Alice and I managed to exchange a few words. They were, ‘I hear you had a little adventure, Vicky. Good thing no one was hurt,’ to which I replied, ‘Yes, isn’t it,’ and to which she responded with, ‘Here’s that book on the Memphis tombs I promised to lend you.’

There were no messages written in invisible ink or spelled out by means of dots or pinpricks under certain words. What there was was a note, hastily scribbled in pencil and stuck in between the pages. ‘He was there. Promised we’ll be contacted as soon as we get to Luxor. Said to lie low, take no action, stay in a crowd. Ali died of drowning. All bruises postmortem except for one on his face. Could have hit his head, knocked himself out, fallen overboard. Suggest you don’t think about the alternative.’ There was a P.S. ‘Burn this and flush the ashes down the nearest convenience.’

I would have done it anyhow. As I watched the ashes being sucked down with the swirling water I thought about the alternative.

After lunch Schmidt and I settled ourselves on the sundeck. Schmidt started writing postcards. He’d already sent them to everybody he knew and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t doing the same.

‘At least to your mama and papa,’ he insisted. ‘Here, here is a pretty one of the pyramids. And one of Cairo for Tony – ’

I took them, to shut him up. It was a little difficult composing appropriate messages. ‘Having a wonderful time’ was not only trite but untrue. As for ‘Wish you were here,’ I could only thank God they weren’t.

Yet as I scribbled a witty greeting on Tony’s card (‘Hi! Guess where I am!’) part of me, the selfish, cowardly part, wished he were. Here. This was the first time I’d been completely on my own, with no one to talk to, argue with, or fall back on. Schmidt hadn’t been particularly useful during the Roman affair, but he had been aware of what I was doing, and towards the end of that business John and I had become reluctant allies. We had spent most of our time together trying to elude various people who wanted to kill either or both of us, but when you are running wildly away from killers it’s nice to have company. John was awfully good at running away.

Stretched out in the chair next to mine, Schmidt had tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed off. His hands were clasped on his tummy and the ends of his moustache fluttered every time he exhaled.