Justice Hall (25 page)

I first hung the crumpled silk dress above the steaming bath to relax it, then slid gratefully into the scented water.

Holmes drew up a stool. “Now: Tell.”

I told.

No reason to dwell lovingly on the glories of Justice Hall: Holmes could see those for himself. The hidden stairway was worth a bit of detail, and I could see his interest rise at the hidden Roman floor (this from the man who had once told his friend Watson that he was not interested in useless knowledge!) before he deliberately pushed it aside as peripheral. The contents of the Greene Library pulled even more strongly at his imagination; that too was set aside. The Circles, the deep relationship shared by the three principals, the painful reading of the Gabriel Hughenfort documents, I summarised those and moved on.

The water in the bath was growing cool and the hour of the gong fast approaching when I finished with the previous evening’s dinner party. That episode had demanded considerably more detail in the telling, and evoked a long, thoughtful silence while Holmes fiddled with the bath-brush.

“Berlin is the centre of Darling’s activities, you would judge?” he asked me.

“He spends a great deal of time there, and he knew of this escape by Mr Hitler before it was in the papers. He claims altruism as his chief interest in the rebuilding process, but at the same time, what industry starts up in the post-war years, he intends to have his hands on the controls.”

“A man worthy of Mycroft’s attentions.”

“If Mycroft hasn’t noticed him already.”

“It must be said, there is nothing criminal in foreign investments. If there were, we would all be in gaol. Not in the least my good wife. I should like to be able to give Mycroft more than a mere name, however. Did Darling give out the title of his company, or even precisely where it is?”

“No. I’m not even sure just
what
it is, other than some kind of heavy manufacturing.”

“Of course, a man in his position would not wish to appear too knowledgeable about his investments, too eager for them to succeed, lest his fellow club-members suspect him of ungentlemanly pas-times. I wonder if his business papers—”

“Holmes, we couldn’t very well burgle our host’s rooms. At least, not unless we get Marsh’s permission.”

“It might be perceived as ungracious,” he agreed.

“And with all the servants around, we’d need spectacular luck not to have a maid walk in at the wrong moment. Or one of the children.”

“The children, yes,” he mused, a faraway look in his eye. “Your Justice Hall Irregulars. Do you suppose… ?”

“Holmes! Absolutely not! One cannot use children to spy against their own parents—it would be—the ethics of the situation would demand—”

“I suppose it does go against the Rules of War,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Freiburg and Stein, on the other hand,” I had begun when we were interrupted by a knock at the door to my bedroom. I raised my voice to call permission to enter: It was Emma, maid of many talents, enquiring through the bath-room door if I wished assistance with my hair. I was impressed that anyone had thought to send her, considering the circumstances. I also wondered that anyone was bothering to dress. Perhaps Roumanian peasant-dresses and monkey-capped lounge suits were considered formal dinner attire by that set.

“If you could return in ten minutes?” I called back. Emma gave me a “Very well, madam” and the outer door closed again. I hurried to finish with the rest of the Friday and then the events of Saturday; Holmes did up my buttons as I finished.

“And the precise sequence of the shooters at the final drive?”

“I was in the middle, with the twins and their father to my left, followed by Darling, Alistair’s cousin Ivo, the Marquis, and I think Sir James bringing up the end. Iris was directly to my right, with Matheson, Radley, Stein, and then Freiburg at that end. Twelve guns in all, with Alistair and Marsh just there for the company.”

“A long line of guns.”

“Bloom is a first-rate gamekeeper. What a man with his talent for presenting birds is doing here, I can’t think. He’d be taken on at Sandringham in an instant.”

He was about to ask me something else, and I was positively simmering with eagerness to know what he’d come up with in London, but we were out of time. With a knock on the door, the obligations of society took over. He slipped out to tell Marsh that he was back; Emma devoted herself to my hair for a feverish seven minutes; Holmes was back in time to clasp my mother’s emeralds around my throat; we were gathered downstairs before the gong had ceased to vibrate.

