‘At St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner.’
‘How is he?’
‘Not great, to be honest. But he’ll live, too. You rang his parents.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘It took courage to do what he did.’ She let her gaze rest on his features. ‘And to do what you did. Thank you.’
He put a hand up, like a wall between them, fending off her gratitude. ‘What happened today in Trafalgar Square is a national disgrace. It has to be investigated at once and someone’s head must roll, preferably Gilmour’s. It was—’ He abruptly brought his words to a halt. ‘Let’s not discuss it further. Not now.’ His eyes shone hard and angry. ‘There’s enough horror in our heads for tonight. Let’s not add more.’ His voice was sad and it stirred something within Jessie. He was right. If she talked about it she would be sick again.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
Jessie was seated at the table, the lamp at her side. She had changed out of the blighted blue dress of this morning and was wearing a woollen dressing-gown, belted at the waist.
‘Reading,’ she said.
He rose awkwardly to his feet, supporting his weight on the arm of the chair and straightening up slowly before moving across the room to stand at her side. This close to her, the flesh of his face looked grey and exhausted but his eyes were
still quick. Jessie felt an urge to put her arm across the page of notes in front of her to hide it from him.
‘What are you reading?’
She said nothing as he picked up the open book at her elbow and gave a wry smile when he saw the title.
‘Sherlock Holmes stories, I see.’
Did he see? She doubted it.
‘Would you like an aspirin?’ she asked to divert attention from the sheet of paper on the table.
‘A whisky would help more.’
‘There’s a bottle in the kitchen cupboard next to the sink. Glasses above the bread bin.’ She wasn’t leaving him alone at the table.
He hesitated and she could feel his resistance, but in the end he went quietly.
‘I’ll help myself, then,’ he said.
‘Please do.’ She added a small smile.
‘Explain it to me again.’ He was sipping his whisky.
Jessie sighed. He didn’t really want her to explain her theory again. What he wanted was for her to speak it out loud one more time, so that she would hear how ridiculous it sounded.
Her hands kept fidgeting with the sheets of paper in front of her, shuffling them, tweaking their corners, planting a row of ticks along the bottom. It was obvious now, clear as day. But it had taken her hours to find it. She made an effort to appear calm, and regarded Monty with a steady gaze.
‘I told you. The four names that Dr Scott said my brother muttered at the séance – McPherson, Hatherley, Hosmer and Phelps. I recognised them immediately.’
‘You told Scott they meant nothing to you.’
‘All right, so I was lying.’ She shrugged impatiently. ‘They are from the Sherlock Holmes stories that we used to read as children.’
‘Read obsessively, by the sound of it.’
Jessie ignored him. ‘So I’ve been sitting here working it out while you slept, going through the four stories again in which the names occur. But I could find no connection between them and Tim. McPherson is the science master in
The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane.
Victor Hatherley is the unfortunate
victim in
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
and Hosmer Angel is the elusive fiancé in
A Case of Identity
. While Phelps is …’
‘… in
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
. Yes, yes, I accept that is true. You certainly know your Conan Doyle.’ He shifted restlessly in his chair. ‘But that doesn’t mean your huge jump of mental tightrope-walking has any logic to it at all.’ He was studying her, concern in his eyes.
Her head throbbed painfully. Was she wrong to trust him with this? What had possessed her to blurt it out? But it had come to her in a blinding flash just as he placed a tumbler at her elbow, a generous splash of whisky at the bottom of it, and offered her a tea-towel wrapped around a bundle of ice cubes from the refrigerator.
‘For your head.’ He’d pressed it against her temple, touching her hair, sending welcome icebergs to the heart of the pain. It cleared her mind.
At that moment it had come to her. The connection to Tim. And she had blurted it out.
‘It’s the Nile.’
‘What?’
She flicked a hand over the sheets of paper with the lists of every character in each of the four stories, of every plot line and every possible cross-reference between them. ‘This case is a three-pipe problem,’ she muttered in a deep voice.
Monty stared at her as if she had lost her senses, but passed no comment. She had noticed that he had a knack of leaving gaps for other people to fill. She took the ice-pack from his hand and knocked back her whisky. Adrenaline was making her careless.
