The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [55]
“Documents, Professor Terbroogan, are only pieces of paper that purport to represent the truth. They’re not truth itself. Surely in your field of study, you’ve seen misleading, even malicious documents.”
You’ve never seen a happier little Dutch professor, Macy, and we had a new client in the Davies-Caldwell-Barry-Hoyt-Marlowe-Trilipush case.
Terbroogan walked me down the hall decorated with sphinx statues and photographs of him in sandy pits, and I asked to see Trilipush’s office. This was a small, windowless room in the basement, with shelves of books and pictures of excavators and relics. Trilipush’s desk was clean, but for a small stack of post which had arrived for him since his departure to Egypt. And right there on the top? An oversized envelope with a familiar return address, stamped with English postage. Oh, yes, Macy, from our Beverly Quint: he’d asked me for Trilipush’s address and must’ve set to writing this the minute I left his rooms: a warning or telltale reminiscence, certainly some proof of conspiracy in what I was beginning to suspect had been the Marlowe-Caldwell murders at the hands of Trilipush and with the leering knowledge of Quint. This envelope must’ve come over on my very boat. Quint and I had floated across the Atlantic, one on top of the other, quite unaware, and now we had arrived at our mutual destination, just inches apart. So much might be answered right there, but damn him, my newest client was hovering over me, asking if there was anything else I needed, and looking at me with one of those faces you see from time to time in our profession, Macy, that look of suspicious superiority from someone so removed from the dirty realities of life that he cannot distinguish between the filth of the criminal and the smudge on the fellow who had to wrestle the criminal in order to save the innocent. I could’ve throttled the professor right there, standing on toff ceremony, pushing me out the door when we might’ve saved so many middle steps, perhaps even saved two more lives, and your lovely aunt Margaret more suffering. No, we were out the door and into the hall, and the door was locked and Quint’s package sat undisturbed on Trilipush’s desk, waiting for his return. Professor Terbroogan meaningfully rattled the locked knob and looked at me looking at Quint’s package through the glass plate in the door. There it is, Macy: from across the globe a pom poofter could simply address an illicit package and count on the protection of some Dutch University snob he’d never met! Whatever’d happened to poor Paul Caldwell—and I had strong suspicions—was going to be devilish difficult to unravel, because as fast as I was unravelling, these toffs and poms and perverts and professors were going to ravel it up again, maybe to hide something wicked, maybe just because they liked things tidy and that meant not letting a simple Australian working man do his job. “Is there anything else you need, Mr. Ferrell?” Terbroogan asked with an unmistakable tone that meant, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s post.” No, of course they don’t, even if gentlemen are murderers.
I had Chester Finneran’s address from Terbroogan. I recall standing outside the gates of Harvard University, hailing a cab. I must’ve gone to his house across the river, for I’ve no notes of interviews between those I conducted with Terbroogan and Finneran, dated the same day. But I’ve no recollection of the cab ride. I feel so ill right now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to continue. I’ll post this at once.
HF
Sunday, 15 October, 1922
To Margaret: It is just after midnight, my love. I sit on my balcony, put the waiters through their paces, relax with a photograph of you before me on the table.
Your abruptly truncated letter troubled me, my darling, not because of the evidence of mis-medication, but because I know that you have been struggling to hide symptoms from me, and when you realised what you had sent me, I am certain you worried and unduly strained your nerves further.