The Case of the Blind Beetle

by Holly Webb

  For William ~ HW

  For Yolande with love ~ ML

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  31 Albion Street, London

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Copyright

  Maisie hurried up the stairs from the kitchen, muttering to herself. “I’m coming! For heaven’s sake, I’m coming! I’ve only just sat down, you know.” And that was after making all the beds, and washing up from breakfast. Her tea would get cold.

  Eddie, her little brown and white dog, galloped up the steps in front, nearly tripping her up. He sniffed hard at the door and let out a flurry of suspicious yelps.

  “It could be someone coming to rent the second-floor rooms,” Maisie told him, suddenly hopeful. She smoothed down her apron. “Shh, Eddie! We don’t want to put them off.”

  The second-floor rooms of Gran’s boarding house had been empty for a while, which meant money was tight. Maisie hadn’t had a penny to spend on toffees for many weeks, and Gran looked worried all the time – there was a thin line between her eyebrows, which never went away.

  But when Maisie swung open the front door, a boy was standing there with a parcel, and Maisie could see a carrier’s cart waiting in the road for him.

  “Hurry up, lad!” the man driving the cart called impatiently.

  “Mrs Sarah Hitchins and Miss Maisie Hitchins?” the boy gabbled, thrusting the parcel at Maisie.

  “Yes. That’s me – I mean, I’m Maisie—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the boy was off, leaping back on to the box of the cart. The driver slapped the reins on the horse’s neck and made chirruping noises to send him on his way.

  Maisie stared down at the parcel in her arms. Eddie scrabbled at her skirt, yapping and trying to sniff at the cloth-wrapped bundle.

  “I thought it would be for Professor Tobin,” Maisie murmured. “He’s always getting strange things sent from abroad. No, Eddie, you’re not to bite it!” Holding the parcel up high, she walked slowly back into the hallway and pushed the door shut.

  Professor Tobin’s last parcel had come from a friend of his who was working somewhere in Italy, and had contained rare butterflies pinned on to a card, along with a large sausage. It had reached the professor slightly chewed…

  “It really is for Gran and me. I can’t tell from the writing, the label’s a bit smudged, but do you think…?” Maisie suddenly broke into a run, galloping headlong down the stairs and bursting into the kitchen. “Gran! Gran! Look!”

  “Whatever’s the matter, Maisie?” Gran stared at her over the cup of tea she was holding.

  “A parcel – for both of us! Is it… Is it from Father, do you think? The writing’s smeared – I wasn’t sure.”

  Gran put down the teacup, her hands shaking so that it jingled in its saucer. “Your father! Oh, Maisie, has he sent us something?”

  “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to get into it to find out,” Maisie muttered, fingering the knotted lengths of string that wound around the parcel. “I suppose he is a sailor, tying rope is part of his job. Gran, can we cut them, please? It’ll take years to undo all these knots!”

  Gran sniffed, obviously torn between saving the useful string and her eagerness to see what was inside the parcel. “Oh, very well!” She took the package from Maisie and peered at the label while Sally, the maid who shared the work at the boarding house, fetched the scissors. “I wonder where he sent it from…”

  Maisie snipped at the knots and finally opened the parcel. She pulled out a beautiful silk shawl and a little leather pouch, together with a letter addressed to Gran. She handed it over.

  “He says he decided to send me the shawl now, after all, rather than bringing it home with him, as he wanted to imagine me wearing it while he was away,” Gran said, smiling as she read the letter. “And inside the pouch there’s a present for you, Maisie. He says it’s Egyptian, very old. From the time of the pharaohs, so the man who sold it to him in the souk in Cairo said. A souk is a market, I think. But your father isn’t sure how old it really is. Anyway, he says it’s a mystery, with a secret message, and maybe you can solve it with your detecting.”

