The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, page 9
He stepped out from behind the black king. Whether he was composed of moonlight from above, or mist rising from the tall grass and tangled riot of flowers, I could not say—perhaps both. When he moved, his body trembled all over, as if he were exerting himself to maintain the illusion of corporeality.
He wore an immaculate white suit. His hair and carefully curled moustache were likewise snow-white, though he hadn’t been that old, barely sixty. His flesh was alabaster, almost translucent. His grip on this world was tenuous. A breeze might blow him away.
I had read about his death in the papers, of course. Some sort of fever. Gould had something to tell me. When was it he had died— May? He had been waiting here all these months to speak to me. A lonely vigil.
“Speak,” I said, though I was shaking.
“I’ve waited for you.”
“I know. Soon you will be at peace.”
“I’ve waited ever so long.”
“You have a message for me, do you not?”
On hearing that, he let out a bloodcurdling scream. I nearly fainted dead away.
He was gone! I had come too late.
Then, slowly, the moonlight congealed into his form again, but now as though he were woven from nothing more substantial than spider webs, flung between the black king and queen.
“She has the name,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Who has the name?”
“She has the true name.”
I wished that Red Cloud were with me, but he was silent. George Gould didn’t want anyone speaking for him. But what did he mean? I could sense him slipping away already.
“Your wife?” But I knew it was wrong as soon as I said it.
“She stole it.”
“The name? Can you tell me her name?” I was straining with every fiber of my being to hold him. He opened his mouth, but his lips fell away, his jaw dropped to the ground and rolled away in the grass. His face crumbled into ash.
Then a light blared behind me. Sir Sherlock? I looked back.
It wasn’t Sherlock. It was a man in a forage cap and tunic, a dark, lanky man with a large electric torch shining in my eyes, yammering at me in French. I didn’t know the language, but he was upset, that I gleaned right off. Did he see Mr. Gould? I turned. No, he was gone! And not only gone, but every bit of spectral energy that had drawn me here had been scattered to the four winds. I felt suddenly weary, oh, so weary. I leaned against a white rook. I went through it and nearly fell on my face. It dissolved into the ether, along with the whole grand chess set.
Miss van Vredenburch began talking excitedly in French. It did not seem to pacify the man. He drew a gun. He almost dropped it pulling it out. He aimed it at her, then at me. He was nervous.
So was I.
Chapter Seven: Dr. John Watson
Thank the stars for Holmes’s fluent French and his easy ability to lie on the spur of the moment. And that the watchman knew Lady Evelyn, or at least knew of her—it was difficult to understand him even when he spoke in fractured English, he was so agitated.
Well, and he had a large bump on the back of his head where the chauffeur had nearly split his head open with a sap. That had probably been unnecessary. But at least I was warned now not to upset her.
She stood by her actions, too. She did not like guns, she said emphatically. She repeated it so many times with such energy that “Ik nou niet van wapens” may be the only Dutch I will ever remember. No one likes guns, of course, though I was glad I had my service revolver secured in the waistband of my trousers. I thought it wisest not to divulge that fact to her.
The watchman finally calmed enough to holster the weapon he’d been waving about. He escorted us back to the auto, as gracelessly as possible, his eyes full of suspicion. No one volunteered the fact that we had been inside the house, nor that we had been through every drawer we could find, searching for a message that said we knew not what. Any trace of George Gould was long gone, of course. Mrs. Roberts, we discovered too late, was not even with us but along with the chauffeur had been tramping through the flower beds on the side of the house. What had Mrs. Roberts been doing out here to put the watchman in such a furor?
And what had her so pale and drawn? What had she seen? She kept harping on about some giant chessboard. Holmes had found a concrete chess table in a corner of the garden, nearly overgrown with marigolds. Not giant.
“Did you find anything, darling?” Lady Evelyn asked her husband, when we were once again on our way, the watchman and the house receding in the distance.
“Of course I didn’t find anything,” growled Beauchamp. “And I think it were best that we drop the entire project right now, before we make bigger fools of ourselves.”
