Herring on the Nile (6 page)

‘And you must be Ethelred Tressider. I see that we have both studied the passenger list. You obviously notice things. Is that because you are a writer?’

‘Possibly. You’ve read my books then?’

‘Yes, I love them.’

I basked briefly in a rare moment of recognition. ‘Which ones have you read?’ I asked.

Purbright named three books by Paul Fielder. Somewhere on the far bank a water bird cried out, ushering in the last of her chicks or trying to pull a passing male. The silence that followed it,
to the extent that I could appreciate it with the
Khedive
’s paddles going, seemed empty and desolate.

‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ I said, suppressing a sigh of resignation.

‘Cooler anyway,’ said Purbright. ‘Your first time in Egypt?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It’s a good time of year to come. Not too hot, but before the crowds arrive. The boat seems half empty.’

‘An interesting mixture of people,’ I said.

‘Yes. You could say that. Is that strange man in pink shorts called Proctor?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Any idea why he keeps winking at me?’

‘Perhaps he thinks he knows you.’

‘A lot of people know me. I can’t think of any who wink at me like that.’

‘Probably not,’ I said.

‘Must be something else then, wouldn’t you think?’

I didn’t feel able to say, though it did strengthen the case for concluding that this was certainly not Raffles and that Herbie Proctor needed to be on another boat entirely.

‘I’m told there’s good shooting round here,’ said Purbright. He too was now leaning against the rail, his shoulder inches from mine. It all felt quite confidential.
‘Waterfowl and so on,’ he added.

‘Really?’ I said. It seemed possible, but it wasn’t really my type of thing. It might have been Purbright’s type of thing – out on the grouse moors at the crack of
dawn after a night’s heavy drinking – but I couldn’t imagine that it was an activity that would be on offer on this trip. An afternoon of bird photography was as much as the
Khedive
’s programme envisaged.

‘You must have had a lot of experience of guns,’ Purbright continued. ‘Your main characters tend to favour the Walther PPK – James Bond’s gun, of course.’

As a former secret service agent, Paul Fielder probably did know quite a lot about guns. Before becoming a writer I, conversely, had worked in a tax office. Of the characters I wrote about, my
Sergeant Fairfax never carried a firearm and the villains he pursued tended not to get much beyond a vaguely described sawn-off shotgun.

‘I know a bit,’ I hedged. Crime writers get to know a bit about a lot of things – much of it by using Google. I had also, after all, fired airguns at the local fair,
occasionally denting a tin duck. Purbright nodded as if this confirmed what he had thought. The chance seemed to have passed, at least for the moment, for me to tell him that I wrote crime as Peter
Fielding (and slushy romance as Amanda Collins). I’d bring the subject up tomorrow, if necessary, over breakfast. ‘Is that a temple over there on the far bank?’ I asked.

‘I guess you could still handle a pistol if you had to?’ He wasn’t that interested in temples.

I smiled and shrugged. For some reason this also appeared to have been a good answer on my part.

‘I was planning to travel with a colleague of mine – a very good shot,’ said Purbright, standing back from the rail again.

‘But he couldn’t make it?’ I said cautiously. It explained the missing passenger on the purser’s list anyway.

‘Apparently not.’ Purbright glanced behind him.

On second thoughts perhaps he
was
Herbie’s client, but had originally planned to bring along somebody reasonably capable of protecting him. If Proctor had been called up at the last
minute to replace this gun-toting colleague, Purbright would have been naturally dismayed when he came to view the detective actually on offer.

‘Were you planning to do some shooting together?’ I asked, still trying to feel my way through a rather obscure conversation.

‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re right. I think that is a temple over there. The valley’s full of them. There’s nothing really worth looking at
until we get to Edfu, of course.’

‘You seem to know this stretch of river well,’ I said.

‘Look, Paul . . . or Ethelred if you prefer,’ he said suddenly. ‘I realize it’s some years since you worked for Her Majesty – you must have left the service round
about the time I joined. But you are probably the one person on board the boat I can trust at the moment.’

Only for a brief instant did I entertain the possibility that he might have worked for the Inland Revenue back in the eighties. I decided that it would be better not to delay explanations until
breakfast, but to tell him now that I was not Paul Fielder, and only fired guns when there was a good chance of winning a goldfish.

‘I’m not sure I can help in the way you think I can,’ I began. ‘You see—’

‘I’m not expecting you to do anything too risky – however much you’d like to. It’s just that there are a couple of gentlemen that I need to keep an eye on. If
things get tricky, it may all look a little confusing to the average bystander – if you know what I mean. Even if the passengers can’t help much, it’s important they don’t
get in the way.’

‘You mean I might think you were a terrorist or something?’

‘That type of thing.’

‘You’re not connected even tangentially with Mr Proctor?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t invite him onto the boat? Perhaps to stand in for your colleague?’

It was Purbright’s turn to look puzzled.

‘Connected? Not at all,’ he said. ‘And why on earth should he be able to stand in for my colleague?’

The theory that Purbright might be Raffles was fading in my mind almost as soon as it had been resurrected. On the other hand, that I was being briefed on something because Purbright thought I
was a well-known author of spy stories, who had formerly worked for MI6, was as close to certainty as you got in this world.

‘Anyway,’ Purbright was saying, ‘the fact that you can handle all sorts of firearms could prove very useful indeed.’

Only if the main threat was tin ducks.

‘Maybe I should clear something up—’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said reassuringly. ‘The chances are that you won’t be called upon to do anything at all. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you could keep
your eyes on the two Arab gentlemen.’

‘I’d be happy to do that – it’s just that I think you are making a mistake,’ I said.

He paused. ‘No, our information is pretty good. Watch them. Talk to them if you can. Let me know what they say. We’d better resume this conversation later – there’s
somebody coming.’

