Locked rooms

Chapter Fourteen

Holmes strode fast along the streets, the houses around him growing obscure with dusk and incoming mist. A fog-horn had begun its periodic moan from the north and the passing motorcars had lit their head-lamps. He turned the corner, his eyes seeking out the jungle-shrouded house, expecting to see the windows dark and to find the doors locked tight: He'd been longer with Miss Adderley than he had intended.

However, the narrow window set into the front door glowed dully, and when he stood before it he could see the light coming from the back of the house. He tried the knob, and gave an approving grunt: At least she'd had the sense to lock it.

He rapped one knuckle onto the door and waited, long enough to be visited by a brief pulse of alarm. His hand was going out for the raucous bell when the light dimmed as Russell stepped into the door-way of her father's library. She had, inevitably, a book in her hand, closed over one finger as she walked down the hall-way to work the bolts on the door.

“Hullo, Holmes. I thought you'd gone back to the hotel.”

“I rather hoped you might be interested in a meal.”

“Oh. Goodness,” she said, peering over his shoulder at the gathering darkness. “It's later than I realised. Yes, I suppose I'm more or less finished here. Let me just get a couple of things.”

Holmes ran an analytic eye over the signs of her passage through her parents' home: The drawer in the small inlaid table near the front door was ajar; the various decorative jars and boxes inhabiting the shelves in the morning room had all been disturbed, as well as the cubby-holes and drawers of her mother's writing desk in the front window. The blotting-paper there had even been turned over, although the stack of glass plates containing the ashes he had found and mounted looked to be untouched. She'd even shifted the furniture, with every wooden foot resting to one side of its decade long dust shadow.

He raised an eyebrow of disapproval at her haphazard methods, and followed her to the library. There his eyebrow climbed again: The room was scrubbed clean and clear of dust-cloths; the rolled-up carpets were now more or less flat on the floor. On the low table across from the fireplace, between the two leather chairs, a rough fistful of flowers from the garden had been dropped into a graceful crystal vase. The chairs had been rubbed into a gleam, and a fire laid, but not lit; probably just as well, he was thinking when she noticed the direction of his gaze.

“I was going to warm it up in here, but then it occurred to me that I ought to have the chimneys looked to first. I wouldn't want to smoke up the place.”

“Or burn it down.”

She looked ill at the thought, although Holmes was beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be for the best: The polished chairs and laid fire, the child's gift of flowers, suggested that she was becoming more interested in re-creating her past than she was in recalling it. He held the door for her until, reluctantly, she pulled herself away from her father's laden desk and joined him in the hall-way. He helped her into her coat, handed her the hat and gloves from the stand, and waited while she locked the door behind them.

“You want to go to your Italian friend again, Holmes?”

“No, I've spent rather enough time there. I suggest we investigate the culinary exotica of Chinatown.”

Wordlessly, she turned towards Grant Avenue. They walked the evening pavements, out of the heights and across the busy thoroughfare of Van Ness, climbing again and then dropping down into the bright lights and lurid colours of the Chinese district, where the gathering mist pulled like gauze across the street-lamps and coloured lanterns.

All the way, she said not a word and kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, making no effort to take his arm. This in itself did not concern Holmes, but that she also kept her eyes on the pavement did. She appeared oblivious to threat, as if the shooting seventy-two hours earlier had happened to another woman in another place. With another person, he might have thought that she was leaving the necessities of defence to him, but she was not that person.

He felt like seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

Or like giving her a hard shock in a less physical manner. But he could not decide if the shock he had in mind would clarify matters for her, or only make them worse. As with any blow, once delivered it could not be retracted; and so he kept his silence, although his eyes never ceased from probing the dim, fog-soft streets around them.

Halfway down the bright cacophony of Grant Avenue, Holmes touched her elbow. “Mr Long appears both fully recovered and at his till,” he noted. “Shall we invite him to join us?”

They were, indeed, before the greengrocer's stand, with the door to Long's bookstore open to reveal the owner making change for a customer, moving his arm with no apparent distress. Without waiting for her approval, Holmes stepped around the displays of bok choy and flat Oriental peas to stick his head inside of the door. The conversation went on for two or three minutes, and then he emerged, touching her elbow again with one hand and indicating the street with the other.

“He'll join us in half an hour, we can have a drink while we wait.”

He led her down the street to a building whose entrance was encrusted with carved dragons highlighted in gilt. Just inside the door was a tiny old woman all in black holding a clutch of large red leather menus to her breast, braced foursquare as if to guard the virtue of a granddaughter. Holmes delivered the message that they were friends of Mr Tom Long, who would be joining them in half an hour. The glittering black eyes scowled up at them, and then she turned and stumped away into what proved to be a large, warm, comfortable-looking restaurant peopled entirely by Chinese. She seated them at a table that was not visible from the front windows yet in close proximity to both front and kitchen doors, dropped two of the menus on the table, and hurried back to her post. Holmes held Russell's chair, then took the one beside her. She opened the menu, glanced at its pages, and closed it again. It was in Chinese.

