The Egyptian Curse Read online

  Hale had known enough artistic types not to be shocked by that, but he quickly saw that his vague idea of Alfie being killed by Leonard Woolf out of romantic jealousy wasn’t looking very likely. He expressed this thought to Eliot.

  “Oh, I think both Woolfs regarded Alfie affectionately, rather as they would a puppy dog,” Eliot said. “He realized he had no particular talent, but he liked to consider himself friends of those who did. And what he lacked in talent he seemed to make up for in money. Even socialists find that a useful commodity.”

  “Let’s talk to Aloysius. He’ll know who Alfie’s friends and enemies were, and be more objective about it than Sarah. He’s usually downstairs by this time.”

  Since the murder of Langdale Pike a couple of years previously, Hale’s former colleague Aloysius Bone had largely succeeded in his ambition of taking Pike’s place as the premier purveyor of gossip to the real trash papers, like The Daily Megaphone. Slight of stature, swarthy, with dark curly hair and an ingratiating manner, Bone had a way of inspiring confidences. Thus he was able to acquire information for free and sell it at good prices.

  Hale and Eliot picked up their cocktails and went down to the basement, where a five-piece jazz band held forth and the dance floor was crowded. Rudolf Valentino had once been mistaken there for a waiter. Hale looked toward the tables and chairs clustered along the sides of the dance floor until he spotted Aloysius Bone sitting at what had become his “usual” table. Bone had succeeded in placing himself far enough from the band so he could hear and be heard as he traded information, and near enough to the stairs so he would see all who came and went (and who they were with).

  Currently this specialist in the sleazy underbelly of journalism was talking to a pudgy, balding man that Hale recognized. His name was Hitchcock - Hitch, for short. Four years earlier, at the time of the Hangman murders, he had been a title designer at the Famous Players-Lasky moving picture studio in Islington. Hale had heard something about him becoming a director.

  Hitchcock noticed Hale coming their way before Bone did. He bowed slightly in the journalist’s direction. “Good evening, Mr. Hale.”

  “Hello, Hitch.” He introduced Eliot to Hitchcock and Bone. “I must say I’m surprised to find you here.”

  “Are you the Hitchcock who helped write The White Shadow?” Eliot asked.

  “Not only did he write it,” interjected Bone, “he designed the sets, edited the footage, and was the assistant director.”

  Bone really liked to show off everything he knew, thought Hale. I hope he is as forthcoming with what I need.

  Hale looked at Eliot. “I didn’t realize you were such a film-goer.”

  “Not much of one, but you know how I love mysteries. This one has good and evil twins, chance meetings, a mysterious disappearance, and madness. Quite an exceptional piece of work really.”

  Hitch looked like he was about to burst his waistcoat buttons from the complements.”I appreciate the kind words, sir. Actually I’m just doing some research at the moment. My next film will require a scene in a seedy cabaret.”

  “I see.” With someone else, Hale might have assumed that was just an excuse. But Hitchcock was eccentric enough that it just might be the truth. “Aloysius, I was hoping to have a word with you.”

  “That is very interesting,” Bone said in his soft voice, “because I have something to tell you as a matter of professional courtesy. Excuse us, Hitch. Good luck with your German project.”

  Hitchcock bowed again and walked away. As soon as he was out of earshot, Bone said:

  “I had a visit from a Scotland Yard inspector, a fellow named Rollins. He woke me up at my residence at the ungodly hour of just past noon. His manners are somewhat lacking. He asked me whether I’d seen you and the former Sarah Bridgewater together since her marriage.”

  “You told him no, of course.”

  Bone sipped a pale pink drink. “By no means, old boy. I couldn’t lie to Scotland Yard, could I?”

  “What?”

  Eliot looked at Hale strangely.

  “But you couldn’t have seen me with Sarah!” Hale protested to Bone.

  “I certainly did. Don’t you remember? Both of you were right here at The 43 about six months go.”

