The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  “What have you done to yourself?” she exclaimed.

  “Testing a theory.”

  “What, that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t require blood in his veins like a mere mortal?” She took his hand and stretched it onto the high table, wincing as she loosened the sodden cloth.

  “Don’t move that,” she ordered, and went for the medical kit, stocked for any emergency short of replacing an organ. She cleaned the arm of blood, and was relieved to find that his blade had missed major vessels and tendons. “This should have stitches,” she told him.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  But the wound seemed to be clotting already, and she had no wish to sew through her employer’s flesh. Instead, she took out the narrow adhesive. “What on earth were you thinking?” she asked.

  He glanced at the wrist, and seemed surprised at what he saw there. “I needed blood. Fresh blood. Or rather, its serum.”

  “And you couldn’t wait to do it properly?”

  She had once assisted in drawing blood for some experiment or other, and told him in no uncertain terms that she did not wish to do so again. After that, he’d learned to do it himself.

  “I was in a hurry.”

  “And if you’d gone light-headed from—” All the talk about blood was making her feel queasy. “Never mind. Let me bind it, and see if it’ll hold.”

  He allowed her to clean and tape his arm, all his attention divided between the clock on the wall and the flask before him. The muscles beneath her fingers felt so taut, she imagined his very bones were creaking. Adhesive drew together the lips of the wound. As she waited to see if it would suffice, she could not help wondering if she would end up drugging his supper, to force his body to take relief from his mind’s demands. She’d done so twice before over the years, when she and Dr Watson had feared for the man’s health.

  She wished the Doctor were here, or even Billy. But Dr Watson was away for another month, and she had already told Billy that she needed him less than she needed the information he could get.

  Which left her with her time-tested means of distracting the man: permit him the release of words.

  “What is this you’re doing?” she asked.

  Predictably, his face twitched in irritation, but the pressure was great enough that a lecture began to spill out. “I am waiting for the blood to clot. When it has, I shall extract its serum. Just an hypothesis, you understand, although I believe that dry blood can be restored to some degree…”

  The adhesive seemed to be holding. She laid down gauze and then bound the arm, letting him explain, understanding only that he was doing the one thing he could think of, the thing he had spent his life doing: searching for the truth among facts.

  After a time, his words ran down. She tied off the ends of the bandage, hoping it wasn’t too tight. When the clock’s minute hand made a tick forward, Holmes reached for the small flask. He tipped it gently. The substance quivered but held, like tomato aspic that is almost set—and with that, Mrs Hudson’s normally phlegmatic stomach tipped along with the beaker. She took a quick step back from the table; reminded of her presence, he shot her a glance like a dagger.

  “I’ll go,” she told him. “Drink your tea, Mr Holmes. Just not…that other.”

  She picked up his coat, discarded on the floor at the base of the laboratory table, then stopped at the sound of his voice.

  “Mrs Hudson, are you…Is there anything you need?”

  She stared at him in astonishment.

  “It could not have been easy,” he said. “Coming in to find…what you did.”

  Slowly, she shook her head. “The only thing either of us needs is for you to find Mary,” she told him, and left him to his work.

  —

  There was no cleaning left to be done. When the choice came down to tears, strong drink, or potatoes, one chooses potatoes.

  She was gouging the eyes out of a heap of the vegetables, bought for the garden party, when a bellow came that began with her name and went rapidly indistinguishable. The mangled lump dropped from her hands and she bolted up the stairs.

  “What is it?” she asked, somewhat breathless.

  “Your hearing is going, Mrs Hudson,” he snapped, eyes glued to his microscope. “I said, tell Lestrade I need Russell’s knife. And ask if it had any fingerprints. I can only hope their laboratory didn’t ruin the evidence.”

  “You don’t mind if he knows you are here, then?”

  “No.”

  “Very well. But, sir, that blood. Is it…is it hers?”

  He made her wait until he’d finished dripping some liquid onto a slide. He looked up, noticing the untouched cup of tea. The milk lay in a skin across the top, but he picked it up anyway.

  “Oh, don’t drink that,” she exclaimed, “I’ll make a fresh pot.”

  He swallowed, then he set down the cup with a grimace and reached for the glass pipette. “I’ve only processed one sample. That one is type B. Russell’s blood type.”

  After a moment, she said, “Someone’s been through my desk.”

  His eyes rose.

  “It wasn’t Mary: whoever it was took my bank passbook. And something I forgot to mention, since it seemed to have nothing to do with matters, but when Patrick and I returned from market yesterday, the saucer from my mother’s tea-cup that I kept near the mirror was on the floor. I thought it had just fallen.”

  “Nothing else missing?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Go and search,” he said.

  She left him to his work.

  Unusually, when he came down the stairs an hour later, he brought the tea tray with him. She was at the sink, drying a batch of glasses that had not needed washing, and listened to the approaching rattle. Tidiness was rarely a good sign with Mr Holmes: it indicated a determination to do for himself. Was she about to be fired? Arrested?

