The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “ ‘Whatever can have given anyone such an appalling idea?’ I had blurted out before I had stopped for thought. ‘Did the doctor tell you something that the rest of us didn’t see? Why, Peseshet wouldn’t harm a fly – more likely she would splint the leg of one that someone else had swatted!’

  “But he was adamant; this was not the dashing father of my childhood but the solemn hypocrite who had married Heterphernebti with Mother still fresh in her grave.”

  Imhotep sucked for a moment on a date, gradually removing the stone and looking at it as if it were something dredged from his memory. He placed it on a plate and stared at it for a while before continuing.

  “That silent boat journey homewards was the most miserable experience of my life. Peseshet was completely bewildered and the guards, longtime family retainers, did not know how to treat her. ‘Why does Father imagine that I did this awful thing?’ she repeatedly asked.

  “ ‘Father told me that you had found out that he was going to share Mother’s Legacy for us with Udimu – and, with your training, you, uniquely among us, have the knowledge of how to kill.’

  “ ‘Since when have I cared about riches – enough to murder? And in that way – his throat was slit from ear to ear, for heaven’s sake – where did I get the razor? Why, I’ve never touched one in my life! What woman would kill with such a thing?’

  “ ‘You muffled him in his sleepy-shawl and swept him out into the garden so that you could kill him silently. The doctor says Udimu was throttled – there were finger-marks on his throat. You had stolen Father’s razor but wrapped it in the bandage so as not to cause more defilement by touching it – but chiefly to make people imagine that the killer must be a man.’

  “ ‘Incredible – so it was Father’s razor!’

  “ ‘Yes – but it was one of your bandages!’

  “ ‘There is no shortage of them about!’ She smiled at me, almost to break my heart. ‘How is your poor leg now?’ I had hurt my leg on the voyage out – how typical of her to be thinking of me at such a time. ‘It seems I can trust no one,’ she said. ‘How could anyone concoct such a terrible scenario? This must be one of Heterphernebti’s imaginings. Once we are back, Imhotep, I beg you to go to Prince Djoser. I would feel safe to tell him.’ Naturally, I had never intended doing anything else.

  “Outside on the deck the poor ape Huni, sent back on the same craft and securely tethered to a rail, whimpered all through the night – but they would not let Peseshet comfort him.”

  Iry’s mind sifted these facts against those recorded in the archives. So far Imhotep had added much flesh to the ancient bones, but not revealed anything new. Even though Imhotep was remembering back some sixty years, Iry believed he knew far more than history had told, but he knew his old mentor had to tell the story in his own time. For all that Iry wished he would come to the point, he harnessed his impatience and sat back, trying to look relaxed and hoping this would encourage Imhotep to reveal more.

  The old man looked at him briefly before his eyes once again receded into the distant past. Iry had known him all of his life, and yet this was but a fraction of Imhotep’s many long years and he wondered just what mysteries there were to reveal.

  “Typically, our prince was there to meet us,” Imhotep resumed, “the tragic news having been sent ahead. We all knew the story must come out, but horrifyingly, in the short time our journey had taken, it was already assumed that my sister was guilty and that my poor father’s problem, apart from burying Udimu, was to find a tasteful way of disposing of her.

  “Our ship arrived in darkness and, as we left, they were shoving poor Huni, screeching, into a cage. Peseshet, her wrists bound, was taken, heavily veiled and in a carrying chair, torchlit, through the sleeping town. I still remember following, limping beside my Prince – the blessed relief of talking to one, who after all, knew all about trusting nobody and watching one’s back! Me, a young lad of just thirteen summers, and Djoser, my hero, being scarcely twenty.

  “We went over and over the details of the murder, trying to fathom out a perpetrator for that frightful death. ‘Udimu couldn’t have known the latrine,’ I remember explaining to him. ‘He hadn’t been shown the garden yet. But he needed little sleep and sometimes wandered at night.’ His nurses, exhausted from supervising him on the boat, unfortunately, had relaxed once back on dry land.

  “I’d heard no report of a break-in at the villa and had to assume the guilt of someone from within – if Pharaoh now has visions of dark magic being involved, I fear nobody saw any trace at the time.

