She obeyed without even asking him. She looked very small and frightened. In the rooms, she found the dress and went towards the bathroom.
“Sarah!” he called.
She turned. He could see the fear in her eyes.
“I just want you to be safe,” he said without thinking.
“Oh!” She gave a weak smile and her eyes filled with tears.
He could not even imagine how lonely she was, and this evening she was going to have to give away the one stable thing in her life, on the chance of getting her mother back. He would have to find a way to get Raffa back—the real Sherlock Holmes would have. But of course, Holmes would not have cared.
He gave her half an hour, then knocked on the adjoining door.
She opened it straight away, and looked up at him. She had obviously washed her hair. It hung in a shining curtain, and she had on a red dress that in a few months was going to be too small for her. Now it was perfect, plain and simple, and the color made her skin glow.
“You look beautiful,” he said seriously. “And red is a good color, bright and brave.”
She gave him the best smile she could.
Downstairs the doorman called a taxi for them and they rode through the streets in silence. Raffa was still in the attaché case, which Marcus never let go of. It would have been nice for her to hold him, but dangerous—and perhaps also too emotional.
He thought about talking, and decided against it. She needed a little while to think of what was going to happen. He looked sideways at her once or twice, but if she was aware of him, she gave no sign. Her face was motionless and very solemn.
They arrived at the restaurant, which was brightly lit, people on the footpath stopping to glance at the menus pasted outside. A man and woman passed them and went in, she in a tight, sequined dress.
Marcus took Sarah’s hand and held it firmly. This was the very last stage of the transaction and he felt she was desperately vulnerable. He did not even think about whether he was being brave or not. For the first time that he could remember, he was ready to fight if he needed to. But this would not be fists or rapiers, it would more likely be a knife that he did not see coming.
He asked for the table he had reserved, in her name.
“Miss Waterman?” the maître d’ said doubtfully.
“Yes,” Sarah lifted her chin a little. “That’s me.”
He was Sherlock Holmes. He did not get emotional, least of all about clients. Villains very occasionally, perhaps.
“Thank you,” he said to the maître d’, and followed him to the table near the wall where they could see most of the room. They sat down and ordered salad and then a plain omelette. Eating was the last thing on their minds, but they must not appear exceptional.
He looked around the other tables as discreetly as he could, and saw two or three groups that could have been them. He had no idea what Maria Waterman looked like.
“Do you see her?” he asked quietly.
“No. I looked. She’s not here yet. She will come, won’t she?”
“Yes. They really want the flash drive inside Raffa.” He was startled by how calm and certain he sounded. But he was an actor, he often said things he did not mean.
She believed him. He saw it in her eyes, her smile.
He had no idea what the salad was made of. It could have been grass for all he tasted. She was eating too, concentrating on it as if it mattered.
“Hello, Marcus,” a sultry voice said at his elbow.
He looked up. “Hello, Lettie. How are you?” Of all the times for the damned woman to turn up. He saw Sarah’s dismay.
“I’m fine, darling. You look fearfully solemn . . .”
His mind raced for a way to get rid of her.
“This is a working dinner, Lettie. I’ll call you next week some time.”
Lettie was startled. Sarah looked up and down her elegant, rather thin figure and its emerald green dress. Clearly she did not approve. Lettie gazed around, searching for the cameras she expected, but did not see them.
Marcus gave Sarah a bright smile. “We should pick up again at the top of the page.” He hoped she would understand that he meant the remark for Lettie. The actress made a sound, then turned and stalked away.
“Was she someone else you helped, Mr. Holmes?” Sarah asked.
“She wants me to. But there is nothing else until this one is solved and you and your mother are safe again. This is perhaps the biggest case I have ever dealt with.”
“Bigger than The Hound of the Baskervilles?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“Oh yes.” He knew all the cases by heart. Here was something to talk about, to take her mind off the waiting. “Don’t forget, the poor dog was not actually supernatural at all.”
“Or The Musgrave Ritual?”
“Definitely. There is far more money involved, but more importantly, lives.”
“The Speckled Band?”
He answered more questions but all he could think of was Maria Waterman, and the men who were holding her.
“There she is!” Sarah said urgently.
He froze. “Where?”
“Behind you, over your shoulder. Left . . . no, right,” she answered.
“Are you sure it’s her? Absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
“Can you walk over and make certain it is your mother, and that she is all right, not hurt or sick?” It was a lot to ask.
“Yes.” She had hesitated only a moment, almost too short a time to be certain it was a hesitation at all.
“I’ll keep Raffa.” He wrote another short note: ‘A straight swap. Meet in the middle.’ “Are you sure?” he asked Sarah again.
She stood up, took the note out of his hand, and without looking at him again, set out across the floor. He swivelled around and watched her, his heart thumping so hard he was sure he actually shook.
She reached the table and looked long and hard at her mother. One glance at the woman, and Marcus knew beyond doubt that she had to be Maria Waterman, and she was terrified for her child. This had to work!
