Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.
The ship's engines picked up in pitch even before we reached the common cabin, and the powerful movement beneath our feet told of some speed. I made for the bath and gratefully shed my dust- thick, sweat-stiff, pungent, threadbare clothing. One hour and three changes of water later I arose transformed: my nails pink and white, my hair freed at last from its concealing wraps, my skin tingling and alive. I slipped on the long, embroidered kaftan I had bought in the stuj in Nablus and, feeling positively sensuous as I glided across the floor, a female again in my loose clothing after weeks of squatting, striding, and scratching, I went to make a large pot of English tea. Holmes had bathed elsewhere and sat reading The Times, dressed in a clean shirt and dressing gown as if he had never gone unshaven, never slept wrapped in goatskins, never concerned himself with the local fauna taking up residence in his scalp. I picked up a delicate bone china cup and laughed silently in sheer delight.
There came a knock at the door, and the captain's "Good evening, Mr. Holmes," I heard. "Permission to enter?"
"Come in, Jones, come in."
"I trust you had a satisfactory stay in Palestine, sir?" the captain said.
"Simple pleasures for simple minds," Holmes murmured.
His words actually startled the good captain into a reaction, causing him to run an experienced eye over the fading green-yellow bruises on Holmes' face and glance for a moment at the neat bandage peeking out from the sleeve of my kaftan. He even went so far as to open his mouth on a comment, but before he could lose control so completely he made a visible effort, snapped his jaws shut, and then turned to close the door. Holmes glanced at me with an expression that looked suspiciously like mischief.
"And you, Captain Jones," he said. "I hope you have had a successful January, though I see you haven't spent too much of it aboard ship. How was France? Rebuilding already, I see." Silence fell, and as I came out of the galley I saw a familiar look of wary perplexity on the captain's face.
"How do you know where I've been? Oh, sorry: Evenin', Miss." He touched his cap.
"No major mystery, Jones. Your skin tells me that you've spent no great time in the sun since you left us, and your new hair pomade and the watch on your wrist tell me you have spent a day in Paris. Don't worry," he said with a chuckle, "I haven't had spies on you. Just my own eyes."
"I'm glad to hear that, Mr. Holmes. If I thought you'd been nosing about I'd be forced to have some gentlemen ask you a few hard questions. Not to offend, sir, it'd just be my job."
"I understand, Jones, and I am careful to see only those things that tell me of unimportant activities."
"That's probably for the best, sir. Oh yes, this packet is for you. It was sent by a courier from London last week, into my own hands — in Paris, in fact." I was standing close to him and reached out for it, but Holmes' voice cut in, sharp, scathing, and utterly authoritative. "Not to Miss Russell, Jones. This and any future official conveyences will be delivered personally to me, and to me alone. Do you understand, Captain Jones?"
In the cabin's shocked silence Holmes rose and walked forward, coldly took the packet from the captain's hand, and went to open it by the window. Jones stared at his back for a moment, then looked at me in open amazement.
A flush of shame crept into my face, and I turned abruptly and went into my cabin, slamming the door. A minute later I heard the outer door close behind the captain.
We had begun our play.
In a few minutes I heard two light taps on my door.
I stood and went to the window before responding. "Come in, Holmes."
"Russell, this packet is most — ah. I see. The mind was willing but the heart taken aback, I take it?" How he could discern my distress from looking at my spine, I cannot think.
"No, no, it was just the suddenness of it, it took me unawares." I turned to face him. "I was not expecting to begin the act so quickly. However, perhaps it is for the best. The captain is now aware that something is amiss, and I doubt that I could have acted that particular scene.
I'm not exactly Sarah Bernhardt." My smile was a bit forced.
"It was indeed most convincing. I fear there will be any number of painful moments before this act is over."
"The lines are written; we must speak them," I said dismissively. "Now, what were you saying about Mycroft's packet?"
"Here, look for yourself. Our adversary has been most prudent. I am filled with admiration for her technique. Were it not that she presses so close in on me, I should relish this case greatly, for I cannot remember one in which such a large number of clues led absolutely nowhere. I think I shall go and fill my pipe."
The packet was a thick one. I put aside for later reading the five fat envelopes with Mrs. Hudson's writing and stamps from various ports of call, and looked at Mycroft's offering. Numerous pages from the laboratories at Scotland Yard described the prints on the cab, the button with its attached bit of tweed, and the analysis of the three bombs, one in grisly detail. It was the description of the hive bomb that illuminated the most, and in fact changed the entire picture. The investigation had found that the charge was ignited, not by Holmes' clumsiness, but by a hair-thin wire that ran from the hive he had been checking, hidden beneath the grass, to the bomb in the next hive. Mycroft's men had found it in the wreckage.
"She never meant to kill you, then!"
"I was glad to see that. The problem had troubled rne. Oh, not her murder attempt, but that mine was the first. The whole point of killing you and Watson, as I read it, was to hurt me, but how could I be hurt by your deaths if I were already dead? I was very pleased to see that explained by the trigger. It also confirms that you shall be safe if we appear alienated. I shall have to arrange for a discreet guard for Mrs. Hudson when she returns from Australia, but Watson's protection we shall continue to leave to Mycroft."
The rest of the pages were interesting, but not as important as the fact of the wire trigger. The prints on the intact Oxford bomb were those of the deceased man, and his alone. The cab's prints included those of Holmes, myself, and Billy, its owner and another driver (both of whom Lestrade had interviewed and released), and two others, one of whom had a thumbprint matching the one on the button. This gentleman was well-known to the police record books and was soon apprehended. His colleague made an escape out the back window of his house and was ru- moured to have fled to America. The large man in custody was being charged with all the injuries done to Billy and to the cab, but Lestrade was of the opinion that the man would not be threatened into revealing anything concerning his employer. "He does not appear frightened of retribution," wrote Lestrade, "simply very firm in his refusal, despite threats of a long prison term for the assault. It should be noted that his wife and their two teenaged sons have recently moved into a new house and seem to have an income from outside. Their bank account does not reflect any great change, but they have significant quantities of cash to spend. Thus far enquiries have been without result."
I looked up at Holmes through his cloud of grey smoke.
"We have another family man in our group, I see."
"Read on, the plot thickens quickly."
The Yard's next document concerned the dead man, John Dickson, who had bombed Dr. Watson's house. He had indeed been apparently reformed, living happily, to all appearances, with his wife and children and working in his father-in-law's music business. About six weeks before the trio of bombs, he had come into a comfortable inheritance, from a distant relative who had died in New York. According to his widow, he had told her that the inheritance was to be in two parts, of equal size, the second to be received within four or five months. He began talking about University for the young children, and the surgery one of them needed on a crippled leg, and they planned a trip to France the following summer. However, shortly after the first sum of money arrived, he began to become secretive.
He put a lock on a back shed and spent hours in there. (The investigation revealed traces of the explosive powder used and clipped ends of wire such as the Oxford bomb had preserved.) He disappeared occasionally for one or two days, returning travel-stained and weary, but oddly excited. He had left the house on a Saturday night in the middle of December, saying that he should be away for several days, but that after this trip he should not have to leave again. The wife and her father tried to persuade him not to go, it being a very busy time of year for the shop, but he was adamant.
In the early hours of Thursday morning he was killed by the bomb, apparently a result of the timing mechanism having been tampered with. One week later a bank draught was received in the wife's name, drawn from a bank in New York. Police there found that the account had been opened some weeks before by a woman who had brought in cash for the purpose. An odd afternote was that the amount of the second payment was exactly twice what the first had been, rather than an equal amount as Dickson had anticipated.
The two draughts depleted the account, which was closed.
Lestrade concluded by noting that although it was irregular, there was no way to prove that the money was connected to the bombing; therefore, it looked as though the widow would be allowed to keep it.
"What do you make of that second payment, Holmes? Guilt pangs?"
"Cleanliness has affected your brain, Russell. Clearly the murder was premeditated."
"Yes, of course. The original amount was what had been planned for. But possibly not by Dickson."
"Make a note, Russell, to ask Lestrade about Dickson's state of mind at the time of death."
"You are thinking that it might have been suicide? In exchange for a payment to the family?"
"Whatever it is, it adds an interesting facet to our foe's personality. She is a person with international connexions, or so the large quantity of American currency would tend to indicate, yet she carries through on her agreement with a dead man. On top of everything else we know about her, she's a murderer with a sense of honour. Most subtle."
I returned to the packet, which included a faint carbon copy of the bomb report, highly technical and couched in police English, several large, glossy photographs of the cab and the Ladies', and a letter from Mycroft. I glanced at the first, set aside the photographs, and began to read Mycroft's cramped but remarkably impersonal handwriting.
The first part of the letter was concerned with the bomb: He agreed that it had been Dickson's work, adding that although the toggle detonator had been manufactured in America before 1909, it had apparently been exposed to London's corrosive air for some many months. He went on to address the problem of the marksman who had shot at us in Scotland Yard, who may or may not have been the same gentleman whom the mother pushing her pram across the bridge had witnessed bundling an elaborate contraption like a street photographer's camera, complete with hood and, in this case, wheels, into the backseat of a waiting taxicab and squealing off. Concerning this he wrote:
I perceive a distinct odour of red herring, as with the fleeing steam-launch, which we discovered was hired — anonymously, with cash — to make off at all speed immediately the captain heard a sound "like a shot".
Concerning the identity of your lady pursuer (continued Mycroft) very little has appeared, but for the following: Three days ago on my way to the Club, an unbelievably unsavoury character with the physiognomy of a toad — and something of the colour — sidled up to me in a manner meant, no doubt, to appear casual, and muttered out of the corner of his flat lips that he had a message for my brother. (I do wish that you might arrange for these persons to send letters. I suppose they are illiterate. Might they be instructed in the use of the telephone?) The sum total of his message was, and I quote: Lefty says there's Glasgow Rangers with buckets of bees in town, the pitch and toss is somebody's Trouble.
End quote.
I thought this might be of interest to you.
Incidentally, heartiest congratulations on the success of your Palestinian episode, no more than I expected from you, but the Minister and the PM are immensely grateful. I suppose that when your name finds its way onto next year's lists you will wish me to arrange for its removal.
This becomes tedious, and I gather that before too long I shall be doing the same for Miss Russell.
I trust this finds you and your companion well. I anticipate your return (with something of the eager interest of a fox outside a henhouse into which he has seen saunter a cat).
Mycroft
I tore my eyes from the intimations of the penultimate paragraph and looked up from the missive. "Glasgow Rangers? Buckets of bees?"
"Cockney rhyming slang. Strangers, with a great deal of money — bees and honey — and the boss is somebody's 'trouble and strife.' Wife. A woman."
I nodded thoughtfully, put down the letter, and took up the photographs to lay them out on the low table in front of the sofa, and began to study them carefully. The photographer had taken two full sets of the interior of the cab, the first as it had been originally, the second after I had removed my scraps. With a pang I remembered the pleasure the green silk dress had brought me as I saw a portion of its cuff in one photograph.
"What was the point of this destruction, Holmes? Why attack the clothes, and not us? Even Billy wasn't badly hurt, just parked to one side. Do you mind if I open the window a bit?"
"It is a bit thick in here, isn't it? That's good. Better close it in a minute or two, though, we don't want our voices heard. Why indeed, as you say, might a foe he content with a few clothes and the seat cushions of an old cab? Except to show us that she knew where we were, and that she could as easily have done the same to our bodies as your clothes. And finally, to thumb her nose at me by pulling my own trick of leaving reversed footsteps, and topping it off with Baker Street mud. It was a demonstration, no doubt about that, but was that all? I think not. Look closely at the slashes on the seats, there." He arranged the last set of photographs so that they overlapped, to place the seat in a continuous line.
"Do you see something?"
I looked at the shredded seats, the cuts that crossed, met at their lower ends, and ran parallel. I laid my spectacles to one side and squinted hard at the clear black and grey images. "Is there a pattern?" I asked, hearing the excitement in my voice. "Hand me that pencil and pad, would you, Holmes?" The first two cuts crossed each other in the middle, and I wrote an X on my pad. The next two met at the lower edge of the seat, a V. After some minutes and discussion with Holmes, I had a string of Xs, Vs, and straight lines on my pad that looked like this: xvxvnxxiixnxxiixxivxxxi
"Roman numerals?" I wondered. "Does this mean anything to you?" I asked Holmes, whose steely eyes were studying the page intently. I could see that it did not, so I put on my glasses and sat back. "A string of twenty-five Roman numbers. Do they add up to something?" I did the simple sum in my head, ten plus five plus ten and so on. "One hundred forty-five, if they make up twenty-five separate numbers. Of course, they could say fifteen, seventeen, twenty-two, twelve, and so forth."
"What would that come to?" "There won't be much difference, because of the nature of Roman numerals, but it comes to, let's see — 143."
"Interesting. And the number between them is 144, a dozen dozen."
"And the two sums added together make 288, which is the number of dollars my father had in his desk when he died. Holmes, these numbers games could go on forever."
"What if we translated the numbers into letters, one of the more simplistic codes?"
We scribbled and thought, but came up with nothing.
