The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  “Stapleton’s body was never found,” Holmes pointed out unnecessarily as he resumed his chair on the other side of the fire. “I was never happy with Scotland Yard’s conclusion, and always felt it possible that he had prepared an escape route and slipped through it while we were occupied elsewhere, but he was never seen, and after two weeks, Scotland Yard was satisfied with his fate in the mire and took their watch from the ports.”

  “I have to agree that the description of the Cavalier painting, wicked Sir Hugo himself with his prim lips and his flaxen hair, does fit Scheiman.”

  “Scheiman is by no means so clear a case, else I should have noticed it when first I laid eyes on him. If Stapleton married in America—although legal marriage it could not have been, nor indeed would Sir Henry’s have been to Beryl Stapleton, the supposed widow—the woman contributed a great deal more to her son’s looks than did the father. Ears, eyes, cheekbones, and hands are all hers; only the mouth (which you will have noticed he takes care to conceal beneath a beard) and the stature are his father’s.”

  “You wondered when the portrait of Sir Hugo had gone: If the surviving Baskerville took it with her rather than sell it with the others to Ketteridge, for the dubious privilege of preserving a memento of the family history perhaps, then its absence is innocent, whereas if it was removed after the sale, by Ketteridge or Scheiman—”

  “Then the why is obvious: that Scheiman’s family resemblance might not be seen by visitors to the house.”

  “Visitors such as Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think I told you, by the way, that Ketteridge was interested in hiring you to investigate the hound sightings.”

  That brought a laugh, as I had thought it might do, albeit a brief one.

  “What brought the resemblance to your mind?” I asked. Surely he hadn’t picked up The Hound of the Baskervilles to read on the train?

  “A number of things. Scheiman’s interest in the antiquities of the moor, the dim lighting of the dining hall, how he spent the least amount of time possible with us—with me, who had known Stapleton. But, I have to admit, the actual possibility was got through hindsight.

  “As I told you, the Ketteridge establishment interests me. It interested me when first I saw the man helping himself to Gould’s liquor cabinet. He does not fit in Dartmoor, and does not seem eccentric enough to justify the oddity of his presence here.

  “So while I was in town, I initiated some enquiries about Ketteridge and his secretary. The responses to my telegrams will take days, even weeks, but I did come across one thing of interest: The two men were not together when they boarded the ship coming over here. Ketteridge began his journey in San Francisco, but Scheiman joined the ship in New York.”

  “There could be an explanation for that.”

  “There could be any number of explanations. However, Ketteridge told us he came over in the summer, yet his passage was in early March.”

  I had to agree that although the oddity was hardly evidence of criminal activity, it did call for a closer examination of the two men.

  “You’ve sent wires to New York and San Francisco?”

  “And Portland and Alaska.”

  “So you think Ketteridge is involved.”

  “He may or may not be. Scheiman is definitely up to something.”

  The generality of the word something was unlike Holmes; after a moment’s thought, and particularly when he would not look at me, I knew why.

  “You believe that Scheiman is after Mycroft’s tank,” I said in disgust.

  “It does not do to theorise in advance of one’s facts,” he said primly.

  I made a rude remark about his facts, and went on. “If this is deteriorating into a spy hunt, Holmes, you don’t need me. It’s been a truly invigorating holiday from my books, but perhaps I may be allowed to take my leave.”

  “Two murders now, Russell. I should have thought that sufficient to overcome your distaste for the War Office.”

  I dropped my head back onto the chair and closed my eyes. “You really need me, Holmes?”

  “I could ask Watson.”

  Dr Watson was only five years older than Holmes, but his heavy frame had aged as Holmes’ wiry build and whip-hard constitution had not. I dismissed his halfhearted suggestion. “A cold day on the moor would cripple him.” That Holmes might rely on police help or Mycroft’s men was so improbable as to be unworthy of mention. “I’ll stay and see it through. Although I can’t promise that I won’t blow up that flipping tank myself at the end of it.”

  “That’s my Russell.” He smiled. I scowled.

