Locked Rooms (3 page)

“Sorry?” said Holmes, looking up from his page.

“I was just thinking how nice it would be if women could get by with three suits and an evening wear. I’m going to have to go out to the shops.”

“Sorry,” he said again, this time intoned with sympathy rather than query.

I gathered my gloves and straw hat, then checked my wrist-watch. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, and we can have a cup of tea. Anything I can get you?”

“Those handkerchiefs I got in Japan were quite nice, but the socks are not really adequate. If you see any, I could use half a dozen pair.”

“Right you are.”

Down at the concierge’s desk, I asked about likely shops, receiving in response more details than I needed. I thanked the gentleman, then paused.

“May I have a piece of paper and an envelope?” I asked. “I ought to send a note.”

I was led across the lobby to a shrine of the epistolary arts, where pen, stationery, and desk lay waiting for my attentions. I scribbled a brief message to Dr Ginzberg, explaining that an earlier letter appeared to have gone astray, but that I hoped very much to see her in the brief time I would be in San Francisco. I gave her both the hotel address and that of the law offices for her response, signed it “affectionately yours,” then wrote on the envelope the address I still knew by heart and handed it to the desk for posting.

The doorman welcomed me out into a perfectly lovely spring afternoon. Far too nice to be spent wrangling with shopkeepers, but there was no help for it—no bespoke tailor could produce something by nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Grimly, I turned to the indicated set of display windows on the other side of the flowered square and entered the emporium.

An hour later, I was the richer by three dignified outfits with hats to match, two pairs of shoes, ten of silk stockings, and six of men’s woollen socks. I arranged to have everything delivered to the St Francis and left the shop, intending to continue down the street to another, more exclusive place mentioned by the concierge for dresses that did not come off a rack. But the sun was so delicious on my face, the gritty pavement so blessedly motionless underfoot, that I decided a brief walk through the flowered square would be in order.

Union Square was full of other citizens enjoying the sunshine. The benches were well used, the paths busy with strolling shoppers and businessmen taking detours. Few children, I noted—and then a sound reached me, and my mind ceased to turn smoothly for a while.

A rhythmic clang, a rumble of heavy iron wheels, the slap and whir of the underground cable: That most distinctive of San Francisco entities, a cable-car, rumbled up Powell Street, its warning bell ringing merrily as it neared Post.

The combined noises acted like the trigger phrase of a hypnotist: I dropped into a sort of trance, staring at the bright, boxy vehicle as it passed. It paused to take on a passenger, then grabbed its ever-moving underground cable again to resume its implacable way down the centre of the street towards the heights. Before it had disappeared entirely, a passer-by brushed past me, waking me from the dream-world. I turned away from the tracks and began walking fast, head down, crossing the flower-bedecked square and fleeing up streets with whichever crowd carried me along.

I was dimly aware of changes: the standard odours of a downtown shopping district—petrol, perfume, perspiration—gave way to more exotic fragrances, chillies and sesame oil, roasting duck and incense. Then a splash of colour caught my eye, and I raised my head to look around me. A row of bright paper lamps danced in the spring breeze, strung between two equally colourful buildings. The streets were oddly discordant, strongly remembered yet utterly foreign, as if I’d known the idea of the place, but not the reality. I walked on, but after a while the streets changed again. The air became redolent of garlic, tomato sauce, and coffee. In a short time, those smells faded beneath the air of a waterfront, and suddenly I had run out of land.

I stood on the edge of a wide, curving roadway fronting a row of piers that bustled with machines and men, loading and unloading ships from a dozen countries. Wagons and lorries came and went, few business suits appeared, and the air smelt only of sea and tar.

Reassuringly like London, in fact.

After a while I began to walk along the waterfront road, turning towards the western sun. It felt good on my face, as the unmoving ground felt good beneath my feet, and the muscles of my legs took pleasure in the fact that they could stride out without having to turn and retrace their steps every couple of minutes. The claustrophobic air of shipboard life slowly emptied from my lungs, and I thought, maybe it actually was some
“curious aversion to the ship itself”
that had inflicted the insomnia on me. That and lack of exercise.

