Shadows on the Nile (7 page)

‘I know who you are.’

Jessie stared at her. How could this woman know who she was?

‘You are Jessica Kenton.’

There was a flicker in the large black eyes. Something like amusement. The rest of her features were too strong to be called beautiful, though her mouth was well-shaped and her lips a full deep red, but her face was one that would always draw attention. There was an intensity to it that made it hard to look away. She was tall and slender like one of her Egyptian papyrus reeds
and her movements were precise and considered. Jessie felt at a disadvantage but didn’t know why.

‘He told me about you,’ Anippe said. ‘Described you.’

‘Who? Old Charlie?’

‘No. Timothy. He showed me a photograph.’

‘A photograph of me?’

‘Yes.’ Suddenly a smile softened the lines of her face, and her thick black eyelashes fluttered. ‘Timothy …’ she said his name with the emphasis on the last syllable, turning it into something exotic, ‘… told me that you are his
uraeus.
’

‘His what?’

‘His
uraeus.
’

‘What is that?’

Jessie wasn’t sure she liked the idea of her brother discussing her with his girlfriend, who now swung around to face the framed photograph on the wall behind her. She pointed to the impressive statue in the picture.

‘Ramses the Second,’ she told Jessie. ‘The greatest pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Three thousand years ago he ruled the New Kingdom for sixty-seven years during the time of the 19th Dynasty. This statue stands in the Temple of Karnak, a temple so magnificent and so vast that I fell to my knees in the sand, pierced by awe and dread, the first time I laid eyes on it.’

Jessie couldn’t imagine this proud creature on her knees to anyone. ‘Where is Timothy?’ she asked.

Anippe ignored the question. ‘You see the headdress that King Ramses is wearing?’

‘Yes.’

It flared stiffly at each side of his head, a bit like a nun’s, and reached to his shoulders.

‘That is called a
nemes
,’ the young woman told her. ‘Can you see what is on the front of the
nemes
on his forehead?’

Jessie frowned at the picture. ‘A snake’s head.’

‘It is a cobra. Only the pharaoh was permitted to wear the cobra on his
nemes
. It was a sign of royalty and it was there
to protect him from harm, a cobra spitting poison at any attacker.’ Anippe’s full lips stretched into a wider smile, but her cheekbones remained taut and hard-edged. ‘It is called the
uraeus
.’

‘The cobra’s head?’

‘Yes. Timothy regarded you as his
uraeus
.’ She studied Jessie’s face in silence for a moment, then said in a low respectful voice, ‘It is an honour to be so regarded.’

‘But it also means that the young blighter saw himself as a pharaoh!’ Jessie pointed out crossly. How much did this person know about her?

Anippe laughed, a crystal clear sound that circled the glass cases and settled in Jessie’s ears. She wanted to pluck it out but couldn’t. She noticed that the Egyptian woman was wearing a chiffon scarf of blue and gold tied around her neck, to which her hands now crept. Tim had once told her that blue and gold were the colours of eternal life in Ancient Egypt, the colours of King Tutankhamen’s death-mask, the one Howard Carter unearthed, glistening with gold and lapis lazuli. Now Anippe wore them.

‘I’m looking for Timothy. Have you seen him, Miss Kalim?’

‘No. He has not come into work this week.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I did.’

A silence, as solid as the bones on the table, settled between them and Jessie felt her mouth turn dry. She was convinced that Tim was not just sulking.

‘I need to find my brother,’ she said firmly. ‘I am worried about him.’

She stepped back and let her gaze rest on one of the cabinets, giving the young woman time to think. She leaned close to the cabinet and was dimly aware of a blur of rich turquoise
within it, but her mind was struggling to think clearly.

‘You came with Tim to our parents’ house, I believe, on the morning of the day he disappeared.’

‘I did.’

‘Why did you come with him?’

‘He wanted me to meet your mother.’

‘I’m sorry. I apologise for my mother’s …’

‘No need. I am used to it.’

Jessie swung around to look at her. An outsider. Always judged by the colour of her skin. The young woman’s expression possessed a stillness that gave no hint of what was in her mind. Or in her heart.

‘Do you love him?’ Jessie murmured.

Anippe Kalim lowered her eyelids until no more than a slit of darkness showed beneath them. Suddenly she stepped forward, so close that Jessie could feel her hot breath and see the raw hairline crack in the carefully constructed façade. She felt a strong grip on her wrist.

