as the taxi ground to a halt behind a sleepy man on a donkey. Their driver leant from the window with a string of good-natured invective. And the donkey moved over.
‘I’ve absolutely no idea, but somehow we’ve lost about twelve hours!’ Patrick glanced at his watch and frowned. ‘What time is it, my friend?’ He leant forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. ‘This says 10.40.’ He stared at it for a moment. It had stopped.
Emma frowned at her own wrist. ‘10.34. No one will believe us.’
‘No.’ He sat back in his seat with a sigh.
They sat in silence.
‘Will they have reported us missing?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Luckily, I’m here on my own. My ex-wife would have killed me if I’d disappeared for hours with a beautiful woman!’
She acknowledged the compliment with a smile. ‘I’m divorced too. I’m here with a girlfriend.’
‘I hope she won’t be too hard on you for disappearing.’
‘She probably hasn’t even missed me, if the truth were known.’ Emma shook her head wryly. ‘Mahmoud will have, though. He counts everyone all the time.’
The taxi had reached the darker streets now, away from the town centre. ‘We have several options,’ Patrick said slowly. ‘We can plead insanity. We can say one of us was ill. I can say I was following a story and forgot the time or got lost. We could say you came with me and we were sidetracked…’
In the end that was the story they chose. After all, it was in a way true. They stood side by side like naughty children as Mahmoud berated them for being late and causing him worry, then they went together to the empty dining room where, having relented a little, he ordered them a drink and some soup.
It was there that Gill found them.
‘You sly old thing!’ She sat down on the chair next to Emma. ‘How did you hook the most handsome man on the boat?’ She smiled dazzlingly at Patrick.
‘I thought Mahmoud was,’ Emma replied softly.
‘He is. Okay. The second most handsome.’ Gill giggled. ‘We’re leaving soon to set off up river. See you on deck.’
Patrick waited for the door to close behind her before he reached for Emma’s hand. ‘So, you’ve hooked me, have you?’
Emma smiled. ‘You must admit my technique is original!’
He nodded soberly. ‘Unique.’
‘We’re never going to know what happened, are we?’
Laughing, he shook his head. ‘Probably not. But I’m going to have a good try at finding out! That’s the investigative journalist in me.’ He leant forward on his elbows, pushing aside his soup bowl. ‘Will you help?’
She nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘You’re not still frightened?’
‘Aren’t you?’
There was a moment’s silence. Then he admitted, ‘If I’m honest, yes.’
‘I wonder if we could find out who they were. The man and the woman I saw.’
‘One incident out of four thousand years?’ He pondered. ‘It won’t be easy. But there will be records. The place is steeped in history. When the boat returns at the end of the week, we can make a start at the museum.’
Beneath their feet the engine rumbled suddenly into life. He stood up. ‘Shall we go up on deck?’
They stood side by side leaning on the rail, staring at the reflections in the water and the stark line of the distant mountains against the stars. ‘This is going to be an interesting holiday,’ he said at last.
‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ She glanced at him sideways. ‘I haven’t thanked you for rescuing me. I think I would have lost my mind if you hadn’t turned up when you did. I’d fallen through a hole in time.’
‘And I fell with you.’ He looked down and their eyes met for a moment.
Behind them the moon was rising, huge and serene.
‘I wonder what their story was. Were they lovers, driven to despair by some sort of betrayal? Did he try to kill her and she defended herself, or did she start it? Or were they priest and priestess of the Temple, locked in battle over rival gods?’ She shivered. ‘I need to know.’
He put his arm around her shoulders and they stood together in silence, watching the silhouette of the palm trees slide by. Emma found herself very conscious of the solid warmth of the man at her side. The strange way they had met, the sudden intimacy of the experience, had brought them together with an intensity which made her feel she had known him forever.
She glanced up and found that he was looking down at her again. He smiled and she knew with absolute certainty that they would go back to the Temple. She shivered. But she also knew that whatever happened there and whatever tragedy they uncovered, she would follow him wherever he went, and that by some strange pact, born from the mystery of this eerie Egyptian night, their future together had been sealed in a Temple as old as time.
Random Snippets
Amanda loved travelling alone. She always had. Where her friends craved companionship and mutual support even on the shortest journey she did all in her power to avoid the hustle and endless chatter which was the inevitable result of someone else going along. She ducked and lurked on railway platforms; she studied shop windows with elaborate care as people she knew walked by, all for the sake of that blissful moment when the doors closed, the train drew away and she felt her spirit fly. She was not a woman who took a mobile phone wherever she went!
It was not that she was unsociable. Far from it. She loved people, enjoyed their company, adored her job as an advertising executive and threw parties and cooked meals at the drop of a hat. But travelling – and, at the end of the day, living – was something she felt she had to experience so absolutely fully that it had to be done alone.
Sex of course cannot be done alone. Well, it can, but Amanda was not a solitary player in that field. She had a lovely, attentive, understanding man who knew the rules of her particular life plan and was happy to abide by them. She knew he had another life. He worked in the City and it was unlikely he did not find solace there when she was away, and sometimes that knowledge saddened her. But she could expect nothing else, nothing more. If she wanted her private secret side, so would he.
Thus it was that he had gone with her to the airport when she had set off on her trip to Canada, joined her in a coffee after she had checked in, chatted amiably about her journey and waved her off with, had she turned to see, only the slightest touch of wistfulness in his smile.
Amanda settled into her seat in delight. She had a new paperback to read, a guide book to Canada and a new spiral-back notebook – the latter because, although she didn’t realise it, Amanda was a writer. When she was born, amongst the thousands of genes she inherited from her parents was the writing gene. She had never actually manifested a desire to be a travel writer or a novelist or a poet. She had never attended writers’ circles or author talks at Waterstones, nor had she ever kept a diary as such. But, and it has to be admitted this was done almost surreptitiously, some might say even secretly, she wrote all the time. She called these writings her snippets. Things she had done. Things she had seen. Things she had thought. And people she’d met. This was the real reason she liked to avoid people she knew on her travels. They distracted her from the people she didn’t know. And from the endless stories which swirled in her head as character after character passed in front of her for her delectation.
Only this morning on the train to the airport it had happened. Admittedly Derek had been there with her, but buried in his