Reading it as 15, 17, 22, 12, 22, 24, 20, 11 yielded gibberish as OQVLVXTK, and no other combination made any sense either. I finally pushed it away.
"There are just too many variables, Holmes. Without a key we can't even know if it's a word, or the combination to a safe, or a map coordinate, or — "
"Yet she left it for us to find. Where could she have put the key?"
"Judging from her previous style, I should say that the key is both hidden and completely obvious, which is always the most effective means of hiding something."
It was very late now, and my eyes felt gritty. I picked up the conversation where we had left it before the slash pattern had appeared.
"I agree that she was demonstrating her cleverness. She won a number of points in that round. I wonder what her next move might have been had we not been spirited away by Mycroft. Cutting off Watson's nose to show that she could have taken his head?"
"More to the point, what will her move be now, when we walk openly home? For how long will her wariness last before she thinks it is perhaps not a trap, that we truly are divided and the trauma of it has made me an empty wreck? Mere extermination is not what she wants, apparently. She wishes to ruin me first. Very well, we'll give her that, and wait for her to move."
He carefully inserted the papers and photographs back into their oversized envelope and stood looking down at me.
"Well, Russell. Thank you for showing me Palestine. It may be a long, long time before we are able to speak freely. I shall say good night, and good-bye, and we will meet when the prey takes the bait and comes into our trap." His lips gently brushed my forehead, and he was gone.
Thus began our act of alienation. Holmes and I had only a few days to perfect our rôles of the two friends now turned against each other, the father and daughter alienated, the near-lovers become bitterest, most implacable of enemies.
It takes time to develop a part, as all actors know, time and an exploration of the nuances and quirks of the person being played. We had to be word-perfect before we reached England for the trap to be effective. We had to assume that we were being watched at every moment, and a slight slip of affection could be disastrous.
It is a truism of the actor's art that one can play only oneself on the stage. To be fully effective the actor must have a sympathy for the character's motives, however unsympathetic they might appear to an outsider. To a large extent, the actor must become the character if the act is to be effective, and that is what Holmes and I did. From the time we rose in the morning we did not play enemies, we were enemies. When we met it was with icy politeness that rapidly disintegrated into vicious attacks. I grew into the rôle of the young student who had come to view her old teacher with withering scorn. Holmes responded with malevolent counterattacks and the full strength of his razor-sharp sarcasm. We cut each other with our tongues and bled and crawled off to the sanctuary of our individual cabins and came back for more.
The first day was technically difficult, keeping up the persona in front of my real face, continually thinking, what might I do at this point if I really were this way? And how ought I respond to that? It was exhausting, and I went to bed early. The second day it quickly became easier.
Holmes never looked out from behind his mask, and mine too was now firmly in place. I went to my room early to read but found it difficult to concentrate. My mind wandered off. What on earth was I doing here? I ought to be in Oxford, not on this boat. I had no business taking off this time of year. Even basic work was impossible in this battleground. Perhaps the captain might let me off in France and I could take the train home. Probably be faster, and certainly more restful. I wonder — I jerked to attention, horrified. These were not the thoughts of an actor; this was the character thinking. I had become, for a moment, the person I had played throughout the day. I sat appalled at the implications: If this could happen after less than forty-eight hours of play-acting, what would happen after days and weeks of it? Would I be able to shut it off at will? Or, my God, would it become a habit too firm to break?
"For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?" Wouldn't a nice clean bomb be better than losing Holmes? A malevolent voice seemed to murmur beneath the engine throb.
"If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." I went out into the common room for some brandy, and Holmes passed me silently as he went into his room. I stood in the dark, looking out at the black sea until the glass was empty, and went back to the hallway.
Holmes had left his door slightly ajar, and my steps slowed.
I stopped and let my shoulder and head come to rest against the wall, not looking in at the segment of his room that was available to my eyes.
"Holmes?"
"Yes, Russell."
"Holmes, when you have acted a part for some days, do you find it hard to drop it?" "It can be difficult to shake off a part, yes." His voice was calm, conversational. "When I spent a week working on the docks on a case many years ago, the day after the man was arrested I dressed and went out at the usual time, and walked clear down to Oxford Street before I came to myself. Yes, a part can become habitual. Had you not realised that risk?"
"Not completely."
"You are doing well, Russell. It becomes easier as time passes."
"That is precisely what I am afraid of, Holmes," I whispered. "How long before the part becomes so natural that it is no longer a part? How am I to maintain my objectivity, to watch for signs that the opponent is opening herself up, if I become the part?"
"When the time comes, you will do it. I have faith in you, Russ."
His easy words brought me an element of stability, calm within the storm. "I am glad you have faith in me, Holmes," I said drily. "I bow to your superior experience."
I could feel his smile through the door.
"I shall send you messages from time to time while you are up at Oxford. Obvious ones, for the most part, though if I have the opportunity to send a secure one, I shall do so. You, of course, will write occasionally to Mrs. Hudson when she returns from Australia, and she will leave the letters lying about pointedly."
"You think it will be safe to allow her to return to Sussex?"
"I do not know how I should keep her away. Mycroft had practically to kidnap her to get her on the ship in the first place; Mrs. Hudson is a very determined woman. No, we shall simply have to take on one or two extra servants. Mycroft's agents, of course."
"Poor Mrs. Hudson. She'll be so upset when she finds we've quarrelled."
"Yes. But Mycroft will be a safe liaison. There's no hiding anything from Mycroft. I fear our alienation will also cause considerable pain to Dr. Watson. I can only hope it will not wind on for too many months."
"You think it could go on so long?" Oh, God.
"I believe our foe is a careful and patient individual.
She will not act precipitously."
"You are right. As usual."
"Your aunt will be pleased, I fear. Your farm, of course, will necessitate the occasional trip to Sussex."
"No doubt it will." I thought for a moment. "Holmes, an automobile might come of considerable use in this adventure. However, I can no longer borrow money from Mrs. Hudson, and I doubt that my aunt would approve the expenditure. My allowance goes up this year, but not enough for that."
"I think Mycroft should be of help there, in persuading your trustees and the University offices that an automobile is a necessary item. You may even come to my farm once or twice, in attempts at reconciliation."
"Which will, of course, fail."
"Of course." I imagined the quick smile flitting across his features. "This is a good trap we're constructing, Russell, strong and simple. It only needs patience, patience and alertness to the prey's movements. We will catch her, Russell.
She's no match for us. Go to sleep now."
"I believe I will. Thank you, Holmes."
I did go to bed, and eventually to sleep, but in the still hours that are neither night nor morning the Dream came for me, with a greater force than it had had in years.
I came up from it to find myself huddled on the floor with my arms over my head, a shriek of complete hopelessness and terror echoing off the walls. All the old symptoms washed over me: cold, copious sweat, sour vomit in the back of my throat, heart bursting, lungs heaving. Then the door was flung open and Holmes was kneeling beside me with his strong hands on my shoulders. "Russell, what is it?"
"Go away, go away, leave me alone." My voice was harsh and hurt my throat. I stood up and nearly fell, and his hands helped me to my bed. I sat with my head in my hands, pushing the dream back into its box, my body slowing.
Over the pounding in my veins I was peripherally aware that Holmes was still beside me, tying the belt of his dressing gown, smoothing his hair back from his temples with both hands, and drilling the back of my skull with his gaze. Eventually he left off and went out of the room, but he did not close the door, and was back after a minute with a glass in one hand and his tobacco pouch in the other. He held out the glass.
"Drink this."
To my surprise it was not brandy, but water, cool, sweet water, sweeter than honey wine. I put the empty glass on the table with hands that were almost steady, and shivered from the drying sweat.
"Thank you, Holmes. Sorry I woke you. Again. You can go back to bed now."
"Pull the bedclothes over you, Russell; you'll take cold. I'll just sit for a moment, if you don't mind."
He brought a chair around to the head of my bed and sat down, crossed his pyjama-clad legs, and took out his pipe, and I curled up and listened to the old, familiar sounds of a pipe being filled and lit: the scrape and tap as he cleaned the bowl, the rustle of the tobacco pouch, the rattle of the matchbox, the quick scratch and flare of the match lighting, the suck of air drawing, and several quick puffs of his lips around the stem. The sharp smell of sulphur and the sweet wash of pipe tobacco filled the air, and Holmes sat and smoked, unobtrusively, undemandingly.
My wits gradually returned from the realm of Pan and, as they had a thousand times before, turned to the Dream. This upwelling of my subconscious had driven me to the works of Freud and Jung and the others of the European schools of psychoanalytic theory — countless hours of self-hypnosis, self-analysis, dream symbolism. I had analysed it, dissected it, thrown the full force of my mind against it. I even tried ignoring it. No matter what the approach, eventually there came another night when I was flung again into the hell and the agony of the thing.
The one thing I refused to try was telling someone about it. One morning my aunt had become too persistent in her questions about my "nightmares," and I had hit her in the face and knocked her to the floor. My neighbours in lodgings had commented on my nocturnal disturbances, and I had passed it off as studying too hard. The thought of telling someone, and having to see their face afterward, had always clamped my mouth down on the words, but now, to my exquisite horror and relief, I heard the words trickle from my mouth. Slowly at first, inexorably, they pushed themselves into the dim room.
"My brother — my brother was a genius. Reading by three, complex geometry by five. His potential was huge.
He was nine when he died, five years younger than I. And I, I — killed him." My harsh voice faded, leaving the low sound of engines and the burble of the pipe. No reaction from Holmes. I turned onto my back and and put my arm across my eyes, as if the hall light hurt them, but in truth it was that I couldn't bear to see his face as I told him this.
"I have this — this Dream. Only it's not a dream, it's a memory, every minute, tedious, horrible detail of it. We were in a car, you see, driving along the coast south of San Francisco. My father was going into the Army the following week. He had been rejected because of his bad leg, but finally he persuaded them to put him into — " I laughed bitterly. "You could guess this, I think — into Intelligence work. We were taking a last family weekend at our cabin in the woods, but I was — being difficult, as my mother put it. I was fourteen, and had wanted to go with some school friends to Yosemite, but had to go to the cabin instead.
My brother was being particularly beastly, my mother was upset over Dad leaving, and Dad was distracted by business and the Army. A merry company, you see. Well, the road is bad there, and at several places it runs along the top of some cliffs over the Pacific. A drop of a couple hundred feet. To make a long story short, we were just coming up to one of these, with a blind corner to the left at the top of it, when I started screaming at my brother. My father turned around at the wheel to tell us to shut up, and the car drifted across the centre. There was another car coming around the corner, going very fast, and it hit us. Our car spun around, I was thrown out, and the last I saw was the outline of my brother's head through the back window as the car went over the side. Dad had just filled the petrol tank. There was nothing left of them. Any of them. They scraped together enough pieces for the funeral." Silence.
How could I possibly have thought it right to tell Holmes this? I was empty, dead, the world was filled with a howling wind and the gnashing of teeth. The Dream had escaped my control, my past had freed itself to destroy me and the (yes, I would admit it) love (the thin waif of my mother's voice as the car went over) I had for this man.
"I went crazy for a while, kept having to be restrained from throwing myself off things. I finally came across a very good psychiatrist. She told me that the only way I could make up for it was not to kill myself, but to make myself worth something. In effect, though she didn't say it so simply, to be my brother's stand-in. It was an effective piece of therapy, in a way. I no longer tried to jump from high places. But the Dream started that same week." Holmes cleared his throat.
"How often does it come?"
"Not often now. I haven't had it since we were in Wales. I thought it was finally gone. It appears not. I've never told anyone about it. Ever." I lay there and thought of the time, just before I left California, that Dr. Ginzberg drove me down to the cliffs, and I had seen the sparkle of glass and the scorch marks below, and how tempting and welcoming and cool the waves looked as they pounded themselves to froth on the rocks far below. "Russell, I — " I interrupted him with a desperate rush of words.
"If you're going to reassure me that it wasn't my fault and say that I mustn't feel guilty about it, Holmes, I'd rather you left, because that really would finish us off, truly it would."
"No, Russ, I wasn't about to say that. Give me some credit, I beg you. Of course you killed them. It was not murder, or even manslaughter, but you are certainly guilty of provoking a fatal accident. That will remain on your hands."
I could not believe what I was hearing. I took my arm away and looked at him then, and saw in his face a mirror image of the pain I could feel on my own, only in his case the rawness of it was smoothed over, soothed by wisdom and years.
"I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it."
His gentle words shook me, like an earthquake, like the tremor I had felt as the gout of flame came bubbling up over the cliff. I felt myself falling into a chasm that yawned up within me, and all that held me was a pair of calm grey eyes. Gradually the trembling stopped, the earth subsided, the chasm fell in on itself and closed, and the eyes saw it all, and understood. My guilt, the secret that had gnawed at me day and night for four years, was in the open now, recognised and acknowledged, and no longer would it be swept away to grow malignantly in the dark.
My guilt had been admitted. I had been convicted, had done my penance, and had been given absolution and told to move on; the healing process could begin. For the first time, the very first time since I had awakened surrounded by white coats and the smell of the hospital, a sob tore into my chest. I saw it on the face of the man opposite me, and I closed my eyes, and I wept.
