Chapter Fifty-Eight

London, January 29, 1980

Her daughter came to visit Eve one afternoon. As she walked over from the entrance, Eve noticed her umbrella was leaving a trail of drips across the gray-blue linoleum. She hugged her tight, almost too tight, and held on for ages, but Eve liked it. She didn’t get enough hugs these days.

“Are you OK, Mum?” she asked. “Are they treating you well?”

“It’s very nice,” Eve said. “They’re all very kind.”

Her daughter glanced around. “I still feel awful about putting you in here, but you needed more care than I could give you. Nursing care.”

“It’s fine. I don’t mind at all.” That seemed to be what she wanted to hear.

Patricia took her coat off and folded it over the back of a chair, tossing her umbrella underneath, then she sat down by Eve.

“There’s something I need to ask you,” her daughter said, pulling a newspaper cutting from her handbag. It had a black-and-white picture at the top. There were four people in the picture: a man, a woman, and two children, all of them dark-haired and foreign-looking, smiling at the camera. “Do you remember that woman?” she asked, pointing.

Eve took it and held it close to her face so she could see better. “Oh, yes,” she said, although she didn’t.

“Her name was Ana Mansour,” her daughter told her. “It says in the story that you gave her something. Is that right?”

Eve shook her head. “No, dear. I wouldn’t do that.”

“A gold container from Tutankhamun’s tomb, it says. I wondered if it was the one I was playing with one day and you dragged me off to wash my hair. Do you remember? I was only four.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Eve was very sure of herself.

“Shall I read the story to you anyway?”

Eve looked around for the sherry. She liked a sherry while someone was reading to her but the bottle wasn’t in her cupboard anymore. They must have moved it. Or maybe she had finished it. “Alright,” she said.

“The headline is: ‘The Curse of Tutankhamun Strikes Again.’” Her daughter made a funny face, rolling her eyes, and Eve laughed. She carried on reading:

A woman found dead in a London hotel room last week is being claimed as the latest victim of the curse of Tutankhamun. Forensic scientists have been unable to find a cause for the death of the forty-eight-year-old Egyptian national, who has been named as Ana Mansour, an archaeologist from Cairo. Some believe she could be the latest in the dozens of people associated with the Ancient Egyptian king’s tomb who died unusual or unexplained deaths.

Mrs. Mansour was in London to collect a rare and priceless solid gold ointment container that came from the burial chamber of Tutankhamun. It was given to her by Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, née Herbert, the daughter of Lord Carnarvon, who funded the exploration that led to the discovery of the tomb in November 1922.

Her daughter smiled at her and said, “That’s you, Mum,” before she carried on.

The ointment container was in the hotel room when Mrs. Mansour’s body was found by a chambermaid. Authorities at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo say that a pungent scent in artifacts that came from the burial chamber has caused breathing difficulties when staff are exposed to it, but the director said it was ridiculous to claim it could have any supernatural qualities. Is he right, or could it be that the ancient king’s curse is still effective after more than three millennia?

Her daughter looked up. “She was the woman who used to come and ask you questions about the tomb, wasn’t she?”

Eve looked at the photo again. They were on a beach and the man had his arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Who is the man?” she asked.

“The caption says: ‘Mrs. Ana Mansour with her husband, Muhammad, and their two children on holiday at the Red Sea resort of Hurghada last month.’”

Eve didn’t know the man or the children but she remembered the woman. They used to talk about important things from the past, back in the days when she could still remember it.

“I liked her,” she said. “She was my friend.”