The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [13]
“Boyd thought like you, though. He was so certain this little boy was my lover. And so he just spent his days down with the tigers, tossing them their meat with a nasty face. But what did he think would happen? That the police would take Paul away from me on Boyd’s word but not tell the public that, at Flipping Hoyt, thieves prowl under the seats?
“They arrested him during the show, without a fuss, I didn’t even know it happened. The first sign was when the native snake-men had to make up some dance with each other, and then just wandered off with the snake while the crowd looked confused and checked their watches, and then Wang and Songchuck were up the pole, twisting on top of each other. ‘What do you reckon has become of Paul?’ I asked Boyd after the show, and he just smoked and looked at me strangely. And I knew. ‘What did you do to him?’ I was afraid he had done something horrible with the tigers. ‘You vile old man, what did you do?’ He wouldn’t speak to me, and it was days before I found Paul, but then the police wouldn’t let me see him. I kept at them for weeks, knocking every day on the door of this brutish inspector. But they wouldn’t let me see him. And then, one day, weeks had passed, they told me he was gone, off to the War to avoid prison.”
“You wrote to him when your husband died.”
“That was 1917. Also to say I hadn’t betrayed him, that it wasn’t me who’d turned him in. I was so afraid he blamed me. I didn’t know where to send the letter. I just sent it to the Department of Defence. I never heard a thing, until I had the notification he was missing. He put me down as next of kin, you see. At that moment, finally, I knew he was not angry with me, that he loved me still. And at that same moment, I was told I’d lost him.
“Still, I thought I should find his real family. I went to that horrid librarian, Paul had told me all about her. They had been, oh, intimate, you see, not his first love, more the case of an older woman taking advantage of a poor boy in need. But she at least would know where to find his blood relations. Later, I had a second letter from Defence saying they changed him from Missing to Dead, but they didn’t have a body or anything, it seemed just for filing. I so want him to find the circus just as he left it . . . that poor penguin . . .”
Mr. Macy, our story today ends with a circus lady sobbing for her dead lover and her dead circus and a dead bird. I waited for a bit to see if she’d pull herself together, but after a few minutes, the end was nowhere in sight, so I went on my way.
Two or three days later, I had a letter:
Mr. Ferrell. Your visit yesterday was a tonic for a tired woman. You would set my mind at ease with any definitive information you unearth as to Paul’s Destiny. I should like to engage you, if that is how these matters are handled. If you should find him alive and if he is staying away from us, amidst the Missing, for reasons of his own, please assure him that I did not Betray him, would never, and that I love him. If he is gone forever, please let me know what became of him. There is little left for me here. I will go anywhere for him—please tell him that. I am soon to become a tiger vendor, at least temporarily, and after that, I cannot say.
With that, Mr. Macy, I had a third client on this same case!
But what did I have of Paul (Caldwell) Davies to present to London? Well, unfortunately, crime. That would probably affect Davies’s final settlement negatively. And his volunteer enthusiasm for the War, it now seemed, may have been a product of circumstance, the Australian Imperial Force being more inviting than penal labour.
But I also had two new leads: Inspector Dahlquist, who’d arrested Paul Caldwell