Justice Hall (37 page)

“Give my regards to the Qs” was all he said. He, after all, should have to make a detour to one of his bolt-holes to exchange his own clothing, so I could not complain.

We took our seats on the train and spent the trip with the Hughenfort diary on our knees, but made few notes. We arrived in London, claimed the bags we’d left there, and went our separate ways.

My taxi deposited me in front of the modernistic block of flats in Bloomsbury in which I had taken a furnished suite of rooms several years before, and somehow never bothered to replace with a more permanent pied-à-terre. Or a more comfortable one—I always forgot, when I’d been away for a while, how awful the place actually was, all chrome tubes and glass. It had matched perfectly the persona I was assuming at the time of the original let, but was, I realised suddenly, a ridiculous place to maintain on the off chance I might need to act the social butterfly in the future. Too, the furniture the actual owners had chosen was beginning to look decidedly out of date. Time for a change, I thought, and dropped my bags on the floor.

A gentle knock followed by the rattle of a key in the lock told me the doorman had informed my housekeeping couple of my arrival. I greeted the Quimbys, husband and wife, and apologised for not warning them of my arrival.

“In fact,” I said, “I asked the doorman to let you be. I’m only here for a change of clothing; no need to turn up the radiators and buy milk for that.”

But Mrs Q was already unloading a picnic hamper to make tea, and I submitted to her sense of propriety.

There was hot water for a bath, and the clothes hanging in the large and ornate bedroom were free of moth and must. I sorted through them, mildly grumbling at the change in hem-lengths over the past two years, and noticed that they had been recently gone over with brush and iron. Mrs Q had to be bored, caring for a household of ghosts, but I did not know that I could do much to change that, not with this place. I couldn’t even ask how they spent their days, since both would be offended at my concern. It simply Wasn’t Done.

The next time I passed through the kitchen I put my head around the corner into the portion given over to a butler’s pantry. Q shot to his feet, a polishing cloth in one hand and one of my shoes in the other.

“Does your wife’s cousin Freddy Bell still keep his finger on London properties?” I asked him.

“Well, yes, I believe he does, mum.”

“Good. I’d like to get out of this place, set up an establishment of my own. Maybe you and he could put your heads together—along with Mrs Quimby, of course—and see if there’s anything on the market just now. House or flat, but larger than this, with quarters for you and Mrs Q. We’ll probably decorate it ourselves—and
not
like this place.”

A whisper of approval slipped past his professional face at my final phrase; I gave him a sympathetic smile and left him to his polishing.

It took me a while on the telephone (an instrument of white and gilt) but I succeeded in locating the woman I sought. She was a dispatch rider in London at the time I had met her, a suffragette doing war service, but she had been a driver in Belgium until a stray shell had hit her ambulance, killing the other VAD attendant and the patients they were transporting. She herself had been made deaf by the explosion, and although a certain amount of hearing had returned, she blithely declared that near-deafness was an advantage to a London driver. Having ridden pillion with her once and been fully aware of the curses on our trail, I could only agree.

Gwyneth Claypool was, her colleague who answered the telephone told me, currently in a meeting with the head teachers of several schools, which was due to finish at four o’clock but would probably go on until closer to five. She gave me the address and rang off. I raided my wardrobe for a dress suitable both for confronting feminists and sitting in the women’s dining room at Simpson’s, had Q ring for a taxi, and left, promising to return for further discussions on the house question as soon as I could.

London was cold and inhospitable, a dreary rain splashing against the taxi’s curtains and dribbling off of the passing hats and umbrellas. At the address I had been given, an assistant guarding the door refused to let me out of the freezing-cold entrance foyer and wouldn’t think of disturbing the meeting with a message. So I took a seat in the least draughty corner I could find, and slowly congealed inside my fur-lined coat.

Gwyneth’s voice half an hour later crackled through the building and rescued me from my icy perch. It had always been loud, I suspect even before her deafness set in, and the silent building quivered in reaction; the tinkle of shattering icicles seemed to follow it. She left the meeting as no doubt she had begun it, commanding action.

“—and I think you’ll find the situation much improved. Girls that age need a goal, or they seek out all kinds of trouble. We’ll meet again in the new year, see how it’s coming along.”

I unfolded myself from my cramped huddle and stumbled forward on numb feet to intercept her. She spotted me, squinted in uncertainty; then her face opened in a wide smile and she boomed a greeting across the echoing space.

“Hello, Gwyn,” I returned.

“Mary! What are you doing here? Looking for me? But why in heaven’s name didn’t you come and find me—you must be in an advanced stage of ice cube-ism. Come along; we’ll find a warm corner with drinks in it and bemoan the state of the world.”

Merely being in Gwyneth Claypool’s presence tended to have a warming effect on a person, even before she thrust into my hand a drink she’d bullied the barman into constructing. It looked like pond scum, smelt of the Indies, and went down with a jolt that tingled the toes and lifted the scalp.

“Lord, Gwyn!” I gasped. “What is this?”

“Rum butter. Does the trick, doesn’t it? Wish I’d known about it in 1914—if we’d issued the men rum in this form, they’d have overrun the Germans by Christmas.”

I loosened my coat and removed my gloves and hat, and set about getting the drink inside me, a quarter-teaspoon at a sip, while Gwyn and I caught each other up on our lives since we’d last met nearly three years earlier.

“Still married?” she shouted, raising the eyebrows of the other customers.

“Indeed I am. And you?”

“No time, no time for all the nonsense.”

So I asked her what she did have time for and she told me of her many projects related to the rights of women, and we talked of that and this and of times past and the feebleness of the present. No, she no longer sped around London on her racing motor-cycle, she’d been run over by a lorry one day when she hadn’t heard it coming and her mother made her stop. And no, she wasn’t hurt, a broken wrist was all but Mum was seventy now and anxious, so the motor-cycle resided in the country—or rather the original machine’s replacement did—where she could roar up and down to her heart’s content.

