Chapter Twenty-Nine

London, February 1973

Eve couldn’t help worrying about Ana Mansour. There had been no reply to her letter so she decided to try telephoning to ask how she was. Brograve wouldn’t approve but she could call when he went out for his walk after luncheon. That was the time when she usually rang her friends, sitting at the telephone table in the hall with a cup of tea to have a good old natter.

The phone in the hotel rang out for a long time and Eve was about to give up when a man with a foreign accent answered. He knew who Ana Mansour was and Eve heard the creaking of stairs, then a knock on the door. There was a pause followed by the sound of feet hurrying down and the receiver being lifted.

“Lady Beauchamp?” Ana said, with hope in her voice.

“Please, at this point you should call me Eve,” she replied. “I wanted to telephone to say I’m worried about you stuck here without your children, and to say please don’t stay in London on my account. I will try to find some information for you but there are lots of gaps in my memory and I’m not sure if I will be able to help.”

Ana didn’t speak for a moment and when she did, she sounded deflated. It occurred to Eve that by telephoning she had raised her hopes, then torn them down again.

“I need to finish my research before I return to Egypt,” Ana said, “but thank you for your thoughtfulness. I do sympathize with your memory loss. It must be hard.”

Eve tried to shrug it off. “Most of the time it doesn’t affect me. Life goes on, you know. But your questions made me stumble up against some of the blank spots, and I wanted to apologize if I seemed vague.”

She heard the flare of a match as Ana lit a cigarette, then inhaled. Eve got a fleeting sense that she could smell the tobacco smoke wafting down the line.

“After my father’s stroke, he found that writing down his memories helped. The more he wrote, the more he remembered little details that had escaped him. You might try that.” Ana inhaled again.

“Yes, I suppose I could, but I don’t seem to have the concentration for writing anymore. Besides, the difficulty lies in pinpointing exactly what I can’t remember.” She laughed, but it made her anxious. It was one thing knowing what she didn’t remember; what about all the things she didn’t know she wasn’t remembering? There might be some important ones. “How is your father now?” she asked.

“He died over ten years ago,” Ana said, “but I spent a lot of time with him after the stroke. Like you, he had gaps in his memory, and I came to the conclusion that his brain protected him from distressing memories, like his experiences in the war. It made me wonder if . . . Please stop me if you find this upsetting, but I wondered if you might have forgotten some things that happened around the opening of the tomb because of all the tragedies that came afterward. It must have been tough for you, and not helped by everyone saying they were caused by a curse.” Eve heard a crackling sound as she took another draw on her cigarette.

“Ah, that old curse myth. Howard Carter used to say that sane people should dismiss such inventions with contempt. Those were his exact words.”

“Did you never have a moment when you wondered if there might be any truth in it?” Ana asked.

Eve considered the question. “If I ever wondered, Howard brought me back down to earth with a bump. And Brograve was always very scathing about it. So I had two rational people to hand.”

Ana chuckled. “I can tell your husband wouldn’t be the type to believe in the supernatural, but when you look at the list of all the bizarre deaths of people associated with the tomb, you can’t help speculating. Maya’s writings, the ones recently discovered at Saqqara, are full of blessings and curses and magic. Maybe some of the items from the tomb were cursed.”

Were they? Suddenly the musky scent of the tomb filled Eve’s nostrils. It used to linger around that gold box and now it seemed to be in the hall where she was sitting. The smell was so strong that she glanced around to see if the container had somehow appeared on the telephone table.

“It does make you question whether there’s anything in it,” Ana continued. “There are still mysteries surrounding how the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, and how they made their incredible observations of the stars without the aid of a telescope, so perhaps they did come up with a way of harming tomb robbers with their spells. I wouldn’t want to keep anything from the tomb in my home, just in case.”

Eve fell silent, thinking back to the weeks after they entered the burial chamber and took their souvenirs. Everything began to go wrong from that moment, starting with Howard’s canary. She shivered.

“Are you alright?” Ana asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m fine,” Eve said, but she had an urge to get off the phone, so she made up a white lie. “It’s just that I think I can hear my husband returning. He doesn’t know I telephoned you. I’d better go. I’ll be in touch if I think of anything that might help you.”

She hung up, feeling alarmed. Why had she telephoned Ana? It didn’t feel as if it had achieved anything. Instead, strange thoughts had been poured into her head, where they swirled around like Scotch mist.

What if the gold container was cursed, and that’s why she kept having strokes? Where had she put it, and why had she not told Brograve? She had to find it and get rid of it as soon as possible before it finished her off completely.