The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus

by Sean McLachlan

  The Case Of The Shifting Sarcophagus

  The Masked Man Of Cairo Book Two

  Sean McLachlan

  To Almudena, my wife

  And Julián, my son

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Fiction by Sean McLachlan

  History Books by Sean McLachlan

  Writing Books by Sean McLachlan

  Copyright 2018 Sean McLachlan, all rights reserved.

  Cover design by Andrés Alonso-Herrero.

  The characters in this work of fiction are fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  1

  Cairo, Spring 1919

  The sarcophagus hadn’t been there the night before.

  When Sir Augustus Wall walked into the main showroom of his antiquities shop, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared. The sarcophagus stood in the center of the room amid his collection of statues, engraved stones, and canopic jars. It was a large specimen made of red granite, its sides carved with a series of rectangular pillars to imitate a palace and topped with a lid showing the hide of a panther in low relief. That it wasn’t a royal sarcophagus was obvious by the fact that there was no cartouche in the inscription that ran along the edge of the lid.

  What was far less obvious was how a sarcophagus that must have weighed at least a ton could have appeared in his showroom without his noticing.

  Augustus ran upstairs and fetched the pistol from his bedside table. Feeling better with its reassuring weight in his hand, he went back downstairs.

  Hurrying to the front door, he found it locked and bolted. Then he made a thorough search of the entire house—the ground floor that he used as a shop and storeroom, the courtyard with its burbling fountain and Egyptian statuary, the first floor that he reserved for his private quarters, and the unused second floor. He even went up to the roof, finding the door locked and bolted like the one to the street, and seeing nothing up there except some dusty old ceramic pots for plants and a bare trellis.

  The squawk of a neighbor woman hanging laundry reminded him why he never came up here. Cairo’s roofs were women’s space in the daytime, and at night were used by families, who generally put up screens to keep hidden from prying eyes.

  He wanted to hide from prying eyes too, which is why he had taken a house in the old native quarter in the first place.

  But now it appeared he had been subjected to an intruder—one who didn’t take things but left things behind.

  Ducking back downstairs without apologizing to his neighbor’s wife—for to speak with her would have compounded the insult—Augustus made his way carefully through the house a second time. He found all the windows locked and secured, and no trace of a break-in.

  He stopped and thought for a moment. His opium sleep of the previous night could not have been disturbed by any amount of noise, which explained why he didn’t hear the sarcophagus being moved in, but what confounded him was the fact that he could find no sign of forced entry. When he had risen half an hour before, he had washed what was left of his face and put on his mask to hide his war injury, gotten dressed, and had proceeded downstairs as he usually did. Nothing had appeared out of place, he had heard no strange sounds in the house, and until he saw the sarcophagus in his showroom he had no idea that anything was amiss.

  At last he returned to the sarcophagus. It was carved in the style of the Old Kingdom and was of fine craftsmanship. Besides a few chips and abrasions here and there it looked in excellent condition. It stood on four thick blocks of wood.

  Augustus circled it, studying every detail. Could it be one of Suleiman Hanzade’s fakes? Augustus had numerous examples of Suleiman’s artistry in his shop, for sale to the more boorish of his customers who didn’t deserve real Egyptian antiquities. He sold them mostly to Americans and London bankers and such people as only wanted something to boast about in their drawing room without having any true appreciation of the object’s historical importance.

  Augustus pulled out a Woodbine from his cigarette case, struck a match against the sarcophagus, and lit it.

  Inhaling the smoke, he thought some more. It could, indeed, be Suleiman’s handiwork. Not even someone of Augustus’s expertise could tell for sure, but that didn’t explain how it ended up here. Suleiman and his stunning wife Zehra had always treated him with kindness and would never have disturbed his desire for privacy by breaking into his home. He couldn’t think of anyone else who would have either. His few friends respected him too much and his enemies … well, his enemies would have used the opportunity to kill him in his sleep.

  The doorbell rang. Augustus went to the front door and checked through the peephole. Moustafa, his hulking Nubian assistant, stood outside, waiting to start the day’s work. Good, he needed another mind to help unravel this.

  Augustus decided not to say anything at first. He let the man in and greeted him as usual, and they went into the showroom together to get it ready for the day’s customers.

  Moustafa stopped as he came into the showroom, his gaze resting on the sarcophagus.

  “What an excellent specimen, Mr. Wall!”

  “Isn’t it? It came last night. Special delivery, you might say.”

  “Oh,” Moustafa replied, peering at it more closely. “Is it from Mr. Hanzade?”

  “No. Or at least I don’t think so,” Augustus replied, taking another drag from his cigarette. “It appeared here last night while I slept.”

