Echoes of Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  The dress she held up did not disappoint her. It was amethyst silk, true silk, generous across the back, even if the waist was as waspish as the fashions of the day had demanded, and from the length of it Za-Za-Zita must have been almost six feet tall. It seemed to be decent cloth, too, from the weight as she held it high. Eagerly, she turned the seam to look at the finish. She rubbed the material between her fingers and found herself frowning.

  “Hmph,” she said. “Flimsy. Weight’s in the lining.” Miss Grant had not been above helping a cheap dress hang better with a sturdy lining, in her younger days.

  And yet, when she subjected the lining to the same scrutiny, it appeared to be finest lawn. The weight, she now saw, was all in the bodice and such a weight, so oddly placed, that her fanciful mind immediately leapt to jewels. Jewels, or banknotes, or shares in a goldmine, stitched in and left there.

  The explanation, of course, was far more humdrum. Za-Za-Zita had not been blessed with womanly lines. Her bodice was heavy because into it she had sewn a pair of little pockets stuffed with . . . Miss Grant palpated one of them and tried to determine what that odd yet familiar substance might be . . . sawdust! There were bags of sawdust sewn in behind the boning of this amethyst dress. And the emerald satin gown underneath it in the trunk, and the pink and yellow bombazine frock which was surely the partner of the pillbox. Miss Grant laid it aside and reached for the next one, but her fingers touched paper instead of cloth. Paper rolled into a scroll and tied with a ribbon.

  She took it over to the little sky-light window to read it there.

  There was something written on the outside of the scroll in a pretty, feminine hand. Miss Grant squinted at it in the dying light.

  “Dearest Edward, you are free. With my undying gratitude for your chivalry, Z.”

  What could it be? Miss Grant asked herself. Divorce papers? A suicide note? An annulment? How could Zita simply set her husband free? Carefully, she pulled on one end of the bow and let the loosened ribbon drop to the floor.

  It was not a letter, she saw as she unrolled the crackling paper. Not legal papers. It was something much, much more exciting. Something so exotic and undreamed of that Miss Grant could scarcely believe it was real. She had seen them in the pictures but she had never imagined she would hold one in her hands.

  It was a WANTED poster. A drawing of a scowling face with $100 REWARD printed in red ink underneath. Miss Grant’s heart thrilled at the sight of those penetrating eyes as it had seldom thrilled in all her years.

  “This must be the jewel thief she was in with,” she said to herself. And then she grew very still as an idea rolled towards her and washed over her, head to toe, unstoppable.

  She had seldom thrilled at the sight of a stranger’s face, but not never. Once before she had seen those eyes, when they were smiling. And the hair had been clean and soft and had looked like raven’s feathers on a milk-white brow. It was him. It was her American stranger. She had watched him walking away down the lane, into his future, leaving his past behind, and leaving Edward Coulter his freedom—if he had only looked in this trunk and seen it there.

  Years of shame and misery, thought Miss Grant. A ruined career, a broken family, and a sister who was about to get the shock of her rotten, greedy little life.

  “I’m using your telephone,” she announced to Lorna and the cook, putting her head round the kitchen door. “I don’t suppose they’re on the phone at Bonnethill, but it’s worth trying. If not, I’ll ring Drysdale to take me to Pitlochry in the cart.”

  For that poor weeping woman should not spend another wretched minute before hearing the news that she was the first Mrs. Coulter after all.

  THE CASE OF THE SPECKLED TROUT

  by Deborah Crombie

  My name is Sherry Watson. It’s a crap name, Sherry, I know. But what can you do? It’s not like I had a say in the matter. My parents, to give them credit, were trying to do the right thing—a sentimental gesture I wondered if they were sorry for after.

  They named me after my godfather, who is—or was, before he vanished a year ago—a famous detective. All I have to say is it’s a good thing I wasn’t a boy, or I would really have something to be pissed off with him about. Actually, he’s responsible for a lot of things I should be pissed off about, my godfather, not the least of which was me standing in a freezing Scottish kitchen, up to my elbows in fish guts.

