Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  “That is true,” Long said, “although its precepts are used not only for architecture, but for investments, farming, planning battles, and a thousand other activities. Here, let me show you.” He patted through his pockets until he found a mechanical pencil and a scrap of paper, smoothing it out on the table-cloth and sketching an octagon. He then connected each angle with the centre, and ascribed to each of the eight resulting triangles an area of influence: family, wealth, knowledge, and so on, with the all-important health at the confluence. After a few minutes, the minutiae of detail became more than even a sober Russell might have asked for, and she interrupted his explanation of the “chien” side of the octagon.

  “What I would really like to know is, why would someone put a mirror, a bowl of water, and a pot-plant in a kitchen?”

  He unfolded another piece of paper and pushed it across to her, laying his pencil on top. “To answer that, you will have to draw the room for me.”

  “It’s the kitchen in the house here. I would assume that your parents were responsible for the items.”

  “My mother. Although she would have called in an expert. Yes, I see. However, it has been some years since I was inside that room.”

  She took up the pencil and sketched the kitchen’s outlines, locating the sink, scullery, cook-stove, and entrances. At his direction she indicated the lights and windows, as well as the locations of the small mirror, the water bowl, and the dead plant. Then she pushed it back across the table at him.

  Soup arrived, and he moved the sketch to one side, keeping his hand on the edge of the paper. “As I remember, the kitchen faces the back of the house, its windows to the west, is that correct?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He picked up both sheets and laid them in front of her, next to each other. “The objects you name would have been intended to correct the chi, the energy patterns, within the room. And thus, of course, within the lives of the residents.”

  “Of course,” she murmured.

  He heard the irony. “I apologise, I know it is complex, and with little logic for the literalist Western mind.”

  “Perhaps I should ask, is it possible to analyse how these . . . additions were intended? Can you tell what was wrong with the chi in the room?”

  Long looked down at the two pieces of paper, his lips pursed in consideration. “That is an interesting question,” he said at last. “I am by no means an expert, but it looks to me as if there was a perceived external threat to the internal harmony. The items were placed to strengthen the internal harmony—the family.”

  But “harmony” was not the word that caught Russell’s attention. “A threat? Of what kind?”

  “That I cannot know. Some force that threatened to pull the family off-centre into disharmony. Which, I agree, is so general as to be considered witchcraft, or mumbo-jumbo.” With an apologetic smile he turned to his soup; after a minute, the others did the same.

  “Apart from the articles of feng shui,” he said when the bowls had been removed and fragrant plates were beginning to appear, “I hope you have found the house in satisfying condition?”

  “I found it run-down, dreary, and most uninformative,” Russell replied.

  “I am sorry.” Long scooped shreds of vegetables in some dark, piquant-smelling sauce on top of his rice, then ventured, “You had hoped to learn something from the building?”

  “Oh, not really. But it would have been nice.” The bookseller’s face wore a look of confusion, although he was too polite to persist with his questions. But to Holmes’ surprise, Russell relented.

  “I’ve had a series of peculiar dreams. Two of them served to remind me about the earthquake and the period afterwards, events I had forgotten entirely, but the third is still puzzling. It involves a secret compartment in a house—nothing particular happens, I just pass by and know that it’s there. I don’t know what the imagery means. Probably nothing, but it would have been satisfying to have discovered a hidden vault under the house or something.”

  Long nodded impassively and the conversation turned to the collection of furniture the cellar contained, some of which was going to have to come out through the coal-cellar doors. They ate the food and drank wine and pale tea, and when they were replete, Long patted his lips with his table napkin and spoke hesitantly.

  “I wonder, about your hidden room. Do you know of the writings of Father Matteo Ricci?”

  Russell shook her head, but Holmes got a faraway look on his face.