“Are you up to a cocktail,” he asked solicitously, “or would you prefer to stick to wine?”

“I'm fine,” she automatically protested. “A gin and tonic would be good.”

He ordered for them both. When their drinks were before them, she inflicted a dose of spirits onto her mistreated insides, then set down her glass sharply and announced, “I'm going down to the Lodge tomorrow.”

He arranged a look of mild surprise on his face. “Do you think that's a good idea?”

“I don't know, but I think it's necessary.”

“Do you wish me to come?”

“I telephoned to Flo this morning, and she'd like to go—her friend Donny will drive us. We'll be back on Wednesday; there's some museum opening Donny wants to attend.”

“Hm,” he grunted. “I'd have thought you'd want to drive yourself.” Russell disliked being driven anywhere.

“I'm sure he'll let me have the wheel part of the time,” she said, although Holmes, having seen the lad's pride in that gaudy motor, had his doubts.

“How many people know of your plans?”

She fixed him with a glare. “Holmes, I know you think I'm being particularly stupid lately, but give me some credit. Neither of them know precisely where the place is, although I had to tell them roughly where we were heading. And I asked them to keep it quiet—I said I didn't want anyone else to know, because they'd want to join us and make it more of a bash than I wanted.”

“‘Bash.'”

“You know what I mean.”

“Of course.”

“I hope you don't mind. That I'm abandoning you here,” she said, belatedly concerned for his welfare.

“Not in the least. I have plenty to keep me busy.”

“Your Paganini research?”

“Actually, it's proving quite intriguing. Do you know, there is a theory that Paganini was commissioned by the Duke of . . .” but between the alcohol and her own concerns, she soon stopped listening. Which was precisely what he had intended.

When the drink was half gone and her eyes had begun to glaze with boredom, he dropped the diversion and told her, “I believe I've identified your faceless man.” Then he corrected himself. “Not identified, perhaps, although I've got a lead on him.”

She stared, picked up the glass and gulped down the second half, coughed a while, then, eyes watering, asked, “What?”

“The faceless man of your second dream. I found an elderly woman who spent some time in the park following the earthquake, and remembered your family. She also gave me the tale of a man coming to the tent city the day the rains began, which was the Sunday, who'd had his facial hair scorched off and wore some white ointment on his skin. Probably zinc oxide,” Holmes noted.

“Ointment,” she repeated, and reached for her empty glass. Holmes raised a finger to the waiter for another.

“The chap was looking for your father. He went to your tent, and his appearance frightened you. Miss Adderley's informant remembered your shrieks.”

“My God.”

The shock—or reverence—of the phrase was tempered by the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach. She seemed scarcely to be listening as Holmes described the old lady and her establishment, the aged butler and his protective granddaughter. He did not tell her about the photograph in his breast pocket, judging that its introduction would drain any rationality from the remainder of the evening. Other than that omission, he piled every conceivable detail into the narrative, until the sheer complexity and the second drink allowed her to attain a degree of distance from his revelation.

She interrupted his description of the old lady's shoes. “So two of the dreams depict actual events. First the earthquake, then an event shortly afterward.”

“So it would appear.”

“That would suggest that the third also refers to a concrete event. That there is an actual hidden room somewhere that I know about.”

“Of that I would not be so certain.”

“Why not?”

“The three do not run in precise parallel. The first two have powerful emotional overtones, yet the third is emotionally neutral, or even mildly reassuring. Of the first pair, the only element that changes is the description of the flying objects, but with the third, change itself is the constant factor—the details of the rooms are different each time; the only similarity in them is that only you know where the hidden apartment is to be found, only you have the key.”

“Which I don't,” she retorted angrily. “Holmes, I tore that place apart today, attic to cellar, and didn't find so much as an out-of-the-way broom closet. I'd have to take a wrecking hammer to it to find any more.”

He nodded: Having measured the rooms scrupulously on Wednesday morning, he would have been astonished had she found any hidden spaces larger than a few inches wide. “When you discover the dream's message,” he told her, “I believe it will be, as it were, out of the corner of your eye, not through use of a sledge hammer and crow-bar. Ah, here comes Mr Long.”

The bookseller was being led through the room by the entrance crone, but his progress was uneven, as one table after another called its greeting and caused him to detour to shake a hand here and exchange a word there. Half the people in the restaurant seemed to know him; all greeted the small man with affection and respect. Even the elderly door-guard seemed to be smiling when they finally reached the table.