  With a shock, Hale realized that Bone was right. He shook his head and slid into a chair at the table. He had completely forgotten - or more probably repressed the painful memory. “But I didn’t bring Sarah here. I was alone. I just happened to run into her. She was with Alfie. It was all quite awkward.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, if you say so. But I don’t remember seeing Alfie that night. I just know that I saw you talking to Lady Sarah.”

  “That’s because he was away from the table at the moment. I wasn’t going to talk to her while he was there, although I really don’t know why not. Our conversation was along the lines of, ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m fine, how are you?’It was all very banal and awkward.”

  “Well, I didn’t get close enough to hear that, although I tried. That Rollins chap seemed very interested in what I saw.”

  “I bet.” Damn the infernal luck. Hale wished he had the time to wring Bone’s neck. “Listen, I wanted to ask you about Alfie. I only met him once. To hear Sarah tell it, he was too loveable for anybody to want to kill him. What do you know about him?”

  “Oh, he was a hail-fellow-well-met, all right - very popular because he was quite free with loaning money to his friends. He seemed to get along especially well with his brother-in-law, Charles. I’ve seen them here together a few times, along with Charles’s fiancé and her brother. In fact, it was Sidney Lyme who told me about the dust-up Alfie got himself into last night.”

  “You mean with Lady Sarah?” Hale didn’t know Lyme, but he was surprised that he would be sharing what was essentially family business with a professional gossipmonger.

  Bone’s dark, Levantine-like eyes widened. “He had an argument with her, too?”

  “Never mind that. What were you talking about?”

  “You can read about it tomorrow. I sold a paragraph to-” Hale had leaned forward until his nose almost touched Bone’s. His I want to know and I want to know now look was unmistakable.”Oh, all right, Hale. He had a very loud row at the Constitutional Club last night with Howard Carter. Do you know him?”

  Hale didn’t know the Egyptologist, but he knew of him. The entire civilized world had heard of the man who, thanks to unfailing persistence over several years and the sponsorship of Lord Carnarvon, had discovered the treasure-laden tomb of King Tut.

  In Search of Motive

  “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motive.”

  – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

  “One suspect, known to have had a romantic relationship with Lady Sarah in the past, has been helping us with our inquiries,” said Inspector Dennis Rollins of Scotland Yard, who is in charge of the investigation. “This individual has given us the name of a woman whom he says he was with at the time of the murder. After a diligent search to find this woman, however, I feel confident in saying that one Miss Prudence Beresford does not exist.”

  Hale threw aside the Tuesday morning edition of The Times, his breakfast ruined. Rollins was playing Artemis Howell, the Times reporter, like a violin. It was an old game: Let the suspect know he’s a suspect, pour on the pressure, and then wait for him to crack like an egg and do something stupid out of sheer panic. Careful not to mention Hale by name, Howell had nevertheless cast suspicion on him in the eyes of anyone who knew about his two-year relationship with Lady Sarah - all of his friends, all of hers, and quite a few other people that they knew more casually.

  Malone would be asleep at this hour, but Hale didn’t hesitate to ring him up. His ability to sound awake when he answered the phone impressed Hale.

 
“What did you find out about Alfie, Ned?”

  “Couldn’t you just pick up a copy of The Morning Telegraph instead of disturbing my beauty sleep? I’m sure they carried my story.”

  “Did you include in it everything that you found out?”

  “No, of course not. Some of it was unprintable because of our country’s benighted libel laws, and some of it just didn’t fit in.”

  “That’s what I figured and that’s why I called. Let’s trade. Give me everything you’ve got and I’ll tell you what I found out at The 43 last night.”

  “I’m not sure that I should-”

  “I’m on your team, Ned. What do you think I’m going to do with whatever you give me - tell Artie Howell or Inspector Rollins?”

  “That’s a good question. What are you going to do with it?”

  Hale paused. “I guess that depends on what you tell me. Look, you know my interest in this. I didn’t kill Sarah’s husband and I don’t think she did either. I want to make sure that neither one of us gets railroaded into paying for a crime we didn’t commit. Something you found out may help.”