There it was. Cards on the table, as it were.
“You know, the British Museum is being inundated with Egyptian relics that people had lying about at home. Everyone is worried to death that they may contain evil spirits,” said Lady Evelyn.
“Everyone’s a fool. What’s that have to do with it?” he blasted.
“It’s not just my brother, Henry. The whole kingdom’s in a state of panic.”
“You can blame the fellow in the back seat for that,” snapped her husband.
She turned away from him with a sigh. “Mr. Holmes, do you have anything to report?”
“It was not so much what I did find as what I didn’t,” replied Holmes at his enigmatic best. Holmes had no cards to play. But he always had a joker up his sleeve.
“What do you mean?” asked Lady Evelyn, intrigued.
“Mrs. Gould must have had the body transported immediately, and no one has returned to the villa since. That much is obvious.”
“Why obvious?” groused Beauchamp, for whom, I suspected, nothing was ever obvious.
“The furniture was not covered. And the dust on the furniture is at least six months deep.” Only a man with Holmes’s reputation for wonders could have gotten away with such an outrageous lie. At least I assumed it was a lie. (That I was largely responsible for that reputation did not occur to me at the time.)
“So she had to get back to her American lawyers. If you think there’s not going to be a battle royal among the heirs—”
“What wasn’t there?” asked Lady Evelyn, determined not to get sidetracked.
“You noticed that all his clothes were still in the wardrobe, and a large part of hers. His personal effects were still there, including some personal papers.”
“Utterly uninformative papers,” said Beauchamp.
“Yet they had not even bothered to throw them away.”
“What wasn’t there?” said Beauchamp irritably.
“My dear sir, the Goulds had just come from Egypt, where they had honeymooned at the tomb of King Tutankhamun, just as you are doing. That suggests a more than passing interest in Oriental culture. And yet there was not a single item of Oriental souvenir in that house. Not a trinket. Does that seem likely?”
“Then she must have taken it with her—if it existed at all.”
“Perhaps, but why was it so important that she would remember it, and not her wedding ring, which was on her dressing table?”
“Because it was gestolen,” said Miss van Vredenburch out of nowhere.
There was a tactful silence.
“Stolen? How did you come to this conclusion, Miss van V.?” said the baronet, very slowly, as to a child.
“It is . . . logical, no? Is that what you say? Logisch?” She glanced over at Mrs. Roberts. She followed with a spate of Dutch, which no one understood. Then she retreated into silence.
Mrs. Roberts finally spoke up. “It wasn’t a thing that was stolen. It was a name.”
“Who said this? The watchman?” asked Beauchamp.
“No,” replied Mrs. Roberts. “Mr. Gould said it.”
This caused a tumult of voices, all vying to be heard at once. Finally, Mrs. Roberts’s voice cut through, distinctly: “It was Gould. George Gould. He spoke to me.”
“You’ve met him before? I knew his wife was interested in spiritualism,” said Lady Evelyn.
“No, I never met him in his lifetime. I spoke to him just now. On the chessboard.”
This caused further consternation. The questions flew, and I thought the driver would put us in a ditch. Mrs. Roberts’s face was a fine shade of crimson. At last Sherlock Holmes silenced us all. He took Mrs. Roberts’s hand in a way that I once would have called too familiar and asked simply, “What did he say?”
Well, after all that to-do, of course it turned out that he hadn’t said much, and no one could make head or tails of what he had said, including Mrs. Roberts herself.
“She stole it? Stole what?” asked Beauchamp.
“The name,” said his wife for the twentieth time, irritation creeping into her voice.
“I would rather know who she is,” said Holmes, speaking my own thoughts. “He gave no clue at all?”
Mrs. Roberts shook her head wearily. “The watchman interrupted.”
“I say she imagined the whole thing” was Beauchamp’s verdict.
The car jumped as the girl shifted into high gear. She was a racer indeed! I clamped my hat on my head before it flew off.
