Crime Short Story: Murder On The Nile

CRIME SHORT STORY BY ALISON CARTER

Lynette wanted to scout out the best options for the company’s new cruise…

The heat of the day was just beginning to become bearable when Lynette got to the hotel.

It was a grand place, all dark orange stone and angled palm trees, and Lynette could well believe that Agatha Christie had written a novel in its rooms.

“That was ‘The Sittaford Mystery’,” her boss had told her back in London before she’d left for Egypt.

Mr Bredon wanted Lynette to come back from Aswan with a solid plan for an inexpensive Nile cruise package, all tied up locally.

It would be added to the travel agency’s portfolio.

She was at the hotel to meet a guy who had presumably heard what she was doing in town.

He’d left a message at her B&B, asking to meet and offering himself as a guide.

He didn’t show up, which was frustrating because Lynette had limited time.

She waited nearly an hour and then left.

When he called the B&B later, she was inclined not to speak to him, but she would need a local or two once the tour was launched, so she took the call.

He was apologetic and Lynette was impressed by the quality of his English, but the call went downhill from there.

He began telling stories of pharaohs he claimed to be distantly related to, about his mystical understanding of the ancient culture of the Nile, and about dreams he’d had in which Nefertiti appeared, chatting to him about his heritage.

“Very interesting,” Lynette said. “Let me take your details and get back to you.”

She put down the receiver knowing she was unlikely to contact him.

Lynette wasn’t even convinced that he’d worked in tourism before.

The following morning, she took a ferry across the Nile to the west bank.

The heat was extraordinary and the tourist numbers low.

The new cruises wouldn’t be offered in high summer, but Mr Bredon had sent her out in August to get ahead of the curve, promising that temperatures calmed down there as the summer waned.

Lynette didn’t want to think about what Aswan might be like in July.

She was here to photograph the Aga Khan Mausoleum for a mock-up brochure.

She toiled slowly up the slope from the water towards the sandy plateau and grounds where the mausoleum sat.

It was a square building the size of a small manor house, windowless with a smooth, neat central dome and intricate crenellations around the top.

A beautiful semi-circular staircase fanned out from its grand entrance, which was above ground level.

The structure looked ancient, but Lynette knew that it wasn’t much more than 30 years old.

Tourists didn’t visit a lot – it was a long trip from the city and not on standard tourist itineraries – but Lynette was sure it would make a great feature of the new cruise.

She nipped inside to cool off before setting to work on exterior images.

She stood looking at the tomb of the Aga Khan, impressive in white Carrara marble and standing in the centre of the space.

As usual, a fresh rose lay on its lid, the bloom facing towards where the sun would later set.

When Lynette came out into the heat, she heard shouts from the opposite side of the building and went round to investigate.

There was a ring of people, some of them officers of the Egyptian civil police.

Between the figures she could see a dark form on the sand – a body.

She drew closer and knew right away that the man had fallen from the parapet of the mausoleum.

He was dead.

The police were already putting up a cordon and clearing the area.

Lynette hung about, hoping that the cordon might be removed quickly and she could take her photos, but she knew that was a vain hope.

Fifteen minutes later an Egyptian journalist arrived in a jeep and he followed the police about, wanting the story.

They were impatient with him – Lynette could see that, despite not speaking Arabic.

“Can you fill me in?” she asked him, hoping he spoke English.

“They’re closing the place to tourists, that’s all I know,” the journalist replied.

“For how long?”

The man laughed.

The rate these guys work at, I wouldn’t hold your breath for the end of this century.

A few more people had gathered.

Lynette recognised the owners of the only café within walking distance of the mausoleum.

They were a chatty couple and were eager to tell her about the mausoleum, as if reassuring a foreigner that violent death was rare.

Lynette knew most of the history already.

The third Aga Khan, although from Pakistan, had fallen in love with Aswan, and so had his fourth and last wife.

French by birth, Yvette had been born Yvonne Blanche Labrousse.

She had been crowned Miss France 1930 and was a florist before she’d met her husband.

She and the Aga Khan had loved each other very much, so the stories went.

He wanted to be buried at Aswan and, after his death in 1957, she had the mausoleum built out of pink limestone.

The Begum Om Habibeh (that was Yvette’s title) had only ever come to Egypt with her husband in the winter.

Now she lived in Paris, but came here often in winter.

It was noon by the time the café couple had told Lynette the whole thing and the heat was unremitting.

