Shadows on the Nile Read online

  Sherlock Holmes never missed any clues. If I follow his methods, I will, as Dr Watson says of his brilliant friend, ‘see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart’.

  The first time. It was as sharp and unexpected as a stamp on the foot. Two fourteen-year-old boys taking bites out of each other with their words. It was July 25th 1921. I am eating breakfast, the same one I’ve eaten for the last twenty years. Two fried eggs on toast, three fried tomatoes and three fried mushrooms. I always eat my food in an anti-clockwise spiral around the plate leaving the bright yellow heart of the eggs till last.

  There are twelve of us in the room – twelve people, I mean. I don’t count the staff as people. Their faces are false. Behind their masks they are guard-dogs and their teeth are needle-sharp, spilling poison into my blood. The twelve of us look towards the doorway where you materialise unexpectedly, all windblown blond curls and legs too long for you and a way of holding yourself that has the scent of freedom about it. It makes me want to howl with fury.

  The skin of my neck prickles, tiny spiky points of pain, which I know means the start of an episode. That’s what they call them – when I lose control. Episodes. Like part of a story. Episodic. The story of my life. I look away and concentrate on my egg, adding salt and cutting the toast into small triangles. I sit alone at the small square table, it’s how I like it, no one too close. When I hear you place a chair opposite me and see your blazer-clad elbows on my table, I have to fight back the words that charge onto my tongue and clamp my hands between my knees to stop them hitting you. If I have an episode in the dining room in front of everyone, it will be more than just the needles coming for me.

  ‘Good morning, Georgie. I’m Timothy.’

  Georgie. Georgie. Georgie. Only one person ever called me Georgie.

  ‘Go away.’ I don’t look at you.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘No.’ I back away to the limits of my chair, as far from you as I can get.

  ‘Please, Georgie. I have gone to a lot of trouble to find you.’

  ‘You haven’t found me. I wasn’t lost.’

  ‘You were to me.’ You hesitate. ‘And to Jessie.’

  I take my handkerchief from my pocket, unfold it neatly and place it over my face, holding it there with the tips of my fingers. ‘Go away. Go away.’

  You reach out and snatch the handkerchief from my face, leaving me naked, but still I don’t look at your face. I see that your sleeve is smeared with yellow from my egg yolk. I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds, coppery and slick inside my mouth, but I notice your hands. They are not the hands that belong to your glossy blond curls, or to your voice that says love-me each time you speak, they are hands that do things. Build things. Dig things. Make things. There is a long jagged scar down the thumb of your left hand, the skin of it silvery white. Where a saw slipped? Or a rock-edge tore it open? If I do not leave now I will put my fork through your wrist, so I push myself to my feet but you lean forward, too close but you do not touch. As though you know you mustn’t touch me.

  ‘Georgie,’ you say softly in your love-me voice, ‘talk to me. Please.’

  6

  The British Museum looms like a mighty fortress of antiquity in Blooms bury, tucked deep in the heart of London. The building was designed by Sir Robert Smirke in 1823 to house the finest and largest collection of ancient artefacts in existence anywhere in the world. The original collection was established by Sir Hans Sloane and added to by avid collectors like the 7th Earl of Elgin who removed the marble statues from the Parthenon and Acropolis in Athens.

  Pillaged was the word that always leapt to Jessie’s mind. Not removed. Pillaged the statues.

  She glanced at the grandiose neo-classical exterior of the museum, guarded by forty-four colossal ionic columns, each one forty-five feet high. Jessie’s head was full of these facts. Robert Smirke. Hans Sloane. 1823. Forty-four columns. It was Tim’s fault. He was always bombarding her with them.

  She approached along Great Russell Street, a tree-lined thoroughfare, dodging a lumbering dray hauling beer barrels as she crossed the road from Bloomsbury Square. A massive pediment loomed over the museum’s main entrance and immediately she heard Tim’s voice chattering in her head, full of enthusiasm and brimming with knowledge.

  ‘See the sculptures on it, sis?’

