“What price a man’s life, Miss Donleavy? How many guineas is recompense to a widow, three fatherless children?” His voice hardened. “You killed him, Miss Donleavy, yourself or one of your hired thugs, who heard your anger and took it as command. You intended him dead when you opened the New York bank account from which he was paid, last November. And he is now dead.”
We sat in utter silence, and my heart beat ten, eleven times before she responded, with grudging admiration and a touch of amusement, and sounding again like herself.
“Mr. Holmes, how generous is the urge to Christian forgiveness in your soul, to perceive the man who nearly killed you and your two closest associates as a poor fellow whose widow and children weep for him.”
“John Dickson was a professional, Madam, an artist with fuse and explosive. He never killed, and only once injured, in his entire career, until you brought him out of retirement. I can only assume you held something over him, some threat to his family, I imagine, to force him to engage in wholesale slaughter. Do not play games with me, Madam, with your accidents and your shows of pique; my patience has its limits.”
The room’s silence was so heavy I was sure she would hear my heart rate accelerate when I saw the end of the gun sag slightly away from me. He had her complete attention now. In a minute her voice came from the dark corner, flavoured with what sounded like respect.
“I can see that with someone like you about a person would never become complacent. You are quite correct: I suppose I did want him dead and tidied out of the way. His affection for those poisonous children of his was a weakness, and he would have exposed me when he had the chance. Ah well; introspection has never been one of my strong points. I have an unfortunate tendency to overlook side issues when I have a goal before me. As Miss Russell could tell you, I think.”
The silver muzzle was again aimed directly at me, and I willed my muscles to relax, cursing inwardly. We were all silent for a long minute, two, and when she started again I knew that Holmes had miscalculated, that his successful gambit had, instead of distracting her, only driven her more strongly into asserting her domination over him. I could have told him, but he could not have known. Her counter-move was vicious and calculated to take him at his weakest point, where pride met aloof independence.
“I believe,” she said slowly, and again she had fluctuated into that slightly “off” manner that made me feel as if I did not know her in the least. “I believe that I shall call you Sherlock. An awkward name, that. What was your father thinking? Nonetheless, we have had such an intimate relationship—admittedly one-sided up to now—for so many years, I believe it is time to make it reciprocal. You will address me please by my Christian name.”
Before she reached the end of this bizarre little speech I knew what the strong sense of wrongness was that I had sensed in her. When I had known her at Oxford, she had struck me as a person whose frustrations with the demands of University life would cause her, before too long, to make a break with the University and go elsewhere to exercise her considerable abilities. Indeed, that is what I had half assumed had taken place when she did not return for Hilary term. It was now clear that the break had taken place, but internally: The tightly controlled impatience she had always exhibited had broken free, and the knowledge of her superiority had progressed to a sense of supremacy. Eccentricity had flowered into madness.
It was an almost textbook illustration of dementia, but I needed no book to tell me what my crawling skin knew: The woman was more dangerous than her gun, as volatile as petrol fumes and malignant as a poisonous spider. My frantic thoughts could find no option to grab hold of, could conceive of no way to calm her, or even distract her. I could only sit, still and unimportant, to one side, and leave the field to Holmes’ vast experience.
“Madam, I can hardly think that—”
“You ought to think very carefully, Sherlock, before you choose.”
I had heard that tone of voice before, on occasions when her reiterated query as to whether I was satisfied with my solution had sent me scrambling for my error before she came down on me like a barbed whip. Holmes either did not perceive the threat or chose to ignore it.
“Miss Donleavy, I—”
The gunshot exploded into the closed room at the same instant that something tugged gently at my upper arm and a piece of equipment disintegrated noisily on a shelf next to the door, and I just had time to hope fervently that Mrs. Hudson would not be brought in by the noise when the pain flared. Holmes heard my gasp and turned to me as I clamped my left hand over the wound.
“Russell, are you—”
“She is fine, my dear Sherlock, and I suggest that you sit quietly or soon she will not be at all fine. Thank you. I assure you that I hit precisely what I intend to hit with this gun. I do nothing by halves, and that includes target practise. And incidentally, you need not worry that your guard will interrupt us this evening; he and Mrs. Hudson are both sleeping very soundly. Now, take your hand away, my dear, and let us see how much you are bleeding. You see? Barely a nick. A pretty shot, I think you’ll agree. You know,” she said in another voice entirely, that of a woman of reason and compassion, “I am really terribly sorry that I had to do that to you, Miss Russell. I hope you realise that I am not in the habit of shooting my pupils.” Her voice tried to coax a smile from me, and the terrible thing was, despite the looming panic and shock, I wanted to give it to her. Wanted to trust her.
“Now, Sherlock, my dear, to return to the topic. What was it you were about to call me?” she said in mock coquetry.
Her voice set my skin to crawling. The surface was light mischief, but just below lay threat and contemptuous laughter and another thing that took me a minute to recognise: a coarse, sly tone of intimacy and seduction from a female completely sure of her power. It made me want to vomit, and then it began to make me angry. With the anger grew control.
“I am waiting, Sherlock.” The gun jiggled slightly on her knee.
