Shadows on the Nile Read online

  I panic. Because you are angry. I don’t know which to choose. I look at you. I look at the chairs.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ I say.

  You sit. You wait for more.

  I perch on the edge of the bed. ‘What fine weather we are having today.’

  You look out of the window. It is raining.

  The list of sentences blurs inside my head, like the rain on the window-pane. They run into each other, they melt into the words you spoke: If you are ever going to get out of here. It is a prospect as distant as the sun from the earth, ninety-three million miles, and as terrifying, yet you have placed it in my lap. It burns right through my flesh, and I feel my heart expand in my chest until it is hard for me to breathe. I struggle to find the correct words to give in return.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ I offer.

  No, no. It’s not right. You are sitting.

  You frown.

  I am running out of air.

  ‘Georgie, for God’s sake, can’t you …?’

  I gabble out another from the list. ‘I’m fine, thank you. How are you?’

  Your mouth is a tight line. I remember at last, your instruction, over and over you tell me, Don’t panic. Breathe. If in doubt, go for Number Ten. It is underlined in blue ink in my head. And for heaven’s sake, SMILE.

  I can’t breathe but I can smile. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  You become very still. I don’t know what is the matter. I am no good at faces. I see a face change from wide eyes to narrow eyes, from mouth turned up to mouth turned down, I see lines creep across a forehead and I don’t know what they mean. I can read ancient Greek and Latin and ancient Egyptian but I cannot read a face. I cannot tell whether it is surprise or annoyance. You once brought me twenty photographs of faces and you wrote on each one what the expression meant – happy or unhappy, angry or confused, surprised or disappointed, bored or interested. You tested me on them for weeks until I could get them right every time. You taught me that the size of a person’s iris changes when they lie.

  But it is much harder to do with real people. I want to hold the photographs next to your face. To compare. I go to the drawer and take them out but you start to shout at me. Harsh cruel words that I have never heard from you before. I cover my ears with my hands because the pain in my head is so bad. This is wrong, wrong. You are wrong. My mind is filling up with red mist, my chest is drowning in scarlet. But still the dirty gutter-black words spill from your mouth at me.

  ‘Filter!’ I scream at you. ‘Filter your rubbish words, Timothy.’

  You stop. You stare at me, eyes wide as oranges. Mouth open. I remember the photograph: it means shocked. A noise starts to escape from your lips, a growl at first, then it turns into a laugh, and you laugh so hard you fall off the beautiful uncomfortable chair onto the floor. You laugh and laugh.

  I walk over to the window and stare out at the lawn. I do not understand.

  18

  Jessie woke with a jolt. Her heart was going crazy inside her chest, her skin hot and tight. She had been dreaming. In the dream she had been fleeing naked down Piccadilly pursued by a pack of baying foxhounds, while ahead of her Dr Scott stood with a shotgun in his hands. She knew that her only escape was to fly over the roofs but she couldn’t unstick her feet from the ground.

  She blinked hard and realised she was lying fully clothed on a settee. In her own flat, wrapped in a blanket. That was odd, as she had no recall of how she got here. But she dragged in a deep shuddering breath of relief and let her mind untie its knots. She sat up. Huge mistake. The whole room cartwheeled and a thousand hammers got to work on the underside of her skull.

  And then she remembered.

  The brutality of Trafalgar Square, horses with huge frantic eyes, shouts and screams drumming in her ears. Archie! Poor Archie! Where was he? She threw aside the blanket and was about to fight her way to her feet when she caught sight of a figure in an armchair by the window. The room was gloomy. It was dark outside and only a dim table-lamp burned in one corner, casting deep navy shadows over the silent figure.

  ‘Archie?’ she breathed.

  But even as she said it she realised her mistake. His legs were too long and his shoulders too broad. Doubting her own thought processes, she stared hard at Sir Montague Chamford and as she did so, she felt something open up inside her, something sore and battered, and in its place flooded gratitude to this man she barely knew. He had saved Archie. He had saved her. And taken a beating in exchange. It was no wonder he had broken that constable’s kneecap. Now she thought about it, the surprise was that he hadn’t snatched up the constable’s truncheon and broken his other kneecap too.