  Augustus proceeded to tell his assistant everything he had discovered that morning, which was precious little. Once he finished, Moustafa looked at the sarcophagus dubiously and then said with apparent reluctance,

  “We should open it.”

  Augustus felt a tingle of excitement. This was turning out to be a good day.

  “Yes, I suppose we should. But don’t you think we should wait for the police?”

  Moustafa shook his head with an air of finality. “No, sir.”

  Augustus chuckled. It appeared the Nubian had as little regard for the abilities of the Cairo police as he did, although the fellow was too polite to say so directly.

  “Very well,” Augustus said. “We’ll open it.”

  He went to one of his storerooms and fetched a pair of crowbars. Handing one to Moustafa, they stood side by side, fitting the crowbars into the seam between the lid and the body of the sarcophagus.

  With a heave, they pried the lid up an inch. Just as they did so, Augustus felt a jolt of worry. What if this thing was booby trapped? Ancient booby traps had nearly done him in on more than one occasion and this thing could hide modern dangers as well.

  But the lid had come up and it hadn’t exploded or shot out spikes or anything. Besides, if whoever had put this thing here had murder on their minds, they could have easily dispatched him without his ever waking.

  Straining their muscles, they pried the lid up further and pushed it several in
ches away from the case. Augustus broke out in a sweat from the effort. Even Moustafa, a mountain of a man and one of the strongest fellows Augustus had ever met, looked like he was having trouble.

  Once they had moved the lid enough, the two of them dropped their crowbars with a clatter and looked inside.

  While Augustus had not been prepared to find a new addition to his stock this morning, he felt doubly surprised at what he saw inside the sarcophagus.

  It was an elderly European man. His features showed some refinement, as did his neatly combed gray hair and dinner jacket.

  A slash across his throat, covered in coagulated blood, showed that he had been murdered.

  2

  Moustafa Ghani El Souwaim had a bad feeling about this sarcophagus. The whole affair was a baffling mystery, and when his boss was confronted with a mystery he did not rest until he solved it. That meant, of course, that Moustafa would get no rest either. It also generally meant that he would get shot at, chased, perhaps kidnapped, and all sorts of other unsavory experiences that would take him away from his family and studies.

  With a deep sigh, Moustafa resigned himself to what God had written for him. Nur and their five children had tolerated his absences before, and they would have to do so again. As for the article he was preparing on Nubian influences on Late Period Egyptian art, that would have to wait too.

  The first thing Mr. Wall did after seeing the body was check the pulse, although both of them knew what the result would be. The man was dead, and judging from the fact that the limbs were stiff but the body had not yet begun to bloat, he looked like he had been so for at least several hours but not more than two days. Mr. Wall cursed and went for the telephone to call one of his least favorite people—Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Commandant of the Cairo Police. Mr. Wall disliked him because the policeman always forced him to go to social events. Moustafa disliked him because he had crushed the independence rallies earlier that year, killing dozens of Egyptians, injuring hundreds, and imprisoning thousands for no greater crime than wanting to be masters in their own country.

  Russell Pasha arrived within half an hour with a colonial policeman dressed in a smart blue uniform and red fez, a man from the Soudan just like Moustafa. The two exchanged glances and a brief nod, but kept quiet as the Europeans talked.

  “Well, well, well, what fresh trouble do you have for us this week, Sir Augustus?” the police commandant asked in English. Mr. Wall generally spoke in Arabic in mixed company. Russell Pasha did not. Just because he was in charge of the law and order of Africa’s largest city did not mean that he spoke its language.

  Mr. Wall pointed at the sarcophagus. “As I said on the telephone, someone has delivered a body to me in rather unique packaging.”

  Russell Pasha walked over to the sarcophagus, looked inside, and jerked back with surprise.

  “Great Scott! I know this man!”

  “Do you?” Mr. Wall asked.

  “He’s Alexandre Legrand, a retired policeman.”

  Mr. Wall perked up. “Oh, this is getting thicker.”

  “It will get thicker yet. He was chief of police in Paris until he retired and moved here just after the war for his health.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have done him much good,” Mr. Wall said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Must you be such a misanthrope? Alexandre Legrand was a good man.”

  “Obviously someone didn’t think so.”

  “Indeed. You’ve never met Monsieur Legrand before?”

  “Never set eyes on him. I fail to see why someone would give him to me.”

  “You told me they snuck it into your home and there was no sign of a break in?”

  “Indeed. You may look around, of course, not that you need my permission given the circumstances.”

  “How could you have missed this big sarcophagus here when you returned home?”

  “I was already home. I was asleep upstairs.”

  Russell Pasha put a hand on the sarcophagus. “There’s no way they could have moved such a weight without causing a devil of a racket.”

  Mr. Wall tensed. “I … take medication to help me sleep.”