  “Ricci was a Jesuit in the sixteenth century who went to China, as a missionary of course, although as was the habit of the Jesuits, he learnt as much as he taught. Many of his writings are in Chinese, which somewhat limits his fame in the West. But one of the things he tried to teach the Mandarins concerned the mnemonic arts. I believe Western philosophers have something of a tradition of memory training.”

  “Ignatius of Loyola,” Holmes supplied, his own memory having performed its retrieval, “founder of the Jesuit order. And Pliny has a section on memory experts, I believe, as do several Mediaeval works on oration.”

  “What does this have to do with locked rooms?” Russell asked.

  “Ricci’s technique involves the construction of memory palaces,” Long told them. “One visualises a large building—real or imagined, palace or basilica—and furnishes it with items that stimulate specific memories.”

  “The problem being,” Holmes commented, “that the formulation and retention of the myriad rooms and furnishings alone requires a prodigious memory.”

  “And,” Long added, with an air of finally being permitted to reach his central thesis, “there is nothing to guarantee that a room once furnished will not be closed off and forgotten. To have its lock turned, as it were.”

  “I see,” Russell said. Her chin had come up and one light brown eyebrow had arched delicately above the frame of her spectacles: scepticism, and a trace of indignation that this stranger would presume to know her mind. Before she could voice her objections aloud, Holmes firmly turned the conversation to books and Chinese philosophy, and in a while they were lighting their after-dinner cigarettes and arguing amiably over the bill.

  She was still silent when they stood to leave, rousing herself only to say the necessary words of farewell to the bookseller. Outside, the fog had thickened into a clean, grey version of a London particular, and Holmes relaxed into its protection, hooking her hand through his left arm as they set off for downtown.

  Holmes was intensely aware of the physical sensation of her arm on his. He generally was aware of her presence, that sturdy physicality wrapped around a magnificent brain and the stoutest of hearts. One flaw alone had he found in this incomparable hard diamond of a woman, an imperfection that had long puzzled him, and cost him no small amount of sleep.

  Five years ago he had sat in a dark cabin on a boat heading to Palestine, listening to the details of her family’s death, hearing of the guilt that had been bleeding her like an invisible wound. Ever since that night, he had waited for Russell to question those things that she believed to be true. She was, he had reminded himself time and again, one of the most competent natural investigators he had ever known, unerring and undistractible. If her ears would not hear and her eyes refused to focus, there might well be a reason.

  Even so, over the years it had been on the very end of his tongue a score of times to push matters into the open. At first, he had not done so because she was so very young, and clearly needed to shield herself against further injury. Later, he had come to realise that forcing her into a confrontation with her beliefs, tempting though it might be, could well drive a steel wedge between the two of them: She would blame him for introducing the troubling question, then further blame him for having waited so long before doing so—if there was a thing Russell hated more than a stranger presuming to know how her mind worked, it was the sensation of being protected. The resulting disquiet and mistrust would have made an already difficult relationship unbearably, perhaps fatally, compl
icated.

  And nearly literally fatal: On the boat out from Japan, he had ventured a slight step, suggesting that the flying dream was a reference to the earthquake; the very next day he’d found Russell at the rail, moments from overbalancing.

  Yes, fear had kept him silent.

  Later, a growing and perverse fascination with his wife’s single, glaring blind spot had stayed his hand. It had felt at times like watching a child’s block-tower continue to grow and wondering when it would topple and crash.

  Abject cowardice, compounded by intellectual curiosity.

  And then in January, his brother Mycroft’s commands had prised them out of England and flung them halfway around the world, and Russell had decided—on her own, without the faintest suggestion from him—to come to this place. He had known it was coming, then, and held his breath. Even when he’d come up the stairway on the ship and seen her about to tumble over the rail, he’d held back.

  She was coming to it: The mounting pressure of the things she had seen yet not perceived would break down her blindness. She knew, yet kept it from herself; she had the key, and had only to draw it from her pocket. He would force himself, as he had all this time, to continue trusting that she would face the question before she failed to notice a man with a gun, or absent-mindedly stepped out in front of a taxi. Sooner or later, something would drive her to a confrontation with all the things she knew and did not see.