He shook hands with the only two Caucasians in the place, then turned to the old woman and began a vigorous conversation. They were joined after a minute by the waiter and, shortly afterwards, by one of the cooks from the kitchen. The discussion escalated into an apparent argument, voices climbing and gestures becoming ever wilder—Long ticking off points on his fingers, the cook's face twisting in incredulity. Then it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Waiter, woman, and cook all turned on their heels and set off in separate directions, leaving Long to sit down, looking pleased.

“What did that concern?” Holmes asked.

“That? Just dinner.”

“Dinner? They weren't asking that you remove us?”

“My goodness, why would they want that? No, we just had to settle the menu. I needed to reassure them that you did not require a slab of beef and boiled potatoes, but to assert that you did not eat pork or shellfish. I recall hearing of this religious peculiarity of your mother's, Miss Russell, and thought perhaps it was yours as well.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” she said.

“Not at all,” he responded, but he looked pleased as he shook out his linen table napkin and draped it across his lap. “So, have you two been busy since we met? I don't suppose you've had a chance to look at the feng shui book?”

“I have, actually,” she replied, dredging up intellect from the muddying effects of drink. “It presents an interesting theory of geomancy, but I have to say, it leaves out a great deal of the practicum. I had understood that feng shui includes the idea that a building's . . . energies can be influenced by the judicial placement of certain items. Water, plants, mirrors and the like.”

“That is true,” Long said, “although its precepts are used not only for architecture, but for investments, farming, planning battles, and a thousand other activities. Here, let me show you.” He patted through his pockets until he found a mechanical pencil and a scrap of paper, smoothing it out on the table-cloth and sketching an octagon. He then connected each angle with the centre, and ascribed to each of the eight resulting triangles an area of influence: family, wealth, knowledge, and so on, with the all-important health at the confluence. After a few minutes, the minutiae of detail became more than even a sober Russell might have asked for, and she interrupted his explanation of the “chien” side of the octagon.

“What I would really like to know is, why would someone put a mirror, a bowl of water, and a pot-plant in a kitchen?”

He unfolded another piece of paper and pushed it across to her, laying his pencil on top. “To answer that, you will have to draw the room for me.”

“It's the kitchen in the house here. I would assume that your parents were responsible for the items.”

“My mother. Although she would have called in an expert. Yes, I see. However, it has been some years since I was inside that room.”

She took up the pencil and sketched the kitchen's outlines, locating the sink, scullery, cook-stove, and entrances. At his direction she indicated the lights and windows, as well as the locations of the small mirror, the water bowl, and the dead plant. Then she pushed it back across the table at him.

Soup arrived, and he moved the sketch to one side, keeping his hand on the edge of the paper. “As I remember, the kitchen faces the back of the house, its windows to the west, is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

He picked up both sheets and laid them in front of her, next to each other. “The objects you name would have been intended to correct the chi, the energy patterns, within the room. And thus, of course, within the lives of the residents.”

“Of course,” she murmured.

He heard the irony. “I apologise, I know it is complex, and with little logic for the literalist Western mind.”

“Perhaps I should ask, is it possible to analyse how these . . . additions were intended? Can you tell what was wrong with the chi in the room?”

Long looked down at the two pieces of paper, his lips pursed in consideration. “That is an interesting question,” he said at last. “I am by no means an expert, but it looks to me as if there was a perceived external threat to the internal harmony. The items were placed to strengthen the internal harmony—the family.”

But “harmony” was not the word that caught Russell's attention. “A threat? Of what kind?”

“That I cannot know. Some force that threatened to pull the family off-centre into disharmony. Which, I agree, is so general as to be considered witchcraft, or mumbo-jumbo.” With an apologetic smile he turned to his soup; after a minute, the others did the same.

“Apart from the articles of feng shui,” he said when the bowls had been removed and fragrant plates were beginning to appear, “I hope you have found the house in satisfying condition?”

“I found it run-down, dreary, and most uninformative,” Russell replied.

“I am sorry.” Long scooped shreds of vegetables in some dark, piquant-smelling sauce on top of his rice, then ventured, “You had hoped to learn something from the building?”

“Oh, not really. But it would have been nice.” The bookseller's face wore a look of confusion, although he was too polite to persist with his questions. But to Holmes' surprise, Russell relented.

“I've had a series of peculiar dreams. Two of them served to remind me about the earthquake and the period afterwards, events I had forgotten entirely, but the third is still puzzling. It involves a secret compartment in a house—nothing particular happens, I just pass by and know that it's there. I don't know what the imagery means. Probably nothing, but it would have been satisfying to have discovered a hidden vault under the house or something.”

Long nodded impassively and the conversation turned to the collection of furniture the cellar contained, some of which was going to have to come out through the coal-cellar doors. They ate the food and drank wine and pale tea, and when they were replete, Long patted his lips with his table napkin and spoke hesitantly.

