Justice Hall

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The long day had left me tired, troubled, and none too pleased with the prospects of an extended evening of merrymaking; at least, I thought as I walked down the formal Justice stairway on Holmes’ elegant arm, my dress was up to the occasion. The grey silk had a faint green thread shimmering through it, and the heavy bead-work that wrapped my upper body also glinted with that occasional reference to the stones around my neck. Clothes might not make the woman, but they certainly can add starch to her spine.

Not until we were in the doorway to the drawing room did I realise that I needn’t have bothered.

Oh, some of the party were dressed for dinner. The Darlings shone, and those of the shooting party who had stayed on, but the impromptu gate-crashers had come-as-they-were from their day’s events. And a mixed lot of events those seemed to have been, since the participants were wearing everything from banker’s black to a silk smoking costume with fur trim, belted with a string of carnelian and lapis lazuli stones and topped by a brilliant swatch of lapis-blue silk, a sort of cross between a bow and a turban. One woman had come in a riding outfit, although on closer look her jodhpurs were of velvet and her crop studded with seed pearls; another, who spoke a studied artificial Cockney and whom I mistook from the back for a maid, wore what appeared to be the uniform of a Lyons restaurant waitress, with the addition of bloodred lipstick, ivory cigarette holder, and immense diamonds at her throat and ears.

I turned to speak in my companion’s ear. “Holmes, do you truly expect to learn anything in this bean-feast? Half the men at the shoot appear to have gone home.”

“Who is here?”

“It’s hard to be sure. That bewildered quartet in the corner is made up of Freiburg and Stein with their wives. The small gentleman at the punch-bowl is the Marquis. I don’t see the Londoners—no, there’s Radley, although I don’t know the person with him. Sir Victor and his family have probably left, for various reasons. I don’t see Alistair’s cousin Ivo either. I say!—Look, over by the windows; isn’t that—Christ!”

My question concerning the identity of a famous face on the other side of the room was cut off when a small, cool, leathery hand insinuated itself into the hollow of my throat and wrapped its diminutive fingers around the necklace. I jerked away, dislodging the spider monkey from its shoulder perch and nearly throttling it on its own jewelled collar. It shrieked hideously, the owner cursed freely, and all hopes of a quiet entrance fled.

Three of the party greeted the introduction to Holmes with coy remarks about the unfortunate resemblance he bore to the Conan Doyle detective; one man heard the name and slunk rapidly away, never to appear again; one woman (she of the silk smoking costume) enquired earnestly if I thought it a fixation or a phobia that had driven me to marry a man more than twice my age; the man with the turquoise-chip earring whom I had seen earlier said they were getting up a game of mah-jongg after dinner and did I play, and if not would I care to learn? The man with the monkey poured some of his gin into a small glass for the creature, saying it would calm his familiar’s nerves. Phillida laughed carelessly at the famous actor’s jokes, acting like a woman ten years younger and two children lighter (and appearing remarkably unconcerned—for a woman who had been chary of upsetting the housekeeper with a mere pair of extraneous house guests—at the house’s present inundation by a considerably larger party of gate-crashers). Sidney held his glass as if it and the house were his own; Marsh, Alistair, and Iris were conspicuous by their absence. I heard at least three versions of Marsh’s shooting, the ill-concealed glee of gossips at their host’s mishap. I accepted the glass that was put into my hand, not knowing if it held arsenic or champagne (and not much caring by that point), and allowed myself to be swatted to and fro by the conversations around me.

“Tristan? Oh, he’s gone off to the Alps to study the chemical effects of prayer.”

“More likely the chemical effects of—”

“Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to bring together decent breeding stock since the War? That poor old bitch of mine is nearly—”

“—recited the whole of Eliot’s Prufrock, standing on the lion’s head in Trafalgar—”

“—Matrimonial Causes Act came just in time for her.”

“Poor old Steed, found Her Ladyship with the gardener right there amongst the orchids, old boy hasn’t been the same ever—”

“Dear Antony, such a lamb, but this nuts-and-berries diet he’s embarked on to cleanse his cells is making him a touch pale.”

“—Serge and the divine Isadora on a stage, in the moonlight . . .”