  Jessie rose slowly to her feet, waited for the walls to stop dancing a can-can, and walked on stockinged feet over to the armchair for a closer look. He was asleep. His head tilted slightly to one side, a lock of brown hair had fallen over his eyes, and his large hands were clasped together on his lap as if he had been twiddling his thumbs, waiting patiently for her to wake up. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Two fifteen. Two fifteen? In the morning? Where had the day gone?

  Why was he here?

  Oddly Jessie felt in no way threatened by his presence, alone with this man in her flat, though she knew Tabitha would be home soon. Was there something in him she sensed, something decent, something of St George? As she turned to look down at him again, disjointed scenes slotted in and out of her vision but not in any order. Nurses in a hospital, Archie on a trolley, a doctor shining a light in her eyes, blood in a taxi-cab, vomiting over Monty’s trousers; the images flashed in and out.

  Vomiting over Monty’s trousers?

  She could smell it on him now, the sickly sweet stench of vomit. Her cheeks burned at the memory. His legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle and she wanted to take off his beautiful suit trousers and dunk them in the bath. Not really feasible without waking him. He had removed his jacket and was wearing just a shirt, waistcoat and silver tie, the elegance of which was spoiled by the dark stains on them. Dried blood, long streaks of it.

  He uncrossed his ankles and murmured something in his sleep, frowning, but didn’t wake. In the shadows she studied the firm lines of his face, the thick sweep of his eyelashes, the resolute set of his mouth even in sleep. What kind of man was he? What lies slid off his tongue, hidden by the silky charm of his class? How far could she trust this quiet controlled face?

  A shape moved in the room. It was Jabez. But as she stroked his black fur, nausea hit her. She dived for the bathroom, flicked on the light, squinting in the sudden brightness, and flinched when she saw the face in the mirror above the washbasin.

  It was ugly. She barely recognised it as Jessica Kenton. The face in the mirror was pale as chalk-dust except for a nasty swelling on her left temple which was sprawling up to her forehead with black and purple streaks. As though someone had painted it on while she slept. Her hair was a mess. The thick blonde waves were sticking out in all directions, as if trying to escape. She didn’t blame them. She would escape if she could. Worse were the eyes. They were big and round, and looked wary. Eyes that didn’t know how to trust people, today or any other day. They scared her. Guilty eyes. What we remember of ourselves from our childhood is never forgotten and never forgiven.

  Quickly she ran the cold tap. Splashed water over her skin, her mouth, her eyes, eager to wash away the face in the mirror, to find a new one underneath. She dragged a brush through her hair and cleaned her teeth. Her teeth were the only part of herself she liked, white and straight and happy-looking.

  He woke almost imperceptibly. Jessie watched him. One moment he was asleep, the next he was awake, with barely a ripple between them.

  ‘Hello,’ he said softly from his chair. He didn’t move.

  ‘Hello, Monty. Feeling sore?’

  ‘No worse than you, I dare say.’

  There was a pause while they smiled at each other, a small acknowledgement of s
omething they shared. The smile felt alien on her face, at odds with the images in her head.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Four-thirty in the morning.’

  ‘I’ve been asleep too long.’

  ‘I’m sure you needed it … and more. Go back to sleep.’

  He noted the blanket she had tucked around him and nodded his gratitude, but gave no indication of returning to his slumbers.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Headachey. But I’ll live. More important, where is Archie?’

  ‘At St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Not great, to be honest. But he’ll live, too. You rang his parents.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘It took courage to do what he did.’ She let her gaze rest on his features. ‘And to do what you did. Thank you.’

