Looking through the open grillwork of the grate, Gideon could see a section of the lower deck twenty feet below them.
“What do you think?” Phil asked. “Is that what did it or not?”
He was pointing at something below, but Gideon couldn’t make out what. The life-ring holder? The bench alongside the crew’s cabin? “Is what what did it, damn it?”
“No, not down there, here.” He tapped his foot. “This, you dummy. The grating.”
“The grating?” Gideon echoed, and then he understood. “The grating!”
He dropped to one knee beside it. It was a latticework of sturdy, edge-up metal strips that crossed each other to form diamond-shaped spaces. The sides of the diamonds were about an inch apart, and because a diamond was a rhombus the parallel lines were slightly offset, precisely like the parallel marks on Haddon’s cheeks.
And each intersection was, of course, a perfect little X.
“Well?” Phil demanded.
Gideon got to his feet. “You’re right,” he said softly. “He fell. Here, on his face.”
Julie let out a sigh. “What a relief. That is,” she said quickly, “it’s a relief to know nobody hit him in the face, nobody threw him overboard. There’s no murderer in our midst. An innocent slip by a tipsy man on a dark night, that’s all.”
Phil scratched his cheek. “Too bad, in a way. I mean to say, as long as he’s dead in any case, a murder would have made it more interesting, if you know what I mean.” He frowned. “I didn’t put that very well, but it was exciting while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
Gideon was looking down at the grating, his arms folded. “Don’t write it off too soon.”
“Uh-oh,” Julie murmured, “here comes a new theory. Pardon, hypothesis.”
“Whenever you find facial impact abrasions from a fall,” Gideon said, almost to himself, “it’s almost certainly a sign that the person wasn’t conscious at the time that he went down. Nobody, tipsy or not, lands flat on his face like that. You turn your head, you throw up your hand to break the fall. It’s instinctive.”
Julie frowned at him. “All right, so he lost consciousness and fell. Maybe he had more to drink in his room. What’s so suspicious about it?”
“It’s not suspicious that he fell, it’s suspicious that he got up again.”
“I don’t understand,” Julie said.
“I don’t understand either,” Phil said.
“How did he get over the side?” Gideon asked them.
“How?” Julie said. “He got to his feet, he staggered to the railing, he lost his balance again-”
Gideon shook his head. “When you pass out from drinking it’s because your central nervous system has essentially collapsed on you. And your blood alcohol level doesn’t started going down just because you’ve stopped drinking, it keeps on rising because the alcohol is still being absorbed. An hour into unconsciousness you’re drunker than you were when you passed out; a lot of times that’s when people die. Believe me, nobody who passes out drunk is going to be getting up on his own steam anytime soon.”
Phil leaned his arms on the railing, gazing across the river. “So you’re implying…”
“I’m implying Haddon was unconscious-maybe dead- when he fell here on the deck. I’m saying it took somebody else to get him over the side.”
“We’re back to murder?” Julie said. “Oh gosh, what now?”
“Now,” Gideon said, “I think I better go take on the Commanding General of River and Tourist Police, Governate of Sohag.” He pushed himself away from the railing. “Not that I’m looking forward to it.”
“Try not to make him mad,” was Phil’s helpful counsel.
General el-Basset was not to be found on the stern deck when Gideon got there a minute later. Neither was Dr. Dowidar or either of the sailors. And neither was Haddon. The decking where he’d lain had already been swabbed. Gideon was astonished. He’d been gone only an hour.
At the guest services desk upstairs Mr. Wahab told him that the general was in the guest library next to the dining room. He also informed him, with equal parts outraged dignity and nervous distress, that nothing such as this had ever happened before in the history of the Happy Nomad Navigation Company.
Gideon offered his apologies, which seemed to make him feel a little better.
He found el-Basset at the single table that almost filled the little room, a row of outdated Country Life on the magazine rack behind him and an emptied Turkish coffee cup at his elbow. He was smoking a cigarette and making notes in Arabic in a pad, but looked up when he saw Gideon approaching, screwed the top on his fountain pen, and motioned him into a chair across from him. He appeared at peace with himself; relaxed and above it all.
“You wished to talk,” he said. “I was about to come and find you.”
“Ah,” Gideon said. Permit me to doubt, he thought.
“Now. What may I do for you? Would you like me to call for something to drink? I can recommend the coffee.”
Gideon wasn’t interested in social amenities. “Where’s Dr. Haddon?” he asked bluntly.
El-Basset eyed him levelly while he took a long pull on his cigarette. The remains, he explained, had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Sohag, where they would be kept under refrigeration while the American embassy in Cairo was contacted. Then, in all probability He paused. “Is there something the matter? You’re frowning.”
Yes, something was the matter. What kind of fatal-accident investigation-an unwitnessed accident under ambiguous circumstances-could be wrapped up in an hour, including releasing the remains? Were there to be no lab tests? No interviews? What was going on?
Not that Gideon said this aloud. He wasn’t intimidated by el-Basset-not exactly-but he was well aware that customs varied from one place to another, that he had no status in this, that he was far from his own turf in every sense of the word, and that there was only one driver’s seat and the commanding general’s well-tailored bottom was in it.
Even so, he didn’t see how he could just drop it. “There were some things I wanted to mention about the body,” he said mildly. “Did you happen to notice the marks on his face?”
“Certainly I noticed them, as did Dr. Dowidar. Everything will be contained in the report.”
“You didn’t find them unusual?”
El-Basset smiled, polished and confident. “When a man falls twenty feet onto his head, a few unusual marks are to be expected.”
“He didn’t get these when he fell.”
Gideon explained about the grating. El-Basset heard him out.
“So it may very well be,” he said. “Thank you, I’ll see that it’s put in the report.”
Gideon stared at him. Put it in the report without checking for himself? “I think it raises some questions,” he said. “General, it’s been my experience that when you find facial impact abrasions from a fall, they indicate that the person wasn’t conscious when he fell.”
“Has it? In my experience, not necessarily,” el-Basset said pleasantly. “But let’s say you’re right. Tell me, what are these questions that are raised?”
He lit a second cigarette from the first, settled back with his arms crossed, and gave Gideon his attention. It was hard to miss the point: el-Basset would listen, but Gideon had only one more cigarette’s worth of time. There were other things on el-Basset’s plate, other places to be.
“Questions as to just what happened,” Gideon said. “How does a man who collapses unconscious on the upper deck end up over the side?”‘
“How? He arises, then collapses a second time. Dr. Had-don had had a great deal to drink. Dr. Haddon, like many elderly people, was also taking antidepressant medication for his chronic depression.”
“He was?” Gideon said.
If it was true, it cleared up something that had been bothering him. Haddon had been drinking, but not recklessly; not to a fall-down-drunk-and-pass-out-cold degree. But even a couple of drinks combined, say, with one of the tricyclic antidepressants El-Basset smiled, pleased at having told Gideon something he hadn’t known. “Oh, yes, I have been talking to people, you know. Our investigation has been quite thorough.”
“Ah,” Gideon said again. You must be an awfully fast talker, he thought.
“Alcohol and drugs,” el-Basset said. “They don’t go well together. What then is so questionable about his falling down while he walks the deck, then picking himself up and falling a second time, but this time, poof, over the
