Dreaming Spies: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  This place was my home like none other. If that tiny young woman had breached its defences, I wanted to figure out how. I could, of course, ask her, when next we met (be that behind the walls of the prison, or in freedom), but if the past twenty-four hours had taught me anything, it was that Haruki Sato had lied to me.

  For how long?

  I examined the Quadrangle walls, and saw a dozen places where a nimble-footed acrobat could jimmy a window and slip inside.

  Lies, and the stories she had told me …

  My own mind, as I stood there surrounded by a million pages of human thought and knowledge, began to glow, then slowly to burn.

  This entire case was about books, beginning with the one in my hands when, thirteen months before, Haruki and I had met on the deck of the Thomas Carlyle. Our first conversation had been of poetry. Lady Darley later spoke of William Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold. And at the centre of it all, Bashō’s folding-out story of a Nakasendo journey.

  Stories.

  Something touched my elbow. I looked down into the worried face of a sub-librarian, saying some words. I nodded and gave him a few words in return, then I turned and left the Quad before he could break any further into my thoughts. I went out through the passageway between the Schools of Natural Philosophy and Music into Radcliffe Square, turning right: down Brasenose Lane, up the Turl, and back along Broad Street. There I paused to look up at the walls of the Divinity School. It had been festooned with ivy, when first I saw it during the War. Were it still, I might have suspected earlier.

  I continued the circuit, down Catte to Radcliffe Square again. There I nodded to myself, having confirmed what I’d thought, before doubling back through the Schools Quad to follow Parks Road towards the north end of town.

  I had once walked into a lamp-post in this city, when my eyes were taken up with a book, and I suppose this day, too, I must have had any number of near-misses. I had a vague sense of blaring horns and alarmed expressions on the faces of strangers, but my mind was too busy weaving a story out of a year’s worth of threads to pay them any attention.

  I made it to my front door without mishap. Some time later, I looked down in surprise at the cup in my hand. My mouth tasted of tea, my eyes were half-blind from standing in the sun.

  I looked around. Holmes was sitting at my kitchen table, a newspaper spread out before him and a bemused look on his face.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Are you quite well, Russell?”

  “I’m not sure.” I took another sip from my cup. For some reason, it was tepid. I pulled the cosy off the pot and topped up the cup with a remarkably powerful-looking brew, and sat down. “What did Inspector Ambrose have to say?”

  Holmes looked at me for a moment, one eyebrow raised, before deciding to humour my question. “She came to him ten days ago with a story he found—”

  “Wait: ten days ago?”

  “The Tuesday of last week.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “She told him a story that at first he found hard to credit, of a local earl who ran a nice line in blackmail. His impulse was to show her the door, but she had letters, from three high-ranking individuals, requesting that the reader tender any assistance possible to Miss Haruki Sato.”

  “There wasn’t a letter from the Prince, surely?”

  “No. But one was from the Japanese ambassador to America. She spent the better part of the day in the Inspector’s office. At the end, he was convinced that she might be speaking the truth, and furthermore, that the plan she presented him was workable.”

  “She came with a plan ready-made,” I said, not a question.

  “She did. The specific details came later, but he agreed to her basic request: that she be permitted to pursue the evidence in her own way. Then, at a time to be arranged, the Inspector would arrive at the Darley house with at least one constable, a man who would not be intimidated by the thought of putting darbies on a nob, as it were. At that point, she would be able to provide him with the evidence he required for prosecution.”

  “I should like to meet this Inspector Ambrose,” I reflected.

  “She—or rather, her extended ‘family’—must have looked long and hard to locate someone who would not only listen to the outrageous claims of a small Oriental female, but would then cooperate with her in a plan of action. Inspector Ambrose comes from a family of devout trades unionists, and although he is Labour rather than Socialist, he seems of a remarkably bolshevist nature.”

  In other words, a man both positioned and primed to raise an uproar at any attempt to give the Darleys a quiet aristocratic pass. Whether he would do so remained to be seen.

  “And do you feel the prosecution of the Darleys will actually go ahead?”

  He smiled. “I had the distinct impression that Ambrose relished the feathers that have begun to fly at all levels of law enforcement in London. It took him some time to locate an expert in how one went about arresting a peer. And some of the papers he took from that safe name regular guests at Sandringham and Balmoral. Were it not for the uncomfortable evidence, Ambrose would be on his way to walk a beat in the Upper Hebrides.”

  “And Haruki?”

  “She is both the case’s weakest point and its greatest strength. Her ‘attempted burglary’ is the reason Ambrose came to Darley House in the first place. Because he was arresting her, he was required to examine the premises closely to see what she had stolen. In the course of the search, he happened to uncover evidence of crimes far greater than a break-in.

  “To dismiss the burglary case against her could undermine the greater case. She will be charged with trespass and a handful of other crimes. Ambrose tells me that she not only agrees, she insists on it. He also tells me that there will be no denying that both Darleys knew of the contents of that safe. Their finger-prints are all over the inside. Hers, too.”