I stopped to watch some fishermen at work, all high boots and loud voices, repairing holes in their nets while wearing sweaters more hole than wool. The fresh, powerful smell of fish and crab rose up all around me, to fade as I continued on. An Army post intruded between me and the water for a time, then allowed me back, and with the water before me, a dark round mountain rising from the northern shore and the island of Alcatraz before me, I stretched out my arms in the late sun, half inclined to shout my pleasure aloud, feeling a smile on my face. I turned to survey the rising city—and it was only then I noticed the length of the shadows the buildings were casting.

“Damn,” I said aloud instead: I’d told Holmes I’d be back for tea.

I crossed the waterfront road to re-enter the city, and in a couple of streets I spotted a sign announcing public telephones. At least three languages mingled in the small room, an appropriate accompaniment to the Indian, English, and Japanese coins I sorted through in my purse. At last I found some money the girl would accept and placed a call to the St Francis. Holmes did not answer, nor had he left a message for me, so I left one for him instead and walked out of the telephone office nursing a small glow of righteousness: Had I been at the hotel at the declared time, I told myself, I’d only have been cooling my heels waiting for him to return from heaven knows where.

I continued south, which I knew was the general direction of downtown—it is difficult to become seriously lost in a city with water on three sides. And I was beginning to take note of my surroundings again, raising my eyes from the pavement to look around me. This was a more heavily residential area, the houses both older and larger than they had been in the area I had fled through, the residents less strikingly regional. As the ground rose, steeply now in a delicious challenge to my leg muscles, the houses began to retreat from the public gaze behind solid walls and gated drives. Street noises diminished with the loss of restaurants and shops, the trees grew taller and more thickly green, and the paving stones underfoot were more even although the number of pedestrians was markedly reduced.

The hilltop enclave might have had a moat around it and signs saying
Important Persons Only.
From here, the bank manager’s driver could take his employer to the financial district and easily return in time to run the man’s wife to her luncheon date downtown. There was no risk of roving gangs of boisterous children here, or late-night revellers walking noisily past by way of a short-cut home.

Even the air smelt of money, I thought, crisp and clean.

I looked up smiling at the house opposite, an unassuming brick edifice of two tall stories, and nearly fell on my face over my suddenly unresponsive feet.

I saw: snippets of red-brick wall and once-white trim set well back from the street, now nearly obscured by a wildly overgrown vine and an equally undisciplined jungle of a garden; a grey stone garden wall separating jungle from pavement, in want of repointing and somehow shorter than it should be; one set of ornate iron gates sagging across the drive and a smaller pedestrian entrance further along the wall, both gates looped through with heavy chains and solid padlocks; the chain on the walkway gate, which for lack of other fastening had been welded directly onto the strike-plate—the very strike-plate that had reached out to gash open my little brother’s scalp when he had tripped while running through it.

There was no mistaking the shape of the house: My feet had led me home.

Chapter Three

I
don’t know how long I stood there in the fading light, gawping at the
house. I do know that it was nearly dark when a hand on my shoulder sent me leaping out of my skin in shock.

I whirled and found myself face-to-face with a tall, thin, grey-haired gentleman with sharp features and sharper grey eyes. I expelled the breath from my lungs and let my defensive hand fall back to my side.

“Holmes, for goodness’ sake, do give a person some warning.”

“Russell, I’ve been standing behind you clearing my throat noisily for several minutes now. You appeared distracted.”

“You might say that,” I said grimly.

“Am I to assume this is your family’s house?”

I turned back to look at what was gradually becoming little more than a blocky outline against the sky. “I couldn’t have told you for the life of me where it was, but my feet knew. I looked up and there it was.”

“Do you wish to go in?”

“I don’t have a key,” I said absently, then caught myself. “Not that the lack of a key would stop you. But frankly, I don’t think your lock-picks would do much good against the rust on those padlocks.”

“The wall, however, is easily scaled. Shall we?” So saying, he bent and hooked his hands together to receive my foot. I eyed the top of the stones, which indeed were scarcely five feet tall, although my memory of them was high—my childhood memory, I reminded myself. The wall was not set with glass or wire, and certainly there would be no watch-dog in that jungly front garden.

I set the toe of my shoe into Holmes’ hands, braced my hands on his shoulder and the wall, and scrambled over the top with stockings more or less intact. He followed a moment later, brushing invisible dust from his trousers.

The walkway was buried under a knee-high thicket of weeds; five feet from the gate, the path disappeared entirely behind the press of branches from the shrubs on either side. Still, the drive was open, and we sidled along the wall until we reached it, then picked our way up the weed-buckled cobbles to the house.

