The Murder of Mary Russell (2 page)

“Does she still wear hers?” he asked.

The chain looked too bright and the gold of the pendant less worn than I remembered, but the necklace definitely caught my attention. I'd never seen it around Mrs Hudson's neck, but I recognised it as the flash of gold I'd first spotted years before, tucked in the bottom of her incongruously large and ornate jewellery box. I might have taken no notice, at the time, but for the casual haste with which she had flipped something over it.

“No, she doesn't wear one like that,” I told him.

“Well,” he said, “I guess she'll remember it anyway.” He gave it a polish on his coat-tails, held it up in admiration, then set off on a circuit of the room, pausing on his way to drop the chain over the jack-knife Holmes always left on the mantelpiece. I watched with increasing unease as he surveyed the walls, peered at the books on the shelves, poked an obtrusive finger through the clutter of papers and oddments on the table under the window. I was sorry I'd invited him in. And I changed my mind about letting him cool his heels here until she returned.

I would give him a polite cup of tea, and I would get rid of him. Let Mrs Hudson meet him on her own terms.

“Tea,” I said. “Just let me put on the kettle. How long have you been in England? I hope your trip went well—that you weren't caught in those storms I read about last month?”

As I moved in the direction of the kitchen, I became aware of two things. First, I wanted badly to be alone, just for a minute, so I could try to beat my thoughts into order. (
Mother? Mother! Though nothing like her. Shouldn't I be pleased? Does that make him my sort-of…brother? But
—) Second and even more peculiar, while my mouth was making conversation, my body wanted nothing to do with him. I was edging away towards the kitchen door because I did not want to turn my back on this man.

What was going on? I knew of no wrongdoing on his part, other than making his mother sigh. Still, I kept retreating backwards, making conversation as I went—too bad he'd hit a rainy day because the view from Beachy Head was glorious. Where did he live in Australia? Was he staying in Sussex or just down from London for the day?

Sydney, came the reply (which I knew) and only for the day (a relief, although he hadn't come far that morning: the car bonnet was shiny, not hot enough to steam away the rain). At that point, my heels touched wood, so I ducked through the door and let it close, to stand with my hands resting on the old, well-scrubbed wooden table. I took a deep breath, then another.

I, better than most, had reason to understand that when one does not face up to events, they return—with a vengeance. My mother's death and my desperate adoption of Mrs Hudson in her place might be facts of a distant past—but only until a situation came along to upend matters.

Well, that situation had arrived. Mrs Hudson was not my mother. Mrs Hudson was getting old, and deserved a full relationship with her son—her
actual
child—before she died. That he was a touch smarmy for my taste had nothing to do with matters.

After a moment, I scrubbed my damp palms down my shirt-front and picked up the kettle. (
The new whistling tea-kettle that
I
gave her for her birthday, just last—Oh, get a hold of yourself, Russell!)
I filled it, shoved the whistle in place, and set its broad bottom over the flame. I would not hurry. Samuel Hudson might push through the door at any moment, to invade his mother's private realm, but he had the right to invade. This was his mother's home. If she were here, she would permit him inside. Therefore, so would I.

But I was relieved when he did not follow me.

Kettle on, two cups on a tray, anything else a hostess ought to do? A plate of something hospitable, perhaps? I searched through the tins where she stored her baked goods, and found a startling array of biscuits, sponges, and tea cakes—ah, yes: we were having a party on Saturday. I hesitated between her Sultana biscuits and a loaf with strips of lemon peel on the top. Which would an Australian salesman prefer? Perhaps I should ask.

“Mrs—your
mother
has made Sultana biscuits and a lemon loaf. Which would you—”

My voice strangled to a halt as I stepped into the sitting room and looked into the working end of a revolver.

Behind the gun stood a man with murder in his eyes.

12:40 p.m.

M
rs Clara Hudson came home through the kitchen door, as always. She placed her laden basket on the scrubbed work-table, then paused to sniff the air, wondering—but an armful of parcels was struggling in the doorway behind her, and she hurried to take some of it.

“Thank you, Patrick,” she said. “I'm glad you talked me into going this morning—the produce would have been picked over, and you were right, it cleared up beautifully. Would you put those in the pantry? Thank you, dear.”

“Don't know why you needed to buy taters,” he grumbled. “Ours'll be ready in a couple weeks.”

“Yes, but I wanted to make my potato salad for Mary's garden party. Her friend Veronica is particularly fond of it.”

“Weather should go fine by Saturday, at any rate.”

“That's what the papers say. Well, thank—”

“Oh, Mrs Hudson,” he said, in a different voice. “I'm sorry.”

She turned and saw Patrick's muscular back in the doorway to her rooms, squatting to pick up something from the floor. She moved around the work-table, and saw that the final survivor of her mother's treasured porcelain had leapt from its little shelf and shattered against the slates. Fetching the hand-broom and scoop, she took the pieces from Patrick's broad hand and dropped them unceremoniously in.

“It could be fixed,” he protested. “I know a man—”

“That saucer has been fixed once already, Patrick. Let's let it die a clean death this time.” In truth, she hadn't much liked its first repair. She'd only put it on the shelf because Mary had gone to such trouble, and expense.