  “Really?” Overlooking finger-prints seemed the mistake of an amateur.

  “It would appear that Lady Darley’s jewels were kept in and among the file boxes containing letters and photographs. Making it difficult for her to claim she had not been in Tommy’s safe.”

  “But—” I stopped, then felt a slow smile grow on my face. “Miss Sato was a busy girl, while Tommy and his stepmother were talking in the library.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I suppose we should be grateful it’s only gaol, and not a broken neck. Did you see her?”

  “I did not. And it being the week-end tomorrow, I doubt we shall be granted a visitation until Monday. Now, would you like to tell me—What is it? Why are you laughing?”

  “ ‘Get the job done.’ ” I sat back in my chair, filled with rueful admiration. “ ‘Our most important skills are those of deception.’ ”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You and I have been played, Holmes. Like a pair of fish. From the moment she told me she came from a family of acrobats. ‘We use the tools we have,’ she said. Or as her father put it, ‘Get the job done,’ no matter the cost to your life, your pride, your freedom.” I shook my head. “If only she’d told us the truth from the beginning, this might all have been avoided.” Or not. But without the chance …

  “How?”

  “I realised something, at the Bodleian this morning. You know how one small fact can tip everything on its head?”

  “The world rests on tiny things,” he agreed.

  “In this case, it’s the absence of blood.”

  “Ah.” He sat back, taking out his tobacco.

  “Haruki Sato told us a story—a story, then its sequel. Designed for us, specifically crafted to entice two clever English detectives to enter the circle of another Englishman, and help retrieve a book. From the moment she made a friendly remark to me as I sat on the deck reading, she was getting a sense of who we were, whether we were sufficiently clever for her purposes, how she might win us over. The only slip she made was to let us see her on the high wire: if we’d really thought about it, that skill might have put u
s on the alert earlier, made us question her claim that she was not herself trained in the family traditions. Though I wouldn’t even bet she hadn’t calculated that particular ‘slip’ to the last degree.

  “She knew about us before she boarded the Thomas Carlyle. Not everything, but enough to get her started. The irony of it is, you and I would have helped her anyway, even if she and her father had been completely honest about their goals. But they couldn’t be certain about that. So they told us a story.

  “And—a double irony, especially bitter—the story came to a very traditional Japanese end last spring, with almost no help from us. We were just a back-up plan that turned out to be unnecessary, since the Emperor’s hidden servant managed to get inside, and give his life for his master, preserving the future and avenging the past.

  “If the Prince Regent had looked closely enough at the book then and there, we might actually have been of some use. But by the time he noticed the substitution, the Darleys were far beyond their reach.

  “So, the entire charade began again. Only now the stakes were substantially higher, and Haruki no longer had the experience of her father to draw from.

  “So she returned to the tools that had served her well the first time: Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell. She did her own investigations, traced the book from King George to the Darleys. Then she went sideways, as we should have done, making enquiries into the history of Lady Darley.

  “As you said, she appears to have been in England more than the few days she told me. She must have been very busy, putting together her information—and her story. I came back and she was here to greet me, standing in my kitchen with blood pouring down her arm.” I met my husband’s eyes. “That young woman could have scaled the Bodleian during the dead of night in an ice storm. What is more, none of the iron fences show the least sign of blood.”

  It took a moment for the meaning to penetrate; when it did, even he drew back, appalled. “She did that to herself?”

  What courage it had taken, to savage her own arm.

  “And I’d thought she was the too-trusting innocent. Just as I thought she got hurt because she came to Oxford without knowing the lay of the land—that she was ignorant of how the Bodleian worked and who Bulldogs were, and paid a hard price for that ignorance. But in fact, her arm was injured precisely because she knew how things worked. She’d known how I worked from the start, when she told me about coming from a family of acrobats and saw my polite scepticism. She also knew that I would be an extremely efficient … ‘tool,’ here in Oxford, if only she could overcome that mistrust. Once she had set me in motion, she could keep me in the dark, exaggerating her fever, letting me believe I was carrying out matters in my own way—leaving her free to slip out the back and buy waterproof paper, see her Inspector, do whatever she needed. All she had to do was pay that initial price.”

  She’d known precisely how to manipulate me. Knew I would consider it unthinkable that any sane person would do that to herself. So I did not think it—neither of us did. And with her flesh she bought my—our—blind belief. Get the job done.

  The room was silent. Holmes came to the end of his cigarette, and pressed it thoughtfully in the ash tray. “I do not think,” he said, “that she knew what her father intended, that night on the Imperial roof.”

  “Not consciously, no. But afterwards? She must have looked back at every moment, studied it all, and realised how thoroughly her father had kept his plan from her as well as from us. None of us would have agreed to his death, so none of us knew. And when she came here, she followed his example. You and I would not have agreed to her arrest, so she said nothing.” I grimaced. “Every person who looked at Haruki Sato saw a girl with a charming smile—including us! We never even considered that she might be a person who could rip open her own flesh, just to come in under my guard.”

  “Madness,” he said.

