Watson on the Orient Express

by Anna Elliott

  I passed through the dining room, where I pocketed a knife from one of the tables, and then the ladies’ lounge and the men’s smoker. Then I opened the door to the third-class carriage.

  Lights were dimmed for sleeping, but I could see shadowy occupants slumped in their seats. There was also enough light for the seated conductor to recognise the hundred-franc note that I held before him.

  I spoke in a low murmur. “I need a quiet word with one of the passengers. I will take him back to the smoking car so that we do not disturb the others.”

  The man nodded and tucked the banknote into his lapel pocket.

  Clegg sat wide awake in the aisle seat across from where I stood. He was watching me.

  “I heard,” he said, getting to his feet. “Shall we go together, like gentlemen?”

  The conductor opened the door for us and stood by in silence as we passed.

  I palmed my knife as Clegg opened the smoking car door. We stood together for a moment as it clicked shut behind us.

  “I think it’s time we had a talk,” I said.

  He stepped back and moved to one of the upholstered chairs, next to a wall of books. He trailed his fingers casually along a shelf crowded with leather-bound spines. “Fine with me,” he said, and sat. Then I saw the silver gun in his other hand.

  “The conductor knows we’re both in here,” I said. “If one of us is found dead, the other will be the only suspect.”

  “And you’re the one who’s being hunted by the police. So you may as well put away that knife you’re holding.”

  I sat in the chair across from him and placed the knife on the chair beside me. He did the same with his pistol.

  “You burned my telegram,” I said.

  “I also got the two you tried to send from Paris. Where you mentioned the Pera Palace.”

  My heart sank. So Holmes and Mycroft would not know where I would be going. They would not know where to find me.

  Unless.

  If Holmes really was working with Jane Griffin, he would know where to find her. My spirit brightened, but I tried to mask my emotion. “How?”

  “Telegraph clerks don’t get paid very well.”

  “So you were watching for me in Paris.”

  “Also in London. Who do you think hit you from behind, and planted you for the Lavender Hill police to discover? I interrupted your telephone call too, but you already knew that. It was my job. But it was also my job to let you get away.”

  “You let me escape?”

  “Did you think you were so accomplished a fighter, Dr. Watson?” He smiled. “At Cambridge, I played on the rugby and fencing and boxing teams. I have kept in trim since.”

  I shook my head. “I thought you were a street thug.”

  His voice now had a mocking tone, with an exaggerated Cockney accent. “Because me ’ead was shaved? Because I said I would get a bit o’ me own back?” Then he shrugged and spoke once again in the voice of an educated man. “I thought you might have spotted my manicured fingernails. But no matter. It’s only business, after all. Nothing personal.”

  “You’re only doing your job.”

  “Sonnebourne gives me the orders.”

  “What orders, exactly?”

  “I am to prevent you from sending telegrams, but to allow you to proceed to Constantinople.”

  “What if I try to escape?”

  “You won’t get far. I have copies of the British newspapers to show the authorities. With your pretty picture.”

  “What happens to me in Constantinople?”

  “I do not become involved. I return when I have handed you off to the woman.”

  “Mrs. Torrance.”

  “Mrs. who?” Clegg’s blank look appeared genuine.

  “The woman in Paris. The woman who ordered you to let me board this train.”

  “Ah. Hadn’t heard that one. She has many names.”

  “The Duchess?”

  He said nothing.

  “What about Griffin?”

  He shrugged.

  “What happens to Holmes?”

  He did not seem at all surprised by my question. “I won’t be around to see it, but I do know. The woman will kill him when she kills the other.”

  “The Frenchman.”

  “The political target.”

  “Why Holmes?”

  “He stole a valuable painting from Lord Sonnebourne, and that theft cannot go unpunished.”

  “Why do you work for a man like Sonnebourne?”

  “Someday I won’t,” he said.

  “You mean someday you’ll have a lot of money?”

  “Oh, I have money now. I’ll quit Sonnebourne when I’m good and ready. Time hasn’t come yet.”

  “You’re waiting for something.”

  He smiled. “Tell you what. If you survive, you can look me up. Roland Clegg. They called me ‘Childe Roland’ at school. My face, you see. Not quite as pretty as some. Ironic. Anyway, I have no other name. The Cambridge registrar will have an address for me.”

  “If I survive.”

  “Now I suggest we return, like gentlemen, to our respective carriages. You are guaranteed safe passage to Constantinople.”

  I picked up my knife. He picked up his gun. Warily, we backed away from one another.

  He shook a warning finger, only partly in jest. “No more telegrams.”

  “Until Constantinople,” I said. Then I asked, “Did Maurice tell you?”

  “That you would send a telegram? No. The woman told me.”

  20. LUCY

  I paused now and again as I made my way through the London Streets, listening for sounds of footsteps from behind. The back of my neck crawled with the urge to turn and look, but I forced myself to keep my eyes focused straight ahead.

  My night’s worth of evasions and costume changes had taken several hours. Dawn was beginning to tinge the edges of the sky and the tops of the brick buildings with red as I came up Warwick Street. The pavements were growing more crowded as night laborers and peddlers straggled home from their work, while the rest of the city woke up to a new day.

