A Monstrous Regiment of Women (31 page)

“Do you think we might build up the fire?” I asked, teeth chattering. “Just until my hair dries?”

We soon had a blazing fire, but although I practically sat in it as well as wrapping myself in a blanket, I could not feel warm. Holmes carried over a small table with another cup of tea on it and sat down across from me. I took up the comb and set about pulling it through my snarled hair, but succeeded only in making it worse.

“Accusations are being made against you,” he said abruptly.

“Accusations?” I said absently. “Damn, I’m just going to have to cut it all off.”

Holmes stood up impatiently. “Give me the comb,” he ordered, and standing behind my chair, he proceeded to tease the snarls out with none of the awkward jabs of the uninitiated that tangle a comb in long hair, but holding the heavy, wet mass in his left hand while the right stroked its way bit by bit towards the scalp with quick, expert movements. Not the first time he had done this, I thought, and felt myself shiver again.

“By the four men downstairs,” he continued after a while. “They are claiming that you are a drug addict.”

“I suppose,” I said, “they have a point.”

“That you came here as an addict. That you chose to inject yourself. That they didn’t know their employer was supplying you. That you chose to lock yourself in an unused cellar occasionally, for unknown reasons.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Holmes.” I stood up and moved away from his hands, wrapping the blanket more firmly about myself, walking aimlessly about the room. I dipped my hand inside the pocket of my skirt, found the handkerchief I’d put there ten days before, and wiped my nose.

“Of course. However, your behaviour over the last weeks has been notably unusual; you have taken to moving with a group of people of whom at least one is a known heroin user and addict; you have suddenly inherited a large amount of money and seem to have taken on yourself the way of life that often does go with experimentation with drugs. To the good inspector downstairs, knowing this as he does, the marks on your arm will be damning enough. When he witnesses the display of symptoms you are currently beginning to demonstrate, he will very possibly try to arrest you.” I turned and stared at him, speechless. “Yours is a remarkably… advanced reaction, considering the number of days you have been away.”

“After the accident, six years ago, they used a lot of it. It was thought to be less addictive than morphine.”

“Yes. It was a very popular cough medicine. You would not, though, care to explain to the good inspector the sources of the predisposition that was then carved into your nervous system.” His hand went inside his coat and came out holding the same long, narrow velvet case, loathsome and thrilling, that I had seen some four dozen times now. His eyes were completely without judgement as he held my gaze. Finally, as if in a dream, I began to pull up the sleeve on my blouse. He went to lock the door, then returned with a snowy handkerchief in his hand, which he whirled into a rope. I extended my arm, and he wound his impromptu tourniquet around my upper arm.

“Hold that,” he ordered as he picked up the case. The syringe was already prepared, as I had always seen it, its plunger pulled back. Holmes examined it.

“He seems to have readied this just before we arrived. He usually gave you the full amount?”

“Yes.” My voice slipped slightly. Holmes did not appear to notice.

“I shall give you half,” he said, and brought up the syringe, felt for the vein, and inserted it impeccably under the skin. He slid the plunger down halfway, removed the needle, plucked the kerchief from my fingers, and pressed it against the tiny puncture.

I closed my eyes and could not control my reaction, the stiffening of pleasure and the shudder as it rushed up from belly to brain. In a minute, I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes into the grey ones of my dearest friend, and I saw in them the terrible reflection of fading pleasure and all the concern that the features did not reveal. I looked at him for a long minute, then down at the table, to the syringe that lay there. I picked it up, wrapped my fist around it, held it high, drove the point of it hard into the immaculate polish of the wooden table, and rocked it back and forth until the needle broke, then replaced it on the silken rest, closed the box, and held it out to Holmes. His face had not changed, but the worry had left his eyes.

Holmes finished combing my damp hair. I pinned it into a severe chignon, ate two biscuits and a piece of cheese, and went downstairs, with Holmes at my side. Inspector Dakins was interrogating one of the thugs, and my flesh began to crawl. Holmes did not give him a chance to speak.

“Inspector, do I understand that accusations have been made against Miss Russell to the effect that she voluntarily and repeatedly injected herself with heroin?”

