‘Got a goddamn college professor on to it. He says it don’t mean a thing. They ain’t even proper Egyptian.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘So what am I missing?’
It got a bit funny, then. Wallace looked kinda sheepish. Embarrassed, even.
‘Tell her, boss, she ain’t gonna laugh,’ Harry says, shooting me a look that says, ‘Your life won’t be worth living if you do.’
‘Of course I won’t,’ I say. ‘Hey, maybe I can help with whatever it is.’
So Wallace hums and he haws, and finally it comes out. ‘It was a book I read,’ he says, and he’s looking straight into my eyes so I don’t dare react apart from going ‘Uh-huh?’ ‘A spy story, you know? There was a letter in it, looked all ordinary. But the spook, he figures out that you look through a stone, get the light shining right, this secret writing shows up.’
‘Right,’ I say. I guess I’ve heard stranger things. ‘No luck yet?’ I ask with a straight face, and he confirms he ain’t had any luck yet. Wow. Can you imagine being so rich you can throw away a huge pile of cabbage on a lump of see-through red rock because you think it might be the key to reading something that you think might be a map? Because I cannot imagine that at all. Like the story even makes sense! Archaeologist guy on his death bed using the ruby he’s just discovered to make a map; doesn’t even send it back to his wife with the letter, he –
Oh my god.
I know where I’ve seen that writing before!
‘Gimme that!’ I demand, snatching the map off the desk. Anger rises in Wallace’s eyes, but I ignore it. I’m right!
‘These symbols,’ I say. ‘I saw them earlier!’ I’m picturing it now. That seedy hotel room. Bible and papers and washbowl on the dresser. The gun going off. Blood splattering everywhere.
Bible and papers and washbowl on the dresser.
Bible and papers …
‘It’s the letter to Badger’s wife – the one that came with the ruby! What if it’s a code – a private form of writing that Badger invented himself?’ Hey, I’m actually feeling excited about this! There’s nothing like the thrill of the chase – even if all you’re chasing is a bit of paper. ‘If we get that letter, maybe we can work out the code!’
‘Well, get it! Now!’ Wallace yells.
‘There’s a dead guy in there … ’ I begin.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Harry says. Look, I don’t need my hand holding – my concern is busting back into what might be a crime scene by now. But I hold back a retort; I can cope with his company. He holds open the office door for me, then takes my arm. ‘Hey Horace – don’t forget to put that back in the safe!’ he calls back over his shoulder, and Wallace gives him a thumbs-up. ‘Not that he would forget,’ he tells me, shouting to make himself heard over the woman in the teeny-tiny clothes who’s now crooning Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. ‘He’s paranoid about that map.’
‘Plus he’s got a million-dollar ruby in there,’ I point out.
We make our way out of the club, and spend the journey swapping stories about our dealings with Wallace. Harry’s real interested in all the stuff about the curse. ‘You didn’t know?’ I ask.
‘Only just got back from overseas,’ he says. ‘Like Wallace says, I got a roaming brief. Go round the world, checking out stuff he might be interested in.’
‘Sounds like a pretty sweet deal,’ I say, and I mean it. Harry agrees, and I fill him in on what else I know about this ruby. I’m just telling him about Mrs Peterson-Lee and that brilliant line: ‘But darling, I was already dead by then,’ which cracks me up every time I think about it, and he frowns.
‘Peterson-Lee?’ he says.
‘That’s her,’ I say.
‘I’ve heard that name before,’ he says, and wrinkles up his brow so a would-be slicked back lock falls onto his forehead. I just stop myself pushing it back in place. And maybe stroking a finger down his cheek afterwards. Maybe running it across his lips …
I shake my head to clear it. We’re at the Liberty Crown.
No police presence – could be a bad sign, the room might have been cleared out already. We take the stairs three at a time. No police tape, so we go straight in. There’s Georgy-boy getting stiffer and stiffer, with his brains just peeking out from behind his head. No one’s found the poor chump yet. Jeez that’s sad. But not my business. I turn to the dresser. Washbowl and jug, Gideons Bible.
