The Egyptian Curse (11 page)

Smuggling

Nemo sine crimine vivit
(No one can live without crime).

– Latin Proverb

Portia Lyme!

Hale, dawdling over his feature story on Madame Tussaud's, suddenly sat up straight. It all seemed so clear to him now. Who would have a good reason to kill Lord Sedgewood? Portia Lyme! The woman who found the idea of a pharaoh's curse “just divine” might be impatient for her fiancé to inherit the earldom and the fortune that went with it.

And what about the murder of Alfie Barrington? Holmes undoubtedly was right that it was just the first step in a devious (or “just divine”) plan to get rid of Lord Sedgewood. But was Portia Lyme really capable of such a round-about plan?
Never underestimate a woman
.

“Portia? Don't be silly.”

Hale had hurried through writing the rest of his story (“Madame Tussaud's is an attraction that waxes but never wanes”), handed it in, and told a colleague that he was leaving for lunch.

He was delighted to find Sarah almost completely recovered back at her own home on Bedford Place.

“You assume Portia's not capable of murder?” he said.

“I suppose that I do assume that,” Sarah said thoughtfully, “but that's not what I meant. Portia has no need of Daddy's money. Her family is richer than ours. And even if she did need money, and she was capable of murder, I can't see her killing Alfie and Daddy. Our families have been friends for years. Sidney and their late father, Sir Harry Lyme, used to knock about Egypt with Daddy.”

Lord Carnarvon immediately came to Hale's mind. “You mean they were rivals at digging up the best mummies and that sort of thing?”

Sarah shook her head. “No, no, for some reason Sir Harry and Daddy were great mates. Maybe Daddy didn't feel threatened because Sir Harry was only a knight and not a peer. They helped each other out - and that's a good thing for Sidney. Daddy could have gotten him into a spot of trouble a while back if he'd chosen.”

Hale felt the hairs on the back of his head rise.

“What do you mean?”

“Sidney tried to sell Daddy a marble
shabti
figure from the tomb of the High Priest Pinedjem I.”

“What's a
shabti
?”

“It's a figurine of a servant, made out of clay or wood and buried with the body of an important person to assist him in the afterlife. This one should have been returned to the Egyptian government under the rules set up by the Department of Antiquities.”

“You mean like that dagger your father shouldn't have had?”

Sarah frowned. “Not exactly. You see, unique items are supposed to go to the Egyptian Museum. The excavators are to divide the remainder, but only to go to public institutions and societies, like the British Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But it's very common for excavators in Egypt to hold on to small items ‘on account,' as they like to say. Rumor has it that Lord Carnarvon's widow had Howard Carter remove everything in her husband's collection taken ‘on account' before she sold it to the Met so as to avoid embarrassment.

“Daddy's little dagger was easily taken out of the country and easily hidden away in his rather small collection in the townhouse. But the
shabti
figure that Sidney offered him was almost three feet tall, which put it into the Egyptian Museum category.”

Hale rubbed his mustache thoughtfully. “Where is it now?”

Sarah shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I suppose Sidney still has it if he didn't find a willing buyer.”

“And that could get him into trouble?”

“Only if-”

The doorbell rang. It was Inspector Rollins.

“Your timing is impeccable,” Hale told the Scotland Yard official as they faced each other in the hallway. “I know who killed Barrington and Lord Sedgewood, and why.”

Rollins smirked beneath his walrus mustache. “So do I.” He held out his right hand. In it was a piece of old oilskin, which he unfolded. Beneath those folds was a golden-handled dagger. The hilt was an ornate gold palmetto design with what appeared to be semi-precious stones and on the copper blade was some floral device.(Hale had never been good at identifying flowers). “And this will prove it,” continued Rollins. “Unless I miss my guess, tests will show that it was this wicked-looking instrument that ended Mr. Alfred Barrington's life.”

Hale felt his chest tighten.

“Where did you find it?” Sarah asked in a wavering voice. Hale gave her credit for the bluff, even though it was a lost cause. Of course she knew where it came from, and Rollins knew that she knew.

“From your garden out back. We just dug it up. I knew there had to be some reason a stray dog's been sniffing around a patch of newly turned earth for several days now. My men have been watching. I'm hoping that we will find fingerprints on it.” He refolded the oilskin. “Of course, the murderer may have wiped it clean, but you never know. We shall need to take the fingerprints of everyone in the household for comparison. I know you will have your servants cooperate. Oh, and I'll need yours and Mr. Hale's, of course, also. You understand that we must be thorough.” The sneer in his voice was almost palpable.

