‘You said it didn’t exist, but it does. Makes your little tomb look like a doll’s house!’
Silence. He drained the last of the whisky and launched the bottle into the night, then stumbled around the outside of the building, banging on the shutters. When he reached the front again he gave a last hammer on the door – ‘A bloody doll’s house, Carter! Come with me and I’ll show you something really impressive!’ – before returning to his motorbike. He pulled on his goggles and slammed the kick-start.
‘He was just a boy, Carter!’ he yelled over the growl of the engine. ‘A silly little rich boy. A thirty-foot corridor and four poxy rooms. I’ve found miles . . . you wouldn’t believe it . . . miles!’
He waved a hand and drove off down the hill, missing the muffled shout that came from inside the house behind him: ‘Bugger off, Pin-Cushion, you damn drunken Jew boy!’
Back on the road he headed south, back the way he had come. He was tired now and drove slower, no longer singing. He made a brief stop at Deir el-Medina to see how Bruyère and the French had been getting on at the ancient workers’ village – such things always enthused more than tombs and pharaohs – and then at Medinet Habu. The temple looked spectacular in the moonlight, a magic silver city, not of this world.
A place of dreams
, he thought, standing inside the First Pylon, imagining the girl and all the things he would do with her. It made him laugh the way Carter and the others knew so little about him, thought he was one thing when in fact he was something entirely different. How shocked they would be to learn the truth!
‘I’ll show you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll show you all, you arrogant bastards!’
He let out a loud, barking laugh, then returned to his motorbike, and drove the short distance to his lodgings in Kom Lolah, relishing the prospect of his first proper night’s sleep in twelve weeks. Parking the Enfield in the dirt alley behind the lodgings, he hunched over to unstrap the pannier bags. As he did so, something came at him from his left. He started to turn, only for an arm to lock around his neck, yanking him backwards. Hands grasped him, strong hands, lots of them, at least three men, although in the darkness and confusion he couldn’t be sure.
‘What the . . .’
‘
Ya kalb!
’ hissed a voice. ‘We know what you’ve done to our sister. And now you’re going to pay.’
Something heavy slammed against the back of his head. He slumped, flailed, was hit again and everything went black. His attackers dragged him out of the alley, heaved him on to the back of a donkey cart and covered him with a rug.
‘How far?’ asked one.
‘A long way,’ replied another. ‘Let’s go.’
They climbed on to the cart, whipped up the donkey and rattled away into the night. Behind them a faint groaning sound issued from beneath the rug, all but lost in the clatter of the wooden wheels.
1972
On the final day of their honeymoon on the Nile, Douglas Bowers treated his bride Alexandra to a surprise she would never forget, although not entirely in the way Douglas intended.
For two weeks they had cruised from Aswan up to Luxor, visiting what felt to Alexandra like every temple, ruin and fly-blown heap of ancient mud-brick in between, with barely a moment for her to do what she really wanted, which was to lounge in the sun sipping lemonade and reading a good romantic novel.
Their four days in Luxor had proved particularly arduous, with Douglas insisting on dawn starts so they could appreciate the sites before the arrival of coach-loads of what he ruefully described as ‘hoi polloi’. Tutankhamun’s tomb had proved vaguely interesting, if only because Alexandra had actually heard of Tutankhamun, but everything else had been deathly – an endless succession of claustro phobic burial chambers and hieroglyph-covered walls that would have left her cold had it not been so suffocatingly hot. Although she would never have said as much, as the end of the honeymoon approached Alexandra couldn’t help but feel a twinge of relief that they would soon be on their way back to the monochrome normality of suburban south London.
But then, out of the blue, Douglas did something unexpected – something that reminded Alexandra what a kind, thoughtful person he was, and why she had married him in the first place.
