Two

T

wo floors below the office of the Chief Constable, two detectives of the newly formed Flying Squad were making their way to the stairs. Outwardly impervious to the sniggers of their col- leagues, the fact that both were dressed as Yeomen Warders of the Tower rankled with each of them.

‘Tell me, Inspector Fabian,’ the taller of the two said under his enormous moustache, ‘do I look as big an idiot as you do?’

Fabian looked his oppo up and down. The man had no calves at all and Tudor tights did nothing for him.

‘I fear you do, Inspector Hambrook. At least the Old Man didn’t insist on those codpieces. I’d have had to get fairly unpleasant with that woman in wardrobe if she’d persisted. A chap on the up like me can’t go around looking totally ludicrous, you know.’

‘What is the Chelsea Arts Ball exactly?’ Hambrook wanted to know.

‘Buggered if I can tell you,’ Fabian shrugged. ‘Bunch of ponces dressed up in funny clothes. D’you think the Old Man’s got it right; about the whole thing being a cover for white slavery, I mean?’

Hambrook shook his head. ‘I’ve got a lot of time for the Ace, but I think he’s out on a limb over this one. I say!’ The detective had stopped on a turn of the stair to stare out of a window.

Fabian whistled at his elbow.

‘I saw her first, Bob,’ he said. ‘Finders keepers.’

‘In a pig’s ear,’ Fabian retorted. ‘What a smashing piece of hors-d’oeuvres. Is my ruff straight?’

And they spun on their Tudor heels and clattered back down the stairs. The object of their attention was Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade who had just driven her Austin Seven into the courtyard below Fred Wensley’s office. She hauled on the handbrake and stepped out, with the intention of fetching her father. Her coat had hooked itself on to a bumper however and just as she was bending over to extricate herself, two Beefeaters had appeared at an upstairs window and had nearly done themselves a mischief craning their necks to the appropriate angle.

Now Walter Hambrook was no slouch. In the Metropolitan Inter-Divisional Sports, he had twice won the hurdles and three times the Hundred Yards Dash. He would have won the Egg and Spoon outright had he not collided with Streaker Jenkins of F Division three yards from home. So on the second turn, he was clearly ahead of the rather dumpier Bob Fabian. But the rather dumpier Bob Fabian had the instincts of a born climber. In fact, had he and Hambrook been running up the stairs, he’d have been well ahead. As it was, he cocked his leg over the banister and slid past his friend with a triumphant whoop, gambolling nimbly over that nasty knob at the bottom and colliding solidly with an elderly gent just emerging from the lift.

‘My God, I’m terribly sorry, sir. Are you all right?’ Fabian helped his target up.

‘All right? All right?’ the elderly gent parroted. ‘I’m careered into by twelve stone of Beefeater and you ask me if I’m all right. Look at my nose.’

Fabian did. ‘Good God’ he gasped. Its tip had gone. Just a flattened end. ‘Did I do that?’

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the old boy wanted to know. Fabian had apologized once. This ancient mariner was beginning to irk him somewhat. And Bob Fabian had never suffered irks gladly.

‘Undercover work,’ Fabian said, hearing Hambrook arrive at his back. He narrowed to the old boy. ‘Do you know who I am?’

The damaged gent peered back. ‘Not a clue,’ he said. ‘But I think I should tell you that if you thought that fancy-dress costume was unique, you’re in for a bit of a shock.’

‘I’m Inspector Robert Fabian,’ Fabian said. ‘Fabian of the Yard. No doubt you’ve heard of me.’

‘No doubt at all’, said the old boy, ‘I haven’t. And who’s this?’

‘Inspector Walter Hambrook.’ Hambrook could be as officious as Fabian when the mood took him. ‘Hambrook of the Yard.’

‘Well, I never.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Take that ridiculous moustache off, sonny, it does nothing for you whatsoever.’

Instinctively Hambrook felt below his nose. ‘How dare you?’ he said. ‘It’s a humble thing, but mine own.’

‘That’s funny,’ said the old boy. ‘I thought moustaches at the Yard went out with tipstaves and wooden rattles.’

‘Yes, well,’ Fabian smirked, enjoying his friend’s discomfiture. ‘That’s as may be, but at the moment, you’re hindering the police in the pursuance of their enquiries. Now you’ve collected for the War Cry or whatever it is you’re doing, on your wheelchair, granddad.’

And the uniformed inspectors spun on their heels and made for the door, elbow to elbow and ruff to ruff.

‘Excuse me,’ they chorused as they stepped into the April sunshine.

‘Ah,’ Emma looked at them in surprise, ‘it’s a Beefeaters’ Excuse Me.’

‘Hambrook.’ The leaner inspector doffed his hat. ‘My friends call me Wally.’

‘Naturally,’ Emma beamed.

‘I’m Bob Fabian.’ The plumper one doffed his. ‘Bob Fabian of the Yard.’

‘I’m Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade,’ she told them.

‘Lestrade?’ Hambrook raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘I know that name.’

‘Pity you don’t know the face,’ a voice snarled behind him.

‘Ah, Daddy.’ Emma squeezed between the Beefeaters and kissed him.

‘Does my nose look red to you? Broken even?’

‘Oh, God.’ Fabian’s face fell and his hand leapt up to catch it. He’d heard it wasn’t like Lestrade to break even.

‘Mr Lestrade, I . . .’ Hambrook began.

