“No, I don’t. I admit to a certain, shall we say, uneasiness about walking into a dark cottage. That blood on the kerb…disturbed me. But it is my house now, and I find myself distinctly resentful at the thought of being made afraid to enter it. No, I do not wish to stay at the farm tonight. However, I should like to stop and pick up a shotgun. It would give me great pleasure to deposit a load of bird shot into the backside of anyone who had anything to do with Miss Ruskin’s death.”
The seat beside me began to shake oddly, and I looked over, to see the gleam of white teeth: Holmes laughing silently.
“That’s my Russell. Let us stop and find you a mighty blunderbuss, and go liberate our castle.”
THERE WAS, OF course, no one there. With a pounding pulse, fighting down the all-too-vivid memories of the night four years earlier when Holmes and I had nearly died in an ambush inside this house, I stood tensely for what seemed to be hours, watching two of the cottage’s doors while Holmes entered the third. No prey was flushed, and soon the entire cottage was blazing with light and Holmes was standing at the front door. Fingers clumsy with relief, I broke the shotgun and went to join him.
Since that morning, I had seen the dead body of a woman I respected and liked, had found evidence of the fact that her death was murder, seen her blood on the street, batted back and forth about London, and spent several hours driving country roads, topped off with twenty minutes outside of a dark house tensely awaiting the sounds of violence. It was now far after midnight, and I stood at the door and looked in at the desolation and the ruin that was my home.
Not one book remained on its shelf. Chairs were turned upside down, their springs exposed, vomiting stuffing onto the floor. Desk drawers had been methodically emptied out onto the middle of the floor, where the carpets had been pulled up. Most of the baseboard was lying loose, prised away from the wall by a crowbar I recognised from the toolshed. Pictures off the walls, the contents of baskets and boxes jumbled together, sewing thread and tobacco, case notes, newspaper clippings, and firewood all lay in a huge mound in the centre of the room. Even the curtains had been ripped from their rods and tossed carelessly on top. I had not been in San Francisco during the great earthquake, but I had seen photographs of the results of that catastrophe, and that was precisely what the room looked like. A huge impersonal giant had shaken the room vigorously, and left it.
“So. I take it they did not find what they were looking for and took it out, as you said, on the furnishings.” I was numb, too shocked to be upset, and my voice was matter-of-fact. I was also feeling the first stirrings of rage, a deep, hot bubble that grew and seethed and steadied me. This is my home, I kept thinking. How dare they do this to my home? I moved around the room, stepping over a fireplace poker and some manuscript pages from the book Holmes was writing. I picked up a few books, straightened bent pages, placed them on the shelf. I reached down and took a photograph of my mother from under the coal scuttle. It had been roughly wrenched from its frame and then dropped. I put it on another shelf. Footsteps came from upstairs and Holmes appeared at the doorway, white feathers clinging to his trouser legs.
“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing, Russell? That is evidence, and we’ll need to look at it in the morning. Not tonight. It would be exceedingly foolish to examine the place without light, and the house batteries would run down before we got halfway through. It will have to wait until morning. It also looks as though we shall need to make use of your farm after all. There are no beds remaining here.”
PART TWO
SATURDAY, 25 AUGUST 1923–MONDAY, 27 AUGUST 1923
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
—GOETHE
EIGHT
theta
SATURDAY MORNING DAWNED clear, but I did not witness it. Long hours later, the growing strength of the light outside penetrated even the north-facing room I was in and tugged at my brain, and I began to crawl towards consciousness. I rolled over to greet the occupant of the other side of the bed and nearly fell out onto the floor. Holmes was missing. This in itself was not unusual, but that the other half of the bed seemed to be missing as well woke me. I raised myself up on my elbows and surveyed the room.
For a moment, my surroundings fell on a blank mind. This was my old room, the north garret room in the house dominated by my aunt, my only refuge from her presence. This was my old narrow bed. Why was I here? Where was Holmes?
