Read Herring on the Nile Online
Authors: L. C. Tyler
Campion rose, sighed and dropped his napkin tetchily on the table. ‘So be it. I shall see you all in half an hour, when it will be my pleasure,
for sure
, to escort you round the
temple of Edfu,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, please do enjoy your breakfasts, while I prepare for the visit.’
As he left the room, clutching his book, he flashed a look at me that was malevolent in the extreme, though all I had done was to try to help the other passengers. He clearly would have also
liked to put the evil eye on Sky Benson, but she was already in conversation with the two Americans and so missed Campion’s petulant exit and his final blameful gaze in her direction.
‘Odd,’ said Miss Watson, as she folded her napkin.
‘Odd?’ I asked. ‘You mean Professor Campion’s evident reluctance to guide us round the temple?’
‘No – if Egyptology is his job, I can see why he might object to having his services commandeered in this way. It’s a bit like getting a professional opera singer to entertain
us with a bit of karaoke or getting a brain surgeon to check out your piles over coffee. If your day job is teaching hieroglyphics to people who are beginning to wonder why they didn’t apply
to read media studies or sociology, then you’d probably resent having to do the same to a group of people who are thinking mainly about what to have for lunch. I meant it’s odd that
they have sent for the
usual
guide as a replacement. Because the question is: Why didn’t we have the usual guide in the first place rather than this thoroughly unreliable person who
has failed to appear?’
‘The boat is half empty,’ said Purbright, turning to us from his seat at the next table. ‘They’ve probably given their usual guide the week off and employed some
first-year archaeology student from Ain Shams, who has now had a better offer at the last minute.’
‘That is a remarkably confident assertion coming from somebody who clearly knows nothing about it,’ said Miss Watson in the sweetest possible tones.
‘I am only speculating,’ said Purbright, with practised patience.
‘I’ll ask the purser,’ said Miss Watson with a sniff. ‘He’s more likely to know than you are.’
Since Miss Watson had made her views of the purser known only minutes before, this was not a comparison intended to flatter.
‘Do, by all means,’ said Purbright. He stood up and made his exit, thus ensuring that he had at least had the last word.
Miss Watson watched him leave. ‘I shall,’ she said, as the door closed behind him. ‘I most certainly shall.’
I’m not sure – returning to Miss Watson’s analogy – how I would have felt if I had been asked to read from my novels to amuse the passengers. I suppose
I would have done it. There was a time – I have to say a much better time in my view – when writers were simply required to write. Now your publisher, and indeed your agent, expects
you to keep up your website, to blog and to appear regularly in order to read, sign and generally be pleasant. Elsie constantly reminded me that my natural modesty was quite charming but
unfortunately sold no books. I did not doubt that, had she thought it would shift even a single copy, Elsie would have had me reading to the passengers every evening, pointing out (no doubt) that
this was after all supposed to be a working visit.
As, of course, it was.
Campion’s annoyance was, in that context, perhaps quite understandable. Miss Watson’s comment to him,by extension, seemed tactless – but perhaps no more so than her remarks to
Purbright, who had done nothing to offend her. Like Elsie, she apparently felt that people were entitled to know her views in full. Hopefully, like Elsie, she also had a finely tuned sense of what
she could get away with – I was completely with Agatha Christie on the issue of whether you could murder somebody on a Nile paddle steamer. You can murder somebody anywhere. It’s
getting away with it that is always the tricky bit.
In the end, Campion’s lecture to us on the main features of an Egyptian temple was informative, but our questions to him were almost invariably dismissed with every sign
of wearied irritation.
‘It’s just a list of the pharaoh’s titles, one after the other,’ he said curtly, in reply to a question from Jane Watson about the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the face
of the vast pylon in front of us. Even first-year students, he implied, would have known that.
‘Such as?’ asked Herbie Proctor. At breakfast Proctor had dismissed any idea of joining our excursion, but had eventually trailed along – mainly to be unkind to Campion, as far
as I could tell. He had displayed no real interest in anything he had been shown, but had occasionally tried fiddling with his phone to see whether he could get a signal.
