The Bride Box

TWO

‘And Soraya is …?’ prompted Mahmoud.

As soon as Owen had established from the guard who it was that had posted him beside the box, Owen had sent for him and Mahmoud had come running.

‘My sister,’ whispered Leila. ‘My big sister,’ she had added after a moment, proudly.

Mahmoud looked at Owen. Owen knew what he was thinking. The obvious thing to do was to get Leila to identify the girl who lay in the box, but he shrank from that.

‘Tell us about your sister,’ said Owen.

On that subject the hesitant Leila was forthcoming. Her sister was bigger than her, a lot bigger. She had looked after her when their mother had died, had stood up for her against the new mother. And against their father. To such an extent that her father had hit her. Their new mother had hit her too and said that she couldn’t have her in the house and that she would have to go. And, soon after, she went.

‘Where to?’ asked Mahmoud.

Leila didn’t know. But the next day her box was taken away so Leila presumed she had gone to get married.

Had Leila gone to the wedding feast?

No, she hadn’t, and she had been rather disappointed at that. Usually when someone got married there was singing and dancing and feasting; the whole village was involved. But there had been nothing like that this time. When Leila had got up in the morning, Soraya had disappeared — without even saying goodbye to her, which Leila found odd and which had made her feel sad.

Had her parents said anything?

No, just that she had gone and that she wouldn’t be coming back. When Leila had asked where she had gone to, her new mother had said, ‘A long way away.’ Leila had been sorry about that because she had hoped she would go on seeing her sister. Indeed, she confided, she had half hoped that Soraya would take her with her and that she could stay with her permanently. She had even suggested this to her father but he had just laughed. And, soon after, she had been sent away herself.

‘Tell us about that,’ said Owen.

A man had come and gone off with her father and they had been drinking. She always knew when her father had been drinking because when he came back he was red in the face and shouted a lot. This time, he had come into the house and shouted for her new mother and when she had come out they had sent Leila off and her father had fetched more beer. When Leila had returned some time later they had been still drinking, her new mother, too, and Leila had gone to bed. Well, not to bed, because they didn’t have one. In the house it was too noisy and they had shouted at her to keep away. So she had curled up in a corner of the yard and slept there. And in the morning her father had woken her and said that she was to get ready. ‘There’s no need for her to get ready,’ her new mother had said. ‘She doesn’t have a box; she can go as she is.’ And, later in the morning, a man had come for her.

‘Was this the white man?’ asked Owen.

‘White man?’ said Mahmoud.

No, just an ordinary fellah, like the fellah in the village, only he didn’t come from the village, or not their village at any rate. The man had come and taken her to a place outside the village where the white man was waiting. He had looked her over carefully and then nodded, and then she had been led to where a group of children were waiting with other men.

‘A group of children?’ said Mahmoud.

‘Yes.’

How many?

Leila had a problem with that. She thought about fifteen.

‘And then?’

‘They had all started walking.’

‘This is a bad family,’ whispered Mahmoud. ‘They drink, and they do not fear God.’

Mahmoud, a good Muslim, never drank.

‘And they beat their children. And — I think you are right — they sell them as slaves. What sort of people are these?’

‘Worse,’ said Owen. ‘What did they do to the sister?’

‘You think they killed her?’

‘I think they might have done. Were they going to sell her, too? And did she stand up against it? It sounds, from what Leila says, like she was the sort of girl who might. There could have been blows.’

Mahmoud nodded. ‘That does not sound unlikely,’ he said and sighed. ‘It sounds as if I’m going to have to go down south,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ said Owen.

They solved the problem of identification by getting Leila to describe the clothing her sister normally wore. There wasn’t a lot of it, even when you took into account what had been in the bride box. And then Mahmoud had taken a less soiled piece of the clothing the woman in the box had been wearing and showed it to Leila.

‘Like this?’

Leila had nodded. She didn’t really understand the purport of the questions but they were making her uneasy. Mahmoud had thought it best not to go on.

‘The body will keep,’ he said to Owen, ‘now that it’s in the mortuary. I’ll get somebody from down there to identify it.’

But where was ‘there’? The little girl had said Denderah. That was certainly a place, and they would try it. It was also on the main line to Luxor. It was where she could have got on the train. And possibly where the bride box had been put on, too. If it was, there would be a record of some sort of it. The Egyptian bureaucracy was not always efficient but it was always there. Even in such a one-horse town as Owen suspected Denderah was.

