“Is that really necessary, Sherlock? Perhaps the sticking plaster could be put on over her clothing?”
“What?” Holmes looked up from his bundles and scraps and realised what had just happened. “Oh, yes, I suppose so.” He looked slightly flustered. “Come here, then.”
Layers of padding gave me Watson’s outline; his hat, scarf, and gloves left only my made-up face exposed; and his spectacles were close enough to mine in appearance to allow me to retain my own, a great blessing.
Holmes added similar padding to himself, and we stood resembling two obese Egyptian mummies risen from our rest. He worked himself carefully into his brother’s clothing and gave his make-up a final adjustment.
“Now to review our plan—Ah, Watson, you’re just in time.”
“Holmes? Is that you? Where are my trousers? What are you doing?” Watson’s puzzled, sleepy voice brought home the absurdity of this entire venture, and I started to giggle. Holmes/Mycroft looked askance, but the real Mycroft joined in, and soon even Holmes was smiling half-willingly.
“My dear Watson, we are making our escape. The enemy followed you here, I’m afraid, or were here already. If they followed you, they may not yet realise that I am at liberty, and assume that only Russell is here. There are too many ‘ifs’ here for my pleasure, but there’s no helping that. Yet. I will leave here now, dressed as my brother. Russell will leave in twenty minutes, dressed as you, Watson. I shall turn to the right out the door, as my disguise is the more realistic. Russell will turn left, so they will see her clearly only from a distance. Twenty minutes after she leaves, the two of you shall depart, together, hatless, and stroll slowly down the street to the right. You will both have revolvers, but I believe they will be more interested in catching up with us than they will in committing double murder in broad daylight. You go with Mycroft, Watson, and you will be quite safe. We will meet up when we may.”
He put Mycroft’s hat onto his head, where it slid down to his eyebrows. Imperiously ignoring our smiles, he put multiple layers of sticking plaster inside the brim and returned it to his head. Mycroft’s thick scarf went around his neck, leather gloves puffed up his hands. Holmes’ own eyes looked out from Mycroft’s face. “Seven-forty-five, then, Russell, at the theatre. You know what to do. And for God’s sake, be careful.”
“Holmes?” It was Watson, very, very tentative. “Old friend, are you going to be all right? The pain, I mean. Do you want something? I have a bottle of morphia in my bag….” He trailed off uncomfortably. Holmes looked astonished, then began to laugh uncontrollably, until his make-up threatened to flake off.
“After all the times—” he spluttered. “You offer me morphine. My dear Watson, you do have a talent for reducing things to their proper perspective.” He softened and raised one mocking eyebrow. “You know I never indulge when I’m on a case, Watson.” He slipped the putty forms into his cheeks and was gone.
His passage down the street sent a small, ragged boy away from the blind beggar’s side and out of sight. It was soon my turn. I turned to thank Mycroft and shook his hand, then leaned forward impulsively and kissed his cheek. He turned scarlet. Watson returned my embrace with avuncular affection, and I let myself out into the hallway, black medical bag in hand, the revolver a comforting weight in my pocket.
As the outside door latched behind me I was aware of eyes on me, Watson and Mycroft Holmes watching from the window above, but other, hostile eyes also, from the street behind me at the very least. It took considerable control to hold myself to Watson’s ponderous and limping gait rather than dash off down the street, but I plodded on through the slush, for all the world an old, retired doctor on his way home. Following Holmes’ precise instructions, I hailed a cab, then changed my mind. I walked west, as if towards Green Park, then hailed another. I turned it away too, and a street later finally got warily into the third. I gave the driver Watson’s address, in a gruff voice, but when we had rounded Park Lane I redirected him. At the building Holmes had told me to go to, I paid the driver generously, went inside, checked my medical bag (which was empty) with the attendant, climbed to the third floor—watching the stairs below me—and through the tearoom on that floor to a passageway, a further set of stairs, and at last a door marked Storage Room. The key Holmes had given me let me in. I flicked the electrical light switch on, closed the well-fitting door, spat out the mouthful of noxious putty, leant against the door, and gave way to a fit of mild hysterics.