‘That’s ex-Detective Chief Superintendent to you, sonny,’ Lestrade snapped. ‘I can only assume that old Fred Wensley is suffering from overwork. Mental strain. Well, it can happen.’

‘Why, sir?’ Hambrook asked.

‘Because he told me you two were officers in the Flying Squad. Either that or I’m deafer than I thought I was. First you knock me flying – perhaps that’s what Fred had in mind – then, you browbeat me with a rank I last held nearly a quarter of a century ago. Now you have the infernal cheek to make passes at my daughter.’

‘Sir, we . . .’ both Beefeaters began.

‘Please,’ Lestrade bellowed. ‘You’ve already done enough today to get yourselves back on the Horse Troughs. One more word and it’ll be a pleasure to have you two sent to the Tower. After all, you’re dressed for the part.’

‘Yes sir.’ Hambrook put his hat back on and saluted. Fabian did the same. They marched smartly back inside to be about their business.

‘Ooh, Daddy.’ She patted his cheek. ‘You are an old bear.’

He smiled ruefully at her. ‘And what if I told you, daughter mine, that one of those two idiots is a murderer?’

She frowned at the entrance way through which they’d disappeared. She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t believe you,’ she said.

‘No,’ he climbed on to the running board of the Austin, ‘neither would I. Can you manage the crank? Only I think Fabian of the Yard just ruptured my clavichord.’

Sholto Lestrade was still muttering about arrogant little whipper-snappers and assuring his daughter that he’d been collaring criminals while Messrs Hambrook and Fabian were still shitting yellow, when a telegram arrived for Emma Bandicoot-Lestrade. It was from Highclere, from Evelyn Herbert who was an old school chum. And her father, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was dead.

The Lestrades, father and daughter, took the Great Western to Newbury, that hideous little market town which stands on the banks of the Kennet. Its church was built, appropriately enough, by Jack of Newbury, who led 150 men north to fight for his king at Flodden. At Newbury, they milled and they malted, pumped and made machine engines; and within its borough boundaries lay Speenhamland, renowned for its System and its racecourse, well known to the Flying Squad through the activities of its touts. Its market day was Thursday. So it was just as well that the Lestrades got there on Tuesday.

‘Tell me about the fifth Earl,’ Lestrade chewed the end of his cigar as the motor-taxi rattled south across the bleak expanse of Greenham Common. He noticed some rough-looking women loitering on its fringes, as though waiting for something.

‘Daddy,’ Emma looked sharply at her father, ‘I’ve told you already.’

‘I know,’ he nodded. ‘Tell me again.’

‘Ah,’ she raised an eyebrow under her cloche, ‘it’s the old “Make ’Em Say It Again” ploy, isn’t it? Will I never be anything but a suspect to you?’

‘Of course not, chummy,’ he scowled. ‘Now you cough like a good ’un or it’s the bracelets for you.’

‘Oh, goodie.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Coral is particularly “in” this year.’

‘The fifth Earl?’ He blew smoke rings at her.

She knew when she was beaten. ‘The fifth Earl,’ she repeated, clearing her throat. ‘George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, born 1866. Nice old boy, although I suspect your Berkshire colleagues may disagree with me.’

‘Oh? He’s got form, you mean?’

‘Hardly that,’ Emma giggled, ‘The late Earl fancied himself as something of a . . . what did people call them? . . . “automobilist”? Up before the beak more often than a baby cuckoo. He nearly killed himself a few years ago.’

‘Really?’

‘It must have been about the turn of the century. Evelyn was staying with us at Bandicoot Hall and I remember Harry coming in very grey-faced to breakfast one morning. Oh, I couldn’t have been more than seven or so, but you know how some things stay in the mind?’

Lestrade did. He’d only ever seen his old friend Harry Bandicoot grey-faced once and that was when someone had suggested they demolish Eton. Other than that, he was the overgrown schoolboy who had brought up his daughter for him. The Lestrades owed the Bandicoots a lot one way or another.

‘Anyway, he said that Evelyn’s pa had been hurt. Oh, of course he played it down for us children, but I heard him talking to Letitia afterwards. It was that apparently that persuaded the fifth Earl to go to Egypt.’

‘Better roads?’ asked Lestrade, never having been further east than the Dymchurch levels.

‘Better climate. I must say when I first met the old duffer some years later, he didn’t look at all well. Eight stone twelve in his combinations - and that wringing wet. He became a prey to our good old British winters and found solace in the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor. It was there he met Howard Carter.’

‘Howard Carter, the Whistling Flasher of Bury St Edmunds?’

‘No.’ She cuffed him round the ear with the beaded end of her scarf. ‘Howard Carter the archaeologist. Honestly, Daddy, do you never read a newspaper?’

‘The Police Review,’ he countered sulkily.

‘Howard Carter’, she told him patiently, ‘is the man who has discovered the lost tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, in the Valley of the Kings.’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade nodded.

‘It’s the most exciting find in the world,’ she enthused. ‘What a heartbreak for the fifth Earl that he didn’t live to see its glories unfold.’

The glories of Highclere unfolded as the taxi swept through the great gates. A long gravel drive ran between cedars of Lebanon to the vast Queen Anne house with its red brick and its Dutch influence, as though its architects had been heartily miffed that Dutch William was dead and his unprepossessing sister-in-law had come to the throne. A huge pair of stone staghounds bayed at the front door and a liveried flunkey stood at the top of the steps.

‘Mr Lestrade?’

