Pirate King E-Book

Laurie R. King

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 495

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The latest adventure for the intrepid Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes takes readers into the frenetic world of silent films, where the pirates are real and the shooting isn't all done with cameras. In England's young silent-film industry, the megalomaniacal Randolph Fflytte is king. Nevertheless, Mary Russell is dispatched to investigate the criminal activities that surround Fflytte's popular movie studio. So Russell is traveling undercover to Portugal, along with the film crew that is gearing up to shoot a cinematic extravaganza, Pirate King. But as movie make-believe becomes true terror, Russell and Holmes themselves may experience a final fadeout.

Leseprobe

PIRATE KING

LAURIE R. KING

This one’s for Gabe: Welcome to the madness.

Contents

Title PageDedicationMapsAUTHOR’S FOREWORDBOOK ONECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENCHAPTER TWENTYCHAPTER TWENTY-ONECHAPTER TWENTY-TWOBOOK TWOCHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVECHAPTER TWENTY-SIXCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTCHAPTER TWENTY-NINECHAPTER THIRTYCHAPTER THIRTY-ONEBOOK THREECHAPTER THIRTY-TWO CHAPTER THIRTY-THREECHAPTER THIRTY-FOURCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVECHAPTER THIRTY-SIXCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTCHAPTER THIRTY-NINE CHAPTER FORTYCHAPTER FORTY-ONEACKNOWLEDGEMENTSBy Laurie R. KingCopyright

PIRATE KING

a Moving Picture in Three Acts

Director:

Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte

Assistant director:Geoffrey HaleAssistant’s assistant:Mary RussellCinematographer:Will CurrieChoreographer:Graziella Mazzo

The Cast:

Major-General Stanley played by Harold Scott Ruth played by Myrna Hatley Mabel played by Bibi The Pirate King played by Senhor M.R.X. La Rocha His Lieutenant, Samuel, played by Sr La Rocha’s Lieutenant Frederic played by Daniel Marks

The Sisters:

AnnieGingerBonnieHarrietCelesteIsabelDorisJuneEdithKateFannieLinda

The Pirates:

AdamGeraldBenjaminHenryCharlesIrvingDavidJackEarnestKermitFrancisLawrence

The Constables:

Sergeant played by Vincent PaulAlanDonaldBertEdwardClarenceFrank

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

IFIND MYSELF OF MIXED mind about this, my eleventh volume of memoirs concerning life with Sherlock Holmes. On the one hand, I vowed when I began writing them that the accounts would be complete, that there would be no leaving out failures or slapping wallpaper across our mistakes.

Nonetheless, this is one episode over which I have considerable doubts – not, let us be clear, due to any humiliations on my part, but because I fear that the credulity of many readers will be stretched to the breaking by the case’s intricate and, shall we say, colourful complexity of events.

If that be the case with you, dear reader, please rest assured that for this one volume of the Russell memoirs, you have my full permission to regard it (and alas, by contagion, me) as fiction.

Had I not actually been there, I, too, would dismiss the tale as preposterous.

– MRH

BOOK ONE

Ship of Fools

November 6–22, 1924

CHAPTER ONE

RUTH: I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of hearing … I took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a pirate.

‘HONESTLY, HOLMES? PIRATES?’

‘That is what I said.’

‘You want me to go and work for pirates.’

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free …

‘My dear Russell, someone your age should not be having trouble with her hearing.’ Sherlock Holmes solicitous was Sherlock Holmes sarcastic.

‘My dear Holmes, someone your age should not be overlooking incipient dementia. Why do you wish me to go and work for pirates?’

‘Think of it as an adventure, Russell.’

‘May I point out that this past year has been nothing but adventure? Ten back-to-back cases between us in the past fifteen months, stretched over, what, eight countries? Ten, if one acknowledges the independence of Scotland and Wales. What I need is a few weeks with nothing more demanding than my books.’

‘You should, of course, feel welcome to remain here.’

The words seemed to contain a weight beyond their surface meaning. A dark and inauspicious weight. A Mariner’s albatross sort of a weight. I replied with caution. ‘This being my home, I generally do feel welcome.’

‘Ah. Did I not mention that Mycroft is coming to stay?’

‘Mycroft? Why on earth would Mycroft come here? In all the years I’ve lived in Sussex, he’s visited only once.’

‘Twice, although the other occasion was while you were away. However, he’s about to have the builders in, and he needs a quiet retreat.’

‘He can afford an hotel room.’

‘This is my brother, Russell,’ he chided.

Yes, exactly: my husband’s brother, Mycroft Holmes. Whom I had thwarted – blatantly, with malice aforethought, and with what promised to be heavy consequences – scant weeks earlier. Whose history, I now knew, held events that soured my attitude towards him. Who wielded enormous if invisible power within the British Government. And who was capable of making life uncomfortable for me until he had tamped me back down into my position of sister-in-law.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘He thought two weeks.’

Fourteen days: 336 hours: 20,160 minutes, of first-hand opportunity to revenge himself on me verbally, psychologically, or (surely not?) physically. Mycroft was a master of the subtlest of poisons – I speak metaphorically, of course – and fourteen days would be plenty to work his vengeance and drive me to the edge of madness.

And only the previous afternoon, I had learnt that my alternative lodgings in Oxford had been flooded by a broken pipe. Information that now crept forward in my mind, bringing a note of dour suspicion.

No, Holmes was right: best to be away if I could.

Which circled the discussion around to its beginnings.

‘Why should I wish to go work with pirates?’ I repeated.

‘You would, of course, be undercover.’

‘Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.’

‘I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress.’

‘A night-dress.’ Oh, this was getting better and better.

‘As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.’

‘Pirates have support staff?’ I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine my husband’s face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.

He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing – which was, I thought, no accident.

‘I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,’ he replied.