Not that anyone could have heard it.

   The long day had left me tired, troubled, and none too pleased with the prospects of an extended evening of merrymaking; at least, I thought as I walked down the formal Justice stairway on Holmes’ elegant arm, my dress was up to the occasion. The grey silk had a faint green thread shimmering through it, and the heavy bead-work that wrapped my upper body also glinted with that occasional reference to the stones around my neck. Clothes might not make the woman, but they certainly can add starch to her spine.

Not until we were in the doorway to the drawing room did I realise that I needn’t have bothered.

Oh, some of the party were dressed for dinner. The Darlings shone, and those of the shooting party who had stayed on, but the impromptu gate-crashers had come-as-they-were from their day’s events. And a mixed lot of events those seemed to have been, since the participants were wearing everything from banker’s black to a silk smoking costume with fur trim, belted with a string of carnelian and lapis lazuli stones and topped by a brilliant swatch of lapis-blue silk, a sort of cross between a bow and a turban. One woman had come in a riding outfit, although on closer look her jodhpurs were of velvet and her crop studded with seed pearls; another, who spoke a studied artificial Cockney and whom I mistook from the back for a maid, wore what appeared to be the uniform of a Lyons restaurant waitress, with the addition of bloodred lipstick, ivory cigarette holder, and immense diamonds at her throat and ears.

I turned to speak in my companion’s ear. “Holmes, do you truly expect to learn anything in this bean-feast? Half the men at the shoot appear to have gone home.”

“Who is here?”

“It’s hard to be sure. That bewildered quartet in the corner is made up of Freiburg and Stein with their wives. The small gentleman at the punch-bowl is the Marquis. I don’t see the Londoners—no, there’s Radley, although I don’t know the person with him. Sir Victor and his family have probably left, for various reasons. I don’t see Alistair’s cousin Ivo either. I say!—Look, over by the windows; isn’t that—Christ!”

My question concerning the identity of a famous face on the other side of the room was cut off when a small, cool, leathery hand insinuated itself into the hollow of my throat and wrapped its diminutive fingers around the necklace. I jerked away, dislodging the spider monkey from its shoulder perch and nearly throttling it on its own jewelled collar. It shrieked hideously, the owner cursed freely, and all hopes of a quiet entrance fled.

Three of the party greeted the introduction to Holmes with coy remarks about the unfortunate resemblance he bore to the Conan Doyle detective; one man heard the name and slunk rapidly away, never to appear again; one woman (she of the silk smoking costume) enquired earnestly if I thought it a fixation or a phobia that had driven me to marry a man more than twice my age; the man with the turquoise-chip earring whom I had seen earlier said they were getting up a game of mah-jongg after dinner and did I play, and if not would I care to learn? The man with the monkey poured some of his gin into a small glass for the creature, saying it would calm his familiar’s nerves. Phillida laughed carelessly at the famous actor’s jokes, acting like a woman ten years younger and two children lighter (and appearing remarkably unconcerned—for a woman who had been chary of upsetting the housekeeper with a mere pair of extraneous house guests—at the house’s present inundation by a considerably larger party of gate-crashers). Sidney held his glass as if it and the house were his own; Marsh, Alistair, and Iris were conspicuous by their absence. I heard at least three versions of Marsh’s shooting, the ill-concealed glee of gossips at their host’s mishap. I accepted the glass that was put into my hand, not knowing if it held arsenic or champagne (and not much caring by that point), and allowed myself to be swatted to and fro by the conversations around me.

“Tristan? Oh, he’s gone off to the Alps to study the chemical effects of prayer.”

“More likely the chemical effects of—”

“Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to bring together decent breeding stock since the War? That poor old bitch of mine is nearly—”

“—recited the whole of Eliot’s
Prufrock,
standing on the lion’s head in Trafalgar—”

“—Matrimonial Causes Act came just in time for her.”

