by Paula Guran
“So the days of bagging any, ahem, mementoes, shall we say, from a dig are gone now? Tutankhamun’s uncle in a glass case in the hall, and all that?”
“Quite gone: the laws are extremely strict, and the authorities do not hesitate to enforce them.”
Cox turned to the nightwatchman, who had hitherto been silent. “Mr Dalton: over to you.”
“Well, sir,” began Dalton hesitantly, “I saw the piece in the Dispatch, and yours too, sir,” (this to Professor Mellis) “and it took my curiosity, on account of the delivery we’d had just the night before. You see, what happens is, they deliver to the yard up until eight o’clock in the evening, and after that I’m the only staff in the place till six in the morning, when the day shift comes on. Now occasionally—it’s by special arrangement, and it’s regular customers only—there are deliveries after eight, and I can book ’em in myself in the usual way; there aren’t so many of these, though, only what you might call exceptional circumstances.
“So, as I say, the night before the article came out, I was on shift as usual, and about ten the bell rang through from the goods yard, meaning someone was wanting to make a delivery. Now I hadn’t heard anything about it, but I went down anyway, and found it was Carter Paterson’s—I knew the driver quite well, as it happens—that had come straight from meeting the boat-train. The driver gave me the paperwork, and I saw it was made out in the name of the Honorable James MacVeigh—”
“Remember that name,” interjected Cox.
“The Honorable James MacVeigh, sir, that’s had an account with Rowlandson’s ever since I’ve been here. So obviously there was no question about it, and the driver and I went and hauled the delivery off the back of the van: it was a crate about six foot by three by three, and the papers said it was to be kept special, because the contents were particularly valuable. Bay Seven on the top for that, then, I said to myself—that’s storage bay seven up on the top floor, where a lot of the valuables go; I’ll show it to you later.
“We got the crate on to a trolley, and took it up to Bay Seven in the goods lift, and I parked it away in a corner to itself, and took the Carter Paterson’s man downstairs for a cup of coffee before he went off. I remember now that he said to me, I’d do well to taste the coffee with the smell of that thing still lingering around, but there! he wasn’t to know I’ve not had any sense of smell since I was a kid, and fell off a swing and hit the bridge of my nose. Anyway, he had his coffee and was off not long after, and I had a last look at the booking-in papers before setting off on my rounds.
“I thought it was odd straightaway, when I went over the details. You see, the crate had come from Cairo—that’s where the paperwork was originated, anyway—but there wasn’t any Customs stamp on the papers, nor anything chalked on the crate itself. I went up again, just to check. What was on the crate was a canceled-out address of a Mr Redmond O’Connell, in Cornwall—someone had scribbled it over in chalk, but you could rub it off and see the writing underneath.
“Now, I was in a bit of a quandary. The MacVeigh business—well, it’s one of the company’s longest-standing accounts, and I didn’t like to cast any aspersions, as you might say. It wouldn’t be my place, and jobs are hard enough to come by nowadays. Still, if a consignment comes in from abroad, and Customs hasn’t seen it—especially from somewhere like Egypt, where the authorities are usually red hot, like you say, sir, and there’s release forms and suchlike—it’s odd, and I can’t deny it worried me a little, what to do for the best.
“What I decided to do in the end, was to book it in from Victoria, as if that was where it came from: that wasn’t anything I could be pulled up over, if there was any trouble over it later on, since Victoria was all the address there was on the Carter Paterson’s paperwork, you see. I wasn’t happy with it—it was just all I could think of to do for the best, as I say.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Cox, encouraging him. “You couldn’t have been expected to do anything else, under the circumstances.”
“So,” resumed Dalton, looking a little relieved at the newspaperman’s kind words, “what’s in the papers next day, but the piece about the new find, in the Valley of the Kings? Redmond O’Connell—I thought I knew the name, but I couldn’t place it before I read it in the Dispatch that morning. Well, then, I thought: it looks like that crate has come from Egypt after all—and very likely without the Customs knowing about it, though how they managed that part of it has me beat.”
“It needn’t, you know,” said Cox; “I’ve looked into it, and I’ll tell you after. Go on, now.”
