Dance While You Can (41 page)

‘I will pay the amount you ask, not as an instalment of any deal
Mr Walters
set up with the Pasha, but for Christine Walters.’

‘Mr Belmayne, you
will
pay the money. But, I am sorry to say, on the Pasha’s terms, not your own.’

‘I am in this country to locate Christine Walters. Until I do, then please tell the Pasha I shall not be leaving.’

‘Perhaps, Mr Belmayne, you will reconsider when I tell you that your daughter, even as we speak . . .’

My mouth went dry. ‘Charlotte! Where is she? What the hell . . .’

‘She is safe, Mr Belmayne. Please, just do as I ask and she will remain so.’ And the line went dead.

‘
Jesus Christ
!’ I spun round as Robert came running in. ‘Charlotte! Where is she? I thought she was with your wife.’

‘She is. What’s going on?’

‘That phone call . . .’ I snatched up the receiver and started to dial. The phone rang at the other end, and almost straightaway Susie answered.

‘Alexander. At last. What happened? Where . . .?’

‘Where’s Charlotte?’ I barked.

‘Isn’t she with you?’

I felt the bottom drop out of the world. ‘No, she’s not with me. When did you last see her?’

‘About an hour ago. I dropped her off at the hotel.’

‘Then where is she now?’ The question was futile, of course.

I slammed the phone down and caught Robert by the throat. ‘They’ve got her. Do you hear me?’

Robert wrenched himself free and snatched up the phone. ‘I’m going to ring the Ambassador. What did the man say exactly?’

I told him. ‘Have you got the money?’ he asked.

‘Of course I’ve got the fucking money. The money’s nothing.’

‘Then I suggest you do as they say.’

‘Robert, you’d better get this into your head now. I am not leaving this country until I’ve got my daughter, so don’t let’s even discuss it.’

‘Robert Lyttleton here,’ he said into the phone, ‘put me on to the Ambassador. I don’t care if he’s in a meeting, put me on now!’

He waited as the operator put him through, and I paced the room, berating myself over and over for not sending Charlotte straight back to England.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, as Robert replaced the receiver.

‘He’s getting on to London.’

‘London! What fucking good will that do?’

‘We’ll see,’ he answered. ‘Meanwhile I suggest we get ourselves over to the Suez Canal Bank.’

We stopped off at the hotel manager’s office. Thank God he wasn’t like his fellow countrymen. Instead of the million apologies I had been expecting, he merely picked up the telephone. I had no idea what he was saying, but when he’d finished he told me to go to the National Arab Bank by the lobby where one hundred and fifty thousand Egyptian pounds would be waiting for me.

When we got to the Suez Canal Bank we didn’t have to wait long before I was approached by an old woman, huddled darkly behind her gilbab and khimara.

‘Eengleesh?’ she hissed.

I nodded, and she handed me a scrap of paper, then turned and disappeared into the crowd. I made to go after her, but Robert pulled me back. ‘She’ll have been paid to deliver the note. It’ll have passed through too many hands before hers for us to be able to find out where it came from.’ He took the piece of paper from me and unfolded it. The only thing written on it was a bank account number.

The transaction went smoothly and I was outside the bank again in less than ten minutes. Robert was waiting in a taxi. ‘I think we’d better go to the Embassy,’ he said.

‘Drop me at the hotel. If anyone wants to contact me, that’s where they’ll try.’

But for the rest of that day we heard nothing.

The first call came the next morning. It was the Ambassador to say the tracing of the bank account had led nowhere. However, his instructions had come through from Whitehall. He was to inform President Mubarak that Her Majesty’s Government would be greatly obliged if every effort would be made by the People’s Assembly to ensure the safe return of the Lord Chancellor’s granddaughter, forthwith.

I looked at Robert, dumbfounded.

‘I don’t think you realise, Alexander just what . . .’

‘
You don’t think I realise
? This is my daughter we’re talking about. She’s been kidnapped.
Kidnapped
! Given the lunatics we’re dealing with, she could be lying out there dead for all I know – and all you lot can come up with is a polite request that she should be returned! What bloody good do you think
that’s
going to do?’

‘You’ll see,’ he answered calmly. And within the hour I did.

The Cairo Chief of Police came to my room at the Marriott. With him was the British Ambassador and two henchmen. The Chief questioned me for over an hour, during which time an emergency police headquarters was set up in the Verdi Salon downstairs.