The street-lamps had come on, but so thick was the vegetation, their light made it to the house’s façade in fits and starts, allowing us a glimpse of downspout here, a patch of peeling trim there, the lining on a set of drapes through a grimy downstairs window.

We followed, initially at any rate, the path of least resistance, and continued along the drive that ran down the side of the house. The windows here were similarly closed and uninformative, the once-trim roses that followed the wall between our house and the neighbours (the . . . Ramseys?) a thicket that reached thorny claws out to our clothing.

At the back of the house, the drive continued to a carriage house where my father had kept his motorcars. Holmes went on, standing on his toes to peer through the high windows, then came away. “Nothing there,” he said, but of course there was nothing inside; my father’s last motor had gone off a cliff and exploded in a freshly filled tank of petrol.

We stood looking at the impenetrable garden in back of the house. “Do you want to push through that?” I asked him.

“As there’s no particular urgency, perhaps we ought to play the Livingstone-in-blackest-Africa rôle when we’ve had a chance to don thorn-proof outer garments.”

“And snake-proof boots,” I added. As we turned back towards the front, I shook my head in disgust. “The garden must have received some rudimentary attention, but it doesn’t appear as if anyone has been inside the house for years. I thought there was an arrangement to keep the place up.”

“I’d have thought it desirable, from a property manager’s point of view. Undoubtedly your Mr Norbert will know why.”

“He’s got some explaining to do; no house should be allowed to get into this condition. It’s a wonder the neighbours haven’t complained.”

“Perhaps they have,” Holmes commented—but not, as I first thought, about the shocking condition of the paint. A motorcar had pulled up in front of the gate, and now I heard two doors slam shut as a pair of powerful torches probed the drive.

“You there,” shouted a voice whose tones would carry the same authority the world around. “Come out here at once.”

“The constabulary have arrived,” Holmes said unnecessarily, and together we moved to obey the command.

Our dress, our demeanour, and our accents soon had the torch-light diverted from our faces into a kinder illumination, and our claim to be the house’s concerned but keyless owners was not instantly discounted. One of the policemen even came up with an orange crate from somewhere, so I could climb with dignity back over the fence. The last shred of suspicion fluttered away after we had been taken to the hotel and been recognised by the doorman. We thanked the two policemen for their concern over the property, and then I put to them the question that Holmes had raised mere moments before they had arrived.

“Before you go, may I ask? Which of the neighbours reported our presence? I’d like to thank them for their concern, don’t you know.”

The two burly men looked at each other; the older one shrugged. “It’s the old dame across the street. She’s kinda taken the house under her wing—’phones the station every so often to have us chase kids out before they can get into mischief.”

“I do understand. Sleepless old lady with nothing better to do. She’ll be disappointed we weren’t stealing the doorknobs.”

The two laughed and took their bulky blue selves away. Holmes and I made for the dining room, for our long-delayed meal. As we passed through the ornate foyer, it occurred to me that it was no longer necessary to search out a looking-glass to straighten hair mussed by the hours out-of-doors. A benefit of my new, if inadvertent, hair-style—Holmes loathed it, but I was not altogether certain that I did.

To our surprise, we were offered—quietly—wine with our dinner. It was local, but unexpectedly good, and although my appetite had yet to return, Holmes consumed his meal with approval. After our coffee, we went back outside for a turn under the lamps of Union Square.

“Holmes, I take it you followed me all this afternoon.”

He was expecting the question, or rather, the question behind it, because he answered without hesitation. “I am concerned about the effect that coming to this place is having on you, yes.”

My hand slipped away from his arm. “You were worried about me?”

“Not worried, simply curious to see where you would go. I thought it possible that, as one of your beloved psychological types might say, your sub-conscious would direct your steps.”

“Indeed.” A few more paces, and my hand went back through his arm. “Holmes, I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I remember this city, and yet I do not. Before I found the house, I’d have sworn I didn’t even know what part of the city it was in. How can that be?”

“I believe,” he said after a moment, “that the process of discovering your ties to the place is one of the reasons we are here.”

We finished our walk in silence, and went up to our rooms. The bed was soft and had the novelty of standing on an unmoving floor, and to my surprise and relief, the night passed in blessed dreamlessness.

