The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (14 page)

“Nah, Mr. Holmes,” Connor began to bluster, the Welsh rhythm creeping back into his throat, “I can hardly think—”

“That is eminently clear, young man. Were you to pause for thought you might realise that a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would suffice. If you agree, then we shall speak with the Simpsons and get on with the job. If your answer is ‘no,’ then you may give Miss Russell back her bags, and I in return will hand you back your case. The decision is entirely yours. Personally I should be glad to get back to my experiments and sleep in my own bed. Which shall it be?”

Cold grey eyes locked with brilliant blue ones, and after a long minute, blue wavered.

“Have no choice, do I? That woman’d have my head.” He shoved back from the table, and we followed the disgruntled chief inspector through the room’s third door and into his office.

The two people who looked up at our entrance wore catastrophe on their aristocratic faces, that stretched appearance of human beings who have passed the threshold of terror and exhaustion and can feel only a stunned apprehension of what will come next. Both of them were grey, unkempt, and fragile. The man did not stand when we came in, only looked past us at Connor. The tea on the desk was untouched.

“Senator, Mrs. Simpson, may I introduce Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Miss Mary Russell.”

The senator reared back like the chief mourner at a funeral confronted by a tasteless joke, and Holmes stepped forward quickly.

“I must apologise for my singular appearance,” he said in his most plummy Oxbridgian. “I thought it best for the sake of your daughter’s safety that I not be seen entering the station, and came in, as it were, through the servant’s entrance. I assure you that Miss Russell’s disguise is every bit as sham as the gold tooth I am wearing.” Simpson’s feathers went down, and he rose to shake Holmes’ hand. Mrs. Simpson, I noticed, seemed blind to what Holmes and I looked like: From the moment Connor spoke his name her haunted eyes had latched onto Holmes like a drowning woman staring at a floating spar and followed his every move as he shifted a chair around to sit directly in front of them. I sat to one side, and Connor went around to take up his normal chair behind the desk, separated by it from the amateur and unconventional happenings before him.

“Now,” said Holmes briskly, “to business. I have read your statements, seen the photographs, reviewed the physical evidence. There is little purpose served in forcing you to go through it all yet again. Perhaps I might merely state the sequence as I understand it, and you will please correct me if I stray.” He then went over the information gained from the file and the newspapers: the decision to strike off into the hills of Wales with only a tent, the train to Cardiff and the car up into the hinterland, two days of peace, and the third day waking to find the child vanished from her sleeping roll.

“Did I miss anything?” The two Americans looked at each other, shook their heads. “Very well, I have only two questions. First, why did you come here?”

“I’m afraid I…insisted,” said Mrs. Simpson. Her fingers were twisting furiously at a delicate lace handkerchief in her lap. “Johnny hasn’t had so much as a day off in nearly two years, and I told him…I told him that if he didn’t take a vacation, I was going to take Jessie and go home.” Her voice broke and in an instant Holmes was before her, with that compassion and understanding for a soul in trouble that was so characteristic of him, yet which for some reason always took one by surprise. This time he went so far as to seize her hand, in order to force her to meet his gaze.

“Mrs. Simpson, listen to me. This was not an accident,” he said forcibly. “Your daughter was not kidnapped because she just happened to be on that hill at the wrong time. I know kidnappers. Had she not been taken here in Wales, it would have been while out with her nurse at the park, or from her bedroom at home. This was a deliberate, carefully planned crime. It was not your fault.”

She, of course, broke down completely, and it took copious supplies of handkerchiefs and a judicious application of brandy before we could return to the point.

“But why here?” Holmes persisted. “How far in advance did you plan it, and who knew?”

The senator answered. “Because we wanted to get as far from civilisation as we could. London—well, I know I’m not being diplomatic, but London’s a god-awful place: The air stinks; you can’t ever see stars, even with the blackout; it’s always noisy; and you never know when the bombs won’t start up again. Wales seemed about as far from that as a person could get. I arranged for a week off, oh, it must have been the end of May we started planning it, just after that last big bombing raid.”

“Did anyone suggest this area to you?”

“Don’t think so. My wife’s family came originally from Aberystwyth, so we knew the country in a general sort of way. It’s hilly like Colorado, where I grew up, no real mountains of course, but we thought it’d be nice to walk into the hills and tent for a few days. Nothing strenuous because Jessie was—because Jessie’s so small. Just someplace quiet and out of the way.”

“And the arrangements—the equipment, transportation—an automobile dropped you, did it not? and you arranged for it to meet you after five days—notifying the police and newspapers. Who did all that?”

“My personal assistant. He’s English. I believe his brother knew where to hire the tent and whatnot, but you’d have to ask him for the details.”

