The Murder of Mary Russell (26 page)

Not a protest, nary a question, just the tea. “Amazing woman, that,” Billy said.

“She has been for years,” the older man pointed out. “Fill your plate and tell me.”

Obediently, Billy carried his refreshment over to the ancient weathered bench against the high garden wall. He balanced cup and plate on the arm, but before sitting, he fished an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Holmes.

“When I got her call, yesterday noon, asking me to put notices in all the papers, I was all set to come down here that very moment, but she said no, because the police were sure to be…underfoot. I would've come anyway—I've never heard her sound like that—but it seemed to me she was right, that if I held off, I might be able to help. Such as this.”

The telegram read:

SAMUEL ALISTAIR MCKENNA LAST SEEN SYDNEY MARCH FIFTEEN THIS YEAR STOP SOLD MOTHERS HOUSE SOLD FURNITURE PUT CAR ETCETERA IN STORAGE STOP MARCH NINETEEN PASSENGER NAME SAMUEL HUDSON BOARDED RMS NEFERTITI DESTINATION LONDON STOP FINGERPRINTS OBTAINED AND SENDING VIA MAIL STOP YOU OWE ME BIG COMMA MUDD BUT WATCH YOUR BACK CHUM STOP WESLEY WARDER

“Warder's a bloke I met during the War, runs an agency in Sydney. We do each other favours, time to time. I told him this one was urgent.”

“Hence you being in his debt.”

“It's nothing. He's sure to find more on McKenna, but I thought you should see that. And actually, I've had Warder keeping his eye on Samuel McKenna for a long time now. Just from a distance, nothing pushy, wandering by to check on him every few months. If it'd been closer up, Wes might've noticed he was gone sooner.
She
doesn't know, of course. And she hasn't seen this, from a while ago. Not that it's worth much.”

A photograph, taken in a non-English city, its target on the opposite side of the street. The man's face was both indistinct and half-shaded by a hat brim. Still, one could see that he had light-coloured hair, and that his body was compact, but muscular.

Plenty strong enough to lift a tall young woman into the back of a motorcar.

Holmes sat back on the bench, eyes on the bees but his mind clearly elsewhere. “Samuel Hudson,” he said, his voice troubled. “So: Mrs Hudson's sister, Alicia McKenna, dies in August. In March, her son Samuel closes up the house and sails to England. In May, someone comes here and has a bloody fight with Russell, leaving behind an object with personal meaning to Mrs Hudson alone.” He described the necklace. Billy nodded, remembering it. “We need to find Samuel McKenna.”

“He's been staying at a third-rate hotel around the corner from Paddington, although he hasn't been there since Tuesday.”

Holmes withdrew his gaze from the bees, eyebrows raised.

“I haven't been there,” Billy told him. “I only found it this afternoon. But he's calling himself Samuel Hudson.”

“Interesting.”

“ 'Fraid the rest of it's more interesting yet.”

“Tell me.”

Billy folded the last of the bread-and-butter into his mouth. “Sorry, that was breakfast. I have a file-folder in the motor, left it there since I didn't want her to see it. The gist of it is, Sam McKenna runs some clubs in Sydney with what you might call ‘dubious ties.' The sorts of clubs that have layers of ownership papers and back rooms for men who don't want to be seen together in public. McKenna's only spent one stretch of a few months behind bars, for selling liquor without a license, but he's been arrested a dozen or more times. Mostly for assault. Two of those involved guns.”

The fragrant garden seemed to go still. The beekeeper stirred. “Hence your friend's warning to ‘watch your back.' ”

“Yes, our Samuel has a temper,” Billy agreed. “There's also reports on the Mum, Alicia Hudson as was. Squeaky clean lady, nothing against her but being hard on her servants—none of 'em ever lasted more than a few months before she fired them. Lots of acquaintances, no close friends to speak of. No other children. Mrs McKenna was big on her position in the city—her husband died when Sam was four or five—and liked to put on an English accent. Took the English papers, bundled up, and shipped out weeks late.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Even if her death was falsely reported, no woman in her sixties could have—”

“Hold on, I'm telling you because of the papers. You haven't caught up with yours yet, have you? From being away?”

“Only the last three months.”

“This was earlier, around Christmas. It started…” He looked down at his hands, somewhat at a loss. “Well, we know when it started. You may not be aware, but I remember that night, in Hampshire. I was only—what, six? Seven?
She
thinks I forgot, and maybe you did, too, but I didn't. I don't know that I actually
saw
it, him getting shot, that is. I think I was standing behind her. But I remember the gun going off, and this old man lying there, all still and bleeding, and Sam wailing and she…Anyway, you sent me upstairs with Samuel. When I came down the next morning there was nothing but a carpet where he'd been, and blisters on your hands—both of you. I never told anyone about it—not even my wife. But I never forgot.”