I was at Mr Norbert’s offices at the appointed hour dressed in one of my new frocks, my silk-wrapped legs taking note of the current length of hem-line. Between the Cuban heels and the curl of hair that barely touched my ears, I resembled a person who cared about fashion.

Norbert welcomed me into an office that would have satisfied the stuffiest of London solicitors, all dark wood and leather. It was his office, for this man, despite being scarcely ten years older than I, was now the senior partner in the august firm that had served my father in life and after. The elder Norbert and his contemporary partner had both succumbed in the influenza epidemic of 1919, leaving the son of one and a twenty-year-old grandson of the other in charge. Norbert had done his best to fill the impressive surroundings, but I thought that even now he was slightly intimidated, and would have been more comfortable among lighter, more modern furnishings.

Still, my London solicitors had never voiced a complaint about his handling of my California affairs, and I knew them to be scrupulous: The senior partner of that firm had been in love (secretly, he thought) with my mother, and had transferred his loyalty wholeheartedly to her daughter.

I settled into my chair, accepted the compulsory cup of weak American coffee, and made meaningless small talk for precisely three and a half minutes before Norbert eased us into business matters.

My California representatives had long been pleading that I apply my attentions to the holdings I had inherited in the state; having seen the house, I could only pray my other possessions were not as derelict. However, it soon appeared that the need for my presence was more for the sake of long-term decisions, re-investments and liquidations that I alone could make. What most of them boiled down to was, if I wasn’t going to take an active rôle in the running of this factory, that company, and the other investment, I should sell my interests and move on.

Which was just what I had in mind.

We set up a number of appointments for the coming days so I could meet with my managers and directors. Looking at the brief synopses of figures Norbert laid before me, one after another, I had to agree: Electrical companies and copper mines did not run themselves for too long before they began to suffer from inattention, and thousands of acres of land adjacent to the recently discovered oil fields in southern California weren’t going to join the boom without some help.

At the end of a long morning, Norbert pushed back in his chair with a sigh and stood. “Time for another cup of coffee,” he pronounced, and went out of the door. I heard him speaking with his secretary for a moment, heard too the flush of distant waters a minute later. He returned with the secretary on his heels.

He poured the watery brown liquid, offered cream, sugar, and biscuits, then settled for a carefully measured five minutes of closing conversation. I broke it after one.

“Mr Norbert, I have to say you’ve done wonders with the entire estate. It couldn’t have been easy, at this distance.” I laid my spoon into the bone-china saucer. “However, that makes it all the more puzzling that the house has been allowed to go to ruin.” I told him the outline of our adventures the previous evening, and he produced little noises of distress at our meeting with the police. I ended by repeating my comment about the state of the house, which observation he met with a sympathetic shake of the head.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” he agreed, looking not in the least shame-faced. “Such a pity. But I hadn’t much of a choice, really; the will was very clear on that.”

“The will,” I repeated.

“Yes, your father’s will. Parents’, I should say. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”

“When I was fourteen, I must have done. Not since then.”

“Oh, my, no wonder you’re a little confused. And here I was hoping
you
might enlighten
me
on the matter. Hold on just a sec.” He reached forward to toggle a switch on his desk-telephone, and said into the instrument, “Miss Rand, would you please bring me a copy of the Russell will?”

Miss Rand duly appeared with the bound document, handing it to Norbert, who passed it over to me. He sat back while I undid the ties and settled in to read it.

It proved to be one of the odder such that I had ever read. I went through the document closely, wondering why I had not seen it before—I was certain that it had not been among the stack of papers I had gone through when I had taken over my father’s estate at the age of twenty-one. My eyes lingered on the two signatures at the bottom, my father’s strong and unruly, my mother’s neat as copperplate, and then went back to an earlier page.

“What does this mean, ‘to ensure that no one unaccompanied by a member of the immediate family be granted access to the house for a period of twenty years after the date of this signing’?”

“Just that. It’s actually quite straightforward, as these things go: If your father died, your mother inherited. If they both died, as sadly happened, you and your brother would inherit the house, however, no one else other than you, your spouses, and your children would be allowed to set foot in it except in your presence for twenty years after the—what was the date of signing?—yes, the fifth of June, 1906. It goes on to say that the house is exempt from the remainder of the disbursements until, as I said, the fifth of June, 1926—a little over two years from now. Now you’re here, you and your husband are welcome to do what you like to the house. Except permit others inside without your being physically present, or to sell it before the given date.”