The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  “What did she used to do?” I responded.

  “She’d keep back the last episode of a magazine serial. Have you ever heard anything more idiotic than that? Used to open her big blue eyes and say she had no idea, why did I think she’d taken it? Bitch. My whole life was hints about secrets and these knowing remarks. She kept on right to the end, too, setting it up so I’d only learn the truth when she was gone. Took her two years to die, and all that time I wondered why she had that damned gloating smile on her face.”

  He caught up the book and threw it on top of the doll. Next came a cheap paste brooch. “Two years of gloating over what I’d find in her papers.”

  His eyes came to mine, startling me with a glimpse of very real pain. “What kind of a choice is that, huh? A mother who makes a boy’s life miserable, or a mother who makes it possible, pretending she doesn’t know what’s going on? She used to send me money for my birthday out of her housekeeper’s pay. Sweet old thing made your life pretty comfortable, didn’t she? You and Mr Sherlock bloody Holmes. Funny thing is, I almost burned all those letters, the ones Mum left for me to find. I had this feeling there’d be something there I didn’t want to see. Why else would the old witch have left them for me? Wasn’t until New Year’s Day that I thought, maybe reading them would make for a clean start. So I did. And that’s when I found I’d been living a pack of lies, my whole bloody life.

  “First thing I did was go piss on her grave. Then I sat down with all those letters—endless things, drive you mental with all that nothing—and think about what they meant. Not just what Mum wanted me to see, what she left there to make the rest of my life a mess. But something else that she didn’t see. And I did.

  “So I came here, for a couple of reasons. Business, and personal. One is a bit of punishment. My mother—my actual mother—left me with a hole in my life, so I decided it was time to make holes in a few other lives. Time to stop letting her make other people comfortable.”

  He tossed the brooch up and down in his hand; it glittered in the sunshine.

  “One thing about travel, you got plenty of time to think things over. On the way here, I decided that the best thing, once I’d found what I needed about my piece of business, was just kill her outright and make it look like you two had done it. But then you walked out the door instead of her, and I thought, this is even better. I can give her and him a story missing its ending. You’re going to be the hole, young lady—for the rest of their lives. I’m only sorry they’re both so old.”

  I had been wrong, so very wrong, to assume that this man’s only emotions were masks he donned. Hate was a thing Samuel Hudson knew all about: hot and cold, the urgent and the long-drawn-out. Hate ran through his veins as love did not. And much as he lusted after that mythic passbook, any moment now he would decide it mattered less than just letting the hatred spill over.

  I held my eyes to his, but I was only half listening to his building rant. All my attention was on the gun: muscles set, feet balanced, knees ready to launch myself at him. Waiting for the moment…

  “Yes, I can leave a big hole in those comfortable lives. As for business, well, who needs the bloody money, really? I’ll make my own way, like I always have, other than—well, we’ll see about him. Yeah, I got my secrets, too, don’t I? One thing I learned from that bitch Mum of mine, how to enjoy secrets. Nobody’ll ever never know what happened to you but me. Just like when I give the coppers my information, nobody but me will know where it came from. Oh yes: when the rope goes around her neck, and that high-and-mighty detective Sherlock Holmes is left all alone in this big old house, I’ll be the one who knows why.”

  I was right on the edge, my muscles anticipating his momentary glance at the crate as he launched the brooch at it—and then his words reached me, and I became aware of a sudden internal tilt, as if I’d been building steam up a dead straight track, only to find myself careering off into a spur line. Wait: What information? Which police? What him was there to see about? And which her was meeting a rope? Who—

  My muscles actually spasmed with my brain’s sharp countermanding of orders.

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  He whooped at the reaction he’d startled out of me. “Yes—there! There you have a little sample of what I went through when I read Mum’s letters. I just know she died with that evil smile of hers across her face. Like I will when I look back on this, a long, long time from now. You got no idea, do you?”

  I shrugged, wide-handed, to suggest not only ignorance, but disinterest—and as I’d hoped, he rose to the challenge of besting me.

