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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
'Deftly interlacing present and past, King offers further fascinating insights into Holmes's family while also delivering an intriguing mystery'- Washington Post September, 1925. After their recent adventures in Transylvania, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes look forward to spending time with Holmes' son, the famous artist Damian Adler, and his family in the French countryside. But when they arrive at Damian's house, they discover that the Adlers have fled from a mysterious threat. In the ominously empty house, Russell discovers several crates packed with memorabilia related to the artist Horace Vernet, including an old journal written in a nearly impenetrable code. Intrigued, Russell sets about deciphering the intricate cryptograph. The secrets of the past appear to be reaching into the present. Could there be things about Holmes' own history that even the master detective does not perceive?
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3
THE LANTERN’S DANCE
LAURIE R. KING
5
This one is for my beloved friends at Bookshop Santa Cruz, who have been a major part of my life for more than half a century.
6
Contents
Chapter One
‘Let me help,’ he said.
‘I can manage.’
‘Russell, I’ll get the—’
‘I’m fine, Holmes,’ I snapped. I was not fine. And when it came to admitting that an infirmity might require some help, I was proving nearly as cantankerous as Sherlock Holmes himself could be.
‘I can—’
‘Holmes, just pay the ruddy driver, I’ll send someone out for the bags.’ Assuming they hadn’t changed their minds as to the invitation. Or gone off to the South of France for the month.
‘Watch the—’
‘I see it!’ And nearly tripped over it, one crutch-leg sliding into an ill-fitting stone on the path.
But he let me get on with my halting progress, stumping along the pathway towards the brightly painted door while the taxi-driver undid the rope strapping our trunks and valises in place. We’d expected to be met when we got off at the station in nearby Délieux. And though the absence of a car might have been a message of sorts – that antipathy had returned, that we should simply continue on to Paris – we had been invited, we had accepted, and we had cabled ahead with our information.8
And even if the absence of greeting at the station had been due merely to the chronic forgetfulness of an artist, one would have thought that Damian’s doctor fiancée, who had impressed even Holmes as being marvellously competent, would remember the arrival of her soon-to-be in-laws. (Stepmother-in-law? Me?)
I reached the end of the pathway without mishap, negotiated my way up the two low steps, settled my balance so I could reach out for the bell – then stopped, abruptly, three feet from the front door. After a moment, leaving the crutches tucked under my aching arms, I unfurled my fingers from the grips and raised them, hands outstretched.
Resentments, unsettled scores, and long-standing acrimony were one thing.
What I had not anticipated was being met by the sound of a break-action shotgun snapping into place behind me.
Chapter Two
Istood utterly still. So did the person with the shotgun. The voices from the lane concluded their business. A car door slammed, the taxi’s engine clattered into life, the gate creaked, footsteps began – and cut short as the world’s first consulting detective saw the tableau on his son’s doorstep.
The sound of the motorcar faded away. Holmes and I waited, either for the man to pull down on the trigger or to decide that we were not the enemy he seemed to be anticipating.
‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’ His voice was raised so as to reach both of us. It was not, to my relief, Damian.
‘Nous cherchons la famille Adler,’ I said over my shoulder. We’re looking for the Adler family.
‘Vos noms?’
‘The name is Holmes,’ came the voice from the gate. ‘Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Ah,’ the man behind me said, in English this time. ‘Good.’
The shotgun mechanism clicked. I let out a shaky breath and lowered my hands onto the crutch grips, manoeuvring myself around.
On the surface, my would-be assailant was a French agricultural worker: soft cap; tie-less, once-white shirt under a working man’s 10waistcoat and red braces; and soil-coloured trousers of hard-wearing twill. His shirtsleeves were rolled up on meaty forearms, revealing a tattoo whose significance no doubt Holmes would read, but to me looked like a scrawl of dark chalk dissolved by time. His shoes, however, were no peasant clogs, but fit him well and had once cost a pretty centime.
The shoes led me to reconsider his status – and indeed, the set of his shoulders made it clear that this was not a gardener in the habit of tugging his forelock, or even doffing his cap. Beyond that, Damian clearly trusted this man enough to give him the name of Sherlock Holmes.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ I said.
‘You, I think, will be Madame Holmes?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘I most abjectly beg your good pardon, Madame. I am Gervais LaRue. Monsieur Adler said you would come. Have you hurt—ah, Monsieur,’ he said, holding out a hand for Holmes to shake. ‘I apologise for my ambuscade on your good wife. Please, come in – here, I shall open. Madame, you have injured yourself?’
‘A minor sprain, nothing to worry about.’ It was a foolish injury, a combination of a small dog, a distracted mind, and some slippery tiles on a Berlin railway platform. My brusque tone of voice told him that I did not wish to talk about it.
He made sympathetic noises, but hastened to retrieve a heavy skeleton key from a pocket and fitted it into the door, fiddling it into place awkwardly around the gun draped across his other arm.
‘Il faut plus d’huile,’ he muttered to himself, then grunted in relief when the key turned and the door came open.
‘Where are the Adlers?’ Holmes demanded.