Holmes. Beds. Gutted mattresses. Upturned bookshelves and Dorothy Ruskin. I flung back the bedclothes and found my watch. Nearly eight o’clock! Ignoring yesterday’s unsuitable clothes, I pulled old friends from drawers and wardrobe, jabbed pins into my hair, and ran downstairs, to find Patrick frying bacon on the old black cookstove.
“Good morning, Miss Mary,” he said, using his name for me since I was fifteen. “I drove Mr Holmes over to the cottage at first light. He asked would you please take some hot coffee when you go, and my camera. The thermos bottle is on the table,” he added. “I’m just making you some bacon sandwiches, and Tillie boiled up some eggs before she left. Give me a ring if you need anything else,” he shouted after me.
If anything, the cottage looked worse by light of day. Holmes had used his hours well, though, and when I came in, I found various chalk marks on the floor and walls in preparation for the police photographer. I greeted him with a greasy sandwich, and we found two relatively undamaged chairs.
“Has Lestrade rung yet?” I asked.
“He should be here in an hour or thereabouts. They received another telephone call, from one of Miss Ruskin’s friends at the British Museum who had seen the police notice, but Lestrade agreed to keep the case in his hands until he’d seen me.”
“He’ll hold back from notifying the sister?”
“He was unhappy and sceptical, but he said he would not give it to Cambridgeshire until he’d seen the body and heard what I had to say.”
The body. Life achieving a distance from the ugly fact of violent death. The thought must have shown on my face.
“Best to keep the mind clear, Russell. Emotion can confuse matters all too easily.”
“I know.” I pushed it away and waved my sandwich at the room. “How could Lestrade be sceptical with this?”
“Unfortunately, it looks like simple burglary with a touch of vandalism thrown in.”
“Burglary? Oh God, what did they take? Not your violin? And the safe?” The violin was a Stradivarius, bought ages before from an ignorant junkman at a ridiculously low price. The safe, well hidden, held a number of small valuables and appallingly toxic substances.
“No, the violin they took from its case and threw down, before ripping out the lining of the case. A scratch is all. They missed the safe. They did get your mother’s silver, Mrs Hudson’s jewellery, and some treasury notes that were in a drawer. Fortunately, the vandalism was not too vicious, mostly throwing things about.”
I brushed off the crumbs and swallowed the last of my coffee from a cracked cup.
“To work, then. Shall I take a few photographs before I start putting things away?”
“Lestrade might appreciate it. You’ll have to give them to him to develop, though. Not much has survived of the darkroom.”
Seventy-five minutes later, I had restored a quarter of the books to their places, dragged two disembowelled chairs out into the garden, nailed up a piece of wood across the broken kitchen window, and was starting on the baseboards when the inspector’s car drove up.
“Where do all these flipping hay wagons come from?” he shouted jovially from the open door, and then: “My, my, my, what have we here? Making yourself unpopular with the village toughs, Mr Holmes?”
“Hello, Lestrade. Good to see you again.” Holmes climbed down from the ladder and dusted off his hands. I said nothing, as I had a mouthful of nails, but nodded and went back to plyi
ng my hammer on the baseboard.
“Mr Holmes, you said you had evidence of a murder for me to look at. Have you a dead body under that pile of rubbish?”
“Not here, Lestrade, this is purely secondary. If you’d like to have your man set to in the kitchen, when he’s through we can offer you a cup of tea. I’ve marked the few possible prints, though I think we’ll find that our visitors last night wore gloves. Here, Lestrade, take this chair; it still has four legs.” He did not see, or ignored, the look of patient humour that passed between the two men and the photographer’s shrug before he took his bulky equipment into Mrs Hudson’s normally spotless kitchen.
Lestrade settled gingerly into the chair and pulled out a notebook. Holmes returned to his armfuls of papers, I to my nails.
“Right, then, Mr Holmes. Would you care to tell me what this mess of yours has to do with Miss Dorothy Ruskin, and what the deuces a ‘demeter archaeopteryx’ is?”
Holmes looked at Lestrade as if the man had begun to spout Hamlet’s soliloquy, and then suddenly his face cleared.