‘Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright-law?’

‘Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might have argued for the literary element.’

‘Gilbert?’ Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.

Headings, plural, for the missive contained two separate letters folded together. The first was from Scotland Yard. The second was emblazoned with the words D’Oyly Carte Opera.

I reared back, far more alarmed by the stationery than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cutthroats.

‘Gilbert and Sullivan?’ I exclaimed. ‘Pirates as in Penzance? Light opera and heavy humour? No. Absolutely not. Whatever Inspector Lestrade has in mind, I refuse.’

‘One gathers,’ Holmes reflected, reaching for another slice of toast, ‘that the title originally did hold a double entendre, Gilbert’s dig at the habit of American companies to flout the niceties of British copyright law.’

He was not about to divert me by historical titbits or an insult against my American heritage: This was one threat against which my homeland would have to mount its own defence.

‘You’ve dragged your sleeve in the butter.’ I got to my feet, picking up my half-emptied plate to underscore my refusal.

‘It would not be a singing part,’ he said.

I walked out of the room.

He raised his voice. ‘I would do it myself, but I need to be here for Mycroft, to help him tidy up after the Goodman case.’

Answer gave I none.

‘It shouldn’t take you more than two weeks, three at the most. You’d probably find the solution before arriving in Lisbon.’

‘Why—’ I cut the question short; it did not matter in the least why the D’Oyly Carte company wished me to go to Lisbon. I poked my head back into the room. ‘Holmes: no. I have an entire academic year to catch up on. I have no interest whatsoever in the entertainment of hoi polloi. The entire thing sounds like a headache. I am not going to Lisbon, or even London. I’m not going anywhere. No.’

CHAPTER TWO

PIRATE KING: I don’t think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest.

MY STEAMER LURCHED into Lisbon on a horrible sleet-blown November morning. My face was scoured by the ocean air, I having spent most of the voyage on deck in an attempt (largely vain) to keep my stomach from turning inside-out. My hair and clothing were stiff with salt, my nose raw from the handkerchief, I had lost nearly half a stone and more than half my mind, and my mood was as bloody as my eyeballs.

If a pirate had hove into view – or my husband, for that matter – I would merrily have keelhauled either with a rope of linen from the captain’s table.

My only source of satisfaction, grim as it was, lay in the knowledge that several of the actors on board were every bit as miserable as I.

The eternal, quease-inducing sway lessened as we left the open sea to churn our way up the Rio Tejo towards the vast harbour – one of Europe’s largest, according to someone’s guide-book – that in the days of sail had made Portugal a great empire. The occasional isolated castle or fishing village along the shore slowly proliferated. Our view panned across a lighthouse, then picked up an odd piece of architecture planted just offshore to our left, a diminutive fort in an unnecessarily exuberant Gothic style. (Was that the style the guide-book – Annie’s? – had called ‘Manueline’?) Someone in the crowd of shivering fellow passengers loudly identified it as the Tower of Belém; my mind’s eye automatically supplied the phrase on an internal subtitle:

‘That’s the Tower of Belem!’

I shook my head in irritation. I had watched more moving pictures over the past few days than in the past few years: My way of seeing the world had changed dramatically.

Beyond the Manueline excrescence rose Lisboa itself – Alis Ubo to the Phoenicians, Ulissipont to the Romans. Our first indication of the city was the spill of masts and belching smoke-stacks that pressed towards the docks. As we drew nearer, a jumble of pale walls and red tile roofs rose up from the harbour (it looked like a lake) on a series of hills (the guide-book had claimed seven, on a par with Rome) punctuated by church spires (a startling number of those) watched over by a decaying castle.

Pirates, I sniffed as I eyed the castle gun-ports. Any sensible member of the piratical fraternity would have steered well clear of this place.

I pulled my thick coat around me, made a fruitless attempt to clean my spectacles, and went below to assemble my charges.

My job – my official job – was to shepherd, protect, nurse and browbeat into order some three dozen inmates of a mobile lunatic asylum. I was the one responsible for their well-being. It was I who ensured the inmates were housed and fed, entertained and soothed, kept off one another’s throats and out of one another’s beds. I was the one the inmates ran to, sent on errands, and shouted at, whether the complaint was inadequately hot coffee or insufficiently robust lightbulb. On the first night out from England, I had been roused from a fitful sleep by a demand that I – I, personally – remove a moth from a cabin.

A fraternity of actual pirates could not have been more trouble. Even a travelling D’Oyly Carte company would have been less of a madhouse.

But I was working neither with buccaneers nor with travelling players: The letter with the heading of the firm responsible for the Gilbert & Sullivan performances had merely been by way of introduction. Instead, I found myself the general coordinator and jack of all trades for a film-crew.

In the early years after the War, Fflytte Films had appeared to be the rising star of the British cinema industry: From Quarterdeck in 1919 through 1922’s Krakatoa, Fflytte Films (‘Fflyttes of Fancy!’) seemed positioned to challenge the American domination of the young industry, producing a series of stupendously successful multi-reel extravaganzas with exotic settings and dashing stories. Then came Hannibal, which ran so far over budget in the preliminary stages, the project was cancelled before the second reel of film was fed into the cameras. Hannibal was followed by the wildly popular Rum Runner, but after that came The Writer, which took eight months to make and ran in precisely four cinema houses for less than a week. The Writer’s failure might have been predicted – a three-reel drama about a British novelist in Paris? – except that Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte (‘Fflyttes of Fantasy!’) was a director famous for pulling hugely successful rabbits out of apparently shabby hats (Small Arms concerned the accidental death of a child; Rum Runner was about smuggling alcohol into the United States; both had returned their costs a hundredfold) and a movie about a thinly disguised James Joyce might have been as successful as his other ugly ducklings, particularly when one threw in the titillating appeal of the Ulysses obscenity ban.

