“Refuse the case, then.”
“I can’t. There’s always a chance they overlooked something, that these suspicious old eyes might see something.” He gave a sharp bark of cynical laughter. “Now, there’s a morsel for Watson’s notes: Sherlock Holmes trusting in luck. Sit down, Russell, and let me put this muck on your face.”
It was horrid, warm and black and slimy like something the dog left behind, and had to go up my nose, in my ears, and around my mouth, but I sat.
“We will be a pair of gipsies. I’ve arranged for a caravan in Cardiff, where we’ll see the Simpsons and then make our way north. I had planned to hire a driver, but since you’ve been practising on Patrick’s team, you can do it. I don’t suppose you’ve picked up any useful skills at Oxford, such as telling fortunes?”
“The girl downstairs from me there is a fiend for Tarot. I could probably imitate the jargon. And there’s the juggling.”
“There was a deck in the cupboard—Sit still! I told Scotland Yard I’d be in Cardiff tomorrow.”
“I thought the ransom note said they had one week? What can you expect to do in two days?”
“You overlooked the agony columns in the papers,” he scolded. “The deadline was as much a pro forma demand as the insistence that the police be kept out of it. Nobody takes such demands seriously, least of all kidnappers. We have until the thirtieth of August. Senator Simpson is trying to raise the money, but it will come near to breaking him,” he added in a distracted voice, and smeared the repulsive goop onto my eyelids. “A senator, even a powerful one like Simpson, is not always a rich man.”
“We’re going to Wales. You think the child is still there?”
“It is a very remote area, no one heard an automobile after dark, and the police had every road blocked by six o’clock in the morning. The roadblocks are still up, but Scotland Yard, the Welsh police, and the American staff all think she’s in London. They’re busy at that end, and they’ve thrown us Wales as a sop to get the Simpsons out from under their feet. It does mean that we’ll have a relatively free hand once we’re there. Yes, I think she is still in Wales; not only that, I think she’s within twenty miles of the place from which she disappeared. I said sit still!” he growled. He was rubbing the sludge into my ear, so I could not see his face.
“A cool character, if that’s the case,” I offered, not meaning the child.
“Cool, as you say. And careful: The notes are on cheap, common paper, in common envelopes, typed on the second most common kind of typewriter, three or four years old, and mailed in busy post offices across London. No fingerprints. The spelling, choice of words, and punctuation are consistently atrocious. The layout on the page is precise, the typist indents exactly five spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, and the pressure on the keys indicates some familiarity with typing. Other than the window dressing of illiteracy, the messages are clear and not overly violent, as these things go.”
“Window dressing?”
“Window dressing,” he said firmly. “There is a mind behind this, Russell, not some casual, uneducated lout.” In his face and in his voice a total abhorrence of the crime itself fought a losing battle with his constitutional relish for the chase. I said nothing, and he continued to coat my hands and arms past the elbow with the awful stuff. “That is why we will take no risks, assume no weaknesses on their part. Our disguise is assumed the instant we step outside of that door over there, and not let down for a moment. If you cannot sustain it, you’d best say so now, because one slip could mean the child’s life. To say nothing of the political complications that will result if we allow a valued and somewhat reluctant Ally’s representative to lose his child while on our soil.” His voice was almost mild, but when he looked into my eyes I nearly quailed before him. This was no game of putting on Ratnakar Sanji’s turban and a music-hall accent, where the greatest risk was being sent down; the penalty for failure in this rôle could be a child’s life. Could even be our own lives. It would have been easy, then, to excuse myself from the case, but—if not now, I asked myself, when? If I refused now, would I ever find the necessary combination of courage and opportunity again? I swallowed, and nodded. He turned and put the beaker on the table, where it would sit, undisturbed, to greet our weary eyes when we returned.
“There,” he said. “Let us hope it doesn’t stop up the plumbing again. Go have your bath and rinse this through your hair.”