“I have that information for you, Mr. Holmes,” growled Connor from his desk. “You’ll have it before you leave.”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector. Now, Senator, that last day. You went for a walk, bought sausages and bread from a farmhouse, cooked and ate them at five o’clock, stayed inside the tent reading after that because it began to rain. You were asleep by eleven and woke at four o’clock to find your daughter missing.”

“She didn’t go!” Mrs. Simpson broke in. “Jessica didn’t go out of the tent by herself. The dark frightens her; she wouldn’t go outside even for the horses. I know she loved those ponies that wander around wild, but she wouldn’t follow them off, not my Jessie.”

Holmes looked directly into her shell-shocked features.

“That brings me to my second question. How did you feel when you woke up the following morning?”

“Feel?” The senator looked at Holmes with incredulity, and I admit that for an instant I too thought the question mad. “How the hell do you think we felt? Waking up to find no sign of our daughter.”

Holmes halted him with a pacifying hand.

“That’s not what I meant. Naturally you felt panic and disorientation, but physically? How did you feel physically?”

“Perfectly normal, I guess. I don’t remember.” He looked at his wife.

“I remember. I felt ill. Thickheaded. The air outside felt so good, it was like breathing champagne.” The great lost eyes stared at Holmes. “Were we drugged?”

“I think there’s a very good chance. Chief Inspector, was anything done on the sausages?”

“Analysed, of course. Nothing there in the two that were left, or in the other food. The old couple on the farm seemed harmless. It’s in the report as well.”

For another half-hour Holmes continued to question both the inspector and the Simpsons, with little result. No known enemies, they’d seen no strangers the day before, the ransom money was being brought in from America, a loan from his father. At the end of it Mr. Simpson was pale and his wife shaking. Holmes thanked them.

“I deeply regret having put you through this painful ordeal. At this point in an investigation one never knows which small detail will be of vital importance. Russell, have you any questions?”

“Just one, about the child herself. I’d like to know how you think she’s taking it, Mrs. Simpson. How do you think she’s reacting to having been spirited away by what may well be complete strangers?” I was afraid my question would break her, but oddly enough it did not. She sat upright and looked straight at me for the first time.

“Jessica is a very self-contained, determined child. She is highly intelligent and does not panic easily. To tell you the truth, assuming she is being treated well, she is probably less upset than her mother is.” A ghost of a smile flickered across her bare face. There were no more questions.

Connor saw them out and returned with a thick, bound folder.

“Here’s the full report, everything we’ve found, copies of the prints, interviews with the locals, everything. Most of it you’ve seen already. I imagine you’ll want to take it with you, not stop to read it now.”

“Yes, I want to be away as soon as possible. Where’s the caravan?”

“The north end of town, on the road to Caerphilly. Stables run by Gwilhem Andrewes. He’s not what you might call a friend of the police, and I wouldn’t trust him with my back turned, but he’s what you wanted. Shall I have a car take you?”

“No, I don’t think that would be appropriate treatment for a pair of gipsies, do you? And you’ll have to have a talk with Miss Carter and Sergeant Donaldson. We do not want the whole police force to know that Senator Simpson spent an hour with two arrested gipsies, do we? No, I think we’ll just carry on as if you’ve let us off with a warning, if you’d be so good as to arrange my release. You know where we’ll be; if you need to talk with me, have one of your constables stop me. No one will think twice of a copper rousting a gipsy. But, if he needs to arrest me, have him do it gently. I do promise not to beat up my daughter in railway stations anymore.” Connor hesitated, then forced a laugh. Perhaps only the circumstances had rendered him humourless.

We rose to take our leave. Connor rose with us, and after a small hesitation, came around the desk and held out his hand to Holmes.

“There’s sorry I am, Mr. Holmes, for what you found here in my building. I am newly come here, but I say that in explanation, not in excuse.” Holmes took the hand and shook it.

“I found good men here, Mr. Connor. Young men, it is true, but I think from the look of you they will age quickly.”

“They will that, Mr. Holmes. Now, I’ll be wishing you Godspeed, and a good hunting to you. And to you, Miss Russell.”

We were soon out on the street, carrying three bags apiece, working our way up to the outskirts of town, where we soon located Andrewes Stables. Holmes left me in the office and went to find the owner. I cooled my heels by juggling for half an hour, desperate for something to read (though strictly speaking I should be barely literate) until I heard voices outside the door, and in came a shifty, greasy character followed by the marginally less disreputable figure of Holmes, smelling strongly of whisky and flashing his gold tooth. Andrewes leered at me until Holmes distracted him by holding money under his nose.

“Well, then, Mr. Andrewes, that’s settled. I thanks you for holdin’ my brother’s wagon for me. Here’s what I owes you. Come, Mary, the wagon’s out in the yard.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Todd, you’re a shilling short here.”

“Ah, terrible sorry, I must a dropped it.” He laboriously counted out three pennies, a ha’penny, and six farthings. “There it is, now we’re quit. Get the bags, girl,” he snarled.

