He looked back at her. Lestrade had known this woman most of his life, as had his father before him. Nearing seventy, must be, but the kind of woman who’d keep her backbone until she was tucked in her coffin. Mrs Clara Hudson was not one to display her grief, not one whose face would show what it felt like to scrub up the blood of a woman she’d raised like a daughter.
For a man who claimed not to care much for women, Mr Holmes sure found some strong ones.
“Yes,” he said gently. “I think we’re finished. I’m leaving a constable here. Ask him to help you when you’re ready.”
“That won’t be necessary, Chief Inspector. My knees are quite up to the task.”
And your spirit, Lestrade did not say. “As you like. In any case, there’ll be a man here. Oh, and we’ll be placing a tap on the telephone line, in case a ransom demand comes. That means the exchange will be watching your calls,” he explained, “and we’ll listen to anything of interest. We might be able to trace its source.”
Well, she thought as she locked the door behind him, it’s a good thing I already talked to Billy.
Outside on the gravel drive, Lestrade had a word with the men, dispatching some of them back to Eastbourne, giving orders to the one who would keep watch. Before climbing into his car, he glanced back at the house and saw Mrs Hudson’s figure just inside the bay window, her back to him. The aged shoulders were clenched, the white head bent to study the sitting-room floor. A motion from higher up caught his eye: the breeze tugging a dust-cloth, left hanging from an upstairs windowsill. Sure sign of the proud housekeeper’s distraction, that she’d laid it there to dry in the sun, and forgot.
The Chief Inspector climbed into his motorcar and told the driver to take him to Eastbourne.
—
When the police detective had left, Mrs Hudson stood for a long time, staring down at the two pools of blood. The smaller one was completely dry now; the larger one, crimson at first sight, had gone a sickly red-brown. The second time in her life she’d stood over a loved one’s drying blood and known herself responsible.
For if this was not Mary’s, then where was the girl?
And if it was not the fault of Clara Hudson, whose was it?
Clara Hudson: a woman with a history of failure and crime, dragged from her moral gutters and shown how to stand upright—and this was how she repaid him? First bringing her past to his door, then being away when it arrived? My fault.
She picked up the constable’s bucket and filled it with fresh water, then got on her knees to finish the destruction of the footprints. She worked numbly, keeping thoughts at bay by an intense focus on the work: wiping and rubbing with the rag, emptying the bucket whenever the water took on a trace of pink, using a tooth-brush to scrub the last traces from the cracks in the floorboards.
It took hours. Every time she thought of Mary—Dead? Dying? Bound and gagged in a cellar somewhere?—she scrubbed the harder. My fault, whispered the brush. My fault my fault my fault my—
The telephone blared through the silent house. She dropped the brush and tried to rise, gasping at the bolt of pain. At the second ring, she managed to get to her feet, and picked up the earpiece on the third.
Her voice was none too certain.
“Clara, dear, is that you?” the earpiece asked.
She sat down, hard, on the little bench beside the door. Her head was spinning.
“Clara?”
Her arm moved to lay the receiver back on its stand, but she caught herself. Clearing her throat, she summoned Mrs Hudson’s voice. “Hello, Ivy, I was dusting, and must have breathed some in. I’d love to have a chat, but I was just…look, my hands are a bit full just at the moment, can I ring you back in a day or two? Good, take care.”
She hung up, silencing Ivy’s voice from the earpiece. She rested for a moment, but when her thoughts resumed their downward spiral, she got stiffly up and went to change the water in the bucket.
She stopped cleaning at the very edge of the dull, dry blood. Arms, shoulders, spine, hips: all on fire, all grating and stiff. She had to use the settee to pull herself upright like someone in her nineties, and wondered if she was going to cry again.
No: perhaps not.
She retreated to the kitchen, closing the door to the sitting room, wishing she could close the door on her own thoughts as easily.