  Jessie had scowled at the fifteen allegorical figures poised above the entrance.

  ‘They’re by Sir Richard Westmacott. Installed in 1852,’ he informed her. ‘Superb, aren’t they? It’s a shame they are so high up and people are—’

  ‘People are thinking,’ Jessie cut in with a shake of her head, ‘what a monument to British hubris and greed they are.’

  ‘Now, Jess, don’t start on that.’

  ‘How would you like it if the Egyptians or Italians or Greeks came over and stole all the remains of our history the way we stole theirs? You would be the first to shout, ‘“Whoa, something is not right here!”’

  He had turned solemn blue eyes on her. Reproachful eyes. Eyes that made her sigh and want to snatch back her words. He could do that to her.

  ‘Jess,’ he laid both his hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the pavement, ‘if explorers and archaeologists hadn’t devoted their lives to rescuing these exquisite moments of history from the sand and the sea and the dank cellars where they were languishing, they would have been lost to civilisation for ever. Look at Henry Salt! Look at Howard Carter!’

  He released one of her shoulders and waved a hand towards the monolithic building in which he worked. Despite herself, Jessie was always impressed by it.

  ‘We owe them so much,’ Tim reminded her.

  ‘Thieves,’ she muttered.

  ‘Caretakers of the world’s creative instinct.’

  ‘Robbers.’

  ‘Just wait until you see Amenhotep’s head.’ Her brother’s eyes were shining. His hair, worn longer than their father liked, gleamed honey-gold in the sunlight.

  Jessie had slipped her hand in his with a sigh of resignation. ‘Lead on, “my intimate friend and associate”.’

  He had thrown back his head and laughed, and it was impossible not to laugh with him. How many times had those words of Sherlock Holmes to his dear Dr Watson tightened the knot between Jessie and her brother when it threatened to fray?

  She ran up the front steps now. Tim would be there, she was sure he would. Back at work today, caressing and numbering his ceramics and potsherds, talking to them. He couldn’t keep away. An indulgent laugh escaped her, snatched away by the icy wind that skittered up from the trees that lined Great Russell Street. Be there, Tim. Stop sulking. You’ve given Ma and Pa enough of a scare.

  She walked with quick steps through the cavernous entrance-hall, but the past came at her, not with a gentle touch and a sleepy murmur, but with claws unsheathed. The milky blind eyes of the towering statues from Rome and Greece scraped her nerve ends and made her indifferent to their beauty. Her footsteps hurried, heels tapping on the York stone flooring, the breath of history coming fast and cold on her neck. Yet she saw other visitors ambling slowly from exhibit to exhibit, taking time to admire the fold of a marble cloak or the sweet delicacy of a maiden’s arm.

  Why can’t I do that? Just stand and stare.

  Tim was enraptured by this place. Why couldn’t she be? She forced herself to a halt in front of the next exhibit and gazed up at the ten-foot-high colossal head of red granite. She knew who it was without looking at its plaque. Amenhotep III. One of Tim’s favourite pieces, vast and regal. A great Egyptian pharaoh whose fist once held power over life and death, and whose head bore a massive granite pschent, the towering double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Part of his face was missing, a frailty that pleased Jessie.

  ‘It was Giovanni Belzoni who found him,’ Tim had told her. ‘He brought him from Luxor in 1817. It took eight days to transport the three-thousand-year-old head, plus its eighteen feet long left arm, just one mile from the Temple of Mut i
n Karnak to the river. From there it was shipped on the Nile to Alexandria and on to London. Just imagine it!’

  Jessie didn’t care to imagine it. Instead she marched off down a side corridor, away from the hypnotic grip of that vast red granite face. But as she raised a hand to knock on one of the doors, she couldn’t help wondering what went on in a person’s head when he worked every day with objects and people who were thousands of years old. Did death become more real to him than life?

  Jessie didn’t look back. She could never bear to look back.

  ‘Mr Kenton?’ The man in the small stuffy office ruffled his moustache in a friendly manner. ‘You should ask Anippe Kalim. She works with him downstairs in the basement, but he’s not in today.’

