Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes
Laurie R. King
Bantam (2012)
* * *
Rating: ****
Tags: Historical, Fiction, Traditional British, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths
Laurie R. King’s New York Times bestselling novels of suspense featuring Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, comprise one of today’s most acclaimed mystery series. Now, in their newest and most thrilling adventure, the couple is separated by a shocking circumstance in a perilous part of the world, each racing against time to prevent an explosive catastrophe that could clothe them both in shrouds.
In a strange room in Morocco, Mary Russell is trying to solve a pressing mystery: Who am I? She has awakened with shadows in her mind, blood on her hands, and soldiers pounding on the door. Out in the hivelike streets, she discovers herself strangely adept in the skills of the underworld, escaping through alleys and rooftops, picking pockets and locks. She is clothed like a man, and armed only with her wits and a scrap of paper containing a mysterious Arabic phrase. Overhead, warplanes pass ominously north.
Meanwhile, Holmes is pulled by two old friends and a distant relation into the growing war between France, Spain, and the Rif Revolt led by Emir Abd el-Krim—who may be a Robin Hood or a power mad tribesman. The shadows of war are drawing over the ancient city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he’s learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell searches for herself, each tries to crack deadly parallel puzzles before it’s too late for them, for Africa, and for the peace of Europe.
With the dazzling mix of period detail and contemporary pace that is her hallmark, Laurie R. King continues the stunningly suspenseful series that Lee Child called “the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.”
Review
'The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today' LEE CHILD
About the Author
Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch, and Touchstone. She lives in Northern California.
Garment of Shadows is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Laurie R. King
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
Garment of shadows : a novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and
Sherlock Holmes / Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90755-1
1. Russell, Mary (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators— India—Fiction. 3. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. British— Morocco—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.I4813G37 2012
813′.54—dc23 2011047287
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: Joe Montgomery
Jacket art: Debra Lill
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Author’s Preface
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Author’s Afterword
Editor’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments and Notes
Glossary
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
It should be noted that sections of this volume of my memoirs depict acts and thoughts of people that took place in my absence. I chose the Godlike point of view because I thought it less distracting for a reader. In fact, those sections reflect testimonies pieced together out of disjointed segments and off-hand remarks given over the course of weeks, and even years.
If this style of narrating my memoir causes readers to interpret the following as fiction, so be it. It would not be the first time.
—MARY RUSSELL HOLMES
I have attached a glossary of unfamiliar terms at the end.
—MRH
… the breath of Chitane
Blows the sands in smoky whirls
And blinds my steed.
And I, blinded as I ride,
Long for the night to come,
The night with its garment of shadows
And eyes of stars.
—EBN EL ROUMI
PREFACE
The big man had the brains of a tortoise, but even he was beginning to look alarmed.
Sherlock Holmes drew a calming breath. Then another.
It had seemed such a simple arrangement: If Mary Russell chose to submit to the whimsy of Fflytte Films as it finished its current moving picture, that was fine and good, but there was no cause for her husband to be tied down by her eccentricities—not with an entirely new country at his feet. He’d never been to Morocco. After some complex marital negotiations, he promised to return, at an agreed-to time and place, which was here and today.
Except she was not there.
He started again. “So she left her tent that night. After dark.”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
“And was still gone the next morning.”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
“She spoke to no one, merely left a brief note to say that she was going to Fez.”
The man nodded.
“The filming ended. The rest of Fflytte’s crew came back here. No one thought this odd. And all you have to say is that my wife was last seen walking into the desert in the company of a child. Three days ago.”
Morocco might be a small country, but it was plenty big enough to swallow one young woman.
Russell, he thought, what the devil are you up to?
CHAPTER ONE
I was in bed. A bed, at any rate.
I had been flattened by a steam-roller, trampled under a stampede of bison. Beaten by a determined thug. I ached, head to toe, fingers and skin. Mostly head.
My skull throbbed, one hot pulse for every beat of my heart. I could see it in the rhythmic
dimming of an already shadowy room. I wanted to weep with the pain, but if I had to blow my nose, my skull might split like an overripe melon.