‘Well,’ said Professor Campion, peering at the carved characters, ‘this one says, “He of the Sedge and Bee”.’
‘And that one?’ asked Proctor, pointing randomly.
‘That says “King of Upper and Lower Egypt”.’
‘And the one up there?’
‘That’s the Golden Horus.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Proctor. ‘That’s
really
interesting.’
Proctor’s little world was, it seemed to me, a curious one. He shared Elsie’s view that the majority of his fellow men were idiots, placed on earth primarily for his own personal
doubt about how she felt about them, Proctor limited himself to snide ambiguities, which might later be disowned if they proved inconvenient. Scratch Elsie, however deeply, and you would just find
more of the same. Proctor’s bravado was no more than a thin veneer, easily damaged but perhaps too cheap to cause him concern if it was.
Campion looked uncertainly at Proctor. Somebody who was sufficiently vain might have taken Proctor’s words as a compliment. Somebody who was sufficiently thin-skinned would almost
certainly have bridled at Proctor’s tone. Campion was possibly both, and therefore unable to decide what the appropriate response might be. In the end, he shook his head as if he had never
come across anything quite like Proctor before, and then led us through the door in the pylon and into the peristyle courtyard, where the impromptu lecture continued.
‘The prof seems to know his stuff,’ said Purbright later, as we stood in the shade just outside the hypostyle hall, its towering columns and stone ceiling creating
a welcoming gloom for those inside and a narrow line of shadow for us outside. Purbright wiped his neck with an old-fashioned spotted handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket. The sun was
now higher in the sky, and Egypt was starting to feel a whole lot warmer. Our little group had dispersed after viewing the sanctuary, and was now wandering round the temple in ones and twos, each
at his or her own pace and in the shade as much as possible. The boat was not due to sail for another hour. Elsie and I had re-examined the great pylon – a solid, almost modernist slab with
its vast figures striding stiffly across its face to some never-fulfilled meeting in the middle. We had plunged into the twilight of the temple to view the sacred barque in the narrow inner
sanctum. We had glanced briefly up a steep staircase that apparently led to the roof. Had I been tempted to venture up there I would have been quickly dissuaded by a sign that read: ‘CLOSED
– REPAIR WORK IN PROGRESS’. Nothing prevented us physically from ascending, other than an old piece of rope tied crookedly across the passage. My natural inclination to follow
official instructions might still have been countermanded by Elsie, who has a theory that you are only ever banned from doing good stuff. Before she could drag me over the rope and up the stairs,
however, she had spotted somebody with an ice cream and decided that locating the shop that sold them was a higher priority than subverting petty bureaucracy.
Thus I found myself talking to Purbright in the growing mid-morning heat. I was beginning to wish that I had joined Elsie, but told myself that there would be plenty of time for keeping cool
once we returned to the
Khedive
.
‘Yes,’ I said to Purbright. ‘Professor Campion was very informative. I think he blames me for landing him in it, though.’
‘I got that impression too,’ said Purbright. ‘I don’t think you’ve made a friend there somehow. Still, it has been very useful for the rest of us.’
I nodded. Though the Ptolemy business still worried me, I could not fault Campion’s role as a guide. At the back of my mind both now and earlier that morning, however, had been the strange
overheard conversation between Campion and Miss Benson. It was true that, when Campion had been leading the group, Miss Benson had been no more and no less attentive than the others in the party.
Had it not been for the words I had heard pass between them, they might genuinely have met on the journey out but found each other neither sufficiently interesting to desire further company nor
sufficiently dull to avoid it altogether. As it was, while Campion had described the layout of the temple, I had not been contemplating the glories of the ancient pharaohs but had been wondering
exactly what sort of hold Campion had over Sky Benson. As he explained the development of the pylon, I had speculated on whether he had actually meant that a murder was planned or just that Miss
Benson was acting in a way that would arouse such a suspicion. Nor were those my only thoughts; the relaxed-looking MI6 man in front of me had also been having an odd discussion with somebody who
was also probably present in the group.
‘I guess we’ll be pretty expert on all of this by the end of the trip,’ Purbright continued, fortunately unable to read my mind. ‘Amazing stuff. Look at those paintings
on the ceiling – over two thousand years old. You’d scarcely think it, would you?’
