A Letter of Mary mr-3

by Laurie R. King

  "They?"

  "You are looking for at least three individuals," Holmes said absently, his attention again absorbed by the paper. "Two of them stand five feet nine or ten inches, thirteen stone or thereabouts; at least one of them has black hair, both are right-handed, and one of them fancies himself as a flashy dresser, with a tendency towards the extreme in footwear, but betrays himself by purchasing inferior-quality goods— hence the dents in the floor"— he gestured vaguely towards a clear patch of boards—"and by the fact that he bites his fingernails. The other is a man of simpler tastes, wearing new boots with rounded toes, a brown tweed suit, and— kindly note, Russell— a dark blue woollen knit cap. One of them sports a neck scarf of white cashmere and a camel-hair overcoat— probably Pointed Toes. Of the third party, the director of the operation, I can say only that he has unfashionably long grey hair and displayed an entirely unwarranted confidence in the abilities of his confederates by remaining in the car while the house was being ransacked." He rattled off the final information in an uninterested rush and turned to wave the paper at me. "I say, Russell, do you remember that forgery case we handled two years ago? I'm suddenly struck by the fact—"

  "Mr Holmes!" Lestrade bristled in irritation, and Holmes looked at him in surprise.

  "Yes, Lestrade?"

  "Who are these men?"

  "I've just told you."

  "But who are they?"

  "My dear Lestrade, I bowed beneath the concerted authority of the only two people in the world, aside from my sovereign, who have any influence over me, under the insistence that Scotland Yard ought to be given a chance to prove themselves capable of hunting down the murderers of Dorothy Ruskin. I have told you who they are. You need only find them." He turned imperiously away from the near-frantic police detective, shot me a glance that was perilously close to a wink, and dropped to the floor amidst his papers, his right knee tucked under his chin.

  Lestrade looked torn between tearing his thinning hair in despair and storming angrily out. I relented and explained what he had seen but not truly observed.

  "They were looking for a piece of paper, Inspector Lestrade. When they didn't find it amongst her things, they came here, possibly assuming that she was bringing it to us."

  "What sort of paper?"

  "That, we don't know yet."

  "Then how do you know it was a piece of paper?"

  Holmes made a rude noise. I ignored him.

  "The way they searched, both here and in her hotel room. The books were shaken out before being dumped, the pictures taken from their frames, carpets pulled up, our various files carefully gone through and a number of pages stolen."

  "But you said she left you some papers?"

  "A single manuscript page, but it's made of papyrus. It wouldn't have fit into a book without being folded, which would damage it."

  "Would they have known that?"

  "Lestrade," exclaimed Holmes from his nest of débris on the floor, "that was a most perceptive question. Russell, I do believe a cup of tea would come most welcome to all concerned and that Mr Ellis is finished in the kitchen. Would you be so good ..."

  I accepted my charge and waded out to the kitchen, where I scraped a handful of tea leaves and some sugar from the floor, found a kettle, though no lid, and four mostly unbroken cups. By the time I had found the bread under a saucepan and trimmed the grimy outside from a piece of cheese, the situation was beginning to amuse me. I hunted for an unbroken jar of relish or pickle, discovered triumphantly a large bottle of pickled onions, and thus assembled a rather strange but quite edible meal.

  "Holmes?" I called.

  "Yes, Russell."

  "I'd like to get this cleared up before Mrs Hudson returns. She'll be back tomorrow, you said?"

  "Yes."

  "Shall I ring Tillie and see if she can send over a pair of her girls to help? Or would you prefer to keep this out of the mouths of the village gossips?"

  "I'd rather, if you think we can do it ourselves."

  "Probably a good idea. I could ask Patrick to come over with Tillie tonight for a while. That might help, and they wouldn't talk."

  I poured the boiling water over the leaves, ignoring a few stray sultanas that clung to the tea, and took the tray into the sitting room. I didn't like the look on Lestrade's face, and I glanced quickly at Holmes for confirmation.

  "Yes, Russell, the good inspector has his doubts."

  "Now, Mr Holmes, that's not entirely true. If you say there's something in this, I'll believe you. What I said was that I'm going to have trouble convincing my superiors that there's a case here. An old lady has an accident and your house is turned upside down, but deliberate murder? It's a damned awkward— pardon me, Miss Russell— it's an awkward way of committing murder, with a car. Takes some explaining to do."

  "I say, Lestrade, you are coming along nicely. That's twice in the past half hour," Holmes began, but I smothered his words with anger.

  "Somebody killed her, you can't deny that, and drove off."

  "Oh yes, no doubt about that, and that's where it'll lie unless I can take it further. Look, it's like this. We're badly overstretched at the moment, and we've had no fewer than three cases in the last year that have cost us the earth in time and money, with nothing to show— one turned out to be suicide, one an accident, and the third we finally just had to let go for lack of any hard evidence. There's been no little criticism about the Yard, and from up high, too. We're all walking about on tiptoes down there."

  "You will go talk with her sister, though?"

  "Now, that's another thing. Why all this bother about her sister? It's not right, my delaying her being notified like this. Normally, one of the Cambridge force'd go and tell her. And aside from that, how'd you know the letter was from her? There was only her address on the envelope. Opening letters, now, Mr Holmes, that's an offence. Interfering with the post."