It would especially have been recorded if it was addressed to a Pasha, if for no other reason than that if you got it wrong, thunderbolts would fall.

But this was another thing that they both found puzzling: that the body should be boxed up and sent, as it apparently had been done, to a Pasha. Wasn’t that the last thing you would do if you murdered somebody? Suppose, for instance, that Owen’s theory was correct and that Soraya had been killed by a bunch of slave traders: would they want to draw attention to themselves? It was, surely, the last thing that they would want to do.

But didn’t the same argument apply if what Mahmoud had originally feared was correct? That this was a dull, ordinary murder, domestic, probably, in an ordinary town very much out in the sticks, just the sort of case that you would be assigned to if your career was on the point of plunging irrevocably downwards? Suppose it was — surely the very last thing a murderer would do would be to draw attention to it?

Unless there was some ulterior motive. Mahmoud feared there might be. And he half feared that the motive was to do with him personally. Mahmoud was on the progressive side of Egyptian politics, which was a lonely place to be. It brought him right up against the most vested interests that there were in Egyptian society, those that were based around the Court and around the Pashas. The one thing they did not want was to have those interests questioned or exposed. But so often Mahmoud had found that they were precisely the thing that made progress impossible.

Mahmoud believed deeply, passionately, in progress. It galled him that Egypt was seen as backward, primitive, locked in the past. It had to modernise — had to! He had fought for that throughout his career and was just beginning to believe that he was on the point of getting somewhere.

And there, of course, lay the snag. For his efforts were beginning to bring him against the most powerful interests of all. They were beginning to notice him; and, no doubt, starting to do something about it.

This case could be the beginning. An obscure case, miles from anywhere. And then the block on it. The introduction of a Pasha into it was the clue. It would stop the inquiry, as it always did. Not completely. Just enough to keep him tied up forever in some backwater down there.

For Owen, too, the entrance of a Pasha into the case was something to make him think. If this really was something to do with the slave trade — an indication, perhaps, of its revival in Egypt — did the connection with a Pasha mean that there were big forces behind it? It was profitable enough to tempt even Pashas. And what about Leila’s mention of white men: how far did this go?

‘Political enough for you yet?’ he could hear Paul saying.

‘I told you it was big,’ Ali said to Hussein. ‘The Mamur Zapt and the Parquet!’

‘Must be a prize dog!’ said Hussein.

‘A Saluki at least!’

‘Shouldn’t have put it in a box like that!’ said Hussein.

‘Without any air!’

‘The Pasha will have the skin off them!’

‘And they’ll deserve it!’

‘Ought to know better!’

‘Ignorant sods down there!’

‘Are you two ever going to do any work?’ asked the overseer.

‘Coming, coming!’

Hussein and Ali bent to the box. They straightened up again.

‘Heavy!’

‘Too heavy!’

‘Look, they’ve taken the dog out of it. So I gather. It’ll be lighter than it was!’ said the overseer.

‘It’s more than a two-man lift.’

‘Four men at least!’

‘Look, it’s only down to the Bab-el-Khalk!’

‘In this heat?’

‘Just get on with it! Or it won’t be the Pasha who flays your hide!’

‘Bastard!’ muttered Ali.

‘Bastard!’ muttered Hussein.

‘Right! Lift!’

They raised it an inch.

‘Can’t be done!’

‘Not with just two of us.’

‘A bride box? Of course it can be done!’

‘Not just with two of us.’

‘All right. I’ll get Abdul.’

‘And Mustapha.’

‘Mustapha’s doing something else.’

‘We’ll wait.’

‘I’m going to fetch Abdul and Mustapha. And then I’m going to kick your backsides.’

The overseer went off in a fury.

Ali and Hussein sat down on the ground in the shade of the box.

‘Doesn’t smell as bad as it did.’

‘You fancy? It’s still pretty bad.’

‘Maybe it’s just that I’m getting used to it.’

‘You do get used to things, don’t you? This box, for instance, I’ve got used to seeing it here. I shall quite miss it when it goes.’

‘Well, I shan’t!’ said the guard Mahmoud had posted. ‘It’s really hot just standing here. And I can still smell it. And it smells pretty bad!’

‘Stop complaining! You don’t have to carry it.’

‘You just have to stand there.’

‘All day,’ said the guard. ‘All day. And all night!’

