The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  “Did Colonel Edwards know all this?” I asked.

  “Exactly my question, and the answer is yes. The nurse wrote a short report for the file, which the colonel read, and she later spoke with him about it when he went to see her in early 1919.”

  “So he knew that his wife had miscarried his baby while off with a mysterious female theatre person, had been with her for some time, in fact. Also that there was a file describing it all, which later conveniently disappeared.”

  “There’s more. The nurse well remembered the baby—she was holding it when it died—and finds it hard to believe that its, er, gestational age was more than five months, six at the very most.”

  “And the colonel had been back at the front since the autumn,” I remembered.

  “November. Slightly over eight months.”

  “He couldn’t have had a leave and the records lost?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “How very sordid and ugly. One can’t help wondering—”

  “If he drove his wife to it, or if she drove him to what he is now?” interjected Lestrade with unexpected perception.

  “Mmm. I’ll have some brandy now, please, Mycroft. I feel rather cold.” My shoulder ached, too, from the horse’s strong mouth on the reins and the succession of long days, but I ignored it and concentrated on what Lestrade was saying.

  “Next, we started working our way through all the travelling entertainers who were in York at the time, beginning with the legitimate theatre players and working our way down to the dancers in the nightclubs. Pretty close to the bottom, we came across an all-woman troupe that specialised in rude music-and-dance versions of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Yes, and it seems to have been as dotty as it sounds. People were hard up for entertainment during those years, but still…. Any road, the old, er, bat who managed it—Mother Timkins, she calls herself—is still alive by some miracle, running a, er, a house in Stepney.”

  “A ‘house,’ Inspector?” I asked. “Of ill repute?”

  “Er, yes. Precisely. She did remember Mrs Edwards, though not by that name. The colonel’s wife was with the Timkins troupe for five or six months, we finally determined. Joined at Portsmouth, was sick mornings for a couple of months, and had just started to, er, to ‘show’ when she died in York. The woman dressed as a man who took Mrs Edwards to hospital was probably Annie Graves, stage name Amanda Pillow. She and the Edwards woman were close.”

  “Lovers?” I asked bluntly. His delicacy was becoming irritating. He turned scarlet and consulted his notes furiously.

  “Er, the Timkins woman seemed to think it possible, although there were a number of men, as well. Obviously, there had to be at least one.” He cleared his throat again. “The, er, the interesting thing is that she told Colonel Edwards the two women were, as you say, lovers, when he went to see her in March of 1919. A month after he received his demob papers, that was.”

  “Four months before he was hospitalized for drink,” I commented. “What happened to the Graves woman?”

  “She was killed.” We all looked up. “In June of that same year. She went off with someone after a performance, and she was found at four the next morning on a country lane thirty miles away. Dead about two hours. She’d been walking, stinking drunk and in five-inch heels, and was run over by a vehicle. Her body was down among the weeds in the verge, but it was quite visible as soon as it became light. They never found the car. Never found the person she’d gone off with.”

  Throughout my report Holmes had appeared to listen politely, which I knew, to my severe irritation, meant that he was taking in perhaps one word in three. With Lestrade’s last revelation, however, he began to pay attention, and he was now looking affronted, as profoundly taken aback as if he had just discovered a distorting flaw in one of his instruments that threatened to cast doubts on the results of an experiement. He did not say anything, merely ground out his cigar and then tried to relight it.

  “Furthermore,” Lestrade continued, with a glance at his notebook, “there may be a slight discrepancy between when the colonel says he arrived home and when he actually did so. I say ‘may’ because the one neighbour who saw the car drive in has a most unreliable clock, which may or may not have been ten minutes slow or fast that night. According to both Colonel Edwards and the headwaiter at the restaurant, he left in his car just before midnight, no more than three or four minutes before. At that time of night, it takes eighteen minutes driving slowly and roundabout or eleven minutes direct and briskly to the Edwards home. The neighbour thought it was closer to twelve-thirty when he came home, but as I said, it’s unreliable.”

  “Why did Miss Ruskin walk?” Mycroft asked. “Granted, it’s not the worst area of London, but I should have thought a gentleman would have insisted on driving her, or at least have arranged a taxi.”

