the next room when the brain cells were handed out. What’s really wrong with him is that he imagines everyone else runs their lives by the same principles of British fair play as he does.’
‘Oh well,’ said Blotto, who fell rather into the same category, ‘if that’s a fault, it’s a spoffing good fault, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘By the way, Christabel me old fruitbat,’ he said, hoping he wasn’t being too intimate, ‘how did you know where to find me?’
‘I telephoned Rollo this morning. Bengt Cøpper had told him where he was taking you. Though I would probably have guessed, anyway.’
‘Oh?’
But Christabel Whipple didn’t amplify her remark. Instead, she went on, ‘You must be very careful, Blotto. Bengt Cøpper is a dangerous major crook – and he’s involved with a lot of other dangerous major crooks.’
‘Don’t don your worry-boots about me,’ said Blotto with a hint of derring-do. ‘I’ve got my cricket bat.’
‘Hm. That might not be enough against the kind of weapons Cøpper and his acolytes favour.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m not on the same page as you, Christabel me old draining board. Could you uncage the ferrets about what’s actually going on?’
‘Yes. Presumably that bounder Cøpper told you this was the Valley of the Kings?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it isn’t.’
Blotto was flabbergasted by this evidence of human perfidy. ‘Broken biscuits!’ he said. And he meant it. In some situations only strong language is adequate.
‘Incidentally,’ he went on, ‘how did you know about the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop?’
‘Rollo told me about it.’
‘Ah.’
‘By the way, you do realise that he’s fallen in love with your sister, don’t you, Blotto?’
‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Everyone does that.’
‘Do they?’ There was a note of wistfulness in Christabel Whipple’s voice. If it wasn’t so ridiculously unlikely, Blotto would have thought she was saying that it was not something she experienced so frequently. Though, with a woman who bore such a close resemblance to Mephistopheles, surely that couldn’t be true. Men must be positively falling over themselves to fall in love with her.
Blotto was tempted to use this little springboard he had been offered for an expression of his own feelings towards Christabel, but he didn’t think the moment was right. Instead he said, ‘If this place isn’t the Valley of the Kings . . . ?’
‘Which it jolly well isn’t,’ Christabel asserted.
‘. . . then this isn’t the burial ground of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop?’
‘Certainly not.’
Blotto nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, that explains something.’
‘What?’
‘Why Corky Froggett’s still got boils.’
Christabel was about to ask for elucidation of this unusual observation when they were both stopped in their tracks by a heavy scraping and rumbling noise.
They rushed through into the main chamber just in time to see the last rectangle of sunlight vanish as the metal cover was shifted into place. There was a series of clanks as the padlocks locked it in position.
Blotto and Christabel were trapped!
26
Conflicting Reports
Twinks was no more settled on her return to Shepheard’s Hotel than she had been when leaving what she still believed to be the Valley of the Kings. Too many odd things were happening. And she didn’t trust Bengt Cøpper further than she could throw him. Also, what was the reason for Blotto suddenly deciding to stay out in the desert? And, above all, why had Corky Froggett still got boils?
Not that they seemed to be worrying the chauffeur at all. He was extremely pleased by how the Lagonda handled without its load of dead pharaoh on the way back to Cairo. Having deposited his two passengers, he had taken the car straight down to the Shepheard’s Hotel garage where he busied himself adjusting the car’s tyre pressure and making other refinements which would bring it back to optimal performance.
Bengt Cøpper left Twinks as soon as she had paid him his fee, which still seemed modest, another thing to reanimate her suspicions. He said he was off to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to check some documents before he returned to the excavation site. Twinks felt considerable animosity as she watched him stride cockily out of the hotel foyer.
She asked at reception whether there was any mail for her and, after the appropriate baksheesh had been given, she was handed two envelopes. The smaller one had no stamps, suggesting that it had been delivered by hand. She opened it straight away.
‘Dear Twinks,’ the message ran. ‘I find myself in the awkward position of having fallen in love with you. You are quite simply the most ravishing creature on earth. Please can we meet again as soon as possible? With all the emotion my honest heart can hold, Rollo.’
She tore up both envelope and letter and dumped the remains in an elephant’s-foot waste bin. The other envelope interested her much more. Its contents were a cablegram, which she decided she would read in the privacy of her suite.
It was, as she had hoped, from Professor Erasmus Holofernes, and its length suggested that when it came to cablegrams he didn’t care about the expense. But its contents were something of a bombshell.
‘Dear Twinks,’ she read. ‘Thank you for yours from Cairo, which caused me considerable confusion, not because of your question about the Riddle of the Sphinx (which can be easily answered), but because of its reference to a letter you received from me at Tawcester Towers.
‘The plain fact of the matter is, my dear Twinks, that I didn’t write any such letter. I know that when you and your brother came to visit me at St Raphael’s I said I would do some investigation and get back to you as soon as possible, but the fact is I got rather waylaid by other matters. It is in the nature of research – or certainly research by someone with a brain like mine – that one’s interests can easily be deflected to another subject. And what interested me in our meeting was not so much the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop as the nature of your brother. You may recall I mentioned doing some work on the hereditary component in genius. And meeting you two siblings, the one so divinely gifted and the other so . . . so much less so, turned my previous thinking on the subject on its head. I have been revising everything I have written on the subject, with the result that everything else has been woefully neglected.
‘Including, I regret to say, my investigations into Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop and his possible link to the Plagues of Egypt. Mea culpa, my dear Twinks, mea culpa.
‘I will now of course drop everything else and concentrate – bela
tedly, I fear – on the problems which you mentioned.
‘Incidentally, going back to the Riddle of the Sphinx (as I promised I would), the riddle most commonly known – “Which creature walks on four legs in the morning . . .”, etc. has nothing at all to do with Egypt. It is part of the Greek legend of Oedipus, who outside the Greek city of Thebes provided the right answer and destroyed the Sphinx who guarded the entrance. Though the Sphinxes of Egypt – particularly the one at Giza – may be more famous, they do not have any riddles attached to them.
‘Why incidentally, my dear Twinks, do you find yourself in Egypt? A very pleasant place for a sight-seeing holiday, I believe, but from what you said about the state of the Tawcester Towers finances I am surprised you can afford one at this juncture.
‘Do pass on my good wishes to your brother, should he remember me (which, from what I gauged of his intellectual capacity, he may well not). And, as ever, I send you my deepest affection, Razzy.’
Twinks sat back on her sofa and looked out over the Nile. The cablegram had prompted so many reactions that it took a moment for her to organise them in her head.
But the predominant conclusion that emerged was that she and Blotto had been duped. They thought they had travelled to Egypt on the express instructions of Professor Erasmus Holofernes, but that now proved not to be the case. The letter that had arrived at Tawcester Towers and sent them off on their travels had been a fake. Holofernes had had nothing to do with it.
So who had sent the letter? Who was it who was so keen to get her and Blotto to transport the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Sinus Nefertop back to Egypt?
And why?
Blotto was torn between two conflicting emotions. He was imprisoned, which was fumaciously annoying. But if he had to be imprisoned, there was no one he would rather be imprisoned with than Christabel Whipple. Doing anything with her was pure creamy eclair. The situation was all very confusing.
It hadn’t taken long for the heat of the sun on the metal cover to turn the outer chamber where they stood into an oven. The temperature in the inner room was slightly cooler, but still pretty unsupportable. Christabel, needless to say, had a water bottle in her knapsack, but its contents wouldn’t last them very long. What might happen when the water ran out neither wished to contemplate.