Locked rooms

Chapter Eight

Holmes reached out to refill Mr Long's glass. The story had taken nearly an hour in the telling, and now our guest sat forward with his drink clasped in his hands.

“That much I know, for a certainty. And it was necessary to tell you in detail so that you might understand the links between our families. It began with the rescue of a woman, but it was not simply a matter of rewarding a service.”

“I do see that,” I told him.

“And as you were young when you knew my parents, I did not think that you would have understood the ways in which they were something other than mere servants. I think your mother would not have spent hours discussing Chinese philosophy with her gardener, were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And your father would not have felt so free to lend him books, and later talk about them, were the things between them not more solid than a job and a payment.”

“I am grateful to you. I . . . I don't remember a lot about my parents.”

“That would be true of any child who is not given the opportunity to know his or her parents as an adult.” The way he said this reminded me that he, too, had lost his mother and father—twice over, in fact.

“As I said,” he continued, “it is necessary to perceive the strength of the links between them in order to make sense of what happened in 1906. Although that, I fear, is precisely where my tale falls into thin ground.

“You may have been too young to remember, but the catastrophe of those first days after the earthquake was unimaginable. Block after block of buildings collapsed, often on top of those trying to rescue their belongings. Men and women wandered the streets, driven mad by shock or simply with no place to go, no possessions to guard. People would be trapped under rubble, and the fire would reach them before the rescuers could—more than one was shot, through mercy, to save them from burning alive. The police feared riot and disorder so much, it was ordered that any person caught looting would be shot on sight—with no suggestion as to how the soldier or policeman might tell if the person in his sights was a looter or a rightful home-owner. It was an absolute hell of irrational behaviour against a back-drop of flames and shattered brickwork.

“In that macabre and unearthly setting, something happened that involved your father and mine. And there my story falters, for I do not know its details, I could merely see the shape of the thing in the aftermath. I was fourteen at the time, no longer a child, not yet seen as a man. I was left with my mother as the fire grew near, to pack our goods and prepare to abandon the house. My father needed to go and see to the Russells, to make certain they—you—were alive and uninjured. A portion of the fire lay between us, so he did not know how long it would take him to work his way around it, but my mother urged him to go, insisted that we would be fine. He left at four o'clock on the Wednesday afternoon, and we did not see him until eight o'clock on Friday morning. In the forty hours he was gone, the fire reached and consumed Chinatown, driving us all to the edge of the sea. When he could finally return, he found all of Chinatown pressed between the docks and a wall of fire, the air thick with explosions and panic, everyone half suffocated from the smoke. I tell you these details to illustrate the urgency of the demands, to have kept him away from his responsibilities to us.

“He was near despair when he could not find us among the crowd, but a neighbour saw him and told him that we had already made our way to the Presidio, where the Army had permitted us an area to shelter, and provided food. He finally caught up with us there, and wept when he found us safe, saying over and over that he should never have left. He told us that your house was damaged but standing, that you were all living under canvas in a nearby park, that he had helped your father move some valuables. And that was essentially all he told us, that day or ever.

“But whatever it was he had done with, or for, your father, made him uneasy. One might almost say it haunted him.”

“What do you mean? Was he frightened?”

“Frightened,” Long repeated, considering the word. “It is difficult to imagine one's father frightened. No, I don't believe so. It was, rather, as if he had done something without considering the results, and reflection made him wonder if he had made the right choice. Or as if he had begun to suspect that what he had been asked to do actually concealed another purpose.”

“As if he no longer trusted my father?”

“Not your father, but as if some underlying question threatened to betray them both.” He shrugged, wincing at the motion. “It is difficult to put into words, a vague impression such as that.”

“But you can't think what it was based upon? Was it something that happened to him, or that he saw, that he did?”

“Any of them. None.” His spectacles caught the light as he shook his head. “He would never talk about it.”

It was by now late, and I could see little sense in playing Twenty Questions with a man who could describe the object only by its outline. Holmes clearly felt the same, for he reached out to knock his pipe decisively into an ash-tray.

“Mr Long—” he began to say.

“There is one other thing,” Long interrupted, and Holmes obediently settled back. “Again I do not know what it means, but your father came to see mine in the middle of September 1914. Two weeks before he died. They talked for a long time, and when he left, my father was quiet, but somehow as if a burden had been lifted from him. And when they shook hands, they seemed friends again, as they had not for some time.”

“But you don't know what they talked about.”

“They walked across to the park and sat on a bench, going silent whenever another person came near.”

