Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  He waited, and Idir did not come.

  He had given the lad a few coins, insufficient for anything more time-consuming than haggling over a handful of walnuts. Perhaps he’d talked—or signalled—his way into a bath. Holmes slung his bag across his shoulder and made enquiries as to the nearest hammam.

  Once beyond the central square, the ill-lit streets of Moulay Idriss were narrow and twisting, often steep enough to become a flight of uneven steps, slick with centuries of use. It did nothing to assuage the feeling on the back of his neck, and his questions to the few shopkeepers and beggars still out—if they had seen a lad with an embroidered cap—grew ever more urgent.

  They had not seen him. Nor had the attendants of the hammam.

  The sky was black overhead when he returned to the square. The arched arcades, bustling with vendors and craftsmen during the day, were mostly shuttered now.

  It made the waiting figure very easy to see.

  A lamp sat on the ground before the man, whose face was covered by a fold of his turban, in the style of a desert-dweller. But Holmes barely looked at the seated figure. His eyes were drawn by the embroidered cap, arranged so the lamp-light fell directly on it.

  Holmes stayed in the deep shadow of one of the entranceways to the square. The space was by no means deserted, and there were others sitting beneath the arcades, most of whom were either smoking or talking with friends.

  The seated figure’s hand came up to adjust the tuck of his turban. His hands were empty. After another close survey of the square, Holmes decided the man was alone. He was also seated in a position that made it impossible to come up behind him.

  Holmes blew out a breath, considering his options.

  There might be no emotional attachment to this Moroccan Irregular, but there was responsibility. And in truth, even knowing that the mute lad’s “personal business” could be with Raisuli’s men and his disappearance a part of a trap, the cap made it difficult for Holmes to turn his back.

  In any event, Mahmoud and Ali were bound to the lad, and that was all the debt he required. Surely Russell would agree.

  He stepped out of the darkness, pacing evenly across the square towards the seated man.

  He was pleasantly surprised when no one shot him.

  The man stood as he approached, his hood going back to reveal a clean-shaven face.

  “Where is the boy?” Holmes asked.

  “We have him.”

  “Yes,” he said impatiently. “Where?”

  “You will come.”

  “Then lead.”

  And incredibly, the man did. Holmes stared at the exposed back, then bent to snatch up the cap before following. Across the square, under the dim arcades, past the shuttered shop-fronts and through residential areas, wary at every step of the darker shadows.

  At the end of the city, the road that came down from the hills and ran along the edges of Moulay Idriss turned sharply away. There the man, as seemingly oblivious of a danger at his back as he had been for the previous ten minutes, came out from the city and continued down the sloping road towards a parked motorcar.

  Beyond the motorcar and the faintly visible figures, a glow of acetylene lights rose from the Roman ruins, a mile or so away. Impossible, not to pause for a moment’s reflection on the symbolic and unreachable brilliance of the French authority—then Holmes shook off the thought, to consider what lay before him.

  It was no later than ten o’clock, but the roadway was deserted other than the motorcar and its cluster of figures, half-illuminated by the head-lamps. Three men, including the one he had followed, stood staring back at the city walls. But it was the fourth figure who interested him. The small one whose shoulder was in the grip of a man’s hand.

  Holmes cupped his hands to shout, “Idir, if you are well, raise your arm.”

  The boy’s head shot up, followed by both hands. They appeared to be bound—and proved so as the lad made a lunge for freedom, then gave an inarticulate cry as he was snagged back. Not only bound, but leashed to his captor.

  The man yanked the boy cruelly towards him, and his arm went up.

  “No!” Holmes’ sharp command surprised himself as much as it did the man. It would appear that he had made up his mind. Cursing under his breath at the wandering of retrievers and the inevitability of emotional grit in the machinery, Holmes accepted the responsibility laid upon him. “If you hurt the boy, you will not get what you want.”

  The tableau held, then the beardless man called, “What do you imagine we want?”

  “You want me.” Not that he could see why, precisely. Still, the ransom was sure to be either political or monetary. If they’d simply wanted him dead, they’d had sufficient opportunity.

