The Egyptian Curse (9 page)

Re-Partnering

What is food to one man may be poison to another.

– Lucretius,
De rerum natura
, 57 B.C.

Burton Hill! In his mind's eye Hale could see the bulky, elderly gentleman who had been leaving Baines's house just as he'd arrived. Apparently he'd also been checking out the archaeologist's story - but why?

Hale spent half the trip back to London trying to figure that out before giving it up as a bad job. He finally decided that he needed to learn
who
before he could have a chance at knowing
why
. Who was Burton Hill? That question he could pursue at the office. Meanwhile, he spent the second half of the train trip organizing his feature story on Professor Walter Courtland, man of science and faith but not superstition.

Trosley was on his way out the door when Hale arrived at Fleet Street. Hale tried to talk the librarian into staying a few extra minutes to help him do some research.

“Sorry, Hale.” He didn't look sorry. “I promised my wife I wouldn't be home late again tonight. It is Saturday, after all. You know where the morgue key is. Turn out the light when you've finished.”

An hour later, Hale was unsurprised to learn that not a single clipping about Mr. Burton Hill appeared in the thousands of files of the Central Press Syndicate morgue. After all, the great majority of solid citizens go through their entire lives without having their names published in a newspaper. What was that old line? “A lady only has her name in the newspaper three times - when she's born, when she marries, and when she dies.” It was far less likely, however, that Mr. Hill's name wouldn't appear in any of the dozens of telephone books leaning against the east wall of the library. But it didn't. Among the Hills there had been one Bart, a Beatrice, two Benjamins, two Brendans, and four Bruces, but no Burton.

Hale strongly suspected that Burton Hill was about as real as Prudence Beresford. And Hale was no closer than when he'd begun at learning what the old fellow was up to.

After dinner, Hale brooded in the small sitting room of his flat. He couldn't shake the fear that whoever had it in for Sarah's husband and her father might have Sarah in his sights as well. His reverie was jarred by the ringing of his telephone. Calls in the evening were seldom good news.

“Hale? This is Charles. Sarah is terribly ill. The doctor is with her now, but she wants to see you. Can you come over to Carlton House Terrace right away?”

Hale hesitated for a moment. It didn't seem a good idea to be running to Sarah at her late father's townhouse while the two of them were under suspicion, and perhaps under surveillance. But, damn it, Sarah was calling for him.

“Of course. I'll be right there.”

He was halfway out the door before he realized he hadn't asked exactly what was wrong with Sarah.

Charles Bridgewater, the newly minted Lord Sedgewood, met him at the door. Portia Lyme, Charles's red-haired fiancée, stood behind him. Reynolds, the family butler, was nowhere in sight.

“How is she, your Lordship?” The sixth Earl of Sedgewood seemed somewhat startled at the question. Perhaps that was the first time anyone had called Charles by his just-inherited title.

“We're waiting for the doctor to tell us.”

“What's wrong with her?”

“We don't know, exactly, just that she became quite sick very suddenly. It started a few hours ago with a stomach ache, cold sweats, weak muscles, and dizziness. She staggered when she walked. When she vomited, I insisted on calling Dr. Johnson.”

A tall man with an impressive head of cotton-white hair and a doctor's bag in his hand came out of the parlor, closing the pocket doors behind him. He said to Charles: “That was too close for my comfort. Good thing I was at home when you called me.”

“Was she really that bad off?”

“She could have died. A few minutes would have made all the difference.”

Sarah's brother looked stricken.”What was it?”

“Some sort of food poisoning, I suppose.”

“But we all ate the same thing,” Portia said. She didn't look like she ever ate much at all, Hale thought. She weighed all of - what? - ninety-eight pounds, maybe.

The doctor looked skeptical. “Odd. Well, at any rate, I gave her an emetic, a purgative, and brandy. Your parlor maid was kept quite busy emptying chamber pots. Lady Sarah won't be dancing the Charleston anytime soon. You can go in and see her, but try not to get her upset.”

“Thank you, Dr. Johnson. I'll see you out.”

Does the butler have another night off?
Hale wondered.
And why am I even worried about that when Sarah could have died?

“It's just like what happened to Carnarvon,” Portia stage-whispered. “Mysterious illness.
I
think it's a curse, like it said in
The Times
. Isn't that just divine?”

Divine!
Hale thought. “There's nothing mysterious about a mosquito bite,” he said in lieu of slapping her. “Or food poisoning.” But how could it be food poisoning if...