  Eccleston Square, though, was only about a block ahead of me and was still deserted at this early hour of the morning. A private garden associated with the Pimlico housing development, the square was enclosed by a thick shrubbery. Tall trees lined the pathways that crisscrossed the garden’s central lawn, casting dark shadows.

  I veered across Saint George Street and entered the park.

  Immediately, stillness and the eerie feeling of isolation closed in, despite the busy London streets surrounding the garden on all sides. The leaves above me rustled in the early-morning breeze. My footsteps echoed and the cold prickles at the back of my neck intensified, but I kept walking—until a man’s voice came from behind me.

  “Stop right there.”

  I turned around slowly.

  The man who confronted me was of medium height and build, dressed in a nondescript brown suit and bowler hat. His face was hard to make out, shadowed by the trees overhead. But his features looked to be remarkably average, as well: somewhere between thirty and forty with rounded cheeks and an unshaven chin. In short, he was the ideal candidate for surveillance, someone who would blend easily into a crowd and pass unnoticed.

  He was also pointing a Colt .45 revolver at my chest.

  “Don’t move.”

  My heart rate picked up, but I felt a wash of relief, as well. I had been afraid that this night’s excursion really would be an exercise in futility and wasted shoe-leather.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Want to do you want?” I didn’t add that if only he had approached me earlier, it would have saved a great deal of trouble and time.

  “You’re to come with me.” Despite his size, the man had a surprisingly deep voice, tinged with gravel.

  “I don’t think so. But I will make you a counter-proposal: why don’t you tell me exactly who hired you for this job and what you know about them?”

  The man was fi
ghting to maintain the stolidity of his expression, but I saw the flicker of surprise register in his gaze. Plainly he had imagined this confrontation going differently.

  “I’m the one with the gun.” He still wasn’t near enough for him to try and grab me; I’d been keeping a close eye on the distance between us. But he made a threatening wave with the revolver. “That means you do what I tell you to.”

  “Again, I don’t think so.”

  The entire purpose of tonight’s expedition had been to draw out our enemies and allow me to come face to face with someone who would—we hoped—be in a position of power high enough that they would know the answers to the questions that plagued this entire venture.

  That was why I had allowed the old man back in Baker Street to come close enough that he would hear my directions to the cabbie—directions that I’d purposely given in a clear voice, before entering the cab. It was why I’d lingered a short while in the church and in the coffee house and in Holmes’ bolt hole: to allow anyone following me to contact their superiors.

  I’d walked and ridden around half of London tonight, putting on a convincing show of someone trying to lose a pursuer—all the while leaving a small trail of breadcrumbs behind that those keeping watch on me could follow.

  The question was whether I’d succeeded, and whether or not the man pointing the gun at me now was a mere minor cog in the wheel, or someone higher up in Lord Sonnebourne’s organisation. Studying his bland, anonymous features, I couldn’t be sure.

  His clothes were of cheap quality, but they could have been purchased especially for his current purpose. His voice was rough and uneducated—but as I knew better than anyone, voices and accents could be easily assumed and discarded again. The guarded intelligence that lay at the back of his light-coloured eyes gave me hope that this exercise hadn’t been completely in vain.

  “I could just shoot you right here,” he growled. He spoke with a shade less certainty than before, although the gleam of enjoyment in his eyes told me that he was no stranger to violence. Unless I was much mistaken, he had taken lives before tonight and enjoyed it.

  Breeze stirred the trees again, and an owl’s low call came from the dense trees somewhere close by.

  I decided to try a gamble. “We both know that if you had permission to shoot me, you would have done it by now. You obviously have instructions to capture me and bring me to whoever is giving you your orders. I want to know who that someone is, to begin with. And you can go on by telling me who among your people is travelling to Constantinople by way of the Orient Express.”

  I’d been right; this time, he couldn’t suppress the shock that etched his features into a momentarily blank mask. Then his expression hardened.

  “And you think you can somehow make me tell you that?” He gave me a dismissive look, upper lip curled. “You, on your own?”

  He might have been surprised. All the while we’d been talking, I had been making silent calculations. His average height and muscle mass were in my favour. He still outweighed me, but I estimated that I had about a seventy-five percent chance of success if I stepped forward under his guard, knocked his gun hand up, kicked his leg out from under him, and then delivered a hard chop to his throat on the way down.

  But I would only go that route as a last resort.

  “Maybe not.” I spoke pleasantly. “But I think the odds are fairly good that he can.”

  As I spoke, Jack stepped out of the bushes just behind the stranger, seized him, and with a quick jerk of motion yanked the revolver from his hand.

  He’d moved so fast that the man was still gaping in astonishment when he found himself with one arm twisted up behind him and Jack’s forearm clamped across his throat.

  “Thank you.” I smiled at Jack before addressing the man in the brown suit again. “You know, it’s remarkable how frequently those who are intent on following a mark will completely neglect to take into account the fact that someone else could be following them.”

