Margery Childe’s secrets were few, but they were potent. My visual memory is normally excellent, but I could not trust my mind in its present state, so I took a piece of paper from the desk and, using Margery’s pen, wrote down the details of her hidden life. In chronological order they were:
A marriage certificate, to a Maj Thomas Silverton, 23 May 1915.
A Military Cross with its purple and white ribbon.
A telegram beginning, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, dated 3 November 1916.
A second marriage certificate, this one in French, dated 9 December 1920—just less than two months ago. Margery was listed by her maiden name alone, no mention of Silverton. Her husband was named Claude de Finetti, with an address in London. His given occupation was the French equivalent of our gentleman.
A will, autographed by Margery and witnessed, on 19 December 1920, by Marie and another whose name was unfamiliar but whose writing was that of an uneducated woman. In it, Margery left one half of everything she owned to her husband, the other half to the maintenance of the New Temple in God.
Another will, written by the same hand that had signed the wedding certificate as Claude de Finetti, dated and witnessed as Margery’s was, leaving everything to his wife, Margery.
I looked long at the man’s writing, at the signatures of a name that was not his own, at the script of an opportunist and a sensualist and an expert at deceiving the world, at the amorality in his m’s and the deception in his t’s, at the cruelty and the self absorption in his upswings and his loops, and I knew, without a fragment of doubt, that I was looking at my captor. Claude, I thought, we have you now.
There were also four brief letters addressed to “My darling wife” and signed just “C.” I glanced at the first, and jerked back as if burned. My immediate impulse was to throw them onto the fire, my second to put them away unread, but I obviously could do neither, and so I reluctantly ran my eyes across his pen strokes. They were, one might say, love letters, were one to grant the word love the broadest possible definition. I made dutiful note of what few pertinent details they contained (“last Thursday”; the name of a play; a restaurant) and folded them up with hands that felt dirty. They did, however, serve to explain Margery’s oddly fervent references to self-abnegation and discipline.
It was now 5:37, and I made haste to tidy up. I put everything back as it had been, wiped my fingerprints from the safe, on the remote chance I had disturbed something without noticing, replaced the chair, and placed her pen back in its holder. I needed to be gone, but the opening of the safe had restored a small degree of life to my brain, and another question had presented itself: How had Margery entered this room, bleeding and disheveled, without being seen on the street?
On earlier thought, I had tentatively decided that it must be the wall of bookshelves that gave way to a hidden opening, but on closer examination, there was no seam. I looked at the cornice that hid the safe.
Marie’s room. I stood up quickly and stared at the adjoining wall on the other side of the fireplace opposite the safe. Only Marie would say nothing, were she to notice an odd chunk out of the floor space between the rooms.
Beside the fireplace was a series of shallow fitted shelves, holding an assortment of photographs and bric-a-brac. On the stray chance that the man who had fitted the secret compartments was as symmetrical as his fireplace surround, I prodded at the decorative bit that matched the safe’s covering. There was a low click, and the wall moved.
As I stood looking proudly at my handiwork, there came another noise down the corridor. I reacted instantly. I dove for the door, undid the lock, slapped the light switch off, ripped the shawl from the door, yanked my handkerchief from the keyhole, tossed the shawl over the back of the sofa, ran silently to the secret door and pulled it open, stepped in, and then leapt out again and retrieved my notes from Margery’s desk, turned off the desk light, and groped my way back to the door. Once through it, I pulled it closed on its well-oiled hinges, and it clicked shut just as the light went on in the room. A pinpoint beam cut a path through and spilt onto my shoulder. I put my eye to the peephole.
Margery came in the study door, tousled and puffy with sleep. The way she moved inside the shimmering dressing gown confirmed her forty years; nonetheless, she was, if anything, more beautiful than her formal self. Feeling like a voyeuse, I watched her go to the fire and scrabble some coals onto the remains, then scratch her scalp and drop onto the sofa. After a moment, she tucked her legs underneath her, and to my great relief, she reached absently behind her and pulled the shawl across her shoulders, without noticing its disarray.