Charles returned. “Are you ready to see her, Hale? This won't be pretty.”

“I'm ready.”

Sarah lay on the settee, where - Hale later learned - she had collapsed. Parlor pillows were placed behind her and her white evening frock was wrinkled and disheveled. The organdy material fell to about eight inches above her ankles and a light green sash of crisp taffeta circled her waist. It was the perfect color to match her eyes. Sarah's shoes sat at the end of the settee and her feet were tucked up near her body. Her face was the color of the keys on the piano in the parlor. She favored Hale with a weak smile. “I knew you'd come.”

“How do you feel?”

“Ghastly, but better now that you're here.”

Portia Lyme put her arm through her fiancé's. “Come on, Charles. I think these two want to be alone.”

Sarah smiled weakly. “Thank you, Charles. You were right.”

“I'd have rather been wrong.” He bent over and kissed his sister on the forehead. “I feel so bad about this.”He turned to Hale. “You mustn't stay long, you know. She needs her rest.”

“I promise.”

Sarah waited until Charles and Portia had gone before she spoke. “Dear Charles! The doctor said he saved my life. I couldn't believe there was anything that wrong with me. Charles himself was slightly ill this morning. I thought I just had a touch of the same thing.”

“Why did you summon me here?”

“Because, my darling, when Dr. Johnson told me it was very, very serious, I was afraid that I might die without ever seeing you again. Right now, you are my only friend and protection. I need you with me.”

Hale moved toward her, but stopped.
Not now, Enoch.
”I think you would do well to remember that your husband was murdered less than a week ago.” He tried to sound stern, even though he felt weak.

She shuddered and looked both hurt and confused. “I'm not likely to forget, am I? Those men from Scotland Yard keep coming back and asking me questions over and over again.”

“Well, I've been asking questions of my own and I think I'm on to something.” He pulled over a chair and sat down in front of Sarah, trying not to look at her shapely ankles. “Linwood Baines tells people that he studied under the highly-respected Walter Courtland at Oxford, but he didn't. He didn't study at Oxford at all!”

Hale's bombshell didn't get the reaction he expected.

Sarah chuckled.

“Daddy knew that, of course. Everybody knew that. It was just Baines's way of trying to get one up on Howard Carter. It was practically a joke, and poor Baines was the only one not in on it. Nobody cares that he doesn't have a university degree - except him. So we all pretend that we believe his nonsense about his days at Oxford.”

Hale put his head in his hands. “So Baines had no reason to kill Alfie or your father to hide his secret, because it wasn't a secret?” He looked at the hat he still held in his hands while he thought for a moment. “But wait, if Baines was the only one who wasn't in on the joke, then he must have thought people believed his tale. And if he believed his secret was about to be given away by Alfie or your father, he might kill either or both of them.”

“I hadn't thought of it like that,” Sarah said. “But surely, he had every reason to wish Daddy good health. With Daddy dead, Baines will have to find himself a new patron.”

With an effort, Hale concentrated on the remaining options. “Either your father knew who killed Alfie and had to be eliminated for the killer's protection, or he killed Alfie and somebody killed him in revenge.”

“Daddy had nothing to do with Alfie's murder. I told you that.” Despite the weakness in her voice, she spoke sharply.

“Did your father give you any hint that he might have known who killed Alfie?”

Sarah shook her head. “Not at all. He seemed as baffled as I was.”

Hale tossed his hat on the settee next to Sarah. “Okay, well maybe somebody
thought
your father killed Alfie.”

Sarah lifted herself up on one elbow. “Like who, Enoch? Who would want to avenge Poor Alfie? His parents and his older brother are dead, his sister lives in New York, and I don't believe those Bloomsbury people really gave a fig for him.”

“What's that mark on your right hand?” Sarah had such beautiful hands.

She looked at it. “It's nothing. A bug bite, I suppose.”

Like Lord Carnarvon.
Hale exiled the thought from his mind as soon as it made its unwanted appearance. For that way lay madness. Frustrated, he punched his fist into his other hand. “Damn it, Sarah! You didn't kill Alfie and your father, and I sure as hell didn't do it. But unless I figure out who did, Rollins is going to try to pin it on us.”

“I'll help you, Enoch! We can do this together.”
Just like Tommy and Tuppence.
“I could even wear a disguise. I know all about make-up from my music hall days, you know.”