I took the bottle of black, viscous dye across the corridor to the bathroom, and some time later stood looking in the mirror at a raven-haired young woman with skin the colour of milky coffee and a pair of exotic blue eyes, dressed in a multitude of voluminous skirts from Holmes’ trunks, draped with colourful scarves and a hotchpotch of heavy yellow gold and bright, cheap trinkets at my neck and wrists. I put on my spectacles to study my reflection in the glass, decided that my standard ones were too scholarly and exchanged them for a pair with heavier gold rims and lightly tinted lenses. The effect was incongruous, but oddly appropriate—a modern variation on the conspicuous wealth I already wore. I stepped back to practise a seductive, flashing smile, but only succeeded in making myself giggle.
“Fortunately, it is Mrs. Hudson’s day off,” was all Holmes said when I swirled into the sitting room. “Sit down, and we shall see what you can do with these cards.”
We left after dark to meet the last train going east. I telephoned from the cottage to let my aunt know that I had decided to spend a few days with my friend Lady Veronica in Berkshire, her grandmother had just died and she needed the assistance of her friends, not to expect me back for a week, and I rang off in the midst of her queries and protests. I should have to deal with her anger when I returned, but at least she was not about to complicate matters by calling in the police over her missing niece.
At the station we climbed down from the wheezing omnibus and took our multiple parcels over to the ticket window. I slipped my spectacles from my nose into my pocket, lest the familiar Seaford agent think to look twice at me, but even half-blind there was no mistaking the expression of dislike on his face, held in by the thin rein of his office manners.
“Yes, sir?” he said coldly.
“First class to Bristol,” Holmes muttered.
“First class? I’m sorry, there won’t be anything suitable. You’ll find the second class quite comfortable this time of night.”
“Naow, s’got to be first class. ’S me daughter’s birfday, she wants a first class.”
The agent looked at me, and I smiled shyly at him (which was, I thought, a bit like schoolgirl braids on a lady of the evening, but it seemed to soften him).
“Well, perhaps, it being night we might be able to find something. You’ll have to stay in your compartment, though. No wandering about, bothering the other passengers.”
Holmes drew himself up and glared blackly at the man.
“If they’ll not be bothering us, we’ll not be bothering them. How much is it?”
Scandalised eyes looked away as we climbed colourfully aboard with our various bags and parcels (I imagined letters going off in the morning post to the editorial page of The Times, but as we were busy for the next few days I do not know if they actually appeared.), and we had a compartment to ourselves for the trip. I opened the case file Holmes handed me, but the long day’s work under the hot sun and the tension conspired against me. Holmes woke me at Bristol, where we found rooms in a sleazy hotel near the station and slept until morning.
The remainder of the trip to Cardiff was decidedly less luxurious than the first part, and Holmes had to help me off the train, as my leg had fallen asleep with the weight of the bags and the woman wedged in beside me. When I could walk, he put his whiskered face against my ear and spoke in a low voice.
“Now, Russell, we shall see what you can do on your own. We have an appointment with the Simpsons in the office of Chief Inspector Connor at half-twelve. It would not be the best of ideas to go in through the front door, as I told you, so we are going
to be arrested. Kindly don’t manhandle your persecutor too badly. His bones are old.”
He picked up the two smallest bags and walked away, leaving me to deal with the remaining four. I followed him to the exit, past a uniformed constable watching the crowd—and us, closely no doubt. The crush at the door grew thick, and Holmes stopped suddenly to avoid stepping on a child. I bumped into him and dropped a parcel, and as I struggled to retrieve it it was kicked away by various feet, beginning with a pair of garish gipsy boots. By dint of elbows and shoulders I followed the parcel, and as I reached down to pick it up something suddenly slammed me against the wall, where I collapsed in a heap of skirts and baggage. A voice snarled loudly above my head.