  “Hah! Clarissa Hudson. Butter wouldn’t melt in the old lady’s mouth. How many years has she been washing your dishes and tidying your messes, and you without a clue what’s under your nose? Not like that husband of yours. He knows. Some of it anyway. And he hasn’t told you a thing, has he?”

  “About what?”

  “Nah, that’s all you get. Let it eat at you. I’ll just say this: when I’m finished with her, Miss Clarissa Hudson will have a date with the executioner.”

  “Her name isn’t Clarissa,” I said automatically.

  “It was.”

  I looked at his face, his stance, searching for delusion.

  All I saw there was the truth.

  Clarissa walked, baby Samuel a warm and contented bundle against her ribs, as the village of Fordingham fell behind her. The rolling countryside looked much like those areas she’d gone to with friends during her so-distant past, eighteen months ago, when she would pack her trunk with silk and wool for a Friday-to-Monday at someone’s country house. The attractions there had been the shooting of birds during the day, the playing of cards in the evenings, and the slipping in and out of bedrooms during the night.

  When did the shooting season end, she wondered? She hoped no one mistook her for a partridge.

  She walked, and walked some more, watching for a tree in the low dry-stone wall, but saw nothing larger than bramble. Once she heard voices behind her, but saw nothing: only countryside, cows, and an endless wall.

  The lowering sky took on shades of purple dusk. Farm labourers were no doubt settled before their hearths, tucking into their laden plates and steaming mugs. She, on the other hand, would find no train out of here before the morning. And the White Hart did not appear to be an inn.

  She cursed her father under her breath, and walked the faster, twice turning to look back at imagined footsteps in the gloom.

  Finally, up ahead, she glimpsed the outline of a tree growing out of the wall. Not that the line of depressed vegetation running off towards a distant copse was anything more emphatic than a rabbit track. Still, this was a tree, and that was a track. As she wavered, caught between the faint appeal of turning back and a grim determination to finish this business, she became aware of a source of light back among the trees.

  With another glance down the empty lane, Clarissa heaved her valise and umbrella over the wall, then gingerly hitched her backside onto the stones and worked her legs over, an awkward process that did the back of her skirts no good at all. Once inside the wall, she squinted upward, then off at the trees. They weren’t far, surely? And Pa could always come back for her things. So she tucked in the edges of her shawl, pulled her cloak over Samuel, and set off along the vague track.

  The last light faded quickly, leaving her all but blind, picking her way along, stopping to loose her cloak from grasping thorns. She stumbled, nearly going to her knees. After that, she inched along, venturing her boot forward in search of rocks and hollows. Her cloak caught, time and again, invisible fingers tugging at the wool. She fought a building panic, cursing the sharp little ripping sounds, swearing aloud at the flicker of light, never any closer.

  Then the rain began.

  By the time she reached the clearing among the trees, she was wild with frustration and pain. A branch had whipped her bonnet into the night, leaving her wet hair tumbling across her face. She was limping from a wrenched ankle. Her
sodden clothing weighed a ton, and her arms and face stung from the tiny assaults of invisible blades as she bent over her armful of child. The dim light became a line, then clearer: lamp-glow through a crack in heavy curtains. Some vestigial recognition that one did not knock on windows drove her around the side of the lonely little house: a faint dark rectangle suggested a door.

  She nearly fell when her toe hit a stone step. Once on the step, she did not even try feeling for a bell-pull, merely pounded the wood with a gloved fist, ignoring the pain.

  No one came. Oh God, she thought. The house was deserted, with nothing but a lantern left to burn in the dark. Her hand fumbled and found the latch, but it stood firm. She gave a sob, her knees going weak in despair—and then came a pale glow along the bottom of the door. It brightened, outlining all four sides, then stopped.

  “Papa?” she called.

  A muffled exclamation came, and the scrape of a bolt. Her father, his face stretched with some emotion that looked like fear, pulled the door open—tentatively at first, then with a yank that had her tumbling in. Never had she been so grateful for the solidity of a man’s hand on her elbow.