He smiled, charmed by her naivety despite his foul mood. “I don't think that will be necessary. Just help me think this through. We need to pick up on loose ends, things that don't fit or don't make sense.” He thought a second. “Have you ever heard of a man named Burton Hill?”

“No. Who is he?”

“That's what I'd like to know. He was coming out of Baines's house just as I got there, and then when I interviewed Professor Courtland I found out that he'd been there before me asking questions. He claims to be a collector of Egyptian antiquities, but Courtland said he didn't know the first thing about the subject.”

“Perhaps he's some sort of private investigator.”

That made sense, of a sort, but who would hire such a person? Or would the killer himself investigate his own killing and leave a false trail for others to follow?
Only in an Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers detective novel!

Hale mentally turned the page on that subject.

“Maybe we need to get back to basics. Let's think about the night that Alfie died. You told me that Reynolds said your father didn't go out that night and Alfie didn't come here. Reynolds also had the day off on Friday, when your father was killed. If I were a cynical fellow, I might say that was very convenient. I'd like to talk to him. Where is he today? Your brother opened the door himself.”

“Reynolds quit without notice.”

“What! When?”

“Just this morning. He said he'd been offered another position a few days ago, and with Daddy's death he decided that he should take it.”

Hale stood up. “Now I'd really like to see Reynolds. What is this new position?”

“He didn't say.”

On the Links

“Two people rarely see the same thing.”

– Agatha Christie,
Murder on the Links
, 1923

With Sarah's strength visibly fading, Hale left soon after.

His fitful sleep was shattered the next morning by the ringing of his telephone. If this kept up, he would have the damned thing pulled out.

“Yeah?” he said groggily.

“Good morning, Enoch. It's Prudence Beresford.”

That woke him up. He didn't appreciate being reminded of how she'd made a fool of him.

“Forgive me if I don't see the humor, Mrs. Christie.”

“I'm sorry. Force of habit. This isn't exactly a social call. Your plight has been much on my mind as I've felt wretched about leaving you in the lurch. When I read about this new tragedy, Lord Sedgewood's murder, I knew I had to take some action. So I've been making some inquiries.”

Good grief! Another amateur sleuth enters the mix!
Hale summoned his patience. “I'm sure you're trying to help, and I appreciate your good intentions-”

“There's someone I think you need to talk to.”

“Who?”

“Your flat is on Claverton Street, near St. George Square, right?”

“Yes, but-”

“I'll pick you up in my Morris Cowley at one o'clock. And wear your golfing clothes!”

She hung up.

Golfing clothes? Damn the woman!

Hale's attitude had not improved any when Agatha Christie pulled up in her gray bull nose Morris Cowley automobile with the top down at the appointed hour. She surely looked the part of the modern sportswoman, with a horizontal striped teal and yellow belted sweater over a white blouse and a pleated white skirt with large buttons that ran down the side. For headgear she wore a white straw snap-brimmed hat that had a ribbon of matching material from the sweater.
Quite stunning, really
. Pushing the thought away, Hale got in and slammed the door. A set of golf clubs occupied the tonneau.

“Where the hell are we going?”

“Sunningdale.”

Hale stared as she confidently stepped on the gasoline pedal. “You actually want to play golf?”

“That's just our cover to get us to the nineteenth hole.”

The fish-out-of-water confusion that Hale felt made him even more testy. “What about your husband? You do remember that you have a husband, Mrs. Christie?”

Her face clouded. “He's off on one of his golfing weekends. Or so he says. Well, we shall play some golf of our own. How is Mrs. Barrington holding up?”

“Not very damned well, but thanks for asking.” He quickly described Sarah's symptoms and the weak condition in which he'd left her the night before.

Agatha shot him a glance. “That sounds like nicotine poisoning.”

“Nicotine is poison? Really poison? I didn't know that.”

“Oh, yes. It can be quite deadly in the right amount - and easy to obtain. Something like arsenic or strychnine may be traceable. Someone who buys rat poison or gets arsenic at the chemist for killing bees has to sign for it. But one can procure enough nicotine to kill from a single pack of cigarettes.”

That sounded too simplistic to Hale.”Doesn't that take some special knowledge or equipment?”

Agatha shook her head, her hair flying from the wind that surrounded the open car. “Not at all. One just removes the paper and places the tobacco from the cigarettes in a small pot of boiling water. Pour the boiling mixture in a jar, put the cover on and let it sit overnight. In the morning decant the liquid through some cheesecloth, squeeze the liquid all out, and discard the residue. Now slowly boil the liquid down to a kind of semi-solid jelly. You have almost pure nicotine and no one knows it.”