Eventually our drinks were empty, seconds refused, and she asked me what I’d wanted of her.

“I need to find one of the VAD drivers who was serving in France in 1918, somewhere west of Reims. She might’ve been French, although what she’d have been doing fetching our lot I can’t think. The only name I have for her is Hélène, and even that may be a nick-name. She had green eyes and was tall; that’s all I know.”

“Green eyes sounds like Charlie, but she was a Scottish girl, or was she American?”

“French-Canadian, maybe?”

“She could have been. Yes, I think—no, I’m confusing her with another girl who was killed in an attack. Her name was something like Helen, but she had dark eyes. Pretty thing. Bled to death from a piece of shrapnel in the throat.”

The room cringed in reaction, and two customers beat a hasty retreat. Gwyn noticed, and lowered her voice.

“Sorry. I forget. Why do you need to find this driver?”

“A friend is trying to find what happened to a nephew of his who was killed in ’18, not satisfied with the official story, and the boy’s diary mentions this Hélène in a manner that indicates they knew each other. She drove him out to the first-aid post.”

“Love at first sight, eh?”

“So it seems. But because he changed regiments and moved around, it’s hard to track down fellow soldiers who might have known him well. We thought he might’ve written this Hélène letters that gave an idea of his situation. The family just wants to know.”

“And the next step’s a séance, is that it? Let me ask around, see what I can come up with. She may’ve come after I had to leave—probably did, in fact, or I’d’ve met her. I’ll give my replacement there a ring, see if green eyes mean anything to her.”

“That’s great, Gwyn. Thanks so much.”

“So who’s the family?”

I hesitated, then said, “Can I tell you that after everything’s cleared up? It’s only, sometimes publicity raises dust and makes it hard to finish.”

“Fair enough. If you promise to bring along this mysterious husband of yours. Ought to meet him, now that he seems permanent.”

The image of Holmes and Gwyn Claypool circling each other like a pair of wary dogs flickered through my mind, and I had to laugh.

“No promises, Gwyn, but I’ll see what I can do.”

I glanced at my wrist-watch, then looked more closely in astonishment: We had been at our chat for better than two hours, and if I was to meet Holmes, I would have to scurry. I gave her a card with the flat’s telephone number written on it (an extension of which line rang in the downstairs servants’ quarters) and resumed my outer clothing. We left the building, embraced, and climbed into separate cabs.

Holmes was not at Simpson’s when I arrived, which did not surprise me. I went to their Ladies to tidy my hair-pins, then allowed the maitre d’ to show me to one of Holmes’ preferred tables.

Half an hour later, Holmes had not arrived, and I was glowering in my seat. At forty minutes my embarrassment and irritation began to crumple under concern. At forty-five minutes the maitre d’ came up to the table with a slip of paper in his hand. It read:

KINDLY INFORM MISS RUSSELL THAT HER COMPANION IS AT HIS BROTHER’S. PLEASE TELL HER THAT SHE MUST
NOT
TAKE THE FIRST AVAILABLE TAXI.

The man before me must have seen my face and feared I was about to succumb to some ladylike vapours, but I brushed away his hand and reached for my possessions.

The only reason to avoid the first convenient taxi was for fear it would be a trap. And the only reason to fear a trap—as well as the explanation for why Holmes was not here—was that an attack had already been attempted.

   I did, as it turned out, accept the first taxi that presented itself, reasoning that if a cab has just pulled to the kerb when a person comes out of a restaurant door, and if that cab then offloads a Member of Parliament, his wife, and his sister, then a person can feel relatively confident that its driver has not been hovering up the street waiting to pounce upon one. I did take the precaution of giving the driver the wrong address, and splashed through an ill-lit alley to Mycroft’s building on Pall Mall.

I trotted up the steps, shunned the lift in favour of the stairway, and pounded on Mycroft’s door, slightly breathless. I felt his presence arrive on the other side, where he paused to look through the secret peep-hole in the centre of the knocker, and then the bolt slid. I slipped past him, shedding rain-coat and hat as I went, not needing to ask where Holmes was because I could see his stockinged feet sticking out from the end of the comfortable sofa.

The six-foot-plus man laid out on Mycroft’s long settee had at some point since the morning changed into a Frenchman. From his silk-stockinged feet to the sleek part of his hair, his trousers, shirt-front, and even the still-attached moustaches were unmistakably French. He’d even, I noticed from a glance at the suit’s coat that lay over the arm of a nearby chair, dug out his Légion d’Honneur. It was honestly come by—Holmes avoided a display of unearned ribbons when he could, even as disguise. The most English things about him at the moment were the squat crystal glass balanced on his chest and the India-rubber ice-bag from the Army and Navy Stores that rested on his head.

A good deal of my apprehension deflated abruptly, leaving me dizzy with relief. Just bruises, then, and perhaps a cracked rib, judging by the care with which he drew breath. And a splint on one finger.

Mycroft placed a glass of brandy in my hand and pushed me gently into a chair. I put the glass aside and sat on the edge of the upholstery.

“You needn’t look so mother-hennish, Russell,” Holmes said crossly. “There’s nothing here that some strapping won’t take care of.”

“What did they use?” A length of pipe, unless the cut on his jaw came by a fall.

“Brass knuckles and boots, for the most part. One of them picked up a cobble-stone.” He gestured at the jaw. “But the other ordered him to drop it. They weren’t aiming to murder me, just to render me
hors de combat
. Or to warn me off, but if so, the small detail of precisely what it was off which I was being warned was left too late, and omitted entirely when the local constable came pounding and whistling to the rescue.”