However, since the film had skirted around the actual depiction of the obscene acts in question, it went rather flat. So now, with three costly duds on his hands and the threatened loss of his aristocratic backers, Fflytte was returning to the scene of his three previous solid successes (‘Fflyttes of Fanfare!’): the sea-borne action adventure.

This one was to be loosely based on the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Loosely as in wobbling wildly and on the verge of a complete uncoupling. Not an inch of film had gone through the cameras; the Major-General was drunk around the clock; the cameraman’s assistant had a palsy of the hands that was explained to me, sotto voce, as the result of a recent nervous breakdown; the actress playing Mabel had taken the bit into her teeth with this, her first starring rôle, and was out to prove herself a flapper edition of Sarah Bernhardt (if not in talent, then in imperious attitudes and a knack of fabricating alternative versions of her personal history); and the twelve other young ladies playing the Major-General’s daughters – yes, thirteen daughters altogether – formed a non-stop cyclone of lace, giggles and yellow curls that spun up and down the decks and occasionally below them – far below, to judge by the grease stains on one pink dress thrust under my nose by an accusing maternal person. Even the eldest of the ‘sisters’, a busybody of the first order, had blinked her big blue eyes at of-bounds out-of-bounds state-room.

We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

‘Producer’s assistant’, then, was my official job. My unofficial one – the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into – was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk – as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

‘Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?’

‘No, thank you.’ I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex – basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver – onto the floor, and sat.

‘Mr Holmes is not with you?’

‘As you see.’ Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

‘You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman, have you?’

‘Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?’

‘No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since the man has vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.’

‘No, we have not heard news of Mr Goodman.’ The literal, if not actual, truth.

‘Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?’

‘I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.’

‘From your husband.’

‘Why?’ Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

‘Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.’

‘Those skills being …?’

‘The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.’

‘And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated women typists.’

‘I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.’

‘Oh. Well, now you have me.’

‘Yes.’ Definitely a sigh, this time. ‘Oh, it might as well be you.’

My eyes narrowed. ‘Chief Inspector, one might almost think you had no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?’

‘Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is—’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.’

‘Ah. Politics.’

‘In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.’

‘Do we have a moving picture industry?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War – all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re beginning to catch up, we no sooner produce a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour – a faint rumour, mind – comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that the man they’re backing may be bent.’

I put the clues together. ‘Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to fund a picture; they mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?’

‘Worse than that – the Palace themselves have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.’

‘I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.’

‘Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three years ago, they made a movie about guns, and—’

‘An entire moving picture about guns?’

‘More or less. This was shortly after the Firearms Act, and the picture was about a returned soldier who used his military revolver in a Bolshevik act, accidentally killing a child.’

‘The Bolshevist terror being why the Firearms Act was introduced in the first place.’ The 1920 Firearms Act meant that every three years, Holmes and I were forced to go before our local sheriff for weapons permits, demonstrating that we were neither drunks, lunatics, nor children.

‘That and the sheer number of revolvers knocking around after the War waiting to go off. Which more or less concealed the fact that someone sold quite a few of said firearms in this country, unpermitted, shortly after the picture came out.’

‘What does that—’

‘Wait. The following year, Fflytte did a story about a young woman whose life was taken over by drugs – Coke Express, it was called. The month following its release in the cinema houses, we had an unusual number of drugs parties along the south coast.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And last year, one of their pirate movies was about rum-running into America. It came out in November.’

‘I was busy in November. What happened?’

‘McCoy’s arrest. “The Real McCoy”? The man’s made a small fortune smuggling hard liquor into the United States.’

‘Hmm. Is this perhaps the same studio that was making a film about Hannibal?’

‘Fflytte Films, that’s them.’

‘Odd, I don’t recall hearing about a sudden influx of elephants racing down the streets of—’

‘I knew this was a mistake. Never mind, Miss Russell, I’ll—’

‘No no, Chief Inspector, sit down, I apologise. Surely there must have been something more concrete to interest you in the case, even in a peripheral manner?’

He paused, then subsided into his chair. ‘Yes. Although even that I can’t be at all certain about. We were beginning to ask some questions – in a hush-hush fashion, so as not to set the gossip magazines on fire – when the studio’s secretary went missing. Lonnie Johns is her name.’

‘When was that?’

‘Well, there’s the thing – it was only four or five days ago. And there’s nothing to say that the Johns girl didn’t just quit her job and go on holiday. The girl she shares a room with said it wouldn’t surprise her, that Lonnie’s job would shred the nerves of a saint.’

‘But Miss Johns didn’t say anything to her, about going away?’

‘The room-mate didn’t see her go – she’d just got back herself from a week in Bognor Regis.’

‘Any signs of foul play at the flat?’

‘Neither disturbance nor a note, although some of her things did seem to be missing, tooth-brush and the like.’

‘If the girl had run off to the Riviera with a movie star, she’d probably have told everyone she knew,’ I reflected.

‘Normally, we’d barely even be opening an enquiry into a disappearance of a girl missing a few days, but time is against us. The entire crew is about to set sail out of England, and if we don’t get someone planted in their midst, we’ll lose the chance. And when my likely officers were unavailable, I thought, just maybe Mr Holmes would have a few days free to act as a sort of place-holder, until I could get one of my own in line for it. But never mind, it was only a—’

‘And in addition, if it does blow up in the face of a gaggle of blue-bloods and splatter them all with scandal, it would be nice if Scotland Yard were nowhere in sight.’

‘Miss Russell, I deeply resent the im—’

‘Chief Inspector, I have nothing in particular on at the moment. I’ll be happy to devote myself to the Mysterious Affair of the Coincidental Film-crew.’

He looked shocked. ‘You mean you’ll do it?’

‘I just said I would.’

‘I thought you’d laugh in my face.’ He gave me a suspicious scowl. ‘You aren’t a “fan” of the cinema world, are you?’

