Dark Detectives Page 7

  “So I understand.”

  Trelawny was an open man, not at all the stuffy professor. He had spent more years in deserts and digs than classrooms and storerooms. Beauregard had liked him at first sight. However, the professor was wary of him.

  Beauregard must seem mysterious: not a policeman or a diplomat, yet given charge of this delicate matter. When called upon to explain his position, he was supposed to describe himself as a servant of the Queen and not mention the Diogenes Club, the adjunct of the Crown to which he was attached.

  “Since the Seven Stars was discovered …”

  “In the Valley of the Sorcerer, two years ago,” Trelawny footnoted.

  “Nine men have died. In connection with this stone.”

  Trelawny shrugged. Beauregard knew most of the dead had been the professor’s colleagues.

  “Nothing mysterious in that, Beauregard. The jewel is of enormous academic interest but also great value. The traditional tomb-robbers believe Egyptologists are, so to speak, poaching on their preserve. To us, these remnants of the past are miraculous glimpses of lost history, but generations of fellahin have seen the tombs of the long-dead as a field of potatoes, to be dug up and sold.”

  Beauregard’s gaze kept returning to the jewel. It was one of those objects that had the power of fascination. Even without the light behind it, there was a fire there.

  “It was found, I understand, inside a mummy?”

  Trelawny nodded. “Not common practice, but not unknown. The mummy was that of Pai-net’em, of the household of Meneptah II. From the fragmentary records, it seems Pharaoh relied on him much as our own dear Queen relies on Lord Salisbury. An influential advisor. Meneptah, a wastrel, left the duller administrative chores to men like old Pai-net’em.”

  “Was he the sorcerer for which the valley was named?”

  “Almost certainly not. Pai-net’em was squeezed in among many tombs. His place of interment is modest, especially considering his importance. By rights, he should have been buried in the Theban version of Westminster Abbey. At first, we believed the mummy to be one of Pai-net’em’s servants but evidence—not least, the Seven Stars—later revealed the body as the man himself.”

  “The jewel?”

  “We shipped the mummy here for examination. When Sir Joseph Whemple and I supervised the unwrapping, it was as if fire exploded from its chest. A trick of the light, but startling. It’s a unique find. The Cairo Museum of Antiquities started hemming and hawing and asking for their mummy back, oh and the the jewel of course. Lord Cromer convinced the khedive the most apt course of action would be to make a gift of the Seven Stars to the Queen, in honour of her Jubilee.”

  “Sir Joseph was subsequently murdered?”

  Trelawny nodded.

  “Some devil cut his throat. In his office. Four doors down the corridor. With a dull knife. It was as if his neck were clawed open.”

  “But the jewel was safe?”

  “In a safe, actually. We have vaults for items of especial value.”

  Beauregard had seen the police reports. Half the Egyptian scholars in London had been ungently interrogated, suspected of membership of some fanatic cult. No arrests had been made.

  The death of Sir Joseph brought the Seven Stars to the notice of the Diogenes Club. Mycroft Holmes, of the Ruling Cabal, had clipped the report from the Times and predicted the affair would be forwarded to his department of service.

  “Has the mummy been returned to Cairo?”

  Beauregard was relying on a favourite tactic, asking a question to which he knew the answer. Mycroft taught that facts themselves were often less significant than the way facts were presented by individuals.

  “Now there’s a question,” Trelawny said, brow crinkled. “Whoever killed Sir Joseph stole the mummy. It was a light enough carcass. Still, not an easy item to get past our stout night watchmen. And of little worth in monetary terms. Mummies are ten a penny. Most were robbed of their funerary ornaments thousands of years ago. If the jewel hadn’t been inside Pai-net’em, the robbers would have had it along with the rest of his grave goods.”

  “Certain occult practitioners have use for the ancient dead,” Beauregard commented.

  “Good Lord, what for?”

  “Charms and potions and totems and such. Ingredients in arcane rituals.”

  Trelawny said nothing. At Oxford, he had been a member of an occult society, the Order of the Ram.

  “‘Eye of mummy, toe of dog’, that sort of thing,” Beauregard prompted.