She swept the floor, surveying the area for stray shards. She found a couple under the writing desk, and absently pushed the drawer shut as she straightened from sweeping around the narrow legs.

“It's really fine, Patrick. Thank you again, for all your help, the marketing would have taken me all day. Give Tillie my love.”

He watched her pour the bits of porcelain into the dust bin, then gave a brief tug at his hat and went out. Clara Hudson ran a damp cloth over the floor to remove their footprints, then walked back into her quarters, taking off her hat and coat, pulling on an apron. She owned four hats but a dozen or more aprons, each suiting a day's mood and tasks—the one she chose now was cheerful but practical, with bright flowers and few ruffles. She checked her reflection (
As if anyone cares what I look like!
) in the small portion of the looking glass not covered by photos and mementoes. As usual, her thumb came absently out to brush the one taken in Alicia's garden. Unlike usual, she paused there, rearranging the mementoes around the gap where the porcelain saucer had stood.

The collection looked like any old woman's shrine to ancient history. It was not. Oh, ancient, yes—nothing here had come into being later than 1880. But it was less a shrine than a series of voices, each one speaking words of admonition.

The saucer had been from her mother's favourite tea-cup, damaged survivor of a careless past; the chewed-up string dolly, to a stranger's eyes the whimsical reminder of a loving childhood, was the work of a dangerous drunk, while the rose-coloured dress it wore had been made from a stolen silk handkerchief. And the photograph—the only photograph she owned of her blood relations? That too bore a message that her eyes alone could see: Alicia holding Samuel like a trophy; Samuel, out of focus and unshaped, waiting to be given form; she herself, wishing she could feel happy for the two of them. And out of sight, the absent figure that explained ten thousand affectionate brushes of her thumb, Billy Mudd, all seven years of him, behind the lens, watching fascinated as the sweating photographer did his work in the Sydney garden. Billy, the photograph's secret presence…

Mrs Hudson caught herself, and made a
tsk
sound with her aged lips. She was secretly pleased to be rid of that dreadful saucer—the mends had haunted her. And she had no cause to feel uneasy, on a beautiful sunny Sussex afternoon with three nice busy days of party preparations before her. The past was dead, good riddance to it.

She tied her apron's strings and returned to work. Mary must have thought about making tea, she saw, and got as far as setting cups on a tray before something distracted her. Bad as her husband, the girl was. She would appear, once she'd come to a spot in her writing—or experiment, or what-have-you—where she could be interrupted.

Mrs Hudson smiled as she unpacked the tender strawberries that had rewarded her early arrival in Eastbourne that morning. Funny, the things one was proud of in life—this life. Potato salad on a spring day; perfect berries from Mr Brace's stall, served with the thick cream that Mrs Philpott promised to send over. Scrubbed kitchen work-tables, shelves without dust, the gleam of sun on fresh-polished floors.

Trust, upheld and unbroken.

When the baskets were empty, their contents stored away, Mrs Hudson wiped her hands on the cloth and looked around, conscious again of that vague sense of wrongness. A smell, one that didn't belong here. Leaking gas? Something going off in the pantry? She walked back and forth, but couldn't find it, and tried to dismiss the sensation.

Tea: that was what she needed. Mary must be even more intent on her work than usual, since she had not appeared to help put away the shopping. Not likely she'd gone off for a walk in the rain—even the papers had said the sky would clear by afternoon.

The housekeeper reached for the shiny copper whistling-kettle, only to discover that it was not only full of water, but slightly warm. She frowned.
Oh, don't tell me I walked out and left my new birthday present over the flame! Have I done this before? Is that why Mary gave me one with a whistle, so I don't burn down the house with being absent-minded?
She was not yet seventy: far too young to have her mind go soft.

She set the kettle down on the flame and stood, kneading her arthritic fingers, wondering how to find out if she'd been absent-minded without asking directly. Questions like that were difficult, with someone as sharp as Mary Russell.

She shook her head and took down the flowered teapot, laid out spoons and milk beside the cups on the tray, checked the kettle's whistle to make sure it was firmly seated, and finally went in search of the young woman around whom she had built the last decade of her life—her already much-rebuilt life.

She did not find her.

What she found was inexplicable: the beautiful little glass lamp, fallen from the table directly into the trash bin; what appeared to be muddy footprints, crossing the freshly polished wood towards the front door. Her shocked gaze flew upwards—only to snag against an even greater impossibility: a slim knife, stained with red, jutting from the plaster beside the bay window.

Her breath stopped. No. One of their experiments, it had to be. A jest, some thoughtless…

Mrs Hudson forced her legs to move into the room. Two steps, three, before an even more horrifying sight came into view.

A pool of blood in two halves, some eight inches apart: one thick and as long as her arm, the other shorter and much smeared about, both beginning to go brown at the edges. Drag marks leading towards the front door. A terrible amount of blood.

And with the sight, with that scream of red across her polished floor, Mrs Hudson abruptly knew what the faint odour was, the one that had picked around the edges of her mind since the moment she walked into her kitchen.

It was the smell of gunshot.