  It was a gamekeeper’s cottage, designed for a solitary man. Rough stairs—a ladder, really—led up from one corner, but the ground floor was a single room: two small windows, one of which had the ill-fitting curtains, the other with a long table resting beneath it. The kitchen was nothing but a dry-sink and some shelves with plates and pans, along with a perforated tin food-safe and two large jugs to bring water from an outside pump. The broad fireplace, laid with a roasting jack and hanging kettle, stood behind two greasy armchairs, a foot-stool, and an ancient, burn-spotted carpet. A moth-chewed Tartan travelling rug on one chair and a tin mug on the three-legged stool beside it showed where Hudson had been sitting. A stack of dry wood was arranged on the stone hearth. The air inside was so icy, Clarissa could see her breath. She began to shudder.

  “Do light the fire, Papa, I’m freezing. And I hope you have something to eat here.”

  Instead of either food or fire, he moved to a bottle sitting on the long table and splashed some unidentifiable liquid into a tin cup, holding it out to her. It stank of raw whisky.

  “I don’t like to raise a smoke when people are about,” he said. “The place is supposed to be empty.”

  “Then you should pull the curtains together,” she told him. “Anyway, who would there be? We’re in the back of beyond, and it’s pouring.” She took a swallow, stifled a choke, and downed another gulp.

  He hastened to overlap the curtain edges, then relented, setting a match to a handful of dry kindling. When her numb skin began to feel warmth, she took off her heavy cloak, hanging it on a fireside peg to drip.

  Hudson turned with a plate holding a slab of cheese and dry biscuits he’d fetched from the food-safe, and nearly dropped it. “What’s that?”

  “ ‘That’ is your grandson,” she snapped. “What did you think, I’d come away and leave him with some London childminder?”

  “A son? I didn’t know…”

  “You thought maybe I’d lost the brat? Always the caring Pa, weren’t you?”

  “Let me see him.” She wanted to snatch Samuel away, but he was stretching in her arms, yawning and blinking in the light. “Hello, little man,” the proud grandfather cooed. “Why, Clarrie, he looks like me!”

  She turned away, dropping to the edge of the chair to settle the infant defiantly to her breast, forcing her father to retreat.

  Lots of infants had blue eyes. And Samuel’s hair would darken with time, it was sure to.

  Hudson lowered himself into the other chair, the taut lines of his face going soft as he stole glances at the maternal scene. He had put on weight since June, she saw, and was wearing a new suit, with a shirt of excellent linen. However, his collar was decidedly grubby, and his hair was in need of a trim. Something had kicked him from a position of—if not luxury, at least comfort, in the past couple of weeks. So much for old friends.

  She washed down the last biscuit with a swallow of raw alcohol, and drew breath. “All right. Tell me what’s happened.”

  He frowned into his cup. “Well, Clarrie, it’s complicated.”

  “Papa, I’m not about to walk back to Fordingham in the dark, so we have till morning. When I saw you last, you were heading off to talk to a friend. Or, not a friend. He’s turned you out?”

  “Oh, a little more than that. Seems he’s died.”

  Mr Holmes was right, then. “Oh, Papa, what have you done?”

  “Not a thing! I swear, not to him, he just…died. Weak heart, I’d guess.”

  “But you were there.”

  “Not even that. I was long gone.”

  “Papa, please, just start at the beginning. Where did you go, after I…”

  “Turned your father out onto the streets?”

  “After I told you I couldn’t work with you until you repaid Mr Bishop,” she corrected him.

  His face took on an old, familiar expression, the one that said he wanted to talk her into something without telling her what it was. And as if that wasn’t enough of a breath from childhood, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tangle of waxed cord in a bilious colour of green. His deft fingers teased the ends free and began to form knots, as if under their own volition, a thing she’d seen him do a thousand times in her childhood, when he was thinking—but not, she realised, since they’d come to England.

