Death Beyond the Nile (Tamara Hoyland Book 5) by Jessica Mann

Author:Jessica Mann [Mann, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-04-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Tamara Hoyland as Hercule Poirot. She could not help feeling that there had been a mistake in the casting.

Stir it a bit, she thought, and said, ‘It reminds me of Death on the Nile.’ Except, she did not say aloud, that the dramatis personae looked so very much less glamorous than those in the film. Without Vanessa to lend elegance, those present could more plausibly have been acting in a drama of modern realism. Only Giles and Hugo had properly acclimatised to the sun and were smoothly brown; Polly’s skin was speckled with pale patches grown over sunburn and insect bites.

Janet Macmillan was polka-dotted with freckles. The thick bones of her large face seemed to jut under the skin as though she had lost weight very quickly. She had the kind of head that might have been sculpted in stone, with angular planes and what Tamara thought would once have been called a chiselled nose. Beside her Tamara felt puny. She wondered how their skeletons would compare.

Ann Benson’s hands and face had erupted in a rash, while John was pinkly sunburnt. Exposure neither tanned nor burnt Tim Knipe who, always pale, hardly looked more so at this moment, and would have been welcomed on the set of an escapist film. He still contrived to look both piratical and poetical.

Max Solomon, of course, was not with the rest of the party. He had not joined them for any meal since Vanessa’s death, though he seemed to have nibbled something from the trays of food his Nubian steward carried down. The servants had decided that he was a wise and possibly a holy man, Giles said.

Tamara went on, ‘If this were Agatha Christie, Vanessa would have been murdered.’

‘By Tim,’ Janet said.

‘You don’t expect me to have read that muck,’ Tim said. He was on his third glass of brandy and two full ashtrays were on the table in front of him. The others had left a little space on either side as they all sat around the long table so that Tim could sprawl and stretch, or simply rest his shaggy head on his folded arms in front of him. He was at once restless and dazed. But then everybody seemed to be not changed, but more noticeably what they normally were, watchful like Hugo Bloom or Polly (though her attention was focused on Giles alone) or abstracted, like Janet, or babbling, like Ann Benson.

‘It made such a wonderful film,’ she said, bravely ignoring a contemptuous glance from her brother. ‘The scenery!’

‘In the story, as far as I recall,’ Tamara said, ‘two people had conspired together to murder someone who was the wife of one and the former friend of the other.’

‘The man had married the wrong woman, don’t you remember?’ Ann Benson said. ‘She’d fallen for her best friend’s young man. Stolen him really.’

Her brother said, ‘I cannot bear people who speak of people as though they were property.’

‘Haven’t you all read it, or seen the film at least?’ Ann Benson asked.

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