The Egyptian Curse (6 page)

Finding the Alibi

“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

– William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night
, 1601

Hale remembered when the photo had been taken, one night when they were out with Tom Eliot shortly after the Hangman Murders were solved.

He could feel his neck turning red.

“You sure had a unique way of showing your love,”

he said. “You married another guy.”

Sarah winced. “I was worse than a fool, Enoch; I was a romantic fool. We were in Egypt. Alfie seemed every bit the intrepid amateur archeologist. The excavation season hadn't even begun yet and Alfie had never picked up a trowel in his life, but somehow that didn't matter. When he proposed under the stars in the Valley of the Kings, it seemed so romantic that I just didn't know how to say no.”

“If you'd sent me a wire, I could have told you how.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Hale wished that he could take them back. Sarah flinched as though he'd slapped her, and he hadn't intended that. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and moved on.

“Rollins said you told him the maid must have heard wrong. Why did you lie?”

“Don't you see, Enoch?” Her voice was pleading. “I didn't want you brought into this. I didn't realize that you would be anyway, just because of what we once were to each other.”

And could be again?
Was that what she was trying to imply?

Hale stood and walked around the conference table trying to gather his thoughts. He needed to concentrate on the issue at hand. On balance, he didn't like it that she lied to Rollins. Her reason sounded good, but if she lied to Scotland Yard she could lie to a Yankee reporter who had been head over heels in love with her.
And still was?
Hale wasn't sure, and this was no time to try to work it out. However he felt about Sarah, she could be lying about the argument with Alfie. Maybe it was about another man and she didn't want Hale to know about him anymore than she wanted Rollins to.

“I'm so thankful you have an alibi,” Sarah added.

“Yes, I was at a performance of
Aida
at Covent Garden. The woman I was with can attest to that.” Sarah looked hurt, as though he had betrayed her - which was ridiculous. She was the one who had married before he'd had a chance to propose. What did she care how he spent his Sunday evening? But then, she had once been an actress of a sort. If she wanted to gain his sympathy, it would come naturally to her to appear hurt that he'd been with another woman that day.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “I don't know who the woman is.”

The next day, the day the Open began, found Hale at the British Museum when he was supposed to be back at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club for another feature story. Since Rollins and his men still hadn't found her, he was convinced that “Prudence Beresford” had been a false name dreamed up by a bored wife in search of adventure and romance. And yet... her flirting - and there was some flirting - had been quite tentative, which didn't seem to fit. But that mystery could wait. First he had to find her. He had just one hope. If it didn't work out, he would be forced to place an advert in the newspaper agony columns.

Unless she had been lying to him, Thursday was the day she often went to the world-famous museum, just two blocks from Sarah's home on Bedford Place. Sherlock Holmes had also once lived near the British Museum, in rooms on Montague Street, in his early days as a consulting detective with few clients. Holmes! Hale should have called the old man days ago, retirement and those infernal bees of his be damned.

Based on the collections of Sir Hans Sloan, the vast, temple-shaped Museum was like the attic of the Empire in terms of the depth and diversity of what was to be found there. But “Prudence” had mentioned the Rosetta Stone, that ancient Egyptian stele inscribed with the same message in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek. It had been on display at the Museum since 1802, just three years after its discovery by a soldier with Napoleon's expedition to Egypt.

Hale stood in front of it, wishing that it held the key to Alfie Barrington's murder as it had held the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics. He went back to his wild idea that “Prudence” had been part of a plot to frame Sarah - and him. Who would do such a thing?
Cui bono?
The real killer, obviously, would benefit by throwing the suspicion on someone else, but why them? There had to be a reason to frame them in particular. If Sarah were convicted of Alfie's murder, she couldn't inherit his money. Where would it go then?

It's always startling, and at first almost unbelievable, to see in the flesh a person you've been thinking of. So that was Hale's first reaction when he realized, after half an hour or so in front of the granite-like rock, that the woman standing a few feet to the right of him, with a few other gawkers in between them, was “Prudence Beresford.”

Moving slowly, he stepped back from the Rosetta Stone and approached her from her left.

“Hello, Prudence,” he whispered in her ear, dripping sarcasm on the name.

Curiously, she didn't seem surprised.

“I knew I shouldn't have come today,” she said, resignation in her voice. “I was fairly sure I mentioned my Thursday habit to you, and of course you would remember that. You're no Captain Hastings, Mr. Hale. You're no fool.”

He didn't know who she was talking about, and he didn't care. “That remains to be seen. Listen, I'm in a spot of trouble and I need your help.”

“I know. I read about it in
The Times
. Scotland Yard is looking for me.” She started walking slowly away, with a nod to indicate that he should follow. Walking through the vast halls of the museum, they could avoid other people and make sure they weren't overheard.

“If you know that, why didn't you come forward?”
Unless that was part of the plan.

“I'm afraid that doing so would put me in an embarrassing position that I wish to avoid. That's very selfish of me, no doubt, but there it is.”