  "Why, Lestrade, who else could it have been from but the sister she'd been staying with? We weren't interfering with it; on the contrary, we were making absolutely certain that you received it. In fact, you owe us a favour for bringing it to your attention so promptly."

  The younger man fell on this red herring, led astray by Holmes' deliberate air of bland innocence. His narrow face pulled in suspiciously.

  "What sort of a favour?"

  "I want you to take Russell with you when you go to see Erica Ruskin."

  I was surprised but said nothing.

  "I can't do that, Mr Holmes."

  "Of course you can. Besides, you should have a woman there. Women are so much better at comforting the bereaved, don't you find?" He shot me a warning look, and I closed my mouth so hard, my teeth hurt. "Lestrade, you know you'd have to take another person with you anyway. Russell's not strictly to the rules, but call her a consultant."

  Lestrade looked as if he'd rather call me something less polite, and I could see that he was not impressed with my father's smudged shirt and the rat's nest of hair atop my grimy face. He was momentarily forgetting that he had seen me in a number of guises, ranging from a lady of the evening to a blind beggar and a chic young heiress, and once as Dr Watson. No, come to think of it, he had come in later on that particular case. Nonetheless, surely he should trust me to dress the part.

  "I will change my clothes and look presentable, Inspector, if you will give me twenty minutes," I said mildly.

  "Better get started, Russell," said Holmes. "The good gentlemen are nearly finished here."

  "Now just one minute. I haven't said I'd go to see the woman, now have I? I've got work up to my ears already. Why should I jaunt on up to the wilds of Cambridgeshire and fight the hay wagons just so your wife can watch me give an old lady some bad news about her sister? Be reasonable, Mr Holmes."

  "She was murdered, Lestrade," Holmes said evenly.

  "So you say."

  "Precisely. So I say." The two men measured each other over the gouged tabletop, until finally Lestrade let out an explosive breath.

>   "Oh, very well, Mr Holmes. For you, I'll go, and I'll take her with me. But I don't have time to come back down to this godforsaken wilderness. She'll have to get back on her own."

  "I believe I can manage the train, Inspector. Twenty minutes."

  Precisely nineteen minutes later, I walked into the sitting room in what Holmes calls my "young lady" guise. The blouse was a bit crumpled, but the unfashionable skirt looked as dowdy as ever and my hair was wrapped tightly around my head and covered with a cloche hat. I pushed a thin notebook and pencil into my ridiculous bag. Lestrade glanced at his watch and stood up.

  "Right. Ellis should be finished with the toolshed."

  "Send me prints of the photographs, would you, Lestrade? Russell, did you give your films to Mr Ellis?"

  "I did. See you later, Holmes. Watch out for the marmalade on the pantry floor."

  I turned to leave and nearly walked into Lestrade, who was bent over in a contortion, peering fiercely at the patch of boards Holmes had earlier indicated. He straightened hurriedly and left. I followed him to the door, then stopped to look back at the room. A swath of bare floor cut through the débris. Holmes stood amidst the ruins, rolling up the sleeves of his collarless shirt.

  "Don't look so grim, Russell."

  "Ring Patrick, Holmes."

  "I'll have him meet you at the station."

  * * *

  Tony Ellis had finished with the photography and was loading his equipment into the back of the car. Lestrade handed him a bag. I was surprised to see that he had no driver.

  "I'll drive back, Tony. Miss Russell is coming with us."

  Mr Ellis glanced at me but said nothing as he went to the front of the car and cranked the starting handle for Lestrade. After several attempts, the elderly engine shuddered to life, and he came around and climbed into the narrow back seat. He looked absolutely exhausted, and I was not surprised when I heard snores erupting from the back before we had gained the main road.

  "Your Mr Ellis seems to have made a night of it," I commented, though, truth to tell, there was no sign of alcohol about him.

  "He's been working for nearly thirty-six hours. We were over in Kent yesterday night when your message reached me. We'd started off with the car, so now we're stuck with it. Can't exactly tuck it into the overhead rack, can you? Ellis offered to come down with me— he doubles as a driver when we're shorthanded."

  "Generous of him to volunteer."

  "He wanted to meet Mr Holmes."

  "Ah. Have you also been on duty since yesterday morning?"

  "Yes, but he drove last night. Don't worry, I won't fall asleep at the wheel."

  "I was not worried, though if you wish me to take over at any point, I'm quite a decent driver." I made the offer, although he did not seem the sort who would care to be driven by a woman.

  "Miss Russell— is that what I should call you, by the way?"

  "Yes, that's fine."

  "I wonder if you'd mind telling me the whole story from your point of view, to cover the, er, gaps left by Mr Holmes?"

  "Certainly. Where would you like me to begin? With her letter to me?"

  "Tell me about her. What was she like, how did you meet her, what do you know of her work in Palestine? Anything along those lines."