It was their last morning. On Douglas’s instructions they rose even earlier than usual, before night had resolved itself into dawn, and crossed the Nile. On the west bank a waiting taxi ferried them to the car park in front of the Temple of Hatshepsut, where two days previously Douglas had spent an entire afternoon taking measurements with the retractable tape he always carried with him. Alexandra envisaged a repeat performance and her heart sank. Rather than going into the temple, however, her husband directed her on to a narrow path that wound into the hills behind the monument. Up and up they trudged, the sky turning an ever-paler shade of grey above them, the Nile Valley dropping ever further below. Eventually, after over an hour of climbing, by which point Alexandra was starting to think that watching her spouse measuring blocks of stone might not have been so bad after all, they scrambled up a last steep incline and on to the summit of the Qurn – the pyramid-shaped peak that dominated the southern end of the Valley of the Kings. A picnic hamper was waiting for them.
‘I had one of the bods from the hotel bring it up,’ explained Douglas, opening the hamper and producing a half-bottle of chilled champagne. ‘To be honest I’m surprised no one’s nicked it.’
He poured two glasses, removed a red rose from the basket and went down on one knee in front of her.
‘May your spirit live,’ he intoned. ‘May you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, beholding happiness.’
It was so wonderfully romantic, so wholly unlike Douglas, that she burst into tears.
‘Don’t worry about the cost, old girl,’ he chided. ‘I got the champagne duty-free. Unbelievably cheap.’
They sat on a rock, sipped their drinks and watched the sunrise over the desert mountains, everything blissfully silent and still, the Nile cultivation a hazy blur of green far beneath, like a tiny model world. Once they had eaten breakfast they had a bit of a kiss, then packed up the hamper, left it where it was – ‘Someone will come up and collect it,’ explained Douglas – and started along the ridge path that ran off the back of the peak.
‘According to that fellow in the hotel – you know the one, Rupert-whatever-his-name-was, pompous chap, big nostrils – if we stay on this path we can go right around the top of the plateau and come down near the entrance to the Valley of the Kings.’
Douglas waved his arm in a wide circle.
‘Should only take an hour or so, and if we get a hoof on we’ll easily be back in time for lunch.’
Alexandra had by now recovered from the climb, and although long walks over rugged terrain weren’t really her thing, she was – thanks in no small part to the champagne – feeling adventurous, and dutifully fell into step behind her husband. The path was narrow and rocky and difficult in places, but like the gentleman he was, Douglas helped her over the hard parts, and to her surprise she found herself having rather a good time.
A real desert adventure
, she thought.
Just wait till I tell Olivia and Flora!
Further and further they went, deeper and deeper into the hills, the Nile now lost behind them, the landscape almost lunar in its desolation – just rocks and dust and a pale white sky. An hour went by, ninety minutes, and although Douglas had brought extra food and water in a knapsack, after two hours walking and with no end in sight, Alexandra was starting to tire. Her feet hurt, the heat had become uncomfortable and worst of all she needed the toilet.
‘I’ll turn my back,’ offered Douglas when she alerted him to the situation.
‘I’m not weeing in the open air,’ she snapped, her mood not as good as it had been.
‘For goodness’ sake, it’s not as if anyone’s going to see you!’
‘I’m not weeing in the open air,’ she repeated. ‘I want some privacy.’
‘Well, either hold it in or go over there, behind that big rock. It’s the best there is, old girl.’
Desperate, she did as her husband suggested, stomping thirty metres away and round the back of a large boulder that erupted from the gravelly desert surface like a giant mushroom. The ground sloped away steeply here, down into a small, funnel-shaped dell, but there was just enough flat space directly behind the rock for her to pull up her dress and squat.
‘Don’t listen,’ she shouted.
There was a crunch of feet as Douglas moved further away, followed by the sound of whistling. Alexandra placed a hand against the boulder to support herself, and stared hard at the rock, trying to relax. The stone was yellow and dusty and scored with a curious matrix of scratch marks which after a moment she realized weren’t scratch marks at all, but rather the faded remains of what seemed to be some sort of hieroglyphic text. She waddled backwards a little to get a better view, underpants stretching around her ankles. There was what looked like a hare, and a squiggly line, and a pair of arms, and other symbols she recognized from all the numerous monuments she’d been dragged around over the last couple of weeks.
