The Egyptologist Read Free Page A

bloke like me. I am who I am, and even thirty years on, I'm curious to hear anything you'd care to disclose. When you refer to finding Margaret's private papers after her death, what does that include, I wonder. What did she say about me? She wasn't above stretching the truth for a story, that one.
    When I knew your family back in '22, you weren't even born yet, I don't sup• pose. When did your aunt meet your uncle? You know, she was a little keen on me, your aunt. She ever tell you this? I suppose not, and I'm sure your uncle was an excellent fellow. But when I met her, she was engaged to that devilish toff poofter explorer, and I think I seemed like just the thing to her—a man of unim• peachable honour, always after the truth, putting the truth first always.
    What even to call this case? Think about it: it started as an odd-duck inheri• tance task, then it was a missing-person case with a dozen different clients, then a double murder, a prenuptial background investigation, then a debt-collection case, and suddenly quite a different double murder. With the imprisonment of the damned Arab (I can't remember his name, oddly), we settled at least the final crime, but much inside this coconut don't slosh when I shake it, even now. You
    should track down that Arab; he's probably still rotting in some Gippo jail. Maybe he's finally ready to reveal where he stashed the bodies and the treasure.
    All right, off we go: the case opens in Mayfair, London, May 1922, according to the notes in my dossier here. There, a very rich man named Barnabas Davies, the proprietor of Davies Brewery, learnt from his sawbones that he hadn't but a few weeks or months to live. Tragic. This Davies, he's an older bloke, but he has a lovely young wife and a couple of little children. Death on its way, Davies settles his affairs with his solicitors. Spick and span, sign on the line, the widow and kids are filthy rich and some junior partner's going to run the brewery show. But then a week later, Davies, still alive, calls his solicitors back and says he's decided to do a few more things he hadn't thought of before.
    This is June 7th now. The solicitors come back to Daviess house, sip more of his brandy, and take their notes as the old man bashes their ears: the family and the business are one thing, but now he realises more should be done. He wants the world to know the Davies name for its permanent power to do good. He wants his money to go to a professor's chair in his name at a university, he wants his money to build a hospital, he wants his name on a museum wing filled with paintings by artists receiving Davies Foundation Modern Art Stipends, he's going to fund a monument to some regiment that lost near every damn man in it in the War, and Davies wants the block stuck in the new Davies Gardens, and a football club out in some little town is going to be the Davies FC, and he has an architect called in to
    start drawing up plans for a zoo shaped like a big D, even as he's on the verge of tak• ing to his bed, perhaps for the last time. Davies, Davies, Davies everywhere.
    And then he instructs the solicitors in something very odd, indeed. Appar• ently, Mr. Davies has risen quite far in this world. He was in the merchant navy as a younger fellow, before he'd had his bit of luck here and there and built the em• pire that kept the pommies in not-bad amber fluid. You've probably not heard of Davies Ale, son. I think it was bought by another brewer after the Second War, and the name was changed. I recall a bottle with a boat on it, maybe a pirate. Ei• ther way, old dying Davies, he presents the solicitors with a list—a rather long list, see— of women all over the world. Women from Canada, the USA, Ecuador and Peru, Australia, even Russia, and the dates he thinks he was last in these places, the last time he'd seen these women. The dates go back to the start of his merchant navy days, a good forty years in some cases, fifteen in the most recent.