  ‘Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘Miss Kenton,’ he said with a chesty chuckle, ‘I see many things in this place, more than you’d ever imagine.’ He pushed his peaked cap to the back of his head. ‘But no, I ain’t seen your brother these last few days. When you do find him, tell him from me, old Charlie, that the last tip he gave me was a beauty.’

  ‘Tip?’

  ‘Lightning Lad. Won a nice little packet, I did.’ He looked at her blank expression and added, ‘At White City.’

  Realisation dawned. ‘Greyhound racing?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Tim, a gambler? Jessie frowned. She had no idea.

  She tried not to feel like an intruder as she entered the room where Timothy worked. It was long and high-ceilinged, the walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets containing historic artefacts. Ceramic pots and silver amulets stood alongside extraordinarily beautiful sets of bead jewellery, laid out with loving care on sheets of cotton wool. Alabaster figurines and bronze sculptures stared at Jessie with ancient eyes. Underneath the cabinets were dozens of mahogany drawers and she could imagine them tightly packed with items that would make her brother salivate with anticipation, the way he did over a box of dates when he was a child. The electric light was harsh and bounced off the large rectangular worktables that filled the centre of the room, and the smell of gypsum hung in the air, as well as a chemical that tasted waxy on the back of her tongue.

  One person stood alone in the room, bent over one of the tables. It was a young woman. Her thick black hair was braided into a loop at the back of her head and her skin was the colour of dusky eggshell. Jessie watched her at work for several moments before she spoke.

  ‘Miss Anippe Kalim?’ she asked.

  Only then did the woman’s eyes lift to her, though she must have heard her visitor enter the workroom. Her eyes were black. Not black like coal is black, but black like the night sky, black within black. Layer after layer of it, with strange lights shifting inside it.

  ‘Yes, I am Anippe Kalim.’

  This was the kind of woman who looked you straight in the eyes. But she doesn’t want me here. Jessie could feel it in the room, the unexpected animosity, like ants crawling over her skin.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you when you’re obviously busy,’ Jessie said.

  When she approached, Anippe Kalim’s hands hovered protectively over the fragments of bone in front of her, as though to ward off inspection. She was wearing an old-fashioned brown dress that reached almost to her ankles under a crisp white buttoned overall, and she slid her hands into its pockets as she turned to face Jessie.

  ‘What is it you want?’ she asked.

  ‘My name is—’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  Jessie stared at her. How could this woman know who she was?

  ‘You are Jessica Kenton.’

  There was a flicker in the large black eyes. Something like amusement. The rest of her features were too strong to be called beautiful, though her mouth was well-shaped and her lips a full deep red, but her face was one that would always draw attention. There was an intensity to it that made it hard to look away. She was tall and slender like one of her Egyptian papyrus reeds and her movements were precise and considered. Jessie felt at a disadvantage but didn’t know why.

  ‘He told me about you,’ Anippe said. ‘Described you.’

  ‘Who? Old Charlie?’

  ‘No. Timothy. He showed me a photograph.’

  ‘A photograph of me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly a smile softened the lines of her face, and her thick black eyelashes fluttered. ‘Timothy …’ she said his name with the emphasis on the last syllable, turning it into something exotic, ‘… told me that you are his uraeus.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘His uraeus.’

  ‘What is that?’

  Jessie wasn’t sure she liked the idea of her brother discussing her with his girlfriend, who now swung around to face the framed photograph on the wall behind her. She pointed to the impressive statue in the picture.

  ‘Ramses the Second,’ she told Jessie. ‘The greatest pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Three thousand years ago he ruled the New Kingdom for sixty-seven years during the time of the 19th Dynasty. This statue stands in the Temple of Karnak, a temple so magnificent and so vast that I fell to my knees in the sand, pierced by awe and dread, the first time I laid eyes on it.’

  Jessie couldn’t imagine this proud creature on her knees to anyone. ‘Where is Timothy?’ she asked.