‘By no means.’

‘And yet you seem almost eager to take this on.’

Motion pictures, or Mycroft? I reached out to snatch the folder from his hand. ‘My dear Chief Inspector, you have no idea.’

CHAPTER THREE

PIRATE KING: Away to the cheating world go you,

Where pirates all are well-to-do.

FROM LESTRADE’S OFFICE, I went directly to that of Fflytte Films. It overlooked the friendly confusion of the Covent Gardens flower mart, where I dodged sweepers, buckets, carts, heaps of pulped blossoms, and a dark and winsome young lady aiming a heather sprig at my lapel.

At the top of a flight of stairs, I found a door standing open, a ring of keys protruding from its lock. Inside, the chaos was nowhere near as colourful as that on the street outside, and the cries of vendors had been replaced with a raised telephonic voice from an inner office. I followed it to its source.

‘—don’t care what he says, the alcohol is to go into the hold, not in his quarters. Yes, I know it’s not your job to search him, I’ll take care of that, you just – That’s right, into the hold, and we’ll worry about his rooms on the day. Great, thanks.’

The telephone clattered onto its stand, and I rapped my knuckles against the half-open door, then repeated it when I realised that the man’s muttered epithet had hidden my first attempt.

Geoffrey Hale, the general manager of Fflytte Films, raised his head from his hands, presenting me with a pair of cornflower-blue eyes in a face too young for the white of his hair – or, what I had thought was white hair, but with a closer look became merely very pale blonde. He was in his late thirties, and would have been quite attractive but for his haunted expression. ‘Yes?’ he said, a syllable that tried for irritable but came out more than a little fearful.

‘I’ve come about the position,’ I replied. ‘Sir Malcolm—’

For Hale’s benefit, I began to trundle out Lestrade’s manufactured story, which in point of fact was a reasonably efficient means of inserting a person (male or female) into Fflytte Films. In the manner of all things English (particularly things in any way connected to the House of Lords) it had drawn its particulars from the old boys’ network: a luncheon conversation at a club; Hale bemoaning the abrupt loss of his secretary-assistant and going frantic over the number of hours required to grease the machinery of a moving picture company; the old boy/luncheon-mate saying that he might know someone, if Hale didn’t require a person who knew the industry; Hale answering that he’d hire a myopic orang-utan if the chimp could take dictation and manipulate a telephone.

And here I was, with three of those four characteristics.

(That, in any event, was how Hale remembered it. According to Lestrade, it had begun the other way around, with Lestrade actively hunting for a man with links to Fflytte or Hale; on finding one, he had arranged for the old boy to invite Hale to lunch, drawing the scent of a potential assistant before his nose.)

(That, at any rate, was how Lestrade remembered it. However, knowing the House of Lords and its fondness for meddling in the lives of those who actually worked for a living, I thought it equally possible that Lestrade had been handed the plan ready made: Here’s our suspicions, the peers had told him; here’s what your man is to do; here’s the path we’ve paved for him to get there.

It had been a set-up from the beginning, although there was no knowing at this point how many layers of deception there were: Hale definitely was being manipulated, Lestrade possibly, me almost certainly. Even that conveniently missing secretary had the faint odour of red herring, a ploy designed expressly to attract the attentions of the police. And if Lonnie Johns was safely tucked up for a quiet holiday in the south of France, it was more likely that the House of Lords was paying her bills than Scotland Yard.

Apart from which, Lestrade was not a good enough liar to manufacture a false concern for a missing girl.)

(Only some days later, as I leant miserably over the storm-tossed railing, desperately searching for something to bring my mind up from my stomach, did it occur to me that Mycroft’s threatened trip to Sussex had been an oddly convenient piece of timing. And once that idea had swum to the surface, a great cloud of morbid thoughts boiled up in its wake: Since the notion of Mycroft Holmes doing the bidding of any number of Lords was laughable, it suggested that the House of Lords were not the instigators of this investigation, but the puppets of Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft had moved them: They had moved Lestrade: Lestrade had moved—

Which in turn suggested that Mycroft had wanted me to do this, but knew that if he were to ask me directly, I would refuse.

Later, when I was not in quite such a vulnerable position, I decided that it was a ridiculously convoluted, Heath Robinsonian piece of machinery, a bit much even for Mycroft. My brother-in-law was sly, but he was practised enough to know that setting a fox before Lords might take the hunt in any direction.

One thing I was certain: If plot there was, Holmes had not been in on it.

But all the doubt and suspicion came later, when it was too late. Had I put the pieces together earlier, I would not have found myself standing before Geoffrey Hale’s chaotic desk in his Covent Garden office that November afternoon, laying out the story Chief Inspector Lestrade had provided for me.)

‘—so I don’t actually know anything about the picture industry, but a friend mentioned this and I’m between projects just at the moment and I thought it sounded like a lark. I’m a whiz at type-writing,’ I added with a bright smile.

I was none too certain how Hale would feel about the person being thrust towards his manly breast – one Mary Russell, who, although well dressed and reasonably energetic, was far too young for the sort of placid, maternal, secretarial authority that his typhoon-struck offices cried out for, who moreover admitted that she knew exactly nothing about co-ordinating a film-crew. But before I could finish my prepared explanation, dawn came up across his unshaven features and he rose as if to fling himself at my feet.

I hastened to stick out my hand, forestalling any greater demonstration; he clasped it hard and pumped away with hearty exclamations.

‘Oh how utterly jolly, a life-saver in sensible shoes, you are so very welcome, Miss – what was it? Russell, of course, like the philosopher, although I’d guess looking at you that you’re a dashed sight more practical than him. Oh, Miss Russell, you can’t believe what a mess things have got into here – I had a perfectly adequate assistant who seems to have upped and left, just as we’re about to set sail. Both literally and figuratively.’

