Cartaret collected his thoughts, and:
"At what time?" he asked.
"At about half past eleven."
"I was out then. I didn't return until after one. Why?"
"A certain Mrs Parradine had the next room. She was seen to go out at about eleven-thirty, and she hasn't come back. Her baggage contains the suit in which she arrived, toilet articles, and so on, and a lot of tissue paper and cord. The whole room is in a state of disorder."
"What do you suspect? Suicide?"
The manager glanced aside at the police officer.
"We don't know. I apologise again. Obviously, you can't help us as you weren't here."
They went out.
Cartaret had just come from the bath when the manager returned alone.
"I couldn't tell you while that damned policeman was standing by," he explained. "But this disappearance of the mysterious Mrs Parradine is probably linked up with something that happened out at Bulak last night."
"What happened there?"
"One of Aswami's girl friends drugged him and got clear away with a haul of his priceless rubies! I wasn't on duty when Mrs Parradine arrived — but I wonder. Aswami's a nasty bit of work, and my own sympathy is entirely with the lady, even if she left without settling her account! Knew you'd be curious, so dropped in to tell you."
For a long time after he had gone, Cartaret sat smoking and trying to find out where his sympathy lay. He recalled the horror which Abdul had whispered. He recalled Sirena's eyes when she had said, "You remember how handsome he was?.. He has seen a famous French specialist. There is hope, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money—"
These recollections settled the point.
But he changed his plans. He decided to leave Cairo that morning.
The Mark of Maat
"What you say is true enough," Tom Borrodale admitted. "Most professional Egyptologists are unimaginative. Meant to be, I guess. You see, they come across queer things, things which just have to be written off for the good of a man's health. There's the Haunted Tomb in the Valley of the Kings where the unwrapped mummy of a strangled girl was found; there's the empty room in the Pyramid of Meydum; and there's the Woman of the Great Pyramid."
He rested bronzed and hairy legs on one chair, leaning back in another — six feet of sunbaked stolidity arrayed in shorts and a khaki shirt. It was the in-between hour, so that Shep-heard's terrace showed as nearly deserted as I had seen it since my arrival in Cairo. There were inky shadows and dazzling high lights, and, save for rather more uniforms than usual, traffic in the Sharia Kamel was much like the traffic I remembered ten years before.
"You look fit, but a trifle warworn, Tom."
"Yes." He nodded and began to fill his pipe. "I joined the infantry, like a mug — and any foot slogger who follows Montgomery wants iron feet as much as iron nerves. Enjoying a spot of leave at the moment."
We fell silent, unticlass="underline" "You are not one of those, I recall, who believe that Ancient Egypt holds no more mysteries for modern man?" I said.
"Not by long odds." He threw a worn pouch on the table and took a sip from his glass. "Those I have mentioned, for instance. Then, since your time, a case cropped up which eclipsed, for a while, the Tutankhamen legends. Something quite in your way."
"What was it?"
"Oh> a classic example! If we hadn't been in the middle of a numberone war, the home newspapers would have sent special reporters out on the job. It happened to a man we'll call Lake. You don't know him, and nothing would be served by using his other name. The second man — a fellow in my own line; experienced excavator and well up in Arab matters — we'll call Thomson. Then — there was a girl."
And this is the story which Tom Borrodale told me about Lake, Thomson, a girl, and the mark of Maat.
Thomson, before the war, had been employed by the Department of Antiquities, and was recognised as a sound Egyptologist. His last job (for which he had been "lent" by the department) was an attempt to complete an excavation begun by Schroeder, the American. Schroeder had sunk a shaft, at great cost, by means of which he had hoped to gain access to the tomb of a queen who was also a priestess of Maat (Maat is the Ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, a somewhat mysterious deity of whose rites little is known).
Funds failing, or something of the kind, Schroeder went home and this shaft was never completed; but Thomson, who had followed the work witir interest, decided to try to influence new capital and to carry Schroeder's shaft through. This was where Lake came into the scheme of things.
Lake and Thomson had been up at Oxford together; but Lake, who had inherited a considerable property, had blossomed into a fashionable dilettante, whereas Thomson had had to work hard for his living. Lake, latterly (this was just before the outbreak of war), had been pottering about Egypt and had developed a keen interest in Thomson's studies. Perhaps seeing himself as another Carnarvon, he agreed to put up the necessary funds and, Thomson in charge, they resumed the work.
It seems that Schroeder's calculations were accurate enough, and in rather a shorter time than Thomson had anticipated, they found their way into the antechamber of the tomb. Further progress was held up by a massive portcullis which offered every promise of a first-class nuisance. However, there were some objects of interest in the anteroom, including a great part of the regalia of a royal high priestess. An amethyst scarab set in a heavy gold ring and inscribed with the sign of Maat, Thomson pronounced to be unique.
Much encouraged, they had just gone to work on the portcullis when war was declared — and once more Schroeder's shaft had to be abandoned. Lake, who already held a pilot's certificate, joined the R.A.F., and Thomson obtained an infantry commission. In due course, both drifted back to North Africa, and both became attached to the Eighth Army. It was during the lull before Montgomery's great advance that the girl stepped into the picture.
Moira (let's call her Moira) was an Irish-Australian and had come out as a nurse with a contingent from Melbourne. Her family had plenty of money, and she had been educated in England, and I gathered that she was by way of being a beauty.
Both Lake and Thomson met her socially in Cairo, and Thomson, who found her altogether too attractive for his peace of mind, seems to have resigned her to Lake, slightly the younger man, good-looking, and in every way more suitable; or so Thomson thought. "He didn't believe," as Tom Borrodale put it, "that mere brawn, a medium brain, and small prospects beyond five hundred a year could appeal to any sensible girl. Particularly, with a charming and wealthy man, who one day would inherit a baronetcy as competition."
Thomson was shifted first; and Moira saw him off. There were tears in her eyes, and he decided that she was sorry for him. Although he had tried hard to conceal his real sentiments, he gave her credit for knowing how he felt; he believed that women were like that. To Lake, on parting, he said simply, "Good luck, old man."
When the campaign really got going. Lake's squadron was right up in support. But the two men had seen little of each other up to the time that Thomson was sent over on a special job behind Rommel's lines. His intimate knowledge of Arabic and the Arabs was not wasted. Suitably dressed, he could pass for a member of any one of six or more orders without much risk of detection.
Attired in Senusi style, he was flown across by a roundabout route to be parachuted at a selected point; and the pilot allotted to him was Lake.
Well, they were unlucky. An unsuspected A. A. gun, hidden in a wadi, scored a beauty just as they were turning northward toward the coast. It developed into a race against leaking petrol and faltering engines — and they lost. Lake crash-landed in the middle of what Borrodale described as "God knows where."