Locked Rooms (40 page)

“If Robert Greenfield had one key, he could’ve had two,” Hammett said, his contribution to the question of the house break-in of the previous March. The sequence, I thought, was fairly clear, once one put Flo’s information together with the telegrams from Watson and Mycroft.

In January, an American living in Paris—either Robert Greenfield or his “half-sister” Rosa—had picked up a copy of the London
Times
and seen a letter that indicated Mr Sherlock Holmes was taking a quick and urgent trip to the Continent. And as Mrs Hudson had specifically mentioned in her telegram to Holmes that she had received several telephone enquiries concerning our return, we could assume that for the price of a trunk call and a little bit of play-acting—no task for a woman accustomed to the cabaret stage—one of the two had prised the information from the chronically trusting housekeeper not only that Holmes and I were on our way to India, but that afterwards we were headed to California as well.

Exactly what drove the pair into action could only be guessed at—and I noticed that Holmes in the next room made no attempt to do so, although Long and Hammett happily argued about the possibilities: Hammett proposed that the hair-trigger of Greenfield’s guilty conscience needed only the tiniest pressure to perceive us as being on their trail; Long thought it likely that the changes in international relations since the War ended meant that France would be more willing to extradite a resident foreign criminal. Personally, I suspected that Flo’s father, now a man in his middle fifties, was simply tiring of Europe, wanted to come home, and knew that if he were to be linked to that dead policeman, he would be a fugitive for the rest of his life. He’d tried, back in 1914, to enter the house, and been thwarted by the watch-dogs. This was his last chance to clean matters up.

In any case, the two had reacted instantaneously, scrambling to locate an aeroplane for Rosa—not Robert, whose memorable scars would surely attract the attention of his fellow passengers and, as far as he knew, be recognisable by me. A brief conversation with a ticket-agent would have told them that the only P. & O. boat whose sailing coincided with our hasty departure from Southern England was the
Marguerite,
which would be in Port Said on the Tuesday. The aeroplane got Rosa there before us. She boarded as Lilly Montera, kept a low profile, and asked questions of various porters and passengers concerning our status and confirming our San Francisco destination. In Aden, the last port before India, she left the boat.

It was just possible that the aeroplane had continued south after leaving her at Port Said, taking Robert to Aden, where he had set up a desperate and unsuccessful attempt at murder. I was still unconvinced that the falling balcony had not been an accident, but it shouldn’t be hugely difficult to find out if he was there.

After Aden, either she alone or the two of them would have caught the next boat out, sailing directly to California, no stops along the way—or if she had sailed alone, he would have met her here. They had come to my house by night, aware of the watch-dogs across the street—and as Mr Hammett had pointed out, there was nothing to have kept Greenfield from making a copy—ten copies—of the key before ostentatiously handing the original over to my father back in 1906. (As I worked at my nails with the brush, I made a mental note to have all the locks changed, as soon as possible.) The two of them had spent the daylight hours inside the house searching for anything that might incriminate him; they’d found Father’s letter eventually, in the library or my parents’ bedroom or in Mother’s desk—wherever Father had stashed it before setting off for the Lodge that fateful week-end in 1914. However, the document had led them no closer to the two boxes, and in the end they had given up the search. They had burnt the letter in the fireplace, along with some related newspaper articles, and rested in the beds upstairs until the full moon was bright enough to guide their departing steps. It must have been frustrating, I mused in the cooling water, to know the boxes were out there in the garden, but be unable to locate them.

“Do you think he would have done what he did, had he realised that the entire family was in the car?” This was Long’s voice, and the thought gave me pause. Yes, Father’s letter had said that he intended to go to the Lodge by himself. He would have told his friends that, and . . . and perhaps I had mentioned to Flo that my father was going but we were not. It was something I would have done—my adolescent self would have complained in either case: If I’d gone, I was being forced to go; if I hadn’t gone, I was being left behind. And Flo’s father had been in town just then, with a pearl necklace for her fourteenth-birthday present. She could have passed on the information I had provided. . . .

But sooner or later, after Father had died, Greenfield would have returned to silence Mother. He knew his old friend, knew that Charles Russell would have told his wife what he’d found in the back garden. What Greenfield had done later to the others who might have known, the Longs and Dr Ginzberg, proved that sooner or later he’d have come for Mother.

Probably not Levi, an infant during the fire, only nine at the crash. And possibly not me—I had, after all, lived unmolested in England all those years. But when I grew up and married the world’s most ruthlessly efficient detective, it must have caused my father’s old friend many sleepless nights. And with the codicil of the will drawing near its conclusion, with it would go twenty years of enforced isolation from snooping strangers—a new owner would surely take the jungle to the ground, and below. And then in January, when I turned with that efficient detective towards California, would have been the final straw—my presence here couldn’t be risked.

So, had Greenfield seen the entire family when we stopped at Serra Beach, and cut the brake line nonetheless? Or had he seen only the motor, after Father had dropped the three of us at the café, with none but its driver walking away?

I sat very still, scowling unseeing at the soap-dish. There was something in that thought, a presence in the back of my mind very like that which had pushed at me beside the lake the other morning at dawn, something
(They died . . .)
that I was not seeing.

(Something . . .)

But Long’s voice broke into my mental search and I lost the train of thought.

“My father was not happy with the idea of concealing the box, but he did so, because he trusted Charles Russell.”

Yes: After the fire, the relationship between my father and him had changed, as if something (
something was there waiting to be noticed something was—
but no, I had lost it again) . . . as if some event had forced a degree of distance in their former intimacy and mutual respect.