“That is correct, Mr. Holmes,” said the policeman carefully. “Mr. Bigley here was just telling me.”

“Too right, I seen her all the time. Made no try to hide it, she didn’t.” The contrived innocence of his face and voice contrasted grotesquely with the leer in his eyes and the vivid recollection of the abuse he had thrown at me. I fought the urge to crawl behind Holmes.

“She was injecting herself, you say?” said Holmes sharply.

“In the library, I seen her, with this band wrapped around her arm, holding the end of it in her teeth. I didn’t know what she was doin’ at first,” he said righteously. “Shameless, she was.”

“The band around one arm and the hypodermic needle in the other?” Holmes enquired.

“Well, a’course. How else could she do it?”

Wordlessly, Holmes took my arm and unfastened the button of my left cuff. He pushed up the sleeve, tucked it so it stayed up, and turned my arm for the two men to examine. It looked worse than ever, nearly fifty puncture marks, several of them infected, the whole arm bruised and angry for a hand’s breadth around it. The inspector looked repelled; Bigley looked smug. Holmes then took my right wrist and ran that sleeve up on an unblemished arm. He caught and held the inspector’s eyes.

“Miss Russell is left-handed,” he said with emphasis. “It is quite impossible for her to have repeatedly injected her own vein—a delicate operation, you will admit—using her right hand.” He turned my left arm slightly and pointed to a greenish smudge which had not been there five minutes earlier. “However, these fading bruises on her arm are perfectly consistent with having her arm held down—which, knowing Miss Russell, I can say would have required several strong men, and may indeed have something to do with the marks of teeth on Mr. Bigley’s hand—while her arm was then injected for her. Against her will,” he added, in case the good inspector had missed the point. He had not, and I could almost see him beginning to bristle at the hapless thug. Inspector Dakins had perhaps been raised on tales of white slavers, I thought to myself, and rolled down my sleeves.

“You will wish a statement, Inspector Dakins?”

“Indeed,” he said, and spoke to the uniformed PC. “Take Bigley into the next room. I’ll finish with him in a minute.”

I dictated my statement, giving but the briefest details of my captivity and leading him completely astray when it came to the effects of the drug on my system. Yes, it was seven or eight hours now since Bigley’s boss had last injected me. No, I did not think I was addicted to the heroin, although that clearly was the intent. No, I had no idea why I had been subjected to the treatment. (The look of disbelief in the inspector’s eyes drove into me, but I met it with equanimity. With Holmes there, and with the accent he heard coming from me, he did not press.) No, I was not feeling any ill effects, although, I admitted, I was quite exhausted and disorientated, perhaps from lack of adequate food, sleep, and sunshine. Holmes took the cue and stood up.

“I shall remove Miss Russell now, Inspector. She has had a trying time, and I have no doubt her doctor will require that she have some days of quiet. You may telephone her on Monday if you have further questions. Good day, and I wish you the best of luck with finding the other two men. Come, Russell.”

To my astonishment, Q was outside with the car. The punctilious correctness with which he greeted me positively vibrated with relief and affection. The temporary strength I had gained from the needle was fading rapidly, though, and I allowed him to tuck a rug around me. Before Holmes could get into the car himself, though, there was a call from behind us. He straightened up to confer with the uniformed constable, then put his head back in, told me he would return in a minute, and went with the constable back towards the house. Q paused before closing the door and spoke in the general direction of my feet.

“He’s been right frantic, miss. No sleep and next to no food. The wife thought he’d drop.” He shut the door before I could summon an answer, then went back to his place behind the wheel. Holmes appeared a minute later, dropping into the seat beside me. He did look nearly as dead as I felt, I noted dispassionately.

“Dakins decided he needed my own telephone numbers as well, although I must have given them him at least five times,” he explained. He looked at the side of my face and after a minute asked, “Sussex, or your flat?”

“Where are we now?” It was the first time I had thought to ask.

“Not far from Little Waltham, in Essex.”

“The flat then, if you think it’s safe.”

