Watson on the Orient Express

by Anna Elliott

  “Not at all. You know my methods. You have often remarked that I make deductions from signs that are so subtle and minute that they go unnoticed. I am here to tell you that you have seen such signs—and heard them, I might add—but you have not observed with sufficient acuity as to extract the full measure of their value.”

  “Even in my dreams, Holmes, you are most annoying.”

  “Hardly my fault, then, you must admit, if you yourself are creating the annoyance. But let us state the problem. You wish to question me, because you need to know if the woman who now calls herself Jane Griffin remains an enemy, or if she has become my ally. You are restrained by Clegg, who has orders to prevent you from questioning me by telegram. And Sonnebourne’s people have framed you for two murders, so you cannot get help from the authorities.”

  “That is all true, Holmes. But what am I to do about it?” My voice rose and I sat up in my bed.

  Holmes and his pillows floated undisturbed above the covers.

  I went on, “Are you working with Jane Griffin or are you not? I must know if I can trust her! She may kill you! So, do not be coy with me!”

  Holmes took a delicate puff on the cigarette and exhaled a series of perfect smoke rings, each concentrically expanding around the next. “The Torrance woman is your answer,” he said.

  “You mean I should ask her whether she is telling me the truth? But her trustworthiness is the very essence of the problem! Holmes, that is too much, even from you.”

  His eyes widened, and he gave a sympathetic nod. “Nevertheless, old friend, I say that the Torrance woman is your answer.”

  From my compartment door came a soft tapping.

  And a voice. Maurice’s voice. “Milord?”

  Holmes’s floating form grew cloudy, and then transparent.

  “Holmes!” I cried. “Holmes!”

  “Farewell, old friend,” he said, and vanished. My compartment was dark.

  The tapping noise became a knock. “Milord? Are you there?”

  22. WATSON

  At breakfast I confronted Jane Griffin.

  We were near Vienna. Bright sunlight streamed in through the tall windows, and the dining car seemed larger and airier than before, with its high-arched and artfully decorated ceiling now clearly visible. On the sparkling white linen tablecloth was local fare: bread rolls with butter and marmalade, muesli, bacon, and boiled egg. Normally I would have had a good appetite. Now, I took only black coffee, which was powerful and steaming hot. We were at one of the tables for two, alongside the window. I kept my voice low so that the couple across the aisle would not overhear our conversation over the rumble and muted clatter of the carriage on the rails.

  “Clegg is on the train,” I said.

  “Third class.”

  “You told Clegg of my telegram.”

  “Of course I told Clegg. He reports to Sonnebourne.”

  “Clegg destroyed my message.”

  She shrugged and took a delicate sip of coffee leaving a faint trace of lip rouge around the gold-edged rim of the fine-china cup. “Those were his instructions.”

  “Aren’t you curious as to what I said?”

  “It does not matter.”

  “I was reporting to Holmes.”

  “Only fair, since I must report to Sonnebourne.”

  “By telegram?”

  She lifted the small crystal vase from our table and toyed with the single pink rose. “I left the train. I can do that, since police are not looking for me.”

  “Have you tried sending a message to Holmes?”

  “Not possible, with him enroute to Constantinople. But I shall try tomorrow from Belgrade. He may be at the Pera Palace by then. He is to meet us there when we arrive Wednesday morning.” She smiled. “I am sure he will be pleased to see you.”

  I had lunch in my compartment. My sleepless night, my pre-dawn encounter with Clegg, and my exasperating dream of Holmes had left me in need of rest. I was determined to carry on. I obtained a guidebook to Constantinople from Maurice. I studied it. It was in French, and so I learned little. I tried to memorize the map, which showed the locations of the railway station and the Pera Palace Hotel. They looked about a half-hour’s walk from one another. Then I dozed, half-wondering if I would dream of Holmes again. But I did not. I woke as we pulled into Budapest station. As I dressed for dinner, I thought of Jane Griffin. I would not have many more opportunities to question her. In a day and a half, we would be in Constantinople and at least one assassin would be preparing to kill Holmes and the French diplomat. Would she also be a victim of the sleek-haired man I had seen across the desk from Sonnebourne?