‘Perhaps.’ Years on the job had taught the ex-Superintendent circumspection.

‘Oh, Daddy,’ Emma hissed quietly. ‘Yes,’ she said to the flunkey. ‘This is Mr Lestrade. I am Miss Lestrade.’

‘Ravishing!’ a voice called from behind her and a tall, good-looking young man was running across from the gazebo. She was struck by his lovely blond curls and his dark-brown eyes and stood there with her mouth open.

‘I’m Jack Holinshed. You have to be Emma.’

‘Do I?’ She stared at him. ‘Do I really?’

He took her hand and kissed it. Lestrade cleared his throat. Here was his daughter, around whom men buzzed like bees on red hot pokers, going googly over an overdressed layabout in a blazer. What were people calling them nowadays? Bright Young Things? He noted the buttons. Some hunt or other? Or was it a yacht club? He’d never really mastered the Gothic script.

‘Ah.’ Holinshed gripped his hand fervently. ‘I thought so,’ he said.

‘Did you?’ Lestrade’s eyes narrowed.

‘I knew your eyes would be hazel.’

‘Really?’ Lestrade felt himself pulling away.

‘The mark of the hunter,’ Holinshed beamed. ‘Isn’t that what you do, Mr Lestrade? Hunt men?’

‘I used to,’ Lestrade said. ‘But all that was some time ago. I’m retired now.’

‘And I’m Fatty Arbuckle!’ Emma snorted. ‘Mr Holinshed . . .’

‘Jack.’ He turned to her, placing an arm around her shoulders and leading her up the steps.

‘Jack,’ she repeated. ‘Where’s Evelyn? We got her telegram . . .’

‘Ah.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the taxi and the flunkey scuttled off to get the bags. ‘Well, there I’m afraid I have an eensy-weensy confession to make.’

‘Oh?’

He led her into the vast marble hall where a huge fire roared and crackled in the grate.

‘The telegram was actually from us.’

‘Us?’ Lestrade followed, looking for somewhere to put his bowler.

‘Oh, dear,’ Holinshed laughed. ‘I’m doing this very badly,’ he said. ‘Come into the library and I’ll explain all.’

The library was a fraction larger than the Bodleian and nearly as dusty. Lestrade had stood in more of these than Jack Holinshed had had hot dinners. He’d always suspected the aristocracy of buying their books by the yard. Unlike the ex-Superintendent himself who always visited Lost Property and bought his books from the Yard.

A striking-looking girl, perhaps a year or two younger than Emma, stood framed in the light of an oriel window. A more romantic soul than Lestrade’s would have seen in her the last glimmer of the Lady of Shalott, but when she moved, the spell was broken and her heavily fringed dress shimmered as she walked. The resemblance however was uncanny. The same curly blonde locks, but the eyes hidden behind the newly fashionable dark glasses that many Bright Young Things were sporting these days. She crossed to Lestrade.

‘I’m Tilly.’ she smouldered, running her fingers across Lestrade’s palm and a little way under his cuff. Any minute now, Lestrade thought she might start reciting ‘Round and round the garden’.

‘My sister,’ Holinshed didn’t need to announce. ‘Tilly, this is Superintendent Lestrade . . . and Miss Lestrade.’ He placed an arm across Emma’s view of the room, so that she was forced to look into his face. She didn’t object.

‘Charmed,’ Lestrade said, rubbing his ticklish wrist on the rough tweed of his Donegal. ‘You two sent the telegram?’

‘We did,’ Holinshed said, reaching across Emma and pulling the bell-pull. ‘Please . . . have seats.’

The Lestrade family collapsed into the bottomless chintz. Jack Holinshed stood by the fireplace, warming his Oxford bags.

‘Ever since George was taken ill, we’ve been here, comforting Lady C and Evelyn.’

‘George?’ Lestrade needed help. ‘Lady C?’

‘Lord and Lady Carnarvon,’ Tilly purred, lighting a black cigarette in an ebony holder. ‘Emma, darling, do you?’

She smiled at her father. ‘Only when Daddy isn’t looking,’ she said and accepted one.

Daddy ignored her. ‘Then why the subterfugue?’ he asked.

‘The what? Oh, I see.’ Holinshed perched on the arm of Emma’s chair. ‘Well, we weren’t sure if Evelyn had spoken to you of us, Emma. I thought if I sent a telegram under my name you wouldn’t come. We discussed the whole thing at some length with Lady C. She suggested we call you in. It was very important that you came.’ He looked into her eyes for so long she had to look away.

‘May I ask why?’

Holinshed looked at his sister. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘because George, Lord Carnarvon, was murdered.’

Emma looked at her father. ‘Where is Evelyn?’ she asked.

‘In the Valley of the Kings by now,’ Tilly said.

‘You’d better tell me all you know, Mr Holinshed,’ Lestrade said.

‘Well,’ he sighed, raising his hands. ‘I’ll try. Tilly, darling, could you see where that wretched butler has got to? Either he’s deaf as Lon Chaney’s parents or that bell-pull has to go.’

She smiled and swept from the room.

‘George left for Aswan at the end of February,’ Holinshed told the Lestrades. ‘He’d exhausted himself at the finding of the tomb . . . Are you an aficionado, Mr Lestrade?’

‘No,’ the ex-Superintendent told him. ‘Church of England.’