‘The Pasha is being questioned,’ the Chief said, as he pulled back the curtains and looked down into the garden.

My heart thumped adrenalin into my veins. ‘You know where he is?’

‘We have him at headquarters. I’m afraid so far this is all we have to go on.’ He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘It is all the Pasha will say.’

We all looked at it, but it was written in Arabic. I didn’t bother to disguise my irritation. ‘So, what does it say?’

‘It says, Mr Belmayne, the French earl curses into double figures.’

‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘As it stands, nothing. We have to work it out. It is the way the Pasha works.’

The Ambassador looked bemused. ‘You mean it’s a riddle?’

‘I suppose, yes. But it is more than that, I’m sure. I believe it will give us the clue to where your daughter is being held, Mr Belmayne.’ I glared at him, certain he had taken leave of his senses. He turned to the Ambassador. ‘Your intelligence agents, sir, I think they should join forces with the police in order to break this code. We have very little time.’

I snatched up the piece of paper. ‘For God’s sake, it’s a riddle. The way you’re behaving, anyone would think it held the answer to die Middle East crisis. A French earl is a count! Curses. Oaths, spells, scourges, plagues . . . Double figures. Anything from ten.’

‘The ten plagues,’ Robert said.

‘Incidentally,’ the Ambassador said, ‘I have just learned . . . What is it, Mr Belmayne? Has something . . .?’

‘The tenth plague,’ I whispered, and when I realised they were all staring at me, I almost yelled, ‘If you knew your bible . . . The tenth plague was the death of the first-born.’

The Ambassador looked at me, appalled, and I stared back at him.
She’s dead! She’s dead
! The words thumped with my heartbeat. Her face swam before my eyes, and I felt the knife of terror rip through my body.

The Chief was speaking. ‘Please, don’t be alarmed,’ he was saying, ‘it is early days yet. And now you, Mr Belmayne, you have given us a beginning.’ Despite his words he looked defeated.

I exploded. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Isn’t the message loud and clear? Isn’t that what the tenth plague means? It’s your damned country, your damned history!’

‘Oh yes, that is without a doubt what it means. But that is only the surface meaning. The Pasha, he will never make anything so simple as that. You see, you break the code in minutes, or so you think. But what we do now is solve the riddle of the tenth plague.’

Observing my reaction, the Chief obviously felt it best he withdraw at that point. I had been living on my nerves ever since Charlotte’s abduction, and now, with this new, implausible turn of events it was highly probable I might go over the edge at any moment.

After a sleepless night the police were still no closer to finding her. The Verdi Salon was in chaos; just about every cryptographer in the Middle East had been sectioned off to help decipher the ‘conundrum’, as they were now calling it. The only people keeping a reasonably cool head seemed to be the Chief of Police and the hotel manager.

Another day went by, and still we heard nothing. My father telephoned but I cut him short, wanting to keep the line free. Henry rang later, but again I terminated the call before he could get started.

On the third day, just before lunch, Robert arrived with a handful of telegrams. He passed them to me just as the telephone, which had been silent all morning, burst into life.

‘Mr Belmayne? Claude de Rousse here, from
Le Monde
.’

‘
Le Monde
?’

Robert pressed his fingers on the connectors and ended the call. ‘I should read the telegrams if I were you. Somehow the story has leaked out. What you have there are messages from the great British public, expressing their support.’

‘What!’

‘Some clever hack has pieced together your story, Alexander, old chum. It’s all over the press back home, so I’m told. Front page stuff. The great love story of the century, I think one of them called it. You and Elizabeth.’

‘Me and Elizabeth? But what . . . ?’

‘You’ll find it goes right back to Foxton’s, I’m afraid. The gypsy and the aristocrat. It’s caught everyone’s imagination. How you’ve loved each other secretly all these years, even that you’re the father of her two children. Everything’s there. Haven’t read it myself, of course, Henry told me. He called me last night. Said he called you first, but got cut off.’

I was listening to him in stupefied silence, while all the time a volcanic rage was rumbling through my gut. When he finished I exploded. ‘This isn’t a bloody soap opera!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t they realise . . .’

The phone cut me short. Robert picked it up. ‘I’m afraid Mr Belmayne isn’t available for comment at the moment,’ he said, and hung up. He rang through to the manager then, and asked him to instruct the operators to divert all calls from the press to the Verdi Salon.