‘Darling,’ she called, shuffling back another few inches, both her embarrassment and the need to pee momentarily forgotten. ‘I think I’ve found—’
She got no further. Suddenly she lost her footing and was tumbling backwards down the sharp incline behind the rock, gravel and dust surging around her, her legs kicking frantically within their constrictive noose of knicker elastic. She hit the bottom of the slope, experienced a brief, curious sensation of crashing through a mass of twigs and branches, and then she was falling again, through open space this time, for what felt like an age, before she slammed into something soft and lost consciousness.
Up above, Douglas Bowers heard his bride’s screams and came charging round the boulder.
‘Oh my God!’ he cried, scrambling down the slope towards the gaping hole at the bottom. ‘Alexandra! Alexandra!’
A deep, rectangular shaft opened beneath his feet, cut vertically down into the white limestone, its walls smooth and neatly dressed, clearly man-made. At the bottom, almost twenty feet away, barely visible through the mist of dust with which the flue was choked, lay a tangled mass of twigs and branches that must once have plugged the shaft’s opening. Of his wife he could see nothing. Only as the dust started to settle did he catch a shadowy glimpse of an arm, and then a shoe, and then the floral print of his wife’s dress.
‘Alexandra! Oh please, can you hear me! Alexandra!’
There was a long and terrible silence, the worst silence Douglas had ever known, and then a faint groan.
‘Oh thank God! My darling! Can you breathe? Are you in pain?’
More groans.
‘It’s OK.’ A groggy voice drifted up from below. ‘I’m OK.’
‘Don’t move! I’ll get help.’
‘No, wait, let me . . .’
There was movement and a crack of twigs.
‘There’s some sort of . . . door.’
‘What?’
‘Down here at the bottom. It’s like a . . .’
The cracking sound intensified.
‘You’re concussed, Alexandra. Just stay still. We’ll have you out of there in no time!’
‘I can see a little room. There’s someone sitting . . .’
‘Please, darling, you’ve hit your head, you’re hallucinating.’
If she was, it was clearly very real to her because at that moment Alexandra Bowers started screaming hysterically, and nothing her husband could say or do would calm her down again.
‘Oh God, get me out! Get me away from him! Please, get me away from him before he hurts me! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!’
T
HE PRESENT
No one could say for sure where the causal chain that culminated in the collision actually started.
That the Nile barge was out of its lane was beyond question. Likewise the rowing skiff should never have been on the river, not after dark and with a leak in the hull, and certainly not with only one serviceable oar.
Such were the most obvious lineaments of the accident. Neither individually nor together, however, could they be said to have been the absolute cause. So many other random elements were required to transform a potentially dangerous situation into a tragic one.
Had a police motor launch not swung by and ordered the skiff back to shore, it might never have ended up directly in the barge’s path. Had the barge’s forward lookout not just bought a new radio, he would not have been absorbed in the Cairo football derby and might have raised the alarm sooner. Had the tanker bringing diesel to refuel the barge at the start of its journey not been delayed, it would have cast off on schedule and already been far to the north by the time the skiff and its occupants splashed out on to the water.
There were so many different links, the chain was so confused and tangled and multi-stranded, that in the final analysis it was impossible to isolate any single unique cause, nor to lay any firm and absolute blame.
Only two things could be said for certain.
First, that around 9.15 p.m. on a clear, cloudless night a terrible accident occurred on the Nile about a kilometre south of Luxor, witnessed by the crew of the police motor launch and an Egyptian family enjoying a moonlight picnic on the river’s eastern shore.
Second, that in the aftermath of that accident the lives of those affected would never, ever be the same again.
PART 1
J
ERUSALEM, NINE MONTHS LATER
It’s dark in here, like the inside of a cave, which is good. It means she can’t see me. Not properly. I am just a shadowy outline to her. As she is to me.
When I followed her in through the door she turned and looked straight at me. For a moment I thought she might know who I was, even in the gloom, even with the hood pulled down low over my face. Her expression was not one of recognition. More of expectation. Of hope. She turned away almost immediately and took no more notice of me. A late evening worshipper, that’s probably what she thinks.