“Ah yes, the telephone connexion was a bit rough, wasn’t it? No, the phrase was ‘amateur archaeologist,’ Lestrade. Miss Ruskin’s passion, the archaeology of the Holy Land.”
“I see,” said Lestrade, who quite obviously did not. He went on, with the air of licking a pencil. “And Miss Ruskin was a friend of yours?”
“More of Russell’s, I should say. She came to see us Wednesday, gave Russell a box and a manuscript, stayed to tea. She then returned to London and got herself killed.” His voice drifted off as he studied one of the pages in his hand. Lestrade waited with growing impatience.
“And then?” he finally prompted.
“Eh? Oh, yes. We know only the outlines of ‘what then.’ She returned to her hotel room, exchanged her bag for her briefcase and went to dinner with a man who didn’t know her, left the restaurant, walked into a simple but effective trap, and died. Her briefcase was stolen and early on Thursday her hotel room searched, and the following evening they came here and searched this house, with rather more enthusiasm and violence than they had talent.”
“They?”
“You are looking for at least three individuals,” Holmes said absently, his attention again absorbed by the paper. “Two of them stand five feet nine or ten inches, thirteen stone or thereabouts; at least one of them has black hair, both are right-handed, and one of them fancies himself as a flashy dresser, with a tendency towards the extreme in footwear, but betrays himself by purchasing inferior-quality goods—hence the dents in the floor”—he gestured vaguely towards a clear patch of boards—“and by the fact that he bites his fingernails. The other is a man of simpler tastes, wearing new boots with rounded toes, a brown tweed suit, and—kindly note, Russell—a dark blue woollen knit cap. One of them sports a neck scarf of white cashmere and a camel-hair overcoat—probably Pointed Toes. Of the third party, the director of the operation, I can say only that he has unfashionably long grey hair and displayed an entirely unwarranted confidence in the abilities of his confederates by remaining in the car while the house was being ransacked.” He rattled off the final information in an uninterested rush and turned to wave the paper at me. “I say, Russell, do you remember that forgery case we handled two years ago? I’m suddenly struck by the fact—”
“Mr Holmes!” Lestrade bristled in irritation, and Holmes looked at him in surprise.
“Yes, Lestrade?”
“Who are these men?”
“I’ve just told you.”
“But who are they?”
“My dear Lestrade, I bowed beneath the concerted authority of the only two people in the world, aside from my sovereign, who have any influence over me, under the insistence that Scotland Yard ought to be given a chance to prove themselves capable of hunting down the murderers of Dorothy Ruskin. I have told you who they are. You need only find them.” He turned imperiously away from the near-frantic police detective, shot me a glance that was perilously close to a wink, and dropped to the floor amidst his papers, his right knee tucked under his chin.
Lestrade looked torn between tearing his thinning hair in despair and storming angrily out. I relented and explained what he had seen but not truly observed.
“They were looking for a piece of paper, Inspector Lestrade. When they didn’t find it amongst her things, they came here, possibly assuming that she was bringing it to us.”
“What sort of paper?”
“That, we don’t know yet.”
“Then how do you know it was a piece of paper?”
Holmes made a rude noise. I ignored him.
“The way they searched, both here and in her hotel room. The books were shaken out before being dumped, the pictures taken from their frames, carpets pulled up, our various files carefully gone through and a number of pages stolen.”
“But you said she left you some papers?”
“A single manuscript page, but it’s made of papyrus. It wouldn’t have fit into a book without being folded, which would damage it.”
“Would they have known that?”
“Lestrade,” exclaimed Holmes from his nest of débris on the floor, “that was a most perceptive question. Russell, I do believe a cup of tea would come most welcome to all concerned and that Mr Ellis is finished in the kitchen. Would you be so good…”
I accepted my charge and waded out to the kitchen, where I scraped a handful of tea leaves and some sugar from the floor, found a kettle, though no lid, and four mostly unbroken cups. By the time I had found the bread under a saucepan and trimmed the grimy outside from a piece of cheese, the situation was beginning to amuse me. I hunted for an unbroken jar of relish or pickle, discovered triumphantly a large bottle of pickled onions, and thus assembled a rather strange but quite edible meal.