“I see.”

“I owe Her everything. And I owe you all the rest. One of the first things I did when I started up my business—twelve years now, thanks to you—was set up a service that sends me clippings from a whole lot of regional papers. I gave 'em a list of names and places—most of them meaningless, just covers. But the ones that mattered were those I remembered from that night: Beddoes. Evans. Trevor. Fordingham. I had a few articles about Victor Trevor—your friend, that would be. He went to India to raise tea, and died a few years back.”

“Yes.”

“The name ‘Beddoes' came up from time to time, but just as a place, not a person. The man himself seems to have left England about then, but his name stayed behind, and every so often there'd be a mention of the Beddoes Estate, near Fordingham. He didn't have family, so when he vanished, it took forever to sort out who owned it. Some third cousin or something. Anyway, a few months ago—October, I think it was—the land around the house was finally sold. A month after that, there was a small piece saying some builders would be putting in a lot of suburban villas—a couple factories had set up in Fordingham, which is on a nice convenient line to Southampton.

“When they were clearing ground, just after the first of the year, they turned up a skeleton.”

“Oh.”

“ ‘Skeleton Found in Beddoes Estate, Near Gamekeeper's Cottage.' It made for a minor sensation, since estimate put the body as being buried more or less when Beddoes himself vanished, forty-five years ago. Though once they decided this wasn't him but some pauper with bad teeth, the papers lost interest.”

“You kept well clear of it, I imagine?”

“You bet. Wouldn't want the police wondering why Billy Mudd was sniffin' around.”

“Very good. And, Mr Mudd: was there a reason you came in your motor instead of the train? You'd have left approximately the same time, and got here slightly earlier.”

Billy smiled a bit at this apparent non sequitur. “Not much gets past you, Mr Holmes. Yes, it did occur to me that you might want to do a little sniffing yourself. And that might be easier behind the wind-screens of my motorcar.”

Holmes closed his eyes. He sat back against the bench.

“If a ransom call comes…”

The odour of hawthorn blossom drifted over the wall; sheep blatted at each other from down the lane. After a time, Billy asked, “If the call came, would you trust Mrs Hudson to handle it?”

“Yes.” Not a speck of hesitation, Billy noticed. He waited some more, then said, “I can pop down to Fordingham, if you like. Ask around about the skeleton.”

Holmes stayed motionless, legs outstretched and hands linked over his shirt-front, the late afternoon sun against his closed eyelids. A person might have thought him relaxed were it not for the raised tendons along the backs of his hands and the faint, rhythmic quiver of his right foot. There was an almost audible hum of tension from the man.

He broke the silence with a question. “Do you know the very worst kind of crime? The one that families never get over?”

Billy knew many such, but he replied obediently, “Which is that?”

“The unsolved disappearance. Murder is foul, but a loss with no answer is a wound that remains forever raw and bleeding.”

Billy gaped, open-mouthed, at his mentor's devastating confession. Holmes sat forward, tugging his shirt cuff down over the gauze beneath. “Patrick Mason and Lestrade's man should be able to keep Mrs Hudson from harm. And if I sit and wait for a telephone call, I may in fact slit my wrists before it comes.”

“Do we tell her about Samuel?”

“No,” Holmes said, without hesitation.

“Which leaves another question. Which of us has to let her know we won't be here for dinner?”

I
t was a long drive, eighty miles across the lower end of England, most of it in the black of night. Mrs Hudson had raised mighty objections to their setting out without eating her roast and the scrubbed potatoes, but when Billy pointed out that Mr Holmes planned to leave with or without him, she subsided, tight-lipped, to fix a pile of sandwiches and a thermos flask of powerful coffee.

The two men waited until Patrick came, carrying his favourite shot-gun over his arm. While they waited, Holmes spoke to the constable outside their door, then talked with Mrs Hudson about what to do in case of a ransom demand. He did not tell her where they were going. Nor did he enlighten her during any of the telephone calls he placed to Sussex from call-boxes along the way.

Holmes pored over the file on Samuel McKenna until the light failed, then smoked two pipes, occasionally switching on the little map-reading torch mounted on the dashboard to check on some fact or other. Billy could think of nothing to say, since any comment on Samuel Hudson would be a comment on the danger to Mary Russell. He simply drove on. He expected to be told that they would sleep in the motorcar beside the Fordingham green, but to his bleary-eyed relief, as they neared Southampton, Holmes told him to watch for a travellers' hotel. The beds they took were not a great deal more comfortable than the seats of the motor would have been, and certainly not as quiet, but it did make for a change of position.