The following morning we resumed our rôles, all signs of the night's revelations banished. It was bearable now, because that night and each successive night after the lights were turned out I would hear two taps at the door, and Holmes would enter, stay for a few minutes, and leave. We spoke of quiet things, mostly concerning my studies. Twice I lit a candle and read to him from the little Hebrew Bible I had bought in the old bazaar in Jerusalem. Once, after a particularly bitter day of verbal duels and bloodletting, he sat and stroked my hair until I fell asleep. These moments made sanity possible. From the time I rose in the morning until I turned off my light, Holmes was my enemy, and the ship rang with our fury, and the men retreated from the ice that spread from us. At night, however, for a few minutes, battle was suspended and, like the British and German soldiers exchanging cigarettes and carols across No-Man's-Land during the undeclared Christmas truce of 1914, we could put away the battle and fraternise, two weary and seasoned veterans.
I grew in strength and pride and, while the weather held, spent hours on the deck reading, turning darker yet, my hair almost bleached white. Holmes, on the other hand, drew in. His scathing attacks began to reveal an undertone of bewilderment and pain, an emotional reaction that his pride would not allow him to show to the world. He rarely left his cabin, where the lights burnt at all hours. His plates were returned untouched, and he smoked vast quantities of his filthy black shag tobacco. When the supplies ran low, he resumed the habit of cigarettes, which he had left some years before. He drank heavily, never showing the slightest sign of its effect, and I suspected he would have returned to his cocaine had he been able to get it. He looked ghastly, with a strange yellow tinge beneath his tan, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed in red, his normally thin frame on the edge of emaciation. One night I objected. "Holmes, there's not much point in this elaborate farce if you kill yourself before she has a chance. Or are you trying to save her the trouble?"
"It is not as bad as it looks, Russell, I assure you."
"You look jaundiced, Holmes, which means your liver is failing, and your eyes tell me you haven't slept in several days." I was startled to feel my bunk shaking, and then realised that he was laughing softly.
"So the old man has a few tricks left, does he? Russell, I discovered a large quantity of spices in the ship's hold and liberated a few of the yellower ones. Also, various irritants rubbed in the eyes cause temporary discomfort but lasting external effect. I assure you, I am doing myself no harm."
"But you have not eaten in days, and you're drinking far too heavily."
"The alcohol that disappears in my cabin ends up largely in the drains, with certain quantities used on breath and clothing. As for the food, I promise you that I shall allow Mrs. Hudson to feed me when she returns. When I step off the boat, Russell, every eye must know that here stands a beaten man, who cares not if he lives or dies. There would be no other reason for me to return openly."
"Very well. I just want your assurance that you will care for yourself in my absence. I will not have anything damage you, even your own hand."
"For the sake of the partnership, Russell?" The smile in his voice reassured me more than his words.
"Precisely."
"I promise. I shall, if you wish, promise to wash out my socks at night, too."
"That will not be necessary, Holmes. Mrs. Hudson will do that for you."
We came home to London on a grey, heavy morning, both of us burnt by the sun and scorched by the fires of conflicts honest and contrived. I stood alone on the deck and watched the city approach, feeling the palpable unease of the captain and men as they worked behind me and below decks. Familiar forms stood on the dock as we approached.
I could see Watson looking anxiously for Holmes, and Inspector Lestrade standing next to him, equally curious at the detective's absence. Mycroft stood to one side, his face a closed book. They called to me as we pulled in, but I did not answer. When the gangway was let down I seized my bags before one of the men could do so, walked firmly across with my eyes down on the boards, and pushed past the men standing on the dock, to the obvious amazement of two of them. Watson held out his hand and Lestrade called. "Miss Russell."
"Mary? Wait, Mary, what's wrong?"
I turned to them coldly, not looking at Mycroft.
"Yes?"
"Where are you going? Is something wrong? Where is Holmes?"
A movement on the deck above caught my eye, and I looked up into Holmes' eyes. He looked dreadful. His grey irises stared out like holes in two blood'filled pools. His yellowed skin sagged over his bones, and he was poorly shaven, this normally fastidious individual. His tie was straight, but the collar of his shirt was slightly rumpled, and his jacket was unbuttoned. I squelched any urge to pity or uncertainty and summoned up every drop of the scorn I had spent the last days in distilling, filling my face, my stance, my mind with it, so that when I spoke, acid dripped from my words.
"There he is, gentlemen, the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Savior of nations, the mind of the century, God's gift to humanity. Gentlemen, I leave you to him."
Our eyes met in a brief flash, and I saw in them both approval and apprehension, and a farewell. I turned on my heel and stalked away down the wharf. Watson must have started after me, because I heard Holmes' sharp, high' pitched, and infuriating drawl stop my friend and uncle dead in his tracks. "Let her go, Watson, she'll have none of us. She's off to make her mark on the world, can't you see?" His voice sharpened further into a querulous cry that must have carried to the other side of the river. "And God help any man who gets in her way!"
With these searing words on my coattails I rounded the corner and set off to find a cab. It was the last I was to see of him for two months.
She is alone in the world, in the midst of an awakening spring.
Dack at Oxford, I threw myself furiously into my studies. I had missed nearly a month, and although the Oxford program is not dependent on classes and attendance at lectures, one's absence is noted and strongly disapproved. My maths tutor was away, illness of some kind, and I was secretly grateful not to have that pressure. The woman who tutored Greek was also away, vanished into maternity over the Christmas holidays. By dint of working flat out for three weeks I managed to redeem myself in the eyes of my remaining supervisors and felt that I had caught up to my own satisfaction as well.
I changed that spring. For one thing, I no longer wore trousers and boots, but filled my wardrobe with expensive, austere skirts and dresses. I had, as I feared, alienated Ronnie Beaconsfield, and lacked the energy to regain her friendship, but instead made an effort to make contact with the other girls in my year. I found I enjoyed it, although after a few hours their talk made me impatient for my solitude. I took long walks through the streets and the desolate winter hills around Oxford. I took to attending church, particularly Evensong at the cathedral, just to sit and listen. Once I went to a concert with a quiet young man from my patristics lecture. The music was Mozart, and well played, but halfway through the shining genius and the pain of it made it impossible to breathe, and I left. The young man did not ask me again.
My written work changed, too. It became even more precise, less tolerant of other, softer viewpoints, more ruthlessly logical: "Brilliant and hard, like a diamond" was a remark from one reader, not altogether approving.
I drove myself. I ate less, worked invariably into the early hours of morning, drank brandy now to help me sleep.
I laughed when a librarian at the Bodleian suggested, only half joking, that I might move into the stacks, but my laughter was a polite, brittle noise. I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.
Holmes himself, on his farm in the south downs, was retreating from the world into softness and bewilderment.
Mrs. Hudson cut short her expedition to the Antipodes and returned home in late February. Her first letter to me was brief and shocked at the state she had found Holmes in. Subsequent letters neither accused nor begged, but pained me even more deeply when she simply stated that Holmes had not been out of bed one day, or that he was talking about selling his hives. Lestrade had set guards on the cottage at all times. (He had tried to do the same for me, but I had baited him and eluded them and finally he withdrew. I did not believe any of Lestrade's men could guard me better than I could myself, and as time went on I was more surely convinced that the rules of the game had indeed been changed, and that I was not yet in danger. Besides, I found their constant presence unbearable.)
Watson wrote too, long tentative letters, mostly about Holmes' health and mind. He came to see me once in Oxford. I took him for a long walk so I might not have to sit and face him, and the cold and my coolness sent him limping away with his bodyguard.
It was a long, bitter winter after the warmth of Palestine.
I read my Hebrew Bible, and I thought about Holofernes and the road to Jerusalem.
In early March I received a telegram from Holmes, his preferred method of communication. It said simply:
ARE YOU COMING DOWN
BETWEEN TERMS QUERY
HOLMES
I read it openly at Mr. Thomas's busy front desk and allowed a short twist of irritation to show on my face before I turned to go upstairs. The next day I sent him a return question.
SHOULD I QUERY
RUSSELL
The following day his response lay in my pigeonhole.
PLEASE DO
MRS HUDSON WOULD ALSO BE GLAD
HOLMES
Mine in return, sent two days later, confirmed that I would come.
The next free day I went to London to see the executors of my parents' will, to lay before them the proposal that I be given sufficient advance from my inheritance, now less than two years away, to purchase a motorcar. The partner who handled my parents' estate hemmed and hawed and made several private telephone calls, and to no great surprise of mine he approved. I went down the next day to the Morris Oxford garage and paid for it, as well as arranging lessons. I was soon mobile.
It was at this time, two weeks before the end of term, that I first became aware that I was being watched. I was highly preoccupied, and often read a book while walking, so it is possible that they had been present before and I hadn't noticed them. The first time I saw the man, I was outside my lodgings and realised suddenly that I had forgotten a book. I doubled back quickly to get it, and out of the corner of my eye noticed a man stoop down suddenly to tie his shoe. It wasn't until I had my key in the door that it hit me: He had been wearing laceless shoes. After that I was more attentive, and found that a woman and another man alternated with the first. All were reasonably good at disguises, particularly the woman, and I should certainly not have been able to pick out the nun with no scuffs on her toes or the man walking the bulldog as being the same person had I not spent time under Holmes' tutelage.
I had only one problem. If I had truly cut myself off from Holmes, I would not hide my annoyance at being spied on. However, I hesitated to bring the thing into the open before consulting him. This was the first time anyone had come sniffing around the bait at my end, and I was loath to frighten them off. Would the adversary believe that I was not seeing them? They were far from obvious, but still — I decided to continue as before, and became even more absentminded until one day as I had my Greek Testament in front of my nose, I walked into a lightpost on the High Street. I found myself sitting stupefied on the ground while people exclaimed over the blood on my face and a young woman held out my shattered spectacles. I came home from the surgery with a large plaster on my forehead, and I had to wear my spare spectacles for two days while the others were repaired. As I would probably not have recognised Mycroft Holmes himself standing in front of me with the old ones on, it settled temporarily the problem of whether or not I ought to notice my followers.
The doctor who stitched me up suggested mildly that I keep my mind off aorist passive verbs while I was walking, and I had to agree. As an actress I was a good changeling.
When my new glasses came I found my tail still behind me. I decided that I would drive to Sussex rather than take the train, and made prior — public — arrangements with the garage around the corner where I kept my new car, telling them that I would be leaving the next morning for my trip home. I wanted to be certain that I was followed, for I was on their mistress's trail every bit as much as they were on mine.
They used five cars on the journey, which proved the money behind them. I wrote down the numbers from their plates when I could read them, which was in three cases, and noted carefully the cars and all their drivers. (I doubt that the doctor would have considered the exercise less distracting than aorist passives, but I avoided all accidents and do not think I was the cause of any one else's.) When I took lunch in a pub before reaching Guildford, the young couple kissing in the front of the roadster pulled out of the parking area three cars behind me. When I stopped for tea on the road to Eastbourne, the old man who had replaced the couple twenty miles earlier drove past, but the woman in the old Morris, who was walking a (familiar?) bulldog behind the inn, was soon behind me on the road. Her lights drove on past only when I turned into my own road a few miles from Eastbourne. I breathed a sigh of relief that they hadn't lost me. I wanted them here, to witness my innocent behaviour and report it to their boss.
My aunt was — well, she was herself. In the morning I saw that the farm was looking well, thanks to Patrick. He accompanied me on a tour. We greeted the cows, discussed the state of the barn's roof, examined the new foal that his huge plough mare Vicky had recently borne, and touched upon the possibility of investing in a tractor, which other farms in the area had turned to. I hung over the stable door and watched the beautiful dun colt, with his stubby black tail flapping furiously, nuzzling at his mother in the warm, straw-strewn barn, and knew that I was seeing the end of an era. I said as much to Patrick, but he only grunted, as if to say that he was not about to get sentimental about a horse. He didn't fool me.
It was the first time in well over a month that I'd worn trousers and waterproof boots, and they felt good. I invited Patrick up to the house for tea, but he, having no great love for my aunt, suggested his own little house instead.
The tea was hot, strong, and sweet, necessary for a cold spring morning. We talked about bills and building, and then suddenly he said, "There was some men in the village, asking about you." Not much went unnoticed in a village. These were obviously city people we were dealing with, but then I had assumed that.
"Yes? When was that?"
"Three, four week ago."
"What did they ask?"
"Just about you, where you was from, that kind of thing. And about Mr. Holmes, wanting to know if you was seeing much of him. They asked Tillie, down the inn, you know?" He and Tillie had been seeing each other for some time now, I noted. "She didn't realise they was askin' 'til later, though, 'cause it was just a conversation, you see.
Wasn't until she found they'd asked the same questions down the post office that she put the two togethet, like." "Interesting. Thanks for telling me."
"None of my business, but why aren't you seeing him any more? It seems to have hit him bad."
I looked at his honest face and told him what would have been the truth, had I been telling the truth.
"You know that race horse of Tom Warner's that he's so proud of, wants to start a stud farm with?"