  “I think you spent too much time around Sherlock Holmes.” Malone sighed. “All right, I’ll give you what I’ve got. Don’t want to see you in the dock! I spent the evening going around to Alfie’s clubs to see if anyone would bite on the idea that he’d spotted someone cheating. The biggest hurdle was getting into the Constitutional Club. Fortunately, my friend Challenger is a member.”

  “Challenger! I thought it was a gentlemen’s club.” The eccentric scientist had the physique of a grizzly bear and a temperament to match.

  Malone ignored him. “But let’s start with the Tankerville Club. Alfie played euchre there a couple of times a week. Everybody I talked to said that he was a cheerful loser, but probably won as much as he lost and didn’t play for especially high stakes. So it’s not likely that he lost a pile and looked for signs of cheating. There hasn’t been a cheating scandal at the Tankerville Club since Major Prendergast was falsely accused back in the Eighties.”

  “Then they’re overdue.”

  “I suppose you could say that. Nobody looked guilty when I mentioned the word ‘cheating,’ although I don’t suppose they would. At any rate, all of Alfie’s mates at the Tankerville Club thought he was absolutely the cat’s whiskers, very free with paying for drinks.

  “Same goes for the crowd at the Drones Club on Dover Street in Mayfair, only more so. That one’s a bunch of impoverished nobility looking for wealth to marry into. I got the impression that almost everybody owed Alfie money and very few of them actually have useful employment. Several chatty gentlemen told me that the new Lord Backwater, for example, and the younger son of the Duke of Balmoral had their hands in Alfie’s pockets more often than in their own.”

  Hale made a mental note of their names for future pursuit if the idea of a deadly debtor seemed tenable.

  “The Constitutional Club is a bit more serious, generally an older membership,” Malone said. “Alfie was one of the newer ones. He only joined after his marriage to Lord Sedgewood’s daughter. The Earl sponsored his membership. Challenger knew him by sight, but he’d never had a conversation with him.”

  “Tell me about the argument.”

  After a pause on the other end of the line, Malone said, “What argument?”

  “Alfie Barrington and Howard Carter had a very public verbal brawl at the Constitutional Club just hours before the murder.”

  “Damn! Nobody told me about that. Well, I guess well-bred gentlemen don’t talk about things like that, at least not to members of the Press.”

  “That’s why I have Aloysius Bone. He’s neither well-bred nor a gentleman. I don’t know what Alfie and Carter were fighting about, but I’m going to find out.”

  Hale felt a professional pride at having turned up something important that had eluded a good reporter like Ned Malone, combined with frustration that his own journalistic hands were tied. Nothing he learned would ever appear in a story under his byline, at least not until he was removed as a suspect and officially covering the case for the Central Press Syndicate. That was a journalist’s nightmare.

  “And there’s more,” he told Malone. “Alfie was in tight with a group of radical artists and writers with some unconventional habits.” He filled Malone in on what he had heard about the Bloomsbury Group from Tom Eliot. “At some point I’m going to drop in on the Woolfs and see what they have to say.”

  “Doesn’t sound too promising, bunch of free-lovers like that. What about the idea that-” Malone paused. “Well, what about the idea that Lady Sarah had a boyfriend?”

  She had never really answered that question when he asked her, Hale realized. Why not?

  “I don’t know, Ned. I can only answer for myself. The last time I saw her was the day she got back to England from the trip that turned out to be her wedding voyage.” That’s not true. “Wait, let me amend that. I did see her once at The 43, in a room full of other people which unfortunately included Aloysius Bone.”

  And Rollins is going to think I lied to him about that.

  “Enoch? I hate to tell you this, but Rollins doesn’t believe there is any such person as Prudence Beresford. His men can’t find her.”

  “I know. Artie Howell dropped that little gem in The Times today. I presume it was in your story, too?”