With a sinking feeling, Hale knew that he was right about the fingerprints. Sarah wouldn't have bothered to clean her prints off of the dagger before burying it.

“Whose dagger is it, Rollins?” Hale asked.

“I believe it to be the rightful property of Queen Ahhotep, mostly recently to be found in the possession of the late Lord Sedgewood.”

“Well, then, of course his fingerprints would be on it, and his daughter's as well,” Hale said.

Rollins slowly nodded, apparently unmoved. “You may well make that argument at New Scotland Yard. But for the moment I'm taking you two into custody.”

Lady Sarah made an inarticulate cry. Her hand went to her mouth and she collapsed against Hale.

“On what charge?” Hale demanded. The timing surprised him. He had thought Rollins would wait until after the formality of comparing the fingerprints to haul them in.

“You are both material witnesses in a homicide. That will do to hold you for the next seventy-two hours. Would you like to make this easier on all of us by just confessing now?”

New Scotland Yard

“Crime is common, logic is rare.”

– Sherlock Holmes,
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

New Scotland Yard sat at the end of Derby Street, on the east side of Parliament Street on the Victoria Embankment. The turreted building, in a Scottish design, was built on the foundation of what originally was going to be an opera house. Its granite façade was quarried, appropriately enough, by convicts at Dartmoor. Hale had been there dozens of times. Somehow, he reflected ruefully as he entered the building, it had looked different when he came there as a reporter rather than as a suspect in custody.

Of the 140 offices in the building, forty of them belonged to the Criminal Investigation Division. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Stanley Hopkins, had an office in one of the turrets overlooking the river. Senior officers, like Chief Inspector Henry Wiggins, had offices on the ground floor. The lower the rank of the inspector, the more flights of stairs he had to climb. Dennis Rollins's office, Hale knew from his most recent visit to the building, was on the third floor in an interior office that didn't even have a window onto the inside quadrangle. But Hale was quite certain that his ambitions fell nothing short of that turret office.

“You are each entitled to one telephone call,” Rollins advised his charges unnecessarily.

Sarah wasted hers on telephoning Sir Edumund Featherstone, a stodgy old solicitor who undoubtedly excelled at wills and trusts but had never been involved in a criminal case. After giving the matter a good deal of thought, Hale decided to call no farther away than the ground floor of the building.

“Wiggins? This is Enoch Hale. Lady Sarah and I are enjoying the hospitality of Scotland Yard.”

“I heard,” the Chief Inspector said. “Rollins is quite proud of himself. But don't get too comfortable. You have friends in high places - or at least a friend of yours does.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you will be rescued within the hour. Just sit tight.”

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Hale gave up asking questions when it became clear that Wiggins preferred to keep him in suspense.

The same could not be said for Inspector Rollins. It seemed that he would never run out of questions as he sat across a table from Hale in a small, windowless room not far from his office on the third floor. Sarah sat on Hale's right. The initial interview would be together, and then Rollins planned to question them separately.

“When did you resume your relationship with Lady Sarah?” he asked Hale.

“I didn't. Not the kind of relationship you mean. We're friends, but until her husband died I hadn't spoken to her in any meaningful since her marriage.”

“A witness says you were with her at an illegal after-hours club.”

Hale shook his head. “I wasn't with her. We happened to be at the same place at the same time. It was a coincidence.”

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Hale knew that he shouldn't have used it. “Coincidence?” A malevolent smile appeared beneath Rollins's walrus moustache. “That's a good one. Is it a coincidence that with her husband and her father dead she's free to marry you?”

“Free to, is not the same as interested in.”

“That's as may be, but what I really want to know is did she give you the knife or did you just take it?”

“She did nothing of the sort!” Hale had to hand it to Rollins; he had a way of getting under your skin.

“So you admit you took the knife without her knowing?”

Hale forced a contemptuous laugh. “I'd never even seen the thing before now. You won't find my prints on it. I didn't take it, she didn't give it to me, and for all I know you did it!”

Rollins half rose from his desk.

“Don't get cheeky with me, Hale. You're in this up to your neck.” Sitting back down, he continued his interrogation. “All right, now, which one of you buried the knife?” Rollins surveyed the two potential murderers in front of him. Hale was trying to control his temper, but Lady Sarah sat with her shoulders humped and staring at her hands.