  “I had tried to establish where everyone had been. Heterphernebti and Father, I knew, seldom slept together in those days. She had been in her rooms attended by her maids, while Father had spent much of the night poring over details of the harvest in his office. Intakes and Meresank and I had also been sleeping in our rooms, exhausted servants in attendance. So, too, had Peseshet – but somehow in her case this had become negative evidence as to whether she had been in her bed or not!

  “Prince Djoser was outraged. The Prince always loved children and so was appalled at the details of Udimu’s death when I described them. We racked our brains in the darkness all the way back to this house, but to no avail.”

  Again, Iry had to blink away that terrible crimson vision of the baby, head yanked back by his child-lock, eyes rolled up in fear.

  “They took poor Peseshet to a secluded room that they had readied for her over there in the south wing. Prince Djoser would take no nonsense from my father’s steward when he tried to discourage him from coming in with us.

  “ ‘Whoever can you have offended, Peseshet, to incur this sort of treatment?’ said our cousin. ‘How could anyone imagine you capable of such an atrocity? Whoever killed poor Udimu certainly meant to do it, didn’t they – but why?’

  “ ‘Peseshet,’ I said to my sister, trying to encourage her. ‘You told me there was something particular you wanted to say to the prince, something that you could trust only to him?’ She looked so beautiful at that moment – could she trust me enough to tell me too?

  “ ‘Something to show, not something to say.’ She had hidden it in a tiny screw of papyrus and slid it into the hem of her kilt. She dropped it into his outstretched palm. ‘It’s part of what Udimu was clutching.’ It was a bit of tied-off fringe.

  “ ‘It’s from Udimu’s sleepy-shawl,’ I said. ‘We all know that. They must have ripped it out of his hand when they grabbed him.’

  “ ‘No!’ she said. ‘Look again. We assumed as much, but when it came to folding Udimu’s shawl to put . . .’ – her eyes filled with tears at the memory – ‘. . . to put beside him, I noticed that it was perfect – there wasn’t a bit missing from the fringe at all. It doesn’t come from Heterphernebti’s shawl. Look at the colours in it, Imhotep – tell me whose shawl it really came from!’

  “The dye was most distinctive, fabulously expensive, which was why it had been suggested that it was stolen. It was Miut’s shawl, carried from her distant land.

  “ ‘This requires most serious consideration from a higher authority.’ Prince Djoser said. He rewrapped the scrap of thread and took it with him.

  “The next day Prince Djoser and I came to the peace of this garden. Just over there, by that clump of iris at the edge of the pond, I almost tripped on one of Udimu’s tiny towers, built like a stairway around all four sides. The gardeners had left it, I suppose, out of respect that it could have been fashioned by a two-year-old, and I must admit that I broke down and wept at the sight of it.

  “ ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ I said. ‘For how many years are we going to be stumbling into his eternal little piles of stone?’

  “Djoser laughed in sympathy. ‘Eternal stones – now there is a thought. If we ever make a royal tomb together, Imhotep, it will be of eternal stone!’ and I limped beside him up to the desolate house.

  “The rest of the family arrived two days later; Udimu was laid to rest with due solemnity in the family grave. Eve
ryone managed great dignity, just as they had after Mother’s untimely death.

  “Lady Heterphernebti, though, was privately giving cause for concern. She refused to eat any food that she had not prepared herself – nor would she have her devoted Miut anywhere near her.

  “My father, who had the Pharaoh’s authority for the territory in which the dreadful crime had been committed, let it be known that it was now a matter for the past. To his shame, it was all a tragic domestic incident. No–one was allowed to see Peseshet. I lived in terror that she might be ‘disappeared’.

  “I did not know what to do. Should I share my knowledge with my other sisters? Peseshet had feared trusting anyone. They were bewildered. They could not believe that Peseshet could do something so terrible, but equally they didn’t believe that Father would do anything so unjust. It must be some court secret that he could not tell us.

  “But for the Prince and myself, it seemed the other way about. If Miut was involved, why was my father protecting her at the expense of his own daughter?

