Herring on the Nile (13 page)

I followed him out of the room, uncertain why he had selected me as his strolling companion. As soon as we were up on deck, however, it became clear that this was an extension of our earlier
conversation. I would need to explain quickly that my links with MI6 were nonexistent.

‘You remember that I mentioned a colleague who had failed to show up?’ Purbright asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s shown up now. Dead, unfortunately.’

I decided not to ask whether he had been ill for a long time. It didn’t sound like that sort of death.

‘Shot on his way from Cairo to join me at Luxor. The group that we are monitoring is clearly monitoring us too. In fact, it looks as though the balloon is about to go up,’ said
Purbright. ‘Mahmoud and Majid have been keeping a pretty low profile so far, but now their people have shown their hand, we can expect some action.’

This was worrying, whatever role he foresaw for me. ‘Do you know what they are planning?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly. The only firm piece of information that I have is that the party on board the
Khedive
had plans to meet up with some of their friends tonight.’

‘How?’

‘The others were going to join us by motorboat on one of the more deserted stretches of the river. Since the
Khedive
is making slow progress, however, my guess is that we
haven’t yet reached the rendezvous point.’

‘And they are after you specifically?’

‘Me? No, they want to blow up the boat. They are terrorists – probably linked to Al-Qaeda.’

‘So how are you involved?’

‘It’s my job,’ said Purbright. ‘My colleagues in the Egyptian security service are trying to track down the people with the motorboat. I’m keeping an eye on Mahmoud
and Majid. They were just a little too curious during this afternoon’s tour of the kitchens, didn’t you think? Planning where to put the explosive, no doubt.’

‘If you say so. But why are you having this conversation with me?’

‘If things go wrong, I need somebody on board I can rely on. As a former agent yourself . . .’

‘I’m not Paul Fielder,’ I said. ‘I write crime as Peter Fielding. Similar names. Not the first time we’ve been confused.’

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you looked like the photos. Too young for one thing.’

The ‘too young’ bit was obviously some compensation, though Fielder was probably now in his eighties.

‘No,’ I said. ‘My Amazon rankings don’t look like his either. Shall I just forget we had this conversation?’

He was nonplussed for a moment, then said: ‘It’s too late for that. And I still need somebody who can, if necessary, get a message back to the right people with our location. Do you
have a piece of paper on you?’ I pulled the
Southend Evening Echo
interview questions from my pocket. He scribbled something on the back and returned them to me. ‘Keep this
number until you need it.’

‘OK,’ I said.

He looked at his watch and frowned. ‘Good man. Now, there’s somebody else I need to talk to. If you don’t mind, maybe you could stay here for the moment and we’ll
continue the conversation when I return. If you spot anything suspicious . . . well, maybe the best thing is just to come and find me. I’ll be back here on deck in about ten minutes. But if
anything goes wrong . . .’

‘I am to phone the number,’ I said. Even an ex-tax inspector could probably do that.

Twelve

The waiters were clearing away the coffee cups when Purbright (or Raffles) dragged Ethelred away for a quiet chat.

I hadn’t quite made up my mind about Raffles (or Purbright). On the one hand, he seemed like a fun sort of guy – plenty of interesting anecdotes. On the other hand, at least if I
trusted Herbie Proctor’s version, he’d probably murdered his wife. My two policemen had suspicions about him as well.

I reckoned Ethelred would be safe with him for a while and carried on talking to the other passengers. Most had however decided it was time for bed. Beginning with Annabelle, one by one my
dinner companions made their apologies and retired to their cabins or took a final stroll round the deck. Eventually my only remaining buddy was Herbie Proctor, who had partaken a little too much
of the free plonk.

‘Well, Elsie,’ he said, successfully slurring both words. ‘Just the two of us now, eh?’

The friendly smile alone was enough to make me decide that it was time for me too to depart, unless Herbie wanted to clear off first. I tried this suggestion on him.

‘Shouldn’t you be watching over your client?’ I asked.

Proctor was clearly a little bemused and, even if he had been sober, might have had difficulty in giving a clear answer. He looked thoughtful, as though trying to work something out.