  My godfather has a history of vanishing, so it wasn’t a big deal in the beginning. But the months went by with no word, no calls, no dropping in unexpectedly for dinner, then Mum and Dad getting more and more stony-faced and changing the subject whenever I asked about him. It was my last year at school and I was expecting at least the encouraging text now and again. I know my godfather supposedly doesn’t like women, but he never treated me like one. Like a girl, I mean. He helped with my science projects, quizzed me on my history, corrected my grammar—even in my texts. (Very annoying, I can tell you.)

  Then, nothing. No congratulations when I aced my exams. Not a whisper when I got accepted at Cambridge to read medicine. Mum and Dad took me out to dinner to celebrate that and my eighteenth birthday, at the Ivy. Dad must have booked months ahead, and they were both so fish-out-of-water, it was simply embarrassing. Daniel Craig was there and they actually nudged each other when they saw him. I could have died. But the worst thing was that he wasn’t there. He’d never missed a birthday. We all knew it and that thought was like the spectre at the feast, if you don’t mind me waxing poetic.

  The next day, Dad called me into his study. He wore his most solemn, doctor-about-to-give-bad-news-in-the-consulting-room look. He sat down in his leather chair with a sigh and said, “Sherry, darling. I think we have to accept that this time he may really be gone. You know he does dangerous things.” He cleared his throat. “You have an exciting time ahead of you, your own life. We all have our own lives, good ones. We’ll be fine.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe it.” Meaning, a) I didn’t believe he was gone, and b) I certainly didn’t think we’d be fine. And I stomped out. Because there’d been something in my dad’s eyes I didn’t want to see, something more than sadness. Being pissed off was the only way I could not keep seeing it, over and over.

  The next day there was a card in the post. Addressed to me, it had a photo of a gray stone house on the back. There was type as well, in a bright yellow that stood out against the purple heather in the photo’s background. Some stupid advert, I thought, and almost threw it in the bin. But something made me give it a closer look.

  YOUR GAP YEAR DREAM JOB it read. CONTACT BURNS HOUSE NOW FOR THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME.

  Really? I crumpled it. Then, a thought stopped me. I smoothed it out and reread it. The only contact information was an email address; burnsgapyear.co.uk. Weird. Seeing as how I was bound to be at the bottom of anyone’s mailing list, I texted some friends from my year. No one else had a card. Weirder.

  A quick Internet search turned up a website for a Burns House in Aberdeenshire, Scotland—an upscale hunting lodge. So I shot off an email to the address on the card.

  Two weeks later I was on the train to Scotland. My parents were happy enough that I was doing something useful before I started volunteering at a local hospital for my gap year experience. (Dad insisted that I find out whether I could cope with the sight of blood, even though I reminded him repeatedly of how cool I’d been the time my godfather had a little accident while testing various knife blades for incision patterns.) In fact, I think Mum and Dad were more than happy not to have me moping round the house for the entire summer.

  I’d never been north of the Border, so as the train gathered speed out of Edinburgh’s Waverly Station I looked out the window with interest. I’d never seen so much green. We climbed, through hills and glens and bits of forest, until at last the train hissed to a stop in the little Highland town of Aviemore. The train station looked like a transplanted Swiss chalet, but the mud-splattered Land Rover in the station parking lot looked
as Scottish as things come. So did the big, bearded man in oiled jacket and wellies leaning against it. He gave a nod when he saw me and strolled across the parking lot. For a moment, I wondered how he’d recognized me, but then I remembered I’d sent a photo with my application.

  “Giles,” he said, lifting my pack as if it was filled with candy floss instead of work boots and Aran knit sweaters. “Giles Burns.” The glance he gave me was critical and he did not seem inclined to conversation.

  We set off, first along a winding, green-cloaked river, then up and across the most desolate moorland I’d ever seen. It was fit for the Hound, I thought with a shiver.

  I dared to interrupt Mr. Burns’s silence. “Um, what exactly will I be doing at the lodge?” My contract had read “domestic assistant.”

  “A bit of cooking and scrubbing, and skinning, I should think,” he added. “Whatever the wife needs.”

  “Skinning?” I said. It came out a squeak.