"Yes, it's a fine runner."
"Would you hitch it up with Vicky to pull a plough?"
It was such a patently foolish question that he looked at me for a minute before answering.
"You're saying that Mr. Holmes wants you to be a plough horse?"
"And that, right now anyway, I need to run. Nothing wrong with a plough horse. It's just that if you force a race horse to work along with a plough horse, they'll both get upset and kick apart the traces. That's what happened with Holmes and me."
"He's a good man. He came and took out a swarm from under Tillie's eaves last year. Didn't fuss." Not fussing was Patrick's highest accolade. "See if you can hold yourself in long enough to see him. I think he'd like it. His gardener tells me he's ailing."
"Yes. I will see him. This afternoon, in fact."
He mistook the hint of excitement in my voice for nervousness, and reached over to pat my soft scholar's hand with his big, calloused one.
"Don't you worry. Just remind yourself that you're not yoked to him, and you'll be fine."
"I'll do that, Patrick, and thank you."
I had arranged to be at Holmes' cottage at four o'clock, knowing that tea was Mrs. Hudson's favorite meal to produce.
There was a farm cart overturned on the road, which made me somewhat late, but at a quarter past four I pulled the car into his gravel drive and shut off the motor. The sound of Holmes' violin came to my ears. The violin is by its very nature one of the most melancholy of instruments when played alone; played as Holmes was doing, a slow and tuneless meditation, it was positively heart-wrenching.
I slammed the car door noisily to interrupt and retrieved the basket of cheeses and fruits I had brought from Oxford.
When I straightened up, the door of the cottage was open, and Holmes was leaning against the door jamb, no expression on his face.
"Hello, Russell."
"Hello, Holmes." I walked up the path trying to discern what was behind those hooded grey eyes, and failing.
I stood below him on the doorstep and held out the basket. "I brought you and Mrs. Hudson a few things from Oxford."
"That was nice of you, Russell," he said politely, voice and eyes saying nothing. He stepped back into the room to let me pass. "Please come in."
I took the basket through into the kitchen and somehow survived Mrs. Hudson's welcome without breaking down into tears. I allowed myself to embrace her, hard, and let my lip quiver slightly to let her know that I was still Mary Russell, and then became polite again.
She laid out vast quantities of food for us and talked on and on about the ship and the Suez Canal and Bombay and her son's family while I filled my plate with morsels I did not want.
"How did you hurt your head, Mary?" she finally asked me.
I decided to make a joke out of it, the absentminded undergraduate walking smack into the lightpost, but it didn't really succeed as humour. Mrs. Hudson smiled uncomfortably and said she was glad the glass hadn't hurt my eye, and Holmes watched me as if I were a specimen under his microscope. She excused herself and left us alone.
Holmes and I drank our tea and pushed the food around on our plates. I told him what I had been doing that term, and he asked a few questions. Silence crept heavily in. I desperately asked him what he had been working on, and he described an experiment going on in his laboratory. I asked some questions to keep the flow of words going, and he answered, without much interest. Finally he put his cup down and gestured vaguely in the direction of his laboratory.
"Do you want to see it?"
"Yes, certainly, if you want to show it to me." Anything was better than sitting here crumbling a cheese scone into a pile of greasy bits.
We stood up and went into his windowless laboratory, and he closed the door behind us. I saw immediately that there was no ongoing experiment, and when I turned to question him, he was standing against the door, his hands deep in his pockets. "Hello, Russell," he said for the second time, only now he was there in his face, and his eyes looked out at me, and I couldn't bear it. I turned my back on him, my hands two fists, my eyes shut. I could not see him now, talk to him, and still keep up the act. After a moment two soft taps came on the door, and I smiled in sheer relief. He understood. He pushed a tall lab stool up behind me and I sat on it, my back to him, eyes still closed.
"We have perhaps five minutes without it looking odd," he said.
"You're watched, I take it."
"Every move, even in the sitting room. They've made some arrangement with the neighbours — telescopes in the trees. They may even be able to read lips. Will tells me that rumour in town says they have a deaf person there."
"Patrick says they were asking about me, and you. They are city people, and don't know that you can't hide anything in the country."
"Yes, and they are sure of themselves. I assume you are being watched."
"I only saw them two weeks ago, two men and a woman. Very good, too. Five cars followed me down here. The lady has money."
"We knew that." His eyes studied my back. "Are you all right, Russell? You've lost half a stone since January, and you aren't sleeping."
"Only six pounds, not seven, and I sleep as you do. I'm busy." My voice dropped to a whisper. "Holmes, I wish this were over." I felt him behind me and stood up abruptly. "No, don't come near me, I couldn't bear it. And I don't think I can do this trip again. I'm fine when I'm in Oxford, but don't ask me to come down again until the end. Please."
Silence radiated off the man like heat waves, and the low, hoarse voice that came from him was a thing I had never heard before. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I understand." He stopped, cleared his throat, and I heard him take a deliberate, long breath before he spoke again in his customary incisive tones.
"You are quite correct, Russell. There is nothing to be gained by it, and much to lose. To business then. I had copies of the photographs made for you. I gave the Roman numeral series to Mycroft, but neither of us can make any sense of it. I know it's there. Perhaps you can dig it out. It's that packet on the bench in front of you."
I took the oversized brown envelope and put it in an inner pocket.
"We must go back out now, Russell. And in about ten minutes we will begin again, and you will leave angrily before Mrs. Hudson can offer you any supper. Yes?"
"Yes, Holmes. Goodbye."
He went back out into the sitting room, and I joined him a few minutes later. Within twenty minutes the sarcastic remarks were beginning to escalate, and shortly after six o'clock I slammed out of his cottage door without saying good-bye to Mrs. Hudson and sped off down the lane. Two miles away I stopped the car and rested my forehead on the wheel for some time. It was all too real.
It is so certain, then, that the new generation — will do something you have not done?
The dreary weeks dragged on. My watchers remained discreet and I, absentminded. Trinity term began, and I was almost too busy to remember that my isolation was an act. Almost. Often at night I would start awake from bed or chair, thinking I had heard two soft taps at the door, but there was never anything. I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian. Oddly, the Dream did not come.
Spring arrived, hesitant at first and then in a rush, heady, rich, long days that pushed the nighttime back into ever smaller intervals, the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out from four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun; or nearly all. I was aware of the spring, peripherally, aware that no one in the University save myself and a number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers was doing any work, and even I submitted to a picnic on Boar's Hill and another day allowed myself to be dragged off for a punting expedition upriver to Port Meadow.
For the most part, though, I ignored the blandishments of my former friends and current neighbours and kept my head down to work. That was the pattern for most of May, and it was the case on the day nearly at May's end when the tight snarled threads of the case began to come loose in my hands.
Upon my return from Sussex I was faced with the problem of where to put the envelope Holmes had given me. I could no longer depend on the security of my rooms, and preferred not to carry it about on my person at every moment. In the end I decided that the safest place to hide it was behind one of the more obscure volumes around the comer from the desk where I habitually worked in the Bodleian.
It was a risk, but short of buying a safe or visiting the bank vaults with suspicious regularity, either of which would have alerted our enemy that I was up to something, it was the safest risk I could come up with. After all, the general public was not allowed inside the library, so my watchers usually waited long hours outside, and both the hiding place and my work table were in dim corners where it was easy to see people approaching. Over the weeks I retrieved it any number of times to study the mysterious series of Roman numerals. Like Holmes, I knew our opponent well enough to be positive that this was a message, and like Holmes and his brother both, I could find no key to unlock it.
However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking. The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets called the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe or playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focussing slightly to one side of the object of interest.
When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eye to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.
I had been working hard, I had spent a sleepless night and rose to bird song, I had attended a lecture, finished an essay, and twice taken out the packet of photographs
Holmes had given me. I held each one by its increasingly worn edges, studying the mute series of numerals until they were burnt into my brain, every wisp of horsehair that tufted from the crossed slashes, every straight edge of the twenty-five recalcitrant black Roman numerals. I even turned the photographs upside down for twenty minutes, in hopes of stirring some reaction, but there was nothing.
All that happened was that I became increasingly irritable at having to cover them with some innocent papers every time someone walked by my worktable.
In the late afternoon the traffic past my table picked up, and after having slipped the photographs away seven times in less than an hour my temper snapped. I had no idea if those accursed slashes meant anything or not, and here I was wasting precious hours on a problem that quite possibly existed only in my mind. I shoved the photos back in their envelope and into their hidey-hole and stalked out of the library in a foul mood. I did not even care what my watchers would think, I was so disgusted with myself. Let them wonder. Maybe there is no goddamned enemy, I thought blackly. Maybe Holmes really has gone mad, and it's all one of his little tricks. Another "examination."
By the time I reached my rooms I had calmed down somewhat, but the look of my desk waiting reproachfully in the corner was more than I could bear. I heard my neighbour moving around in her room next door. I went out into the corridor.
"Hello, Dot?" I called. She appeared at her door.
"Oh, hello, Mary. Cup of tea?"
"Oh, no thanks. Are you doing anything urgent tonight?"
"Going to hell with Dante, but I'd be glad of an excuse to put it off. What's up?"
"I'm so sick of it, I can't face another book, and I thought — "
"You? Sick of books?" Her face would not have registered more disbelief if I had sprouted wings. I laughed.
"Yes, even Mary Russell gets fed up occasionally. I thought I'd have dinner at the Trout and go listen to a harpsichord recital a fellow in one of my lectures is giving. Interested?"
"When do we leave?"
"Half an hour all right with you?"
"Forty-five minutes would be better."
"Right. I'll call for a cab."
We had a pleasant dinner, Dorothy found a friend to flirt with, and we went to the recital. It was an informal affair, mostly Bach, which has the beauty and cadence of a well-balanced mathematical formula, particularly when played on the harpsichord. The symmetry and nobility of the master's music, together with a glass of the champagne served afterwards, calmed my nerves, and I found myself in bed before midnight, a rare occurrence in the past few months.
It was, I think, about three in the morning when I jerked up in my bed, my pulse thudding thickly in my ears, my breath coming as fast as if I had sprinted upstairs. I had been dreaming, not the Dream, but a confusing mixture of things real and imagined. A shadowy face had leered at me from the bookshelf in the corner, half-hidden by blonde hair, and held out a clay pipe in a twisted hand. "You know nothing!" the figure cackled in a voice both male and female, and laughed horribly. His/her gnarled fist tightened over the pipe, which I knew to be one of Holmes', and then opened.
Shards bounced slowly about the floor. I stared despairingly at the shattered pipe and knelt down to retrieve the pieces, in hopes of glueing it together again. Some of the larger bits had rolled underneath the bookshelf, and I had to lie down to reach them. As I felt around, my hand was suddenly seized, and I shot upright in terror with a fading image of the bookshelf in my mind's eye. It had been a section of history, the titles all on Henry VIII.
I groped for a light and my spectacles and lay back until my cold sweat dried and my heart no longer pounded in my chest. I knew that I could never get back to sleep after that, so I reached for my dressing gown and went to make myself a cup of tea.
In a few minutes I was sitting, inhaling the comforting steam, and thinking about the nightmare. It was very rare for me to be aware of dreams, other than the Dream, and I could not remember having another nightmare since my family had died. What was the purpose behind this one?
Some of its elements were obvious, but some were not. Why, for example, was the hidden blonde both male and female, when I invariably thought of my adversary as female?
The smashed pipe was an easily understood image of my intense, nearing frantic anxiety about Holmes, and bookshelves were such a part of my life that I could hardly imagine any part of me, even a dream, omitting them. But why were the books on history? I held no great passion for recent history, and due to my erratic schooling English history was a relative stranger. What was King Henry doing in front of my eyes? That obscene, gout-ridden old man with his numerous wives, all of them sacrificed to his desire for sons, as if it were their fault and not that of his own syphilitic self. What would Freud make of that dream, I wondered, with Holmes falling beneath the misogynist king, to the echoes of a man/woman's laughter? It was the sort of thing that would have made Dr. Leah Ginzberg lean forward in her chair with a Germanic "Ja, and then?" I sighed into the silent room and reached for my books. If I had to be up at three o'clock in the morning, I might as well make some use of it, Henry VIII or no. I settled myself to work, but all morning the dream kept intruding, and I would find myself staring blankly at the wall in front of me, seeing the spines of those books. Henry VIII. What did that mean?
I worked on, and in the afternoon I went out to take coffee in the covered market before an afternoon lecture, and I ended up ordering a large meal I had not known I wanted until I had walked into the tantalising smell of frying bacon. Two meals, actually, and pudding — more food than I had taken at one sitting at any time since Mrs. Hudson had been feeding me.
Somewhat bloated, I left the market stalls and walked up Turl Street for the afternoon lecture, only to find my steps slowing as I approached the Broad. I stopped. Henry VIII. When in ignorance, consult a library. With few qualms I abandoned the enquiry into Second Dynasty Burial Texts and turned right instead of left. (The familiar loitering and overaged undergraduate behind me emerged from a shop entrance and followed me up Broad Street and past the Sheldonian, but not through the doors of the library.)