‘Well,’ Holinshed went on, ‘as far as we could gather from the telegram Evelyn sent us from Cairo, her father cut himself shaving, whether at Aswan or before, we don’t know. He’d been bitten by a mosquito, here on the cheek.’ He held an elegant finger up to his handsome face. ‘Apparently, the bite was swollen, his cut-throat razor opened up the wound and he was soon running a temperature of 101. Evelyn – you know her, Emma – insisted he went to bed to rest. She’d gone out to visit at the end of March. Anyway, after a seeming recovery, he got worse. Lady C was hysterical. We got her into a Puss Moth with Dr Johnson and off they went.’

‘Puss Moth?’ Lestrade repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Dr Johnson?’ Wasn’t he the bloke who wrote a dictionary and thought that a horse was part of a postern?

‘It’s an aircraft, Mr Lestrade,’ Holinshed explained. ‘Johnson is the family quack. Lord P got there just in time.’

‘Lord P?’ Lestrade queried.

‘Teddy Porchester,’ Emma cut in. ‘Evelyn’s brother.’

‘The poor old aristocrat passed into the void in the early hours of the morning. The fifth of April. He’ll be sorely missed, I fear.’

‘Probably,’ nodded Lestrade, ‘but what you’ve described to me, Mr Holinshed, is a tragic accident, no doubt extrapolated by the heat and the flies. It’s a long way from murder.’

‘Yes,’ Holinshed stood up. ‘Will you excuse us, Emma?’ He held her hand again. ‘There’s something I’d like to show your father.’

‘Of course,’ she smiled.

Holinshed held the door open for Lestrade and then led the way through the oddly silent house. For all that flames danced in every room, a coldness hung on stairway and hall that made Lestrade pull his ancient Donegal about him. Holinshed took his man down a flight of stone steps into the cellar where bottles of port, cocooned in cobwebs, waited to titillate the palate of a man who would drink no more. A dead dog lay on a table in the centre, its tongue lolling, its eyes glazed.

‘This was Susie,’ Holinshed said. ‘George’s favourite terrier bitch.’

‘Dreadful.’ Lestrade shook his head. ‘Bled to death, I suppose.’

‘What?’

‘The leg,’ Lestrade said. ‘The animal only has three legs.’

‘That’s an old loss, Mr Lestrade,’ Holinshed said. ‘It happened years ago. No, Susie just howled on the morning of the fifth and dropped dead. I didn’t want to involve Tilly in all this. The unfortunate beast was on her bed at the time.’

‘Just as well she’s a bitch,’ Lestrade muttered.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The terrier.’ He pointed to it. ‘It’s just as well she’s a bitch. Don’t know how she’d have managed in the lamp-post department with an injury like that if she’d been a dog.’

‘Oh, quite,’ Holinshed frowned. ‘But that’s not all. On the day the antechamber to the tomb was opened, the pet canary of Howard Carter, the resident archaeologist, was swallowed by a cobra.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘Exactly. And at the very moment Carnarvon died, the lights went out, all over Cairo.’

‘Fancy.’ Lestrade shook his head.

‘Mr Lestrade.’ Holinshed stood squarely to his man, holding him by the shoulders. ‘All I know is that the Herberts have been friends of ours since I can remember. Evelyn has often spoken to us of Emma and Emma’s father, the doyen of detectives. This is no accident, Mr Lestrade. The dog, the canary, the lights. I can’t pretend to explain it, but it makes the skin on my scalp crawl.’

‘What would you like me to do, Mr Holinshed?’

‘I’d like you to find out what really happened,’ the blond man said. ‘I’d like you – and Emma – to come to Egypt with Tilly and me and ask those foreigners a few questions.’

‘Come to Egypt?’ Lestrade’s eyebrows had all but disappeared under his hairline. ‘How?’

‘Fly, of course,’ Holinshed beamed. ‘This is 1923, Mr Lestrade. This is the age of the plane.’

‘Where?’ Fred Wensley was incredulous. First, his old oppo Sholto Lestrade had asked to meet him, not at the Yard, but in the library of the British Museum, a room Wensley always thought Lestrade knew nothing about. Second, they’d drifted upstairs to the Museum Tea-Rooms after an ancient researcher, a somewhat unsavoury chap, had complained about their whispering together. Third, Lestrade was paying.

‘Egypt,’ Lestrade repeated.

‘That’s what I thought you said. Are you being mother?’ Wensley pointed at the teapot.

‘Not at my time of life,’ Lestrade said. ‘The honour is all yours.’

‘Well, well.’ Wensley poured for them both.

‘You don’t mind, do you, Fred?’

‘My dear Sholto, you’re not under my jurisdiction. You’re a free agent. If you’ve got the folding stuff . . . Personally, I can’t afford to get much further east than Rotherhithe, but that’s what being a chief constable does for you.’

‘Apparently.’ Lestrade’s tie-end somehow joined his spoon to swirl around in his tea. ‘Oh, bugger.’ He wrung it out. ‘Apparently, money is no object.’

‘How nice.’

‘No, I mean, it’s on the Herberts.’

‘I see.’

‘No, I just meant . . . well, you did ask me to have a little peep at the Old Fogey murders. No doubt you felt I had a certain entity with the victims.’

‘Well, yes, but I . . .’

‘Well, I’ve got an idea.’

‘Oh.’ Wensley’s stirring came to an abrupt end. He had an enormous respect for Sholto Lestrade. And an affection beyond the common. He’d go to hell and back for that man. But as for listening to his ideas, well, that was something else. Lestrade’s ideas tended to get you held at knife-point or thrown off a bridge or handcuffed to the buffers of the eight thirty-six from Swanage.

