Justice Hall

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I crossed London at its wet and dreariest, let myself into Mycroft’s flat, found it empty with no indication that either Holmes brother had been there since the morning, and decided that the cure for heaviness of spirit and head-ache—or at least the only cure to hand—was cleanliness. And as Mycroft had recently installed an elaborate and modernistic shower-bath (I believe it was becoming too much of an effort to heave himself out of the bath-tub, although I would never have said anything of the sort), I thought I might give it a try.

With trepidation, I stepped into the closet of this technological wonder and opened all four sprays. I stepped out of it a fervent convert. And beyond the invigoration was the discovery that long hair washed while standing upright did not become the usual mass of tangles. I was humming as I ran the comb through it.

My hair was little more than damp when my companions returned—together, which indicated that Holmes had reentered the investigation. I watched as he divested himself of coat and hat, and was pleased to see a near-normal range of motion. He had been very lucky; for the moment, all was well.

Dinner—sans business—and a fire, tobacco and brandy for the brothers, and we were ready for work. I sat on the floor with my arms around my drawn-up knees, and watched them speak. Mycroft was, in all things, slow and thorough, where his younger brother flew straight to the core. Together they were formidable, and I could not imagine that many details got past them unnoticed.

It was Holmes who set aside his impatience in order to tell me what they had discovered during the day. That amounted to: One of the clerks who was in a position to know more or less where one inquisitive Frenchman would be at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening had, interestingly enough, left his desk in the middle of the following morning, reporting that he had been taken ill. He had not gone home, however, and enquiries at his doctor’s surgery had drawn a blank as well.

The button Holmes had torn from his attacker’s coat had been traced to a Jermyn Street tailor, who said the button could have come from any of a hundred such coats the firm had made over the last seven years. The list included nearly a third of the men who had been at Justice for the shooting party, including Sidney Darling, the Marquis, and both Germans, as well as the late duke, Marsh’s brother Henry.

The Army records for Sidney Darling gave the picture of a competent officer who took great care to avoid the front lines. Staff officers invariably were granted a greater freedom of movement than line officers, and in the spring of 1918 Darling had been based less than twenty miles from Gabriel Hughenfort’s new regiment. Because Gabriel’s records had been lost—by accident or malice—there was no telling who was responsible for his transfer to the hard-pressed unit he had joined that March, but certainly Darling had been in a position to slip one more such transfer into the machinery of war. Similarly, he could have been the red-tab major who came to see the condemned man the night before Gabriel was taken out and shot by his comrades. To slip away from headquarters for a few hours in the middle of the night, particularly during the chaos of the summer’s shifting Front, would have presented small risk.

However, Ivo Hughenfort’s position as a suspect held many of the same points. With his family name to stand upon, he had quickly assumed a place in Paris collating information and writing daily briefings for the Commander-in-Chief. Ivo had been in a position to watch Gabriel, and indeed to nudge him from one place to another, although there was no immediate indication that he had done so, nor was there any sign of an impromptu trip out of Paris in the early hours of August the third.

The records, however, were both voluminous and ill-organised for our purposes. Five years after Armistice, clerks were still filing, and there was nothing to say that another Hughenfort had not been in the wings, a South African son of Philip Peter, say, or the Australian Ralph.

The key element in Gabriel’s death, the letter that had driven the nail into his coffin, had been the letter from Haig confirming the divisional commander’s sentence of death. That, too, had vanished along with Gabriel’s records, and copies of either letter had yet to come to light.

“I’ve an appointment with Haig himself tomorrow morning,” Mycroft said. “I cannot imagine he will have forgot a letter such as that.”

I wished I had his faith in the memory, and the sense of moral responsibility, of the commanding officer in question. Still, if the man knew anything about the condemnatory letter, Mycroft was better suited to prise it out of him than any person I knew.

Except, perhaps, one other.

“Have we heard any news of Mah—Marsh, I mean to say?”

“I took advantage of Mycroft’s offices this afternoon to place a trunk call to Justice,” Holmes replied. “He is having a bad time of it, with some blood-poisoning in one arm, but he retains sufficient strength for his voice to be heard from across the room and down the telephone, demanding that we report to Justice Hall without delay or else he will come after us and take matters into his own hands. I quote.”

“Sounds like he’s better. Now, do you wish to know who Gabriel’s VAD friend was?”

