The Quest of Julian Day (17 page)

‘Cigarette?' I asked, fishing out my case and offering it to her.

She hesitated a moment and I grinned. ‘Afraid I might rush you and snatch the pistol if you get too close?'

She shrugged, and coming a step nearer, extended her hand.

‘I've taken such absurdly big chances already to-night, it doesn't seem as if one more will make much difference.'

‘Fine. I'm glad about that. Because, you see, that pistol isn't loaded, so I could quite easily have taken it from you any time I wished.'

‘What?' she exclaimed.

‘Yes. I was afraid you might spot that owing to its lightness; but evidently you're not quite so used to handling weapons as you would have me think.'

She laughed then, a soft, low gurgle that was good to hear. ‘You must think me an idiot for having let you fool me like this.'

‘Far from it. I give you full marks for brains and for pluck. Running me to earth at Mena when the whole Egyptian police-force had failed to track me down was a first-class piece of work.'

‘Oh, that was Mustapha mostly, and a little luck. For that matter, it's you who really come off with flying colours. You're still a free man and could do what you liked with me out here without anyone hearing my shrieks.'

‘Really?' I said. ‘I'm very easily tempted.'

‘How dare you?' she said. ‘I didn't mean that.'

‘Of course you didn't; forgive my nonsense. But what I'd like to be certain of is whether you still think it possible that I murdered your father?'

‘No,' she said decisively. ‘I am quite convinced now that it wasn't you.'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘You were quite convinced I
had
done it half an hour ago, and you've had nothing but my bare word to cause you to alter your opinion since.'

‘I don't know. Call it “feminine intuition” if you like. But from the way you speak and act, I have a feeling that you're quite incapable of committing such a horrible crime.'

‘That's good. Let's sit down, shall we?' I motioned her towards a near-by slab of stone and as we sat I casually relieved her of the automatic. Pressing the button on the upper part of the butt, I removed the clip of bullets from it and quietly held them up for her to inspect.

‘Oh, dear!' she groaned in mock distress. ‘So it
was
loaded after all.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Sorry I had to lie to you about it, but I can't afford to take chances.'

‘That's another lie. You knew quite well I wouldn't have tried to shoot you unless you'd turned really nasty. You pulled that bluff merely to impress me.'

‘Quite right,' I laughed. ‘But don't you consider that a compliment? Unless you're a liar too, you'll confess that you were impressed.'

‘Of course I was,' she agreed quite frankly. ‘And if you want the truth, you've done little else but impress me ever since we … er… met.'

‘“Met's” the word,' I agreed cheerfully. ‘But it's you who are to blame because you're so remarkably well worth impressing.'

‘Hadn't we better talk about Father?' she said stubbing out her cigarette. ‘You know, that's what we came out here for.'

‘True. Although with the pyramids and stars and all, on a night like this, I could wish that it was something else.'

‘You've conveyed that quite sufficiently already, Mr. Day. But I'm not in the mood for that sort of thing, or in the habit of entering into flirtations with complete strangers. If you don't mind, until Mustapha and Amin turn up, we will confine our conversation to facts.'

‘I do mind. But on the other hand I can see that your suggestion is quite reasonable. I'll tell you now, as briefly and clearly as I can, how I got drawn into this.'

For the next ten minutes I gave her a pretty thorough outline of everything I knew about the business from the moment of my meeting her father in the ‘Hampshire' up to the point of her discovering my trying to get into O'Kieff's window at Mena House that night.

She did not ask me a single question and sat silent for a moment or two afterwards. Then she said:

‘Am I to understand that the Belvilles will vouch for all this?'

‘Yes. As soon as I get a change of clothes which will make me a little more presentable, we'll do our best to evade the police, who must be hunting for me all round Mena House by this time, and return to Cairo, where Harry and Clarissa themselves can tell you exactly the part I've played.'

‘Why did you set out for Egypt in the first place?'