  Anippe ignored the question. ‘You see the headdress that King Ramses is wearing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It flared stiffly at each side of his head, a bit like a nun’s, and reached to his shoulders.

  ‘That is called a nemes,’ the young woman told her. ‘Can you see what is on the front of the nemes on his forehead?’

  Jessie frowned at the picture. ‘A snake’s head.’

  ‘It is a cobra. Only the pharaoh was permitted to wear the cobra on his nemes. It was a sign of royalty and it was there to protect him from harm, a cobra spitting poison at any attacker.’ Anippe’s full lips stretched into a wider smile, but her cheekbones remained taut and hard-edged. ‘It is called the uraeus.’

  ‘The cobra’s head?’

  ‘Yes. Timothy regarded you as his uraeus.’ She studied Jessie’s face in silence for a moment, then said in a low respectful voice, ‘It is an honour to be so regarded.’

  ‘But it also means that the young blighter saw himself as a pharaoh!’ Jessie pointed out crossly. How much did this person know about her?

  Anippe laughed, a crystal clear sound that circled the glass cases and settled in Jessie’s ears. She wanted to pluck it out but couldn’t. She noticed that the Egyptian woman was wearing a chiffon scarf of blue and gold tied around her neck, to which her hands now crept. Tim had once told her that blue and gold were the colours of eternal life in Ancient Egypt, the colours of King Tutankhamen’s death-mask, the one Howard Carter unearthed, glistening with gold and lapis lazuli. Now Anippe wore them.

  ‘I’m looking for Timothy. Have you seen him, Miss Kalim?’

  ‘No. He has not come into work this week.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if I did.’

  A silence, as solid as the bones on the table, settled between them and Jessie felt her mouth turn dry. She was convinced that Tim was not just sulking.

  ‘I need to find my brother,’ she said firmly. ‘I am worried about him.’

  She stepped back and let her gaze rest on one of the cabinets, giving the young woman time to think. She leaned close to the cabinet and was dimly aware of a blur of rich turquoise within it, but her mind was struggling to think clearly.

  ‘You came with Tim to our parents’ house, I believe, on the morning of the day he disappeared.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why did you come with him?’

  ‘He wanted me to meet your mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I apologise for my mother’s …’

  ‘No need. I am used to it.’

  Jessie swung around to look at her. An outsider. Always judged by the colour of her skin. The young woman’s
expression possessed a stillness that gave no hint of what was in her mind. Or in her heart.

  ‘Do you love him?’ Jessie murmured.

  Anippe Kalim lowered her eyelids until no more than a slit of darkness showed beneath them. Suddenly she stepped forward, so close that Jessie could feel her hot breath and see the raw hairline crack in the carefully constructed façade. She felt a strong grip on her wrist.

  ‘Jessie, you are his uraeus.’ The words came in a low hiss. ‘Protect your brother.’

  ‘From what? From whom?’

  From you? Is that what you mean?

  Anippe Kalim swept back to her table of broken bones where her fingers started to shift them around, zigzagging them back and forth like the pieces of a jigsaw.

  ‘Women!’ she said contemptuously, as if she were a different species herself. She didn’t look at Jessie again. The conversation was over.

  Jessie stood stiffly without speaking for two full minutes. Only the click-clack of the bones made holes in the dusty silence. When she had control of the words in her head, she straightened a smile on her face and approached the table once more. She picked up a nodule of bone and weighed it in her hand.

  ‘Now,’ Jessie said softly, ‘enough of this. Please tell me what you know about what Timothy was doing and what you think might have happened to him.’

  The stillness vanished from the dark eyes.

  ‘Miss Kalim?’

  Dusky fingers twisted at the blue and gold scarf. ‘I have neither seen him nor heard from Timothy since that Friday.’

  ‘What happened after you left my parents’ house?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Her slender shoulders shrugged. ‘We came here to work.’

  ‘Was Tim annoyed with my mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And after work?’

  There was a moment. A blank spot. As if Anippe Kalim’s intelligent mind had just hit a brick wall.