She wanted to leave, but still hoped to get some sort of information from the police about a timescale.

Eventually, one of them spoke to her in English.

“This is a crime scene,” he told her. “Until this crime is solved there is no possibility of opening the interior.”

Lynette thought of her folder of research and the hole that would open up without this stop on the cruise and stomped back towards the shoreline.

A thin, moustached man was standing watching the police, shading his face with a raised arm.

Lynette asked him if he had any information, but he said he didn’t.

Once again, Lynette was impressed by the locals’ command of English.

“I’m only the gardener,” he told her, and Lynette understood why he looked forlorn.

“The rose,” she said.

He looked momentarily puzzled.

“Yes, the rose.”

Lynette knew that the Begum laid a red rose on her husband’s tomb every day, and that when she was away from Aswan the gardener took on the task.

The gardener scuffed the sandy earth with his foot.

“I’ll just have to wait until I can start up with the rose again,” he added.

Lynette nodded.

“I’m sure the Begum will understand.”

“I usually get the boat back at sunset at this time of year,” the man told her, “but I will go home now. This is so sad.”

Lynette hung about for a while longer, taking photos for reasons she couldn’t really put her finger on.

Active police investigations usually only lasted a short time, but the tomb remained closed.

The police were obviously irritated by Lynette’s questions, even though she pointed out that she was potentially bringing valuable business to the area and needed the site opened.

They did tell her that it might have been a suicide and that they didn’t have resources to look into that.

Lynette asked for a photo of the victim, but they refused point blank.

She pondered what the motive might be for such a murder and annoyed a junior officer by following him to a coffee shop on the Al Kotpi road to ask.

To get rid of her, he told her that they weren’t even sure who the dead man was yet.

“But you’ve gone door to door, haven’t you?” Lynette asked. “Combed records?”

He reddened.

“We have limited resources,” he admitted. “The boss says it’s easier if he did himself in.”

Lynette went back to the mausoleum several times, always taking a boat.

It was possible to drive, though that was a very long way round, and she liked the ferries.

She chatted to anyone who spoke English and was hanging about, gawping.

If it was murder – and her instincts told her that this was a funny place for a suicide – then was the location important to the crime?

The site could simply have been chosen because it was quiet and away from city bustle.

It could also be a safe place to push someone off a roof and not be seen.

“Sand hides evidence,” one American woman declared, her eyes wide with morbid interest. “I just love a murder, don’t you? I’m from Atlantic City, so I know all about sand.”

She waved to a small, thin man standing some distance away beside a hire car.

“If I wanted to kill Fred, I’d pick a sandy place. Sand blows about, see, and hides evidence!”

Fred looked as though he wanted to be elsewhere.

Lynette’s enquiries told her that the mausoleum had a caretaker who came weekly, but that she was away for the month, and there was only the one gardener.

A few days passed and the mausoleum remained closed.

Lynette was beginning to think that she’d have to give up, but she dreaded telling Mr Bredon.

The selling point of the cruise was that it was a bit different.

She decided to ask around about the dead man; she could give anything she found out to the police.

An obvious starting point was the boats that plied their way across the Nile.

There were too many boatmen and too many boats for her to carry out a comprehensive survey, but she walked up and down.

Lots of them knew English because they dealt with tourists.

“I can’t remember any guys looking suicidal,” one of them said.

Lynette had managed to gather a group together and they all nodded in agreement.

“We get maybe twenty a day going to the mausoleum at this time of year.

“It’s been the usual this week – Americans and British people mad enough to come in summer, the ones who like the red rose and Miss France.

“We get the caretaker on Mondays – she lives over near the train station so she needs a boat.”

“And the gardener guy,” another said. “He’s a nice guy; he tips. I didn’t see him the night they found the body.”

“I’ve met him,” Lynette said. “He did come back over, but earlier, because of the incident.”

The boatman nodded.

“Maybe Mustafa carried him – Mustafa works the afternoons.”

He looked around at his colleagues.

“What’s the gardener’s name? He’s quiet, never talks about family or friends.”

Another man spoke.

“I noticed he’s been anxious. He told me he’s worried about site security.”

“What do you think he meant by that?” Lynette asked, but the boatman shrugged.

Later, Lynette met with a local official to hammer out mooring arrangements for the cruise ships.

The official noticed the mausoleum in the folder.

“Bad business,” she said. “Is it still a crime scene over there?”

“Barely, but the police won’t reopen,” Lynette replied. “It’s frustrating.”