‘My client is quite safe,’ he said eventually.

‘In spite of the rock that you say was aimed at you?’

Proctor considered this. ‘But they missed,’ he said.

‘Or,’ I said, ‘maybe it wasn’t aimed at you. Maybe it was aimed at Ethelred.’

‘Ethelred? Who would want to kill a third-rate crime writer?’ asked Proctor.

‘Second-rate,’ I said. It wasn’t really true, but as an agent you have to promote your writers actively. Herbie was however right in the sense that Ethelred was part of that
class of living creatures that have almost no known predators. Nobody – even Annabelle – would really want to kill him. Accident still had to be the most likely explanation, but then
again there had been that text message . . .

‘Have we speeded up a bit?’ asked Proctor.

‘What?’ I said. ‘I can’t hear you above that awful noise!’

‘I said: We’re going like a bat out of hell.’

I hadn’t really noticed but, looking out of the window, I noticed that the bank did seem to be heading north a bit faster than usual. And the gentle throb of the ship’s engines had
increased to an unpleasant rumble that threatened to loosen my fillings.

‘I thought we had to go slowly to avoid damaging the engines or something,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Proctor.

‘I said . . .’

But the noise had increased to a point where normal conversation was becoming impossible.

For a few minutes we behaved as if we were a rather unsuccessful mime act, mouthing and gesturing at each other. Then Miss Watson returned and said something to which both Herbie Proctor and I
could only mime: ‘
What
?’

She waved a hand at us wearily and sat down at the table in a resigned sort of way. Then, inexplicably, she stood up again and ran towards the door. She turned and said something but I’m
not sure how she expected us to hear her. Herbie Proctor actually had his hands over his ears and I was thinking of following his example. Miss Watson made her hands into a sort of megaphone and
tried again, but she might as well have been reciting Keats, frankly.

Then the inevitable happened. There was an almighty crash and the sound of what was probably an old ship’s engine breathing its last.

‘ . . . I said I heard a pistol shot, you cretins,’ yelled Miss Watson, finally audible in the silence. Not a Keats sonnet after all then, or not one of the better-known ones.

‘It was just the noise of the ship’s engine,’ said Proctor, rising to his feet. ‘Blowing up probably.’

‘No, a moment ago, while we were still sitting at the table. I’m sure I heard a gun. We need to go and investigate.’

‘You go then,’ said Proctor. Coming from a private investigator I thought this was pretty wet, but Proctor only private-investigated for cash in hand.

‘What if it’s Purbright?’ I asked.

‘Raffles? Impossible,’ he said. But he was now looking worried. A fee might be claimed eventually from a living client who had attempted to renege on a contract. Extracting a fee
from a dead one might be trickier, especially when one of the key terms of the contract had been to keep him alive. ‘You stay here. I’ll go and check.’

The three of us did not have to go far. Just out of the door and round the corner, on a sheltered bit of deck, somebody in a white dinner jacket was lying face down. I know
references to pools of blood are a bit of a cliché, but ‘lake’ was possibly overstating things and ‘pond’ didn’t quite have the right ring to it, with its
connotations of ducks and willow trees.

Just for a moment I thought it was Ethelred, then I caught a glimpse of the lined and leathery face. Miss Watson squatted down by the body, gathering up her skirt so that it did not trail too
much in the pool/lake/pond thing, and took the wrist closest to her. It seemed unlikely that the victim would have much of a pulse on the grounds that you need blood inside you for that, but I
guess somebody had to try it.

‘He’s dead,’ said Miss Watson after a few moments.

So, there it was. Herbie Proctor had just lost a client. Careless, really.

Thirteen

After that things started to happen quite quickly.

First Inspector Majid appeared from round the corner and came to an abrupt halt. He looked from me to Herbie to Miss Watson, and back to me.

‘It wasn’t us,’ I said, though I wished that I hadn’t sounded quite so much like a third-former caught behind the bike sheds with a couple of roll-ups.

‘We heard a shot,’ said Miss Watson, deciding to go for a more grown-up approach. ‘We came to investigate.’