Hale felt his pulse rising. “My situation is a little more serious. A Scotland Yard inspector gives every indication of wanting to measure me for a hangman's noose. As I happen to be fond of my own neck, this makes me uncomfortable. Look, I need an alibi, and you're it. All you would have to do is tell the truth. Surely even Rollins wouldn't believe that a woman would lie to protect a man who killed another man to be with his wife.”

She looked at him strangely.

“Don't ask me to say that again,” he said, “because I'm not sure that I could.”

“I understand your point. Complex plots are nothing new to me.” She paused in front of a black statue of the Egyptian god Horus. “Let me tell you about my circumstances. First of all, I am married.”

“That is not exactly a news flash,” Hale said dryly. “As you said, I'm no fool.”

“You surprise me. I didn't think you were the sort of man who would keep company with a married woman.”

She sounded disappointed in him. How did that figure? She was the one who was married, she had asked him to meet her at the opera, and now she was moralizing.
Women!

“I'm willing to stipulate that if Rollins put me in the dock on charges of not being a saint, he could probably get a conviction,” Hale said. “But I never thought about you being married until the second time, at
Aida
. It just never occurred to me. When I looked for a wedding ring, you weren't wearing one, although it looked like you had. Now, I don't know a lot about marriage, having never been married, but I'm going to guess that when a woman takes off her wedding ring and meets a man she barely knows for a night at the opera, her relationship with her husband is not the best.”

She nodded. “I suppose it's an old story. We married on Christmas Eve, 1914. He was home on leave from the war. By then it was clear that this wasn't going to be the short war we had all expected at the beginning, home by Christmas and all that. But he had a ‘good war' - no injuries - and I made myself useful here at home as a volunteer nurse and dispenser.

“Archie left the army in 1919 and went into finance. Things were all right for awhile. Last year we had a marvelous adventure traveling the world for months to promote the British Empire Exhibition. But I missed our daughter terribly, and when we came home last October Archie had no job. I don't think he liked it that we got by on my inheritance from my father and the money I make from writing. Earlier this year Archie got a job and I made enough from selling serial rights to buy my dear bottle-nosed Morris Cowley.”

“So what's the problem?”

“If only I knew! It seems that nothing I say or do is right. I'm too cheerful! I'm too gloomy! That's why I came alone to the opera, but it was nice to have an intelligent person to talk to before and after. You see, I've had to find ways to amuse myself that don't involve Archie. He spends all of his weekends on golf. We used to golf together but now he won't let me play with him because he says I'm not good enough. Do you play golf?”

“I know how to hold a club.”
And I'm supposed to be at the British Open right now, earning my paycheck
.
”What you're telling me is that things aren't good with your husband, but you don't want to make it worse.”

“I still have hopes, Mr. Hale. And a daughter.”

This woman's marriage was hanging by a thread. Hale couldn't bring himself to cut it off. He sighed. “Without you swearing to Scotland Yard that I was with you on Sunday night, I have no alibi. I'll just have to find another way out of this pickle.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll solve the murder myself, like an amateur sleuth in one of those damned detective novels. I've been involved in something of the sort before.”

The woman next to him colored. “Now you're making fun of me, Mr. Hale.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't play the coy American with me.”

Hale was losing his patience. “Listen, Mrs. Whoever You Are, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Do you seriously mean you don't know who I am?”

Hale rubbed his mustache. “You mean Prudence Beresford isn't your real name?” Now he
was
joking.

“I'm sorry. How silly of me - I had thought I had completely given myself away by my choice of a pseudonym, but I suppose you are not familiar with my work. Why would you be? I write those damned detective novels, Enoch. My name is Agatha Christie.”

Looking for an Introduction

Honest, unaffected distrust of the powers of man is the surest sign of intelligence.

– G.C. Lichtenberg,
Reflections
, 1799

“Christie!” Tom Eliot exploded. “I should have known.”

Hale regarded him skeptically across Eliot's desk at Lloyds. “How so?”

“You know how I love detective stories.” Eliot ran his hand through his hair while he shook his head. “I've read all of her books -
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
,
The Secret Adversary
,
Murder on the Links
, and
Poirot Investigates
. Her second one,
The Secret Adversary
, is about a bright young couple named Tommy and Tuppence. But Tuppence's real name is Prudence, and at the end of the story she marries Tommy, whose last name is Beresford.”

“So she adopted a name she'd already made up for one of her characters?” Hale said. “That's not very imaginative.”

“Fooled you, old boy. Besides, Mrs. Christie has quite an imagination, I assure you - international intrigue and all that. And I think she's on to something with that little Belgian detective of hers.”

On this Friday morning, Hale was supposed to be at the last day of the British Open, working on a final feature story. Rathbone would never know that he wasn't. Yesterday, arriving late in Hoylake after his conversation with Agatha Christie, he had had the good fortune to run into a reporter acquaintance named Willie Gordon.

