Suddenly the persistent drizzle turned to a downpour. The quay was inky black, and merged with the sky as the sullen rain clouds scudded over. Malinferno stumbled on a loose coil of ropes, losing his footing. Doll grabbed his arm and he regained his balance. It was so dark, he could barely make out the location of the quayside, but thought he saw the outline of masts and rigging. Holding on to Doll’s arm tightly, he groped his way towards the ship. A long, dark shape, lying on its side, loomed out of the pelting rain, blocking their way to the Dispatch. Malinferno could see that it was fully six foot high and square, but it tapered away evenly to their left. He touched its surface, and he could feel carvings all along its length. It was the Philae obelisk, lying where it had been offloaded onto the quay. Fascinated, he took a step along it, but Doll held his arm, stopping him.
‘Listen,’ she hissed under her breath, and held a cupped hand to her ear.
He did so, and discerned a sound like someone chipping at the stone. It was coming from the other side of the obelisk. Malinferno indicated that he would go to the left, and that Doll should go to the right around the base of the prostrate pillar.
‘Just position yourself at the end,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘but don’t show yourself until I have had time to get close to Bankes.’
She would have asked how Joe knew it was William Bankes who was chipping away at the obelisk, but he disappeared into the darkness before she had a chance. She shrugged, and pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders. Somehow the rain was penetrating her cloak, and a cold dribble was running down her neck. She tiptoed towards the end of the mighty monument, stroking her fingers along the cold stone, admiring the hieroglyphs that disturbed its surface. She was almost stopped in her tracks by a familiar cartouche, but realised that if she examined it she would not be in place to trap whoever it was on the other side of the obelisk. She pressed on. The base of the stone was smoothly cut, and as she rounded it she could now see the ship at its mooring and the grey surface of the Thames beyond. The water was like a wide, undulating grey ribbon caught between the darkness of the sky and the quayside. Raindrops pockmarked its otherwise dark and mysterious surface. She peered cautiously around the end of the stone, knowing that Joe would not yet be in place.
Despite the gloom, she could make out a tall elegant figure, shrouded in a heavy coat similar to Joe’s garrick. He was apparently poking and prodding with one hand at the surface of the obelisk. He held a cane in his other hand, which was pressed against the surface of the obelisk for balance.
As Doll observed him, he looked nervously down the length of the obelisk towards where Joe would emerge. He must have heard something. She decided to act before he got worried and ran for it. She stepped out from the base of the stone and strode towards the figure.
‘Hello, Étienne. What have you found? Cleopatra’s cartouche?’
The Frenchman spun round, astonished at Doll’s presence.
‘Cleopatra? What do you mean?’
‘It was you, wasn’t it? Who stole Joe’s notebook with my translation of the cartouche in it. You could tell from the different handwriting that it was my discovery, not Joe’s. And that my experimental replacement of the two “ke”s at the end of the word with “a”s gave me most of a familiar name. Cleopatra. That is why you decided to murder me at the Royal Coburg. You could not bear the thought that a mere Englishwoman would beat you to the great prize of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unfortunately for you, and Morton Stanley, the bath I was in was misplaced. So your heavyweight trap fell on the wrong person. You even absented yourself from the theatre at the moment the apparent accident was to take place so as not to be suspected of foul play.’
Quatremain sneered, recovering his sang-froid.
‘Yes, I invited myself to Bankes’s celebration of the arrival of the obelisk to these shores.’ He patted the prostrate stone. ‘So neither of us was at the theatre when the… accident happened.’
He took a step away from the obelisk, and closer to the quayside.
‘No one could accuse either of us of dropping the counterweight on you. And neither of us would be suspected of knowing enough of backstage matters to set the trap, if it was seen as something more than a mere accident.’
‘Except you made the mistake of telling me that your uncle was once the manager of the Comédie Française in Paris.’
Quatremain poked with his cane at the gaps in the stone slabs of the quay. His right hand was behind his back.
‘Ah. I had thought that you would not remember me saying that. Now I have two reasons to kill you.’
‘Before you do, do tell me what you were doing to the obelisk.’
‘I was trying to obliterate the Cleopatra cartouche so that neither you nor Bankes would see it and get to decipher hieroglyphs before I did. Now I must use this hammer for another purpose.’
He brought his hand from behind his back, and swung the hammer he held in it high in the air. But before he could bring it down, Malinferno, who had been sneaking up behind Quatremain as Doll diverted his attention, grabbed at his arm. However, the Frenchman must have seen the look in Doll’s eyes, betraying her accomplice’s presence to him. He twisted round at the last moment, and Malinferno missed Quatremain’s upraised arm. Instead he caught his shoulder, and the Frenchman stumbled sideways. He dropped the hammer, and reached out to break his fall. But there was nothing behind him but air. He teetered on the brink of the quay, and his elegant shoes slipped on the wet, rainy surface. The edge of the dock was curved and did not help him regain his balance. For a long moment he hung in the air. Then he moaned and, still clutching his cane, fell into the waters below.
Cautiously, both Joe and Doll stepped to the edge of the quay, and peered into the inky Thames. The tide was fast flowing out to sea, and Quatremain had already disappeared into the river’s depths. Malinferno ran up and down the quayside for a while, but could see nothing of the Frenchman.
Then Doll cried out, ‘Look!’
She pointed downstream at the middle of the torrent. Malinferno gazed hopelessly into the teeming rain, the gap between the downpour and the river hardly discernible. Then he spotted what Doll had seen. An elegantly clad arm was raised above the waves holding on to a silver-topped cane. To Malinferno, it resembled the outstretched arm of the Lady of the Lake holding Excalibur. But then, he had been embroiled in several Arthurian escapades lately, and his fevered fancy was aroused. As they both watched, the arm slid slowly beneath the waters, still clutching the cane.
Malinferno and Doll Pocket met Augustus Bromhead in the eerily silent Royal Coburg Theatre the following day. Will Mossop was supposed to be present, but had left a note with Job, the stage-door man. It apologised for his absence due to ‘pressing matters’. Bromhead sighed.
‘He means he is busy finding a replacement for The Play of Adam, which has been cancelled.’
Doll joined her sigh to Bromhead’s as she scuffed at the chalk cross on the stage that was to mark the place of her death.
‘I suppose that, after losing the leading man, today’s news was the final straw for the production.’
Everyone knew to what she was referring. Since the farce of the King’s coronation, and her failure even to gain access to the Abbey, Queen Caroline had taken to her bed. She complained of persistent stomach pains, for which she took copious amounts of milk of magnesia laced with laudanum. Late on the previous night, when Joe and Doll were struggling with Étienne Quatremain in Deptford Docks, Caroline had given up her struggle to live. Her death had put an end to Mossop’s topical version of Augustus’ rediscovered play. No one was in the mood to satirise a dead queen. Actually, Doll was not too disappointed.