‘I’ll bet you don’t stand there all night!’

‘Well, no one would expect me to. But I’m still on guard.’

‘With his eyes closed!’

‘I would know if anyone tried to make off with it.’

‘You’d probably have tipped them off. Then down in the souk with it and split the money!’

‘A bride box?’

‘Well, there’s always a demand for them. Girls are always getting married.’

‘Yes, well, most girls don’t put dogs in them!’

‘Hello, here are Abdul and Mustapha!’

‘This it? We’re not expected to carry this down to the Bab-el-Khalk, are we?’

‘Yes, you bloody are!’ said the overseer. ‘Four of you! Why, I could carry it there myself!’

‘Go on, show us!’

‘I’ll show you something else in a minute! Now bloody get on with it!’

They bent and lifted.

‘Hey! What are you doing with my sister’s box?’ said Leila indignantly. She had just come up the platform with Owen and Mahmoud.

The men put the box down.

‘Your sister’s, is it?’ one of the guards said. ‘Well, it needs a bit of a clean.’

‘It was all right when she took it away!’

‘Well, that was then, and this is now. It’s had something in it since. Something which doesn’t smell too good.’

‘What the hell do you think it can be?’ said Abdul, sniffing.

‘I reckon a rat’s got in there,’ said Mustapha.

‘Got in and stayed, by the smell of it!’

‘A pretty big-sized rat, it must be.’

‘We reckon it was a dog. It’s addressed to a Pasha, see. And we reckon it’s one of his prize dogs. Must be, for them to go to the trouble.’

‘A dog!’ said Leila, bursting into tears. ‘In my sister’s box?’

The men looked at each other uncomfortably.

‘It’s not right, you know,’ said Abdul. ‘You shouldn’t do that to a girl’s bride box.’

‘It’s special,’ said Mustapha. ‘It means a lot to her.’

‘Do you know what I think?’ said Abdul. ‘I reckon the Pasha came along and said: “I need a box. That one will do.” So they just tipped everything out and put the dog inside.’

‘They shouldn’t do that!’ said Leila, crying. ‘It’s my sister’s bride box!’

‘No more they should!’ said Abdul. ‘These Pashas are bastards!’

‘Think they can get away with anything!’ said Mustapha.

‘Bastards!’ all four men agreed.

‘But what about my sister’s things? They were beautiful things. She’d made them herself!’

‘Yes, well, that’s how it is,’ said Abdul, with a sympathy surprising since this was only a girl.

‘Don’t worry!’ said Mustapha. ‘The people in the village will have picked them up.’

‘And gone off with them, I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Hussein.

‘If they have, her husband will get them back,’ said Abdul. ‘“Give them back or I’ll beat your head in,” he’ll say. And you’ll be surprised at the effect it will have.’

‘They ought not to have done it,’ said Leila. ‘It’s my sister’s box!’

When it was hot, really hot, for it was always hot in Cairo, they slept on the roof. They had fenced off a garden area with trellis work up which they had trained beans. Beans were grown for decoration as well as food in Egypt. On the roof they served as a dense, green screen, with occasional splashes of red from the flowers. Behind the screen they were invisible to the sleepers on neighbouring roofs, like them in search of air during the hot nights.

The drawback was that you woke with the sun. Zeinab merely pulled the sheet over her head and carried on sleeping. But Owen was fully awake from the moment the first sun touched his face. He always was.

This morning he got up and walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the still, sleeping city to where the Nile curved round the houses and the hawks were already beginning to hover on the upward currents of air. Below him, in the little nearby gardens, the doves were beginning to gurgle in the trees. He always loved this moment of the day before the city woke up, when all was still and quiet and the air fresh, sometimes with dew.

Sometimes, as now, it was even chilly. At least, you could imagine that, and people, English men especially, nostalgic for home, often liked to do that. In the evening you sometimes even lit a fire, which you never really needed to do, but it was nice to imagine it on a frosty morning in England and to stretch out your hands and feel the warmth. Of course, there was warmth all the time but this was a different warmth. He didn’t need that today, though. Already the heat was beginning to build up. Already, over the Nile, there were little heat shimmers.

All the same, he pulled on his cotton dressing gown. In the pocket he felt something. He pulled it out. It was a little trocchee shell and it had been found clutched in the girl’s fingers when they had conducted the post-mortem.