  “No. It seemed premature. It’s only been a day.”

  “Does Rathbone know that you’re holding back on news?”

  “It was his decision.”

  Hale chuckled. “That old fraud! He’d be the last to admit it, but he has a soft spot.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I think he just has some old- fashioned ideas about fairness and justice. He’d cut you off in a heartbeat - assuming he has a heart - if he thought you’d done for Alfie. I hope you’re not holding anything back about this Prudence Beresford - something that could help Scotland Yard find her.”

  “I told Rollins everything I know, and that’s almost nothing! It’s as if she existed just to give me an unprovable alibi.”It’s as if... “Wait a minute. Ned, what if that’s just it. What if Prudence Beresford doesn’t really exist at all? The whole time I was with her I felt like she had some kind of a secret. Suppose that’s not her real name. Suppose she’s the killer’s accomplice who met me at the opera just to make sure that I didn’t have a better alibi on the night of the murder. What do you think of that?”

  “I think that’s a brilliant idea... for Edgar Wallace or R. Austin Freeman. It’s mystery story stuff, Enoch. Nobody would dream up something so convoluted in real life.”

  Malone was right, Hale thought. He was thinking like Tom Eliot or Dorothy Sayers.

  “And if it’s not her real name, for whatever reason,” Malone added, “I don’t know how you’re going to find her.”

  Yes, how? The prospect seemed bleak. Hale strained to remember what he knew about Prudence Beresford that might be helpful. She liked opera - but opera season was over - and she liked Egypt. Egypt! The British Museum! What had she said?”Almost every Thursday I go to the North Wing of the British Museum and look at mummies and the Rosetta Stone. Needless to say, I’d rather be back in Egypt.” He remembered how her face had lit up when she’d said it.

  “I think I know where to find her,” Hale said. “But I’ll have to wait until Thursday.”

  She re-read the last paragraph of the Times story, in the grip of several emotions. How strange that the murder she had read about turned out to involve someone that she had met. And moreover, he was a suspect! But he didn’t do it, poor man. He was with her at the time. The problem was, that meant that she was also with him. She couldn’t come forward without Archie knowing that she’d been out with another man, however innocently. That would be most unpleasant. She was quite sure that what was good for the gander was definitel
y not good for the goose, in his view.

  If Mr. Hale - Enoch - got arrested, she would have to come forward. She couldn’t let an innocent man go to trial. But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that.

  Meanwhile, Scotland Yard was looking for her. That sentence, “Prudence Beresford does not exist” really annoyed her. Of course she exists. Aren’t one’s characters real people?

  Train Talk

  A wise man is never surprised.

  – Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

  Hale spent most of Tuesday working on his story about George Leigh Mallory. Being the prime suspect in a murder case had played havoc with his concentration, but he got through it.

  If the experienced mountaineer had died earlier that month on the world’s highest mountain, as seemed likely, he had left behind everyone he loved: his parents, three siblings, a wife, and three children. He had also left something else, Hale suspected - an immortal quote that would be remembered long after Mallory’s name was forgotten. The previous year, The New York Times had carried the headline “WHY CLIMB MOUNT EVEREST?” “BECAUSE IT’S THERE,” SAID MALLORY. Whether Mallory had actually said that in so many words or the reporter had been paraphrasing was beside the point now.

  Scrambling to get the story done in a day, Hale had managed to talk to Mallory’s father, the Reverend Herbert Leigh-Mallory, his younger brother, Tafford Leigh-Mallory, and his wife, Ruth. The hyphens in the last name had confused him until he found out that the father had changed the spelling about a decade before. Hale also talked to an old friend of Mallory’s called Robert Graves. Mallory had taught Graves at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, and later was best man at his wedding. Graves became a poet; Mallory kept climbing mountains.

  After some late-night work, Hale handed Rathbone the story on Wednesday morning as demanded.

  Rathbone grunted, lit his curved pipe, and settled back to read the typed manuscript.

  By Enoch Hale