“Holmes?” I called.
“Yes, Russell.”
“I’d like to get this cleared up before Mrs Hudson returns. She’ll be back tomorrow, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I ring Tillie and see if she can send over a pair of her girls to help? Or would you prefer to keep this out of the mouths of the village gossips?”
“I’d rather, if you think we can do it ourselves.”
“Probably a good idea. I could ask Patrick to come over with Tillie tonight for a while. That might help, and they wouldn’t talk.”
I poured the boiling water over the leaves, ignoring a few stray sultanas that clung to the tea, and took the tray into the sitting room. I didn’t like the look on Lestrade’s face, and I glanced quickly at Holmes for confirmation.
“Yes, Russell, the good inspector has his doubts.”
“Now, Mr Holmes, that’s not entirely true. If you say there’s something in this, I’ll believe you. What I said was that I’m going to have trouble convincing my superiors that there’s a case here. An old lady has an accident and your house is turned upside down, but deliberate murder? It’s a damned awkward—pardon me, Miss Russell—it’s an awkward way of committing murder, with a car. Takes some explaining to do.”
“I say, Lestrade, you are coming along nicely. That’s twice in the past half hour,” Holmes began, but I smothered his words with anger.
“Somebody killed her, you can’t deny that, and drove off.”
“Oh yes, no doubt about that, and that’s where it’ll lie unless I can take it further. Look, it’s like this. We’re badly overstretched at the moment, and we’ve had no fewer than three cases in the last year that have cost us the earth in time and money, with nothing to show—one turned out to be suicide, one an accident, and the third we finally just had to let go for lack of any hard evidence. There’s been no little criticism about the Yard, and from up high, too. We’re all walking about on tiptoes down there.”
“You will go talk with her sister, though?”
“Now, that’s another thing. Why all this bother about her sister? It’s not right, my delaying her being notified like this. Normally, one of the Cambridge fo
rce’d go and tell her. And aside from that, how’d you know the letter was from her? There was only her address on the envelope. Opening letters, now, Mr Holmes, that’s an offence. Interfering with the post.”
“Why, Lestrade, who else could it have been from but the sister she’d been staying with? We weren’t interfering with it; on the contrary, we were making absolutely certain that you received it. In fact, you owe us a favour for bringing it to your attention so promptly.”
The younger man fell on this red herring, led astray by Holmes’ deliberate air of bland innocence. His narrow face pulled in suspiciously.
“What sort of a favour?”
“I want you to take Russell with you when you go to see Erica Ruskin.”
I was surprised but said nothing.
“I can’t do that, Mr Holmes.”
“Of course you can. Besides, you should have a woman there. Women are so much better at comforting the bereaved, don’t you find?” He shot me a warning look, and I closed my mouth so hard, my teeth hurt. “Lestrade, you know you’d have to take another person with you anyway. Russell’s not strictly to the rules, but call her a consultant.”
Lestrade looked as if he’d rather call me something less polite, and I could see that he was not impressed with my father’s smudged shirt and the rat’s nest of hair atop my grimy face. He was momentarily forgetting that he had seen me in a number of guises, ranging from a lady of the evening to a blind beggar and a chic young heiress, and once as Dr Watson. No, come to think of it, he had come in later on that particular case. Nonetheless, surely he should trust me to dress the part.
“I will change my clothes and look presentable, Inspector, if you will give me twenty minutes,” I said mildly.
“Better get started, Russell,” said Holmes. “The good gentlemen are nearly finished here.”
“Now just one minute. I haven’t said I’d go to see the woman, now have I? I’ve got work up to my ears already. Why should I jaunt on up to the wilds of Cambridgeshire and fight the hay wagons just so your wife can watch me give an old lady some bad news about her sister? Be reasonable, Mr Holmes.”