I was safe, for the moment at any rate: Margery was not about to follow me into the passageway (for the breath of air on the backs of my legs informed me it was not merely a hole), nor was she about to begin work at her desk, where the heat of the light could hardly fail to alert her that it had recently been on.
She sat and stared blankly into the fire. I could hear movement behind me in the room Marie occupied: water running, a door closing. In a few minutes, she came in, combed and starched in her grey uniform dress, carrying her tray. She greeted Margery formally, then laid out the tea things, built up the fire properly, and left Margery to her thoughts, and me to my dilemma.
I had originally thought to go downstairs and slip past the night guard through the front door, trusting that the mystery of an unbolted door, without signs of burglary, would soon be dismissed. Now, however, I was trapped.
Unless . . .
No. I’d had quite enough of dark places. I was happy to wait.
Until Holmes tires of watching for me and comes in? Oh, curse the man. Why choose now to become a solicitous male? He would rescue me, if I wished it or not.
No. No, thank you, there would be cobwebs and steps and hidden latches at the other end, and me with one small box of vestas.
One thing, though: I’d learnt skills in the dark.
Absolutely not. I will wait here until she goes to dress, and then I will sneak out. The place will be nearly deserted, of a Sunday morning.
How long? Two hours, three? Your bladder will burst, thanks to the refuge’s tea.
That, unfortunately, was true, and truth to tell, the fear of having to do something about it in the passageway, all too reminiscent of my time in the cellar, drove me down into the dark more than anything else.
It was a long, long passage, tortuous and utterly unrelieved by light. The vestas I clutched as talismans against the night. I lit each one with care, scurried along until it began to burn my finger, then groped my way down the passage for a few more feet, considerably more disorientated than if I had remained in the dark. I knew that if I gave my senses a chance, they would guide me, but in craven cowardice I clung to my feeble lights, and I still had three in the box when I reached the end.
There was a door, a narrow one, and it opened easily onto an equally narrow passageway that was, glory of glories, open to the sky. I sidled between two buildings, stepped out onto a street, and stood breathing in the early-morning air.
The street seemed to me a foretaste of paradise—the morning mist was the breath of God; the early pedestrians, angels. I had come straight through the block of buildings onto the next street up from the hall, so with a wary eye for constables and Temple members, I made my way around the two corners until I found Holmes (Buttercup long discarded for the costume of an indeterminate labourer). I seized his hand, which surprised me as much as it did him. What is more, I did not release it until we reached my flat.
21
SUNDAY, 6 FEBRUARY
[Thy husband] craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience—
Too little payment for so great a debt. . . .
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she’s froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless
traitor to her loving lord?
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THAT SILLY DEMONSTRATION seemed to convince Holmes that I was at the ragged edge, either physically or mentally. On reaching my flat, he insisted that I undress, bath, and take Mrs Q’s breakfast in bed, where he sat scowling horribly at me until I had pushed the last of it down. I was taken aback, as Holmes normally treated my infirmities as his own—that is, he ignored them. Perhaps, as Q had hinted, the previous days had been as hard on him as they had been on me, if for different reasons. I looked at him over the rim of my cup and dutifully recited all I had done and found within the Temple buildings. He sat on a pink satin boudoir chair, his labourer’s boots propped on the foot of my Brobdingnagian bed, his fingers steepled, his eyes shut. I reached an end, then waited, but there was no response. I suspect he was asleep. I put the cup noisily on the tray, and his eyelids flashed open.
“I never asked you, Holmes. How did you find me . . . in that house in Essex?”
He leant forward and busied himself with the coffeepot, and I thought at first he was not going to answer. However, renewing his scowl and transferring its focus to his cup, he said, “My career has been sprinkled with glittering examples of incompetence, Russell, normally buried under the verbiage by Watson, but rarely has my stupidity had such potential for truly calamitous disaster. I did not even realise you were missing until Friday morning.”
