The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [6]
Then, March ’22, I received an offer to become part and parcel of Tailor Enquiries Worldwide, a growing concern in London and ready to put some truth in that “Worldwide.” I did a little looking into their business. They were run by a Nicholas Tailor, who was really a Hungarian named Miklos Szabo, who’d done well in England, making of himself the gentleman’s confidential enquirer sort of bloke, with a vague continental accent and an air of worldly know-how. Good enough for me, and like that, for an exchange of monetary units and a discussion with their representative as to who paid what to whom and when, I took down my Ferrell Detection sign and had a bloke I knew pop round with one saying Tailor Enquiries Worldwide, Sydney Branch.
And not long after our transaction, I had my orders on the Davies case. I received the same letter that Tailor’s men received all over the wide world, explaining our assignment from the London solicitors who’d engaged Mr. Tailor’s agency. For, sure enough, one of good Mr. Davies’s ports of call had been Sydney, and I was to track a lady named Eulalie Caldwell, who as of 1890 or ’91 or 1892 or maybe ’93 (as best as Davies could remember) had been a nice-looking young woman with no attachments, living on her own in Kent Street (a very rough part of Sydney), making a temporary living doing some washing up. End of information.
Mr. Macy, sir, it is not every day a detective begins to look for a lost heir and instead solves two double murder cases, one a full four years old. But that is precisely what I accomplished. If I savour the details of this triumph from a long and difficult career, I trust you’ll understand.
Kent Street was a dismal hole in the 1890s, and it wasn’t much improved by ’22. But I wasn’t unfamiliar with slums like it, could hardly avoid such things in my chosen field of endeavour. And, with that knowledge, I certainly didn’t share Mr. Davies’s illusion that his lovely young lass had been stopping there temporarily on her way to better things. If she was alive, she wouldn’t be far. This would take no time at all, and I was only curious to see how I could bill London HQ for the maximum time and expense, since it all went back to the solicitors and Mr. Davies in the end.
Public records, asking around, not too hard to get the drum on something like this. Two days later, June 24th, and I’m in a nasty tenement not in Kent Street proper, but two streets over. What a sight, the way these poor bastards lived. I almost felt a bit of a saint—these folks needed Davies’s money and I was there to help at least one of them say the right things to get some. You know what people like that want? A little space just to be alone, get some quiet sleep, get clean in. A little privacy. You’ve no idea, Mr. Macy, in your great big mansion in New York. Compassion, you see, I don’t lack for it.
So there I am in a crowded room, trying like hell to shake sense out of a woman who looks about sixty-five or seventy, toothless and ghastly, nose like a rotted cabbage, no shape to the rest of her at all. Mr. Davies must have been one lonely merchant sailor, even thirty years earlier, because she says she’s Eulalie Caldwell. (Although she gives me a birth date that would make her forty-nine. Women are like that.)
The place looks and smells like rodents come and go as the mood hits them, and the noise from the other families in the courtyard and upstairs makes your teeth rattle. If Davies has a brat in this crowd, it would be about thirty, and there are a few who might fit that bill, but who can say, because there are people everywhere, barging in and out, yelling, bringing in or hauling off this or that piece of rubbish. There are kids no older than thirteen, others are strapping angry fellows who claim they do standover work, but my nose says they’re into something underhand. A couple of young women, filthy things, who I recognised as practitioners of a discreet profession. There’s no way to tell who’s related to who or who even lives there. My notes from