And the letter.
You know what, that was a surprise. That’s not how things usually work – they don’t go that smoothly. I’d been expecting the letter to be gone, or the corpse to be gone, or that someone had written some mysterious message on the wall in blood. Nope! This had all worked out just fine.
Harry picks up the letter, folds it and puts it in his pocket. He ain’t got no more scruples than me about calling the cops, and we leave, still unseen.
We’re heading back to the Pink Tiger club, and I’m wondering what clothes I’ll need to pack for a trip to Egypt (no question I’m seeing this through to the end). As we’re walking past the docks, Harry suddenly stops still.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘That name – Peterson-Lee. I remember where I heard it. There was a dame with that name on the boat I came back on. Fifties, maybe? All sable and rouge.’
I shake my head. ‘No idea. All I’ve seen is the name.’
We speculate until we get back to the Pink Tiger. The girl’s now doing ‘Meet Me In St Louis, Louis’. We head through to the office, guessing that Wallace is going to be pretty pleased with us, hopefully so much he’ll get real generous.
Harry opens the door – and stops.
Horace P. Wallace is lying face down on his desk, and ain’t going to be handing out bonuses any time soon.
Harry’s just staring, frozen. I squeeze past him – maybe there’s something I can do.
No. The guy is definitely, one hundred per cent dead, and there’s a knife sticking out of his back.
This ain’t the same situation as with George Junior, we can’t deal with this by shutting a door on it. And tampering with a murder scene is out. Wallace is lying on the desk phone, so I tell Harry to go find a phone box and call the cops. He don’t move. Well, I guess he’s known the guy longer than I have, gotta be a bit of a shock.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘Just give me a minute and I’ll come too.’
I do a quick survey of the room, my PI instincts kicking in. Map – ruby – neither of them are on show. The safe is open and still got piles of cabbage in it – but the folding stuff takes up a lot more room than a ruby, even given the whole ‘size of a pigeon’s-egg’ deal. Makes sense to leave it and just take the million-dollar sparkler.
Except why would your standard, everyday robber take the map too?
I spot something that I’m fairly sure hadn’t been there when we left. A scribbled note, just by the dead man’s hand – just three letters: ‘SPL’.
Of course, two of those leap out, considering who we’d just been talking about. ‘Peterson-Lee,’ I say. ‘Ever heard the dame’s first name?’ No answer. ‘Harry! Get with it!’
He shakes his head, like he’s trying to kick-start his brain. ‘I’m thinking it’s Susan,’ he says at last. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Susan Peterson-Lee.’
‘Right.’ That is what we in the detective business call ‘a clue’. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We’ll go phone.’ There’s a key on the inside of the door, I take it out and lock the room as we exit.
‘Hey,’ I call out to the barman on our way out. ‘Anyone been back there since we left?’
He don’t even look up from the glass he’s polishing (I swear he’s been polishing the same glass for however many hours), and says, ‘Not seen anyone.’
The canary stops singing and comes across to us. Her cutesy little-miss voice with a complete disregard for the invention of the letter R puts my teeth on edge. ‘I saw a broad go in there. It was when Lenny was out the back.’
I look back at barman Lenny. He shrugs.
‘Hey, I dunno. I was just coming out of the little girl’s room, you know?’ A look of ecstasy suddenly crosses her face. ‘She had on this fur coat to die for. It went right down to the floor!’ Then she frowns. ‘It was a bit odd, you know? She was kinda looking around, like she didn’t want no one to see her, you know?’
Lenny frowns too. ‘What’s this about? Someone been bothering the boss?’
‘Something like that,’ Harry says, which is a fair enough response. Being murdered would bother someone. ‘Better not go disturb him, OK? We’re gonna be back soon.’ I’m glad to see he’s starting to think clearly again.
I wait till we’ve left the joint, then I look at him and say, ‘Fur coat down to the fl-oh-rer,’ imitating the canary’s cutesy voice.