“Well, thank you, Mr Long,” I said, wishing I did not feel so dissatisfied.

“If we think of any questions, Mr Long,” Holmes said, “may we call on you in your shop?”

“Either I will be there, or my assistant will know where I have gone.”

“Let me go downstairs with you and arrange a motor to take you back. It is late, and your arm clearly troubles you.”

Long protested that it was but a short walk, but Holmes would not be swayed. He retrieved our guest's hat, standing at the ready should the man have any difficulty rising from his chair. He did not, although as Holmes had said, the wounded arm gave all indications of paining him. By way of support, Long gingerly worked his hand into the pocket of his jacket, but when he had done so, he paused, and drew the hand laboriously out again. In his fingers was a paper-wrapped object the shape of a very short cigar, secured in neatly tied twine, which he held out to me.

“In the turmoil of the past few hours, I forgot to give this to you. My father said that it was an object precious to your mother, and removed it for safe-keeping, lest vandals take it.”

I turned the object over in my hands and saw, in a precise, spidery hand:

Inside the paper lay the front door's mezuzah.

Whatever Long saw in my face caused him to take a half-step forward as if to grasp my arm, but he wavered, and instead merely asked, “I hope my father's actions did not create problems for you. He seemed to think it was a kind of household god, perhaps not literally but—”

“No,” I said, my hand closing tightly around the cool metal. “It's fine. I'm very glad to find it safe. Thank you.”

I felt Holmes' sharp gaze on me, but I did not look at him. He caught up his own hat and stick to accompany our guest out, so I was not surprised when he did not return for the better part of an hour, approximately the time it would take to make a slow and thoughtful foot trip back from Chinatown.

When he came in, he found me where he had left me, curled on the sofa with the mezuzah in my hand. When he had shed his outer garments at the door, he came and sat down beside me, taking my hand—not, as I thought at first, in a gesture of affection, but in order to prise my fingers away from the object. The palm of my hand was dented red with the shape of it, my fingers stiff. He examined it curiously before laying it on the low table before the sofa, then reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief.

I blew my nose noisily and drew an uneven breath. “I never had a chance to say good-bye to them. Not before they died, not even at their funerals, since they had to be buried before I got out of hospital. Dr Ginzberg took me to their grave site, but I was so full of drugs at the time, it made no impression on me.

“It's the . . . unfinished quality of their deaths that is hard to set aside.”

“Yes.” There was an odd intonation to the monosyllable, almost as if he had asked a question: Yes, and . . . ?

“What do you mean, ‘yes'?”

His grey eyes, inches away, drilled into mine, his expression—his entire body—radiating an intensity I could not understand. He did not answer, just waited.

I shook my head wearily. “Holmes, you apparently believe you see something I am missing entirely. If you want me to react to it, you're just going to have to tell me.”

“Your parents died in October 1914.”

“And my brother, yes.”

“And you were either in hospital or under your doctor's supervision until you came to England in the early weeks of 1915.”

“Yes.”

“Your parents' cook and gardener—ex-gardener—were murdered in February 1915.”

“According to Mr Long.”

“Your house sits vacant for ten years, then is broken into in late March, approximately the time you would have been here had we not stopped in Japan. And within forty-eight hours of your return to San Francisco, someone is shooting at you.”

“Or at Mr Long. Or simply at a Chinese man who dared to venture from his assigned territory.”

I might not have been speaking, for all the impression my voice made on his inexorable push towards his ultimate point. “And during the earthquake and fire of 1906, some experience troubled a brave and loyal servant into a change of heart towards his employer.”

“Holmes, please, I really am too tired for this.”

“Within two months of that event, your father's will was given an addendum to ensure that the house be left untouched by anyone other than family members for a minimum of twenty years.”

“So?” I demanded, driven to rudeness.

“And finally, your emotional turmoil over the unfinished nature of your family's death has led to a series of disturbing dreams.”

“Damn it, Holmes, I'm going to bed.”

“The evidence is clear, yet you refuse to see it,” he mused. “Fascinating.”

“See what?” I finally couldn't bear it another moment, and blew up at him. “Holmes, for Christ sake, I'm absolutely exhausted, I have bruises coming up all along my shoulders and skull, and my head is pounding so hard I'm going to have trouble seeing my face in the bath-room looking-glass, and you persist in playing guessing games with me. Well, you'll just have to do it in my absence.” I stood up and stalked into the bath-room, where I ran a high, hot bath and immersed myself in it for a very long time. Holmes was asleep when I came out; at any rate, he did not stir.

