Dance While You Can

by Susan Lewis

  Christine looked up at him, and I saw a strange, almost hypnotic adoration shine from her face. The Pasha nodded for us to go into the room behind him. Robert and I exchanged glances, but there was very little we could do with a gun at our heads.

  I was already inside the room when I heard the shout. The front door crashed open and suddenly the place was filled with police. Two shots were fired, almost simultaneously. I swung round – and the Pasha’s eyes seemed to bore into mine. Before he fell I saw more evil in that one look than I had ever seen before in my life. Christine screamed and ran towards him, then before any of us had time to move, she had seized his gun and was pointing it at me.

  ‘You!’ she spat. ‘You! Everything that’s happened is because of you and your slut! You killed my brother, and now you’ve killed my husband.’ And before anyone could stop her she had pulled the trigger.

  The bullet tore through my shoulder. Within seconds the police had seized her. Robert was hanging on to me, keeping me from falling. It must have been only minutes later that I lost consciousness.

  I passed the night at the Embassy, drugged with painkillers, and my left arm supported by a sling. Robert came to see how I was next morning, and after taking my temperature and checking my wound, the nurse told him I was fit enough to leave the room. On the way to the Ambassador’s office he filled me in on what had been happening throughout the night.

  The Pasha wasn’t dead. While Robert brought me back to the Embassy doctor, where I would be safe from the press, the Pasha had been rushed to hospital under police escort.

  ‘And Christine?’

  ‘She’s being held at El Knater – the women’s prison.’ He stopped to let someone pass, but made no move to walk on again. ‘I don’t suppose you knew she’d married the Pasha, did you?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No, but I suppose that’s what her brother meant by the Pasha having some kind of hold over her. She’s going to live to regret that marriage.’

  We started to walk on. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Under the laws of Islam isn’t a woman her husband’s property? I take it the Pasha is a Moslem?’ Robert nodded. ‘Then she’ll have to face the rigours of Egyptian law. With the murder of the security guard, the forging of the mask, illegal import and export, kidnapping and God only knows what else they’ve been up to, she could be facing a death sentence.’ I steeled myself before asking the next question, even though I already knew the answer. ‘Has either of them told you where Charlotte is?’

  Robert shook his head. ‘She wasn’t in the villa, the police searched it from top to bottom. But there is some good news. They’ve called in some egghead from the Cairo Museum who thinks he s cracked the conundrum.’

  We were at the Ambassador’s office now. Inside were the Ambassador, the Chief of Police and the professor. The professor was seated at a table by the window, surrounded by bibles and history books.

  ‘It was necessary to channel thoughts in a new direction,’ the Chief said, once the introductions were over. ‘My friend here has done that, and now, after a long process of elimination, we have the answer.’ The professor sat by, smiling benignly, as the Chief explained how the professor had come up with the solution. It was, like almost everything else I had encountered since I’d arrived in Egypt, bizarre in the extreme.

  ‘We merely used hieroglyphs,’ the professor explained, as if one might use hieroglyphs to solve any old problem. ‘First, we took the rod. Do you remember? Moses’ rod changed to a snake. It was God’s way of showing Moses he had the power of God within him. Here,’ he held up a piece of paper, ‘the hieroglyph snake. Do you see?’

  Robert, the Ambassador and I looked blankly at a squiggle that vaguely resembled a snake. The professor merely shrugged at our lack of appreciation. ‘Then we considered the plague and how the children died. They were visited by the angel of death, yes? Flying like a bird by night over Egypt, yes? And the bird that flies by night? An owl. And the hieratic script for owl, see here?’

  Again he showed us a piece of paper. On it was scribbled what looked to be the figure three.

  ‘This is the sign for the owl. And now see, if you put them together, the sign of the snake and the sign of the owl, this is what you have.’

  He waited while we passed round the results of his efforts, then taking it back from Robert, and, hardly able to contain his excitement, he said. ‘This is the sign which is inscribed over a door in El Khalifa – the City of the Dead. It is the door of the Pasha’s mother’s house. I have no doubt in my mind that your daughter is there, so if you are ready, Mr Belmayne, we will go.’

