Locked Rooms (23 page)

Later in the day he’d tracked down that other source of inside knowledge into a neighbourhood, the Pacific Heights milkman of 1912. He’d been forced to hare across town twice in the process, wasting huge blocks of time, and all for nothing. The man might as well have been deaf and blind for all he knew about the Russells, or anyone else for that matter. Now, if Holmes could tell him of any unusual standing orders the family habitually placed, he might remember. . . .

It happened in every investigation, hours wasted. Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite tediousness, he reminded himself, and scraped out his cold pipe into the motor’s ash-tray, filling the bowl anew.

Friday had also seen the utter collapse of Russell, knocked flat by the news of Dr Ginzberg’s death. All in all, not a good day, Friday.

But not without its bright points. Mrs Hudson’s answer, typically long-winded, had finally come into his hands during one of his cross-town trips on Friday:

MR HOLMES GLAD TO HEAR FROM YOU AND SORRY FOR THE DELAY I WAS VISITING MY FRIEND MRS TURNER IN SURREY. DR. WATSONS HOUSEKEEPER SAYS HE IS AT THE BADEN SPAS BADEN GERMANY FOR HIS ARTHRITIS POOR MAN WHAT A MARTYR HE IS. I TOOK YOUR BROTHER SOME ELDERBERRY WINE HE LOOKS WELL. SEVERAL PEOPLE RANG TO ASK WHEN YOU WERE RETURNING PLEASE DO LET ME KNOW. LOVE TO MARY. MRS CLARA HUDSON

Seeing that Watson was off taking the cure, Holmes had hesitated before sending his request.

But only briefly. After all, someone had to interview the ship’s pursers about the mysterious Southern woman, and although he would naturally have preferred to do it himself, he was far from home, and the idea of letting it lie for weeks until he could do it himself made his skin crawl with impatience.

So he’d sent it:

WATSON URGENT NEED ENQUIRIES STAFF ESPECIALLY PURSERS ON P AND O SHIP MARGUERITE DOCKING MARSEILLES SATURDAY EVENING. WOMAN POSSIBLY FROM SOUTHERN UNITED STATES ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT US DURING JANUARY RUN AND WHO LEFT AT ADEN. ANY AND ALL INFORMATION VALUABLE BUT CHIEFLY DID SHE KNOW WE WERE CALIFORNIA BOUND QUERY DID SHE ARRANGE OWN FURTHER TRAVEL QUERY WAS SHE WITH ANYONE QUERY AND FINALLY HER NAME AND DESCRIPTION QUERY. SORRY OLD MAN. HOLMES.

Only later in the morning, cooling his heels waiting for the milkman, had it occurred to him that Watson could as easily have made a leisurely journey to London on Thursday and intercepted the ship when it arrived there. He nearly turned back and sent another missive to say that Thursday would do, but in the end he did not.

Knowing Watson, Holmes reassured himself, he’d have left Baden immediately, and the second telegram would miss him anyway.

And the information received from Mrs Hudson provided its own form of solace. Mycroft had been ill since the winter, and it was good to know that Mrs Hudson had found him well.

Watson and Mycroft would come through, he reassured himself, and set a match to his pipe.

He wished he could be as certain about his other assistants, who were abundant if somewhat questionable. He was accustomed to working with Irregulars, to be used and discarded when their purpose was served. He was also well acquainted with the problems of finding reliable help, particularly as he was generally forced to draw from a pool of candidates consisting of society’s dregs: One was less likely to find honour amongst thieves than simple thievery, and one developed the habit of not placing too much weight on any one helpmeet.

Take this Hammett fellow, for example. He appeared to be an ideal Irregular (apart from his chronic infirmity), a man whose ready knowledge of the ground, and especially the underground, could save an employer a great deal of superfluous footwork. However, the niggling question of whether he might be too good to be true had already cost Holmes a hurried trip cross-town Saturday morning, returning to the telegraphist’s near the P. & O. offices to request that they retain any messages for him there, and not (as he had arranged earlier) have them delivered to the St Francis. A local ex-Pinkerton might well have as close an agreement with the Western Union boys as he had with the taxi drivers, and if Hammett was in fact currently under employment, that employer was likely to be the very subject of the telegrams from Mycroft and Watson. Better to keep them from leaving the telegraph office under any hands other than his own.