“We’re not on speakers at the moment, not since he brought that horrible female home and expected me to—”

“—Josephine Baker revue, the most extraordinary—”

“He’d been fine all these years, but he just collapsed, went into his club to read the Daily Mail, and just started sobbing, so they had to take him away and lock him in the attic; so sad.”

“The Daily Mail will have that effect on a man.”

“—want to play a few rounds of mah-jongg?”

“Stan, that damned monkey of yours has done something unspeakable on your jacket.”

“So tiresome, I know. Michael Arlen has the same trouble with—”

“—came a cropper on the hedge near the stream.”

“—Arabia, wasn’t it, Miss Russell?”

The sound of my own name jolted me from my reverie. I blinked and looked into the sparkling, avid eyes of Marsh’s sister. “Arabia,” Phillida repeated. “Where you met Marsh? Terry heard him cursing like the devil after he’d been shot, said my brother had a nice line in Arab gutter invective. And Terry should know.”

I went to sip from my glass, found it empty, found too that it was not the same glass I’d started with. How many drinks had I downed while my mind was wandering through green and quiet fields? I searched for a convenient surface and got rid of the glass, but when I had done so, Phillida was still there.

“It’s a large area, where Arabic’s spoken, isn’t it?” I said. “Although if you know your brother at all, you’d not expect him to settle in a place as unromantic as either Cairo or Damascus.”

“Baghdad!” she pounced. “It was Baghdad, wasn’t it?”

I answered not, just gave her an enigmatic smile that sent her away happy.

Dinner was too hugger-mugger to arrange a convenient, that is, knowledgeable dinner partner whose brains I might pick concerning the ties and habits of the Darlings. Of the men on either side of me, one was walking the edge of drunkenness, had no idea who his host was other than that he thought he might have been introduced to him at the door, and told me plaintively several times that he was only trying to get back to London in time for the final curtain of his girlfriend’s play. The man on my other side was if anything drunker, and proceeded to tell me many apocryphal tales of that thrilling old detecting gentleman at the next table. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was married to the gentleman in question, nor that I knew for a fact that three of his stories were utter nonsense.

The dinner showed signs of having been hastily stretched to accommodate twice the number as originally planned for, the soup rather more liquid and the meat somewhat more thinly sliced than they might otherwise have been. When we were freed from our places, I made for Holmes.

“I am not going to be segregated with the ladies,” I informed him. “If you wish to join the men at their cigars, you shall find me upstairs in Marsh’s rooms.”

I was not surprised when he accompanied me from the room. Somewhere nearby, Gershwin was giving over to a painful attempt at “Kitten on the Keys.”

Once outside the din, I leant up against the wall to catch my bearings. “Did you notice,” I asked Holmes, “the men in that room?” For a post-war gathering, there had been an astonishing percentage of whole and hearty young men.

“Not a missing limb or a gassed lung among them,” Holmes agreed, adding, “and half the guests are using cocaine.” (I kicked myself for my innocence: I had thought it merely high spirits.) A raised shrieking and bellows of male laughter followed us from the Hall; Holmes grimaced. “And these are the men for whom Gabriel Hughenfort died.”

I knocked lightly on Marsh’s door and then opened it, following the call of “We’re in here” through to the sitting room, where we stepped into an utterly unexpected cosy domestic scene: Iris before the fire with a book on her knees, Alistair across from her, Marsh stretched out on his right side on a leather sofa. They had been listening to her read—from, I was amazed to see, The Wind in the Willows. Iris waited until we were inside, then calmly finished the section before placing a marker in the book and putting it to one side.

Alistair came over to shake Holmes’ hand and to pull us up a couple of chairs. He had been out of the room earlier when Holmes stopped in and was, he said, glad to see him. Earlier, Alistair had still been too covered with Marsh’s blood to determine if he’d been injured himself, but now I could see that some of the gore had indeed been his own. What he had dismissed as “a few pellets” looked to have been closer to a score; one pellet had gouged a line across his forehead, missing both the eye and the soft temple by mere inches. His jaw had a pair of sticking-plasters, but his left hand and forearm had received the brunt of the spray. Hand and wrist were bound in gauze, and although he tried to act as though nothing was wrong, he could not help favouring the arm. Holmes took the chair from him and set it in the circle; we all sat down. Holmes was, I knew, wary of the extra woman in our midst, and uncertain as to the extent to which we would include her in our knowledge and our discussions.

