Locked Rooms (7 page)

“You were . . . distracted.”

“I did see the soil, but I’d have said it was old. And I’m certain the kitchen door showed no signs of tampering.” That I definitely would have noticed.

“No,” he agreed.

I slid the drawer shut, let the cloth fall over it, and got to my feet. “Which means that either their locksmith’s talents deteriorated, or they had the one key and not the other. I shall have to ask Mr Norbert just how many sets of keys there were.”

The rest of the house held neither ghosts nor clues. Even my bedroom might have belonged to a stranger, its fittings and knick-knacks curiously apt rather than familiar. I picked from a shelf a tiny porcelain baby-doll, all unruly brown hair and a lacy robe, which fit most satisfyingly into the palm of my hand. I had not been a child who played with dolls, but I vaguely thought that a friend had given me this one; perhaps I had kept it through affection for her rather than for the object itself. I put it back on the shelf, dusted off my hands, and continued through the upstairs rooms.

Each room showed signs of a recent passage through it, with disturbed objects and footprints in the dust. And not just footprints.

I went back downstairs and found Holmes in the library with a book, sitting in the leather chair I had uncovered. He had carried one of the candelabras in here from the dining table and filled it with candles; drips of wax on the floor-boards traced his progress along the shelves. The candles, half-burnt, now stood on top of the desk, but still gave sufficient illumination to the shelves that I could see that the dust-lines where the books had stood no longer coincided with the edges of the books.

I picked up the candle-stick and held it close to the shelf: dust along the tops, faint disturbance along the top ridge of some of the spines—the intruders had pulled the books back to look behind them, but not removed each one to rifle through the pages. It was something of a relief, for to have laboriously searched each book, then scrupulously replaced it on the shelf, would have indicated a particularly organised and potentially dangerous sort of mind. These people were just looking in the more obvious places.

But for what?

I put the candelabrum back on the desk, pinched out the flames, and gently pulled back the wrap of the other chair, allowing the cloth to slump gently to the floor. I sneezed and sat down.

“Any idea what they were searching for?”

“Something of his rather than hers. There is no safe in the house?”

“Not so far as I know. I know they kept Mother’s jewellery in the bank, and had to remember to retrieve it in time when she wanted to wear it.”

“I should say your intruders did not know that, going by the universal disturbance of the picture-frames.”

And I’d thought time had misplaced them. As if to redeem myself, I asked, “You noticed that the two guest-room beds had been disturbed?” In response, he patted his suit coat, telling me that his inner pocket held envelopes of evidence. “Hairs?”

“Short grey on the one, long brown on the other.”

“How long?”

“As long as yours—as yours used to be,” he said, resigned to the necessity of my scant haircut, but not the fact.

“A woman? Good Lord.”

He closed the book on his knee. “Russell, what precisely do you intend to do?”

“I don’t know, Holmes,” I said, taking off my spectacles to rub at my irritated eyes. “I really don’t know.”

After a while, he opened his book again and I went into the kitchen, unlocking the back door to step out into the wilderness. As I stood there on the damp, subsiding bricks, my naïve determination to restore my family’s home to its former glories faltered beneath the enormity of the task. What was I thinking? It would take weeks, months to bring the house and gardens to a state of liveability, and what then? I had no intention of moving back to California.

Restoring the house would not restore my family.

Better to sell it now, before the building wormed its way into my affections. Let someone else worry about the brambles and the mice. Let someone else love it.

And as if to lay an omen of blessing on the decision, a small piece of Nature’s magic whirred past me, a flash of red more brilliant than a maharaja’s rubies, moving so fast I could not easily focus until it paused, hovering to drink from the pendulous blossoms of a fuchsia: a humming-bird. I hadn’t seen one since I was a child, and I gaped at it with a child’s wonder. When it darted away, I was aware of a smile on my face.

I returned to the library, and spoke to Holmes’ back. “As I see it, there are two separate problems here. One is the house itself and what to do with it. The other concerns the puzzles we’ve found here—not necessarily the break-in, as nothing seems to be missing other than the mezuzah, but I’ve decided that I wouldn’t mind, after all, knowing something more about my family. About the years I spent here. It is, after all, my past. I’ll give it a week, in between my appointments with Mr Norbert. And then we’ll leave and I’ll tell Norbert to sell it once the restrictions are lifted, two years from now.”