For the brief, dull, businesslike venture that I had expected of our trip to San Francisco, it had already proved remarkably eventful. Even before we arrived, dreams had been pounding at the door of my mind; in the three days since the ship had docked on Monday morning, I had been arrested, confronted with a bucket-load of oddities, seen the evidence of a house-breaking, met a large slice of my past, been attacked on the street, and had a serious argument with my husband.

But the deadly ambush laid for us Thursday as we walked in all innocence across the hotel lobby reduced the rest to little more than specks of dust on our way.

We'd had a pleasant breakfast—or Holmes had, while I drank coffee and ate a piece of toast while reading the newspapers. Holmes had the Call, I had the Chronicle, working my way from NEW WOMAN IN POISON CASE and past an advert for MJB coffee with two finger-prints accompanied by the statement “No two are alike—People differ in their coffee tastes as well as their thumb prints.” I consulted Holmes, and we agreed that the prints in the advert were those of fingers, not thumbs, so I went on to GAY GATHERING ON YERBA BUENA FOR SWIM PARTY and RESCUED GIRL TELLS COURT BONDAGE STORY.

All in all, a satisfying day's headlines.

We drained our cups, dropped our table napkins beside our plates, and made our way towards the lift.

The first volley of the ambush rang out across the dignified lobby, startling every inhabitant and sending Holmes and me into immediate defensive posture. The next shot fired hit home and froze me where I stood.

“Mary! It's Mary Russell, I'd never be wrong about that, you're the spitting image of your father. When I read you were in town I—”

I straightened: The previous night's argument notwithstanding, I had no wish to inflict on Holmes a bullet aimed at me. I fixed him with one of those glances married people develop in lieu of verbal communication—in this case, the urgent glare and slight tip of the head that said (to give its current American colloquial), “Scram!”

Holmes faded away as no man over six feet tall ought to be able to do, leaving me alone to face my attacker.

The top of her hat might have tucked under my chin, had I been foolish enough to allow her that close. Its waving feathers and bristling bits of starched ribbon were ferociously up-to-date, her well-corseted figure was wrapped in an incongruously youthful dress whose designer would have been outraged at the sight (although it testified well to the tensile strength of the thread), and her hair might at one time have been nearly the intense black it now was. Her fingers sparkled with a miscellany of stones, and the mauve colour of her sealskin coat came from no animal known to Nature. She was making for me with both arms outstretched, and although she looked more likely to devour me than to embrace me, I did the English thing and resisted mightily the impulse to place the outstretched heel of one hand against her approaching forehead to keep her at arm's length. Instead, I allowed her to seize my forearms and smack her painted lips in the general direction of my jaw.

It appeared that I had a dear friend in San Francisco.

“Mary, Mary, why on earth did you never write? My, you've become so grown-up, and so tall! Taller than your mother, even, and I thought she was a giraffe! Oh, dear, you poor thing, whisked away from your friends and your home like that—I said to Florence—you remember little Flo, your good friend?—that someone should just get on a train and go fetch you back. Imagine! Nothing but a child, and all alone in the world.”

“Er,” I managed.

“And you've kept your blonde hair, like your dear father—it never did darken like your mother said it would, now did it? Do you rinse it in lemon, like I told you to when you were twelve years old? It looks a nice thick head of hair, too, although this fashion for men's haircuts is so unfortunate.”

“I'm terribly sorry,” I pushed out into the storm of words. “I'm not sure I know who you are.”

The sound she emitted—laughter, I suppose—was a string of seven notes descending from a soprano's high shriek to a low sort of chortle. The gaiety of it was somewhat undermined by the hurt expression in her eyes, but it was hard to know how I might have posed the question any less bluntly.

“I'm Auntie Dee, dear child. Your mother's very best friend in all the world. She used to bring you over to my house so you could play dollies with my Flo. Although you usually ended up in a tree or down the street with her brother Frankie's friends,” she added reluctantly, as if the memory was a somewhat shameful one.

I had to admit, in a tree with the boys sounded more like me than dollies with Flo. Although what my quiet, intelligent mother would have seen in this woman was beyond me.

Still, I did what was required of me. “Auntie Dee, of course, how ever are you, and dear Flo?”

During the course of the monologue that followed, I glimpsed Holmes coming out of the lift, dressed for the day. Give him credit, he did raise a questioning eyebrow in my direction. But there was little point in inflicting this female person on him, so I gave him an imperceptible shake of the head and lowered my eyes until I was gazing soulfully into my companion's face. The motion, or perhaps the fact of her audience actually turning attention onto her, silenced her for a moment, a gap I took advantage of.

