Death Beyond the Nile (Tamara Hoyland Book 5)

by Jessica Mann

  Tamara had frightened herself off too. She realised it on the way home, during the flight from Aswan to Cairo.

  She never did discover which luckless passengers lost their seats on the aeroplane when the magic code number did its trick, nor how some official at the British Embassy had arranged for the survivors to leave the country without further formalities.

  Hugo Bloom was not with them.

  He had been on the steps of the New Cataract Hotel when a garry pulled by a dejected horse delivered Tamara, Tim and a still hardly conscious Janet. He hurried into the town himself, presumably to find out what had happened, and was arrested, red-handed—as it must have seemed to the authorities—beside his putative victims. News was still awaited that (or whether) Giles Needham had also been arrested and put in beside him. Tamara was prepared to believe that Giles would ignore, and even forget, the fact of two dead English people at Qasr Samaan; and if the computers never turned up the fact that Vanessa Papillon and John Benson had entered but not departed from Egypt, he might never be reminded.

  Nobody from the consulate had yet seen Hugo. Mr Black wondered whether he was waiting for rescue by the Israeli army. ‘They ought to show him some gratitude, short of a commando raid. That information would have been quite some present.’

  Would was the operative word. Mr Black and Tamara looked at the copy of the American Journal of Mechanical Medicine that lay on the desk in front of him. Janet’s discovery was the subject of the leading article. Her friend Cal had done her proud.

  ‘She dumped the problem on him so he decided what to do and did it,’ Mr Black said.

  ‘An inconvenient and uncharacteristic case of promptness in the Egyptian postal services.’

  Janet had given her letter to an Arab to post at Dendera, realising that mail left on the ship to be posted was likely to be seen and wondered about by other passengers. ‘She isn’t as naïve as I thought,’ Tamara said. ‘She guessed from the very start that someone was there to keep an eye on her. It could have been anyone who booked the trip after she did, but I think she probably eliminated the Bensons straight away.’

  ‘She assumed it was Hugo Bloom,’ Mr Black said.

  ‘In the role of agent provocateur? No, I rather think she guessed it was me. Don’t forget my sister had been indiscreet about it in the past.’

  ‘There are certain drawbacks to this small worldness of the life people like you lead.’

  ‘People like me! What on earth do you mean? It was pure coincidence that Janet knew Sandra.’

  ‘One of those coincidences that so regularly pops up in the life of the second-, third-, fourth-generation intellectuals.’

  Tamara knew that he was teasing; in his own world of senior civil servants and ex-regular officers there was a far more powerful network than any that intellectual or social snobbery could provide.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said firmly, ‘the upshot is that the whole excursion was a wasted effort.’

  ‘On Hugo Bloom’s part?’

  ‘On mine.’

  ‘Completely wasted? You have seen the Sphinx. You made some interesting friends. Attractive, too.’

  ‘That, unfortunately, is quite misleading. The phrase “handsome is as handsome does” might have been coined about Giles Needham in the first place.’

  ‘Your work was good,’ Mr Black said. He sounded indulgent. ‘You must be glad you rescued Janet. It was well done.’

  But it was not well done. Tamara was ashamed to remember herself as a cold fighting machine. She had disabled two men. ‘I could have saved her without the brutality,’ she muttered.

  ‘How? Without exposing the very secret you stopped her telling?’

  ‘But the point is that she had already told it. And even if she hadn’t, there must be something I could have done. I didn’t stop think.’ It was the picture of herself as a rapid, decisive automaton from which her memory shied away.

  In the jet that took them back to London Janet had been unwell, probably suffering the after-effects of whatever drug her captors used to loosen her tongue. Tamara had been sympathetic and helpful; and in a part of her mind felt that she had no right to minister to the sick. She was tainted by her own passionless expertise. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I’d even felt angry. If I had acted in hot blood. But I didn’t. It was just the next thing to do.’

  ‘You were calm and sensible.’

  ‘That is a contradiction in terms, Mr Black. It is inherently not sensible to use force except in self-defence.’

  ‘Or in defence of your protégée.’