‘Because I knew this man O'Kieff was sailing in the “Hampshire” and I want to get even with him over a past affair.'

‘What sort of affair?'

‘That, my dear, is nothing to do with you.'

‘Tell me something about yourself. Who are you? What's your background? What d'you do?'

‘Sorry. None of that enters into this affair, so I don't propose to tell you.'

I felt her stiffen slightly, and her voice hardened a trifle as she said, ‘You realise, I suppose, that your reticence is highly suspicious? No normal person has any objection to talking about themselves.'

‘True,' I agreed. ‘But I am a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have a huge, horrible, gory skeleton in my cupboard, which eyes such as yours are far too beautiful to look upon.'

‘You can cut out the “beautiful eyes” part,' she said coldly.
‘In the first place they are not particularly big and you haven't even seen them properly yet. But unless you've really got something to hide I don't see why you should be anxious to conceal your past.'

Although I had tried to skate over the matter by treating it lightly, the skeleton was a grim and sordid fact, and she was quite justified in wanting to know something about me. I relaised that by digging my toes in I was only converting her good impression of me to a bad one. But I had no alternative; so I stuck to my line of semi-comic nonsense.

‘If I were to tell you who I am and what I've done you would shrink from me as though I were a leper. People who snatch the coppers from a blind man are simply nothing compared with me, and I live by preference on the immoral earnings of women. I'm a dope-runner and a blackmailer and, up to date, I have bigamously married seventeen old women to get hold of their savings. Now, are you satisfied?'

‘No,' she said firmly. ‘I'm not. You haven't done one of these things. You're not that type of man at all; but you're hiding something. And it might have a bearing on Father's death. That's why I have a right to know what it is.'

‘That's where we differ. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I maintain that
no one
has a right to dig in to another person's affairs.'

‘All right,' she shrugged. ‘We'll leave it like that for the moment.'

We fell silent after that and whereas a quarter of an hour before it had seemed that a spontaneous mutual attraction bid fair to smooth away the strangeness of our situation, there had now developed a definite tension between us. I was quite glad when, across the angle of the great pit which had been dug all round the Spinx, so that its lower limbs may now be seen, I caught a movement in the shadows which I felt fairly confident was caused by Amin and Mustapha.

As there was always the odd chance that it might be a couple of police scouting for me even as far away from Mena House as this, I wasn't taking any risks. I grabbed Sylvia by the arm and made her crouch down with me behind some big rocks. But Amin and Mustapha it proved to be and we came out again to meet them.

Amin had seen Harry and had duly returned with a blue lounge suit of mine, shirt, collar and tie; also a pair of my own shoes. I changed into these at once behind the rocks and reappeared feeling a little more like my old self, except for the fact that I still had twenty-four hours' growth of stubble on my chin.

Mustapha reported that two trolley-loads of police had come dashing up within five minutes of my leaving Mena House with Sylvia. They had surrounded the whole hotel and garden and instituted a thorough search but, of course, failed to find us.

Amin had arrived back while they were busy drawing the grounds and questioning the hotel servants. Mustapha had been extremely anxious for his mistress's safety but it seemed that a few moment's conversation with his old friend, Amin, had set his fears at rest. They had decided between themselves that Mustapha should tell the officer in charge that Sylvia had made a mistake about the Greek workman whom she had thought was me, and had gone back to Cairo leaving him to apologise to the police for having brought them out there on a wild-goose chase. The officer had cursed Mustapha roundly for not having Sylvia's message earlier, but the dragoman had excused himself by saying that he had been in the kitchen quarters having some supper when the police had turned up and that he had only just learned of their arrival. The police had then piled into their trolleys again and returned to Cairo.

This was the best piece of news I had had that evening, as I had been badgering my wits in vain to find some means of securing either Sylvia's car or my own from outside Mena House with the police swarming all round it. For a moment I even considered making a second attempt to get into O'Kieff's room, but dismissed that as much too risky. He would certainly have finished his dinner by this time and might already be back in his suite or go up to it at any moment. Moreover, in spite of my change of clothes there was a chance now that some of the hotel porters might recognise me as the man for whom the police had been looking.

