Dance While You Can (43 page)

‘She is gone,’ the Chief said. ‘They took her away this morning.’

‘They? Who are you talking about?’ I demanded, failing to keep the desperation from my voice.

The Chief nodded to his driver, then turned to face us. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Belmayne, I cannot say. All I know is that she was alive when they took her. My men are taking the Pasha’s mother away to be questioned, but I think she was speaking the truth when she said she didn’t know the people who came for your daughter.’

I slumped back in my seat, unsure if I could take any more. None of us spoke as we were driven back to the Embassy. None of us wanted to admit that we could be right back at square one.

‘Ah, Meester Ambassador, Meester Belmayne,’ Shami said as we walked into the Ambassador’s office. He was grinning like a pumpkin. ‘The secretary she say I can wait here for you. You find your daughter, no?’

‘No!’

The smile fell from his face. ‘You no find her? But was my . . .’ He threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘He drink again,’ he said, mysteriously. ‘You come with me, Meester Belmayne, I take you to your daughter. Very fine, very beautiful girl, your daughter. I take you there now. She wait for you.’

‘You mean you know where she is?’

‘Sure. She with my brother. I take her from El Khalifa in this morning. She no like it there. Come, she wait for you.’

I was aware of my whole body turning rigid as grim suspicion flowered into certainty. ‘Have you known all the time where she is, Shami?’

Shami nodded brightly. ‘For sure I know, Meester Belmayne. Shami know everything.’

I lunged at him but Robert and the Ambassador pulled me back. ‘If you knew, then why have you let us go through all this?’ I yelled.

Shami shrugged. ‘To say mean no money, Meester Belmayne. Like everyone in the world, Shami need money.’ He grinned. ‘And the chase, aaah, the chase, he was good, no?’

For the moment, robbed of the power of speech, all I could do was stare at him. While my daughter had suffered in God only knew what kind of hell, with God only knew what kind of people, this man had thought no further than the money he could make and the sport to be had in making it. He shuffled his feet and grinned sheepishly from me to Robert. Then the Chief of Police ushered him out of the room before I could regain control of my faculties . . . .

– Elizabeth –

– 31 –

I had been in Holloway Prison for exactly sixteen days when Alexander brought Charlotte back to England; already it felt like a lifetime. Henry came to see me that day to tell me Alexander had taken Charlotte straight to hospital. I can’t explain what it was like living with the frustration of such helplessness.

The day after he flew in Alexander, together with Oscar Renfrew, came to see me. As I was led up to the visiting hall my heart was in my throat and I felt sick with the humiliation of him seeing me like this. The first time he had come, the day before he went to Cairo, I was still too dazed to think straight. But now, as I walked soundlessly along the corridors, avoiding the eyes of the officers we passed, I was all too aware of the living hell my life had become. When I’d been told he was coming I’d brushed my hair and left it loose, but I knew it wouldn’t hide the dark rings round my eyes or the dullness of my skin. Of the three outfits I’d been allowed to take into prison I’d chosen a black Chanel suit as the one I would wear for visiting days. I no longer had it. The other women, resenting the open display of wealth had ripped it to pieces and were using it as dusters to clean their cells. Very few of them spoke to me except to sneer and hiss and cat-call across the landings. I was terrified of them. I stood at mealtimes – unable to sit down because no one would let me. I ate very little, as they spat in my food or knocked it from my tray. Most of the time I was dirty because I was too afraid to go to the washrooms. It wasn’t until Isabelle, my cell mate, decided to befriend me that I managed to utter more than a few words to anyone. Without Isabelle I don’t know how I’d have got through. After days of silently watching the way I was treated, she took it upon herself to protect me from the constant threats of violence and sexual abuse, and pulled strings to get me a job in the library with her. It was my only respite from the nightmare.

Just past the visiting hall, the prison officer stopped and opened the door to an interview room. There was brown carpet on the floor and the walls were bare. In the middle was a table. I went in and she closed the door behind me. A few minutes later I heard footsteps, then the door opened and Alexander was there. I had promised myself I would be strong, that I wouldn’t let him know how awful things really were, but when I saw the look in his eyes my control fell apart. I had never seen a man’s face so filled with love and anguish.

