The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor

by Laurie R. King

“Take care, Mary.” He laughed, then went down the hall whistling something complicated and Mozartian.

  EIGHTEEN

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  I EXPECTED THE drive back to London to be something of an ordeal, but it was not. The colonel was, if anything, more relaxed and friendly, almost as if he were relieved to have some bothersome question out of the way. The clouds, actual rather than metaphorical, gathered again as we neared London, and it was raining lightly when Alex pulled up in front of Isabella’s boardinghouse. The colonel moved to open his door, but I put out a hand to stop him.

  “Colonel, I just would like to say thank you for such a nice day. It was perfect. All of it.” I looked into his eyes for a moment, then leant forward to plant a daughterly kiss on his rough cheek. He seemed very pleased, so I let it go at that and got out when Alex opened my door.

  Holmes was not there. Drat the man. I bathed, dressed, fidgeted, and at seven o’clock put a call through to Mycroft.

  “Good evening, Michael,” I said. “I was calling to see if by any chance you had news of a friend of mine? I was halfway expecting him to appear before this.”

  “No, I haven’t heard from him.” His voice was surprised but untroubled. “If he hasn’t shown up by now, he will probably come directly here. There’s no reason to let his absence spoil your dinner.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I’ll give him a few more minutes, then come on over.”

  I fidgeted for another eight minutes, then threw up my hands and went down to find a cab. I stood in the protected doorway and looked in disgust at the unceasing rain, wondering how long it was going to take me to find an unoccupied taxi on a wet Sunday night. Fortunately, my luck was in, for a shiny black taxi cab, empty but for the driver, came cruising down the street. I waved for it to stop, bent down under my umbrella, and climbed in without waiting for the driver to open the door for me. As I sat back in the seat, he clashed the gears irritably and growled at me through the speaking window.

  “Damn it all, Russell, you had more sense when you were fifteen than you exhibit now. How many times have I told you—what are you laughing at, woman?” I was laughing, suddenly intoxicated with the sheer pleasure of being back in the presence of this ageing, supercilious, impossible man who was often the only thing in my life that made any sense.

  “Oh, Holmes, I knew it was you the instant I saw the taxi start up. You know, if you wanted to make a truly dramatic entrance instead of something predictably unusual, you could astonish everyone by merely walking up the stairs, where and when you were expected. Oh, don’t look so crestfallen. I’m glad to see you’re having a good time.” I caught his eye in the mirror and watched as he began reluctantly to match my grin. “Now tell me what you’re doing in this cab. The last I heard, you were going to Bath. Did you finish with Mrs Rogers, then?”

  He held up his left hand silently, and by the light of the street-lamps I could see the fading wounds of a lengthy battle with thorns and the extreme dryness of skin that comes from long hours of chafing and immersion in wet glue.

  “Yes, I see. Did you do the entire house?”

  “Two rooms. I told the good lady I would return Tuesday morning.”

  “And is she a good lady?”

  A long pause followed, only in part due to a surge of traffic around a cinema house. When we had negotiated the tangle, Holmes spoke again, musingly.

  “I do not know, Russell. There are a number of oddities about this case, and not the least of them is Mrs Erica Rogers.”

  When we arrived at Mycroft’s, Holmes parked the car with neither incident nor illegality and turned to look at me through the glass partition.

  “No one on our tail?”

  “None I could see, and I was watching carefully.”

  “So I observed. Do you know, Russell, it is a distinct pleasure to look upon your features again. The floor of Mrs Rogers’s shed was both hard and cold. Now,” he went on before I could answer, “I just need to get something from the back.”

  The something from the back was a wooden crate that rattled metallically. He volunteered no information, and I did not spoil the surprise by asking. The doorkeeper eyed us closely before admitting us, and Lestrade opened the door with a glass in his hand.

