A Letter of Mary (15 page)

"You know, Holmes, if Lestrade finds you've been impersonating a police detective, he'll be furious."

"One cannot impersonate what one is in fact, Russell," came his imperious and muffled reply. "Is anyone more a citizen of this
polis
than I? Is anyone more a detective? Where then lies the falsehood?" He reappeared, fastening the cuffs of a less dramatic shirt. "The pursuit of justice may be the trade of a few men, but is the business of all," he pronounced sententiously.

"Save it for the warders," I suggested, and bent down to rip out some threads from the back seam of a sleeve. "Did you find us rooms?"

"I found many things this day, including, yes, rooms. Two adjoining, ill-furnished and underlit rooms with a bath down the hall and back windows five feet above a shed roof. No bedbugs, though. I looked."

"Thank you. What else did you find?"

"An uninspired kitchen and mends in the curtains."

Very well, if he wanted to tantalise me, I would allow him to prolong the telling of what he had discovered while masquerading as a Yard detective.

"How did you find them? The rooms, I mean. Mycroft?"

"No, actually, the house belongs to a cousin of Billy's."

"Billy! I should have known. How is he?" Billy had come into Holmes' employ from the streets as a child and, as far as I could tell, remained willing to drop everything to serve his former master. A thought occurred to me, and I interrupted the description of Billy's ventures into the retail trade and his convoluted family life.

"Is he going to be keeping an eye on me?"

"Do you mind?"

With the morning's shopping successfully behind me and the knowledge of a husband who was no longer bored, I was willing to be benign.

"I don't want him following me about, no, but if he wants to loiter in the hallway listening for gurgled screams, he's quite welcome." I threaded a needle and started to mend the seam I had just picked out.

"He won't be following you, just available if you need auxiliary troops or messenger boys. He has turned into quite a sensible person." High praise indeed.

"That's fine, then. And you— you won't be coming back from Cambridgeshire every night, I take it?"

"I doubt it. It would look exceedingly odd for a member of the nation's great unwashed and unemployed to board the nightly five-nineteen for St Pancras. Too, I hope to worm myself into Mrs Rogers's affections to the extent of dossing down in her toolshed. I shall return Friday night. If you need to reach me before that, send Billy, or have Lestrade send a constable around to pick me up on a vagrancy charge."

"I assume Lestrade will have to agree to all this?"

"Oh yes. Unofficially, of course, but thanks to Mycroft, that will not pose a problem. Lestrade will take care that any police investigator who comes to one of the houses will either not know us or else be warned we're there and not to take any notice."

"Is there a telephone at the house of Billy's cousin?"

"You sound like a poor translation out of the French, Russell. But yes, there is a telephone at the house of the cousin of my friend. Utilize
chez,
feminine singular, masculine singular."

"And to his wife the unwashed tramp will telephone, is that not so?"

"But yes, with regularity the tramp his wife in the boarding house will telephone."

"Merci, monsieur."

"De rien, madame."

He walked over to where I stood, took my free hand, and ceremoniously slipped off the gold band I wore.
"Mad'moiselle."
He examined my fingers and tapped the pale shadow of the ring. "Put some dye on that," he ordered.

I dropped my stitching abruptly.

"All right, Holmes, what is it? What did you learn today?"

His eyes flared with gratified amusement, and he wandered over to the fireplace to fill his pipe from the tobacco cache Mycroft kept there.

"Your Miss Ruskin had something of value when she entered the country. Or at any rate, something she valued highly. It took her two hours to negotiate the distance between Victoria Station and her hotel, which could hardly have taken a full hour if she'd walked, dragging her suitcases behind her. Inspector Jack Rafferty, one of Lestrade's unrecognised Irregulars, discovered that the distinctive figure of Miss Dorothy Ruskin had deposited two leather valises with the left-luggage gentleman at Victoria, then reclaimed them nearly two hours later. He furthermore discovered, pursuant to his aforementioned investigation— do you know, Russell, I believe I shall write a monograph on the obfuscating peculiarities of constabulary vocabulary and syntax— that said Miss Ruskin had subsequently paid visits to no fewer than three banking establishments in the immediate vicinity— is it as difficult to listen to as it is to produce?"