“Er, Auntie Dee, I haven't had breakfast yet. Would you care to join me?” A lie, but casual interrogation of this woman might prove informative.

Again came the wince-making seven descending notes of laughter, and she reached out to slap my hand playfully. “How silly of me, of course you're standing here starving to death, when all the while I came to your hotel to whisk you away to breakfast at your old Auntie Dee's own table. If you're free, that is, of course.” She looked vaguely around, showing that she had registered something of Holmes' presence before he had faded into the palm trees. But before she could spot him, I took her hand in an imitation of childish glee.

“Of course I'd love to come. Shall we get a cab, or do you have a car?”

She looked at me askance, speech for once difficult to retrieve. But only for a moment. “Don't you want to go and get your hat or something?” she asked.

I might have been proposing to walk into Union Square wrapped only in a bath-towel. However, I thought perhaps I wouldn't take her to our rooms, even if Holmes had left.

“Oh, I'm only going to my old second home, aren't I?” I asked. “No need for formality here, is there?”

Thus bereft of hat, coat, and gloves, I walked out of the hotel in my half-nude state towards the waiting car, only to pause at the sound of not-so-distant drums.

“What is that noise?”

“Oh, the Loyalty Parade down on Market Street,” she answered.

Now that I looked more carefully at the flow of traffic and pedestrians, it was obvious that some major disruption was going on a couple of streets down to my right.

“I hope we don't have to get across it,” I said, climbing into the car, but fortunately she too lived in Pacific Heights, five streets up from the house I was slowly beginning to think of as mine. Aunt Dee's, however—I could not call her otherwise for the moment, as she had yet to provide me with her full name—was higher up, far more ornate, and possessed a front garden no one would mistake for a jungle. The car rolled to a halt under the imposing Greek pillars of the portico and a man with a face like an ebony carving came out, surreptitiously tugging his white gloves into place. He held the door for my companion, allowing the driver to do the same for me.

“This is Miss Mary Russell,” she told her servant. “Tell Mrs La Tour that we require breakfast.”

“Yes, Mrs Greenfield,” the man murmured. I was grateful for the name, which rang not the faintest chime of familiarity. His, however, was another matter.

As Dee Greenfield turned to the door, she told me, “You won't remember Jeeves, Mary; he's only been with us for two years.”

Startled, I looked straight into the black eyes of the butler, seeing in their depths a well-concealed spark of humour. “Jeeves?”

It was she who answered, over her shoulder. “Yes, his name was Robert, but we could hardly have that, could we, it was my husband's name. So I let him choose another and that's what he came up with. Silly, but what can one do?”

My involuntary grin fanned the spark of humour for an instant, then he turned to open the ornate wooden door for us. As I went past, I said, “Carry on, Mr Jeeves.”

The smooth dark skin around the man's mouth twitched briefly, but nothing more.

The inside of the house was as needlessly ornate as the outside, although it reflected a very different era. The exterior decoration dated to the house's period of construction some forty years earlier, but the original Victorian interior had been transformed, and recently by the looks of it, into a showcase of modern design. The Deco movement contributed its whirling patterns of rich colours on the walls, a tangle of wire and glass around every lighting fixture, long and languid chest-high marble figures of standing women and seated greyhounds in every corner—it was like taking up residence in a box of chocolate crèmes, chokingly rich.

As Mrs Greenfield unloaded her gloves, handbag, and the extraordinary mauve coat into the white-gloved hands of Mr Jeeves, she babbled without pause. “Isn't this room just the most beautiful place you've ever seen? I shouldn't say so myself, I know, but we just finished it last Christmas and it still gives me a little thrill whenever I walk into it. We had a dress ball to celebrate, and oh, you should have seen it with all the candles glowing and an eighteen-foot Christmas tree in the corner there! Every guest here oohed and aahed like they were children, it was so lovely. Oh, do run along, Jeeves, Miss Russell is utterly famished. Tell Mrs La Tour we'll start with coffee in the conservatory.”

Although I was prepared for nearly anything in the realm of the spectacular, the conservatory had apparently resisted the efforts of Mrs Greenfield's modern-minded decorator, and sat, Victorian and defiant, attached to the back of the house. It was a pleasant room, white-painted wood and basket chairs, although the plant life showed an unfortunate preference for orchids so ornate they appeared artificial.

