The Murder of Mary Russell (29 page)

At that, I uttered an Anglo-Saxon phrase.

“Quite,” he agreed. “Of course, once I saw the police photographs, I was set on the right track at last, but those only came into my hand a few hours ago.”

Billy, who had been following this with growing agitation, broke in. “I don't see where these messages of yours lie. The footprints, sure—those might have shown that Miss Russell's shoes were doing the clearing up, but the knife?”

Sherlock Holmes with a look of disappointment on his face is a terrible thing. “Mr Mudd, if some ten percent of the population have type B blood, and some ten percent of the population are left-handed, what are the chances Russell's attacker shared both characteristics with her?”

“Like I said earlier—”

“The dent in the floor told us that he was
not
left-handed.”

“Why?”

Holmes lifted an eyebrow at the poor man. “You saw the dent, beneath the table.”

“Yeah. So?”

“And the blood?”

“Next to the table, yes.”

“Its shape indicates he was lying on his…”

“Back. The blood ran down both sides of his chest. One side was smeared when he was rolled into the blanket.”

“If the gun had been in his
left
hand, and it fell at the same time he did, to land beneath the table would require that he was standing…where? Given that he was not three feet tall?”

Frowning, Billy tried to re-create the place. Blood there. Gun there. Person standing…

Holmes saw comprehension dawn, and nodded. “He'd have been standing in the bookshelf, yes. Simple geometry. But it wasn't until I saw the photograph that I could be sure of the sequence. That someone left-handed had driven the knife into the wall—had first wiped off the knife, then scraped it through the blood, and driven it into the wall—could only be a message. Hence, the blood was not Russell's.”

Billy was not entirely satisfied, but then, he seldom was when it came to the explanations of Sherlock Holmes. “I'm not sure you can keep all this from Mrs Hudson,” he said. “Sooner or later, she'll have to know her son tried to kill you, or maybe her.”

“Why?” Holmes asked.

“You can't honestly intend to—”

I did not think this was the time for that particular discussion: I interrupted. “Until we know exactly what
was
going on, I'm not sure we can make that decision. I just didn't want her coming back from market and…oh, damn. The strawberries. Today was supposed to be…”

“The party,” Holmes said. “She has made the necessary telephone calls. She merely told your friends some important case had come up.”

Crates of rotting strawberries, on top of everything else, I thought sadly.

Billy pushed us ruthlessly back on track. “You should at least have left her a note. So she knew you'd not been kidnapped. Or killed outright.”

“I did leave a message—tried to—just not for her. I didn't think a note would be safe. Samuel's partner—or employer, whichever it is—could be anyone. He could break in and see the note, he could hear about it from the police, it could even end up in the newspapers. If there was a message that Holmes alone could read, it was secure. At the cost of some hours of grief for her, yes, but I could see no way around that.”

“Why would it matter if everyone knew you were safe? You'd killed a man with a gun, in your own house. No one would call that wrong.”

“Her
son,
” I said. “Who had some terrible secret about her. Which he might have told a partner.”

I let him think about that for a moment—Billy, who loved Mrs Hudson as much as I did. “If his partner knew that Samuel had failed, we were all vulnerable. But if Samuel just vanished, along with me, it would at least confuse matters for a few days. Long enough that we could set a trap for a second attempt at the passbook or letter or what-have-you.

“Which we could have done,” Holmes remarked, “were it not for the helpfulness of the police.”

“I didn't even know if Samuel had come alone, or if there were companions watching the place. I knew they wouldn't be able to see his motorcar, where he'd left it—not without me being able to see them. I thought that if I motored off with him, it would at least get him off the premises and away from Mrs Hudson, so we could decide what to do with him. But I also thought that if he did have companions in the area, and they spotted his car driving away, they might follow.”

The two men raised identical eyebrows.

“I was armed, remember. With his gun. And I thought I could lead them for some distance before I tried to lose them. By that time, Mrs Hudson would have got home. I knew the first thing she would do would be to telephone the police. They and Patrick would stay with her until you arrived and deciphered my message.”