EVENTUALLY IT RAN its course. I got somewhat shakily to my feet, curiosity coming to the fore. The Storage Room was one of Holmes’ bolt-holes, his handful of small, almost inaccessible hideaways in unlikely places across London, from Whitechapel to Whitehall. Watson had mentioned them in several of his stories, and Holmes had made passing reference to one or another of them in conversations with me, but I had never actually been inside one.
It was, I found, little more than its name implied, a windowless, stuffy, oddly shaped room providing the most basic necessities of life and a remarkably elaborate amount of equipment for changing identities. Three metal dressmaker’s racks bulging with clothes took up a quarter of the floor space, and an enormous dressing table littered with tubes, pencils, and pots and overhung by a wall-sized mirror surrounded by small electrical light bulbs took up another quarter. The kitchen consisted of a stained hand-basin, a minuscule geyser, a gas ring, and two pots. There was one chair, at the desk, a piece that looked to my half-educated eyes like a particularly beautiful Chippendale that had spent part of its recent life as a painter’s stool, judging from the varicoloured splashes across the seat and back. The only other furniture was a long sofa, taking up more than its quarter of the room and looking as if it had been hauled up from beneath a bridge somewhere, and a garish Chinese screen behind the “kitchen.” Behind the screen, as I might have suspected, was a water closet, gleaming new and, I soon discovered, remarkably silent.
As I nosed about I began to shed my numerous layers of disguise. The outer clothing I folded neatly to return to Watson, the mummy layers I shoved, plaster and all, into a bin of what I took to be rags behind the sofa, and the make-up joined the stains in the hand-basin. My own shirt was hopelessly stuck together by the tape that Holmes had strapped on to change the set of my shoulders, but after a bit of rummaging about in the clothes racks (where I found an evening suit and tweed plus-fours cheek-by-jowl with a linen chasuble, the brocade tunic and trousers of a maharajah, and a stunning scarlet evening dress) I came up with a comfortable embroidered cotton dressing gown and put it on in lieu of the shirt, which followed the mummy strips into the bin.
In the kitchen I found a canister of tea leaves, a pot, and some tins of milk, so I made tea, poured myself a cup (superb bone china, no saucer) and carried it to the dressing table. As I sipped it and sat poking through the objects in and on the table, I was struck by the extraordinary fact of the room’s existence. What kind of a man would keep an entire drawer full of moustaches and beards? I thought. Or a shelf of wigs—a bushy redhead, a slicked-down black hairpiece, a woman’s blonde curls—arranged on stands to resemble eerily a row of heads on pikes? Could Holmes actually, honestly consider wearing that evening gown, high-necked though it was? Or the—was it a sari? How many normal men had hair ribbons trailing from their chest of drawers, a collection of well-padded female undergarments, three pair of false eyelashes, two dozen old-school and club ties, and a macabre cigar box filled with sets of false teeth? And even if one overlooked the reason for its existence, how did he manage it? How had he brought that sofa up here without inviting comment, and the mirror? Granted, it was a large and busy building, but did no one notice the occasional unexpected noise from a supply room, the sound of running water at night, the comings and goings of odd characters—some of them very odd indeed? What did Holmes do if, I wondered, while disguised as one of his more unsavoury characters, he were accosted and explanation of his presence demanded of him? The possibilities for comedy of the burlesque variety were greatly a
ppealing, and several vignettes worthy of the lower classes of stage went through my mind. And, my mind continued, who had plumbed in the sink and WC? Who paid for the gas, the electricity, for heaven’s sake?
