Dreaming Spies: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  I met Holmes’ gaze: if the man was not here, we probably knew where to find him.

  Our original plan had been to take turns out of the room, since the absence of both Russells at once might cause notice. However, that plan had long blown to the four winds, so as soon as the Prince Regent’s entourage moved towards the viewing windows, Holmes slipped from the room, with me following a bare minute later.

  The screens blocking this section of the wing made it simple. Holmes already had the door unlocked; I stepped into the suite.

  Sato-san gave me a friendly nod, then bent awkwardly to resume his search of the earl’s wardrobe.

  I opened my mouth, but there were both too many questions and none. Instead, I turned to Holmes, head down at Lord Darley’s bedside table. “I thought the Prince was about to turn his guard loose on Darley.”

  “The temptation was apparent.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  But Sato-san answered me from the wardrobe, his voice muffled by clothing. “The Son of Heaven is guided by his advisors. Since he was first laid on his nursemaid’s breast, the Prince has been schooled against the impulse act. Personal desire will always come second to an agreed course of action.”

  I kept picturing those limp fingers in the strong grip of a foreign blackmailer. A peasant’s life for me.

  I tugged off my long kid gloves and got to work. We turned the suite upside-down, scrupulously returning every item to its position. Holmes started in the earl’s room with Sato-san, while I moved next door to sort through Lady Darley’s gowns and frocks, furs and hatboxes. I ran attentive fingers along all the edges of her furniture, lifted her mattress, opened the drawer in her bed-side table. There I found a pretty blue Moroccan leather box. I was excited for a moment, and picked it up, lifting its top, staring down at the contents, wondering what …

  I closed it hastily, trying not to picture the two Darleys making use of those objects. There had been a couple of items whose purpose I could only guess at, but with the others, it was all too clear. And sitting there in the drawer for maids to see, as if its contents were no more exotic than the tube of lavender-scented hand crème, or the violet cachous, or the ornately-bound Bible! Well, that last was a bit exotic: a large volume with a spine so perfectly hinged, the inner pages did not so much as shift when I flipped open its front cover. I closed it, thumbed the latch shut, and arranged the … other things as they had been on its top.

  Then closed the drawer and knelt to feel around the rest of the small table.

  Nothing there. No slipcover book of illustrated poems, nor the document it hid, in the entire room.

  We met up at the doorway between his quarters and hers.

  “Could it be in Tommy’s rooms across the hall?” I asked.

  “Either there or in the hotel safe.”

  “One of us had better get back to the party.”

  “You go.”

  I did not argue. Holmes was welcome to search the young man’s bedside table. I worked the long gloves back up my arms, then opened the door a crack, to check that the corridor was empty. We left the suite, me for the end rooms and the two men for the son’s suite across the way.

  The party had grown louder as darkness approached, helped by bouncy music played by a mixed quartet of Western and Japanese men in evening wear. The Prince Regent was still by the windows, Haruki-san at his elbow.

  I plucked a half-empty glass from a sideboard and edged into the room in the lee of a group of tall young men, including the inescapable Monty Pike-Elton. The group laughed at some no doubt off-colour joke, and I joined in. They heard my voice and shifted back to incorporate me into their circle. Young Pike-Elton looked at me—then looked again.

  “You know, Mrs Russell, if it weren’t for those glasses, I’d never have recognised you.” His smile became frankly appreciative.

  I gave him a tipsy-sounding laugh, and asked how they had been enjoying Tokyo.

  A bit later I glanced into the room. Lady Darley was looking in my direction, so I raised my borrowed glass at her, eyes beaming in appreciation of her party, then returned my gaze to the circle of men.

  Things went on this way for an interminable ten or fifteen minutes, as the windows went dark and the quartet began to repeat itself. Finally, Lord Darley made his move—although it was not the move I anticipated.

  With a hand resting on his son’s shoulder, the earl clambered onto one of the chairs that had been pushed back to the wall. The band fell silent, and his voice rang out over the still-shouting voices.