The coffee arrived, blessedly strong and served in eggshell-thin bone china, a combination that soothed the spirit. Mrs Greenfield rambled on, regaling me with elaborate tales of people whose names she seemed to think I should know. I began to suspect that her mind might be none too firmly rooted in the here and now, that perhaps she imagined that I was my mother, but then I decided that no, it was more a matter of her self-absorption being so profound, she simply assumed that the rest of the world saw through her eyes.

A person like this is the easiest of all to interrogate, as they never look beyond the opportunity to talk about themselves to question why their audience might be asking along certain lines. It is mildly exhausting, to be sure, as it requires close attention to tumbling streams of nonsense in order to pluck out the occasional nugget being washed one's way. And since it would hardly do for me to take notes, I had to hold in my mind all the glimmering bits, gold and pyrite alike.

If this woman knew my mother, then she would know when my family had lived in this city, and when they had not. It took many circuitous loops and back-tracks, and a number of the reference points she used would take some research on my part to pin down as to their date—for example, that we had arrived back in San Francisco, baby brother in tow, the very week that that exclusive French couturier on Post Street had opened.

The cook also very evidently dated from before the modernisation of the house. Mrs La Tour presented us with a breakfast that was solidly Edwardian in its sensibilities, and although I was not in the least hungry, I had begun by telling my “auntie” that I was on my way to breakfast, so I could scarcely claim to have eaten already. I pushed my eggs, grilled tomatoes, and various fried objects around on the plate until she noticed, and then forced down a quantity of the congealed food before she could pick up my fork and feed me. The meal left me feeling as if I ought to set off for a brisk march around the circumference of the city, and it was with gratitude that I pushed away from the table.

This time she led me into a morning room from which the sun had already retreated. But a fire had been laid and more coffee stood ready on the low table between two comfortable chairs. I was handed a cup without being asked if I wished it, and before I had done more than blow across the top of the cup, we were interrupted by a person whose presence went far to explain the vast and recent changes in the household.

A bustle in the hall-way and an exchange of words at the door warned of an impending invasion, and indeed, seconds later the door was flung open and in whirled a petite, black-haired, absolutely perfect specimen of the species Flapper Americanus. She was quite obviously just coming in from the night's entertainments, although it was well past nine o'clock in the morning, and her clothing and makeup were very much the worse for wear. Both of her silk stockings were out at the knees—stockings that I knew from my earlier bout of shopping cost nearly five dollars—an English pound for a pair of stockings! The hem of her abbreviated skirt cried out for the attention of an expert seamstress, her collar was smudged with face-powder, and unless wearing a single earring was the fashion here, she'd lost one of her diamond pendants.

What I found most shocking, however, was the lack of reaction on the part of her mother, who merely shook an affectionate head at the bedraggled state of the newcomer.

“Mummy, darling,” the jazz-baby was exclaiming before she had cleared the door-way, “Jeeves says you have a guest—what on earth are you doing bringing a guest home at this hour, I thought that kind of goings-on was reserved for the younger generation? And even I only drag friends in for breakfast after we've been out all night, I don't begin the day with abductions. Oh! I've been with Trudy for the past three hours, stuck on the other side of Market Street with that pig of a parade the children are putting on—twenty thousand boys, they say, God, what a nightmare thought, all of them banging away on instruments and marching and pulling floats, so that even if you weren't drunk beforehand you'd need to be by the time you'd got past it—and she's just given up smoking and I'm dying, just dying for a smoke, tell me you don't mind, Mummy dearest, and if your friend objects I'll just have to skulk away into the conservatory and puff away among the orchids.”

In the course of this speech, the girl had made her way across the room in that languid, loose-limbed shuffle characteristic of her species, moving as if her shoes were too large and threatened to fall off, or to trip her up. Neither mishap occurred, however, before she reached a swooping sort of octopus-armoire whose many arms were each topped by a small Benares-ware tray, seven in all. Drawing a brightly enamelled cigarette holder a good eight inches long from somewhere about her person, she flipped open the lacquered box that sat on one of the trays and pulled out a cigarette, sliding it into the holder with a frown of concentration. She lit it with a grenade-sized cigarette lighter that matched the enamel of her holder, drawing in a dramatic lungful of smoke and emitting a small cloud along with a sound of satisfaction. She then hurled herself onto the chaise beside the fireplace, crossed her knees in a manner that would have had her grandmother swooning, and looked at me brightly.

I was hard put to keep my hands from applauding.

