“What did you find downstairs?”
“A dead rabbit.” He shuddered. “Not just dead, but … pulled apart. Took me hours to clean it all up. Thing is, my father has a soft place for rabbits. He likes to walk down the Christchurch meadow round about dusk and feed them. Has some of ’em near to tame. So whoever left it not only broke in without leaving a sign, they knew us. They’d been watching us.”
“So you did as they asked.”
“Yes. Though I gave the Bodley the best effort, just in case. And I guess I did a good enough job, because nobody came complaining. I thought I’d got away with it.” He raised his eyes to Holmes. “But if you turn me in, I won’t tell the police what I’ve just told you. Not about the ’phone calls. I’ll go to gaol first.”
There was not much more the man could tell us. The voice on the telephone had been educated, but muffled and whispering.
In the end, Holmes and I walked out to a clatter of glass, the sound of a man with uncertain hands pouring himself a much-needed drink.
Dark, shining cobbles,
A glimpse of spring’s first new moon,
Through the dirty glass.
Dawn was still a long way off. Our footsteps echoed from the narrow walls, splashing at the puddles amongst the cobblestones. The rain had stopped for the moment.
We turned north on Walton Street, passing through the sleeping Jericho. “I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Mr Bart Collins?” I asked Holmes.
“Not yet.” In the Baker Street days, Holmes’ encyclopaedic knowledge of his country’s criminals would have made it a simple matter of flipping through his memory’s files—or at last resort, his actual compendium on the shelves. With the new generation, it was more a matter of knowing a man who would know Collins—or, knowing a man who knew a man who would. “At any rate, we have the sequence. Young Bourke discovered the letter and showed it to his fence, Bart Collins. Collins recognised that it might be valuable, and took it to a client. The client kept it for several days, probably finding someone to translate it. Once he realised its importance, he came up with a means of turning it into cash.”
“Twice over,” I pointed out. “First asking £20,000, using the counterfeit version of the book, then a second demand of £100,000 for the original. But what if the Prince had spotted that it was a fake last April?”
“I expect he would have been told that the original sum was for the book, the greater was for what the book contained.”
“Why not ask for the larger sum to begin with?”
“Human nature: once a man has agreed to extortion, you have softened him into paying again—particularly if this time he can be sure he receives the original source of the blackmail. And second, were the demand to have been that enormous to begin with, it would have invited a reply of aggression. The Prince Regent did not order troops into the Imperial Hotel over a matter of £20,000, but he might well have if confronted by five times that.”
Troops, or pet ninjas.
“Clever. Too clever for Lord Darley?”
“Darley may have been simply the middle-man.”
“Like he was with the Frenchman? A Frenchman who may not have died in the trenches, after all?”
“Darley’s personality seemed to me more that of assistant than master,” Holmes mused.
“Any road, we need to talk with Bart Collins. He may even have had two separate clients—one for the book, the other for its hidden contents.”
“That rather over-complicates matters. As you say, Russell, we shall have to ask Mr Collins himself.”
We turned up the Woodstock Road. In the distance, a horse-cart clopped along. It started to rain again, and I turned up my collar.
“I wonder if Darley just didn’t realise what he had,” I mused. “If he set out to ransom the book, but discounted the letter. We’ve been thinking of it as a clear document, something that might be legal in a court of law, but what if it was more …”
“Poetic?”
“Exactly. It’s possible that the meaning would only be clear to those in the know already. Those who have eyes to see, as it were.”
“And Darley himself did not have eyes to see, but someone else now does. Someone with access to the Darley mailing address.”
“I wonder when Lady Darley and Tommy returned? One or the other of them may be in the house in London.” The house where Darley had wanted to plant Japanese cherry trees, no doubt. “What time is it?”
He retrieved the watch from his waistcoat, and held it up to the next street-lamp.
“Just going midnight.”
Too late for the trains. “Holmes, care for a drive?”
