The Egyptian Curse Page 5

Central Press Syndicate

  “Because it’s there.”

  Friends and family say those words summed up George Herbert Leigh Mallory’s attitude not only to conquering mountains, but to facing other challenges in life as well.

  Mallory, along with climbing partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, disappeared...

  “Nice work.” Rathbone said as he came to the end. He set the pages aside. “You see, a story doesn’t have to be a murder mystery to be compelling.” Reaching over to the credenza, Rathbone picked up a pasteboard card with the picture of a golfer on it. He flipped it at Hale. “As you know, the British Open begins tomorrow. The qualifying rounds are already underway. I want you to cover the human interest angle.”

  Hale took a moment to find his voice. “I’ve never written a sports story, sir. And I’m not much of a golfer. My handicap has more digits than my telephone number.”

  “How are you at mountain climbing?”

  Had the old man gone daft all of a sudden? “Sir?”

  “You’ve never climbed a mountain in your life, have you? I didn’t think so. That didn’t stop you from writing a fine feature story about Mallory, did it? I don’t want you to write about golf, Hale, I want you to write about people. Talk to the golfers’ caddies, talk to their wives and girlfriends, find the fellow who’s been a professional for ten years and finally made it into the qualifying rounds of the Open and his child is sick. You know what to do.”

  “I do?”

  The managing director glowered. “You bloody well do.”

  “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  Rathbone consulted his pocket watch. “There’s a train leaving from Euston Station in about twenty minutes and you’re going to be on it. It won’t get you to the Royal Liverpool Golf Club in time for the first tee-off, but soon enough. Get moving. And come back with a good story.”

  Hale was already on the move as he grabbed his hat. He could have sworn that out of the corner of his eye he saw his boss stifle a smile.

  The cab ride to Euston gave Hale plenty of time to rue the way this day was going. He had hoped for a quick and easy assignment that would allow him to sneak in a conversation with Sidney Lyme, Charles Bridgewater’s future brother-in-law. Hale wanted to know more about the argument between Alfie and Howard Carter at the Constitutional Club that Lyme had witnessed.

  He made it to the station with three minutes to spare before his train departed. The trip to Liverpool would take two and a half hours, according to the schedule, and the club at Hoylake another half hour. As soon as the train was well clear of the station, he went back to the dining car for a cup of coffee. He was startled to see the familiar figure of a tall, lean man in his early forties with a high forehead.

  “Plum? Is it really you?”

  “None other, old boy! On my way to the British Open. Qualifying rounds, you know.”

  Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, “Plum” to family and friends, had been writing humorous tales of the British upper classes for two decades. Many of them were about golf, one of his passions in life. He was also well known for his stories and novels about a valet named Jeeves. Hale had interviewed Wodehouse a year ago for a story about Winston Churchill as a lark - Plum was avowedly non-political. They had run into each other once or twice since, and Plum always remembered him.

  “Do you know Carter?” Plum asked, pointing to a brown-haired man with a mustache next to him. “He’s a member of my favorite club.”

  They shook hands all round as Plum made the formal introduction of Enoch Hale, “journalist chap,” and Howard Carter, “digger up of old things.” Hale couldn’t believe his luck. Now he would have no need to get Lyme’s account of what had happened at the Constitutional Club - he would get it first-hand from the archeologist himself.

  Carter should have been on Hale’s list to talk to even without the argument. Carter had enjoyed the patronage of George Herbert, the Earl of Carnarvon, with whom Alfie’s father-in-law had long been in competition. Hale’s Central Press Syndicate colleague, the aptly named Reggie Lestrange, had written a number of stories about their unfriendly rivalry years ago, before Hale had met Sarah.

  Hale recalled that Carter and Carnarvon had been in Egypt at the same time as Sarah, her father, and Alfie. The Sedgewood party had departed in September, with Sarah and Alfie marrying on the ship on their way home, but Carter had stayed in Egypt. Two months later, he had found the tomb of a relatively unknown pharaoh named Tutankhamun. The riches discovered in the previously unplundered tomb had made Carter a household name around the world.