Holmes had a bed, but did not occupy it, any more than he had slept during the drive. He walked the dark streets. Every two hours, he returned to the hotel, flipping impatiently through old newspapers as he waited for his telephone call to go through. When he had spoken to his housekeeper, and listened to her lack of news, he resumed his pacing of the streets.

He let Billy sleep until dawn before dragging him to the breakfast room for a half gallon of coffee, and they got back on the road again.

Fordingham had changed in four and a half decades: the only thing Billy recognised was the White Hart. The small green across from it had been carved up to make room for a pair of converging roads. The village shops now boasted broad windows and garish signs, and houses with the occasional pebbledash front dared to raise their modern façades.

As they passed through the village, only a tea room showed any activity. The White Hart appeared to be following the 1921 Licensing Act as to its hours, and was shut tight. Billy circled the remains of the green and headed for the road beside the pub's spruced-up exterior.

The 1870s village had spread somewhat, but once away from the new houses, the countryside was little changed since that night an excited little boy and a young man in ill-fitting clothes had crept silently through the dusk behind Clarissa Hudson.

Both men now peered through the wind-screen, searching for landmarks. The lane was wider, its surface metalled. The rock wall remained, although it had been rebuilt and made taller. The copse of trees off in the distance had been plucked to a vestige of its former self, and the drive down which Holmes and Billy had walked that night, rather than beat their way along Clarissa Hudson's rough pathway, led not to the gamekeeper's cottage but to an expanse of construction materials dotted by buildings in various stages, from bare foundations to snug slate roofs. A few early work-men were preparing for the day.

The cottage had vanished, along with most of the trees. “You want to take a look around?” Billy asked.

“Little point, I should think,” Holmes replied. “Let us try the village tea room. It should be a lively source of gossip.”

A couple of the labourers watched the motor turn around. A lorry laden with hessian bags paused to let them escape, and twice, Billy pulled into the narrow verge to let other lorries inch past. As they went by the restored wall, he said, “I can't believe you talked me into going with you, that night.”

“I resorted to bribery. Once I'd got my pocket watch back.”

“And that pretty little pen-knife. I'd forgot about the bribe. Ah, penny dreadfuls. That was the first Jack Harkaway I ever owned. Funny, my son discovered my collection of
Boys of England
just the other week.”

“Beware of his taking Mr Harkaway's chivalrous lessons to heart. You came because I suggested your presence would offer her protection.”

“You always were a sly one,” Billy agreed.

The village tea room was open. This suggested an establishment that offered actual meals rather than afternoon social entertainments—and indeed, as the entry bell rang over their heads, all the smells of breakfast seized their senses. Billy thanked the stars, and turned to consult Holmes on a choice of table.

But his companion had changed. The man who climbed out of the motor two minutes earlier had been a tall, intense figure, vigorous beneath his haggard expression; this person who blinked beneath the tea room's lights was a vague, amiable, and absent-minded sort with narrow shoulders stooped by his years. The old dear smiled his encouragement at the waitress who bustled forward, and tottered forward with an uncertainty that made Billy's hand come out, until he caught himself.

They sat, a fiddly operation involving coats and adjustments and spectacles, then ordered—a full breakfast for Billy, milked coffee with toast for the old geezer across the table. By the time they were left to themselves, Billy, despite their reason here, was not far from a grin.

“As many times I've seen you do that, it still sets me back on my heels.”

Holmes blinked, goggle-eyed through the magnifying spectacles. When their drinks came, he spilled the sugar (Sherlock Holmes did not take sugar) then dropped his table napkin (nor did he drop things) and apologised to the waitress half a dozen times in the space of two minutes (much less did he apologise) before explaining to her that he was an amateur archaeologist and someone had told him—was it in Salisbury, William? Or Wells? There was a cathedral, surely, or perhaps it was that abbey in Bath? “I am a retired vicar, you see, and my dear nephew here takes me about the countryside on his free days to look at old bones. And someone, somewhere—Little Malvern, was it?—told me that you had some bones down here. On the Beddoes Estate, it was. Do you know anything about those, my dear?”