‘Er,’ I said, retrieving my squashed hand and glancing down at my shoes, which were the most fashionable (and hence impractical) I owned. ‘Do you want to see some letters of recommendation or something?’

‘You speak English and you’re dead sober at two in the afternoon, what else could I ask for? You know your alphabet?’

‘I know several alphabets. And shorthand.’ Holmes, when going undercover, could disguise himself as anything from garage mechanic to priest; I was forced into the more womanly rôles of secretary or maid. (Although after one stint in the kitchen of a manor house, I tried to avoid being hired as cook; still, the fire had been quickly doused.)

‘And you have a passport, and no small children or aged grannies needing you at home? If you spoke with Malcolm, you’ll know that we will be away from London for some weeks? Although we’ll try our best to be home by Christmas.’

That was either a gross and self-delusional underestimate, or a blatant lie designed to soothe a nervous would-be employee. But I did not blink. ‘I am aware that the job entails travel, yes.’

‘Perfection. Can you start with these?’

He stabbed the air with a desk spike impaled with more than four inches of paper. Avoiding the wicked point, I extracted the object from his hand. ‘You want me to begin immediately?’

‘Absolutely. That is, could you?’ he asked, recalling his manners with an effort.

‘I could, although it might be good if I had some idea what you’d like me to do.’

When he flung himself out of the office six minutes later, late for a meeting with a last-minute addition to the cast on the other side of town, I had not much more of an idea. However, I soon discovered that by identifying myself as ‘—with Fflytte Films’, the voice in the earpiece would instantly break in with the urgent business at hand, much of which had to do with unpaid bills. At 6.40 that evening, I reached the bottom of the spike, having taken care of roughly half its problems and transferred the remainder onto a single sheet of lined paper for consultation with Hale. With that in hand, along with another page holding a list of cheques needing to be sent, I locked the door with the abandoned keys, and set off for Hale’s home.

At 7.00 that morning, Mrs Hudson’s coffee in hand, I’d neither heard of nor cared about Geoffrey Hale, Randolph Fflytte, or the business of putting a moving picture before the great British public. Twelve hours later, I felt I had been intimately involved for weeks.

Geoffrey Hale was the lifelong friend, long-time business partner, and (another inevitability in English business arrangements) second cousin of Randolph Fflytte himself. Hale was the man who enabled the director’s vision to inhabit screens around the world. Hale was the one to assemble cast and crew, negotiate with the owners of cinema houses and would-be filming sites, and in general see to the practical minutiae of taking a film from initial discussion to opening night. Hale was the one to ensure that the actors were sober enough to work, that the actresses had enough flowers and bonbons to soothe their delicate egos, the one to make certain that the country house where filming was to take place actually possessed four walls and a roof.

Hale, and now me.

CHAPTER FOUR

PIRATES: A rollicking band of pirates we.

GEOFFREY HALE LIVED in St John’s Wood. A rotund and shiny-headed person on the far side of middle age opened the door, his chins gathered above the sort of collar that labelled him a butler of the old school.

‘Mary Russell, for Mr Hale,’ I told him. His manner made me regret keenly that I did not have a card at hand for him to carry upon a polished salver.

He bore up under the disappointment, parked me in the room designated for the parking of intruders, and glided away, returning a precise four and a half minutes later to convey me to the presence of the master of the house, up a set of magnificent mahogany stairs that looked as if someone had recently dragged a piece of light artillery down them. I avoided the worst of the splinters, wondering if Hale’s cousin and partner was experimenting with a scene from a forthcoming war movie.

Despite what I had said to Lestrade, I had in fact heard of Fflytte Films. (‘Fflyttes of Fun!’) I believe even Holmes would have known the name. Over the course of a decade of film-making, the trademark element of Fflytte Films had become Realism. In an industry with papier-mâché Alps and Babylonian temples made of composition board and gilt; where Valentino’s Sheik pitched his tents a quick drive from Los Angeles (rumour even had it in Queens), and Blood and Sand showed not Spain, but a Hollywood back lot; where even Robin Hood had been born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Fflytte Films made it known that when this company made a movie about the open seas, to the open seas the crew went; and when Fflytte Films produced a story about an aeronaut, by God the cameraman and his instrument were strapped in and set to turning. In Quarterdeck, half a ton of equipment had gone down in a storm; in Jolly Roger, men had been washed overboard – and if no lives had actually been lost, the great movie-going, gossip-magazine-reading public stoutly believed to the contrary.

One might have expected this rigid commitment to authenticity to require that any version of Pirates of Penzance be filmed in Penzance. However, during the course of that long day, I had come to suspect we were not bound for that sleepy watering-place on England’s south coast.

Hale had shaved since flying out of the office that afternoon, although the smears of tiredness under his blue eyes were no lighter. He crossed the opulent library with his hand out, a ready apology on his lips.

‘Miss Russell, can you ever forgive me for my state this afternoon? You must have thought you were in the company of a raving maniac – Thank you, Pullman, that will be all – or, no, ask Mrs Corder to send up a tray of – coffee, Miss Russell? Or tea? To go with these sandwiches and what-not? Coffee, then. Do sit down, Miss Russell, honestly, I’m not always in that sort of state.’

The first three minutes were spent with my mouth full as Hale delivered honeyed apologies while simultaneously performing the sort of dance upper-class males do when faced with a woman both of a lesser rank and in their employ: a polite, brotherly flirtation that lacks the faintest element of sex. It is amusing, particularly when based on invalid assumptions, but it must be even more exhausting to generate than it is to receive. Once I had relieved a meal’s worth of dainty snacks from the platter, I used my linen napkin, then cut the dance short.

