The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  “The Gloria Scott simply disappeared: no one knew of her fate apart from the survivors. And it was unlikely that a country gentleman and magistrate would face arrest for a twenty-five-year-old crime. Embarrassment, yes, and no doubt a fine, but not enough to cause a man to pack his trunks and run for it.”

  “Had Hudson in fact told the police?”

  “No, it was merely a threat, to extort money. I, however, informed Beddoes that Hudson was not the only man to know of his sins, and suggested that he make use of that ticket to America.”

  “It couldn’t be him, could it? Who…”

  “Came to Sussex on Wednesday? Beddoes himself would be in his nineties, if he’s still alive. He had no legitimate children, hence the lack of a clear inheritance to the estate, but when I last looked, there was an American grandson who appeared to be following in the family tradition. In Chicago, I believe, where this experiment in the prohibition of liquor looks to be taking a very bad turn.”

  “What about the other family? The one you were friends with?”

  “Ah yes, Victor Trevor’s dog certainly seized on more than my ankle, that Sunday morning. Victor never got over the revelation of his father’s history. He did manage to marry and beget a son before going off to India, but that was the extent of his sociability. The son is still alive, I believe.”

  The detective shifted around to retrieve his tobacco pouch, and switched on the little map-light. “Do you know, Billy, it’s a good thing I never believed in omens, or the Gloria Scott case would have turned me against detecting before I started. It was a farce, that began with a dog bite and ended with failure: my client died and my friend lost his faith in humanity; I buried the villain and compounded my first felony by saying nothing. I drove away a man I suspected of forgery, rather than confronting that crime.

  “The case ate at me for years. I even conducted a search for Jack Prendergast’s missing fortune, thinking that some portion of it might have stayed in England. But everything I found pointed to his having taken the fortunes of six families with him to the ocean floor. And it’s not over yet: I lacked the courage to dig that bullet out of Hudson, in 1879, so the police now have the thing. Utter failure, start to finish.” He jabbed his cleaning tool at the pipe with irritation. “The only good things that came from it were you and Mrs Hudson.”

  Startled, Billy looked sideways, but Holmes was intent on his work. It took a minute before the younger man’s thoughts could retrieve their direction. “Hudson killed Victor Trevor’s father, is that right?”

  “To be precise, he made threats that terrified the old man into an early grave. Hudson’s true crime was blackmail, not murder.”

  “And, Hudson himself. Was it you, who…”

  “No,” Holmes said gently. “She shot him herself.”

  “I thought so. I was behind her, so I only heard the sounds. And afterwards, I was never really sure. It seemed like some kind of a fever-dream. Guns, the woods. You. And then later…I didn’t make your promise, but I never wanted to ask her about it.”

  “She’d have answered if you had.”

  “I know. I suppose I was afraid.”

  “Of her?” Holmes sounded astonished.

  “Of you.”

  Holmes gave a shake of the head, and began to press tobacco into the bowl.

  “Because she was,” Billy explained. “Afraid of you, that is. Not that she ever said, but she was always different when you were in the room. Formal. Careful, like you are around a loaded gun. Did you…” He stopped, trying to find a shape for the next question. The pipe was going at last, but Holmes did not help him, merely filled the car with smoke. In the end, Billy blurted it out. “Has she worked for you all these years because of some kind of…blackmail?”

  A spray of burning tobacco flew into the air, followed by furious slaps and the stench of scorched wool. Once Holmes was sure he was not about to go up in flames, he turned to the driver in a fury. “Blackmail! Do you not know me at all, Mr Mudd? Could you possibly be unaware that of all the world’s sins—”

  That the car did not swerve off the road at Holmes’ outburst was proof that Billy knew what the impact of his words would be. He kept his eyes on the road, although his knuckles had gone somewhat pale beneath the skin.

  “Yes, sir, I am aware of that,” he said evenly. “But you cannot deny that you have some kind of hold over her, and have done since the day she and I came back from Australia. If you say it’s not blackmail, I accept that. But I can’t help wondering just what it is.”