“Damn the watchman for showing too soon!” I erupted, which earned me turned heads and blank looks. “Well, I mean . . .” I had been swept up in the moment.
“At least we know who unlocked the gate. It must have been the watchman,” said Lady Evelyn.
“No, that was why he was so livid,” Holmes said. “He thought Mrs. Roberts had managed it somehow.”
“Mr. Gould unlocked the gates,” Mrs. Roberts said.
The baronet barked a laugh. I myself was inclined to dismiss her claims. But if the watchman hadn’t unlocked the gates, who had? Mercifully, Beauchamp decided to put it from his mind and push on to an entirely different subject.
He turned back to his wife. “Well, tomorrow we’ll be in Cairo, well quit of Gould’s ghost. If Shaw can actually scare up a plane for us.”
It seemed to me that as long as Mrs. Roberts was with us, we would have more than our share of ghosts.
“Is this Shaw a dependable fellow, would you say?” Holmes asked.
“He’s the most resourceful man I’ve ever met,” said Lady Evelyn.
“I hope we’re not taking him away from his duties,” I said.
“He’s on leave, awaiting a new assignment,” she assured me.
“He seems to be assigned to you,” her husband edged in.
Was there a bit of friction between man and wife over the dashing pilot? (I say dashing, though he barely came up to my chest. There wasn’t much of him, but what there was he carried off with panache.)
“Shaw seems an interesting fellow. He must have seen action in the Arab campaign?” asked Holmes. He seemed inordinately curious about this Shaw fellow.
“Oh, no!” said Lady Evelyn hurriedly. “He was a . . . fighter pilot. In France.”
Holmes’s face registered puzzlement. Apparently, his ability to read a man’s past had faded with the years. Not much chance to exercise his talents in the solitude of Sussex, I expect.
“And now he’s stationed in Cairo? Or Damascus? Does he speak Arabic?”
Lady Evelyn did not answer. “A bit. Enough to get by in the souks, you know,” supplied Beauchamp.
Quiet seemed to steal upon the group, or perhaps it was simply sleepiness. Thankfully, we soon arrived at our hotel. I wasn’t sure by that point whether we were in France or Monaco or Italy. I don’t imagine it mattered.
But it was a perfectly splendid establishment, the Hotel Reine d’Azur, though not much larger or grander at first sight than the Goulds’ villa, but the entrance was braced by palms and the view of the bay was magnificent, and the wide verandah was welcoming. The service was typically surly, like all the French, except for the occasional obsequious Italian or proud Monegasque, but the rooms were spacious, and the bed looked perfectly alluring. If there was one fault with the blue train, it was that the beds were, perforce, rather narrow. This one could have done for a football pitch. This, of course, would have been the time for me to confer with Holmes over a pipe and brandy, but now Mrs. Roberts was included in our tête-à-tête, and she commandeered the most comfortable chair. And, of course, we could not smoke in front of a lady.
“Now then, Madam, what did you see? Exactly,” Holmes began.
What she recounted next sounded like a ghost story. It was a ghost story.
But she had a strong feeling, she said—although she hadn’t said before, and was probably only dressing up her story—that she felt whatever had been stolen had been stolen from Tutankhamun’s tomb, which she knew as well as I did was exactly what Holmes wanted to hear. She was an artful creature.
“What did he mean, she stole the true name? Did Gould have a new mistress, Watson? I know you follow the society pages,” said Holmes.
“I don’t. I only take the Mail to follow the royals. And whatever she saw, what’s it to do with our case?”
“Why, did you not hear Lady Evelyn? They met Gould and his wife on their honeymoon at Tutankhamun’s tomb. A week later he arrives at the villa on the sick list, according to the watchman, and four weeks later he is laid to rest. He is obviously the fourth victim of the curse.”
“Ah. Then why isn’t his wife dead as well?” I demanded.
“A point that cannot be overlooked. Why are some subjected to the curse while others are spared? I suspect that is the key to the riddle. What say you, Mrs. Roberts?”
