The Egyptian Curse Read online

  “What kind of questions?” Sarah asked.

  Hesitating, Hale glanced toward Portia Lyme. She didn’t look away.

  “Portia’s going to be part of our family,” Sarah said. “Whatever you want to ask, you can do it in front of her.”

  Hale nodded. “All right, then. Inspector Rollins said you had an argument with Alfie last night. Was your marriage in trouble?”

  “Now see here, Hale!” Charles sputtered.

  Sarah cast her green eyes down. “No, it’s all right. The inspector asked about that, and I’m sure he’ll be asking the servants and all of Alfie’s friends. The fact is, we didn’t quarrel a lot. But neither were we in love. I think I told you once, Enoch, that he was like a brother to me. That turned out to be all too true. We were more like brother and sister than husband and wife.”

  If Charles and his girl hadn’t been in the room, Hale would have taken her into his arms. He had to force himself to pay attention as Sarah continued.

  “I suppose it’s only natural that he should look elsewhere for... female companionship.”

  “He had a girlfriend?”

  “I’m not really sure.” She sat back down on the divan, hesitating as she apparently collected her thoughts. “He’d been hanging around with what they call the Bloomsbury Group, the writers and artists that populate this district. I suspect he was rather too fond of that Virginia Woolf woman.”

  “Suspect or know?”

  “It’s just a feeling I have, and not a strong one. What difference does it make whether they were intimate or not? That’s where he spent his time, that’s where his heart was - with that crowd and at his club.”

  Hale had heard of Woolf as a writer, and a wild woman, although he’d never read anything by her.

  “Isn’t Virginia Woolf quite a bit older than Alfie?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes - early forties, I think. Doesn’t say much for me, does it?”Her cheeks flushed as she inspected her hands nervously held in her lap.

  “And isn’t she married to some sort of literary type - an editor or something of the kind?”

  Sarah nodded. “Yes, Leonard Woolf. He was a friend of Alfie’s, too. It was all very civilized.”The last word was spit out with a heavy note of bitterness.

  “Father was quite upset about Alfie’s choice of friends,” Charles said.

  Was it almost as bad as your sister seeing a journalist? Lord Sedgewood’s contempt for his profession still rankled Hale. He had chosen it in part to irritate his father, and was dismayed when it proved a stumbling block to his potential father-in-law as well.

  Hale could think of all sorts of love-triangle murder motives that wouldn’t make Sarah the murderer. Perhaps Alfie wanted to break off whatever he had going with Virginia Woolf - if anything. Or perhaps Leonard Woolf wasn’t as “civilized” as he liked to let on.

  “Do you think Alfie’s involvement with these people may have had anything to do with his murder, Sarah?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then whom do you suspect?”

  “No one! I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill Alfie. He was so... inoffensive. I shall miss him terribly.”

  Sarah turned slightly, as though to hide the catch in her throat and the tear in her eye. Were they the products of emotion or acting? Given that she had once been a music hall performer, Hale couldn’t be sure which it was. And he was even less sure which he wanted it to be.

  “Even the governor wouldn’t kill a man just because he didn’t like the company he was keeping,” Charles said.

  “Don’t even talk like that!” Sarah snapped, her voice trembling. Portia Lyme’s air of youthful sophistication dissipated into a look of embarrassment. She looked like she’d rather be somewhere else.

  Maybe Sedgewood would do that, Hale thought - not out of calculation, certainly, but out of rage. And maybe that’s why Sarah reacted so strongly.

  He thought back to the first time he had met the fifth Earl of Sedgewood, almost four years earlier during his reporting of the Hangman murders[2]. Hale had managed to talk his way into His Lordship’s oak-paneled library, where they sat and talked next to a black statue of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet. Convinced that Hale was in the pay of the Bolsheviks or his rival Carnarvon, the Earl had answered few questions before ordering him out of the town house. Their relationship had later taken several interesting turns - after Sedgewood found out that Hale was involved with his daughter and before he convinced her to go with him to Egypt. A widower, he was very protective of Sarah.

