“Mrs Rogers, I asked you to come down here today so I could take a statement from you concerning your movements on Wednesday the twenty-second of August, the night your sister, Dorothy Ruskin, was killed by an automobile, and on the night of the twenty-fourth, when the house belonging to Mr Holmes and his wife was broken into and certain objects were stolen.”
“Inspector Lestrade.” The corpulent solicitor’s voice informed us that he was a busy man and found this unnecessary intrusion on his time rather annoying. “Am I to understand that you are charging my client with murder and theft?”
“Suspected murder and burglary are being investigated, Mr Coogan, and we have reason to believe that your client may be able to assist us in this investigation.” Lestrade was cautious in his choice of words, but he would make a poor poker player. Everyone in the room knew what a sparse hand he held. Erica Rogers, on the other hand, was completely inscrutable.
“Inspector, my client has no objection to helping in a criminal investigation, so long as she is not the subject being investigated. As far as I can see, you have little to connect her with Miss Ruskin’s death, save their blood relationship. Is that not the case?”
“Not entirely, no.”
“Then what evidence have you, Inspector? I believe my client has the right to know that, don’t you?”
“I’ll tell you what evidence they have, Timothy: They have nothing, nothing at all.” Mrs Rogers’s voice was as hard and as scornful as her old vocal cords could make it, and I saw the young constable go white and drop his pencil, while my hand scribbled automatically on. “They have a box of wrecked parts from the front of some motorcar that was brought into my grandson Jason’s shop for repair, and they have the story of a woman who was drunk at the time but miraculously recovered her memory after being mesmerised, who described a person fitting Jason’s general description. That is nothing, Chief Inspector. I had no reason to kill my sister, now did I? Yes, I thought her digging holes in the Holy Land was a waste of time, but I can’t see you taking that in front of a judge and jury as some kind of a motive for murder. And as for the two of you”—she swung around to where Holmes and I sat and stabbed at us with her eyes—“I wanted you here so you could see just what your prying and nosing about get you: nothing. You, young lady, though I don’t know that lady is the right word for you, you come poking your nose into my sitting room, pretending to be all sympathetic and helpful. You should be home scrubbing your floors or doing something useful.
“And as for you, Mr Basil, or Sherlock Holmes, or whoever you are, I hope you’re proud of yourself, the way you wheedled your way in my door, ate my food, slept in my shed, took my money, and then used my generosity to spy on me. Can you imagine how I felt when Mr Coogan here shows me a photograph of Mr Sherlock Holmes and I see it’s old Mr Basil, who’s been working in my potato patch? Inside my house? It made me feel dirty, it did, and I have half a mind to have you arrested for it.”
“I beg your pardon, madam,” broke in Holmes, in his most supercilious manner, “but with what do you imagine I could be charged? Impersonating an officer, in my ancient tweeds? Hardly. Fraud? With what did I defraud you? You hired me to do work; I did the work, at, I might say, considerably lower wages than I generally pay my own workers and in considerably poorer conditions. No, madam, I broke no laws, and had you consulted your expensive legal counsellor before threatening me, he would have told you that.” His voice turned cold. “Now, madam, I suggest that you stop wasting the time of these officers of the law and continue with your statement.”
Her eyes narrowed as she realised what she had been harbouring in the unshaven person of Mr Basil. She glanced at Lestrade and Mr Coogan, then down at her hands, which held no knitting.
“I have nothing to say,” she said sullenly.
“I’m afraid I shall have to insist, Mrs Rogers,” said Lestrade.
“Then I want them out of here,” and she jerked her head at us.
“Mrs Rogers, you asked for them to be here,” protested Lestrade. “You insisted on it.”
“Yes, well, I’ve had my say, and now I want them gone.”
Lestrade looked at us helplessly, and I folded my notebook and stood up.
“Don’t worry about it, Chief Inspector,” I said. “You can’t be held responsible for the whims of other people. Or for their lack of manners,” I added sweetly. “Good day, Mrs Rogers, Mr Coogan. I shall be down the hall, Chief Inspector, borrowing a typewriter.”
As we went through the door, Mrs Rogers fired her final peevish shot at Holmes.
“And you made a rotten job of the wallpaper, too!”
IT TOOK ONLY a few minutes to type a transcription of my shorthand, and it took Lestrade only slightly longer to receive Mrs Rogers’s statement. He was sitting slumped at his desk, staring at it morosely, when we returned to his office. He straightened abruptly, glanced at Holmes and away, and fumbled with unnecessary attention at lighting a cigarette.
“How could she have known our evidence? Or lack of it?” He said finally.
“Did you leave her alone with that young constable who was taking notes?” enquired Holmes.
“He sat with her on the way down from Cambridgeshire, but—Good Lord, he told her? But how could he be so stupid?”
“With Mrs Erica Rogers, I shouldn’t wager that you wouldn’t have told her yourself, if she started in on you. She’s a very clever woman. Don’t be too hard on him.”
“I’ll have him back on the streets, I will.” He seized his anger like a shield and would not look at us.
“What of the two men?” I interrupted impatiently. “Holmes said you had arrested them. What were their statements like?”