‘Why don’t I take your suspects with me?’

‘What?’

Lestrade closed to his man. The Flying Squad were all masters of disguise. Who was to say that the floozy in the mob-cap wasn’t Sergeant Joe ‘The Ox’ Ledbetter? Or that the old girl in the wheelchair sucking her Bath Oliver wasn’t actually Inspector Tom ‘Hercules’ Bennett? Lestrade kept it low. ‘You suspect Macclesfield, Hambrook and Fabian. Am I right? The torn warrant card?’

‘Let’s say I’m keeping an eye on them,’ Wensley nodded.

‘Well, let me do that. In Egypt, they’re out of your hair. I can work my wiles on them. And if another old fogey bites the dust in their absence, you’ll know they’re in the clear. At the same time, I can use their powers of arrest to affect the Carnarvon murder. If murder it be.’

‘Do you think this Holinshed character is on to something?’

Lestrade stroked his moustache. ‘I don’t know, Fred. I’ll be able to tell you more when I’ve checked the set-up out there.’

‘You’re keen to go, then?’

‘Keen?’ Lestrade nearly dropped his cup. ‘Fred, I’m absolutely terrified.’

Wensley shook his head. ‘It’s unprecedented, Sholto,’ he said. ‘Yard officers going to Egypt. Dear God, we’ll be sending them to the Falkland Islands next!’

The rather fetching young lady in the powder-blue uniform made the announcement one more time, bellowing into her loudhailer as she sauntered around the departure lounge in Croydon Airport: ‘Imperial Airways are pleased to announce the departure of their flight to Cairo. Will passengers please make their way on to the concourse, preferably before the wind changes.’

‘I didn’t care for that.’ Wally Hambrook picked up his suitcase.

‘What?’ Bob Fabian grappled with his.

‘That wind-changing bit.’

‘Ever flown before?’ Norroy Macclesfield asked, handling his Antlers with dexterity.

‘No,’ his fellow inspectors chorused. ‘Have you?’

‘Not unless you count the hurricane of ’21,’ he told them. ‘I estimate I travelled forty-eight feet at an altitude of six or seven inches before I hit that gate.’

‘Well, that’s pretty good,’ Hambrook nodded, impressed. ‘As good as the Wright brothers, anyway.’

‘Anybody seen Lestrade?’ Fabian asked.

They turned in a body to see an elderly gent in bowler and Donegal crossing the wind-swept tarmac. Perhaps it was the way his ravishing daughter was tugging him from in front, then changing position and pushing him from behind, but something gave them the distinct impression that ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Lestrade was a little reluctant to go.

Ahead of them, the de Havilland DH66 Hercules throbbed on the runway like a great silver bird.

‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ Jack Holinshed sauntered past the struggling Lestrades, his blond hair held in place by a Panama of generous cut.

‘If you say so,’ Lestrade senior growled above the snarl of the engines.

‘She’s a prototype.’ He helped the ex-Superintendent on to the steps. ‘Wide-track undercarriage and slab-sided fuselage mounted on the lower wing. Triple fins and rudders. Cruising speed, just under a hundred miles an hour.’

He’d vanished into that slab-sided fuselage by the time Lestrade’s jaw had stopped falling. ‘How fast did he say?’ he asked Emma.

‘Daddy,’ she shouted into his ear, ‘we promised to help Evelyn Herbert and that’s what we’re going to do.’

He clutched her sleeve. ‘I’ve heard people’s bodies fall apart if they travel too fast.’

‘That’s what they said about the motor car,’ she told him. ‘And before that, about the train. You’d remember both.’

‘Thank you, dear,’ he said and let her push him inside, tripping ever so slightly and landing in a wicker chair. The cabin was laid out as for a Cheltenham tea-room. The Holinsheds, Tilly and Jack, were chatting to a dashing young man with gold braid on his sleeve. He, apparently, was the pilot and it comforted Lestrade not one jot to discover that he’d flown Camels during the War. Being in the desert with Lawrence of Arabia hardly made for safety.

The three wise policemen, inspectors all, were being wedged into their seats with thick blankets by the girl in powder blue. Then she clapped her hands and made an announcement.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am Veronica and I am your air hostess for all the legs of this flight. We shall be taking off in a quarter of an hour. Morning coffee will be served at eleven, luncheon at twelve thirty. We expect to reach Paris by two at the latest. Now, may I introduce your captain, Captain Mainwaring.’

‘People call me Guy,’ he smiled. ‘Welcome to Imperial Airways’ spanking new bus.’

‘Bus?’ Lestrade hissed to Emma.

‘She may not be as pretty as the Handley Page, but she’s got bags of get up and go and that’s just what we intend to do. So sit back and enjoy yourselves.’ He turned towards the cockpit. ‘By the way, you may experience a slight vibration on take-off and a feeling of excessive nausea after that. Veronica will pass among you with bags. And please don’t open the windows in case of blow-backs. Incidentally, the usual office is to be found at the rear of the aircraft. Some of you gentlemen may find your style a little cramped, but this aircraft is only a prototype, so any complaints, please pass them to Veronica.’

Hambrook winked at Fabian. Veronica appeared to be the kind of girl chaps often passed a complaint on to. In the half-a-mile-high club, it went with the job.