‘Mr Hale, I have a degree from Oxford, I am on the boards of several companies, I speak four languages fluently, five haltingly, and can read several more. As I said, this is a lark for me, since I’m at loose ends at the moment and I’m always up for a new experience. This is not a job I need to pay the rent. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, and I’ll tell you if I can do it?’

He sat back, startled as much by my blunt attitude as by what I had told him. ‘Er, yes. Very well. Perhaps you’d care for a drink instead of coffee?’

And so over glasses of brandy, he told me what I was in for: actors, crew, sets and costumes, local negotiations, food and housing, the lot. ‘We’re scheduled to spend ten days in Lisbon doing rehearsals – which, since you have little experience with the picture industry, I should note is not always the case, that many companies have neither rehearsals nor scripts. Fflytte Films uses both. We’ve found that if we don’t prepare the choreography, as it were, of the fight scenes, we waste a lot of time and miles of film.’

‘And you have a number of fight scenes?’

‘We do.’

‘Sorry, but I’d understood that you were filming The Pirates of Penzance?’ Which I remembered as a distillation of saccharine songs, much tip-toeing about, topsy-turvy logic, and slapstick chases. My attempt to keep any dubious feelings out of my voice was only partly successful: Hale’s quick glance at me glimmered with understanding and humour.

‘Nothing so simple as that, Miss Russell, although making a silent film about a musical performance would be just the sort of thing Randolph would love to try. This is Pirate King: a film about a film about The Pirates of Penzance.’

‘Very well,’ I said slowly.

This time he laughed outright, and his face lost its pinched look, becoming both younger and more nearly handsome. ‘What do you know about Fflytte Films?’

‘Not a whole lot. Randolph Fflytte is in the papers from time to time, of course, but I have to admit, I only go to the cinema a handful of times a year.’

‘Don’t let Randolph hear you say that. Not unless you want to be sat down for a marathon screening of his work. You might say that Fflytte Films began in 1902, when Randolph got his first camera. He was seventeen at the time. For some years it was a summer-holiday toy, recording the antics of friends, playing around with effects. Randolph’s first serious attempt at telling a story on the screen came in ’07, when he bought up a lorry-load of Boer War uniforms and had every working man on his estate dress up to re-enact the Siege of Mafeking.’

‘I don’t know that I’ve seen that one.’

‘You won’t, either. There were only three prints made, and nine years ago, he threw them on the fire. Nearly burnt the house down – cellulose nitrate is remarkably flammable. He was unhappy with Mafeking even as he was editing it, since a battle across Berkshire countryside looks nothing like a battle across open veldt. Every time he looked at it, he regretted that he hadn’t just piled his workers on a boat and taken them to South Africa.

‘Two years after Mafeking, he took some friends to Paris to make a film, as a joke more than anything. This time, once he’d done the editing, he sold it. And decided that was what he wanted to do with his life. Before we knew it, we were making films commercially – most of them so dreadful they’ve blessedly disappeared from the scene, although Hester’s Grandmum wasn’t too bad, and She Begs to Differ had its moments.

‘Then came the War, and while the Americans happily went on building studios and hiring actors, Randolph was reduced to filming the local evacuees and German prisoners on pig farms. But in 1915, he talked his way into France, where he shot The Aeronaut, about a spotter balloon. Two and a half years later, in the winter of 1917, he managed to return, and was thrilled to come under live fire. Or within a mile or so of live fire, at any rate.

‘It was a revelation. Randolph came home and burnt those copies of Mafeking as a sort of vow, that utter realism would be the guiding light of Fflytte Films. And so it’s been to this day: We make the audience feel “the wind in your face and the lash on your back”.’

‘I do remember that – the Roman galley film!’

‘The first time Fflytte Films hit the headlines.’

‘But wasn’t the case dismissed?’

‘Not dismissed: settled out of court. Randolph paid the actor off, although, truth to tell, the chap hadn’t actually been beaten. It was camera tricks. Occasionally, we are reduced to mere verisimilitude.’

‘I’m glad to hear you don’t sacrifice your actors for the battle scenes. Or bury them under volcano ash. But why on earth pay the man off?’

‘One cannot buy that kind of publicity, Miss Russell. Fflytte Films pummelling its actors bloody for the sake of realism? Priceless word-of-mouth. Almost as good as burning down the village in Krakatoa – although the ash there was flour, and the volcano was only waist high.’

‘Good to know. And now you’re doing The Pirates of Penzance – or at any rate, a picture about a picture about it.’

‘The plot is, a film-crew is making a picture about the pirates who come to Penzance in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. And as they film, the crew gets involved with real-life Barbary pirates.’

‘Er, you do know that there aren’t any more Barbary pirates?’ An American film-maker might not have picked up on this little fact, but a man with Hale’s accent would surely have had a modicum of history thrust down his throat.

‘Of course. On the other hand, there will always be pirates of one stripe or another in the world.’

‘And this film-within-a-film is about real pirates wrapped around fictional pirates?’

‘You’re catching on.’

‘It’s a farce, then?’

‘No, actually, it’s more along the lines of an adventure. Do you remember the story in The Pirates of Penzance?’

‘Dimly.’ I had probably fallen asleep halfway through the first act: Music has that effect on me. A source of continual outrage from my musical husband.

‘The young pirate Frederic, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, announces to his fellows that he has never been able to stomach piracy, and that even though this particular band to which he has been apprenticed is soft-hearted, he intends to leave them and devote himself to fighting piracy. He falls in love with the daughter of a major-general, but through a piece of trickery, the pirates take him back into their ranks, capturing the girl and her sisters to take as their wives. There follows a great deal of Gilbertian shenanigans before the pirates are revealed to be not only Englishmen, and loyal to the Queen, but of noble birth as well, which makes them appropriate husbands for the Major-General’s many daughters. Happy endings all around.’

To such had the wit of Chaucer and Shakespeare descended.

‘How many daughters?’ I asked.