‘Peterson-Lee?’ Harry suggests.
‘Sure looks like it. I guess we need to tell the cops about her.’
But Harry shakes his head. ‘We can’t tell the cops about any of this stuff. The map and such, I mean.’
I remember the line I’d fed to Wallace when we met, about how he wouldn’t want cops running the show cos everything’d end up in Evidence, and I saw where Harry was coming from.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll call them, gotta do that. Yeah, we’ll get tied up in questioning, but we both got watertight alibis in each other, so it’ll be sweet. We just maybe leave a few things out. Then we find Mrs P-L and do a bit of questioning ourselves. You in?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You bet I’m in. She ain’t gonna get away with this.’
And something in the way he says that makes me think I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Harry Durkin. No sir, not at all.
CHAPTER TEN
STORMCAGE, AD 5147
It took a long time for Ventrian to tell me everything, by which time I’d almost finished the book. I kept reading it to him, chapter by chapter, and in return he would tell me the next instalment in his own story. When I finally knew all of it, I wasn’t surprised that he struggled with life in the day-to-day.
I’m going to set it out here as clinically as possible. Just the bare bones.
That’s quite an unfortunate turn of phrase, actually. Because that’s what Ventrian dug up to start his nightmare. The bones of a man – well, a humanoid at least. The bones of a man, and this Device, the thing he was now calling the Eye of Horus.
It might have been unclear what the Eye was, but what it had was immense power, and what it wanted was for Ventrian to use it.
This is what he figured out, eventually. Someone had brought the Eye to this uninhabited, tech-free world to starve it of almost everything it needed – then had died themselves, removing the last, living component that the Device needed to function. They’d put up a plague beacon to keep people away, but Ventrian’s probe had given this Device access to technology once again, and it drew him in.
‘The Device’s power comes through other things,’ Ventrian had said. ‘It can’t control people directly, but it can control technology and twist reality until the people are controlled anyway. And that’s what started to happen. It filled my head with such dreams … ’
‘Couldn’t you just put it back where you found it?’ I’d asked.
He’d laughed almost hysterically when I’d said that. ‘It makes you want to use it! And every time you do … it takes a piece of your life force.’
‘Killing the host is an evolutionary dead end,’ I’d pointed out, trying to bring a bit of rationality into this.
‘Not if it heals you too,’ Ventrian told me. ‘The trouble is – it heals you by replacing your life force with its own. You slowly become it. Your thoughts are twisted to its own way of reasoning. Once the real you is lost, you can no longer stop it. And unstopped … truly, it could destroy the universe.’
‘Then you destroy it,’ I’d said.
Of course, I should have known that things weren’t quite so simple.
Ventrian had returned to his own world, never quite sure what was real and what was illusion as the Device feasted on all the technology around him. He tried to use the Device for good – or what the Device made him think was good. He piled up riches and his influence started to spread.
And another planet declared war. I’m not entirely sure how it came about, because Ventrian was only aware of it vaguely, amid the fog, so couldn’t tell me. All he did know was that the Device wanted him to destroy the other planet. To weave it out of existence somehow.
He tried not to do it. He fought. And his wife, the only one close enough to see what was happening, fought too. And Ventrian killed her.
She didn’t die straight away. Ventrian had a moment of complete clarity, where he understood what was happening to him.
He could have used the Device to heal her.
But healing used up so much more power than hurting. (Isn’t that always the case?)
If he healed her, he would go over the tipping point. He would become the Device’s puppet entirely. And he would have no way to prevent it destroying that other planet – and going on to do who knew what else.
He couldn’t let that happen. So he let his wife die. He let her die in front of him.
And the moment she died, grief unleashed such horrors inside him that he destroyed the planet anyway.
He’d let her die for nothing.
He fled. He couldn’t destroy the Device – the Eye of Horus – no person was strong enough. It would take him first. So he took it back to where he’d found it, and buried it again on a planet free of people, free of technology, surrounded by plague beacons.