‘Jessie, you are his
uraeus
.’ The words came in a low hiss. ‘Protect your brother.’

‘From what? From whom?’

From you? Is that what you mean?

Anippe Kalim swept back to her table of broken bones where her fingers started to shift them around, zigzagging them back and forth like the pieces of a jigsaw.

‘Women!’ she said contemptuously, as if she were a different species herself. She didn’t look at Jessie again. The conversation was over.

Jessie stood stiffly without speaking for two full minutes. Only the click-clack of the bones made holes in the dusty silence. When she had control of the words in her head, she straightened a smile on her face and approached the table once more. She picked up a nodule of bone and weighed it in her hand.

‘Now,’ Jessie said softly, ‘enough of this. Please tell me what you know about what Timothy was doing and what you think might have happened to him.’

The stillness vanished from the dark eyes.

‘Miss Kalim?’

Dusky fingers twisted at the blue and gold scarf. ‘I have neither seen him nor heard from Timothy since
that Friday.’

‘What happened after you left my parents’ house?’

‘Nothing.’ Her slender shoulders shrugged. ‘We came here to work.’

‘Was Tim annoyed with my mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘And after work?’

There was a moment. A blank spot. As if Anippe Kalim’s intelligent mind had just hit a brick wall.

‘We said goodnight.’

‘Did you quarrel that evening? Did he walk away? Angry for the second time that day. Is that what happened?’

Jessie saw a mask fall into place, as rigid as Tutankhamen’s, as the Egyptian woman answered, ‘We were going to a lecture by Professor Bascombe about the exciting new finds on the Giza plateau near Cairo, but …’ she blinked, just once, ‘but he told me he had somewhere else to go.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘No.’

Jessie could imagine it. This young woman too proud to ask, and Tim too absorbed in his own turmoil to notice. Did he come to Putney? To seek out his big sister. But she had been out that Friday night at the jazz club with Tabitha. A kick like a mule’s hit her stomach but she didn’t even flinch. It was guilt. Her old friend.

‘If you hear from him – or hear anything that might give a clue as to where Tim is – please telephone me.’ Jessie placed her business card on the mahogany surface of the table beside the ancient bones. It looked out of place. As if a segment of 1932 had accidentally slid down a fissure into the wrong millennium.

Anippe did not even glance at it.

‘Goodbye, Miss Kalim.’

A faint nod was the only response, nothing more. Frustrated, Jessie walked away but as she did so, she felt a fierce sense of groping in the dark. Her footsteps echoed across
the floor, like the footsteps on the landing that echoed in her mind.

Feed me. Please. Feed me.

The words were silent. Locked inside the eyes that stared dully up at Jessie from the gutter. A little girl, sooty as a chimney sweep, was sitting on the kerb, hugging her bony knees to her chest. Her thin coat was belted with string and her feet were bare in her shoes, the tips of which had been cut off to allow for growth. Her hand stretched out limply towards Jessie as she passed, but it transformed itself instantly into a sharp little mousetrap when Jessie placed coins in it. With a scrabble of limbs, the child scuttled away down a narrow alleyway under lines of washing.

Jessie watched the skinny legs vanish and she felt a surge of anger. The National Government was a sham. It was doing nowhere near enough to sort out the economic disaster in Britain right now and Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald was a fool. A fool who had betrayed his own socialist cause. Each day the newspaper headlines grew worse and each day her stomach turned at the sight of despairing queues outside soup kitchens. The Great Depression they were calling it. The Slump. Though one MP had the gall to call it no more than a
set-back
. It didn’t matter what name the politicians pinned on it, it all meant the same
to the men and women in the street. Factories closed. No jobs. No bread on the table. Hardest hit were the workers of Scotland, Wales and the north of England where mass unemployment was rife, but even here in the East End of London conditions were appalling.

And now Sir John Gilmour, the Home Secretary, was going to snatch the roof from over their heads by cutting unemployment benefit and imposing a means test. The savagery of it had created unrest throughout the country, and here in these helpless, hopeless streets where people huddled, raw-faced in the wind, Jessie could sense the tension as thick as the yellow fog in the air. It made the hairs on her arms rise and the thickness of her winter coat feel like a disgrace.

‘Archie, open this blasted door!’