  I was too stunned by the tortured logic to do more than smile stupidly.

  It was a long journey to the south-eastern outskirts of the city, and one I can barely remember now, for I spent the time praying that the Chief’s confidence was not ill-placed. As we drove into the City of the Dead Robert wound up the windows to block out the stench. We remained in the Chief’s car with the Ambassador while, surrounded by his men, the Chief made his way into the macabre town.

  I could hardly believe what I was seeing as they stepped through the dust among emaciated animals, mud-fronted tombs and wretched, tired-looking old men. But it wasn’t that that shocked me, it was the brand new Mercedes, Jaguars and most incredible of all, Rolls Royces. Robert explained that even if they became rich, some people preferred to stay with their neighbours among the ancient tombs, where they had become used to living side by side with the dead. If I hadn’t already, then it was at that point that I gave up any hope of ever understanding this nation.

  We had been waiting for ten minutes, maybe less, when the haunting cry of the muezzin drifted from distant minarets. Hunched and shrouded figures shuffled past on their way to prayer, and round brown eyes glanced furtively in our direction. A few minutes later the Chief came striding towards the car. Behind him an old lady, wailing loudly, was being escorted by two police officers. They bundled her into a car, and the Chief got back into his. There was no sign of Charlotte.

  ‘She is gone,’ the Chief said. ‘They took her away this morning.’

  ‘They? Who are you talking about?’ I demanded, failing to keep the desperation from my voice.

  The Chief nodded to his driver, then turned to face us. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Belmayne, I cannot say. All I know is that she was alive when they took her. My men are taking the Pasha’s mother away to be questioned, but I think she was speaking the truth when she said she didn’t know the people who came for your daughter.’

  I slumped back in my seat, unsure if I could take any more. None of us spoke as we were driven back to the Embassy. None of us wanted to admit that we could be right back at square one.

  ‘Ah, Meester Ambassador, Meester Belmayne,’ Shami said as we walked into the Ambassador’s office. He was grinning like a pumpkin. ‘The secretary she say I can wait here for you. You find your daughter, no?’

  ‘No!’

  The smile fell from his face. ‘You no find her? But was my . . .’ He threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘He drink again,’ he said, mysteriously. ‘You come with me, Meester Belmayne, I take you to your daughter. Very fine, very beautiful girl, your daughter. I take you there now. She wait for you.’

  ‘You mean you know where she is?’

  ‘Sure. She with my brother. I take her from El Khalifa in this morning. She no like it there. Come, she wait for you.’

  I was aware of my whole body turning rigid as grim suspicion flowered into certainty. ‘Have you known all the time where she is, Shami?’

  Shami nodded brightly. ‘For sure I know, Meester Belmayne. Shami know everything.’

  I lunged at him but Robert and the Ambassador pulled me back. ‘If you knew, then why have you let us go through all this?’ I yelled.

  Shami shrugged. ‘To say mean no money, Meester Belmayne. Like everyone in the world, Shami need money.’ He grinned. ‘And the chase, aaah, the chase, he was good, no?’

  For the moment, r
obbed of the power of speech, all I could do was stare at him. While my daughter had suffered in God only knew what kind of hell, with God only knew what kind of people, this man had thought no further than the money he could make and the sport to be had in making it. He shuffled his feet and grinned sheepishly from me to Robert. Then the Chief of Police ushered him out of the room before I could regain control of my faculties . . . .

  – Elizabeth –

  – 31 –

  I had been in Holloway Prison for exactly sixteen days when Alexander brought Charlotte back to England; already it felt like a lifetime. Henry came to see me that day to tell me Alexander had taken Charlotte straight to hospital. I can’t explain what it was like living with the frustration of such helplessness.