  “According to the restaurant’s doorman, there was some disagreement outside the restaurant about just that, which ended with the lady simply walking off.”

  “Could you go over the maître d’s story again?” I asked Lestrade.

  “I was going to do that. He seems to have spent a couple of days thinking, and when I went back Thursday, he had a lot more to tell me. Remember, he told Mr Holmes there was some disagreement between Miss Ruskin and the colonel? Well, it occurred to me that for a headwaiter he was very unaware of what was going on in his restaurant, and I mentioned at our first interview that I might find it necessary to ask the local PC to patrol the area more closely, stick his head in occasionally.”

  “Coercion, Lestrade? Tut-tut,” said Holmes in mock disapproval.

  “Not coercion, just encouragement. It did serve to boost his memory, and he managed to give me a more detailed account of the three hours the colonel and Miss Ruskin were there, with certain gaps where he, the waiter, was off elsewhere, though it was not a busy night. The first half hour, he said, seemed pretty heavy going, long silences, much studying of menus. He got the impression that the colonel had been expecting her to be a man, remember, and that he was not at all happy about having to deal with Miss Ruskin. She, however, seemed to find it funny. Things did settle down, and they spent the next couple of hours going through a pile of papers she had with her. By this time, about eleven-forty, they’d both had a lot of wine and the colonel had drunk three g and t’s besides. Unfortunately, this was one of the times when the waiter was out of the dining room, some kind of hubbub in the kitchen, apparently, and when he came back about ten minutes later, the two of them were staring each other down across the table, furious about something. He says he was worried because the colonel looked like a gentleman they’d had die in the restaurant four or five years ago, his face dark red and his eyes popping in his head. He was gesturing at some papers Miss Ruskin was holding, and was, in the waiter’s words, ‘considerably upset’ over them. She seemed to be very sure of herself, and he heard her say a number of times something like ‘Yes, it’s possible.’ A few minutes later, the colonel’s chair fell over and the waiter looked up, to see him, I quote, ‘standing over that old lady, looking for all the world like he was going to grab the papers away from her, or hit her, or something, but she just sat glaring up at him like a banty, and halfway to laughing. He stood there almost shaking, like he was about to explode with anger.’

  “That’s when he asked to use the telephone. He had the waiter bring him a double brandy in the manager’s office and was closed up in there with the telephone for about ten minutes before he came back. He was calmer then, sat down and talked to her for another twenty minutes or so—uncomfortable talk, very stiff, and they seemed to be working themselves back up to the state they had been in before when all of a sudden, Miss Ruskin put her papers back into her briefcase, got to her feet, and left. Outside on the street, he offered to drive her to her hotel. Which offer she refused, and she died perhaps fifteen minutes later.”

  “Those words of hers—‘Yes, it’s possible’—are just what she told me that afternoon when I doubted the manuscript’s authentic
ity,” I said. “It sounds fairly conclusive that she showed him a copy of it.”

  “I agree,” said Lestrade, then stifled a yawn that left his eyes watering. “Sorry. Haven’t had a solid eight hours for two weeks.”

  “The Kent murders?” asked Mycroft with sympathy.

  “That, yes, and yesterday I was down in Cornwall, where the child was killed. Nasty piece of work, that. Still, there was a witness, which should help. And as for your witnesses, Miss Chessman and Mr O’Rourke were no help at all. He had his back to it the whole time—climbing a drainpipe to nick a flower from a window box for his lady love—and she draws a blank and starts crying when it comes to details. Says she saw the old beggar sitting and Miss Ruskin walking up to the street corner, but after that, all she remembers is shiny black paint and the blood. She was pretty hysterical, I gather, by the last time I sent someone round, and worse than useless at the inquest. You saw we got an adjournment, did you?”

  We had.

  “Now, about Mrs Rogers. You’ll understand, I hope, that this case has pretty low priority compared with two women knifed in Kent and a little boy horribly dead in Cornwall, which means that information is slow in coming in. All I have to add concerning Mrs Rogers is that her two sons have greying hair, since you asked, Mr Holmes. One is a sailor, like his father. He is not married—in this country at any rate—and has been out of the country since March. The other is married to an Italian woman; they have four sons and three daughters, ages fifteen to thirty-two. The two youngest and an unmarried daughter and her child live at home still, but the others are scattered from Lincoln to Bath. I had already begun to look at them before I got your telegram,” he said with a faint touch of reproof, acknowledged by Holmes with a gracious nod.