  “Thank you all for joining us tonight, I hope you’ve enjoyed the champagne, thanks to my friend hosting this little bash—and thanks to my clever wife, who put it all together. But now Lady Darley and I have a little surprise for you. Our prayers were answered by a lovely soft night, so we’ve had Imperial set up dinner on the roof. They even have warm wraps, for those of you who didn’t arrive from outside, so pick up your garments and come up the stairs for dinner—and another surprise!”

  I had about thirty seconds to warn Holmes, and did so by darting into the corridor and giving a sharp whistle. But there was no time for him and Sato-san to escape, since the first guests were on my very heels. I paused to let the excited gabble wash past me, then watched, heart in throat, as Thomas Darley marched down the hall to his room and flung open the door.

  I waited for the explosion. And waited. And three minutes later, when the migration was thinning and Lord and Lady Darley were about to bring up the rear, young Darley came out, brushing a splash of water from his cuff before shrugging into his ebony overcoat.

  I let out my breath, and walked past his rooms to ours, fetching my warmest shawl.

  The earl’s second surprise was searchlights. The party came together again on the hotel roof, where in good weather films were shown and constellations admired. Tonight, it had been transformed into a grotto of potted palms and Oriental statues, with strings of fairy lights creating a rooftop of artificial stars. When all the guests had fresh glasses, Lord Darley gave an order to one of the hotel staff. The man trotted away, and with a series of clicks, the lights went off. Darkness held for a few seconds, and then a searchlight beam split the night. The party gasped as one after another, half a dozen brilliant spot-lights, mounted on the highest reaches of the hotel and on several nearby buildings, pointed down into the gardens that lay all around us, beginning at our feet and extending across to Hibiya Park and the Palace itself. The cherry trees, which in daylight were delicate clouds, burst into a sea of startling white. It was utterly unexpected, and completely spectacular.

  It took me a moment to remember why we were here, and what this considerable distraction might be covering. I looked around for the Prince—but there he was, standing at a slight remove from the rest, gazing down at a city transformed into a stage set by the cheque-book of an English interloper.

  I wondered what was going through his mind.

  I felt Holmes at my shoulder, and murmured, “I hope you weren’t hiding in Tommy’s wardrobe?”

  He shook his head. “Under the bed.”

  “Good thing this isn’t a ryokan. What now?”

  “Now,” he said in bitter tones, “unless we can intercept the final exchange, you and I will have the singular opportunity of watching the future Emperor of Japan pay off an English blackmailer.”

  The Darleys took their places at the end table. The Prince was seated at the head, with Lady Darley at his right and the earl beside her, and Haruki-san on the Prince’s left, followed by Tommy. The bodyguard merged into a potted palm.

  Holmes, who had bluntly overridden seating protocol in favour of having me at his side, now spoke into my ear. “One of those three will leave to fetch the book. If it’s Lady Darley, you go after. I’ll take the earl, and Sato-san can watch Tommy.”

  But watch as we might, none of them slipped away. The fairy lights were lit again, the guests were seated, soup arrived. Fish, meat, endless courses of English food: bland, overcooked, tas
teless.

  Sato-san worked his way up and down between the tables, serving wine. Judging by his aroma and the increasing lurch to his gait, he was sampling it as well. The Prince Regent listened to Haruki-san’s translations of Darley comments, looking as inscrutable as any Oriental face ever was. I could feel Holmes beside me quivering with suppressed desire to do something.

  The last course was cleared. Next came dessert.

  Holmes and I saw it at the same moment, and sat up sharply. When a platoon of white-hatted cooks appeared with carts, it could only mean the drama of crêpes suzette. The most distracting dish in a chef’s repertoire.

  All eyes turned to the cart nearest them—all eyes but ours. The drama began, the chefs lit their burners in preparation, and Lord Darley raised his table napkin to his lips and set it aside. Then to our surprise, the earl bent forward, feeling under the surface of the table in front of his knees. His shoulders gave a small jerk. He then leant over to say something in his wife’s ear before silently easing back his chair and striding off into the shadows.

  Carrying something in his right hand.

  We had failed.

