Locked rooms

Chapter Fifteen

The fog had ceased its teasing around the street-lamps and taken possession of the streets. However, the fog here was a very different thing from that stinking, inert yellow blanket that settled over London every winter. This seemed a living thing, shifting and breathing across the city, and it sheltered their walk, wrapping these two wayfaring strangers in anonymity. No shots rang out, no gaunt figures with tubercular coughs dogged their heels, and they walked arm in arm in mutually distracted silence, physically linked but mentally miles apart, through the Chinese district and downtown to the welcoming lights of the St Francis.

Between the excess of drink and the shock of two complete meals that day, Russell succumbed quickly to the warmth of the bed and did not wake until Holmes placed a cup of coffee on her bed-side table. She opened one eye, winced back from the brightness as the curtains went back, then threaded out a hand to fumble with the alarm-clock, holding its face up before her own. When she had focussed, she slammed it back down and made to throw off the bed-clothes.

“Nearly nine o'clock! Holmes, why didn't you wake me earlier? I told you that Flo wanted to get an early start, and I haven't finished packing my things.”

“Your friend telephoned five minutes ago to say that she was only now putting her things into a bag, that she would be here in an hour. The word ‘early' appears to have a different meaning in Californian English.”

“Only in the dialect spoken by a certain sub-genus of nocturnal Californians,” Russell said, pawing the bed-clothes back into place and reaching for spectacles, then coffee. With lenses and the beverage, her vision improved, and she looked more closely at her husband's attire and his purposeful movement through the rooms.

“Are you going somewhere, Holmes?”

By this time he had his coat and hat in hand, and it was apparent that he was indeed on his way out of the door. “Yes, if you don't mind I shan't wait for your friend to arrive. There's a gentleman with a collection of manuscript papers across the Bay in Oakland, and a ferry that leaves at ten-thirty. If that's all right with you?”

“Of course it is,” she answered with just the faintest edge of too much protest in her voice. “I'm glad you have something to keep you busy, so I won't worry that you're going to be bored silly in my absence.”

“No danger of that,” Holmes replied lightly. “Do you wish me to mention at the desk that we won't be leaving San Francisco on the Wednesday as you had intended?”

“Oh! I forgot to do that. Yes, would you? I have a few more days' business with Norbert, so perhaps another week?”

“The fourteenth,” he said, pulling on his gloves, and carefully not bringing up the topic of cross-country aeronautical pioneering.

“Or maybe the next day; that ought to give Norbert sufficient time to finish things off.”

“Thursday the fifteenth it is. Have a pleasant time, Russell.”

“I'll ring you if I'm going to be delayed past Wednesday,” she said, but the door had closed on the final words. She frowned; he'd seemed merely distracted, but perhaps he was in truth affronted by her abandoning of him for Flo and the cabin.

No, she decided in the end; it was merely a piece of academic investigation that had caught his imagination, nothing more.

More cheerful than she'd felt in some time, she went to dress and consider an appropriate wardrobe for a none-too-rustic cabin in the woods.

Holmes, in the meantime, made straight for the front desk. Auberon handed his guest the heavy Gladstone bag Holmes had left there earlier, and after informing the manager of the change in their departure date, Holmes lowered his voice to ask, “Is my car here?”

The gentleman responded in kind. “Around the back, Mr Holmes, as you requested.”

One man's palm lifted slightly from the polished surface of the desk and, so smoothly it might have been rehearsed, the other's palm came down and slid the note away. Before it had reached Auberon's pocket, Holmes was halfway to the kitchen.

He passed through that steamy cacophony with scarcely a glance from the white-clad workers, slipping out of the delivery door into the passage-way through which flowed the great hotel's supplies. A shiny Pierce-Arrow with velvet curtains across its back windows was idling off to his right, its driver immersed in a garish journal entitled Weird Tales; Holmes opened the door, gently laid the Gladstone bag on the seat, and got in beside it; the motor's tyres were moving before he had the door shut.