  “You will trade yourself for the boy?”

  “You let him go, I will come out.”

  “You come out first.”

  Holmes walked out of the darkness, covering a third of the distance before he stopped.

  “You are armed?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Lay your gun down.”

  “Not until the boy is free.”

  The sound that came made his skin go cold: the working of a rifle bolt, as the third man readied to fire. He forced his voice under control, to say, “You may take one of us alive, not both. And what harm can he do you? He can’t talk.”

  The conversation that followed was too low for him to hear, but after a minute, the large man leashed to Idir moved. There came a dull flash of metal, but the knife was low—and in an instant Idir was running up the road.

  The boy skidded to a halt in front of him. Holmes stepped around so the motorcar’s head-lamps were not blinding him, face on. He pulled the embroidered cap from his pocket, then bent down to meet the child’s eyes.

  “You must not let these men take you again,” he said. “Make your way to Fez and tell Russell—tell Miri what happened here. She will help you. Understand?”

  The half-lit, half-shadowed face nodded, then the boy snatched the cap and shoved it onto his unkempt hair.

  “Run,” Holmes told him. “Run like the wind, and do not let them capture you—now, run!”

  And the boy flew—up the road and around the corner, and was gone. Holmes straightened slowly, aware of a thin trail of longing that followed the small figure. Still, the lad’s safety simplified what was to come—and would provide Russell with a scent of where her husband had gone.

  He was left with two options. Simple flight was not one of them: He had committed himself too far into the road for that. He could straighten his arm and empty his revolver at the men, trusting to their startled scramble for shelter to cover his retreat into the town. His other choice was to go with them.

  Long before Raisuli, kidnapping for ransom had been a time-honoured profession here in the Maghreb. And while kidnappers were not gentle to their victims, they rarely murdered them outright. Also, captivity by its nature bore the possibility of escape, particularly with Mary Russell and Ali Hazr in pursuit. Who knew—he might even find Mahmoud.

  For he had no doubt at all that this shiny motor sitting before him was the same one that had taken Mahmoud, nearly killing Russell in the process.

  But he would not think about that just yet. Anger was incompatible with clear thinking.

  “Your gun,” prompted the man.

  “If I lay it down, you will shoot me,” he answered.

  “If you do not lay it down, we will shoot you.”

  “If you’re going to shoot me either way, why shouldn’t I want to take you with me?” It was an idiotic conversation, about an idiotic topic—what an ignominious episode for an otherwise superb career, to be snagged by unimaginative thugs on a dusty road in a distant country. But the longer he kept them talking, the farther the boy could run.

  “If you come with us, we will not shoot you.”

  “A knife, then.” One minor blessing was that Russell didn’t have to overhear this supremely pointless conversation.

  �
��We will not kill you.”

  “You don’t imagine I believe that?”

  But to his astonishment, the man swore an oath—using the Divine name—that neither he nor his companions would kill Holmes, if he laid down his gun and came with them: immediately.

  It was an oath no true believer would break. As Holmes considered where the oath’s loopholes might lie, the man’s voice made it clear that his time was at an end.

  “Do not make me shoot you.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” Holmes answered.

  Laying his revolver on the ground, he straightened and took two steps to the side. And waited.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  My world was black. Tar black. Feel-your-eyelids-to-see-if-they’re-open black. Blinded black.

  It smelt of dust. Not the baked dust of a summer’s day, dust bleached clean by the sun’s heat, but a dust that was old and vile, dust that was the crumbling of bones and subterranean spaces. Dust that had collected for centuries, without a glimpse of the sky.

  Once before, I had awakened in a black cellar, an experience that still haunted my dreams. For an instant, I thought this another nightmare, but the smell was wrong: The cellar had smelt of damp, this of dry. That tiny difference not only convinced me I was awake, it kept me from stepping instantly into panic.

  Instead, I sneezed, which generated three reactions: First, my skull screamed at me that I really mustn’t do that again, for a very long time, if ever. Second, chains rattled in a most unfriendly fashion. And third, I heard a voice.

