The Hidden Oasis (14 page)

There was way too much stuff to go through it all in detail. Instead he contented himself with opening each drawer in turn and walking his latex-gloved fingers over the protruding section headings, pulling out a folder here, a folder there – Bedouin; Khepri; Long Range Desert Group; Pepi II; Wingate – before moving on again, never lingering too long on any one subject, skimming.

Only two files caused him to pause for a more in-depth perusal. One, labelled Gilf Kebir/Satellite Imaging, contained a sheaf of colour pictures. Starting with wide-scale shots of the entire south-west corner of Egypt, the images homed in, in ever greater detail, on specific areas of the Gilf, the desert landscape becoming progressively clearer
and more defined. The last twenty or so shots were so sharp Angleton could make out the actual cliff faces along the Gilf’s eastern edge. Occasionally there would be a prick of green – probably just a couple of trees or a clump of desert bushes – but otherwise the area was utterly lifeless and empty. No sign, certainly, of Brodie’s mysterious oasis.

The other file that caught his attention was labelled Magnetometry Data (was that what the sensing device in the hallway was? A magnetometer?). The file’s contents – sheet after sheet of meaningless monochrome speckles and smudges – meant nothing to him. The data itself wasn’t important. What gave him pause for thought was the fact that Brodie was using a magnetometer at all. Magnetometers, so far as Angleton was aware, were used for sub-surface imaging and metal detection. And yet in his talk the other evening Brodie had specifically stated that the Stone Age inhabitants of the Gilf had not yet developed metal-working technology. There was doubtless some perfectly innocent explanation, but all the same it was curious.

‘Why the magnetometer?’ he drawled into his Dictaphone, pausing the machine before almost immediately pressing Record again.

‘And where does he get all the satellite stuff from? NASA? Oil companies? Check who would have this material.’

He finished going through the cabinets and ran his eyes over the bookshelves again. It was all Egyptology, so far as he could see, save for one section devoted to current affairs – lots of stuff on Iraq – and, slotted in behind a row of leather-bound volumes on ancient Egyptian architecture,
which is why he’d missed it before, a book on, of all things, Russian aeroplanes.

‘
Osprey Encyclopedia of Russian Aircraft
,’ he intoned into his recorder. ‘What the hell’s that doing here?’

He returned to Brodie’s desk last. It was a large affair, old-fashioned, polished oak, with a phone, lamp, blotter, paper tray, pen holder – all the usual stuff, neatly arranged. No desktop computer, which suggested the Englishman worked off his laptop. And he must have taken his laptop with him to Dakhla since there was no sign of it in the flat. Annoying. Angleton scouted around for a memory stick in case Brodie had backed his work up but there was no sign of one. With time ticking away he abandoned the search, turning his attention first to the contents of the paper tray, none of which were especially revealing, and then, finally, to the book sitting on the blotter at the centre of the table:
Cuneiform Texts of The Hermitage Museum.

There was a sheet of A4 paper sticking up about halfway through. Opening the book at that page Angleton found himself looking down at a photograph of a toffee-coloured clay tablet, badly eroded and covered in rows of small wedge-shaped marks. Underneath was a caption: ‘The Egypt Tablet. Royal archive of Lugal-Zagesi (
c.
2375-50
BCE
). Uruk. From collection of N. Likhachev’.

He stared at the photograph, then turned his attention to the A4 sheet. On it Brodie had painstakingly transcribed the wedge-marks on the tablet, or at least those that were legible. Beneath he had then written out what Angleton assumed was a transliteration of the original cuneiform, rendering the text phonetically into Latin characters. And beneath that – again Angleton was guessing, although it
seemed a fairly safe bet – a straight English translation, with rows of dots where the cuneiform was marred or damaged, and bracketed guesses and question marks alongside the words of whose meaning Brodie seemed to be uncertain:

Angleton read through this a couple of times, unable to make head or tail of it.

‘Weird shit about stones,’ he said into his recorder, shaking his head in bemusement at the things people found interesting. He paused a moment, then added: ‘Probably not relevant.’

Replacing the A4 sheet he closed the book and shifted it
fractionally across the blotter so that it was exactly as he had found it. He gave the room one last sweep, planted the GSM listening devices – one in the phone, one behind the bookcase, one underneath the living room sofa – and left the flat. He’d been in there for just under ninety minutes, and by his reckoning Brodie’s flight wouldn’t even be halfway back to Cairo yet. Good, precise work, he thought to himself. That’s what they paid him for. That’s why he was the best.

‘Alex would never have injected herself. Not in a million years. There’s something wrong here. You have to believe me. There’s something wrong.’

Dr Mohammed Rashid furrowed his brow, tweaking at his left earlobe.

‘You have to believe me,’ Freya repeated. ‘Alex had a phobia about needles. I would have said something before but I assumed she’d swallowed pills or drunk something. She could never have injected herself. Never.’

She was wound up, agitated, had been ever since Molly Kiernan’s parting comment about the needle prick. The moment she’d registered what Kiernan had said she’d tried to call Zahir on his mobile, ask him to come back, explain things to her. His phone had been switched off. The same with Kiernan’s and Brodie’s. She hadn’t bothered leaving messages. Frantic, she had just grabbed her knapsack and started running, through the palm and olive groves and
along the desert track back towards the main oasis. She didn’t know what she was going to do, just knew that something was terribly wrong and she had to do something. After about a kilometre she heard a rattle and a clatter behind her and a donkey-drawn cart had come up alongside, driven by the elderly, toothless man she and Zahir had passed on their way to Alex’s house the previous afternoon – Mohammed, Mahmoud, something like that. Zahir had warned her not to have anything to do with him, but too worked up to care she accepted his offer of a ride, desperate to get to Mut as swiftly as possible. He had jabbered at her and squeezed himself up unnecessarily close, allowing his hand to brush against her thigh, but she had barely noticed.

