A Letter of Mary mr-3

by Laurie R. King

  The thought of Holmes steadied me. I looked grimly at my shadowed reflection and told myself, Enough of this, Mary Russell. You are here to track down the person who murdered a good woman, a friend. You are the former apprentice and now full partner of the best man in the business. You have a quick, trained mind that is second to few and certainly better than that of Col. Dennis Edwards. And you are the daughter of Judith Klein, who was by no means small in spirit. This rôle calls for caution and a sure touch, but it is nothing to be overwhelmed by, and you will not be intimidated by a large middle-aged man with overactive glands and hairy hands.

  I went to bed then and listened to the night sounds of the city. With dim surprise, I realised that it was one week since Dorothy Ruskin had died, one week and a couple of hours and three miles from the site. I slept eventually, although I did not sleep well.

  THIRTEEN

  nu

  The rain started during the night, in its typical understated London fashion. The grumble of distant thunder grew imperceptibly from the dying roar of the traffic, and the eventual rustle of drops on stones and slate gradually came to underlie what passed in London for a quiet night. Nothing dramatic, just dull London wetness. I huddled under my black umbrella in the bus queue the next morning and thought, Here I cannot even turn to my neighbours and say how good it is for the crops— they'd look at me as if I were from another planet.

  I escaped from the crowded omnibus and its smell of wet wool a full twenty minutes early, so I went into Rosie's for a cuppa to start the day. Rosie was busy, but she sloshed my tea with affection and asked what I was doin' out so early.

  "I found a position! I start with Colonel Edwards this morning. I met him at the pub last night and he said he needed a secretary, and he hired me."

  Rosie froze, and her face travelled through surprise and appraisal to suspicion and reappraisal, then ended up at a politely noncommittal "Good for you, dearie, so I guess we'll be seein' summat of you."

  Ten minutes later, I splashed up the drive to my new job, berating myself. Fine detective you make, Russell, I thought. Can't even play a rôle without worrying about what a complete stranger thinks of you. I shook the water from my umbrella, squared my meek shoulders, and rang the bell.

  * * *

  The work of any decent detective is at least nine-tenths monotony, despite the invariably brisk pace of any detective novel, or even a police file, for that matter. Take, for example, the accounts written by Dr Watson of the earlier cases of Holmes: They give the overall impression of the detective leaping into the fray, grasping the single most vital clue in an instant, and wrestling energetically with the case until all is neatly solved. There is little indication of the countless hours spent in cold, cramped watch over a doorway, of days spent in dusty records rooms and libraries, of the tantalising trails that fade away into nothing— all are passed over with a laconic reference to the passage of time. Of course, Watson was often brought in only at the end of a case, and so he missed the tedium. I could not.

  I will not recount the secretarial work I did for Colonel Edwards, because to do so would bore even the writer to tears. Suffice it to say that for the next few days I was a secretary: I filed and organised, I typed, and I took dictation. At the same time, of course, I had my ears fully cocked and my eyes into everything, at every moment. I listened in on telephone calls when I could, hearing long, dreary, manly conversations about dead birds and alcoholic beverages. I went systematically through each filing cabinet until my fingers and back cramped, and I dutifully chatted with the servants whenever I could manage to happen across them, receiving mostly monosyllabic grunts for my pains. No, if I wanted a life filled with nonstop excitement and challenge, I should not choose the life of a detective. High-wire acrobatics, perhaps, or teaching twelve-year-olds, or motherhood, but not detecting.

  It is endurance that wins the case, not short bursts of flashy footwork (though those, too, have their place.) For the next days, I soaked up all possible information about Colonel Edwards and the people around him: his eating and drinking habits, what he read, how he slept, his likes, dislikes, passions, and hates— all the urges and habits that made the man.

  The first day, Thursday, I spent all morning with the colonel in his upstairs study, sorting out correspondence and putting things to order. We ate lunch together in the study, and afterwards he showed me, almost shyly, the first pages of his book on Egypt in the years preceding the war. I promised to take it home and study it, which seemed to please him. We then sat down to dictation.