I called up several books on the period, but they bore no resemblance to my dream image, and leafing slowly through them caused no bells to go off in my mind. Knowing it was hopeless, I retrieved the photographs, laid them out on the desk in front of me, and it was then that the voice spoke to me, and I knew.
Holmes and I had discussed the possibility that the series was based on a number/letter substitution code, in which, for example, I might be read as A, 2 as B, and 3 1-2 translates as CAB. Extreme complexity — basing the substitution on a key text, primarily — is commonly used to make the translation from number to letter difficult: A long message in such a code can be broken by a bit of fiddling, but for short phrases, one must discover the key. If the key is something external, such as the words on a page of a book, decoding a brief message such as the one we were faced with may prove virtually impossible.
In this case the numerals used were not our Arabic ones, but Roman ones, and as they had not been spaced or had their divisions marked, it was sheer guesswork to know whether there were twenty-five separate numbers, or only seven, or some total in between. That is where Holmes and I had left off, as we could make no sense in the number/letter result we had extracted.
I had to make a few basic assumptions in looking at the problem. First of all, I had to assume that she had left it there for us to see and, eventually, understand, that it was not just a means of maddening us with tantalising clues that led nowhere. Second, I had to believe that the key to it lay somewhere in front of me, waiting to be seen. Third,
I assumed that once the key was found, it would unlock the puzzle fairly quickly. If it did not, I would undoubtedly conclude that this was not the correct key and lay it down again. To give an example, it would call for a boneheaded sort of persistence to unravel the Roman numeral series XVIIIXIIIIXXV through all its possible Arabic equivalents into the numbers 18-13-1-25, and then into RMAY, and then finally to unscramble it to MARY, unless the person already knew what she was looking at. No, the key would not give too much difficulty once it was inserted into the lock. Of that I was certain.
If I was right, the key had been found by the still, small daughter of a voice and laid into my dream for me to find. Henry VIII meant nothing to me, but VIII, or base eight, meant a great deal. If human beings had been born with three fingers instead of four opposing their thumbs, we would count by units of eight instead of tens. A one plus a zero would mean eight, 11 would be how we wrote nine, and 20 would be the same as a base ten sixteen. I wrote it out on a piece of paper, the first twenty-six numbers in base eight with the alphabet underneath:
I 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 30 31 32
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
I was left with the problem of dividing up the twenty five
Roman numerals into numbers whose letter equivalent said something. Although I knew them by heart now, backwards and forwards, I wrote them out too as a visual aid: xvxvnxxiixi/xxiixx/vxxxi
Twenty-five numerals, ones, fives, and tens. Taken at its most straightforward, these yielded a series of Hs, Es, and As, which would be meaningless. My job was to divide that string up so that the letters made sense.
I began with the first ten numerals, XVXVIIXXII.
That last / might be attached to the following X to make nine, but I should keep that possibility in mind. XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense. Taking the first XV as 15 gave me MHEA. X-V-XVII = 10, 5, 17 gave HEO, which was better than the other. Higher numbers gave the greatest variation of the alphabet. I tried using the highest possible numbers I could get from the twenty-five digits, which divided into 15, 17, 22, 12, 22, 24, 31. In base ten this had read OQVLVX. The 31 was a problem because there are only twenty-six letters. However, in base eight that yielded M-O-R-J-R-T-Y. It took me a moment to realise what I was seeing. My pencil reached out by itself and slowly crossed out the figure 12, substituting 11-1, and there it was. MORIARTY.
Moriarty could not have done this. The professor-ofmathematics-turnedcriminal-mastermind had died at the hands of Sherlock Holmes, hurled over a huge falls in Switzerland nearly thirty years before. Why then was his name here? Was our foe telling us that the purpose behind our persecution was revenge for his death? After nearly three decades? Or was there meant to be a parallel between this case and that of Moriarty and Holmes? I do not know how long I sat there in the Bodleian while the light faded outside, but eventually the little daughter of a voice whispered for one last time, and I heard myself, talking to Holmes in my room on the night it all began. "My maths tutor and I came across some mathematical exercises developed by an old acquaintance of yours, while we were working with problems in base eight theory." And the whispery voice of Holmes in my ears: "Professor Moriarty — "
My maths tutor. She was not the owner of the blonde hairs we had found in the cab; her hair was dark and tinged with grey. However, she had laid Professor Moriarty's base eight exercises before me on the very day the bomb appeared at my door and, I knew now, three days later had slashed that string of ciphers with great precision into the seats of our cab. My maths tutor, Patricia Donleavy, who had left because of an unexplained illness beginning that same week. My maths tutor, a strong woman, a mind of great subtlety, one of the teachers I had found to learn from, who had shaped me, whose approval I cherished, with whom I had talked about my life, and about Holmes. "Another Moriarty," Holmes had speculated, and she herself had just confirmed it. I pushed the implications from me. My maths tutor.
I looked up blankly to see someone standing beside my desk, a desk openly strewn with photographs, calculations, and the translation. It was one of the old library clerks, looking amused. He had the attitude of someone who has waited to be noticed.
"Sorry, Miss Russell, it's time to close up."
"Already? Heavens, Mr. Douglas, I had no idea. I'll be with you in a minute."
"No rush, Miss. I have some tidying to do, but I wanted to let you know before you took root in here. I'll let you out when you come down."
As I began hastily to insert the pages back into their envelope, a very unpleasant thought came to me. How many other people had glanced onto the desk during the evening? I knew I had been careful to hide the photographs at first, but at what point had I become so engrossed in the mathematical detective work that I had simply not seen who came past? I seemed to remember two first-year men who had been searching for a book, and an old priest who coughed and blew his nose loudly, but who else? I hoped no one.
Mr. Douglas let me out with a cheery "Night, now" and locked the door behind me. The dark courtyard was deserted but for the statue of Thomas Bodley, and I walked quickly through the entrance arch to the Broad which, conversely, seemed crowded and well-lit, and safe. I walked back to my lodgings, deep in thought. What to do next?
Telephone Holmes, and hope no one was listening in? Send him a coded telegram? I doubted I could devise one quickly, a message Holmes could read and Patricia Donleavy could not. If I went to him, could I do so without alerting my watchers? A sudden movement on my part could endanger Holmes. And where was Miss Donleavy?
How could I find her, and how could we spring a trap on her now?
In the midst of all these whirling thoughts I became aware of some other idea niggling gently at the back of my mind. I stopped dead and tried to encourage it to show itself. What was troubling me? Busy street? No, not even so crowded now. The idea of the telephone ? No, wait; back up. Not crowded? The watchers! Where is my watcher? And I saw then that I had not been followed since I left the Bodleian, and I knew immediately what it meant that they had been pulled off me. I clapped my hat to my head and Mr. Thomas looked up startled at the crashing entrance of a breathless undergraduate into his lodge. "Mr. Thomas, get Holmes on the telephone, I have to talk with him; it's an emergency." I was grateful that the old man did not pretend he didn't know the name of his unacknowledged employer, merely saw my face and reached for the telephone.
I stood tautly, tapping my fingers on the counter, wanting to scream at the slowness of the thing. Connexions were made, exchanges consulted, and then Mr. Thomas's face became still.
"I see," he said, and, "Thank you." He hung up and looked at me.
"The telephone lines seem to be down on that side of Eastbourne," he said. "Some kind of accident on the road, apparently. Can I do anything, Miss?"
"Yes. You can go around the corner and tell the garage to get my motor out. I'll be there in a few minutes."
With surprising agility Mr. Thomas ducked out the door, leaving his post unattended, and I pounded off up the stairs. I had the key in my hand before I cleared the last stair, reached for the keyhole, and stopped. There, in the middle of the shiny brass knob, was a black, greasy smudge.
"Holmes?" I whispered, "Holmes?" and flung open the door.
The enterprise is hopeful, but full of hardship and danger, it would seem to have been conceived by some sovereign intelligence, that was able to divine most of our desires.
"It's a good thing there wasn't another bomb here, Russell. There wouldn't be much left of you." It was the old priest from the library, sitting in my chair and peering at me with disapproval over his spectacles.
"Oh, God, Holmes, it is good to see you." To this day he swears that I thrust his head between my breasts, but I am quite certain that he was on his feet by the time I reached him. I was reassured that his musculature had not suffered during his weeks of confinement and enforced sloth, and in fact felt distinctly bruised about the rib cage from the force of his arms. He of course denies this.
"Holmes, Holmes, we can talk again, it's over, I know who she is, but I thought she had you, my watchers disappeared and your telephone line is out, and I was coming up here to get the revolver and drive down to Sussex, but you're here, and — "
Fortunately Holmes interrupted this drivel.
"Very well, Russell, I am flattered that you seem relieved to see me alive, but could you be a bit clearer please, particularly concerning the telephone line and the watchers?"
He reached up to reattach his beard, and I stooped to pick up an eyebrow from the floor and absently handed it to him. "I've been working in Bodley this afternoon — "
"Oh for God's sake, Russell, don't be completely daft. Or has my absence softened your brain?"
"Oh, of course, you were there. Why didn't you make yourself known then?"
"And have a scene like this in the midst of those hallowed halls? I thought you might wish to work there again in the future, so I came here to wait for you. I could also see you were on the edge of something and didn't want to risk knocking it out of your head. I did blow my nose loudly in your ear, if you remember, but when that failed to get your attention I took the hint and left. What did you find? I could see that you were working on the Roman numerals theory, but without peering too closely I couldn't see where your thoughts were taking you."
"Yes, Holmes, it was a code. Roman numerals in a base eight, not base ten. It spelt Moriarty. And do you know who had me working on base eight three days before the bombs were set?"
"I do remember, yes, your maths tutor. But how does — "
"Yes, and she even told me of Moriarty's exercises, though not directly, of course, just mentioned offhand that she had seen some problems in a book and — "
"Ah, I see now. Yes, of course."
"Of course what?"
"Your maths tutor is a woman. I might have known."
"Didn't you know? I thought I told you. But she's not blonde, you see, so — "
"And where is she now? Kindly quit blithering, Russell.
I should greatly enjoy catching this woman if she is so kind as to walk into our trap, so I shouldn't have to spend the rest of my life dodging bombs and pretending to detest the very mention of your name." "Oh. Yes. But she is. I mean, she withdrew my watchers today while I was in the library. She may have guessed what I was doing, or she may have just decided to go ahead, but the telephone lines to the village are down, so I thought — "
"Right you were, Russell, and that means we must fly. Can you put on some more sensible clothing? There may be rough work ahead of us."
I plunged into the next room and into my young man's mufti in two minutes flat, and in another thirty seconds had my boots on and the gun and a handful of bullets in my pocket.
The two of us created quite a sensation clattering down the stairs. The hypochondriac down the hall had just come out of the bathroom when we came running towards her. She screamed and clutched her dressing gown to her chest as we flew past.
"Men! Two men in the hall!"
"Oh, for God's sake, Di, it's me," I shouted ungrammatically.
She leant over the stairwell with several others to watch our descent. "Mary? But who's that with you?"
"An old friend of the family!"
"But it's a man!"
"So I noticed."
"But men aren't allowed in here!" Their protests faded above us.
"Russell, I must use Mr. Thomas's telephone — Ah, here he is. Pardon me, Thomas."
"I beg your pardon, reverend sir, may I help you? Miss
Russell, who is this? Please, sir, what do you want? Sir, the telephone is not for public use. Sir — "
"Mr. Thomas, is my car ready?" I interrupted while Holmes awaited connexion.
"What? Ah, yes, Miss, they said they would bring it out for you. Miss, who is this gentleman?" "A friend of the family, Mr. Thomas. Dear me, I hear
Dianne at the top of the stairs. Do you think you should perhaps see what she wants? You know how highly strung she is. No, Mr. Thomas, you go help her; I'll show this friend of mine out. Yes, friend of the family. Very old. Yes.
Good-bye, Mr. Thomas, I'll not be back in tonight."
"Or tomorrow night," shouted Holmes. "Come, Russell!"
The car was warmed up and running at the kerb, and the garage man quickly got out when he saw us coming, then paused with his hand on the door.
"Is that you, Miss Russell?"
"Yes, Hugh, thanks a million. Bye." He winced as I squealed the tires, but after all, it wasn't his motorcar.
Holmes did more than wince before we were out of Oxford, but I didn't hit anybody, and only brushed the farm cart slightly. It wasn't his automobile either, and what do men know about driving?
When I had settled the Morris down to a slow blur on the black and narrow road out of Oxford, I turned to Holmes.
"What are you doing here, anyway?"
"I say, Russell, do you think — that is, is this the proper speed for this particular road and these — watch the cow — these particular conditions?"
"Well, I could go a bit faster, if you like, Holmes. I suppose the car would take it."
"No, that was not what I had in mind."
"Then what — Oh, of course, you want an alternate route. You're right as usual, Holmes. Reach behind you and get the maps; they're in that black pouch there. There's a hand torch in the pocket. Holmes, your eyebrow has fallen off again."
"I'm not surprised," he muttered, and peeled off the rest of the disguise.