‘Ah, Monsieur, now that is a tale – come, my wife will bring food, and I will tell you all.’11
M. LaRue trotted ahead of us into the dim interior, ducking through one door and reappearing without the gun, then crossing the hallway to disappear through another. His footsteps went soft as he passed over carpet, then came the sounds of windows and shutters being thrown open. Holmes turned back down the path to fetch our bags. LaRue came out, squeezing past me to trot after Holmes. I decided there was little point in blocking the hallway, so stepped inside what proved to be a large sitting room, its stale air rapidly dissipating with the morning breeze.
On the outside, the Adler home was a substantial stone-walled, two-storey, red-tile-roofed French house with bright flowers along the path and, unlike any of its neighbours in this village to the south of Paris, shutters and door painted an orange so bright, a child might have chosen it.
The inside, too, was a mix of traditional and modern, with a Rococo limestone fireplace and ornate fringed ceiling lamps – once gas, now electrical – that looked askance at the brilliant blocks of colour in the carpet and the dozens of bottles lining the wall behind a cocktail bar decorated with a modernist version of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, its polished metal top set with ashtrays from half a dozen Parisian cafés. Gilt-framed portraits and landscapes shared the walls with art that resembled industrial schematics, primitive cave-paintings, or in one case, an artist’s actual palette. The curtains were pale green linen, the seats were mostly Deco armchairs in several shades of darker green velvet, and the low table before the fireplace looked like a piece fallen off of an aeroplane. A leather settee in a startling shade of fuchsia was blessedly muted by the magnificent old Turkish rug draped across it. An elegant antique glass-fronted bookcase was stuffed with modern novels and books for children. On its top was a tangle of deer antlers, out of which peeped a child’s teddy.12
The orange doors, angular furniture, shin-endangering table, and avant-garde rectangles of painted canvas on the walls testified to the presence of Damian Adler: Surrealist artist, occasional murder suspect, and consequence of the affair between an American contralto and the world’s most eminent English consulting detective, some thirty years before.
The children’s books and teddy bear were signs of one Estelle Adler, Damian’s four-and-a-half-year-old, disconcertingly intelligent daughter.
The pale green curtains, the modern-but-subdued wallpaper, and the pieces of furniture that looked as if they might actually be used for sitting upon, demonstrated the conciliatory influence of Damian’s wife-to-be, Dr Aileen Henning.
And underlying these three strong modern personalities, I caught glimpses of another strong individual: the Rococo fireplace, ceiling lamps, and Turkish throw-rug were signs of the opera singer and renowned adventuress, Irene Adler. Damian’s mother, my husband’s long-ago … paramour.
This house had once belonged to her. In his early years on Baker Street, Irene Adler had come to Holmes’ attention as the suspect in a case of blackmail – and promptly claimed his youthful heart by outwitting him soundly.1 He eventually discovered that she was not only innocent, but that she was the wronged party, fighting to protect her future with the man she loved. She and Godfrey Norton had married, escaping with their dignity and their love – only to have it turn to ashes when he died and she was injured in an accident a few years later.
Holmes heard of the accident as he was working his way back across Europe after an enforced absence from London. He tracked her down in Montpellier, to offer his condolences. Matters 13progressed – only to have her briskly send him on his way home to London in April of 1894, with no more explanation than she wished to return home to America.
What she failed to mention was that she had become pregnant. Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, knew – Mycroft seemed to know most things – but Holmes himself only learnt of his son’s existence six years ago, in the already tumultuous summer of 1919. When we met Damian, he was an ex-soldier-turned-artist whose problem with drugs had led to a murder charge. Holmes and I investigated the matter and saw him freed – after which he, like his mother before him, disappeared from view, only in his case, to Shanghai.
So far as I knew, Holmes had never been inside this house that was now Damian’s.
I heard voices from outside: a woman calling a question, answered by a shout from M. LaRue, coming in the front door and going past the sitting room with our bags. Holmes followed, his arms also full. Their two voices came from deeper in the house, then returned up the hallway. I turned on my crutches and followed, finding them in the kitchen – a room where the traditional French furnishings of burnished copper, hand-hewn wood, and practical fabrics gave no ground to modern life. M. LaRue was unlatching a side door onto a tree-lined terrace whose lines I remembered from one of Damian’s sketchbooks, seen long ago.
The woman whose voice I’d heard – who indeed had not ceased to mutter to herself, despite Monsieur’s attempt at explanation – bustled in, pounced on the kettle, filled it from the old tap, slapped it down on an electrical ring that was the most modern thing in the room, crossed the kitchen to give my hand two brisk pumps – down, up, down – then did the same to Holmes, before hurrying out of the door and into the garden. Her ongoing monologue faded along with the sound of her heels on the gritty stone.14
‘My wife,’ M. LaRue offered. ‘Pauline.’
I looked at the kettle, and at the very British teapot beside it. Tea was not a French habit.
Two minutes later, she was back, carrying a heavy-laden basket that she proceeded to unpack onto the wooden table: a baguette, two pieces of cheese (one hard, one soft), half a roast chicken, a bottle of wine with no label, a small pot of liver pâté, and a gorgeous smooth-skinned melon whose late-summer aroma I could smell even over the garlic and cheese.
Holmes surveyed the growing banquet with disapproval, and turned to the husband.
‘Do you generally greet strangers with a shotgun?’
‘As I said, your son’s absence is a tale, to be told at length.’
Son?
