The Body in the Bookseller's: A Sherlock and Lucy Short Story (The Sherlock and Lucy Mystery Series Book 21)

by Anna Elliott

  “Then explain what a strongbox with all this cash is doing in your basement, when you yourself have admitted that your shop is in financial difficulties and that you may lose your lease for failing to pay your rent.”

  Lovejoy stared directly at his accuser, his gaze unflinching. “I call upon the message of Sir Galahad,” he said. “My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.”

  Holmes stepped close to Lestrade and spoke quietly into Lestrade’s ear, so quietly that I could not make out what he said. Lestrade grimaced, but then he nodded. “Very well,” he said. “But only for twenty-four hours.”

  CHAPTER 11: WATSON

  “Please, Mr. Holmes.” Clarissa’s eyes were red and swollen with crying. About ten minutes had gone by since Lestrade and the constables had taken away the body and led her father off to prison, in handcuffs. Holmes and I had been left behind to question her. She had obviously dressed in a hurry: her gloves were unbuttoned, her hair was still uncombed, and she was wearing one black boot and one brown. Sitting on one of the armchairs placed so that shop customers might peruse books in comfort, she put me in mind of a bewildered child.

  “Please save my father,” she continued. “I don’t understand anything that’s happened. Who that man was who was killed in our basement and why Günter has run away and—” she swallowed hard, blinking back fresh tears. “I don’t understand at all! But I know my father is innocent. He would never have killed a man who is a stranger to us both. Why should he? But if he didn’t, then it must have been Günter, and I can’t believe—”

  “Drink your brandy, Miss Lovejoy.” Holmes spoke with the gentleness he reserved for the innocent, the very old, and the very young. “And we shall see what can be done.”

  Clarissa obediently took a swallow of the brandy Holmes had found in a decanter in the back room of the shop, and a little colour came back into her cheeks.

  “Now,” Holmes went on. “As you know, Eric Brown was also attacked last night by a woman who shot at him while he was at work across the street in the museum library. The woman who shot him gave her name as Mrs. Arabella Arden. Have you ever heard that name before?”

  “No, never.” Clarissa looked exhausted, but her voice was quite positive.

  “She is an elderly, grey-haired woman, blue-eyed, and with a small, slender frame. Have you noticed anyone of that description speaking to Mr. Brown? Or observed her coming into the shop?”

  “We get a good many customers.” Clarissa rubbed her eyes, clearly trying to remember, but then said, “I don’t think anyone who looked like that has come to our shop. At least, not recently. But if this Mrs. Arden shot at Eric, couldn’t she be the one who killed the man in the cellar, too?”

  “Unfortunately, that is not a viable supposition.” Holmes nodded in my direction. “When Dr. Watson discovered the body on your father’s premises, the dead man had only just been killed. He could have been dead only a very few minutes, no more. And at the time he must have been killed, Mrs. Arden was in police custody. So you see, she would have had no opportunity to kill the man Watson found.”

  Clarissa’s shoulders slumped as though with defeat.

  “Now, Miss Lovejoy,” Holmes went on. “Mr. Brown is still under sedation from the surgery required to remove the bullet from his upper arm. Mr. Richt is missing, having fled the scene of a murder. It is a reasonable assumption that one or both of them were involved in something dangerous—whether by their own free will, or because they stumbled onto it through innocent chance. Neither can tell us anything. It is therefore of the utmost importance that you to cast you mind back and give us any information that you can about them: their family background, where they have come from, whether you ever heard them express any political leanings either for or against the current government.”

  Clarissa’s brow puckered. “I don’t know … I can’t remember … I know that Günter once told me that he grew up in Munich. And I think that Eric must have had family there, as well, because he seemed to know the city.”

  “Eric’s family are German?” Holmes had not moved, and his tone of voice had not altered, but I knew from long experience with his moods that inwardly he was sitting up at attention.

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember him ever speaking of his parents. But I think he has at least visited Germany. I remember he recognised the name of the street where Günter said his father ran a clock-making shop.”