“But how do you get someone to take it. Isn't it bitter, like tobacco?”

“Somewhat,” she replied as she downshifted and roared past a Bentley. “But one doesn't have to eat it to be poisoned. One could do that, of course, but one can also get quite ill just handling it - the skin absorbs it - or by inhaling the fumes when it's boiling down.”

Hale was suddenly very glad that he hadn't got too close to this woman with such a grisly turn of mind. “How do you know this stuff?”

She smiled. “Murder is my business. And I've been intrigued by nicotine poisoning since the War. In the dispensary, I once saw a soldier mad with shell-shock get sick from eating tobacco.”

“Well, we're a long way from 1918. You should use nicotine in one of your books, but I'm not convinced that someone used it on Sarah.”

“What else, then - coincidence or curse?”

Hale had no answer for that. And if Agatha was right, it meant that whoever killed Sarah's husband and father also wanted to do away with her.

In about fifty minutes they arrived at Sunningdale.

“I do hope we can get on the new course designed by Harry Colt,” Agatha remarked as she swung into the club's parking area.

“Oh, there he is!” she exclaimed.

A medium-size man with short hair and aquiline features, wearing a black suit, stood near the putting green. As they drew closer, Hale realized that he wore a clerical collar.

“Is that the person you want me to meet? Or should I say the parson?”

“No, we're just playing golf with him. I brought you a set of clubs, by the way.”

After parking the car, Agatha led Hale over to the man. “This is Father Ronald Knox, chaplain at St Edmund's College in East Hertfordshire, the oldest Roman Catholic school in England.” That seemed to Hale an odd sort of friend for Agatha Christie to have. Had she gone to him for marriage counseling? As if reading his mind Agatha added, “He's quite the detective story buff.”

That was proved by the discussion that accompanied their movement from hole to hole.

Knox had already procured caddies and, after shaking hands with Hale, insisted that they must hurry. “We had best not be late. We only have a few minutes to start. They are very strict around here about tee times.”

Hale was not looking forward to playing. He had only played three or four times since coming to England. Before that had been the war - not much golfing there.

Knox stepped up and addressed the ball on the first tee. “This course starts with a par four, Mr. Hale. It is 465 yards to the hole. I would recommend you try to keep your ball to the right on the fairway.” So saying, Knox drove his ball about 180 yards to the exact place he had pointed out to Hale.

“I hope that I can give the two of you some competition, Father,” Hale remarked as he set his ball to tee off. “I don't play much and when I did my handicap ran eighteen.”

“I'm sure you will do fine, Mr. Hale. What's your handicap these days, Agatha?”

Agatha laughed out loud. “You know very well it is a miserable thirty-five. Now go ahead, Mr. Hale, and start so we can move up to the women's tee box.”

Hale hit to the right just as Knox had recommended - so far right he was somewhere in the trees. “Nice slice,” Hale muttered to himself.

As they walked down the fairway after Agatha put her shot just short and to the left of Knox's ball, she started to direct the conversation.

“The detective story is a game, just like golf,” Agatha said, “so it must have rules.”

“Perhaps it would not even be blasphemous to call them commandments,” Father Knox suggested.

“But rules can be broken.”

“So can commandments, but with more severe consequences.”

“What are these rules of the detective story?” Hale asked, just to keep his hand in as he started to look for his ball. He had resigned himself to a waiting game. Whatever Agatha had in mind would unfold in due time.

“That's the devil of it,” Father Knox said. “No one knows what the rules are. They haven't been written yet, but they will be
[4]
. They must. Detective stories are more popular than mahjong right now, but anybody can write anything - secret passages, detectives who turn out to be murderers. Someone has to bring order to it!”

“I'd like to see you try,” Agatha said. “Everyone may agree that there should be rules, but no one will agree on what those rules should be. For example, I have this notion of making the narrator of my Hercule Poirot stories the killer. No one would suspect him! But I'm certain that some readers would say that's against the rules which haven't been written.”

Father Knox laid his second shot just off the green to the left.

“You can't do that, Agatha! It's just not cricket! The first commandment of detective fiction should be that the killer mustn't be anyone whose thoughts we are allowed to share.”

“Why not?”

“Because the killer would be naturally thinking about his crime, so if we're going to peer into his thoughts that's what should be there.”