A weighty pause lay across Mme LaRue’s ongoing monologue – the baguette was lamentably stale and the chicken was left-overs, there would be better cheese tomorrow after the Délieux Wednesday market – while Holmes and I contemplated the fact that Damian had not only given this man the name Sherlock Holmes, but had disclosed how they were related.
‘Tell me now,’ Holmes demanded.
‘Oh, Monsieur, I did not mean to alarm – they are fine; merely, it was thought that between the questions and the intruder—’
… that the grapes were not quite ripe yet so perhaps we could make do today with the melon from the garden, Mme LaRue maundered on.
Two men facing off, one woman attempting to ease tensions with hospitality, another woman whose irritation with herself and apprehension with the situation had been building for days.
I abruptly saw that things had got off to a poor start here. And that alienating these two people – people intimate with the Adler 15household – by demanding facts before food would not be a helpful way to proceed. In any event, the stuffy air in the sitting room indicated that the family had been gone for a while. What difference would another half hour make?
‘Holmes,’ I cut in, ‘perhaps we might want to eat first.’
I held his gaze for a moment, then deliberately picked up the melon in both hands and lifted it to my face, filling my lungs with an exaggerated degree of appreciation. M. LaRue smiled and fetched a corkscrew; Mme LaRue fell silent at last and fetched some plates; and Holmes, after a hesitation, accepted my recommendation and pulled out a chair.
In fact, it proved little hardship to act out the greed of two people who had spent too many days subjected to train schedules across the width of Europe.
The wine was the work of M. LaRue – from vines, he told us, that his father had planted during the reconstitution of France’s devastated vineyards. This opened polite conversation concerning the wickedness of phylloxera vastatrix and the inferiority of modern wine grown on American stock. I quietly drank, and made no attempt to defend my countrymen.
The melon was sublime.
When the feast was nothing but bones, crumbs, and a pot scraped empty of pâté, Mme LaRue asked – in French again, although she seemed to understand English well enough – if we preferred coffee or tea, and said that she would bring it out onto the terrace, where we could talk.
Her husband dragged chairs and a small metal café table into the dappled shade of a plane tree growing over the little pond, and we sat.
The respite, I could see, had achieved the goal of setting the LaRues at ease.16
‘Alors,’ he said. ‘You will want to know of your son, and why he is not here.’
‘If you would,’ Holmes said. He drew out his pipe, M. LaRue his cigarettes. I satisfied myself with a tiny cup of madame’s café fort and a glance at Holmes.
He did not meet my eyes.
1 ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Chapter Three
Holmes did not speak much about his son.
After we had freed Damian in 1919, years had gone by with no word. We had both resigned ourselves to the thought of him dead. He had, after all, a troubled history of drugs and drunken arguments, and although in actual fact he was both alive and productive, his work becoming well known even outside of Shanghai, it was under a pseudonym that Mycroft’s agents had not caught.
And then a year ago, Damian turned up at the door of our Sussex home, reluctantly asking Holmes to find his missing wife.2 Yolanda was a native of Shanghai he had met, married, and had a daughter with.
I shall never forget the look on Holmes’ face when Damian told him about the child, who was also missing: Sherlock Holmes – a grandfather?
By the time Damian came to us, his marriage was more by way of a business partnership than a romance, with most of Yolanda’s energy and enthusiasms dedicated to a man named Thomas Brothers, leader of a religious cult, the Children of Lights. We had not managed to save Yolanda, but we had preserved the lives of Damian and little Estelle, 18picking up an odd assortment of friends along the way – including a tiny red-haired Scots physician named Aileen Henning.
That particular friendship began as little less than outright abduction – polite, and entirely for her medical skills, that she might deal with the bullet in Damian’s shoulder – but nonetheless, abduction it was. To our surprise, Aileen had chosen not to return to her hard-fought practice in a remote Scottish fishing town. Instead, she had come to France with Damian and the child, and a letter over the summer had informed us that a wedding was in the works. In fact, the letter went on to say, young Estelle was already addressing her father’s intended as ‘Mama Aileen.’
The letter had come from Aileen, not Damian. And although it included her blithe note that Damian was looking forward to our visit, neither Holmes nor I were entirely reassured. The relationship had never been easy.
Still, ancient animosities aside, I looked forward to seeing how a fiery Scots lady doctor and a devoutly idiosyncratic Surrealist painter of nightmares might formalise their relationship in a French village, accompanied by half the French Bohemian art world, with the bride attended by the small, wickedly smart, grey-eyed, half-Chinese granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes.
M. LaRue finished building his cigarette, lit one end, handed it over to his wife, and began to assemble a second one as he started to tell us why none of the Adlers were at home.
‘This is a small village, Madame, Monsieur. Strangers are noticed. When M. Damian and his daughter and la belle docteur came here last year, they were the first new faces since the end of the War. For the most part, our young people leave, for Paris or beyond. But of course we knew M. Damian. He was small when Mme Adler came, so he grew up with our children. When she died, before the War, my wife 19and I were instructed to hold the house in waiting for him.