I pretended I did not hear his sigh. In fact, I am an excellent driver.
To our relief, Haruki was curled asleep on the settee, and did not wake when I passed through to retrieve my keys. I left a note where she could not miss it:
Much news from the book restorer, we’ve gone to London to follow it up and will be back by breakfast.
—Mary
The engine starting just outside the house may have wakened her, but we were out of the gate in a matter of seconds. The London road was almost deserted, and London itself as quiet as that great mass of humanity ever got. We crossed the river and wound through the roads of Southwark, until I pulled to the kerb and shut off the engine. In the noisy silence, we peered up at the dark house. The very dark house.
I made no effort to be first out of the car.
Holmes’ relationship with William Mudd had begun thirty-five years before, when the street urchin tried to pick the great detective’s pocket. Holmes had promptly draughted little Billy into his Irregulars, demanded schooling of the lad, and eventually set him up in his own investigation offices. He drew the line at permitting Billy to name a son Sherlock—as if Billy’s wife would have approved: Emily Mudd did not appreciate some of the scrapes Holmes got her husband into—but Billy’s new daughter had been christened Mary.
Very fortunately, Billy’s wife sent her husband to the door. Seeing him and him alone, I made haste to follow Holmes, and we were soon tucked into a spotless kitchen, still warm from the day’s fires. Cups of powerful tea scrubbed the sleep from Billy’s face, and after answering our questions as to the health of daughter and family, Billy asked what he could do for us.
“Do you know a fence name of Collins?”
His reaction was not what either of us had anticipated. He leaned back in his chair, as if to put as much distance between us as possible. “Why do you ask?”
It was not a question he would normally have put to Sherlock Holmes. Why does Holmes ask anything? Because there is some kind of crime attached, of course. Holmes merely raised an eyebrow, and in a moment, Billy realised what he was doing, and seemed deliberately to set his wariness aside.
“Sorry,” he said. “No business of mine. Yes, I knew Collins.”
Past tense.
“What happened to him?” Holmes asked.
“He got in the way of a bullet or three, in the Isle of Dogs.”
“When?”
“Just before Christmas.”
“Any arrests?”
“Nothing. Not even any whispers, far as I know.”
“Would you know?”
“I have been keeping my ears open. Collins was on the edge of a case I was working.”
“What kind of a case?”
Billy didn’t hesitate. “House up in Essex got broken into and stripped to the walls. I traced one or two of the paintings back to him.” He went on to describe the details, complete with all names and information, but neither Holmes nor I could find any point of connexion between stolen country house paintings and an incriminating Japanese document. Eventually, Holmes cut him off.
“Doesn’t sound like anything to do with us. But if you hear of any ties the man had to forgery and blackmail—particularly any of his buyers who might have been looking for useful material along those lines—let me know? And it would be good to hear any further details of the killing itse
lf.”
Billy assured us that he would see what was available, and urged us to stay—for breakfast, for the night, for good if we wanted. I glanced involuntarily at the ceiling, and told him that we were fine, that he should go quietly back to bed, and please do give his wife our apologies.
“Before we go,” Holmes said, “let us use your telephone.”
“Good heavens,” I said. “Who do you want to ’phone at this hour?”
“I’d like to know if the Darleys are at home.”
“Shall I?” Billy offered.
Holmes looked amused at his one-time assistant’s eagerness. “By all means.”
It took Billy a little while to uncover the Darley number, but once in hand, he did not hesitate. It rang several times, but then his face changed—and his voice as well, going thick and drunken. “Lookin’ for the Darleys,” he said. “Nah, the young one—”
“Thomas,” I provided.
“Tommy,” he said. He listened for a moment, then cut off the rising protest on the other end. “Just lookin’ fer ’im. He there? When he cornin’—I unnerstan’. Thank you very much, my good man.” He replaced the earpiece.
