Grief warred with despair and anger in me, and I bent and placed my head in my hands as the sun moved behind the elm tree and covered me in shadows.
Then, later, when I had composed myself, I retrieved my case, stood, took a last lingering look at the small flowers, then turned and made my way out of that place.
One singular thing happened on my way to the street. Near the entrance of the cemetery was another bench and what I saw upon it made me stop and stare. There, folded neatly, was a greatcoat of smoke-colored cloth and a battered top hat. Against the edge of the bench, standing at an angle, was a walking stick with a slender silver head shaped like a leaping trout. I turned, alarmed, thinking that the old man had taken leave of his senses and left his belongings behind, but the cemetery was quite empty. When I accosted passersby on the street, no one admitted to having seen an old man fitting Dupin’s description. The newsboy on the corner looked at me as if I was mad.
I returned to the cemetery to check the coat pockets for some clues and found nothing. No cigarette case, no calling cards, no ticket stubs for a train. Nothing at all.
I lingered there at the edge of the cemetery until darkness began to fall and was not able to find a clue. So I gathered the items and flagged down a cab to take me to Scotland Yard, where I shared them and my strange story with Inspector Gregson.
“Someone has been playing a prank on you, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Impossible. I spoke with the man. Go and see if those flowers are not there.”
He doubted me, but he sent a constable. While we waited he sent a series of telegrams to his colleagues in Paris. After hours of my fretting and feeling like a fool, Gregson and I sat in his office with the coat, hat, and stick upon his desk. The constable had returned with the loose bunch of flowers. The responses from Paris had all been in agreement on one point. There was no one named Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin in the Faubourg Saint Germain in Paris, and no one of that name had ever lived among the townhouses of the hôtel particulier variety. The Paris police were not at all amused by Gregson’s inquiries and accused the detective of playing a poor joke.
We sat and stared at each other.
“What are we to make of it?” he asked me.
“I have no idea,” I confessed. “Do you believe me?”
He gestured to the clothes. “I have known you too long to believe that you are a prankster, Doctor. And we have these.”
We sat and wrangled over it for hours, but we got nowhere. Our final conclusion was that I had been the victim of a particularly elaborate and cruel joke. I felt like a fool, and in low spirits I left his office and headed to my empty house.
It was only when I reached my own door that the last and strangest thing occurred, for there, tucked into the knocker of my front door, was yet another example of that strange, delicate, and enigmatic flower, Leontopodium alpinum Reichenbachium.
There was no note and I was left to interpret it however I would like. I nearly crushed the cursed blossom and snatched it up to do that very thing, but in the act of commission I paused and then relented. Instead I bore it inside with me and put it in a teacup of water. My mail had been delivered and I sorted through the various bills, notices, letters, and magazines in an attempt to distract my troubled mind. There, half buried by the detritus delivered by the postman, was a small envelope addressed in a familiar hand. I opened it quickly to confirm that Mycroft Holmes had sent it and it was an invitation to attend a lecture at a club in the city. I frowned, for it was not Mycroft’s custom to seek out my company. Nor was I in the habit of attending any events with him, lectures on travel the least of all. The invitation had been to hear of the recent travels of a Norwegian by name of Sigerson.
Mycroft’s addendum to the advertisement was a hastily scrawled, “You might find this of particular interest.”
He was wrong. I did not, and I threw the invitation onto my desk and promptly forgot about it. Full dark had come upon the city and I retired to my sitting room with a cold piece of meat pie and a tall bottle of whiskey. I built a fire and placed the teacup with the flower on a table so that I could see it in the firelight.
What did it mean?
Who was the man who pretended to be Auguste Dupin?
In hopes of discovering some clue to my mystery I read again “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as well as the other two Dupin stories from a book I purchased that evening from a tiny bookshop at the corner of Church Street. However if there were answers to be found in Poe’s writing it was beyond the reach of my perception. So, I closed my eyes and thought of Sherlock Holmes, dead these three years. Gone with so much left undone. Gone, with so much wreckage left behind. The recent murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair was but the latest of the matters which I feared the police were mishandling and which Holmes would have attacked with great zeal and singular insight.
“Why have you left me here to do this alone?” I asked aloud. As if he could hear me. As if his ghost would even care.
In the silence, I drank my whiskey and watched the firelight trace the edges of the flower.
The house around me felt as dark and immense as the night.
LIMITED RESOURCES
by Denise Mina
Three hundred alcoholics clinging to a rock. That’s what our neighbors call our island. It’s only partly true. There is drinking, there’s no getting away from that, and we can be a bit wild, but the good side of island life is how close we are. People here look after each other. If you’re a native, like me and Margie, your fates are forever intertwined. We support each other, an insult to one is an insult to all, one person’s win is everyone’s win. Outsiders are outside. Incomers, well, that depends on the person. Shirley is an incomer.
We are the northern-most habitable island in the UK. Maps show us in a wee box in the corner, an addendum to the main map, because they’d have to show miles and miles of sea to include us. We are a meeting place for two seas and an ocean: the North Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea, and the North Sea. It’s windy. You know where you live is quite extreme when people visit on a dare.