  He put a hand up, like a wall between them, fending off her gratitude. ‘What happened today in Trafalgar Square is a national disgrace. It has to be investigated at once and someone’s head must roll, preferably Gilmour’s. It was—’ He abruptly brought his words to a halt. ‘Let’s not discuss it further. Not now.’ His eyes shone hard and angry. ‘There’s enough horror in our heads for tonight. Let’s not add more.’ His voice was sad and it stirred something within Jessie. He was right. If she talked about it she would be sick again.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  Jessie was seated at the table, the lamp at her side. She had changed out of the blighted blue dress of this morning and was wearing a woollen dressing-gown, belted at the waist.

  ‘Reading,’ she said.

  He rose awkwardly to his feet, supporting his weight on the arm of the chair and straightening up slowly before moving across the room to stand at her side. This close to her, the flesh of his face looked grey and exhausted but his eyes were still quick. Jessie felt an urge to put her arm across the page of notes in front of her to hide it from him.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  She said nothing as he picked up the open book at her elbow and gave a wry smile when he saw the title.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes stories, I see.’

  Did he see? She doubted it.

  ‘Would you like an aspirin?’ she asked to divert attention from the sheet of paper on the table.

  ‘A whisky would help more.’

  ‘There’s a bottle in the kitchen cupboard next to the sink. Glasses above the bread bin.’ She wasn’t leaving him alone at the table.

  He hesitated and she could feel his resistance, but in the end he went quietly.

  ‘I’ll help myself, then,’ he said.

  ‘Please do.’ She added a small smile.

  ‘Explain it to me again.’ He was sipping his whisky.

  Jessie sighed. He didn’t really want her to explain her theory again. What he wanted was for her to speak it out loud one more time, so that she would hear how ridiculous it sounded.

  Her hands kept fidgeting with the sheets of paper in front of her, shuffling them, tweaking their corners, planting a row of ticks along the bottom. It was obvious now, clear as day. But it had taken her hours to find it. She made an effort to appear calm, and regarded Monty with a steady gaze.

  ‘I told you. The four names that Dr Scott said my brother muttered at the séance – McPherson, Hatherley, Hosmer and Phelps. I recognised them immediately.’

  ‘You told Scott they meant nothing to you.’

  ‘All right, so I was lying.’ She shrugged impatiently. ‘They are from the Sherlock Holmes stories that we used to read as children.’

  ‘Read obsessively, by the sound of it.’

  Jessie ignored him. ‘So I’ve been sitting here working it out while you slept, going through the four stories again in which the names occur. But I could find no connection between them and Tim. McPherson is the science master in The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane. Victor Hatherley is the unfortunate victim in The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb and Hosmer Angel is the elusive fiancé in A Case of Identity. While Phelps is …’

  ‘… in The Adventure of the Naval Treaty. Yes, yes, I accept that is true. You certainly know your Conan Doyle.’ He shifted restlessly in his chair. ‘But that doesn’t mean your huge jump of mental tightrope-walking has any logic to it at all.’ He was studying her, concern in his eyes.

  Her head throbbed painfully. Was she wrong to trust him with this? What had possessed her to blurt it out? But it had come to her in a blinding flash just as he placed a tumbler at her elbow, a generous splash of whisky at the bottom of it, and offered her a tea-towel wrapped around a bundle of ice cubes from the refrigerator.

  ‘For your head.’ He’d pressed it against her temple, touching her hair, sending welcome icebergs to the heart of the pain. It cleared her mind.

  At that moment it had come to her. The connection to Tim. And she had blurted it out.

  ‘It’s the Nile.’

  ‘What?’

  She flicked a hand over the sheets of paper with the lists of every character in each of the four stories, of every plot line and every possible cross-reference between them. ‘This case is a three-pipe problem,’ she muttered in a deep voice.

  Monty stared at her as if she had lost her senses, but passed no comment. She had noticed that he had a knack of leaving gaps for other people to fill. She took the ice-pack from his hand and knocked back her whisky. Adrenaline was making her careless.

  ‘That means it was a tough case for Holmes,’ she explained. ‘He needed to smoke three pipes of tobacco to think a particularly difficult problem through to the end.’

  ‘I can offer you a cigarette instead.’

