Shadows on the Nile (21 page)

That’s when you take the photograph of my sister from the breast pocket of your jacket and show it to me.

I start to cry and I don’t stop.

I have a secret.

I have to train myself not to tell it to you, just like I train my muscles with the Indian clubs every Saturday. I am not allowed to keep the wooden clubs because
they
say I would be dangerous with them, but you smuggle them in each week. Like you smuggle in newspapers. I have to wear gloves to read them because I cannot stand the black ink blurring onto my skin and you only let me read certain pages because you say they will shock me. Even so, I am shocked. At the violence. At the murders. But I like to read about them because they make me realise I am not alone.

I would murder Dr Churchward if I could.

My arms and my chest are a man’s, you tell me, not a girl’s any more. They were never a girl’s, they were mine, but I don’t point that out. I am learning.

I have a secret. It concerns the roof of this residence. Sometimes it takes all my strength not to share it with you. But
it is too dangerous.

Croydon Airport had style. The terminal was an art deco building constructed only four years earlier in 1928. It oozed confidence and calmed nerves with its distinctive aroma of cedarwood polish. Monty stood under the central glass dome in its vast booking hall and looked up at the blue sky above. A good day for flying.

He watched Jessie walk towards him across the acres of parquet, weaving her way smoothly through the crowds and past the towering square pillars where motes of dust in a beam of sunlight flickered around her head like fireflies. He felt the familiar clench in his chest at the sight of her, the not altogether unpleasant sensation of a stranger’s hand pushing between his ribs and ripping his lungs out. An unwieldy mixture of pain and pleasure. Right now he concentrated on the pleasure. He smiled and waved his panama hat at her and headed towards her to relieve her of the small leather suitcase. He liked that. The way she travelled light.

She was wearing a jaunty cloche hat and a fitted navy jacket that came down low over a cream skirt of a soft floaty material. It swayed from her hips as she strode up to
him in her practical flat shoes. He greeted her with a kiss on each cheek.

‘The French way,’ he laughed, ‘as we’re heading for Paris.’

She nodded, looking around, her interest caught by the wooden column on which clocks were displayed showing the time at all the major airports in the world. ‘I like this place.’

‘It’s the pride and joy of Purley Way. People flock here just to watch the planes. Come on, let’s book you in at the Imperial Airways desk, then let me show you the observation deck upstairs.’

He picked up her case and drew her hand through his arm. To his surprise, she didn’t resist.

The thing about being up high is that it alters perception. Ask Amy Johnson in her Gipsy Moth. It removes you from scurrying around in the dirt alongside all the other ground-dwellers and lets the wind rush in to rearrange your thoughts. Monty leaned on the railing of the observation deck on the roof of the terminal building, smoking a quiet cigarette, and for the first time in a long while asked himself why the hell he was fighting so hard to maintain the Chamford Court Estate. It would be so much easier to let Dr Septon Scott build his filthy factory and tenements on it and be damned.

‘What did you say?’ Jessie was waiting for a reply.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ he answered and wondered which words had made it from his mind to his mouth without his noticing.

She was standing beside him, strangely quiet. Totally free from the sense of tense activity that bustled around the other passengers who were waiting for the 12.30 flight to Paris. She was focusing on the planes swooping down onto the grass airfield like great grey birds coming home to roost. As each one landed and taxied towards the concrete apron, he named it for her: an Imperial Airways three-motor Argosy or a KLM Fokker monoplane, and parked over by the hangers were a veteran De Havilland 50, a Nimbus and a couple of French LeO 21s.

‘You know your aircraft,’ she commented.

‘Too many misspent hours reading
The Aeroplane
magazine under the blankets, I’m afraid, when I should have
been acquainting myself with Herodotus,’ he laughed. ‘I was always a lazy blighter.’

She gave him a sideways glance. ‘Really?’

He pointed to the throng of spectators down in the enclosure who had paid their penny to gain a good viewing position. It cost threepence to access the roof.

‘Do you know,’ he murmured, ‘over seventy thousand people have paid to watch the aeroplanes here so far this year?’

‘I don’t blame them. It’s like sitting on the edge of the world, waiting to launch yourself off into …’ She stopped. The wind snatched at her hat and she held onto it tightly, her profile to him, her skin like warm cream in the sunshine.

‘Into what?’ he asked.

‘Into a piece of the future.’