  Or, I thought I did, underneath my own groan at the flare of pain. I lay still, breathing through my open mouth, eyes straining at the darkness. It came again, a hoarse whisper.

  “Miri?”

  The surge of emotion that swept through me was both powerful and absurd. Given that he had to be as much a prisoner here as I, the sensation that my flailing hand had just encountered a solid raft in a vast ocean was unjustified.

  But that is what I felt.

  “Mahmoud!” I said. “Is that you?”

  My voice slithered unpleasantly into the blackness, stirring echoes; belatedly, I realised that perhaps I should have kept my voice down.

  But the sound he’d made had been faint not through a fear of being overheard or because it was far off, but due to a quality I would never have associated with Mahmoud Hazr.

  Weakness.

  A murmur arose, a sound like a distant engine that took me a while to realise was coming from my companion in the darkness. He paused to draw breath, before the thready voice came again, this time in words rather than a mumble. “How long?”

  “How long have you been here, do you mean? It’s five or six days since they drove off with you.” Was this still Tuesday night? “Where are we?”

  He drew breath, and spoke on the exhale. “Habs Qara.”

  For a moment, the words meant nothing. Then the combination of hiss and guttural descended like a fist: Habs Qara, the vast underground prison built by the tyrannical sultan Moulay Ismaïl to house his foreign slaves. Some fifty thousand of them. Those who did not die and become construction material. I sat up, feeling metal bite my left ankle as I did so.

  “No! Why?”

  His breath wheezed in and out for a few moments before his laborious answer came. “El-Raisuli. Is of the Alaouite. Dynasty.”

  I bit back my initial response of Huh? for fear of making too great a demand on his strength. While my thoughts fumbled with his words, my fingers explored the metal on my ankle: shackles, rough but sturdy; padlock, ditto; chains extending out in both directions, flat against the floor. The whole lot rattled as I worked myself around to lean against stone—a pillar, judging by the chains, rather than a wall. I scratched my head—bare; pushed up my spectacles—gone; and tried to pull my burnoose tight against the cold, only to find it missing as well. Why they hadn’t stripped me entirely, I did not know.

  Very well: I still had my brain.

  As I told myself that, I discovered it was true: The frozen grip on my memories had loosed. The dream that had brought me awake was no dream: the motorcar, the fight, the stone in my pocket. All real.

  I made a noise, which sounded like pain even though it began as a kind of laughter, at the hideous irony: Light had dawned in the utter darkness.

  I ripped myself away from that pointless spiral, and started thinking aloud.

  “Raisuli is of— Oh, and by the way, Ali is fine. He went back into the Rif with Abd el-Krim after the meeting with Lyautey, which was apparently successful, although I can’t see that much of an agreement was reached. However: Raisuli. As you say, he is of the house of Alaouite, and claims to be the rightful heir to the Moroccan throne. Being a descendent of Moulay Ismaïl (frankly, I should think it’s hard to find a Moroccan who isn’t), that would make Ismaïl’s capital city a potent symbol. And Ismaïl’s dungeon for foreigners doubly so, it being under the very noses of the foreign intruders.”

  I waited for a response. When none came, I went on. “Lyautey and your friend Abd el-Krim agree that Raisuli himself is very ill, which makes it unlikely that he was actively involved in putting us here. If you think he is behind this, it would, rather, be his supporters, striking a blow against France and the Rif Republic at the same time.”

  I interpreted the small noise my fellow prisoner emitted as approval, however vague. I continued. “I’m not going to ask how you got here or what you imagine they have in mind for us, since I can tell that you’re finding speech difficult. More immediately, we need to free ourselves before they come back. Let me know if they left you with anything that might be of use—I have no spectacles, robe, or turban, though they did leave me my trousers, shirt, boots, and— What was that?”

  I went quiet so he could repeat his short phrase. When he did, I heard the words but the meaning escaped me. At first. When they finally took hold in my mind, the darkness grew so very cold.