  Finally, Trelawny snorted.

  “Some dunderheads do take an interest in that sort of rot,” he admitted. “In my student days, I ran into a pack of them myself. The sons of the clods I knew probably still pay through the nose for crumbled horse manure passed off as the ashes of the mages of Atlantis. Pai-net’em’s poor bones might fetch something on that singular market. I trust the police are pursuing that avenue of inquiry.”

  “So do I.”

  Beauregard looked back at the Seven Stars.

  “I shall not entirely be sorry to see the jewel go to the Tower,” Trelawny said. “The death of Sir Joseph rattled me, I don’t mind telling you. The scientist in me says I should cling to the stone until its mysteries are exhausted. But the cautious man tells me to let the next fellow worry about it.”

  “And I’m the next fellow?”

  Trelawny smiled, sadly. He dropped a cloth on the Seven Stars.

  “From Meneptah to Pai-net’em,” the professor said. “And now from Abel Trelawny to Queen Victoria. From pharaoh to sovereign in just three thousand years. Perhaps that’ll be the end of it. For my part, I certainly hope so.”

  Beauregard made his way upstairs. Late in the afternoon, the crowds were thinning. He touched his hat-brim to Jenks, the Diogenes man who wore the uniform of an attendant and had been working here, keeping an eye out, ever since the murder of Sir Joseph.

  The Hall of Egyptian Antiquities, always popular, was almost empty. A noseless giant head dominated the room, eyes eerily impassive. Beauregard wanted to take a look at some mummies, to get an idea of what was missing.

  Under glass was the bandage-wrapped corpse of a young girl.

  He thought of his late wife, Pamela. She was buried in the hill country of India, a world away. Would she find herself on display millennia hence, a typical specimen of the 19th Century Anno Domini?

  He felt an instant of connection. With the girl.

  The plaque said she was unknown, but the daughter of wealth. Ushabti mannikins were found in her grave, to be her servants in the afterlife. Her bindings were an intricate herringbone. Her nose still had definition under ancient cloth.

  Beauregard had a sense that he was a moment in history, a pause in a story which had begun long before him and would continue well past his death. People came and went, but some things remained, eternal.

  He thought of the Seven Stars, undisturbed for three thousand years. And who knew how old the jewel was when buried inside Pai-net’em?

  A chill crept up his spine. He felt eyes upon his back, but the only reflection in the glass of the display case was that of the blind stone head.

  He turned, and saw a woman with a pale face and smoked glasses. Almost a girl, fair and fragile. He thought for a moment she might be blind too, but she was watching him.

  He almost said something, then, very swiftly, she was gone.

  In another life …

  He looked at the mummy again, wondering why he was so stirred inside.

  He bade Jenks a good day and left the museum.

  Pall Mall was half-decorated. London was disappearing under cheerful swathes of patriotic bunting in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Her sixty years on the throne had seen unimaginable changes in Britain and her Empire. The Queen had weathered constitutional crises, setting an example in conduct that many of her subjects, from her own children down, could not match.

  He had taken an open cab from the British Museum, enjoying the early June even
ing. The Jubilee, not yet fully upon the city, encouraged an opening-up. People wore sashes and ribbons in celebration of a Queen who ruled through love, not the fear Meneptah and his like had wielded like a lash.

  In years of service, he had seen the Empire at its best and worst. He hated the pettiness and cruelty that existed as much in this city as in the farthest outpost, but admired fiercely the aspirations to decency and honour embodied in Victoria’s great heart. To him, the Union Jack was not the trademark of some gigantic financial concern or the territorial stink of a bristling bulldog but a banner which meant the innocent were protected and the helpless defended.

  He entered the lobby of the Diogenes Club and was discreetly admitted to the chamber of the Ruling Cabal. Mycroft Holmes, the huge spider at the centre of the nation’s intelligence web, sat in his custom-made leather armchair, plump fingers pyramided, brows knit in thought. He did not greet Beauregard for a full minute, as he finished some mental calculation.

  “Beauregard,” he said. “This is a delicate business.”

  Beauregard agreed.

  “You’ve seen the bauble?”