Now I am watching her. There are windows set high in the walls and up in the dome, but they’re dirty and anyway it’s almost dark outside. What little light there is comes from one of the brass lamps hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the cathedral. Even that does little more than soften the murk in the immediate vicinity. She is standing almost directly beneath the lamp, in front of the carved wooden screen that separates the altar area from the rest of the church. I’m near the doorway, on one of the cushioned benches that run around the walls. Outside the rain is hissing on the courtyard flagstones. The weather isn’t what I expected, but it’s useful. It means I can keep myself wrapped up. I don’t want my face to be seen. Not by her, not by anybody.
The drape covering the doorway suddenly lifts and thuds. She looks round, thinking someone has come in. Realizing it is just the wind, she turns forward, towards the icon-covered shrine behind the altar. Her travel bag sits on the carpet at her feet. The bag is a problem. Or rather the journey the bag implies is a problem. It limits my timeframe. She seems to be waiting for someone, and that’s a problem too. One I can handle. Two is more complicated. I might have to improvise. I might have to do it sooner than planned.
She wanders over to one of the four giant pillars supporting the dome. A painting is hanging from the pillar, a huge painting inside a heavy gilt frame. I can’t see what the picture is. I don’t care what the picture is. I’m staring at her and thinking. Calculating. Should I do it sooner than planned? I can smell incense.
She looks at the painting, then moves back to the altar-screen and lifts her arm, examining her watch. I can feel the Glock in the pocket of my coat, but I worry that even with the rain the noise will be heard, will bring people running. Better to do it the other way.
How
isn’t the issue.
When
is the issue. I’m supposed to find out what she knows, but with the bag and the possibility of her meeting someone . . .
She wanders off again. There are doors in the cathedral’s side-wall, opening into what I think are small chapels, although it’s too dark to be certain. She looks into each in turn, moving back towards me. Outside the nearest chapel an area of the carpeted floor is fenced off with a low wooden screen. She sits down on a bench inside the screen, barely visible. I grasp the wire, working everything through in my head, weighing the options. If only I wasn’t supposed to interrogate her.
Now she’s up again and coming towards me. I dip my head as if in prayer, keeping my face well hidden, staring down at my gloved hands. She walks right past, circling around the tiled walls back to the altar where she takes another look at her watch. Should I just keep following, see where she’s going? Or do it now, while we’re alone, while I’ve got the chance? I can’t make the decision. Another few minutes pass. Then she picks up the travel bag, turns and heads for the door. As she comes level with me she stops.
‘
Shalom
.’
I keep my eyes on the floor.
‘
Ata medaber Ivrit?
’
I don’t say anything. I don’t want her to hear my voice. I feel tense suddenly.
‘Do you speak English?’
I’m still looking at the floor. Very tense.
‘Are you Armenian? I don’t want to disturb you, but I’m looking for—’
I make the decision. Coming to my feet, I hit her hard underneath the jaw with the base of my palm. She staggers backwards. Even in the dark I can see blood bubbling from her mouth, a lot of blood, which makes me think the blow might have caused her to bite off the end of her tongue. It’s a momentary thought. Almost immediately I am behind her and the garrotte is looped around her neck. I cross my wrists and yank hard on the toggles at each end of the wire, appreciating the grip they give me, the force I am able to exert on her windpipe. She is way bigger than me, but I have all the advantage. I kick away her legs and pull as hard as I can, arching my head back and holding her as she bucks and gurgles and claws at the wire. It lasts for less than thirty seconds, and then she goes limp. I keep pulling, making sure, absorbed in my work, not even thinking about the possibility of someone coming in and finding us, the wire biting deep into the flesh of her neck. Only when I am absolutely certain do I ease off and lower her to the floor. I feel elated.