‘That means it was a tough case for Holmes,’ she explained. ‘He needed to smoke three pipes of tobacco to think a particularly difficult problem through to the end.’
‘I can offer you a cigarette instead.’
She shook her head and instantly regretted the movement. ‘The solution is not in the names of the characters, it’s in the names of the stories.’
His eyes gleamed darkly in the
shadowy light. ‘Tell me.’
So she told him. ‘If you drop the
The Adventure of
and
A Case of
from the beginning of the title of each one, you are left with
Lion’s Mane, Engineer’s Thumb, Identity
and
Naval Treaty.’
‘So?’
‘Now take the first letter of each.’
‘L.E.I.N. That spells nothing.’
‘Rearrange them.’
‘N.I.L.E.’
‘Exactly!’
He had gone silent on her and thrown himself back into his armchair with an air of exasperation. But none of his huffs and puffs could shake her conviction. Now, as he sat there sipping his whisky, the shadows seized him and turned him into a stranger, a different person from the one who had clasped an arm around her on the Mall and who had draped a blanket over her on the settee. This person she didn’t know.
‘It makes sense,’ she urged. ‘Tim is an archaeologist who works with Egyptian artefacts. I am convinced he has gone to the Nile.’
Her words fell into the absolute silence of the room and became small unlikely things. Inert and laughable. But he wasn’t laughing. He was angry and she didn’t know why. For a long moment neither spoke and the sense of disconnection was only broken when Jabez abruptly popped up out of the shadows and with feline persistence leapt onto Monty’s lap with a demand for attention. The tension in the room slid down a notch as he ran a hand along the cat’s back.
‘The letters also spell LINE,’ he pointed out mildly.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘I have no idea. But it’s equally possible.’
Another silence trickled between them, but this time Jessie had no patience with it.
‘I believe Tim was sending me a message.’
‘You weren’t even there!’
‘He must have known something was going to happen and I would come looking for him.’
‘My dear Miss Kenton, with the greatest respect
I think the blow to your head has scrambled your brain.’ His breath came out sharp. ‘The whole Sherlock Holmes idea has led you astray and the line between fact and fiction has become blurred in your mind.’
His voice was like slivers of glass buried in soap. Scented on the outside, razor sharp on the inside. Jessie rose to her feet to ask him to leave, but the sudden movement set her head spinning and it felt as though a steamroller had landed on top of it. She stumbled. The room retreated to a tiny circle of light in the centre of a swarm of darkness.
Hands held her on her feet. A voice murmured words but they blew away like autumn leaves, rustling as she walked over them. She wondered why dead leaves were scattered on her carpet.
Jabez
, she told herself.
He must have brought them in, silly cat
. She put out a hand and stroked him lovingly. She could tell him anything without receiving a sceptical grunt in return. She gave him another caress and wrapped her hand around his warm head, dimly wondering where his fur had gone.
Jessie woke. On the settee again. Still dark. Through slitted eyes and moving her head no more than an inch, she inspected the room. No figure in the armchair this time. She released a sigh of relief but at the same time realised that she felt oddly empty, which annoyed her, especially when she recalled the barb about fact and fiction being blurred in her mind. She felt colour rush to her cheeks and was glad he was gone. Very glad.
Carefully she moved her head, experimenting with the steamroller, and nearly fell off the settee when she found a shadowy face right beside her. She blinked to remove it but it didn’t go away.
She groaned.
‘Hush,’ he murmured, ‘just rest.’
She felt stupid. He was sitting on the floor beside the settee, smiling gently at her. How long had he been there, watching her sleep? Worse – far worse – she was clutching his hand. Clutching it for dear life.
She groaned again and closed her
eyes.
*
When she woke this time, she heard voices. Low and secretive, coming from the kitchen. She recognised her flatmate’s smoky tones, which meant Tabitha was home from the club.
What was Monty saying to her? Spreading his theory – that Jessie’s brain was scrambled – to all who would listen? Damn the man! She already regretted telling him of her discovery of the meaning of Tim’s coded words and questioned now why she had done it. Maybe he was right; maybe her thoughts
had
become scrambled and she had foolishly thought she could trust him.