“Morning, sir,” said the young man at the wheel. Holmes opened his mouth to ask if this connoisseur of pulp fiction had read anything by Hammett, then changed his mind at the number of complicated conversational path-ways this would open up. Instead he said merely, “What's your name, lad?”

“Greg Tyson, at your service.”

“The name's Holmes. Auberon told me you were a relative.”

“His wife's nephew. And he told me that you needed a fair bit of driving today and a lot of shut mouth afterwards.”

“An accurate description. You know the coast road south?”

“Know it well, sir.”

“I shall let you know when to stop.”

“Very good,” the boy said, and set out to provide what Holmes had required, both the driving and the closed mouth.

Holmes dropped his soft hat on the dark green leather of the seat beside him and went about making himself comfortable, tucking one foot beneath him, loosening his overcoat, and arranging the travelling-rugs behind him. When he had got things as close to a nest of cushions as he was about to achieve in a motorcar, he took out his tobacco pouch—cigarettes were for social occasions and for stimulation, but a pipe was for thinking. And a peaceful review of the past seven days had become increasingly necessary.

He'd rather have stayed to see Russell safely into the motorcar with Flo Greenfield and her friend Donny, but from what he'd seen of that young man and his blue motorcar, once pointed on the road out of town, there would be no catching him up. And Holmes very much wanted to be in front of the carload of merrymakers.

No, he would have to trust that nothing would happen to Russell before her new friends arrived, and that they would quickly out-distance any potential pursuers. Russell was safely out of the way for the next three days.

By the time she returned to the city, he intended that their as-yet-unidentified opponents would no longer be in the equation.

He grimaced with the irritation of it. Cases were far more congenial when there was no personal element in them, and this sensation of being his wife's fond fool was highly unsatisfactory. Urging her to eat, fretting about her safety—he must put Russell out of his mind before the distraction could interfere with rational thought.

The case had started slowly, but was now progressing somewhat, despite the distances it involved in both time and place. While Russell had been immersed with her solicitor and business affairs, he had been occupied with things far more demanding than Paganini sheet music.

Tuesday morning, their first in San Francisco, he had used the time while she was busy with Henry Norbert to get the lay of the land, assembling maps and creating the initial contacts among the local vendors of newspapers and flowers, the shoe-shine boys, the local policemen, and the all-important street-sweepers: his eyes on the world.

He had also succumbed to a growing urge and laid out the beginnings for a line of enquiry into some unfinished business. This had begun with a trip to the P. & O. Line's offices. With considerable difficulty, he had finally determined that the ship on which he and Russell had sailed to Bombay in January, the Marguerite, was currently on its way back across the Mediterranean and due to dock in Marseilles late on Saturday. Immediately he left the steamship offices, he had sent a telegram home to Sussex, asking Mrs Hudson to find the whereabouts of his old comrade-in-arms, Dr Watson. After a bit of thought, he had also sent one to his brother, Mycroft, requesting that he find out if anyone had been enquiring in early January about the absence, and whereabouts, of one Sherlock Holmes.

That damnable incident in Aden bothered him mightily. He wanted to be quite certain that the falling balcony was just an accident.

He still was not sure what had driven him to appeal to those two for assistance—an ill Mycroft and an arthritic Watson. No doubt it was at least in part due to the unexpected and highly disconcerting absence of his partner-wife's usual competence; in her mental absence, he had turned to her predecessor.

In any case, turned to Watson and Mycroft he had; there was little point in agonising over the why of it.

With past events cared for as best he could, he turned to present concerns, and cast out for information regarding Russell's city, family, and history. With a visit to the offices of the Chronicle, he'd come up with an obituary for the Russell family—Charles (age 46, born in Boston), wife Judith (age 39, from London), son Levi (age 9), survived by daughter Mary (age 14)—and the article about the crash, from which he gleaned a description of the actual location.

