Gwyneth Claypool was, her colleague who answered the telephone told me, currently in a meeting with the head teachers of several schools, which was due to finish at four o’clock but would probably go on until closer to five. She gave me the address and rang off. I raided my wardrobe for a dress suitable both for confronting feminists and sitting in the women’s dining room at Simpson’s, had Q ring for a taxi, and left, promising to return for further discussions on the house question as soon as I could.
London was cold and inhospitable, a dreary rain splashing against the taxi’s curtains and dribbling off of the passing hats and umbrellas. At the address I had been given, an assistant guarding the door refused to let me out of the freezing-cold entrance foyer and wouldn’t think of disturbing the meeting with a message. So I took a seat in the least draughty corner I could find, and slowly congealed inside my fur-lined coat.
Gwyneth’s voice half an hour later crackled through the building and rescued me from my icy perch. It had always been loud, I suspect even before her deafness set in, and the silent building quivered in reaction; the tinkle of shattering icicles seemed to follow it. She left the meeting as no doubt she had begun it, commanding action.
“—and I think you’ll find the situation much improved. Girls that age need a goal, or they seek out all kinds of trouble. We’ll meet again in the new year, see how it’s coming along.”
I unfolded myself from my cramped huddle and stumbled forward on numb feet to intercept her. She spotted me, squinted in uncertainty; then her face opened in a wide smile and she boomed a greeting across the echoing space.
“Hello, Gwyn,” I returned.
“Mary! What are you doing here? Looking for me? But why in heaven’s name didn’t you come and find me—you must be in an advanced stage of ice cube–ism. Come along; we’ll find a warm corner with drinks in it and bemoan the state of the world.”
Merely being in Gwyneth Claypool’s presence tended to have a warming effect on a person, even before she thrust into my hand a drink she’d bullied the barman into constructing. It looked like pond scum, smelt of the Indies, and went down with a jolt that tingled the toes and lifted the scalp.
“Lord, Gwyn!” I gasped. “What is this?”
“Rum butter. Does the trick, doesn’t it? Wish I’d known about it in 1914—if we’d issued the men rum in this form, they’d have overrun the Germans by Christmas.”
I loosened my coat and removed my gloves and hat, and set about getting the drink inside me, a quarter-teaspoon at a sip, while Gwyn and I caught each other up on our lives since we’d last met nearly three years earlier.
“Still married?” she shouted, raising the eyebrows of the other customers.
“Indeed I am. And you?”
“No time, no time for all the nonsense.”
So I asked her what she did have time for and she told me of her many projects related to the rights of women, and we talked of that and this and of times past and the feebleness of the present. No, she no longer sped around London on her racing motor-cycle, she’d been run over by a lorry one day when she hadn’t heard it coming and her mother made her stop. And no, she wasn’t hurt, a broken wrist was all but Mum was seventy now and anxious, so the motor-cycle resided in the country—or rather the original machine’s replacement did—where she could roar up and down to her heart’s content.
Eventually our drinks were empty, seconds refused, and she asked me what I’d wanted of her.
“I need to find one of the VAD drivers who was serving in France in 1918, somewhere west of Reims. She might’ve been French, although what she’d have been doing fetching our lot I can’t think. The only name I have for her is Hélène, and even that may be a nick-name. She had green eyes and was tall; that’s all I know.”
“Green eyes sounds like Charlie, but she was a Scottish girl, or was she American?”
“French-Canadian, maybe?”
“She could have been. Yes, I think—no, I’m confusing her with another girl who was killed in an attack. Her name was something like Helen, but she had dark eyes. Pretty thing. Bled to death from a piece of shrapnel in the throat.”
The room cringed in reaction, and two customers beat a hasty retreat. Gwyn noticed, and lowered her voice.
“Sorry. I forget. Why do you need to find this driver?”
“A friend is trying to find what happened to a nephew of his who was killed in ’18, not satisfied with the official story, and the boy’s diary mentions this Hélène in a manner that indicates they knew each other. She drove him out to the first-aid post.”