  23. LUCY

  The train’s whistle blew a sharp blast. The wheels began to move, and the Gare de l’Est platform receded as the train pulled out of the station.

  I was in Paris—or had been, until the train’s departure a moment ago, having caught the early morning train at Victoria that had brought me to Dover, and from there taken the ferry across the channel to Calais.

  Now I was at last on the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits train commonly known as the Orient Express. I leaned back against the cushioned seat in my sleeping compartment and shut my eyes. Thanks to Mycroft, I once again had my own private compartment, and like everything else about the train, the small chamber was of luxurious quality. The walls were of dark panelled wood. The seat that could be folded out into a bed at night was covered with velvet and eminently comfortable. But however tired I was, my nerves were too on-edge for me to rest.

  I had seen only a few of my fellow passengers so far and only in passing, but I was fairly certain that none of them had been Holmes, even in disguise. For safety’s sake, Mycroft hadn’t told me the name and persona under which Holmes would be travelling—and apart from ruling out the two baggage cars, he could now be in any of the berths on the train.

  Assuming that he had made it onto the train. He could have been attacked in London, or at any point in his own journey from London to Dover and on to Calais.

  I snapped that line of thinking off. Unlike my own evasive measures, Holmes’ movements before leaving London would have been genuinely designed to throw off pursuit. And there was no one better at shaking a follower off than Sherlock Holmes.

  I stood up, splashed water from the pitcher into the wash basin, washed my face and combed my hair. Then I changed out of my travelling clothes and into the ruffled pink silk dress that I—or rather Clarice Earnshaw—had chosen for evening wear.

  The restaurant carriage was at the far end of my train carriage. I made my way there along the narrow aisle that ran alongside the individual sleeping compartments, nearly bumping into a tall, grey-haired man in the robes of a Roman Catholic priest. He gave me a disapproving look from under bushy grey brows that suggested he found my dress and jewellery to be sinfully expensive at best, immodest at worst. Then he muttered something unintelligible and disappeared into the sleeping compartment two doors down from mine.

  Despite it being the dinner hour, the restaurant car when I reached it wasn’t crowded, with only about half of the white-clothed tables occupied. The train must not be fully booked with passengers.

  I took a seat at an empty table near to the door and surveyed the room.

  Two stout men of middle-aged and prosperous appearance were seated at a table near the end of the car and were deep in a discussion in Italian that included raised voices and a multitude of hand-gestures.

  A slim younger man was seated a few tables away from them. His clothes were of the best Saville Row quality, and he had fair hair, a weak chin, and peered at the world through a monocle. Only if he had British Aristocracy tattooed in ink across his forehead could his background have been more clear.

  Although those details were easy enough to fake. I was currently dressed to look like the young man’s female equivalent—an English society miss, brought up to believe that life was one long round of balls and tea parties and London society seasons.

  To that end,
my wedding ring was gone, left behind in London in case of anyone’s searching my luggage. Wigs and other elements of false disguise were as difficult to maintain long-term and in close quarters as male apparel would have been. But I had coloured both my eyebrows and my hair with henna. It would eventually wash out, but for now my usually dark brown hair had reddish mahogany highlights, and I had arranged it in a riot of curls that had caused me to burn myself three times with the curling tongs.

  I continued my study of the dining car’s occupants. At the table next to mine sat a middle-aged woman with iron grey hair and a weather-beaten, formidable face: determined jaw, broad nose and cheekbones, and piercing dark eyes. She was currently taking a waiter to task for the fact that she had been brought coffee with sugar, when in fact she had requested it black.

  “Yes, Lady Danville. Right away, Lady Danville. That is, I shall bring you another cup straight away.” The waiter bowed hasty apologies and made his escape, bearing away the offending coffee cup.