Most of Wednesday had been spent at the house, first in a quick survey of the house records—the financial accounts he found shelved in the library, a set of garden journals from Mrs Russell's morning room. Then he had taken out the graph paper and measuring tape Auberon had provided for him, going over the house inch by inch until he was satisfied that no rooms hid between the walls. His knees had suffered and his lungs filled with dust, and he had scarcely finished before the sound of a gun-shot had drawn him inexorably to the front door where he'd stood, his blood running cold as he strained for the sound of another shot or of wailing, only breathing again when his wife and her new acquaintance had appeared at the gate. He'd enjoyed meeting Mr Long, although he rather wished the means of their introduction had been somewhat less dramatic.

Thursday morning he had continued to unearth the family's past, examining the social registers for the early years, interviewing neighbours and post office employees. In the afternoon he had finally got those burnt scraps between glass, although he'd had to put off scouring the newspapers for the pertinent articles until the following day. That night being free, they had passed up the cinema offering of Harold Lloyd and the advertised “SF Musical Club High Jinks” at the Palace Hotel in favour of a small, private recital of lieder by a visiting coloratura soprano to which Auberon had arranged an invitation. It had brought him pleasure and given Russell an hour's sleep, and served as a reminder of culture after long months in the wilds of the Far East.

Friday morning had been spent digging through mountains of old newspapers, at the Chronicle building, City Hall, and the public library. Now in his possession were Photostat copies of the pages that had been burnt in the morning room fireplace: The bold, heavily leaded “URNS!!” had indeed been a headline about the city burning, from a newspaper outside the area of damage whose presses were still functioning. Nothing in it seemed to explain its presence among the papers burnt, other than its possible value as a souvenir, for the page was primarily concerned with names of the missing, availability of shelter, news about looting, and the expected recovery of the fire chief (who, Holmes had later read, in the end died of injuries caused by his house falling in on him). The other piece of burnt newsprint, smaller than the first to begin with, was from the following Monday, long enough after the original disaster and the cessation of the fire that urgent news was being supplemented by human-interest stories. Prominent among those was the tale of a newlywed couple who had been separated in the hours after the quake and driven apart further by the track of the fire. Each had spent days convinced that the other was dead, until a chance encounter with a mutual friend had led the husband to his wife. On the obverse were several small articles no more than a paragraph or two long: the theft of a number of Army tents from Golden Gate Park; an infant rescued from wreckage; a dog gone mad with grief; the burnt body of a policeman amid the charred ruin of a house; and the departure from San Francisco of the great tenor Caruso. Holmes set aside the Photostats, for further consideration.

Later in the day he'd tracked down that other source of inside knowledge into a neighbourhood, the Pacific Heights milkman of 1912. He'd been forced to hare across town twice in the process, wasting huge blocks of time, and all for nothing. The man might as well have been deaf and blind for all he knew about the Russells, or anyone else for that matter. Now, if Holmes could tell him of any unusual standing orders the family habitually placed, he might remember. . . .

It happened in every investigation, hours wasted. Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite tediousness, he reminded himself, and scraped out his cold pipe into the motor's ash-tray, filling the bowl anew.

Friday had also seen the utter collapse of Russell, knocked flat by the news of Dr Ginzberg's death. All in all, not a good day, Friday.

But not without its bright points. Mrs Hudson's answer, typically long-winded, had finally come into his hands during one of his cross-town trips on Friday:

MR HOLMES GLAD TO HEAR FROM YOU AND SORRY FOR THE DELAY I WAS VISITING MY FRIEND MRS TURNER IN SURREY. DR. WATSONS HOUSEKEEPER SAYS HE IS AT THE BADEN SPAS BADEN GERMANY FOR HIS ARTHRITIS POOR MAN WHAT A MARTYR HE IS. I TOOK YOUR BROTHER SOME ELDERBERRY WINE HE LOOKS WELL. SEVERAL PEOPLE RANG TO ASK WHEN YOU WERE RETURNING PLEASE DO LET ME KNOW. LOVE TO MARY. MRS CLARA HUDSON

Seeing that Watson was off taking the cure, Holmes had hesitated before sending his request.