(myfaultmyfaultmyfaultmy—)
Would it be hours, or days, before help arrived? She could scrub no more, not on her knees, but there were other ways to keep busy.
Through that night and into the next morning, she employed most of those ways. She polished the old house down to the bone, leaving her so exhausted, she even managed a little sleep in Thursday’s pre-dawn hours.
The house was so damned silent.
She cleaned: stove, tiles, windows, ceiling.
She cleared: pantry, spice cabinet, the backs of her cupboards, the depths of her wardrobe and chest of drawers, ending up with two boxes and three pillow-cases of items for the church sales.
She baked: six loaves of bread, three pies, and several batches of shortbread to pack up and send to Dr Watson, currently in…New York, was it? She ate none of it, forcing down half an egg and some dry toast.
She mended everything she could find, laundered all she could lay hands on, polished the silver and the crystal.
Three times, she approached the garden-party strawberries, intending to cook them into preserves, and three times she let the cloth drop over them again, unable to accept the finality of it.
Thursday morning, twenty-two hours after she had come home to blood on her floor, the waiting ended. She was at the front door, reassuring the bored constable that his superiors were certain to call him home soon, when she heard the small tick of the kitchen door closing. She ended the conversation quickly, telling the young man that she would bring him a sandwich later on, and hurried through the sitting room to the kitchen.
It was empty, but the door to her quarters was ajar.
She paused long enough to light a low flame under the kettle: one thing Clara Hudson had learned from the past forty-five years was that any catastrophe could be softened by tea.
Mr Holmes stood in the centre of her private sitting room, his body braced like a soldier awaiting the over-the-top whistle.
“Mrs Hudson, what is it?”
The question told her how he’d heard: if Billy had found him, he’d know already.
“You saw the notice in the papers?” she asked.
“The agony column, yes. And then your dusting cloth signal at the upstairs window. What has happened?”
There was no softening it. “It’s Mary.”
A person who did not know him would have seen no reaction. Certainly his face revealed nothing. But Clara Hudson had known Sherlock Holmes, man and boy, for forty-six years. She had lived with him, nursed his wounds, cooked his meals, worked at his side: she felt the man’s shock as if his bones were her own. His long, rigid body seemed to falter, like the moment before a sawn-through tree began to teeter, and she hastened to prop him up with what little information she had. “When Patrick and I came home from market yesterday, she was missing. There was blood on the sitting-room floor, and her little knife—a knife that looks like hers—was sticking out of the wall next to the bay window. Lestrade was here within a few hours, and he’s left a man to watch the place. I didn’t know if you’d want it known that you’d returned, so I left the cloth as warning. His men took the knife, and dozens of photographs.”
At the words “sitting-room floor,” Sherlock Holmes had started to move. She followed him out of her rooms and through the kitchen, throwing facts in his direction as one would throw floating things to a drowning man. “There were footprints,” she said at his back, “but one of Inspector Lestrade’s men mopped across them before I could stop him. I’m sorry. I did manage to preserve the…well, this.”
He was looking down at the ominous barrier she had left on the floor, an Indian carpet that normally la
y before the fireplace. Another man would have sunk to his knees, or thrown a chair through the window; with Sherlock Holmes, reaction lay in acts of the mind.
“I couldn’t bear to see it,” she admitted. “So I laid the rug across it. I hope that was all right?”
Without reply, he bent to seize two of the rug’s corners, glancing a command at her. She hastened to take hold of the other two, and at his nod, lifted.
The light carpet stuck sickeningly on what lay beneath, the blood not having been as dry as she’d thought. However, even with a few missing patches, the stains were clear. Too clear.
He tossed the rug to one side and squatted down.
The larger of the two blood puddles, on the side nearer the window, was mostly intact. The other was smeared about, where a blanket had been laid down and the body rolled onto it.
“There were drag marks and footprints going towards the door,” she told him. “I did take—”
“What kind of drag marks?” His voice was crisp, even, utterly focussed—what would have sounded cold to someone who did not know him. Clara Hudson heard the panic around the edges.