  The only other occupants of the restaurant car sat at the two tables across the aisle from mine. They appeared to be a family party: a father with sleek dark hair and a walrus moustache, and his daughter, who shared her father’s colouring and looked to be seven or eight. I doubted that the lady sitting with the child was the mother, though. She was somewhere in her middle thirties, and her plain brown dress and severe, entirely unornamented hairstyle clearly proclaimed governess.

  At the moment, she was endeavouring to get her charge to eat her dinner—a vain effort, because the little girl was sitting with her arms folded and her face set in a ferocious scowl, kicking her heels against the bottom of her chair.

  “Come, Rosamund, just try one bite?” the governess cajoled in a sing-song voice. “Just one tiny little bite? It’s lovely rice pudding, see? And you’ll never grow big and strong if you don’t eat, you know.”

  The governess no doubt meant well, but in the child Rosamund’s place, I would have refused to do anything asked of me in that tone of voice just on principle.

  “I said I don’t want it!”

  Rosamund had almost Spanish colouring: lightly tanned skin, dark hair and long-lashed dark eyes set under very straight dark brows. Her face was square jawed, and was probably determined-looking even when she was in the best of tempers—which at the moment she patently was not.

  “I won’t eat it, I won’t!” She shoved the dish of rice pudding across the table, nearly catapulting it onto her governess’s lap. “Father—I don’t like the food on this train! Tell Miss Nordstrom that she can’t make me eat it! Tell her!”

  Her father held a newspaper spread open in front of him and appeared to be paying no attention whatever to either his daughter or Miss Nordstrom. But at Rosamund’s address he lowered the paper just enough to give his daughter a quick glance.

  “Do as Miss Nordstrom says, Rosamund.”

  His voice was curt, and the moment he’d spoken, he once more raised the newspaper, forming an effective barrier between himself and his two companions.

  Rosamund looked at him a moment, then scowled harder, kicking her feet with extra emphasis.

  “There, you see?” Anyone who had the smallest degree of experience with children ought to have known that silence in that moment was by far the best policy. Miss Nordstrom was either new to her job or extremely bad at it, because she pounced on her employer’s words with beaming triumph and went on in the same chirping tone. “Now, come along, just a teensy little bite?”

  Instead of answering, Rosamund jumped up—this time knocking over the glass that had contained her milk—and bolted from the restaurant car.

  Miss Nordstrom’s brow puckered in distress. She dabbed helplessly and ineffectually at the puddle of spilled milk with a napkin, then murmured something about going after the child before hurrying from the carriage.

  Rosamund’s father didn’t reply or even glance up from his newspaper.

  “That child is abominably spoiled.”

  I looked up to find that the grey-haired woman Lady Danville was addressing me from the table next to mine.

  “Do you think so?” I glanced at Rosamund’s father again. Our voices were covered by the continual clatter of the train’s wheels and the chug of the engine, but in any case, Rosamund’s father appeared as oblivious to our conversation as he had been to his daughter’s departure. He spared us not a single glance.

  “I am certain of it!” Lady Danville said.

  Now that I had a chance to study her more closely, I remembered that I had seen her before. Not in person, but her name appeared in the papers in association with various charitable works. Her husband, Lord Danville, was a member of Parliament, and with his backing, Lady Danville championed projects to create more schools and better housing amongst the poorest neighbourhoods of London’s East End.

  A formidable woman—but then she would have to be in order to accomplish any tangible results in Whitechapel or Limehouse. And certainly no one could claim that reforms in those areas were not desperately needed.

  She, too, glanced across the restaurant car’s aisle, then lowered her voice. “We were staying at the same hotel in Paris for the past two days before the train’s departure, and I had the chance to make a study of the family. That governess creature simply hasn’t any backbone at all. The child misbehaves, and she does nothing whatsoever about it. I always insisted on hiring German governesses for my own children when they were small. Whatever else one may say of the Germanic people, they do understand proper order and discipline! But that child Rosamund is constantly allowed to get her own way in everything.”

