The Egyptian Curse Page 13

  “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.”

  The Murder Room

  They are greedy dogs which can never have enough.

  – Isaiah LVI, 11, c. 700 B.C.

  Lord Sedgewood’s oak-paneled library felt different to Hale than it had when he was courting Sarah, even though everything looked just the same, save perhaps the addition of one or two minor items in the Egyptian collection. It wasn’t just that the Earl was dead, never again to gaze upon his precious Egyptian artifacts, that had Hale disoriented. Rather, it was the inescapable realization that Hale had never really known the man who spent so much of his time here, even though Hale had thought he had.

  “What are you shaking your head about?” Sarah asked. They stood together at the wall farthest from the fireplace, under the watchful eye of Inspector Rollins.

  Your father was a womanizing scoundrel, Hale thought, even worse a man than I imagined. And he thought I wasn’t good enough for you! “Nothing important,” he said. “It just feels strange to be back here.”

  “Yes, it does. But this is the beginning of the end, isn’t it? Holmes is going to end this nightmare, right?”

  Sarah now looked none the worse for her time at New Scotland Yard. In fact, Hale found the glow of excitement that filled her wide green eyes quite fetching.
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  He squeezed her hand. “That’s the agenda.”

  “Why doesn’t he just tell us the name of the killer and be done with it?”

  Hale smiled. “Because he’s Sherlock Holmes, that’s why. The man has an irrepressible flare for the dramatic. Remember the time he had his landlady serve up a missing naval treaty on a plate?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, I don’t remember that. I presume it was before my time. And I do hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s never yet been wrong in the end, when it really counted.”But what about those unsolved cases that Dr. Watson mentioned? Even Holmes failed there.

  Hale kept it to himself, but he worried that without knowing what he’d found out about Sidney Lyme’s ill-gotten shabti figure, Holmes could be on the wrong scent. It was hard to tell, based on the dramatis personae Holmes had assembled in the library. Portia Lyme and her fiancé, the new Lord Sedgewood, stood at the unlit fireplace, deep in conversation with a man Hale took to be Sidney Lyme. Linwood Baines and Howard Carter stood on opposite sides of the room, studiously avoiding each other.

  “Well, then,” Rollins said, “everyone is here, so-”

  “Actually, not everyone,” Holmes corrected. He still cut a commanding figure as he stood in the center of the room, only a little stooped by age. “There’s one more guest to come.”

  In a few minutes the doorbell rang and they were soon joined, to Hale’s intense surprise, by a stout, elderly man he had seen briefly once before.

  Holmes smiled broadly. “Ah, welcome, Watson.” Hale gaped at the name.

  “He called himself Burton Hill,” Baines blurted out, obviously no less astonished.

  “No hard feelings, I hope,” Dr. Watson said, shaking his hand. “I apologize for the deception.”

  “It was quite necessary, I’m afraid,” Holmes said briskly. “While I was stuck in Sussex, I needed an ally to begin the investigation for me. Not that I didn’t trust Hale, but I strongly suspected that his emotions would bias his judgment in this case. My associate Mercer was unavailable, but my old partner Watson jumped at the chance to get back into harness. I could hardly allow him to use his own name without tipping my hand, could I? I’m afraid his rather sensationalized accounts of our adventures have been all too successful at spreading both of our names and linking them together forever.”

  “Right,” said Rollins with ill-concealed impatience. “Now what?”

  Holmes looked around the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you all know, Edward Bridgewater, the fifth Earl of Sedgewood, was murdered in this very room. His death was a particularly violent one, as he was crushed beneath a statute of the cat-headed deity Bastet.” He pointed to a spot in the floor. “His body lay there, bleeding profusely from the head.”

  Sarah gasped and put her hands to her mouth. Hale put an arm around her waist, a natural gesture of comfort, without thinking about it. “Holmes! Please!”

  “Surely,” Holmes went on, “in such a circumstance the poor man’s spirit cannot easily have moved on to a place of peace. It must linger here still, troubled and unhappy that his murder remains unsolved and the murderer unpunished. I suggest we attempt to communicate with this spirit.”

  “You mean a séance?” Howard Carter sputtered. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Delicious!” Portia Lyme declared.

  “Idiotic,” her fiancé countered. Rollins somehow managed to agree with the new peer just by the look on his face, without saying a word.

  Holmes turned to Sara’s brother. Hale still had a hard time thinking of Charles as Lord Sedgewood. Holmes seemed to have no such problem. “You are skeptical, Your Lordship?”

  “You’re damned right I am. I don’t believe in ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”

  “In short, you don’t believe in the supernatural?”

  Hale could have sworn that Charles’s aristocratic nose turned up in the air. “No, of course not. That’s just silly superstition. This is the twentieth century and I’m a rational man.” In that moment Hale remembered Charles the day after Alfie’s murder condemning The Times story with its “rubbish about Carnarvon and the supposed Tutankhamun curse.” The family always read The Times.