  “Will you go down to see Miss Baskerville yourself, to ask about the painting?” I asked him.

  “I should like to know as well some of the particulars concerning the sale of the Hall. Yes, I shall go myself. Now, you have yet to tell me about Elizabeth Chase’s hedgehogs.”

  “One hedgehog, and it does not belong to her. It now resides in the garden of a friend of Miss Chase’s in Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, where Miss Chase carried it to nurse it back to health after finding it on the twenty-eighth of July, its leg crushed by a fast-moving wheel and its back bitten by large teeth.”

  “Aha!”

  “Indeed. Moreover, she goes on to offer us one large and spectral dog with a glowing eye and a taste for scones.” To my great pleasure, this statement actually startled Holmes.

  I told him about Elizabeth Chase’s wounded hedgehog and about Samuel’s encounter with the Hound, and after telling him I sat forward and pulled the map to me, marking with an X the spot between the stone row and the hut circles where she had heard the piteous cry of poor wee Tiggy and the place where Samuel had seen the dog. Holmes took the pencil and drew in the probable route of the coach as seen from Gibbet Hill, added a star shape to mark the adit in which he had found signs of life, and we studied the result: my X, his line, two Xs for the sightings of the coach in July, and a circle to show where Josiah Gorton had last been seen. All of them together formed a jagged line running diagonally across the face of the moor from Sourton Tor in the northwest to Cut Lane in the southeast, roughly six miles from one end to the other. The imaginary line’s nearest point to Baskerville Hall was three miles, although the closest sighting, that of the courting couple, was more than four miles away.

  I sat for a time in contemplation of the enigmatic line while Holmes slumped back into his chair, eyes closed and fingers steepled. When he spoke, his remark seemed at first oblique.

  “I find I cannot get the phial of gold dust from my mind.”

  “Did you give it over for analysis?”

  “I looked at it myself in the laboratory. Small granules of pure gold—not ore—with a pinch of some high-acid humus and a scraping of deteriorated granitic sand.”

  “Peat is highly acidic,” I suggested.

  “Peat, yes, but there was a tiny flat fragment that looked as if it might have been a decomposed leaf of some tough plant such as holly or oak.”

  “Wistman’s Wood is oak.”

  “So are a number of other places around the moor. I shall ring the laboratory later today, to see if their more time-consuming chemical analyses have given them any more than I found. In the meanwhile, I think I can just catch the train to Plymouth, although it may mean stopping there the night. Perhaps you could go and ask Mrs Elliott if Gould’s old dog cart is available.”

  “And if the pony can pull it.” Red was still in residence at Baskerville Hall.

  Holmes went up to put his shaving kit and a change of linen into his bag, and I put the breakfast things back on the tray and took them into the kitchen. There I found Mrs Elliott, looking somewhat dishevelled.

  “Oh bless you, my dear. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Rosemary and Lettice have taken to their beds with sick headaches—from crying no doubt; they’d be better off working and keeping their minds off that silly man, but there you have it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Elliott. Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked hesitantly. “Washing up
or something?”

  She looked shocked. “That will not be necessary, mum. But thank you for the kind thought.” She would have to be in a sorry state indeed before she allowed a guest to plunge her ladylike hands into a pan full of dishes.

  “Well, please let me know if there is something I can do. But I need to ask, can someone take Mr Holmes down to the station? He needs to catch the train to Plymouth.”

  She looked up at the clock over the mantelpiece and hurriedly began to dry her hands. “He’ll need to step smart, then. I’ll have Mr Dunstan hitch the pony to the cart.”

  She ducked out through the door. I eyed the stack of unwashed dishes and left them alone, going up the back stairs to tell Holmes the cart would be ready. I found him just closing his bag, and reported on the time constrictions. He nodded and sat down to change his shoes.

  “What do you wish me to do while you’re away?” I asked. I was half tempted to throw together a bag and join him, for the sake of movement if nothing else.