“He wouldn't be thinking about it all the time, especially before the murder. And in my idea, the narrator is deliberately concealing some of his thoughts as a kind of game to fool the reader until the end of the book. Everything that he says is true; he just doesn't tell the reader everything.”

Father Knox remained unconvinced. And on it went. Hale tuned out. At some point he realized that the topic had switched to the use of Orientals and twins in detective stories. Father Knox was against both.

“But if they exist in real life, why not in fiction?” Hale objected.

The clergyman gave him a pitying look. “My dear fellow, the truth is no excuse. Fiction must be believable, even if it's based on something that really happened. No fiction writer would dare serve up some of the stories I've heard in the confessional. So I say sinister Orientals and convenient twins are out on the grounds of implausibility.”

“How do you feel about servants?” Agatha asked.

“I don't have any, save the housekeeper, and she isn't a very good one. Bless her soul, she does try, though.” Swinging too hard, he chipped over the green. “Have to come back now, won't I?”

“No, no. I mean servants as killers or witnesses.”

“You mean, ‘the butler did it'?”

“Actually,” Agatha said reflectively, “that would be a bit of a surprise, wouldn't it? I mean, has any butler in fiction ever actually done it?”

Father Knox appeared to think about it. “I don't recall any, come to think of it.”

“In real life, there was that Musgrave Ritual business that Sherlock Holmes solved as a young man,” Hale said. He had immersed himself in Dr. Watson's accounts of the great detective soon after meeting him. “The Musgrave butler was the villain - but that wasn't murder.”

“And besides, as Father Knox said, real life doesn't count,” Agatha pointed out with a note of triumph in her voice. “At any rate, I did have a point. People don't pay attention to servants, either in fiction or in life. They should, you know. When I was young we had a lot of servants, and I learned ever so much from them. Who knows more about what's happening in a house than the servants? They see everything, and don't think they don't talk about it with each other even if it goes no further. The gossip upstairs among the family is nothing to what's going on downstairs among the servants. That's why I paid a call at the tradesman's entrance to Number 10 Carlton House Terrace this morning.”

Surely Hale was dreaming this. “You did
what
?”

“You heard me. Lord Sedgewood was killed in his own home. Who would know more about it than his servants? I talked to the cook and the maid. It turned out that Brigid, the maid, adored my second novel,
The Secret Adversary
-quite the romantic, that one! How disappointing that she knew so little. And do you know who I didn't talk to?”

“Harley Reynolds, the butler,” Hale snapped. “He quit.”

“Quite so. But I found out where he went.”

“You did?”

“Yes, but that will wait. It's a beautiful day and there are seventeen more holes to play. Lay on MacKnox! You've only won one hole so far.”

Hale was frustrated, which didn't help his game any. By the time they finished the eighteenth hole, he was down nineteen shillings to the good father. Leaving their bags with the caddies, Father Knox recommended a trip to the clubhouse bar.

Of all the surprises in that day of surprises, the biggest was the sight of the man mixing drinks behind the bar. At about six-foot-five, he looked more like a prizefighter than a bartender - or the butler that he had formerly been.

“Reynolds!” Hale exclaimed.

Lord Sedgewood's ex-servant smiled in recognition. “Mr. Hale - good to see you, sir!” The two had met on many occasions, the first being when Sarah's father had had the butler throw Hale out of his townhouse after their first encounter almost four years earlier. Hale could scarcely believe that the man he had most wanted to talk with was standing behind the bar on a golf course.

“Whatever are you doing here?” he asked.

Reynolds straightened up. “I'm the assistant steward, sir.”

“Congratulations. Lady Sarah told me that you'd left the family's service, but she didn't know why.”

Reynolds looked around, leaned forward, and spoke in a low voice. “It was the curse, sir. I got the heebie-jeebies being in that house after the old Earl was killed. Suppose that old mummy had bad aim and zapped me next by mistake!”

“Curse be damned!” Father Knox exploded. “Superstitious drivel! That should be another commandment for detective stories - no ghosts.”

“A Roman priest is a fine one to be talking about superstition,” Reynolds sniffed. “Even Mr. Charles - Lord Sedgewood, as he is now - said there might be something to the curse. I heard him talking on the telephone about it after His Lordship's body was found.”

Hale found it hard to believe that Reynolds had that right. Charles must have been displaying an unsuspected penchant for black humor in a call to a friend. At any rate, Hale had more important questions to ask.