The Egyptologist (3 page)

should track down that Arab; he's probably still rotting in some Gippo jail.
Maybe he's finally ready to reveal where he stashed the bodies and the treasure.

All right, off we go: the case opens in Mayfair, London, May 1922, according
to the notes in my dossier here. There, a very rich man named Barnabas Davies,
the proprietor of Davies Brewery, learnt from his sawbones that he hadn't but a
few weeks or months to live. Tragic. This Davies, he's an older bloke, but he has a
lovely young wife and a couple of little children. Death on its way, Davies settles
his affairs with his solicitors. Spick and span, sign on the line, the widow and kids
are filthy rich and some junior partner's going to run the brewery show. But then
a week later, Davies, still alive, calls his solicitors back and says he's decided to do
a few more things he hadn't thought of before.

This is June 7th now. The solicitors come back to Daviess 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 tak•
ing to his bed, perhaps for the last time. Davies, Davies, Davies everywhere.

And then he instructs the solicitors in something very odd, indeed. Appar•
ently, 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 em•
pire 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. Ei•
ther 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 chil•
dren. 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 notewor•
thy, or seem like they might. There's equations on his chart, I was told. A Frenchie
in a profession is worth 3.5x as much as an Argentine sailor, for example.

Not surprisingly, the solicitors put up a bit of a fuss. They point out that if no•
body'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 every•
thing they accomplish in this world is mine, too, and should bear my name, be•
cause 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 track•
ing 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 be•

fore 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 En•
quiries 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 Tai•
lor Enquiries Worldwide, Sydney Branch.

And not long after our transaction, I had my orders on the Davies case. I re•
ceived the same letter that Tailor's men received all over the wide world, explain•
ing 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 Syd•
ney), 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 pre•
cisely 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 tem•
porarily 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 al•
most 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 every•
where, 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 un•
derhand. A couple of young women, filthy things, who I recognised as practition•
ers 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 ei•
ther 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 de•
pends, 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 sib•
lings, 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 ad•
vancement from this or that lying toff, here an unwilling but profitable prosti•
tute, 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