  “The Chief Inspector said he would come straightaway,” she told him as he came in. She straightened the corners of the dish-towel on its rack, and turned to face him. “I also looked for other signs of disturbance. Someone may have sat in my chair, the one near the window; I think the throw-pillow was moved. And I found that among the papers on the sitting-room table.”

  That was a very battered page from Dombey and Son.

  “It’s from that box of my sister’s things that Samuel sent me, after she died. I put it under the stairs months ago. November, it was. The contents were tidy when I left them, but they’re now somewhat at odds. That could have happened at any time, if the box fell over when someone moved it around. Nothing else appears to be missing.”

  He studied the page, and recited, “Blanket, passbook, twine, saucer. Necklace.”

  “What have you learned?” she asked.

  His jaw worked. “My theory that one might reinvigorate dried blood with fresh serum proved—”

  “Is it Mary’s?”

  He shifted the cup on the tray. “Nine or ten percent of the population—”

  “Mr Holmes. Is it hers?”

  He could not meet her eyes. “I do not know. All I can say for certain is that all six samples react as type B.”

  Mrs Hudson’s hands had decided to brace themselves against the side of the table. “Sir, how much…Was there actually as much as it seemed? Spread all about like that, it’s hard…”

  “Without knowing how much blood might have been absorbed by clothing, one can only—” A retreat to the discourse mode had allowed his eyes to come up, but the look on her face stopped him. When he resumed, his voice was cold, precise. “Two or three pints. A person of Russell’s mass has between eight and nine. With a thirty percent blood loss, a person goes into shock and requires urgent treatment. The patient would be extremely light-headed and possibly unconscious. However, one must also take into account the marked fading of the blood trail as this body was pulled across the floor. Even with a blanket beneath, it would have leaked considerably more if the wound had not been staunched in some manner. Which suggest
s that—Mrs Hudson, sit!”

  She lowered herself into the chair, clutching the edges of the table as her vision faded. “Perhaps…” She swallowed, tried again. “Is there any of that tea left?”

  A cup of tepid, too-sweet, tannin-rich tea later, the room became more solid. The word “staunched” stood front and centre in her mind. “You think she could be alive?”

  “I…” he started. “If…” He cleared his throat. “Someone went to the effort of dragging his victim away instead of simply leaving a body for you to find. There could of course be any number of reasons why—”

  “No,” she broke in. “Don’t tell me. Let me believe in a ransom demand. As you say, the blood might not even be hers.”

  He blinked. “It was the possibility that she is alive that caused you to faint?” he asked. “Why do women find relief a greater burden than fear?”

  His exasperation made for a blessed note of normality, and Mrs Hudson responded in kind. “Perhaps because we have so little experience with relief.” The tart reply was barely off her tongue when she thought, Good Lord, could he have said that—in his current state—to stiffen my backbone? Well, it worked. “You were saying: if her wound was treated?”

  “I was about to say that your description of the trail leading to the door, half-dry footprints and indistinct drag marks, suggests that the wound was staunched in some manner.”

  “I thought…” No. She would not say it, no more than he would: the other reason for a person not bleeding was that their heart had stopped. “Could it in fact have been a kidnapping? It’s only been a day: they could be waiting to send a demand?”

  “Delay is a time-honoured means of building tension,” he agreed, with a clear lack of conviction. He dropped into the chair across from her, taking out his tobacco pouch. For once, she raised no objection: smoke in the kitchen today would be a welcome thing. When the pipe was going, his interrogation began.

  “The blanket. Who knew it was there?”

  “Anyone who looked in the cupboard.”

  “Someone familiar with the house, then?”

  “Not necessarily. Anyone might search under the stairs for a rug or tarpaulin.”

  “Your necklace. Who knew about that?”

  “Anyone who knew me…then. Or someone who had poked about in my jewellery box. There was even a photograph, taken when I was perhaps twelve or thirteen, that showed me wearing it.”

  “Who among those people would be aware that it was significant to you?”

  “It’s only a good-luck charm.”

  “It’s more than that. You have always treasured it above more valuable pieces of jewellery. You used to wear it as you have it now, beneath your clothing. And it is one of the few pieces you still have from…before.”

  It was the closest, in all these years, that Sherlock Holmes had come to talking about her life before Baker Street.

  She sat for a time, digging through distant memories. “My father gave it to me when I was ten, as a memento of our first…Job. We had no money—really none—so a half sovereign meant the difference between eating and going hungry. But even that first day, we brought in enough for dinner without the coin. And since it was from the year I was born—1856—it seemed like an omen. Papa surprised me with it strung on a chain, two or three days later.

  “Alicia would have been seven. The minute she saw it, she wanted it. Well, she wanted anything I had—clothes, toys, food—and I usually gave it to her. But this time, Papa wouldn’t let me. And dear heaven, the tantrum she threw! She moaned about it for days, until he took her out into the harbour for an outing. Because I didn’t get to go, that seemed to satisfy her.”

  He plucked the key element out of her memories. “Your sister was born in 1859?”

  “Yes, why—that other coin! That was the date of the one from the mantelpiece. You think she might have had one, too?”

  “Wouldn’t you have known, if your sister had one like yours?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, perhaps. It depended…”

  “On?” His patience was wearing thin.