So I lay in the dim room, and watched my heart beat, and ached.
Some time later, it came to me that the angle of the vague patch of brightness across the opposite wall had changed. Some time after that, an explanation slipped out between the pain-pulses: The sun had moved while I slept. A while later, another thought: Time is passing.
And with that, a tendril of urgency unfurled. I could not lie in bed, I had to be somewhere. People were depending on me. The sun would go down: I would be late.
Rolling onto my side was like pushing a motorcar up a hill. Raising myself up from the thin pad made me cry out—nearly black out—from the surge of pressure within my skull. My stomach roiled, my ears rang, the room whirled.
I crouched for a long time on the edge of the bed. Slowly, the pounding receded. My vision cleared, revealing a snug, roughly plastered room; hand-made floor tiles; a tawny herringbone of small bricks; a door of some dark wood, so narrow a big man might angle his shoulders, a hook driven into it, holding a long brown robe; a pair of soft yellow bedroom slippers on the floor—babouches, my mind provided: new leather, my nose told me. The room’s only furniture was a narrow bed with a rough three-legged stool at its head. The stool served as a table, its surface nearly covered with disparate objects: in the centre stood a small oil lamp. To its left, nearest the bed, were arranged a match-box, a tiny ceramic bowl holding half a dozen spent matches, a glass of water, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that appeared to have been trod upon. The other side of the lamp had an even more peculiar collection: a worn pencil stub, a sausage-shaped object tightly wrapped in a handkerchief, some grains of sand, and one pale stone.
I studied the enigmatic display. The little bowl caused a brief memory to stir through the sludge that was my brain: As I slept, the sound of a match scratching into life would wake me; the sharp smell would bite my nostrils; faces would appear and make noises; I would say something apparently sensible; the faces would bend over the light, and with a puff, I would be back in the shadows, alone.
My hand reached out, hesitated over the water, rejected it, and picked up the spectacles instead. I winced as they settled between my ears and the snug head wrap I wore, but the room came into focus.
The matches also came into focus: a cheap, bright label, in French. I picked up the box, slid it open, my nose stung by the smell of sulphur. Four matches. I took one, scraped it into life, held it to the oil lamp. A spot of warmth entered the room.
By its thin light, I looked down at what I wore. Drab homespun trousers and tunic. Bare feet. The clothing was clean, but not my hands. They looked as if someone had tried to wipe away a layer of some dark greasy matter, leaving stains in the deeper creases and under the nails.
I stretched the left one out nearer the lamp. Motion caused the flame to throw dancing shadows across the room. When it had steadied, I frowned at the finger-nails to which I was attached.
Not grease.
Blood.
The light of a candle/the sunshine smell of linen/the slope of ceiling/the soft throat of a young girl asleep/the blood on my hands—
The bolt of memory shocked me to my feet. I swayed, the room roaring in my ears, my eyes fixed on the flat, slope-free ceiling. Don’t look down (blood on my hands)—don’t think about the hand’s memory of the smooth, intimate glide of sharp steel through flesh.
I ventured a step, then another, towards the shuttered window.
To my surprise, the latch flipped beneath my awkward fingers, and when the hinges creaked open, there were no bars. Why had I expected to be a prisoner?
The brilliance was painful, even though the sky was grey with unshed rain. I lifted a hand to shade my eyes, and squinted at the view: a dirty, cobbled lane far too narrow for any motorcar. One could have passed an object between opposing windows—had there been windows. I saw only one, higher even than mine, tiny and tightly shuttered. I could see two entranceways off this diminutive alley: One had been painted with brightly coloured arabesques, long ago, and comprised a small door inside a larger one, as if the carpenter had learned his craft on castles and cathedrals. The door across from it was a single rectangle, black wood heavily studded with rusting iron circles the size of my thumb-nail. Around them, grubby whitewash, a fringe of grass on the rooflines, chunks of plaster flaking from walls that bulged and slumped. In one place, wooden braces thirty feet from the ground kept two buildings from collapsing into each other.
The house I was in seemed to be the lane’s terminus; thirty feet away, beneath the slapdash web of braces, the passageway turned to the right and disappeared.