“Well: I read the article, and then I read Professor Mellis’s piece the next day, and I thought that was a bit more sensible, if you know what I mean. Bit more scientific—I’ve not much time for magic and hocus-pocus, as a rule.”
Professor Mellis smiled self-deprecatingly, and Cox observed to no one in particular, “Spare a thought for the poor trod-upon hack, dear heart: the Great British Public tend to quite like a bit of flummery, from time to time.”
“Is that so, sir? Perhaps it is—I wouldn’t know, myself. As I was saying, I read both the pieces in the Dispatch, and the business was sort of in the back of my mind, for a few days after. It got to the point where I was convinced something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t work out what to do about it. I couldn’t go to my superiors and tell them—after all, I’d booked the thing in myself—and I couldn’t very well get in touch with the MacVeighs and ask them, this crate you’ve put into storage, what do you know about it, and how’s it got past Customs?”
“Frightful quandary,” agreed Cox, “really, you did the best thing in coming to me. A newspaperman’s allowed to be a nosy-parking blighter—people expect it of him—just the chap for a little poking around behind the scenes, as it were.”
“Just so, sir,” agreed Dalton, “I daresay that’s the truth of it, if you like plain speaking. I saw Mr Cox here’s name at the foot of the original article, and rang him up in strictest confidence—and here we are.”
“Just so,” said Cox briskly, “and you needn’t worry about that confidence, by the way. I shan’t bring you into it, you know, and Professor Mellis will keep mum—won’t you, Professor?”
The Professor agreed enthusiastically, and Cox resumed: “Now: Cox is the name, and snooping’s the game—wouldn’t you like to hear what I’ve found out since you first told me all this, a couple of days ago? Well, then: MacVeigh first of all, and this business of the crate.
“If you’d have taken the trouble to try and get in touch with the Honorable James MacVeigh, you’d have found out fairly soon that he was in Cairo—in the Hotel Luxor, with a party of three; himself, his wife, and Mr Redmond O’Connell. The minute you said MacVeigh to me, I thought, hullo: wasn’t his wife one of those rather scatty old dears who went in for table-tapping and Spiritualism and mediums and all that nonsense? Of course she was, and she’d had Redmond O’Connell leeching off her for the last fifteen years, on and off—that’s the way he lives, you know, just like the very worst sort of hanger-on and cad. I believe he’d even managed to take in the Honorable James—and he was quite a big noise in the Foreign Office not so long ago, when there were plenty of people backing him for the top spot in Whitehall. Then his wife took up O’Connell, and all that fizzled out rather. But still he must have contacts in the embassies, you know—I asked the fellows on the foreign desk, and it turns out that our man in Cairo at the present is none other than MacVeigh’s one-time protégé, a man named Harris, who owes absolutely everything to his old boss.
“Which raises all sorts of possibilities—if you want to get something out of the country on the q.t., you know, and not bother those poor busy Customs chappies any more than you have to.”
“Good gracious!” ejaculated Professor Mellis.
Cox smiled, and resumed: “Well, it’s a theory. It’s also libelous in the extreme, and the sort of thing no self-respecting editor would allow within shouting distance of newsprint without the most copper-
bottomed, triple-caulked, reinforced proof going to back it up. I had to dig a bit further if the story was going to come to anything, and not just end up spiked for lack of evidence, so I got on to our Cairo stringer, a chap named Masters, to see if he could find out exactly what O’Connell and party were up to out there.
“He rang me up this morning with all the gen he could raise at such short notice. It seems things are jumping rather in the dear old bazaar, so to speak. The first bit of news was that the authorities are on to O’Connell. Of course I’d been expecting that, after the fool was good enough to splash it all over the pages of Britain’s third-largest rag—Masters said that O’Connell had been taken under arrest to the police station the night the story broke, and had been held overnight before MacVeigh turned up and stood bail the next morning. The dig site is closed off, with armed guards on patrol, and no one can get within fifty yards of it—Masters tried, but no joy.
