The Murder of Mary Russell (37 page)

“Did Samuel know about the skeleton?”

“Not until I told him.” He walked back to the settee. “I'm not sure why I did. Probably to get him out of the way for a bit, so I could think things over. It was the second time we'd met. The first time he showed up here was a Tuesday, when I have a regular lunch date with the Prime Minister, so I'd have put him off even if he hadn't been talking madness. We met again the next afternoon—not here. There's a nice anonymous restaurant I know that keeps a few muscular waiters in shouting distance, in case a customer gets out of hand. He sat there drinking a lot of expensive claret while I squinted my way through his letters. That's when I told him about the skeleton.”

“I don't imagine that was the last time you saw him.”

“No. He 'phoned here last Saturday, and I met him at the same place. He'd been in Hampshire, and although most people figured the bones had to be those of Beddoes himself, who'd disappeared about then, Samuel was convinced they were his grandfather's. Something on the body that the people in the village told him about. We had a long talk, and I, er, I told him he should go down and see you. Just to say hello.”

Surely Hugh hadn't always been such a shockingly bad liar? Had her eyes been clouded by love back then, or had he lost the knack? Perhaps he simply could not be bothered to assemble a believable lie for such an obvious old failure as Clara Hudson?

“So you knew where I was, all the time?” she asked.

Something flickered at the back of his eyes, and he bent sharply to take a cigar from the ornate table-top humidor. He clipped the end and traded the clipper for a cigar lighter in the shape of a naked woman. Her silver head spouted flame as he warmed the length of tobacco (a masculine ceremony that had always struck her as odd, considering the cigar's resemblance to the male anatomy). Comforted by the delay, he set the lighter back on the table and spoke from a concealing cloud. “Actually, no. He'd told me where you'd been all these years, the first time he and I met. I'd no idea. Keeping house for Sherlock Holmes—imagine.”

His open disdain could not hide a degree of uneasiness. Most likely it was due to the mere idea of Mr Holmes, who tended to make even the innocent a bit uneasy. She wished she could be sure. She said nothing, which encouraged him to go on.

“I suppose if I'd realised where you were, I might have looked you up. I know the man's brother, slightly. He's a, well, a professional contact, really. Not a friend—ha! Mycroft Holmes has no friends. But it never came up. And Hudson is a common enough name.”

Something about Mycroft Holmes appeared to bother Hugh: he spoke the name as if picking at a sore, unable to help himself. However, she had a few more mild questions before she could begin to press.

“It was good of you to suggest that Samuel come down to see me.”

“Well, a boy only has one mother. Except when he has two, I guess,” he added with a bray of laughter.

“And when you told him about the skeleton, he said he might know who the bones belonged to. I'll have to let the police know that it might be my father. After all these years. I wonder what could have happened? And, what was it they found on his body, do you know? That Samuel recognised?”

“Some object made out of string, he said. Got pretty worked up about it, for some reason. And, er, that's when he said he'd go down and see you. Except that he didn't have any money. So I gave him some.”

“Really?”

He shrugged, studying his cigar. “The least I could do.”

“He must have been pretty broke, if he couldn't have afforded a train ticket to Sussex.”

“Yes, well, it was a bit more than that. He said he'd need a motorcar. Not just to go see you, of course, but while he was in England. And I think he wanted to impress you, a little. Maybe.”

“A motorcar.” Some part of that was a lie, she thought.

He rubbed off the end of the cigar in the ash-tray, then looked up at her, head tilted to one side. “You're still a remarkably attractive woman, Clarissa Hudson.”

She laughed. “And you haven't changed a bit, Hugh. Your face looks as if you've never had a moment's worry in your life. You look unlived-in.”

Stinging words from this frumpy woman across the table startled him into a sharp reaction. “How
could
you give your baby up, Clarissa? What kind of unnatural mother were you?”

“You—” She caught herself, and turned slashing scorn into a calm interest. “Perhaps you think I should have handed him over to
you
?”