“Love at first sight, eh?”
“So it seems. But because he changed regiments and moved around, it’s hard to track down fellow soldiers who might have known him well. We thought he might’ve written this Hélène letters that gave an idea of his situation. The family just wants to know.”
“And the next step’s a séance, is that it? Let me ask around, see what I can come up with. She may’ve come after I had to leave—probably did, in fact, or I’d’ve met her. I’ll give my replacement there a ring, see if green eyes mean anything to her.”
“That’s great, Gwyn. Thanks so much.”
“So who’s the family?”
I hesitated, then said, “Can I tell you that after everything’s cleared up? It’s only, sometimes publicity raises dust and makes it hard to finish.”
“Fair enough. If you promise to bring along this mysterious husband of yours. Ought to meet him, now that he seems permanent.”
The image of Holmes and Gwyn Claypool circling each other like a pair of wary dogs flickered through my mind, and I had to laugh.
“No promises, Gwyn, but I’ll see what I can do.”
I glanced at my wrist-watch, then looked more closely in astonishment: We had been at our chat for better than two hours, and if I was to meet Holmes, I would have to scurry. I gave her a card with the flat’s telephone number written on it (an extension of which line rang in the downstairs servants’ quarters) and resumed my outer clothing. We left the building, embraced, and climbed into separate cabs.
Holmes was not at Simpson’s when I arrived, which did not surprise me. I went to their Ladies to tidy my hair-pins, then allowed the maitre d’ to show me to one of Holmes’ preferred tables.
Half an hour later, Holmes had not arrived, and I was glowering in my seat. At forty minutes my embarrassment and irritation began to crumple under concern. At forty-five minutes the maitre d’ came up to the table with a slip of paper in his hand. It read:
KINDLY INFORM MISS RUSSELL THAT HER COMPANION IS AT HIS BROTHER’S. PLEASE TELL HER THAT SHE MUST NOT TAKE THE FIRST AVAILABLE TAXI.
The man before me must have seen my face and feared I was about to succumb to some ladylike vapours, but I brushed away his hand and reached for my possessions.
The only reason to avoid the first convenient taxi was for fear it would be a trap. And the only reason to fear a trap—as well as the explanation for why Holmes was not here—was that an attack had already been attempted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I did, as it turned out, accept the first taxi that presented itself, reasoning that if a cab has just pulled to the kerb when a person comes out of a restaurant door, and if that cab then offloads a Member of Parliament, his wife, and his sister, then a person can feel relatively confident that its driver has not been hovering up the street waiting to pounce upon one. I did take the precaution of giving the driver the wrong address, and splashed through an ill-lit alley to Mycroft’s building on Pall Mall.
I trotted up the steps, shunned the lift in favour of the stairway, and pounded on Mycroft’s door, slightly breathless. I felt his presence arrive on the other side, where he paused to look through the secret peep-hole in the centre of the knocker, and then the bolt slid. I slipped past him, shedding rain-coat and hat as I went, not needing to ask where Holmes was because I could see his stockinged feet sticking out from the end of the comfortable sofa.
T
he six-foot-plus man laid out on Mycroft’s long settee had at some point since the morning changed into a Frenchman. From his silk-stockinged feet to the sleek part of his hair, his trousers, shirt-front, and even the still-attached moustaches were unmistakably French. He’d even, I noticed from a glance at the suit’s coat that lay over the arm of a nearby chair, dug out his Légion d’Honneur. It was honestly come by—Holmes avoided a display of unearned ribbons when he could, even as disguise. The most English things about him at the moment were the squat crystal glass balanced on his chest and the India-rubber ice-bag from the Army and Navy Stores that rested on his head.
A good deal of my apprehension deflated abruptly, leaving me dizzy with relief. Just bruises, then, and perhaps a cracked rib, judging by the care with which he drew breath. And a splint on one finger.