  It was, as always under Mycroft’s roof, a superb dinner with agreeable conversation. Holmes, more formally clad now in clothing he kept in his brother’s guest room, entertained us with stories about a one-armed tattooist in the West End, a woman who had a counting horse up in Yorkshire, the craft of stained glass, and the distinctive familial patterns of Kashmiri rug makers. Mycroft, more phlegmatic but with a nice line in what the Americans call “deadpan humour,” contributed a long and absurd story concerning a royal personage, a hen, and a ball of twine, which may even have been true. Even Lestrade kept up his end, laying out for us the latest escapade of his nephew—an episode which had convulsed the lad’s boarding school for a week and left the headmaster with a red face even longer. His tale ended with him saying, “Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That lad’ll make a fine detective.” When the laughter had subsided, Mycroft stood up.

  “Shall we take our coffee and brandy in the next room? Mary, would you—”

  “No, I do not mind if you smoke.”

  “Thank you, but I was going to ask if you preferred something other than brandy. A glass of sherry, perhaps?”

  “God no!” All three men looked at me in varying states of astonishment at my vehemence. “I’m sorry, it’s just that sherry seems to have played a somewhat excessive part in my life the last few days. I don’t think I’ll drink a glass of the stuff by choice for several weeks. Just the coffee, thanks.”

  “I do understand,” said Mycroft. “I’ll just see to it. Sherlock, perhaps you would stir up the fire.” Lestrade followed him, leaving Holmes and me to choose chairs in front of the fireplace. Holmes threw some coal on the glowing remnants, then lowered himself into his armchair. With great deliberation, he stretched out first one long leg and then the other, and sighed deeply.

  “Are you well?” I asked. His reply was to open one eye and look at me. “You drank rather more wine at dinner than is your custom, and you seem in some discomfort.”

  “I am getting old, Russell. Gone are the days when I could scramble about on the moors all day and curl up happily at night with a thin blanket and a stone for a pillow. Three nights on floorboards and one night without sleep following three days at strenuous labour make me aware that I am no longer a callow youth.”

  “Have the results matched the effort?”

  “I think so, Russell. I believe they have. But it is a fine thing to stretch to one’s full height in a soft chair. As you would no doubt agree,” he added. My normal five feet eleven inches was intimidating for many people, so Mary Small stood a full two inches shorter. My back, too, had ached since Wednesday.

  Brandy and coffee arrived, and with them a certain reticence, a hesitancy to cut into the festive mood with the hard edges of information and analysis. We each sipped our coffee with undue attention, then gathered ourselves, until finally I put down my cup with a shade more clatter than necessary and cleared my throat.

  “Ladies first, I suppose, particularly as I was so remiss over the dinner table. Also, it will allow me to go through my material before my brain gets too fuzzy. Very well, then: Wednesday. You know where the colonel lives, and as you all know London better than I, you also no doubt are aware that it is one of those backwaters that remains a village within the city, complete with shops on the high street and small-town gossipmongers. Mycroft, you may not know that the colonel lives in a large turn-of-the-century—the last turn, that is—house slightly removed from the village centre, in the remnants of what were once lovely grounds. Although he seems to be unpopular with some of the chattier, and therefore more inquisitive, shopkeepers, he is very much the village squire, in his own mind at any rate. He drinks in the local pub with the workers and the shopkeepers, and that is where I arranged to meet hi
m. Quite by accident, of course, but it just so happened that I possessed the qualifications for a personal secretary and knew he needed one.”

  “A bit chancy, that, wasn’t it,” Lestrade asked, “depending on his needing a secretary?”

  “With a big house and only two permanent staff, and considering the problem of hiring servants these days, I knew he’d be sure to need somebody. And Mary Small is versatile. If he had needed kitchen help or someone to scrub the floors, I would simply have lowered my accent a few notches and rubbed some dirt under my fingernails. I might have had some problem if he’d needed a valet, though,” I admitted.

  “You’d have managed somehow,” Holmes commented dryly.