  From what little I had seen of them, I would have said that the answer to Rosamund’s troubles was more complicated than a simple case of being spoiled. But I didn’t voice the opinion out loud.

  “Who is her father, do you know?”

  Lady Danville got up from her seat and came to join me at my table. “May I?”

  I acquiesced with a nod, and Lady Danville went on, nodding to Rosamund’s father.

  “His last name is Anstruther. He is a widower, and I believe he is something to do with the diplomatic service—going out to protect our interests in this trouble they seem to be having over the Suez Canal.”

  The mention of the Suez made my nerves prickle, even though a less likely conspirator than Lady Danville could scarcely have been imagined.

  “He travels all over the world, and so the child is dragged here, there, and everywhere. And her father can’t be bothered to see that she has any kind of proper training.” Lady Danville sniffed disapproval.

  Mr. Anstruther must care about his daughter, though, otherwise he would have left her in a boarding school while he went abroad, instead of bringing her with him. I’d grown up in an establishment like that, with several of my classmates being the daughters of highly-placed diplomats.

  “And you?” I asked. “Are you travelling all the way to Constantinople?”

  “Yes. I am joining my daughter, whose husband works for the foreign office and is stationed in the embassy there. She is expecting her second child, and I am going out to lend a hand with things after the birth.”

  At the mentioned of her daughter and grandchild, Lady Danville unbent perceptibly, even going so far as to show me a sepia photograph of her daughter and her daughter’s little boy—a curly haired child of two or three.

  “And you, my dear?” she asked, when she had stowed the photograph away once more. “I hope that you’re not travelling all the way to Constantinople alone?”

  As a young, unmarried female, travelling such a distance on my own would indeed be something of a scandal.

  “I’m afraid so. Originally, my aunt was to accompany me, but she took ill at the last moment and couldn’t come after all. I’m travelling out to join my father. His regiment is stationed in Syria, but he’s coming to meet me in Constantinople. He only has leave to come and meet me for a short while—that was why it was important that I not miss the train or delay the j
ourney for another time.”

  “Your father is with the army?”

  “Yes, General Earnshaw.”

  Mycroft’s connections had elicited the information that there was indeed a General Earnshaw currently serving in the army at one of Britain’s more obscure outposts in Syria. But there hadn’t been time to create a deeper or more complete cover story for me than that.

  Now I had to hope that I wouldn’t have the spectacularly bad luck to discover that Lady Danville was in fact acquainted with that gentleman.

  She merely nodded, though. “Well, my dear, you must allow me to look after you, especially if this is your first journey abroad. The way these foreigners will try to take advantage of one is simply shocking—especially a young girl, travelling alone.”

  Gaining Lady Danville as a chaperone could prove inconvenient if she wanted to keep an eye on my every movement. But it might also have its advantages.

  “Do you know any of the other passengers on the train?” I asked.

  As I had suspected, Lady Danville did indeed. She was of the type who, though not at all malicious or a gossip, simply considers everyone else’s business to be her own. And she was only too happy to share her knowledge. “Well, as I told you, the child Rosamund’s father is something to do with the diplomatic service. Then there is a Roman Catholic Priest.”

  “I saw him earlier,” I volunteered. “He has the compartment two doors down from mine.”

  Lady Danville inclined her head in acknowledgment. “He told me when we were boarding the train that he runs a mission in Constantinople and was returning after having been in England to raise funds. Ordinarily, I do not approve of Catholics; however, he seemed perfectly sincere.”

  “What about that gentleman over there?” I nodded to the fair-haired Englishman with the monocle—who so far was leaving his dinner untouched, but was making rapid progress through the bottle of wine that the waiter had brought to accompany his food.

  “That is the Honourable Richard Mallowe.” Lady Danville’s brows pinched with disapproval. “You would be well advised to stay away from him, my dear. Despite his title, he is not a respectable person to know.”