  The day after he flew in Alexander, together with Oscar Renfrew, came to see me. As I was led up to the visiting hall my heart was in my throat and I felt sick with the humiliation of him seeing me like this. The first time he had come, the day before he went to Cairo, I was still too dazed to think straight. But now, as I walked soundlessly along the corridors, avoiding the eyes of the officers we passed, I was all too aware of the living hell my life had become. When I’d been told he was coming I’d brushed my hair and left it loose, but I knew it wouldn’t hide the dark rings round my eyes or the dullness of my skin. Of the three outfits I’d been allowed to take into prison I’d chosen a black Chanel suit as the one I would wear for visiting days. I no longer had it. The other women, resenting the open display of wealth had ripped it to pieces and were using it as dusters to clean their cells. Very few of them spoke to me except to sneer and hiss and cat-call across the landings. I was terrified of them. I stood at mealtimes – unable to sit down because no one would let me. I ate very little, as they spat in my food or knocked it from my tray. Most of the time I was dirty because I was too afraid to go to the washrooms. It wasn’t until Isabelle, my cell mate, decided to befriend me that I managed to utter more than a few words to anyone. Without Isabelle I don’t know how I’d have got through. After days of silently watching the way I was treated, she took it upon herself to protect me from the constant threats of violence and sexual abuse, and pulled strings to get me a job in the library with her. It was my only respite from the nightmare.

  Just past the visiting hall, the prison officer stopped and opened the door to an interview room. There was brown carpet on the floor and the walls were bare. In the middle was a table. I went in and she closed the door behind me. A few minutes later I heard footsteps, then the door opened and Alexander was there. I had promised myself I would be strong, that I wouldn’t let him know how awful things really were, but when I saw the look in his eyes my control fell apart. I had never seen a man’s face so filled with love and anguish.

  With one arm he held me, burying his face in my hair and whispering for me to be calm. Oscar nodded to the prison officer and she left us alone. It was some time before I could pull myself together. Throughout the time Alexander and Charlotte had been in Cairo, Henry had kept me informed of what was happening, and now, knowing they were both home and safe, all the torment and terror I had somehow managed to bottle up came pouring out. Alexander waited while I reminded him that I’d told him not to go, that I had warned him about the kind of people he was dealing with; I called him irresponsible, selfish and stupid, I even lashed out at his wounded arm. In the end he caught hold of me and turned me to face him.

  ‘It’s good to see you too,’ he said.

  He sat me down then and, perched on the edge of the table, he laughed as he told me how Jonathan was green with envy that he hadn’t been kidnapped too, and couldn’t wait for Charlotte to come home from the hospital so he could hear all the gory details.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled as he saw my look of alarm, ‘my father’s taking Jonathan off to the country this afternoon, so Charlotte will be spared. Canary and Caroline will be looking after her. And me, of course.’

  I looked away, my heart aching. They would be together now – Alexander, Charlotte and Jonathan, and here was I . . .

  He must have sensed how I was feeling because he slipped his arm out of its sling and hugged me. ‘We’ll have you out of here, darling,’ he promised. ‘I know it’s difficult, but please, try and be patient.’

  But I knew from the way his eyes met Oscar’s that something was troubling him, and when I challenged him, he admitted it. It was the way the Egyptians had gone about interrogating Christine. Although he had no actual details of what they had done to extract the confession from her, he knew that when it came to appeal the prosecution would make a great deal of their methods and perhaps succeed in invalidating the confession altogether.

  ‘Our only hope is for her to be present at the appeal,’ Oscar said. ‘Even then, there’s no way of knowing if she will admit to the crime.’

  But she did. Exerting every ounce of influence they had, between them the British Ambassador in Cairo and Alexander’s father managed to get Christine, under heavy guard, flown to London for the appeal. It was only later I found out, that, had she not been there, there would have been no appeal.

  It was almost nine months since I had last seen her, and four of those she had spent in an Egyptian prison. She was forty-three now, but looked closer to sixty. Her hair, what was left of it, clung to her skull, and as she looked up from her bony hands and shifted her weight stiffly from one leg to the other, I saw the strange pallor in her eyes. Her small, heavy-lipped mouth was drawn into sharp, parallel lines of rancour. She held herself erect, but I could see that beneath the brown serge that almost engulfed her, her emaciated body was beginning to sag with the effort.