  “Three members of the family have criminal records, for what it’s worth: The sailor son bashed someone over the head with a bottle in a brawl a few years back, got four months; a granddaugter, Emily, aged thirty now, was done for shoplifting seven years ago; and a grandson, Jason, age twenty-six, seems to have spent his youth with a bad crowd—housebreaking, picked up for passing stolen goods once, petty stuff, not brutal and never for bodily harm—but either he decided he wasn’t much good at it and went straight or else he suddenly got much better, because he hasn’t been touched in four years. And before you ask, Mr Holmes, most of the crew have dark hair.

  “Finally, the ibn Ahmadi family and their grudge against Miss Ruskin. Preliminary reports—”

  I interrupted him. “Who?”

  “Ibn Ahmadi,” he repeated, doing his best with the strange pronunciation. “Oh, sorry, I forgot what a solid week it’s been. That’s the family Mr Mycroft Holmes mentioned, who were done out of a piece of land in Palestine.”

  “Muddy,” I offered, to his momentary confusion, the homophone suggested by Erica Rogers in the letter to her sister—a name foreign, multisyllabic, and sounding like mud. Before I could go further, he was nodding.

  “Yes, muddy, like she said in her letter. There are no less than twenty-four members of the clan, if I may call it that, here in Britain at present, all but four of them male, every one of them, I’d wager, having black hair, with the possible exception of one old auntie of sixty-three years who was thoroughly draped and hidden. Questions are being asked concerning whereabouts, but it will be slow, I’m afraid, and less likely to be fruitful as each day passes.”

  “I fail to see any connection between the Ahmadi family and the ransacking of the cottage,” growled Holmes. “Her death, perhaps, but could she have had something they wanted? Mycroft?” He seemed curiously uninterested in the question, merely as it were playing out a part written down for him.

  The large figure of his brother stirred and leant forward in his armchair, his grey eyes on the balloon glass of brandy cradled in his enormous hand.

  “I fear that I shall have to throw yet another scent in our paths by answering that in the affirmative.” Holmes made a sharp, impatient motion that amounted to a derisive snort. His brother ignored him. “One of my…colleagues succeeded in identifying the taxi driver who picked Miss Ruskin up from her hotel that Tuesday morning.”

  “No easy matter, that, in this city,” I commented. His fat face took on a satisfied look, like a cat full of warm milk.

  “I was pleased with that piece of work, true. Very fortunately, Miss Ruskin was not taken to a railway station or to the underground, but to a specific address here in London—a house. I had become interested in this case, so I went there myself, only to find that the family who lived in that house had no knowledge of such a woman. Nor did the four houses on either side. I was even more interested by now, and I took a leisurely stroll up and down, until I came across a house on the next street over that had all the signs of being other than a family dwelling: curtains tightly shut, signs of somewhat greater foot and bicycle traffic than the other houses, no wear on the front door at child level—all those small indications—you know them as well as I. The address was one which I recalled from a report that came across my desk a few months ago, minor organisations in London that in themselves seem harmless but which might nonetheless become linked with difficulties in the future. I knocked on the door and asked the man who answered if I might speak to whomever had been seen by Miss Dorothy Ruskin that Tuesday.

  “He was, shall I say, hesitant about letting me in, and I was forced to make a few unfriendly and authoritative noises at him. After much dancing about, he went off and returned with the gentleman who seems to be in charge of the house, which is, as you might have foreseen, a unit of Weizmann’s Zionist organisation. I will not trouble you with the whole of the following lengthy and highly interesting conversation. I will merely say as a précis that we found ourselves to have a number of mutual friends, and when eventually we returned delicately to the topic of Miss Ruskin, my new friend the rabbi was happy to admit that she had indeed been there, had brought with her a thick manila envelope containing a number of letters and papers from Palestine, and had, among other things, told the rabbi that the business of the ibn Ahmadi family’s land was far from over and that she foresaw an escalation of hostilities, both within Palestine and without. She was concerned that this might become a ready rallying cause for a variety of unrelated grievances, and she wanted to warn her friends to be, as the saying goes, on the lookout.”

