A Darker Place (58 page)

A Letter of Mary
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery

Late in the summer of 1923, Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the illustrious Sherlock Holmes, are ensconced in their home on the Sussex Downs, giving themselves over to their studies: Russell to her theology, and Holmes to his malodorous chemical experiments. Interrupting the idyllic scene, amateur archaeologist Miss Dorothy Ruskin visits with a startling puzzle. Wording in the Holy Land, she has unearthed a tattered roll of papyrus with a message from Mary Magdalene. Miss Ruskin wants Russell to safeguard the letter. But when Miss Ruskin is filled in a traffic accident,
Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer
.

THE NEXT DAY
,
The Times
arrived at one o’clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand.

“What is it? Holmes?” I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.

I sat down heavily next to Holmes.

“No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o’clock.”

In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin’s wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my
feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.

The Moor
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery

Though theirs is a marriage of true equals, when Sherlock Holmes summons his wife and partner, Mary Russell, to the eerie scene of his most celebrated case, she abandons her Oxford studies to aid his investigation. But this time, on Dartmoor, there is more to the matter than a phantom hound. Sightings of a spectral coach carrying a long-dead noblewoman over the moonlit moor have heralded a mysterious death, the corpse surrounded by oversize paw prints
….

To say
I
was irritated would be an understatement. We had only just pulled ourselves from the mire of a difficult and emotionally draining case and now, less than a month later, with my mind firmly turned to the work awaiting me in this, my spiritual home, Oxford, my husband and long-time partner Sherlock Holmes proposed with this peremptory telegram to haul me away into his world once
more. With an effort, I gave my landlady’s housemaid a smile, told her there was no reply (Holmes had neglected to send the address for a response—no accident on his part), and shut the door. I refused to speculate on why he wanted me, what purpose a compass would serve, or indeed what he was doing in Devon at all, since when last I had heard he was setting off to look into an interesting little case of burglary from an impregnable vault in Berlin. I squelched all impulse to curiosity, and returned to my desk.

Two hours later the girl interrupted my reading again, with another flimsy envelope. This one read:

Damn the man, he knew me far too well.

O Jerusalem
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery

At the close of the year 1918, Russell and Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes’s enigmatic brother, Mycroft, and find themselves at the service of two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. A recent rash of
murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. His singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous inns, cliff-hung monasteries—and into mortal danger
.

THE SKIFF WAS BLACK
, its gunwales scant inches above the waves. Like my two companions, I was dressed in dark clothing, my face smeared with lamp-black. The rowlocks were wrapped and muffled; the loudest sounds in all the night were the light slap of water on wood and the rhythmic rustle of Steven’s clothing as he pulled at the oars.

Holmes stiffened first, then Steven’s oars went still, and finally I too heard it: a distant deep thrum of engines off the starboard side. It was not the boat we had come on, but it was approaching fast, much too fast to outrun. Steven shipped the oars without a sound, and the three of us folded up into the bottom of the skiff.

The engines grew, and grew, until they filled the night and seemed to be right upon us, and still they grew, until I began to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise before it had even begun. Holmes and I kept our faces pressed against the boards and stared up at the outline that was Steven, his head raised slightly above the boat. He turned to us, and I could see the faint gleam of his teeth as he spoke.

“They’re coming this way, might not see us if they don’t put their searchlights on. If they’re going to hit us, I’ll give you ten seconds’ warning. Fill your lungs, dive off to the stern as far as you can, and swim like the living hell. Best take your shoes off now.”

Holmes and I wrestled with each other’s laces and tugged, then lay again waiting. The heavy churn seemed just feet away, but Steven said nothing. We remained frozen.
The thud of the ship’s engines became my heartbeat, and then terrifyingly a huge wall loomed above us and dim lights flew past our heads. Without warning the skiff dropped and then leapt into the air, spinning about in time to hit the next wave broadside, drenching us and coming within a hairsbreadth of overturning before we were slapped back into place by the following one. Down and up and down and around we were tossed until eventually, wet through and dizzy as a child’s top, we bobbled on the sea like the piece of flotsam we were and listened to the engines fade.

“Welcome to Palestine,” Steven whispered, grinning ferociously.