  “We need to know more about Pethering,” he said. One set of laces was looped and tied, and the other foot raised. “I want you to—”

  “Sorry, Holmes,” I said, raising one hand. “Was that the door?” We listened, hearing nothing, and I went over to the window. There was a motorcar in the drive, but the porch roof obscured my view of the door, so, feeling a bit like a fishwife, I opened the window and put my head out to call. “Hello? Is someone there?”

  After a moment a hatted, overcoated man came into view, backing slowly out from the porch and craning his head to see where the voice had come from.

  “Inspector Fyfe!” I said. He found me and tipped his hat uncertainly. “Do come inside and warm yourself; the door is not locked. We’ll be right down.” I drew in my head and latched the window.

  Holmes was already out of the room, and I did not catch him up until he was shaking hands with a still-hatted Inspector Fyfe in the hall. As I seemed to be playing hostess (or rather, in the temporary absence of Mrs Elliott and her disturbed assistants, housemaid), I took his coat and hat. Not knowing quite what to do with them, I laid them across the back of a chair and joined the two men at the fire.

  Fyfe rubbed his hands together briskly in front of the smouldering fire, while Holmes squatted down to coax it back to life. “What can we do for you, Inspector?” I asked.

  “I have some questions to ask Mr Baring-Gould about the man Pethering.”

  Holmes looked up. “What do you imagine Gould would know about him?”

  “Well, I hope he knows something, because we can’t find a trace of where he comes from or who he is.”

  Holmes’ eyebrows went up. “I understood that he was a Reader at one of the northern universities. York, I believe Gould said.”

  “They’ve never heard of him. Nor do they have anyone on their staff who fits his description, an archaeologist or anthropologist or what-have-you, with a wife and young family.”

  “You interest me, Inspector. Mrs Elliott,” he said, raising his voice, and indeed, when I turned to look, there she was in the door to the drawing room. “Would you be so good as to tell Mr Dunstan that I won’t be needing the cart? I shall have to take a later train. And I believe the inspector could make good use of a hot drink.” He swept the maps off the bench in front of the fire, uncovering the blithely sleeping tabby, and sat down beside the animal, gesturing Fyfe towards a chair. “Tell me what you do know about him, Inspector.”

  Fyfe settled onto the edge of the nearest armchair. “I’ll be calling in Scotland Yard this afternoon,” he said, sounding resigned about it.

  “We don’t have the facilities here. Meantime, about all we know about Pethering, or whatever his name might be, is that he arrived at Coryton station on the Saturday afternoon, walked up to Lew Down to arrange a room at the inn, had some tea, and then came here to Lew House, where he stayed from ’round about six until you turned him out, which Miss—Mrs—which your wife says was a shade after midnight.

  “He then returned to Lew Down and knocked up the innkeeper, who let him in. He came down from his room around ten o’clock Sunday morning, struck up a conversation with William Latimer, who stepped in to deliver a basket of eggs his wife had promised for Saturday but couldn’t bring because one of their boys fell out of an apple tree and broke his arm, and she was away at the surgery getting it seen to. Latimer told Pethering about the sightings of the hound on the moor, Pethering got all excited and rushed upstairs to get his map. Latimer showed him where to look, and Pethering ran upstairs again, put on his heavy boots, and packed two bags—or one bag and a large rucksack. He left the bag with the innkeeper, and walked off down the high road in the direction of Okehampton.

  “A farmer near Collaven saw him ’round about two o’clock making for the moor. That’s the last anyone saw of the man alive.”

  I retrieved the one-inch map from the floor and looked for Collaven. It lay at the foot of the moor, two miles north of Lydford and a mile from Sourton Tor, on the edge of the area so heavily marked by our pencilled lines and Xs.

  “Where was he going?” Holmes asked.

  “Latimer told him the hound had been seen near Watern Tor.”

  His elbows on his knees, Holmes gazed into the fire, fingers steepled and resting on his lips. “Why the hound?” he mused.