‘Now calm down,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘Don’t you see, with the British public and the press on your side, it puts all the more pressure on the Egyptians to find her. And they will.’

‘I wish I had your confidence. And where the hell is Shami?’

Robert looked at his watch. ‘He should be arriving any minute. He says he knows where Christine is.’

‘What! Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

He shrugged. ‘Thought I ought to warn you about the paparazzi. They all flew in this morning, so we’re going to have to sneak out the back way.’

‘And the police? Have you told them you might know where Christine is?’

‘The Chief is on his way up. Incidentally, the telegram on the top is from your wife.’

He grinned at my look of dismay. ‘I’d read it, if I were you. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’

It was very short. ‘Good luck, darling,’ I read, ‘try and stay in one piece for our divorce. Love Jess.’

I looked at Robert and saw he was laughing. For the first time in days I laughed too. ‘She certainly knows how to pick her moment,’ I said. ‘Cable her back for me, will you?’

‘The message?’

‘“It’s a promise.”’

The moment Shami walked in and saw the Chief of Police, his eyes sank back in their sockets. He mumbled his apologies for bursting into the wrong room and started to close the door. The Chief was too quick for him and hauled him back inside.

He looked more shifty than ever as he admitted that it wasn’t he who had seen Christine, but his brother. He shrugged. ‘But is the same thing, no?’

The Chief shook his head, and Shami looked crestfallen. ‘But I explain, my brother, he know wife of second cousin of Pasha, she take my brother to a place where they see your Christine. It is in Khan-el-Khalili, where the men they make the gold. The gold they use for King Tutankhamun mask, no?’

The Chief was eyeing Shami. ‘What Tutankhamun mask, Shami?’

Shami looked round the room helplessly. ‘I donno, sir. Shami, he know very little.’ He turned his eyes to me. ‘But my brother, he say to be at Fishawi today. Someone will lead us to the men, and maybe they tell you where is your Christine. We hurry there now, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said the Chief.

Shami’s face was gloomy as he said his brother would not be pleased if he arrived with the police. ‘Not that he no like the police,’ he hastily assured us.

The Chief tossed us a wry smile and picked up the telephone. He spoke hurriedly in Egyptian, then asked us to wait a few minutes while his men arranged a decoy out of the hotel, to mislead the press.

A fleet of cars was waiting, none of them marked with police insignia. As we sped away from the hotel I noticed several of them break away from the convoy and fall anonymously into the traffic.

When we reached the bazaar the Chief disappeared inside the Sayyidna el-Hussein Mosque. Two of his men followed, and when they emerged several minutes later, they were all three dressed in traditional Egyptian garb. A police officer I recognised from the Verdi Salon approached us. He spoke to the Chief, waving his arms in the direction of the bazaar. The Chief listened gravely, nodded his head, then turned to us.

‘My men are in position. They are covering the Khan el-Khalili at every strategic point. I must instruct you, Mr Belmayne, that should we encounter any danger you are to leave everything to them. Please, no heroics. You do not understand the kind of people we are dealing with here. To them everything is
inshallah
– God’s will. If a man stands in their way and they have to kill him to get what they want, it is
inshallah
, they do not think twice.’ He turned to Shami. ‘Go ahead to the Fishawi, and no tricks, Shami, you will be being watched.’

When Shami had blended into the crowd the Chief turned again to Robert and me. ‘Now, please, follow me. I will lead you to the Fishawi – it is a coffee bar a few streets from here. When you see me sit down, please go no further than a nearby stall where you should inspect the merchandise. Do not, under any circumstances, move from there unless I say so. We will be in Shami’s hands. And again I stress, please, no heroics.’

A few minutes later we plunged into the pandemonium of the Khan el-Khalili. The Fishawi wasn’t far, but I knew that if I tried to find my way there again I would undoubtedly fail. The Chief, in his striped galibaya and turban, blended perfectly into the coffee bar crowd. Robert and I stood innocuously by, hustled and jostled as we inspected a display of brass and copper pots. Within seconds the owner of the stall was asking us to name a price, and so as not to call unnecessary attention to ourselves, Robert entered into a long-drawn-out haggle. I made a pretence of watching them, but all the time my eyes were fixed on Shami who was seated a few tables from the Chief of Police.