With one arm he held me, burying his face in my hair and whispering for me to be calm. Oscar nodded to the prison officer and she left us alone. It was some time before I could pull myself together. Throughout the time Alexander and Charlotte had been in Cairo, Henry had kept me informed of what was happening, and now, knowing they were both home and safe, all the torment and terror I had somehow managed to bottle up came pouring out. Alexander waited while I reminded him that I’d told him not to go, that I had warned him about the kind of people he was dealing with; I called him irresponsible, selfish and stupid, I even lashed out at his wounded arm. In the end he caught hold of me and turned me to face him.

‘It’s good to see you too,’ he said.

He sat me down then and, perched on the edge of the table, he laughed as he told me how Jonathan was green with envy that he hadn’t been kidnapped too, and couldn’t wait for Charlotte to come home from the hospital so he could hear all the gory details.

‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled as he saw my look of alarm, ‘my father’s taking Jonathan off to the country this afternoon, so Charlotte will be spared. Canary and Caroline will be looking after her. And me, of course.’

I looked away, my heart aching. They would be together now – Alexander, Charlotte and Jonathan, and here was I . . .

He must have sensed how I was feeling because he slipped his arm out of its sling and hugged me. ‘We’ll have you out of here, darling,’ he promised. ‘I know it’s difficult, but please, try and be patient.’

But I knew from the way his eyes met Oscar’s that something was troubling him, and when I challenged him, he admitted it. It was the way the Egyptians had gone about interrogating Christine. Although he had no actual details of what they had done to extract the confession from her, he knew that when it came to appeal the prosecution would make a great deal of their methods and perhaps succeed in invalidating the confession altogether.

‘Our only hope is for her to be present at the appeal,’ Oscar said. ‘Even then, there’s no way of knowing if she will admit to the crime.’

But she did. Exerting every ounce of influence they had, between them the British Ambassador in Cairo and Alexander’s father managed to get Christine, under heavy guard, flown to London for the appeal. It was only later I found out, that, had she not been there, there would have been no appeal.

It was almost nine months since I had last seen her, and four of those she had spent in an Egyptian prison. She was forty-three now, but looked closer to sixty. Her hair, what was left of it, clung to her skull, and as she looked up from her bony hands and shifted her weight stiffly from one leg to the other, I saw the strange pallor in her eyes. Her small, heavy-lipped mouth was drawn into sharp, parallel lines of rancour. She held herself erect, but I could see that beneath the brown serge that almost engulfed her, her emaciated body was beginning to sag with the effort.

Mesmerised, horrified, I watched her as she took the oath, almost choking on the pity and sadness I felt at seeing her like that. Then, as she looked out across the courtroom, a triumphant gleam lighting her yellowed eyes, I knew the time for reckoning between us had come.

‘I am in no doubt,’ she said. ‘I know that by the end of this year I shall be dead. The crimes my husband and I have committed in Egypt are sufficient to earn us not one but two death sentences. I welcome them. There is nothing left to live for. My husband and my brother were my life. I am under no illusions about the way they manipulated me, the way I became a pawn in their dangerous games, the way I was used as an exchange of favours between them, but it doesn’t matter. I got what I wanted. I got Salah – the Pasha. He married me because my brother requested it. He never did and never will love me, I know that, but I can accept it. For me it was enough to be his wife. He was a man who wielded immense power; he could be ruthless and tyrannical, he was malevolent, corrupt and cruel – yet he only ever treated me with kindness.

‘I am telling you all this because I want you to understand why I did what I did for my brother. You see, I knew what it was to love someone who was in love with another man. My brother lived with that hell for more than twelve years. Every day was torture to him – to be with her, yet not to be loved by her. It drove him out of his mind, in fact it killed him. Salah too loved a man, but I shall be the one who is with him at the end, in a way my sister-in-law was never with my brother.’