“Actually, we, er, we’ve decided not to arrest them just yet. Yes, I know, I thought we would, but we’ve let them go for the time being. Maybe they’ll get cocky and hang themselves. There was nothing in those statements, nothing at all. The two of them were out both those nights, testing the engines on two cars. No alibis whatsoever, but they shut their jaws like a pair of clams after they recited their story, and they’ll say nothing more.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Jason Rogers I met,” commented Holmes.
“It’s the old granny’s doing, I’m sure of it. She’s a cunning old witch, is that one, and she’s put the fear of God into him to shut his trap. She was right about the need for a clear motive, though how she figured it out, I cannot think. Must have been her—Coogan didn’t seem to have brains enough to pound sand down a rat hole. Without either a motive or harder evidence than buttons in a burn pile, five hairs that bear a passing resemblance to theirs, some smashed auto parts with a tiny bit of dried blood, and the fact that she got rid of a shelf full of murder mysteries, we’d be fools to give it a try. The only thing that’s the least bit firm is the mud on your ladder, which matches the wet patch outside her potting shed, but even Coogan wouldn’t have much trouble making a jury laugh at that. I’d rather go for Miss Russell’s colonel, or Mr Mycroft’s Arabs. I won’t make an arrest yet, but we’ll keep a very close eye on those boys. They may try to sell the stuff they took from you. If granny keeps an eye on them, they won’t, but we can always hope. We’ll get them, Mr Holmes, eventually. We know they did it, and we’ll get them. Just, well, not yet.” He ran out of words, then looked up from the intent study of his hands like a schoolboy before the headmaster, mingled apology and dread on his face, and shrugged his shoulders. “Without a motive, we’d be fools to make an arrest, and we’ve been over the inheritance with a nit comb—no insurance, no big expenses to make anyone need cash now. Wouldn’t seem to make any difference if Dorothy Ruskin died now or twenty years from now. Her stuff from Palestine should arrive in the next week; we’ll go through that. May find a new will or a handful of diamonds in there.” His attempt at laughter trailed off, and Holmes stood up and clapped him on the shoulder with an uncharacteristic bonhomie.
“Of course we see that, Lestrade. Never mind, you’ll get them eventually. Pati
ence is a necessary virtue. Keep us informed, would you?”
We collected our possessions from Mycroft, and we slunk home.
PART SIX
WEDNESDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 1923–SATURDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 1923
The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.
—THE FIRST LETTER OF PAUL TO THE CORINTHIANS 3:6
TWENTY-THREE
psi
IT WAS A sorry pair of detectives who rode the train south towards Eastbourne. I felt dreary and drained and utterly without interest in matters criminal or academic. Holmes, controlled as ever, looked merely determined, but there lay about him the distinct odour of brutally quenched campfire.
With an effort, I pulled myself out of this stupor. Oh goodness, Russell, I expostulated, it’s hardly the end of the world, or even the end of the case. A temporary check in the hunt, no more. Lestrade will surely…
I had not realised I was speaking aloud until Holmes shot me a frigid glance.
“Yes, Russell? Lestrade will surely what? Oh yes, he will surely keep his ear to the ground, but he will also certainly be caught up in these other cases of his, and time will pass, and if he does lay hands on the link of evidence he so desires, it will be only through sheer luck.”
“For heaven’s sake, Holmes, she’s just an old granny, not a Napoléon of crime.”
I should have known that the phrase would tip him over the edge into an icy rage.
“It’s a damned good thing for Lestrade’s lot that she’s too much a middle-class English woman to turn her hands to crime. Napoléon went to war, but she’s satisfied herself with one brief, self-righteous campaign, and now she’s captured her goal—whatever the deuces it might have been—she’s entrenched. The police will never prise her out on their own. No, I ought never to have listened to you and Mycroft. If we’d kept Scotland Yard out of it, I might have got to her without giving warning, but now it’s going to mean weeks, months of delicate, painstaking, cold, and uncomfortable work, and I tell you honestly, Russell, I’m feeling too old and tired to relish the thought very much.”
His last bleak phrase deflated any reciprocal anger I might have summoned. I sat while he fished a crumpled packet of Gold Flakes from his pocket and lit one. He looked out the window; I looked at the cigarette.
“Since when have you taken to gaspers again?” I asked mildly, more mildly than I felt, seeing the sucks and puffs of nervous anger.
“Since I first laid eyes upon Erica Rogers. She’s not the only one with premonitions.” That cut it. I took a deep breath.
“Holmes, look. We will get her. Give me a week to tie things up in Oxford, and then we can go after them. Or to Paris, or Palestine, if you think there’s anything there.”
He snatched the cigarette from his lips and dashed it to the floor, ground it under his heel, and immediately took out the packet again.
“No, Russell, I’ll do this myself. I can hardly expect you to sacrifice your firstborn for the cause.”
I was furious and crushed and obviously superfluous in the compartment, so rather than making matters worse, I left and walked up the train to stand staring out the window at the gathering clouds and sea drizzle.