‘He would come, from time to time. He spent some weeks here after the War, recovering from injuries, but after that, we did not hear from him for years. However, we had no reason to think that he had died, so we continued to maintain it for him. Madame and I live next door. Her brother, Pierre, has a small cottage that Mme Adler built for him at the back. Pierre was … disfigured in the War, and is grateful that M. Damian has agreed for him to stay. Pierre works,’ LaRue hastened to explain. ‘The garden is mostly his, and he has clever hands for repairing all manner of things. But the way he looks, not everyone would be willing …
‘At any rate, this has been the situation, until finally, last year, M. Damian returned. And despite the undeniable oddness of M. Damian and his living arrangements – and some of his parties, although those have gone quieter since the conseil sent a letter – the village has come to look upon the family with affection, even humour. And the child is lovely and Madame la docteur is both charming and willing to turn out for a sick or injured neighbour.’
‘The Prodigal returns,’ Holmes said. He was being remarkably tolerant, although I could feel him quivering with impatience.
‘Exactement. And therefore, when strangers come and begin to ask about them, even the village children know to turn a puzzled face on the questioner.’
At last.
‘Strangers? When?’
‘It began the middle of last week – not here but in Délieux. Two men came off the Paris train. One was thirty or so years old, handsome, in a well-tailored suit. The other was older, and more foreign. Neither looked entirely French.’
‘You saw them?’
‘Not the older man, but the younger one came here – not here to 20the house, but to Sainte Chapelle – in a motorcar, a day or two later.’
‘Jour du marché,’ Madame LaRue contributed.
‘That’s right, it was market day, which makes it Friday. He stood out, not just because of his shiny motorcar.’
‘Not French, you think. Then what?’
‘From one of the colonies, perhaps, although he spoke almost like a Parisian.’
‘Africa?’ France had colonies across the African continent, and faces in all the multiplicity of browns were common in the larger cities, especially those with busy ports. But LaRue was shaking his head.
‘Not from l’Afrique, no. From the East, I would say.’
I shot Holmes a glance. The East – as in Shanghai?
‘China?’ he suggested.
LaRue thought for a moment, then looked to his wife, who gave one of those eloquent French shrugs indicating the vast extent of what she did not know. He shook his head. ‘I think not, but I am not certain I could judge. Black hair and eyes, and dark skin, both of them. I heard that the older man was darker.’
‘What questions did they ask?’
‘In Délieux, I understand, they were looking for an artist named Adler. I suppose someone there gave them the name of this village, and the younger man came to Sainte Chapelle, to ask at the market. As I say, no-one here would give them information, but Délieux is a larger town, without our loyalties. When the man came, he knew of a red-headed lady in the house. He wanted to know how long had they been here, where did they come from, which house was theirs. Oh, and he asked about la famille Vernet.’
Holmes stiffened.
Arthur Conan Doyle had given the world precisely three facts about Sherlock Holmes’ background. First, that he had an older brother 21named Mycroft, who was something high and enigmatic in the British government (read: a spymaster). Next, that the Holmes family were English ‘country squires’ (that is, not quite aristocracy). Finally, that his grandmother was ‘the sister of Vernet, the French artist.’ Doyle never specified which of the half-dozen artists Vernet was meant, but in fact Holmes’ grandmother had been Horace Vernet’s sister, Camille Vernet-Lecomte.
But virtually no one outside of Holmes’ immediate circle knew that he was in any way related to Damian Adler. There was no reason why the name Vernet should have been heard in the village.
‘Did they say why they wanted a member of the Vernet family?’ he asked LaRue.
‘Not so far as I heard. Although I understand the Vernets are distant relations of M. Damian. He was in Paris last month, and when he returned, he told us that he had gone to see the place where his uncle used to work.’
‘His uncle?’ This time, Holmes could not hide his alarm. The only uncle Damian Adler possessed was Mycroft Holmes. Not only had Holmes’ older brother never worked in Paris, but if that connection was becoming known, we might be in trouble.
‘Grand-oncle.’ This was from Mme LaRue. ‘Ou peut-être arrière.’
Her correction made it slightly less worrisome. A great-uncle could be one of the lesser late-Victorian Vernets – or if ‘arrière,’ then the previous generation, possibly Horace himself.
LaRue waved away any concerns about the generational divide.
‘Some uncle or other. M. Damian was amused at the thought – he showed us the man’s work in a book, so very, very different from his, n’est ce pas? At any rate, when he took the family to Paris for a few days, that they might see the Exposition des Arts, he went past l’Academie and asked to see the uncle’s rooms. Others are there now of course, but the building itself has not changed. And it seemed that 22a concierge who has worked there since La Belle Époque remembered another Vernet who painted there, who died twenty, twenty-five years ago. So clearly,’ he finished up, ‘M. Damian must have told the people at l’Institut of the family link.’
Which was not ideal, although a family as widespread as the Vernets could be claimed by any number of descendants.
‘Les caisses,’ Madame prompted.
‘Ah yes – the crates! Some days after the family returned to Sainte Chapelle, a letter arrived to say that the concierge had got to thinking and remembered that once, long ago, some Vernet possessions had been left in a storage attic, and when he went to look, he was astonished to discover the boxes still piled together in a distant corner. Since they had never been claimed and there was some desire to clear the storage, did M. Damian want them? Naturally M. Damian said yes, and that he would pay for the shipping, and so they came here.’
‘When did all this happen?’
After some consultation, the LaRues agreed: the trip to Paris had been the first week of August, with the family’s return the 11th or 12th. The Institut’s letter had come on 14th August. M. LaRue had collected the four crates at the train station two and a half weeks later, on the first of September – one day before the foreign men had shown up in Délieux, and three days before the younger one came to Sainte Chapelle on market day.