‘Tally Ho!’ shouted Mainwaring. ‘Last one in France is a cissy.’

If Lestrade thought the throbbing of the three engines intrusive before, it was nothing to what he experienced now. Ahead, through a partially curtained door, he saw Captain Mainwaring fitting a leather helmet over his head and fiddling about with knobs and levers. The old policeman’s ears seemed to collapse inside his head and his brain to explode as Mainwaring wrestled with the throttle. Hedges that ringed the aerodrome became a blur, Croydon a jumble of buildings that hurtled past them.

Lestrade thought it best to concentrate on things inside the cabin. Emma sat beside him, smiling, chatting to Norroy Macclesfield. Hambrook and Fabian were in earnest conversation over a hand of Canasta. The Holinsheds were ordering drinks from Veronica. This was all some mad dream, some terrible nightmare from which he would wake. But he was awake. And suddenly, there was no more land. The comforting landmarks of Surrey were a crazy jigsaw of fields and ribbon roads, snaking away to his right and behind him. He felt his stomach hit the roof of his mouth and then an eerie strangeness as the Hercules climbed through the low cloud. He was in limbo, lost in a way he’d never ever been lost in the streets of London. He shut his eyes and prayed.

Emma and Norroy had morning coffee. So did everybody else except Sholto Lestrade. At twelve thirty on the nose, Veronica, her powder-blue uniform wrapped in a powder-blue apron, served the noisettes d’agneau et pommes frites, followed by blancmange Lafayette, to remind the passengers they were over France. Lestrade had a glass of water.

He was still sitting with his eyes shut, his moustache curled over the rim of the Imperial Airways blanket, when the aircraft began to lurch to the right and rattle violently. He opened his eyes to see Tilly and Emma casually angling their coffee cups to counter the roll and Walter Hambrook, who was winning at Canasta, neatly catch his winnings and sweep them into his pocket.

‘What’s happening?’ Lestrade grabbed Veronica’s arm as she swept past, collecting empties.

‘We’re banking,’ she said.

‘On what?’ Lestrade’s question was rather more falsetto than he would have liked. ‘Getting down alive?’

She smiled and patted his hand. ‘Wouldn’t you like to take your bowler off, Mr Lestrade?’ she asked. ‘We’ll be in Paris in a few minutes.’

‘Thank you, no.’ He sat resolutely. ‘I might catch a chill.’

Lestrade’s eyes were closed again as the ground came up to meet them. He didn’t see the crowds surging on the runway, nor the large placards held up to the plane by running, gesticulating men on the ground. Nor would it have been very pointful if he had, because the placards were written in French.

Luckily, Captain Mainwaring had been stationed there during the war and he spoke it like a native.

‘Strike of airport officials!’ he shouted back into the cabin. ‘We can’t touch down here.’

‘What?’ Lestrade’s eyes flew open. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ll have to fly on to Lyons.’

‘Where?’ Lestrade shouted.

‘Lyons,’ Veronica repeated for his benefit. ‘It’s only another two hours in the air.’

‘Two hours?’ Lestrade thought he said, although no sound had escaped his lips.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Mainwaring chirped. ‘There’s only a slim chance of us running out of fuel.’

Lyons may have lacked the élan of Paris and the industrial sabotage of its airport workers, but it was the second largest commercial centre in France, famous for its silk, its Credit Lyonnais and its spuds of almost the same name. Imperial Airways, ever ready to doubt the support of foreigners, was ready for the argy-bargy on the Orlée Airstrip and had a nice little hotel – L’Aviateur Fatigué – waiting in the Rue de la Guillotière. Lestrade had never been so glad to see terra firma in his life and he even partook of a cognac in the hotel bar – Macclesfield was paying. He collapsed into his bed a little after midnight, but the damned thing kept banking and diving through the clouds of his sleep and it was a wreck who staggered down to breakfast the next morning.

While Hambrook and Fabian demanded in loud English their bacon and eggs, Jack Holinshed nipped out to the runway to check that all was well. The de Havilland had been duly washed and polished and refuelled and all was in order.

‘Where to today?’ Lestrade was almost afraid to ask as he crossed the concourse. A warm wind lifted the flaps of his Donegal, and for all it was April, he felt peculiarly mellow – for a man staring death in the face, that is.

‘Rome,’ Veronica smiled. ‘But before that we have a little treat.’ All the passengers except Lestrade were delighted to discover that the tables had been stashed to one side of the fuselage and all the seats were facing forward. Pinned up across Mainwaring’s cock-pit door was a white canvas screen. On a jardinière-type thing at the narrow end stood a black contraption that looked for all the world like Arlt and Fricke’s Improved Hair Drying Apparatus, the Mark Three version of 1905. In fact, it turned out to be a cinematograph projector.

‘On a prototype aircraft,’ Mainwaring beamed, ‘you would expect prototype entertainment. No expense has been spared in bringing you a cinematic delight. We have The Cabinet of Dr Caligari on the flight to Rome and tomorrow, on the flight to Cairo, Il Duce Pulls It Off, a documentary with English subtitles about everyday Fascist folk.’

There were murmurs of approval all round.

‘Now, while I get “Olivia” into the air, Veronica will pass among you with the petit fours. And the vomit bags. All hell’s likely to break loose over the Dordogne. I’m expecting turbulence with a capital T.’

And as Lestrade stole a glance out of the window, the sun kissed the great dome of the church of Notre Dame de Fourvière, sliding away out of sight on the dark green hills below.

