The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [187]
I led the copper to Trilipush’s villa (the resident journalists greeted us but had seen nothing), and then across the river, using a police motorcycle on the far bank. This time, another quarter-mile or so further past Trilipush’s excavation site, the policeman and I found a gramophone with Trilipush’s name inscribed in the lid. Odd sight: the device was just sitting on the path, a lone gramophone in the middle of the desert. A disk was still resting on its table, and I marked down the title: “I’m on the Back Swing, Sit Down, Dear.” Some hundred feet farther on, there was evidence of a bonfire, including remnants of burnt clothing. Something was afoot, something very bad indeed. I guided the inspector back around the cliff face and into the Valley of the Kings to Carter’s site, and there I asked Carter if he’d seen Trilipush or Finneran again since he and I spoke. He hadn’t. I had the inspector ask if any of Carter’s men had any knowledge of Trilipush whatsoever. The question was passed among the men, and before long, one of them—a native—admitted he’d actually worked for the Englishman for the month of November, and what of it? We took him aside. This suspiciously defensive Egyptian—a strong-looking, bald bloke of about thirty or thirty-five—described abandoning Trilipush’s expedition at the end of November, as it had plainly failed, and he claimed he hadn’t seen the Englishman since November 25th, the day he came to work for Carter. He denied knowing anything of Finneran, even the name. We took his name and address and watched him walk back to his digging work.
Events moved very quickly now, Macy, so pay attention. I had two hypotheses, which I had no choice but to pursue simultaneously, as time was ticking away very fast indeed: (a) Trilipush and Finneran had been spooked by my discoveries and had flown secretly, Finneran to Boston with his gold, Trilipush as far away as possible from my investigation of the Marlowe-Caldwell murders, OR (b) they had been set upon by someone who knew of their golden find, and foul play was afoot. I had to chase both possibilities, but I needn’t’ve bothered with Hypothesis A, as it turned out. Still, I had someone watching the railways already, and I telegraphed the hotel in Cairo to alert me should my suspects appear up there somehow. Further, upon our return to the police station, the inspector put the word out to his men to keep their eyes open for anyone of Trilipush’s and Finneran’s descriptions, likely to be moving with a vast amount of luggage, which they would be very unwilling to open to an enquiring policeman. If they were seen, they were to be considered very dangerous indeed.
But, as I said, such steps were quite unnecessary, for having taken them, the police inspector then discovered in his files that this same black at Carter’s site who’d worked for Trilipush had been involved in a violent incident in his previous employment on the Cairo–Luxor steamer line! For this brawl, he’d been arrested and then released, and he’d also been fired from his post on the riverboat. This had been at the end of October, after which he must have gone to work for Trilipush, who apparently was happy to hire a known thug—interesting, that. The copper and I left immediately from the station to investigate the native’s home. And, behold! We arrived just a few minutes before the man himself: he’d left Carter’s site in the middle of the workday, directly after we’d spoken to him. Very suspicious. We arrived just in time, for in the din of this native’s arguments and fumbled explanations and wife’s wailing and children’s crying, I found under his bed another of Trilipush’s inscribed gramophones and, right in the open on a table, a plate containing easily a dozen cigars with black-and-silver bands bearing the monogram CCF. That settled that. We had our suspect in custody by the afternoon of Monday, January 1st, 1923. The murders had taken place at some point between the time Trilipush left our interview and that morning. It will not surprise you to hear that our native