They did, and I described how I had traced Philippa Helen O’Meary through the dusty papers of the VAD. As with most aspects of an investigation, the telling took considerably less time than the doing, and lacked any shred of the dramatic.

At the end of my recitation, Canada seemed farther away than ever.

“I shall write to her immediately,” I concluded. “Or, as soon as I can compose a letter. How exactly does one ask a complete stranger, ‘Were you once in love with a young soldier, and did he leave you any letters that might incriminate those who arranged his death?’ It is not going to be an easy letter to write.”

I stared into the fire for a minute or so, turning over phrases in my mind, before I slowly became aware that I was seated within a fairly ringing silence. I looked up, and found the two Holmes brothers engaged in a wordless conversation over my head. My husband broke it off first, to lower his gaze to mine.

“Russell,” he said. At the first touch of that gentle, affectionate voice, I nearly leapt to my feet and planted my back against the nearest wall: When Holmes stoops to wheedle, God help us all. “My dear Russell, how right you are. As always. This is precisely the sort of sensitive query that demands a more personal touch.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, bristling with suspicion while trying to see from which direction the threat was coming.

“Why, Russell, I am merely agreeing with you. It would indeed be an excellent idea to confront this O’Meary woman to her face when you ask for the return of Gabriel’s letters.”

Now I really was on my feet. “Oh, no. Cross the Atlantic and half of America to ask some woman if a British soldier had once confided in her? In November? Are you mad? No. Absolutely not.”

“There’s a boat for New York that sails tomorrow afternoon,” Mycroft noted, studying his fingernails.

“Don’t be absurd. I’m not going anywhere. Except perhaps Oxford. Yes,” I declared, warming to my theme, “I think I’ll take the train up to Oxford and get back to work on my paper. You two can continue to hunt down your red-tab major if you like, but as far as I’m concerned, Marsh Hughenfort can accept that nice boy Thomas as his heir and hie off back to Palestine. You identify who set Gabriel up, the child will be safe, Marsh and Alistair can go back to their tents, I can go back to my books and Holmes to his beehives. How happy we all will be.”

“You can write your paper on the boat,” Holmes told me. “You’re always complaining that you never have the leisure to work properly. You’ll be in New York by the middle of the week, take the train to Toronto Thursday or Friday, and be back on board by the Monday sailing. Two weeks, total, to solve our case. Maybe three.”

“You go.” I felt like a rat cornered by two determined terriers; I was not going down without a fight.

And I did not. Go without a fight, that is, although in the end, go I did, and on the Friday boat as Mycroft had said. With hastily packed trunks holding clothes scavenged from my flat and Mycroft’s guest-room cupboards, and bearing only the most rudimentary books to keep this fool’s journey from being an utter waste of time, I was flung onto the ship as by a tornado, the gang-way pulling back almost as soon as I had cleared it. I stood on the vibrating deck to watch England retreat into the fog, knowing that I should be very lucky if this exercise in futility were to cost me only three weeks. I put together a complicated Arabic curse worthy of Ali and gave it to the wind; feeling somewhat better, I went below to find my rooms.

As I was shaking my head at the peculiar selection of out-of-date and unseasonable clothing I had at my disposal, and wondering if I might slip beneath the ship’s social eye by keeping to my cabin at meal-times, a rapid-fire knock sounded at my door. If that was a purser bearing propitiatory flowers from Holmes, I swore under my breath, he’d be fortunate to escape with his head on his shoulders. I went back through the rooms, yanked open the door, and felt as if I’d walked into a solid wall.

It was not a purser, flowers or no. Nor a maid, nor a first officer welcoming me on board, nor a boy with a telegram, nor any of the dozen other likely candidates for disturbing me. It was not even Holmes, whose capacity for appearing where he could not possibly be was unparalleled in human experience.

Standing in the corridor was Iris Sutherland.

“Hallo, Mary. I see by your face that the news I was coming along did not reach you.”

“It most certainly did not.”

“Hardly surprising—I didn’t know myself until about six hours ago, and there was some question I’d actually make it. You going to invite me in?”

“Of course, please. Sorry—it just surprised me so. But it’s an absolute joy to see you.”

And it was. Suddenly this voyage, and the arduous land journey at the end of it, did not seem so much of a burden on my soul.