“Aw for God’s sake, can you not ’ang on t’yer bags? I shoulda brought your brother; at least he can stand up straight.” A hard hand seized my arm and jerked me upright, but when it let go too soon I stumbled into a group of elegantly dressed men. Gloved hands kept me from falling, but all movement through the doors had come to an abrupt halt.
“Damn you, girl, you’re worse than your mother for falling into the arms of strange men. Get over here and pick up your things,” he yelled and, hauling me out of the supporting hands of my rescuers, shoved me hard towards the bags. Tears had come into my eyes with the pain of the wall’s initial impact, and now I groped blindly for the handles and strings. A murmur of properly accented voices protested my mistreatment, but none moved to stop my “father.”
“But Da’, they was only tryin’ to help me—”
I saw his hand coming towards me and moved with it, but it still connected with a crack. I cowered against the wall with my arms over my head and cried out piteously when his shoe kicked the valise beneath me.
Finally a police whistle rang out.
“Stop you that, man,” cried the Welsh voice of authority. “There’s shameful, there is, hurting a child.”
“She’s no child, and she needs some sense beat into her.”
“That you will not, man. No,” he shouted, and grabbed Holmes’ upraised arm. “We’ll not be having that. There’s to the station with the both of you; we shall see if that cools your tempers.” He looked at me more closely and then turned to the group of men. “Perhaps you gentlemen might care to check your pockets, see if there might be anything missing?”
To my relief there was nothing, although I would not have put it past Holmes to add that bit of verisimilitude to the proceedings. The constable made good his threat anyway, and as my voice joined with Holmes’ in vociferous abuse we were bundled into the back of a police van and taken away. Once inside the wagon we did not look at each other. I sniffed occasionally. It concealed the smile that kept creeping onto my lips.
At the station a PC seized Holmes’ handcuffed arm and led him roughly away. My own young constable and the matronly sort he handed me over to both seemed undecided as to whether I was an innocent victim or a worse scoundrel than my father, and it required an enormous amount of effort and a tedious amount of time before I could make myself sufficient of a nuisance to be granted my request, which was a brief interview with Chief Inspector Connor. Finally, I stood outside the door that held his name on a brass plaque. The tight-lipped, over-corseted matron hissed at me to stay where I was and went to speak with a secretary. Matron glared at me, secretary raked me with scandalised eyes, but I did not care. I was there, and it was only twenty past twelve.
To my dismay, however, the secretary decided to stand firm. She shook her head, waved her hand at the closed door, and was very obviously refusing me access to the man inside. I dug out a pen and a scrap of paper from my capacious pockets and, after a moment’s thought, wrote on it the name of the child whose fate brought us here. I folded it three times and walked over to hold it out deferentially to the secretary.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss,” I said. “I shouldn’t think of bothering the chief inspector if I weren’t absolutely certain that he would want to see me. Please, just give this to him. If he does not wish to see me after that, I shall go away quietly.”
She looked at the folded scrap, but perhaps the uplifted syntax got through to her, because she took my note and went resolutely through the door. Voices from inside cut off short, then came hers in tones of apology, and then an abrupt and stifled exclamation was all the warning I had before a florid, middle-aged man with thinning red hair and an ill-fitting tweed suit stormed out of the doorway, growling magnificently in the rumble and roll of his Welsh origins.
“If the Pharaoh in Egypt had been so plagued by Moses as I have been by all the troublemakers of the world he would have delivered the children of Israel in his own carriage to the very gates of Jericho. Now look you here, Miss,” he pinned me down with a pair of tired, brilliant blue eyes, “there’s pitiful, there is, the sly ways of your sort, coming by here and—”
I leant into the gale of his speech and contributed two low, forceful words of my own.
“Sherlock Holmes,” I pronounced. His head snapped up as if I had slapped him. He took a step back and ran his eyes over me, and I was amused to see him think that even a man famous throughout the world for his skill at disguise was not likely to be the person before him. His eyes narrowed.
