A Letter of Mary (7 page)

I'm afraid I gave them rather short shrift, as Mama was waiting for her bath. I hope they didn't think me rude, and I hope they give you lots of money, which they obviously have, as they drove off in an enormous shiny black saloon car, complete with uniformed driver.

Please write to tell me what the Holmeses were like. I imagine an extraordinary couple. But then, we may see you on Saturday, with any luck.

Your loving sister,

Erica

"Oh God, Holmes, I can't bear the thought of telling that woman that her sister was— that her sister is dead. Isn't it time to turn this over to the police?"

However, Holmes was not listening. He frowned over the pages in his hand, then thrust them at his brother.

"What do you make of the writing, Mycroft?"

"I admit that you are my superior in graphological analysis, Sherlock, but this is not exactly what I might have expected, either from the contents of the letter or from a sister of the woman you described. The lack of education in words and writing indicates only that Miss Ruskin achieved what she did through the sheer force of her mind, but still, I should have expected a greater degree of intelligence and independence here."

"But she's clever— look at those overstrokes!"

"Clever, yes, but with an undercurrent of anger that wells up in the full stops."

"And the hooks on the t-bars, why, I don't believe I've seen such tenacity since the time—"

"Holmes!"

"Yes, Russell?"

"We have to give this to the police. To Scotland Yard."

"She's quite right, Sherlock," said Mycroft. "Much as it goes against your grain, it is their job, and they might take it amiss were you to withhold it from them. They have become quite competent at legwork, you know. I can also make enquiries over the weekend. Fellow at the club knows everything and everyone in the Middle East. He may have some idea of what's going on."

I was tempted to ask how a fellow member of a club dedicated to noncommunication and misanthropy had managed to make known his peculiar talents, but I was distracted by Holmes, who had risen and was pawing vigorously through a desk drawer, finally to emerge with paper, pen, and a pot of glue. He shrugged as he bent to daub the flap of the envelope.

"Very well, if two minds greater than mine own agree, I can only plead force majeure. Russell, would you be so good as to write a note to Lestrade to accompany this virtuously unopened letter?" He paused to examine his handiwork, then bent to reapply a microscopic quantity of glue to a recalcitrant bubble, and continued. "You will tell him that we happened to come across it and thought it might have come from the sister whom Miss Ruskin mentioned during her visit to us. Also stress that he is to do nothing about contacting the lady until he has seen us, and invite him to join us in Sussex at his earliest convenience. Throw in whatever threats or entreaties you consider appropriate, and tell him I said it would do him good to get out of London." He ran a nail along the edge and angled the envelope to the light critically. "You should also mention that a Yard photographer might prove a useful companion. I can do any necessary fingerprints myself."

I looked up from my paper.

"Sorry?"

He lifted his eyes, and his face went carefully, dreadfully blank. He glanced at Mycroft, then looked down at the somewhat overworked envelope in his hands.

"What a noble mind is here o'erthrown," he remarked conversationally, and keeping his voice light, added, "Russell, that theology of yours is rotting your brain even more rapidly than I had anticipated. You did read the sister's letter."

"But you don't think ..." I trailed off as he raised his face to mine, a face awful in judgement and disappointment.

"What else am I to think, Russell? She visits us, she dies violently, her papers are searched, and her briefcase is stolen. Someone has asked after us and been given our address. It is possible they found what they sought, but if not, can we be anything but their next goal? I only hope that when they didn't find what they were looking for, they didn't vent their irritation on the furniture."

I felt my brain begin sluggishly to move, and my heart sank.

"The box. Oh, Holmes, I left it on the dining room table."

"You left it there, Russell. I did not."

"You moved it? Why?"

"No particular reason. Call it tidiness."

"You? Tidy?"

"Don't be rude, Russell. I put it away."

"Where? No, let me guess." He winced. "Sorry, poor choice of words. Let me deduce. When I went to get the car, you went out the back and came around the house. The toolshed?"

"How utterly unimaginative," Holmes said, offended.

"Sorry, again. The hole in the beech? No— oh, of course. You were scraping off a stinger— you shoved it into one of the beehives." How ridiculous, the relief engendered by a mere nod.

"Not shoved, Russell, gently placed. The third hive from the end is making queen cells at a tremendous rate, so I thought I might give them something else to think about. They've also been very active of late, and most people would think twice about putting a hand in there, even at night."

"Except you. But do you mean to tell me that you anticipated ... visitors, even this morning?"

"Merely a precaution."

My warming brain gave another, more alarming lurch.

"Mrs Hudson! Good Lord, she's there alone. We must warn her!"

"She is not there. I telephoned from the café and told her to take a day or two away. She's with her nephew in Guildford."

"You knew then? Already?"

"We do not know that anything has taken place. We are merely talking about likelihoods," he said with asperity, and placed the envelope in a breast pocket. I began to laugh.

"My dear Holmes, if I hear you use the word
senility
again, I shall stuff it down your throat. You are still too fast for me. I didn't see the possibilities until I read the letter."

He did not laugh, merely looked at his brother.

"You see why I married her, Mycroft? The exquisite juxtaposition of ladylike threats and backhanded compliments proved irresistible." He turned back to me, and his voice and face hardened. "Russell, if you were occasionally to raise your sight from your Hebrew verbs doubly weak and irregular and your iota subscripts, you might take more notice of the world around you. Your preoccupation with your studies could kill you."

He was dead serious, and Mycroft's fat face mirrored the grim expression of his brother. My voice was small in response.

"Yes, I see. Could we go home now?"

"Do you wish to equip yourselves with some of what the Americans would call 'firepower' before you go?" suggested Mycroft with the air of a housewife offering provisions for a journey. "Or, given an hour, I could arrange an escort."

"No escort, thank you, Mycroft. I've never much fancied myself as a leader of men, and this is no time to begin. Your old revolver would be a welcome addition, on the stray chance that Mr 'Mud' or one of his companions has chosen to wait for us to appear. I should doubt it, but still ..."

"Quite," his brother said with an admirable lack of concern, and heaved himself upright. He padded out of the room and returned a short time later with a huge and, I was relieved to see, well-oiled pistol, which he handed to Holmes along with a box of ammunition sufficient to withstand a minor invasion of the southern coast. Holmes gave the weapon a cursory inspection and inserted it and the box with difficulty into his pockets.

We took our leave of Mycroft, found a taxi, retrieved the car, left the letter and its covering note at Scotland Yard, and plunged into the darkening countryside of south England, our noses turned for home.

Shortly after midnight, the car's headlamps caught the final signpost. The hedgerows pressed close on either side. A fox with something white in its jaws flickered away into the dark. For the last hour, Holmes had been either stiffly asleep or engaged in a silent contemplation of events. In either case, I interrupted him.

"Do you wish to collect Patrick and another gun as we go past the farm?" My own farm, and its manager, lay a few miles before the cottage. "Or, we could stay there tonight...."

"Do you wish to do that, Russell?"

Damn the man, he would not even use a sarcastic tone for the question, only stating it simply as a request for information. One of the most difficult things about marriage, I was finding, was the absolute honesty it demanded. I thought for a mile or so.

"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.