Marsh took care of that question right off. “Iris is to be trusted,” he said bluntly. “Anything you have to say, she may hear as well.”

Holmes dived in with equal bluntness. “You are aware that this was no accident,” dipping his chin at Marsh’s state—a curiously Bedouin gesture.

“I thought it unlikely. The boy is not a careless child, and two shots went off on top of each other. Even with the shock of being hit, it seemed wrong. Then when I saw the shot the butcher dug out of me, I was certain. Assuming that Peter was still using my gun.”

“It was in his hand when I saw him,” I answered. “How is the shot different?”

“I always load my own cartridges for that gun. Its pellets are larger and smoother than those the doctor took out.”

“So. A gun, aimed at you, ready to go off as soon as the boy could be brought to shoot behind him,” Holmes said. “Too far away, as it turned out, most fortunately. An opportunistic crime, not a meticulously planned one, and it went awry. Who could it have been? Two men, I think. Or one very quick one.”

“Well, it wasn’t Iris, at any rate,” I joked. “I could see her the whole time.”

“I had already assumed that,” Marsh replied.

“I should hope so,” Iris retorted.

“Had you been intending to murder me, you would not have missed,” he clarified, on his face a faint but welcome smile.

“And it wasn’t Sir Victor—he had no gun, and I could hear him talking to his sons,” I went on more seriously. “It could have been any of the four on the far side of the clump of trees. Then again, I heard someone moving behind the line, which could have been any of the four to my right, or the women who’d stayed on to watch, or any of a hundred men. Sorry, but between the distractions and the fog, it’s an open field.”

Holmes brought out his pipe and assembled a contemplative smoke. “What do we know about the two Germans?” he asked.

“They’re Sidney’s connexion in the City,” Alistair answered. “Sidney made a young mint during the war—profiteering, I’d call it, although nothing was proved. Freiburg and Stein did the same, smuggling black market goods into Germany. Luxury goods and foodstuffs, rumour has it, not guns. No-one was much interested in prosecuting them, particularly as they had a certain amount of loot to offer in return. Small, portable works of art that were formerly in museums within Germany are now to be found on mantels across England.”

“And the others?”

“I don’t know the Marquis; he’s a newcomer. Sir Victor was a front-line soldier until ’16, seconded to London after he lost some toes and got shell-shocked. He has at least two medals. Of the two Londoners, Matheson seems a good sort. I don’t know Radley.”

“And Ivo Hughenfort?”

“My cousin?” Alistair said. “He lives five miles from here, has always considered Justice his second home. His friendship with Darling does not recommend him, but it’s hardly a criminal offence. I don’t know him all that well—he’s eleven or twelve years younger, and lives just beyond easy horse range from Badger. I do know he was a staff officer during the War, in northern France.”

“You don’t say,” said Holmes thoughtfully.

“What do you mean by that?” Alistair demanded, but Holmes continued as if he had not spoken.

“We are agreed, then, that someone took a shot at the two of you, a more or less impulsive shot that took advantage of the mist, the concealing shrubbery, and the possibly wounded bird?”

We were all in agreement.

“It would be nice to know for certain who the target was,” Holmes mused.

“What do you mean?” Alistair said, sounding indignant. “The gun was aimed at Marsh.”

“Who was moving across the line of fire at the time, and who could therefore have been the inadvertent recipient of a load of shot meant for you.”

This time Alistair could not miss the suggestion, but the very idea that someone would place him over Marsh, even as a candidate for murder, offended his yeoman’s soul so deeply that he did not even deign to answer, merely moving off to rummage through Marsh’s desk for a packet of cigarettes. Iris watched him; Marsh did not.

“You have information for us, I think,” Marsh said. His voice was a bit slurred, either by the effort of keeping the pain at bay or else from some drug one of the others had forced upon him. Holmes studied him closely, and I knew that this would be a long and demanding tale, since he was wondering if the telling had not better wait until the morning.

Marsh saw the look, too, and responded with the ghost of a smile. “I’ll not sleep for hours yet, Holmes; you may as well provide me with distraction.”

His lips pursed, Holmes slapped the still-burning contents of his pipe into the fire and dug the bowl into his tobacco pouch. “You were correct in your suspicions,” he told Marsh. “Your nephew was indeed executed.” Alistair grunted in pain, Iris closed her eyes, but Marsh sat, mutely braced for the rest. “For refusing an order.”