  ‘You may be able to justify what I have become in verbal logic. But I feel . . . corrupted. That’s the only word for it.’

  ‘That is the nature of involvement in affairs. The only true innocents are those who make sure they never know what other people are doing for them.’

  ‘To them,’ Tamara said.

  ‘The victims?’

  ‘I am not sure that anyone would ever have called Vanessa Papillon innocent. And as for John Benson . . .’

  ‘A forger.’

  ‘And a victim.’

  ‘But not, it seems, Hugo Bloom’s.’

  *

  Max Solomon had not resumed his diary writing at Qasr Samaan after emerging from his creative seclusion. But he had described his last days there to his son Jonty, for whom his father’s words were among the few facts he could record in a mass of speculation.

  Unlike Tamara herself, Max Solomon slept badly on that last night, and heard his neighbours’ night noises through the cosmetic partitions that separated the cabins. John Benson had snored, Ann Benson ground her teeth. And Hugo Bloom had spent the whole of the night with Janet Macmillan. They had made and could have made little secret of it. In the morning they had parted for no more than ten minutes, met fully dressed in the passage and gone up to have a quick jog and then breakfast together.

  Max had heard other footsteps on the stairs before that; but not Hugo’s. He listened to the repeated scraping of Giles Needham’s matches as he lit his morning pipe. He listened to John Benson snorting himself awake and performing uninhibited morning rituals. He heard him go up the stairs, muttering about what he could not bear; and Ann Benson say ‘John?’, unanswered, before she resumed her rhythmic grinding. He heard Giles, always first to resume the day’s duties, go up; and the swish of a woman’s skirt in the passage and her soft footsteps. He had not looked out of his door. Max thought it could have been Tamara he heard, or Polly. That was at least ten minutes before Janet and Hugo amorously separated to get dressed, and twenty before anyone else emerged.

  ‘Polly,’ Mr Black said.

  ‘She was already in the saloon when I went up there with Janet and Hugo, but she was usually there before the rest of us. I didn’t think anything of it,’ Tamara said.

  ‘You were so sure that Hugo was your man.’

  ‘I am afraid I was.’

  ‘Not entirely your fault,’ Mr Black said kindly. ‘You couldn’t have known how useful to him the Bensons were. He would have wanted them alive. His Israeli masters—’

  ‘I think friends would be a better word,’ Tamara said.

  ‘As you like. But I told you that our colleagues have worked out how he was spying on Fernley. Why it never occurred to anyone that the Bensons next door were providing the perfect base for checking on what goes on there, I really can’t think. But heads are rolling like billiard balls.’

  ‘And whose head will roll for Vanessa Papillon and John Benson?’ Tamara asked. She faced the facts in her own mind. ‘They are dead, almost certainly murdered. You can’t get away from it. It happened. It’s where fairy tales meet real life. Unless you see yourself, ourselves, as fairy godmothers.’

  Mr Black got up from his chair and walked to the window. His office had recently been moved from Fortress House in Savile Row to another branch of the civil service maze; now he could look out on Whitehall.

  ‘I prefer this,’ he said.

  ‘Soldiers to tailors?’ T
amara said.

  ‘I like processions. I like ceremonies. I like royal occasions.’ The window was bullet-proof and mirrored reflections, rather than showing what was inside. There was modified triple glazing, to prevent vibrating words from being picked up by well-aimed microphones. The room (larger and more luxurious than the one he had had before) was checked three times a week for eavesdropping devices.

  He said, ‘I honestly don’t know what’s to be done.’ It was unlike Tom Black to admit to anything but omniscience and even omnipotence.

  Tamara said, ‘About Janet?’

  He looked surprised, as though he had forgotten the original purpose of Tamara’s mission. ‘That’s over with, spilt milk. It will be up to the defence boffins to find an antidote. Win some lose some, as they say. No, not that.’ He shuffled around in the papers on his desk. It was affectation. He had never been known to lose or even mislay anything. ‘It’s the analyst’s report on the stuff you brought back in that mineral water bottle. And, incidentally, the Lacoste shirt. It was stained with ink.’