  Holmes let loose a bitter laugh. “And you imagine I set her up in Baker Street for my convenience? Because it made my life so carefree? Lad, it took years before I could feel at all certain that she wasn’t going to lace my supper with poison.”

  “Then why?” Billy asked. “Why did you…why?”

  After a minute, Holmes bent down to pat around the floorboards for his pipe. Billy surreptitiously flexed his hands on the wheel, and started to breathe again.

  “Call it parole,” Holmes answered, when he’d got the tobacco burning. “A French word indicating that a prisoner has given his pledge, that he would thenceforth walk a straight line. A prisoner is granted probation—a period of testing—to prove that he is not hopelessly corrupt, and that freedom under supervision might return him to a sense of morality.

  “When I sent your…guardian to Australia, it was a clear and unfettered offer of freedom. She chose to return. She chose to enter into the agreement I had offered: that her past in all its specifics would be put behind her. Behind both of us, for that matter. I vowed that I would never mention it, never seek any form of punishment whatsoever, so long as she continued to walk that straight line. Your presence did complicate matters, but after a considerable negotiation, I agreed to extend her parole over you. I was not convinced that London would not tempt you, that the adventure and apparent ease of conquest offered by The Bishop and his ilk wouldn’t pull you back in. But you never let her down. Or me.”

  At that, Billy did swerve a little before catching at the wheel. “I never knew. That she’d had to ‘negotiate’ for me to stay.”

  “I was young, and convinced of my rightness.”

  “But…”

  “Yes?”

  “The baby. Little Samuel. Leaving him behind hurt her. Bad.”

  Miles passed before Holmes responded. “I was young,” he said again. “I thought a mother’s child would be her weakness. I hoped to force her to stand alone. I may have been wrong.

  “It also occurs to me that, having been responsible for their separation, I may be the one her son is out to punish.”

  —

  Traffic along the coastal roads was heavy, causing Billy to curse day-trippers and inexpensive petrol. It was quite dark when they passed through East Dean, head-lamps lit against the wandering sheep—and, as they got closer, the house’s two guards, first Lestrade’s constable, then Patrick Mason with his bird gun. Mrs Hudson had the front door open before Billy had set the hand-brake, but one look at her posture told the two men that there had been no telephone call. No ransom demand. No news.

  The house was redolent with all the comfort a housekeeper could summon: warmth and light and odours from the kitchen that, even in his bone-weary state, set Billy’s mouth to watering. She pressed strong drink into their hands, demanded that both men get themselves around a bowl of thick soup and a slice of fresh bread, then marched them both to their beds. Billy she shoved into the guest room, telling him that she had already telephoned to his wife in London, who did not expect him back tonight. Then she did the same with Holmes: not trusting him to abstain from the temptations of the laboratory, she accompanied him to his bedroom door and saw it shut before she would go downstairs.

  Such was Holmes’ state that he permitted it.

  Not so long ago, he reflected, forty hours without sleep would have been nothing…He eyed the bed (the empty bed) and decided that three hours of rest might restore some degree of wit, and energy.<
br />
  Maybe four.

  —

  At 3:20 the following morning, Saturday the 16th of May—a day intended for garden parties with strawberries and cream—the silence of the old stone villa was shattered by a bellow from the top of the stairs.

  “Mrs Hudson!”

  The most long-suffering housekeeper in all of Sussex fought her way out of the bedclothes’ confines, struggled into her dressing gown, flung open her door—to come face to face with Holmes, equally dishevelled and dishabille. “Why did you not give me these the instant I returned?” he demanded.

  She pulled back to focus on the sheaf of pages beneath her nose. “What are those?”

  “The photographs! What is wrong with you, woman?”

  “Yes,” said another voice. “What is wrong?”

  Billy’s brown cheek bore seams from the pillow, having apparently not moved since dropping face-down onto the guest-room bed.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs Hudson said. “However, clearly this calls for tea and—”

  “Tea!” Holmes’ objection was very near to a shout, and he loomed above her.