  This time he threw me an amused glance and I saw the glint of white teeth in the beard. “It is a hunting lodge, lassie. We occasionally pot rabbits for our suppers.”

  That shut me up. While I was trying to decide whether I had sold myself into Dickensian slavery—or was destined to be a Scottish Jane Eyre, stuck on the moor with a dour master and a mad wife—the road ran downhill and we were again in the land of green glens and burbling streams. In the distance, the hills were a patchwork of gold and black, as if a giant quilt had been thrown over the land. I’d read that they burned the heather to encourage the grouse but I’d never imagined it looked like that.

  Giles swung us off into a smaller track and soon, round the trees, the house I’d seen on the postcard came into view. The sun was slanting low across the land and the lamps were just coming on in the house. The Land Rover’s tires scrunched on the gravel drive and a moment later the front door swung wide and the mistress of the house came out to greet us.

  Morag Burns was tall, red-headed, and as chatty as her husband was taciturn. She was also quite pregnant. “I thought I could do with a bit extra help this season,” she explained as her husband carried in my bag. “For obvious reasons.” She grinned and patted her belly. “None of the locals are willing to live in so we enlisted an agency to find someone. We thought your medical training would be useful.”

  “I haven’t actually had any yet,” I said hurriedly, trying to avert my eyes from her bulge.

  Morag laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not due until the end of August. It’s just that we assumed anyone wanting to be a doctor would have a good head on her shoulders. And you were highly recommended.”

  That gave me pause. I mumbled responses as she took me into the house and gave me a tour. My head swam with tartan. It was everywhere, in shades of red and green. Carpet, wallpaper, over-stuffed armchairs. But somehow it all worked and the effect was cozy, aided by the just-lit fires in the fireplaces.

  “There are six guest bedrooms,” Morag explained. “All en suite. At the moment we just have a couple of Dutch gentlemen, but from Sunday we’re fully booked until the end of the grouse season. We do breakfasts but dinners are only by special arrangement. The local girls come in to help when there’s a big shooting party, but otherwise it will just be you and me.”

  I gulped.

  Morag must have seen my expression because she gave me an encouraging pat on the back. “You’ll be fine.”

  And I was. My room was in the attic, but it wasn’t Spartan. I even had my own bathroom. We soon settled into a routine. I got thin, and fit, and really good at washing up and setting tables and airing linens, and at cleaning trout and salmon. The venison, thank God, went to a local processor, as I don’t think I’d have managed that.

  I got used to the sound of the stalking parties’ guns booming in the hills, and to red hands, and to the fact that what Scots called “a nice day” barely got me out of my down waistcoat.

  When I needed a break from the kitchen, I communed with the fish prints that lined the central hall on the ground floor. They were Victorian, Morag said, hand-colored and intricately drawn. I loved the delicate play of colors in the salmon’s scales and the cheerful polka dots on the big brown trout. Their fins seemed almost to quiver as they stared back at me with their flat, luminous eyes.

  “You’re a funny girl,” Morag said, coming into the hall one day and catching me gazing at them.

  I shrugged. “My godfather always told me to pay attention to detail. And they have personalities, don’t you think?”

  Morag stood for a moment, hand pressing into the small of her back. “Old Spot, there”—she nodded at the brown trout—“seems to have an opinion about something.” There came the now-familiar crunch of gravel as the Land Rover pulled into the drive and we went back to work.

  I’d soon begun to see that the guests were wealthy. We generally booked week-long stays, but we had one guest who had reserved for the remainder of the summer. Thirty-something and ordinary looking, with short brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he was from some Balkan country whose name I never managed to pronounce. Unlike some of the guests, Stefan was friendly and always seemed to have time for a chat.

  He was a civil servant, he said, in his slightly accented Received English, interested in learning ways his country could increase tourist revenue. He spent most of his days going out with Giles, almost as if he was an assistant, but I noticed that Giles treated him with a deference he didn’t extend to even the poshest of the other guests.

  Stefan was standing in the drive one afternoon when I went out to ask him if he wanted to join us for dinner. His back to me, he seemed to be gazing at the distant moors, where if you looked just right you could see the first faint blush of purple from the heather. Summer was moving on.