“Next off, Masters telephoned the Hotel Luxor, and tried to get an interview out of O’Connell. Now normally, this is about as difficult as getting fizz from a shook-up bottle of bubbly, but this time, O’Connell is playing it close to the chest—very. He won’t see Masters, and that’s that; neither will MacVeigh. No comment, is the line they’re putting out. But Masters is a resourceful egg, bit like yours truly, and he knows a way around this: he has a word with the porters, and the desk staff. and so on, and a few bob changes hands, all sub rosa, and the upshot is that everything that comes in or out of MacVeigh’s suite, letters or telephone calls or telegrams, comes across Masters’ desk as well. Hardly ethical, you say; but then neither is defrauding Customs.
“After a couple of days, Masters has a nice little sheaf of this and that: a lot of telephone calls, placed to the Department of Antiquities; three or four telegrams as well, begging them to allow O’Connell back on to the dig—grave and unspecified consequences if they don’t, they’ve no idea what they’re dealing with, dark forces uncovered, beyond all control save that of O’Connell . . . the usual bombast, you know his sort of thing. Just like in the original piece: I had to tone that down ever so much before we ran it, and it was still the most creaking old rot even then. It doesn’t wash with the Department, though: no joy, the site is still closed, Mr O’Connell will remember that he is technically still under arrest, and is requested not to leave the precincts of the hotel.
“MacVeigh even tries to get the Embassy involved; but not even old Harris is going to stand for that, and neither will the Irish Embassy, where they’ve even less time for the Grand Panjandrum, or whatever he likes to be called. So there we have it: O’Connell is under house arrest in the Hotel Luxor, the dig is under armed guard around the clock, and back here at Rowlandson’s—well, Mr Dalton, do you think we might just slip upstairs now, and have a look at your famous crate?”
So Professor Mellis and Mr Gilbert Cox found themselves being transported to the top floor of the depository in the electric goods lift, operated by Dalton the nightwatchman. The lift appeared to be reluctant to deliver them directly to their destination; Dalton had to work the up-and-down controls for some little time to align the floor of the lift compartment to that of the upper story. “Always get trouble with this, on the top floor,” he muttered under his breath. “Hang on a minute, gents—now come on, you—there!”
He released the sliding grille doors, and ushered them out into a large open space, dimly lit by a few weak electric bulbs, that extended the width of the building. This space was divided along each side by thin partition walls into open bays or carrels, such as one might find in a library, say. In each of these bays were stacked crates and boxes and trunks, each with an identifying label indicating its owner and date of admission, and spaces beneath in which an auditor might mark off and date his regular inspection of all the goods in the warehouse.
Dalton led them to the last of these bays on the left, in which there was but the one crate, of the general dimensions described by him earlier; it was stood up on its end, in accordance with the “This Way Up” labels it bore. “That’s the one,” he said, indicating. “Now, do you gentlemen smell anything about it, the way the Carter Paterson’s man said he could?”
As a matter of fact, both Cox and the professor could smell something: to Cox, it was a vaguely High Church odor, faintly exotic yet faintly bitter, with something in it of the damp cellar or the potting shed in wintertime. To the professor, who had been in Egypt many times during his long and illustrious career, the scent was immediately recognizable, and he burst out, “That’s Egyptian, or I’ll retire on the spot—there’s no mistaking that scent, I’ve come across it a hundred times. I was with Carter, when he broke through to the burial chamber of Tutankhamun: it’s the very same smell, the incense and spices and the unguents the high priests used to—”
“Quite,” said Cox, scratching his nose, “to dress up the dear old mummies, before they put them to sleep, as it were.” He laid a hand experimentally on the side of the crate, and withdrew it quite quickly. “Rather warm,” he said, as if by way of explanation. “I suppose it gets a bit stuffy up here in the summertime, eh, Mr Dalton?”
“This floor’s supposed to be temperature-controlled, sir,” the night-watchman said, his eyes on the crate. “But yes, I daresay you’re right, it is a little warm.”
“Just a little,” said Cox, and again placed his hand upon the crate. He rapped tentatively at its side: it sounded hollow, yet sturdy, though the planking of the crate was only a thin plywood layer. “There’s something under this,” he said aloud, and picked at a corner of the crate that had been knocked in transit, so that the plywood had splintered a little. “I thought so: it’s lead, I think. Thick lead foil, a layer of it all the way round inside the crate, so as to keep what’s inside airtight. Now what,” he continued, rhetorically, “might need to be kept airtight, that came out of an old Egyptian tomb, I wonder?”