  “It’s considerably more than that, Mycroft. A ruby as big as my fist.”

  “It’s not a ruby.”

  “I fail to see how the geology is germane to the affair.”

  “One should consider a jewel from all angles, the better to appreciate its many facets. This is a jewel like no other.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “It won’t attract as much attention as the Koh-i-noor or the Moonstone or the Eye of the Little Yellow God. But it’s the more remarkable.”

  “It’s washed in blood.”

  “All great gems are.”

  “This one looks like it.”

  “Tell me, Beauregard, what of the points of light?”

  “The Seven Stars. Exactly in the configuration of Ursa Major. That’s an uncanny feature. As if the stone were a star map.”

  “Stent, the Astronomer Royal, has suggested the Seven Stars fell to Earth as a meteor. Maybe it is a message from those stars.”

  Beauregard shuddered again. He didn’t like to think of a red streak nearing the Earth, millennia ago.

  “It’s a strange thing,” he admitted.

  “And what of the murder of Sir Joseph Whemple and the theft of the mummy?”

  Beauregard considered the little he had learned.

  “Trelawny went out of his way to pooh-pooh a suggestion that the mummy might have been stolen for use in magical rituals. Yet he was, admittedly as a youth, involved in such rites himself. It’s my consideration that he suspects as much, but does not dare propose the theory strongly lest his past be looked into too closely.”

  Mycroft’s fat face crumpled in mild irritation. “We know much about Abel Trelawny and the Society of the Ram. Have you heard of Declan Mountmain?”

  “The Fenian?”

  “Not strictly. We came close to gaoling him for that dynamite business at Lord’s but he slipped through the net, found subordinates to take the blame.”

  Beauregard remembered the atrocity. It was a wonder no one had been killed.

  “Mountmain is a crank,” declared Mycroft, “but a dangerous one. Most advocates of Irish Home Rule distance themselves from him. The Fenian Brotherhood regard him as a loose cannon of the worst sort. He wrote a pamphlet which was suppressed as obscene, alleging prominent cabinet ministers and churchmen constitute a cult devoted to the pagan worship of a goddess incarnated as our Queen. Apparently, we are given to snatching drabs from the alleys of the East End and ritually disembowelling them in a temple beneath Buckingham Palace.”

  Beauregard found the suggestion disgusting.

  “Mountmain himself believes none of it. He is merely trying to project his own methods and manners on those he deems his foemen. He is an adept in occult sciences, and remains the Great Pooh-Bah of the Order of the Ram. His beliefs are a mixture of paganism and Satanism, with a little Hindoo or Ancient Egyptian tosh thrown in. He blathers about Atlantis and R’lyeh and the Plateau of Leng, and Elder Gods from the Stars. All very arcane and eldritch, no doubt.”

  “You believe this Mountmain to be behind the attempts on the Seven Stars?”

  “I believe nothing that cannot be proven. Mountmain has an old connection with Trelawny. He is a collector of weird artifacts. He has a fortune at his disposal, augmented by funds extorted from supporters of his dubious political cause. He is by no means the only blackguard of his stripe—you’ve heard me remark that the mountaineer Aleister Crowley is a young man worth watching—but he is currently the worst of his shabby crowd.”

  “Should I make some discreet inquiries about Declan Mountmain?”

  “If you think it worthwhile.”

  As usual with Mycroft, Beauregard felt he had been led through a maze to a foregone conclusion. It was the Great Man’s knack to draw his own ideas out of other people.

  “Very well. I think I know where to start.”

  A mere hundred yards from the Diogenes Club were the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette. He strolled casually, pondering the two sides to his immediate problem.

  When Mycroft mentioned Declan Mountmain, he knew he would have to bring Katharine Reed into it. She was a reporter, the sole woman in regular employment at the Gazette, at least when she wasn’t in jail for suffragette agitations. Kate knew as much about the Irish Home Rule movement as any man, probably because she was in it up to her spectacles. She also had a knack for finding out things about prominent personages that did them no credit. He was certain Kate would know about Mountmain.