They arrived on New Year’s Eve. Three of them. Head to foot in all-weather clothing, driving from the ferry with a Range Rover full of equipment. They walked into the baker’s shop when it was full of us locals. Everything shuts down for three days when the year turns and we were all giggly and excited. They looked like spacemen. You could hardly see a patch of skin on them. Hoods up, hands double-gloved, trouser legs tucked into £300 all-weather boots.
I want to point out that Shirley is not a witch. She’s not psychic either, whatever the older ones say. She’s odd, but there’s room for that here.
Shirley likes being alone and she likes room to think. Those are good reasons for living here. She’s writing a book about why DNA evidence is wrong. She says it’s an art, not a science. Results may come from a lab but they still need subjective interpretation. Good science doesn’t require interpretation; it’s a series of observations leading to irrefutable conclusions. She doesn’t like leaps of logic. To be frank, that’s as much as I listened to—it’s dry stuff. Anyway, she came from Glasgow but she fits in perfectly here. There’s room for odd here.
At first people thought she was psychic. Shirley knew exactly what you had just been up to. She’d say she was “in purdah,” wherever that is, somewhere in her house I think, writing for weeks. She’d see no one and then she would meet you, out on a hill, walking past her garden, and she’d ask you weird psychic questions: Who drained your septic tank? How did your Golden Labrador die? She knew things.
Margie said she was following everyone on Facebook, but no one posts about draining a septic tank. Anyway, some of the stuff she knew had just happened two minutes before. Margie and I cornered her in town and made her explain. Shirley said it was elementary: Jonny O smelled of septic tank and pipe cleaner, fresh, and had red hands from the cold and clothes that smelled of washing powder. Kelly was covered in short blond hairs. They were on her shoulder and a
ll down her back. She’s small, the dog is big, so it must have been asleep or unconscious. Her eyes were red. She loves that dog. If the dog was unconscious, Kelly wouldn’t be out for an aimless walk. Reasoned deduction. Can you go away now please?
It isn’t witchcraft. Shirley’s witchcraft is that she can take all of that in with one glance. It’s overwhelming, she says, so much info at all times. That’s why she needs to be alone so much.
I was in Margie’s baker’s shop when they walked in. It was busy that day because of the holiday. The door tinkled and silence fell as it shut behind them. They were tall and looked alien compared to the rest of us, a gaggle of small women in anoraks and woolly hats.
Margie looked at them and asked innocently, “Has there been an anthrax attack?”
We all laughed—not unkindly, just because spirits were high. We don’t really do open confrontation here. There are other ways.
They didn’t laugh. The leader ordered Margie: “Give me three loaves and the rest of your pancakes.”
Everyone stopped laughing. Disapproval crackled in the air.
It was very rude, both the way he said it and what he’d said. We’re an island. Resources are limited. You’re only allowed as many pancakes as there are people in your party, Margie’s rule. She says, otherwise it’s anarchy, people queuing before the bakery is open and all sorts of madness.
Margie didn’t confront it straight on. That’s not her way. She changed the subject.
“What are you fine gentlemen doing here?” It was clear that she was annoyed, though.
“Camping,” he said and dropped, and I do mean dropped, a shower of pound coins onto the counter. “A loaf and the pancakes.”
Not even a please. Margie glared at the money and then at him. He looked back at her. They had a bit of a silent standoff.
“We’re here for New Year’s Eve.” One of the other ones had spoken. He was smiling around the room as if asking us to stop hating him. “We want to be the first to sign the new visitor’s book.”
Ah, the famous Saxa Vord Visitors’ Book. Saxa Vord was a radar station until satellites made it redundant. They shut it down. Now it is an extreme campsite of international renown. People use their visitors’ book signature as an avatar on Twitter. They would blog about how rough it is in their extreme sports club or whatever. This was the most extreme day of the year. They couldn’t have been less interested in us or our rules about pancakes.
“We call it Yules here,” Margie told him. “That’s Norwegian for ‘New Year.’”
Margie was being friendly. Saying this to a visitor normally leads to a discussion about how close we are to Norway or about the Viking history of the place. Conversations with outsiders have a course, like a river, and she was inviting them to follow her down the course of this one to a softer bank. But they didn’t take it. The first man spoke again.
“Yeah, the loaf and the pancakes.”
Margie was furious now, which was bad because everyone knows she has a temper. She went to prison for killing her husband. It’s not a secret. I used to go visit her. We stick together here.
Looking straight at him, she laid her forearm on the counter and swept all the coins onto the floor. They bounced and rolled around our assembled feet. “Get out.”
We all watched the men leave in silence. They didn’t even pick up the money. It was a bit much.
I ran after them. I thought they deserved an explanation. I told them, you know, all the shops will be shut for three days. You can’t just roll into town and buy everything up, d’you see what I mean? They seemed quite interested in that but the rude one said, you know what, to hell with it, we’re not coming back to this shit-hole. We’ll be gone by tomorrow. Then they climbed up into their all-terrain Range Rover and sped off to the headland.
They were right. They were gone the next day.
Margie and I were out for our “Yule day yomp” and ended up at Saxa Vord. I heard her shout: “Oh God, no!”