The best-laid plans.

“In fact,” Holmes said, “her first call was to Billy.”

“Really? Ah, to have him locate you—I saw the message in the agony column. My own message demanding that the Beekeeper be in touch with his brother will appear in today's papers.”

“Why on earth didn't you telephone me?” Billy asked.

“I did, twice. The first time you were out, the second time you had gone to Sussex, and I wasn't sure I wanted to leave a message with your secretary. But if you all thought I was dead, shouldn't one of
you
have 'phoned
here
? God knows Mycroft wanted me to 'phone you.” I'd never have managed to keep my brother-in-law from interfering if he hadn't been so preoccupied with the Honours list.

“Had you gone missing in Paris or Macau, yes,” Holmes said—and it was true, Mycroft's sources of information were strongest when it came to international affairs. “But Mycroft has been looking a bit…stretched. I thought that adding a burden about which he could do nothing would benefit no one. At any rate, it was only a few hours later that Billy provided me with a file on Samuel Hudson. I did not feel that Mycroft could improve on it.”

I had not been talking about using Mycroft, but about telling him—still, I let it go for the time.

Billy started to ask another question. “So where's—”

But Holmes spoke over him. “Speaking of Mrs Hudson, I did promise to let her know you were safe. Billy, if you don't get home to your wife, she'll never permit you to come to Sussex again. I'll ring you later in the day when Russell and I have made our decisions.”

Billy did not care for being dismissed. I could see him consider a protest, but as he watched Holmes go to the telephone and begin the business of putting a call through to Sussex, he subsided—not happily, but with a lifetime of experience.

Still: he turned to me. “She's spent three very frightened days.”

“I imagine. I'm sorry.”

“Tell her that.”

“I will.”

He cast a dark glance at Holmes, who was patiently arguing with the exchange, and picked up his hat.

I half expected Holmes to ring off the instant Billy left. Instead, he let the call go through, and said quite clearly, “Mrs Hudson, I shall be staying in London for some days, with friends. Yes, friends. I do have them, you know. No, I don't know when I'll be back. Give my greetings to Lestrade.” Abruptly, he returned the earpiece to its stand.

I was surprised. “That was an odd sort of conversation, even from you.”

“A tapping of the telephone line, Russell. The police hope for a ransom demand. Mrs Hudson and I agreed on the code word ‘friends.' ”

Holmes had code words with Mrs Hudson? Well, at least that made for one tiny concern off my mind: Mrs Hudson could rest easy now.

Holmes placed his hands lightly on my shoulders. “It was not murder, you know.”

He felt my shudder. “Yes, it was.”

“Where is the body?”

“Mycroft had someone come for it, and the car. He said they would make it look like an accident, with a fire. He also told me that Hudson bought the thing just last week. He paid cash.”

“I was not sure that you would bring the problem to Mycroft,” he said. “You have not been terribly fond of my brother, in recent months.”

“Even if there hadn't been a threat lying over Mrs Hudson, I couldn't let her walk in and find that. And I haven't changed my mind about Mycroft. He has too much power. But in the end, who else did I have?”

“That may, in fact, be the entire point of Mycroft Holmes. In any event, it was the right decision. You could not have anticipated the problems.”

He drew me into a quick embrace, then turned towards the sitting room, grumbling as he went. “I have to say, Russell, haematology has proved a most irritating science, woefully slow to develop past a crude analysis of evidence.”

It was his way of apologising, for his own perceived failure to summon a miracle. “Still, once you saw the photographs, you knew. Why did it take Lestrade so long to get them to you?”

“Ah. Well. That was not entirely his fault. More coffee?”

Holmes poured from the dregs of the pot. I arranged a pillow beneath my aching arm.

“Were you away?”

“In Hampshire,” he replied. “With Billy.”

“Hampshire? What was so urgent down there?”

“I needed confirmation of an identity.”