"You make a fine priest, Holmes, very distinguished.
Now, those maps start with Oxford and work their way down to Eastbourne. There's a point in a few miles where we can get off to the left. It's marked as a farm track. Do you see it?"
Holmes claims that night's ride took ten years from his life, but I found it quite exhilarating to be rocketing along unlighted country lanes at high speeds with the man I hadn't been able to properly speak with openly for so many months. He didn't seem to find many topics of conversation during those hours, though, so I had to fill in.
Once, when we slipped by inches through a gap between a hay wagon and a stone wall, losing considerable paint to the latter, Holmes was really quite uncharacteristically silent. After some minutes I asked him if he was feeling well.
"Russell, if you decide to take up Grand Prix racing, do ask Watson to do your navigating. This is just his métier."
"Why, Holmes, do you have doubts about my driving?"
"No, Russell, I freely admit that when it comes to your driving abilities, I have no doubts whatsoever. The doubts I have are concerned with the other end of our journey. The question of our arrival, for one thing."
"And what we shall find when we get there?"
"That too, but it is perhaps not of such immediate concern. Russell, did you see that tree back there?"
"Yes, a fine old oak, wasn't it?"
"I hope it still is," he muttered. I laughed merrily.
He winced.
We succeeded in working our way across all the major arteries coming from London on our cross-country flight. Finally we shook them off and straightened out for the last clear run at home. I glanced at Holmes in the pale moonlight.
"Are you going to tell me how you came to be in Oxford? And what your plans are for the next few hours?" "Russell, I really think you ought to slow this machine down. We cannot know when we will come across our opponent's minions, and we do not wish to attract their attention. They believe you are in Oxford and I am in bed."
I allowed the speedometer to show a more sedate speed, which seemed to satisfy him. Hedgerows and farm gates flew past in our headlamps, but it was still too early for the farmers themselves.
"I came to Oxford by train, a commonplace method of transport considerably more comfortable than your racing car."
"Holmes, it's only a Morris."
"After tonight I doubt the factory would recognise it. At any rate, I regret to inform you that your friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes has taken a definite turn for the worse. It seems that last week he foolishly allowed himself to take a chill and was soon in bed with pneumonia. He refused to go into hospital; nurses were in attendance around the clock. The doctor came regularly and looked grim when he left. Russell, have you any idea how difficult it is to find a specialist who can both lie and act? Thank God for Mycroft's connexions."
"How have you kept Watson away?"
"He did come to see me once, last week. It took me two hours to apply the make-up to convince him, and even then I had to refuse to let him examine me. If he had come bouncing out of my cottage like a cat hiding the feathers, can you imagine what that would have done with the trap? The man never could prevaricate. Mycroft had to convince him that if anything were to happen to my dear friend Watson it truly would do me in, so he is back in hiding."
"Poor Uncle John. We shall have a lot of explaining to do when this is over."
"He has always been most forgiving. But, to continue. I had thought that my grave illness might increase the pressure on the woman and force a move out of her. I was going to speak to you about it when you came down this week, as I knew you should when you got Mrs. Hudson's weekly letter tomorrow — or, rather, today — but it began to move faster than I had anticipated, so I came to Oxford to consult. Only to find that you in turn were coming here."
"What happened to make you come?"
"You know my hillside watchers? They've really become most careless, glints of light from their glasses and lighting cigarettes in the dark. One of Mycroft's little gifts last month was a high-powered telescope, so I've spent a great deal of time behind my bedroom curtains, watching the watchers. Their routine is quite predictable, always the same people at the same times. Then suddenly yesterday, or rather the day before yesterday — Sunday evening it was — as I was watching them watch me, they all disappeared.
A man whom I hadn't seen before came from the back side of the hill, they talked for a few minutes, and then off they went, leaving their equipment behind them.
I hadn't dared hope for something like that, but given the opportunity I wasn't about to let it go by. I sent old Will up to take a look and bring back what he could find for me. He's retired, but in his day he was the best, and when he doesn't want to be seen, a hawk wouldn't find him.
"He came back two hours later, just after dark, with a fine sack of rubbish for me to pick over. Cheese rinds, an old boot heel, some biscuit wrappers, a wine bottle. I took it into the laboratory, and what did I find? Oxford cheese, Oxford mud on the old heel, and a wrapper around the biscuits from a shop in the Oxford covered market. I smoked a couple of pipes and decided to spend the day in bed while catching the morning train. The doctor, by the way, gave a slightly more hopeful prognosis this afternoon, the night nurse has been dismissed, and the sound of my violin has been heard from behind the bedroom curtains on and off throughout the afternoon. You know, Russell, of all the miracles of modern technology, I have found the gramophone the most useful. Incidentally," he added, "Mrs. Hudson is in on the charade now."
"You could hardly keep it up without her, I'd have thought. How is she doing at the game?"
"She was absolutely delighted to join in and has emerged as a very competent actress, to my surprise. Women never cease to amaze me."
I did not comment, not aloud. "That explains it until now. What comes next?"
"The signs all point to a rapidly approaching dénouement. Would you not agree, Russell?"
"Without a doubt."
"Furthermore, all my instincts tell me that she will want to meet me face to face. The fact that she has not lobbed an artillery shell into the cottage or poisoned my well is an open statement that it is not just my death that she wants. I have been dealing with the criminal mind for forty years now, and of this I am certain: She will arrange a meeting, so as to gloat over my weakness and her victory.
The only question is, will she come to me, or have me brought to her?"
"Not exactly the only question, Holmes. I should think even more important the question of our response: Do we meet, or not?"
"No, dear Russell. That is no question. I have no choice but to meet her. I am the bait, remember? We have simply to decide how best to position you, to give you the best opportunity to strike. I must admit," he mused softly, "I am quite looking forward to meeting this particular adversary."
I braked hard to avoid running over a badger, and resumed.
"Holmes, if I didn't know better, I might think you were becoming quite infatuated with Patricia Donleavy.
No, you needn't answer. I shall just have to remember that if I ever want to catch your attention, all I need do is threaten to blow you up." "Russell! I should never have thought — "
"Never mind, Holmes, never mind. Really, Holmes, you are a most exasperating partner at times. Would you please get on with it? We'll be at my farm in two minutes and you still haven't told me your plan of campaign. Talk, Holmes!"
"Oh, very well. My telephone call was to Mycroft, asking him to bring a few of his most discreet individuals into the area after dark tonight. Last night there were too many people coming around my cottage to allow your Miss Donleavy to make her move, but today my medical friend will announce that I am recovering and need peace and quiet. Mrs. Hudson will take herself to bed early, at her end of the cottage, and we shall lie in wait. I believe your manager, Patrick, is trustworthy?"
"Completely. We can leave the car in the barn and walk to the cottage across the downs. I assume that's what you have in mind."
"You do know my methods, Russell. Ah, here we are."
I drove through the gates and up to the doors of the old bam that lay apart, next to the road. Holmes jumped out and opened the door for me. Once we had shifted a few hay bales the vehicle fit in snugly between the stalls, and Vicky and her various family members peered at the odd black intruder with mild curiosity.
"I'll go tell Patrick it's here, so he'll keep the doors shut. Back in a few minutes."
I let myself into Patrick's house and climbed the stairs to his room, whispering his name at regular intervals so that he wouldn't take me as a burglar. He was a sound sleeper, but I finally roused him.
"Patrick, for God's sake, man, the barns could burn and you'd sleep on."
"What? Barns? Fire? I'm coming! Who's that? Tillie?"
"No, no, Patrick, no fire, don't get up, it's I, Mary." "Miss Mary? What's wrong? Let me get a light."
"No light, Patrick. Don't get up." I could see by moonlight that the top half of his body was unclothed, and I had no wish to find out about the other. "I just had to tell you that I've hidden my car in the lower barn. Don't let it be seen: It's very important that nobody knows I'm here. Even my aunt. Will you do that, Patrick?"
"Certainly, but where are you, here?"
"I'll be at Holmes' cottage."
"There's trouble, Miss Mary, isn't there? Can I help?"
"If you can, I'll get a message to you. Just don't let anyone see my car. Go back to sleep now, Patrick. Sorry to wake you."
"Good luck, Miss."
"Thank you, Patrick." Holmes was waiting for me outside the house. We set off in silence across the dark downs, empty but for the foxes and owls.
It was not the first time I had walked that way at night, though the setting moon lit the first couple of miles.
I was concerned at first that his confinement might have lessened Holmes' normally iron constitution, but I needn't have worried. It was I who breathed heavily at the tops of hills from the hours spent in the library, not he.
Sounds carry at night, so our conversation was low and terse, dwindling to a few muttered words as the miles passed and his cottage neared. The moon had set, and it was the darkest time of night before the stars faded. We stood on the edge of the orchard that backed the cottage, and Holmes leant close to breathe words into my ear.
"We'll circle around and go in through the end door, then straight up to the laboratory. We can have a light in there; it won't be seen. Keep to the shadows and remember there's a guard about somewhere."
He felt my nod and slipped away. Five minutes later the door clicked lightly to his key, and I stood inside the dark cottage breathing in the mingled smells of pipe tobacco, toxic chemicals, and meat pies, the fragrance of home and happiness. "Come, Russell, are you lost?" His low voice came from above me. I pushed away the feelings of reunion and followed him up the worn steps and around the corner, not needing a light, until my hand touched the air of an open doorway and I stepped inside. The air moved as Holmes swung the door closed.
"Stay there until I make a light, Russell. I've moved some things about since you were here last." A match flared and illuminated his profile, bent over an old lamp. "I have a cloth to tack up over the door edges," he said, and adjusted the flame to give the greatest light, then turned to set it on a worktable.
"My nose tells me that Mrs. Hudson produced meat pies yesterday," I said shrugging off my coat and hanging it on the peg on the door. "I'm glad she is convinced of your approaching recovery." I turned back to Holmes, and I saw his face. He was looking across the lamp to the dark corner, and whatever it was he saw there bathed his face in dread and despair and the finality of defeat, and he was utterly still, slightly bent from depositing the lamp on the table. I took two quick steps forward so I could see around the bookshelf, and there, dominating my vision, was the round reflected end of a gun, moving to point directly at me. I looked at Holmes and saw then the first fear I had ever witnessed in his eyes.
"Good morning, Mr. Holmes," said a familiar voice. "Miss Russell."
Holmes straightened his long body slowly, looking terribly, utterly exhausted, and when he replied his voice was as flat as death.
"Miss Donleavy."
…There being not room for many emotions in her narrow, barbarous, practical brain.
"What, Mr. Holmes, no bon mots? I perceive you have been in Afghanistan,' or New York? Well, not every utterance a gem, perhaps. And you, Miss Russell. No greeting for your tutrix, not even an apology for the inadequacy of your final essay, which was not only sodden but hurried as well?"
At the sound of her precise, slightly hoarse voice I was overcome, pierced to the core of my being. Her voice, sweeping me into memories of her dim and opulent study, the coal fire, the tea she served me, the two occasions when she had given me a glass of rare dry sherry to accompany her rare, dry words of praise: I had thought — I had thought I knew what her feelings towards me were, and I stood before her like a child whose beloved godmother has just stabbed her.
"You do look like a pair of donkeys," she said in irritation, and if her first words had left me stunned, her quick ill humour jolted me back into life, an automatic response learnt early by all of her students: When Miss Donleavy snaps, one gathered one's wits with alacrity. I had seen her reduce a strong man to tears. "Sit down, Miss Russell. Mr. Holmes, while I have this gun pointed at Miss Russell, would you be so good as to switch on the electrical lights I see over our heads?
Move very carefully; the gun is already cocked, and it takes very little pressure to set the trigger off. Thank you. Mr. Holmes, you look considerably further from Death's door than I was led to believe. Now, if you would please bring that other chair and place it at the table to the left of Miss Russell. A bit farther apart. Good. And the lamp, extinguish it and place it on the shelf. Yes, there. Now, sit down. You will please leave your hands on top of the table at all times, both of you. Good."
I sat at arm's length from Holmes and looked past the gun's maw at my mathematics tutor. She was sitting in the very corner of the room behind a rank of shelves, so that the shadow cast by the shelves cut directly across her. The overhead glare illuminated her tweed-and silk- covered legs from the knee down, and occasionally the very end of the heavy military pistol. All else was dim: an occasional flash of teeth and eyes, a dull glint from the gold chain and locket she wore at her throat; all else was shadow.
"Mr. Holmes, we meet at last. I have been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time."
"Twenty-five years or more, isn't it Miss Donleavy? Or, do you prefer to be addressed by your father's name?"
Silence filled the laboratory, and I sat bewildered.
Did Holmes know where the woman came from? Her father — ?
"Touché, Mr. Holmes. I take back my earlier criticism; you still do a nice line in bon mots. Perhaps you might explain to Miss Russell."
"It was her own name that Miss Donleavy signed on the seats of the four-wheeler, Russell. This is the daughter of Professor Moriarty."
"Surprise, surprise, Miss Russell. You did tell me what a very superior sort of mind your friend has. What a pity he was born trapped in a man's body."