She did, and she was happy to tell him what she knew, which was pretty much nothing. Although she was fairly certain the bones weren't all
that
old, not like fossils and such, since the man's suit—it had been a man, and he'd been wearing tweeds—his suit was almost intact, although there was nothing in his pockets beyond odds and ends. No, nothing that would identify him. Still, the skeleton was definitely not Beddoes himself—and did the vicar know about their other local mystery from the previous century, the disappearance of Mr Beddoes? No? Well…

Only the arrival of another set of customers kept them from hearing the entire adventure and thirteen sets of alternate explanations, but she told them enough to ensure that there were no secrets to be had here.

As they were paying—Holmes counting out coins from a little purse—she expressed regret that she hadn't been able to finish telling them all the details.

“It really was ever so interesting, the press came down from London, even, asking about. Mr Rathers, across the green—the White Hart, you know?—had quite a week of it, everyone wanting to come and see what he had. Even offered to buy some of the bits and bobs off him, but he figured he'd make more off selling beer to those who came to see them.”

“Bits and bobs?” Holmes enquired, rather more sharply than a vicar might.

“Oh, Mr Rathers has some of what Constable Mackey found in the poor fellow's tweed rags. I wouldn't have them in my place, of course, disgusting things, but the White Hart patrons, well, they're not quite so particular, are they?”

Back out on the street, the two men eyed the public house, still resolutely shut. “William,” said Holmes, “how long before opening time does a publican arrive to sweep the floor and polish his glasses?”

Billy had a hard time convincing Holmes that a wait would be worth it: fitting pick-locks to the back door might gain them access to the White Hart's trophies, but it was sure to hinder any investigation of what the publican might know about them.

Fortunately, only two cigarettes passed before the man himself appeared with the keys. He looked surprised at the early customers, and delivered the formal protest that opening time was at 11:00, but the click of a coin on the bar had him agreeing that a responsible publican needed to test his taps thoroughly, and in any event, the front door was still locked if the constable wandered past.

Holmes-the-vicar had given way to Holmes-the-rogue: loosened tie, hat on the back of his head, and nary a spectacle in sight. Five minutes of conversation on the Salisbury races established him as a betting man; two minutes of wrangling with Billy made it clear that he generally backed the losing side; another two minutes and the topic was local history, with the old man offering the publican a wager that nothing of interest ever happened in this little backwater. That he'd never seen its name in the newspapers, not even once.

The owner of the White Hart proudly challenged the claim, and in thirty more seconds, was displaying the framed article from the
Southampton Times,
along with the grubby mementos taken from the pockets (what had once been pockets) of their local celebrity, The Skeleton from the Gamekeeper's Cottage. Billy agreeably kept the fellow talking, about the problems of identifying the body. (“Wasn't Mr Beddoes himself, he was a fine figure of a man with good teeth, we all knew that. And it waren't the gamekeeper, neither, just a titch of a fellow. And—he'd a bullet in him! A titch of a bullet, for that matter, but big enough to do a man in. Obviously.”)

But at this point, Billy was not listening to the man, either. Both he and Holmes fixed upon the noxious little blob the detective had unearthed in the publican's collection: a two-inch-tall figurine, one leg ending in a tangle of greenish linen cord. Holmes had seen the thing itself; Billy had seen its like: a faded happiness bluebird was pinned to a board over his desk.

“Funny,” the publican said. “The other fellow was interested in that, too.”

The man was gratified at their return of attention, and happy to tell them all about the other fellow, who had come through the door one warm afternoon, just the previous week.

Australian, he was, a tow-head with blue eyes. Yes, might be the man, he said, looking at Billy's photo. Better-looking than you'd think from that picture. Had a good smile, professional-like. No, not like a toothpaste model. More like someone who has a car he thinks you'd just love.

“Did he stay in the area?”

“I don't think so. Said he was just here for the day, had family that used to live around here. Funny, though, I can't remember the name. He must've told me, wouldn't you think? Anyway, some kind of family, but they moved away a long time ago, so I might not even know them. Nice fellow. Talkative once you got used to that accent of his. Wanted to know all about the place, and like I said, the gamekeeper's skeleton struck his fancy. What he was wearing, what he had in his pockets. Seemed a little disappointed that this was all I had, but I pointed out the police kept anything that might give a clue about who he was. Told him he could talk with the village constable about it, if he was interested.”

“And did he?”

“I sort of got the idea he wasn't keen on talking to policemen, you know what I mean? But I had to tell him, there wasn't likely much the police knew that I hadn't heard about—village this size, we all know each other's business, and Constable Mackey isn't exactly close-lipped. So I could be pretty sure there wasn't anything in the skeleton's pockets with a name on it. No driver's license, no passport, no cheque-book. Not so much as a monogrammed handkerchief.”

“Did that satisfy this Australian?” Billy asked.