And then there was Tom Long, another convenient assistant dangling before his nose, tantalising in his intelligence, experience, and personal commitment to the cause. If, that is, Tom Long was what he appeared to be.

Or even the driver of this motor. Tyson, as with the motor, had been provided by the hotel manager, Auberon. Driver and vehicle made for an unlikely pair—the motor had been chosen to give an impression of an aged employer out for a sedate drive, but beneath the livery and cap he wore, its driver was a bright young man with carroty hair and a cheeky grin. Tyson’s own motor, according to Auberon, was of a colour to match his hair, along with chrome-yellow seats and a throaty engine—ill suited for the sort of surveillance they were conducting today. Tyson appeared to be a simple young man with a passion for motorcars and a deplorable taste in literature; on the other hand, he could conceivably be an agent of the faceless enemy, planted on Holmes by yet another agent, Auberon.

Even Henry Norbert bore a question mark above his head, as the lawyer knew more than anyone else about Russell’s business, whereabouts, and life in general. He had keys; he was in a position to manipulate the Russell fortunes; and he might indeed know more about the Russell past than he was saying.

The only person Holmes could be sure of was currently
hors de combat,
so distracted by her problems that she was effectively half-witted. She hadn’t even noticed that morning that he did not actually say he was taking a ferry to Oakland, merely that there was a manuscript and there was a ferry-boat. In her right mind, she’d never have missed that.

So, here he was, Sherlock Holmes on his own again with the dubious assistance of an unlikely trio of Irregulars: a cadaverous Pinkerton who ought to be abed, a diminutive Chinese bookseller with a wide knowledge of arcane topics, and a red-headed modern-day barrow-boy trying out for a part in one of Conan Doyle’s bits of airy nonsense. His most reassuring partner at the moment was good old Watson, halfway across the globe and launched on another desperate dash across Europe on the business of his longtime friend.

Holmes smiled around the stem of his pipe at the image of his erstwhile partner, thinner of hair and stouter of girth, limping with bulldog tenacity across a crowded German railway station. If anyone could intercept the
Marguerite,
it would be the doctor.

Soon, however, he would need another pair of hands and feet—very soon, if Watson had succeeded in catching the ship in Marseilles. Whom to trust? The storyteller, the bookseller, or some sturdy young man picked at random from the street?

With luck (a commodity in which Holmes placed no trust whatsoever) today’s outing would settle at least one of those questions.

And in the meantime, he would hold up for consideration four points.

First, those burnt scraps they had salvaged from the fireplace, from a document written on the machine in Charles Russell’s study. The surviving words made it clear that the document had concerned matters of some import: “Army . . . looters . . . stolen . . . executed”—these were not from the draught of a chatty family letter.

Two: That they were burnt, and so close to the source of their writing, indicated a certain urgency, or at the very least an emphatic quality, in the act of destruction. A more sanguine individual would merely have carried them off rather than risk discovery through lighting a fire in the fireplace of a vacant house.

Two points did not an hypothesis make, but taken with the third—that persons unknown had broken into the Russell house with, to all appearances, the sole purpose of destroying that document—they formed a shape. And the shape was one that Holmes had studied closely the whole of his professional life: blackmail.

Point four: Although the victims of blackmail often turned on their tormentors, he could not recall a single incident when a blackmailer had deliberately killed his victim.

This was the most troubling of all, for in the midst of those four salient points lived the growing and awful possibility that the blackmailer had been none other than Charles Russell himself.

Holmes had always despised the sly and verminous quality of the blackmailer, and his every instinct shouted that the stalwart young man in the photograph was no extortionist. However, that was emotion talking. Certainly he would say nothing to Russell—not yet, perhaps not ever, if no further evidence came to light. And perhaps, under certain circumstances, if Charles Russell had been given no choice, if he had been driven to the detestable weapon by the needs of his family, if one could accept that blackmail was a weapon like any other . . .

He hoped very much it did not come to that.

On the other hand, there remained the question of the relationship between Charles and Judith Russell: Two months after the fire, husband and wife have a furious argument; that very day she packs up the children to leave for England; for the next six years he sees them only periodically, in England, for slightly less than half the year. According to Russell, her parents were easy and affectionate with each other when they were together, but the fact remained that the family was divided for much of the year from June of 1906 until the summer of 1912.