  Mesmerised, horrified, I watched her as she took the oath, almost choking on the pity and sadness I felt at seeing her like that. Then, as she looked out across the courtroom, a triumphant gleam lighting her yellowed eyes, I knew the time for reckoning between us had come.

  ‘I am in no doubt,’ she said. ‘I know that by the end of this year I shall be dead. The crimes my husband and I have committed in Egypt are sufficient to earn us not one but two death sentences. I welcome them. There is nothing left to live for. My husband and my brother were my life. I am under no illusions about the way they manipulated me, the way I became a pawn in their dangerous games, the way I was used as an exchange of favours between them, but it doesn’t matter. I got what I wanted. I got Salah – the Pasha. He married me because my brother requested it. He never did and never will love me, I know that, but I can accept it. For me it was enough to be his wife. He was a man who wielded immense power; he could be ruthless and tyrannical, he was malevolent, corrupt and cruel – yet he only ever treated me with kindness.

  ‘I am telling you all this because I want you to understand why I did what I did for my brother. You see, I knew what it was to love someone who was in love with another man. My brother lived with that hell for more than twelve years. Every day was torture to him – to be with her, yet not to be loved by her. It drove him out of his mind, in fact it killed him. Salah too loved a man, but I shall be the one who is with him at the end, in a way my sister-in-law was never with my brother.’

  As she continued to speak, trying to explain her blinding passion for the Pasha, it was as if she were reliving it all again, oblivious of the courtroom and everyone in it. Until Alexander told me I’d had no knowledge of her marriage, and now, together with everyone else in the court, I sat spellbound as she spoke of the obsessional and unrequited love she had for Salah – a love that, time after time, she likened to Edward’s love for me.

  Finally she lowered her eyes. ‘Maybe now you will understand why I set fire to the Bridlington warehouse with the intention of killing my sister-in-law.’ I felt my body go rigid and everything around me started to swim. ‘I hated her. She brought her bastard daughter into our home, that man’s bastard –’ her hand was trembling as she pointed towards Alexander, though she had not raised her voice – ‘and my brother treated the child as his own. He gave them both everythi
ng they could want. And how did she repay him? She ran off with her lover again, returned to us when he had finished with her, and tried to palm her second bastard off as my brother’s child. And even after lying to him and cheating him in the way she had, he forgave her, because he loved her. He even adopted her children as his own. He changed his will for them. And all the time I was the one helping him to realise an ambition that would save him from the final ignominy of her faithlessness. The need for the mask burned in him with all the might of his love. If he couldn’t have it, there was nothing left for him. And while I helped him, she was back in her lover’s bed. This time when my brother found out, it killed him. My sister-in-law deserved to die, and she would have died if Daniel Davison had not saved her life.’ Her eyes rested fleetingly on me before she looked away again. ‘If it were left to me she would not go to prison, she would rot in hell.’ She paused again, and a gruesome smile dawned on her face. ‘But my brother loved her. He would have forgiven her anything, and it is because of him that I am prepared to absolve her from her sentence. She is innocent.’

  My hands bit into the rail in front of me as she turned and fixed her yellow eyes on mine. Her smile had widened now, and there was something so sinister about it that my mind went numb with terror. Why was she doing this? Why, when she hated me so much, was she setting me free? My whole body trembled with horror as she hissed the answer:

  ‘Now live with the guilt.’

  Her eyes were still boring into mine as a barely audible chuckle escaped her lips. She had won.

  After my release, as the weeks passed I saw less and less of Alexander. I couldn’t look at him and love him without seeing Christine’s face and the way she had looked that last day. He tried everything he could to persuade me to pull myself together, but the more he yelled or cajoled, the more I withdrew.

  Then, on the day Christine was sentenced to die – September 14th – a messenger arrived with a special delivery. Even now I find it difficult to put into words the way I felt when I opened the envelope. There was nothing to say who had torn the page from Christine’s diary and sent it to me, I even wondered if she had done it herself. The entry was for September 12th and as I read, my heart was filled with the terrible loneliness and confusion she must have suffered, not only during her final hours, but ever since I had come into her life.