  “Inconclusive, but suggestive,” commented Holmes grudgingly. “How long was she there?”

  “Approximately two and one half hours. One of their men was going into town, and they shared a cab as far as Paddington, where she left him just before noon.”

  “Oxford,” I cried at the name of the train station. “I told you she went to Oxford. Did you have any results with those names, Inspector?”

  “None at all. The old man at the library was gone part of that day, and he didn’t see her.”

  “Jedediah out sick? The place will collapse—he’s been there practically since Thomas Bodley married Mrs Ball.”

  “His mother’s funeral, I believe. She was one hundred and two.”

  “Ah, good. For a minute, you had me worried.”

  “Was there any more, Mycroft?” asked Holmes, as scrupulously polite as a concert pianist at a children’s music recital.

  “Just that I was allowed to examine the envelope of papers, and they were as they should have been, no personal documents, no will. That is all, Sherlock. The floor is yours.”

  Up to that point, I had immersed myself in the charade. I had stated my evidence factually, listened to Lestrade’s contribution as if it were of some importance, and noted Mycroft’s rumblings, but before Holmes opened his mouth, before he so much as sat upright, I knew what he was going to say. I could see all my hard-won efforts tumbling down, and I knew that it was an emptiness. I saw the body of the case against Colonel Edwards flash up and crumble away into a drift of ashes like the walls of a wooden house in a fire: Holmes had the case in his hands, and there was nothing for it. The rest of us—even Mycroft—were left scrambli
ng on thin air, and I was suddenly furious, seized by a pulse of something disturbingly near hatred for this superior prig I had so irrevocably attached myself to. It lasted for only an instant, before common sense threw a bridge out across the morass of tiredness, resentment, and uncertainty, of the awareness of urgent work undone and the remnants of shame and confusion from the afternoon, and I stood again on firm ground. I only hoped that neither pair of all-knowing grey eyes had witnessed the moment’s lapse. Holmes was completing the motion of sitting upright.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Lestrade, would you mind pulling that crate over from the corner? Just put it here, thank you.” He leant forward, untied the grubby string, and removed the top with the flourish of a conjurer. Inside was a jumble of chromium-plated bits of metal, hunks of broken glass, a large slab of dented mud guard, and a sheaf of the inevitable evidence envelopes. My heart twisted at the sight, then started to beat heavily. I must have moved or made a sound, because Holmes looked at me.

  “Yes, Russell, the murder weapon. Or rather, portions of it. I knew it would be there, once I knew that Miss Ruskin had been killed by a motorcar, and particularly when the machine was not found nearby, stolen, used, and abandoned. Why a motorcar, a method which took at least two persons to arrange and had all the attendant danger of the telltale damage? The person who thought of it had to have the vehicles both ready to mind and near to hand; plus, the means of repairing damage must be available to him. I knew I should find some such facility as a garage, and the only danger was how thoroughly they had covered their tracks. In this case, they were too sure of themselves—Jason Rogers had rid himself of the pertinent sections in a load of other scrap metal sold to a local dealer, from whom I retrieved them.

  “Unfortunately, their carelessness went only so far. They did quite a thorough job of washing the wreck down before they set to repairing it. There are only three small deposits of what may be dried blood, the largest being here, inside the broken headlamp. Samples of black paint from the side of the mud guard are in the envelope—to be matched up against whatever you may find on the button and her hairpins in your evidence envelope—as well as several hairs and one tiny scrap of fabric that resembles closely Miss Ruskin’s coat, all of which I found among the débris. Fingerprints were useless, all of them from people who work in the shop, and as Inspector Lestrade notes, most of the Rogers grandsons have black hair, including Jason and his younger brother Todd, who occasionally works in the shop. I did take samples from the back of Jason Rogers’s chair, though, as you know, the most one can hope for is a probable match. I have been working on different tests for matching hairs, but I have yet to come up with the definitive one.”