She thought back to earlier that day, when she had been over to check.

She’d exchanged tetchy words with the junior officer on guard, the one from the coffee shop.

As they’d talked she had watched the gardener.

He’d been using a pickaxe on a hard patch of ground on the slope.

“That’s terrible ground for planting,” Lynette had remarked to the officer.

He hardly turned to look.

“I don’t know anything about gardening. We let him back in with his rose.”

“That’s good.”

Lynette moved close enough to the mausoleum entrance to see the red rose.

It was pointing the wrong way, halfway between east and north.

Looking back at the gardener, sweating under the sun, Lynette felt sorry for him. He had to be pretty stressed.

Now, the official in charge of moorings said she’d see what she could do and they parted company.

Lynette went down to the ferry stop to visit a bar that had a good breeze on its terrace.

One of the boatmen hailed her from the shore.

“I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.

He obviously wanted to get in with her because she might send regular business his way.

They sat and looked out over the water, and Lynette laid her bag and her new digital camera on the table.

The boatman had never seen such a camera and asked her to take his picture.

“You show the tourists a real Nile boatman!” he exclaimed.

Lynette snapped him as he grinned madly, and then he asked to take a look at the camera.

Lynette showed him how to view the pictures.

“This your boyfriend?” he asked, pointing to a snap of the mausoleum grounds.

“No,” Lynette replied, puzzled. “That’s your friend, the gardener.”

He shook his head firmly.

“No, that’s not him.”

Lynette’s mind began to work.

“Can you take me back over?” she asked.

The sun was setting when they docked.

Once again, the gardener Lynette had spoken to was digging and sweating, but the grounds were empty.

Lynette walked up to him, suddenly nervous because it struck her that they were alone.

She swallowed.

“The red rose usually faces west,” she said.

He looked up, his face flushed with sudden anger.

“I’m working.”

Now that she was paying attention, she thought she recognised his voice.

It was more difficult, when most men she met in Aswan had accented English, but she could hear the gritty tone to it.

“We spoke on the phone,” she reminded him, “a few days ago, before that man was killed.”

“They say it was suicide,” he said, his body defensive behind the spade he had propped against this knee.

“You didn’t come to our meeting at the hotel,” Lynette said. “I think that’s because you didn’t want me to see your face. You realised that I might see you here later.

“You wanted as few people to see you as possible, because you are not the gardener and you killed the man who was.”

He glared at her, calculating his next move, and she felt a stab of fear.

But it was too late now to stop and she wanted the truth.

“What was your motive?”

It must be connected somehow, she thought, to their failed meeting. He’d had something to sell to her.

He looked around, checking there was nobody listening, and a thin smile spread across his face.

“I am a true Egyptian; my family have been here for centuries. My father taught me about treasures buried on this sacred bank of the Nile. Our treasure.”

Lynette knew the mythology: Ancient Egyptians associated the west bank with the journey to the afterlife.

“My father was a great man, held back by other people. He was poor when he should have been rich, and he was searching this land when that woman bought it.”

“The Begum?”

He nodded.

“There are things here. Artefacts.”

“So you, and your dad before you, wanted to be the next Howard Carter. You thought you could find a pharaoh?” Lynette asked.

He spat on to the sand.

I am an Egyptian! This mausoleum stopped my father.

It was terribly unlikely that there were important things buried here.

Archaeology had turned up the treasures that were to be had, and in very different sites.

“So your solution was to kill the gardener,” Lynette went on, “who knew you were up to something and was worried about security.”

He backed away.

“It was a mistake to try to see you at the hotel.”

“You wanted to be able to tell visitors all about you, your father and your own importance, but without evidence of any such thing.”

The man was getting angrier, and he gripped the handle of the heavy spade.

Suddenly Lynette was aware of how much smaller than him she was.

As he spoke she watched him grow in confidence and try to take the upper hand.

He growled his words.

“I knew the gardener was a loner with no family, no friends. No loss, in fact.”

“Everyone is a loss,” Lynette retorted. “Especially if you murder them.”

He tossed his head.

“The owner, that French woman, won’t come back before November, and the caretaker is away.

“The place is quiet.” He smiled. “A body dropping on sand makes a soft sound, but the fall from up there is too far to survive. The man agreed to let me see the crenellations.”

“He was a nice man.”

“I took his job.” He laughed. “Unpaid. I wanted time to dig because I had a right.”