Jessie’s hand banged against the wood. Its paint was peeling and the smell of damp-rot sent sour spikes up into her nostrils. The dilapidated building was one of the many back-to-back terraced houses in a maze of narrow mean streets. It had outside steps leading down to a basement, and it was down this flight of crumbling stone stairs that she had descended to Archie Dashington’s basement flat. In the gloomy stairwell, set ten feet below street level, rubbish had accumulated: discarded Woodbine cigarette packets, fish and chip papers, a sodden
Sunday Pictorial
and a broken clothes-mangle. Jessie knew it was no good expecting Archie to clean up the mess. He wasn’t that type.

With one eye alert for rats, she rapped on the door once more and heard the soft pad of feet on the other side. It opened halfway to reveal a mole-eyed young man of about her own age with rumpled ginger hair, wearing a collarless flannelette shirt tucked into shapeless trousers. He looked – mistakenly – like a workman. Jessie had known Archie since he was thirteen, when he had given Timothy a black eye at school.

‘Gosh, Jessie! Jolly early in the morning to come calling.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Archie, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Hardly early.’

His small eyes blinked at her uneasily. He might have hidden his breeding behind second-hand clothes, but he betrayed
himself in his upper-class vowels and a vocabulary straight out of a boarding school tuck-box.

‘I need to talk to you, Archie. About Tim.’

‘Oh?’ He didn’t open the door any wider.

‘May I come in? It’s filthy cold out here.’

He made no move to admit her, so she stepped forward, forcing him to retreat into the dank hallway.

‘It’s not frightfully convenient just now,’ he muttered, belatedly standing his ground. ‘Next week would suit …’

Jessie smiled. ‘Come on, Archie. Whatever or whoever you’re hiding in there, I won’t tell, I promise.’ She kissed his freckled cheek. ‘Unless it’s Tim, of course.’

‘It’s not Tim.’

‘Then let’s go in and talk.’

She slipped an arm purposefully through his and steered him towards the door to the living room. It was always the same with men of Archie’s class, born to privilege and wealth. They might rule the British Empire but they had no idea how to stand up to a woman. She put it down to a childhood spent dominated by a nanny in starched white uniform who wielded the back of a spoon with enthusiasm over bare young knuckles. Why Archie Dashington had chosen to exist in this dismal working-class hovel while still drawing a generous monthly allowance from his father who was a minister in the Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, Jessie had no idea. Archie certainly didn’t appear to do any work, had in fact never held a job in his life, as far as she knew, not since leaving Harrow School along with Tim. She swung open the door, a tight grip on her host’s arm to stop him bolting.

The smell struck her first. Unwashed socks and the sour breath from empty bellies. There must have been twenty men crammed in the small room. No sound. Just suspicious eyes fixed on her and a grey pall of cigarette smoke blurring the edges of scowls. Thin as ferrets, all of them, and dressed in work clothes. Some stood in huddles, others sprawled on the bare linoleum, a few propped
up the damp walls. Jessie could sense their hostility.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ she said brightly.

‘Who’s this?’ a voice demanded. It came from a man who wore a stained flat cap and was chewing on a crust of bread. In fact, Jessie noticed that all the men had something to eat in their hands.

‘She’s the sister of a friend of mine,’ Archie explained with a dismissive shrug. ‘Just fussing over something. Nothing for you to worry about.’ He barged a pathway through the men, pushing her towards the tiny kitchenette at the far end of the room, and shut the door behind them, but not before someone’s hand had touched her calf as she stepped over him. Tiny was too big a word for the kitchenette. It was barely larger than a telephone booth.

‘Archie! What on earth is going on out there?’

‘Just some men.’

‘I can see that. Who are they?’

‘They’re marchers. Union men.’ He pushed his face towards her, worried. ‘Don’t say a word about them to anyone, will you?’

‘Marchers?’

‘The Means Test march.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Archie, are you crazy?’

‘No.’

An organisation called the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement had rallied thousands of unemployed from all over the country to set off on a march on London to present a petition to Parliament. Against the Means Test. A million signatures. The snaking column of thousands of marching boots and banners was due to arrive for a mass gathering in Hyde Park the following Tuesday, 27th October. But rumours were spreading already. That it was Communist-led. That they intended to smash the government. That London was in danger. Panic was seeping under the closed doors of government offices throughout London. Here in the slums of the East End the mood was sour, and this close to Archie, Jessie could see the anger in his eyes. But there was something else there, too. Shame. That was it, a dark grey wing
of shame.