  “At last the prince came quietly to me and said, ‘When I told my mother about what has been done to Peseshet, she cried. Miut may go missing very shortly.’

  “I found it difficult to imagine Queen Nemaathap allowing herself to be moved to tears. But then there was little that that great lady did not understand about being a sacrifice for the good of her family.”

  Imhotep paused again. Iry had some sense of what was to come and knew the next part of the story would be painful for Imhotep to recall. Iry bowed his head, hoping to appear as a pupil not inquisitor. With a voice broken by emotion, Imhotep continued.

  “When my father discovered that Miut had been taken by agents of the Great Wife, he hanged himself from a beam. Everyone was numb with astonishment – and poor Intakes and Meresank devastated by this new grief.” Again he paused but Iry said nothing. Imhotep coughed to clear the emotion from his throat and continued in more defiant tone. “But Father had known his time was up – he was just a poor upstart who had made himself too many enemies. Under interrogation much emerged. Miut had been a uniquely skilled poisoner and Father had found out. It transpired that this was not such a surprising thing for him to light upon, because he was a consummate poisoner himself. His swift rise to riches in his youth had been based as much on these skills as on any of those immense talents for which he was later justly revered.

  “Miut’s services had been used on countless occasions – starting with the removal of my beloved mother when Heterphernebti found, to her astonishment, that she was expecting my father’s child. Mother would never have been reconciled to his betrayal of her with her best friend. She would have insisted on a messy divorce and taken all her riches and probably his good name with her.”

  Imhotep smacked his hand down on the armrest of his chair as if that were an end to it and stared at Iry intently. Iry found himself almost cowed by the steady gaze and had to look away towards the garden. He spoke, his voice sounding distant, but with enough conviction to remind Imhotep of his purpose.

  “But Udimu was not poisoned, my Lord. The files record the death of your father and the fate of Miut, but say no more. One is left to draw conclusions that your father was directly involved in the death of his own son.”

  Imhotep struggled to lean forwards and locked Iry fiercely in his gaze.

  “We could not bury Father with Mother and poor little Udimu. He was a great man but now he is forgotten. His name was erased everywhere in his tomb and you will find no mention of any relative or companion, or any provision for mortuary priests to remember him. Kanofer is entirely alone. I did that to him and he deserved it for what he did to Mother and Peseshet and Udimu. They loved him and he betrayed them.

  “Toddling out into the darkness of the garden, what did little Udimu find? Father and Miut at a tender moment? More likely, he overheard something it was vital he did not repeat and so had to be silenced. He may have been only two but he understood all that he heard even if he did not always appreciate its significance. He would certainly have told others of plots and schemes. Silence and secrecy are the essence of the poisoner’s art. Father, realizing that hardly anyone would ever know the exact details of Udimu’s murder, must have ruthlessly decided on finding a quick scapegoat in Peseshet. Why would Miut, who was so very useful to him in his craft, ever be implicated at all?

  “Heterphernebti got her just deserts. She must have known something of my father’s secret business all along. Her fear of Miut once her mind started to go after her baby’s death was enough to convince me. Mighty Pharaoh, not wishing his previous wife to know any hardship, took her into his keeping. I do not know when or how she died, or where she rests. I do not care.

  “Miut met the fate of any poisoner who has lost her friends. She was rather more loyal to my father than he was entitled to expect. I later discovered that she had not revealed all that she might have done to the interrogators of the Great Queen.

  “Peseshet survived to be set free, as I am sure I need hardly tell his majesty, who shares her blood. She would have been destined for removal when the time was right, but her servants were vigilant. She was happy to be a minor queen for love of a prince with so many charming sisters – her name forever kept alive by the disciplines of medicine that she founded.

  “So there you have it, Iry, all very shocking – but a tidy ending. What more could his majesty require to know?”

  Now was the moment that doctor Iry had been dreading. He cleared his throat. “My Lord. Forgive me if I think on this.” He got up, a trifle stiff from sitting for so long on the hard stone, and walked around the pool, where Udimu’s potent story had been told and where Imhotep had stumbled on the tiny tower of stone. He looked at the venerable gentleman sitting among the irises and noticed the slight trembling of the long-fingered old hand against the whiteness of the fine linen kilt.