  Mrs Hudson drew herself up in all her six years of superior age, fixing him with one dark eye. “Mr Holmes, you are standing in my bedroom, at some unearthly hour, with what clearly is going to require some attention. Please leave. I shall come into the kitchen when I am decent.”

  He gaped at her. Then, to Billy’s astonishment, Sherlock Holmes turned obediently and went out. He even ran water into the kettle and placed it over the flame before dropping the sheaf of photographs onto the work-table and splaying them along it like a deck of cards.

  Billy went to look over his shoulder: the police photographs of the scene. His gaze dwelt on the sickening black stain on the floor, smeared and trodden about—but that was not where Holmes’ interest lay. Instead, he had his magnifying glass over one that showed the knife protruding from the wall.

  When Mrs Hudson came in—having donned clothing and combed her hair in something under three minutes, although her feet were in bed-slippers—Holmes snatched up the photograph to thrust at her. She ignored him in favour of the tea caddy and a couple of brisk orders to Billy that sped matters along.

  When the drink was brewed and a symbolic first sip taken, she returned her cup to its saucer and accepted the photograph.

  “That’s Mary’s knife, in the wall,” she said.

  “But look at it!”

  “What am I not seeing?” she asked patiently.

  “The angle. Don’t go by the photograph, cameras lie. Is that what you saw? Actually saw?”

  “A knife, sticking out of the wall? Yes.”

  “No! The angle, Mrs Hudson! It’s all in the angles. From the start the evidence contradicted itself—the dent, the bullet, and the knife. Think, woman. You have seen Russell practice a thousand times: is there any way a thrown blade could come to rest at that angle?”

  “I thought you had determined the knife was stabbed into the plaster, not thrown there?” She handed the photograph to Billy, craning over her shoulder.

  “But the angle!”

  “Mr Holmes—”

  “Look: you are standing at the wall with the knife in your hand. The table is to your right, the hive’s cover is at your knees. If you drive the knife into the wall, what is the resulting angle?”

  “Why would she—”

  “Never mind why—let us look at the facts, not speculate on motivation. What angle?”

  Clara Hudson took another fortifying swallow from her cup, then laid her hands in her lap and meditated upon the photograph. After a minute, she pulled open the table’s shallow drawer and took out a paring knife, carrying it over to the bit of wall between the back door and that of her rooms. She held the handle in her fist, mimicking the act of stabbing it into the plaster. The result left her dissatisfied. She turned her wrist this way and that—then shifted the knife into her left hand and held its point against the wood.

  When she turned, her face had changed.

  “Ha! Ha!” Holmes crowed—and then something he’d never done, in all the years of their acquaintance: he leapt to his feet, clapped his hands on either side of her head, and delivered a kiss smack to the centre of her forehead.

  In a swirl of dressing-gown, he dashed away, shouting for Billy to dress, they were headed for London.

  “What about questioning the neighbours?” Billy called, but to no reply. He looked at the woman he had known longest in the world. “What just happened?”

  “Someone drove that knife into the wall with their left hand,” she said.

  “But, there’s millions of left-handed people about!” he protested.

  She merely shook her head. From upstairs, thuds gave evidence of a madman disrupting the contents of his wardrobe. “I’ll do some egg sandwiches, but you’d best go and dress, lad. He’ll set off for London without you.”

  Billy even had time to swallow coffee before Holmes came pounding down the steps—dressed and clean shaven, humming some complicated tune beneath his breath.

  “You will ring me,” Mrs Hudson said sternly as the two men went out of the door.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” called Holmes meekly.

  The engine protested at the hour, but caught at the second try. Once they had left the village and hit the main road, with Holmes his captive for the next two hours, Billy set out for some answers. “Why would Miss Russell have put the knife in the wall? Why even assume it was her—there’s hundreds of left-handed people around. Maybe Samuel is left-handed. Or maybe he didn’t want to let go the gun in his right hand.”

  “Mr Mudd, you see but you do not observe.”

