The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

  I was not close enough to the edge of the cliff to see them both, although their lights flickered occasionally on the oak copse on the opposite bank and from time to time one or the other would walk briefly through one of the places I could see. Ketteridge now appeared with the spool of wire in one hand. He made a loop of it, laid the loop on the ground, and put two or three rocks on it to hold it in place. He then stood up and began walking upstream, letting the wire spool out behind him, and disappeared around the bend.

  I wondered how far he would go, to set up the triggering device.

  I wondered if Holmes would give the river wide berth on his return.

  I wondered what I should do if Holmes did not reappear shortly.

  I did not wonder for long, though; to my horror I heard shouts echoing from upstream, loud shouts of anger that could only mean one thing. I flung myself off my rock and ran silently around the rise of the tor, and there I saw Holmes, caught in the beam of Ketteridge’s torch, his open hands outstretched.

  “Stand there and don’t move a muscle, Mr Holmes,” Ketteridge was saying. “I’m a dead-eye shot.”

  “Of that I have no doubt, Mr Ketteridge,” said Holmes. He stood and waited while the narrow beam came closer, and soon Ketteridge was in front of him, blinding Holmes with his torch.

  “Hands on top of your head, Holmes,” he ordered, and did a thorough search of Holmes’ pockets, ending up with Holmes’ gun, folding knife, and torch. By this time another light was shining from the riverbed and Scheiman’s panic-laden voice could be heard shouting enquiries.

  “It’s nothing, David,” Ketteridge shouted back over his shoulder. “Just an intruder. You’d better finish laying those charges before this storm is completely gone. I’ll blow it as soon as you’re ready.” The other torch beam wavered and then disappeared, and I strained to hear what Ketteridge was saying to Holmes.

  “Well, well, Mr Holmes. I was afraid of this.”

  “That, I presume, is why you attempted to distract me with Pethering.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t do the trick. I liked you, Mr Holmes, and I’d have been just as happy to do my business here and be away without meeting you again. Speaking of which, where is your wife?”

  I started, and began to creep backwards towards the safety of my tor.

  “Asleep in Lew House I should think,” Holmes told him.

  “No assistants at all, then?”

  “I fear not.”

  Ketteridge kept the torch on Holmes’ face for half a minute, then without warning dropped it down for a fast search of the hillside. I leapt back as soon as I saw it coming, and backed rapidly towards the rocks from which I had come. I heard Ketteridge say something to Holmes, and then the two of them started towards me.

  I thought Ketteridge would play his torch over the side of the clitter that faced the river and be satisfied with that, so I circled around to the far side of the tor. It appeared, however, that he was prepared to be a good deal more thorough; his light was coming around to my right, and unless I fled away over Sourton Common, where a chance lightning strike would show me up like a spotlight, I had to keep the central mound of the tor between us. I continued circling, feeling the shaky ground under my feet and balancing with the damned gun in my hand and no light on my way. He was gaining on me quickly, the very edge of his beam lighting the top of a pile of rocks to my right before skipping away, but in moments he would have me. I dived for the pile, thinking to freeze into a rocklike lump beneath my coat, but to my astonishment I discovered that the solid mound of rock was split down the middle. I shoved my way into the concealing crack, and precipitated head first into a low, smooth, and remarkably dry depression among the stones. I was thoroughly hidden, within the very heart of the tor.

  I squirmed around to look out of the entrance, and watched the light approach. It lit the entrance with a shocking burst of brightness, but the flare of reflection as the beam passed over my glasses must have appeared like any other reflection from off the watery slope. I shrank back and watched them pass, and after they were well past I slowly emerged, as wary as any rabbit venturing from its bury.

  They started down the slope, Ketteridge far enough behind Holmes to keep his prisoner at a distance, but too close for me to chance the scattered shot from my own gun, even if, as I found when I came to the edge of the cliff, they had not been on a direct line of fire. I sat down on my heels to see what developed.