He wanted to die there. He wanted to stay until his bones lay beneath the earth, like the Eye’s last host. But he was a wanted criminal. People would come looking for him, and he had to lead them away from that world, away from the Eye.
He left, and he was caught, and he was sent to Stormcage.
‘I told you it was like your Eye of Horus,’ he said, when he finally got to the end of his tale. ‘It brings nothing but death. It’s cursed.’
I’d already told him what I thought about curses. But I agreed that word fitted perfectly.
I think referring to this Device as ‘the Eye of Horus’ helped him, somehow; he was watching events at one remove, the pages of a book were between him and reality – it was as though he could look on all the terrible things that had happened as fiction. At times I wondered if he could even tell the difference between fantasy and reality any more.
I was almost considering breaking my solo rule and getting him out of Stormcage. It’d cause me a few headaches down the line, but – and I couldn’t quite believe I was thinking this – it was the right thing to do. Being with a certain Special Someone has definitely rubbed off on me.
Not only did Ventrian not deserve to rot in prison, but he needed help that he was never going to get in here. I was convinced, too, that there was still danger out there. Ventrian had breathed life into the Eye and it wouldn’t give that up easily.
Also, a Device powerful enough to warp reality sounded like fun. I was in a warped reality once – strangely enough, Cleopatra was there too. I think. Don’t really remember it that well, although I’m fairly sure I didn’t bring up the subject of her tomb. It would have been rude. You know, if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to kill the man I loved, I could have had so much fun. It’d be nice to have a do-over. All the things I could do if I were in charge of the universe!
For a start, I’d –
And that’s how it would get me. Me, thinking I’m so much cleverer than silly Ventrian. So much more clear-sighted, so much more sophisticated, so much more experienced.
I would have to be careful. Put the Eye of Horus out of my mind. Concentrate on the next step I need to take in this reality.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea of a joint jailbreak appealed. Visions of escape plans danced in my head. No need to be hasty, I’d let them percolate for a few days. While much
of my life is governed by a ‘seat of my pants’ rule, occasionally it’s worth planning ahead. I may treat things lightly – earnest doesn’t suit me, and I certainly have no intention of developing worry lines – but that doesn’t mean I don’t know when something’s serious. I was going to be the grown-up for once. I’d think it all through carefully.
Plus I rather wanted to finish my book first. I was only a few chapters away from the exciting denouement – the murderer is revealed! I was looking forward to that. The only part of writing even better than starting a project is writing ‘THE END’.
Unfortunately, waiting turned out to be a really bad move.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NEW YORK, AD 1939
Dealing with the cops ain’t my favourite thing, but we’ve crossed paths enough times and they know I’m straight. Me and Harry get the easiest ride being as we was alibis for each other. That canary gets all hysterical when she works out what’s going on and throws herself in Harry’s arms – you ask me, though, she’s been looking for an excuse. Harry passes her off soon as he can, and when we vamoose she’s crying on a cop’s shoulder instead. Keep crying, canary – we want to be out of reach before she starts singing about the fur coat she saw.
We need to track down the Peterson-Lee dame before the cops fix on her as a suspect. Could be a lot of legwork, or we might get lucky. She don’t know that anyone saw her in the Pink Tiger, maybe she don’t feel the need to hide. Now, that map? It’s a secret. No one knows about it but me and Harry and maybe a couple people way over in Egypt, that’s what Harry tells me – and it’s darn sure Wallace ain’t going to be telling anyone about it any more. Peterson-Lee? Why did she take it, if she don’t know what it was (and speaking as one who’s seen it, ain’t no one gonna work it out at first glance)? Well, I got a theory about that. Peterson-Lee was at the auction, she knew the ruby came with a letter. The map – it had all those little hieroglyphs on it, same as the letter did. So, there’s the ruby on the desk, there’s this paper with funny writing on it Egyptian-style – wouldn’t you jump to the conclusion they’re connected? That maybe that’s the letter? So if you’re taking the ruby, makes sense you’d take that too.
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