Case file
The Ninth Season
The premise
A dig house above a wadi in the Theban hills, February 1936. Nine seasons the Marsh expedition has cleared these tombs, and nine seasons the great find has not come. The money stops at Easter.
The day before yesterday it came: a queen's diadem in a sealed foundation deposit — photographed in the wall, lifted at noon, toasted until midnight. Last night at dinner, Professor Julian Marsh told one man what two days with the sealings had given him: the knot is two dynasties wrong.
This morning the reis found the shaft ladder in its place and Marsh at the foot of the shaft, dead where the winter water stands. The diadem is gone from the finds tent. The police come up from Luxor in three days. You have three rounds.
Who is at the table
Everyone introduces themselves with one public line before a word is said. Nothing below is a clue — this is only what the whole table already knows.
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Constance Vane
Nine seasons of Marsh's funding, the last four from her purse alone. She came out in January to decide whether there would be a tenth.
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Tewfik Rachid
The Antiquities Service's man on the concession: nothing leaves the wadi without his signature. Nine seasons of Marsh's paperwork, and not one page of it late.
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Warren Holt
A curator out from New York doing the arithmetic of a share: the museum that funds a tenth season keeps a share of what comes up. He arrived the day before the diadem did.
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Girgis
Foreman of four hundred men and keeper of the ladders, ropes and lamps. What the workmen know, Girgis knows a day sooner.
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Lucien Favre
The expedition's photographer, out from Paris every winter since the fourth season: every find exists twice, once in the ground and once on his plates. Marsh trusted the plates more than his own eyes.
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Evelyn Ashe
The expedition's epigrapher: every seal, graffito and painted line in the wadi passes through her notebooks. Marsh called her the best copyist in Egypt, and he was right.
Where you are
The dig house on the spur: the finds tent, the dark tent where the plates are developed, the magazine with its padlock, and the mess where the toast was drunk. Below, the ninth-season shaft: twelve metres down a wooden ladder to a gallery where the winter floodwater stands knee-deep. There are two ways down — the ladder, and the old robbers' slit from the west spur: a squeeze, but dry. The night was moonless, and a lamp carries a long way in the wadi.
Everyone at the table gets a character, three cards and one rule: you may hide things, you may not invent them. Between the acts a dossier appears on every phone with a new fact about somebody in the room — and it never clears anyone.
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