A small three-seater Puss Moth side-slipped down out of the sun and purred to a halt on the grass below.

‘Is that what you hope to find in Egypt … a piece of your future?’

She swung to face him, her eyes full of the wide blue sky. ‘No. I want to find my past. To cut it loose.’

They sat side by side. She didn’t speak much. Monty appreciated the way she left him to his silences without trying to fill them with chatter. In his experience, that was rare in a woman. But at times when she thought no one was observing her, she touched the small curtained window at her side with the flat of her hand, as if trying to hold on to a slice of the sky.

‘“Luxury aloft”,’ Monty commented. ‘Imperial Airways certainly live up to their claim for their Silver Wing service.’ Jessie had insisted stubbornly on sticking to her plan of travelling without help from him, so Jack and his plane had been politely rejected.

She smiled at him. ‘It’s smarter than my flat.’

‘And warmer than my kitchen. Better food too.’

She laughed. ‘A bit noisier though.’ In the background the four Bristol Jupiter engines hummed incessantly. She was showing no sign of nerves at flying for the first time. Quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, her eyes kept flicking forward to the door
of the pilot’s cockpit, as though impatient for the aircraft to increase speed.

The Handley
Page 42
biplane was impressive. It carried thirty-eight passengers in a level of comfort that reminded Monty more of one of the great ocean liners than an aeroplane, all plush cushioned seats and varnished woodwork, white damask table cloths and fine bone china. Even an electric bell to summon a steward from the buffet. What it was not known for was speed.

‘This plane is as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar,’ Monty commented, as coffee was placed in front of them by a uniformed steward, ‘and about as fast.’

‘Three and a half days to get there,’ Jessie muttered under her breath. ‘How much can happen to him in three and a half days?’

‘It will pass quickly.’

‘Will it?’ A lock of her hair fell forward, a slender shimmer of gold, but it didn’t prevent him seeing the tension in the muscles along her neckline.

He thought about putting his hand over hers.

‘We’ll be in Cairo before you know it,’ he assured her.

‘Eighty hours to Cairo.’

‘And then what?’

‘Simple. Then we find Tim.’ She did not let him look at her eyes.

In Paris it was raining. They landed at Le Bourget airport and Monty took Jessie sight-seeing, as they had time to kill. The train that would whisk them all the way across France and down to Brindisi in southern Italy was not due to leave the Gare de Lyon until 9.30 that evening, so Monty took Jessie to his favourite Parisian landmark, the Sacré Coeur Basilica. He kept her interested with stories of the insurrection by the Commune of Montmartre in 1871 that led to the commissioning of the great white church on the hill.

‘It was built here as a memorial to expiate the rebels’ crime,’ Monty explained.

She turned from the church to look at him. ‘Expiation. How very appropriate.’

To his surprise she pulled out a drawing pad and
stood sketching the church with a few deft pencil lines. He held an umbrella over her while she did so, but he was certain that she was unaware of it, lost to the world, so totally absorbed was she in what she was doing. When she had finished depicting its Byzantine domes, she snapped her notepad shut before he could see it, and tossed it in her shoulder-bag as if it were worthless. She slipped her wet arm through his and said, ‘Let’s eat.’

He took her to Fouquet’s, its red and gold awning offering a haven from the rain on the Champs Elysées. In its elegant panelled dining room she insisted she wasn’t hungry but he looked at the paleness of her cheeks and ordered for them both: escargots, trout meunière, followed by pigeon rôti and grapefruit sorbet. Her fork chased her food around her place but she ate little. Only the coffee and the liqueur seemed to bring her pleasure.

‘How does the Sacré Coeur stay so white?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Why isn’t it black with city soot and pollution, like the Houses of Parliament are in London?’

‘Because it’s constructed from Château-Landon stone. When it rains, the stone reacts with the water to secrete calcite which acts as a bleach.’

She rested her elbows on the table and slowly smiled at him across it. ‘You know a lot of odd things, don’t you?’

‘Nothing of use, it seems. Nothing like …’ he lit her cigarette, ‘… like why your brother is in Egypt or where he is in hiding. Have you considered the possibility that he doesn’t want to be found?’

‘You think that hasn’t occurred to me? Of course it has. It keeps me awake at night. But why would he leave me clues if he didn’t want me to find him? Why?’

‘Are you sure they’re clues? Not just something you are reading into a few random names?’