But he'd seen her reaction. “Why not? I could have given him to one of the tenants to raise, given him a job when he was grown. Too short for a footman, but maybe sub-gardener.”

“That would have been generous of you.” Suddenly, she was weary: weary of this man, sick of the Act. In any event, she had all the facts she needed—all but one. “Hugh, when you bought Samuel a car, did you also give him a gun?”

“I never gave—I mean, did he have a gun?”

The empty protest echoed through the room. With a sigh, and feeling every one of her years, Mrs Hudson moved her handbag from settee to lap, signalling her preparation to leave. First, however, she spoke to the man who had once been her lover: whom she had once thought she loved. “Yes, Hugh. Samuel came to my house with a gun. I think you not only knew it, you planned it. I think you and he decided that I was going to mysteriously disappear, and a ransom note would be delivered to Mr Holmes. Just…not for money.” She waited. When no denial came, she shook her head in despair.

“I imagine you wanted to pressure Mr Holmes into doing something. That's how you work, isn't it? You find a person's weak spot and exploit it to the hilt. So you have some sort of a business deal or power play in the works, and when Samuel walked in your door, he all but handed you the means of tipping matters in your direction. I suppose the plan was that he would hold me somewhere until the deal was concluded.

“Or was he just going to shoot me and push me into a pit, like my father was? It doesn't matter. No threat to me would have bent Mr Holmes to your will. Even when he thought it was his wife you had, he was coming after you. And he will find you.”

“Clarissa, I have no idea what—”

“But I wasn't at home. Instead, a young woman came out of my door. A young woman I am extremely fond of. For three days, I believed she was dead. Her husband believed she was dead. I stood back and watched him tear himself to pieces, knowing that I was to blame—that whatever took her, it was somehow due to me. But she didn't die. In fact, I believe the dear girl may have killed Samuel.”

He gaped across the table at her. “Samuel is
dead
? I thought…”

She got to her feet. “You thought he was hiding somewhere? In a house you'd arranged for him, perhaps, with me tied up and waiting?”

He too rose, cigar forgotten in his hand. “I never! How could you think…!”

“I wonder if Samuel was bright enough to realise that he was condemned, the instant you sent him towards me. If he murdered me, you'd have seen that the evidence against him left you untouched. If he set me loose, once you'd got your way, you'd have been too afraid of betrayal to let him live. Either way, my son had to die. Isn't that right, Hugh? Over nothing more than a business deal.” She put a twist of utter scorn on her last words, and watched him explode.

“Business deal!” he roared. “I've been working my whole bloody life for this, Clarissa. My father shot himself, my mother and wife between them made my life a living hell, I was too young for one war and too old for the other, and three times—
three times!
—I've been mooted for the Honours list and set aside. I've served my nation all my life, doing the Crown's dirty work, and I'm left as nothing but an Earl without a son. My title is going extinct, after me. Jesus, the nation owes me a Dukedom—the least it can give me is a KG!”

She could only stare at him. A son and a father, each with their own mad desires, brought together to ignite like one of Mr Holmes' experiments gone bad. This was madness—doubled. Trebled, even: her father had lighted the slow-burning fuse. Oh, the men in her life who thought their needs justified any wickedness, men for whom the world was meat and entertainment. Were it not for Mr Holmes—and Billy before him—would she have become the same?

She shuddered. “Oh, Hugh. This nation owes you nothing but a prison cell.”

His face changed. His pale eyes moved, considering the flat colour of her hair, the mediocre cut of the dress she wore, the sagging skin of her ageing cleavage. She was nothing; she was less than nothing. Half a century ago, Clarissa Hudson had challenged and entertained him, and now she stood here—she
dared
to stand here—and
threaten
him?

She saw the decision come upon him: his mouth went cruel, his eyes flicked at the closed door. He noticed the cigar in his hand, and threw it at the ash-tray. With his hands free, he took a step around the corner of the table, headed towards her at last.