  Hale made a mental note to check on where Sedgewood was last night. Then he changed the subject without warning, always a good interview technique.

  “I didn’t ask you about the quarrel you and Alfie had last night. According to Rollins, Alfie was overheard to say something like ‘you love him, don’t you?’ I know what you told Rollins about that, but if I’m going to help you I need to know the truth. I’m also kind of curious since it’s the reason I have to prove where I was during the murder. So let’s have it: Is there another man in the picture?”

  Sarah opened her mouth to answer. Hale would later wonder what she would have said if the door hadn’t opened behind him.

  “Daddy! What did he say?”

  The peer, a short man with a bit of a paunch and prematurely thinning blond hair above a high forehead, had changed little over the past two years. The expression on his face was somewhere between grim and determined. “You are in good hands, my dear. Sir Edmund has agreed to act as your solicitor in this matter, whatever may be involved. You are to meet with him tomorrow. Until then you are to say nothing further to Scotland Yard. He believes they may attempt to prove that you were not, in fact, asleep during Alfie’s murder if their other suspect falls through.”

  Sedgewood scowled, apparently noticing Hale for the first time. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “He wants to help,” Sarah said.

  “How - with more of his stories for the trash papers?”

  It was a measure of the man that he regarded The Morning Telegraph and the dozens of other respectable clients of the Central Press Syndicate as “trash papers.” They weren’t The Times.

  “I’m not writing anything about the case, Your Lordship. But that won’t stop me from putting a bug in the ear of the man who is. Sometimes the Press can point the police in the right direction if they’ve gone off the rails, which I’m very much afraid they’ve done in this case.”

  The Earl regarded Hale shrewdly. “Perhaps so, perhaps not. I understand that Scotland Yard suspects that you may have had some hand in this. That hardly seems beyond imagining. You wanted to marry Sarah. I would never have permitted that, of course, but that reality did not seem to disturb your fantasies. Sarah’s marriage to a thoroughly suitable partner did, however. Now that obstacle to your delusional hopes has been removed.”

  Charming as ever, Hale thought. Still, Hale couldn’t deny his logic. It made perfect sense, objectively speaking, that Hale could have killed Alfie on his own initiative in hopes of winning Sarah back. “Fortunately, I have a witness as to my whereabouts at the time of the murder - another woman.”

  What was that look that Sarah gave him? Surely it couldn’t be hurt or disappointment. She had left him. She must have understood that he would go on with his life without her.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” Sedgewood said. “It’s not likely that another woman would lie to protect you, given the circumstances.”

  “Who do you think killed Alfie?” Hale said.

  The Earl shrugged. “I will leave that to the police to find out. That is what they are paid for.”

  “And they usually do a good job of it, more than readers of detective stories think, but not always. I believe they could use a little help on this one. Who might have wanted Alfie dead?”
>
  “I cannot imagine unless... perhaps someone at the Constitutional Club, near where he died. I suppose he might have caught someone cheating at cards.”

  1 See The Poisoned Penman, MX Publishing, 2014.

  2 See The Amateur Executioner, MX Publishing, 2013.

  Debt and Death

  “Out of debt, out of danger.”

  – Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

  “Killed to cover up a cheating scandal?” Malone repeated over a pint that evening. Hale’s working day was over. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon on interviews for the story about the lost mountaineer. But Malone’s day was barely beginning. “That reminds me of the Ronald Adair murder back in the early Nineties.”

  Hale wrinkled his eyebrows. “That doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It should. That was the case that brought your friend Sherlock Holmes ‘back from the dead,’ as more dramatic writers than yours truly like to say.”

  Holmes lived still. He spent his days keeping bees at his villa on the Sussex Downs and occasionally doing a favor for old friends at Scotland Yard or his even more ancient brother in the Secret Service. But Hale hadn’t seen the old man in ages.