As she continued to speak, trying to explain her blinding passion for the Pasha, it was as if she were reliving it all again, oblivious of the courtroom and everyone in it. Until Alexander told me I’d had no knowledge of her marriage, and now, together with everyone else in the court, I sat spellbound as she spoke of the obsessional and unrequited love she had for Salah – a love that, time after time, she likened to Edward’s love for me.

Finally she lowered her eyes. ‘Maybe now you will understand why I set fire to the Bridlington warehouse with the intention of killing my sister-in-law.’ I felt my body go rigid and everything around me started to swim. ‘I hated her. She brought her bastard daughter into our home, that man’s bastard –’ her hand was trembling as she pointed towards Alexander, though she had not raised her voice – ‘and my brother treated the child as his own. He gave them both everything they could want. And how did she repay him? She ran off with her lover again, returned to us when he had finished with her, and tried to palm her second bastard off as my brother’s child. And even after lying to him and cheating him in the way she had, he forgave her, because he loved her. He even adopted her children as his own. He changed his will for them. And all the time
I
was the one helping him to realise an ambition that would save him from the final ignominy of her faithlessness. The need for the mask burned in him with all the might of his love. If he couldn’t have it, there was nothing left for him. And while I helped him,
she
was back in her lover’s bed. This time when my brother found out, it killed him. My sister-in-law deserved to die, and she would have died if Daniel Davison had not saved her life.’ Her eyes rested fleetingly on me before she looked away again. ‘If it were left to me she would not go to prison, she would rot in hell.’ She paused again, and a gruesome smile dawned on her face. ‘But my brother loved her. He would have forgiven her anything, and it is because of him that I am prepared to absolve her from her sentence. She is innocent.’

My hands bit into the rail in front of me as she turned and fixed her yellow eyes on mine. Her smile had widened now, and there was something so sinister about it that my mind went numb with terror. Why was she doing this? Why, when she hated me so much, was she setting me free? My whole body trembled with horror as she hissed the answer:

‘Now live with the guilt.’

Her eyes were still boring into mine as a barely audible chuckle escaped her lips. She had won.

After my release, as the weeks passed I saw less and less of Alexander. I couldn’t look at him and love him without seeing Christine’s face and the way she had looked that last day. He tried everything he could to persuade me to pull myself together, but the more he yelled or cajoled, the more I withdrew.

Then, on the day Christine was sentenced to die – September 14th – a messenger arrived with a special delivery. Even now I find it difficult to put into words the way I felt when I opened the envelope. There was nothing to say who had torn the page from Christine’s diary and sent it to me, I even wondered if she had done it herself. The entry was for September 12th and as I read, my heart was filled with the terrible loneliness and confusion she must have suffered, not only during her final hours, but ever since I had come into her life.

‘
From the moment I met her there was never any doubt in my mind that one day I would have to kill her. Perhaps it was a genuine vision of the future, though I recall no images, not even the vividness of the fire that was to consume so much. I felt only the overwhelming need to protect myself, and all that was mine.

Elizabeth Sorrill. She was blessed with the kind of beauty I had only ever dreamed about, bringing love and laughter to my brothers, while all the time she nursed the pain of a love she had lost – a love she would never give up.

And what right had she to that love? I am a woman, I have known love, I have known the pain of loss. Have I spent my life making others suffer for it?

But I know now that I have never experienced anything like the love that bound Elizabeth and Alexander. It was a love that not only
bridged the gulf of class, but survived years of parting, the agony of rejection, and that most destructive of emotions, guilt. Do I envy her that love? No, I pity her. A love of that depth, that strength, exacts its own price. I was the one to call in the debt, and I have no regrets. Why should she have had it all? What was her suffering compared to mine? My brother gave her the world – but it was my world too, and I lied, cheated and murdered to get it back. Yet all the time my enemy – my invincible enemy – was not Elizabeth, not Alexander, but the love they shared.

Why was their love so indestructible?

I rest my head against the wall now. There is nothing to see here, only darkness, but my nostrils flare at the cloying stench of my surroundings. Among the few, almost indistinguishable sounds, I can hear myself laughing. Laughing and laughing. The bitter irony of it is, if anyone could answer me that last question, then here, at the end, they would hand me the key to life itself.