Professor Mellis was also examining the outside of the crate, stooping this way and that to see around it. “There are no stamps of any kind from the Egyptian authorities,” he reported, straightening at the knees. “If this came out of Egypt, as I have no hesitation in supposing it to have done, then it came illegally, and I must congratulate you, Mr Dalton, on your perspicacity.”
“That’s that, then,” said Cox decisively, “and now shall we go back downstairs? Whatever he’s got in there, I don’t particularly want to spend the evening up here with it, especially as it’s getting rather dark now. I don’t like that scent—and I’m not sure I like this, either,” he continued, moving sharply to one side, away from the crate. “Tell me, Mr Dalton: I suppose there’s bound to be a problem with vermin in a place like this—rats, and mice, and the like?”
“We lay traps, sir, and there’s a cat has the run of the place, and there’s poison bait put down in the cellars each night,” said Dalton, with a dutiful show of professional pride and loyalty to his employers. “But between ourselves, it’d be unreasonable to expect anything else, this close to the river, and such a big old building. There’s usually a few dead ’uns to throw away, before we open to the public each morning.”
“Just so,” said Cox, “like these, perhaps?” He gestured behind the crate, back in the shadows. Dalton and the Professor looked where he pointed, and saw three or four bodies of rats, legs up stiff in the air, backs bent in a taut impossible arch, littering the area to the back of the crate.
“That’ll be the poison bait, sir,” suggested Dalton, with a distinct trace of doubt in his voice.
“No doubt, no doubt whatsoever,” said Cox. “Now, as I was saying, shall we go back downstairs?”
They descended to the ground floor by way of the staircase, since Dalton was disinclined to trust the lifts. “Not when they’re playing up, sir: they’ve only to jam on us, as they’ve been known to before now, and there we’d be, the three of us—stuck till the morning, and then how should I explain it away?”
Back in the little ground-floor office, a plan of action, of sorts,
was agreed on: Mr Cox and Professor Mellis would between them compose a letter, to be sent to Redmond O’Connell, as if from a wealthy admirer who was also something of an Egyptologist. This letter would contain an offer of funding for further excavations, together with a plea for full details of the discoveries to date; in this way, Cox hoped to gain the confidence of the Irishman, and acquire valuable information on his activities so far and his intentions for the future. Mr Dalton, meanwhile, was to keep an eye on the crate, and see that, if any attempts were made to move it, a record of its new destination was kept.
On that note, they parted, Cox and Professor Mellis returning to the professor’s club, where they set about composing their letter. This fraudulent missive was ready for dispatch by the morning of the following day, and should have arrived in Cairo under normal circumstances some forty-eight hours after that; as it turned out, though, events had by that time taken a fresh turn.
The meeting at Rowlandson’s had been on a Wednesday; it was Friday when Professor Mellis next heard from Gilbert Cox. The professor had just finished his dinner, and was retiring to the Club smoking rooms, when he was seized by the eager young reporter, his eyes alight with mischief. “Look here—Professor—you must come—unbelievable news from Cairo—unbelievable!” This was all the perplexed academic could get out of him, until they were both in the cab and heading out west, toward Rowlandson’s pantechnicon.
“It’s all gone haywire over in Cairo,” explained Cox breathlessly. “I had a phone call from Masters not half an hour ago, and he says—well! Let me try to get my breath and tell you properly.
“Masters had been keeping up the watch on the Hotel Luxor, to see which way O’Connell would bolt. Today, around four p.m. their time, he got word that a private car had been ordered on the west bank of the Nile, by the passenger ferry landing, to be there in an hour’s time, orders of MacVeigh. Jolly good, says Masters, and undertakes to be the driver for the occasion: he puts his most down-at-heels suit of whites on, and passes himself off as an ex-Army sort down on his luck, bit fond of the bottle—you know the type, if you’ve knocked round the Middle East much. Round comes the car by the landing at five; Masters is waiting, and he pays off the Egyptian fellow and gets in. Five minutes later, over come O’Connell and MacVeigh on the ferry, done up to the nines in robes and burnouses and what-have-you, like Lawrence of Arabia—obviously thinking this’ll go to make them less conspicuous, bless ’em!
