Herring on the Nile (26 page)

I had just completed the purchase of a black and gold statuette of the god Thoth, his pen poised above a writing tablet. I was about to exit the dark, narrow little shop, still blessed with many
reasonably priced deities of all shapes and sizes, when I found my way barred. I could not leave without pushing past Annabelle, who had chosen that moment to enter and purchase that or some
similar divine being. For my part, I had no wish to retrace my steps and buy (say) Horus or Osiris, though the shopkeeper had already pressed upon me the many advantages of acquiring one or the
other. I had in any case already hesitated too long to be able to pretend that I had not seen her.

‘Good morning, Annabelle,’ I said.

‘Good morning, Ethelred. I didn’t see you at breakfast. I can scarcely believe sometimes that we are travelling on the same boat. You are quite elusive.’

‘No, I just breakfasted early.’

‘How wise. I did however run into Elsie back there by the spice shop.’

‘Did you?’

‘Don’t look so worried. Yes, we’ve just had a lovely little chat. Could I ask you to tell her a couple of things though?’

‘Of course.’

‘The more important is that you should get it into her head that I have never been a pole dancer. I have no idea where she got that idea from, but I would not know how to dance round a
pole, even if you gave me one.’

I confirmed that I had no plans to do this. ‘And the second thing?’ I asked.

‘The less important thing is that she seems to be working on the theory that I have been wandering round the deck of the boat carrying a pistol with criminal intent. Can you tell her I
have no idea what she is talking about? And if you are backing away because you also think I am the mad gunman of Edfu, let me give you the same assurance. Whoever shot Purbright, it was not I. Is
that clear?’

‘If you had tried to shoot me . . . I wouldn’t necessarily blame you.’

‘How sweet of you. That’s my dear, if somewhat pathetic, Ethelred speaking there. You’d forgive me for attempted murder, as long as you were the intended victim? I suppose
that’s nice to know. I’m glad you and I are no longer an item, Ethelred. You really are completely useless. I could forgive you for being a failure as a crime writer if it were not for
your pathetic ambitions to write a great literary novel.’

‘I understand why you are angry,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry about the sale of Muntham Court.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to be too sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s good of you to be so understanding,’ I said.

‘Yes, I am, aren’t I? And hopefully you’ll be equally understanding when I tell you that your buyer has dropped out.’

‘Has he?’

‘Sadly, yes. It was the death-watch beetle holes in the cellar that convinced him that Muntham Court was not a good purchase.’

‘There’s no death-watch beetle.’

‘But there
are
holes that do look very much like death-watch beetle – at least on casual inspection. Of course, they might equally have been made by a Black and Decker
eighteen-volt cordless drill – I couldn’t honestly say.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘the survey will show up that there is no trace of live beetle, so you’ve wasted your time with the drill.’

‘There will be no survey. Unlike you, I did actually meet your buyer – remember? He told me, over a very friendly coffee, that he had pulled out of a previous purchase because of the
merest suggestion of dry rot. People who aren’t used to old buildings do panic over very little. So I was reasonably sure that when he saw the holes on his second visit a few days ago, he
would decide to fly home without further ado. The estate agent, regrettably, has no other prospects at present. Of course, who knows what will put off other potential buyers – stories of
ghosts, for example, or the threat of legal action from the current occupant? I do wish I could rule out either of those possibilities. People can be so picky.’

‘Do you think you can stop me selling for ever?’

‘Maybe not for ever. But perhaps for quite a long time. We’ll see, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’

‘I hope,’ said Annabelle, ‘that the shopkeeper hasn’t understood our little conversation. But if he has, I think the purchase of that lovely reproduction of the Sphinx
over there will probably buy his silence. It’s been good chatting, Ethelred. I’ll see you back at the boat, shall I?’

Twenty-nine

‘What’s that?’ I asked Ethelred, when I managed to find him again.

He looked vaguely at the newspaper-wrapped object in his hand. ‘It’s Thoth,’ he said. ‘He’s the god of scribes – and by extension crime writers.’

I compared the only available crime writer with the ibis head sticking out of the paper. They had a certain beaky similarity.