“I didn’t know we were dealing with the nobs.” He raised his nose and spoke in the exaggeratedly posh accent of a butler. “ ‘Lord Darley and Lady Darley are at the country house for the remainder of the month. One believes they are currently visiting friends in Leicestershire.’ ”
“Nicely done,” Holmes told him. Billy beamed, and showed us to the door, pumping hands with Holmes, then me, then Holmes again. I started the engine with as little noise as I could manage and put the car gently into gear—only to have Billy’s voice ring out along the darkened street in a good-bye as we pulled away.
The information we’d got was very nice, but making our escape without having to face an outraged Mrs Mudd was the night’s true prize.
Less of a prize was the drive home, compounded by an empty stomach and the loss of a potential witness.
Holmes smoked, and brooded. He only broke the long silence as we touched the outskirts of Headington. “A question remains.”
“More than one.”
“Who has resumed the criminal activities of Lord Darley?”
“I’d say the son, Thomas, is the most likely candidate.”
“He’s been to hand all the while, certainly,” he agreed.
“He’s a cad and an habitual cheat, and he’s bright enough to plan it all.”
“What about Lady Darley? Could she be in on the business?”
I thought back to the time on the Thomas Carlyle: a year later, I chiefly remembered it as long weeks of endless sea and broken sleep. “She and Tommy didn’t seem all that keen on each other.” They had exhibited the kind of stand-offish politeness one often saw between a grown son and his stepmother—to say nothing of two future rivals for a fortune. “Although one might say the same for her and Darley himself.”
“True.” Was she one of those generally amiable and much-friended women who yet have little depth to their relationships? She’d had some show of emotion over a brother—no, a cousin, who had loved poetry. If his death in the trenches had left her timid of further blows, well, she wasn’t the only woman whose heart had been hardened by War. The only one who married a wealthy older man for the protection offered. (I do not, by the way, include myself in this category: I married Holmes for the adventure of it, not from any delusion of security.) A man who already had the needed son and heir, one whose interests lay outside of the London whirl …
A thought darted around the back of my brain, until I managed to drag it to the light. “Back on the ship, the earl showed up to one of Haruki’s talks, on sports. Were you there that day?”
“I do not remember ever seeing him in one of her salons, no.”
Had he known Darley would be there, he would not have been absent that afternoon. “He asked about hunting, and after some confusion about falcons as opposed to foxes, I believe he mentioned riding with the Aylesbury Hunt.”
“Which suggests that he has a house very near here—capital, Russell! A pity you have never assembled an adequate library of British life; we shall be forced to wait until your public library opens its doors.”
“Holmes, Oxford is my city; I have my own personal reference librarians.”
For a century and a half, the Covered Market had sheltered the many shops that fed the city. Originally exclusive to butchers, one could now buy anything from cheese to chives. But its heart was meat: sides of beef, pork haunches, hares and pheasants and hanging game in season, cut into chops and baked into pies and transformed into sausages. It smelled of death and the sawdust was not swept as often as it might be. Ardent vegetarians avoided Market Street entirely.
But it knew its meat. It knew its customers. And some of the shops had been there a long, long time.
The Market would not open to the public for hours yet, but much of the action went on long before the gates went up. Colleges, after all, could not be expected to wait until mid-morning for delivery of the day’s roasts.
I had been formally introduced to this butchers’ guild when I was still an undergraduate, when a matter of no great importance to anyone but the child involved led me through the forbidden doorway out of hours. Fortune had smiled on me, and on the child; ever since, the patriarch of the most noble of meat-cutters gathered beneath those glass roofs had claimed me as one of his own.
I waved to Anthony the greengrocer, arranging his baskets of spring lettuces, and paused at the stall of Nigel the fishmonger to admire his artistic display of Cornish spider crabs and early mackerel. It was distracting, and I became very aware that it was coming to breakfast time; on the other hand, the odour of blood and corruption (meat, after all, needed to be properly hanged) became more cloying as one pushed into the centre.