The more I thought about it, the curiouser it became. What kind of human being would need a refuge capable of sustaining life in a siege? For the plentiful if desultory tins of food, the two travelling rugs tossed over the sofa, three tins of pipe tobacco, a pound of coffee, and the copious reading material—staid medical journals, philosophical tomes, novels with lurid covers, and brittle newspapers ancient enough to qualify as archaeology—all testified that the room’s purpose was to make possible a prolonged captivity. It was quite patently not a refuge for comfort or convenience; at his height, Holmes would find the sofa a dismal night’s sleep. And it was also clearly no holiday retreat; the threadbare line down the center of the carpet bespoke hours spent measuring its half a dozen paces of clear space.
No, there was no question in my mind: Either my friend and mentor was quite mad, a man willing to go to considerable difficulty and expense to satisfy a bizarre and romantic fantasy of paranoia, or else the life of my rustic beekeeping companion with the odd skills was extraordinarily more demanding, even dangerous, than I had fully realised.
Somehow I could not think him mad.
There was no doubt that the room had been recently occupied: The tea leaves were relatively fresh, the dust had not settled much onto the desk or teapot, the air, though stuffy, was not stifling and smelt faintly of tobacco. I shook my head. Even I had not suspected how very active his career still was.
I wondered, not for the first time that day, nor for the last, what he was doing and how he was holding up.
Which brought me around to wonder what I was going to do. I could, of course, stay here until it was time to meet Holmes, and at the thought of explosive devices and flexible and imaginative would-be murderers, the bolt-hole’s canister of tea, tins of beans, and lurid novels (to say nothing of the revolver I had brought and the other one I had found in the kettle) seemed both tempting and eminently sensible.
Still, there was Holmes in the streets, and Mycroft and Watson bolting for cover, and to sit in a hole with the bedclothes over my head seemed disloyal, cowardly even. Illogical, but true. There might well be nothing I could do, but my own self-respect demanded that I not be completely intimidated by this unknown assailant. Of course, had I known then how very flexible and imaginative our foe actually was, I should probably have stayed well hidden, but as it was I decided defiantly to see what I could do about depleting the number of high-denomination notes that lay in my handbag on top of the gun, and went to assemble an appropriate wardrobe.
By the end of four years of war, standards of dress had become markedly less demanding, and even the upper levels of society were occasionally seen in clothing that before 1914 would have been given to the maid or the church’s next jumble sale. Still, it took me some time to find myself clothes among Holmes’ collection. In the end I uncovered a tweed skirt that I might tuck up to current length, and a blouse that did not look like something handed down from the butcher’s wife. Stockings and suspenders I found aplenty, but I nearly gave up altogether on the shoes. Holmes’ feet were larger than mine, and his selection of women’s shoes somewhat limited. I held up a pair of scarlet satin sandals with four-inch heels and tried to imagine Holmes in them. My imagination failed. (But if not Holmes, then who? I put them down abruptly, shocked at myself. Keep your mind on the business at hand, please, Russell.) I picked up a pair of dowdy black shoes with a strap across the instep and low Cuban heels and found that I could at least walk in them.
I switched on the row of lights and sat down with the pots and sticks to change my face (How many young women had been taught the subtleties of make-up by a man? I reflected idly.), added a long string of pearls (real) and small earrings (fake), wrapped my head in a piece of cloth from the scarf drawer (which had, judging from the shape, once been the lining of a coat), and finally stood away from the desk to look at myself.
Amazing. Nothing fit me, nothing matched, and my feet hurt already, yet I would easily pass for a Young Thing out for a day in Town. I darkened the rims of my spectacles with some odd brown fingernail enamel and decided reluctantly that I should have to leave them off for much of the day, as any other vain young myopic would do. I gathered up Watson’s clothes, turned off the lights, took a deep breath, and, with my hand inside my bag, opened the door.
No bombs went off, no bullets flew, no rough hands grabbed at me. I closed the door behind me and went off to spend the money I had borrowed so shamelessly from the Holmes brothers.
11
Another Problem: The Mutilated Four-Wheeler
Ever and anon, from a sudden wave that shall be more transparent than others, there leaps forth a fact that in an instant confounds all we imagined we knew.