Nearly a month went by between Damian’s visit to his artist ancestor’s rooms and the men asking after a Vernet descendant.
‘What was in the boxes?’ I asked.
‘Nothing of importance. A dozen or so small paintings. Sketches, some journals and letters, odd things collected during travels. Personal memorabilia, you understand? The sort of things that servants hesitate to throw out completely, when clearing rooms that have been vacated. At least, nothing that seemed of any great interest under a preliminary 23look. They have yet to be properly unpacked, as M. Damian was préoccupé with a new painting and Madame la docteur was busy with renovations to the plumbing and decorating. She was determined that the two of you should have a proper bathroom, when you arrived.’
‘Et alors—’
‘And then,’ LaRue cut in, overriding his wife, ‘the lascar broke in.’
Holmes nearly dropped his pipe. ‘A lascar? Why on earth would an Indian sailor come out here?’
I had to agree. Even in En gland, one rarely saw lascars outside of port cities. But I had a question of my own: ‘How did you know he was a sailor?’
LaRue laughed. ‘I know nothing – it was M. Damian who saw him. It was the middle of the night, and la petite had wakened him. She is a restless sleeper, I understand. When she was asleep again, he made his way downstairs in the dark – he broods over his paintings some nights, though he takes care not to wake the others. But he heard a sound as he went past the sitting room. Something moving, he thought, perhaps the shutters were loose, so he turned on the switch to see and found himself face to face with this … foreign stranger. The man turned and dove out of the window he’d just climbed in, and ran off into the night.’
‘And Damian said he was a lascar?’
‘It was a sort of joke, perhaps, because the man looked Indian and his feet were bare. It sounded to me like one of his Bohemian friends – as you can imagine, we have had all sorts here, since they arrived – but M. Damian said he did not know him, and that the man’s appearance made him think of the sailors who would climb up and down the rigging. At first, he was angry, and I think frightened. Then he said, perhaps the lascar had nothing to do with the two nosy men and was merely a house-breaker looking for something of value. And then he decided that perhaps my explanation was the right one, and he tried 24to convince Mme Aileen that it could be one of their friends playing games – you know, the kinds of idiot blagues and trickeries that young people play these days. I believe he was trying to reassure himself as much as Mme la docteur. But in truth, he looked to me a touch inquiet. And madame did not find it at all a joke.’
‘Il a fait un dessin,’ contributed our one-woman Greek chorus.
But then, Damian’s hands were constantly producing sketches, and Holmes had a more immediate concern than his son’s artistic inspirations. ‘Is that why the family is away? Because of this lascar?’
The LaRues looked at each other, and Monsieur rose and went into the house, coming back with a knife, or more accurately, a machete. It resembled a Gurkha’s kukri, but heavier. And, we saw when he laid it on the table, dull enough to shame any Gurkha.
‘He dropped it as he fled. In the garden bed outside.’
A knife put a very different face on the matter. A person could slaughter an entire family with this blade, in no time at all, and in utter silence.
As it was, the smears along the last few inches of the blade were merely soil. Holmes bent to examine the marks, without touching it.
‘You suppose there’s any chance of prints?’ I asked him.
‘We can try. When did the man break in?’ he asked LaRue.
‘Sunday night – or early Monday morning, I suppose. They packed and were on the train by noon.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘To Nîmes. M. Damian has friends who run an hotel there – La Petite Bohème. He said to tell no one but you.’
No one but us, I thought, and any of the dozens of artists who might be travelling down to the Riviera.
‘When is the next train down there?’
LaRue fished out a large brass pocket watch and popped it open. 25‘Forty … three minutes. That is for l’Express. The next one is not until evening.’
Holmes stood. ‘Is there someone who can drive me to the station?’
‘Pierre could run you in.’
‘Leave the knife there,’ Holmes told him. ‘Russell?’
‘I’ll deal with it.’
He had crossed the terrace and disappeared into the house before I’d retrieved my crutches. Well, I thought, that decision had certainly been made without much contribution from me.
2 See The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive.
Chapter Four
Our room – fortunately – was on the ground floor. When I got there, Holmes was busily yanking things out of bags and shoving them into a valise.
I stepped out of my shoes to sit on the bed, studying my strapped-up ankle. There was no denying that it interfered with my mobility.
‘I take it that you intend to leave me behind.’
‘Don’t you think it best?’
‘No. Well, not really.’
‘I doubt I’ll be more than a day or two. Leave it propped up, you’ll be fine by the time I return.’
‘Holmes, I’m sorry.’ The words surprised me – I hadn’t planned to say them, had only meant to ask what he intended to do when he found Damian. Perhaps I had overindulged in M. LaRue’s wine.
He raised his head. ‘Sorry for what?’
I could see the accumulation of stress in his face: my ill temper, his uncertainty about Damian, grown now into out-and-out worry. To say nothing of recent events.
‘Berlin was … difficult,’ I said. ‘But there’s no reason for me to take it out on you.’
What we had found there, sent on what seemed a minor matter 27by Mycroft, had been deeply disquieting. A Freudian might have said I injured my ankle deliberately, so as to remove the both of us from the situation.