‘Of course they’re clues.’ She exhaled impatiently. ‘But they are clues that no one else would recognise, which means he wants to keep secret the fact that I am following him. I am worried it might endanger him in some way. So you must
be discreet too.’ She watched his reaction.

He was impressed by that quality in her, her directness. Her honesty. Now he was under no illusions. If any poor blighter – and that included himself – was fool enough to step in the way of her finding her brother, dismembering limb from limb would be just the first course.

‘Jessie,’ he said softly. Because she had to be told. ‘This adventure is splendid, but it’s utterly madcap. You do know that, don’t you? We haven’t a cat in hell’s chance of finding Tim. You must be prepared for … disappointment in Egypt.’

Her eyes widened, and he saw a flash of anger in their depths before they suddenly grew foggy and oddly blurred, and it dawned on him with horror that she was fighting back tears.
Christ, Monty, you blithering idiot
. This wasn’t an adventure for her, this was a gruelling ordeal. He looked away, his eyes roaming the room, inspecting the other diners, giving Jessie time. He picked up his brandy and swirled the amber liquid around the glass.

‘So,’ he said quietly after a moment, ‘very well, Jessie, we will not discuss that possibility again.’

When he glanced up, she was still sitting there, but now she was grinning at him. ‘Hah! A weak spot revealed at last. A damsel’s tears.’

‘I’m a Chamford! We have no weak spots.’

She laughed and he summoned the bill. When it arrived he tossed a hefty fistful of franc-notes on the silver platter, brushing aside her attempt to add her own to the pile, and she sat back in her chair, lips in a tight line.

‘Thank you. But I thought you were skint,’ she muttered. ‘Strapped for cash in your big empty mausoleum.’

‘I hocked another painting.’ He tapped his pocket cheerfully. ‘Rolling in the stuff now.’

‘I thought it was meant for the roof.’

‘The bally house can wait.’ He whisked her into her coat and out onto the glistening pavement. It was dark outside and still raining, so he put up the umbrella and she tucked her arm through
his, raindrops lodged between her eyelashes. The Paris traffic was heavy, headlamps dissecting the Champs Elysées, but Monty was in no hurry to reach the Gare de Lyon where the train and their travelling companions would be letting off steam. Just for this moment he could forget Egypt, forget séances and leaking roofs and chasing nebulous phantoms across the sands. Instead they sauntered along the street like any other normal couple in Paris and he could feel the warmth of her snaking from her slender arm into his ribs.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you rolling in the stuff too?’

She leaned close into his shoulder to make herself heard above the barrel-organ on the street corner that was grinding out ‘Frère Jacques’ for the tourists. ‘I’ve saved my money all my life,’ she confessed. ‘Even as a child with my piggybank. Tim was always sticking a knife into it to slide out a few coins because he was forever broke. I always felt …’

He waited but no more words came.

‘Felt what?’

‘That I had to be prepared.’

‘For what?’

‘For …’ Her breath plumed in the damp air between them. ‘For a disaster that was coming my way.’

He stopped in his tracks and turned to face her under the umbrella. ‘In heaven’s name, Jessie, what kind of person are you?’

She rolled her eyes at him, teasing. ‘An unpredictable one.’

They laughed together in the rain.

At the station it was different. She seemed
to shut down, to withdraw into herself and vanish from his reach. Yet Monty felt his blood stirred by the noise and bustle, with porters shouting, whistles blowing, the wave of handkerchiefs and the glisten of fur coats. Shoe-shine boys touted for business and newspaper stalls rattled in the wind, while a hot coffee counter was doing good business, its aroma drawing in last-minute customers. A violent argument flared up between two travellers and had to be settled by a railway official. There was no such thing as silence here. Just voices, and voices and more voices.

But over them all breathed the massive steam engines like creatures from another world. Monty possessed a schoolboy’s passion for these beings of iron and steel, oil and fire, that were waiting patiently to be unleashed. Clouds of steam billowed along the low platform, spitting flecks of soot into his eyes and nostrils, leaving its fingerprint on his cheeks, and he felt his pulse accelerate at the prospect of the journey ahead. The air bloomed grey and thick inside his lungs. Pigeons fluttered to the ground, seeking scraps of baguette from under his feet, and a child with a tray around his neck was selling shoelaces, chattering away at them in some alien patois.