Mycroft placed a glass of brandy in my hand and pushed me gently into a chair. I put the glass aside and sat on the edge of the upholstery.
“You needn’t look so mother-hennish, Russell,” Holmes said crossly. “There’s nothing here that some strapping won’t take care of.”
“What did they use?” A length of pipe, unless the cut on his jaw came by a fall.
“Brass knuckles and boots, for the most part. One of them picked up a cobble-stone.” He gestured at the jaw. “But the other ordered him to drop it. They weren’t aiming to murder me, just to render me hors de combat. Or to warn me off, but if so, the small detail of precisely what it was off which I was being warned was left too late, and omitted entirely when the local constable came pounding and whistling to the rescue.”
“Not robbery?”
“If so, it was secondary to the pleasure of knocking me about.” He shifted in the pillows, and winced. “If you are not going to drink that excellent brandy, Russell, I shall happily offer it a home.”
His speech and his eyes seemed clear, and the head wounds minor. I handed him the glass. He took a mouthful and made a face; since I was certain that any brandy kept by Mycroft would not make him grimace, I added a loosened tooth to my mental list.
The brandy settled him. After a minute, he went on without prompting.
“Two men, one of them a gentleman or something very near—and yes, I am fully cognisant of the absurdity of that statement, but his voice through its muffling mask had the accents of authority and education, and he commanded the other to drop the stone with the bark of an officer. Unfortunately, that phrase, ‘Drop it,’ were the pair’s only words—not sufficient to identify the speaker’s origins or identity.” He paused to take another swallow, reducing the glass to half its original level, then resumed. “The authoritative individual was a fit man of around five feet ten or eleven inches—I fear the alley was too dimly lit to allow for any more detail. He had done a certain amount of boxing, I should say, but like most amateur pugilists, he was not entirely familiar with the sensation of hitting with a set of brass knuckles.
“The other man, the muscles of the team, was more street fighter than pugilist. Certainly he was no respecter of the Queensberry rules. He was more than comfortable with a brass weight wrapped between his fingers. Shorter, heavy-set as a stevedore, smelling of beer and bad teeth, wearing a working man’s boots.”
Even the sharpest and most disciplined of minds tends to wander somewhat under the influence of a pummelling followed by several ounces of alcohol. Holmes, I thought, could use a gentle firming-up.
“Was the muscle local talent, from London? Or a country boy?”
That made him focus. The confusion at the back of his eyes dissipated as he concentrated on the memories, reaching through the tumult of attack to retrieve the more subtle sensations.
“There must have been three of them in all, with the third in charge of transport. They were waiting down the street from the door I’d gone through an hour earlier.”
“How did they find you?”
“They may have ears within the War Offices. I had been interviewing there all day, in my guise of a retired French colonel seeking candidates for posthumous awards, and at least three clerks had the opportunity of overhearing the conversation I had with Alistair at Justice Hall regarding our progress, during which I chanced to mention my destination for the evening. I shall give you their names, Mycroft; see if you can turn up any past wrongdoing among them. In any case, my attackers waited up the street, saw which way I was going, and drove past me. As I walked, I noticed two men, their heads ducked against the rain, dash from a private car into a doorway. When I had gone past, they came back onto the street and one of them—the muscles—literally tackled me from behind and ran me into an alley-way. We ended up in the entrance to a yard, with fisticuffs among the dust bins.
“Mycroft,” he interrupted his narrative to say. “Do you think you might ring down for that light supper you offered me earlier? Soup or a boiled egg for me, although Russell no doubt could do with something more substantial, having had dinner at Simpson’s snatched out from under her nose. Where was I? The dust bins, yes.
“The muscular individual was quite aware that a blow to the head induces sufficient disorientation to allow for a more leisurely treatment to the rest of the victim’s anatomy. And so it proved. Against him alone I might have stood; the two of them soon had me down and were, as they say, putting the boots in.