With a wrenching effort I took control of my thoughts and sent them, useless as it might now seem, in the direction of the last plan that Holmes and I had laid. I swallowed and studied my hands on the tabletop.
"I cannot agree, Miss Donleavy," I said. "Mr. Holmes' mind and his body seem to me well suited to each other."
"Miss Russell," she said delightedly, "sharp as always. I must admit I had forgotten how I always enjoyed your mind. And, as you intimate, I had also forgotten that the two of you have become — alienated. I must say I often wondered what you saw in him. I could have done a great deal with you had it not been for your irrational fondness for Mr. Holmes."
I pointedly said nothing, just studied my hands. I did wonder why they weren't shaking.
"But now the fondness has turned, has it?" she said, in a voice that was soft and tinged with sadness. "So very sad, when old friends part and become enemies."
My heart leapt with hope, but I kept all expression from my face. If she believed this, we might yet get around her. It was difficult for me to tell, partly because I had to judge solely by her voice and also because my trust in my own perceptions had been badly shaken, but beyond this she also seemed somehow foreign, her reactions exaggerated, fluctuating.
I had little time to reflect on the question, because Holmes stirred at my side and spoke up, his voice flat.
"Kindly refrain from baiting the child, Miss Donleavy, and continue: I believe you have something you wish to say to me."
The round metal circle on her knee began to shake slightly, and after a brief moment of terror I heard her laughter, and I felt ill. She had been playing with me. We might have fooled her for a time, but now our act was exposed, and even the small chance we'd had with deception was no longer ours. "You are right, Mr. Holmes. I have not much time, and you have robbed me of a great deal of energy in the last few days. I have no great energy to spare, you understand.
I am dying. Oh yes, Miss Russell, my absence from the college was no sham. There is a crab with its claws in my belly and no way to remove it. I had originally planned to wait several years for this, Mr. Holmes, but I do not have the leisure now. Before much longer I will not have the strength to deal with you. It must be now." Her voice echoed in the tiled laboratory and whispered away like a snake.
"Very well, Miss Donleavy, you have me at your mercy. Let us dismiss Miss Russell and get on with the issues between us."
"Oh no, Mr. Holmes, sorry. I cannot do that. She is a part of you now, and I cannot deal with you without including her. She stays." Her voice had gone cold, so cold it was hard for me to connect it with the person who had drunk tea with me and laughed in front of a fire. Cold, and with danger uncoiling from its base. I shivered, and she saw it.
"Miss Russell is cold, and I imagine tired. We all are, my dear, but we have a while to go before the end. Come now, Mr. Holmes, don't keep your protégée here all day. I am sure you have a number of questions you would like to ask me. You may begin."
I looked at Holmes, sitting less than a yard from me.
His hand rubbed across his face in a gesture of fatigue, but for the briefest fraction of an instant his eyes slid sideways to meet mine with a spark of hard triumph, and then his hand fell away from features that were merely bone tired and filled with defeat. He leant back in his chair with his long, bony hands spread out on the table before him and gave a tiny shrug.
"I have no questions, Miss Donleavy."
The gun wavered for a moment. "No questions! But of course you have — " She caught herself. "Mr. Holmes, you needn't try to irritate me. That would be a waste of our precious time. Now come, surely you have questions." Her voice had an edge to it, and a flash of memory came, of a time when I had failed to make a logical connexion that ought to have been obvious, and her voice had cut deep. In perfect counterpoint came the voice of Holmes, fatigued and slightly bored.
"Miss Donleavy, I tell you, there are no questions in my mind regarding this case. It has been very interesting, even challenging, but it is now over, and all the significant data have been correlated."
"Indeed? Pardon me if I doubt your word, Mr. Holmes, but I suspect you are playing some obscure game. Perhaps you might be so good as to explain to Miss Russell and myself the sequence of events. Hands on the table, Mr. Holmes. I have no wish to cut this short. Thank you. You may proceed."
"Shall I begin with the occurrences of last autumn, or of twenty-eight years ago?"
"As you wish, though perhaps Miss Russell may find the latter course of some interest."
"Very well. Russell, twenty-eight years ago I, not to mince words, killed Professor James Moriarty, your maths tutor's father. That it was self-defence does not contravene the fact that I was responsible for his falling to his death over the Reichenbach Falls, or that it was my investigation into his extensive criminal activities that was the direct cause of his seeking to kill me. I found him out, I exposed his network of crime, and I was the immediate cause of his death.
"However, Russell, I made two mistakes at that time, though how I might have anticipated events I cannot at the moment think. The first was that my subsequent three- yearlong disappearance from England allowed the scattered remnants of Moriarty's organisation to regroup; by the time I returned it had succeeded in extending itself internationally, with little structure left aboveground in this country. My second mistake was to allow Moriarty's family — the existence of which was one of his better kept secrets — to disappear from my view. His wife and young daughter left for New York, never to be seen again. Or so I had thought. Was Donleavy your mother's maiden name?" "Ah, so you do have a question! Yes, it was."
"Minor lacunae, Miss Donleavy, and hardly worth the effort of pursuit. What does it matter, whether the hair you left for me to find was your father's? or, which room in the warehouse across the river the marksman was in before shooting at Miss Russell? or indeed, was it you or some minion who prematurely triggered the bomb that killed Dickson? Peripheral matters left unanswered make for an untidy case but hardly affect its basic framework."
"An interesting statement, from a man who bases his investigations on minutiae," she commented, with some justification. "But we'll let it pass. Yes, it was my father's hair, from the days when he wore it down to his collar. My mother kept it in a locket. This locket I wear, in fact. And yes, my friend with the accurate rifle was indeed in the warehouse, although I understand that Scotland Yard is still looking for the launch. How they can imagine that anyone could aim from a boat en water and achieve any degree of accuracy — And as for Dickson, he knew the risks when he signed on. I was angry with him, for making such a mess of the bomb that incapacitated you, and it made him clumsy. I was generous with his family's compensation, you will give me that."
"What price a man's life, Miss Donleavy? How many guineas is recompense to a widow, three fatherless children?"
His voice hardened. "You killed him, Miss Donleavy, yourself or one of your hired thugs, who heard your anger and took it as command. You intended him dead when you opened the New York bank account from which he was paid, last November. And he is now dead."
We sat in utter silence, and my heart beat ten, eleven times before she responded, with grudging admiration and a touch of amusement, and sounding again like herself.
"Mr. Holmes, how generous is the urge to Christian forgiveness in your soul, to perceive the man who nearly killed you and your two closest associates as a poor fellow whose widow and children weep for him."
"John Dickson was a professional, Madam, an artist with fuse and explosive. He never killed, and only once injured, in his entire career, until you brought him out of retirement. I can only assume you held something over him, some threat to his family, I imagine, to force him to engage in wholesale slaughter. Do not play games with me, Madam, with your accidents and your shows of pique; my patience has its limits."
The room's silence was so heavy I was sure she would hear my heart rate accelerate when I saw the end of the gun sag slightly away from me. He had her complete attention now. In a minute her voice came from the dark corner, flavoured with what sounded like respect.
"I can see that with someone like you about a person would never become complacent. You are quite correct: I suppose I did want him dead and tidied out of the way.
His affection for those poisonous children of his was a weakness, and he would have exposed me when he had the chance. Ah well; introspection has never been one of my strong points. I have an unfortunate tendency to overlook side issues when I have a goal before me. As Miss Russell could tell you, I think."
The silver muzzle was again aimed directly at me, and I willed my muscles to relax, cursing inwardly. We were all silent for a long minute, two, and when she started again I knew that Holmes had miscalculated, that his successful gambit had, instead of distracting her, only driven her more strongly into asserting her domination over him. I could have told him, but he could not have known. Her counter move was vicious and calculated to take him at his weakest point, where pride met aloof independence. "I believe," she said slowly, and again she had flue-tuated into that slightly "off" manner that made me feel as if I did not know her in the least. "I believe that I shall call you Sherlock. An awkward name, that. What was your father thinking? Nonetheless, we have had such an intimate relationship — admittedly one-sided up to now — for so many years, I believe it is time to make it reciprocal. You will address me please by my Christian name."
Before she reached the end of this bizarre little speech I knew what the strong sense of wrongness was that I had sensed in her. When I had known her at Oxford, she had struck me as a person whose frustrations with the demands of University life would cause her, before too long, to make a break with the University and go elsewhere to exercise her considerable abilities. Indeed, that is what I had half assumed had taken place when she did not return for Hilary term. It was now clear that the break had taken place, but internally: The tightly controlled impatience she had always exhibited had broken free, and the knowledge of her superiority had progressed to a sense of supremacy.
Eccentricity had flowered into madness.
It was an almost textbook illustration of dementia, but I needed no book to tell me what my crawling skin knew: The woman was more dangerous than her gun, as volatile as petrol fumes and malignant as a poisonous spider.
My frantic thoughts could find no option to grab hold of, could conceive of no way to calm her, or even distract her. I could only sit, still and unimportant to one side, and leave the field to Holmes' vast experience.
"Madam, I can hardly think that — "
"You ought to think very carefully, Sherlock, before you choose."
I had heard that tone of voice before, on occasions when her reiterated query as to whether I was satisfied with my solution had sent me scrambling for my error before she came down on me like a barbed whip. Holmes either did not perceive the threat or chose to ignore it. "Miss Donleavy, I — "
The gunshot exploded into the closed room at the same instant that something tugged gently at my upper arm and a piece of equipment disintegrated noisily on a shelf next to the door, and I just had time to hope fervently that
Mrs. Hudson would not be brought in by the noise when the pain flared. Holmes heard my gasp and turned to me as I clamped my left hand over the wound.
"Russell, are you — "
"She is fine, my dear Sherlock, and I suggest that you sit quietly or soon she will not be at all fine. Thank you.
I assure you that I hit precisely what I intend to hit with this gun. I do nothing by halves, and that includes target practice. And incidentally, you need not worry that your guard will interrupt us this evening; he and Mrs. Hudson are both sleeping very soundly. Now, take your hand away, my dear, and let us see how much you are bleeding. You see? Barely a nick. A pretty shot, I think you'll agree. You know," she said in another voice entirely, that of a woman of reason and compassion, "I am really terribly sorry that I had to do that to you, Miss Russell. I hope you realise that I am not in the habit of shooting my pupils." Her voice tried to coax a smile from me, and the terrible thing was, despite the looming panic and shock, I wanted to give it to her. Wanted to trust her.
"Now, Sherlock, my dear, to return to the topic.
What was it you were about to call me?" she said in mock coquetry.
Her voice set my skin to crawling. The surface was light mischief, but just below lay threat and contemptuous laughter and another thing that took me a minute to recognise: a coarse, sly tone of intimacy and seduction from a female completely sure of her power. It made me want to vomit, and then it began to make me angry. With the anger grew control. "I am waiting, Sherlock." The gun jiggled slightly on her knee.
Holmes' response landed in the room like a glob of spit.
"Patricia."
"That's better. We need to work on the intonation, but that will come. As I was saying, I feel that I know you very, very well by now. Do you realise that you have been my hobby since I was eighteen? Yes, quite some time now.
I was in New York. My mother was dying, and in the newsstand outside the hospital I saw a copy of a journal with your picture on the front, and inside a story of how you had not died, but how instead you had murdered my father.
It took my mother a long time to die, and I had many hours to think about how I should meet you one day. I inherited my father's business, you know, though I was really more interested in pure mathematics than the organisation.
It ran itself, really, while I went to school. My managers were very loyal. Still are, for that matter. Most of them. They occasionally consulted me at University, but for the most part I would tell them what to do, and they would work out the how. Sometimes I made requests, which they carried out most efficiently."
"Such as the unfortunate accidents that befell two of the other tutors shortly before you were hired?" I blurted out, unthinkingly letting loose a snatch of remembered conversation. I felt Holmes tighten disapprovingly beside me, and kicked myself mentally for drawing her attention.
"So you heard about that, Miss Russell? Yes, unlucky, weren't they? Still, I had the job I wanted, the job my father had been cheated out of, and I could get on with my hobby. I collected every word written by or about you.
I even have an autographed copy of your monograph on bicycle tyres, one that you presented to the police commissioner.
I assure you, I value it more highly than he did.
Over the years I have learnt everything about you. I located three of your London hideaways, though I suspect there's at least one other. The one with the Vernet is quite nice," she said casually, "though the carpet leaves something to be desired." She waited for a reaction and, getting none, went on in irritation. "Billy was too easy to find, and following him that night you went to the opera was child's play. I had thought of using him against you, blackmailing him concerning certain incidents in his sister's past, but it seemed cheating somehow." Again the pause, again no response. "Yes, there is very little I do not know about you, Sherlock. I know about why Mrs. Hudson's son emigrated so hastily to Australia, about you and the Adler woman after my father's death, about the scar on your backside and how you came to have it. I even have a rather fetching photograph of you emerging from the steam rooms at the Turkish Bathhouse on — Ha! That reached you, didn't it?" she crowed at Holmes' faint exclamation and drove it home. "I even bought the farm up the hill from you several years ago, through an employee, of course, so I might look down upon you, even through your bedroom window."