  Scheiman stood watching them come down the steep hillside, gun in one hand and torch in the other. His tool bag lay empty on the ground, the twenty heavier two-inch pipes in an untidy pile next to it, the nineteen charges buried in their place. Ketteridge put his pistol in his pocket and walked over to his own bag, from which he took a ball of twine. Approaching Holmes, he said, “My secretary is not quite as good a shot as I am, Mr. Holmes, but he is certainly good enough for this distance. Don’t try to move.”

  He bent and tied Holmes’ hands together behind his back, then hobbled his feet loosely, but securely. He tied it off, cut the end with his pocket knife, and stood away from Holmes.

  “Be seated, Mr. Holmes. We won’t be very long. David, watch him closely.”

  Holmes looked around and chose a mossy rock, shuffled over to it, and took his seat. Scheiman watched him intently, and moved over near him.

  “Don’t stand too close to him, David,” Ketteridge warned, and then went back to finishing the connexion of each of the nineteen charges to the master switch at the end of the spool of wire. Lightning flared briefly overhead, but the grumble that followed was distant, almost perfunctory. Holmes had not looked up at me once. I could not tell if he knew I was there, although he would be certain I was not too far away. There was no other place for me to be. There was also no means for me to reach Holmes, no way I could dispatch the two men without putting Holmes into mortal danger, either from their guns or from the wide spread of shot from my own. I should have to wait, and hope he could provide me with an opening. Meanwhile, I knew, he would encourage Ketteridge to talk.

  Holmes eased his shoulders and spoke in a clear voice to Ketteridge where he knelt over the pieces of wire. “Am I right in assuming that you and Mr. Scheiman here first met on the boat from New York? This plan of yours seems to have been assembled somewhat, shall we say, piecemeal ?”

  Ketteridge’s sure hands did not react. “We did, yes. It was a very monotonous journey, and when David came onboard in New York, what else was there to do but talk?” He reached down into a pocket and drew out a small pair of wire cutters, and snipped the join before wrapping it methodically. “I had no plans for England. It didn’t seem the sort of place for my particular kind of scheme, so I was just going to relax, see the countryside, and spend some of the money I’d made … elsewhere.” Satisfied with his handiwork, he dug into his bag for a bit of broken tile, propped it over the wires to keep the rain off, and then shifted over to the next pipe. “We talked around things, if you know what I mean. It was funny, a meeting of minds, you might say. Nobody else in the world would’ve known what we were really talking about, but David and I knew.” He paused to look over his shoulder. “I suppose you might’ve known, if you’d been listening in. No, we recognized each other like two Masons with a handshake, and sort of told each other about our scams, without saying much direct. Anyway, when the boat docked we said good-bye without thinking any more about it. I mean to say, he’d amused me with his talk about the school he’d run in upstate New York that went bust—oh, don’t worry, David,” he said at his secretary’s protest, “Mr Holmes knows about it, I’m sure. And David knew something about my little tricks in the goldfields, buying up dud land and selling it off as claims to men hundreds of miles away. Neither of us told the other anything that might be called incriminating, but we were sort of showing off our cleverness, I suppose, to someone who’d appreciate it.

  “So, there I was in London having the time of my life when who should appear at my hotel but David, looking all excited and with a g
reat plan for the two of us.

  “Turns out David is a Baskerville.” He swivelled again to look at Holmes, and I could see his teeth gleam as he turned back again. “Thought you might know that one, too. One of the reasons he came over here was to take a look at the family house that his father, who wasn’t exactly legitimate, you might say, was cheated out of. So, when David gets to Plymouth, what does he hear but that the big old place is in the hands of one solitary little girl, who wants to find herself a tenant and move into town.

  “Well, being a tenant isn’t exactly what David has in mind, although he doesn’t really have enough of the ready stuff to buy the Hall outright. He sits and thinks it over for a couple of days, and then comes to look me up with a proposition: He and I run a swindle, whatever kind of swindle I want, we share the results, and he can then afford to move in and become the lord of the manor.”

  “Hardly a peerage,” Holmes said drily.

