A Letter of Mary (9 page)

"I'll drive back, Tony. Miss Russell is coming with us."

Mr Ellis glanced at me but said nothing as he went to the front of the car and cranked the starting handle for Lestrade. After several attempts, the elderly engine shuddered to life, and he came around and climbed into the narrow back seat. He looked absolutely exhausted, and I was not surprised when I heard snores erupting from the back before we had gained the main road.

"Your Mr Ellis seems to have made a night of it," I commented, though, truth to tell, there was no sign of alcohol about him.

"He's been working for nearly thirty-six hours. We were over in Kent yesterday night when your message reached me. We'd started off with the car, so now we're stuck with it. Can't exactly tuck it into the overhead rack, can you? Ellis offered to come down with me— he doubles as a driver when we're shorthanded."

"Generous of him to volunteer."

"He wanted to meet Mr Holmes."

"Ah. Have you also been on duty since yesterday morning?"

"Yes, but he drove last night. Don't worry, I won't fall asleep at the wheel."

"I was not worried, though if you wish me to take over at any point, I'm quite a decent driver." I made the offer, although he did not seem the sort who would care to be driven by a woman.

"Miss Russell— is that what I should call you, by the way?"

"Yes, that's fine."

"I wonder if you'd mind telling me the whole story from your point of view, to cover the, er, gaps left by Mr Holmes?"

"Certainly. Where would you like me to begin? With her letter to me?"

"Tell me about her. What was she like, how did you meet her, what do you know of her work in Palestine? Anything along those lines."

"Miss Ruskin was one of those odd women this country occasionally throws out, like Gertrude Bell or Mary Kingsley. Fascinated by the exotic, oblivious of comfort or convention, largely self-educated, an incongruous mixture of utter, inflexible certainty and immense insecurity around her peers, so that in normal social intercourse, she usually spoke in brief, brusque phrases. Left off pronouns. Loud voice. In writing or when she was involved in explaining her work, she could be very eloquent. Devastatingly observant. Dauntingly vital. Immensely intelligent, and wise, as well. It's hard to think of her as dead, even having seen her body. I shall miss her."

Lestrade was a good listener, and his questions were apposite. I talked; he prompted. We stopped in Southwark to push Tony Ellis out at the terrace house he shared with his three brothers, then drove on to Scotland Yard, where Lestrade left the photographic film to be developed. He also made what seemed to me a feeble attempt to abandon the automobile, but when a consultation with the schedules revealed a nearly two-hour wait at King's Cross, he decided not to descend to forms of transport less demanding of constant attention, and despite the lack of a driver, he kept the car. A motorphile who cannot afford a machine of his own, I diagnosed with resignation.

There was a pause in conversation as he steered between the carts, drays, lorries, taxis, omnibuses, trams, and the thousand other forms of moving targets, but when eventually we had fought free, unscathed, of the greater concentration of traffic, he resumed as if without interruption.

"This manuscript, what did you call it?"

"It's called a papyrus. We should have shown it to you, but it's in a safe place and Holmes thought it best to leave it hidden. The manuscript itself is a little roll of papyrus, which is a kind of thick paper made from beaten reeds, very commonly used in ancient Egypt and the whole Middle East, apparently, though very little of it has survived. Miss Ruskin consulted authorities on it, but they decided it was not an authentic first-century document, partly because there's so little extant Palestinian papyrus. However, she thought that as it was sealed inside a glazed figurine, it could have resisted wear that long. I haven't had a chance to examine it closely, but there were definite signs of red pottery dust embedded in the fibres. It was put into the box quite recently, in the last twenty years."

"Tell me about the box."

I described it, the animals, inlay, date, and probable origin.

"I'd like to take it to the British Museum to have a friend look at it, but it's undoubtedly quite valuable. It's in excellent condition, though how it got to a Bedouin tribesman from Italy will take some figuring."

"And the manuscript itself, what's it worth?"

"I have no way of knowing."

"Guess."

"Surely you know better than to ask that of a student of Sherlock Holmes," I chided.

"Miss Russell, I am asking for a rough estimate of the thing's value, not a bid at auction. What is it worth?"

"Half a million guineas?"

