Justice Hall mr-6

by Laurie R. King

He planted his feet, then stepped a little to one side. “About here. It’s hard to tell—it’s getting so dark.”

  “And you heard something from those bushes?”

  “A rattle. Like a bird panicking through the undergrowth.”

  “And you turned . . .”

  “I took a couple of steps, and then the bird flew out.”

  “From the bottom, near the ground?”

  “About halfway up. Sort of where that dead branch is.”

  “And you brought up your gun.”

  “I counted two. It helps, to count. Steadies the gun on the bird’s path.”

  “One thousand one, one thousand two, is that how you count?”

  “Faster. One. Two. Bang.”

  I picked my way in the direction of the holly clump, where Marsh was fighting to get to his feet (cursing all the while, in English now, ladies or no). The pheasant lay tumbled on the forest litter; I knelt beside it, trying to tell if there might indeed be blood of two different ages on the feathers, but it was impossible to tell. That on the wing might have been marginally more dried, and thus indicate, as the boy thought, an earlier injury that had made the bird both clumsy and nervous enough to flush from what was actually a safe haven. There was no telling. I left the bird there and went back to the boy.

  “Did you use both barrels?”

  “I just had one. I’d tried for a bird a minute before, and missed. Father was loading for Roger. We didn’t need a loader before His Grace lent me his gun.”

  We both looked down at the elegant weapon the boy still carried, his face gone stark with renewed horror, mine no doubt fighting a rueful smile: Marsh had been shot with his own gun.

  The beaters devised a rough pallet to carry their wounded duke off the field of battle. While dogs and men scurried to retrieve the birds before darkness rendered them invisible, one of the motorcars that had been waiting to transport us back to Justice was pressed into service as an ambulance. Alistair and Iris rode with Marsh; the women who had stayed on piled into the other vehicles; I walked a ways apart from the men trailing cross-country back to the house; they, in turn, kept their distance from the grimly limping Sir Victor and his two silent sons. There was little of the merriment that normally accompanies a returning shoot, and I for one had much to think about, as I trudged tiredly through the swirls of fog towards the glow of Justice Hall.

  As we approached the house, I fell behind to allow the others to enter before me. In fact, I sat at the foot of the pelican fountain for a while, allowing my thoughts to quiet, considering what had happened that day, the effects and implications. When finally I stood up to brush off my trousers, the drive and entrance were empty. I went up the steps, and had my hand on the elaborate brass latch when the door was jerked open from within. Ogilby held the door, his professional calm worn so thin he looked almost harried. As I entered the Hall, I understood why: Our staid little party had expanded exponentially. The Hall was a tumult of colour and motion. And sound—voices shouting over what sounded like two gramophones playing different songs at full throttle.

  “What on earth is this?” I asked the Justice butler.

  “It would appear that some friends of Mrs Darling were in the neighbourhood and decided to drop in.” Ogilby’s face gave nothing away, but I could just imagine the state of the kitchen at the moment, with what looked to be thirty unexpected dinner guests.

  I gave the butler a look of commiseration, and stepped inside. The very air seemed to push out of the doors past me, fleeing for the still terraces.

  “Where did they take the duke?” I asked him.

  “His Grace was taken up to his apartment, madam. The doctor is with him.” Beyond the temporary confusion of sheer numbers, I thought, the butler seemed distracted, even distraught.

  “He’ll be all right,” I tried to reassure him. “Very uncomfortable, but all right.”

  “Thank you, madam,” he replied, so clearly unconvinced that I had to wonder if something further had happened on the trip here. I hurried off to see for myself.

  I had no intention of getting caught up in the fray, and made along the front wall of the Great Hall in the direction of the western wing, but even that backwater was pulsing with full-throated conversation. I edged around a three-sided argument involving a woman wearing a sort of Roumanian peasant gown with a multitude of scarfs over it, a tall, cadaverous man with a handful of turquoise chips hanging from his right ear-lobe, and a short, plump individual in a man’s lounge suit who might have been male or female. This last person wore a small, ill-tempered spider monkey on the left shoulder of the suit; the creature was plucking irritably at the jewelled collar and gold chain that kept it from leaping to the heights. I gave the monkey wide berth, nearly knocked into a huge betasselled sombrero someone had perched on a marble bust of the third Duke, avoided the peculiar green drink thrust in my direction by a woman dressed predominantly in beads and fringe, and escaped.