  “Thank you, Mighty Thoth,” breathed Iry. Fine, white linen. Imhotep had stumbled. Imhotep had limped. Imhotep had found it hard to face Peseshet’s concerned eyes on board the transport home. The bandage mattered. Could it be that Imhotep was involved some way in his baby brother’s death? Again, Iry seemed to see the world flood crimson as he turned to face his childhood mentor.

  “Dear master, you must know what you have just said – that Miut had not revealed all she might. How could that be, if you did not know much more than you have told me? If, indeed, you were not in some way implicated yourself?”

  Lord Imhotep laughed. Iry watched the tension drain from the frail shoulders. “Whatever your private thoughts of Pharaoh, Iry, he chose you well. He is the Morning and the Evening Star and maybe he understands better than I do, that now I approach my end, as we both know I do, I need to search my soul for the truth of things. Ask me then, what more troubles you?”

  “Firstly, why was that poor infant killed not once, but three times – the death for one of power? That fascinated his majesty and horrified me. What was the significance of Udimu’s dreams? Did your father truly leave his razor at the scene of the crime, an intelligent man like him? And what of the linen bandage – are you somehow concerned in that – were you jealous of him, surely not?”

  The old man smiled sadly, looking back, Iry felt, across all the years to his family gathered in this garden. “What Miut never revealed was hidden in the dream, but she did not truly understand that herself. Yes, I am sure that Udimu saw the Boat Of A Million Years and was about to watch the weighing Osiris. I no longer mourn my little brother. He will come again, he was of the kind that does – a great magician. It was I who flew out from under the shelter of his wing and, yes, I was jealous of his abilities. As I draw near to the weighing of my heart, I hope I did right – but fear that I did not.

  “That night, like Udimu, I could not sleep. On board ship I had hurt my ankle and we’d bound it with a strip of linen. In the heat of the night, I got up to bathe it with cold water. I entered the hallway and Udimu suddenly came scuttling out into the moonlight and t
oddled off into the garden. Naturally, I followed, but instantly sensed that we were not alone. A garden is a place for secret meetings, but Udimu failed to understand. There were voices coming from out there. Like Udimu, I heard what they said, but unlike him, I recognized its implication. To my horror, Udimu came running out to the two of them, all laughter. Miut was on to him swiftly and, without remorse, throttled him with the ruthlessness of any cook. Father stood dumbstruck.

  “ ‘What is the matter?’ Miut said callously. ‘He would have spoken. Did you want that?’ Savagely, Father wrested the limp child from her grip, breathing deep gasps of horror as Miut continued relentlessly: ‘You don’t think he was your child, do you? Lady Heterphernebti thought she was barren, she comforted herself with many men.’

  “I could not see Father’s face to judge his reaction, but from then on he moved as if in a dream. They bundled Udimu in Miut’s shawl and carried him deeper into the garden, finally ramming him down the latrine – a piece of unspeakably pointless violence. Perhaps it was Father’s anger at what he had just heard.

  “I hid in the bushes until they were done, creeping into the latrine hut once they had gone back into the house. I pulled him out and tried to revive him. Remember, Iry, how young I was, how little I knew of death or how a dead body will react when moved. I even thought that he choked once or twice. I was filled with rage and fear at what I had heard and what they had done.

  “When I saw what the sand had made of his poor little eyes, I closed them. His baby’s mouth, pulled back in the rictus of death, terrified me. I unwound the bandage from my ankle and placed it as a pad between his lips to hide the horror of his tongue and I left him sitting upright, decorous.

  “I had no idea what to do or who to turn to. As I ran from the latrine in a panic of grief and terror, something slithered and fell in the darkness behind me. It must have been the poor baby slumping over because I had failed to prop him up correctly – but I did not turn back. I knew that if the tiny soul was still living, the pad that I had placed in his mouth would probably stifle him – but I ran on. I have lived with that burden ever since.