"What?"
he choked, and nearly had us in the ditch.

"The road, please, Inspector," I said urgently, and then: "You're certain you don't want me to drive? Very well. The thing could as easily be worth ten pounds, I have at present no means of evaluating it. But you asked two questions— one of its worth, and the other of its value. The two are related, although not the same. If it is not authentic, as merely a curiosity, the manuscript is nearly worthless and of little value. If, however— and it's a very large if— if it is authentically what it appears to be, whoever owned it could set the price. Only a handful of individuals in the world could afford it. And its value ... Its value as an agent of change? Good Lord, if the papyrus came to be generally accepted as a voice from the first century, the repercussions would be ... considerable."

My voice drifted off, and he glanced at me in surprise.

"Perhaps you had best tell me about it. It's a letter, you said?"

I sighed and tried to arrange my thoughts as if I were presenting an academic paper to a colleague. That this particular colleague knew not the first thing about the topic and that I was struggling in far over my head with it did not make the presentation any easier.

"I must begin by emphasising that I am not a qualified judge. I am no expert in Greek or in first-century Christianity. If," I was forced to add parenthetically, "you can even call it Christianity at that point. Miss Ruskin gave me the manuscript knowing this, on, as near as I can gather, a personal whim combined with annoyance at the experts, who rejected it out of hand. She thought it worth more than that, and thought, rightly, that I would find it as tantalising as she did." I took a deep and steadying breath.

"It is a letter, in Koiné rather than classical Greek, with one passage of Aramaic, a form of Hebrew that was commonly spoken at the time. The letter is purportedly written by a woman who calls herself Mary, a common enough name, but she refers to herself as an apostle of Jesus and is writing to her sister in the town of Magdala."

It took several seconds to sink in, but when it had sorted itself out in his mind, he took his astonished gaze off the road again and turned it on me for a disturbingly long time before remembering to steer the car. It was another long moment before he could choose an appropriate reaction, which was, predictably enough, a roar of laughter.

"A letter from Mary Magdalene?" he spluttered. "Of all the ... Leave it to Sherlock Holmes to come up with something as crazy as that. Next thing, he'll be finding the Holy Grail in a pawnshop. Mary Magdalene! That's a rich one, that is."

I looked out the window at the scenery, row upon row of recently constructed Homes for Heroes that gave off abruptly to fields and cows. Let him wrestle with it, I thought, and set out to count the varieties of toxic wildflower in the passing hedgerows. I had reached eleven before his laughter finally dribbled to a halt, and three more (or should the aquilegia, a garden escapee, be allowed? I debated) before his next question came, spoken like a joke waiting for the punch line.

"What does this letter say?"

I answered as if he had asked a serious question.

"Actually, not an awful lot. There's a section in the middle I'm having difficulties with, partly because of some stains across the script but also because the Greek itself is unclear. It begins with a fairly straightforward greeting, such as the various New Testament letters start with, except that rather than being from 'Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,' for example, it's from 'Mariam, an apostle of Jesus the Messiah,' and it's written to 'my sister Judith in Magdala.' She is apparently writing from Jerusalem in the last weeks before the city was conquered by Rome and laid waste in the Jewish revolt of the years 68 to 70, when the Temple was last destroyed. She's sending her grandchild to Judith and is herself going away to the south, something about a 'rocky desolation.'

"The rest of it I've only glanced over, but it looked to me like an explanation of why she followed 'the rabbi.' I was planning to tackle that section Friday morning when Holmes saw the notice in
The Times
about Miss Ruskin's death. I'm hoping it gives a hint on why the author should be writing in Greek, since one would rather expect it to be all in Aramaic. It's a nice little puzzle."

Lestrade looked at me, then back at the road.

"Is that so?" he said, and then held his peace for at least five miles. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his face screw itself up over this utterly foreign dilemma, and suddenly I found myself liking him. Eventually, he gave it up, shook his head, and turned to those parts of the problem that lay within his ken.

"This box. Would you say it's valuable enough to kill for?"