  “What do you mean, ‘not coming’?” I demanded. “Raisuli’s made a career out of selling back foreign prisoners. Once Lyautey pays the ransom, we’ll be out of here.”

  No answer came.

  I pushed the silence away. “I suppose that if his followers see Raisuli as the heir of Moulay Ismaïl, kidnapping Europeans comes naturally to mind when their purse runs empty. And Raisuli seems to treat his captives better than Moulay Ismaïl did. The important ones, anyway. Like Perdicaris and Maclean. And us.”

  Silence. Raisuli perhaps, but his followers?

  “I have to say, it’s awfully cold in here. Did they give you a blanket or robe of some kind?”

  Either he did not answer, or his response was too low for me to hear.

  “What about food? I don’t imagine it’s anything to write home about, but how often do they bring it?”

  He did not reply.

  “Mahmoud, can you hear me?”

  His answer was long in coming. When it came, I wished it had not done so.

  “No food.”

  The cold and dark seized my very bones. “No food?” It was my turn to whisper. “What about drink? Surely at least they bring water?”

  No answer came. Which from Mahmoud was answer enough.

  “You’ve been here for five days with no food or water?”

  The appalled silence that fell was a palpable entity, a huge, infinitely heavy thing that drifted over a pair of tiny heartbeats, faltering lungs, weak fingers. The other time I had woken in blackness, my imagination had peopled that prison with an enemy capable of utter silence, invisible at my side, readying a knife for my throat. Here, I was in a dungeon that had known the implacable death of a thousand like me—ten thousand, suffering and abandoned beneath the ground, the living bound up with those who rotted in their chains, while above, the world went on.

  I have known fear before. This was terror. It hollowed my strength and brought a whimper to my throat, and with it an almost overpowering urge to fling myself to the reaches of my shackles and scream until my voice failed.

/>   Almost. Had Mahmoud not been there, had the memory of his sardonic gaze not been more immediate than the present reality of a man barely conscious, the wave of despair would have broken over me. But he needed me—Mahmoud, needing me—and I could not afford the luxury of losing control. If any passer-by even heard my screams, they would be dismissed as the wind, or as a jinn. Just as Mahmoud’s had been: He must have shouted to the limits of his strength. It was why he could barely speak.

  And at that knowledge, my hollow limbs filled, my spine went stiff, my trembling mouth snapped shut. This proud and gifted man had given a lifetime of service to king and country, only to be reduced to screams for help in a deserted prison. Death in open battle was one thing; craven atrocity could not be permitted.

  I would not permit it.

  “Damn it, Mahmoud,” I shouted, “Ali will have my guts for garters if I let you die here!”

  I had been locked in a lightless cellar before, and survived. The experience had taught me that there are more ways to see than the one. It was hard, to force my mind away from emotion and into a cold analysis and assessment, but as I did so, I began to suspect that our captors were more driven by ideological passions than methodical criminality: They had removed my burnoose and djellaba, but had not stripped me bare. They had found the bank-notes, coins, and folding knife in my pockets, but failed to notice the two thongs around my neck, both of them holding gold rings. They had removed my glasses—in any event, my glasses had disappeared—but left behind the flat stone, the scrap of onionskin, and a few bread crumbs. They had found the sturdy knife I had strapped to my right wrist, but—

  Incredibly, they had left me my tired footwear. Including the slim throwing knife that rode there.

  “Mahmoud, are you there?”

  “…”

  “I have a knife. I’m going to get us out of here. Don’t you dare die on me.”

  His response was indistinct, trailing away in echoes, but even so, I knew what he had said: insh’Allah. And I knew, too, that even now, there would have been a faint smile as he said it.

  Rage warmed my fingers as they searched the shackles around my ankle. Fury pushed back the darkness, reducing it from a deadly threat to an exasperating inconvenience. The shackles were rough with rust, but not to the extent that they were weakened. The hasp was fastened with a padlock, which felt new. I had a brief picture of a man in a djellaba haggling with the medina equivalent of an ironmonger, and that stoked my outrage further.