Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [160]
“Not now, Emerson, we have arrived. Just leave it to me.”
I was guilty of a slight amount of hubris when I implied that I had, on the spur of the moment, invented an explanation for a particularly inexplicable situation. However, I am accustomed to having such tasks thrust upon me and I did not doubt that, given sufficient time, a solution would come to me. Unfortunately, I was not given any time at all. Cyrus was waiting at the door to greet us, as was his hospitable habit. Hospitality was not his only aim, however; as the others passed on into the drawing room, he drew me aside.
“All right, Amelia, what’s going on?”
Hoping he did not mean what I feared he meant, I attempted to equivocate. “I beg your pardon, Cyrus?”
“How is Emmeline?”
A grin spread across his lined countenance as he waited for an answer. None was immediately forthcoming. I defy any reader to produce one.
“Selim was kind enough to ask after her,” Cyrus went on. “He had heard from his Uncle Yusuf, who had heard from Jamil, who had heard from your steward about my poor sister. Sure came as a surprise to me that I had one.”
“What did you say to Selim?” I asked, still sparring for time.
“Why, I thanked him for his interest. Who is the lady?”
“Bless you, Cyrus! It is a somewhat—er—complicated story. I will explain it to you later. Katherine will be wondering what is keeping us, and Emerson—”
“Tonight,” Cyrus said firmly.
“Yes, of course. Tonight.”
I hope I may not be accused of braggadocio when I say that by the time we joined the others I had arrived at the obvious solution. Having cleared my mind of that matter, I was able to concentrate on my suspects.
We were quite a large party in ourselves, but Cyrus enjoyed nothing more than seeing every seat at his dining table occupied. He had only managed to collect two other guests that evening: Mr. Barton, who had been persuaded (without difficulty) to stay to dine after giving Bertie his lesson in hieroglyphs, and Mr. MacKay, whom Cyrus had caught on his way home from the Valley.
Owing to the impromptu nature of the gathering (and Emerson’s well-known aversion to evening dress), attire was casual and so was conversation. Emerson did most of the talking, so I was able to study my suspects—three of them, including William. I was acquainted with MacKay, but I had not met Mr. Barton.
The poor lad was not prepossessing. His features were rough-hewn and his movements awkward. Some of the awkwardness might have been occasioned by the fact that he never took his eyes off Nefret, which rendered the neat consumption of food and drink difficult. Sentimentality and youth were irrelevant, of course; I had known a number of criminals with those characteristics. His relative lack of experience in the field might suggest that he was unlikely to have discovered a new tomb, but such discoveries are often serendipitous. It was safe to assume that he was familiar with the name and career of Sethos; that gentleman’s exploits (along with our own) had become part of the legendry of Egyptology.
Mr. Barton appeared to have a solid alibi for at least one incident. He had been with Nefret and Ramses when the body fell from the cliff, so it could not have been he who pushed it off. However, I was not prepared to accept unquestioningly Ramses’s belief that the man had been deliberately murdered. I respect my son’s acumen, but he is sometimes mistaken. In fact, I could think of no sensible reason why anyone—Bedouin, Senussi, Turk, or tomb robber—would drop a rock and then a body on Ramses. It could not have anything to do with the matter of the missing tomb. It must have been an accident. And therefore Mr. Barton was still a suspect.
I transferred my attention to Mr. MacKay, who was talking to Cyrus about the Valley of the Kings.
He had been in Egypt longer than Barton and was reputed to know every square foot of the Valley. If the tomb was there, he was the most likely person to have come upon it. The other considerations I have mentioned applied equally well to him. I knew nothing to his discredit