  “He really said that?” Maisie murmured, undoing the drawstring at the top of the little pouch and tipping the contents out into her hand. She hadn’t been sure what her father would think about the cases she had solved. She had written to tell him about them, but she’d had so few letters in return over the years he had been away that it was hard to tell what sort of person he was. He might have thought that her detective work was unladylike and dangerous, or (worse) just silly. But if her father had sent her a secret message to solve, it didn’t sound as though he was going to try and make her stop, when he came home in a few months’ time.

  “It’s a necklace,” she said, holding up a pendant dangling on a dull gold chain. “What sort of stone is that?”

  “A carnelian?” Sally suggested, leaning over to see. “It’s a lovely colour, Maisie, that dark red.”

  “It’s engraved,” Maisie said, peering at the pendant in the dim light of the kitchen. “Look at these lines – is that an eye? And there are more symbols on the other side. That must be the mystery.” She ran her thumb gently over the pendant and smiled to herself. Her very own mystery, from her father.

  She would look at it properly later on, with the magnifying glass that Professor Tobin had given her to help with her detective work. She slipped the chain over her head and tucked the pendant under her dress, so it wouldn’t get in the way while she was dusting.

  “You could ask the professor what it means,” Gran suggested, and Maisie nodded. Professor Tobin was sure to know or, if he didn’t, he’d have a book he could look in.

  But that seems like cheating, somehow, Maisie thought. She would wait a while and see if she could solve the mystery by herself.

  “Cup of tea, Professor?” Maisie asked, carefully balancing the tray as she opened his door. He usually had some tea and biscuits at this time of the afternoon.

  The professor peered out from behind his newspaper, his huge white eyebrows drawn together so that he looked rather grumpy.

  Maisie paused by the door, wondering if she shouldn’t have disturbed him.

  “Oh, come in, come in,” the professor growled. “I’m sorry, Maisie, it’s not you I’m cross with. A cup of tea might cheer me up.”

  “Is there something wrong, sir?” Maisie asked him. She’d seen the professor look worried before, but he was always friendly and polite.

  “This!” The professor shook the newspaper. “Utter nonsense! Look, Maisie!”

  Maisie put down the tea tray on the little table next to his chair and peered at the tiny print. The article seemed to be about someone called Lord Dacre.

  “Oh! Egypt! My father has just been there. He wrote to us from Cairo.” She started to read aloud. “Lord Dacre has discovered an amazing set of royal tombs… Full of precious artefacts… Solid gold statues! Goodness, they’re a bit strange-looking.” She frowned at the drawing printed in the paper, trying to work out the best angle to look at it from.

  “Leggy Dacre has only discovered them because he has more money than he knows what to do with!” the professor snapped. “Anyone can go and find Egyptian tombs if they have a few spare million. He’s had an army of workers out there digging. Would have been more of a miracle if they hadn’t found anything!”

  “Do you know him, then, Professor?” Maisie asked, wondering why the professor called Lord Dacre Leggy.
<
br />   “I was at university with him,” Professor Tobin said, shaking the newspaper again. “He’s a friend of mine, really. I’m just a grumpy old man, Maisie. I’d like to have millions to spend on an expedition, that’s all. Your father was in Egypt, did you say?”

  “Yes, he sent me a present, look.” Maisie carefully pulled her beautiful pendant over her head, hoping it would cheer the professor up. She wouldn’t mind if he solved the mystery of the pictures, if it made him feel better.

  The professor held it gently. “This is thousands of years old, Maisie. What a treasure! You’re a lucky girl. These are hieroglyphics on the underside. Picture writing. I’m not an Egyptian expert, though, so I’m afraid I don’t know what it means.”

  “My father said it was a mystery for me – to work out what it said,” Maisie explained. “It’s like a secret code.”

  “Excellent idea!” The professor nodded excitedly. “Tomorrow afternoon, Maisie, we shall go on an expedition of our own! To the British Museum. They have a whole Egyptian gallery there. I shall persuade your grandmother that it will be most educational. We shall see if we can find some clues.”