  Standing outside of the heavy door to Marsh’s rooms, I could hear voices. I knocked, then turned the knob to open the door a few inches.

  “May I enter?” I asked.

  “Come in,” Iris answered.

  The tableau that greeted my eyes was like some dramatic canvas depicting the aftermath of battle: doctor in rolled-up shirt-sleeves with blood to his elbows, his assistant (Alistair) holding up a lamp to throw strong light on the victim, a worried nurse (played by Iris) clasping her hands. Except that none of them were dressed for the part, the victim was more furious than suffering, the surgical table was a vast high bed covered in velvet, and the worried nurse on closer examination seemed rather to be clasping her hands to keep back laughter as the grizzled Scots doctor mumbled on and on about the foolishness of walking out in front of bairns with guns. I shook my head to dispel the images of paint on canvas (Justice Hall was having a powerful influence on my imagination, I thought in irritation) and stepped forward to offer succour to the wounded. Or distraction, at the least.

  With the blood cleaned away, the injury became a matter less of gore and carnage than of a myriad of oozing punctures gone angry with reaction. The doctor, working his way methodically from cheek to thigh, was currently prodding away at the upper arm. A small saucer of dug-out shot lay to one side, and Iris reached out with the sticking-plaster to cover one trickling but empty hole in her husband’s shoulder.

  The doctor’s digging produced another tiny lump, which he dropped into the saucer with a wet clink.

  “You’re certain you won’t have a wee bit of morphia, are ye?” he asked. “You’ll find it goes ever so much easier.”

  “No morphia,” Marsh grunted.

  “Very well,” the doctor said in an It’s-your-funeral sort of voice, and picked up his probe.

  Sweat was running freely down Marsh’s taut face, the only indication of what had to have been agony.

  “Can I get you a drink?” I asked him. “Water? Whisky?”

  His answer was a flicker of the eyes in the direction of the bedside jug near the doctor’s elbows. I took the glass to the lavatory and filled it with water from the tap. When the next piece of shot was in the saucer, he propped himself on his right elbow and drank thirstily.

  A rat-a-tat of knuckles on wood interrupted us, and a sudden increase of noise indicated the door being opened.

  “Yoo-hoo,” came Phillida’s voice. “Anyone here? There you are—Marsh, you poor boy, are you all right? How terribly awful for you—er.” Her cheerful air did not survive the sight of the doctor’s bloody hands or the small plate of gory lead pellets, but she did not flee. “Marsh, dear. You must hurt like the blazes. Do you want me to put my friends back on the road so we won’t disturb you?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he told her, his eyes narrowed against the probe in his ribs. “Just keep them in the centre block and I won’t hear you.”

  “Are you sure, my dear? I don’t mind if you—”

  “Phillida, please. Go back to your party.” She started to say some
thing, but in the end just turned and left the room.

  After a while, I told Marsh, for distraction more than anything, “The boy—not Roger, but the other one—is devastated. He thought he’d killed you.”

  “I thought he had too, for a moment,” he said with a glimmer of dark humour. “I’ll see him when this butcher is finished.”

  The doctor seemed unoffended. Perhaps he actually was deaf, I speculated, but his next words proved he was not. “When I’m finished, you will rest. No interviews with guilt-ridden laddies.”

  Marsh acted as if the medical man had not spoken. “Would you also ask Ogilby to send trays up for us? I don’t imagine either Iris or my cousin will much care for a formal dinner. Have yours sent up too, if you like.”

  The annoyed doctor bent to his task again, and Marsh withdrew into himself. Distraction, I saw, was clearly impossible; I might as well go and try the hot water supply for a bath. Even if I succumbed to the temptation of dinner on a tray, I should prefer to be clean for it.