‘How much did you pay for him? Don’t worry – whatever it was, you were robbed. People just see you coming, whether it’s sellers of statuettes or scarlet women. Talking of
which, I saw Annabelle a little while ago. I let her know we’re onto her.’

‘Yes, I saw her too,’ he said.

‘And what did she have to say for herself?’

‘She says she’s never been a pole dancer,’ he said.

‘Absolutely. Far too old.’

‘She also said she’s going to wreck any attempt I make to sell Muntham Court.’

‘Can she?’

‘She’s having a good try. And if she challenges the will, then I guess buyers will not be too keen to pay out good money on something they may never get their hands on.’

‘So you can’t sell it?’

‘I think I might give it away,’ he said. ‘It’s scarcely the sort of place I’d like to live in myself. And, frankly, I’m not comfortable having the sort of
money I’d get if I sold it – I’ve done nothing to deserve it, after all. I’ll find a suitable charity and offer it to them. Maybe it could become a hospice? Their lawyers
may have to fight Annabelle’s claim, if she really decides to make one – but I don’t think she will. And the courts are less likely to rule against a charity.’

‘You wouldn’t like to give it to me, I suppose?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want it either. Anyway, she clearly didn’t need to kill me. That was never her plan. She always had another perfectly good way of
getting what she wanted. As far as I’m concerned, we are back to having no female killer matching Tom’s theory.’

It still seemed to me that Annabelle might have had Plans B and C as well as a Plan A, but there didn’t seem much point in explaining this to Ethelred. Short of some sudden last-minute
revelation, we would just have to accept the official version of events.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘this literary novel of yours had better be good if you’re going to make your fortune from writing.’

Ethelred fingered the newspaper wrapping, as if consulting his personal deity. ‘I’ve gone off the idea of a literary novel,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll carry on writing
crime. I may not sell that many, but as long as anyone wants to read them and I can get somebody to publish them, that’s what I’ll do. Crime – and maybe the odd spy
story.’

‘What will the next one be then?’ I asked. ‘Crime or spies?’

‘Maybe both,’ he said. ‘I think I could probably write something that overlapped the two genres.’

‘It has to be one or the other,’ I said. ‘Anything that mixes up spies and crime will just be a mess.’

‘I’ll work on the plot while we travel back to Luxor,’ he said.

‘Good luck,’ I said.

He looked at me uncertainly. He knew deep down that I was right.

‘You’re meeting Masterman there, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, just before we fly back. He said he wanted to tie up a few loose ends.’

‘Good luck with that too,’ I said.

The End

‘I think that pretty much ties things up,’ said Masterman.

We were on the sun deck of the
Khedive
again, now securely moored at Luxor. From the direction of the engine room came the constant sound of activity as the repairs to the engines were
finally completed.

‘I’m still not sure I understand it all,’ I said.

I had toyed with the idea of explaining to him that Annabelle had possibly shot Purbright in mistake for me, but Masterman was in ‘transmit’ rather than ‘receive’ mode.
He therefore proceeded to tell me what had happened.

‘The two terrorists, Mahmoud and Majid, were both British citizens, as you’d possibly worked out,’ he said. ‘Hence our involvement. We’d been onto them for some
time and had followed them out here. We knew too that they’d made contact with a group based in Egypt. Their initial plan was to blow up the
Khedive
. It was an attempt to resume the
attacks on tourist targets in Egypt. Unfortunately the boat’s progress was slow and they were going to miss their rendezvous with their local friends, who had the explosive. So they got
Captain Bashir to go faster – hence the engines blowing when they did. They had also decided they would have to get rid of our man, Purbright, before the rendezvous, to improve the odds. One
of them – Mahmoud we think – arranged to meet Purbright alone on some pretext and shot him. Then, or perhaps a bit later, he dumped the pistol in the cabin by the dining room, which
Miss Watson had carelessly left unlocked, according to the captain, after her inspection of it. Afterwards he joined Majid and the boat’s captain on the bridge.’

‘But Captain Bashir said they were
both
on the bridge when the shot was heard.’