“When I didn’t show up for the presentation. But didn’t Duncan miss me sooner than that? We had planned to spend Wednesday together—Holmes! You went there, to the presentation?”
“I was there, properly gowned—my own gown, too, mind you, not from a costume box. I walked into the hall, to find utter panic, of the Oxford variety: tight voices, careful poly-syllables, a certain amount of wringing of hands. Margery Childe was there, too, incidentally. I found your colleague Duncan and he controlled himself long enough to tell me that no one had seen you that week. I sought out Miss Childe and she confirmed that you had not come to the Temple during the week, as you had halfway promised, but she had assumed that you were busy. After your landlady assured me that you had indeed not been in your rooms for nine days, it took me the remainder of Friday to confirm that you had been on the late Saturday train and to assemble an investigatory team, half of Saturday to locate a stationmaster who remembered a party of drunken Londoners, which included a totally unconscious woman, and then the trail went dead. Your abductor took to the minor roads in a Ford automobile, and the number of farmers who remembered hearing a Ford go by in the wee hours of Sunday, in opposite ends of a county at once, could not be believed. By Monday, I was reduced to quartering the countryside, with—”
He broke off at the sound of the telephone. I obediently allowed Q to answer it, then waited until he came to the doorway to pick up the instrument at the side of my bed (installed there, no doubt, for the convenience of ladies who slept until noon). When I put it to my ear, all I heard was a wild gabble of male voices.
“Stop!” I ordered. “I cannot understand you. Who is this?”
“Miss Russell, oh Miss Russell, it’s Eddie here, she’s off, is Mr ’Olmes there, he said I should ring if she came out onto the street, my cousin’s following her, but he said to tell you and Mr ’Olmes, is he there—”
“Eddie, where are you?” I said loudly. Holmes went rigid.
“Around the corner from the Temple building, miss, she’s making for the river, Billy’s on her tail, she and that maid of hers came out and had a blooming row and she ended up shoving the old grouch on her backside in the street, and then she just took off.”
“Stay where you are, Eddie. We’ll be there in five minutes.” I slammed the receiver down, cracking off some of the gilt decoration, and threw myself out of bed. Holmes was already at the door.
“Russell, you’re in no condition to—”
“Oh do shut up, Holmes. Fetch us a taxi,” I said, and began to remove the few clothes I had on. He made haste to disappear.
Instead of a taxi, I found Q behind the wheel of the car, Holmes beside him. I jumped in and the car was moving away before the door had shut. We were soon driving past the Temple, deserted on the Sunday morning, and around the corner a lanky sixteen-year-old waved us down from the door of a newsagent’s. I held the door for him, and he climbed cautiously in. He bobbed his head at me and greeted Holmes with the same excitement he had demonstrated on the telephone.
“Morning’, Mr ’Olmes, sir. Billy said he was doin’ just like you said. There’s a string of us left behind where she goes. He’s stayin’ with her,” and then he began to repeat himself in slightly different words, several times. There were indeed a string of them, the youngest a girl of six, the oldest a gaffer bent over a cane, each of whom we gathered up into the car. I had shaken the hands of eight of Billy’s multitudinous relatives when Holmes’ sharp order came from the front seat.
“Down!”
Ten of us collapsed onto the floor and seat while the car drifted sedately past first Billy and his current cousin and then Margery Childe, turned into a side street, and pulled up to the kerb. Holmes and I extricated ourselves.
“Q,” I said, “I want you to return these good folk to their homes. If you can find a tea shop open, give them breakfast first. I’ll reimburse you.” Despite protests, I closed the door firmly in all those faces and Q drove off. Holmes and I pressed ourselves into a doorway and waited for Margery to pass on the adjoining street; then we walked out to intercept Billy and tell him to drop back.