  “I wonder then,” Holmes said quietly, “why you planted the idea of a curse in the mind of Mr. Artemis Howell of The Times.”

  Charles licked his lips nervously. “I did no such thing.”

  “I think you did. It has always been a habit of mine to closely read the Press accounts of cases in which I’m involved or interested. Although often inaccurate, I find such articles nonetheless instructive. Howell’s story advancing the notion of a ‘curse of Ahhotep’ appeared the day after Reynolds overheard you expressing belief in such a curse to someone over the telephone. That someone was Howell. Most likely, you put the idea into his head to begin with. You were also his source ‘close to the family’ who told him about the acquisition of the Queen Ahhotep dagger.”

  “Nonsense.” Charles managed to sound both contemptuous and superior in a single word.

  “Why would he even do such a thing?” a bewildered Sarah asked.

  “I can think of three reasons why a man might promote a theory he didn’t believe in,” Holmes said, “but the simplest - and therefore most likely - is to draw attention away from the real solution. Speculation about a curse, which even seemed to touch you in the form of a near-fatal illness, Lady Sarah, did more than evoke the supernatural. It also put a spotlight on the three victims’ connections to Egypt. At least, that was the plan - although Inspector Rollins remained too focused on his own theory to see that. And why did the killer want to turn on that spotlight?”

  “Because the killer had nothing to do with Egypt,” Baines said with obvious satisfaction.

  Holmes nodded. “Precisely. And who does that describe? Charles Bridgewater - he was the only member of the family who’d never been there or even taken an interest in Egyptology.”

  Sarah’s body tensed, but she said not a word. Perhaps she couldn’t.

  Rollins and Charles both had their mouths open to speak, but Hale beat them to it. “That can’t be right,” he said. His own legs felt a little weak. “Sidney Lyme did it.”

  “Me?” Lyme looked bemused. He was much older than his sister, in his thirties, and portly in contrast to her slim figure. What remained of his hair was dark, whereas she was a redhead. Hale wanted to slap him and then shoot him. Instead, he shared what he had learned from Sarah:

  “Lyme had an embarrassing secret to protect: Sedgewood knew that he had illegally smuggled a significant antiquity out of Egypt. I think he murdered to keep that secret.”

  “Come now, Hale,” Holmes said. “You haven’t thought that quite through. If Lyme wanted to kill Sedgewood to shut him up - and presumably Alfie Barrington for the same reason - he hardly would have done so in a way that called attention to his Egyptian connections, the very source of his guilty secret! Besides, I learned about Lyme’s smuggling from a certain female member of the household staff at Number 10 Carlton House Terrace, which means that it couldn’t have been much of a secret.”

  Sarah pulled away from Hale, her arms out in appeal to Holmes. “But I already explained to Enoch that Charles didn’t owe Alfie money. And he’d reconciled with Daddy. Why would he kill either of them?”

  Holmes spoke with surprising tenderness to the woman who had lost her husband and her father in a matter of days, and whose brother now stood accused of the murders.

  “As I explained earlier to Hale, your father was the real target all along. Partly it was about money, but nothing so trivial as a loan. Charles had an income from your father and was marrying a wealthy woman, but no man is satisfied with having money at the sufferance of others. He wants it for himself. As the only son, Charles would get that eventually - and a title besides -
but that could be a long time coming. The Earl was in quite vigorous health - as he proved by making love to Charles’s fiancée. That was the final straw, wasn’t it, Charles - Lord Sedgewood?”

  Portia Lyme seethed in the direction of her husband-to-be. “Are you just going to stand there and let him insult me like that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am, my dear. And thank you, Mr. Holmes, for providing all these witnesses for the lawsuit which I shall certainly file against you for slander.”

  Holmes appeared unmoved. “I regret the necessity to air these personal matters so publicly. It has been well attested by the household staff that the late Lord Sedgewood was romantically involved with a certain gracious lady who has learned her lesson and whose name need not be brought into this. She was succeeded in his affections by another whom she saw twice, once while the Earl was in the company of his family. Based on her description, the identity of this younger woman fairly leaped at me. How the current Lord Sedgewood knew about it, I have no idea.”

  “Oh.” The word escaped Sidney Lyme as if he’d just realized he’d committed a minor social gaffe. “That might be down to my account. I was great pals with Alfie, you know, and I told him. It didn’t seem cricket to me. Sorry, Portia. Alfie must have let it slip to Charles.”

  Lyme cowed before his sister, who regarded him murderously.

  “So Charles had ample reasons to kill his father - too many, in fact,” Holmes continued. “As the heir who had not so long ago been estranged from his father, he would have been the most obvious suspect, even to Scotland Yard.”

  Rollins glowered at Holmes.

  “So, perhaps influenced by having once worked with the highly creative Dorothy Sayers, he conceived this rather convoluted plot of killing someone else, framing his father for the murder, and having the hangman clear his way to the title, the Sedgewood fortune, and Portia Lyme. That’s been done at least twice before that I recall - in New York in 1895 and in Warsaw in 1913.”