  I continued with my narrative and told of the dinner, the work, the colonel, and his son. I found myself curiously hesitant to give specifics of the colonel’s attitude towards me, and I gave the barest account of the son’s attack (Holmes laughed when I described how I had retaliated; Lestrade and Mycroft winced), but I could see that Holmes read between the lines. I promised him wordlessly that I would go into greater detail when we were away from the others, and I could see that he received the message. The colonel’s bedroom and its contents spurred considerable discussion, and by the time I finished with Gerald’s traffic summons, it was after eleven o’clock. I dismissed the current day’s events with two flat sentences, ignored a curious look from Holmes, and closed my mouth. After a moment, Lestrade looked up from his notes and broke the silence.

  “You’re saying, then, that you could see Colonel Edwards behind this?”

  “I could, yes. I will admit that I rather like the man, though I detest a number of things about him, not the least his attitude towards women. He’s appealing, somehow, and I can easily see him in charge of men who will do anything for him. Authoritative, yet slightly bumbling. Of course, it has to be at least in part an act—he was, after all, a soldier who spent the war years efficiently going about the business of getting his men to kill. In any case, yes, I can visualise him as the murderer of Dorothy Ruskin. Not just any woman, but that particular one, under those particular circumstances, yes.

  “There is, I must say straight off, no evidence concrete enough to be called by the name. One might analyse the man’s writing to the point of knowing what colour his necktie will be on a given day, but it counts for nothing before a jury. Here, in this room, however, I can say that there is a faint odour of brutality in his writing, a clear delineation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and a subsequent disregard for ‘their’ rights and indeed ‘their’ very humanity. Particularly when ‘they’ are women. In more specific terms, though, points witnessed.” I ticked them off on my finger. “First, there’s his temper. He was not far from real violence with me, over a chance remark, and with Miss Ruskin he was faced not only with—point two—a woman who embodied everything he hates—independent, successful, intellectual, and with a sharp tongue she was willing to use—but, worse—point three—the knowledge that he had been tricked by a colleague, another man, who had deliberately put him in the humiliating position of being suddenly confronted by the fact of her gender, and knowing that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it, that it was too late to deny her the funding for her project. I suspect, and he probably did, too, that his colleague and the man’s friends within the organisation did it to laugh at him.”

  “I should have thought a military man would have more self-control than that,” Mycroft objected. “Surely he must be driven to the brink of murder every day in this town, if he’s so infuriated by women of that sort.”

  “He probably wouldn’t have done anything other than storm furiously out of the restaurant and send off his resignation to the Friends, but for one thing: point four. I believe Miss Ruskin told him about the manuscript. You’ve heard it; it is very powerful. How would it have affected him? That document, even if its authenticity were never finally proven, would still turn the Christian world on its head. Mary Magdalene, an apostle of Jesus? To many people, the only thing more shocking would be if someone produced evidence that Peter was a woman, or Jesus himself. The colonel couldn’t help seeing that, couldn’t help being driven nearly insane by this woman, casually producing a document that would turn everything he stands for into a farce.

  “I can see you have something you want to put in here, Inspector, but I’m nearly through. Can it wait? Good. Finally, there’s the son. A current and, I think, valid, psychological theory says that a child reflects the subconscious, or unconscious, attitudes of the parent and that repressed hostilities and drives of the adult are often acted out openly by the offspring. Stripped of the jargon, it is simply that children absorb what their parents actually feel about someone or something, not just how the adult acts on the surface. Holmes, I think you used a version of this theory thirty years ago with the Rucastle case, didn’t you? Obviously, the older a child becomes, the more tenuous the link becomes, and at twenty-one, Gerald Edwards can hardly be thought of as a child. However, his attitude towards Mary Small, a sweet young thing if ever there was, is positively predatory. Or, I should say, it was until yesterday afternoon. Even more revealing was the attitude Edwards took concerning his son’s actions: slightly amused, somewhat proud parent looking on, exasperated, but not taking it any more seriously, and seeing no more need to apologise, than if his dog had anointed a neighbour’s tree.”

  I had kept my voice to a dry recitation of the surface events, pushing away the uneasiness I felt remembering the actions, not of the son, but of the father. I told myself that it was merely the unexpectedness of the man’s sudden fury that had taken me aback, and I decided not to mention it. Holmes would not need much of an excuse to pull me out of the Edwards house, and although a part of me would appreciate the gesture, I knew I had to remain there until my job was done.