  "Miss Ruskin was one of those odd women this country occasionally throws out, like Gertrude Bell or Mary Kingsley. Fascinated by the exotic, oblivious of comfort or convention, largely self-educated, an incongruous mixture of utter, inflexible certainty and immense insecurity around her peers, so that in normal social intercourse, she usually spoke in brief, brusque phrases. Left off pronouns. Loud voice. In writing or when she was involved in explaining her work, she could be very eloquent. Devastatingly observant. Dauntingly vital. Immensely intelligent, and wise, as well. It's hard to think of her as dead, even having seen her body. I shall miss her."

  Lestrade was a good listener, and his questions were apposite. I talked; he prompted. We stopped in Southwark to push Tony Ellis out at the terrace house he shared with his three brothers, then drove on to Scotland Yard, where Lestrade left the photographic film to be developed. He also made what seemed to me a feeble attempt to abandon the automobile, but when a consultation with the schedules revealed a nearly two-hour wait at King's Cross, he decided not to descend to forms of transport less demanding of constant attention, and despite the lack of a driver, he kept the car. A motorphile who cannot afford a machine of his own, I diagnosed with resignation.

  There was a pause in conversation as he steered between the carts, drays, lorries, taxis, omnibuses, trams, and the thousand other forms of moving targets, but when eventually we had fought free, unscathed, of the greater concentration of traffic, he resumed as if without interruption.

  "This manuscript, what did you call it?"

  "It's called a papyrus. We should have shown it to you, but it's in a safe place and Holmes thought it best to leave it hidden. The manuscript itself is a little roll of papyrus, which is a kind of thick paper made from beaten reeds, very commonly used in ancient Egypt and the whole Middle East, apparently, though very little of it has survived. Miss Ruskin consulted authorities on it, but they decided it was not an authentic first-century document, partly because there's so little extant Palestinian papyrus. However, she thought that as it was sealed inside a glazed figurine, it could have resisted wear that long. I haven't had a chance to examine it closely, but there were definite signs of red pottery dust embedded in the fibres. It was put into the box quite recently, in the last twenty years."

  "Tell me about the box."

  I described it, the animals, inlay, date, and probable origin.

  "I'd like to take it to the British Museum to have a friend look at it, but it's undoubtedly quite valuable. It's in excellent condition, though how it got to a Bedouin tribesman from Italy will take some figuring."

  "And the manuscript itself, what's it worth?"

  "I have no way of knowing."

  "Guess."

  "Surely you know better than to ask that of a student of Sherlock Holmes," I chided.

  "Miss Russell, I am asking for a rough estimate of the thing's value, not a bid at auction. What is it worth?"

  "Half a million guineas?"

  "What?" he choked, and nearly had us in the ditch.

  "The road, please, Inspector," I said urgently, and then: "You're certain you don't want me to drive? Very well. The thing could as easily be worth ten pounds, I have at present no means of evaluating it. But you asked two questions— one of its worth, and the other of its value. The two are related, although not the same. If it is not authentic, as merely a curiosity, the manuscript is nearly worthless and of little value. If, however— and it's a very large if— if it is authentically what it appears to be, whoever owned it could set the price. Only a handful of individuals in the world could afford it. And its value ... Its value as an agent of change? Good Lord, if the papyrus came to be generally accepted as a voice from the first century, the repercussions would be ... considerable."

  My voice drifted off, and he glanced at me in surprise.

  "Perhaps you had best tell me about it. It's a letter, you said?"

  I sighed and tried to arrange my thoughts as if I were presenting an academic paper to a colleague. That this particular colleague knew not the first thing about the topic and that I was struggling in far over my head with it did not make the presentation any easier.

  "I must begin by emphasising that I am not a qualified judge. I am no expert in Greek or in first-century Christianity. If," I was forced to add parenthetically, "you can even call it Christianity at that point. Miss Ruskin gave me the manuscript knowing this, on, as near as I can gather, a personal whim combined with annoyance at the experts, who rejected it out of hand. She thought it worth more than that, and thought, rightly, that I would find it as tantalising as she did." I took a deep and steadying breath.

  "It is a letter, in Koiné rather than classical Greek, with one passage of Aramaic, a form
of Hebrew that was commonly spoken at the time. The letter is purportedly written by a woman who calls herself Mary, a common enough name, but she refers to herself as an apostle of Jesus and is writing to her sister in the town of Magdala."

  It took several seconds to sink in, but when it had sorted itself out in his mind, he took his astonished gaze off the road again and turned it on me for a disturbingly long time before remembering to steer the car. It was another long moment before he could choose an appropriate reaction, which was, predictably enough, a roar of laughter.

  "A letter from Mary Magdalene?" he spluttered. "Of all the ... Leave it to Sherlock Holmes to come up with something as crazy as that. Next thing, he'll be finding the Holy Grail in a pawnshop. Mary Magdalene! That's a rich one, that is."

  I looked out the window at the scenery, row upon row of recently constructed Homes for Heroes that gave off abruptly to fields and cows. Let him wrestle with it, I thought, and set out to count the varieties of toxic wildflower in the passing hedgerows. I had reached eleven before his laughter finally dribbled to a halt, and three more (or should the aquilegia, a garden escapee, be allowed? I debated) before his next question came, spoken like a joke waiting for the punch line.