Holmes’ response landed in the room like a glob of spit.
“Patricia.”
“That’s better. We need to work on the intonation, but that will come. As I was saying, I feel that I know you very, very well by now. Do you realise that you have been my hobby since I was eighteen? Yes, quite some time now. I was in New York. My mother was dying, and in the newsstand outside the hospital I saw a copy of a journal with your picture on the front, and inside a story of how you had not died, but how instead you had murdered my father. It took my mother a long time to die, and I had many hours to think about how I should meet you one day. I inherited my father’s business, you know, though I was really more interested in pure mathematics than the organisation. It ran itself, really, while I went to school. My managers were very loyal. Still are, for that matter. Most of them. They occasionally consulted me at University, but for the most part I would tell them what to do, and they would work out the how. Sometimes I made requests, which they carried out most efficiently.”
“Such as the unfortunate accidents that befell two of the other tutors shortly before you were hired?” I blurted out, unthinkingly letting loose a snatch of remembered conversation. I felt Holmes tighten disapprovingly beside me, and kicked myself mentally for drawing her attention.
“So you heard about that, Miss Russell? Yes, unlucky, weren’t they? Still, I had the job I wanted, the job my father had been cheated out of, and I could get on with my hobby. I collected every word written by or about you. I even have an autographed copy of your monograph on bicycle tyres, one that you presented to the police commissioner. I assure you, I value it more highly than he did. Over the years I have learnt everything about you. I located three of your London hideaways, though I suspect there’s at least one other. The one with the Vernet is quite nice,” she said casually, “though the carpet leaves something to be desired.” She waited for a reaction and, getting none, went on in irritation. “Billy was too easy to find, and following him that night you went to the opera was child’s play.
I had thought of using him against you, blackmailing him concerning certain incidents in his sister’s past, but it seemed cheating somehow.” Again the pause, again no response.
“Yes, there is very little I do not know about you, Sherlock. I know about why Mrs. Hudson’s son emigrated so hastily to Australia, about you and the Adler woman after my father’s death, about the scar on your backside and how you came to have it. I even have a rather fetching photograph of you emerging from the steam rooms at the Turkish Bathhouse on—Ha! That reached you, didn’t it?” she crowed at Holmes’ faint exclamation and drove it home. “I even bought the farm up the hill from you several years ago, through an employee, of course, so I might look down upon you, even through your bedroom window.” However, Holmes had recovered from his lapse, and she abandoned the attempt to goad him.
“It took me five years to bring seven of my employees into the area, but I enjoyed every move. And then—oh, the delicious irony of it!—your Miss Russell came to me for tutoring. I could not have asked for a more perfect gift: my own intimate link with the mind of my father’s murderer. Had I taken up residence in the corner of your sitting room I could not have learnt more about you than I did from Miss Russell. It was truly delicious.
“During the summer holidays I generally spend time with the business, just to keep my hand in. This last summer we decided to follow up a rumour that an important American senator was about to place himself in a remote area, so we borrowed his daughter. As you know, we were not entirely successful, but imagine my pleasure when I realised that you too were on the same job, albeit from the other end. It was almost worth the failure, having that piquant extra, a chance to meet, as it were, to work together.
“From that fiasco came my plan. I decided to kidnap Miss Russell, take her to a place where you would not find her, and play with you, in public, over a prolonged period of time. I laid plans. I bought clothing for her in Liverpool—quite adequate clothing, you will agree, though I gather she did not make use of the things? Pity. One of my lighter-fingered employees removed a pair of shoes from her rooms, mostly to underline the parallelism of the two kidnap cases—ah, I see you missed that point. How disappointing. I planned to take her at the end of term, so my absences might not cause undue comment.”
It was extremely disconcerting, listening to her talk about me in this matter-of-fact manner, but I did not react. I was disappearing from her sight now, becoming a third-person reference. My right arm throbbed, and the fingers of that hand were tingling mildly.
“Then in late October everything changed. My doctor told me that I should be dead in a year, and I was forced to review my plans. Did I truly want to embark on a complex and physically demanding project, one that might take six or eight months to do properly, and should involve regular travel to some godforsaken place like the Orkneys? I decided, reluctantly, to simplify matters. I could not bring myself to forego the pleasure of a cat-and-mouse game, but I decided at the end of it I should merely kill you all and have done with it. If I could make public your failure to escape me, so much the better. I had little to lose, after all.
“By the end of term everything was in place. I arranged my medical leave, from which I will not return, hired Mr. Dickson, and, just before I left Oxford, laid some of my father’s mathematical exercises in front of Miss Russell. The next few days were marvelous, they truly were, like a complex equation falling into place. I was, as I said, really most annoyed at Mr. Dickson for knocking you about so thoroughly, and had to delay Miss Russell’s bomb for a day until I could be sure you were up to defusing it. Then I sat back to see which of your paths I would pick you up on first. I did not need Dr. Watson, though that was amusing, was it not? Doddering old fool. I had a boy watching your brother’s room all day, and I knew you were there before you went through the door. The next day I gambled, after you succeeded in throwing off my men, but I put my money on Billy, and it paid off. He led us straight to you and carried on a tedious conversation with me until he fell asleep. I was sorry about your clothes, Miss Russell. They must have cost a goodly percentage of your allowance.”