  “I been in a place called Donnithorpe, up in Norfolk. Bloke I knew, back before you were born. We were—well, let’s say we were on the same boat together, out to Australia. He’d turned things around for himself, him and this other cove name of Evans—Beddoes, he is now. The two of them made their fortune in the gold fields, came back here to England, set up like rich colonials—one of ’em, him in Norfolk who called himself Mr Trevor, got himself made magistrate, if you can believe that! A man who’d sailed off to Botany Bay in chains.”

  “He was transported?”

  “That he was. And he called me the criminal!” His laugh was a harsh noise in the small room. Clarissa unconsciously pulled Samuel closer to her chest.

  “So, what? You went up to Norfolk threatening to turn him in, this Trevor? Surely he’d paid his debt?”

  “Not to me he hadn’t. And his high-and-mighty neighbours might not be so keen on old Trevor if they knew how he’d got his start. So I invited him to give me a berth for a time. First he wanted to make me a gardener—you can imagine how that turned out. I let him make me butler instead, which meant I could sit in front of the fire and sample his port for him, bring down the odd bird for the supper table. It all went fine for a while, until the son got all high-and-mighty. Little Victor Trevor,” he sneered. “Didn’t like his papa’s old shipmate, embarrassed him in front of his friends. Still took him all summer to nerve himself up to say anything.”

  “Oh, Pa,” she said sadly.

  “What? Trumped-up thief, has the nerve to treat me like dirt? Then when his son manhandles me out of the room and won’t so much as apologise for it—well, I knew the time had come to push matters. I told old Trevor I was coming down to Hampshire to see his partner, Evans—Beddoes, he was calling himself, didn’t want people wondering if he might be Evans the forger. I figured if I played the two off against each other, one or the other of ’em would break.

  “But before I did, Trevor and I had a little talk about…well, things.” He shot her a glance and went back to his knots. “Nothing important, just, information. We’ll have to see how it pans out. Anyway, his son threw me out, and I came down here to tell Beddoes that if he didn’t want the world to know about the old Gloria Scott, he needs to find me some ready cash.” He stopped, concentrating on the work his fingers were doing.

  An excited tale of information leading to treasure was by itself a familiar childhood ritual, but at her father’s close focus on the work, her eyes narrowed. “Then what?”

  “Well, Beddoes told me that Trevor dropped dead. He�
��d just heard.”

  “Oh, Papa.”

  “Nothing to do with me.” He did not look up.

  “Papa, what are you not telling me?”

  His eyebrows rose in an utterly transparent act of innocence, belied by the gaze that stayed fixed on his knots. “Nothing at all, dearie.”

  “Papa, there’s something.”

  He dropped the act, and turned on her a crooked smile. “Ah, Clarrie, you know me too well. You’re right, something happened. I’m not going to tell you what, not until it’s sure and done, but it changes things, all the way down the line. I got to get back to Sydney, and I can’t do it by honest work—last year, on that stinking tramp steamer, it nearly broke me. Your old man’s getting too tired for that. So I need a grubstake, that’s all. Just the cost of getting to Australia, and I’m gone.”

  “If I had it, Papa, I’d give it to you.”

  He completely missed the grim edge to her promise, and gave her a proud look. “I know you would, honey, but honest, I can get it from Beddoes. I just need to get to him.”

  “He wasn’t at home?”

  “Oh, he was, and I told him what I needed. I gave him the warning, and then I went away—had to sleep rough, damn the man. Anyway, next day I went back to tighten the screws, but the bloody butler wouldn’t let me in, can you believe it? That riled me mighty, as you can imagine. So I trotted around the house to where Beddoes had his library and shouted through the window that I’d told all, that the coppers were coming to get him, that he was ruined.”

  “Why on earth did you do that?” The most important rule of all when it came to Marks was not to push a man to the brink.

  “Ah, Clarrie girl, I was angry. And hungry and my bones ached.”

  “But—”

  “I wasn’t being completely stupid, not your old Pa! I figured I’d give him the next day to get himself into a righteous stew over it, and then I’d go back at night and say, ‘Just fooling, I didn’t tell anyone, but now you see how you’d feel if it was for real. So unless you get out your wallet…’ ”