The king of the butchers spotted me coming down the lane (Holmes and I being the only two people in sight who were not hauling slabs of dead animal) and threw down his massive cleaver to greet me. I did not react to the slight stickiness of the hand that seized mine, merely asked after the man’s daughter. His face lit up and he pulled an aged leather case from his trousers, removing a recent photograph.
I dutifully exclaimed over the image, a shy girl with large teeth but beautiful eyes wearing the soft cap of an Oxford undergraduate, then submitted to the praise and jests he pulled out every time I saw him. I introduced Holmes, and when the butcher found where Holmes lived, he instantly launched into a lecture on thymum serpyllum, the Sussex native herb that had given Sussex lamb its distinctive flavour but which, after Napoleon’s war caused much of the countryside to be put to the plough, was largely unavailable. Before Holmes could illuminate the man on a reliable source for this succulent meat (our neighbours down the lane), I interrupted with my question.
“Darley?” he said. “Lord Darley, yes. Died a while ago, in some heathenish place. Liked his beef, that one did. Sent me birds from time to time, when he’d had a shoot on his land that left him with more than they could use. Deer, too, couple of times. Had a conversation with him once about peacocks, his were breeding like pigeons and he thought I might like to develop a line of them. Brought me some, but they had no taste at all. Maybe if he’d fed them—”
“He lived not too far from here, didn’t he? His country place, that is.”
“Up towards Bicester,” he said promptly, then scratched his head, displacing the whitish cap. “Stratton Audley? Fringford? Somewhere in there. I’d have it in the order books, for sure. Let’s see, when did he order last? Couple years ago.” He pulled out a book, prepared to hunt through its thousands of orders for an address.
“No, no,” I interrupted. “That’s plenty close enough. I’m not actually looking for the Darley place. I met him a while ago and he told me about one of his neighbours who bred a particular kind of horse that last week another friend told me he was looking for, so I thought I might see if I could find it.”
Arrant nonsense, bu
t any tradesman who dealt with the aristocracy had a wide acceptance of nonsense, and exotic horse-breeds was well within the realm of possibilities. We thanked him, assured him again that we would be on the watch for anyone raising sheep on undisturbed pasture (“It’s the native thyme, you see? Dies off under the plough but gets into the beastie’s blood and waits for the oven …”), and made our escape from the sanguinary realms of the Market.
Turl; Broad; Magdalen; St Giles; Banbury—it takes nearly as long to name the roads as to drive them. We were back at the house before Miss Pidgeon’s lights were burning, although the sky was growing pale. My bleary eyes squinted at the gates, my numb hands steered the motor through without losing either headlamp. My body craved a large meal, a gallon of coffee, and sleep.
Maybe not the coffee.
Haruki heard us come in. Before our coats were off, she was swaying a path across the sitting room, fever declaring itself in her damp hair and pink cheeks.
I reached out for her forehead but she twisted away irritably. “Where have you been? You left hours ago. Look, it’s almost morning! You must have learned something?”
“Didn’t you get the note?”
“Note? Yes,” she said, “I found the note.” But it sounded to me as if she had forgotten it, and I wasn’t at all certain I wouldn’t need to catch her when she turned. She pulled Holmes’ old robe around her shoulders and went back to the fire, complaining peevishly if not entirely coherently. I tossed wood on the coals, then told her I would make tea. Two minutes later, I looked into the sitting room, and found she had fallen into an uneasy sleep.
Holmes looked up as I came in. I shook my head.
“You have a pet nurse?” he asked in low voice.
“A doctor, actually. She worked at the college before she retired. But our guest will have to be unconscious before she lets me ring the woman. It’ll have to be Miss Pidgeon.”
I almost laughed at the subtle shift on my husband’s features.
Men might walk cautiously around Miss Pidgeon, but in our absence, the woman would watch over Haruki like a mother wolf.
Dreaming Spies Page 26