  He, Holmes, had known the question’s answer the moment he saw that intent young man making his way up the hill in Miss Adderley’s photograph: This was not a man to be fatally distracted by a pair of argumentative children.

  Russell should not require a photograph: She knew her father.

  And there were any number of ways to send a motorcar off a cliff: steering wheel, brakes, a score of parts vulnerable to sabotage.

  Russell knew that as well.

  Soon now, she would look down at her hand and see the key lying there; she would ask herself a simple question that would teeter an edifice of ten years’ belief.

  Was it indeed an accident? Or had my family in fact been murdered?

  Chapter Fifteen

  The fog had ceased its teasing around the street-lamps and taken possession of the streets. However, the fog here was a very different thing from that stinking, inert yellow blanket that settled over London every winter. This seemed a living thing, shifting and breathing across the city, and it sheltered their walk, wrapping these two wayfaring strangers in anonymity. No shots rang out, no gaunt figures with tubercular coughs dogged their heels, and they walked arm in arm in mutually distracted silence, physically linked but mentally miles apart, through the Chinese district and downtown to the welcoming lights of the St Francis.

  Between the excess of drink and the shock of two complete meals that day, Russell succumbed quickly to the warmth of the bed and did not wake until Holmes placed a cup of coffee on her bed-side table. She opened one eye, winced back from the brightness as the curtains went back, then threaded out a hand to fumble with the alarm-clock, holding its face up before her own. When she had focussed, she slammed it back down and made to throw off the bed-clothes.

  “Nearly nine o’clock! Holmes, why didn’t you wake me earlier? I told you that Flo wanted to get an early start, and I haven’t finished packing my things.”

  “Your friend telephoned five minutes ago to say that she was only now putting her things into a bag, that she would be here in an hour. The word ‘early’ appears to have a different meaning in Californian English.”

  “Only in the dialect spoken by a certain sub-genus of nocturnal Californians,” Russell said, pawing the bed-clothes back into place and reaching for spectacles, then coffee. With lenses and the beverage, her vision improved, and she looked more closely at her husband’s attire and his purposeful movement through the rooms.

  “Are you going somewhere, Holmes?”

  By this time he had his coat and hat in hand, and it was apparent that he was indeed on his way out of the door. “Yes, if you don’t mind I shan’t wait for your friend to arrive. There’s a gentleman with a collection of manuscript papers across the Bay in Oakland, and a ferry that leaves at ten-thirty. If that’s all right with you?”

  “Of course it is,” she answered with just the faintest edge of too much protest in her voice. “I’m glad you have something to keep you busy, so I won’t worry that you’re going to be bored silly in my absence.”

  “No danger of that,” Holmes replied lightly. “Do you wish me to mention at the desk that we won’t be leaving San Francisco on the Wednesday as you had intended?”

  “Oh! I forgot to do that. Yes, would you? I have a few more days’ business with Norbert, so perhaps another week?”

  “The fourteenth,” he said, pulling on his gloves, and carefully not bringing up the topic of cross-country aeronautical pioneering.

  “Or maybe the next day; that ought to give Norbert sufficient time to finish things off.”

  “Thursday the fifteenth it is. Have a pleasant time, Russell.”

  “I’ll ring you if I’m going to be delayed past Wednesday,” she said, but the door had closed on the final words. She frowned; he’d seemed merely distracted, but perhaps he was in truth affronted by her abandoning of him for Flo and the cabin.

  No, she decided in the end; it was merely a piece of academic investigation that had caught his imagination, nothing more.

  More cheerful than she’d felt in some time, she went to dress and consider an appropriate wardrobe for a none-too-rustic cabin in the woods.

  Holmes, in the meantime, made straight for the front desk. Auberon handed his guest the heavy Gladstone bag Holmes had left there earlier, and after informing the manager of the change in their departure date, Holmes lowered his voice to ask, “Is my car here?”