‘Productions of the opera have varied in the numbers of both daughters and pirates – there are four named sisters and simply a “chorus” of pirates. In addition to Mabel and Frederic, Randolph has decided on twelve of each.’

‘Thirteen daughters? Wouldn’t that make some of them a bit young to marry?’ Or old.

‘We’re classifying them as four sets of triplets. And Mabel, of course.’

‘Mustn’t forget Mabel. And a dozen constables as well?’

‘For symmetry, one might imagine, but no, only six of those. Plus the sergeant.’

‘Twelve and twelve and two and seven – thirty-three actors?’

‘We won’t have pirates at first, but you have also to add Ruth, Frederic’s piratical nursemaid, and Major-General Stanley, Mabel’s father.’

‘And you want me to help keep that lot happy, healthy, and in some kind of order?’

‘Plus the crew – cameraman and assistant, make-up woman, seamstress, three or four others. No servants; Randolph banned the actors from bringing their servants along after Anna Karenina – two illegitimate pregnancies, one divorce, and a bullet wound between them. Because of the cold,’ he explained.

‘Of course.’

‘So no personal maids or valets. However,’ Hale added, his voice innocent but his eyes taking on a wicked gleam in their depths, ‘the four youngest sisters – youngest in fact, not youngest on film – will bring their mothers.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ I said. I had encountered the mothers of young prima donnas before.

He laughed aloud. ‘You begin to see why I greeted you with such enthusiasm this afternoon.’

‘You all but wept in joy. Well, if that’s the case, I’d best—’ I started, but he cut me off.

‘There’s something else.’

What on earth could surpass what he had already described? ‘Yes?’

He reached for the decanter, replenishing our glasses. The level in the glass rose; I braced myself. ‘You seem a sensible kind of person, Miss Russell. The kind of person who pays attention to details.’

‘I try.’

‘And the kind of person who dislikes … wrongdoing.’

The very model of an unwilling apprentice pirate, one might say. ‘Yes,’ I ventured.

‘And quite, well, sensible.’

Like my shoes? I wondered.

‘Plucky, even.’

Plucky?

‘Because I was thinking, perhaps you would be willing to … extend your assignment. Just a little.’

Please, please don’t ask me to dress up as one of the daughters. ‘Er,’ I said.

‘So that in the course of your job, if you come across something – how to say this? Something out of the ordinary – you will bring it to my attention.’

I kept my face still, although my heart gave a little thump. Was the man aware of the same activities that had attracted Lestrade’s attention? Or had one of his blue-blooded chums dropped a hint about the investigation, and he wished me to share any findings with him? Or – further concern – could he be laying a false trail for me by claiming concern for illicit behaviour?

Pirates within pirates, crime within crime …

‘Perhaps you’d best explain what you mean by “out of the ordinary”.’

He picked up his glass, to swirl the contents into an amber whirlpool.

‘Three years ago, Fflytte Films made The Moonstone. Do you remember it?’

‘I did see that one, yes. Very realistic, as I remember, the scenes in India.’

‘As I said, our hallmark. The actor playing Ablewhite – who you may remember dies in the story – was killed a few days after his final scenes were filmed.’

‘How unfortunate.’

‘He was drunk playing the Dame in a Christmas panto and fell into the orchestra pit, breaking his neck on the kettledrum, but yes, it was a tragedy. Later that year, we went to Finland for Anna Karenina, Finland being the closest we could come to Russia without getting involved with the Reds. But as I said, it was cold, and our Anna got frostbite when the filming was only halfway through and went home (quit the profession entirely, I heard the other day; she now runs a boarding house in Leeds), so we had to turn the story into a short about the frozen North instead. And even then, the polar bear rather chewed up its handler.’

‘Oh dear. Perhaps a crew as accident-prone as yours ought to go into a less hazardous business.’

‘And then in Jolly Roger, we almost lost two men in a freak wave.’

‘Yes, so you mentioned.’

‘With Krakatoa, two of the cinema houses where it was running burnt down. In Coke Express, one of our actors decided to drive through town in the altogether – that one took a lot of work to hush up. I had to prove that he was just drunk, not coked.’

I said nothing: True, the coincidences were piling rather high, but clumsiness in stunts did have a way of bringing its own punishment, and Hale himself had pointed out how inflammable film could be. And actors had been known to drink.

‘Hannibal was cancelled, but one of the men we’d used as a consultant for Rum Runner was arrested, for rum-running. The Writer, about a failed writer, well, failed.’ He knocked back a hefty swallow from his glass, and continued bleakly, ‘We’re cursed. Whatever the movie’s about, it happens. There: Now you’ll probably quit on me, too.’

I blinked. Lestrade wanted me to look into chronic lawbreaking; Hale was suggesting I investigate—

‘You want me to help you with a curse?’

Hale went on with an air of determination. ‘Miss Russell, this current picture is about piracy. And yes, I will admit it sounds mad, but I’ve got the wind up about it. Getting fined for mistreating an actor is one thing, but I don’t have time for a court case involving some dastardly deed on the open seas.’

I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of If a beaten galley slave sells movies, wouldn’t a pirates’ curse make for a sure-fire hit? but caught myself. If someone in Fflytte Films had come up with that brilliant publicity scheme, it would either be Hale, or Fflytte himself.

Still, looking into a fantasy threat would give me the ideal excuse to snoop, if Hale happened to catch me at it. And he would be so grateful I stayed with the company – at any rate, stayed long enough to find who was responsible for the crimes that concerned Lestrade: say, fourteen days, 336 hours – that he would overlook any oddities in my behaviour.

‘It would appear that building a reputation for realism has its drawbacks,’ I remarked.

‘It’s a major pain in the backside,’ Hale replied. ‘But it is what we do. When we’re filming The Moonstone, we send a camera to India. If we’re making a film about the Punic Wars, we take some elephants to the Alps. Even if it nearly kills us all and leaves us bankrupt.’

