The Egyptologist Read online

  This is June 7th now. The solicitors come back to Davies’s house, sip more of his brandy, and take their notes as the old man bashes their ears: the family and the business are one thing, but now he realises more should be done. He wants the world to know the Davies name for its permanent power to do good. He wants his money to go to a professor’s chair in his name at a university, he wants his money to build a hospital, he wants his name on a museum wing filled with paintings by artists receiving Davies Foundation Modern Art Stipends, he’s going to fund a monument to some regiment that lost near every damn man in it in the War, and Davies wants the block stuck in the new Davies Gardens, and a football club out in some little town is going to be the Davies FC, and he has an architect called in to start drawing up plans for a zoo shaped like a big D, even as he’s on the verge of taking to his bed, perhaps for the last time. Davies, Davies, Davies everywhere.

  And then he instructs the solicitors in something very odd, indeed. Apparently, Mr. Davies has risen quite far in this world. He was in the merchant navy as a younger fellow, before he’d had his bit of luck here and there and built the empire that kept the pommies in not-bad amber fluid. You’ve probably not heard of Davies Ale, son. I think it was bought by another brewer after the Second War, and the name was changed. I recall a bottle with a boat on it, maybe a pirate. Either way, old dying Davies, he presents the solicitors with a list—a rather long list, see—of women all over the world. Women from Canada, the USA, Ecuador and Peru, Australia, even Russia, and the dates he thinks he was last in these places, the last time he’d seen these women. The dates go back to the start of his merchant navy days, a good forty years in some cases, fifteen in the most recent. And here we go: Mr. Davies tells the solicitors that some or many or maybe all of these women might very likely have had children by Mr. Davies.

  Find the birds, he says, and find out for certain if they have had his brats. If they have, don’t say another word, just thank the mothers and go find the children. Talk to the children and present them with this offer: Davies will leave them each some money—good money, when you consider all they had to do for it was get themselves born out of matrimony, which isn’t that hard a trick—if they agree to two things: (a) don’t pester the Davies family back in England for one more penny, seeing as legal family is still a cut above, even to this maniac, and (b) agree to take the name Davies as their own. That’s right, Mr. Macy, change their names. The oldest will be forty years old, right? But if a bastard wants his cash, he’ll change his name. How much cash? The amount’s negotiable, Davies tells the lawyers as he presents them with a chart he’s made: ideally the children take the bottom figure, but the lawyers can go up to the higher sums, depending on nationality, and whether the children have accomplished something noteworthy, or seem like they might. There’s equations on his chart, I was told. A Frenchie in a profession is worth 3.5× as much as an Argentine sailor, for example.

  Not surprisingly, the solicitors put up a bit of a fuss. They point out that if nobody’s come for old Davies so far, and he is—no use dancing around it—about to meet St. Pete anyway, there’s no need to go scraping around for old problems to dig up. Besides, says one sane solicitor, it puts Davies at a disadvantage to have these illegitimates suddenly taking his good name. “Not at all,” says Davies, “you’re quite missing the point, chappies. These children are mine, and everything they accomplish in this world is mine, too, and should bear my name, because I’m proud of them. I want the Davies name to live on in them and in what they do. We’re all Davieses,” says the old fellow, getting himself into quite a sweat about it, “my dynasty.” “Well, we’re just solicitors,” say the solicitors, “and tracking down your abandoned brats in the four corners of the earth isn’t our affair,” although they don’t put it quite so hard to their wealthy client as that, I shouldn’t think. But he won’t listen: “Get detectives to do it, I don’t care how you do it, just do it, make it legal, put it in a document, and I’ll sign the thing, but do it fast, ’cause time’s at stake here, isn’t it just? If I have to, I’ll sign blank ones and you can fill in the children’s names later” is more or less how Mr. Davies puts it.

  And I hear you ask: “Just how many possible mothers were there?” Well, Davies’s first list turned out to be rather preliminary. The final tally kept swelling over the next few days, as the fat brewer calls back the solicitors to add names when he recollects them, or when he finds another lady’s signature at the bottom of some old love note he’s burning before signing off for his lunch date with the almighty. When HQ contacted me in Sydney Branch, the 21st of June, 1922, the tally of potential Davies spawn was at thirty-eight and still climbing.