  The gentleman responded in kind. “Around the back, Mr Holmes, as you requested.”

  One man’s palm lifted slightly from the polished surface of the desk and, so smoothly it might have been rehearsed, the other’s palm came down and slid the note away. Before it had reached Auberon’s pocket, Holmes was halfway to the kitchen.

  He passed through that steamy cacophony with scarcely a glance from the white-clad workers, slipping out of the delivery door into the passage-way through which flowed the great hotel’s supplies. A shiny Pierce-Arrow with velvet curtains across its back windows was idling off to his right, its driver immersed in a garish journal entitled Weird Tales; Holmes opened the door, gently laid the Gladstone bag on the seat, and got in beside it; the motor’s tyres were moving before he had the door shut.

  “Morning, sir,” said the young man at the wheel. Holmes opened his mouth to ask if this connoisseur of pulp fiction had read anything by Hammett, then changed his mind at the number of complicated conversational path-ways this would open up. Instead he said merely, “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Greg Tyson, at your service.”

  “The name’s Holmes. Auberon told me you were a relative.”

  “His wife’s nephew. And he told me that you needed a fair bit of driving today and a lot of shut mouth afterwards.”

  “An accurate description. You know the coast road south?”

  “Know it well, sir.”

  “I shall let you know when to stop.”

  “Very good,” the boy said, and set out to provide what Holmes had required, both the driving and the closed mouth.

  Holmes dropped his soft hat on the dark green leather of the seat beside him and went about making himself comfortable, tucking one foot beneath him, loosening his overcoat, and arranging the travelling-rugs behind him. When he had got things as close to a nest of cushions as he was about to achieve in a motorcar, he took out his tobacco pouch—cigarettes were for social occasions and for stimulation, but a pipe was for thinking. And a peaceful review of the past seven days had become increasingly necessary.

  He’d rather have stayed to see Russell safely into the motorcar with Flo Greenfield and
her friend Donny, but from what he’d seen of that young man and his blue motorcar, once pointed on the road out of town, there would be no catching him up. And Holmes very much wanted to be in front of the carload of merrymakers.

  No, he would have to trust that nothing would happen to Russell before her new friends arrived, and that they would quickly out-distance any potential pursuers. Russell was safely out of the way for the next three days.

  By the time she returned to the city, he intended that their as-yet-unidentified opponents would no longer be in the equation.

  He grimaced with the irritation of it. Cases were far more congenial when there was no personal element in them, and this sensation of being his wife’s fond fool was highly unsatisfactory. Urging her to eat, fretting about her safety—he must put Russell out of his mind before the distraction could interfere with rational thought.

  The case had started slowly, but was now progressing somewhat, despite the distances it involved in both time and place. While Russell had been immersed with her solicitor and business affairs, he had been occupied with things far more demanding than Paganini sheet music.

  Tuesday morning, their first in San Francisco, he had used the time while she was busy with Henry Norbert to get the lay of the land, assembling maps and creating the initial contacts among the local vendors of newspapers and flowers, the shoe-shine boys, the local policemen, and the all-important street-sweepers: his eyes on the world.

  He had also succumbed to a growing urge and laid out the beginnings for a line of enquiry into some unfinished business. This had begun with a trip to the P. & O. Line’s offices. With considerable difficulty, he had finally determined that the ship on which he and Russell had sailed to Bombay in January, the Marguerite, was currently on its way back across the Mediterranean and due to dock in Marseilles late on Saturday. Immediately he left the steamship offices, he had sent a telegram home to Sussex, asking Mrs Hudson to find the whereabouts of his old comrade-in-arms, Dr Watson. After a bit of thought, he had also sent one to his brother, Mycroft, requesting that he find out if anyone had been enquiring in early January about the absence, and whereabouts, of one Sherlock Holmes.