But only briefly. After all, someone had to interview the ship's pursers about the mysterious Southern woman, and although he would naturally have preferred to do it himself, he was far from home, and the idea of letting it lie for weeks until he could do it himself made his skin crawl with impatience.

So he'd sent it:

WATSON URGENT NEED ENQUIRIES STAFF ESPECIALLY PURSERS ON P AND O SHIP MARGUERITE DOCKING MARSEILLES SATURDAY EVENING. WOMAN POSSIBLY FROM SOUTHERN UNITED STATES ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT US DURING JANUARY RUN AND WHO LEFT AT ADEN. ANY AND ALL INFORMATION VALUABLE BUT CHIEFLY DID SHE KNOW WE WERE CALIFORNIA BOUND QUERY DID SHE ARRANGE OWN FURTHER TRAVEL QUERY WAS SHE WITH ANYONE QUERY AND FINALLY HER NAME AND DESCRIPTION QUERY. SORRY OLD MAN. HOLMES.

Only later in the morning, cooling his heels waiting for the milkman, had it occurred to him that Watson could as easily have made a leisurely journey to London on Thursday and intercepted the ship when it arrived there. He nearly turned back and sent another missive to say that Thursday would do, but in the end he did not.

Knowing Watson, Holmes reassured himself, he'd have left Baden immediately, and the second telegram would miss him anyway.

And the information received from Mrs Hudson provided its own form of solace. Mycroft had been ill since the winter, and it was good to know that Mrs Hudson had found him well.

Watson and Mycroft would come through, he reassured himself, and set a match to his pipe.

He wished he could be as certain about his other assistants, who were abundant if somewhat questionable. He was accustomed to working with Irregulars, to be used and discarded when their purpose was served. He was also well acquainted with the problems of finding reliable help, particularly as he was generally forced to draw from a pool of candidates consisting of society's dregs: One was less likely to find honour amongst thieves than simple thievery, and one developed the habit of not placing too much weight on any one helpmeet.

Take this Hammett fellow, for example. He appeared to be an ideal Irregular (apart from his chronic infirmity), a man whose ready knowledge of the ground, and especially the underground, could save an employer a great deal of superfluous footwork. However, the niggling question of whether he might be too good to be true had already cost Holmes a hurried trip cross-town Saturday morning, returning to the telegraphist's near the P. & O. offices to request that they retain any messages for him there, and not (as he had arranged earlier) have them delivered to the St Francis. A local ex-Pinkerton might well have as close an agreement with the Western Union boys as he had with the taxi drivers, and if Hammett was in fact currently under employment, that employer was likely to be the very subject of the telegrams from Mycroft and Watson. Better to keep them from leaving the telegraph office under any hands other than his own.

And then there was Tom Long, another convenient assistant dangling before his nose, tantalising in his intelligence, experience, and personal commitment to the cause. If, that is, Tom Long was what he appeared to be.

Or even the driver of this motor. Tyson, as with the motor, had been provided by the hotel manager, Auberon. Driver and vehicle made for an unlikely pair—the motor had been chosen to give an impression of an aged employer out for a sedate drive, but beneath the livery and cap he wore, its driver was a bright young man with carroty hair and a cheeky grin. Tyson's own motor, according to Auberon, was of a colour to match his hair, along with chrome-yellow seats and a throaty engine—ill suited for the sort of surveillance they were conducting today. Tyson appeared to be a simple young man with a passion for motorcars and a deplorable taste in literature; on the other hand, he could conceivably be an agent of the faceless enemy, planted on Holmes by yet another agent, Auberon.