Holmes shook his head. ‘The current relative calm seems to have even Mycroft misled. He has a great deal of ground to make up there.’
Without us, I sincerely hoped. ‘What will you do with Damian?’
‘Put him and his two womenfolk in a safe place. I will then return, and we can find out what is going on.’
‘Thank you for saying “we”.’
He grinned, and slapped a pair of clean shirts into the valise – which in my case would have meant a myriad of wrinkles, but in his, merely a sharpening of the crisp folds.
‘Could this …’ I paused, and climbed off the bed to close the door. ‘Could this be one of that madman’s followers, the Children of Lights, come for revenge? I’d have thought that, without Brothers, they would simply go looking for someone else to adore.’
‘Revenge does seem unlikely, but I’d rather not take a chance.’
‘You’d say it has to do with that question about the Vernets rather than with the Children of Lights.’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Almost.’
He did not reply, being occupied with folding a pair of trousers under his chin.
‘It could be nothing,’ I pointed out. ‘Even Damian said it could be one of his more thoughtless friends, playing a joke on him. Or a newspaper reporter, after a clever scoop about the artistic antecedents of Damian Adler.’
‘A reporter who broke in with a machete in hand?’
‘He didn’t actually use it.’
He cocked an eyebrow at that, and dropped to his heels over the bag that held our books. ‘There are those who would relish finding a 28means of harming me through my family.’
‘Surely Damian can protect himself?’
‘And Dr Henning, and the child? While he is preoccupied with his work?’ He dropped a book into the valise, frowned, and went to fetch his shaving kit.
‘Holmes, Damian was a soldier, and he’s far from stupid.’
‘True. On the other hand, the lad sounds halfway to convincing himself that the matter means nothing. That horrific events in his past do not mean that the future holds the same thing. And, incidentally, that the work his father has spent his life doing has nothing to do with the real world of Damian Adler.’
‘He couldn’t be that foolish.’
‘I won’t know until I speak with him.’ He tucked a packet of tobacco into the case and started to buckle it shut.
‘Holmes? Take the revolver.’
‘You may need it.’
‘I’ll sleep with M. LaRue’s shotgun.’
After a moment, he nodded and retrieved it from its concealed pocket. He then fastened the buckles and picked up the valise, giving me a very nearly apologetic smile. ‘Perhaps you’ll be able to raise some fingerprints from the knife.’
He detoured long enough to deliver a brief kiss to the top of my head, and went out of the door.
‘Or perhaps,’ I called at his retreating form, ‘the lascar and his two associates will come back, and I’ll have them all nicely bound and gagged when you return.’
Chapter Five
The sound of the motor faded from the kitchen. Mme LaRue and I looked at each other.
‘Have you a sheet of newspaper?’ I asked.
She fetched one from the stove-side kindling box, and I carried it outside to the café table, wrapping up the knife and bringing it back to the kitchen.
‘Mme LaRue, you said Damian made a drawing. Was it of the lascar – the burglar?’
‘Oui,’ she said, and went on to tell me – in French – how he’d thought perhaps someone in the village might have seen the man, but although she and her husband had shown it among the neighbours, no one had recognised him.
‘Do you still have the drawing?’
‘Bien sûr. Un moment.’ She walked out and came back to lay the torn-out page of a sketching block on the table.
Rendered in pencil, it showed a man in the kind of loose garments worn anywhere from North Africa to India. More Bengal than Shanghai, I thought. He was bare-headed, and stood in a slightly crouched stance, as if startled and about to bolt and run. Both hands were visible: no knife, and if he’d been wearing it through his belt, it 30was well hidden by his tunic-length shirt. There was something in his left hand, but it looked more like a small torch than a weapon. His feet were bare, the toes splayed on the floor tiles.
Most of Damian’s attention had been spent on the face: angular features, heavy eyebrows over dark eyes, thick black hair. No beard or moustache. He had shaded the skin to indicate a darker tone, like the two men who had been asking for information, although the face could be from anywhere between Istanbul and North India.
Small exaggerated patches of graphite suggested smallpox scars, along with a thin, crescent-shaped scar along his right cheekbone.
The drawing was precise and alive, although I had to wonder at the expression Damian had given him. The man seemed more alarmed than threatening – which could be actuality, or it could be an artist sacrificing exactitude to his need to deny fear. Or even to the wish of avoiding the cliché of a bloodthirsty foreigner. Still, I had no doubt that I would recognise the man if I passed him in the street.
‘Is there a photographic studio in the village?’ I asked. ‘I should like to have reproductions made of this.’
Mme LaRue regretted that there was not such a thing in Sainte Chapelle, but the town of Délieux had one, and M. LaRue could easily take this when he returned from the train station.
I thanked her, and set the drawing aside until I could find a protective envelope. When she had finished tidying away the lunch things, I assured her that I did not need any help getting around, but accepted her offer to bring me some of the dinner she was cooking for her husband. She urged me to keep the doors and shutters locked, lest the lascar return, then paused on the doorstep.
‘Mon frère,’ she began, and then ran aground on an uncomfortable silence.
‘Who lives in the back,’ I prompted.
Her brother, it seemed, was among other things what passed for 31a night-watchman, chez Adler. Her brother was appalled that he had not kept the house from being invaded. He felt responsible. I should be aware, therefore, that Pierre was likely to be outside at all hours of the night, by way of protecting the house. I should not concern myself, were I to see a strange man. One with … injuries.