This was by no means the first failure Holmes had had, but it rankled to be defeated by a woman of no great wits, her lumpish grandson, and a small-time crook. Holmes, too, had been touched by Dorothy Ruskin, and it was hard not to feel that we had let her down. The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.
I knew, however, that what disturbed him most was the thought that he had failed me. He knew the affection and respect I had had for Dorothy Ruskin, and it could only have been devastating to know that all his skills were not enough. I did not hold him to blame, and I had tried to make it clear that I did not, but nonetheless, for the first time he had on some level failed me.
However, I had to admit that he had been right, yet again, back there in the compartment: Were I to lay down my academic career, even temporarily, in order to expiate my guilt and bolster his ego, it could well prove damaging to the strange creature that was our marriage. On the other hand, were I to lay the books aside out of my own free choice—well, that was another matter entirely.
I had known Holmes for a third of my life and had long since accustomed myself to the almost instantaneous workings of his mental processes, but even after two years of the intimacy of marriage, I was able to feel surprise at the unerring accuracy of his emotional judgement. Holmes the cold, the reasoner, Holmes the perfect thinking machine, was, in fact, as burningly passionate as any religious fanatic. He had never been a man to accept the right action for the wrong reason, not from me, at any rate: He demanded absolute unity in thought and deed.
Oh, damn the man, I grumbled. Why couldn’t he just be manipulated by pretty words the way other husbands were?
THE TRAIN SLOWED. I climbed down and walked back along the platform to help Holmes with the bags. We got the car running, I drove back to the cottage, and we went about our separate tasks, with barely a word exchanged—not in anger, but in emptiness. He went out late in the afternoon. After an hour or so, I laced on my boots against the wet grass and followed. I found him on the cliff overlooking the ocean, one leg dangling free, the smell of a particularly rancid brand of tobacco trailing downwind. We sat in silence for some time, then walked home.
That evening, he picked at his dinner, drank four glasses of wine, and ignored the accumulation of newspapers spilling from the table near the door. Later, he sat staring into the fire, sucking at an empty pipe. He had aged since that fragrant August afternoon so long ago, when we had drunk tea and honey wine and walked the Downs with a woman who would be dead in a few hours.
“Have we overlooked anything?” I had not meant to speak, but the words lay in the room now.
For a long moment, he did not respond; then he sighed and tapped his teeth with the stem of the pipe.
“We may have done. I don’t know yet. I begin to doubt my own judgement. Not overlooking things used to be my métier,” he said bitterly, “but then they do say it’s notoriously difficult to see what one has overlooked until one trips over it.”
Like a taut wire on a street corner, I thought, and thrust it away with words.
“She told me that afternoon that it was the most pleasurable day she could remember for a long time, coming here. At least we gave her that.” I shut my eyes, encouraging the brandy to relax my shoulder and my tongue, to push back the silence with a tumbling stream of reminiscence. “I wonder if she knew it was coming. Not that she seemed apprehensive, but she mentioned the past several times, and I shouldn’t have thought that like her. She used to come here as a child, she told me. She was also fond of you. Perhaps fond is not the right word,” I said, though when I looked, he didn’t seem to be listening. “Impressed, perhaps. Respectful. She was intrigued by you. What was it she said? ‘One of the three sensible men I’ve ever met,’ I think it was, grouping you with a French winemaker and a polygamous sheikh.” I smiled to myself at the memory.
“I’ll never forget meeting her at her tell outside Jericho, coming up over the edge and there’s this little white-haired English woman glaring up at us from the bottom of the trench, as if we had come to steal her potsherds. And that house of hers, that incredible hotchpotch of stone and baked-earth bricks and flattened petrol drums, and inside a cross between a Bedouin tent and an English cottage, with great heaps of things in the process of being classified and sketched and a silver tea service and a paraffin heater and block-and-board shelving sagging with books and gewgaws. She had a handful of exquisite pieces, didn’t she? Like that ivory puzzle ball.” I sipped my brandy, so lost in the memory of those exciting few weeks in Palestine that I could almost smell the dusty night air of Jericho.
“Do you remember that ball? Odd, wasn’t it, that she should have a Chinese artefact? Such a lovely thing it was, with that pearl buried in it. She ment
ioned it, come to think of it, when I was driving her back to the station. You made quite an impression on her, the way your hands seemed to figure it out by themselves while you carried on with some story about Tibet. I wonder what happened to it? It looked so incongruous on those bare planks, like the silver tea set complete with spirit burner pouring Earl Grey tea through the silver strainer into rough clay—”
I stopped abruptly. Something had changed in the room, and I sat up startled, half expecting to see someone standing in the doorway, but there was no one. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped the split brandy from my hand and the knee of my trousers, then took up the glass again to settle back into the cushions, but when I turned to my companion to make some sheepish remark about the state of my nerves, the words strangled unborn. Meeting his eyes was like brushing against a live electrical wire, a humming shock so sudden, my heart jerked. He had not moved. In fact, he sat so still in his chair that he looked as if he might never move again, but his eyes glittered out from the hardened brow and cheekbones, intent and alive.
“What did you say, Russell?” he asked quietly.