“What are you doing here?” Hale had asked. “Golf is a bit out of your line, isn't it?” Gordon, a round man with a fringe of white hair, covered politics for
The Morning Star
.

“I'm on the sick,” Gordon explained in a near whisper.

“You don't look sick.”

Gordon winced. “Be a mate, will you? Forget you saw me. Pillsbury would have my hide.”

So that was it! Old Gordon was malingering so he could watch some golf and his notoriously foul-tempered editor had better not get wind of it.

“Willie, how would you like to do me a return favour and earn a few extra pounds in the process?”

Gordon had quickly accepted Hale's offer to pay him handsomely for conducting interviews and giving Hale the notes. Thus Hale was able to turn in an acceptable piece of work even though he had arrived very late on the scene. He actually did do the writing, he told his conscience; it was only most of the quotes that the veteran reporter had supplied. The scheme had worked so well that Hale had hired Gordon for an encore the next day, freeing Hale up to pursue some possibilities in Alfie's murder that he was certain Rollins wouldn't touch.

“You told me all about the Woolfs,” he said to Eliot. “Can you introduce me to them? It's time I asked them some questions.”

“Nothing simpler. Let's go round to the 1917 Club.”

“Will they let us in?”

“They'll let anybody in, with the possible exception of a capitalist.”

Hale had never been to the 1917 Club, but it was just a few doors down from The 43 on Gerrard Street in Soho. The building itself was a rather unimposing four-story on a corner lot. The green door at the entrance was flanked by an old pair of sconces that seemed rather dated. In fact the whole inside of the “club” had more the appearance of a flat ready to let than a meeting place for the socialist elite. Hale looked around to see if he recognized anyone.

“Isn't that man with the moustache H.G. Wells?” he asked Eliot.

“No, I believe his name is Blevins. He's some sort of minor government functionary.”

“Oh.”

“I don't see... Oh, there's Virginia.”

She was a tall, lean, angular, and rather nervous-looking woman with long hair gathered in back.

Eliot was just completing his introduction of Hale when her long-faced husband joined them with a “Hello, Eliot” that sounded more lugubrious than jaunty.

As previously agreed upon, Eliot explained to the literary couple that his old friend Hale was in a bit of a spot.

“It seems that Scotland Yard is casting a wary eye on him because he was once romantically involved with the lovely Mrs. Barrington, and more power to him for that.”

“Alas, poor Alfie,” Virginia said. “I knew him, Eliot.”

“Harmless sort of fellow, one would think,” her husband put in.

“Then you don't have any idea who would have wanted to kill him?”

“Good heavens, no!” Leonard Woolf's equine face registered shock, or a good imitation of it. “I heard he'd been stabbed to death, but I didn't catch the details. I assumed it was a robbery or something of that sort.”

Hale shook his head. “It definitely wasn't a robbery. His money was still in his pockets and his watch wasn't touched.”

“Alfie was pathetically eager to please,” Virginia said. “That tended to annoy one, but surely not to the point of murder.”

“He spent a lot of time with you and your friends, didn't he?” Hale asked, knowing the answer from his conversation with Sarah and Charles.

“I'm afraid so,” Leonard said.

“I've heard that Lord Sedgewood wasn't happy about that.”

“The whole bloody clan was a bit nose up in the air about it,” Virginia said, “even that brother-in-law, Charles. He was another stuffed shirt.”

“And he was quite the heavy partier himself when he came back from the War, or so Alfie said,” her husband added. “Apparently his father cut him off from his allowance until he changed his ways to get back into the old boy's good graces. Capitalist money will do that.”

That's one way of looking at it
, Hale thought, although Sedgewood was hardly an old boy - barely a decade older than the Woolfs.

“This is all rather unpleasant sort of talk,” Eliot said. “Can't someone say something nice about the poor bastard who's dead?”

“Well, he was free with his ill-gotten family funds,” Leonard said, “always willing to loan his friends money, sometimes rather large amounts.”

Bone had said the same, and Ned Malone had suggested that maybe somebody had decided to shove a knife into Alfie rather than pay him back.

“You wouldn't happen to know who the recipients of this largesse were?” Hale asked.

Leonard appeared to think about it. “I don't know that I ever heard. It was just common talk that Alfie was an easy touch.”

Hale was not at all sure that Leonard was being quite honest in his statement. Something in the look he had given Virginia made Hale think he knew something he didn't want to share. A moment's uneasy silence followed.

Virginia looked as if she had made a decision when she turned away from Leonard and spoke again to Hale.

“I bet Charles hit him up,” Virginia said. “His father probably keeps him on a tight leash financially. And I would suspect that Alfie's friend Baines, the archaeologist fellow, was into his pockets as well. Alfie brought both of them around now and then. Charles was tedious but quite comfortable with our views on the late war. He was one of the millions who had suffered for the stupidity of the generals.” She took a long breath before she continued. “Baines had even less to recommend him. He was a name-dropper and quite impressed with himself.”