“Now what do we do?” Van Alt asked. “We’ve got a confessed murderer on the tour, and her accomplice.”
The Cheops moved upriver, the palm-fringed boulevard, Hassan, and the waiting carriages six hours behind. The river banks were thin strips of green behind which the immense and pitiless desert waited. The tour had halted briefly in mid-morning to inspect a lonely ruin, with the Cheops uneasily nosed against the sandy bank below the tawny temple columns that waited for the desert to cover them once more.
“ ‘It’s the duty of the tour director to see that all tour members who depart on side trips return from them,’ ” Rogers said. “If that isn’t a quote from the Tour Director’s Guide, it ought to be. When we stopped two hours ago at the temple ruins, did everybody get back on the boat?”
“I didn’t check. They’d better have. There’s nothing here but river and desert.”
“Mrs. Murray — Ruth Strong — and Thomas Trewin didn’t,” Rogers said.
“What do you mean?” said Van Alt in alarm. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve got to get to the ship’s radio!”
“Wait. When we visited the temple ruins at the last stop, I was the last to leave and come down to the boat. The place seemed empty and I was about to start down the bank when I saw Mrs. Murray and Trewin walking away from the temple and the river. They were heading east, into the desert. I called to them and started after them. They indicated I should go back to the boat and kept walking.”
“Heading into the desert!” Van Alt exclaimed. “But they won’t last—”
“Probably not. But survival wasn’t their intention. What was their alternative? You would have turned them in when we got back downriver. The law is the law whether it’s one’s own country or another’s. They were sentencing themselves.”
Van Alt thought for a long time. His face cleared and he nodded.
“This tour,” he said. “A man murdered. The two people involved in it turn up missing. Yet everything is in order, nothing more needs to be done, and—” his voice rose as if in a bright and happy conclusion suddenly arrived at “—none of it can be blamed on me. I am still the best tour director in Egypt.”
Rogers was silent. We must not break another man’s ego bowl, he thought.