The Cairo Brief Read online

  THE CAIRO BRIEF

  “Poppy Denby is on top form solving the mystery surrounding the ancient Egyptian mask of Queen Nefertiti. Highly recommended!”

  Dolores Gordon-Smith, author of the Jack Haldean murder mysteries

  “Intrepid Poppy Denby visits a country estate not unlike Downton Abbey in this caper. It’s great fun following Fiona’s crew of early twentieth-century reporters as they seek scoops and solve murders on the side.”

  Deb Richardson-Moore, author of The Cantaloupe Thief, The Cover Story and Death of a Jester

  “Thoroughly enjoyable mystery. Murders, sinister figures, a cursed Egyptian mask… and a seance! All the ingredients for another superlative Poppy Denby investigation.”

  A. J. Wright, award-winning author of the Lancashire Detective series

  “Fiona Veitch Smith, where have you been all my life? Poppy Denby is delightful, the plot rocks, and the 1920s era is perfectly evoked. British mystery fans, you want to read this. You really,really do.”

  Cassandra Chan, author of the Bethancourt and Gibbons mysteries

  Text copyright © 2018 Fiona Veitch Smith

  This edition copyright © 2018 Lion Hudson IP Limited

  The right of Fiona Veitch Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by

  Lion Hudson Limited

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Business Park

  Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com

  ISBN 978 1 78264 249 7

  e-ISBN 978 1 78264 250 3

  First edition 2018

  Cover image: © Laurence Whiteley

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  For my granddad, Horace Hawkins,

  who first gave me music,

  and

  my beautiful Ruby Tuesday, faithful friend and

  furry companion during many writing hours.

  I’ll miss you curled up at my feet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s hard to believe the flapulous Poppy Denby is about to embark upon her fourth adventure in so many years. That girl has a far more exciting life than her author, who spends most of her time in slippers. However, I do occasionally get out and have a chance to put on some glad rags. Most recently that’s been for the Newcastle Noir Crime Festival. I had a fantastic time meeting readers, listening to other authors, and having a chance to introduce Poppy and her friends to a whole new audience.

  But it’s the readers that have been with me and Poppy from the beginning whom I would like to thank now. I can’t tell you how heartening it is to receive emails from readers desperate to know when the next Poppy Denby will be out. To know that the stories I imagine as I’m lying in bed, or walking the dog, or riding on the bus – and then type up in my slippers – actually make a difference in people’s lives, is humbling.

  I would also like to thank all the kind people I meet – in person, or virtually – during the course of my research. Firstly, to my Facebook friends who are a font of trivial but useful information: ta very muchly. Then, to the experts I’ve plagued at various museums and institutions. I would particularly like to thank the London Transport Museum who were able to tell me exactly what bus Poppy would have got, from where to where, on her trips around London.

  My appreciation also goes to the very kind guide at the British Museum who helped me one day when I swooned – more accurately it was shaking, sweating, and needing (very quickly) to find the nearest toilet. I didn’t get the lady’s name, but she was very supportive. Fortunately, that was the only bad experience I’ve ever had at the British Museum. In doing research for this book I have spent many an hour wandering through its halls, pretending I’m Poppy, and imagining what it would have been like back in 1921.

  Thanks as always goes to my indefatigable editor Jessica Tinker, who has simultaneously trained for and run a triathlon(!) while preparing for her upcoming nuptials. I am delighted to hear that Poppy has inspired her to wear a 1920s themed gown. I wish Jess and Mr Jess a glorious wedded life. My thanks too to the ever-supportive and eagle-eyed Julie Frederick, as well as the rest of the team at Lion Hudson. In addition, I would like to thank Blackwell’s Bookshop in Newcastle upon Tyne for hosting the last two Poppy Denby launches and look forward to our next shindig.

  Finally, I would like to toss some bouquets towards my wonderful family. My husband Rod and daughter Megan are my rocks. They put up with so much from me while my mind is wrapped up in my writing. I love you both with all my heart. Thank you too to my dad Dougie and cousin Shirley who both, in their own ways, encourage me to keep on doing what I’m doing. In the words of Maisie the flapper from The Boyfriend, “I love you all!”

  CHARACTER LIST

  FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

  Poppy Denby – arts and entertainment editor for The Daily Globe. Our heroine.

  Rollo Rolandson – senior editor and owner of The Daily Globe.

  Daniel Rokeby – photographer for The Daily Globe. Poppy’s beau. Has sister, Maggie, and two children, Arthur and Amy.

  Ike Garfield – senior journalist at The Daily Globe. Has wife, Doreen.

  Ivan Molanov – archivist at The Daily Globe.

  Delilah Marconi – actress and socialite. Poppy’s best friend.

  Yasmin Reece-Lansdale – barrister and former solicitor. Legal adviser to delegation from Cairo Museum. Rollo Rolandson’s on-off sweetheart.

  Marjorie Reynolds – MP and Minister to the Home Office. Has son, Oscar, who owns Oscar’s Jazz Club.