He had shown it to Mahmoud and Mahmoud had asked him where it came from.

‘Probably Flamenco Bay,’ he had said. ‘That’s where most of them come from.’

Flamenco Bay was a little to the north of Port Sudan and was where the red, green, and yellow-painted dhows unloaded their cargoes of trocchee shells in hundreds of thousands.

‘The shells go to the United States and to France, where they’re cut up into buttons. Most of the pearl buttons that you see come from Flamenco Bay.’

He had told Mahmoud to smell it.

‘That’s awful!’ said Mahmoud. ‘It smells like rotten fish!’

‘It is rotten fish. They sort of stew inside the shells. The sun rots them, and then they drop out. But the smell! You should smell it in Flamenco Bay!’

‘I’d rather not!’

‘They grind them up into a powder. There’s a steady demand for it in Arabia.

‘As a fertilizer?’

Owen smiled.

‘As an aphrodisiac.’

It was a button, here, one they had found in Soraya’s hand.

Pulled off from her assailant? That didn’t necessarily mean that the attacker had been a woman. Men wore pearl buttons as well, sometimes on their shirts, if they were posh, on their galabeyas if they were not. Even sometimes among the beads on their skull caps.

Soraya had fought before they killed her. They had had to stun her with a blow. And then they had strangled her. The body had decomposed badly in the heat of the box, but the pathologist had been able to make this out.

Owen was wondering how to tell Leila. He would tell her very little, as little as he could.

He would have to show her the button and ask her if she recognized it. It could have come from Soraya’s own clothes. But somehow he didn’t think it did. It had been ripped off. Did you do that to your own clothes? It was more likely that Soraya, who seemed to have been a girl of spirit, had fought back.

The question, though, was whether the button told you more. Trocchee buttons were everywhere in Egypt. But they were most plentiful, naturally enough, along the Red Sea coast, where they came from. There everyone wore them.

Did that indicate that her attacker had come from round there? The Sudan? Not Egypt.

More; could that mean that that was where she was being taken? As a slave, along with her little sister, and other children. First, to a port on the Red Sea — Port Sudan, say — where the control was not as tight as it was in Egypt, and where boats, Arab boats, came and went every day in large numbers? Once there it would be easy to put children on an incoming dhow just after it had dropped its cargo, of trocchee shells, possibly, and then sail them over to the other side of the Red Sea and on to the still existing slave markets of the Middle East. Was that where Leila — and possibly Soraya — had been bound?

That morning the first thing he did when he got into his office at the Bab-el-Khalk was to get Nikos to issue a general instruction to the police station and customs offices of south Egypt alerting them to the possible passage of a slave caravan with children. The Mamur Zapt had few officers of his own; but you ignored his direct instructions at your peril.

Of course, the slavers would be keeping to the desert and giving towns and police as wide a berth as possible. They might even have an arrangement with some police forces. That he could do nothing about. In fact, trying to pick the caravan up in the desert was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. The distances were vast and there was no question of combing the desert. He just didn’t have enough men to do that. The time to intercept them was when they were coming to the coast and looking for their port. The trouble was that that might be anywhere along the Red Sea coast.

He sat thinking for a moment and then gave the Navy a call. They didn’t have many ships and the sea was even more vast than the desert. But Navy ships patrolled the area regularly looking for gunrunners and they could just as well look for children as for guns.

And then he put in a call to the Sudan Slavery Bureau in Khartoum.

Mahmoud’s experts thought they had at last deciphered the address on the box’s label.

‘An illiterate scrawl,’ they sniffed. ‘And badly soiled.’

However, they thought the box had been directed to the Pasha Ali Maher, so Mahmoud went to see him.

‘A bride box?’ said Ali Maher incredulously. ‘Not much call for them up here!’

‘You don’t, perhaps, collect such objects? As antiques, possibly?’

‘No, I don’t!’ said the Pasha, waving a hand at the exquisite furnishing and objects that surrounded them. Even Mahmoud could see that the carpets that hung on the walls (you put carpets on the walls, not on the floors in Egypt, where the floors were cooler marble) were soft and luxurious and, in his terms, pretty well priceless.

‘A bride box.’ Ali Maher smiled and looked around at the lovely blue vases, probably Chinese, and the jade pieces standing discreetly in niches around the room. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t go in for primitive art.’