I looked up at the large stone slabs that formed the ceiling. Some were well preserved. Others were cracked or decaying – explaining perhaps why the steps to the roof were temporarily out
of bounds. But, where the old surface remained, the reds, blues and yellows were still surprisingly fresh, as though just decorated using a giant paintbox with just a few blocks of primary
colour.
‘You can get up onto the roof, I think,’ said Purbright, following my gaze, ‘if you pay some baksheesh to one of the temple guards.’
‘It’s closed off,’ I said. ‘There’s a notice on the staircase, anyway. It all looks a bit precarious. I’m not sure I’d risk it.’
‘Might be worth checking out,’ he said. Purbright was clearly somebody who preferred doing to merely looking and shared Elsie’s scepticism regarding health and safety
warnings.
He had already departed, for the roof or elsewhere, when Herbie Proctor appeared from the entrance to the hall and joined me on the outside, in my small strip of shade by the columns. I
pretended to be examining the hieroglyphs intently, in the hope he would pass me by without comment.
‘You’ll be able to read that stuff now, having listened to Campion,’ said Proctor with a sneer.
‘Not really,’ I said, giving up the charade of doing so.
‘Exactly,’ said Proctor, leaning against the pillar. He was using a thumbnail to extract the last remains of his breakfast from between his front teeth. He held up the modest fruits
of his labours to the light and squinted at it before adding: ‘That man’s a complete fraud.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far . . .’
‘Oh, I would. “He of the Sedge and the Bee”. What sort of title is that? He hadn’t got the first idea what those cartouches said.’
‘I did wonder the same thing,’ I said. I couldn’t vouch for the hieroglyphs, but the Ptolemy numbering thing continued to niggle me. It felt odd siding with Proctor, but his
suspicions echoed my own. I glanced round the courtyard to see whether any of our party was within earshot. I could see nobody, but of course anyone could have been concealed behind one of the
numerous columns. ‘Yes, he is acting oddly,’ I agreed. ‘He said something last night that I’m sure was wrong. He said this temple was constructed by Ptolemy II.’
Proctor nodded. ‘They can’t fool you, eh Ethelred? Ptolemy II my arse.’
For a moment I thought that, like Elsie, he was not taking my concerns seriously. I pressed on anyway.
‘So, why should he be pretending to be an Egyptologist?’ I asked.
‘Why indeed, Ethelred? Why indeed? You see, I’m trained to pick up these things – in real life, where it counts. Of course, if this was one of your little books, he might just
be a red herring – he might have some entirely innocent reason for playing at being a professor. But not in real life, Ethelred. When that sort of thing happens in real life, there’s a
reason for it. What you need in this business is cold logic and an instinct for danger. You have to be two steps ahead . . .’
The slab of sandstone, as I was later informed, was halfway to the ground before anyone spotted it. At that point two or three people had screamed helpfully, but it took far longer for us to
react than for the rock to complete its descent and shatter against the flagstone floor. It was fortunate that standing still was a relatively safe option. I was aware only of something large
hitting the deck not far from us. Whereupon a whole lot more people screamed. As the dust cleared I saw Proctor staring at me open-mouthed; then everyone within the courtyard and some from the hall
beyond converged on us asking us if we were all right. My arm, I discovered, had been grazed by a fragment of stone, thrown up when the slab flew apart. Proctor appeared shocked and dusty, but
unhurt. It was only once I had reassured everyone that I was fine that I thought to look up.
‘It must have broken off from the roof, up there,’ I started to say, though I couldn’t have said exactly which part of the roof had given way.
‘We need to clear the hall and get people over to the other side of the courtyard,’ said somebody near me. ‘Another piece could come down at any moment.’
There was general agreement on this point. Though the outer court was entirely open to the sky, and no part of it other than that adjoining the hall offered any threat of falling objects, most
of us gravitated quickly to the far side – with frequent backward glances. There I met other members of our party, including Elsie.
‘What happened in there?’ she demanded, lick in galarge ice cream with three chocolate Flakes. ‘Did you break something?’