Too late to take it back.
All she could do now was get rid of him. Muscle by muscle, bone by bone, she eased herself off the settee. So far, so good. It was still dark outside, the blackness edging sideways into the room around ill-drawn curtains and Jessie had to curb the urge to fiddle with them. Instead she aimed for the closed kitchen door. Weird sparkles like Christmas lights reflecting on water kept getting in the way, but she made it and opened the door.
The light was bright. It spiked right into her temple. Standing on one side of the narrow strip of flooring were Monty and Tabitha, their eyes wide with astonishment at the sight of her. Opposite them stood another man, leaning his bulk against the sink. Even through the racket that the steamroller was making in her head, she recognised his voice, and his face. Dr Easby. Her father’s doctor. In Kent. What the hell was he doing here in Putney?
‘Good morning, everyone,’ she said in a bright voice. ‘I assume it’s still early morning, anyway.’
Tabitha was the first to move. ‘Jessie, honey, thank God!’ She threw her arms around Jessie, squeezing her tight, making the room rock.
Over her friend’s shoulder Jessie saw Monty watching her intently. He thrust his hands in his pockets and shifted from foot to foot. Did he think she was going to throw him out? Something about him had changed. As if a thin layer of his skin had peeled away while she slept, leaving him slightly raw at the edges. He looked drained, but he made a sound that she
recognised as a low laugh, a sound of welcome. She was too tense to laugh. She extricated herself from Tabitha’s embrace and turned to the other occupant of the small space.
‘Dr Easby, what are you doing here?’
She held out a hand for him to shake but instead he placed his fingers on the pulse of her wrist and studied her eyes in a professional manner. He looked immensely serious – unusual for this jolly bon viveur, who was wearing a crumpled suit with the Fair Isle waistcoat his mother knitted for him before she died of meningitis last year. He had soft warm hands and a soft warm smile that he dispensed along with his medicines. Jessie’s father thought the world of him.
‘What brings you to London?’ she asked.
‘You do.’
Not good. Not good at all.
‘I asked Tabitha to telephone your parents,’ Monty told her.
‘We thought it was for the best,’ Tabitha added.
Jessie wasn’t aware of her expression changing but it must have because Monty reacted immediately.
‘You were asleep too long, Miss Kenton. You had us worried.’
Jessie withdrew her hand. ‘It is morning, isn’t it?’ She directed her gaze to the black square of window. Just a flicker of daylight out there in the east.
‘Yes, my dear, it is morning,’ Easby soothed, ‘but it is
Thursday
morning. You’ve been asleep over twenty-four hours and your father thought it best that I should come up to town and check you over. You remember receiving the bump on your head?’
She started to back towards the door. ‘I’m fine.’ The thought of people man-handling her while she was asleep was too ghastly to contemplate. ‘I’ll just go to my room and …’
‘Now, now, my dear girl,’ Dr Easby said with his soft treacly voice, ‘you need to relax. I’ve given you something to calm you down, something to get you over the shock of …’
‘I’m perfectly calm.’
She stopped herself wiping her palms on her dressing
gown.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He smiled his warm smile. Paused a moment. Everyone knew there was more to come. He held out his hand, palm up, the way he would offer an apple to a nervous horse. ‘Take these. Just in case.’ There was a small white tablet-box. ‘For your nerves.’
He took a step towards her, so she snatched the box quickly and slipped it into her dressing-gown pocket to stop him coming closer.
‘Your parents are worried.’
‘Not worried enough to come and see me themselves, it would seem,’ she said and walked out of the room before he could reply.
By the time she reached her own room, her head was foggy and she could feel sweat beading on her forehead. She leaned her back against the closed door and slithered slowly to the floor, gathering her knees to her, clasping her hands around them to hold everything together. She was overreacting, she was aware of that. But she didn’t want some doctor reporting on her to her father, whatever his motives. The gap between her father and herself was too precipitous, altogether too barren to allow such flimsy seeds to grow. She wanted her father to believe she was in the best of health.
Nothing wrong with me. I’m not Georgie. You can’t shut me up in a home for the sick in the head. You can’t
.