I pause a moment to get my breath – I am breathing hard – then roll the wire into a neat loop, return it to my pocket and take a look through the door-drape into the courtyard. It is rain-swept and deserted. I allow the drape to drop, take out my pocket torch and play it across the carpet around the body. There are a few barely noticeable speckles, but most of the blood from her mouth seems to have been absorbed by her raincoat and jumper, which is good. I squeeze the sides of her jaw, opening the mouth. Although she has bitten deep into her tongue, it is still in one piece, which is also good. I feel in her pocket, find a handkerchief and stuff it in to prevent more mess. Then I shine the torch around the cathedral. I need to buy myself some time, can’t have her being found just yet. I know where she lives and will go there afterwards, but for the moment I require somewhere secret. I dislike improvising, but hopefully it should all turn out OK.
* * *
Detective Arieh Ben-Roi of the Jerusalem Police narrowed his eyes and gazed into the murk, watching intently as the body was outlined to him. It seemed to be curled into a ball, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure exactly what was what. Only slowly did the form become clear – head, torso, arms, legs. He shook his head, barely able to believe what he was looking at. Then he smiled and squeezed Sarah’s hand.
‘He’s beautiful.’
‘We don’t know it is a “he” yet.’
‘She’s beautiful too.’
He craned forward, staring at the grainy image on the ultrasound screen. It was Sarah’s third scan – their third scan – and even at twenty-four weeks he was still struggling to get to grips with the precise configuration of the baby (although he hadn’t repeated his howler of the twelve-week scan when he had pointed out what he proudly assumed was an extremely large penis only to be told it was actually the baby’s thigh bone).
‘Is everything OK?’ he asked the sonographer. ‘Everything where it should be?’
‘It all looks fine,’ the girl assured him, sliding the scanner back and forth over the jellied parabola of Sarah’s tummy. ‘I just need Baby to turn so I can measure the spine.’
She squirted out more jelly and drove the scanner in just below the belly button. The image on the screen bulged and blurred as she struggled to get the angle she needed.
‘Baby’s being a bit stubborn today.’
‘Wonder where he gets that from,’ said Sarah.
‘Or she,’ put in Ben-Roi.
The operator continued probing, holding the scanner with one hand while with the other she manipulated the control pad beneath the screen, isolating still images of different parts of the foetus, taking readings and measurements.
‘Heartbeat’s good,’ she said. ‘Uterine blood flow’s fine, the limbs are all within normal developmental—’
A blare of music interrupted her. Loud, electronic. ‘Hava Nagila’.
‘
Nu be’emet
, Arieh!’ groaned Sarah. ‘I told you to turn it off.’
Ben-Roi gave an apologetic shrug. Popping open a pouch on his belt, he pulled out his Nokia cell phone.
‘He can never turn it off,’ she sighed, addressing the sonographer, seeking sisterly support. ‘Not even for his child’s scan. Always it’s on, night and day.’
‘I’m a policeman, for God’s sake.’
‘You’re a father, for God’s sake!’
‘Fine, I won’t answer it. They can leave a message.’
Ben-Roi dangled the phone in his hand and allowed it to ring, making a show of leaning forward and staring at the screen. Sarah grunted. She’d seen it all before.
‘Watch,’ she whispered to the sonographer.
For five seconds Ben-Roi sat there, apparently absorbed in the ultrasound image. As the strains of ‘Hava Nagila’ continued to blast out, tinny and insistent, he started to tap his foot, then jiggle his arm, then shift around in his seat as if itching. Eventually, unable to stop himself, he glanced down at the phone, checking the incoming number. He was on his feet immediately.
‘I’ve got to get this. It’s the station.’
He moved across to the corner of the room and brought the phone up to his ear, accepting the call. Sarah rolled her eyes.
‘Ten seconds.’ She sighed. ‘I’m amazed he lasted that long. It’s only his baby, after all.’
The girl gave her a reassuring pat on the arm and resumed her examination. On the far side of the room Ben-Roi listened and talked, keeping his voice low. After a few moments he ended the call and slipped the Nokia back into its belt-holder.
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, I have to go. Something’s come up.’
‘What’s come up? Tell me, Arieh. What’s so important that it can’t wait five minutes till we’ve finished the scan?’
‘Just something.’
‘What? I want to know.’
Ben-Roi was pulling on his jacket.
‘I’m not going to have an argument, Sarah. Not with you . . .’