“Yes, Da’.” I meekly followed him, laden with the four largest bags again, through the muck-slimed yard to the gipsy caravan standing in the back. A rough-coated, heavy-legged horse was being introduced between the traces. I deposited my load and went around to help with the process, blessing Patrick’s tutoring as I did so, and found that though the arrangement of the harness was different from that of a plough or a hay cart, it was logical and quickly mastered. I climbed up beside Holmes on the hard wooden seat. He handed me the reins, his face a blank. I glanced at the two men standing nearby, arranged the thick straps in my hands, and slapped them hard across the broad back in front of me. The horse obligingly leant forward, and we pulled out onto the road north, on the trail of Jessica Simpson.

O
N THE VERY
outskirts of the town Holmes had me pull over and apply the brake.

“We need to do a thorough check on this equipment, I fear,” he said. “The last time I hired one of these the wheel fell off. It would not be convenient this time. You strip the horse down, take a look under the traces, and I think you’ll find a few sores. Currycomb, rags for padding, and ointment for the sores are in the calico bag.” He disappeared beneath the caravan, and while I brushed and treated the puzzled horse, he tightened bolts and applied grease to dry axles. With the horse back in harness, I went around to see if I might be of help and found his long legs protruding from the back.

“Need a hand?” I called.

“No point in both of us looking like mechanics. I’m nearly finished.” A minute passed, silent on my part, grunts and low imprecations on his.

“Holmes, there’s something I must ask you.”

“Not just now, Russell.”

“I need to know. Is my presence…an embarrassment?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I mean it, Holmes. Inspector Connor today all but accused you…me…I just need to know if my presence is inconvenient.”

“My dear Russell, I hope you don’t flatter yourself that because you talked me into bringing you on this delightful outing, that means I am incapable of refusing you. To my considerable—Oh blast! Give me a rag, would you? Thank you. To my considerable surprise, Russell, you have proven a competent assistant and, furthermore, hold some promise for becoming an invaluable one. It is, I can even say, a new and occasionally remarkable experience to work with a person who inspires, not by vacuum, but by actual contribution. Hand me the large spanner.” His next remarks were punctuated by grunts. “Connor is a fool. What he and his ilk choose to believe is no concern of mine, and thus far it has not seemed to harm you. You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool as well were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.”

“I see. I think.”

“Besides,” he added, his voice muffled now by the undercarriage, “a renowned bachelor such as myself, you probably would be more of an embarrassment were you a boy.”

There really was no possible response to that statement. In a few minutes, filthy as a miner, Holmes emerged, cleansed himself as well as he was able, and we set off up the road again.

We wobbled along north in the colourful, remarkably uncomfortable little caravan, walking up the hills whenever the sway of the high wooden seat and the jolts to the base of the spine became too much, which was most of the time. Holmes peppered me with information, badgered me mercilessly into my rôle, criticised and corrected my walk and speech and attitude, forced Welsh vocabulary and grammar down my throat, and pontificated between times on the Welsh countryside and its inhabitants. Were it not for the constant awareness of a frightened child’s life and the fraying thread that held it, the outing would have been great sport.

Up through Glamorgan we walked and rode and walked again, into Gwent and then Powys, turning west now into the hilly greensward that curled up towards the Brecon Beacons, all hill farm and bracken fern, terraces and slag heaps and sheep. The shepherds eyed us with mistrust as we rumbled past, although their thin, black, sharp-eyed, suspicious dogs, lying with bellies pressed to the ground, as alert as so many pessimistic evangelists to snatch back a straying charge, spared us not a glance. As we passed through the villages and hamlets children ran shrieking to the road, and then stood in silent wonder staring up at our red, green, and gold splendour, their fingers in their mouths and their bare feet spattered with mud.

Wherever we went, we performed. While the children watched, I juggled, pulled colourful scarves from their colourless pockets and ha’pennies from dirty ears, and when we had the attention of their mothers, Holmes would come out of the pub wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and pull out his fiddle. I told the fortunes of women who had none, read the cracked lines on their hard palms and whispered vague hints of dark strangers and unexpected wealth, and gave them stronger predictions of healthy children who would support them in their old age. In the evenings when the men were present their wives looked daggers at me, but when their ears were caught by “me Da’s” ready tongue, and when they saw that we were moving on for the night, they forgave me their husbands’ glances and remarks.

On the second day we passed the police roadblock, receiving only cursory abuse since we were going into the area being guarded, not coming out. On the third day we passed the Simpsons’ camping site, went on a mile, and pulled off into a side track. I cooked our tea, and when Holmes remarked merely that he hadn’t thought it possible to make tinned beans taste undercooked, I took it that my cooking was improving.

When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us—the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator’s staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family’s coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.

Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer’s night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, shambling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, before its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.

“Russell? Russell, are you all right?”

