The reply came thick and fast. Obviously not, then, he thought pressing the next one down after a garbled apology.

“Ma esmouk Ben?” he repeated his question as the second person answered.

“La!”

“Hal tatakallum Inglesi?” he stumbled around the sentence. That was it, pretty much the end of his Arabic phrases: it was always suitable to end with Do you speak English. There was a shout from the speaker and the man laughed.

“Siix tooo, not waan; tooo,” came the heavily accented reply.

“Shukran!” Six-2, he thought. Even if he’d remembered that, without labels on the buttons it wouldn’t have helped him: he had no idea, in a country that spoke Arabic, if 2 would have been the button on the left, or on the right.

He pressed the only other button on the sixth row.

“Ben!” he exclaimed with relief as the familiar voice answered.

“Ha! George, yes it’s me! Come up!” Ben sounded ecstatic, and quickly buzzed him through the iron gate.

George remembered that the last time he had visited, the lift had been out of order; Gail and he had stood in it with the door open for a couple of minutes before one of Ben’s neighbours had walked past, laughing. This time, however, it seemed to be working, and the door slid closed silently. The lift’s soft female voice said something in Arabic as he pressed for the sixth floor.

At their first meeting ten years earlier, Ben and George had immediately clicked. His sense of humour matched George’s perfectly, and whilst there were a few years between them, they shared similar hobbies, namely sport, television and computers. Archaeology, it had turned out, wasn’t one of Ben’s strong points anyway.

Over the years, they had seen each other dozens of times. Ben even visited them in England and worked for a year in London, during which time his English had been perfected, which was more than George could say about his Arabic.

But this time was very different; George had never been to see Ben in Cairo without Gail.

When the lift door opened again, he was met by Ben’s familiar grin and wide open arms.

“George!” he exclaimed. “It’s been a long time!”

“A year or two,” George agreed. Instead of a hug, Ben clasped George’s outstretched hand, shaking it vigorously while at the same time gripping his shoulder. No matter how good friends they were, it always took George a moment to adjust to his enthusiasm.

“Sorry I missed your calls,” he said, leading him towards the door of his flat. “How are things? Did you just get here?”

George hesitated. As soon as he’d been told to go back to his hotel by Captain Kamal of the Cairo police, he had tried to call Ben. Unfortunately, there had been no response on the landline, and either Ben had changed his mobile number or it was turned off in a drawer somewhere.

Since then, he had tried once more, the previous evening, again with no success. It had been on his third attempt, leaving the café that morning, that Ben had picked up. In the briefest of conversations, they had agreed to meet at Ben’s flat later that morning.

“Actually, I landed on Tuesday.”

Ben stopped in his tracks. “I landed? Have you been married that long that you forgot your beautiful wife at home, George?” Ben was grinning, but his eyes betrayed genuine concern. “Where is Gail?”

George had honestly thought that they would have at least made it inside Ben’s home before the question came out. As it was, despite several days adjusting to Gail’s death, he hadn’t fully prepared himself for telling someone face-to-face about it. Telling his parents via the videophone had been hard enough, but somehow this was different. His bottom lip started to quiver and he fought to control it.

 “George, what’s wrong?” he asked, the long pause too much for him. Before waiting for an answer, he pushed the door to his flat open and ushered his friend through. Closing the door behind them, he took George to the living-room and sat him on a long, black-leather sofa before repeating his question.

In front of the sofa, a large flat-screen television showed four different feeds simultaneously. Ben reached for the remote and turned the screen off.

Apart from the noise of Cairo, which still managed to filter through the closed windows, and the low hum of the air conditioning unit, silence descended on the room. “George, what’s wrong?” Ben asked again.

“Gail came here on Monday,” he began. It wouldn’t be so hard if he just told the story as it was; simply a series of facts. “She came to visit the Professor, because of the finding of the Stickman on Mars.” Ben’s eyes lit up at this. He was going to interrupt when George asked: “I take it you know about the Professor?”

“How could I not,” he gestured towards the television. “Apparently he was murdered by some petty thief on Monday. I kind of assumed that was why you came: to pay your respects.” He lifted his head suddenly. “And Gail? If she went to see him on Monday, was she hurt, too? Is she alright?”

The emotional nosedive that George had been in since seeing Gail’s body three days earlier had pretty much levelled out. From having been told that his wife was missing, to being confronted by the unwelcome news that she was dead, and then being informed by the police that not only was she the only suspect in the murder of the Professor but that her motive was the theft of a few books, he thought he had reached the end of the week with fairly thick skin. He had even managed to discuss funeral arrangements with Captain Kamal as if the punch in the face had never happened, and had looked into transporting Gail’s urn on his return flight. But now he realised that he had not yet fully opened up to anyone; the only person in whom he could normally confide was now gone, and he was a widower.

She was dead.

He was as low as he could get. Meeting face to face with a common friend, someone he had met with Gail and who had only known them as a couple, made it painfully obvious that a large part of him was missing. And now he had to tell this friend that Gail was dead, and that according to the police, she murdered the Professor, another common, if not so close, friend. He looked at Ben and tried to speak, but his lips and throat were too dry for the words to slide out, so instead he croaked.

As if reading his mind, Ben got up and returned seconds later with a glass of ice-cold water. He sat down again sombrely. “She was there, wasn’t she?” he asked. “She was with the Professor?”

George gulped down a mouthful of the water and nodded. It was easier like this, he thought briefly; easier for Ben to guess than for him to say the words.

“Was she hurt also?”

He nodded again.

“Is she alright?”

He shook his head slowly; tears welled up in his eyes. He’d shed so many over the last few days; quiet, private tears. But now they were building up in front of Ben, he tried to fight the urge to cry.

This was no easier than just coming out with it. So he told Ben everything. He told him about Gail’s cold body in the morgue, about how he’d punched a captain of Cairo’s police force on the chin, and about the alleged theft of books from the Professor’s office. He told him about the Amarna stickman on Mars, about how it had upset Gail, and how the Professor had asked her to come to Cairo as soon as possible to discuss it.

And he told him about Martín Antunez, the Spanish ESA employee who had been trying to get hold of Gail on Monday, and who on Wednesday had met George in Cairo and had been with him ever since. He even mentioned Martín’s short-lived abduction theory. He finished repeating himself, going over in disbelief his identification of Gail’s body, and how he had punched Captain Kamal in the head.

When he’d finished he felt drained, his soul empty like a reservoir after the breaking of a dam. He’d let his tears come out in floods, without holding back, for the first time since Gail’s death. He could easily have felt quite foolish at his emotional outbreak. Instead, he simply didn’t care; what had to come out had come out, and he sat limply on the sofa.