“Fortunately, it ignored me completely, thank the Lord,” Lady Fitzpatrick continued. “Instead it went straight over to my safe, hidden behind the portrait of my father…”
Charley saw the painting propped against the wall; the man really did have a glorious moustache.
Coolly and calmly, Charley pulled out her magnifying glass and began her examination. There were traces of sand on the carpet and she collected a few grains, storing them in a test tube. Then she focused her attention on the safe. The door had been ripped from its hinges… She turned to Lady Fitzpatrick. “How did it do this?”
“With its bare hands,” said Lady Fitzpatrick.
Charley tried to take it in, her brain racing as she calculated how much physical strength it would take to do that sort of damage. The safe door had been torn clean off, the metal hinges shorn in two by the mummy’s bare hands. She gasped – she couldn’t help it. Those same hands had grabbed Billy…it could have been him in two pieces.
“So tell me what happened,” said Billy, sitting opposite the maid. “From the beginning.”
The girl had dried her tears now, but she was very young and it wouldn’t take much to set her off again. “I don’t know what went on upstairs. I’m only allowed in Her Ladyship’s rooms if I’m cleaning them, but I can show you where the monster got in,” she said. “The scullery.”
“You’ve got a room to keep skulls in?”
“Don’t be daft,” she said, “the scullery is where we do all the laundry and washing-up. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Billy followed silently. He knew full well what a scullery was; he was just playing the fool to help put the frightened maid at ease.
“Why do you think the creature came from here?” he asked as they came around the corner. Then he saw the trail of sandy footprints, leading back to a circle of sand on the scullery floor. Billy dropped to his knees to investigate. First there was that swirling vortex of sand at the railway station, and now this. What could it mean? There were pictures in the sand too, although some of them had clearly been swept away, either by accident or on purpose. Billy took out his notebook and pencil and began to make a sketch of the remaining images. A man; some strange fat animal’s head; what might be a staff or magick wand.
“And what about the doors?” Billy asked.
“All locked from the inside.”
“And the windows? Any broken glass? Any sign that they might have been forced from the outside.”
The maid shook her head. “The windows were all shut, Her Ladyship is most particular about it.”
Billy picked up some of the sand and let it fall through his fingers. “I wonder,” he said. “I wonder.”
“So what was stolen?” asked Doogie as they rode away together in the zebra-drawn carriage, leaving Lady Fitzpatrick and her troubled household behind.
“All of Her Ladyship’s most treasured possessions,” said Charley, reading a long and detailed list. “One sapphire and diamond ring; three cameo brooches; a pearl necklace; diamond earrings; a blue carbuncle pendant; pearl earrings; a rare bird’s-claw kilt pin in eighteen-carat gold.” She turned the page. “It goes on and on.”
“Inspector Diggins can worry about getting the jewels back, we’re only after the mummy,” said Billy.
“On that subject, I found a strand of fibre snagged on the safe and it looked surprisingly clean for something which was meant to be thousands of years old.”
Billy nodded, taking it in. “The servants confirmed Lady F’s story,” he said. “The mummy made straight for the secret safe. If it weren’t for the fact that the burglar was thousands of years old and as dead as a doornail, I’d say this was a simple inside job.”
Doogie nodded enthusiastically. “Servants are always pinching stuff from their employers.”
Charley raised an eyebrow.
“Or so I’m told, anyhow,” Doogie said quietly.
“No sign of forced entry, all the windows and doors were locked,” said Billy, opening his notebook. “But what do you make of this?”
Charley examined the pictures eagerly. “Hieroglyphics,” she said. “Ancient Egyptian picture language.”
“Like a code,” said Billy.
“Exactly,” said Charley, “so I’d better get cracking. I’ve got some books in my luggage which might help. Translating ancient languages is never an easy task, and hieroglyphics are famously difficult to decipher.”
“Each picture is a word,” said Billy, showing the full extent of his knowledge.
“I wish it was that simple,” said Charley, “but there’s more to it than that, unfortunately. Not all pictures are words, some are sounds.”
“Like letters.”
“Yes, but some sounds that we use in English weren’t used by the Egyptians at all, like ‘th’ – ‘Thoth’ may have been pronounced ‘tote’, for example. Whilst other sounds that we think are different, the Egyptians thought were the same, such as ‘f’ and ‘v’. Anyway, that’s when it starts to get really complicated.” Charley knew that she was showing off a little, but she couldn’t resist it.
“Most Egyptian scribes left out vowel sounds altogether and just used consonants. So to give the reader a clue as to the word they were writing they’d use an extra glyph, a determinative, on the end. Then there are ideograms – those are glyphs which represent a thing or an object without spelling it out. Plus, and this is the best bit, the hieroglyphs can be written left to right, right to left, vertically or horizontally.”
Charley stopped in mid-flow and frowned at the paper Billy had given her. “What have you drawn here, Billy? Is that meant to be a dog?”
“It’s a man,” said Billy.
“Oh dear,” Charley sighed. “This may take longer than I thought.”
Sir Gordon’s house was massive. More like a castle really, Billy thought, with its turrets and crenellated walls. A harassed-looking butler approached the carriage.
“I am Mr Cowley,” he said. “This way if you please.” He helped Charley down and then directed them inside with a small bow. “Sir Gordon is expecting you.”
With a little help, Charley was able to get her wheelchair up the front step and the two detectives found themselves in a huge hallway, a shimmering chandelier above their heads. “Doogie will look after your luggage,” said Cowley, “and rooms have been prepared for you upstairs.”
Charley groaned inwardly as she took in the mountain of stairs that she would need to negotiate.
“We have a lift,” Cowley added, as if reading her thoughts. “Sir Gordon had it installed last year at great expense. He is very proud that his house is the only private dwelling outside of London to have such a modern facility. We all so enjoy His Lordship’s little…eccentricities.” In a nervous gesture, Cowley’s fingers briefly touched his perfect fringe, checking that not a single hair was out of place.
Billy and Charley followed silently, their heads turning left and right as they tried to take in their extraordinary surroundings. Many fashionable houses contained a “cabinet of curiosity”, a collection of strange and wonderful objects from around the globe. Sir Gordon seemed to have turned his entire house into one enormous curiosity cabinet. The walls were crowded with exhibits and oddities. In frames. In display cases. Everywhere they turned they were surrounded by the macabre and the bizarre. Fierce masks from Africa. Bronze statues. Bones and skulls and beetles of every size and shape. Knives and axes and arrowheads from a hundred different tribes. A stuffed walrus suspended from the ceiling.
For Billy, it felt as if he was being assaulted on every side. Most houses had some supernatural traces in them. Faint footsteps of long-dead ghosts. The echoes of joy and sorrow lingering in the brickwork. Whispers from the spirit realm. But Sir Gordon’s house was shouting at him. There was something very wrong in 44 Morningside Place.