  “Stefan,” I called, but he didn’t turn. “Stefan,” I said again, but he stood unmoving, his hands in his pockets. It was only when my footsteps crackled on the gravel as I crossed the drive that he turned, a startled look on his face.

  “Oh, Sherry, I didn’t hear you.” He quickly rearranged his face into his usual affable expression.

  I delivered Morag’s invitation and started to go back to the house. Then I turned and blurted the thought that had come into my head. “Your name isn’t really Stefan, is it? That’s why you didn’t hear me.”

  “Ach, I was merely daydreaming,” he protested, shaking his head. Then something in his face relaxed and he sighed. “No, you are right, Miss Sherry. It is not. But please don’t say anything to anyone.”

  “But Morag and Giles—”

  “Oh, your employers know who I am, but they have promised discretion. You see, I try to do some things for my country that will help people, and there are those who don’t like that. Or like me.” He gave a ghost of a smile. “So better I be Stefan for a while.”

  “Mum’s the word.” I nodded solemnly, all the while a little thrill tingled up my spine. Maybe I was here for something besides cleaning and washing up, after all.

  After that I worked even harder at noticing details. I made it my business to know everyone on the estate, from the white-haired, burly gamekeeper to the tall, thin beekeeper, who was spending the summer in a little hut on the hillside that the Scots called a bothy. There was a tenant in the distant estate cottage as well, an ex-military bloke called Trevor. He looked a soldier, with his flat cap and neat little moustache, and his enormous Irish wolfhound was always at his side.

  We were only a few miles from Balmoral as the crow flies, and as July rolled into August, we began to see black cars on the road that ran past the lodge.

  “Security,” Giles growled into his beard when I asked him. “Advance teams for the bigwigs who’ll be arriving for the shooting parties at Balmoral.”

  Stefan grew quieter, abstracted, and spent more and more time poring over papers he kept locked in a briefcase in his room.

  Well, I could put two and two together, couldn’t I? Stefan was here for more than learning about estate management, and his summer-long
visit had something to do with the August parties at Balmoral. I tried to keep an eye on him as much as I could, but then the Glorious Twelth arrived and we were absolutely bonkers with work. We had two weeks of parties with only men, and they wanted packed lunches for the shooting and the fishing, as well as full-course dinners most nights.

  Morag was as big as a house by this time and looked exhausted, so I tried to take up slack in the kitchen where I could. Cooking, it turned out, was only chemistry.

  Then we had a break. Two cancellations, two pleasant couples, and a single woman in Room 6. She was an actress and her name was Amanda.

  The two wives were tweedy types, as big on sport as their husbands, so were out during the day, but Amanda spent more time around the lodge. She said she was resting and had thought a holiday in the fresh air would do her good.

  Amanda was anything but tweedy. She wore Burberry and Prada and chattered about hairstyles and nail polish and celebrities, the sort of thing I’d found desperately boring at school. But I found I didn’t mind, really. When I told her she looked familiar, she said I’d probably seen her in a coffee advert on the TV or in some horror movies. “Bit parts,” she added with a shrug. “But they pay the bills.”

  They must, I thought, for her to have booked a week at Burns House.

  She went out with the shooting parties and seemed chuffed with her braces of birds, but fishing, she said, was really her thing. But then the rain set in, coming down in sheets for three solid days. The guests were bored and Morag kept me busy organizing charades and board games and helping with special treats in the kitchen.

  “I thought it wasn’t supposed to rain in August,” said Amanda, popping her blond head in the kitchen door. The kitchen was supposed to be off-limits to guests, but Morag seemed to welcome the female company, too.

  “It doesn’t, usually. But this is Scotland. There are no guarantees.” Morag wiped a floury hand across her brow.

  Amanda came all the way in and wandered about the room, stopping to admire the array of bottles and jars of spices and vinegars on the shelves of the big dresser. Then she spied the picnic hamper. “Ooh, what fun,” she said, folding back the top. “That’s what I’ll do when the rain stops. I’ll take a fishing picnic and invite Stefan. Will you make us something nice, Morag? Maybe a game pie? With cold salads, and a tart?”