  Before Fyfe could respond, the rattle of crockery heralded Mrs Elliott’s approach. Holmes prodded the cat until it jumped down, tail twitching in disgust, allowing Mrs Elliott to put the tray on the bench. She had thoughtfully included a high pile of buttered toast and three plates, although Holmes and I had only recently eaten. Fyfe, however, ate nearly all of it, drinking three cups of coffee as well before he was through.

  “What was that about the hound?” he asked, his voice rather muffled with toast.

  “I was merely wondering, Inspector, why the hound should be making an appearance.”

  Fyfe swallowed. “I understood there’d been a number of sightings over the summer.”

  “Those were of Lady Howard’s coach, which does indeed come complete with dog, but that does not explain why the dog should also appear sans coach.”

  Fyfe had suspended his toast in puzzlement. “I took it the hound referred to the Hound of the Baskervilles story.”

  “They are very different hounds, Inspector, separated by their time, their ghostly genesis, and their mission. It is as if Jacob were to have appeared in Isaac’s tent to receive his blessing wearing Joseph’s coat of many colours: not entirely impossible, one would suppose, but not terribly reasonable either.”

  “Different stories,” I translated for the inspector, who was looking confused. “Everyone seems to be mixing up the two different hounds.”

  “The only question is,” said Holmes, “whether or not the confusion is deliberate.”

  “Hardly the only question, Holmes,” I objected mildly.

  “No? You may be right. Tell me what the postmortem found, Inspector.”

  Fyfe hastily thrust the remainder of his wedge of toast into his mouth and reached into his pocket for a notebook. When the page was found and the toast was out of the way, he began to read. “A slim but adequately nourished male approximately thirty-seven years old, five feet six inches tall, distinguishing features a birthmark on his right shoulder blade the size of a shilling and an old scar on his left knee. Minor dental work—the description is being sent out—and otherwise in good health until someone cracked his skull open with a length of pipe.” The last sentence had not depended on the notebook.

  “Why pipe?” Holmes asked sharply. “Did the pathologist find traces?”

  “No, I just said pipe to indicate the size and hardness. Could have been a walking stick of some dashed hard wood, or the barrel of a rifle, if the killer didn’t mind mistreating his gun that way. ’Course it’d make more sense than the other way around. I once had a gunshot that we thought was murder until we had the victim’s handprint off the end of the barrel—a shotgun it was, and he’d swung it
at another man, and when the stock hit the other man, the gun discharged and took off the head of the man holding it. But that’s neither here nor there,” he said, recalling himself to the matter at hand. “Some blunt instrument a little thicker than your thumb, most likely from behind by a right-handed man. Went at a slight angle, up to the front.” He drew a line just above his own hairline, clearing the ear and ending at his right temple. It could have been a blow delivered by a left-handed individual standing above the victim, if Pethering had been on his knees, for example, but Fyfe’s simpler explanation was the more likely.

  “When was death?”

  “Very soon after he was hit—there was not much bleeding into the brain, and external blood loss the doctor estimated at less than a pint. Rigor had come and gone, putrefaction had begun in spite of the cold. Doctor said all in all he was probably killed late Tuesday or early Wednesday, but he’d only been in the water a few hours. Less than a day, certainly.”

  “Stomach contents?” Holmes asked. Fyfe looked sideways at me and put the next piece of toast down onto the edge of his plate.

  “Been a long time since he’d eaten, just traces of what the doctor thought might be egg and bread.”

  Which helped not at all, as that combination might be eaten at any time of the day, from breakfast to tea, particularly on a hike into the moor.

  Holmes jumped to his feet and held out his hand to Inspector Fyfe, who, after a quick pass at his trouser knee, shook it.

  “Thank you, Inspector. That is all very interesting. You have taken the fingerprints of the body?”

  “Yes, we raised some good prints, in spite of the puffiness from the water. Nothing yet, but we’ve sent them to London.”

  “Good. Let us know what else you find. We’ll be in touch.”

  19

  In La Vendée we saw men with bare legs wading in the

  shallow channels that intersect the low marshy fields.

  After a moment of immersion out was flung one leg and

  then another, to each of which clung several leeches … .