  “A tragedy. We’d have helped her, without question. You’d have jumped at the chance to catch James Darley.”

  “But not to kill him.”

  “Yes. We let them know that we would draw that line, didn’t we?”

  “I also expect Miss Sato needed to feel in command of the operation, to the end. That is the problem with bringing in partners: it limits one’s freedom of action.”

  “Still, she did trust us at the end, with the document.” She must have hesitated over the decision, I thought. It was nice to know that we had proved a marginally more desirable alternative than simply burning the thing. I drew a deep breath, and looked into Holmes’ grey eyes. “Do you think … did she come here with the intention of following in her father’s path? Killing the Darleys, and herself?”

  “I think it very possible.”

  Neither of us looked away. Both of us were thinking of the woman’s abilities, and the fact that at the moment, but for a few locks, she had the Darleys very close to hand.

  Temple of the Book:

  A Fool’s errands all around:

  Gallows lie below.

  Give me a week, she had asked. In the end, it only took her five days.

  The Darleys were arrested on Friday morning, ushered into the dank and draughty confines of His Majesty’s Prison, Oxford, a part of the castle complex dating back to the eleventh century. The Empress Matilda had escaped over the frozen Thames, but then, she had a great deal of help from within.

  Apparently, the two Darleys did not.

  On Monday, I returned to the Bodleian and filled out the request slips for a number of books that had nothing whatsoever to do with Japanese art. When I walked back out through the Schools Quad, I was covered with drying sweat and tingling with nerves, but the Bashō—in its naked silken slip-case—was sitting on a high shelf in Mr Parsons’ office, waiting to puzzle the poor man when he came across it. I could only hope his wrath at finding an empty paperboard case on the shelves (or—catastrophe!—a case containing the wrong book) did not result in a sub-librarian losing his job, or his head. Or worse, cause Mr Parsons to believe that he was becoming absent-minded …

  Wednesday morning, the Earl of Darley and Charlotte, Lady Darley (quite alive and filled with imperious fury) were formally charged with a long list of crimes. The four intervening days, I later learned, had seen a whirlwind of consternation as far up as the Palace: how could one conduct the trial of a peer charged with blackmail, and not make public the specifics of the evidence?

  But Ambrose hung tough. Haruki had either been lucky, or chosen the point of her wedge with great care. Probably both.

  I added that to the list of questions I intended to ask her.

  Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, the post brought notification from the prison that we would be permitted a half-hour of visitation on Thursday morning, to speak with prisoner Haruki Sato.

  Holmes had been in London, adding his weight to the prosecution, but he caught a late train back to Oxford. He had questions of his own.

  I woke that night, for no discernable reason. Some tiny noise …

  I slipped out of bed and went down the stairs.

  Moonlight came through the sitting room windows. The book that Holmes had pulled from Lady Darley’s Bible was sitting openly on my desk, as it had been since Friday. All those books, I reflected. Bashō’s poems, the Bard’s plays, a countess’s empty Bible. And now this one, a lovely fake with a history of its own. I slid it from its case and turned back the front cover.

  The document I had left sitting inside it was gone.

  In its place was a folded square of the paper from my desk. As I picked it up, a few tiny spots of brightness fluttered out. I switched on the desk lamp to see: three cherry blossoms, perfect and white against the dark wood. On the page were two English sentences in her trim writing, followed by three rows of descending Japanese characters, then the poem’s English translation:

  My very first word of you warned that I should take great care, because you and your husband were English shinobi. If in the future the Sato family may be of any service to you, I
would consider it a sign that you forgive my betrayal of your friendship.

  In a castle keep

  The prisoner sees the moon.

  Freedom lies just … there.

  For the first time in days, I felt my face relax into a smile. I returned the blossoms to the paper, the paper to the book, and the book into the slip-case young Mr Bourke had so ingeniously crafted. I checked the doors and windows—locked, all of them—then went back upstairs. No need to rise early; no cause to brood over an assassination of Darleys, or to agonise over how we might prise a friend out of the English justice system. Upon her noble face there would be no note how dread an army hath enrounded her; in the background no war-engines, no awareness of gallows in a courtyard below.

  “What was it?” My house: my right to investigate untoward noises. But that did not mean Sherlock Holmes slept through them.

  I climbed back into my warm bed and pulled the blankets up around my ears.

  “Nothing, my dear Holmes. Nothing more than a little touch of Haruki in the night.”

  For Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald:

  travelling companions in the Empire, and beyond

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For the ladies (and gents) of the Capitola Book Café, for twenty-one years of Laurie King celebrations: my thanks are laid at your feet.

  My love to Linda Allen, the agent who got me here.

  Thanks are also due, a thousand times over, to the people who make up Penguin Random House. They make my books stronger, less nonsensical, more beautiful—and available, to people like you who might want to read them. Special thanks to Kate Miciak, Libby McGuire, Jennifer Hershey, Kim Hovey, Scott Shannon, Sharon Propson, Kelly Chian, Carlos Beltrán—and welcome, Julia Maguire. I owe you guys everything.