“The money was mine, actually,” Holmes volunteered. I felt her eyes leave me and return to him.
“Well, that’s all right, then. Did you enjoy my little game in the park? Your articles on footprints were most instructive and helpful.”
“It was very clever,” Holmes said coldly.
“‘It was very clever’…?” she prompted.
He spoke through clenched jaws, to my relief. I had begun to think his anger genuine.
“It was very clever, ‘Patricia,’” he spat.
“Yes, wasn’t it? But I was most upset when you disappeared on that damnable boat. Really very angry indeed. Do you know what it cost me to keep an adequate watch on the docks? To say nothing of the other ports? I was certain you would come back into London, and instead, weeks went by without a sign. My managers were disturbed at the expense. I had to get rid of two of them before the others would calm themselves. And the time, my valuable time, lost! Finally you came back, and I could not believe it when my man reported how you looked and behaved. I actually took the risk of coming down here to see for myself, and I admit, I fell for it. I did not think that it could be an act. Oh, on your part, yes, that I would have believed, but I did not expect that Miss Russell was capable of that quality of performance; it’s a far cry from dressing up as a gipsy girl and slurring your speech. It was not until you both came through that door that I knew for certain it was bogus.”
Her voice had become increasingly hoarse, and the gun had drooped casually to one side as she talked. Holmes and I remained still, he with a look of polite boredom on his face that must have been infuriating, I trying to look young and stupid. The blood had stopped dripping onto the tiles, though my right hand was a bit numb. When Donleavy spoke again her voice cracked slightly with tiredness. I waited, invisible, for Holmes to make me an opening.
“Which brings us to the present. Sherlock, my dear man, what do you think I’ve come for?”
His response was uninterested, obedient, insulting.
“You wish to crow over me, like a cock on its dung-heap!”
“Patricia.” The gun rose in threat.
“Patricia, my dear.” His sardonic voice turned it into a sneer.
“To crow over you, I suppose, is one way of putting it. Nothing else?”
“To humiliate me, preferably in some public manner, so as to revenge your father.”
“Excellent. Now, Miss Russell, do you see the envelope on the shelf to your right? The top one. Stand up and get it please—slowly now, remember. All right, take it back to the table and place it in front of Sherlock. Sit down, hands on top of the table. Good.
“This document is your suicide note, Sherlock. Rather lengthy, but that cannot be helped. If you are curious, the machine it was typed on is downstairs, substituted for your own. Read it, by all means, and lay it in front of Miss Russell if you wish her to see it. You will not touch it, Miss Russell. One never knows how clever the fingerprint people have become, and it would not do to have your fingerprints on such a highly personal document as this. Please, dear Sherlock, you must read it. I am really quite pleased with the effect it produces, if I do say so myself. Besides that, you must never sign any document until you’ve read it.” She laughed merrily, and the madness rang clearly from her.
It was, as she said, a suicide letter. It began by stating that he, Sherlock Holmes, being in his right mind, could simply no longer see any point in staying alive, and it went on to elaborate the reasons. My rejection of him and the ensuing depression it caused were so vehemently denied as to underline my absence as the chief cause of his decision, though I personally was carefully removed from blame. Then the letter launched into a long, rambling, detailed explanation of how the cases as recorded by Dr. Watson had been so entirely wrong. Seventeen cases in all were presented with microscopic attention, pointing out in each one where the credit for its solutio
n had in reality lain: usually with the police, occasionally elsewhere, several times by Holmes accidentally stumbling on the answer, once with Watson. Page after page of it, we read and she sat. Finally came the murder of Moriarty, where it was revealed that the entire story was a deliberate fabrication against an inoffensive professor who had stolen the young woman Holmes desired, and whom Holmes had then hounded to his death by the creation of a totally imaginary crime syndicate. The document ended with an abject apology to the memory of a great man so badly wronged, and to the population in general who had been so misled.
It was an extremely effective piece of writing. The reader was left with the clear impression of a badly unbalanced, severely depressed, drug-ridden egotist who had destroyed careers and lives in order to build his reputation. The simple white sheets with their lines of print, were they ever to get before the public, would create a huge scandal, and very possibly turn the name of Sherlock Holmes into a laughingstock and the object of scorn. I sat back, shaken.
“You have a definite flair for fiction-writing,” said Holmes, his voice cold with revulsion, “but surely you cannot believe I might sign the thing.”
“If you do not, I shall shoot Miss Russell, then I shall shoot you, and one of my employees will forge your signature to it. It will appear to be a murder-suicide and will take Miss Russell’s name down with yours.”
“And if I do sign it?”
“If you do sign it, I shall allow you to give yourself one final injection, one that will prove fatal even for a man of your inclinations. Miss Russell will be taken away and released after the newspapers have found your letter. She has no proof, you see, none at all, and I shall be far away.”
“You would give me your word that no harm should come to Miss Russell?”
He was quite serious, even I could see that.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 33