  Almost as fascinating to Hale as the mummy’s tomb filled with gold and gems was Carter’s amazing life story leading up to that day at the end of November 1922. Without a university degree, he had started out in Egypt as a tomb illustrator while only seventeen years old. He rose to become the first chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. After supervising excavations in Luxor, he transferred to Lower Egypt and discovered the tombs of Thutmose I and Thutmose II, which already had been sacked by grave robbers in antiquity.

  Carter resigned from the Antiquities Service in a dispute in 1905 after siding with the Egyptian site guards in a confrontation with French tourists. A kind of exile followed, during which he worked as a watercolor painter and dealer in antiquities. Then he managed to hitch on to Lord Carnarvon as his supervisor of excavations. The Earl already owned one of the most valuable collections of Egyptian artifacts in private hands, and seemed to have an insatiable desire for more.

  Carter became obsessed with one tomb in particular, that of the boy pharaoh who became familiarly known as King Tut. Year after year he searched for it. By 1922, a frustrated Carnarvon served notice that this would be his last season of funding Carter. And so Carter began digging for his final season on November 1 of that year. Three days later, he found the steps that led to the tomb of Tutankhamun. He wired Carnarvon to come to Egypt for the opening of the tomb, which the latter did. When Carnarvon died the following April, the legend of King Tut’s Curse was born.

  Carter’s biography suggested a determined and therefore disciplined man - not one who would kill another over a row in a club. Nevertheless, there was a row, if Lyme was to be believed. Maybe Carter regretted that and went to Alfie later with the idea of making up, a gesture that ended in disaster. That seemed implausible, but not impossible.

  Hale would approach the topic of Alfie Barrington slowly, he decided as they took over an empty table in the dining car - or restaurant car, as they called it on this side of the ocean.

  “So - how’s the mummy business?” he asked Carter jovially.

  “Not so blasted good at the moment.” Carter looked like he needed something stronger than coffee. “I just returned from a speaking tour in the States and a large trunk containing some important artifacts, pictures, slides, and reference material got lost along the way. I’m on my way to the Cunard docks to press them to find it.”

  “Hard cheese,” Plum said. “But that reminds me of a very funny story.”

  Hale paid scant attention as the humorist went on and on with a story about losing his clubs on a golfing trip. Hale signaled the patient waiter for three cups of coffee, which were promptly delivered as Plum’s tale continued.

  Frustrated, Hale was trying to think of a way to bring the discussion around to Alfie Barrington. He was slowly stirring his half full cup and wondering if two hours was enough time for Wodehouse to finish the story when his opportunity came. Plum ended with, “Well, anyway, it’s good to see you, Carter. It’s been ages. Sorry I missed you at the Constitutional the other night. Heard you were there.”

  Perfect! Good old Plum had introduced the subject for him.

  Carter grunted. “Not my warmest welcome home!”

  Hale waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, Hale said, “I heard there was some kind of a row involvi
ng Alfred Barrington, the man who was stabbed outside the club later that night.”

  Carter looked as if he’d been slapped. “Where the devil did you hear that?”

  “I happen to know a chap named Sidney Lyme.” That was only a slight exaggeration. They had met. “He’s a member of the Constitutional and he overheard the argument.”

  “Oh, Lyme.” The expression on Carter’s face was as if he’d just bit into a particularly sour lime. “He used to knock about Egypt a bit. Knowing him, he must have told you that I was the other fellow. I feel bad that Barrington’s dead, but that doesn’t change that fact that he was a fool and a rotter.”

  Hale slowly lit a panatela. He had to be careful not to overplay his hand. “I can’t say I was a fan of Alfie Barrington myself. Fact is, the cad stole my girl and married her.”

  Carter gave Hale a sympathetic look. “They didn’t seem a very happy couple, if that makes you feel any better. From what I gathered, they’d had an argument that night. He came to the club and started hitting the bottle rather hard. If he hadn’t been drunk he probably wouldn’t have insulted me.”