‘From the War, yes?’ She gave a vague gesture to her face, and nodded. I assured her that I had seen such injuries, that I appreciated his diligence, and that I was not about to be frightened, now that she had warned me.
‘Though he probably shouldn’t try to come in without knocking.’ I wouldn’t want to club the poor fellow with a crutch.
‘Oh, non! Non non, il n’entrerait jamais!’
‘Well, that’s fine, then. It’s very good of him to keep an eye on things.’
She was grateful that I understood, and explained again that Pierre was so happy to be permitted to continue in his small house, that he had loved Mme Adler when she was alive and he was honoured to be invited to serve her son, and she herself had been afraid that M. Damian’s wife-to-be and small daughter might be frightened by Pierre’s face and manner, but they had been so generous and …
She was still speaking as I gently pushed her out of the kitchen door. I closed it. After a moment’s silence, her voice came through, reminding me to lock it. I turned the latch; her footsteps retreated.
Had Holmes been there, I would not have admitted that my foot ached. But he was not, and it did, so I swung my way down the hallway to the rooms we’d been given, tossed Holmes’ strewn possessions into one corner, found a book, and stretched out on the bed with a sigh.
It was a very pleasant room, an addition to the house so recent, one could smell the paint. The practicality and decisiveness of the building project made me smile. Over the course of six weeks the previous 32year, Dr Henning – Aileen, she’d said I was to call her – had gone from under-employed lady doctor to involuntary partner-in-crime to romantic interest of a wildly avant-garde artist, ending up in this patch of French countryside where she divided her time between treating the ailments of local farmers and bringing her fiancé’s inherited home into the twentieth century. I suspected that Damian Adler’s free-thinking way of life did not mean that he took over many of the household drudgeries.
And now, it seemed, poor Aileen was on the run again. Truly, one never knew where one would find oneself when in the company of a Holmes.
Or occasionally, where one might find oneself abandoned to her own devices.
I opened the book, read half a page, and found my thoughts returning to Pierre, the Adler gardener, handyman, and self-appointed night-watchman. A nation full of damaged young men, left to eke out a living where they could, including a hut in the back garden of his sister’s neighbour. Though he’d lived there before he was injured, acting as resident muscle to an elderly American opera singer. Well, not elderly – she was only in her fifties when she died. She’d been three years older than Holmes, so would have been thirty-seven when Damian was born. Remarkably old for a first baby, perhaps, but plenty young enough to be … appealing.
Holmes claimed he’d never suspected. That he’d been offended by her haughty declaration that she was going home to America, and had secretly agreed that it was past time for him to get back to his work in London. I believed him – although I suspected that, had it been a man who showed such uncharacteristic behaviour, he might have enquired further. Women had always been a blind spot in Holmes’ generally suspicious approach to the world – a consequence of his Victorian upbringing, perhaps, or of his mother’s early death by 33suicide and having spent his adolescence with a bereft father. A father who, come to that, had been even more catastrophically abandoned by the woman he loved.
I’d always been curious about Irene Adler. Interest in one’s predecessor was only natural – but not exactly a comfortable topic of discussion with one’s husband. I hoped to learn a little more about her on this visit to the house that had been hers for twenty years. Just as I looked forward to learning more about her son, my (still such an odd thought) stepson who was five years older than I. Very probably the only child Holmes would have. Window into a life that might have been.
And with the house lying empty around me, surely twenty minutes was enough to prop up a twisted ankle? I lowered my feet to the bedroom floor and retrieved the crutches to set off for a survey of the house – or at least its ground floor. Not the kitchen, though I might snoop through the cabinets at some point. I started with the sitting room which, beneath the modern trappings, had been laid out by Irene Adler.
Chapter Six
The sitting room took up one corner of the house, with two sets of wide casement windows on each of its outer walls. The windows, which M. LaRue had opened in order to push back the shutters and give the room light, had then been carefully locked again, as if an army of lascars waited to invade. The air was now stuffy, although I imagined that on Sunday night, the household had done as most French residents would do, namely leave the windows open but the louvred shutters locked, allowing the house to cool. As I crossed the room, using caution lest the crutches stub into the carpet underfoot, I noticed marks where the intruder had come through, at the front corner window. He must have stood in the flower-bed and used the long blade of that intimidating knife to jemmy open the shutter’s latch – hence a few bits of peeled-off paint and wood slivers on the floorboards.
I opened the latches so I could lean out and see where the man had stood. The ground was soft enough to be disturbed, and a couple of the plants had been crushed, either by the intruder’s leap or the heavy shoes of those coming to look. I could see a pair of deep dents, some eighteen inches apart, that might have been made by naked heels leaping from window height, although they had been 35partly obscured by later visitors. The ground immediately below had a hole roughly the dimensions of the blade, probably where LaRue had retrieved it. I could see nothing of any interest as evidence, though I would go and look more closely later, when the sun was shining on this side of the house.