  Ketteridge gave a dismissive wave with the wire clippers. “Well, I had to tell him that city jobs aren’t exactly my strong point. Too many foreign ideas, and way too many, what do you call them, bobbies? But I invite him to dinner and he tells me about this place, and I begin to get a few ideas. A remote place like this, a man can have some room to set things up. So, we talk it over and we come to an agreement from the land-sale side of things, and he takes care of scaring people away from the piece of ground we’re developing as well as giving me a hand with toting and hauling.”

  “Which he did by adapting some vehicle or other to resemble Lady Howard’s coach, and then bringing in some large, dark dog to add to the charade. Actually,” Holmes said, “I was rather wondering why you didn’t make more extensive use of the dog.”

  Ketteridge laughed and shook his head over the wires. “Have you ever worked with a dog, Mr Holmes? Maybe the one we managed to get hold of was just particularly badly trained, but it was a real nightmare. Oh, it looked the part all right, and David even fixed a cute little contraption on its head to give it a ‘glowing eye’—powered by a battery—but the whole point of having the dog was making it ghostly, and a hundred and twenty pounds of dog is anything but. Lock it in the stables and it howls and scratches the door down; turn it loose and it chases sheep and gets itself shot at; you have to feed it meat and then clean up after it so your ghostly dog isn’t leaving great stinking piles across the countryside; and you never know, when you’re off on a Lady Howard run, if the dog isn’t going to take off. We did two trips out with the ‘coach’ back in July, and two in August, and halfway through the second one the damned animal lit off at high speed for a nearby farm where I’d guess there was a bitch on heat. We were unbelievably lucky there, because the family was away, all except one deaf old granny, but my nerves couldn’t take it, and I had David get rid of the animal. I have to hand it to David’s father, to go about his own version of the scheme with just a big dog. Damned if I know how he did it.”

  “And for this he planned to get the Hall and you would get—what?”

  “Oh, I’d have the lion’s share of the actual money—which only seemed fair since I was doing most of the expert work—and as we planned it, I’d then sell him Baskerville Hall—all fixed up and pretty as we made it—just as the swindle started, for what would be on paper a goodly sum but in actual fact would be less than a dollar. I’d take the blame and the profits and skip the country, he’d be left with egg on his face, having not only been so stupid as to choose such a crook for a boss but to have fallen for his boss’s land scheme as well. But then again he’d have all the linen in Baskerville Hall to wipe it off with. And,” he paused again, this time sitting back on his heels to grin across at his assistant, “this clever devil even went and got himself engaged to that pasty-laced Baskerville woman. He was looking to have it all.”

  “Until Pethering.”

  Ketteridge uttered a monosyllabic curse, and went back to his work. “Yeah, until that blasted shrimp stumbled into our setup. Jesus, what a piece of luck. I mean, the old guy last month, that was one thing, but then he goes and cracks the nosey little mutt of a professor on the head.”

  “What else could I have done?” Scheiman shouted. “We couldn’t let him go, and he sure wouldn’t be paid off.”

  “You’re absolutely right, David,” Ketteridge said freely. It sounded like a familiar argument, one in which he was not terribly interested any longer. “But it did put paid to you taking over the Hall. Having the neighbours whispering among themselves that you had more to do with that damn American’s swindle than it looks like is one thing, but actual murder, now, that’s something I find neighbours are slow to overlook. No, David, like I’ve told you, you’re just going to have to take your share of the money and abandon the Hall to the mice. Find a nice lady in some warm climate and set up a school there.”

  He stood up and dusted off his hands, and shone the torch over his work to check it: nineteen bits of broken tile, nineteen leads running to the main wire, all of them neat and dry and ready to go. And what was he planning to do with Holmes?

  “You tidy up those pipes, David, and make sure I haven’t left anything behind. I’ll take Mr Holmes and meet you at the end of the wire. Up you go, Mr Holmes,” he said, taking out his gun. “Just follow the wire.” He aimed the torch at Holmes’ feet, and followed him away from the tin works.