  According to what Lucy had told me, Eric spoke English without an accent, and Brown was not at all a German last name.

  But then, Eric might be operating under a false identity. Or it was possible that his family had changed their name in all innocence; many immigrants did alter their surname to something easier for the residents of their adopted country to pronounce. Braun could have become Brown at the desk of some immigration and customs official.

  Holmes’s question drew me out of my reverie.

  “And you can think of nothing else? Nothing that either Mr. Brown or Mr. Richt might have said that could shed light on this affair?” he asked.

  Clarissa’s chin wobbled and her eyes flooded again as she shook her head. “No. Nothing. I can’t believe it! I can’t believe any of it, both Günter and Eric were always so kind to me and to Father, as well! Just the other day, when Dr. Johnson—our cat, you know—had a thorn stuck in his paw, Eric insisted on taking it out with tweezers and swabbing the spot with brandy to make sure it didn’t get infected. And Günter mended my father’s chair for him—the one he keeps in the back room, so he can sit down and rest a spell if there are no customers to be seen to. It had gotten loose, you know, and the legs wobbled, and Günter set it right again so it was as good as new.”

  Clarissa’s voice broke on the final words, and she covered her face with her hands.

  “Thank you, Miss Lovejoy,” Holmes said. “We will not trouble you with further questions.”

  “Have you a place to stay?” I asked. “If it would be too distressing for you to remain here alone, our landlady Mrs. Hudson would, I have no doubt, be happy to offer you a bed for the night.”

  The police were still on guard outside and would no doubt remain so. But this was still a place where murder had occurred.

  “Thank you, you’re very kind.” Clarissa gave me a wan smile, though her eyes still held a bruised, bewildered look. “I can pack a bag and be ready to leave in just a few minutes.”

  She went out, pushing open the hanging curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back rooms. A tawny form slipped past her ankles and padded across the bookshop floor to sniff delicately at my boots.

  “Dr. Johnson, I presume.” I held out my hand, and the feline bumped its head against my fingers, then gathered itself and sprang onto one of the higher book shelves.

  “The cat, at least, appears untroubled by the events of tonight,” I remarked to Holmes.

  “A fact which may be of significance.”

  “A similar case, you mean, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time?”

  In that instance, the dog had not barked, leading Holmes to the conclusion that the animal had been well acquainted with our criminal.

  “The cat would have known Günter well,” I said.

  “The same could be said of Phineas Lovejoy.”

  “So that is the direction in which your thoughts are trending? You said nothing of that possibility to Miss Lovejoy.”

  “Even I, Watson, have enough sensitivity not to suggest to a bereaved girl that her father may be a cold-blooded murderer. In one of your more sensational stories, the more evidence that piles up against a suspect, the more likely he is to be proven innocent. But in the real world, more often than not, the evidence points the way to the guilty party—and there is currently a great deal of it stacked up against Phineas Lovejoy. Lestrade—”

  Holmes cut off speaking as a girl’s frightened scream split the air, coming from the back of the shop.

  Instantly, we were both on our feet and
running. Holmes reached the dividing curtain first and flung it aside, in time to see the rear door slam shut.

  Holmes sprang forward and wrenched it open. I caught up with him, and we both ran out into the night.

  A cart was pulling away from the street outside. In it, Clarissa sat slumped over, as though unconscious or too stunned to move.

  A man was driving the cart, lashing at the horse that pulled it, whipping the poor beast into a frenzy. His back was to us as the cart bounced on the cobbles, picked up speed, and raced away down the narrow lane. But the light of a nearby street lamp glinted on his tall, broad-shouldered frame and his head of pale blond hair.

  CHAPTER 12: LUCY

  “And you believe that it was Günter who attacked and kidnapped Clarissa?” I asked.

  I was afraid for Clarissa, but I also felt a prick of guilt as I said it for being almost equally concerned about Jack.