  “I seem to recall that I was in short pants at the time - and in Boston,” Hale said. “Tell me about it.” He motioned the bartender to bring two more pints of Fuller’s London Pride to lubricate his colleague’s storytelling.

  “The newspapers called it the Park Lane Mystery, and quite a mystery it was. Young Adair, a handsome man about town, had been shot to death in a room locked from the inside and no weapon to be found. It turned out that Adair had caught on that his whist partner at the Bagatelle Club, Colonel Sebastian Moran, had been cheating. Even though this dishonesty had benefited him, Adair threatened to expose Moran unless the cad resigned from the club and promised to give up cards.”

  “And the Colonel declined rather definitively, I take it.” The story was beginning to sound familiar.

  Malone grabbed a fresh brew as it was deposited on the bar. “You could say that. Adair probably never knew how badly he had miscalculated. Moran was both a champion big game hunter and the chief lieutenant of the late Professor Moriarty. He shot Adair in the head through the open window of his house, using a specially built air gun. You can read all about it in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, the first story.”

  “I think I already did, but that was a long time ago. Well, if somebody killed to avoid a card cheating scandal once, it could certainly happen again. It seems to me that was one of Holmes’s techniques - looking for parallel crimes in those scrapbooks of his. So maybe Sedgewood was on to something with the idea that Alfie might have caught a fellow club member cheating.”

  “It’s not out of the question. A man who cheats at cards is no gentleman. Exposure would ruin him socially. That’s plenty of motive for murder. I’ll ask around whether Alfie was a card player, or hung around card players.”

  “Ask whom?”

  “The fellow members of his clubs. I already found out that he belonged to several. And I have another little idea I want to follow up as well.”

  “Which is?”

  “Maybe somebody owed him money. People in his set always owe each other money.”

  Hale nodded slowly. He remembered the Drones Club, which he had visited during the investigation of Langdale Pike’s murder[3]. The members were always hitting each other up for a few quid until they got their allowance. Were all the London clubs like that? Hale didn’t think so, but not being a clubbable man himself he wasn’t sure.

  “Or he owed money to someone else beyond his ability to pay,” Hale continued Malone’s thought. “Or his friends in Bloomsbury were to blame for some reason we don’t know, yet.”

  “Or he was the victim of a random act of violence.”

  “Or he was a secret Fenian and Special Branch had him done in,” continued Hale.

  “Or he was Special Branch and the Fenians had him done in,” countered Malone.

  “Or a secret Egyptian society killed him as a warning to others, or, or, or!” Hale gazed into his half- finished pint. “We really are nowhere, aren’t we? What are my friends at Scotland Yard up to?” Malone had just returned from an interview with Rollins.

  “I’m not sure you have any friends at Scotland Yard these days,” Malone said darkly. “No, that’s not true. From what I hear, Chief Inspector Wiggins is four square on your side. But he’s part of an old guard that’s a bit on the outs just now in favor of younger blood. Commissioner Hopkins seems quite taken by the winds of change, and Dennis Rollins is as windy as they come.”

  Hale chuckled. “He’s formidable, all right. I’m not so sure that his rapid climb up the ladder is entirely attributable to friends at the top. He’s smart, rather devious, and a hard worker. That’s why I’m not worried about being in his sights. Once he talks to Prudence Beresford, he’ll realize it’s time to cut his losses and look elsewhere. I just hope he gives up his notion that Sarah was involved.”

  “While you’re hoping, you should also hope that he finds your Miss Beresford. He hasn’t yet, and he’s had three men working on it since this morning.”Malone looked at Hale from the corner of his eye. “She does exist, doesn’t she?”

  “I certainly hope so.” Hale drained the glass.

  3 See The Poisoned Penman, MX Publishing, 2014.

  Gossip

  “Foul whisperings are abroad.”