  The first letters were to the managers of two manufacturing businesses, concerned with the upcoming yearly reports. The third was a short letter to a friend confirming a weekend bird-slaughtering party in September. ("Do much shooting, Miss Small?" "Why, no, Colonel." "Invigorating way to spend a holiday. Of course, it takes some strength to use a bird-gun." "Does it, Colonel? It sounds jolly fun.") The fourth was to a bank manager, with details for increasing the monthly allowance for the colonel's son, Gerald, when he returned to Cambridge. (Thank God it's Cambridge, I thought, and not Oxford. I'm not exactly unknown there.) The fifth was of considerable interest to me, addressed to a friend, concerning a comember of an organisation whose name set off bells. It read:

  Dear Brooks,

  I've been doing a lot of thinking about the little flap-up last week, and I have come to the conclusion that I shall have to resign from the Friends. It was a downright nasty trick Lawson played on me, keeping information from me until the last minute like that. I was the chair of that committee, after all, and it makes me look a damned ('I beg your pardon, Miss Small, change that to confounded, would you please?') fool not to know it was a woman I was meeting.

  His supporters seem to have rallied round, and there's little chance he'll resign. If he apologises, I might reconsider, but not otherwise.

  My best to the missus, and hope to see you both on the twenty-fourth.

  Dennis Edwards

  I did not think his resignation threat referred to the Society of Friends.

  Two other letters followed, but I recorded them mechanically, taking little notice of their content other than seeing that they had nothing to do with my interests.

  "That's it for today, Miss Small. Do you want to read them back to me before you type them?"

  "If you like, but I think they're quite clear."

  "Didn't go too fast for you, did I? Let me see."

  "No, not at all. Oh, do you read shorthand?"

  "I read a bit, but I don't recognise this. What is it?"

  I couldn't very well tell him the truth, that it was my own system, a boustrophedonic code based on six languages, three alphabets, a variety of symbols mathematical and chemical, and a hieroglyphic, designed to keep up with even the fastest of lecturers and leave me time to record nonverbal data, as well. It was totally illegible to anyone but Holmes, and even he found it rough going.

  "Oh, it's a system I learned in Oxford."

  "Were you writing right to left?"

  "On alternate lines. Makes it much smoother, not having to jump back to the beginning of the line each time."

  "Well, live and learn." He handed me back my notebook. "Time for a little something. Sherry, I think, Miss Small?"

  "Oh, Colonel Edwards, I don't think—"

  "Now look, young lady." His mock sternness was meant to be amusing. "I never drink alone if I can help it— it's bad for the health. If you're going to be around here, you'll have to learn to be sociable. Here." He handed me a brimming wineglass, and I sighed to myself. Oh well, at least the quality was decent.

  An hour later, he stood up. "I must go, though I'd dearly love to repeat last night's dinner. You go on home, take my manuscript, and finish the letters tomorrow. We'll go to dinner tomorrow night."

  Not with Holmes due back, we wouldn't. "Oh, no, I couldn't—"

  "Tomorrow or Saturday, one or the other, I won't take a no."

  "We'll, er, we'll talk about it tomorrow," Mary Small s
aid weakly.

  "Or tomorrow and Saturday both, if you like. Here's the manuscript. Didn't you have a coat? Oh now, look at the rain out there. I'll have Alex run you home and come back for me; it'll take me that long to climb into my stiff shirt anyway." Protests were ignored as he stepped out and shouted orders to his man. "That's settled, then. I don't like to think of you getting wet. Here's your coat."

  He held it for me, and his hands lingered on my shoulders. "Don't you think I should call you Mary?"

  "Whatever you like, Colonel." I busied myself with my buttons.

  "Would you call me—"

  "No, sir," I interrupted firmly. "It wouldn't be right, Colonel. You are my employer."

  "Perhaps you're right. But we will go to dinner."

  "Good night, sir."

  "Good night, Mary."