Seeing that lack of reaction on the part of the wounded man, Holmes nodded, and began the tale of his time in London.

“You did not give me much to work with. I’m not complaining, you understand, merely making note of the fact that in general, a case begins with some starting point, be it a body or a missing necklace. Here, all we have is an untenable situation that wants straightening up. And as my housekeeper could tell you, straightening up is hardly my strong point. Therefore I resolved to approach the situation as if there was an actual case, knowing that sooner or later, a thread would appear and ask to be followed.

“The thread I chose, to fill the time until Wednesday’s meeting in London with the heir apparent, was that of Gabriel Hughenfort.” Holmes paused to set a match to his pipe, then settled back into his chair.

“I began my search for your nephew’s war record, logically enough, at the War Records Offices.”

“Under what name?” Iris asked.

The question rather confused me—how would she know that Holmes had been in disguise?—but Holmes shot her a sharp glance.

“Ah,” he said. “You knew.”

“That Gabriel had enlisted under a pseudonym? He told me, yes.”

Holmes looked at Marsh. “But you did not know this?”

“I had no idea. Why would he use a false name?”

“Because he wanted to be a soldier,” Iris told him simply. “Not a Hughenfort.”

Marsh nodded, understanding. “When I wrote him, I sent the letters through my brother,” he explained. “My knowledge of his whereabouts was likely to be out of date. They never mentioned it. What name did he use, then?”

“Gabriel Hewetson,” Holmes answered.

“Hewetson?” I repeated. “As in Christopher? Irish sculptor, eighteenth century?”

“You saw the Hewetson bust of the third Duke in the Hall?” Iris asked. “It was one of Gabriel’s favourites, looked a bit like him. He may have chosen the name because it hits the ear rather like ‘Hughenfort.’ ”

“It might even appear like ‘Hughenfort’ on an envelope at the Front,” Holmes said, and added, “You’d have saved me half a night of pawing through filing cabinets, had you known. Still, it can’t be helped.

“There is a clerk in the Records Offices for whom I once performed a discreet service, and who in return is happy to expedite any enquiries I might have concerning those who have worn a uniform. That Gabriel Hughenfort’s was not a public record was apparent immediately I heard that members of the man’s own family were unaware of his fate. A shameful end for a prominent name—records are sealed for much less than that. However, I had not expected that they might be removed entirely.

“All started well enough. I arrived in London, I found my man, arrangements were made for an after-hours rendez-vous when we might read our files undisturbed, and I passed the intervening time in an afternoon concert. I am pleased to report that the cultural life of the great city is quite recovered from the losses during the War. However, you are not interested in my pleasures.

“I presented myself at the appointed hour, allowed myself to be escorted surreptitiously through a side-door, and gave my clerk the information I required. It was not with the general records, which was no surprise, but we pressed on.

“Eventually, we found a file with the name we sought, but as a soldier’s service record, it left a great deal to be desired. His family history consisted of Justice Hall, Berks, full stop. There were medical records from his enlistment, height, weight, and childhood illnesses, but those contained nothing after October. The service record itself covered training and made note of where he was being sent, then that too stopped.”

“So his records from the Front were either lost or separated?” I suggested.

“So I’d have thought,” he said, “except that his file also contained the standard typed notification of Gabriel Hughenfort’s death.”

That, we all had to agree, was difficult to explain.

“My clerk was well and truly stymied. He’d never seen anything like it, he said—and then he corrected himself. He had, perhaps, once or twice, when he’d chanced upon the ill-concealed record of government agents. Spies, if you will.”

Holmes puffed his pipe and watched our reactions. Alistair and Iris sat up sharply; Marsh tried to, and grunted. Even I was startled—and here I’d thought I was joking when I speculated about the future Phillida’s two children might find in the family espionage business.

Holmes was nodding. “My ears pricked, as you can imagine. And then I noticed, written in faint pencil on the inside cover of the file, the name Hewetson.

“Under that name, however, there was little more, only the record of where he’d trained before being sent to France. No service record, no medical papers, not even a death notice.

