The Sands of Sakkara [antikvár]

Chapter One Cairo It was April and the khamsin was blowing, a howling desert wind that lashed the streets with gusts of blinding sand. . As the taxi pulled up outside the morgue and I stepped out, I wondered again what had possessed me to come here on such a wicked night, and with no more evidence to go on than the corpse of an old man washed up on the banks of the Nile. 'Do you want me to wait, sir?' The taxi driver was a young man with a beard and a mouthflil of bad teeth. 'Why not?' It definitely wasn't the kind of night to go looking for another cab. The morgue was one of those grand, solid old stone buildings you often see in Egypt, a relic of its colonial past, but now it looked quite gloomy and the worse for wear, the granite blackened by years of pollution and neglect. I saw a filthy alleyway at the side, litter swirling in the driving wind. A porch light blazed above a blue-painted door, a metal grille set in the middle. I went down the alleyway and rang the bell. I heard it buzz somewhere inside the building and after a few moments the grille opened and a man's unshaven face appeared. 'Ismail?' The man nodded. 'I've come to see the old man's body,' I said in Arabic. 'The