‘You have quite a gift for words, Mr Sweet,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you aren’t a famous writer in disguise?’

Sweet laughed. ‘Alas, no. We do have a well-known writer with us; she is travelling under her own name, but she has made no secret of her pseudonym. No doubt she means to make copy of us all! Mr Blenkiron is the tall, dark-haired gentleman at the table under the painting of the fellow spearing fish.’

Jen had given me up as a bad job and was devouring smoked salmon, so I proceeded to stare to my heart’s content.

The activities of most excessively wealthy individuals bore me to tears, but Blenkiron was an exception. Unlike some of his billionaire peers he shunned publicity; he didn’t attend fund-raisers or hoity-toity social functions, or hobnob with politicians and rock stars. He didn’t give interviews, or even get divorced. I knew his name because he had been a generous and unobtrusive supporter of many cultural enterprises – the rebuilding of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence after a bomb blast, the conservation of the water-rotted monuments of Venice, to name only a few. His chief interest, however, was ancient Egypt. I had read of the restoration of Tetisheri’s tomb, and I admit that the prospect of visiting it was one of the few plus entries in an otherwise negative agenda. To see the famous paintings restored to their original freshness, with the film of grease and grime removed and the damaged sections repainted, would be a unique experience.

I had expected Blenkiron to be older. There was grey in his hair but it was only a sprinkling of silver against dark brown, and the lines in his face, fanning out from the corners of his deep-set eyes and framing a long-lipped flexible mouth, were those of good nature and maturity. He too was inspecting his fellow passengers; catching my eye, he nodded and smiled.

‘The person on his right is his secretary,’ Sweet informed me in a conspiratorial whisper.

The person wasn’t a blond female but a bald male. I couldn’t see his face, since he had his back to me.

‘Who’s the other guy at the table?’ I had a pretty good idea. He resembled all the lean, lined heroes of western films and his dinner jacket didn’t fit quite right.

Sweet rolled his eyes. ‘Bright and I have dubbed him The Bodyguard.’

‘How clever of you,’ I said.

By the time we had finished (five courses, not six), Sweet had identified some of the other passengers for me, and supplied capsule biographies for many of them. The blonde in the tight corset was a Mrs Umphenour from Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt), who had taken the cruise to console herself for the death of her third husband. The misanthropic reader alone at a nearby table was a German surgeon who specialized in urology. What he was doing on the cruise Sweet could not imagine; he was not a friendly person and he appeared to be only mildly interested in Egyptology.