"It is certainly tedious," I agreed, my head bent again over the seam.

"Good. Miss Ruskin was looking for a bank that would allow her access to its safety-deposit boxes outside of the normal bankers' hours. The first two seemed to consider her some sort of eccentric, I cannot think why, but the third bank was quite happy to oblige— it is owned by Americans, who are notoriously willing to cater to any behavioural oddity if the customer is willing to pay. She let a box for one week only, and into it she put a small parcel, wrapped in a checked cloth, and a thick manila envelope."

"They revealed all this to Inspector Jack Rafferty, the man with the dead mouse on his lip? I'd have thought even my fellow Americans would have some standards when it came to professional discretion, much less their employees."

"My dear child, what do you take me for? As soon as I realised what she was about, I nipped around the corner to change my persona." To one of his bolt-holes, I interpreted, those scattered and invisible hideaways that served as combined retreats and dressing rooms. I finished the seam and bit off the thread, admired the puckered stitching, and hung up the blouse.

"Holmes, I admit your infinite appeal in that gorgeous suit, but was that sufficient to crack the reserve of a senior bank official?"

"Ah, well, no. It happened that the bank manager is a sort of distant family connection. Second cousin twice removed sort of thing." I looked at him in surprise.

"Good Lord. I'm always forgetting that you have a family. You and Mycroft seem to have sprung full-formed from the brow of London."

"I haven't seen the man in twenty years and probably would not have recognised him had it not been for his nameplate. He certainly did not recognise me, but after a few of these gruesome cocktails everyone's tossing back these days, he became quite the old gossip. I fear I shall have to open an account there and demand the odd service at inconvenient hours to justify the curious slant of my questions."

I wondered if any blood tie had actually existed before that morning but decided not to press the matter.

"I take it that the cloth-wrapped parcel was the box. Was there any indication what the envelope contained?"

"No. But she returned to the bank twice: once early Tuesday, and again just before opening on Wednesday. At which time, unfortunately, she closed out her account and declared she had no further use for the deposit box."

"Oh dear."

"Yes. I had hopes in that box. It might have held documents, or treasure, or at the very least a will. But— nothing."

"So she only used it on Tuesday to fetch whatever was in the envelope and on Wednesday to remove the box and bring it to Sussex."

"So it would appear."

"Where, then, did she take the envelope on Tuesday?"

"Indeed. The other question being ..."

I paused for a brief moment in my abuse of another defenceless frock in order to think.

"Did she wish to protect the envelope and the box in general, or did she envisage some specific threat to them during her trip to Cambridgeshire?"

"Excellent," he said.

"Elementary," I replied, and ripped off another button.

* * *

Lestrade rang up as we sat down to tea, to say that he had no further information and that he was being called off to Shropshire. Did we want him to send another inspector to take his place? he asked. Holmes settled himself next to the telephone with his cup and told Lestrade how we intended to obtain information concerning Colonel Edwards and Mrs Rogers. Their conversation took up an excessive amount of time, but there was never really any doubt about the outcome. Lestrade's objections were finally worn down against the grit of Holmes' determination and the hard fact of his authority, unofficial though it might be, and he submitted to Holmes' suggestion that we meet again on Friday. The field was cleared for our hunt.

When I came into the dining room the next morning, following my lengthy toilette, Mycroft choked on his coffee and Holmes' face turned dark.

"I knew I should have left before you," he muttered. "Good Lord, Russell, is all that really necessary?"

"You told me what he was like, Holmes, so you have only yourself to blame."

He stood up abruptly and picked up the greasy rucksack that lay near the door. His unshaven cheeks and bleary eyes matched the clothes he wore, and I had absolutely no desire to embrace him with a demonstrative farewell. He paused at the door and looked me over, his expression unreadable even to me.

"I feel like father Abraham," he said, and my astonishment was such that it took nearly two seconds before the penny dropped. I began to laugh.

"If I am Sarah, I don't believe any Pharaoh on earth would mistake me for your sister. Good heavens, Holmes, shall I never get your limits? I didn't know you'd ever read the book."

"I was once snowed in with a group of missionaries near the Khyber Pass. It was either the Bible in my cubicle or their conversation in the common room. Good-bye, Russell. Take care of yourself."