  Russell Pasha gave Moustafa’s boss a sympathetic look. The police commandant had been through the war too. Moustafa, thank God, had not, but he had seen what it could do to a man.

  “Well, we must look around, of course,” the police commandant murmured as he looked away.

  Russell Pasha and the colonial policeman spent an hour searching the house and found exactly what Mr. Wall had found, and what Moustafa had found while waiting for them to come—that is to say, nothing.

  “This is a damned queer business,” Russell Pasha said, scratching his jaw. “Well, I’ll get to work. First thing’s first. Constable, take the body to the car and drive it to the morgue.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Nubian policeman said. Moustafa moved to help.

  “If you don’t mind,” Mr. Wall said, “could you leave the sarcophagus here for the time being? I have a couple of experts I’d like to have take a look at it. They might give us some clue as to why Monsieur Legrand was killed and why he was delivered in such a fashion.”

  Moustafa resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He knew his boss would want to get involved in this. He grabbed the body under the arms and pulled him out. The policeman took his feet and together they laid him on the stone floor.

  “Very well,” the police commandant replied as he peered into the sarcophagus, finding nothing else inside. “It’s not like we have room for it at the station. It’s yours until we establish ownership. If we don’t, well, I suppose it’s yours. It was delivered to you, after all.”

  “If we cannot establish ownership, then it belongs to the National Museum,” Mr. Wall said.

  Russell Pasha scoffed. “Don’t distract me with such petty matters when I have a murder to solve.”

  This time Moustafa did roll his eyes. The last time the police commandant had vowed to solve a murder, Mr. Wall and Moustafa had done it for him.

  Russell Pasha bent down and searched the body’s pockets. He found a billfold that had his identity papers in it but no money.

  “Whoever did this robbed him too. He had a fine watch and a gold ring as well. Both of those are gone,” the police commandant said.

  “There’s a night watchman on this street. I’ll question him,” Mr. Wall said.

  At last Moustafa spoke up. “I know the man, boss. I can act as translator.”

  Mr. Wall looked about to object, but then understanding dawned on his face. Or at least half of it. Moustafa still hadn’t gotten used to his boss having one half of his face covered by that strangely lifelike and yet immobile mask.

  “Um, yes,” Mr. Wall said. “That’s a good idea, Moustafa. You know the local dialect better than I do. I still need to switch from Moroccan to Cairene Arabic. There are so many differences between the two.”

  His boss had caught the hint. Russell Pasha spoke no Arabic, and Karim, the watchman, would feel more comfortable being interrogated by a fellow African.

  After Moustafa helped the constable load the body into the car, drawing a large crowd as he did so, the constable drove off to the station. As soon as the car left, Moustafa got assailed with questions.

  “Someone has been killed in the Englishman’s house again?” Bisam the water seller asked, hunched over from the large water skin he lugged around on his back.

  “Yes,” Moustafa replied.

  “That man was born under an evil star,” Youssef the barber declared. “Trouble follows him around like flies follow a dying camel.”

  “Has anyone seen Karim?” Moustafa asked.

  “He’s usually asleep at this hour,” someone said.

  “Well, go wake him up instead of standing here gawking!” Moustafa shouted. Didn’t these people have anything better to do?

  Youssef went off to fetch Karim. Part of the crowd followed him, while another part stayed in front of Mr. Wall’s house hoping for more excitement. Oth
ers tired of waiting and returned to the Sultan El Moyyad Café across the street to start their tongues wagging. The owner had recently added more outside seating so that his usual clientele of idlers could get a better view of Mr. Wall’s house. The street’s lone European resident served as a rich source of gossip. Moustafa shook his head in frustration. Was it any wonder that Egypt was a colony of the British and not the other way around?

  “What’s going on?” a young voice asked behind him.

  Moustafa turned and saw Faisal, one of the street urchins who always got underfoot in this neighborhood. The boy was about twelve, with a dirty and patched jellaba and filthy bare feet. His tangle of curly hair stuck out every which way.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Moustafa grumbled. “What are you doing here?”

  The boy’s eyes went wide. “I heard someone was killed.”

  “I don’t have time for you right now,” Moustafa said, waving his hand at him in a dismissive gesture. “In fact, I never have time for you. Go beg somewhere else.”

  “I’m not begging. Is it true someone was killed in the Englishman’s house?”

  “It’s worse than that. Go away.”

  “What happened?” Faisal asked.

  “Go away, I’m waiting for Karim.”

  “What happened?”

  Moustafa turned his back on him, hoping he’d take the hint. A foolish move, he knew. Faisal never took the hint.

  “What happened?”

  Moustafa rounded on him. “Mr. Wall woke up this morning to find a body stuffed in a sarcophagus that somehow appeared in his showroom. I don’t know anything more. Now go away before I kick your backside so hard it turns into your frontside!”