  He was beside me on the sofa of the Baker Street sitting room, and his demeanour hadn’t altered perceptibly. Jack always, even at rest, radiated a kind of contained, tightly controlled energy. But Holmes and Watson’s news must have dredged up all sorts of memories from his own abduction that he was trying to forget.

  Holmes was leaning back in his chair, his expression and posture at its most languid—which meant that his mind was currently churning at its most furious pace.

  “The man who drove away with her resembled him to a high enough degree that I think we may take the identification as virtually certain.”

  Holmes and Watson had, so they’d told me, chased after the cart that had driven away with Clarissa. But on foot and in the dark, they’d soon lost sight of it, and had been forced to leave the search to the police constables who were as we spoke canvassing the streets all around the bookshop for any hint of the direction Günter might have taken.

  The four of us were grouped together around the tray of coffee and sandwiches that Mrs. Hudson had brought in before retiring for the night. According to her, Becky was already asleep downstairs, although it wouldn’t shock me if she made an appearance, claiming wakefulness. Actually, it would shock me far more if she didn’t come upstairs sooner or later to find out what had been going on.

  “I assume that Lestrade has already sent men to wherever Günter has been living?” I asked.

  Holmes’s voice was clipped. “He rents a small, cheap abode in a guest house on Bucknall Street. It was empty of all personal possessions and bore signs of having been hastily cleared out.”

  “So it looks as though Günter or Lovejoy killed the assassin Parker. Günter panicked and fled the scene, then gathered up everything he owned and returned to Lovejoy & Sons to kidnap Clarissa.”

  “But who sent Parker, and for what purpose did he come to the bookseller’s? Those are the essential questions.”

  It obviously rankled Holmes to have had Clarissa snatched practically from under his nose. “Was it Adolph Meyer who hired an assassin to function as a courier, as Lestrade supposes?” he continued, “or was Parker hired in his professional capacity, to kill someone?”

  “Hired by Meyer—or by some other person,” I added.

  “And in either case, Günter might be working for Adolph Meyer,” Jack said.

  Over the course of the past quarter hour, Jack and I had given Holmes an account of our movements tonight after leaving the museum, and our meeting with Rook. And because time was of the essence, Holmes had telephoned to Lestrade, who was having a pair of his constables go straight to the Betterton Street address in search of Clarissa or Günter.

  Judging by the tension in the line of Holmes’s jaw, I could see that the forced inactivity on that front was chaffing at him as much as it was me.

  “There was one interesting tidbit from Mycroft,” Holmes said, “Which he telephoned to give me just before you came in. The shop assistant who has been working at Lovejoy & Sons as Günter Richt is in fact using a false identity.”

  “He’s not actually Günter Richt?”

  “No. According to Mycroft, who has connections at the German Embassy, the name Günter Richt and all of the other personal details listed by our man on his identity papers in fact belong to a perfectly respectable gentleman from Hamburg who died last year of a burst appendix.”

  “Do you think our man has some connection to the actual Günter Richt?” I asked.

  “One assumes that he must in some way, otherwise how did he get hold of the real Herr Richt’s identity papers? However, making full inquiries will involve telegraphs to Hamburg that will no doubt take days to achieve anything like answers.”

  “And in the meantime, we had no idea who our Günter really is, or why he’s taken Clarissa hostage. Although if he is working with Meyer, perhaps he thinks that we’ve already found the stolen packet? They might be planning to offer a trade—Clarissa’s life for the anthrax?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at Jack as I said it. That had been the motivation behind his kidnapping: our cooperation with a criminal’s demands in exchange for his life.

  Jack was frowning, though, and looked as though his whole attention were focused on the issue at hand.

  “If that’s true, where is the anthrax, really? It was stolen from Hobbes, from the Queen’s Messenger Corps, we’re assuming by someone who wanted to sell it. But as far as we can tell, no one has bought it. We know we don’t have it. And if someone thinks we do, why haven’t any demands been made, offering to exchange Clarissa for it? Has Meyer made contact with anyone else, do we know?”