"Insufficient data, as Holmes would say. To an extremely corrupt collector, perhaps, or to a madman, but I shouldn't have thought that the point was merely possessing whatever it was they were after. They must have wanted to be rid of Miss Ruskin as well, or else they would have simply broken in, or held her up, and taken whatever it was they wanted. Either she knew who they were and could identify them to the police or she knew the details of whatever they were wanting and could duplicate the information. Besides, it's not the box itself they were after, as we told you; it was something flat and small, like a piece of paper."

"But you still don't think it could have been the— what d'you call it?"

"Papyrus. I did wonder. Only a lunatic would fold it in half and stick it into a book or behind a framed photograph, but it's possible they didn't know precisely what it looked like. If so, it's not a collector. If it is the manuscript they're after, then we've either got a mad academic on our tails or else someone who wants it suppressed, if not destroyed. Holmes thinks it's more likely that someone believes that Miss Ruskin gave us some other paper entirely, either for safekeeping or investigation. It could be a will or a codicil, or a secret treaty— she was thick with the political types over there, an ideal courier. Even a letter. We don't have it, of course, but I suppose it's a case of Holmes' name causing a dramatic overreaction. Someone had to be very worried in order to risk murder and breaking into an hotel room and then driving to Sussex to ransack a house."

He did not respond to this, and I shifted to look over at him. His rather ferretlike features were without expression as he concentrated on the road ahead.

"But I was forgetting, you have yet to see any tie between her death and our house. Will you go with me later to her hotel room and to the corner where she was killed?"

"Certainly." He took a deep breath. "Miss Russell, let me make myself clear. You know that my father was with Scotland Yard and that he worked with Mr Holmes a number of times. You may not realise it, but he was greatly influenced by the way Mr Holmes worked. He really worshipped Mr Holmes, used to tell us kids stories about how he solved crimes against all odds, just by using his eyes and his head. Even now, he never misses an issue of the
Strand
when it has one of Dr Watson's stories in it. I'm not a child anymore, Miss Russell, but I know how much Scotland Yard owes to Mr Holmes. Things he did that looked crazy thirty, forty years ago are now standard procedure with us. Some of the men laugh at him, make jokes about his pipe smoking and violin and all, but they're laughing at all those stories Dr Watson wrote, and they don't like to admit that their training in footprints and the laboratory's analysis of bloodstains and tobacco ashes comes straight from the work of Sherlock Holmes. Even fingerprints— he was the first in the country to use them in a case. Miss Russell, when he says there was murder and a burglary was connected with it, then I for one believe him. I just have to find a way of laying it in front of my superiors. I must have some firm evidence to connect an apparent hit-and-run accident with your sitting room. No doubt we'll find it eventually, but I'd rather it be sooner than later, when the trail is cold."

This lengthy speech drained him of words for another two miles; then he stirred.

"Sounds to me like your friend handed you a right hornets' nest," he commented.

"My life was full enough without it," I agreed obliquely.

"Not that she could have known," he hastened to add,
nil nisi bonum.

"I'm not sure. Oh, not the current ... business, not her death, but she must surely have known that the manuscript would prove a major headache. Owning a thing like that, it's no small responsibility."

"Do you mean you think it's real?" he asked cautiously, unsure whether he had a madwoman in the car beside him or if I was launched on some elaborate Holmesian leg-pull.

"Dorothy Ruskin thought it might be."

"Would she have known?"

"I trust her judgement."

"Oh." I could almost hear the whirs and whine of the desperate reevaluation process going on in his mind. "Responsibility"— his flailing grasp latched onto my word. "What kind of responsibility do you mean? That it's worth ... so much?" He could not bring himself to vocalise the sum I had only half-facetiously suggested.

"Not the money, no. If the thing were to convince me that it is real, then, you see, I am faced with a decision: Do I spend the rest of my life fighting to convince others of its truth? I told you that if it is what it appears to be, the repercussions would be considerable, but that is putting it mildly. The sure knowledge that one of Jesus' apostles was a woman would shake the Christian world to its foundations. Logically, there's no reason why it should, but realistically, I have no doubt that the emotional reaction would set off a bitter, bloody civil war, from one end of the church to the other. And smack in the centre of it, holding a scrap of papyrus in her hand like a child keeping her dinner from a pack of hungry dogs, would be Mary Russell Holmes. A Jew, to boot."