  “It’s so big,” Maisie murmured, as she and Professor Tobin walked through the iron gates to the British Museum. Then, as they headed across the courtyard towards the front steps, she stopped and caught the professor’s sleeve. “Sir, I don’t think I’m allowed in here. I can’t be. It’s like a palace.” She was very glad she had left Eddie at home.

  Professor Tobin patted her hand comfortingly. “I assure you, Maisie, you most certainly are allowed in. Why, the museum belongs to all of us!” He steered her up the broad steps and between the huge columns. “Do hurry, Maisie, I have a feeling it may snow. Look at the sky. It will be warmer inside. And now that the galleries are lit with electric light, we will have longer to look at the treasures. It used to be a terribly dark place on winter afternoons like this one. Everyone had to leave at four o’clock because you simply couldn’t see a thing.”

  Maisie hurried after him through the entrance hall, scurrying past hundreds of marble statues all draped in the most insubstantial clothes. (Some of them were quite shocking, Maisie wasn’t at all sure that Gran would approve, and on a wintry afternoon the poor things looked frozen.)

  The professor stopped and looked back at her as they came to the opening that led into the Egyptian Galleries. He was beaming, and his smile grew wider as Maisie stared around. The galleries were large, with high ceilings, but even so the huge statues looked as though they might burst their way out.

  “If that’s only his head,” Maisie whispered to the professor, gazing at a huge face of dark stone, “how big was the rest of him? His head is taller than me.”

  “He was probably sitting down,” the professor pointed out helpfully. “The pharaohs often were in their statues. The museum might have managed to get all of him in here, but it would have been a squash.” He led her on past the enormous statues to stand in front of a slab of grey stone set into a wooden frame with a glass top, like a painting lying flat. “Can you see it, Maisie? It’s a little high… This is one of the museum’s greatest treasures.”

  Maisie glanced at him doubtfully. The stone looked rather boring, compared to the glittering blue and gold coffins she could see further down the hall.

  “This is the Rosetta Stone, Maisie – a message, you see, from the pharaoh, about taxes. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but the important thing is that it’s in three languages. This is how we learned to translate the Egyptian picture writing, the hieroglyphs!”

  “Oh!” Maisie stood up on tiptoe to look at the stone. “The hieroglyphs are the bit at the top?”

  “Yes. Until this was found, scholars had hardly a clue what the ancient language meant – but this stone has ancient Greek writing at the bottom and the newer Egyptian script in the middle. So they could work out some of the picture signs by comparing all three.” Professor Tobin sighed and stroked his hand over the glass. “This stone is two thousand years old, Maisie – and half the exhibits in this gallery are much, much older. You know, when the stone was found, it had been built into a wall? What if no one had seen it, hmmm? We might never have known…”

  Maisie peered at the hieroglyphs, wondering if she would recognize any of them from the engraving on her pendant. “Those are birds! And – is that a man with a bucket on his head? Professor, this must have taken ages to write in.” She frowned, imagining trying to write a letter to her father using all these fiddly little drawings.

  “I don’t think most people could write in it,” the professor agreed. “It was more for special occasions and announcements, not sending a note to the butcher complaining about the sausages.”

  “I can’t see anything that looks like the symbol on my necklace,” Maisie said, gazing at the squiggly drawings.

  “No…” the professor agreed, as he started walking on down the gallery. “We need to ask someone, I think. I know a few of the curators, though Egyptology isn’t my subject. I wonder if anyone is around…”

  “Scruffy!” Maisie jumped as someone bellowed behind them, and the professor nearly fell into a sarcophagus.

  “Good Lord. Leggy!” the professor cried, as a huge man seized him by the hand, and then shook it violently up and down.

  “What on earth are you doing here, Scruffy?” the man demanded. “Didn’t know you were interested in Egypt! Finally going to admit that the greatest civilization the world has ever known is a bit more interesting than mouldy old South American animals?”

