The Murder of Mary Russell (24 page)

There was no softening it. “It's Mary.”

A person who did not know him would have seen no reaction. Certainly his face revealed nothing. But Clara Hudson had known Sherlock Holmes, man and boy, for forty-six years. She had lived with him, nursed his wounds, cooked his meals, worked at his side: she felt the man's shock as if his bones were her own. His long, rigid body seemed to falter, like the moment before a sawn-through tree began to teeter, and she hastened to prop him up with what little information she had. “When Patrick and I came home from market yesterday, she was missing. There was blood on the sitting-room floor, and her little knife—a knife that looks like hers—was sticking out of the wall next to the bay window. Lestrade was here within a few hours, and he's left a man to watch the place. I didn't know if you'd want it known that you'd returned, so I left the cloth as warning. His men took the knife, and dozens of photographs.”

At the words “sitting-room floor,
”
Sherlock Holmes had started to move. She followed him out of her rooms and through the kitchen, throwing facts in his direction as one would throw floating things to a drowning man. “There were footprints,” she said at his back, “but one of Inspector Lestrade's men mopped across them before I could stop him. I'm sorry. I did manage to preserve the…well, this.”

He was looking down at the ominous barrier she had left on the floor, an Indian carpet that normally lay before the fireplace. Another man would have sunk to his knees, or thrown a chair through the window; with Sherlock Holmes, reaction lay in acts of the mind.

“I couldn't bear to see it,” she admitted. “So I laid the rug across it. I hope that was all right?”

Without reply, he bent to seize two of the rug's corners, glancing a command at her. She hastened to take hold of the other two, and at his nod, lifted.

The light carpet stuck sickeningly on what lay beneath, the blood not having been as dry as she'd thought. However, even with a few missing patches, the stains were clear. Too clear.

He tossed the rug to one side and squatted down.

The larger of the two blood puddles, on the side nearer the window, was mostly intact. The other was smeared about, where a blanket had been laid down and the body rolled onto it.

“There were drag marks and footprints going towards the door,” she told him. “I did take—”

“What kind of drag marks?” His voice was crisp, even, utterly focussed—what would have sounded cold to someone who did not know him. Clara Hudson heard the panic around the edges.

“Bloody.”

“What
made
them?” he snapped. “Heels? Chair legs? A wheelbarrow?”

“I think it was a blanket. There's one missing, that heavy one I keep in the cupboard beneath the stairs, for picnics and such. I put it there after Mary…she said it was too scratchy to—”

He had lowered his face to the floor, as if to breathe in the stain. “The footprints,” he interrupted. “What were they?”

“Shoes, rather than heavy boots. And none of them were complete footprints, only partial marks, to the side of the dragging blanket. As if someone had stepped around to readjust the…body. By the time everything reached the door, it was barely visible.”

He nodded curtly, then shifted to see the stain from another angle. She went on.

“I took some photographs, with your camera, before the police got here, although I don't imagine they're as good as Mr Lestrade's. I also made a sort of drawing, what I could remember of the prints before they got cleaned away.”

He held out his hand for the page she took from her apron pocket, sitting back on his heels to look at it: a crude map of the room, two long ovals to indicate the blood pools, x-marks showing where the footprints had been.

“It's as best as I could remember.” He raised his eyes to the pristine boards, and she flushed. “Perhaps I should have left the smears, even though…”

That steely grey gaze hadn't changed since it first stabbed into her in the autumn of 1879. It had rooted her in place then; it did so now.

“I am sorry,” she repeated miserably.

But to her astonishment, he gave a brief nod. “I understand.” He turned back to the stain.

She closed her eyes, fighting for control. “There's something else,” she started to say, but he was already speaking.

“Was anyone seen, in the area?” he demanded. “I assume the police have performed that much of their function? The Rootley brothers were released a few weeks ago—”

“Mr Holmes—”

“The two of them swore in 1902 that I would pay for their little brother's death. Benny Rootley certainly would have attracted notice—”

“Mr—”

“—being bald and taller than I. Or, this case I was consulted about last week, there's some nasty business brewing there that might have—”

“Mr Holmes! It's not you.”

His eyes snapped up, more at her tone than her words, then followed her gaze towards the fireplace. He rose, more rapidly than most 64-year-old knees could manage, and strode across to see.

When Sherlock Holmes had moved to Sussex, twenty and more years ago, he'd left behind most of his London possessions and many of the habits. One that had persisted, to the irritation of both women in the house, was his habit of fixing any correspondence he deemed important (which, granted, was not much) to the mantelpiece with a jack-knife, lest a stray breeze carry it into the flames. From that knife now hung an object that she had seen the previous morning, the moment she walked back from making the telephone calls. An object she had not drawn to Lestrade's attention.

An old half-sovereign coin on a golden chain.

“Y
ours?” Holmes had his nose inches from the coin pendant.

“No. It's almost identical—it's even from the Sydney mint—but it's the wrong year.”

“Where is yours?”