  “He has not. The agents who have him under surveillance report that he has not set foot outside his home in the last eight hours, and that no one—not even a letter-carrier or a bakery delivery boy—has entered his place of residence.”

  “So we know Meyer doesn’t have it,” Jack said. “Lestrade searched the bookshop, and it’s not there. I don’t suppose it’s been found at the museum, either?”

  “No. Lestrade has a team of his constables making an exhaustive search of the premises. For reasons of security, they have not been informed of the exact nature of the packet they are searching for, only that it contains secrets of national importance. So far they have found nothing.”

  Holmes was still reclining in his chair with his eyes half-closed.

  “What about this Mrs. Arden?” Watson asked.

  “I made inquiries about her when I spoke to Lestrade,” Holmes said. “A female police matron searched her on her arrival at Scotland Yard and found nothing suspicious. Certainly no anthrax packet.”

  I picked up my cup from the tray of coffee that Mrs. Hudson that brought in and took a sip. Something about Mrs. Arabella Arden was tugging on my own memory, reminding me of something I had seen? Or read? The memory slithered away, though, before I could grasp it.

  Holmes went on. “Under questioning, Mrs. Arden is quite firm in her story that she acted alone tonight, and that she was simply doing what she considered to be the good work of eliminating a so-called agent of the devil. And according to everything Lestrade has been able to uncover, Mrs. Arden is exactly who she claims to be: a respectable widow who makes her residence in a Cheapside boarding house. She is evidently in straightened circumstances, renting the least expensive room in the attic of the house for a mere three shillings a week, and according to her landlady, hardly eats enough to keep a bird alive. But she has been in all ways a perfectly model tenant, and her neighbours—all equally respectable—were at a complete loss to explain how she could have come to shoot Mr. Brown at the museum tonight. By all accounts, she has been until now quiet, polite, and betraying no signs whatsoever of madness or religious mania.”

  I suppressed a sigh that would have rivalled one of Inspector Lestrade’s.

  Investigating a crime was somewhat like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, in which the fragmentary clues and scraps of evidence could be arranged to fit into a logical pattern. But Mrs. Arden was like a rogue piece from an entirely different puzzle. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make her f
it in any credible way into a plot involving anthrax and German spies and a dead assassin in the Lovejoy’s basement.

  Then I had an idea. “What if we set a trap for whoever sent Parker to the bookseller’s?”

  “A trap?” Holmes gave me one of his curious looks.

  “We assume that Parker was indeed sent in his professional capacity, to kill someone. We let the sender think that Parker succeeded.”

  “Which we can do by simply not identifying Parker as the dead man,” Holmes said.

  “Then Meyer, or whoever else may have sent Parker, will proceed with his plans without suspecting anything has gone wrong,” I said. “But can we do that? Is it too late to notify Lestrade not to reveal the identity of the body?”

  Holmes gave me a nod of approval. “The thought had occurred to me as well,” he said. “So I had a quiet word with Lestrade before he took Mr. Lovejoy into custody earlier this evening. Lestrade did not like it, but he agreed to suppress the identity of the body for twenty-four hours. Which should give us time to cast our net—”

  He broke off at the sound of a knock at the door, and he lowered his voice. “I believe that knock announces the arrival of Mr. Hobbes, the courier from whom the anthrax packet was stolen. I suggest that in his presence we maintain the fiction that the identity of the body at the bookseller’s is at this point unknown.”

  CHAPTER 13: WATSON

  “Welcome, Mr. Hobbes.” Holmes escorted our visitor into the room. “Thank you for coming out at such a late hour when you are still recovering from your ordeal.”

  “Of course.” Hobbes took off his spectacles, which had gone foggy in the sudden transition from the cold outside air to the heat of the room, and polished them, blinking. “I’m only too happy to assist in any way that I can.”

  He looked very nearly as dishevelled as he had done on our previous meeting, his clothes rumpled and his boots in sore need of being polished. It was obvious that the theft of the packet continued to trouble him; his cherubic face bore the stamp of worry, with tension lines bracketing his mouth.