I turned my back on the garden, letting the crutches hold my weight, to study the room from the angle the intruder had seen it (albeit briefly). The moon had been four days past full, plenty of light to get inside without using the torch. He probably switched it on once inside, since even a room furnished in the minimal modernist fashion has plenty of hazards to the unwary. So what would his beam have shown? Books on shelves and tables; paintings and prints on the wall; knick-knacks, framed photos, and a time-faded daguerreotype on the mantelpiece: some of those were probably valuable, but nothing that would call out to a common or garden burglar. The objets d’art arranged in the corner-piece étagère, for example – a piece of furniture that looked like a cross between a Chinese bird-cage and a futurist chair – would seem at first glance like knick-knacks, although nestled amongst the beach-side souvenirs, bird-nests, paper flowers, and much-loved toys were an exquisite Fabergé egg daubed with a smear of what looked (and, on closer examination, smelt) like chocolate, a Tiffany clock with its XI missing, and an enamelled elephant some three inches tall whose eyes could have been actual diamonds.
Pride of place, I noticed, was given to a tiny hand-made tea set with cups fashioned from acorn caps.
The Fabergé egg alone would have made any burglar’s trip worthwhile. And two or three of the smaller paintings would have been worth something. I especially liked the one of two women from the back, shoulders nearly touching, grey head and blonde bent over an infant – and I saw it was signed: ‘E Vernet-Lecomte,’ and dated 361895. The artist was Camille’s son, Sherlock Holmes’ uncle, Charles Émile Hippolyte Lecomte (who had added the ‘Vernet’ to his name for its saleability).
However, the intruder had already been halfway across the room when Damian came in, and Damian seemed to have heard the actual sounds of his breaking in. Which would indicate that the intruder’s goal was not here, in the sitting room.
His torch, however, was.
I found it beneath a settee, flung away as he’d leapt for the window, overlooked thereafter. It was a task retrieving it, but after many curses I got one crutch behind it and pulled it into the open. With care, I lifted it onto a cushion without leaving my own fingerprints behind. Had it been on? The sliding switch appeared to be in the ‘off’ position – even with it burning, he’d have been blinded when the room’s lights went on.
I tried to reconstruct the moments following the break-in. Trip the latch, climb up to the sill – a place to check for fingerprints – and then inside. What then? Either put the knife down on the table or window sill and take out the torch, or slide the blade into a sheath hidden by clothing. Either way, according to Damian’s sketch, his right hand was free as he crossed the room to the door, which had opened before he reached it.
Then, after he and Damian stared at each other long enough for his face to imprint on the artist’s memory, instead of pulling his knife – or leaping over to where he’d left it – and using it to attack the householder who had disturbed him, he flung away the torch, scrambled out of the window, dropped or knocked the knife to the flower-bed, and disappeared into the night.
Most likely, I thought, he had left the knife on the window sill, and accidentally kicked it out as he fled.
Shoes and transport must have been somewhere nearby, but 37unnoticed. A resident of this quiet village would have heard a motorcar’s arrival. And if he’d used a cycle, it would have been foot-powered and silent, not powered by petrol.
The whole thing demonstrated an unlikely combination of skill and panic. Was he a thief, or an assassin? If burglary, then his target was both specific and something he knew with a brief glance was not in this room. And assuming this break-in was related to the questions the two foreigners had asked, then work by more valuable artists than the Vernets – including Damian Adler himself – could be found in any French villa or Paris hôtel particulier.
On the other hand, if murder had been on his mind, whether he was a member of the Shanghai cult out for revenge or some enraged art critic in esoteric clothing, he had proved blessedly inexperienced and faint-hearted at the art of assassination. But what other options were there? A spy? For what purpose? Damian Adler held no secrets, had no politics at all, so far as I knew. Granted, his uncle Mycroft held political secrets enough for several families, but if an enemy had learnt of the connection and thought to use Damian to manipulate the British government through his uncle’s affections – a plot even Conan Doyle might have considered far-fetched – why send a trio of distinctly foreign men into the French countryside?
What if their target wasn’t Damian, but Aileen Henning? She did not strike me as a woman with mighty secrets in her past. And yes, one might speculate that some personal threat had sent her to that obscure corner of Scotland, except I knew for a fact that she had not been in hiding, since any number of her brothers, sisters, cousins, and school friends knew precisely where she was.
I shook my head. One could not construct bricks without mud, or a theory without data. The pool of data I had was so thin as to trickle through my fingers: Time to move on, Russell.
The rest of the sitting room contained much of interest, but 38nothing related to the invasion of the home, so I fetched another sheet of newspaper and wrapped up the torch, leaving it on the kitchen table with the machete.
The next room had been an office or library. It was still furnished with a heavy pigeonholed desk, reading chairs, and a peculiar mix of books, from a Victorian survey of women explorers to a racy French novel about a woman’s affair with a man half her age. However, it appeared as if the shelves were in the process of being cleared, and the packets and equipment spreading out across the glass-front bookshelves declared the room now a doctor’s surgery. Her patients’ complaints seemed mostly to involve sore throats, eye infections, minor wounds, and broken bones, but she was prepared for something more traumatic: syringes waiting beside a new-looking safe implied that it was her drugs cabinet, while a prominently placed valise was ready-packed with the equipment and drugs needed for a major accident. I helped myself to a roll of medical strapping tape, and hobbled on.
Across the hallway from the office/surgery was a small, cheerfully tiled lavatory, either newly installed or comprehensively re-built. Beyond that were two doors. On the right was the guest suite we’d been given. I opened the door on the left.
