“Impossible,” Haddon said curtly. “This area was in regular use until-when was it?”

“Until the big rains five years ago, so they’ve been here less than that,” TJ said. “Five years at most. And I doubt if the jackals can get into the compound. Dogs, more likely, or those monster rats.”

Arlo’s face, pasty at the best of times, was distinctly greenish in the light from the flashlights. He looked away as Haddon shone his light directly onto the skull.

“Who is it?” the director demanded, sounding thoroughly aggrieved. “How did he get in? What the devil was he doing in here?”

No one answered. “Nobody’d better touch anything,” Jerry said.

Haddon’s lips turned down. “Perish the thought.”

“And I think we’d better notify the police.”

“The police?” Haddon turned on him. “Good God, Jerry, have you ever dealt with the Egyptian police? Why would we want to drag them into this? This-this person has been dead for years and no one’s missed him yet, have they? I think it’s clear enough what happened. The poor beggar got in here somehow, hoping to find something worth stealing in the collection and had the misfortune to die in flagrante delicto. Claimed by the Grim Reaper in the very act of plunder.”

His light darted erratically through the jumble of discarded objects. “Ha, see that piece right there? He must have come in here-”

“Why here!” TJ said. She waved her own smaller beam over the mounds of debris. “What would he want in here?”

“Now how would I possibly know that? Who knows what was in the heart of a dead man? Perhaps he heard someone coming and ran in here to hide. Perhaps he was hiding until nightfall, when he could make his, er, getaway more easily. Whatever it was, he simply had the bad luck to die in the interim.”

“Of what?” TJ persisted. “Old age? Gallstones? Guilt?”

“Whatever the reason,” Haddon said sweetly, “we can rest secure in the knowledge that the unfortunate gentleman is in the arms of Osiris and beyond caring what we make of him.