I sat up, and his hand fell away.

“No. Yes, I’m all right, Holmes.” I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. “Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child, I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Nothing to be concerned about.”

He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.

“Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?”

His concern raked at me.

“No! No, thank you, Holmes, I’ll be fine in a minute. Go back to bed.”

He stood with his back to the light, and I felt his eyes on me. I stood up abruptly and went for my spectacles and coat.

“I’ll get some fresh air. Go back to sleep,” I repeated fiercely, and stumbled from the caravan.

Twenty minutes down the road my steps finally slowed; ten minutes after that I stopped and went to sit on a dark shape that turned out to be a low wall. The stars were out, a relatively uncommon thing in this rainy corner of a rainy country, and the air was clean and smelt of bracken and grass and horse. I pulled great draughts of it into me and thought of Mrs. Simpson, who had called it breathing champagne. I wondered if Jessica Simpson were breathing it now.

The Dream gradually receded. Nightmare and memory, it had begun with the death of my family, a vivid re-creation that haunted and hounded me and made my nights into purgatory. Tonight, though, I had Holmes to thank for interrupting it, and its aftermath was considerably lessened. After an hour, cold through, I walked back through the first light of dawn to the wagon, and to bed and a brief sleep.

In the morning neither of us mentioned the night’s occurrences. I cooked porridge for breakfast, flavoured with light flecks of ash and so lumpy Mrs. Hudson would have considered it suitable only for the chickens. We then walked up towards the described campsite, taking a roundabout route and a spade to justify our presence.

The site was unattended when we arrived. The tent was still standing, slack-roped and flabby-sided, with a blackened circle and two rusting pans to one side where Mrs. Simpson had cooked her meals. The area smelt of old, wet ashes, and had the forlorn look of a child’s toy left out in the rain. I shuddered at the image.

I went up to the tent door and looked in at the jumble of bedrolls and knapsacks and clothing, all abandoned in the scramble to locate the child and now compulsively preserved in situ by police custom. Holmes walked around to the back of the tent, his eyes on the trampled, rain-soaked ground.

“How long have we?” I asked him.

“Connor arranged for the constable on guard to be called away until nine o’clock. A bit under two hours. Ah.”

At his expression of satisfaction I let the canvas flap fall and picked my way around to the tent’s back wall, where I was met by the singular vision of an ageing gipsy stretched full out between the guy ropes with a powerful magnifying glass in his hand, prodding delicately at the tent’s lower seam with his fountain pen. The pen disappeared into the interior of the tent. I turned and went back inside, and when the bedding had been pulled away I saw what Holmes had discovered: a tiny slit just at seam line, the edges pushed inward and the threads at both ends of the cut slightly strained.

“You expected that?” I asked.

“Didn’t you?” I was tempted to make a face at him through the canvas, but refrained; he’d have known.

“A tube, for sleeping gas?”

“Right you be, Mary Todd,” he said, and the pen retreated. I stood up, head bent beneath the soggy canvas roof, and looked at the corner where Jessica Simpson had slept. According to her parents, the only things missing from her knapsack or the tent had been her shoes. No pullover, no stockings, not even her beloved doll. Just the shoes.

The doll was still there, feet up beneath the tangle of upturned bedding, and I pulled out the much-loved figure, straightened her crumpled dress, and brushed a tangle of yarn hair from her wide painted eyes. The once-red lips smiled at me enigmatically.

“Why don’t you tell me what you saw that night, eh?” I addressed her. “It would save us a great deal of trouble.”

“What was that?” asked Holmes’ voice from a distance.

“Nothing. Would there be any objection if we took the doll with us, do you think?”

“I shouldn’t think so. They only left these things here for us to see; they have their photographs.”

I pushed the doll into my skirt pocket, took a last look around, and went outside. Holmes stood, back to the tent and fists on his hips, looking down the valley.

“Getting the lie of the land?” I asked.

“If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?”

I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.

“Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it’s a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one’s back, even for a strong man.” I studied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. “Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn’t they?”

“It’s a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Overlooking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared.”

I cringed away and whined at him.

“Aw, Da’, it waren’t me fault. I war lookin’ a’t’evidence.”

“Harden your
t
more,” he corrected absently. “So, which way?”

“Not towards the road; there’d be too much chance of being seen.”

“Down the valley then, or over the hill?” he considered aloud.

“A pity we weren’t here a week ago; there might have been something to see.”

“If wishes were horses…”

“Detectives would ride,” I finished. “I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it.”

“We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I’ll go up the hill; you take the base of it.”

We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of “Oy, what’s this then?” from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye—but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.

“Hol—Uh, Da’!” I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.

“Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier,” he said magnanimously. “Let us see how far this might take us.” We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.

Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered
J
.

“Was this an accident?” I wondered aloud. “Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn’t have thought so.”

We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.

“That’s my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon.”

We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.