  Dot Denby – actress and former suffragette. Poppy’s aunt.

  Grace Wilson – bookkeeper and former suffragette. Dot Denby’s companion.

  *

  Sir James Maddox – adventurer, antiquities collector, and amateur archaeologist. Baronet of Winterton Hall.

  Lady Ursula – wife of Sir James.

  Fox Flinton – actor and cousin of Lady Ursula.

  Grimes – butler at Winterton Hall.

  Wallace – footman at Winterton Hall.

  Booker and son – the gamekeeper and his son.

  Lionel Saunders – reporter, The London Courier.

  Harry Gibson – photographer, The London Courier.

  Dr Giles Mortimer – Head Curator, Department of Egyptian & Assyrian Antiquities, the British Museum.

  Dr Faizal Osman – Director, Egyptian Antiquities Service, Cairo Museum. Brother of Yasmin Reece-Lansdale.

  Kamela El Farouk – assistant to the Director, Egyptian Antiquities Service, Cairo Museum.

  Herr Dr Heinrich Stein – Director of Antiquities, Museum of Berlin.

  Herr Dr Rudolf Weiner – assistant to the Director of Antiquities, Museum of Berlin.

  Dr Jonathan Davies – Director of Antiquities, Metropolitan Museum of New York.

  Jennifer Philpott – assistant to Director of Antiquities, Metropolitan Museum of New York.

  Albert Carnaby – auctioneer for Carnaby’s Auction House.

  Madame Minette / Minifred Hughes – spiritualist medium.

  Walter Jensford – retired journalist for The Times.

  Freddie Waltaub – former assistant to Dr Ludwig Borschardt at El-Amarna archaeological dig.

  DCI Jasper Martin – chief detective for the murder squad of the Metropolitan Police.

  Sergeant Barnes – desk sergeant at New Scotland Yard.

  Constable Jone
s – police constable at Henley-on-Thames.

  HISTORICAL CHARACTERS

  SirArthur Conan Doyle – author, physician, and metaphysicist.

  Lady Jean Conan Doyle – second wife of Arthur Conan Doyle, spiritualist medium.

  Emmeline Pankhurst – founder of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union. In this book she is a friend of Dot Denby, Grace Wilson, and Marjorie Reynolds.

  Howard Carter – archaeologist, Egyptologist, and (in this book) special adviser to the British Museum. In February 1922, three months after the fictional events of this book, Howard Carter discovers the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun, grandson of Nefertiti.

  Dr Ludwig Borchardt – archaeologist and Egyptologist. In 1912 he discovered the famous bust of Nefertiti at El-Amarna. In this book he also discovers the (fictional) death mask of Nefertiti in 1914.

  *

  Nefertiti – wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten who ruled Egypt from 1353 to 1336 bc. Together they founded the city of Akhetaten (Horizon of Aten) whose ruins are at modern-day El-Amarna. They were considered heretics because they abandoned the pantheon of old gods and declared only one god was to be worshipped – the sun, Aten, who created the world. Nefertiti and Akhenaten had six daughters, one of whom he also married, and with whom he incestuously fathered Tutankhamun. After Akhenaten died it is believed Nefertiti may have ruled as pharaoh queen, before abandoning the city and returning the capital to Thebes, where Tutankhamun became king and returned Egypt to the old religion. Akhenaten was buried in El-Amarna. Nefertiti’s body has never been found.

  OZYMANDIAS

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains: round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

  CHAPTER 1

  10 APRIL 1914, EL-AMARNA, EGYPT

  Two brown-cloaked figures picked their way through the half-filled trenches and incomplete excavations of the ancient city. Without its centuries-old shroud of desert sand, Akhetaten lay shivering and exposed in the shameful moonlight, filtering down from the carved cliffs to the east. From the cliff face, hacked and hewn, the likenesses of the heretic pharaohs Akhenaten and Nefertiti stood sentinel over the valley where, three and a half thousand years before, they had built a city to worship Aten, the golden sun.

  But tonight it was Iah, the silver moon, that ruled the shadowlands below, where the city of the dead was being reclaimed by the living. To the west of what the foreigners called “The Dig”, the Nile snaked through fields and farms, an artery of life to the villages dotted along the plain.

  The cloaked, trespassing figures were a twin boy and girl of around seventeen who lived in one of the nearby villages: Et-Till Beni Amra. At least they used to. Now they were at boarding school in Cairo, far, far to the north, and only came home during the holidays. Their parents were the only people in the village able to afford to send their children away to school, an enormous expense and – so the villagers whispered as they tilled their crops – a wasteful one, particularly on the girl. But the twins’ illicit family business – secretly passed down from generation to generation – had been doing well in recent times, thanks to the Europeans swarming over the carcass of Akhenaten like pale flies. The children with whom the twins now shared dormitories in Cairo talked behind their backs and called them graverobbers. But their father preferred the title “antiquities dealer” and now, since he had been so well paid by the German professor, his children were able to write his profession in German, English, and French.