I pushed the shutters wider open, intending to lean out and examine the face of the building below me, then took a step back as the left-hand door came open and a woman emerged. She was swathed head to toe in pale garments, with a straw bag in one hand and a child’s hand in the other. She glanced down the alleyway, her eyes on a place well below me, and I could see her brown, Caucasian features and startling blue eyes. She pulled her scarf up over her face and tugged the child down the lane, vanishing around its bend.
Arabic; French; woman in a robe—djellaba, the internal dictionary supplied, although that did not seem quite right. Those clues combined with the woman’s Berber features suggested that I was in North Africa. Algeria or perhaps Morocco. In a suq.
The knowledge of where was just beyond my grasp, like an elusive name on the tip of one’s tongue. Similarly, how I came to be here. And what had been so urgent it drove me to my feet. Or why I had blood on my hands.
Or, my name.
Who the hell was I?
CHAPTER TWO
Sweat broke out all over my body, despite the cold of the room. There was a good explanation, for everything. One that I would remember in a minute, once I could think around the pounding in my head. Or …
I turned to consider the narrow door. The shutters hadn’t been locked. Yes, the window was high and the drop to the lane sheer, but perhaps it meant that my situation was not the source of that feeling of urgency. That the water in the glass was not drugged. That the door led to assistance, to information. To friends, even.
My bare feet slapped across the cold tiles. I stopped beside the bed, transferring everything but the lamp, water, and bowl into my pockets, then moved over to the door and put my ear to the crack: nothing. My fingers eased the iron latch up until the tongue came free; the wood shifted towards me. I was not locked in.
The odours that washed over me threatened to turn my stomach over. Frying oil, onions, chicken, a panoply of spices—for some reason, I felt that if I were more experienced with their names, I would be able to identify each individual element of that sensory cloud.
I pushed aside the evidence of my nostrils, concentrating instead on my vision. The scrap of corridor was no more revealing than the view from the window: the same rough herringbone on the floor, cobalt-and-cream tiles halfway up the walls, with crisp whitewashed plaster above; another door; a tidy stack of straw baskets; the suggestion of a house off to the left. I took a step out: To my right, a stone stairway curled upward out of view—to the roof, I felt, although I could not have said why. Then I heard a voice—two voices, so distant, or behind so many doors, that I could not determine the language, much less the words.
But I could hear the tension.
For some reason, I reached around to the back of my waist-band, my fingers anticipating a cold weight nestled against my spine, but there was nothing. After a moment’s consideration, I drew a breath, and stepped out. Nothing happened.
I crept down the hall to the left and took up a position just before the bend, not venturing my head into the open. The voices were clearer now, the rhythms suggestive of Arabic. Cool air moved across my face and the light around the corner was daylight, not lamps, as if the walls of the house had been sliced away. Words trickled into my mind. Dar: a house of
two or three storeys built around a ground-level courtyard, open to the sky; halka: its wide central sky-light; riad: a house whose inner courtyard was a garden.
Another brief internal flash: clipped green rectangle/rain-soaked brick walls/figures in academic gowns/the odour of learning—
I was gathering myself for a step towards that light when a harsh sound juddered through the house, coming from below and behind me at the same time. I hurried back into my tiny cell and across the tiles to peer downwards into the narrow lane—
Soldiers!
No mistaking that blue uniform and cap: two armed French soldiers, pounding on the door below.
Aimless urgency blew into open panic: I could not be taken by them, it was essential that I remain free, that I get to—
To where? To whom? But while I might have given a single gendarme the benefit of the doubt, armed soldiers could only be a declaration of war. I snatched the robe from the hook, stepped into the slippers, and made for the curve of steps leading up.
The upper door’s iron latch opened easily. Outside was a terrace roof around an iron-work grid, open to the house below. On one side was strung a bare laundry line; the furniture consisted of six pots of winter-dead herbs and a pair of benches. The rooftop was empty—had I known it would be?—but it smelt of rain, the drips on the clothes-line showing that it had been recent. The air was very cold.
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