Was he being deliberately obtuse? Conspiracy never seems to afford any place to coincidence.
Mrs. Roberts was at least discreet enough not to voice an opinion on the matter. She would leave the sleuthing to Sherlock Holmes.
“Now we have our first clue,” he crowed, clapping his hands together. “X stole Y. From where? From the tomb. I think we can safely infer that much. We must simply fill in the missing variables.”
Of course. Though there was no evidence of it whatsoever. Mrs. Roberts had either made it up out of whole cloth or hallucinated the entire episode. It was really only a question of whether she was a fraud or a lunatic. But I would play along. “Why not from the house? The widow, perhaps, has absconded with something not hers? Papers in his name?”
“Now you sound like the Baronet Beauchamp.”
“It wasn’t a thing, it was a name,” Mrs. Roberts reminded us.
“How does one steal a name?” I objected.
“That is the problem we must solve,” Holmes pronounced, continuing in his algebraic vein.
It was all very well for him to say so.
“So she, whoever she may be, steals something from the tomb, yet the tomb reaches out and kills Gould? And what’s his name, Carter, who’s packing up the entire tomb lock, stock, and barrel and hauling it away like the Elgin Marbles, remains healthy as a horse. It doesn’t make the least bit of sense.”
“We must determine what was stolen,” said Mrs. Roberts decisively, as if she had just made the deduction of the year.
“Then Howard Carter is the person to ask. According to the papers, he keeps an exact record of every mouse and housefly that goes out of that tomb,” I flung back.
“Then we are on the right path. What is it, Watson?” asked Holmes.
I had opened my mouth and shut it again. I had a million questions, a million objections. I wanted to say how barmy it all was, but if I did, I could simply pack my bags and go home. If I wanted to play, I would have to play by their rules. I had been co-opted.
Holmes leaned toward us, spreading his hands out. “One more thing—this pilot, Shaw. Don’t let’s share any of this with him. Keep your distance from him tomorrow,” he cautioned.
So I had noticed him giving the slant eye to our tiny captain. Why? I wondered.
“I’d rather we weren’t flying to begin with,” said Mrs. Roberts. “Wouldn’t a ship be far safer?”
“Never been in the air before, Mrs. R.?” I said. “It’s not so bad— rather exhilarating, really. And a sight better than humping our way through the desert with all that ancient dust. But what’s wrong with this Shaw, Holmes? Lady Evelyn seems to think he’s a pukka sahib. And he seems to worship you.”
Holmes chose his words carefully. “Perhaps there’s nothing wrong. But he seemed a bit too eager to meet me. There are still some of Moriarty’s old henchmen in the remote wastes of the world, and all quite eager to make my acquaintance.”
That cast a different light on the matter. Holmes had had an old raven named Moriarty, if it still lived, but I had not heard that name uttered as a threat for thirty years. Moriarty’s men were known for holding long grudges. “Should I keep my revolver at the ready?”
“No, but keep your eyes open.” Then a look of concern enveloped his face. “Not that same service revolver you’ve been carrying around since 1881, I hope?”
“No, I procured a new one after our encounter with Mr. Hyde.”
“Ah, an elephant gun.” That drew a laugh from me.
“If you shoot him, how shall we land?” Mrs. Roberts’s face paled with the thought.
“We might have to call on your Red Clown,” I said, which drew a laugh from Holmes.
“Red Cloud!” she snapped.
“Yes, you’d best not mock him if you expect him to save you from the vasty deep,” said Holmes, but there was mischief in his eye. All was right with the world, at least for the moment. Mrs. Roberts bade us good night, perhaps a bit miffed with us.
Holmes seemed wide-awake.
“Holmes . . . the fellow at the casino . . .” I ventured.
“Yes, I thought you’d catch that. I don’t believe anyone else did. I felt Mrs. Roberts needed something to bolster her confidence, especially after the Hodson debacle. Completely unnecessary, as it turned out. Her performance at the roulette table was astonishing.”