We stood looking over at the cliff top, the bitter north wind stinging our faces. There was no one in sight. The tent was gone. Their Range Rover was still there, one door jammed open and stuff strewn all over the ground. The heavy chassis was rocking in the wind.
We hurried over, buffeted one way and another. The wind caught my hood, shoving me in a staggering little circle. Margie caught my arm and we looked at each other. We both knew they were all dead. Margie looked at me, frightened and sad. I cupped her face to comfort her. She didn’t want to go over to the car, she wanted to turn back but I made her come with me to make sure.
We got there, finally, and they were gone. The grass was flattened in a rectangle right on the headland. Tent pegs lay on their sides like sharpened metal question marks. A length of rope was trailing on the ground under the car, whipped hither and thither by the wind, tied to the door handle as if they’d used it as a winch. Anyone seeing it could well imagine those men staggering around in their specialist clothes, unable to see, tying off the rope and lowering it down to the companion who had slipped onto a ledge, clinging on for dear life. Margie was shaking her head and asked, why didn’t they tie the rope to the axle? Why the door? It made no sense.
On the way back we passed the sunken radar bunker. If they’d had any sense they would have sought shelter in it. We slipped in and saw the brand new visitors’ book. They had all signed it and written, “Here for midnight 2015! Happy Yule!”
I groaned inwardly at that.
We went home to phone and tell everyone. Then the cops came from the neighboring island. Two incomers, both transferred up here from Glasgow. They asked after Shirley. They knew her from there. Said she had worked with them before.
They went off to see the campsite. They were there for a while. They came back with Shirley: they’d picked her up on the way back. Awkward, they said, to bring it up but they’d heard on the ferry that there was an argument in the bakery yesterday when Margie refused to sell them pancakes?
“No,” I corrected, “Margie refused to sell them all of the pancakes. That was the point. They wanted to clear the bakery out of pancakes and leave none for the rest of us. That’s not on.”
“I see,” said the one policeman thoughtfully. “Thing is, we looked in the car and found three pancakes on the back seat. It seemed strange.”
I suggested that the pancakes could have come from elsewhere. They seemed quite selfish, those men. Maybe they already had pancakes before they came into the bakery and were just being really greedy?
No one answered, but Margie looked uncomfortable. They took out a phone and showed her a photograph of the pancakes in situ. Yes, she said, they did look like her pancakes. She makes them big and half an inch deep. They left to go back and see the scene again and took Shirley with them. She might have something to add, they said. Margie sat crying in the front room.
An island is a self-selecting community, and that attracts a lot of oddities. People move here without really knowing anything about it. If an incomer mentions getting away from the rat race you know they won’t last. Give them one winter. They’ve usually argued with everyone, wherever they were before, and think other people are the problem. It takes coming here for them to realize that they’re the problem. We get cast in this uncomfortable psycho-drama every so often. When anyone comes here you wonder why. You wonder what their motive is. Not me though. I’m from here, as is Margie. Shirley isn’t, but we know she’s here for peace and quiet. And now the police are taking her to Saxa Vord and that’s the opposite of peace and quiet.
I like Shirley. I was a bit worried about her. That’s why I followed them.
Up across the hills and heaths, over the headland and down into the shallow valley, I followed the cops in my car. The wind was pulling and shoving my old Mini. It’s built for a city and not this exposed rock on the very edge of the Arctic Sea. It was already getting dark, still only early afternoon but the night glowered on the horizon, the sea clawing viciously at the cliffs. I drove with my lights
off. No point in giving them a rear view warning.
Just before the Vorde there’s a small cove in the hillside. I parked there and watched, keeping low.
The cop car had stopped on the cusp of the hill. The lights went out. I could see the three of them silhouetted in the windows, chatting for a while in the twilight. The doors opened, front and back, and they all got out. Shirley put her flashlight on first. She was watching the ground, her waxed Inverness Cape flapping in the frantic wind. She went into the radar bunker first. When she came out her shoulders were slumped. She walked slowly along the path to the Range Rover. The flashlight flicked up, catching the rope whipping under the wheels. She followed the ground markings to the tent pegs and the flat rectangle of grass. She brought her flashlight up to the ground beyond it, at the edge of the cliff. I knew she could read it all. I think I started blushing.
The vicious wind bullied her sideways, her cape snapped around her face, and, as she lifted her hands to push it down, she saw me.
“Get her!” she shouted.
I didn’t run. There’s nowhere to run on an island.
It seemed to take the police officers a long time to get to me, but I stood still, waiting, my hands out to the side. They walked us all back over to their car and we got in. They asked Shirley to explain, the way Margie and I had asked her about the Golden Lab and the septic tank. She looked at them and told them what had happened step by step. It was uncanny.
I arrived after midnight: she knew this because the visitors’ book had been signed. I crept around the headland so that the camping men wouldn’t see me, tied the rope to the door handle, and left the door open. I set the rope on the ground and covered it with leaves. Then I held the rope and waited in the dark, watching the warm lights flickering in the tent. Shirley pointed to the flattened thicket. “She waited there. Didn’t you, Alison?”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 33