“Poor old Steed, found Her Ladyship with the gardener right there amongst the orchids, old boy hasn’t been the same ever—”

“Dear Antony, such a lamb, but this nuts-and-berries diet he’s embarked on to cleanse his cells is making him a touch pale.”

“—Serge and the divine Isadora on a stage, in the moonlight…”

“We’re not on speakers at the moment, not since he brought that horrible female home and expected me to—”

“—Josephine Baker revue, the most extraordinary—”

“He’d been fine all these years, but he just collapsed, went into his club to read the
Daily Mail,
and just started sobbing, so they had to take him away and lock him in the attic; so sad.”

“The
Daily Mail
will have that effect on a man.”

“—want to play a few rounds of mah-jongg?”

“Stan, that damned monkey of yours has done something unspeakable on your jacket.”

“So tiresome, I know. Michael Arlen has the same trouble with—”

“—came a cropper on the hedge near the stream.”

“—Arabia, wasn’t it, Miss Russell?”

The sound of my own name jolted me from my reverie. I blinked and looked into the sparkling, avid eyes of Marsh’s sister. “Arabia,” Phillida repeated. “Where you met Marsh? Terry heard him cursing like the devil after he’d been shot, said my brother had a nice line in Arab gutter invective. And Terry should know.”

I went to sip from my glass, found it empty, found too that it was not the same glass I’d started with. How many drinks had I downed while my mind was wandering through green and quiet fields? I searched for a convenient surface and got rid of the glass, but when I had done so, Phillida was still there.

“It’s a large area, where Arabic’s spoken, isn’t it?” I said. “Although if you know your brother at all, you’d not expect him to settle in a place as unromantic as either Cairo or Damascus.”

“Baghdad!” she pounced. “It was Baghdad, wasn’t it?”

I answered not, just gave her an enigmatic smile that sent her away happy.

Dinner was too hugger-mugger to arrange a convenient, that is, knowledgeable dinner partner whose brains I might pick concerning the ties and habits of the Darlings. Of the men on either side of me, one was walking the edge of drunkenness, had no idea who his host was other than that he thought he might have been introduced to him at the door, and told me plaintively several times that he was only trying to get back to London in time for the final curtain of his girlfriend’s play. The man on my other side was if anything drunker, and proceeded to tell me many apocryphal tales of that thrilling old detecting gentleman at the next table. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was married to the gentleman in question, nor that I knew for a fact that three of his stories were utter nonsense.

The dinner showed signs of having been hastily stretched to accommodate twice the number as originally planned for, the soup rather more liquid and the meat somewhat more thinly sliced than they might otherwise have been. When we were freed from our places, I made for Holmes.

“I am not going to be segregated with the ladies,” I informed him. “If you wish to join the men at their cigars, you shall find me upstairs in Marsh’s rooms.”

I was not surprised when he accompanied me from the room. Somewhere nearby, Gershwin was giving over to a painful attempt at “Kitten on the Keys.”

Once outside the din, I leant up against the wall to catch my bearings. “Did you notice,” I asked Holmes, “the men in that room?” For a post-war gathering, there had been an astonishing percentage of whole and hearty young men.

“Not a missing limb or a gassed lung among them,” Holmes agreed, adding, “and half the guests are using cocaine.” (I kicked myself for my innocence: I had thought it merely high spirits.) A raised shrieking and bellows of male laughter followed us from the Hall; Holmes grimaced. “And these are the men for whom Gabriel Hughenfort died.”

   I knocked lightly on Marsh’s door and then opened it, following the call of “We’re in here” through to the sitting room, where we stepped into an utterly unexpected cosy domestic scene: Iris before the fire with a book on her knees, Alistair across from her, Marsh stretched out on his right side on a leather sofa. They had been listening to her read—from, I was amazed to see,
The Wind in the Willows
. Iris waited until we were inside, then calmly finished the section before placing a marker in the book and putting it to one side.