  “My sister loved her secrets, and she was very good at keeping them. If she had a necklace like mine, especially if Father had given it to her—”

  “On a day spent out in the Sydney Harbour, perhaps?”

  He could see the answer on her face. “To repeat the question, who knows its true significance?”

  “No one. If anyone noticed, I would just say it was a lucky charm.”

  “Your sister? Your…lover?”

  The thought of Hugh Edmunds playing with the pendant between her breasts could still make her blush, after nearly fifty years. “Not him. But, my sister…”

  “Yes?” Her pause made his voice sharp.

  “I think that if Alicia knew my necklace had meaning, she’d have dropped hints about it. And, Papa would have hesitated to tell her, especially when she was small, because it would be revealing to her what he and I did. It is possible,” she admitted, “that Papa wrote her about it after we’d left Australia. It’s not the sort of thing he would normally commit to paper, but sometimes he wrote her when he’d been drinking.”

  “You would say that your sister knew the necklace had significance to you, but not why?”

  “Yes.”

  “And anyone who saw that childhood photograph would notice it?”

  “Yes, although I’m not sure you could tell what kind of a coin it is.”

  “Someone who found both photograph and necklace might think it had been yours?” he pressed. “Her son, for example?”

  Not your son: that would violate his scrupulous adherence to the vow.

  “He might.”

  “Your sister died last August, I believe?”

  “Yes, some kind of infection in her lungs. And I know what you are thinking.”

  His sceptical glance stung.

  “Mr Holmes, I am nowhere near as clever as Mary, but I have watched you at work for a very long time. When I found…that”—she made a gesture at the adjoining room—“my first telephone call was to Billy, before the police. I told him I had to find you, and asked him to place notices in all the papers. Then I asked him to make urgent enquiries in Sydney, to find out if Samuel is still there. Considering the time it would take for a response, I thought it best to begin matters immediately, rather than wait for you to give the order.”

  The grey eyes blinked. After a minute, he said, “Mrs Hudson, you have again managed to surprise me. Thank you for the tea. I shall be upstairs in the darkroom, developing your photographs.”

  “What shall I tell Mr Lestrade, when he arrives?”

  “That if he comes into the darkroom and spoils the photographs, he will regret it. I shall speak with him when I finish.”

  “And may I…that is, are you finished with the…the bloodstain?”

  He could not control the sideways glance of his eyes towards the sitting-room door, no more than he could control the dread that lay behind them. “I will deal with it,” he said.

  “No. This one is for me to clean.”

  In nearly half a century of life together, two people build a vocabulary of glances and tones, permitting entire conversations that go unspoken. In the end, he rose, and said only, “Yes, I am finished with it.”

  Mrs Hudson was relieved when the door-bell clattered, interrupting her attempts to get the last marks from the floorboards. She stifled a groan as she clambered to her feet, drying her hands on her apron.

  “Come in, Chief Inspector Lestrade. I’ll put the kettle on.” Twenty-eight hours after she had returned from market, and every motion still caused the world to spin a little, every sound gave off an echo of the macabre. But when normality was impossible, one embraced pretence. “Or would you like something stronger?”

  “Tea. Thank you.” The policeman followed her through the house, his steps faltering near the wet spot on the floor. Miss Russell had not always made his life easy, but that had little to do with affection, or respect. />
  “Did you have any lunch?” The housekeeper reached for the clean towel she’d left across the tray of sandwiches she’d made for Mr Holmes to ignore.

  “I told the wife I’d be home, thanks, so just the tea for now. Well, all right, I could probably…” He sat at the scrubbed deal table and reached for a thick triangle of bread and cheese. “Any word from Mr Holmes?”

  Just then, the sound of a distant crash came from upstairs.

  “What the—” He stopped at the touch of her hand. The two kept a tense silence for a full minute before Mrs Hudson eased back on her chair.

  “He is upstairs—and by the sound of it, having no luck.” She gave him a cheerless smile. “The last time he threw something across the laboratory was 1905. We had to call in the fire brigade.”

  Lestrade’s mouth would have dropped, had it not been full of food. He swallowed hastily. “Mrs Hudson, I specifically told you to ring the Eastbourne station the moment he showed up.”

  “Yes. However, he wished to work without distraction. I imagine that he will be down shortly.” When Lestrade made to set down his impromptu meal, she hardened her voice to a landlady’s no-nonsense tones. “Mr Holmes said to permit no interruptions, even from you. And in any event,” she added in more sympathetic tones, “if he’s as furious as it sounds, you’ll want to give him time to collect himself.”

  Lestrade had felt the edge of Holmes’ cold wrath too many times over the years to ignore the warning, and permitted her to distract him with a question about his children. A few minutes later, as he showed signs of summoning the courage to beard a lion in his den, they heard the noise of feet on the stairs.

  “Ah,” she said unnecessarily, “here he comes.”

  Lestrade thrust out his hand when the older man came in. “Mr Holmes, how are you holding up? I was terribly—”

  “Lestrade, your constables are a menace. Where’s the knife? Mrs Hudson, have you no lights in this room?”