  ‘I thought blood would have come off in the water. But Hugo had a cut on his hand.’

  ‘A plaster to cover spilt red ink, I should think,’ Mr Black said. ‘But there was poison in the mineral water. You were right about that.’

  ‘Selenium from the chemical store? Or Max Solomon’s sleeping pills?’

  ‘No, arsenic. It was in an extraordinary compound of ingredients. It wouldn’t be permitted here or in the United States, even as a skin lotion. It is sold plastered with warnings. Not to be taken internally, use with care, keep away from children. Claims to remove wrinkles, very expensive, imported from the Far East. A magic potion.’

  ‘Taken from Vanessa’s own collection,’ Tamara said, ‘but surely not by her.’

  It could have been any of those present on the dormitory barge at Qasr Samaan who put the poison into Vanessa Papillon’s bottle of mineral water, as Tamara had realised at the time. Whether it was indeed a drink from that bottle that had poisoned her could not now be established, short of a post mortem to find traces of arsenic in the body. There was no need for one.

  Tamara had followed this trail of conjecture before, several times, with the boring repetitiveness of any thoughts that are incapable of resolution.

  Vanessa had died as a result of poison; she could have committed suicide. The other members of the party had accepted that her death had been accidental. One of them, however, had almost certainly caused it. Any of them could have done so. Tamara had veered between suspecting all, any and none of them. ‘How could one prove it?’ she muttered.

  ‘Get hold of the body, have a post mortem. Take evidence from everyone who was at Qasr Samaan. Bounce a confession.’

  ‘But who would? The British police? The Egyptian? It’s unthinkable. I don’t know what you are going to do about it,’ Tamara said.

  ‘I?’ replied Tom Black. ‘My dear Tamara—what are you?’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  To a certain extent Tom Black was right. He usually was. Tamara did live in a small world—at least, as to the aspect of her that the larger world recognised. It was seldom very hard to arrange to meet people who were second-, third- or fourth-generation educated. Somewhere there would be a more or less elaborate maze of common acquaintances, through which she could find her way to the desired centre. It was simply the result of living on a small island with an archaic system of education.

  The approach to Paula Crosse was simple. Professor Crosse was a colleague of Thea Crawford, who had been Tamara’s tutor and was now her friend. His daughter was at home with them, near Buriton in Cornwall. She could not be locked away in the privacy of a Scottish castle.

  Polly, on the other hand, had been sent north, away from reporters, photographers and curious eyes. It was either a punishment or a protection depending on which story one believed or on which of her parents was talking. They thought that Paula was more at fault than Polly. They would have liked to have their daughter’s commoner friend clapped into the Tower of London for treason.

  The Crosses were as much proud of their daughter as they were angry with her. They thought the cause for which she had cheated first her friend and then her government justified any minor misbehaviour. Polly’s family should think itself lucky, Mrs Crosse said, that Paula was not interested in publicity.

  As a matter of fact, Paula would have liked to get the credit for those plane-loads of supplies. She wanted to believe that she herself had been the saviour of the lives the food had, one presumed, saved.

  By this time a good many of her friends knew what she had done. It would not be long until the story was public knowledge. Would Polly still be thought a heroine?

  Tamara Hoyland, who suspected that Polly was a criminal, was taken to the Crosses’ house by Professor Thea Crawford. Thea had listened to much of Tamara’s story with commendable detachment; she was in the final stages of a long book about European connections with Britain in the Iron Age, and the doings of a Hanoverian princess were of far less interest to her than that Tamara had brought her an accurate drawing of a relevant sherd of pottery in the Aswan museum. She clearly felt that driving Tamara five miles out of town to the Crosses’ place was payment for it. It was not ungenerous. Thea had to pretend that she was buying supplies from Mrs Crosse’s trout farm for a dinner party as excuse for a call she could not otherwise plausibly make. Tamara, introduced not as Dr Hoyland but by her first name alone, put on her ingénue face, and said she had met Paula at a party in Oxford and would go out in the garden to hunt for her. She would not have been surprised to hear Mrs Crosse telling her to go outside and play.