“It will be,” he said, somewhat ambiguously, and leant forward to speak to Q. I looked back as we went down the drive, and I saw a big, ugly, down-at-its-heels stone country house, like a hundred others. Nothing whatsoever to distinguish it, except the knowledge that I had left the remnants of my youth in one of its deserted cellars.

NINETEEN

Wednesday, 2 February-
Saturday, 5 February

For nature has in all beasts printed a certain mark of dominion in the male and a certain subjection in the female, which they keep inviolate.

—John Chrysostom

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The next days were tedious, but I had spent enough time recovering from various injuries to know that health would return eventually. It was less painful than most of the other convalescences I had gone through, rather like a case of the influenza that had ravaged the country the last two winters.

And yet, that is a lie. Not that the bodily discomfort was to any extent extreme: I felt shaky and feverish, cramped and aching and quite unable to eat, but no more than that. It was my soul that was ill, in a way I had never known and did not know how to deal with.

I first knew severe injury when I was fourteen, recovering from the automobile accident that had cost my family’s life, an accident for which I felt responsible. Guilt ate at me then, and for some years afterwards. The second time was when I took a bullet in the shoulder, one that was meant for Holmes. In the aftermath, I had retreated emotionally, because the woman trying to kill us had been a person I respected and thought loved me, and because I could not blame Holmes for causing her death.

Now what I felt was shame, simple, grinding shame at my body’s continued craving for the poison that had been fed me.

I wanted the needle, wanted it badly, and the desire was a craven one, and I was ashamed. For the rest of Thursday and all of Friday, I raged up and down in my locked bedroom, ignoring the entreaties of Mrs Q with her tea and her delicacies.

It was not simply physical addiction. Heroin does not turn a person into a raving dope fiend in a night, or a week. However, circumstances conspired against me, and the drug had acted more quickly than might have been expected. Normally, the man might have pumped me full of the stuff for a month and I still should have viewed the process with loathing; however, alone, undernourished, off balance in the dark, and with a history of prolonged use of a similar drug, I could not resist the only pleasures and stimulus offered me.

The desire wore down, of course; it was, after all, hardly a habit of any duration, and, like any addiction, it was mostly in the mind. However, the shame and the rage only grew, until I hated everyone: Margery, whose fault it somehow was; Veronica, who had put me here; Holmes, who had seen me in that despicable state and burnt me with his compassion. I refused to go to the telephone, had Q simply inform people that I was unwell and not to come by or send flowers. I did not read the growing pile of messages: from Margery Childe, from Mrs Hudson, from Duncan. I hated everyone, except, oddly enough, the true villain of the piece, the man I thought of as simply Him. After all, He had been an honest enemy, not a masquerading friend.

It was Holmes, I suppose inevitably, who pulled me out of this maudlin state. He came to the flat late on Friday. I naturally refused him entrance to my room. He entered anyway, by the simple expedient of sliding a newspaper under the door, poking a kitchen skewer through the keyhole to knock the key out, and briskly drawing back paper and key to his side. His shoulder proved stronger than my bare foot against the door, and I faced him in a fury.

“How dare you!”

“I dare many things, Russell, not the least of which is entering a lady’s chamber contrary to her express wishes.”

“Get out.”

“Russell, had you truly not wanted me to enter, you would not have left the key so conveniently to hand. Put on your shoes and coat; you’re coming for a walk.”

Had I been less debilitated, he might easily have failed, but by dint of physical strength and verbal abuse, he got me into my coat, got me to the pavement, pushed and prodded and chivvied and distracted me until I found myself at the entrance to Regent’s Park.

And there we walked. Up and down the paths we went, Holmes carrying on an endless and effortless monologue, beginning with the history of the park, the body once found in this hollow here, and the uprising plotted in that house over there. I then heard about the park’s botanical oddities, the flora of northern India, the peculiar league of poison-eaters from Rajasthan, the embroidery of Kashmir, and the differences between Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhism, followed by a description of his recent monograph on the glass of automobile headlamps, another study on analysing the types of gin used in cocktails, his experiments with a recording of various automobile engines that he thought the police might find useful in helping witnesses identify unlit autos by night, yet another monograph comparing the occasional outbursts of mass hysteria in Medieval times with the current madness for dances with jerking and incomprehensible movements—