Shadows on the Nile Read Online Free PDF Page A

listened to Alistair’s tight breathing at the other end of the line and relented.
    ‘How about Sunday afternoon instead?’ she offered. ‘We could go to Kew Gardens. The hothouses will warm us up.’
    ‘Or we could go for a meal after you’ve finished your work tonight.’ Alistair was stubborn as granite. He inherited it from his Scottish father.
    ‘No.’ A pause. ‘Sorry. Too tired.’
    ‘I could bring over a steak and cook it for you?’
    ‘Thanks, but no thanks. See you on Sunday afternoon.’
    She hung up, irritated with herself for being cross with this man who so generously offered to cook a meal for her. She was damn sure nobody barged in on Beethoven with an
Apfelstrudel
when he was hard at work on his
Heroica
symphony.
    Jabez yawned and treated her to a cool stare.
    ‘I know, you greedy creature, you want steak instead of sprats.’ She ran a hand along his sleek back, triggering a purr, aware that she could easily have done the same for Alistair.
Get it right, Jessie
, she told herself.
You are no Beethoven and this is no symphony.
    She inspected the sheet of sketches in front of her. With a sigh she drew a thick black line across the page and flicked it to join the others on the floor. It was never good enough. Was that what Beethoven said to himself? Was the music ever good enough? Always there was this chasm between what was in her head and what was on the page. She pulled a fresh sheet of paper towards her. She would go on all night, until she got it right.
    The telephone leapt into life once more and this time she answered it with alacrity.
    ‘Hello, Alistair,’ she said. ‘That steak sounds—’
    ‘Hello, Jessica.’
    ‘Pa!’
    ‘I need you to come over straightaway.’ Her father was not a person who believed in small talk.
    ‘I haven’t finished the designs for you yet, so—’
    ‘Right now, Jessica.’
    Even for her father, this was abrupt. The evening was dark and wet outside and Beckenham was an hour’s drive away.
    ‘Can’t it wait?’ she asked.
    ‘No.’
    One word. That’s all. But she heard the fear encased within it, and it set the hairs on her neck on end. Her father was afraid of nothing.
    ‘What is it, Pa? What has happened?’
    There was a silence. She had a senseof something growing under her ribs and felt a thump deep in her chest.
    ‘Your brother has gone missing.’

4

    There were some things Jessie wasn’t willing to lie about. Not even to herself. But the whereabouts of her brother wasn’t one of them. She had spent an absurd amount of her life lying through her teeth for Timothy. It was amazing that her tongue hadn’t turned blue from all the cold-hearted lies that had slid off it. Her words were finely honed ice-picks to the soft centre of the girls and, later, of the young women who came knocking on the door in search of her brother with their sweet smiles and insistent pleas. Jessica possessed a whole arsenal of excuses.
    ‘I’m sorry, Isabella, but Tim is playing cricket.’
    ‘He’s in bed with the ’flu.’
    ‘He’s caring for his aunt in Peterborough.’
    ‘Thanks for the Sobranie cigarettes, Amanda. Tim will love them. But he’s working late tonight.’
    ‘No, absolutely no more cigarettes, Amanda. He’s given up.’
    As the years went by, the excuses became increasingly bizarre.
    ‘Don’t you know that he’s in training to be a monk?’ or, ‘Sorry, but he’s having dinner with Noel Coward.’
    It wasn’t Timothy’s fault. The girls fussed over him like bees on a honeycomb, fluttering their pretty wingsat him. All his life his golden good looks and his effortless charm had been his undoing. They thwarted the attempts of his first-class brain to be taken seriously and undermined his own resolve to make full use of it. Whenever he bewailed his harem-shadow, Jessie would narrow her eyes at him and say nothing. What was the point? Her brother knew his own weaknesses even better than she did. Nevertheless she carried on lying for him