“But this is Mary, my dear,” Mrs Greenfield explained. “You remember Mary, your best friend when you were a little thing? She used to play dollies with you.”

This was, as I had suspected, my former play-mate, Flo.

“I remember she used to play a vicious game of kick-the-can with Frank's friends, and one time climbed up to the top of that tree that Billy Murrow broke both legs falling out of.” The flapper's tired face creased in amusement, and she gave me a languid wave of her cigarette holder by way of greeting. “Hi.”

“Hullo.”

She tipped her head a fraction, and asked, “Do you have an English accent now?”

“Didn't I before?”

“I suppose you did, and I'd forgotten. You live in England, then? So what are you doing here?”

“She's touring the world,” Mrs Greenfield broke in. “I opened the paper this morning to the society page and what should jump out at me from under the ‘gossip from hotel lobbies' section but the name Miss Mary Russell, and I just knew it had to be her, had to be. So I had Jeeves send for a car and went right down to welcome her home. We've just had breakfast, although we'd have waited if I'd known you were on your way.”

Flo grimaced, making me suspect that there might be a link between the red of her eyes and her lack of enthusiasm over Mrs La Tour's cooking. “Thanks but no thanks,” she said. “So, Mary—shall I call you Mary?”

“Of course.”

“What are you doing in the City?”

“There's some business to take care of here; my father's holdings need attention. As I was sailing the Pacific, it was easy enough to stop here for a few days.”

“But is that all?” Mrs Greenfield cried. “You must stay longer and see your old friends. Flo, tell her she must stay on.”

“I'd be happy to show you something of the night life, such as it is,” Flo drawled, and stifled a yawn.

“Oh, what a good idea!” exclaimed her mother. “I was going to invite some of her mother's friends over for a morning tea and perhaps treat her to a night at the theatre, but you young things might have a better time dancing and having fun.”

Neither jazz-dancing nor provincial theatre was high on my list of passions, particularly while inhabiting a skull that still gave twinges of protest at the previous day's crack on the pavement, but it was difficult to say so in the face of the mother's enthusiasm. Or of the daughter's flagging attention. Flo yawned again hugely, not bothering to pardon herself, then stood up to grind her cigarette out in an ash-tray.

“There's a party on for tomorrow night that doesn't sound too frightful. Shall we pick you up at nine, then?” she asked me. “That's early, I know, but we could have a bite to eat first.”

Nine o'clock as the opening hour of a night's adventures sounded ominous, but I was trapped for the moment. Well, I thought, I could always telephone to the house and say I had developed a sudden rash from oysters or something. “That would be grand,” I told her.

She merely nodded, and directed her steps towards the door-way, already half asleep on her feet.

Mrs Greenfield shot me an apologetic smile. “She's a good girl, just going through a silly phase. She worked so hard with the decorator, when it was finished she was at something of a loss what to do. Blowing off steam, you know?”

I nodded to say I knew, although it seemed to me the girl might find a manner of release less destructive to both body and possessions. But Flo's involvement in the renovations wrought on the house did explain the style better than if Mrs Greenfield had been supervising them. And I thought that, once a person got used to the vigorous style, there was an appeal in Deco. In small doses, preferably.

Flo's departure gave an excuse for my own, although it took many promises and an acceptance of the Greenfield telephone number to free me from the establishment. Mrs Greenfield told Jeeves to have the motor brought up, but I countermanded the order.

“No, really, I'd rather walk a bit. It's a lovely morning, and I could use the exercise.”

“Oh, you young girls,” she gushed, “it's all faddishness with you, isn't it? Exercise and education—why, next thing you'll be running for public office and joining the Army!”

The descending seven notes of her laugh followed me down the steps to the drive.

Running for office; what a mad idea.

I suppose Mrs Greenfield thought I was strolling the five streets over to my house, but in fact, I had an appointment with Mr Norbert and two managers at ten o'clock. I stood at the gates to the house, searching up and down the street for waiting figures. I had more or less decided that whoever took a shot at me had been a random madman, but I wasn't about to be foolish enough to ignore another explanation. And I admit, the possibility made my spine crawl. To put off making a decision, I settled onto a section of low wall in the shelter of the gate, and spent a minute scribbling notes in my little book. I might have done it in any event, since I did not wish to forget any of what Mrs Greenfield had told me. And when I was finished, I closed the note-book, hopped down from the wall, and without hesitation turned towards the solicitor's office.