“Of course, the Records Offices are in deplorable condition, and even the most straight-forward of records go astray all the time. Assuming that this specific case of loss was due to malice would be leaping to conclusions—an exercise at which, as Russell could tell you, I have much practice, although I try to kerb the impulse.

“Still, I now had the unit with which he’d been sent to France. Assuming, that is, that he stayed with the original regiment.”

“Which he didn’t,” Iris broke in. “When I saw him in Paris in March, he was en route to a new posting.”

“My dear lady, I might as easily have remained here and had most of my work done for me by your arrival. However, in the end, rather than pursuing the boy through several million dusty bits of paper, we let ourselves out of the building and I caught a cab straight-away for my brother Mycroft’s.”

He paused to choose his words. “My brother is a mine of information when it comes to the inner workings of the machinery of government.” This was a delicate way of explaining Mycroft’s all-pervasive and enormously powerful role in, as Mycroft whimsically called it, “accounting.”

“I know your brother,” Iris said. “I did some work for him during the War.”

“You don’t say? Well. In any case, after I’d turned Mycroft from his bed and confronted him with the name, he was no more forthcoming than the clerk’s file had been. He’d never directed a man by that name. He did agree, however, that for a second lieutenant to have virtually no records was an unexplained irregularity, and it is my brother’s function, certainly in his own mind, to explain the inexplicable, to account for the unaccountable. It took him the entire morning—which is an exceedingly long time for Mycroft—but he did follow young Gabriel’s elusive tracks far enough to uncover the second regiment to which he was posted, following his release from hospital in March.

“Once I possessed that piece of information, the rest was foot-work. The names of the demobbed from that regiment and their addresses allowed me to winnow out those men from London, as I could see no advantage to be had in seeking out names from far-flung villages. Time enough for that, if it proves necessary.

“From the score of names that immediately presented themselves, I chose half a dozen to begin with, all of them old enough to suggest that their survival was due to a degree of low cunning, rather than sheer luck. One captain, one sergeant, the rest privates.

“The four I located before the hour became too late for calling told me a story that interested me deeply. I began by showing them the photograph I had borrowed from the library downstairs, and although they were all uncertain about the name Hughenfort, they did know the face, and knew that ‘Angel’—their nick-name for the lad—had been shot.

“Two things concerning the testimony of these soldiers interested me greatly. First and most obvious, that they knew the face and the first name, but none recognised the family name. This confirmed that your nephew used his nom de guerre exclusively, not just for the authorities.

“The other thing that interested me was not so much what the men knew, as how they felt about their ‘Angel’ Gabriel. When I first brought up the subject, each was loth to speak of the lad at all. When they did, it was with an uncomfortable mixture of deep resentment and sorrow that quite obviously pained them. All felt considerable distress at what happened to the lad, and a kind of hurt bafflement, as if a friend had badly let them down, for reasons they could not comprehend.

“It was not shame. Nor was it the disappointment in a too-soft sprig of the aristocracy, a lad who had no business in the trenches and ran afoul of his own inadequacies. It was more a case of, There but for the grace of God might I have gone. They accepted Gabriel as one of their own, a fledgling soldier with a weakness none had foreseen, but none could condemn.”

“They mourned him,” Iris said in a soft voice.

“Precisely. And at a stage of the War when few souls had any capacity for mourning left in them.”

I looked at my companions, and found that the soldiers were not the only people to mourn this “sprig of the aristocracy.” Iris was staring unseeing at the flames, her eyes dry but tragedy on her face—she’d been fond of the boy, this representative of a lost generation of golden youth. Alistair was scowling and kicking with his heel at the basket of logs. And Marsh—

One glance at Marsh, and I shot to my feet in confusion, exclaiming, “Look at the time—after mid-night already; I’ll tumble into the fire with exhaustion. Holmes, surely we can continue this in the morning?”

I practically hauled at his ear-lobe to get him out of the room; fortunately, he caught my urgency, if not its reason, and we made our hasty farewells.

But I knew that the image of Marsh Hughenfort, his face half covered by one hand and actual tears trembling in those black eyes, was one that would stay with me for a long, long time. The man looked decades older than Holmes, and far from any source of vitality or hope. We had no business inflicting the vivid reminder of an innocent’s death on the man when he was in his current condition.

Let Iris drug him to sleep with the tale of Ratty and Toad.