She pulled its twin from the neck of her shirtwaist. His eyes narrowed. “Am I wrong in thinking you haven't worn that in a very long time?”

“No, you're right. I keep it in my jewellery box. But before…”
Before death; before Baker Street…
“When I was young, I used to wear it all the time.” So much so, the hole had elongated and Victoria's youthful face was barely visible. “It can only be a message. To say that whatever has happened is because of me.”

She waited for him to stoutly deny the link as coincidence, to issue a blanket reassurance. However, Sherlock Holmes may have kept from her any number of things over the years, but had never lied to her, so far as she knew. He did not start now.

One hand plucked the chain from its resting place, the other yanking out the jack-knife. “Clean paper, Mrs Hudson.”

Commands were a refuge and a relief, for them both. She scurried away for some pristine sheets of typing paper, and came back to find him lying on his belly with a magnifying glass, examining the blood. The necklace and jack-knife lay on a clean patch of floorboard to his side. When the paper appeared, he picked up the knife and used its tip to prick something invisible out of the blood, looking at it under the strong glass.

“What colour was the blanket?”

“Several colours, mostly blue.”

“Is any twine missing?”

“Twine?”

“You heard me, Mrs Hudson.”

“There's a roll of twine—I'll go look.”

It was a large roll, and far from new. When she came back she had to admit she could not be sure. “It's possible there's more gone than when I last used it.”

“What about that dent beneath the edge of the table?”

At last, a question she could answer. “That is new. Lulu and I polished the floor on Tuesday, and it was done after that. Although after I left Wednesday morning, Mary could have—”

“Yes. The drag marks crossed here?”

“They did. I cleaned nothing that the constable hadn't already, er, obscured.”

Holmes set the magnifying glass to one side. He scraped the tip of the knife through the stain, then wiped the resulting gobbet onto the white surface. He cleaned the blade on his handkerchief, then repeated the act in a different place.

Six times altogether. He discarded the handkerchief atop the Indian rug, then rose, glass in hand again as he stepped to the section of wounded plaster. “This is where the knife was?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He lifted the glass to the gouge, tilted his head in preparation of telling her to bring the lamp, and then looked at the table where it had stood.

“I'll get a torch,” she said.

She shone its light onto the plaster hole, trying to anticipate his needs. She succeeded in doing so, enough that his next words were not a command. “The lamp could not have caused the dent in the floor?”

“It fell directly into the trash bin. The few bits of it that flew out seemed to be where you—where
I
would have expected to find them. I took photographs of that, too.”

The bright light revealed a clean divot out of the plaster with a quarter-inch slice at its base. Holmes peered into this so thoroughly, it looked as if he were about to climb inside. Then he stepped back and looked at the floor, seeing one piece of evidence she had managed to preserve: the bits of fallen plaster.

He swept them onto another piece of the paper, twisting it around the pieces.

Then he stood back and studied the three: blood, plaster, dent. He stepped to the far side of the blood and looked over the wall and the floor, his hands unconsciously tracing motions on the air. Dissatisfied, he ran his fingertips over the dent, several inches back from the edge of the table, then picked up the torch for another close look at the hole the knife point had left behind.

His frown grew deeper: nothing was making sense. Back around the bloodstain again, toes at its beginning, he looked behind him at the tiny dent.

He grabbed the torch and jack-knife and dove under the table, working his way along the window to the corner bookshelf—where he gave a grunt of satisfaction.

His arm swept the lowest shelf clear of books, twisting around to peer into the depths of it. Mrs Hudson hurried to take the torch, freeing his hands to dig with the knife.

He emerged with a flat grey lump between finger and thumb.

“A bullet!” she exclaimed.

It went into another screw of typing paper.

However, its presence only seemed to trouble him further. He stepped around the table, trading positions, bending down, his fingers playing the air as he tried to envision what had taken place in this spot.

In the end, he made an impatient gesture, and turned away from speculation. “I shall consider the evidence,” he said, and gathered his bits of paper to take up the stairs.

Mrs Hudson put away the unused paper and the big magnifying glass. She thoroughly wiped the table, where he had casually laid the jack-knife. She waited twenty minutes, then followed him up to the laboratory with a laden tray.

He was on a stool at the long table, shirt-sleeves rolled back on his forearms. The accusing necklace lay at his right hand, covered with fine, black powder. She set down the tray beside it. “Did you find any finger-prints?”

“Even schoolboys know to wipe away evidence,” he snarled.

Mrs Hudson poured her employer a cup of tea. She added milk as he liked and sugar as he needed (he would have neither eaten nor drunk since seeing her message in the morning paper) then placed it at his elbow, where he would notice it eventually. As she withdrew her hand, she noticed first that the glass vessel he was staring at so intently contained an alarming quantity of very-liquid blood, and second, that his left wrist was crudely wrapped with a blood-soaked handkerchief, like a suicide whose resolve had failed at the last instant.

“What have you done to yourself?” she exclaimed.

“Testing a theory.”

“What, that Sherlock Holmes doesn't require blood in his veins like a mere mortal?” She took his hand and stretched it onto the high table, wincing as she loosened the sodden cloth.