Holmes turned to look at me, and there it was again, that raised eyebrow of omniscience, asking me to reconsider some hasty judgement. I thought I knew what he was after this time, however, and sighed to myself. He’d been too long without intellectual challenge and itched to uncover more about the house’s invasion.

“Holmes, they didn’t take anything, they didn’t damage anything but the lock on the desk.” The eyebrow remained arched, and I raised a hand in surrender. “But please, go right ahead and investigate, if that’s what you want to do.”

“Very well,” he said, depositing the book on the small table and getting to his feet. “I shall begin by applying myself to the finger-prints on your father’s dressing-table.”

“You brought your print kit?” I asked, surprised. His magnifying glass and evidence envelopes went everywhere with him, but the tin box containing powders, brush, and insufflator created unnecessary bulk in the pockets, unless he anticipated needing it. But his only response was yet another unreadable yet disapproving look as he went out of the door.

I was at something of a loss to know where to begin myself, so in default, I walked in the direction of the first room we had entered, my mother’s morning room. I had my hand on the door-knob when Holmes’ voice brought me up short.

“I shouldn’t go in there while the kitchen door is standing open,” he commanded. “The draughts might prove destructive, and I haven’t any glass plates.”

With that Delphic utterance, he continued climbing the stairs, leaving me with my hand on the knob and many questions on my lips. Draughts? Glass plates? What on earth was he on about?

Slowly, I put it together. Glass plates, used for the preservation of fragile documents. Documents, such as burnt papers. Burnt papers, such as a drift of trembling black ashes in an otherwise pristine fireplace.

Ah.

Was I being very stupid, or was he being unnecessarily scrupulous? I could not answer that, so I went back to the library to begin a methodical archaeology on my father’s desk.

An hour or so later, during which Holmes had bumped about all over the upstairs, he came back in, brushing ineffectually at his sleeves with hands even grimier than mine. I looked up from my reading, blinked, and realised it was nearly dark. I reached for the lamp and switched its control, but without result. I closed the book and sat back.

“Any joy?” I asked him.

“They wore gloves.”

“All the best-dressed villains wear gloves,” I commented by way of commiseration.

“However, they remained in the house long enough to require sleep on the guest-room beds. Separate rooms, if you were wondering.”

That they had slept in the beds seemed to please him. “They took off their gloves to sleep?”

“Possibly. But for other activities as well.” With a smile, he took an oversized envelope from his pocket and held it for me to see. Inside lay the flowered porcelain pull-handle from a flush water-closet, detached from its chain.

“But surely there are layers of prints on it?” I asked.

“Oh, I’d say the maid your parents employed was a fine woman who took pride in her work. No short-cuts in her cleaning. Mrs Hudson would approve.” Purring with satisfaction, he looked down at his unlikely treasure. “One lovely hand-print, from palm to finger-tips, each one clear and precise.”

“Well done, Holmes.” Now all we had to do was ask the population of San Francisco to give us a comparison, I reflected—but no need to be churlish and say it aloud. “The man’s or the woman’s?”

“By the slim size of the fingers, hers. Her shoe size and length of stride suggest a height of slightly over five and a half feet, whereas her grey-haired companion is a short man, two or three inches under five and a half feet, whose broad feet suggest a broad hand. We shall have to make enquiries as to the weather over the past weeks,” he added, folding away the pull-handle. “Their shoes left soil on the floor beneath their beds, but not enough to indicate they walked through actual mud.”

“And if they came in through the kitchen, you’re right, that ground would be a morass after a rain. Did you find any signs of lamps, candles, torches, anything of the sort?”

“The woman had a carpet-bag she set down several places, which could have held anything. But I saw no signs of dripped wax or any impression of a lamp’s base. I think it probable they did their work during the daylight, so as not to alert the aged but sleepless watch-dog across the way.”

“Coming in before dawn and leaving after dusk? I’d have thought that risky. Unless—”

“Yes,” he said. “It would be satisfying to discover that the full moon coincided with a dry spell, would it not?”

