"It could easily have been someone from outside," I said soothingly.
"No, it couldn't," she said. "There are three gates into the hotel grounds. Only one is ever left unlocked, the main one, and when it's open, there is a guard on duty every minute. Even that one is locked at night. That's why the guests are given keys to the gate when they check in, so they can let themselves in anytime. There are also regular patrols of the grounds from dusk until dawn, in case an intruder tries to scale the wall. I've asked the guards. The gates are all locked, and there has been no sign of anyone coming in from the street. So it has to be someone in the hotel. I have to tell you I believe in the honesty of my staff absolutely. That leaves her roommate, Mme. Windermere, I'm afraid."
"I'm not so sure," I said.
"We've never had any trouble before. This is a law-abiding country. Who else could it be?"
The question really was, was it one of us, and to my way of thinking, the answer was yes. Catherine had put the chain and earrings in her purse when we were leaving Frankfurt, so the staff wouldn't have seen it. Several of the rest of us did. I tried to think who had heard that conversation about Catherine's jewelry in the airport: Betty and Jimmy for sure, Ben and Ed, Marlene and Chastity. Emile hadn't joined us at that point, nor had Curtis, Aziza, and Rick.
However, Catherine had continued to wear the necklace right on to the plane, so the others might have seen it when we were all lining up to board. It was very obviously a good necklace. That was my problem with it in the first place. It just screamed "steal me." And Susie made a big thing about it at the cocktail party, so I couldn't even leave out the people who joined us there.
Given the possibility that all of them not only knew she had the chain, and also that she hadn't got around to putting it in the hotel safe, I had to look for motive and opportunity to narrow the field a little.
These people were all strangers to me. I'd met a couple of them at the shop before we left--Susie and Catherine and Marlene, to be specific--but none of the others. But if money was the issue, then surely at least a few members of the group could be eliminated. Susie seemed a little anxious about finances, but she was hardly alone in the world in that. Clifford Fielding, the group tycoon, didn't need the money. I could leave him and Nora off the list of suspects, I thought, unless, of course, they had tendencies to kleptomania I didn't know about.
By the same token, I'd have to eliminate Emile, too. For all his charm, Emile, the group diplomat, was a tycoon, too, or at least well on his way to being one again. Rick was a tycoon wannabe, and Curtis and Aziza were not exactly hurting, either. I was a little surprised by the people who signed up, in fact. I'd expected antiques and archaeology lovers, certainly, and this wasn't a budget tour, but neither was it a luxury junket, just--how had Clive described it?--upscale and charming. But somehow we'd attracted some real financial powerhouses.
So if motive wasn't immediately apparent to me, who had the opportunity to do this? I walked about the lower floor and looked up at the upstairs hallway. Because of the atrium-style design of the building, most of the guest-room doors were visible from downstairs. But not all of them, my own room and Catherine and Susie's being two that weren't. Our rooms were off small corridors at opposite ends of the building. Yes, you could see someone walking along the hall outside the rooms, but the thief could have ducked quickly into the corridor, and then into Catherine and Susie's room.
As I stood there, Susie hailed me from upstairs, then came bounding down to talk to me. "Catherine's asleep now," she whispered to me, as if her roommate could hear us from the floor above. "I've been sitting there thinking about which one of us could have done this," she went on, gesturing me to a seat in the lounge. "I know it wasn't me, and I don't think it was you, either, because you were here when Catherine and I came down to dinner, and you never left the whole time. So who was it, do you think?"
"I have no idea," I confessed.
"What might help would be figuring out who left the courtyard," she went on. "Aziza did, I know, and Curtis with her. Ben left, too, after Chastity doused him with wine. At my table, the only person who didn't actually leave the room was Chastity, and maybe her mother, although even she went to get a liqueur at some point, I think. Cliff and Emile headed off somewhere, although they came back at different times, so they weren't together the whole time," she said, barely stopping for breath. "Aziza left a second time with Betty: they went out to the garden to see the lights of the town. Rick went off for a while. I shouldn't say this, but I was happy to see him leave for a few minutes. My, that man is a bore. I don't know where he went, and I didn't ask. I was sure if I did, he'd tell me he'd phoned Japan to see how his stocks were doing, and I couldn't bear to hear it. The Lord strike me dead for saying it, but that's the truth. Didn't Rick say he went to get aspirin, or something, and that's when he saw Mohammed?"
"He said at first he'd gone up to call Montreal to see how his stock portfolio was doing, and he also said he went to get some aspirin. Did he go twice?" It felt a little strange having this conversation with the number one suspect, Susie having both some motive and all kinds of opportunity, given her room key--but if anyone had noticed what was going on, she had, and furthermore she was prepared to talk about it.
"Maybe," she said. "I'm not sure. But do you really think you can eliminate Chastity? She caused quite a stir with that wine, and nearly knocked me over with her chair. Maybe it was a diversionary tactic so her mother could dash upstairs and do the deed. I'm trying to recall whether Marlene was in the room at the time. Do you remember?"
"I don't," I said. If it had been a diversionary tactic, it had been very effective with me. I was so mesmerized by the pattern of the wine splatters on Ben's sweater, I didn't see anything else. Chastity had certainly done a job on the poor man. He'd been awfully good-humored about it. It was possible, of course, that the thief was Ben, taking advantage of the opportunity, but he'd have had to move rather fast to change his clothes and then rob another room.
"Somehow I don't think Chastity's move was deliberate," I said.
"I guess not. Did you notice how Nora managed to get out of Chastity's way, unlike slow old me? Nice reflexes that woman has."
"She jogs, apparently," I said. It was the most compelling argument I'd heard in some time for getting back to jogging: to avoid being knocked senseless by Chastity Sherwood's backpack. For a moment I even toyed with the idea of getting up early the next morning and going for a run. "I've got to get some sleep," I said dismissing the idea. "We are not going to solve anything tonight."
"When I think about it, I don't think we've eliminated anybody, have we, except maybe Chastity? What should we do?" she said.
"I think we should just carry on with the tour, but keep our eyes and ears open," I said.
So that is what we did.
"T HIS IS WHERE it all began," Briars said. We were standing on the summit of Byrsa Hill, with the city of Tunis around us, the water of the Gulf of Tunis behind, and the hills of Cap Bon across the gulf. "These are the very foundations of one of the most important cities of the ancient world, the great city of Carthage. Its history begins with a love story. A tragic one, perhaps, but a love story, nevertheless. It is the story of a woman called Elissa.
"At the time I am speaking of, the ninth century B.C.E., the whole of the Mediterranean," he said, waving his arms toward the sea behind him, "all of it, right to the Pillars of Hercules and beyond, was dominated by a merchant nation we have come to call the Phoenicians. They didn't call themselves that. In fact, we really don't know what name they went by: Canaanites, perhaps.