  Jack had left Becky in the care of Mrs. Hudson, and had been following after me since Baker Street. A police sergeant’s uniform was nearly as good as a false beard and glasses for remaining anonymous. Those intending to break the law had only to see Jack’s blue tunic and brass buttons before deciding to stay as far away from him as possible.

  The owl’s call had been our signal that he was here and in position.

  Jack tightened his arm across the stranger’s throat. “I think the lady asked you a question. You can answer it now. Or I can arrest you for attempted abduction, and you can answer that and a lot of other questions at Scotland Yard. Your choice.”

  The man’s face twisted, anger replacing shock as he struggled in Jack’s grip. But the anger ebbed quickly when he found that Jack’s hold on him didn’t slacken, and when he spoke the words were thready with fear.

  “You don’t understand! She will kill me if I talk to the rozzers!”

  Now that he was captive, his voice had changed slightly, the accent of East London becoming tinged with something else, something that sounded Eastern European. Born in one of the Balkan states and emigrated to London as a child would be my guess.

  “We can keep you safe,” I told him. “But who is she?” We were aware already that the woman we knew as Mrs. Torrence was high up in Sonnebourne’s organisation, but we didn’t have either her real identity or her current whereabouts.

  The stranger’s eyes were so wide I could see the whites gleaming in the dawn light.

  “You think you are a match for her?”

  From the nearby Victoria Station, a train’s shrill whistle cut the park’s stillness. The man’s head lifted, then his face twisted again. “She’ll kill you, too!”

  Jack’s grasp still had him immobilized, but he managed to raise one hand, bringing it to his mouth in a movement so lightning quick it took me a split second to even register.

  “Jack!”

  My warning came too late. The man had already bitten down on something, and now his face changed, contorting horribly as he choked and gasped. His whole body went rigid, then collapsed.

  Swearing under his breath, Jack lowered him to the ground and worked over him, tilting his head back and trying to clear his airway.

  I shook my head. “It’s too late.” The stranger’s face was blue-tinged and his breath had already stopped. “He’s dead. He must have taken cyanide.”

  “My fault,” Jack said. Grim frustration tightened his mouth. “I checked to make sure he didn’t have any other weapons, but I never thought about poison.”

  “It’s not your fault. Cyanide never occurred to me, either.” I tensed against a shiver as I crouched down next to Jack and examined the dead man. “He must have had it hidden in his ring.”

  I gestured to the heavy signet ring the man wore on his left hand. The stone was flipped up to reveal a Lucrezia Borgia-style compartment for poison.

  “It’s like something out of bad quality sensational fiction—except that it’s real.”

  We had also just run solidly into the proverbial dead end. The sky was lightening, and the train to Dover would be leaving from Victoria Station soon.

  Jack nodded, even though I hadn’t spoken out loud. “You need to go or you’ll miss your train. I’ll take care of this and see it gets reported to the Yard.”

  He stood up, gesturing to the body at our feet.

  I still felt chilled, even though the early morning air wasn’t especially cool. “Thank you.” I managed a smile as I straightened up, too. “It appears there are some advantages to being married to a policeman.”

  “Just a few?”

  I leaned against him for a moment. “Possibly several.”

  Jack put his arm around me. “You’ve got everything you need?”

  “I have the false identity papers from Mycroft.” They were sewn into the lining of my jacket. “And Flynn has already checked a trunk for me at the Victoria Station baggage claim. All I have to do is give them the claims ticket.”

&nbs
p; I couldn’t maintain a male disguise in the close quarters of a train, where people would see me up close, so the young man would vanish on the way to Dover in the private train carriage that was also already booked for me, to be replaced by Clarice Earnshaw, the name on my identity papers.

  Jack and I had been over the details before, but I could tell he didn’t want to let me go any more than I wanted to leave.

  Finally, though, Jack bent down and rested his forehead against mine. “Come back to me, all right?”

  I nodded, shutting my eyes. “I promise I’ll do my absolute best.”

  21. WATSON

  I returned to my compartment and slept fitfully. Amid the clatter of the wheels and swaying of the car, I caught the scent of tobacco smoke.

  I came awake to find Sherlock Holmes seated at the foot of my bed.

  Cross-legged in his contemplative or meditative posture, clad in his smoking jacket, he sat upon a stack of embroidered pillows, a magnifying lens in one hand and a long cigarette holder in the other. His hair appeared blacker and sleeker than when I had last seen him. I wondered if he had put on one of his theatrical disguises in order to gain admission to the train. “You find yourself boxed in, old friend,” he said. “You are wondering what to do.”

  Then I noticed that he and his pillows floated nearly a foot above my silk bedclothes.

  “Holmes,” I said, “you are not real. You are a figment of my distressed imagination. You are no more than a residue of the over-rich crème brûlée I consumed some hours ago.”

  “That is a medical explanation,” he replied. “A more advanced theory would be that your own imagination has brought up the image that you wish for, in response to your frustrated attempt to reach me by telegram. Pray, question me, then, old friend, as you wish. I am at your service.”

  “This is folly,” I said.