And so it proved, in a pleasingly neat confirmation of how the intruders came and went unnoticed. When we repaired to the hotel an hour or two later, for supplies, soap, and sustenance, enquiries at the desk were followed within minutes by a simultaneous knock on our door and the ringing of the telephone. Holmes went to the door, holding it open for the man with the laden tea tray, while I received the information that February had been wet more or less throughout, but two weeks of dry weather in the middle of March had been broken by rain the morning of the twenty-fourth. The March full moon had been the twentieth.

I thanked the manager, then: “Oh, and Mr Auberon? Could you please have someone look into train reservations to New York, the middle of next week? That’s right, two of us. Sorry?” I listened for a minute, then asked him to hold on, and covered the mouthpiece with my hand.

“Holmes, he says the hotel has another guest who is planning a cross-country aeroplane flight to leave the middle of next week, and wants two partners in the enterprise. Might we be interested?”

The vivid memory of our recent, nerve-fraying night-time flight over the Himalayan foothills winced across his face, but Holmes’ upper lip was nothing if not stiff. “Up to you,” he replied mildly, and returned to pouring the tea. I addressed myself to the telephone.

“Perhaps you could get the details of both, and we could decide which fits better with our plans. Thank you.”

Holmes brought me a cup of tea and a selection of sandwiches, settling down at the window with his own refreshment. He ate two sandwiches in rapid succession, then sat back with his cup. “Have you a schedule for the morrow?” he asked.

“Norbert’s arranged various appointments in the morning, but I have the rest of the day free. Would you like to see something of the city? We could go out to the ocean and sun-bathe, if the sun comes out. And there’s a famous salt-water baths out there as well, if you’d like those.”

He fixed me with a disbelieving gaze. “You wish to play the tourist?”

I kept the innocent expression on my face for as long as I could, but a slight movement of my mouth gave me away, and the answering relief on his face released the laughter. “Holmes, I wouldn’t think of getting in the way of your glass plates.”

He shook his head with disapproval, but said only, “You shall ask Mr Norbert about the keys?”

“Certainly, and if he knows where I can find Mah and Micah.”

“You might also enquire if his watch-dogs saw anything out of the ordinary before the twentieth of March.”

“I shall.”

In the end, we did play the part of tourists, for that evening at least. We took a motorcar out to where San Francisco ended, and ate dinner at the Cliff House restaurant with the Pacific Ocean pounding at our feet, watching the sun go down. Wine again proved to be available, albeit decanted into an anonymous pitcher, and if the cooking was not as exceptional as the view out of the windows, the food was palatable. When we had finished our coffee, we walked down the steep hill and onto the sand, strolling along the beach. The wind had died down and the fog was lying well off-shore; it was quite pleasant.

At the far end, with the western sky darkening towards deepest indigo, Holmes settled onto a section of the sea wall that kept the sand at bay and took out his tobacco.

“Is this beach familiar to you?” he asked.

“It is, although the Cliff House I remember was a magnificently absurd Victorian monstrosity, so enormous and top-heavy it was a wonder that it didn’t topple into the sea in the earthquake. We used to come here a lot with my father. Levi would build elaborate Gothic fortified castles using dribbled wet sand while I read a book, and my father would alternate between swimming and reading one of his dime novels. Which reminds me—do you know what I found on the shelves in the library?”

“Oh, Lord,” he said.

“Yes, three of the stories Conan Doyle published. Oh, Holmes, my father would have been so delighted by the situation. He had a very droll and complicated sense of humour—you saw the cat carving on the high shelf?” I explained to him my father’s canary perch, and he chuckled around the stem of his pipe.

“Were the library books his?”

“A lot of them were in the house when he took it over. You see, his parents badly wanted him to remain in Boston, but he refused to leave California, and lived on his own here for years before they decided that, for the sake of the family name, if their son wasn’t coming home, he might as well comport himself in as civilised a fashion as one could in the wilderness of San Francisco. They gave him the family house and its fittings to permit him to do so. I think they’d bought the books by the linear foot when they built the library—you know how it is, books look good on the shelves, even if they’re never read. Actually, my father wasn’t a huge reader himself—you may have noticed that many of those books still have uncut pages. He used to come home with a book he’d bought, spend half an hour skimming through it to extract the essence, and never look at it again.”