  First, though, a responsibility: I tapped Alistair on the arm and gestured with my head towards the door. He handed the bright light to Iris, and followed.

  I spoke in a low murmur, for his ears only. “This looks like an accident.”

  He looked back steadily. “That is how it appears.”

  “Still, it might be good for you to remain in this room tonight. And, if a tray comes with food for him alone . . .”

  There was no need to finish the sentence, I saw. However: “It would also be as well for you to watch your own back, too. You and he were standing side by side, after all.”

  He did not appear even to have heard what I was trying to say, but I did not push the issue. I could only trust that his protective alertness would extend out from Marsh’s person to cover his own.

  “I will see you in a little while,” I told him. “I’ll be in my room, if you need anything.”

  Just before I left, a voice followed me. “Peter,” Marsh said. “The boy’s name is Peter. Tell him to come and see me later.”

  So before I retreated to hot water and privacy, I hunted down one worried boy to reassure him that his victim was well and had asked to see him after dinner. Both parents looked grateful, and I climbed the steps again, meditating on the powerful, potentially devastating commitment to the future made by parents.

  Until I had my hand on the door-knob of my room, I had forgotten about my letter to Mrs Hudson concerning the appropriate wear for a formal country house dinner. For about half a second, I thought about finding someone who might know whether she’d sent it, and whether in the confusion anyone had fetched it from the station, but then I decided not to bother. A tray would do me fine. I turned the knob and walked in.

  And there the dress lay, tossed on the bed by a remarkably careless house-maid. I looked at the heap of crumpled grey silk, and knew in an instant that no Justice Hall house-maid could ever have abandoned such a dress in such a state. Which left only one possible culprit.

  “Holmes?” I called.

  “Russell,” answered the voice through the connecting door to the shared bath-room. “What on earth is going on out there? The place sounds like an overturned beehive.”

  I followed the voice through the steam-filled bath-room and found my partner and husband seated on the edge of the dressing-table bench, threading studs through his shirt. I went and sat beside him, leaning into his shoulder with affection.

  “Oh, Holmes, it’s so very, very good to see you.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Does something need to have happened for me to be glad to see you?”

  “When it is said in that tone of voice, yes. You sound like a besieged subaltern seeing his lieutenant heave into view.”

  “You’re right. It is relief as well as pleasure. Someone shot Mah—Marsh.”

  “Shot him?”

  “Peppered him with bird shot. If he’d been ten feet closer or had his face turned towards the gun, it could have been serious. One of the inexperienced guns—a boy of fifteen—looks to be responsible. An accident.”

  “But also not an accident?”

  “It feels slightly wrong. Here—let me show you.” I went to paw through his writing desk for a sheet of the elegant Justice stationery and a pen, then began drawing, Holmes bent over my shoulder. “We were here, strung out along the side of a hill lightly covered with bare trees and the odd clump of evergreens. The beaters were working their way towards us along this line.” The uneven row of twelve Xs was joined by a long squiggle indicating the front of the drivers. I drew in a couple of star bursts to show the clumps of evergreens. “The two boys and their father, Sir Victor, were here. The boys each had guns—they started the day sharing one, with their father unarmed and coaching them, but Marsh gave his gun to one of the boys after lunch, so they could both shoot. Sir Victor must have been a front-line soldier,” I reflected aloud. “And he must have been wounded at some point—he limps, and twitched at every shot.”

  It was, in fact, proof of the man’s will-power that his body hadn’t taken command and dived for cover at some of the louder volleys. I’d seen soldiers on the street do just that, leaping for doorways at the back-fire of a lorry.

  “This drive was to be the last,” I went on, “since the mist was coming in and it was getting dark. In fact, the head-keeper and Marsh’s brother-in-law had a disagreement over whether we had time to do one more drive. Darling insisted, but it meant that there was a bit of a rush on.” I described in some detail the ground, the placement of the guns, the movement of the beaters approaching, and the presence of a person or persons behind me. Holmes leant over the desk, propped on the heel of his right hand, studs forgotten, all his attention on the rough sketch taking shape under my pen.