  Now “Sydney Branch” and “London HQ”: I should clarify those. I’d run my own proprietorship, Ferrell Detection, until March 1922, just a few months before this case, The Case of the Promiscuous Brewer and the Murders in the Desert, eh? Catches you? It wasn’t a particularly lucrative venture, Ferrell Detection, but I’d a knack for disguise and getting people to tell the truth or at least show it when they were lying. I was a brave little bastard and that’s a fact. I knew my Sydney, top and bottom, and I had no time for criminals who thought they were geniuses, because not a one of them ever is, Mr. Macy. There ain’t more than three types of people in this world, I can tell you after my years of dealing with them, and maybe not even three.

  Then, March ’22, I received an offer to become part and parcel of Tailor Enquiries Worldwide, a growing concern in London and ready to put some truth in that “Worldwide.” I did a little looking into their business. They were run by a Nicholas Tailor, who was really a Hungarian named Miklos Szabo, who’d done well in England, making of himself the gentleman’s confidential enquirer sort of bloke, with a vague continental accent and an air of worldly know-how. Good enough for me, and like that, for an exchange of monetary units and a discussion with their representative as to who paid what to whom and when, I took down my Ferrell Detection sign and had a bloke I knew pop round with one saying Tailor Enquiries Worldwide, Sydney Branch.

  And not long after our transaction, I had my orders on the Davies case. I received the same letter that Tailor’s men received all over the wide world, explaining our assignment from the London solicitors who’d engaged Mr. Tailor’s agency. For, sure enough, one of good Mr. Davies’s ports of call had been Sydney, and I was to track a lady named Eulalie Caldwell, who as of 1890 or ’91 or 1892 or maybe ’93 (as best as Davies could remember) had been a nice-looking young woman with no attachments, living on her own in Kent Street (a very rough part of Sydney), making a temporary living doing some washing up. End of information.

  Mr. Macy, sir, it is not every day a detective begins to look for a lost heir and instead solves two double murder cases, one a full four years old. But that is precisely what I accomplished. If I savour the details of this triumph from a long and difficult career, I trust you’ll understand.

  Kent Street was a dismal hole in the 1890s, and it wasn’t much improved by ’22. But I wasn’t unfamiliar with slums like it, could hardly avoid such things in my chosen field of endeavour. And, with that knowledge, I certainly didn’t share Mr. Davies’s illusion that his lovely young lass had been stopping there temporarily on her way to better things. If she was alive, she wouldn’t be far. This would take no time at all, and I was only curious to see how I could bill London HQ for the maximum time and expense, since it all went back to the solicitors and Mr. Davies in the end.

  Public records, asking around, not too hard to get the drum on something like this. Two days later, June 24th, and I’m in a nasty tenement not in Kent Street proper, but two streets over. What a sight, the way these poor bastards lived. I almost felt a bit of a saint—these folks needed Davies’s money and I was there to help at least one of them say the right things to get some. You know what people like that want? A little space just to be alone, get some quiet sleep, get clean in. A little privacy. You’ve no idea, Mr. Macy, in your great big mansion in New York.
Compassion, you see, I don’t lack for it.

  So there I am in a crowded room, trying like hell to shake sense out of a woman who looks about sixty-five or seventy, toothless and ghastly, nose like a rotted cabbage, no shape to the rest of her at all. Mr. Davies must have been one lonely merchant sailor, even thirty years earlier, because she says she’s Eulalie Caldwell. (Although she gives me a birth date that would make her forty-nine. Women are like that.)

  The place looks and smells like rodents come and go as the mood hits them, and the noise from the other families in the courtyard and upstairs makes your teeth rattle. If Davies has a brat in this crowd, it would be about thirty, and there are a few who might fit that bill, but who can say, because there are people everywhere, barging in and out, yelling, bringing in or hauling off this or that piece of rubbish. There are kids no older than thirteen, others are strapping angry fellows who claim they do standover work, but my nose says they’re into something underhand. A couple of young women, filthy things, who I recognised as practitioners of a discreet profession. There’s no way to tell who’s related to who or who even lives there. My notes from the day read “Dirty animals,” but I don’t know if I meant vermin or house pets or these people.

