“But—”
“Please.” El-Basset raised a peremptory hand. “Everything in good time.”
“Look, General,” Gideon said, openly bridling now, “what—”
“Urn—” Phil touched Gideon’s elbow. “Time to go, I think.”
On the stairs Gideon was fuming. “Did you see that? He didn’t hear anything I said. He barely knew I was there.”
“ ‘The barking of a dog does not disturb the man on a camel.” “ Phil said. ”Old Egyptian proverb.“
“Great, just what I need.”
When they got back upstairs, Phil laid a hand on Gideon’s arm. “Would you like a word of advice?”
“Sure.”
“I wouldn’t go around telling the Egyptian police how to do their job.”
Gideon nodded. “Or any police,” he said.
Julie shook her head doubtfully. “But how can you be so sure he didn’t get those scratches when the sailors pulled him up? It would have been a struggle getting him into the boat.”
“No,” Gideon said, stripping the peel from a finger-sized Nile banana, “I think Mahmoud and his pal were telling the truth.”
“Even if they were, they might have hit his face against something without knowing it.”
“I don’t think so. Postmortem abrasions have a funny look to them—yellow, almost translucent. If they happen before death, they’re sort of rust-colored, pretty much the way they are on living people—and that’s what these were.”
“I’m impressed. I didn’t know you knew so much about that kind of thing.”
“I guess I’ve seen enough of it by now,” Gideon said. “Unfortunately.”
He looked at the banana and decided he didn’t want it after all. Instead, he poured himself some more coffee.
A simple buffet breakfast had been laid in the dining room. Gideon and Julie had taken a pitcher of coffee and a plate of fruit, pastries, and hardboiled eggs up to the swimming pool area, preferring the outdoors to the grim atmosphere of the dining room and the subdued but glittery-eyed discussions of Haddon’s demise. Julie had started on some date bread while Gideon told her about what had happened, but she soon lost her appetite. Gideon had never had any.
“So the question is,” she said, “what would make marks like that?”
“Right. I keep trying to come up with a simple, innocent explanation. Sometimes if a person is hit with the flat side of something hard and narrow—a board, say—you get those parallel lines, because the edges dig into the skin. But a lot of bruising usually goes along with that because the flat part crushes blood vessels underneath. And there isn’t any bruising on Haddon.”
“So what would be a simple, innocent explanation?”
“That he accidentally hurt his face sometime between dinner and the time he fell over. I’d just feel more comfortable if I could figure out on what. It’s that
Phil had slipped into a vacant chair at their table with a self-satisfied expression on his face and a tray with a cup of tea and a couple of gooey, stringy cakes drenched in honey in his hands. “You two are looking mightily puzzled.”
“We were talking about those marks on Haddon. I still can’t—”
“Well, it wasn’t anything in his room, I can tell you that.” He lifted one of the dripping cakes above his head, lowered it carefully to his mouth, end first, and bit half of it neatly off. Not a driblet of honey made it to his chin.
“You went to his room?” Gideon said.
Phil nodded, chewing. “Certainly I went to his room. Of course I went to his room.”
Gideon leaned back. “Why am I not surprised?”
“As I remember it,” Phil said, “you said
“Phil—”
“What did you find?” Julie asked.
“Nothing that could have made those marks. No convenient mirror, or picture frame, or table, or box with sharp corners that he might have cut his face on, no projecting cupboard doors, no convenient X-shaped rivets on the walls. Nothing.”
“Well, that’s something to know,” Gideon said.
“So I thought I’d walk around the deck and see what I could find.” In went the other half of the pastry, to be followed by a swig of tea.
“And?” Gideon said.
“And I did,” Phil said around the mass of food, then set himself to serious chewing.
Gideon looked at Julie. “Do you suppose he’s planning to tell us what he found anytime soon?”