  The other side of the coin was that Kate was insatiably curious and as tenacious as a tick. Every time she was asked a question, she would ask one back. And trade answer for answer. With her disarming manner and steel-trap mind, she might latch on, and follow him to what she imagined was a story worth printing. The Diogenes Club prided itself on being the least-known arm of the British Government. Mycroft had a positive distaste for seeing the organisation’s name, let alone his own, in the papers. Such things he left for his more famous, though less acute, brother.

  Kate had been a friend of Pamela’s. She shared with his late wife a trick of looking through Charles Beauregard as if he were a pane of glass. And he was about to recruit her for a confidential mission.

  He thought, not for the first time, that he must be mad. He knew where Kate’s cubby hole was, but would have been able to identify it anyway. By the shouting.

  A large, well-dressed man, neck scarlet, was blustering.

  “Come out from that desk and be thrashed!”

  He recognised Henry Wilcox, the financial colossus.

  He guessed at once that the Gazette must have carried some story under Kate’s byline that revealed an irregularity on Wilcox’s part.

  “Shift yourself, coward,” the colossus roared.

  Wilcox was standing over a sturdy desk. He lashed it with a riding-crop. The desk shook.

  Kate, Beauregard gathered, was underneath.

  He wondered whether he should intervene, but thought better of it. Kate Reed didn’t care for it if other people fought her battles for her, though she was herself practiced at pitching in to any brawl that came along.

  Wilcox savagely whipped a typewriting apparatus.

  The desk heaved upwards and a small woman exploded from her hiding-place.

  “How dare you!” she shouted. “Henry Wilcox, you have a great deal to be ashamed of!”

  The colossus, as imposing physically as he was financially, was given pause. Kate, red-haired and freckled and often hesitant in polite company, was in a fine fury. Up on her toes, she stuck her face close to Wilcox’s and adjusted her thick spectacles.

  “This piece which names me,” he began.

  “Do you deny the facts?”

  “That’s not the point,” he snarled.

  “I rather think it is. Maybe we should print a follow-up article. You want your side of it to be given. Well, Mr. Wilco
x, now is your chance.”

  Kate set her chair upright and fed a sheet of paper into her typewriter.

  “First of all, there’s the question of the girl’s age. What was your initial estimate?”

  “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

  “Really? Where do you go to be insulted? I understand the house which employs your young associate offers many varieties of satisfaction.”

  “Your manner does not become your sex.”

  Kate Reed looked as if she was about to breathe fire.

  “I suppose seeking Biblical knowledge of children is a noble and worthy occupation for the mighty male gender.”

  “That’s libel.”

  “No, that’s slander. It is only libel if we print it. And if it’s proven untrue.”

  “She’d never furnish proof.”

  “Your soiled dove? How much would you wish to wager on that?”

  Wilcox’s entire face was red. Beauregard wondered if the colossus were not on the verge of a coronary. From what he gathered, the man was an utter swine.

  Kate typed rapidly, fingers jabbing like little knives.

  “Would you care to take the address of the Gazette’s solicitors with you? Your own can get in touch with them when this piece runs.”

  Wilcox muttered a word Beauregard had hoped never to hear in a lady’s presence. Kate, unblushing, kept on typing.

  The financial colossus put on his hat and withdrew, pushing impatiently past Beauregard.

  “Stupid little tart,” he said.

  “The girl or me?” Kate shouted after him.

  Beauregard replaced Wilcox in Kate’s line of fire, standing by her desk. She looked up, smiled a little, and kept on typing.

  “Charles, good day to you. What trouble am I in now?”

  “You seem more than able to find enough on your own.”

  “That man buys children for unspeakable purposes. And yet he’ll probably wind up with a knighthood.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Others have before him,” she broke off typing, and looked at him. “Oh, I see. Words in the right ears. A name crossed off a list. Closed ranks. Nothing in the open, you know, where it might upset the rabble. Just an understanding. Some things aren’t done, you know. He has money all right, and the house, and the prospects. But he’s not a gentleman. You can probably do it. I don’t underestimate your shadowy influence. But getting him blackballed isn’t the scope of my ambitions for the monstrous thug. I’d rather see him deballed.”