  I stand there trying to get Eulalie to listen to me. Plainly she isn’t suited to do any work anymore, if she ever was. She’s useless, and I’m just praying to squeeze some of the last brain activity out of her when in comes a short, skinny, sickly looking black-haired fellow in shirtsleeves who takes a piece of brown bread out of his tucker bag, pulls the hard crust off it, and drops it in the old lady’s lap. She looks down at it and nods, like at an old friend. The fellow stands behind her and watches me. He seems a likely candidate for my heir. I ask my question: “Do either of you know a Mr. Barnabas Davies?”

  Eulalie goggles at me, but then just gnaws at her bread and looks at her feet. The bloke opens the negotiations with “What if we do?” and I counter with the industry-standard “Well, then I have another question for you.” He has to pose a bit more, so we get a “Who are you anyway?” which always earns a “That depends, don’t it?” Finally, we arrive at “She might know of Davies. But if he wants her now, it’s a little late, isn’t it?”

  “You never know, son, I work for very powerful men,” and he chews on that for a bit, and away we go: yeah, yeah, Davies is a name the young fellow knows, but still Eulalie don’t say a word, just takes a bottle of beer from her young man.

  The fellow starts coughing up pieces of the story, here and there, for me to gather up and fit together. This one, Tommy, is one of Eulalie Caldwell’s brats, one of eleven that saw the light of day and cleared their first year. Tommy knows the name Barnabas Davies only because Eulalie used to “babble on and on” about Barnabas when Tommy was a boy. “Barnabas: the one true love of her life, the man who would’ve made her a happy woman in London, but it wasn’t meant to be. Christ, what a song.” I’m thinking, That was an easy case, I have my boy and now we get on to changing his name, job done. But no: her next man was Tommy’s father, and he stayed around longer than Davies had, living with her and the kids for a few months of Tommy’s life, even returning later on to father child number four, but he was never of the “quality” of the mysterious Davies, come and gone like the wind, promising, as he set off to sea, to return for the lovely nineteen-year-old he’d spent a weekend with (on). No, it turns out Tommy is child number two. He has a full sister (child four), and there’s a flock of half siblings, tragic stories he now wants to share with me since I’m there and he thinks I asked, and to which I listened with no interest as they had no bearing on my business: a long and tedious recital of stillborns, hunger, broken promises of advancement from this or that lying toff, here an unwilling but profitable prostitute, there a nasty marriage, one boy killed at Gallipoli, another working at a station in the north, all the way down to the thirteen-year-old girl standing right there in front of me (no name in my records).

  Of course, how damned dull this all was, like poverty always is, and when Tommy was done singing all this, we worked back to the main question. Where was Tommy’s older sibling, sired by Davies, Eulalie’s child number one? And only then does Eulalie look up at me, and she starts to make an odd noise and then she’s crying, by which I mean her nose is dripping like a tap and her lips are shaking, but no tears are coming. “Oh, Paul,” she says, and you can’t even imagine how angry Tommy looks—not at me, but at the drunk hag sitting in front of him who only now has managed to put two words together. “Shut your mouth, why don’t you? Get off your date and clean something, you bloody bitch,” and the crying woman manages to shuffle out of the room, with the youngest girl following her out, calling Tommy nasty names.

  Back to the raging, wheezing little man’s tale: Paul Barnabas Caldwell was a “year or two older” than Tommy, so that meant born in 1892 or 1893, which fit my bill. Tommy hated Paul. He grew up loving him, of course—he’s your older brother, you love him, and you feel sorry for him when he gets smacked by Mum or by the man of the house (a rotating title, apparently) or by Bowlex (Dowlex? I think I’m reading that right)—but Paul grew up fast and started throwing his weight around too: he started to hit Eulalie back, before he ran away for the last time. And Paul was good at school, surprising thing, even when he was a little fellow. Tommy don’t like that, though: Paul was the only one who’d had a chance at school, a real chance, since Eulalie could still work a bit back then, could make a little money, and so Paul got to go to school “regular, not just now and again,” while the others were in and out, helping their mum with work, quitting the books as soon as the state said they were through. Worse though, Eulalie always told Tommy and the other kids that Paul was special because Paul’s dad was something special, and she’d throw that at Tommy’s dad too: “You aren’t Barnabas Davies.” Tommy told me with a quiet, angry amazement, “But Paul wasn’t even grateful for that,” he used to call Eulalie a whore and a disgrace, would say she wasn’t his mother, wasn’t a proper woman at all, and he’d be off out the door to visit his other friends, “and he never took me,” says Tommy, “never once took me, never showed me his books and pictures, looked at me like I was dirt because my dad wasn’t your Mr. Davies, but was just poor old Tom from down the pub. But I got him once”—Tommy laughs, showing his few teeth—“I got him good. I once snatched one of his library books, a real nasty one, took it and showed it to Rowler (Bowlex?). Paul had the devil whipped out of him that day. That was something to see.”