They were talking in French. Cairo’s upper classes felt more at home in that language than in Arabic. Come to that, they felt more at home on the airy Riviera than in sweaty Cairo and spent as much time as they could in France.

Mahmoud had no problem with French. The Egyptian legal system was based on the Code Napoleon — an earlier Khedive who admired all things French, especially the women, had taken French law as the model when he had reformed the system. The lectures in the School of Law were all in French. Meetings in the Parquet were usually conducted in French; memoranda were usually written in French, occasionally in English but hardly ever in Arabic. Arabic was a tricky language to write and on the whole the Parquet preferred to keep the records in French. At home Mahmoud spoke Arabic; with his colleagues he usually spoke French (and either French or English when he was speaking to Owen; they both were at ease in both).

So Mahmoud was not bothered by Ali Maher’s assumption that they would converse in French. It was the language of all the Egyptian upper classes. You could almost say that he was treating Mahmoud as an equal.

But Mahmoud knew he wasn’t. There was a subtle condescension about everything Ali Maher said or did. It was as if merely receiving Mahmoud in his house was doing him a favour. Parquet officers did not rate high with Pashas.

‘It seems odd that the box should be specifically addressed to you,’ said Mahmoud.

‘A simple mistake, I expect,’ said Ali Maher languidly. ‘They happen all the time in this benighted country. Where did you say it came from? The south? Oh, well, that explains it! The people there are backward. Blockheads, most of them. Some oaf has just got it wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘A bride box? To me?’ He laughed. ‘Now, if it had been a bride or two, I could understand!’

It was then that Mahmoud told him what the box had contained.

He was watching Ali Maher closely and would have sworn that the Pasha lost colour. He pulled out a silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

‘How ghastly!’ he said.

‘Does this put a different complexion on it?’

Ali Maher looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why should it?’

‘Addressed to you. Meant for you. You personally.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t see …’

‘Not a mistake,’ said Mahmoud.

‘Not a mistake?’

‘A threat, perhaps. Or a warning.’

‘Why should it be any of those things?’

‘I don’t know. I was hoping that perhaps you would tell me.’

‘I can see no reason why it should be either of those things.’

‘There is no one who might wish to harm you? Who has reason to feel hostile towards you?’

‘Well, of course, as a public figure …’

‘Down in the south?’

‘Well, that’s a big area …’

‘Near Denderah, say?’

‘Denderah? Well, I have heard of it. But, no, I don’t think so. I try to have as little to do with such places as I can.’

‘You have no connections with the place?’

‘No. I would try to avoid having any connections with anywhere like that.’

‘Or persons …?’

Ali Maher held up his hand. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘why go on? Is it not obvious that this is a simple mistake? What could I possibly have to do with a woman in a box?’

But was it Denderah? Leila had certainly said so. That was where she lived, she had said, and if she had lived there presumably her sister had done too. That was where the box had started. Or had it? Leila had thought that was the name of her village but she was a little girl and had not been too sure. Owen tried to question her about the village, but it seemed a village like any other: houses, a street (sort of), a kind of square. Doum palms. A water wheel pulled by an ox. The river? Not far away but the village had not been quite on the river.

That was where she had lived and thought she had got on the train. When she had slipped away, in the late night or early morning, from the other children, evading the guard, she had walked and walked. She didn’t know the way; she had just followed the tracks the caravan had made. It was easy. There were no other tracks to confuse her. The caravan had kept away from other people.

So she had walked and walked, and been very hungry and thirsty, but a woman had given her a bowl of durra and let her have a drink from her water skin. And she had gone on walking until she had seen her village. She had intended to go back to her house but she had met a woman, a neighbour, who had recognized her, and said that she should not go back because her mother would beat her again.

She hadn’t known what to do. She had asked the woman, Khabradji, if she knew where Soraya was, and the woman had clicked her tongue and said no. She could well be a long way away by this time. Khabradji had given her some water and some bread and had let her sleep in the sand behind her house but had said she must be gone by morning or her man would be angry.

So Leila had gone to sleep behind the house, but she had been cold in the middle of the night and had woken up. As she was lying there she had heard the train and the thought had come to her that she might get on it and go far away, far away from her nasty new mother and from the white man and the men with whips.

And she had walked over to where she knew the train would be. It was dark and no one had seen her. The train had stopped and the driver had got out and was squatting at a brazier with the other men. And they were drinking tea.

