Shadows on the Nile Read Online Free PDF Page B

worry.’
    ‘Yes, I know.’
    Kind. Considerate. Thoughtful. A loving son. Timothy was all these things. She was not. She was wary of love because she knew it could damage you. That’s what she’d learned one cold October night when she was seven. She had moved out of the family home the day that she reached eighteen, trying to outrun the long shadow cast by her childhood. She had worked her way through St Martin’s School of Art and Design, drawing by day, waitressing by night in her black dress and dainty white cap in the Lyons Corner House on Tottenham Court Road. Each Saturday she had set up a stall to sell her paintings in the market in Porto-bello Road.
    Only recently had she and her father managed to work together on occasional projects with her designs and his printing presses. In the last year they had begun to make allowance for each other. She glanced around the neat workroom and inhaled the familiar tang of ink and hot metal from the small printing press in the corner, a smell she always associated with her father. It followed him around like a dog. Just as she associated the perfume of freesias with her mother.
    The substantial printing company, Kenton Print Works, which her father owned and ran with fierce dedication, had its main presses on the outskirts of Sydenham. But he liked to keep his hand in with small, private jobs here in his workshop. She was the same herself, doing much of her design work at home in her flat, away from the bustle of the studio. The difference was that her father’s workshop was clean and orderly, everythingrigidly in its place, whereas hers was a wanton mess. Here the books and files were arranged in alphabetical order. Disciplined stacks of pamphlets. Neat towers of brochures and leaflets.
    A large pile of posters caught Jessica’s eye. From the top one the face of a handsome man stared out at her, immensely pleased with himself, and she recognised it immediately. It was Oswald Mosley. The charismatic founder of the newly formed British Union of Fascists was a wealthy baronet who had tried his hand as a Member of Parliament in both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. But he was an impatient and arrogant man, and he had parted from them acrimoniously. Instead he’d set up his own political party – the British Union of Fascists.
    Jessie frowned. She felt a ripple of distaste and turned away. She walked over to her father’s desk, perched on the high stool, folded her arms and said, ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Nothing happened. That’s what I can’t understand.’
    He started to pace. Back and forth across the centre of the room, his face creased in a scowl. Jessie noticed his hands fingering a pen as he talked, the same way hers did when her mind was fretting at something. But her father’s hands were refined and elegant, the hands of a thinker, whereas hers were short and spatular.
    ‘When did you last see Timothy?’ she asked.
    ‘Last Friday morning. He came home for a clean shirt before going to work. He spent Thursday night with you, remember?’
    That was news to Jessie.
    Something in her face must have raised doubts in his mind because he asked abruptly, ‘He did, didn’t he?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Lying about her brother’s whereabouts came naturally.
    ‘I thought he might have said something to you, Jessica. Especially as he has been spending so muchtime at your place in recent weeks.’
    Jessie hadn’t seen Timothy for at least a fortnight.
    ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘He said nothing. Have you contacted the museum to see if he’s been to work?’
    ‘Yes. They haven’t seen him since last Friday.’
    Jessie felt her stomach give a shaky lurch. Timothy loved his job at the British Museum, where he was employed to catalogue their Egyptian antiquities. For him to be missing from work was a bad sign. Bad enough to make her rise to her feet.
    ‘Have you contacted the police?’ she asked