Sarah put the note on the table and one of the two men picked it up and read it. He turned to the other and said something. The other man nodded. He spoke to Sarah, but he was looking beyond her, straight at Marcus and the attaché case. Then in one moment he rose to his feet and moved towards Sarah. He had only just touched her shoulder when she shot forward and bumped into a waitress carrying two bowls of soup. They clattered to the floor. Another waitress jumped to help, and Sarah slipped between them to run back to Marcus, throwing herself against him. Instinctively he held her for a moment, far more tightly than he had intended to.
Then he let her go. He opened the attaché case and took Raffa out. He held the giraffe tightly in one hand, and his mobile phone in the other. He flicked it open, and deleted one file. He returned the telephone to his pocket and held up his hand, one finger pointed. He shook his head.
“One gone,” he mouthed, and the man’s face told him that he had understood.
Suddenly, Sarah snatched Raffa out of his hand and started off across the restaurant towards her mother and the two men. When she got there, she said something to her mother, who rose very slowly to her feet.
Sarah hugged Raffa tightly, and said something to him, then she passed him over to the man. She and her mother walked across the floor and stopped next to Marcus.
It was done. Maria was safe.
The two men rose to their feet and started to walk away, pulling the stuffing out of Raffa as they went. In a moment, they had the flash drive—but they still carried the giraffe, dangling by one leg.
Sarah shook free of her mother’s hand and began to go after them.
“No!” Maria called out, her voice sharp with fear. “They’ll . . .”
Near the door, the two men stopped: a large party, a dozen or more guests, was coming in—and behind them, a pair of uniformed police.
The men instantly stopped. One of them spotted a doorway, a
nd pushed his partner towards it. Marcus knew, however, that it was not a side entrance, but led towards the roof garden—and, an external stairway down again.
Sarah was on their heels.
“Stay here!” Marcus said to Maria grimly. “Stay where people can see you. If you come you’ll be a hostage again. That’s an order! Do you understand?”
“Get her back,” she pleaded.
“Stay here and I will!” Another wild promise he could only try to keep.
He dodged across the floor through the milling guests, sending one man crashing into a chair, but Marcus did not pause. He had to get Sarah before one of the men grabbed her.
Through the door, he saw the men near the top of the empty flight of stairs. The child was close on their heels.
“Sarah!” Marcus shouted as loudly as he could. “Stop!”
“They’ve got Raffa!” she called back to him. “It’s not right!”
It wasn’t right. Why couldn’t the bastards drop the toy? They were getting away with it, escaping. He charged up the flight, taking the steps two at a time. One of the men made a grab at Sarah, but she jerked sideways, and Marcus was only five steps away. The man changed his mind and raced after his partner.
Sarah went straight after him, quicker than Marcus would have believed. He increased his speed, but she was always two steps beyond his reach.
They went clattering up the next flight, and then the last one. The first man flung the door open onto the roof, the second man right behind him.
Sarah went straight after Raffa.
Marcus reached the door just as the second man lunged for Sarah, catching her wrist.
Marcus hit him with all his weight. He had never hit anyone so hard in his life. He felt bone crack under his fist, and the shock up his arm. The man collapsed to the ground. Was he foxing? Just in case he was, Marcus picked him up and hit him again.
Sarah had fallen, and was sitting up slowly. In the glare of the city lights she looked small and crushed.
Where was the other man? He was standing near the gate to the emergency stairway, Raffa in his hand, swinging him as if about to let him fly into space.
Sarah climbed to her feet, her eyes on Raffa.
“No!” Sarah shouted desperately. “Wayne! Don’t!” She took a shaky step towards him.
This was Wayne? Marcus lost his temper completely. The betrayal was total and unforgivable. He charged at Wayne, who had turned to wrestle with the gate’s latch, and hit Wayne with all the impetus of a man with Sherlock Holmes’s considerable height. Wayne smashed into the iron gate, dropping the giraffe as he staggered backwards, the breath knocked out of him. But before Marcus could seize him, the man’s heels caught on a tile and he stumbled towards the edge of the roof.
For a moment he teetered.
Marcus grabbed Sarah, blocking her view so she would not see her mother’s lover go over.
There was a long, thin wail, then silence. Marcus and Sarah stood, listening to the cries of passersby rise up from below. He bent, and picked up the limp toy giraffe, now minus a good deal of his stuffing. Beside it lay the scrap of plastic at the heart of everything. He pocketed the flash drive, and brushed some of the dust off Raffa. Very gently, he laid the child’s friend in her arms.
“He can be mended,” Marcus said. This time it was not a wild hope: he really did know how to do that. “It won’t be difficult at all. And I think we should wipe away everything on the flash drive anyway, just in case.”
There were sirens in the street below, and the maître d’ was standing in the doorway to the stairs down, Maria Waterman beside him.
Sarah looked up at Marcus. “Thank you,” she said gravely. “Not that I was afraid, Mr. Holmes. I was sure you would get Mummy and Raffa back, and make it all right.” She gave him a slow, sweet smile.
He had not been sure—had never been less sure of anything in his life. But the child had just given him the most stellar review he’d ever received.
“It was you who got Raffa back,” he pointed out.
Now her smile was radiant. “Maybe I’ll be a detective when I grow up. I’ll come and find you . . .”