  “The drive was probably more than half over—the thickest body of birds already out of the woods—when Peter Gerard heard movement in the shrubs to his left and turned his gun in that direction. It sounds as if his movements were sensible, to a point: He waited until the bird broke, followed it for a quick count of two before firing. Only, Alistair and Marsh were here behind him, moving up the line in the same direction the bird flew. Marsh had just stepped in front of Alistair when the gun went off.”

  “What are the distances here?” He pointed to the marks for Peter Gerard and the two evergreen clumps.

  I estimated as best I could, not having had a measuring tape with me in the field. The three marks—gun, bird, and Marsh—formed a lopsided triangle, the line between gun and victim being slightly the longest.

  “And the bird—did you see where it lay?”

  I drew a small X approximately halfway between the clumps, then turned the pen upside-down and used the end to trace the creature’s path from its emergence at the clump to the point at which I had found it. As I moved the pen, I recited, “One. Two. Bang.” The pen end halted at the small X.

  Far short of the holly bush into which Marsh and Alistair had fallen.

  “Could the boy be wrong?”

  “Wrong, yes, but not, I think, deliberately lying.”

  “I must speak with Marsh.”

  “Not for at least another hour. The doctor is with him,” I explained.

  He grunted his frustration, then returned to the drawing. “All the guns will be here to dinner?”

  Damn, I said to myself. “As far as I know, dinner will go ahead without Marsh. Alistair and Iris will stay with him.”

  “Who is Iris?” he asked absently, and the last two days suddenly flooded in on me.

  “You did not interrogate the servants upon your arrival? That isn’t like you.”

  “I found a taxi at the station, and when I came in the servants were all frantically occupied. Why?”

  “Iris, my dear Holmes, is the wife of Lord Maurice, the seventh Duke of Beauville. Mahmoud is married.”

  His astonishment was instantly gratifying. He lowered himself onto the dressing-table bench. “I appear to be lacking some fairly vital
information,” he remarked.

  “They kept it from Debrett’s,” I told him.

  “They kept it from Mycroft,” he said, and I had to agree that was the feat truly worthy of note.

  “They were married—”

  “Wait,” he interrupted. “Tell me while you are getting ready for dinner.”

  “Oh, Holmes, must we? It’s chaos down there, they’re all the most eccentric friends of the Darlings, and I’ve spent a full twenty-four hours being sociable. Marsh suggested a tray.”

  “Sympathetic as I am to your plight, my dear Russell, I think dinner is potentially too rich a mine for data for us to miss. I shall draw you a bath while you shed your hunting gear.”

  I first hung the crumpled silk dress above the steaming bath to relax it, then slid gratefully into the scented water.

  Holmes drew up a stool. “Now: Tell.”

  I told.

  No reason to dwell lovingly on the glories of Justice Hall: Holmes could see those for himself. The hidden stairway was worth a bit of detail, and I could see his interest rise at the hidden Roman floor (this from the man who had once told his friend Watson that he was not interested in useless knowledge!) before he deliberately pushed it aside as peripheral. The contents of the Greene Library pulled even more strongly at his imagination; that too was set aside. The Circles, the deep relationship shared by the three principals, the painful reading of the Gabriel Hughenfort documents, I summarised those and moved on.

  The water in the bath was growing cool and the hour of the gong fast approaching when I finished with the previous evening’s dinner party. That episode had demanded considerably more detail in the telling, and evoked a long, thoughtful silence while Holmes fiddled with the bath-brush.

  “Berlin is the centre of Darling’s activities, you would judge?” he asked me.

  “He spends a great deal of time there, and he knew of this escape by Mr Hitler before it was in the papers. He claims altruism as his chief interest in the rebuilding process, but at the same time, what industry starts up in the post-war years, he intends to have his hands on the controls.”