  Paula’s penance was to gut and fillet fish.

  ‘Mother’s expanding into smoking and pickling,’ she said gloomily, holding out her slimy hand as evidence that she could not shake Tamara’s. ‘I am getting used to the smell, but you’d probably rather go outside.’ Outside was windy and damp.

  ‘Typical Cornish weather,’ Paula said.

  ‘It’s welcome after Qasr Samaan,’ Tamara replied.

  ‘Are you a journalist?’ Paula had won a scholarship to one of the stuffiest formerly men’s colleges at Oxford. She was quick on the uptake. Tamara looked thoughtfully at her clever face: thin lips, narrow cheeks, straight, dark brows above straight-aimed, dark eyes. She was an only child. Her mother had founded the Buriton branch of the Society for Gifted Children, writing peevish letters to the local paper about the problems faced by their parents. They attracted slight sympathy, but Tamara, recognising an uncompromising intelligence, felt a little sorry for the girl’s less intelligent parent.

  Tamara decided to be truthful about facts though not about inferences. Paula, fascinated by what she heard about the events at Qasr Samaan, was only too willing to talk about her friend Polly.

  ‘The trouble with Polly is that she’s cleverer than she needs to be but not as clever as she thinks she is.’

  Paula and Polly had met at school. It was really Mrs Crosse’s fault, all this, Paula explained, and Tamara refrained from asking what wasn’t. ‘It’s all down to my mother. If she hadn’t sent me to that silly school . . .’

  The two girls were not together at university. Polly was at one of the remaining all-woman colleges, but her family regarded Paula as a suitable friend and the invitations to dinner and garden and country house parties (palace parties, Paula called them) continued. ‘It was my bloody mother who made me ask Polly back,’ Paula said. ‘You can imagine what my real friends thought of her.’

  ‘So whose idea was it that she should borrow your passport and take your place on the excavation?’

  ‘I suppose it was both of ours. I never wanted to go to Egypt anyway. My father picked up something I said about it, months ago, and organised it all as a treat for me. He went to tremendous trouble. He even paid for the air ticket. I couldn’t tell him I never really meant it. Poor bloke, he has enough to put up with round here. So I was moaning about it when I saw Polly, you know
how one does. She really did want to go. She was simply dying to. So we agreed to swap.’

  ‘And you were left to tell her family? Rather you than me,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Good Lord no. Not myself. I was meant to post a letter Polly had left with me. They would have got it once she was safely there. And while she was on the way, they thought she was staying in our cottage in North Devon. She’s been there with us before. Her heavies think it’s perfectly safe.’

  ‘You mean they simply never noticed she wasn’t there with you?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, the middle of winter, we wouldn’t have gone outside much anyway. They thought we were staying in bed late and eating and watching television. So Polly could get away in disguise without being noticed. There would have been a bit of trouble—I was going to say she’d got me to cover for her while she had a jaunt for a couple of days. She wrote home that she’d pinched my passport and I didn’t know anything about it, but they would never have believed that. They always used to say I was a good influence on her. I’d have stopped being persona grata but that’s no hardship as far as I’m concerned. Ma would have minded.’ Paula’s expression showed how little that would distress her.

  ‘And what you actually did was send anonymous letters about kidnaps and ransoms . . .’

  ‘It was brilliant. It really worked. We weren’t sure that it would, you can imagine. It was just that there seemed no harm in trying. I said she’d gone for a stroll one morning and just never come back, as simple as that. I pretended to be frightfully upset. You can imagine the fuss. The questions, the police—I should think they suspected me, but there was nothing they could show against me. Anyway by then she was safely incommunicado in the middle of Lake Nasser. And the starving Sudanese got three whole planes’ full.’

  ‘Which were loaded and ready to fly before you began on this,’ Tamara suggested. ‘Isn’t that what was announced?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean a thing. Of course they would never have done it if it hadn’t been for the pressure,’ Paula insisted.

  ‘There had been pressure in Parliament and the Press too. It does rather sound as though your efforts were . . . superfluous,’ Tamara said.