  “But he was such an inoffensive chap!” Plum protested.

  “Not to me!” Carter looked around and, seeing the waiter, signed for more coffee before he continued. “Barrington adopted his father-in-law’s rivalry with Lord Carnarvon as if it were his own. With His Lordship’s untimely death, that rivalry was transferred to me. I’ll give you an example. I was in a dispute with the Egyptian government when I left there in March for my speaking tour. The Egyptians wanted me to use Tutankhamun’s tomb as something of a tourist attraction, which was interfering with my work. But when I allowed some of the expedition members’ wives into the tomb, my former friends at the Egyptian Antiquities Service demanded the keys to the tomb. Well, I couldn’t have that. So I locked the gates and took the keys with me. The Egyptian government took over the site by force. Barrington seized on this bother as a wedge to try to get the Antiquities Service to give the tomb of Tutankhamun over to Lord Sedgewood’s man, Linwood Baines, and keep me out. It didn’t work, but it was a near thing.”

  Hale waited as the waiter poured more coffee.

  “Is that what you were fighting about on Sunday night?” Hale asked once the man had left.

  “Well, I could hardly ignore the issue when I saw him at the club, could I?”

  “But you said he insulted you.”

  Carter nodded. “I’m very much a self-made man, gentlemen. Despite my record of over thirty-three years in Egypt, Barrington attacked my credentials because I don’t have a blasted university education. I told him that I’ve never made any secret of that, and that he ought to take a hard look closer to home if that sort of thing is so important to Lord Sedgewood.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning Baines, my counterpart in the Sedgewood camp. He claims to be an Oxford man, but I’ve heard that isn’t true. He may well be a fraud, a charlatan!”

  Hale sat stunned for a moment at the vehemence in Carter’s voice.

  “You don’t suppose,” interjected Plum, “that Barrington could have confronted this Baines chap, do you?”

  An Old Friend

  The perfect friendship is that between good men, alike in their virtue.

  – Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 340 B.C.

  “I can’t believe that Hale would have done it,” Chief Inspector Wiggins said, putting down his pint of Guinness with an emphatic thump. “He couldn’t have.”

  Sherlock Holmes, sitting across the table at the Northumberland Arms, raised a grey eyebrow. “Couldn’t have killed the man who married the woman he loved?” Holmes sipped his whiskey and soda. “Men have murdered for far less reason. Most men are not the thinking creatures that we like to believe them to be. You, of all people, should know that. How many homicides have you investigated over the years? They are as common in the drawing room as in the gutter.”

  “Oh, he might have killed the blighter, but he would have owned up to it. He’s a man and no mistake about it. But Rollins won’t see that. All Rollins will see is a chance for a clever headline and his name on the promotion list.” Wiggins leaned his chair back on two legs and waived his arm out in front of him punctuating each word he said with a thrust of his hand, “Reporter Writes Own Death Warrant.” The chair dropped back to the floor with a crack. “Or some such catchy phrase. Rollins, bother!”

  Holmes smiled. “You remind me of the way Lestrade and Gregson treated my ‘clever theories,’ as they liked to say.” Wiggins would remember them well, two stalwarts of the Yard back when he had been the leader of Holmes’s irregular force of street Arabs.

  “Rollins is no Sherlock Holmes. He’s hard working, ambitious, and not at all short on brains. I’ll give him all that. But” - Wiggins put a finger to his nose - “he can’t smell the truth. He isn’t able to sort, if you know what I mean. He can’t tell the difference between the significant and the trivial. He confuses them all the time and I have a feeling we have more than one innocent man in jail ’cause he can’t tell the difference. He’s a bit low on street smarts.”

  There was no lacking that in Wiggins, Holmes thought. He had grown up on the streets, picking up coins from Sherlock Holmes for directing his little band of urchins to find a taxicab or a steam launch. And the lad Wiggins had been smart enough to know that there was no future in the streets picking up those coins. The future was in working hard and taking opportunities as they came.