“One would understand, Lady Sarah, if someone like yourself should want to help an old flame. With your husband murdered and your old,
um
, friend in a desperate situation... well, it would be the most natural thing in the world to want to help out of fear of what the man might do next. A person might take the knife to hide it and hope she wouldn't be next. But now, with your father murdered too, well, you can see how it is. There is no safety from such a man. That's what happened isn't it? You hid the knife to help out Hale here because you were afraid for your own life.”

Sarah didn't move. She just stared at the handkerchief she was twisting in her hands.

“I must give you points for originality on the story line, Rollins,” said Hale. “But if I tried to turn that kind of no-fact drivel in to my editor I'd be working for the shilling shockers in two minutes. Look, somebody clearly has it in for the whole family. Sarah herself was poisoned. The doctor said she could have died.”

Rollins grinned. “But she didn't, did she? The falsified attack is an old dodge.”

Half an hour had passed and Hale was getting tired of this. He'd tried to tell Rollins that Sidney Lyme was the killer, but Rollins had ignored him.

“You don't really have anything, do you?” Hale said.

Ignoring that, Rollins pretended to study some papers in front of him. “Diligent investigation by the force has established that your friend Prudence Beresford doesn't exist.”

“No, it just proves you can't find her,” rebutted Hale. Rollins, not listening, pushed on.

“You have no alibi for the night Alfred Barrington was stabbed to death. Where were you when Lord Sedgewood, the man who rejected you as a son-in-law, had his head smashed in?”

“You don't even know when that was. All you know is when the maid found his body. I've given you a rundown of what I did that day four times - or maybe five. I may have lost count. But here it is again: I met the Woolfs at the 1917 Club, I interviewed Linwood Baines at his home, I went back to my office, I went out for dinner at Goldini's, I went home.”

“Alone? Miss Beresford wasn't with you?” Rollins's voice dripped sarcasm.

“Yes, alone. Innocent people don't always have convenient alibis.”

“Innocent people don't have murder weapons buried in their backyards.” Rollins glared at Sarah, suddenly shifting the focus of his attack.

Hale was still thinking about how to answer that when the door opened. In his wildest flight of fancy, Hale would never have expected that the next person he saw would be Sherlock Holmes.

“Hello, Hale,” the detective said briskly, as if he were the host of the party. “And you must be Inspector Dennis Rollins. My name is-”

“I know who you are,” Rollins snapped. “I read about you when I was a nipper. That was a long time ago.”
In other words
, Hale thought, “
you're long past it, old man
.”
That's what Rollins means
. “What I don't know is by what authority you've come bursting into my interrogation of a suspect.”

“That's interesting, because I was given to understand these people are being held as material witnesses, not suspects. In any case, your question is quickly answered.” Holmes pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Rollins. “I am here by this authority - a letter to you from the Commissioner.”

Oh, this is rich
, Hale thought. He knew that Stanley Hopkins, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Holmes went way back together. Hopkins had worked with Holmes more than thirty years before, when the officer had still been wet behind the ears and Holmes was already the most famous sleuth in the world. Some of the Scotland Yard boys had been loath to admit how much they'd learned from the consulting detective, but not Hopkins.

Rollins opened the envelope, unfolded the single sheet of paper inside, and read it. Hale noted with satisfaction that he moved his lips when he read. After a couple of minutes, he lowered the letter and addressed Holmes.

“I suppose you've read the letter, so you know that Commissioner Hopkins wants me to extend you every courtesy and do whatever you ask within the bounds of the law.” His moustache twitched as he spoke, as if in protest at what he was forced to say.

Holmes bowed his head in mock courtesy. “I believe that Commissioner Hopkins did tell me something of the sort.”

Hale read the calculation in Rollins's eyes. Even though the young inspector had strong patrons, they weren't powerful enough that he could simply ignore a request from Stanley Hopkins himself - not if he planned to someday occupy that turret office.

“What can I do for you?” Rollins appeared to form the words with some difficulty.

“It's quite simple, really,” Holmes assured him. “I should like you to bring together several individuals at the scene of Lord Sedgewood's murder. Rest assured, you need not leave Hale and Lady Sarah out of your sight during this charade. Their presence is quite crucial to exposing the real murderer.”