“And how are you knowing about—” He stopped, glanced at the startled woman in the doorway, went back to close his door, and then led me away into a smaller, shabbier office than the one I had caught a glimpse of—an interview room, with three doors. He closed the door behind us.
“You will explain yourself,” he ordered.
“With pleasure,” I said sweetly. “Would you mind awfully if I were to sit down?”
For the first time he actually looked at me, drawn up short by the thick Oxford drawl emerging from the gipsy girl, and I reflected upon the extraordinary effect gained by speech that is incongruous with one’s appearance. He gestured to a chair, and I took possession of it. I sat. I waited. He sat.
“Thank you,” I said. “There is a certain Romany gentleman being held in your cells—my ‘father.’ That is actually Sherlock Holmes. I understand that he did not wish it known that he was being called in on the Simpson case, so we chose to arrive for the appointment through the back door, shall we say, rather than the front. Your officers were very polite,” I hastened to reassure him, not altogether truthfully.
“Jesus God,” he swore under his breath. “Sherlock Holmes in the lockup. Donaldson!” he bellowed. A door opened behind me. “I want here the gipsy they arrested by the train station. You will bring him, yourself.”
Heavy silence descended, until Connor abruptly recalled the two Americans in his office and scrambled away. His voice vibrated through the intervening space for several minutes. He then came out of his office and spoke in a low voice to his secretary.
“We will drink tea, Miss Carter, biscuits, whatever. A tray in to the Simpsons, if you please. And by here, three teas. Yes, three.”
He came back into the interview room, lowered himself cautiously into the chair across from me, and folded his hands together on top of the table.
“Nah,” he said, “there’s funny there is. Why was I not told…” He stopped, and with an effort shook the Welsh from his tongue and put on English like a uniform. “That is to say, I did not know that there would be someone accompanying him.”
“He himself did not know it until yesterday. My name is Mary Russell. I shall be his assistant on the case.”
His mouth slid out of control, but he was saved from further conversation on the matter by the arrival of Donaldson and Holmes. The latter was still in handcuffs, but his eyes sparkled with amusement, and he was patently enjoying himself despite the bruise darkening the ridge of his already dusky cheek and the puffiness to the left side of his mouth. Connor looked at him aghast.
“Donaldson, what does this mean? What has happened to his face? And take those cuffs from his hands.”
Holmes cut in with his roughened voice.
“Naow, cap’n, there bain’t no problem.
They was just doin’ their job, like.”
Connor looked hard at Holmes, then glanced at his sergeant.
“Mister Donaldson, you will go down into the cells and you will tell the men with the ready fists that I will have no more of that thing. I do not care what the man before me permitted or encouraged; there will be no more of it. There’s bad, that is, Donaldson. Go, you.”
Miss Carter came in as the sergeant slunk out and put a tray with three cups and a plate of cakes on the table, keeping her eyes to herself but positively radiating curiosity. Evidently we were not Connor’s normal variety of tea guests.
The door closed behind her, and Holmes came to sit in the chair next to mine.
“You are quite to time, Russell. I trust I did not harm you?”
“A few bruises, nothing more. You managed to miss my spectacles. And you?”
“As I said, there were no problems. Chief Inspector Connor, I take it you have met Miss Russell?”
“She…introduced herself. As your ‘assistant.’ I ask you, Mr. Holmes, is this truly necessary?”
There were multiple layers insinuated into his question but, innocent that I was, I did not immediately read them…until I saw the way Holmes was just looking at the man, and suddenly I felt myself flush scarlet head to toe. I stood up.
“Holmes, I think you would be better off alone on this case, after all. I shall return home—”
“You will sit down.” With that note in his voice, I sat. I did not look at Chief Inspector Connor.
“Miss Russell is my assistant, Chief Inspector. On this case as on others.” That was all he said, but Connor sat back in his chair, cleared his throat, and shot me a brief glance that was all the apology I would have, considering that nothing had actually been said aloud.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 11