MY FIRST TASK was to make a move towards reuniting Watson with his trousers, but as I made my way back through the tearoom and the store’s many levels, it occurred to me that Holmes’ bolt-hole was ideally situated, that I could easily spend the day without having to set foot on the street, for this was one of the two stores in London (I shall not mention which, as the Storage Room may still be in use.) that touted itself as catering for needs from cradle to grave. It could certainly afford me protection, nourishment, and entertainment for a single day.
With that happy thought I deposited the bundle of Watson’s salvaged clothing into his black bag and left it checked, mailed the receipt to Mycroft at his club, and set off on the unfamiliar but surprisingly agreeable task of spending money. Late that afternoon, my Storage Room reach-me-downs long since vanished into the rubbish bin, my hair sculpted, my fingernails buffed and gleaming beyond all recognition, my legs encased in sheer silk stockings that were actually long enough, and my feet in heeled shoes that didn’t pinch, I decided that, all things considered, the occasional dose of pampering could be great fun.
I took a light and leisurely tea, assembled my multitude of parcels (which they offered to deliver, and I refused), and was escorted to the door. Here I ran into a problem. Holmes had insisted that I follow the same routine as the morning’s, except to take the fourth cab, but here stood the uniformed doorman, and the first cab. I put on my spectacles, gave him a huge tip, and shook my head.
Fifteen minutes later the third cab arrived. It was getting very dark, and at that hour few cabs were free. This one looked enticingly warm, and my new evening clothes were not. Surely Holmes had not meant to be inflexible, had he? I looked through the door at the bored driver, stepped back, and waved him on. He looked highly irritated, which matched my mood precisely. I peered down the street in wan hope, studiously ignoring the doorman, when up before me pulled a very old and very battered cab drawn by one very old and battered horse.
“Cab, Miss?” said the voice from the moving anachronism.
I cursed Holmes under my breath. It looked very cold in there compared to the others, but it was a cab, or it had been thirty years before: a London growler. I told the driver where I wanted to go, saw my purchases piled inside, and got in. The doorman looked after me as if I were stark raving mad. Which I was.
I did not know London at all well then, though I had studied the maps a bit, so it took me a while to realise that we were going in the wrong direction. Not completely wrong, just very roundabout. My first thought was that the driver was pulling a swindle in order to charge me more for the ride. I had opened my mouth to call out when I froze with a terrible thought. Perhaps I had been followed. Perhaps this driver was an ally of the blind pencil seller. First I was frightened, but then I was furious. I fought the remnants of a window down and craned my neck out to see him.
“Oy, driver, where are you taking me? This isn’t the way to Covent Garden.”
“Yes, Miss, this is the faster way, away from the heavy traffic, Miss,” the voice whined obsequiously.
“All right, you, now look. I have a rev
olver, and I will shoot you if you do not stop immediately.”
“Now, Miss, you doesn’t want to be doing that, now,” he snivelled.
“I’m feeling more like it every moment. Stop this cab, now!”
“But I can’t do that, Miss, I really cannot.”
“Why not?”
The shaggy head leaned over the side, and I stared up at him. “Because we’ll miss the curtain if I do,” said Holmes.
“You! You utter bastard,” I growled. The gun shook in my hand, and Holmes, seeing it, drew his head back quickly. “Look, you, that’s the second time you’ve played your bloody tricks on me in three days.” I caught the startled look of a passerby and lowered my voice. “If you do it again and I have a gun in my hand, I won’t be responsible, d’you hear? As sure as my mother’s name is Mary McCarthy, I’ll not be responsible for my temper.”
I sat back in the swaying cab and caught my breath. Several minutes later a thin voice drifted down to me.
“Yes, Miss.”
Some distance from the theatre he pulled the ancient cab into a dark spot adjoining one of London’s innumerable small and hidden parks. The growler sagged sideways with his weight, and in a moment the door fell open. He eyed me.
“Your mother’s name was not Mary McCarthy,” he said accusingly.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 21