  My distraction functioned admirably, and I found myself faced by three variously affronted and indignant males. Their chivalrous attitude was nearly funny, but I thought it well to remind them who and what I was.

  “Remember, Inspector,” I said gently, “I have certain skills when it comes to the rough-and-tumble of life.” I waited until I saw the recollection dawn in a familiar male look of quizzical half disapproval, and then I did laugh. He looked abashed, then chuckled unwillingly.

  “You’re right, I was forgetting. That lad with the knife—two years ago was it? You broke his arm well and truly.”

  “It was his elbow, and I didn’t break it; he did it himself.”

  “Still could have been dangerous,” he said, referring to the more recent escapade. “I mean to say, what if young Edwards had been able to, you know…”

  “Meet me on my own ground? I was quite certain he could not. One can tell, something in the way a person walks.” I dismissed the topic. “At any rate, now you have my story. Colonel Edwards had a motive to kill Dorothy Ruskin and the organisational skills and experience to seize an opportunity and carry it out. He had the means, with both a driver and a son available to him; he was in the area when she was killed; he has no firm alibi for the period after her death, when her room was searched, or for the following night; and his son was not only not in Scotland, he was actually in the south of England the morning after our home was ransacked. Furthermore, the person who searched our papers was interested primarily in those written in foreign alphabets and those taken up with chemical and mathematical symbols, which to the uninitiated may resemble a language. The Greek was then discarded, but the pages they took away with them include a seventeenth-century fragment of the Talmudic tractate on women, a sixteenth-century sermon in old German script, a sampler or, more probably, practice page from some Irish monk’s pen, which was Latin but so ornate as to be illegible, a Second Dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription—a copy, actually, dating from no later than the middle of the last century—and half a dozen pages of a Coptic text. As none of them were of any great value, and in fact several were my own transcriptions, I believe we can leave out the question of a mad collector o
f rare manuscripts. I only note that Gerald Edwards reads Greek and, I should think, Latin, but not Hebrew, certainly not the old German script, and I doubt that he has ever heard of Coptic.”

  “You are discounting the evidence they left behind, then, Russell?” Holmes asked quietly.

  “Holmes, even twenty years ago the hairs you found would have been very near to a sure thing. Now, however—well, there’s just too much common knowledge about detecting techniques to make me happy about having a case rest on five hairs and some mud. These days, even the butcher’s boy knows about fingerprints and tyre marks and all those things that you pioneered—this lot certainly did, as they never took off their gloves. You’ve been too successful, Holmes, and what the police know, the criminal and the detective-story writer pick up very soon. Those hairs could conceivably have been put there for us to find.”

  “My dear Russell, as you yourself have admitted, I am not yet senile. It is obvious that those hairs could have been put there as red herrings. It is an attractive theory and even possible, but I fear I deem it unlikely.” He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Now, if you are finished, I believe that Inspector Lestrade’s shining eyes and position on the edge of his chair indicate a certain eagerness for the floor. What have you for us, Lestrade?”

  “We’ve had an interesting week, Mr Holmes. First of all, we managed to find a nurse in the hospital where Mrs Edwards died. She had a clear memory of it for the simple reason that she was newly qualified, and it was her first death. It was childbirth that brought Mrs Edwards there. The baby, a girl, lived for less than an hour, and the mother followed her two days later. However, the man who brought her in? He was not a man, but a woman. The nurse remembers her very well, because ‘she dressed and talked like a man, but wasn’t,’ in her words. She seemed very nervous, but she stayed to help Mrs Edwards in her confinement. The nurse had the impression that the stranger was an actress or a singer, and the reason she had to leave the next morning was that the show was moving on. She telephoned several times and talked to the nurse, seemed satisfied with her friend’s progress, but suddenly Mrs Edwards took a turn for the worse, and she died that night of childbirth fever. The nurse was off duty when the woman next rang, and she was never heard from again.”