And another man was doing something to the engine. He had climbed up on to the top of it and had swung across — she wasn’t quite sure what he had swung across; it was like a huge arm — and he had put one end of it into the engine and then said ‘Taib!’ — arabic for ‘it is well’ — and another man, who was standing beside a sort of tall tower, to which the arm was attached, had also said ‘Taib’, and then there had been a gurgle as of water, and she thought the train might have been drinking. Well, that would be reasonable, wouldn’t it? A train needed a drink, like everyone else. And after a while it had stopped drinking and the man had swung the arm back, the driver had got back into his cab, and Leila had guessed that the train was soon going to start, so she had crept under a carriage and found a place.

Owen asked her about the station. What station? There wasn’t one, not a big one as in Cairo. There was no platform or anything. There was just a little building for ‘the man’ and the water tower. And the piles of gum arabic stacked beside the line to be picked up by a goods train at some point.

When people came — yes, people did come; she had seen them on other occasions — they took a horse and carriage and drove into the town. The drivers knew they were coming and shortly before the train arrived the carriages would draw up. Sometimes the people rode on donkeys.

There were often a lot of people. The ladies were ‘Inglesi’, although not all of them were English, and they wore beautiful long dresses and big hats and looked beautiful. Although they were sometimes very hot. Even under the hats the sweat was running down their faces. And they were forever calling for water. And the men wore suits and they also had big hats, although different ones.

And what did they go into the village to see?

Leila shuddered. ‘The Place of the Giants,’ she said.

From what she said it sounded like a temple. Was there a temple at Denderah? He rather thought there was. He would have to ask McPhee, the Assistant Commissioner, who was interested in such things.

But there were many places with temples in Egypt.

He asked her about this one.

Yes, she had been there. But she didn’t like it. It was frightening. Big and dark, although it had got lighter since the Pasha had ordered some of the sand to be cleared away. But it was still dark and there were lots of places from which boys could jump out at you. But even they were frightened, she thought. The fact was, it was not a good place. It was not a decent, holy place, not a good Muslim place. There were spirits there, bad spirits. And you knew that was so because — she crept closer to Owen and whispered in his ear — of the magic marks. Right up there on the front, for everyone to see!

Owen went in to see McPhee to check if there was a temple at Denderah. This was a mistake since once the Assistant Commissioner got started on Egyptian antiquities you couldn’t get him to stop.

‘Ah, Denderah!’ he said reminiscently. ‘The Temple of Hathor. It’s very late, you know. Roman. The earliest name you find there is Cleopatra, that vile woman!’

‘Oh, really? You feel that, do you?’

‘Definitely! Sexually abandoned.’

‘Well, I’ve always thought that-’

‘No, no, Owen. You have a romantic view of her. That’s Shakespeare’s doing. “The chair she sat in …” You know, that sort of stuff. A marvellous picture, but quite untrue. She sold herself for power, you know!’

‘Well, if you’re going to sell yourself, that might be worth doing it for.’

‘No, no, Owen. It’s her honour she’s selling as well as her body.’

McPhee had always seemed to Owen to have a Boy Scout’s view of life.

He put Cleopatra reluctantly to one side.

‘Apparently the temple has some unusual markings …’

‘Oh, yes, the famous Zodiac.’

‘Famous Zodiac?’

‘Yes, on the portico. You see, the sign of the Lion comes first, showing that the summer solstice was then in that sign. Not like now, of course, when it’s in Cancer.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘At Esne the sign of Virgo comes first.’

‘Extraordinary! Well, I’d better be getting along …’

‘Of course, this shows that in Egypt the precession of the equinoxes was already well known.’

‘It does?’

‘Of course, it may simply be that the Egyptian astronomers wanted to represent two successive states of the sky-’

‘Yes, yes. Well, thank you. I’m afraid that now I must be-’

‘That in which the summer solstice was in Leo, and consequently the Vernal equinox in Taurus, instead of Aries.’

‘Yes, yes, most interesting. But I’m afraid I-’

‘As opposed to that in which the summer solstice was in Virgo and consequently the vernal equinox in Gemini.’

‘Most interesting. Well, I must be getting along …’

‘Champollion thinks-’

‘Yes, yes, thank you. Thank you. I’m afraid I have to be …’

He edged out of the door.

They could be Leila’s ‘magic marks’! In which case, yes, the halt where she had got on the train was at Denderah. And Denderah was the village she came from.