“Bloody.”
“What made them?” he snapped. “Heels? Chair legs? A wheelbarrow?”
“I think it was a blanket. There’s one missing, that heavy one I keep in the cupboard beneath the stairs, for picnics and such. I put it there after Mary…she said it was too scratchy to—”
He had lowered his face to the floor, as if to breathe in the stain. “The footprints,” he interrupted. “What were they?”
“Shoes, rather than heavy boots. And none of them were complete footprints, only partial marks, to the side of the dragging blanket. As if someone had stepped around to readjust the…body. By the time everything reached the door, it was barely visible.”
He nodded curtly, then shifted to see the stain from another angle. She went on.
“I took some photographs, with your camera, before the police got here, although I don’t imagine they’re as good as Mr Lestrade’s. I also made a sort of drawing, what I could remember of the prints before they got cleaned away.”
He held out his hand for the page she took from her apron pocket, sitting back on his heels to look at it: a crude map of the room, two long ovals to indicate the blood pools, x-marks showing where the footprints had been.
“It’s as best as I could remember.” He raised his eyes to the pristine boards, and she flushed. “Perhaps I should have left the smears, even though…”
That steely grey gaze hadn’t changed since it first stabbed into her in the autumn of 1879. It had rooted her in place then; it did so now.
“I am sorry,” she repeated miserably.
But to her astonishment, he gave a brief nod. “I understand.” He turned back to the stain.
She closed her eyes, fighting for control. “There’s something else,” she started to say, but he was already speaking.
“Was anyone seen, in the area?” he demanded. “I assume the police have performed that much of their function? The Rootley brothers were released a few weeks ago—”
“Mr Holmes—”
“The two of them swore in 1902 that I would pay for their little brother’s death. Benny Rootley certainly would have attracted notice—”
“Mr—”
“—being bald and taller than I. Or, this case I was consulted about last week, there’s some nasty business brewing there that might have—”
“Mr Holmes! It’s not you.”
His eyes snapped up, more at her tone than her words, then followed her gaze towards the fireplace. He rose, more rapidly than most 64-year-old knees could manage, and strode across to see.
When Sherlock Holmes had moved to Sussex, twenty and more years ago, he’d left behind most of his London possessions and many of the habits. One that had persisted, to the irritation of both women in the house, was his habit of fixing any correspondence he deemed important (which, granted, was not much) to the mantelpiece with a jack-knife, lest a stray breeze carry it into the flames. From that knife now hung an object that she had seen the previous morning, the moment she walked back from making the telephone calls. An object she had not drawn to Lestrade’s attention.
An old half-sovereign coin on a golden chain.
“Yours?” Holmes had his nose inches from the coin pendant.
“No. It’s almost identical—it’s even from the Sydney mint—but it’s the wrong year.”
“Where is yours?”
She pulled its twin from the neck of her shirtwaist. His eyes narrowed. “Am I wrong in thinking you haven’t worn that in a very long time?”
“No, you’re right. I keep it in my jewellery box. But before…” Before death; before Baker Street…“When I was young, I used to wear it all the time.” So much so, the hole had elongated and Victoria’s youthful face was barely visible. “It can only be a message. To say that whatever has happened is because of me.”
She waited for him to stoutly deny the link as coincidence, to issue a blanket reassurance. However, Sherlock Holmes may have kept from her any number of things over the years, but had never lied to her, so far as she knew. He did not start now.
One hand plucked the chain from its resting place, the other yanking out the jack-knife. “Clean paper, Mrs Hudson.”
Commands were a refuge and a relief, for them both. She scurried away for some pristine sheets of typing paper, and came back to find him lying on his belly with a magnifying glass, examining the blood. The necklace and jack-knife lay on a clean patch of floorboard to his side. When the paper appeared, he picked up the knife and used its tip to prick something invisible out of the blood, looking at it under the strong glass.