  With Holmes held to a hobbling pace, they would be some minutes reaching the plunger that would set off the charges. I abandoned my post above the river and circled the bend to get there before them, and by the fitful light from the moon and the occasional pale flare of the faraway lightning, I scrambled down to the river, dislodging stones and risking life and limbs in my haste.

  The plunging device stood ready, waiting only for its connexion to the wire and the lowering of its contact points. I hesitated only a moment before deciding that it did not actually matter if another tiny quantity of gold flakes found their way into the gozen of old tin mine, and it would make for an almighty distraction. I found my penknife and with my torch shaded by a handkerchief and held between my knees on the ground, I hastily stripped the ends of the wire, looped them around the points, and screwed down the contacts as quickly as I could. I then picked it up and, tugging to make sure the wire was not caught on anything, stumbled rapidly downriver to the obscuring bend in the cliff face. I could hear nothing above the noise of running water, but in less than a minute I saw the glow of the moving torch, and I got ready to act. I did not know where Scheiman was, although I assumed he would not be far behind his boss, but I could think of no better plan. I did, I admit, say a fervent prayer for protection in an act of madness.

  The torch approached, and I could hear a voice: Holmes talking loudly, which I hoped meant he expected me to be waiting in the only logical place, where indeed I was. I heard the sound of scuffing feet, and Ketteridge speaking sharply, and then they were on top of me.

  I hit the plunger and raised the shotgun more or less simultaneously, just as Holmes threw himself backwards against Ketteridge. The sound of the blast and the unexpected attack conspired against the accuracy of Ketteridge’s gun, so that although his finger tightened spasmodically against the trigger, the shot went wide and the torch flew out of his hand an instant later, its beam whirling crazily into the air. Holmes tumbled off into the darkness near the river, and I let off one barrel of the shotgun for effect.

  Disarmed and barraged, Ketteridge did not hesitate, but whirled and sprinted back in the direction from which he had come, towards the slowly erupting hillside. He vanished into the cloud of dust, but I was not about to follow until I had Holmes safely up and out of the water.

  My lawfully wedded husband had come to rest just above the waterline, wedged painfully among the rocks and swearing mightily. I propped the gun against a boulder and fished out my pocket knife, cutting the bonds of his hands first and then his legs.

  “Thank you, Russell,” he said when he was upright and had his breath back. “Precisely where I had anticipated,
with even more effect than I had hoped for. Where is Ketteridge?”

  “Off up the hill, heading for the vehicle. Or was it horses?” I held out a hand and helped him extricate himself from the slick rocks.

  “A peculiar contraption, a motorcar with very wide, highly inflated tyres and a great deal of padding over the engine—practically silent on the moor and leaving no tracks. However, he will not go anywhere in it tonight. And Scheiman?”

  “May have gone with him.”

  “He was behind us.”

  “Oh God. I hope I haven’t killed him.” I looked in apprehension back at the cloud of dust, swirling mightily in the still shaft of light from the miraculously unbroken torch that Ketteridge had dropped. It was only then that I realised the rain had stopped. “I did not imagine that the blast would be so big.”

  “It should not have been. Perhaps the cliff was unstable. I shall have to leave you to deal with Scheiman. Can you do that?”

  “Holmes, you can’t go after Ketteridge without a weapon. At least wait until we’ve taken Scheiman’s gun away from him.”

  “Russell, I will not permit a second villain to escape me on this moor,” he said grimly. “Follow when you can.” He caught up the torch from the ground and flung himself up the hill after Ketteridge.

  I replaced the spent shell, and with great circumspection I went downstream to the site of the blast, expecting at any moment to be pounded upon by the murderous secretary. When I found him, though, he was quite incapable of pouncing, being unconscious and half buried under tons of rock from the collapsed hillside. I checked his pockets, removing the sturdy clasp knife I found in one of them, and then set about digging him out.

  One ankle was broken, and the bone above it as well, and I knew he would be black from the waist down by the next day. If he lived that long. I dragged him away, tied his hands behind his back, then took off my waterproof and my woollen overcoat and tucked them securely around him. I would prefer that if this escapade cost Scheiman his life, it be at the hands of a judge, not mine.