‘About a minute ago,’ said Proctor. ‘While the engine was making all that noise. The trained ear, though, can always pick up a pistol shot. Miss Watson heard it too, I
think.’

My own recollection was that Proctor had had his hands over his trained ears at the time, but Miss Watson seemed inclined to be quite charitable for once – we were, after all, in this one
together. ‘That’s right,’ she said simply. ‘The three of us were in the dining room and we heard the shot. Whoever did it must still be close . . .’

Well yes, obviously, the killer could not have gone far. We were on a boat – a boat that was, I noticed, now drifting back towards Luxor with the current, slewing slightly as it did so. I
alerted Inspector Majid to this interesting fact, but he replied tersely that he was sure Captain Bashir had things under control. It seemed to me that the Nile had things under control but, as a
policeman, Majid was perhaps rightly more concerned that we had a dead body on board.

Proctor too was primarily worried about the stiff in front of us. ‘We’ll need to question all of the passengers,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to give you a hand with
that, Inspector.’

Inspector Majid had, you will notice, said relatively little up to this point. Having now fully registered the material facts, he took matters in hand: ‘Don’t any of you touch
anything, right? That includes you, Mr Proctor. Stay exactly where you are. And keep out of that pool of blood.’

OK, then, it was officially a pool.

The inspector, too, bent down to examine the body and, reaching the same conclusion that Miss Watson add one shortly before, stood up again. ‘I’m going to have to contact my
colleagues at headquarters. In the meantime, we’ll need all of the passengers in the saloon.’

We shuffled back the way we had come and walked through the dining room to the saloon. The trip was accomplished in silence, not even Miss Watson deeming it appropriate to jolly things up.
Proctor, thinking we might well be here for a while, quickly appropriated the most comfortable chair for himself. He was not however a happy private eye, clearly feeling that he should be helping
with, or indeed leading, the investigation.

‘I’m sure the police will invite you to assist them later in the process,’ said Jane Watson. It was nominally a consoling remark, but in practice simply drew people’s
attention to the sad lack of trust that the local officers had for Herbie Proctor – which may well have been her intention.

‘At least we know it wasn’t one of us,’ said Proctor.

‘That is true,’ said Jane Watson. ‘I am happy to vouch for you, Mr Proctor. And for you, Elsie.’

‘You’d better tell them about the death threats that Raffles had received,’ I said to Proctor.

Proctor picked at an imaginary spot on the table with his fingernail. He was going to look pretty silly and he knew it.

‘Raffles?’ asked Miss Watson.

‘The deceased – Mr Purbright as he was calling himself – had received a threatening letter,’ explained Proctor.

‘And you are saying that his real name was Raffles?’ asked Miss Watson.

‘That is correct,’ said Proctor.

‘And how do you know this?’

‘He was employing me to . . . look after certain matters for him,’ said Proctor. He had another go at the imaginary spot. Hopefully the table had a pretty solid veneer.

‘Ah,’ said Miss Watson. ‘And had you formed any views as to which of the passengers might want him dead?’

‘I had my eye on two of them,’ said Proctor.

‘Which two?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Proctor, as if clinging to some small vestige of professional pride.

‘But two people working together?’

‘Yes,’ said Proctor.

‘How terribly interesting,’ said Miss Watson, as though some long-held suspicion had just been confirmed.

We were at that point joined by the two Americans, both in pyjamas and silk dressing gowns. Tom had slippers to match his dressing gown. I would have to ask them where they shopped for
nightwear. Those boys certainly knew how to dress for a crisis.

‘Anybody happen to know what’s going on?’ asked Tom. ‘We were told to come straight here.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars
.’

‘Mr Purbright has been shot,’ said Miss Watson.

‘
Raffles
,’ said Proctor, though nobody much seemed to be paying attention to him. ‘His real name is Raffles.’

Tom frowned. ‘Shot? Here? On the boat?’

‘Terrorists?’ asked John.

‘We don’t think so,’ said Proctor. ‘We think that somebody followed him out from England.’