  Well, Mr. Macy, you can imagine that this was quite a tiresome spectacle—vengeful lies, self-pitying misunderstood memories—but it was something I could understand and put up with as long as I got my job done. Had to listen to a heap of this before I could get young Tom calm enough to answer me: where was Paul Davies now? My mistake triggered another storm: “He isn’t Paul Davies, he’s Paul Caldwell, you hear? The Caldwell name is good enough for him, he’s lucky to have it.” “Fine, Paul Caldwell then, Tom—where is he?” Turns out Paul’s been gone since Tommy was thirteen or fourteen. Not one word when he left. “That broke Eulalie,” says Tommy. “She needed him. He was going to be the man of this house, and now I still have to bloody well hear how I’m not Barnabas Davies’s son.”

  “And since then, since, let’s say, 1907?”

  “Yeah, that Bolshie, what’s her name, the crazy library lady, she came by one day, in ’18 or ’19, prim and proper and disgusted by us, and shows us the letter from the Army saying Paul was missing, a corporal he was, and ‘no further information’ known. We didn’t even know he went off to the War. Him missing and Mick dead on that Turkish beach, God damn, Eulalie cried for a bleeding month. Now what in Christ’s name do you want with us?”

  My notes say, “Two and a half hours with those animals. Bill London for ten hours.” No crime that, Macy, since London turns around and bills the solicitors for twenty and they bill Davies for forty, and that’s about right for this bastard, leaving women in distress like he did. Can you ima
gine, Macy? All over the world, detectives like me were prying around in the open sores of unhappy families and abandoned women. There must have been a whole city’s worth of pathetic, screaming scenes like this one going on all over the world right then, at that very moment, because old Mr. Davies had been a wolf as a young man and wanted to be loved for it as an old man.

  My notes also say, “Engaged by Tommy Caldwell to bring back any word of Paul Caldwell’s address or grave, payable on contingency.” I had my second client on what was now the Paul Davies/Paul Caldwell case, though I highly doubted his intention to pay.

  Mr. Macy, I slept like a baby last night, not the old nightmare, nor a toss or a turn. For this alone I thank you. Just knowing that you and I are working together on this memoir, opening up the old case, explaining its logic and structure, letting the world know what I achieved. I feel a new man. I even ate a full breakfast this morning, choked down all this poison and it tasted just fine. Last night, before I nodded off, I pulled out my other boxes of files from under the iron bed, and I read through a couple of the finest, though the rotter next to me whinged about the light and even called in one of the toughs to force me to douse the glim—it hardly matters. After you and I do this one, I think the one I call The Beautiful Dead Girl would do well with our readers. (“Don’t miss another Ferrell and Macy adventure, coming next month!”)

  So, the Barnabas Davies case was closed, eh? We had the name of Davies’s Sydney child: Paul Caldwell, born 1893. We had a personality sketch of him up to the age of fourteen: possibly above-average intelligence, but with the anger of the abandoned child trapped in poverty. Beyond that, we don’t know what kind of son Mr. Davies left behind when he tripped onto his boat and buttoned up his trousers. We know the boy went off to fight in the War and he didn’t come home. Missing, Mr. Macy, meant they couldn’t sort out the pulped-up bodies in the French mud or on the Turkish beach or in the Suez Canal. And Melbourne just called you dead after a while being missing. I think it was in ’19 or ’20 they said no one was missing anymore—all the missing files got relabelled as killed. So as far as official records had it, Paul was dead, though for some reason no one had got around to telling Eulalie and Tommy yet. Either way, case closed, I reckoned.