“The muscles was at the most seven inches over five feet, but solid. Wearing an Army greatcoat, newer boots with stiffened toes, steel perhaps—but no, his smell was of city streets and the docks, not of manure and grass. A city tough. He’ll have a black eye, but no obvious marks on his hands—he wore gloves.
“The other: not, perhaps, a gentleman in the strict sense, but a man of education. A schoolmaster or high-ranking clerk, perhaps a gentleman’s gentleman. Homburg type rather than cloth cap, although they’d abandoned the actual head-gear and pulled on stocking caps, or balaclavas, when they came out of the doorway. His overcoat was good, heavy wool, dark colour but not I think actually black. Neck scarf, also dark, gloves that gleamed in the light, polished lace-up boots. A city suit, I’d say, under the overcoat. No facial hair that I could tell, but I’d have missed a trimmed beard or a small moustache. The gentleman will have a limp: I gave his left knee a good one when I was down. And his overcoat is missing a button.”
With a smile of satisfaction, he worked a cautious hand beneath Mycroft’s borrowed dressing gown to the pocket of the shirt, and brought out a silk handkerchief, which he held out to me. I knelt down at the low table with it, and allowed it to unroll. A round of horn dropped out. Wordlessly, Mycroft brought me a small leather kit containing powders, brushes, and insufflator. I raised three partial prints from the surface, and allowed Mycroft to put the object in a safe place, away from the attentions of his housekeeper.
A rattle in the service lift heralded our much-delayed evening meal, with its mixture of invalid food and hearty labourer’s fare (for Mycroft, whose brain sweated mightily for king and country). Mycroft grumbled that the roast beef was dry, but as it was close on to midnight I privately reckoned we were fortunate not to be served shoe leather and yesterday’s sprouts.
Holmes looked more substantial after his soup and boiled egg, and I decided not to press for putting him to bed. Not that I would have succeeded; the most I could have hoped for was that he would occupy the sofa while Mycroft and I retreated to our beds. However, I judged that he would stand up to further conversation, so I told him how far I’d got in tracking down the green-eyed Hélène. Which admittedly was not far, so that with the social aspects of my hours with Gwyn left out, my narrative was brief.
“And you, Holmes? Did your crawl through the War Offices records bring you anything? Apart from a beating, that is?”
“Sidney Darling was a staff officer in France, although when I telephoned to Justice this afternoon, neither Alistair nor Marsh could say that Darling and Gabriel ever came into contact over there.”
“I have to say, neither of your attackers resembles Darling in the slightest.”
>
“Another name did come up,” Holmes continued. “Also a staff major, also posted to that section of France. Ivo Hughenfort.”
“Alistair’s cousin?”
“The same.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall against the cushions, leaving me to glance at Mycroft, see his questioning raised eyebrow, and offer a word of explanation.
“Ivo would be fourth in line to the title,” I said. “After the boy Thomas, then Alistair.”
“Ah,” Mycroft said, threading his fingers together across his substantial waistcoat. “I see.”
Mycroft and I between us succeeded in bullying Holmes to take to the guest-room bed, and we passed a restless night. In the morning Holmes looked worse but felt better, as the bruises coloured richly while the bone and muscle beneath them eased somewhat. Or so he claimed, although his movement remained cautious and he chewed a lot of aspirin. More telling, he did not insist on venturing out into the City in search of further information. He settled before the fire with another heap of unread newspapers and a fistful of tobacco, and dismissed us from his mind.
Mycroft climbed into his overcoat and left at his usual hour—the world of Intelligence never rests—and I rang the Qs to ask that they telephone to Mycroft’s number if Gwyn came up with a name and number for me. I then went out myself (rather nervously eyeing all passers-by) to examine closely the site of Holmes’ assault. I spent a sodden and dirty half hour in the alley-way that failed to reward me with a dropped calling card or conveniently traceable bespoke hat or boot, then another forty minutes knocking on doors to confirm that at seven o’clock on a wet Tuesday evening there had been no busy pubs or nosey neighbours to witness the event. Without having been set upon by thugs, I returned to Mycroft’s flat.
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