  Maisie saw the professor take a very deep breath, which made his moustache flap, but he only smiled politely. “I am interested in everything, Leggy,” he answered, with a slight bow. “I was just explaining the history of the Rosetta Stone to my young friend here, Miss Hitchins. Maisie, this is Lord Dacre. I – ahem – mentioned him to you yesterday…”

  “Oh!” Of course – this was the professor’s friend from university, Maisie realized. The one who had millions to spend on digging up half of Egypt. Now that she looked, she could see he was particularly smartly dressed and he was very brown, as though he had been out in the sun a great deal. He also had the most immensely long legs – it was obvious where his nickname had come from.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.” She curtseyed. “The professor showed me the newspaper article about your finds.”

  Lord Dacre frowned very slightly, and Maisie wondered if he didn’t like to be reminded that his old friend was a professor, and he was not. Or perhaps he just wasn’t used to being introduced to girls in shabby dresses. Maisie had put on a lace collar that her friend Alice had given her, so as to look as smart as possible for their outing, but her dress was still obviously rather old and worn.

  “Charmed to meet you, young lady,” he murmured. “And may I introduce my secretary, Mr Travers. Travers, this is Scruffy Tobin. Old friend. Mad collector of strange creatures…”

  “Actually, my lord, I’ve read Professor Tobin’s work on the rituals of the South American tribes.” The thin young man who had been hovering behind Lord Dacre stepped forward and bowed to the professor and Maisie, a smile splitting his tanned face.

  “Have you read it, Miss Hitchins?” he asked politely. “It’s a fascinating work.”

  “No, sir, but the professor has shown me many of the strange things he brought back with him from the Americas,” Maisie said, smiling. She liked Mr Travers at once, and it was nice of him to suggest that she might have read something so difficult. Although she wasn’t sure that Lord Dacre was very pleased. He looked quite annoyed that his secretary clearly admired old Scruffy Tobin.

  “Are you here to discuss giving some of your beautiful new finds to the museum, Leggy?” Professor Tobin put in quickly. “That blue enamelled death mask looks truly exquisite, even in the drawing in the newspaper.”

  Lord Dacre suddenly sagged at the shoulders and seemed to look much shorter. “No… No, Scruffy. I shall of course be making some donations to
the museum, but today we are here to talk to the head curator. One of the treasures of my collection has been stolen. I came to talk to Mr Canning, to ask if he could keep an eye out for it among the sale rooms, in case anyone tries to auction it off. And I want him to let me know if the blackguard who stole it tries to sell it directly to the museum.”

  “Stolen?” Maisie asked curiously, before she could stop herself. It wasn’t really her place to ask, but she couldn’t resist.

  “My beautiful Golden Scarab,” Lord Dacre pulled an embroidered handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose loudly. “Gone. Disappeared. I’ve had the police with me all morning, but they couldn’t tell me anything useful. No forced entry, they said. They had the cheek to suggest it was one of my household that took it! Piffle!”

  “A scarab,” Professor Tobin repeated. “A beetle?”

  Maisie looked at him thoughtfully. The professor was very knowledgeable about all sorts of animals, and she had a feeling that he knew very well what a scarab was. He just wanted his old friend to enjoy knowing something that he didn’t. The professor was trying to cheer him up, Maisie decided.

  “Not just any beetle! The beetle! A sacred image for the Egyptian people, Scruffy!” Lord Dacre launched into lecturing mode, and began to pace up and down. “The great symbol of the sun! The god Ra, you know, in his aspect of Khepri, the beetle.”

  “Their god was a beetle?” Maisie asked in surprise, but Lord Dacre was too carried away with his lecture to listen.

  “Not just any beetle,” Mr Travers whispered in her ear. “A dung beetle! Er, poo, you know?”

  “I most certainly don’t!” Maisie glanced at him suspiciously, thinking that he must be teasing her.