“My, my,” she was saying. “This is posh. They’ve stuck me into a broom closet seventeen levels below the water-line, said they’d try for something with air when they got sorted out.”

My own arrival was nearly as hastily arranged, but either Mycroft’s strings or my own cheque-book had kicked me upstairs.

“I’ll have a word with the captain,” I told her.

“Don’t bother, I already have. Using Marsh’s name,” Iris added, with a look of mischief. Yes: The knowledge that they had placed a Hughenfort in steerage would set the feathers flying, all right.

I laughed. “The next knock on the door will be some gentleman with a lot of gold braid telling me ever so apologetically that a mistake’s been made, that my room is a nice cosy broom closet, seventeen levels below the water-line.”

“That’s all right, then,” she said, gesturing towards the adjoining room. “We’ll make you up a bed on the sofa.”

“How is Marsh?”

“Spitting mad that the doctor and Ali won’t let him out of his bed.”

“I didn’t even know until yesterday that he’d taken a turn for the worse.”

“He nearly lost his arm.”

“Iris!”

“They couldn’t get the infection down. The doctor wanted to amputate—blood-thirsty idiot—but Ali wouldn’t let him. Threatened to amputate the doctor’s arm, in fact. That shut him up.”

“I can imagine.” Particularly if the threat had been accompanied by a blade and one of Ali’s patent glares.

“All it wanted was round-the-clock compresses. Ali and I took turns; the infection centralised and could be lanced after a couple of days. Marsh is weak, but he’ll be fine.”

“Holmes said he was going down to see them today or tomorrow. I suppose—” I caught myself: We were still standing, as we had been since I let her in. “Do you want some tea or coffee or something?”

“I’d like a drink, actually. A good old English gin and tonic. Do you have such a thing, or need we call for it?”

“There should be a drinks cabinet somewhere.”

There was, and although I would have preferred hot tea, I joined her in a g-and-t. She swallowed, and exhaled in appreciation.

“Yes,” she said, picking up on my last statement. “Justice Hall is a house divided. Phillida is going berserk. She’s got this elaborate ball planned for the fifteenth, absolutely refuses to shift it to the London house; I can see her point—she’d be better to cancel it. At the same time, Alistair won’t let anyone but Ogilby into the part of the house where Marsh is, which means the entire wing is effectively cut off from the main block. Sidney is irate, because that means the billiards room and the library are in No-Man’s-Land, and they had planned to have a few friends up for the week-end. Alistair won’t budge, swears he’ll empty a load of bird shot into the billiards room if he hears any movement down there. They believe him.”

As would I, I thought, but only commented, “Sounds like a fine game of Happy Families.”

“An interesting family, no doubt of that. But, Ali told me your husband was attacked on Tuesday. Was it serious? Was it connected with everything else that’s going on?”

“Who knows?” Who knew, in fact, what was going on? “He was fortunate—a constable happened on them before it got past the bruises-and-cracked-ribs stage.”

She pulled a face. “Still, at his age, even that’s no small matter.”

I paused, taken somewhat aback. I rarely thought of Holmes as being of any particular age, much less a great one, but it was true: A beating at twenty is not the same as one at sixty. I wondered if I should have insisted he see a doctor, then dismissed the idea immediately. If he’d needed medical attention, he’d have sought it.

We applied ourselves to our glasses and chatted of nothing in particular—flying lessons, as I recall, with Iris asserting that in a few years we’d be criss-crossing the world’s oceans in passenger aeroplanes, g-and-t in hand, and think nothing of it—and I waited for her to ask me for the information Holmes and I had collected since we had last seen each other a week earlier. She did not ask. Once she started me off, of course, the painful flow of facts and images would wash over her in a flood. She knew that, knew there was no comfortable way to ease into the past, and so she hesitated to ask.

In the end, I simply gave her Gabriel’s journal. I had brought it with me to search it more closely with an eye to the tall Canadian Hélène whom I would soon be confronting, but it appeared to me more important that Iris read it first. I took it from my locked case, and placed it in her hands.

“This is Gabriel’s diary,” I told her. “Your son’s war journal. When you’ve read it, I’ll tell you how we found it.”

She received the battered object with the attitude of a believer accepting the communion host. She bent over it for a moment, then left the cabin without a word.

I did not see her for two days.