“What colour was the blanket?”
“Several colours, mostly blue.”
“Is any twine missing?”
“Twine?”
“You heard me, Mrs Hudson.”
“There’s a roll of twine—I’ll go look.”
It was a large roll, and far from new. When she came back she had to admit she could not be sure. “It’s possible there’s more gone than when I last used it.”
“What about that dent beneath the edge of the table?”
At last, a question she could answer. “That is new. Lulu and I polished the floor on Tuesday, and it was done after that. Although after I left Wednesday morning, Mary could have—”
“Yes. The drag marks crossed here?”
“They did. I cleaned nothing that the constable hadn’t already, er, obscured.”
Holmes set the magnifying glass to one side. He scraped the tip of the knife through the stain, then wiped the resulting gobbet onto the white surface. He cleaned the blade on his handkerchief, then repeated the act in a different place.
Six times altogether. He discarded the handkerchief atop the Indian rug, then rose, glass in hand again as he stepped to the section of wounded plaster. “This is where the knife was?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He lifted the glass to the gouge, tilted his head in preparation of telling her to bring the lamp, and then looked at the table where it had stood.
“I’ll get a torch,” she said.
She shone its light onto the plaster hole, trying to anticipate his needs. She succeeded in doing so, enough that his next words were not a command. “The lamp could not have caused the dent in the floor?”
“It fell directly into the trash bin. The few bits of it that flew out seemed to be where you—where I would have expected to find them. I took photographs of that, too.”
The bright light revealed a clean divot out of the plaster with a quarter-inch slice at its base. Holmes peered into this so thoroughly, it looked as if he were about to climb inside. Then he stepped back and looked at the floor, seeing one piece of evidence she had managed to preserve: the bits of fallen plaster.
He swept them onto another piece of the paper, twisting it around the pieces.
Then he stood back and studied the three: blo
od, plaster, dent. He stepped to the far side of the blood and looked over the wall and the floor, his hands unconsciously tracing motions on the air. Dissatisfied, he ran his fingertips over the dent, several inches back from the edge of the table, then picked up the torch for another close look at the hole the knife point had left behind.
His frown grew deeper: nothing was making sense. Back around the bloodstain again, toes at its beginning, he looked behind him at the tiny dent.
He grabbed the torch and jack-knife and dove under the table, working his way along the window to the corner bookshelf—where he gave a grunt of satisfaction.
His arm swept the lowest shelf clear of books, twisting around to peer into the depths of it. Mrs Hudson hurried to take the torch, freeing his hands to dig with the knife.
He emerged with a flat grey lump between finger and thumb.
“A bullet!” she exclaimed.
It went into another screw of typing paper.
However, its presence only seemed to trouble him further. He stepped around the table, trading positions, bending down, his fingers playing the air as he tried to envision what had taken place in this spot.
In the end, he made an impatient gesture, and turned away from speculation. “I shall consider the evidence,” he said, and gathered his bits of paper to take up the stairs.
Mrs Hudson put away the unused paper and the big magnifying glass. She thoroughly wiped the table, where he had casually laid the jack-knife. She waited twenty minutes, then followed him up to the laboratory with a laden tray.
He was on a stool at the long table, shirt-sleeves rolled back on his forearms. The accusing necklace lay at his right hand, covered with fine, black powder. She set down the tray beside it. “Did you find any finger-prints?”
“Even schoolboys know to wipe away evidence,” he snarled.
Mrs Hudson poured her employer a cup of tea. She added milk as he liked and sugar as he needed (he would have neither eaten nor drunk since seeing her message in the morning paper) then placed it at his elbow, where he would notice it eventually. As she withdrew her hand, she noticed first that the glass vessel he was staring at so intently contained an alarming quantity of very-liquid blood, and second, that his left wrist was crudely wrapped with a blood-soaked handkerchief, like a suicide whose resolve had failed at the last instant.
The Murder of Mary Russell Page 20