  * * *

  My portrait of Colonel Edwards was filling out. It now included his home, his investments, his relationships with servants and hired help, and the suggestive knowledge that he had been duped by colleagues over the gender of D. E. Ruskin, for some as-yet-unknown reason, and was very angry about it. In addition, I now had eighty-seven pages of material written by his hand and shaped by his mind, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is so revealing of a person's true self as a piece of his writing. I hurried through the substantial tea provided by Billy's cousin, a tiny, whip-hard little woman with the unlikely name of Isabella, and shut myself in with the manuscript.

  At page seven, there came a knock at the door.

  "Miss, er, Small? It's Billy. There's a, er, gentleman on the telephone for you."

  "Oh, good. Thank you, Billy. You're looking well. Perhaps we can have a chat sometime, over a pint? Where's the 'phone? Ah, thank you."

  It was very good to hear his voice.

  "Good evening, Mary," he said, warning me unnecessarily of the need for discretion— he never called me Mary. "How does the new job go?"

  "Billy told you, then. It's very interesting. I've learnt a great deal already. He's a nice man, though I've heard some talk about him. Hard to believe, though."

  "Is it?"

  "Yes, it is. And you? How are you getting on?"

  "Well, as you know, the place is pretty run-down; there's a lot for someone like me to do. I spent yesterday morning weeding the rose beds and the afternoon digging in the potato patch."

  "Poor thing, your back must be breaking. Don't pull anything." I more than half meant it— sustained physical labour was not his forte.

  "I was inside today with a leaking joint in the kitchen, and she started me stripping wallpaper."

  "Lucky you."

  "Yes, well, that's why I'm calling, Mary. I won't finish the job tomorrow, so she wants me to stay on until Saturday."

  I shoved away the rush of disappointment and said steadily, "Oh, that's all right. Disappointing, but I understand."

  "I thought you might. And, would you tell those friends of yours that we'll meet them Saturday night instead?" Lestrade and Mycroft.

  "Sunday morning?" I asked hopefully.

  "Saturday."

  "Very well. See you then. Sleep well."

  "Not too likely, Mary. Good night."

  * * *

  I read the manuscript through quickly, then took myself off for a long, hot, mindless bath. The second time, I made notes for improving it, the secretarial and editorial review. The third time, I went very slowly, reading parts of it aloud, flipping back to compare passages, treating it like any other piece of textual analysis. At the end of it, I turned off the lights and sat passively, wishing vaguely that I smoked a pipe or played the violin or something, and then went to bed.

  And in the night, I dreamt, a sly and insidious dream full of grey shapes and vague threats, a London fog of a dream that finally gave way to clarity. I dreamt I was lying in a place and manner that had once been very familiar: on my back, my hands folded across my stomach, looking up at the decorative plaster trim on the pale yellow ceiling of the psychiatrist's office. One of the twining roses that went to make up the border had been picked out in a pale pink, though whether it represented a moment of whimsey on Dr Ginzberg's part or her painstaking attention to the details of her profession, I could never decide. As it was directly in line with the gaze of any occupant of her analyst's couch, I suspected the latter, but I liked to think it was both, and so I never asked.

  In the dream, I was suspended by the familiar languor of the hypnotic trance she had used as a therapeutic tool, like a vise that clamped me to the padded leather while she chipped delicately away at my mind, peeling off the obscuring layers of traumas old and new. They all felt very old, though most of them were recently acquired, and I had always felt raw and without defence when I left her office, like some newborn marsupial blindly mewling its way towards an unknown pocket of safety. I had been taken from her before I had a chance to reach it. I was fourteen years old.

  My voice was droning on in answer to a question concerning my paternal grandmother, a woman about whom I had thought I knew little. Nonetheless, the words were spilling out, giving such detail of fact and impression as to sound almost clairvoyant, and I was aware of the onlooker within, who, when I came up from the trance, would be faintly surprised and amused at the wealth of information that had lain hidden. I do not remember what Dr Ginzberg's question was— there was a vague flavour of an adolescent's concept of Paris in the nineties, the cancan and sidewalk bistros and the Seine running at the foot of Notre Dame, so I suppose it must have been to do with the early years of my parents' marriage— but it hardly mattered. I was quite content to chunter on in any topic she might choose— almost any topic.