He nodded towards her bare belly, the skin gleaming and slippery with ultrasound jelly, auburn wisps of pubic hair clearly visible within the opened V of her jeans front. The gesture seemed to rile her further.
‘I appreciate your consideration,’ she snapped, ‘but I’m more than happy to argue like this. Now please enlighten me, what’s so important that it takes precedence over the health of your baby?’
‘Bubu’s fine, she just said so.’
Ben-Roi flicked a hand towards the ultrasound operator, who was staring hard at the screen, trying to keep out of it.
‘Thirty minutes, Arieh. That’s all I ask of you. That for thirty minutes you forget about the force and give us your undivided attention. Is that too much?’
Ben-Roi could feel his temper rising, not least because he knew he was in the wrong. He held up hands, palms out, as much to tell himself to calm down as Sarah.
‘I’m not going to argue,’ he repeated. ‘Something’s come up and I’m needed. That’s the end of it. I’ll call you.’
He bent and kissed her head, threw a last look at the screen and crossed to the door. As he went out into the corridor he heard Sarah’s voice behind him.
‘He can’t let go. It’s why I had to end it. Even for thirty minutes. He just can’t let go.’
He listened as the sonographer offered words of comfort, then pulled the door to.
Nothing in his life had ever brought him quite the degree of happiness he felt at the prospect of being a father. Nor, he reflected as he walked away, quite the degree of guilt.
Hadassah Hospital sat near the top of Mount Scopus, and the antenatal unit was in a suite near the top of the hospital. As he waited for the lift to take him down to the ground floor, Ben-Roi gazed out of a window, looking north across the Judaean Hills. In the distance he could just make out the drably uniform housing of the settlement suburbs of Pisgat Amir and Pisgat Ze’ev; closer were the equally drab, if more jumbled Palestinian tenements of Anata and the Shu’fat refugee camp. It was a forlorn landscape at the best of times: ugly swathes of housing interspersed with equally ugly swathes of hillside, rocky and rubbish strewn. Today it looked positively bleak, what with the curtains of rain drifting down from a leaden sky.
He glanced back at the lift, then out again, tracing the line of the Wall as it curled around Shu’fat and Anata, cutting them off from the rest of East Jerusalem. It was a subject that was guaranteed to get Sarah ranting, even more than his police work. ‘An obscenity,’ she called it. ‘A shame on our nation. We might as well make them all wear yellow stars.’
Ben-Roi was inclined to agree, although not in such in flammatory terms. The Wall had reduced the number of bombings, no question, but at what cost? He knew a Palestinian garage owner, a mild-mannered man up in Ar-Ram. Every morning for twenty years he had walked the fifty metres from his house across the road to his garage, and every evening he had walked the fifty metres back again. Then the Wall had been built and suddenly there were six metres of vertical concrete separating him from his place of work. Now to get to his pumps he had to go round and through the Kalandia checkpoint, turning a thirty-second journey into a two-hour one. It was a story that was repeated the length of the barrier – farmers cut off from their fields, children from their schools, families divided. Go for the terrorists by all means, smash the bastards, but to punish a whole population? How much more anger did that generate? How much more hatred? And who was on the front line dealing with all that anger and hatred? Schmucks like him.
‘Welcome to the promised land,’ he muttered, turning as lift doors pinged open behind him.
Down in the car park he got into his white Toyota Corolla and drove out and down on to Hebrew University Road and then Derekh Ha-Shalom, back towards the Old City. The morning traffic was light and he reached the Jaffa Gate in ten minutes. Once through the gate, however, he found himself locked in a vice of stationary traffic. The municipality were upgrading the road system around the Citadel, reducing two lanes to one, clogging Omar Ibn al-Khattab Square and the top end of David Street. They’d already been at it for eighteen months and by all accounts had at least another year to go. Normally the traffic managed to get through, albeit at a crawl. Today a lorry was stuck trying to reverse out of Greek Catholic Patriarchate Street and no one was going anywhere.
‘
Chara
,’ muttered Ben-Roi. ‘Shit.’