  Lady Darley bent to deliver her husband’s message to the Prince. He sat for a moment, gazing into nothing. Then, with the expression of a young soldier determined to face his firing squad with dignity, his shoulders went forward. His chair slid back. Haruki-san looked at him. His raised hand ordered her to stay where she was. Once on his feet, he made the same gesture, with greater emphasis, to the bodyguard standing behind him.

  And the future Emperor of Japan followed Lord Darley away from the mesmerised dinner guests, into the shadows at the edge of the rooftop veranda.

  We could not intervene. Anything we did in this too-public venue would point back to the Prince Regent, raising questions, accusations, repercussions. So, ransom would be paid; a potential friend of England would be forever alienated. Weeks of preparation, words of promise, the love we had come to feel for this magnificent country—and all we had left was the taste of ashes in our mouths.

  But the taste was more than Haruki-san could bear. She pushed back her chair to hurry in her Prince’s wake. Lady Darley, looking surprised, followed her first with her eyes, then in fact. Then Tommy laid his own napkin onto the table and trailed along, with the dark figure of the bodyguard bringing up the rear.

  This migration of the better part of the high table drew notice where a mere two men had not. A dozen pairs of eyes followed the green kimono and the silken gown, winking with the fairy lights and the gouts of flame from the Grand Marnier. Twenty others noticed their preoccupation, and turned to see.

  What they saw was this: two men—host and honoured guest—standing at the dim reaches of the veranda. Joining them, the small Japanese woman, then the earl’s wife and son. The large figure that had watched over the Prince all night went, too, pausing away from the others.

  And then from stage left: the wine waiter, his face wearing the look of serenity one sees on a statue of the Buddha, or a man profoundly drunk. He was frankly weaving, pursuing the others with his tray, determined to provide them with his wine if it was the last thing he did. The clot of figures gathered around the Prince Regent, heads down in urgent conversation, did not notice.

  The waiter’s upraised tray flared light as his uneven progress caused it to waver first this way, then that. The dinner party held its collective breath, watching aghast as the series of would-be recoveries took their toll on the man’s precarious balance. He lurched in an attempt to compensate, and that was one trial too many for the tray at the end of his fingers. One of the laden glasses teetered, tipped, nearly returned to its place, but finally gave up its argument with gravity, vaulting lightly over the side of the tray. Up it went, over it turned, and down it came, to land with unbelievable precision straight above the back of Lady Darley’s gown. She shrieked at the cold champagne bath, gloved arms snapping up in reaction. One of her outflung hands hit the tray: silver, crystal, and bubbly wine exploded in all directions.

  But the polished silver disk was not finished with its path of destruction. In a move a cinema crew would have laboured over for days, its fluted edge lifted the tiny translator’s elaborate wig from her head, tossing it in the direction of Lord Darley’s face. Reflexively, his hands jerked out. The brisk sequence of pratfalls raised stifled snorts and titters from the tables; those facing the other direction started to turn in their seats. And all might still have been well, except that the waiter’s over-large shoe then caught the edge of a tile. He stumbled, his inebriated waver turning into a heavy forward stagger.

  Monty Pike-Elton’s bray rose up: “That drunken fool is going—”

  The wine waiter tried hard to catch his balance. Instead, he caught Lord Darley.

  The object in Darley’s hand shot into the air as the smaller man slammed him back into the railing, and then—beyond. Incomprehensibly, horribly, the earl and the waiter were simply … gone.

  Embarrassed laughter strangled in fifty throats. I rose, my nails biting into Holmes’ sleeve as I waited for that quizzical face to pop up over the edge again. And waited. Electrified silence stretched unbearably; hands remained frozen mid-air.

  And then the first woman screamed.

  The Prince Regent disappeared long before the police arrived, bundled away by his translator, leaving behind the bodyguard. Who, it turned out, had seen remarkably little of anything.