“Don't move that,” she ordered, and went for the medical kit, stocked for any emergency short of replacing an organ. She cleaned the arm of blood, and was relieved to find that his blade had missed major vessels and tendons. “This should have stitches,” she told him.

“Go ahead,” he said.

But the wound seemed to be clotting already, and she had no wish to sew through her employer's flesh. Instead, she took out the narrow adhesive. “What on earth were you thinking?” she asked.

He glanced at the wrist, and seemed surprised at what he saw there. “I needed blood. Fresh blood. Or rather, its serum.”

“And you couldn't wait to do it properly?”

She had once assisted in drawing blood for some experiment or other, and told him in no uncertain terms that she did not wish to do so again. After that, he'd learned to do it himself.

“I was in a hurry.”

“And if you'd gone light-headed from—” All the talk about blood was making her feel queasy. “Never mind. Let me bind it, and see if it'll hold.”

He allowed her to clean and tape his arm, all his attention divided between the clock on the wall and the flask before him. The muscles beneath her fingers felt so taut, she imagined his very bones were creaking. Adhesive drew together the lips of the wound. As she waited to see if it would suffice, she could not help wondering if she would end up drugging his supper, to force his body to take relief from his mind's demands. She'd done so twice before over the years, when she and Dr Watson had feared for the man's health.

She wished the Doctor were here, or even Billy. But Dr Watson was away for another month, and she had already told Billy that she needed him less than she needed the information he could get.

Which left her with her time-tested means of distracting the man: permit him the release of words.

“What is this you're doing?” she asked.

Predictably, his face twitched in irritation, but the pressure was great enough that a lecture began to spill out. “I am waiting for the blood to clot. When it has, I shall extract its serum. Just an hypothesis, you understand, although I believe that dry blood can be restored to some degree…”

The adhesive seemed to be holding. She laid down gauze and then bound the arm, letting him explain, understanding only that he was doing the one thing he could think of, the thing he had spent his life doing: searching for the truth among facts.

After a time, his words ran down. She tied off the ends of the bandage, hoping it wasn't too tight. When the clock's minute hand made a tick forward, Holmes reached for the small flask. He tipped it gently. The substance quivered but held, like tomato aspic that is almost set—and with that, Mrs Hudson's normally phlegmatic stomach tipped along with the beaker. She took a quick step back from the table; reminded of her presence, he shot her a glance like a dagger.

“I'll go,” she told him. “Drink your tea, Mr Holmes. Just not…that other.”

She picked up his coat, discarded on the floor at the base of the laboratory table, then stopped at the sound of his voice.

“Mrs Hudson, are you…Is there anything you need?”

She stared at him in astonishment.

“It could not have been easy,” he said. “Coming in to find…what you did.”

Slowly, she shook her head. “The only thing either of us needs is for you to find Mary,” she told him, and left him to his work.

There was no cleaning left to be done. When the choice came down to tears, strong drink, or potatoes, one chooses potatoes.

She was gouging the eyes out of a heap of the vegetables, bought for the garden party, when a bellow came that began with her name and went rapidly indistinguishable. The mangled lump dropped from her hands and she bolted up the stairs.

“What is it?” she asked, somewhat breathless.

“Your hearing is going, Mrs Hudson,” he snapped, eyes glued to his microscope. “I said, tell Lestrade I need Russell's knife. And ask if it had any fingerprints. I can only hope their laboratory didn't ruin the evidence.”

“You don't mind if he knows you are here, then?”

“No.”

“Very well. But, sir, that blood. Is it…is it hers?”

He made her wait until he'd finished dripping some liquid onto a slide. He looked up, noticing the untouched cup of tea. The milk lay in a skin across the top, but he picked it up anyway.

“Oh, don't drink that,” she exclaimed, “I'll make a fresh pot.”

He swallowed, then he set down the cup with a grimace and reached for the glass pipette. “I've only processed one sample. That one is type B. Russell's blood type.”

After a moment, she said, “Someone's been through my desk.”

His eyes rose.

“It wasn't Mary: whoever it was took my bank passbook. And something I forgot to mention, since it seemed to have nothing to do with matters, but when Patrick and I returned from market yesterday, the saucer from my mother's tea-cup that I kept near the mirror was on the floor. I thought it had just fallen.”

“Nothing else missing?”

“Not that I've noticed.”

“Go and search,” he said.

She left him to his work.

Unusually, when he came down the stairs an hour later, he brought the tea tray with him. She was at the sink, drying a batch of glasses that had not needed washing, and listened to the approaching rattle. Tidiness was rarely a good sign with Mr Holmes: it indicated a determination to do for himself. Was she about to be fired? Arrested?

“The Chief Inspector said he would come straightaway,” she told him as he came in. She straightened the corners of the dish-towel on its rack, and turned to face him. “I also looked for other signs of disturbance. Someone may have sat in my chair, the one near the window; I think the throw-pillow was moved. And I found that among the papers on the sitting-room table.”