"Until Friday, Holmes."

He left, and as I walked over to pour myself some coffee, the bemused expression on Mycroft's face caught my eye. I stirred the cup and said casually, "We said our fond good-byes earlier." He went blank for a moment, then flushed deeply, scarlet up into the reaches of his thinning hair, stood up, and bustled his way out the door, leaving the field to a thin young woman in a skimpy frock, laughing silently into her cup.

After breakfast, I went back and stood in front of the full-length mirror to study my reflection and to assume my rôle. The clothing, hair, and makeup went some long way towards the personality of Mary Small, but my normal stance and movements inside those clothes would create a glaring incongruity. The dress I wore was a light and frivolous summer frock, white cotton sprigged with blue flowers, a touch of lace at the Peter Pan collar and along the lower edge of the sleeves. The fabric and lace gave it an old-fashioned air, but the thin body-revealing drape and the length of the skirt (hemlines had dropped that year, and the shopkeeper had been irritated when I insisted that she raise mine to the extremes of the previous year) would have been considered inappropriate even for a child in Edwardian times. My arms looked thin and long beneath the short puffed sleeves, my legs even longer, and I reflected idly that my currently fashionable outline would no doubt have been someone's despair twenty years ago, when corsets and bustles filled in nature's wants. The heels on my shoes were higher than I was accustomed to and turned my stride into an indecisive wobble. I hoped I would not break an ankle. I bent around to examine the seams on my stockings. I had bought several pairs of sheer silk stockings, an extravagance for Mary Small, but if the colonel was a man who admired extremities, as I suspected he would be, the effect would be well worth it. My eyes told me that my ankles and several inches of calf were quite appealing, but then Holmes' reaction had already confirmed that.

I studied my reflection, starting at the top: cloche hat drawn to my eyebrows, hair beneath it in a prim bun which would soften as the day went on. I coaxed a few wisps to lie across my cheek and touch the neck of my frock. No earrings. I retrieved my makeup box, with which I had already lightened my brown skin, and added to the faint shadow under my cheekbones, to help me look slightly underfed. Taking off my spectacles, I rubbed a tiny smudge of purple into the skin under my eyes. The eyes were the hardest thing to disguise, always. One flash of intelligence at the wrong time could undo all my work. The horn-rimmed glasses with lightly tinted lenses I pulled on helped, and they made my face seem even more ethereal behind them. They would also serve to make me look naked when I removed them.

My chin was too strong. I practised dropping it, and my eyes. Shoulders drooping, as if the world was just a bit too heavy. Back and hips were already rearranged because of the shoes. I spent nearly an hour walking up and down in front of the mirror, refining the hang of my arms, the awkwardness of my hands in their demure white gloves, and the angle of my head. I sat in various chairs to practise until the seduction of my silken legs was completely unconscious. I lit a cigarette and coughed violently until I recalled the knack of diluting the smoke with air. Mary Small would definitely smoke, half-defiant, half-guilty. She also bit her nails— off came the gloves and I got to work with the nail scissors.

Finally, I could think of no other preparation— the rest of Mary Small would make herself known to me as the day went on. I stood in front of the mirror, and there she was, a young woman with my features but bearing almost no resemblance to Mary Russell in all the essentials. The doorman did not recognise me as he let me out of Mycroft's building. Cheap suitcase in hand, I went to stalk my prey.

I ran him to ground that evening, though I had known for some hours precisely where he was. At two in the afternoon, the omnibus had let me off at the bottom end of what had once been a village high street. I stood for a moment to survey the ground (without the suitcase, which lay in the wardrobe of the boardinghouse room Holmes had let) and was well pleased by what I saw.

It was ideal for my purposes, an area of London that yet preserved the social structures of the village it had been in the not-too-distant past, before London in one of its spasms of growth had surrounded it, found it impossible to incorporate due to a scrap of canal and the slightly inconvenient angle of its high street, and then, like an oyster with a piece of grit, had smoothed the foreign object's uncomfortable edges with a couple of thoroughfares and a bridge, and moved on, leaving the village, its two pubs and a post office, its church, shops, and teahouse, engulfed but more or less intact.