He winked and slipped away, down the stairs to the deck below. Oh well, hopefully there would still be time to explain things to Purbright at breakfast tomorrow. I should have tried harder to
correct him, but (on reflection) I had rather enjoyed being mistaken for a man of action. Or even for a best-selling author. What harm could there possibly be in that?

‘He’s called Purbright,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said. The contrast to Purbright could not have been greater. He had seemed totally self-assured. She on the other hand still looked ready to start at the first shadow. The
sun was setting. There were a lot of shadows around.

‘So, we’re all here? The missing passenger did not show up?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We left without him – or her.’

Relief briefly fluttered across her face, but only briefly.

‘Whoever it is might still join us at Esna or Edfu, I suppose?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose they might.’ Our progress was slow enough that we could have been easily overtaken by somebody driving a car – a train would have flashed
past in seconds. I was, as I say, now assuming that the absent traveller was Purbright’s colleague – the man who was good with a gun – though that was not of course necessarily
the case. ‘Is the missing person a friend of yours?’

‘No,’ she said, as if that should have been obvious to me.

Having raised the matter of the missing passenger, Miss Benson seemed disinclined to discuss him further. She briefly observed that the weather was hot but not as hot as she had expected.

‘Your first time in this part of the world?’ I asked.

‘Majorca,’ she said distantly. I must have looked puzzled because she added: ‘With Brenda and Susan. That was hot too.’

‘Of course,’ I said. That, I thought, placed her. For those not used to travel, a very different culture, like Egypt’s, could be overwhelming. ‘Egypt’s a bit
different from Majorca. But here on the boat, you won’t have any hassles.’

‘Hassles? What hassles?’ she asked.

‘Well, people trying to sell you things, for example . . .’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t imagine that they could sell you things here on the boat.’ But she glanced nervously over her shoulder as she did so. Her knuckles
gleamed white against the mahogany rail. If my game plan had been to put everyone on the boat on edge I was doing well. Two down, nine to go.

After five minutes of a very one-sided conversation about the Nile and the sites we were due to visit the following day, she made a short apology and walked unsteadily back down the stairs, in
the direction that Purbright had taken a few minutes earlier.

‘Not at all,’ I said quickly. ‘Well, not very much. You sort of crept up behind me. You’re Professor Campion, aren’t you?’

‘How do you know that?’ He looked at me with deep suspicion.

‘I was just behind you in the queue for keys,’ I said.

He tilted his head at an angle that might have been intended to show sagacity but in practice revealed a great deal of nose hair. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Your first time in Egypt?’ I asked.

‘No, I’ve been here quite a few times. I teach Egyptology.’ Again, I was made to feel this was something I should have known.

‘Good to have an expert on board,’ I said. ‘I’m sure we’ll learn a lot from you.’

Campion’s expression changed to that of a man who, out on a pleasant stroll through the countryside, notices for the first time the bull that is sizing him up from a shady corner of the
field. ‘I’ve no plans to run courses . . .’

‘No, of course not. Still, it helps to have somebody on board who knows their way around.’

‘Does it?’ He still seemed worried I might know of a way to make him teach us Egyptology.

‘I think so. It’s a completely different culture here, isn’t it? Sky Benson seemed a little nervous.’

‘Miss Benson?’ This was a new problem for him. He tipped his head to one side, as if miming ‘Thought’, and frowned. ‘Who exactly is she . . . ?’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought you knew each other. You were sitting next to her on the plane?’

‘Ah, yes, the plane.’ He seemed on the verge of asking which plane, then thought better of it. ‘
Benson
– was that it? And what was her first name again?’

I repeated it. He repeated it, though with a pathetic note of uncertainty in his voice. I sympathized. I am not that good at remembering names either, as I may have said. At his third attempt he
seemed reasonably satisfied that he now knew about whom he was talking.

‘Or perhaps she was nervous about something else,’ I said, picking up the conversation from where we had left off.

‘She seemed fine on the plane,’ he said. ‘To the extent we conversed, anyway.’

‘I think she hasn’t travelled much,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, but the way he said it suggested her concern was not only avoidable but also reflected, in some obscure way, badly on himself. Maybe he too had tried to reassure her
earlier and failed.

‘Well,’ I added, ‘it’s not your problem anyway.’

‘
Exactly
,’ he said, but I had, somehow, just placed an unreasonably heavy burden on his already stooped shoulders. My score was now three.

Another very one-sided conversation followed, this time about dinner and how we might or might not dress for it. Here too I was not a success. I said that I thought that, on the first night at
least, dinner jackets would not be required. He said that he had not packed such a thing. I replied that I doubted very much that it mattered what we wore on any night, but he shook his head sadly.
He clearly blamed me, and me alone, for the fact that he would be wrongly attired – perhaps not tonight, but almost certainly on some future occasion. He too took his leave after an awkward
silence. Bearing in mind we were all on holiday, a high proportion of the passengers seemed nervy and tense. Purbright alone had seemed relaxed, in spite of the absence of his colleague, equally
fearless of being murdered in his bed or caught in the wrong sort of dinner attire.

Though dress was indeed informal, no effort had been spared to continue the illusion of old-world luxury. The mahogany panelling shone sumptuously and the gold palm fronds, carved onto the top
of each pillar, gleamed as if freshly painted. Burgundy velvet curtains, of a kind positively designed to capture the desert dust in every rich fold, formed graceful arcs around the windows. The
chairs were vast and antique, though perhaps a little too soft and yielding to be described as truly comfortable. The table linen, by contrast, was rigid with starch and the massed ranks of bright
cutlery arranged on it promised more courses than I felt entirely comfortable with. It was a room from which the twenty-first century had been banned.