I pulled the plug and dressed, in trousers and a clean shirt—no need to appear as an heiress today. When I joined them, Long was just leaving, as his assistant needed to be away during the afternoon and he did not like to close the bookstore unless it was necessary.

“I am very willing to stay and help with anything,” he offered, but Holmes shook his head.

“I shall bring some copies of the Greenfield photograph by your shop. If you would care to distribute them throughout Chinatown, that would be a great assistance.”

While Holmes walked Mr Long to the door, I picked up a rather dried-looking sandwich and ate it hungrily, washing it down with tepid coffee. Why was it, I reflected, that when one’s appetite did return, there never seemed to be anything the least bit interesting to eat?

But I filled my stomach while Holmes and Hammett debated how best to go about the next step, namely, suggesting to the police with their superior resources that they might help us find Greenfield and his half-sister. I piled my things onto the serving tray and went to fetch some boots from the wardrobe, and was sitting at the table lacing them up when the telephone beside me rang.

It took me a moment to understand the voice, as there seemed to be a minor riot going on in the background. “Mr Auberon? Is that you?” I said loudly. “Can you repeat what you said?”

“I’m very sorry to disturb you, madam, but there are some children here who are insisting that they—”

“We’ll be down in an instant, Mr Auberon. Tell them that we’ll be right down.”

I grabbed my coat and headed towards the door, which Holmes already had open, driven there by the urgency of my tone. “It’s your Irregulars,” I told him.

His face lighted with joy, and as he galloped down the corridor towards the lift he cried, “Come, Russell—the game’s afoot!”

Hammett, catching up his coat and walking beside me with more decorum, looked at me askance. “He actually says that?”

“Only to annoy me,” I told him, and all but shoved him towards the opening lift door.

The dignified St Francis doorman was attempting with ill success to keep at bay an affront of urchins, denizens of the streets wearing an interesting assortment of extreme and ill-fitting raiment. Upon seeing Holmes, they dodged around the poor man’s outstretched arms like so many football forwards and came up short before Holmes, bouncing up and down on their toes and squeaking in excitement.

One long, commanding adult hand went up, and they settled instantly back onto their feet, quivering like retrievers ordered to sit.

“Mr Garcia, you have something to report?”

The lad whipped off his cloth cap and all but saluted. “Hey, mister, sir, they came to the house, and we followed them!” His response set off the others, who chimed in with great enthusiasm but little intelligible detail. He shushed at his fellows with no result, then started slapping at them with his cap. This had the desired effect; rebellion quelled, he turned back to Holmes. “They headed down Market Street. I’ve got some of my gang on them, but you need to hurry.”

Holmes laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder and turned him towards the entrance, calling over his head to the doorman, “Taxi, please! Now, Mr Garcia, tell me who came and what they did.”

In bits and snatches, interrupted by contributions from the others and by the process of piling three adults and what proved to be only three children into the taxi, we learned that the boy on the fire-escape duty had heard a noise from the apartment hall-way just a little before eleven o’clock. Looking in, he had seen a man bent over the lock of the Hammett door, and behind him a woman, looking up and down the hall-way nervously. It had taken the man several minutes to breach the lock (this was imparted with scorn, and the aside that the lad telling this part of the story had an uncle who could have done it in half the time). They had been inside the apartment just a few minutes, and come out with the woman slipping something into her hand-bag. They had pulled the door to behind them, and left in a hurry.

Master Garcia and seven of his boys had been arrayed in wait. They followed as far as Market Street and saw the two turn west; Garcia had then divided his troops: two with him to summon help, the others to follow their quarry.

The lad paused in his story to look at Holmes with wrinkled brow. “I shoulda asked—do you got any two-bits with you?”

“Yes, I have some quarter-dollars. Why?”

“It’s just that I told my guys that, if them two make too many turns, we’re gonna run out of boys, and they should ask someone who looks like they can use two bits to stand on the corner and let us know which way they’ve gone. So you might have to hand quarters out to a few bums.”

We all three looked at him with respect, and he blushed for a moment before throwing back his head with a cocky expression. “Only makes sense,” he asserted.

“How very true,” Holmes said. “And when we’re through with this, you might talk to Mr Hammett here about local employment opportunities for promising lads.”

The taxi drove through the Market Street traffic for nearly a mile before the lad came upright on his seat. “There’s Mick! Stop, up there,” he told the driver. The man cast a look at Holmes, who nodded. The motor pulled over and arms dragged another boy inside. This one was quite small and so excited he could not get his words to come out in any kind of order until Ricky grabbed his arm and shook him hard. The child gulped in gratitude and loosed a great torrent of words: “They went down Market and they got on a street-car and Rudy said we couldn’t get on too they’d see us but then Kurt he said he could hang on the back he did it all the time but I don’t think he did I think it was his brother who’s bigger than him but anyway he ran over to the street-car and grabbed on and Rudy went with him and then Vince tried but you know Vince he’s too fat so he fell off and I couldn’t reach the thing it was too tall so Vince and Markie and me got left behind and Rudy shouted that we should wait until you came along and tell you where we’d gone but Vince and Markie said they could run as fast as the street-car and that I should wait until you came along and so even though I can run faster than Vince I did what they said I waited.”

The full stop at the end of that sentence came so abruptly, we all took a moment to recover, then everyone in the motor drew a simultaneous breath.

“Good lad,” Holmes said, and handed him a bright quarter-dollar. That shut the child up for good—I never heard another syllable from him.