She retreated. He came inexorably on, moving faster now. “Hugh!” she cried, stumbling a bit on her unfamiliar shoes. And then he was on her, hands around her throat like a mockery of love remembered. His grip closed down, and the room faded around her.

H
olmes and I watched Mycroft retreat to a well-deserved rest.

“He looks tired,” I commented. Holmes grunted, cleaning out the day's muck from his pipe, a last act before taking to his bed. Uneasily, it occurred to me that Mycroft had looked tired before his heart attack—and that Holmes could use a rest as well.

“When did you last sleep?” I asked him.

“On the way up from Sussex this morning. Billy was driving so slowly, there was nothing to do but escape.”

“So, an hour last night, less the night before.”

“Oh, at least twice that.”

I had not been aware until that very moment that my mind was made up. I stood. “I, however, have had more sleep than my body knows what to do with. I'm going to take a cab over to Steadworth House and make certain the Earl doesn't slip away while we're not watching. Bring me a flask of coffee when you and Mycroft come in the morning. And—would you please ring Billy before you come? I promised I wouldn't take any action without him, but I'm not going to wake his wife at this hour for the sake of watching a dark house.”

Normally, Holmes would have raised an amused eyebrow and handed me my coat. Perhaps my doubts about Mycroft's infallibility were proving contagious. Or perhaps the accumulated emotional burden of the past week—my apparent death and the threat lying over Mrs Hudson—had made inroads on his usual willingness to bid me adieu. In any event, he could see I had no intention of following Mycroft's hands-off decree towards the Earl of Steadworth, and he was not willing to let me go on my own.

We resumed our coats and went to wave down a taxicab.

After I telephoned to Billy.

There were, in fact, lights on in Steadworth House: one showing through the fan window above the transom, another in the room to the left of the doorway.

When the taxi had puttered away, I asked Holmes in a quiet voice, “Do you think we should ring?”

“I'd rather know who is in that side room.”

Hugh Edmunds' London home was one end of an eighteenth-century terrace block, a pair of houses joined together internally after his ancestors came into money. The narrow street down its side, little more than an access alley to the yards and stables behind, had a marked slope to it. Some Victorian-era improver had decided to tidy that side with a terrace that was scarcely wider than its collection of Grecian statuary, but tall at its back due to the slope.

The terrace, naturally, was encircled by a stone balustrade topped with spikes to discourage burglars, prank-players, and
hoi polloi
in general. The barrier did not discourage us, although we did retreat a distance down the dark alley before Holmes boosted me up, so I in turn could pull him over.

We padded on silent feet down the terrace stones, circling the urns and statues towards the shaft of light that spilled from a pair of tall, diamond-paned doors. We were still well short of the light when a muffled cry reached our ears. We exchanged a startled glance, then leapt forward as one, to press our noses to the glass.

The curtains were parted, but the diamond panes broke the room beyond into a million pieces of light. There was a lamp in there, and a fire burning, but other than that, it could have been empty or filled with a silent crowd.

I put my mouth near Holmes' ear. “I did hear something.”

He nodded, but we held back, hoping for more. A cry comes from passion—but of that, there are many flavours. It would be rather embarrassing to break in and discover the aged Earl in flagrante with his housemaid. On the other hand…

Holmes put his head next to mine. “If all proves innocent, run.”

He was bending down for a marble dryad when two other sounds broke the still night. The first was a motorcar engine, moving fast, that pulled up in the street. The din its brakes made nearly obscured a noise from the doors: a sound like a muffled gunshot. We looked at each other, then lifted the dryad and threw.

Glass diamonds exploded into the room, followed by Holmes and me—just in time to see two people collapse on the other side of a red settee, the man's hands around the woman's throat.

Even when we pulled the man away, it took my astonished eyes some time to identify the woman on the floor beneath him as my own Mrs Hudson.