“I wonder, about your hidden room. Do you know of the writings of Father Matteo Ricci?”

Russell shook her head, but Holmes got a faraway look on his face.

“Ricci was a Jesuit in the sixteenth century who went to China, as a missionary of course, although as was the habit of the Jesuits, he learnt as much as he taught. Many of his writings are in Chinese, which somewhat limits his fame in the West. But one of the things he tried to teach the Mandarins concerned the mnemonic arts. I believe Western philosophers have something of a tradition of memory training.”

“Ignatius of Loyola,” Holmes supplied, his own memory having performed its retrieval, “founder of the Jesuit order. And Pliny has a section on memory experts, I believe, as do several Mediaeval works on oration.”

“What does this have to do with locked rooms?” Russell asked.

“Ricci's technique involves the construction of memory palaces,” Long told them. “One visualises a large building—real or imagined, palace or basilica—and furnishes it with items that stimulate specific memories.”

“The problem being,” Holmes commented, “that the formulation and retention of the myriad rooms and furnishings alone requires a prodigious memory.”

“And,” Long added, with an air of finally being permitted to reach his central thesis, “there is nothing to guarantee that a room once furnished will not be closed off and forgotten. To have its lock turned, as it were.”

“I see,” Russell said. Her chin had come up and one light brown eyebrow had arched delicately above the frame of her spectacles: scepticism, and a trace of indignation that this stranger would presume to know her mind. Before she could voice her objections aloud, Holmes firmly turned the conversation to books and Chinese philosophy, and in a while they were lighting their after-dinner cigarettes and arguing amiably over the bill.

She was still silent when they stood to leave, rousing herself only to say the necessary words of farewell to the bookseller. Outside, the fog had thickened into a clean, grey version of a London particular, and Holmes relaxed into its protection, hooking her hand through his left arm as they set off for downtown.

Holmes was intensely aware of the physical sensation of her arm on his. He generally was aware of her presence, that sturdy physicality wrapped around a magnificent brain and the stoutest of hearts. One flaw alone had he found in this incomparable hard diamond of a woman, an imperfection that had long puzzled him, and cost him no small amount of sleep.

Five years ago he had sat in a dark cabin on a boat heading to Palestine, listening to the details of her family's death, hearing of the guilt that had been bleeding her like an invisible wound. Ever since that night, he had waited for Russell to question those things that she believed to be true. She was, he had reminded himself time and again, one of the most competent natural investigators he had ever known, unerring and undistractible. If her ears would not hear and her eyes refused to focus, there might well be a reason.

Even so, over the years it had been on the very end of his tongue a score of times to push matters into the open. At first, he had not done so because she was so very young, and clearly needed to shield herself against further injury. Later, he had come to realise that forcing her into a confrontation with her beliefs, tempting though it might be, could well drive a steel wedge between the two of them: She would blame him for introducing the troubling question, then further blame him for having waited so long before doing so—if there was a thing Russell hated more than a stranger presuming to know how her mind worked, it was the sensation of being protected. The resulting disquiet and mistrust would have made an already difficult relationship unbearably, perhaps fatally, complicated.

And nearly literally fatal: On the boat out from Japan, he had ventured a slight step, suggesting that the flying dream was a reference to the earthquake; the very next day he'd found Russell at the rail, moments from overbalancing.

Yes, fear had kept him silent.

Later, a growing and perverse fascination with his wife's single, glaring blind spot had stayed his hand. It had felt at times like watching a child's block-tower continue to grow and wondering when it would topple and crash.

Abject cowardice, compounded by intellectual curiosity.

And then in January, his brother Mycroft's commands had prised them out of England and flung them halfway around the world, and Russell had decided—on her own, without the faintest suggestion from him—to come to this place. He had known it was coming, then, and held his breath. Even when he'd come up the stairway on the ship and seen her about to tumble over the rail, he'd held back.

She was coming to it: The mounting pressure of the things she had seen yet not perceived would break down her blindness. She knew, yet kept it from herself; she had the key, and had only to draw it from her pocket. He would force himself, as he had all this time, to continue trusting that she would face the question before she failed to notice a man with a gun, or absent-mindedly stepped out in front of a taxi. Sooner or later, something would drive her to a confrontation with all the things she knew and did not see.

He, Holmes, had known the question's answer the moment he saw that intent young man making his way up the hill in Miss Adderley's photograph: This was not a man to be fatally distracted by a pair of argumentative children.

Russell should not require a photograph: She knew her father.

And there were any number of ways to send a motorcar off a cliff: steering wheel, brakes, a score of parts vulnerable to sabotage.

Russell knew that as well.

Soon now, she would look down at her hand and see the key lying there; she would ask herself a simple question that would teeter an edifice of ten years' belief.

Was it indeed an accident? Or had my family in fact been murdered?