  – William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1605

  Hale had his own idea about another line of inquiry, which he kept to himself. That evening he called his fellow ex-pat friend Tom Eliot. A banker at Lloyd’s, Eliot also dabbled in poetry. He even had a bit of a reputation along that line among the literati. He would know about this Bloomsbury Group.

  “Yes, I am indeed well acquainted with the Woolfs,” Eliot assured Hale over the telephone. “I knew that Alfie Barrington traveled in their circle.” Eliot agreed to meet Hale later at The 43, an unlicensed nightclub that didn’t open until midnight. Hale also wanted to talk to Aloysius Bone, who spent a good deal of his time there.

  The disrespectability of The 43, a dingy little joint at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho, made it highly popular among the bright young things who had popped up now that the world was safe for democracy. Hale wouldn’t be surprised to see Portia Lyme there. The owner, a rather motherly Irish woman who bribed dozens of coppers to stay in business, sat behind the cash desk of her office on the ground floor and decided who got in and who didn’t. Students, soldiers, aristocracy, and journalists always got through. Hale was known there as an occasional visitor, perhaps a couple of times a year, although not a member.

  “Evening, Mr. Hale,” she rasped. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Meyrick. You’re looking lovely as always.” Surprised that Eliot had never been there before, Hale made the introductions as he paid the ten-shilling non-member fee for each of them. They quickly made their way to the first-floor lounge and ordered a martini with Booth’s gin for Eliot and a Manhattan for Hale.

  “All I know about Bloomsbury comes from my friend Dorothy Sayers, who lives nearby,” Hale said, lighting a panatela. “Tell me about this Virginia and Leonard Woolf. I just know that’s she’s a writer with a reputation, and not only a literary one.”

  “Those Woolfs don’t bother with sheep’s clothing.” Eliot pulled a Gauloise cigarette out of the familiar blue box and lit it. “Let’s see. I’ll start with Virginia. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters. She had a breakdown when he died twenty years ago. That was her second breakdown, actually - she’d also had one when her mother died.”

  “I don’t think I need her mental history.” After he said it, Hale wanted to bite his tongue. What an insensitive clod he was! Both Eliot and his English wife, Vivienne, had suffered from mental disorders.r />
  “Right. I’ll skip the other breakdowns, then.” Eliot exhaled smoke from his gasper. “She married Leonard Woolf about a dozen years ago. They started Hogarth Press about five years later. Virginia sets the type herself on a hand press they bought.”

  “Do they publish Virginia’s novels?”

  Eliot picked up his martini. “Oh, yes, but more than just that. They are actually great appreciators of fine poetry.” Eliot smiled at Hale’s quizzical look. “Last year they came out with the first UK edition of my Waste Land in book form, for example.”

  Hale chuckled. “Okay, they run a high-quality publishing house. But tell me about Leonard.”

  “He’s the literary editor of the Nation. Before that, he edited the International Review and the international section of the Contemporary Review. Several years ago, he and some of his friends founded the 1917 Club just down the street from here. It’s kind of a Bohemian mirror image of a gentleman’s club, and it’s not restricted to gentlemen - or even to men. Very egalitarian.”

  “Named 1917 in honor of the Bolsheviks, I take it.”

  Eliot nodded. “Membership is about what you’d expect - Ramsay MacDonald, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, and that sort.”

  “How did Woolf meet Virginia?”

  “He was a friend of her brother Thorby at Cambridge.”

  Hale nursed his Manhattan. “What do you know about their marriage? Do they get along?” Considering the fragile state of Eliot’s own union, this, too, was delicate territory, but he had to ask. Eliot didn’t seem bothered.

  “By all accounts they’re very devoted to each other. But there is a girlfriend in the picture.”

  “Woolf has a girlfriend?” This was not what he’d expected.

  “Not that I know of. But Virginia does. Her name is Vita Sackville-West. She’s a writer and gardener married to a diplomat called Harold Nicolson.”