There still remained the possibility that somebody had spotted Sylvia's car and, in consequence, the police officer had not accepted Mustapha's story entirely but had left a couple of
men to keep a watch on it, so on second thoughts it seemed wiser that neither of us should return to Mena House if it could be avoided.

‘Are you game for half an hour's walk?' I asked Sylvia.

‘Why?' she enquired.

‘Because I think it would be best if we sent Amin and Mustapha back to collect the cars and were to meet them ourselves a mile or so away from Mena on the Cairo road.'

‘D'you know your way across this bit of country in the dark?' she asked a little dubiously.

‘With the lights of the main road stretching for miles right in front of us it's impossible to miss it.'

‘All right,' she shrugged, and having given careful instructions to the two dragomen, we set off.

If Sylvia had realised what she was letting herself in for I doubt if she would have agreed to accompany me, seeing that our relations were by no means of the best at that moment; but when we started neither of us was aware what a difficult piece of ground we had to traverse. There was never any question of our losing our direction as we could see the lights on the road the whole time, but getting there was the very devil.

A little way in front of the Sphinx we came to the
gebel
, as they call the natural embankment which forms the confines of the Nile valley and runs, several miles inland, more or less parallel with the actual banks of the river. The ground shelved away sharply beneath us forming almost a cliff-face where it marked the division between the flat lands below, which are flooded by the Nile during the inundation period, and the arid desert on the edge of which we were standing.

The drop was about forty feet, but we had to get down it somehow and, I must say, Sylvia was game enough not to complain when I led the way down the shaly sandstone slope. We slipped and slithered, clutching at projections of crumbling rock here and there, but managed to reach the bottom in safety. The next five minutes proved easier going but after that we came upon fields of lucerne and cotton where the soggy soil hampered our progress badly and at times we were bogged in it almost up to the ankles. Dykes, small and large seemed to bar our path in all directions. Some we were able to cross by plunging down their slimy banks and wading
through the few inches of water in their muddy bottoms; others were so wide and deep that we were forced to make tedious detours to find bridges over them. It was a hellish business but at last we reached an Arab village on the banks of the big dyke that runs alongside the main road.

What I had estimated at half an hour's easy walk proved an hour's exhausting travail and although Sylvia did not complain her temper was by no means improved by the time we had crossed the last bridge and reached the cars which the two Arabs had brought to meet us.

My bright idea had ruined a pair of shoes for Sylvia, and both her stockings and her dress were in a shocking mess, so I felt very small indeed as I tumbled into her car, leaving the two guides to follow in Amin's taxi. She still said nothing but I could tell by the reckless way she drove me back to Cairo that she was livid with rage and that our hour of floundering round in the mud had cost me the last remnant of any prestige I had managed to earn for myself during the early part of our talk together.

It was half-past ten before we reached the Nile bridge. At the city end I pulled Sylvia up and waited for the other car to halt behind us. The great block of the Semiramis, with its fine outlook over the river, was only just on the other side of the road, but I felt that we could not possibly present ourselves there in our present condition; so I suggested to Sylvia that she had better go straight to her hotel and change before seeing the Belvilles, while I cleaned myself up as well as I could and joined them later.

Leaving her there I drove off with Amin to another part of the city where an acquaintance of his duly shaved me, cleaned up my suit and got some of the mud off my shoes. Meanwhile Amin secured a room for me in a small
pension
near by and, having told him to report to Harry at nine-thirty the following morning, I took another taxi back to the Semiramis.

I was by no means happy at the idea of entering Cairo's great luxury hotel, and felt I should have been wiser if I had got the Belvilles to come out and meet me somewhere, but none of the people in the ‘Hampshire' had seen me without a beard, and the police had no full description of me as I was at the moment.