George wasn’t surprised at the name. He had expected another call from him sooner or later. “Hello Mr Antunez,” he said, still struggling with the name, “I’m afraid I don’t know where my wife is. Did you not speak to her last night?”

“No, I’m afraid not, I left a message with a man at the museum.”

“Professor al-Misri? He’s dead.” George added. In his search for Gail he hadn’t spent much time thinking about the Professor, and the fact stumbled out, emotionless.

“I heard that; the police told me this morning,” he replied, slightly taken aback by the Englishman’s bluntness. “Mr Turner, I know that your wife has disappeared, and I believe these circumstances are too coincidental not to be linked.”

“What?” George was exasperated, tired of people trying to get hold of Gail, when all he wanted was to get hold of her himself. The last thing he needed was a riddle.

There was a pause, short enough for George not to have to check his phone’s signal, but too long to be caused simply by the long distance call bouncing into space and back on its way from France.

“Mr Turner, a massive cover-up is underway at the moment, and what is happening on Mars is somehow linked to your wife, and the finds that she made in Egypt. The reason I needed to speak to her was to talk about this and see where it would lead. I am not the only one who believed that your wife has the answers, Mr Turner, and I am sure that she has been taken.”

George bit his bottom lip. “Kidnapped?” The police had said nothing of kidnapping, in fact his impression had been that she was being treated as a suspect rather than as a victim. “Why do you think that? Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t want to say more over the phone, we have to meet.”

Chapter 43

Café du Corail was a French-style affair that, like many in Cairo, harked of a different era. George imagined that it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, and by the looks of it neither had its clientele.

Whilst a lot of Cairo seemed to be constantly re-modelling itself with building sites that never seemed to end, many of the older areas still remained.

The great marketplace of Khan el-Khalili was one of the most famous; a sprawling, maze-like network of narrow streets, the awnings of open shop-fronts reaching across the cobbled alleyways, drawing in endless streams of lobster-faced tourists with bum-bags. There, the bartering started three times higher than anywhere else, though few were tempted to shop around too much, lest the tour bus leave without them.

Café du Corail was not in Khan el-Khalili. It was on the other side of the busy main street via a dank-looking footbridge, away from the kitsch, in what the tourist-guides referred to as the local market. To say it had a different atmosphere was to take understatement to the extreme. It was practically impossible to walk in el-Khalili without being offered something, or if you were a woman, without being propositioned. Here, in contrast, if you didn’t speak Arabic, or didn’t know exactly what you wanted, it was surprisingly difficult to buy anything at all.

On the subject of price, all that needed to be said was that people bought in the local market, and sold on el-Khalili.

But the biggest difference, and the exact reason why George and Gail liked it so much, was that the local market was, indeed, where you found true Cairenes. El-Khalili had its charm, it was bright and colourful and full of happy smiling people who spoke English, Spanish and a dozen other tourist languages. But here, you were actually in Cairo, not in a tourist-sustained bubble.

To George, the Café now provided a quiet shai served without a smile by a man whose interpersonal skills extended only to waving the flies away from his face. A few minutes later a water-pipe, or shisha, was set down beside him, hot coals were placed above the tinfoil wrap on the top, and the long pipe hooked onto the little lid that covered it. A small plastic packet containing a single-use mouthpiece was placed on the table.

George sat just inside the entrance and waited. He had chosen the café as he was sure no tourists ever went there, and as such he was certain that it would be the last place anyone would look for an Englishman; Martín Antunez had been quite specific that secrecy was highly important.

However, his main reason for choosing the Café du Corail was that he always went there with Gail when they visited Egypt. If she was in trouble, she would see him there, he was sure of it.

“Mr Turner?”

He looked up and saw the man in the doorway; he looked exactly as he had imagined, with the exception that his skin was not pale as he expected a Frenchman’s to be, but olive-brown instead. Even George would have admitted that he was handsome.

“Good afternoon,” he stood up and offered his hand limply. He felt drained, both emotionally and physically.

It was eagerly accepted, and they both sat down at the round table. His guest eyed the tea, and George made a signal to the nonplussed waiter, who brought a second cup, along with a second mouthpiece for the shisha. Martín served himself from the small teapot.

“So you are Mr Antunez?” George said, looking at the man intently.

“Yes, please call me Martín.”

“You don’t sound French.”

“I’m Spanish,” he explained.

“And how do you know my wife?” Despite the civilised surroundings, he couldn’t help but sound bitter and accusing.

“Mr Turner, I am on your side,” Martín defended himself.

“I wasn’t aware that there were sides?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Turner,” he held up his hands. “I forget that while you are coming into this cold, I have already been involved in this for several months now.”

George gave a short laugh. “You can say that again. Cold is definitely the word.”

“I don’t really know your wife; we met briefly many years ago at one of her lectures in London.” He had a sincere tone that George found quite disarming, despite his bad mood. “I have not spoken to her since I asked her to sign a copy of her book.” He placed the book on the table and offered the inscription on the inside of the cover as proof.

George looked at the inscription and recognised his wife’s handwriting. It proved nothing; she had probably signed hundreds of books in the last few years. “Why are you looking for her now?”

“As I explained over the phone: because of the finds on Mars. I work for the European Space Agency. We released the pictures to the press.”

“And you want to speak to my wife because the Mars finds are like those she found in Egypt, like all the other reporters. All you want is a statement, and when you couldn’t find my wife, you thought you’d get hold of me instead. The scoop’s almost as good, isn’t it? Egyptologist goes missing – husband has no idea?” he said scornfully.

Martín shook his head fiercely. “No, I am not a reporter. I am a scientist. And I do not want a story, although I am sure my boss would.” He added the last statement almost as an afterthought. “My Agency uncovered the images from Mars and released them to the press because someone involved in the Mars mission was covering them up. Without us, they would never have been seen. We believed that it would be important to speak with your wife to seek more information about the symbols, to understand how they came to be on Mars, to see if she could help unravel the mystery of why this is being covered up.”

“Except you were too late?” George asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. It is reasonable to assume that whoever is responsible for the cover up would also want to stop anyone from contacting your wife, and would therefore seek to have her kidnapped.”

“Or murdered,” George said. The thought had crossed his mind a few times in the past day but he always pushed it away quickly. This time, he felt a huge weight descend on his stomach and his eyes dropped involuntarily.