Chapter Forty-Seven

London, May 1973

I can’t find that slip of paper with Ana Mansour’s telephone number,” Brograve said over dinner. “Do you know where it is?” They had started eating their meals at the kitchen table. There seemed no point in carrying dishes through to the dining room only to carry them back again afterward. Besides, Eve liked her kitchen. Unruly houseplants grew on a broad sunny windowsill, alongside which sat a little cabinet painted to look like a chocolate-box cottage that contained a range of dried herbs in jars. Most were past their best, but it was a pretty object.

“I already telephoned her,” Eve said. “She told me she was sacked for having an affair with a colleague. Hardly a hanging offense in this day and age!” She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him. “She was hoping that if she solved the mystery of the missing items from the tomb and perhaps took some back to Cairo, they might consider reinstating her.”

Brograve grunted, still suspicious. “What about all the time you spent answering her questions? Will the tape recording be given to the museum, as she promised?”

Eve hadn’t thought to ask about that. “I’m sure it will,” she said, then told him the story of Ana’s husband getting custody of her children and even denying her access.

“She should have thought of that before she had an affair,” Brograve said. “Sharia law is very much on the side of men. I believe they can divorce their wives simply by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times, but women don’t have the same right.”

“Goodness! So they could blurt it out in the heat of an argument one night, then wake up divorced the next morning? That seems harsh.” She had a sip of sherry, her favorite medium-dry one. “I feel sorry for her. I wish we could have helped.”

“I don’t like being lied to,” Brograve grumbled. “I’ve got a good mind to contact the university and tell them she’s still sending out letters on their notepaper and pretending to be an employee.”

“Please don’t do that,” Eve said. “After all, no harm has been done.”

“She might be trying to trick someone else. Maybe we weren’t the only targets. And you only have her word for it that she was planning to return the items to Egypt.”

He finished his meal and put his knife and fork together. He ate at twice the speed of Eve so his plate was always empty when she was just halfway through. She cut off half her remaining chicken breast and passed it across.

“I can’t help wondering what happened to that gold unguent container,” she said, in an attempt to distract him from his annoyance about Ana. “Do you think there’s any chance we might have left it in Framfield, in a forgotten corner? What about the hollow behind the panel in the bathroom, where we used to hide my jewelry when we went on holiday? Or in the storage space under the window seat in the library?”

It was a funny old house. The corridors had unexpected twists and turns, so you could easily lose your bearings. Even after living there for years, Eve would glance out a window expecting to see the front garden and instead she’d be facing the kitchen yard.

“I checked both of those before we left,” Brograve assured her. “And now the new owners have gutted it. Knocked down walls, added extra bathrooms, created an open-plan kitchen-diner out the back. If there was anything hidden away, I’m sure it would have been found by their builders.”

Eve’s heart ached to think of that house—her house—being ripped apart. She still mourned for it. Why did they have to leave? She pined for the garden in particular. May was one of her favorite months; the trees would be in leaf, there would be a shimmering carpet of bluebells in the orchard, and a few early roses might have put in an appearance.

“Talking about things that are missing, have you seen my father’s gold clock?” Brograve asked. “It used to be on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It crossed my mind that Ana could have taken it when I left her in there, the day Sionead and I had to help you to bed.”

“Goodness, you have taken against her!” Eve raised her eyebrows. “I’ve been rearranging the ornaments in there so I’ve probably moved it somewhere safe. I’ll have a hunt later.”

She’d been trying to return objects to the groupings they used to have in Framfield. Where had the clock been? She was pretty sure it used to be on the mantelpiece, so why wasn’t it there now?

After they finished their meal, she walked all around the apartment, checking every shelf, but couldn’t see the clock anywhere. What might she have done with it? She had a vague memory of putting it somewhere useful, but where?

She went to the cupboard where they kept the photo albums and dug out some Framfield ones, mostly from the late 1920s and early 1930s, soon after they moved in. They might confirm where the clock used to be. Brograve was watching a detective show on television, but Eve sat by the drawing-room window, under a standard lamp, and began to leaf through pictures of the house she had loved so much. If she spotted the clock in one of the photos, then she could work out where it was now and stop Brograve from blaming Ana for something she didn’t do. That was her plan, at least.