  The girl had been reluctant to come on the moonlit adventure. It had been fun to dig around in the ruins when they were children, but now she understood the consequences of being found with reclaimed artefacts. She’d heard stories of locals being beaten and imprisoned for theft. The Egyptian Antiquities Service issued licences to excavators on a seasonal basis. For the last seven years the licence had gone to Professor Ludwig Borchardt and his team. No one else was allowed to dig there – no rival European archaeologists and most definitely not a pair of young Mohammedans. Never mind that the girl’s family had been digging and selling the fruit of their labour for a hundred years before Borchardt came. Her father had been hired by the German as a consultant and had sworn to stop his own black-market business in return for a substantial salary. But her brother refused to adhere to the agreement. “It’s our people’s heritage,” he had argued, “like the crops of the field and the fish of the Nile.”

  So, on this weekend which the Christians called Easter, when her father was in Cairo with his German employer, her brother had coaxed her to join him in a little subsistence looting. “For old time’s sake,” he had grinned. Reluctantly, she agreed. After she helped her mother wash up and read her younger siblings a bedtime story, she donned her cloak, preparing to join her brother for an evening walk.

  The mother assessed her twin children. The boy looked as cock-sure as always. But the girl… there was something bothering her. “You don’t have to go,” the woman said to her daughter. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “I – well – I –”

  Her brother interrupted before she could finish, putting his arm around her and ushering her to the door. “Don’t worry, mother, I’ll look after her. She’s just a bit out of practice, aren’t you?”

  The girl couldn’t deny this. She nodded half-heartedly.

  “Hmmm,” said their mother, wiping her hands dry on her apron. “If I didn’t know the Europeans were away I might be more worried.”

  “Worried about what?” asked her son, as he too pulled on his cloak. “We are just going for an evening stroll. And if we happen to walk past the old city… well…” he grinned and kissed his mother on her forehead.

  “Watch out for Mohammed and his dog,” said the mother. “He’s usually asleep on the job, and he owes your father half a dozen favours, but you never know...”

  “We will,” said her son as he and his sister picked up their sacks – containing ropes and tools – and headed out into the night.

  Half an hour later the twins were at their preselected destination: the remains of an ancient workshop that had belonged to a man called Thutmose, the personal sculptor of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Two years ago the German team, guided by the twins’ father, had unearthed the ruins of the sprawling facility and found a bust of the beautiful queen, with only one eye. The sculpture had now been sent to Berlin. But it wasn’t the only work of art retrieved. There were dozens of half-finished statues and bits of broken limbs in a series of storerooms and trash piles. And – so the twins knew – a secret underground chamber where the sculptor had kept his most precious work. Their father had declined, so far, to tell his new employers about the chamber. But rumour of its existence had been passed down in the family from generation to generation.

  “I still don’t understand why Papa hasn’t told the Germans about it yet,” said the girl.

  “Perhaps they haven’t paid him enough,” observed the boy. He struck a match and lit a small hurricane lantern he’d taken from his sack, then ranged the lamp in a wide arc over the trenches and roped-off squares of earth. “But it’s only a matter of time until someone finds it.”

  “And you think you know where it is?” asked the girl.

  The boy nodded. “And so do you. Do you remember that rh
yme Grandpa used to sing?”

  The girl’s face lit up in the light of the lamp. She smiled, remembering fondly the old man with skin like dried parchment. “One palm, two palm, between the trees, there’s Old Tut’s treasure, so please don’t sneeze!” She giggled, just like she used to when she was a child.

  The boy grinned. “The thing is, I don’t think it was just a rhyme.” He pointed to a small copse of palm trees about thirty paces west of the perimeter of the workshop dig. A pair of trees were set slightly apart from the rest. “What do you think?”

  The girl’s almond-shaped eyes opened wide. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

  The boy shrugged and walked towards the trees. “Worth a dig, though, don’t you think?”

  The girl scanned the horizon, looking for any sign of the old watchman and his dog. It was all clear. She sighed, shifted her sack from one shoulder to another, and followed her brother. “Can’t do any harm, I suppose...”

  “Hey! Looks like someone’s already been here,” called the brother. The girl broke into a run and joined her sibling under the palms. He ranged his lantern over the area to reveal a hole in the ground, which had previously been hidden by rock and scree. The siblings both knew that this is how the entrance to Thutmose’s workshop had been found: under a pile of rubble. But around this entrance were footprints in the sand – human and animal. The girl got down on her knees and peered into the hole, gesturing for her brother to shed light on it. He did and the girl could make out a steep tunnel, wide enough for a medium-sized man to squeeze into, angled down into the darkness. “Do you think someone’s down there now?” she whispered.

  “I doubt it,” said the boy. “If the Europeans had found it already, they would have blocked the area off and put guards on it until they came back from their Easter break.”

  The girl nodded her assent and cocked her ear, trying to pick up any sounds that might be emanating from the underground chamber. “I agree about the Europeans. So that means it must be one of our people.”