“Holmes, don't make me pull teeth. Just tell me.”

“It has to do with the
Gloria Scott
case.”

“Who is she?”

“It, not she. A ship that went down following a mutiny, six years before I was born.”

“Oh yes, I remember now. You had a friend. Talbert?”

“Trevor.”

“That's right. His father was being blackmailed by a man named…” I stopped—and not because I could not recall the villain's name.

He nodded. “Hudson.”

“Do you mean to say,
that
Hudson has something to do with this?”

“I am afraid so.”

“What?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Why on earth not?” I knew more state secrets than half the men in the House of Lords: what could possibly be worse here?

“A promise made.”

“A promise involving Mrs Hudson, who used to be called Clarissa, who had a son that the whole world assumed belonged to her sister? A son with clear criminal tendencies, who was related to a blackmailer, and who came to England to get something from his mother?”

Holmes did not comment.

“The
Gloria Scott
was one of your first cases,” I continued. “I knew it was no coincidence that you came to rent rooms from her on Baker Street. I'm now suspecting that I didn't guess the half of it.”

He cocked his head. “Are you saying that you knew Mrs Hudson was…not all that she appeared?”

“I've known that forever, more or less.”

“How?”

“Simple mathematics. Dr Watson's readership might believe that the names are but an amusing coincidence, but what are the odds that two unrelated people, both of whom had a great impact on your personal history, should bear the same surname? There was another Hudson, too.”

“Morse, who owned a statue shop. A distant cousin.”

“Also,” I admitted, “I searched her rooms.” He blinked; I laughed. “I know, not a thing one does to one's housekeeper, but the first time I came back from Oxford, during the Christmas holidays, I noticed that her accent had slipped somewhat. She regained it quickly, but I started to reflect on some other behaviour of hers that didn't entirely fit with what I knew of her—what I
thought
I knew of her. You apparently had not noticed—certainly you'd never given me any indication that she might be other than she appeared. I had to be certain. That you did not have a traitor in your midst, I mean. So one day when you both were away, I conducted a search.”

“You, were protecting me?” The look on his face was most peculiar.

“I suppose I was. She has a pistol, you know? A tiny little thing, but with bullets.”

“Does she, now?” It did not seem to come as a surprise to him. He fiddled with his pipe, taken up with the image of sixteen-year-old Mary Russell, protecting an experienced grey-haired detective from his potentially homicidal housekeeper. “And what,” he asked eventually, “did your search tell you? Apart from the gun?”

“That she had secrets, but nothing that seemed ominous. One thing was interesting: a birth certificate for a boy, with her as the mother, and no father's name. Nor was there a marriage license among her papers.”

He picked up his pipe, and busied himself with its bowl.

“Since then, I've been aware that when letters came from Australia, they spoke of her nephew, but gave news of her son.

“So, Holmes, tell me: who is Samuel Hudson's father?”

His tobacco was giving him difficulties. “Holmes?” I said sharply.

He shook out the match and dropped it into the laden bowl. “I met Clarissa Hudson in the autumn of 1879, when Samuel was an infant. A year later, she returned from Australia without him. Three months after that, in January, 1881, Watson and I took rooms in her house. Outside of that,” he said, “I made her a promise. That so long as her past remained behind her, I would make no further enquiries into her life, pursue no more investigation into any crimes and misdemeanours she might have committed. From that day, her slate was clean. I gave her my word,” he reiterated.

“For forty-five years?”

“An excellent mental exercise, always to be upon one's guard.”

“Always?”
I exclaimed.

His grey eyes squinted at me through the smoke.

“And has that past remained behind her?” I asked. “Doesn't her son sticking a gun in my face call for a re-evaluation?”

“If she brought him deliberately to our doorstep, perhaps. Do you think that to be the case?”

“It could be argued that his presence alone was a statement, but no, he said nothing that directly suggested she knew he was coming. And,” I added as a memory hit me, “the bonnet of the car wasn't hot. It hadn't come far.”