  And then she laughed. Dr Ginzberg. During a session.

  It is difficult to describe just how shocking this was, even doubly wrapped as I was in the dream and the dreamy world of trance, but my sense of rightness could not have been more offended had she suddenly squatted down and urinated on the Persian carpet. Her kind of psychotherapist simply did not react— outside of her rooms, yes, when she was another person, but Dr Ginzberg in the silent room with the yellow walls and the pink rose and the leather sofa? Impossible. Even more astounding had been the laugh itself. Dr Ginzberg's laugh (and outside the yellow room, she did laugh) was a quiet, throaty chuckle. This had been a sharp barking sound, a cough of humour from an older woman, and it cut off my flow of words like an axe blade.

  I lay, paralysed by the wrongness of the laugh and the remnants of trance, and waited for her inevitable response to an unjustified pause, that encouraging "Yes?" with its echo of the Germanic ja. It did not come.

  I became aware, with that logic of dreams, that I was younger than I had thought, that my feet were imprisoned in the heavy corrective buttoned shoes I had worn until I was six, and that the shoes came nowhere near the end of the couch. Dr Ginzberg waited, silent, in her chair behind me. I drew up my right foot and pushed with the heavy shoe against the leather, then twisted my body around to look at her.

  Her hair had gone white, and instead of being gathered into its heavy chignon, it flared in an untidy bowl around her ears. She wore a pair of black, black glasses, like two round holes staring out from her face, hiding all expression. What bothered me most, though, was not her appearance— for she was still Dr Ginzberg, I knew that— but the fact that she held in her hands not her normal notepad but an object that looked like a small Torah scroll, spread across one knee while she made notes on it.

  She stopped writing and tilted her head at me.

  "Yes?" Ja.

  I felt comforted, but gave a last glance at the scroll on her lap, and then I noticed her hands. They had wide, blunt fingers, and no ring, and a thick fuzz of dark copper hairs covered their backs. After a moment, the hands capped the pen, clipped it over the top of the scroll, and reached up for the black, black spectacles. I watched her hands rise slowly, slowly from her lap, past her ordinary shoulders, to her temples, and as they began to pull at the earpieces, I saw the shape of her head, the flat w
rongness of it, and with a rush of childish terror I knew that I did not want to see the eyes behind those dark lenses, and I sat up with a moan strangling in my throat.

  The boardinghouse seemed to throb with movement, but it was only the pounding in my ears. The shabby furnishings, grey in the light that seeped through the ungenerous curtains, were at once comforting and inordinately depressing. I sighed, considered and discarded the thought of finding the kitchen and making myself a hot drink, and squinted at the bedside clock. Ten minutes past four. I sighed again, put on my dressing gown, lit the gas lights, and reached for the colonel's manuscript.

  It was not time wasted. By the time dawn overtook the streetlamp, I had confirmed a few hypotheses, drawn others into question, and given myself something to think about during the day.

  FOURTEEN

  xi

  The day proved to contain a surfeit of things to think about, even without the manuscript. The first was the figure who greeted me as I entered the study: The son had arrived home from Scotland. He looked up from his coffee and gifted me with what I'm sure he thought of as a captivating grin, which might have been had it reached his eyes.

  " 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, the pater's new secretary is certainly an improvement over the last one. I see he didn't tell you that the prodigal was coming home. Gerald Edwards, at your service." He was the quintessential 1923-model final-year Cambridge undergraduate, sprawled with studied negligence across the maroon leather armchair, dressed in the height of fashion in an amazing yellow shantung lounge suit. His dark hair was slicked back, and he wore a fashionable air of disdainful cynicism on his face, with a watchful awareness in his bloodshot eyes. He made no move to stand, merely watched my body move across to the desk and bend down to tuck my handbag into a drawer. I straightened to face him and answered smoothly.

  "I'm Mary Small, and no, he didn't mention it. Is he here?"