“I’ll be here,” he promised. He would be. Sherlock Holmes would always be, because he would be needed.
THE CROWN JEWEL AFFAIR
by Michael Scott
I forget things.
Today is a blur, yesterday is lost in fog and the day before that gone completely.
The calendar on the wall tells me it is October, 1980, and the nurses have drawn a red circle on the 13th, which is my birthday. I was born in the year of our Lord, 1880, so this year I will turn one hundred. It is an incomprehensible age. When I am asked to what I attribute my good health, I have no real answer. I ate all the wrong foods: white bread and sugar, red meat and little fruit. However, in my favor, I rarely drank and never touched opium, hashish nor laudanum, because I never wanted to lose control. I have seen, too often, what happened to women who lost control. I never smoked cigarettes, but not for health reasons; when I was growing up, a lady never smoked.
Though my recent past is gone and faded, the further back I go, the clearer the images and memories become. When I scroll back through the years, the fog of memory clears and I remember who I was, and what I was.
Today, the nurses call me Miss Lundy and the young doctors rather familiarly call me Katherine. They ask about the past, and if I remember the Wars—First and Second—or rationing, and they wonder if I was in Dublin for the Easter Rising? And I do, I remember it all and yes I was in the city for that terrible week in 1916.
But I prefer to remember the city before the Irish revolutionaries and the British army fought in the streets and changed it forever. I lived there during its heyday, when it was beautiful, elegant, and cultured, the second capital of the Empire . . . though, like most cities, there was another side to it: diseased and pox-ridden, with one of the highest child mortality rates in Europe, home to the first venereal diseases hospital in the world.
Society knew me as Katherine Lundy, a widow—though, in truth, I had never married. By day, I was a society hostess, elegant, refined, and reserved, but like the city, I too had a dark side. When night fell, I became Madam Kitten, sometimes called The Whoremistress—though never to my face. I ran one of the most exclusive brothels in the city and my tentacles ran deep into Dublin’s underworld.
What a time that was!
I may not be able to remember yesterday, but I do remember the woman I was half a century and more ago, the life I lived and the man I loved. He was a policeman and it was a crime which brought us together. He believed I had stolen the Irish Crown Jewels.
Katherine Lundy woke at five minutes before noon. Even if she had only been to bed with the dawn, she would open her eyes just before the city trembled with the sound of the noon-day bells. In a city divided by religion, the bells simply marked midday for the Protestant and Church of Ireland Dubliners, but for the majority Catholic faithful, they were a call to prayer.
Absently counting down the peals, Katherine sat up in bed and settled back on the pillows. On cue, as the last of the chimes faded, there was a discreet tap on the bedroom door. Katherine started to smile as Tilly Cusack appeared, carrying a tray with tea, toast, and the morning papers.
“Why do I employ maids, when you insist on bringing me tea every morning . . .” Katherine began and then stopped. The flame-haired, red-cheeked woman was followed by a large shaven-headed man whose thick ears and twisted nose suggested a former career as a boxer. Katherine’s smile faded: she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Mickey Woods had stood in her private chambers. “Good morning, Mickey.”
“Good morning, ma’am, though technically,” he added, “it’s more of an afternoon.” The huge man stood at the foot of the bed and twirled a grease-shined bowler hat in his hands as Tilly poured tea from a solid silver service into almost transparent china.
“I take it we have a problem,” Katherine said fina
lly.
“A situation,” Mickey said in a whisper. In his youth, a jezail bullet had damaged his larynx during the Battle of Maiwand, rendering him incapable of raising his voice.
Tilly perched on the end of the bed. On other mornings, she would quickly run through the events of the previous night in the score of houses owned and controlled by Madam Kitten: the number of guests, the amount of food, drink, laudanum, and opium consumed, the most popular girls and boys—and, the all-important profit at the end of the night. Tilly would also report if the services of Mickey, or one of the twenty men under his command, had been called upon.
“Well, it cannot be too bad,” Katherine said, “at least you’ve not killed someone tonight.”
“Not tonight,” he rasped. “How did you know?”
“You’re still wearing your work clothes and boots. And there’s no blood on them. You’ve not washed your hands, and your knuckles are not bruised.”
The big man looked down at his hands and grinned. “Could have used a shillelagh,” he suggested. He carried a short length of iron-hard blackthorn tucked into his belt.
“You like using your hands, Mickey.” Katherine looked from Mickey to Tilly. “Problem with one of the girls . . . or guests?”
“No. All in all, a quiet night,” Tilly said, with just the hint of her Cockney upbringing audible under a flat Dublin accent.
“So, there is no problem, but there is a situation?” Katherine said.
“There’s been a robbery,” Mickey whispered.
Katherine’s lace nightdress slipped off one shoulder. “Were we robbed?” she asked quickly, a touch of disbelief in her voice.
Tilly and Mickey shook their heads.
“A client . . . a girl?”
“No,” Tilly said, a broad smile curling her lips. “No one would dare.”
“Enough with the teasing . . .”
“The Crown Jewels,” Mickey rasped. “Someone’s only gone and nicked the Irish Crown Jewels.”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 19
