The Ape Who Guards the Balance - Elizabeth Peters [64]
“Good Gad,” I cried. “Are you suggesting that someone has imported an instrument of medieval torture?”
“Stop that, Peabody,” said Emerson, who had forgot his qualms and was listening with intense interest. “The Iron Maiden, so called because it was the size and shape of a human body, had spikes protruding from the interior of the back and the lid. When the lid was closed the spikes penetrated the victim’s body. The same effect could be produced by a less complex mechanism—long nails driven into a heavy wooden plank, for instance.”
“Exactly,” said Nefret, finishing her whiskey. “The wounds were confined to the head and torso, and I distinctly saw the gleam of metal in one of them. It was, as I suspected, the broken-off point of a spike or nail.”
“You—you extracted it?” David asked, swallowing.
“Yes. It is evidence, you know.” She touched her shirt pocket. “I brought it back with me, since no one at the zabtiyeh seemed to want it. There was only one other extraneous object on the body—a piece of cord deeply imbedded in his neck.”
“A strangling cord,” I breathed. “The devotees of the goddess Kali—”
An odd sound from Ramses interrupted me. His lips were so tightly compressed they formed a single narrow line.
“The poor fellow wasn’t strangled, Aunt Amelia,” Nefret said. “The fragment was at the back of his neck, not his throat. It seems more likely that he was wearing a crucifix do amulet round his neck, and that someone or something pulled at the cord until it snapped.”
“I suppose you—er—extracted that, too,” Emerson said resignedly.
“Yes. The question is, why would anyone go to such elaborate lengths to kill someone?”
“A new murder cult,” I exclaimed. “Like the cult of Kali in India. A revival, by insane fanatics, of the worship of the crocodile god, Sobek—”
“Kindly control your rampageous imagination, Peabody,” Emerson snarled. “The metal jaws of some machine, such as—er—some machine or other could cause similar wounds. If he was drunk and stumbled into something of the sort—”
“Headfirst?” I inquired with, I believe, pardonable sarcasm. “And the operator of the machine, not noticing a pair of protruding legs, started it up?”
David, gentle soul that he was, turned a shade paler.
Since the hypothesis was obviously absurd, Emerson did not try to defend it. “A more important question is: Who was the dead man?”
“The face was unrecognizable,” said Ramses. “However, Ali Yussuf was missing the first two joints of the third finger of his left hand. The extremities had been nibbled at by smaller predators, but only the ends of the fingers and toes were gone, and that particular finger—”
David rose precipitately and hurried away.
“I believe I will just have another whiskey and soda, Emerson,” I said.
On the face of it, the news was cursed discouraging. One cannot interrogate a dead man. To look at it another way—and I am always in favor of looking on the bright side—Yussuf Mahmud’s murder confirmed our theory that another group of villains was involved, villains more interesting than a seller of second-rate antiquities. Emerson could (and did) jeer all he liked at my theories of mysterious and deadly cults, but I remained convinced that Yussuf Mahmud’s death had all the hallmarks of ritual murder—execution, even. In some way he had betrayed the others, and he had paid a hideous price. But in what way had he betrayed them?
The answer was obvious. Yussuf Mahmud’s desperate attempt to retrieve the papyrus—for only a desperate man would risk invading the house of the Father of Curses—was his last hope of saving himself from the vengeance of the cult. I did not doubt that the Followers of Sobek (as I termed them) employed valuable antiquities like the papyrus to lure prospective victims into their murderous hands. Not only had Yussuf Mahmud allowed the victims and the valuable to slip through his hands, but he had selected for the slaughter, not a naive tourist, but the members of a family known the length and breadth of Egypt