  Few of the guests noticed how deftly the translator had snatched the earl’s dropped object from its trajectory. None of them saw her press it into the Prince’s hand, nor did they see how closely he clutched a dark rectangular shape in one hand and a white envelope in the other. She hurried him towards the stairway, but His Highness was not the only one to make a hasty and discreet exit. Those who remained were busy pushing forward to see the two figures tangled together in the garden below. The reactions of the people who rushed out to assist made it clear that both were dead. The earl’s neck, it turned out, was broken, even though the waiter appeared to have landed first. One brilliantly-shined shoe gleamed in the garden lights from a drift of shed blossoms, twenty feet away.

  Talk ran wild through the city for a few days, particularly among the less inhibited Western community. But when the newspapers said nothing, and when it was given to understand that the Prince had in fact left some time before the accident, that it was his bodyguard everyone had seen speaking with Lord Darley, not Hirohito himself, the talk subsided.

  No one could provide a name for the drunken waiter. A terrible accident. The humiliated management of the Imperial Hotel prostrated themselves in all directions, and quietly tore up the sizeable bill for the Darley stay. Three days after the incident, the two remaining members of the family quietly sailed away. In the end, Lady Darley and the new earl took the old earl’s body with them: they had been mysteriously unable to obtain a Japanese burial permit.

  Holmes and I moved out of the Imperial that same night, to a lovely quiet traditional ryokan just outside the geisha district. There, on Sunday morning, an invitation was delivered, by a uniformed footman who walked across our tatami in stockinged feet to deliver the ornately calligraphed missive. He bowed, took a few steps backwards, bowed again, and stood waiting. Lacking a gold-and-ivory letter opener, Holmes thrust his thumb under the flap of the suede-textured envelope. Several layers later, he came to the meat of the matter.

  “We are invited to call upon the Prince Regent at his home, at two this afternoon.”

  “If he tries to give us a medal I’m going to throw it in his face,” I said. The corners of my eyes kept catching on objects they imagined to be shiny black shoes.

  “You will not.”

  “Holmes, you go.”

  His grey eyes held mine. “Sato-san might have been the closest that young man had to a friend.”

  After a minute, I sighed. “Two o’clock is fine.”

  The Palace was a short walk away, although once we had shown the guards the invitation and p
roved that we were neither assassins nor, worse, photographers, the walk up the long drive from the street took almost as long. The Akasaka Palace was a vast neo-Baroque monstrosity built for the Prince Regent fifteen years earlier. Together with the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo now had a complete set of lessons in the things to avoid in Western architecture.

  Up the steps, through the columns, up to the door, through echoing marble and several hundredweight of gilt into a room that would have pleased that other Sun King, Louis. We were parked in a room that looked about as Japanese as I did, with painted ceiling, gilded swags on every exposed inch of plaster, and a pair of massive crystal chandeliers. I eyed them, considering the nature of earthquakes, and declined the damask-and-gilt chairs that lay beneath.

  I anticipated a long wait, but to my surprise, in under a minute the door came open.

  Looking very small and pale, Haruki Sato stepped in. The muted cotton fabric of her kimono instantly shifted the room from merely gaudy to frankly vulgar.

  I was pleased when she led us outside, into the gardens.

  The moment we turned down the manicured paths, the Palace and the city beyond faded from all awareness. Here, it was all about the shape of the patches of lawn among the trees, the descent of the tiny stream, the odour of moss, and the intense emerald and scarlet of the unfurling maple leaves.

  And above all, the cherry blossoms.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “About your father.”

  “You should not be. He was privileged to serve his Prince. And unless the afterlife is a cruel place, his body no longer causes him pain.”

  We walked, pausing on a bridge over a pond. Haruki-san pulled a bit of rice-cake out of her sleeve’s pocket and crumbled it over the water. A swirl of enormous, brilliant orange and silver carp rose from the muddy depths, all jewelled scales and wide mouths scooping up the crumbs. When the bits were gone and the fish dispersed again, we, too, went on, still in silence.

  Around the next corner, Prince Hirohito was seated upon a silken carpet among a stand of blossoming cherry that would have made Hiroshige weep. To one side was a beautifully woven rectangular basket, its top shut. The Prince was wearing a kimono, rather than the Western dress he preferred; a few petals had floated onto his shoulders and hair.