However, Holmes had recovered from his lapse, and she abandoned the attempt to goad him.
"It took me five years to bring seven of my employees into the area, but I enjoyed every move. And then — oh, the delicious irony of it! — your Miss Russell came to me for tutoring. I could not have asked for a more perfect gift: my own intimate link with the mind of my father's murderer.
Had I taken up residence in the comer of your sitting room I could not have learnt more about you than I did from Miss Russell. It was truly delicious.
"During the summer holidays I generally spend time with the business, just to keep my hand in. This last summer we decided to follow up a rumour that an important American senator was about to place himself in a remote area, so we borrowed his daughter. As you know, we were not entirely successful, but imagine my pleasure when I realised that you too were on the same job, albeit from the other end. It was almost worth the failure, having that piquant extra, a chance to meet, as it were, to work together. From that fiasco came my plan. I decided to kidnap Miss Russell, take her to a place where you would not find her, and play with you, in public, over a prolonged period of time. I laid plans. I bought clothing for her in Liverpool — quite adequate clothing, you will agree, though I gather she did not make use of the things? Pity. One of my lighter-fingered employees removed a pair of shoes from her rooms, mostly to underline the parallelism of the two kidnap cases — ah, I see you missed that point. How disappointing.
I planned to take her at the end of term, so my absences might not cause undue comment."
It was extremely disconcerting, listening to her talk about me in this matter-of-fact manner, but I did not react.
I was disappearing from her sight now, becoming a third- person reference. My right arm throbbed, and the fingers of that hand were tingling mildly.
"Then in late October everything changed. My doctor told me that I should be dead in a year, and I was forced to review my plans. Did I truly want to embark on a complex and physically demanding project, one that might take six or eight months to do properly, and should involve regular travel to some godforsaken place like the Orkneys? I decided, reluctantly, to simplify matters. I could not bring myself to forego the pleasure of a cat-and-mouse game, but I decided at the end of it I should merely kill you all and have done with it. If I could make public your failure to escape me, so much the better. I had little to lose, after all.
"By the end of term everything was in place. I arranged my medical leave, from which I will not return, hired Mr. Dickson, and, just before I left Oxford, laid some of my father's mathematical exercises in front of Miss Russell.
The next few days were marvelous, they truly were, like a complex equation falling into place. I was, as I said, really most annoyed at Mr. Dickson for knocking you about so thoroughly, and had to delay Miss Russell's bomb for a day until I could be sure you were up to defusing it. Then I sat back to see which of your paths I would pick you up on first. I did not need Dr. Watson, though that was amusing, was it not? Doddering old fool. I had a boy watching your brother's rooms all day, and I knew you were there before you went through the door. The next day I gambled, after you succeeded in throwing off my men, but I put my money on Billy, and it paid off. He led us straight to you and carried on a tedious conversation with me until he fell asleep. I was sorry about your clothes, Miss Russell. They must have cost a goodly percentage of your allowance." "The money was mine, actually," Holmes volunteered.
I felt her eyes leave me and return to him.
"Well, that's all right, then. Did you enjoy my little game in the park? Your articles on footprints were most instructive and helpful."
"It was very clever," Holmes said coldly.
" 'It was very clever' — ?" she prompted.
He spoke through clenched jaws, to my relief. I had begun to think his anger genuine.
"It was very clever, 'Patricia,' " he spat.
"Yes, wasn't it? But I was most upset when you disappeared on that damnable boat. Really very angry indeed.
Do you know what it cost me to keep an adequate watch on the docks? To say nothing of the other ports? I was certain you would come back into London, and instead, weeks went by without a sign. My managers were disturbed at the expense. I had to get rid of two of them before the others would calm themselves. And the time, my valuable time, lost! Finally you came back, and I could not believe it when my man reported how you looked and behaved. I actually took the risk of coming down here to see for myself, and I admit, I fell for it. I did not think that it could be an act. Oh, on your part, yes, that I would have believed, but I did not expect that Miss Russell was capable of that quality of performance; it's a far cry from dressing up as a gipsy girl and slurring your speech. It was not until you both came through that door that I knew for certain it was bogus."
Her voice had become increasingly hoarse, and the gun had drooped casually to one side as she talked. Holmes and I remained still, he with a look of polite boredom on his face that must have been infuriating, I trying to look young and stupid. The blood had stopped dripping onto the tiles, though my right hand was a bit numb. When Donleavy spoke again her voice cracked slightly with tiredness.
I waited, invisible, for Holmes to make me an opening.
"Which brings us to the present. Sherlock, my dear man, what do you think I've come for?"
His response was uninterested, obedient, insulting.
"You wish to crow over me, like a cock on its dung-heap."
"Patricia." The gun rose in threat.
"Patricia, my dear." His sardonic voice turned it into a sneer.
"To crow over you, I suppose, is one way of putting it. Nothing else?"
"To humiliate me, preferably in some public manner, so as to revenge your father."
"Excellent. Now, Miss Russell, do you see the envelope on the shelf to your right? The top one. Stand up and get it please — slowly now, remember. All right, take it back to the table and place it in front of Sherlock. Sit down, hands on top of the table. Good.
"This document is your suicide note, Sherlock. Rather lengthy, but that cannot be helped. If you are curious, the machine it was typed on is downstairs, substituted for your own. Read it, by all means, and lay it in front of Miss Russell if you wish her to see it. You will not touch it, Miss Russell. One never knows how clever the fingerprint people have become, and it would not do to have your fingerprints on such a highly personal document as this. Please, dear Sherlock, you must read it. I am really quite pleased with the effect it produces, if I do say so myself. Besides that, you must never sign any document until you've read it." She laughed merrily, and the madness rang clearly from her.
It was, as she said, a suicide letter. It began by stating that he, Sherlock Holmes, being in his right mind, could simply no longer see any point in staying alive, and it went on to elaborate the reasons. My rejection of him and the ensuing depression it caused were so vehemently denied as to underline my absence as the chief cause of his decision, though I personally was carefully removed from blame.
Then the letter launched into a long, rambling, detailed explanation of how the cases as recorded by Dr. Watson had been so entirely wrong. Seventeen cases in all were presented with microscopic attention, pointing out in each one where the credit for its solution had in reality lain: usually with the police, occasionally elsewhere, several times by Holmes accidentally stumbling on the answer, once with Watson. Page after page of it, we read and she sat. Finally came the murder of Moriarty, where it was revealed that the entire story was a deliberate fabrication against an inoffensive professor who had stolen the young woman Holmes desired, and whom Holmes had then hounded to his death by the creation of a totally imaginary crime syndicate. The document ended with an abject apology to the memory of a great man so badly wronged, and to the population in general who had been so misled.
It was an extremely effective piece of writing. The reader was left with the clear impression of a badly unbalanced, severely depressed, drug-ridden egotist who had destroyed careers and lives in order to build his reputation.
The simple white sheets with their lines of print, were they ever to get before the public, would create a huge scandal, and very possibly turn the name of Sherlock Holmes into a laughingstock and the object of scorn. I sat back, shaken. "You have a definite flair for fiction-writing," said Holmes, his voice cold with revulsion, "but surely you cannot believe I might sign the thing."
"If you do not, I shall shoot Miss Russell, then I shall shoot you, and one of my employees will forge your signature to it. It will appear to be a murder-suicide and will take Miss Russell's name down with yours."
"And if I do sign it?"
"If you do sign it, I shall allow you to give yourself one final injection, one that will prove fatal even for a man of your inclinations. Miss Russell will be taken away and released after the newspapers have found your letter.
She has no proof, you see, none at all, and I shall be far away."
"You would give me your word that no harm should come to Miss Russell?"
He was quite serious, even I could see that.
"Holmes, no!" I cried, appalled.
"You will give me your word?" he repeated.
"You have my word: No harm will come to Miss Russell while she is in my care."
"No, for God's sake, Holmes." My attempt at lying invisibly in wait was shattered. "Why on earth would you believe her? She'd shoot me as soon as you were gone."
"Miss Russell," she protested, affronted, "my word is my honour. I paid Mr. Dickson his fee posthumously, did I not? And I support that other worthless family while my employee is in prison. I even sent that messenger lad who delivered the clothing his second sovereign. My word is good, Miss Russell."
"I believe you, Patricia. Why, I don't know, but I do. I am going to take my pen from my inner pocket," he said and, with slow and deliberate movements, did so. I watched in horror as he uncapped it, turned to the last page of the sheaf of papers, and put the pen to the paper.
Anticlimactically, the thing refused to write. He shook it, without success, and looked up.
"I'm afraid the pen is dry, Patricia. There is a bottle of ink in the cupboard above the sink."
There was a moment's hesitation as she looked for a trick, but he sat patiently with the pen in his hand.
"Miss Russell, you get the ink."
"Holmes, I — "
"Now! Stop snivelling, child, and get the ink, or I shall be tempted to put another hole in you."
I stared at Holmes, who looked back at me calmly, one eyebrow raised slightly.
"The ink, please, Russell. Your tutrix appears to have us in a position of checkmate."
I pushed my chair back abruptly to hide my surge of hope and went to fetch the bottle. I put it on the table in front of Holmes and took my seat. He pushed the paper away, unscrewed the top of the squat ink bottle, drew the ink up into his pen, and cleared the nib of excess ink by pulling it, first one side and then the other, against the glass rim of the bottle. He then laid the pen on the table, screwed down the lid, put the bottle to one side, picked up the pen again, pulled the final sheet of typescript back in front of him, held the pen over the paper, and paused.
"You know, of course, that your father also committed suicide?"
"What!"
"Suicide," he repeated. He capped the pen absently and laid it on the table in front of him, picked up the ink bottle and fiddled with it for a moment, deep in thought, laid it aside, and leant forward on his elbows.
"Oh, yes, his death was suicide. He followed me to Switzerland after I destroyed his organisation, arranged a meeting at the most solitary spot he could find, and came to meet me. He knew he was no match for me physically, yet he did not bring a gun. Odd, don't you think? Furthermore, he arranged for a confederate to fling rocks at me afterwards, because he suspected that he would not take me with him into death. No, it was suicide, Patricia, quite clearly suicide." In the course of this speech his voice had grown harder, colder, and his lips curled over her name as if he were pronouncing an obscenity. The relentless cadence of his words went on, and on.
"You say you have come to know me, Patricia Donleavy." He spat out her name and wrapped it in scorn, facing her across the table. "I know you too, Madam. I know you for your father's daughter. Your father had a superb mind, as do you, and as you did he left the world of honest thought and turned to the creation of filth and evil. Your father created a network of horror and depravity that exceeded anything these islands had ever before known, a web woven of all that the world of crime has to offer. His agents, 'employees' as you call them, robbed and murdered, drained families through blackmail, and poisoned men and women with drugs. Nothing was too squalid for your father, Patricia Donleavy, from smuggling and opium to torture and prostitution. And all the time — ah, the perverted, filthy genius of it! — all the time the good professor sat in his book-lined study and kept his delicate hands clean of it. Nothing touched him, not the agony or the blood or the stink of terror that spread out from his agents. Just like you, Madam, he was touched only by the profits of all that sordid purulence, and he bought his wife pretty dresses and played mathematical games with his little daughter in the drawing room. Until I came along. I, Sherlock Holmes, with my meddlesome ways. I carved the network into many small pieces and I turned the name Moriarty into a term of derision, so that even his daughter will not carry it openly, and finally, when there was nothing left of his life, when I had driven him into a corner from which he could not escape, I pushed him over the Reichenbach Falls and he died. Your father, Patricia Donleavy, was a festering sore eating into the face of London, and I, Sher — "
With a shriek of animal fury she broke. The gun rose and swung up to face Holmes, and I, my useless right hand lying limp on the table, picked up the heavy bottle of ink and threw it hard and straight at her hand. The room was split again by a flash and deafening report, and the gun flew spinning against the wall. She came out of the dark corner in a dive for the pistol, and reached it a moment, just an instant, before I hit her in a massive, launched tackle that sent us crashing into the shelves, showering us with books and bottles and pieces of equipment. She was immensely strong in her madness and rage, and she had the gun in her hand, but I held her down with my entire body, and my hand hung with all its strength onto her wrist, to turn the weapon away from Holmes, slowly, so slowly against her impossible strength, and then came a confused jumble of impressions, of something slipping and my left hand holding a hot, empty palm just as a third and completely deafening explosion went off beside my head, and the shock of it went through me like a physical jolt.
She stiffened beneath me in a curious protest, and coughed slightly, and then her right arm went limp and her left hand came down across my back. I lay stunned in her embrace for a moment until my eyes focussed on the gun,inches away from her arm, and I pushed the gun hard away from me so she could not reach it, and then thought, Oh my God, where had her second shot gone, and turned to see that Holmes was unhurt but something was wrong,something was suddenly very wrong with my right shoulder.
And then finally the pain came, the immense, overwhelming, shuddering roar of pain that built and beat at me, and I flung out my hand to Holmes and cried aloud as thunder filled my ears and I slid down into a deep well of black velvet.