If Judith Russell had discovered that her husband was a blackmailer, that could have driven her away. But if her outrage against his morals had caused her to flee, why then welcome the man when he came to her in England? And why return to San Francisco after six years?

That was more the behaviour of a woman protecting her children from threat than a woman disillusioned with her husband.

He shook his head and, noticing that the pipe had burnt itself out, he slid it into a pocket. Too many questions, not enough data.

The remainder of the journey he spent divided between a study of the maps and watching the landscape go past.

Eventually, the motorcar’s bonnet shifted west, and soon the grey Pacific stretched out into the distance. Holmes folded the map away and set both feet on the floor, intent now. He’d read the newspaper report that suggested where the crash had happened, and he had studied the maps closely until he had narrowed down the possibilities to one.

“Drop your speed somewhat,” he said to the boy in the front. “Not as if you’re watching for something or about to stop, but as if you’re under direction from a nervous passenger.”

“Got it.” The car’s progress became more stately, and Holmes resumed his hat and sat back. It would take very sharp eyes indeed to see the vehicle as anything but the means of an elderly gentleman’s progress.

Half a mile from the spot where he had decided it happened, the road climbed, then abruptly turned and dropped away at the same time. Young Tyson’s foot came down hard on the brake pedal, and Holmes nodded grimly to himself.

Near the top of the hill, a battered bread-delivery lorry—truck, as they called them here—had been pulled into an inadequate flat space on the eastern side of the road. On the other side, overlooking the sea, stood a short, bow-legged man with close-cropped hair, his garments tossed by the wind. His knees were against the guard-rail as he craned to look over the edge. As they went past, Holmes raked the figure with a glance, then resumed his straight-ahead gaze, frowning slightly.

At the bottom of the hill the waves had deposited a small beach, a golden crescent of sand. At the far end of it, two people were making their way up the sand to the road, a picnic basket and bright blankets in their arms, heads ducked against the wind. Even from a distance, Holmes could see their Model T rock with the wind.

Holmes spoke to Tyson in a taut voice. “Park where those two young people are just leaving, but turn around on the other side of them so as to be facing north. I want to have an open view of the cliff.” The young man nodded, performed the turn and, once the Model T had left, eased cautiously off the road onto the edges of the sand. As he slowed, Holmes said, “Pull your wheel a few more degrees to the right and go forward ten feet.” When he had done so, Holmes dropped the back window and looked out at the cliff, seeing what he had feared. With a shake of the head, he told the boy to shut off the motor.

“We shall be here for an hour or two, possibly longer. You may stay or go, as you like; if you remain in the motor, you must keep quite still; if you go, you merely need to stay within the sound of my voice.” While speaking, Holmes had retrieved the Gladstone from the floor and yanked open the top. He now drew out a stubby brass telescope, not new but with the polish of care, which Auberon had conjured up for his guest. Laying it on the seat, he went back into the bag and took from it a tripod with extendable legs, which he set up on the floor, arranging his long legs around it. He fastened the telescope onto the tripod, raised it so it reached the height of his eyes, and leant back to examine it. The sun was well away from any reflective portion of the instrument, but he tugged the velvet drapes a few inches closer together, rendering the interior invisible.

Only then did he lower his eyes to the eyepiece and put his hand to the adjustments.

A six-foot-two-inch man with tubercular lungs was hanging from the cliff face while waves were reaching up to catch at his feet.

Damn the man, thought Holmes, angry and apprehensive; what was he trying to prove? That he was better than the famous Sherlock Holmes? A sickly man with a family to support, risking his neck for the sake of what? The faint possibility of ten-year-old evidence? He’d been told to look at the wreckage, which very clearly was not on the rocks, and to interview the locals, which equally clearly the man standing up on the road was not.

As Holmes watched the thin figure pick his way from one precarious hand-hold to the next, he felt precisely as he had whenever he had placed Watson in danger—a thing he’d generally done as inadvertently as he had this man. Scarcely breathing, he watched the man on the cliff, expecting at any moment to see those long arms flail and the body crash down into the foam: one assistant shot, another smashed; this case was proving hard on the Irregulars.