“No, I don’t think so, at least not yet,” Martín reassured him. “She knows more about her field than anyone, I expect she is as useful to them as she would be to us.”

The man’s belief did little to settle him. “And who are these people who are supposed to have kidnapped my wife?”

“We don’t know that much, but we do know that they are most likely to be based in the United States. It’s even possible, though I think highly improbable, that they are working from within NASA.”

“You’re saying NASA kidnapped my wife?” George said in disbelief.

“No, not at all. At the most they may be members of NASA who work for someone else also. NASA is as innocent as the other Space Agencies in this cover up.”

George sat in silence for a while before letting out a long sigh.

He hadn’t ordered the shisha, but neither had he had the energy nor presence of mind to refuse it. Maybe the owner had assumed from the look of him that he needed it. Now, he found himself unwrapping the mouthpiece and attaching it to the pipe. He looked at it vacantly for some time before lifting it to his lips and sucking on it tentatively, until the water bubbled gently and the glass chamber near his feet filled with thick white smoke. He then took a long, slow inhale, the satisfying crackle of the coals under the lid coming slightly before the thick, warm apple-smoke filled his mouth, throat and lungs. He exhaled slowly, pointing his nostrils towards the ceiling like a curious dragon.

It had been a hellish twenty-four hours. He’d spent the previous evening sick with worry in his hotel room, without a word from the police. In the morning, he’d visited Captain Kamal, who had done his best to outdo himself on the previous day’s unpleasantness scale. The afternoon so far had been no better, and now this Spaniard was telling him his wife had been kidnapped by some unknown conspirators.

From what he understood, shisha was simply tobacco soaked in apple; there was nothing druggy about it. And yet it made him sink into his chair. Only the fact that he couldn’t find Gail remained clear in his mind.

And here, he thought, is a man who’s trying to help find Gail. He slipped his mouthpiece out and passed the pipe over. Martín accepted it nervously, fumbling the mouthpiece from its wrapper and taking a quick suck of the pipe. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, and managed to hook it back on the shisha lid clumsily.

“Did you tell all this to the police?” George asked.

“Not the entire story, no,” he said. “But I relayed my fears that many people may want to talk to your wife, and that she may have been taken. The Egyptian police officer seemed very interested in my theory.”

At that moment George’s phone rang, vibrating its way along the metal table. He picked it up, listened in silence for a long minute, then put it down gently.  His fingers were like lead as they released the device and his hand slumped down on the table beside it. He felt his whole body sag like a wet teabag. He’d felt despondent before the shisha, numb during and now, after the call, he didn’t know how he felt. Helpless, still. More numb.

Empty.

Now there was nothing. No shisha, no shai, no el-Khalili.

No kidnapping.

He closed his eyes and felt his bottom lip begin to tremble.

“Mr Turner?” Martín said, almost whispering.

No kidnapping.

He wanted to get up and leave, but his limbs were unresponsive, dead. He wanted to run, to jump back in time, to stop Gail, to call her, to hold her. To have anything but this.

He could vaguely sense the Spaniard touching his arm, looking at him, asking him something. It didn’t matter anymore.

He knew where Gail was, now.

Chapter 44

Captain Kamal was waiting when he arrived at the police station in a daze. He didn’t accept the Egyptian’s outstretched hand and was quickly ushered into the building and immediately down a short flight of stairs.

“Thank you for coming,” Kamal said gently.

His attitude was now entirely different, almost as if he felt sorry for the Englishman, possibly even slightly nervous.

George could barely bring himself to grunt unintelligibly in reply.

He was led past an open lift and through a long corridor flanked by half a dozen windowless doors on either side. The passage was well lit, leading to a set of hospital-style double-doors. George did not need to be able to understand the small sign in Arabic; a general sense of foreboding told him he was about to enter the station morgue.

Kamal held the left-hand door open and he walked in.

He stopped in his tracks as he laid eyes on the row of trolleys along one wall. About half were covered by thin sheets, and it was obvious to him that they concealed human bodies. Only one, at the far end of the room, was of a shape that could be his wife. With all his might he told himself that it couldn’t possibly be Gail, but deep down inside an overpowering dread informed him that it could be no one but her.  His wife was surely under that sheet, but if he didn’t get any closer, it somehow made it less real.

Kamal had continued forward into the morgue, and was now standing beside the trolley. He looked back at George, waiting patiently for him to follow.

“Where did you find her?” he said without moving from the doorway. “Gail wouldn’t have been far from the Museum or the Professor’s house.” His voice was monotonous, going through the motions, dodging the fact that lay ahead of him, cold.

“There is a series of canals running to the west of the city. Some are but a trickle of water, as Cairo nowadays gets most of its supply from the purification plants to the north. The canal is used mostly by vagrants. We received an anonymous call some hours ago that a body had been found under a bridge.” He looked down at the still-covered body between them. “It’s a long way, but still within walking distance of the Museum, Mr Turner. We need you to officially identify the body.”

George walked forwards slowly. As he approached the trolley, Captain Kamal gently peeled back the cover to reveal the black hair and white skin of a woman in her late thirties to early forties. Her skin was undamaged and had a frozen, plastic-like quality. Her eyes were closed, but as he looked down at her lifeless corpse, George imagined her looking back at him, her infectious smile lighting his life. What had previously been a weight on his stomach lurched uncontrollable, welling upwards, no longer held back. He stroked her hair, touched his cheek to hers, and as he held her lifeless body tight, wept.

His tears were confirmation enough for Captain Kamal, who after barely a minute moved him away from the table quickly and moved the sheet back across the woman’s face.

“How?” George asked eventually, trying to control his voice. It seemed so wrong that Gail should be lying lifelessly in front of him. So wrong because she was such a good person, and could never hurt anyone herself. So wrong because he hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye. So wrong because he loved her, because he lived to make her life perfect, and her death only meant that he had failed. Gail couldn’t be dead.

Kamal hesitated. “It’s not easy to explain, Mr Turner. I am very sorry for your loss.”

George looked up at the officer. “How did it happen, Captain?” he asked more forcefully.

“She was stabbed several times in the lower abdomen with a knife, probably a switchblade. They are unfortunately very common in the city. We believe that she was robbed,” he said.

“What was she doing in the canal in the first place? Why would she want to go anywhere near it?” George raised his voice. Everything seemed to be wrong. Gail was dead, and all because she was wandering around some silly canal? It didn’t make sense to him.

“Your wife was found clutching several pages of torn paper.” He looked nervously at the grief-stricken man before him. “The book they were ripped from was – and probably still is – extremely valuable. It was part of a collection of similar books that were taken from Professor al-Misri’s office yesterday evening.”