Because the de Havilland ‘Olivia’ was only a prototype, Imperial Airways had not had time to solve the problem of the in-flight cinematic delight. The projector could be housed satisfactorily and Veronica wore a more revealing cutaway uniform in order to sell her ices. It was generally agreed, however, that a silent film was nothing without the music. And the problem remained, where to put the piano? In the short term, Veronica provided a solution there too. She was not only an air hostess, it transpired, but a siffleuse of some note. Lestrade had obviously misheard in the rumble of the engines and assuming the unfortunate young lady to have acquired a social disease, moved his seat a little further back. It only confirmed his suspicions that she wasn’t well when she began to purse her lips and flap her hands around them. Peculiar symptoms, Lestrade frowned amid the engines’ roar; it looked for all the world as if she was whistling.

A thick carpet of fog lay over Rome’s airport and Captain Mainwaring had to circle a few times. Hambrook and Fabian were deep in conversation, trying to unravel the complexities of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Emma and Macclesfield were pointing out of the window, swearing they could see the sun glinting on the dome of St Peter’s and the Palazzio Venezia. For a brief moment, as the de Havilland shuddered and groaned, Lestrade thought he was going to die. Then they were buffeting along the runway and newspaper-men were racing with them, cameras popping and flashing in the noonday Italian sun.

‘Look at this, Wally.’ Fabian pointed. ‘We’re famous!’ And he rummaged in the luggage rack for his Yard trenchcoat. Veronica opened the door and Bob Fabian was first out on to the steps, pipe in hand, fedora at a rakish angle. And when the papparazzi rushed past him, hats and notepads waving, his lip only trembled for a moment with disappointment.

‘What’s going on?’ Hambrook joined him at the door.

‘Buggered if I know,’ Fabian muttered, relaxing his careful pose. ‘Some bloody Wop VIP over there by the look of it.’

‘That’s Mussolini.’ Holinshed squeezed past them. ‘II Duce himself. Take a good look at him, gentlemen. That’s the next ruler of the world.’

‘What?’ Fabian frowned. ‘That fat little bloke? All boots and bald head?’

‘That’s the one,’ Holinshed beamed. ‘He flies into the airport now and then just to raise a crowd.’

‘What a poser!’ Fabian growled.

‘Maybe,’ said Holinshed. ‘But at least in this country, the planes run on time.’

Someone once said when a man is tired of Cairo, he’s tired of Fife. Lestrade couldn’t remember who it was exactly or what the precise connection. Certainly, beyond the confines of the little airport there was no sign of a Scotsman anywhere.

‘The temperature’, Captain Mainwaring informed his passengers as he hauled off his helmet and passed among them, ‘is a pleasant 68 degrees. Over there’, he pointed through the port windows, ‘is the Bab-el-Nasr, the gate of victory. And beyond that, the tombs of the Caliphs. I should keep your hands on your wallets and purses from now on, ladies and gentlemen. You will find yourselves surrounded by street urchins of every complexion. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll clip ’em round the ear. And gentlemen . . .’ he lowered his voice and raised his eyebrows, ‘keep close to the walls in the Old Native Quarter. Hunnish practices.’ He would say no more.

They were shepherded quickly through customs, eyed closely by tall men in fezs. Already Lestrade was making enquiries about the sea route home. The smell of camels hit them as they crossed the Ismailiyeh Canal en route to the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities.

‘I am Kalil,’ their tall, fierce-eyed guide had told them. ‘The Sirdar is waiting.’

‘Sirdar?’ Lestrade said out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Sort of High Commissioner,’ Holinshed explained. ‘Our Man in Cairo. It’s not every day an English aristocrat dies in their desert. He’ll have all the facts by now.’

‘Then’, Tilly said, ‘we must go and find Evelyn.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Emma agreed. ‘The poor dear.’

Some yards away on the street called Sharia El-Kubri, two Egyptian fellahin rested on their shovels.

‘Bitch of a day, Hassim,’ the taller one murmured.

‘Working here has its compensations, though, Mubarak. Look at the pyramids on that.’

Hassim spat into the dust that lay like a Persian carpet everywhere in those mean streets. ‘White women!’ He followed his friend’s gaze. ‘I wouldn’t give you a thank you.’

‘Well,’ Mubarak shrugged, ‘to each his own. Allah, look at that one in the funny hat. Why is he wearing that coat?’

‘White men!’ Hassim spat again, this time behind him, so that his aim plopped into the sluggish brown waters of the Nile.

‘Allah created the English mad,’ Mubarak nodded, watching the one in the funny hat fanning himself frantically. ‘My old donkey to your pet cobra he passes out before he gets to the door.’

‘You must be joking,’ Hassim scowled. ‘There’s no sport in that. Oops, there he goes now.’

And they watched, nodding and shaking their dark-brown hands, as the gentlemen in the English party carried the one with the funny hat into the cool of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

‘How was the flight into Egypt?’

Lestrade sat bolt upright. Ahead of him, in the shadows, a basalt jackal leered at him, his ears erect, mouth gaping, every sinew of the neck taut and rigid. The jackal looked quite relaxed by comparison. A rather pallid face appeared between the statue and Lestrade. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘Are you with us again?’

‘That all depends on who you are.’ Lestrade squinted in the cool of the darkness.

‘Oh, sorry, old boy. I’m Aubrey Herbert.’

‘Of the Carnarvon Herberts?’