‘Yes, we’ve thought about that. I had a word with your Mr Proctor – a very astute man. He’d come up with what seems to me to be the solution to that problem. His theory
is that Purbright was killed a bit earlier, using a gun with a silencer. The “shot” people heard shortly after was just part of a very old engine giving up the ghost. When Mahmoud and
Majid discovered what people
thought
they knew, the two of them threw the silencer over the side of the boat, deliberately allowing people to find a gun that apparently
had
to be
audible. Very clever. So there was confusion about the timing of the shot.’

‘Jane Watson was convinced,’ I said. ‘She said she knew what a gunshot sounded like.’

‘Typical woman,’ said Masterman. ‘Absolutely sure of herself but totally wrong. She’d have scarcely misled you all deliberately, of course, but if she was right about
when the shot was fired, none of the rest of it makes sense. On the other hand, take out that one small piece of incorrect information and it all fits together, doesn’t it?’

‘Mahmoud and Majid were adamant that it was somebody else,’ I said. ‘They said they had abandoned their initial plan to blow up the boat because Purbright’s death
convinced them that one of the other passengers must be from another group with similar aims. They didn’t want to kill somebody from their own side and needed time to confirm whether they had
sympathizers on the boat. They were pretty sure it was a woman, by the way. Apparently when the Egyptian agent was shot he was talking on his mobile and said something about a woman he was going to
have to watch out for.’ But I was aware that I was losing my audience.

Masterman shook his head and gave me another of his sad smiles. The quality of my thinking was clearly only just above that of Jane Watson. ‘The Egyptian security people said nothing to us
about a woman terrorist.’

‘Or maybe one of their own agents?’

‘You have to remember,’ said Masterman, ‘that Mahmoud and Majid were just stringing you along. Obviously they had to make up something vaguely plausible. There was a great deal
of play-acting for your benefit – that bit of Majid’s phone call, for example, about wanting to come in from the cold – thrown in simply for you to overhear and assume to be a Le
Carré reference. Ridiculous. Anyway, to continue the story, when the boat ran aground, they realized that they simply wouldn’t have time to plant the bomb before our people arrived. So
they decided to switch to a Plan B that they’d had in reserve for some time – kidnapping a prominent member of the party.’

‘Me,’ I said, ‘but they decided I wasn’t important enough.’

‘Of course you weren’t,’ said Masterman. He smiled at me understandingly. ‘At one point they were considering taking Lady Muntham, but it would seem that your agent
– Elsie, isn’t it? – persuaded them you were the one to go for. Anyway, though we knew, as I say, about the original plan, we didn’t know about the change in tactics until
after you had been taken.’

‘For a while, I genuinely thought Majid was on our side.’

‘As I say – poor-quality play-acting. The pretence that Majid was a double agent was purely for your benefit, to persuade you to carry the bomb back on board the boat. Having
discovered you were no earthly use to them, it was the best plan they had left. The whole story they told you was laughable when you think about it. Why did they have to take you back to the boat,
when they could easily have dumped you at some remote spot to find your own way back? And why should anyone have resorted to such a clumsy way of communicating with us as passing on a briefcase
full of papers? An encrypted CD ROM, maybe, or a data stick . . . They must have thought you were completely unacquainted with modern technology in any form.’

‘Possibly,’ I said.

‘What beats me is that they were stupid enough to think that anyone would fall for something so crude and unsubtle.’

‘I did fall for it,’ I said.

‘Yes, but how likely was it that somebody like you would fetch up just when they needed them?’ Masterman chuckled and shook his head, inviting me to share the joke.

‘Pretty unlikely,’ I said.

‘But to continue the story,’ said Masterman, ‘Purbright was supposed to be accompanied on this mission by a thoroughly reliable member of the Egyptian security service –
the Egyptian was to pose as the tour guide, so that he could watch the crew while Purbright watched the passengers. It had all been arranged with the owners of the boat; but none of the crew, even
Captain Bashir, knew. Unfortunately, as you say, the local man was killed before he even got to the boat – hence Purbright boarding alone and hence your not having a guide.’

‘I’d wondered if Purbright’s colleague was the missing passenger.’