She was making for the river, that was clear. She looked back twice, but both times Holmes seemed somehow to anticipate her, and she did not see us. Other than those two backward glances, there was no attempt at subterfuge, no urge to take to wheeled transport, and she went straight south to Tower Bridge. We followed her over the greasy, cold river, staying well back until she had gone off of it going east, when we trotted to catch her up. She took to the dockyards on the south bank of the river, the dirty warrens where the sun never penetrates, and we alternately strolled and sprinted in her wake.
We were, it seemed, nearly to Greenwich when, hurrying up to a corner, we peered forward and caught the glimpse of a disappearing cloak.
“Gone to earth, by God. I thought she’d walk to Dover,” muttered Holmes. “You stay here. Follow if she reappears. Drop crumbs or something. I’ll place Billy on the corner back there, in case of a back door.” He faded into the background.
A conscientious bobby can be one of the most irritating things on the face of London. One such found me after less than five minutes, took a look at my young man’s clothing and long henna hair, and began to give me a hard time. I took my eye off the street, fixed him with a condescending stare, and spoke down my nose in my most imperious of plummy tones.
“My good man, I should inform you that you are speaking to Margaret Farthingale Hall. Lady Margaret Hall. What you see before you is the tail end of a long and not terribly amusing party that Jeffie Norton—the American film star?—held yesterday night. A costume party, as you can see. I suppose I ought to be gratified that you find my costume so intriguing, but I am beginning to find the game just the least bit tedious, and I fear the costume is proving less exotic than I had anticipated. My escort for the evening, when I last saw him, had the more interesting costume, a nineties number with feathers and sequins—too, too Folies Bergère, don’t you know? You haven’t seen him, I don’t suppose? No, that’s too much to hope for. Knowing him, he is waiting around the corner until you leave. He’s a dear boy, but so conservative without champagne to keep up his nerve. So, if you’ll just run along, I shall see if I can coax him out of the woodwork.” I turned a dismissive back.
An older constable might well have persisted, but I had intimidated this one into believing the voice and the attitude rather than the clothing, and after issuing a stern warning, he left me to my vigil.
After ten minutes, I was beginning to wonder how long my constable’s rounds took him. After fifteen,
Holmes’ head appeared unexpectedly, protruding from the doorway into which Margery had gone. I hurried forward and slipped inside.
There was a body just inside the door, bound and gagged.
“The only guard?” I whispered.
“There was another at the back. Help me carry this one out of the way.”
I picked up his feet, then nearly dropped him as I saw his features.
“Holmes, this was the other man from the house in Essex.”
“Good,” was his only remark, but he showed no gentleness when we dumped the body in an adjoining office room.
“She’s upstairs,” Holmes whispered. “Second floor, by the sound of it. The place seems almost deserted.”
“Perhaps they’ve all gone to church.”
The building was a warehouse, which seemed to contain little but great coils of rope and bales of rags. Two lorries stood near the gates, but as a business, it seemed none too prosperous. There were voices coming from upstairs, wordless but angry. As we went carefully up, they sorted themselves out into a man’s rumble and a woman’s shrill, and closer still, I knew them both. The woman was Margery, although I’d never heard her sound like this. The male voice was that of Claude Franklin: my captor; Margery’s husband.
I flushed, hearing him, and felt abruptly how very ill and tired I was. I must have sagged slightly, because Holmes’ hand was on my elbow.
“Take the revolver,” he said, holding the thing out to me. I reached for it automatically, then pushed it back into his hand.
“You keep it, Holmes,” I whispered. “I’d shoot my own foot.”
He slid it back under his belt and we began to creep up the stairs until we were on a level with the arguing voices. They didn’t hear any of the creaks the old stairs made, and there seemed to be no other people in the building.
“—could you possibly think I wouldn’t find out, Claude?” Margery was saying. “I suppose I’ve been incredibly stupid, but when I heard Friday that Mary was held captive, and then her will—That’s why you’ve been away, all this time, isn’t it? Were you planning on . . . Would you actually have killed her? For her money?” Her voice rose with incredulity.