The brisk hike from Pacific Heights settled my nerves somewhat and cleared all manner of cobwebs from my mind, and the equally brisk and pleasantly efficient meeting with Norbert gave me the feeling that things were moving with admirable purpose. I signed papers; agreed to commissions for selling various stock; agreed, too, although with a degree more reluctance, to remain in nominal control of my father's division of the company for a year, or at the most two, until the most opportune time to sell my interests came about. I was on my way shortly after noon, having declined to join the three men for a luncheon at their club (the ladies' room, of course). I stood in the door-way, my hand on the heavy bulge in my hand-bag as I studied the adjoining street-corners and building entrances, but the most dangerous character I could see was a boy on roller-skates, zipping in the direction of the parade. I told myself that no-one was about to shoot at me on a crowded street. And during the time I was walking to the hotel, no-one did.

Holmes was not there, so I changed my formal business attire for clothing better suited to a dusty house, and left again. The cable-car passed by the front of the hotel, but instead of joining it I walked up to Post Street, studying the shops until I found the one Mrs Greenfield had mentioned. When I went in, the sales-girl looked at me with one plucked eyebrow raised past her hair-line, but she answered my question politely enough, and I thanked her. Only then did I hop onto a cable-car, and rattled up the hills with the working girls and the tourists.

Getting off at the same place I had disembarked the other night, this time I waited for the connecting line to carry me into Pacific Heights, and I reached the house without being shot at, tackled by Chinese men, or otherwise assaulted.

The padlock was off the gate, and when I rang the bell, the house responded with motion. In a minute, I could hear Holmes' footsteps approaching, and the door popped open.

“Ah, Russell,” he said, stepping out rather than back. “Just in time. Glad to see you survived the affections of your adoptive aunt.”

“Wait 'til you see her daughter. Just in time for what?”

“Luncheon, of course,” said the man to whom meals and clocks were only faintly linked.

“Holmes, I've just eaten.”

“I, however, have not, and am in need of sustenance. Come, I passed a small Italian bistro whose morning odours were most promising.”

With the door securely locked in my face, there was little to do but follow him down the drive (he, too, peered sharply all around before he stepped out of the gates) in search of his fragrant Italian bistro. My lunch consisted of a glass of wine (which the waiter solemnly called “grape juice”) and a crisp bread-stick; Holmes, on the other hand, did the menu justice.

When he had mopped up the last of his tomato sauce and drained the inky coffee from his cup, we returned to the house, and spent the afternoon trying, with small success, to rescue any portion at all of the blackened papers in the fireplace. Holmes had taken a closer look at them the previous morning and, after having the first flake dissolve into dust, decided that four hands were better than two for the job. But even with both of us, Holmes to raise each remnant a fraction and me to slide the glass beneath it, they were still heart-breakingly fragile. No matter how gently we worked and despite all the art in Holmes' hands, time after time they crumbled into flakes and dust.

At the end of it, we were left with sore knees, black hands, and seven fragments large enough to preserve words.

Five of them, rather to my surprise, were type-written, as far as we could tell on the Underwood in my father's library, which had a marginally skewed lower-case “a” from when a curious child—me—had tried to commit surgery on it. Holmes judged it the letter's original, rather than a copy, which is why it was so disappointingly preserved: Carbon would have survived the fire better than the ink had.

From the top sheet, three fragments survived:

tates Army.

y conscience of the

has chosen to

may not reveal

Good friend—GF —

felt that I owed

and his stalwart

From later pages, the two fragments we deciphered were:

shoot looters

the earthquake—

had himself stolen

those looters actu-

myself witnessed three

the least justified

ured it wouldn't be healthy

full of money.

The newspaper cuttings appeared to be from the period immediately following the quake, for one had the bold headline “URNS!!” which was more likely, considering the size of the font, to be an article concerning the destruction of the city than the archaeological discovery of some Greek jars.

The other appeared to be about a man and his new wife who had lost each other for days after the Fire, then discovered that they were half a mile apart in Golden Gate Park. With either of the newspaper bits, however, it could have been the opposite side that was of importance, and in both cases that obverse was illegible.

We left the plates arranged on my mother's writing desk and went through the kitchen to sit on the stoop, where Holmes lit a pipe and I worked to find a comfortable niche for my kinked spine.

The jungle of the garden was oddly appealing, particularly in the quiet of late afternoon. I could hear the sound of children's voices somewhere far away, and closer in, a woman singing softly.

“Do you make anything of those fragments, Holmes?” I asked.