‘The same.’ He extended a sinewy hand.

‘I thought you’d have a trace, at least, of a Welsh accent. Ooh.’ The ex-Superintendent’s head throbbed like the de Havilland engines.

‘Daddy!’

‘Ah,’ Lestrade smiled. ‘My daughter’s voice.’

‘We were so worried.’ Emma was suddenly beside him, patting his hand, stroking his head.

‘The last thing I remember’, he said, ‘was shooing away those little boys who were buzzing round us. I fainted, presumably?’

‘It’s the heat, Daddy,’ Emma told him. ‘As well as the flies.’

‘Actually,’ Herbert produced Lestrade’s headgear, ‘it’s the demon bowler.’

‘Oh?’

‘Too stifling for Cairo. And as for this . . .’ Herbert held up Lestrade’s Donegal, ‘six Merinos must have died to make that.’

‘I don’t think they actually kill the sheep these days, do they, Mr Herbert?’ Lestrade had the strength to snatch back his belongings, as Emma helped him to sit upright.

‘Take my advice,’ Herbert said. ‘Get yourself a lightweight galabieh and a Panama. Oh, and if you’re going up-country to the tombs, you’ll need plenty of Keating’s Powder.’

‘Who is this Keating?’ Lestrade had been a passenger long enough. It was time he took command of the situation. He had three inspectors of the Yard who collectively couldn’t inspect a bus ticket, a couple of socialites who would be as much use in a murder enquiry as umbrellas under Niagara Falls and . . .

‘The johnnie who invented the powder, I suppose.’ Herbert lit his pipe, his jaundiced face flashing yellow in the eerie light. ‘Fleas are a huge problem out here, Mr Lestrade, along with tomb robbers and terrorist murder.’

‘Terrorist murder?’

An alien voice echoed through the marble halls of the Museum of Antiquities. ‘Excuse me, Herbert Pasha, you are not permitted to smoke in the Museum.’

‘Oh, bugger off, Mahmoud, my brother dug most of this stuff up. And don’t give me any of the old acid about your birthright. If it weren’t for us British, you lot would have been overrun by the mad Mahdi years ago.’

The attendant scowled in the shadows, and exited, muttering.

‘Ungrateful johnnie, your average fellah,’ Herbert commented, getting comfortable on a stool of the Sixteenth Dynasty. ‘Mind you, his ancestors knew a thing or two about creature comforts. Fits the bum like a glove, this . . . oh, beggin’ your pardon, my dear. We Carnarvons call a spade a spade.’

‘That’s all right,’ Emma smiled. ‘So do we Lestrades.’

‘My condolences for your late brother, Mr Herbert.’ Lestrade was almost his old self now, the hum in his ears having lessened to an acceptable level.

‘Now, Daddy . . .’ Emma warned.

‘I’m all right, darling.’ He patted her knee. The look on old Herbert’s face suggested that he rather wanted to do that. ‘Where are the Three Wise Men?’

‘If you mean Norroy, Wally and Bob . . .’

Lestrade groaned.

‘. . . As soon as it was obvious you hadn’t had a stroke, they went off with the Holinsheds to book in at the hotel.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Shepheard’s,’ she told Herbert.

‘Ah.’ His face fell. ‘Don’t have the mouton a la Grecque.’

‘Really?’

‘Awful lot of Grecque and not much mouton, if you catch my drift.’

‘Now.’ Lestrade patted his daughter’s hand this time. ‘I’m perfectly all right. You go and soak up some culture in the Museum while Mr Herbert and I have a little chat.’

She looked sideways at him, stood up and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I never thought it would happen to you.’

‘What, that I’d pass out in the heat?’

‘That you’d become a patronizing old bugger!’ And she swiped him round the head and clattered away into the Nineteenth Dynasty.

The grey Arab pawed the sand in the purple haze of the twilight. The Frenchman pulled his galabieh round him, for night was the Winter of the Tropics and it was suddenly cold.

‘She is a magnificent animal, Le Clerk Pasha,’ the fellah said, patting the animal’s warm neck and steadying the stirrup. ‘It is nearly dark, but she will carry you faithfully. Has she not the eyes of the stars and the heart of the lion?’

Alain Le Clerk was no judge of horseflesh. He was his country’s leading Egyptologist and, if he said so himself, a pretty dab hand when it came to the old bicyclette. He appreciated, however, that the old bicyclette was damned hard work in the desert, and at least a horse was preferable to a camel.

The fellah with the fez barked orders to the fellah without and the latter dropped to his hands and knees so that Le Clerk could mount. He put his left foot into the stirrup, his right on the fellah’s back and the fellah grunted to take the strain. Then he rose up, lifting the Frenchman to saddle height. The grey shifted under his sixteen stone and tossed her head as she felt the bit ease back against her soft mouth.

‘Thank Mr Carter for his hospitality,’ Le Clerk said. ‘I’ll meet him at Luxor tomorrow as we agreed.’ And he nudged the Arab with his heels and the two of them cantered off into the desert night.

Howard Carter was waiting at Luxor at the appointed hour. Le Clerk was late. The Frenchman would be late for ever now. In the rising gold of the dawn, against the ever-changing ripples of the sand, the grey Arab pawed the ground in its search for scrub grass. Some yards away, the galabieh flapping in the wind, lay the body of France’s greatest Egyptologist. Above him, circling with hungry eyes and razor beaks, the vultures of the desert came to dine.