  “Why are you telling me this, Wiggins?”

  “I was hoping you’d want to help Hale, seeing as how you worked together on that Hangman business and the Pike murder.”

  Holmes thought for a moment as he gently rotated the glass on the tablecloth. “I’m afraid he hasn’t asked for my help, Wiggins.”

  “That’s a matter of pride I suppose. Or, maybe he’s waiting for you to offer.”

  Or maybe he just forgot about me, Holmes thought. Maybe everyone has forgotten about me. I’m seventy years old and I look it. I’ve been officially retired more than twenty years - not that Mycroft didn’t put me to work anyway, especially during the Great War. It’s even been seven years since Watson has published one of his highly romanticized accounts. My gait is slower now and I don’t remember things as well as I used to. If Hale asked me to help, could I even do it?

  Holmes stood up. As he did, Wiggins realized that his old mentor now looked the part of an older man. His clothes were somewhat dated and they hung a little loosely. His eyes were still bright, his wit still quick, but yes, the hair was grey and the movements not as spry as he remembered.

  Wiggins smiled to himself and looked at his own attire - not quite as loose at it should be - and he knew the hairline was staring to recede. The sedentary life behind the desk of a chief-inspector was taking its own toll.

  “It’s always good to see you, Wiggins,” Holmes said. “Thank you for calling. But I think that I had best get back to my bees.”

  “Then you won’t help, Mr. Holmes?” The look of disappointment on Wiggins’s face was plain.

  Holmes hesitated a moment, then placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder.

  “Should Hale call for assistance I will do what I can, but perhaps my time has passed. Good day, old friend.”

  An Awkward Surprise

  In matters of love a woman’s oath is no more to be minded than a man’s.

  – John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, 1696

  Within a few hours at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hale had talked to a dozen duffers, hangers-on, and golfers’ wives - quite enough for the light feature that Rathbone was looking for. The American who was playing, Walter Hagen, had won the 1922 Open. And one Scot by the name of MacIver was having none of that as a possible repeat. The old gentleman had literally followed Hale around for the better part of an hour giving his personal discourse
on the game and the inherent right of a Britisher to win it (preferably a Scot). Hale allowed as how Hagen was three strokes back today and the Empire should have nothing to worry about. A £75 prize seems hardly worth crossing the Atlantic for, thought Hale as he made his escape from McIver. He was glad he was only a Saturday duffer.

  The return trip to London by the 9.04 into Euston Station gave him the chance to organize his notes for writing, with plenty of time left over for pondering what Howard Carter had said. He sat back in the carriage and tried to think about it logically, as Sherlock Holmes would.

  He even thought of calling Holmes, but that didn’t seem right. Didn’t the old man deserve his peace? Besides, Hale should have learned a thing or two from the world’s greatest consulting detective. He just needed to put his mind to it. All right, then.

  If Linwood Baines was a poseur who had lied about his background in order to get Lord Sedgewood to fund his expeditions - and to line his pockets - that might be a secret worth killing for. But in that case, why not also kill Carter - and whoever told him? They all knew the secret. But perhaps killing Alfie wasn’t a rational act. Suppose Alfie confronted Baines and he reacted like a cornered animal. But Alfie was killed right outside the Constitutional Club just hours after his encounter with Carter. What were the chances that he would have had the opportunity to challenge Baines so soon after Carter suggested that something was amiss? Well, maybe Alfie just happened to have had an appointment with Baines that night, to talk about a loan or something. Stranger things had happened.

  Hale was still bouncing ideas around like that - raising objections to Baines’s guilt and then knocking them down - when he returned to the headquarters of the Central Press Syndicate on Fleet Street. A familiar form, heart-achingly familiar, stood in the shadow of the doorway. Her hair was covered by a dark blue draped crown hat and her dress by a mid-calf length coat in what the latest fashion magazines called a grackle head blue. She looked even more tired than when he had seen her on Monday. Hale wondered when she had last slept.