“Very little. The words might be provocative, suggesting some act of violence during the earthquake, and money, but any conclusions built upon them would have foundations of air. If the fragments have any value, it may come to light later in the case. Clearly, the house was fairly thoroughly cleaned before your Mr Norbert turned the key and walked away—unless the fireplaces were scrubbed and the carpets rolled up before your parents actually left. I don't suppose you remember?”

“Norbert senior arranged for the cleaners to come in and roll up the carpets, to ‘protect his clients' assets' as his son put it, put on the dust-covers, and clear out the ice-box. They may have scrubbed the fireplaces then, although September tends to be warm in San Francisco, warmer here than the actual summer. They could have been cleaned at any time.”

“We need to know if Norbert senior left them all clean.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I sighed—but quietly, to myself—at his insistence that we were investigating a case. There was no point in saying that it was quite likely that the papers were the remnants of some last-minute business letters of my father's, draughts later rewritten and dropped into a post-box, so I got out my note-book and wrote down the instruction to myself: Norbert——fireplaces cleaned?

I glanced over the previous pages, added one or two facts that I had neglected to make note of earlier, then said to Holmes, “Mrs Greenfield was actually very helpful in sorting out our times in San Francisco.”

“And she assured you that your family was all here during the earthquake and fire.”

“She did, yes. You were right, Holmes. But we did come and go a number of times, so my memory of England isn't entirely wrong, either.”

I had been born in England, in January 1900: That much I knew. What I had not known was that we came here when I was just over a year old, in the spring of 1901, at which point Mrs Greenfield met my mother. Eighteen months later, according to Mr Long, my parents and I had gone walking on a wave-swept beach and met him and his father.

We lived in San Francisco for three years that time, leaving again for England in the summer of 1904. My brother was born in February of 1905, so it was probable that Mother, finding herself pregnant, preferred to give birth among her own people. However, once he was six months old, they returned here, arriving just after the couturier on Post Street had opened in September 1905—although my “aunt” vaguely thought that we had stopped in Boston for a time on the way, with my father's family.

Which may have been when the coloured window and the small furry dogs had lodged themselves into my young mind.

We lived in San Francisco from September 1905 until the summer of 1906. Many of my parents' friends had fled the shattered city in April, but Mrs Greenfield was quite clear that Mother had insisted on staying on until at least June, assisting with the early weeks of the emergency, before the demands of her young family took her back to England.

This time, without my father. For the next few years, he had lived half the year here and half in England, taking a train to New York and sailing back and forth across the Atlantic in order to be with his family, until finally in the summer of 1912, Mother relented and joined him in California. Two years and three months later, they died, and I had gone away for good.

I laid my scribbled notes in front of Holmes, who glanced at them thoughtfully. “When I first met you,” he said, “I heard a solid basis of London in your voice, with a later overlay of California. Clearly, the influence of very early childhood had been put aside. I shall have to look into this—it would make an interesting monograph.”

“Why don't I remember it?” I protested, then flinched at the tight strain of agony in my voice. “I can understand the early years, but don't people remember things from when they were five or six?”

He studied me appraisingly. “You do honestly wish to know?”

“Don't be ridiculous, Holmes. Why wouldn't I want to know about a large chunk of my missing life?”

“I can think of a number of reasons,” he said, his grey eyes unwavering in their intensity.

“Well, I can't. It's vexing. And more than a little humiliating. Why wouldn't I want to feel whole?”

“If, for example, you discovered that your parents were not the paragons you think them?”

“I loved my parents and respected them, but they were hardly paragons,” I scoffed. “My father was easily distracted and my mother could be cold. And after all, disillusionment is a part of growing up.”

“And if the disillusionment was more serious? If, say, you discovered your father was involved in some act of criminality during the earthquake?”

“What sort of criminality?” I asked sharply.

“Perhaps whatever it was that happened during the Fire, the thing that so upset Mr Long's loyal father.”

I tried to picture my father in the rôle of a criminal, and failed. I shook my head. “Holmes, he was an ethical man. And my mother enormously so—she never would have put up with a real wrongdoing. No, I can only say that, if he did something criminal, there would have been a reason for it.”

“She would not have put up with it, you say. And she left for England a few weeks after the Fire.”

“Wouldn't any woman with two small children?”

His gaze neither changed nor left me, and I shifted uncomfortably. What was he getting at? Why did I feel suddenly uneasy, as if a masseur were closing in on some bruised and tender spot?

But Holmes said nothing further; in its way, that was even worse.