  “Now, that’s just irritating, that is.”

  But the old detective said no more. Instead, he scrunched the travelling rug against the window and settled his head into it. In seconds, he was snoring, leaving Billy to wrestle with the conundrum of the knife in the wall, all the way to London.

  —

  The sun rose at four o’clock. It was full daylight when Holmes spoke, passing through Camberwell. “You remember how to find Mycroft’s flat?”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  “It’s either there or Oxford.” He sat up. “You made good time.”

  “We’ve missed most of the traffic. Will your brother be awake?”

  “If not, he soon will be.” There came the rustle of paper, then: “I thought Mrs Hudson made us sandwiches?”

  “I ate them.”

  “Yes?”

  “And drank the coffee.”

  “Well. Good thing we’re headed to Mycroft’s.”

  —

  Mycroft’s doorman had little luck with stopping their invasion, or even delaying them much. Holmes strode through the entrance foyer to the lift, hauled the gate shut the instant Billy’s heels had cleared it, and worked the controls without waiting for the lift-man. A pulse of the hand against his leg betrayed his impatience with the dignified ascent, and he slammed back the lift’s gate before its rise was finished. Down the hallway, around the corner, fist up—and the door opened before he could pound.

  About the last expression William Mudd might have expected on the face of a dead woman was one of exasperation. Even if the dead woman was Mary Russell.

  Miss Russell in a dressing gown, hair awry, a bandage on one arm: very much not dead.

  I opened the door to my husband, much aggrieved at my days of waiting. “Where the deuces have you been?” I exclaimed. “I expected you—oomph!” then “Ouch!”

  The embrace was as brief as it was emphatic, and left Billy open-mouthed as Holmes stepped away from me—one hand lingering on my shoulder.

  I felt a bit open-mouthed myself at this unprecedented public display. I looked a question at Billy, saw his confusion, and returned my attention to my husband. “Holmes, what on earth is wrong? Did you—oh. Oh, dear Lord. You didn’t see my message?”

  “Not until a quarter after three this morning,” he said.

  I
was appalled. “And you thought—what about Mrs Hudson?”

  “I told her I would telephone. Patrick is with her, and a relatively competent constable.”

  A voice came from the depths of the flat. “Perhaps we might move this discussion behind the door? The neighbours do complain so.”

  I raised my voice to include my brother-in-law, who had been nearly as unwilling a participant as I in the three days of my residency. “Mycroft, they thought I was dead.”

  “Most inconvenient,” said his voice from behind me. “Good day, Mr Mudd. Sherlock, do you require coffee, or strong drink?”

  I watched Holmes’ growing impatience as his brother fiddled with his new patent coffee contraption (which, frankly, produced a beverage indistinguishable from the boiling-beaker-and-old-sock method we used over our laboratory’s Bunsen burner) and carried the laden tray out to the sitting room, arranging it beside the platter full of sweets and savouries he had summoned from the depths of his pantry.

  The big man stood back, decided the offering was sufficient, and brushed the labours from his hands. “If you will excuse me, I am expected at the Palace for breakfast. The Gazette goes to press in the afternoon.”

  Billy’s eyes narrowed as he watched Mycroft leave. I explained, “The next issue of the London Gazette contains the King’s birthday list—of honours? Mycroft is usually called upon to vet the names, to save the Palace any potential embarrassment. Would you like to pour the coffee, Billy? I’ll have cream in mine.”

  “How much of that blood on the floor was yours?” Holmes asked.

  “Not a lot. How much did you add to it?” I looked pointedly at his wrist: he had winced slightly as his arm came into contact with me at the door, and the edge of his cuff betrayed a dressing in need of attention.

  “Two and a half ounces.”

  “A remarkably precise measurement.”

  “It went into a beaker.”

  I eyed the bloodstain: either something was interfering with his usual fast healing, or the blood-letting had taken place quite recently. Yet if he thought I had been abducted or murdered…“Seems a bit nonchalant, Holmes, to be conducting experiments while one’s wife is missing.”