‘And when the script says pirates, you go to sea.’

‘Lisbon first.’

‘“On, on, the vessel flies, the land is gone.”’

He cocked his head, and replied, ‘“What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold!”’

‘“But whoso entereth within this town / That, sheening far, celestial seems to be / Disconsolate will wander up and down.”’

‘Yes, Byron was not fond of Portugal, even before he had an unhappy affaire there.’

Long, long ago, as an unschooled orphan preparing for university examinations, I had a tutoress with a marked, even startling, affection for Lord Byron. There were lines of Childe Harold that the Byron-besotted Miss Sim had taken care to skip lightly over – thus guaranteeing that her adolescent student should commit them indelibly to memory. Triggered by mention of the Portuguese capital, some of those phrases began to rise now to the surface of my mind: memorials frail of murderous wrath, and the shrieking victim hath / Pour’d forth his blood beneath the assassin’s knife, and Throughout this purple land, where Law secures not life … I could see from the way Hale fiddled uneasily with his cigarette case that those phrases were pressing at his memory as well.

‘No doubt much has changed in the past eleven decades,’ I observed.

‘So I have been reassured.’

‘Very well: We set off on Monday for some weeks in Lisbon.’

‘And Morocco.’

‘Africa?’

‘The town of Salé, on the coast north of Casablanca. In the seventeenth century, it was a pirate kingdom.’

‘“Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale,”’ I blurted out. ‘“The sable curls in wild profusion veil.”’

‘“There was a laughing Devil in his sneer / that raised emotions both of rage and fear,”’ Hale agreed. Before any more of Miss Sim’s Byronic Corsair images could trail before my eyes, I pushed the glass of brandy away from me. ‘Mr Hale, you’re making a film about a film about pirates. Unsuccessful Victorian pirates from fifty years ago, not blood-thirsty African pirates three hundred years in the past. And from Penzance, not Salé. Why on earth don’t you just film the thing in Penzance?’

‘Because at some point real pirates enter the scene, and they are based in Morocco.’

‘But if you are telling a story about some people telling a story, why not just construct a fake-Africa studio? Which, since you’re after realism, is what your fictional film company would have done, in any event.’ Real realism about realistic verisimilitude …

‘As I said, Pirate King is about a film-crew that is making a picture – which is also called Pirate King – about The Pirates of Penzance. The picture’s director – the fictional director, not Randolph Fflytte – is dissatisfied with the looks of the men in England, so he takes the production to Lisbon to hire some swarthy types, only to have their boat captured by actual pirates, who take them to Salé. The fictional director and the apprentice pirate Frederic are both played by Daniel Marks. The fictional director’s fictional fiancée is an actress. That is to say, she is an actress working on the fictional film, playing the part of Frederic’s girlfriend, Mabel, both parts being played, I’m afraid, by Bibi, who is an actual actress. Or so she claims. You don’t know Bibi? Oh, blessed innocence!

‘But lest you think there’s a further stratum of reality, Daniel Marks and Bibi are not, in turn, romantically connected. Daniel is, shall we say, otherwise inclined. Then there’s Major-General Stanley, who is not only Mabel’s father but the fiancée’s father, and also a financial backer of the film. The fictional film, that is – the actor himself, Harold Scott; you’ve heard of him, I expect? – is unrelated to Bibi, and doesn’t have a sou. Spent it all on drink and horses.’

I made a small noise rather like a whimper.

‘I know, it gives one a headache. Still, that’s Randolph’s plan. Ours not to reason why.’

Ours but to do and die? God, I hoped he wasn’t thinking of blending in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: Cannon to the port of them, cannon to the starboard of them; some major-general had blundered …

Where were we? ‘So, you load everyone on a boat for Africa?’

‘Lisbon first.’

‘Don’t tell me: Mr Fflytte also wants to hire swarthy actors?’

‘In part – and it’s true, English actors just don’t look very piratical. Plus, Will the cameraman threatened mutiny at what an extended period of sand would do to his delicate machines, even though I don’t believe Salé is very sandy, and Bibi – the female lead – put her tiny foot down at the idea of what sand would do to her delicate complexion, so compromise was reached. We’ll cast the parts in Lisbon, then start rehearsals and work out the choreography of the fight scenes. After ten days, we’ll load the entire circus onto a boat – everything but the horses, thank heavens: I managed to convince Randolph that horses were one thing Morocco had plenty of – and sail to Salé. Or actually Rabat across the river, which I am told is friendlier to infidels.’

‘And you’re filming there so as to capture the essence of a seventeenth-century pirate kingdom within a nineteenth-century comic opera for the edification and amusement of twentieth-century house-maids, factory workers, and garage mechanics.’

He grinned. ‘You’ve got the idea now.’

Even in the early stages, it turned out, the script would make for a two-hour picture, and Hale admitted that it was likely to grow by at least half. Apparently, embedding an operetta into a film, then making a film of the process, requires time.

And although the The Pirates of Penzance is all about the songs and the silliness, Pirate King would be dead earnest and without the songs.

In addition, to put the cap on the enterprise, certain portions of the film were due to be tinted, in an as-yet secret (and, I suspected, as-yet unperfected) technique similar to the DeMille-Wyckoff process, which Fflytte intended to patent under his own name.

Pirate King would either set the standard for movie-making for a generation to come, or it would set a match under the Fflytte fortune, incinerating a boat-load of careers along the way. And displeasing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the current resident of Buckingham Palace, and a number of Peers of the Realm.

Actual peers, one assumed, not fictional and piratic peers.

CHAPTER FIVE

FREDERIC [looking off]: By all that’s marvellous, a bevy of beautiful maidens!

RUTH [aside]: Lost! lost! lost!

THAT FIRST EVENING