The Serpent on the Crown - Elizabeth Peters [29]
“Ramses,” I said urgently. “Is anyone on guard?”
“Dammit,” said Ramses.
He moved too fast for me in my trailing garment. When I reached Emerson’s study, Ramses had found Emerson’s keys and was in the act of unlocking one of the desk drawers. With a long sigh of relief, he removed the painted box and lifted the lid.
“It’s safe,” I exclaimed. “A false alarm.”
“No. Someone has been here.” He indicated a set of dusty footprints that ran back and forth across the floor. They were those of bare feet.
“Not yours?” I asked.
“Those are mine.” He indicated a single line of prints, narrower and longer than the others.
We followed the intruder’s prints along the hall. They led into Emerson’s and my sleeping chamber.
“He came here first,” Ramses muttered. “He looked under the bed and in the drawers of the chest. One of them is still partly open. Unless you—”
“I am never so untidy. It was a quick and somewhat superficial search. He knew he couldn’t count on much time. Finding nothing here, he went to your father’s study.”
“He heard us coming and fled before he had a chance to search thoroughly,” Ramses finished. “Which means he didn’t know precisely where it was hidden. Let’s see which way he went.”
The dusty prints faded out in the corridor, but it was not difficult to deduce that the intruder had come in through the courtyard and left the same way.
“Hell and damnation.” Ramses ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, dislodging a shower of sandy dust. “He didn’t leave a single clue. As Father would say, this is getting monotonous.”
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
* * *
The children had been awakened by the commotion, and were indignant at Elia for not letting them join in the fun.
“It was not fun,” Ramses said sternly. “Wasim might have been badly hurt.”
Carla looked ashamed, and David John considered the comment. “We should not be angry with Elia. She did what you told her to do.”
“So it’s my fault?” Ramses inquired, tucking the blankets around his son.
“You acted for what you believed to be the best,” David John conceded. “Was it an unfortunate accident, or an attempt at distraction?”
Silently Ramses cursed his son’s precocity. He tried to avoid lying to the children, so he phrased the answer with some care. “We don’t know yet. Now go to sleep.”
He kissed them both good night and left, knowing full well that his attempt at equivocation would be a failure. They’d hear the whole story, and a number of wild theories, from the servants.
Instead of going to Deir el Medina next day, they conducted another kind of excavation. The rubble had been disturbed by their frantic attempts to free Wasim, but close examination, of the sort Emerson would have approved, confirmed Ramses’s suspicion that the sturdily built structure couldn’t have been brought down by anything less than a battering ram or an explosive charge. They found a few fragments of a stick of dynamite and, some distance away, traces of the fuse.
Dynamite wasn’t hard to come by. (Nothing was, in Egypt, if you knew where to go.) Examination of the blackened, fragmented bricks at what had been the northeast corner indicated that the effect of the blast had been limited to that area. The collapse of the rest of the building had followed, but it might not have been intended.
“It was lucky for Wasim that he was sleeping near the door,” said Selim, brushing powder off his hands. “But this is not good, Ramses. We must question the men of Gurneh and find out who has an alibi.”
Ramses smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “You are getting to be quite a detective, Selim, but I doubt that line of investigation will get us anywhere. I photographed the clearest of the footprints this morning, but that is probably a forlorn hope too. The fellow wasn’t missing a toe or anything useful of that sort.”
“All the same, we will ask,” Selim said. “How is Wasim?”
“Enjoying a nice rest and all of Fatima’s food