  She shook her head and instantly regretted the movement. ‘The solution is not in the names of the characters, it’s in the names of the stories.’

  His eyes gleamed darkly in the shadowy light. ‘Tell me.’

  So she told him. ‘If you drop the The Adventure of and A Case of from the beginning of the title of each one, you are left with Lion’s Mane, Engineer’s Thumb, Identity and Naval Treaty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Now take the first letter of each.’

  ‘L.E.I.N. That spells nothing.’

  ‘Rearrange them.’

  ‘N.I.L.E.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  He had gone silent on her and thrown himself back into his armchair with an air of exasperation. But none of his huffs and puffs could shake her conviction. Now, as he sat there sipping his whisky, the shadows seized him and turned him into a stranger, a different person from the one who had clasped an arm around her on the Mall and who had draped a blanket over her on the settee. This person she didn’t know.

  ‘It makes sense,’ she urged. ‘Tim is an archaeologist who works with Egyptian artefacts. I am convinced he has gone to the Nile.’

  Her words fell into the absolute silence of the room and became small unlikely things. Inert and laughable. But he wasn’t laughing. He was angry and she didn’t know why. For a long moment neither spoke and the sense of disconnection was only broken when Jabez abruptly popped up out of the shadows and with feline persistence leapt onto Monty’s lap with a demand for attention. The tension in the room slid down a notch as he ran a hand along the cat’s back.

  ‘The letters also spell LINE,’ he pointed out mildly.

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I have no idea. But it’s equally possible.’

  Another silence trickled between them, but this time Jessie had no patience with it.

  ‘I believe Tim was sending me a message.’

  ‘You weren’t even there!’

  ‘He must have known something was going to happen and I would come looking for him.’

  ‘My dear Miss Kenton, with the greatest respect I think the blow to your head has scrambled your brain.’ His breath came out sharp. ‘The whole Sherlock Holmes idea has led you astray and the l
ine between fact and fiction has become blurred in your mind.’

  His voice was like slivers of glass buried in soap. Scented on the outside, razor sharp on the inside. Jessie rose to her feet to ask him to leave, but the sudden movement set her head spinning and it felt as though a steamroller had landed on top of it. She stumbled. The room retreated to a tiny circle of light in the centre of a swarm of darkness.

  Hands held her on her feet. A voice murmured words but they blew away like autumn leaves, rustling as she walked over them. She wondered why dead leaves were scattered on her carpet. Jabez, she told herself. He must have brought them in, silly cat. She put out a hand and stroked him lovingly. She could tell him anything without receiving a sceptical grunt in return. She gave him another caress and wrapped her hand around his warm head, dimly wondering where his fur had gone.

  Jessie woke. On the settee again. Still dark. Through slitted eyes and moving her head no more than an inch, she inspected the room. No figure in the armchair this time. She released a sigh of relief but at the same time realised that she felt oddly empty, which annoyed her, especially when she recalled the barb about fact and fiction being blurred in her mind. She felt colour rush to her cheeks and was glad he was gone. Very glad.

  Carefully she moved her head, experimenting with the steamroller, and nearly fell off the settee when she found a shadowy face right beside her. She blinked to remove it but it didn’t go away.

  She groaned.

  ‘Hush,’ he murmured, ‘just rest.’

  She felt stupid. He was sitting on the floor beside the settee, smiling gently at her. How long had he been there, watching her sleep? Worse – far worse – she was clutching his hand. Clutching it for dear life.

  She groaned again and closed her eyes.

  *

  When she woke this time, she heard voices. Low and secretive, coming from the kitchen. She recognised her flatmate’s smoky tones, which meant Tabitha was home from the club.

  What was Monty saying to her? Spreading his theory – that Jessie’s brain was scrambled – to all who would listen? Damn the man! She already regretted telling him of her discovery of the meaning of Tim’s coded words and questioned now why she had done it. Maybe he was right; maybe her thoughts had become scrambled and she had foolishly thought she could trust him.