‘Mut,’ she kept saying to him. ‘Please, Mut, hospital, quickly.’

In the mud-brick village at the head of the track he had pulled up in front of the Kodak shop with its ‘Fast Foto devilp’ sign and flagged down a pick-up truck which had driven her the rest of the way. Dr Rashid was on his ward round, they had told her when she reached the hospital, wouldn’t be available until past midday. She had insisted on seeing him, had made a scene, and eventually calls had been made, pagers bleeped and he’d come down and led her up to his office.

‘You have to believe me,’ she said a third time, struggling to control her voice. ‘Alex couldn’t have killed herself. Not like that. It’s impossible.’

In front of her, the doctor shifted in his chair, eyes flicking from his desk to Freya and back again.

‘Miss Hannen,’ he began slowly, still tweaking at his ear-lobe, ‘I know how difficult—’

‘You don’t know!’ she snapped. ‘Alex could not have injected herself. She couldn’t! She couldn’t!’

Her voice was becoming shrill. He gave her a moment to calm, then tried again.

‘Miss Hannen, when a loved one dies …’

She started to interrupt but he raised a hand, requesting that she give him a chance to speak.

‘When a loved one dies,’ he repeated, ‘especially in this manner, it can be very hard to accept. We do not want to believe it, to acknowledge that someone we care for – care for deeply – could be in so much pain that taking their own life becomes preferable to continuing with that life.’

He clasped his hands on the desk, shuffled his feet.

‘Alex had an incurable, degenerative condition. One that had already, in a very short space of time, robbed her of most of her movement, and one that was inevitably going to kill her, most likely in a matter of months. She was a courageous, strong-willed woman, and took the decision that if she was going to die, she at least wanted to control where, when and how it should happen. I am not happy about it, I wish she hadn’t done it, but I understand her reasons, and I respect her decision. Painful as it is, you must try to do so as well.’

Freya shook her head, clasping the armrests of her seat.

‘Alex would not have injected herself,’ she insisted, spelling out the words, emphasizing the ‘not’. ‘If she’d taken an overdose, or hanged herself, or …’

She broke off, overwhelmed by the scenarios she was describing.

‘Ever since we were kids Alex was terrified of needles,’ she continued after a moment, fighting back the tears,
struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘I know we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, but I also know that sort of fear doesn’t just go away. She couldn’t even look at a needle, let alone fill one with morphine and stick it in herself. It’s impossible.’

Dr Rashid looked up at the ceiling, then down again, exhaling slowly.

‘Sometimes, when you are very ill, you make the impossible happen,’ he said gently. ‘This I have seen many times as a doctor. I am not suggesting you are wrong about your sister, or that her fear was not what you say it was. Simply that when you suffer as she was suffering, fear becomes relative. What terrified her when she was in good health probably did so less when measured against the greater terror of a slow, lingering, painful death, one that day by day was stripping her of what little dignity she had left. By the end Alex had become desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. I am sorry to be so blunt about it, but I do not like to see you adding to your grief in this way. Alex took her own life. We have to accept—’

A loud bleeping from his pager interrupted him. Apologizing, he lifted the phone and hit a button, turning away from her and speaking in hushed tones. Freya rose and crossed to the window. She gazed down into a large paved courtyard with a towering India laurel at its centre. A family were breakfasting in the shade beneath the tree; a man in blue pyjamas was shuffling around wheeling a drip-trolley, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. She watched him, fingers drumming on the windowsill, waiting for the doctor to finish his call.

‘Did Alex tell you she was going to do something like
this?’ she asked the moment he’d replaced the receiver, jumping straight back into the conversation. ‘Did she say anything to you about it?’

Rashid adjusted the position of his chair, clasped his hands on the desk again.

‘Not in so many words, no,’ he replied. ‘It had come up a couple of times in a … how do you say? … abstract sort of way. She certainly didn’t ask for my help, if that is what you mean. And I certainly wouldn’t have given it if she had. I am a doctor. My job is to save lives, not take them. She knew my views on this.’

Freya took a step forward.

‘Who found her body?’

‘Miss Hannen, please, these questions …’

‘Who?’

Her tone was blunt, insistent.

‘The housekeeper,’ he said with a sigh. ‘When she arrived in the morning.’

‘Where? Where did she find Alex?’

‘On the back porch, I believe. In her wheelchair. She liked to sit there, look out at the desert, particularly towards the end when she found movement difficult. The morphine bottle and syringe were on the table beside her. Exactly as would be expected.’

‘Was there a suicide note?’

‘Not so far as I know.’

‘That didn’t strike you as strange? Someone kills themselves and doesn’t leave a note, a letter of explanation.’

‘Miss Hannen, it was obvious what she had done and why she had done it. She had already made it known that if anything should happen to her you were to be contacted, that
she wanted to be buried in the oasis near to her house. There was no reason for her to leave a note.’

‘The morphine bottle?’ Freya pushed. ‘The syringe? What happened to them?’

He shook his head, a faintly exasperated expression creasing his face.

‘I have no idea. I think the housekeeper threw them away. Given the circumstances it would have been morbid to—’

‘There was a bruise on her shoulder,’ said Freya, cutting him off, changing tack. ‘A big bruise. How did she get that?’

‘I really can’t tell you,’ he replied helplessly. ‘She fell over, she bumped into something. Her condition made her very unsteady. People with multiple sclerosis often have bruises. Please believe me, Miss Hannen, if there was anything—’

‘Where did she do it?’ snapped Freya, again cutting him off.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Inject herself. Where did she inject herself?’