Even Henry Norbert bore a question mark above his head, as the lawyer knew more than anyone else about Russell's business, whereabouts, and life in general. He had keys; he was in a position to manipulate the Russell fortunes; and he might indeed know more about the Russell past than he was saying.

The only person Holmes could be sure of was currently hors de combat, so distracted by her problems that she was effectively half-witted. She hadn't even noticed that morning that he did not actually say he was taking a ferry to Oakland, merely that there was a manuscript and there was a ferry-boat. In her right mind, she'd never have missed that.

So, here he was, Sherlock Holmes on his own again with the dubious assistance of an unlikely trio of Irregulars: a cadaverous Pinkerton who ought to be abed, a diminutive Chinese bookseller with a wide knowledge of arcane topics, and a red-headed modern-day barrow-boy trying out for a part in one of Conan Doyle's bits of airy nonsense. His most reassuring partner at the moment was good old Watson, halfway across the globe and launched on another desperate dash across Europe on the business of his longtime friend.

Holmes smiled around the stem of his pipe at the image of his erstwhile partner, thinner of hair and stouter of girth, limping with bulldog tenacity across a crowded German railway station. If anyone could intercept the Marguerite, it would be the doctor.

Soon, however, he would need another pair of hands and feet—very soon, if Watson had succeeded in catching the ship in Marseilles. Whom to trust? The storyteller, the bookseller, or some sturdy young man picked at random from the street?

With luck (a commodity in which Holmes placed no trust whatsoever) today's outing would settle at least one of those questions.

And in the meantime, he would hold up for consideration four points.

First, those burnt scraps they had salvaged from the fireplace, from a document written on the machine in Charles Russell's study. The surviving words made it clear that the document had concerned matters of some import: “Army . . . looters . . . stolen . . . executed”—these were not from the draught of a chatty family letter.

Two: That they were burnt, and so close to the source of their writing, indicated a certain urgency, or at the very least an emphatic quality, in the act of destruction. A more sanguine individual would merely have carried them off rather than risk discovery through lighting a fire in the fireplace of a vacant house.

Two points did not an hypothesis make, but taken with the third—that persons unknown had broken into the Russell house with, to all appearances, the sole purpose of destroying that document—they formed a shape. And the shape was one that Holmes had studied closely the whole of his professional life: blackmail.

Point four: Although the victims of blackmail often turned on their tormentors, he could not recall a single incident when a blackmailer had deliberately killed his victim.

This was the most troubling of all, for in the midst of those four salient points lived the growing and awful possibility that the blackmailer had been none other than Charles Russell himself.

Holmes had always despised the sly and verminous quality of the blackmailer, and his every instinct shouted that the stalwart young man in the photograph was no extortionist. However, that was emotion talking. Certainly he would say nothing to Russell—not yet, perhaps not ever, if no further evidence came to light. And perhaps, under certain circumstances, if Charles Russell had been given no choice, if he had been driven to the detestable weapon by the needs of his family, if one could accept that blackmail was a weapon like any other . . .

He hoped very much it did not come to that.

On the other hand, there remained the question of the relationship between Charles and Judith Russell: Two months after the fire, husband and wife have a furious argument; that very day she packs up the children to leave for England; for the next six years he sees them only periodically, in England, for slightly less than half the year. According to Russell, her parents were easy and affectionate with each other when they were together, but the fact remained that the family was divided for much of the year from June of 1906 until the summer of 1912.

If Judith Russell had discovered that her husband was a blackmailer, that could have driven her away. But if her outrage against his morals had caused her to flee, why then welcome the man when he came to her in England? And why return to San Francisco after six years?

That was more the behaviour of a woman protecting her children from threat than a woman disillusioned with her husband.

He shook his head and, noticing that the pipe had burnt itself out, he slid it into a pocket. Too many questions, not enough data.

The remainder of the journey he spent divided between a study of the maps and watching the landscape go past.

Eventually, the motorcar's bonnet shifted west, and soon the grey Pacific stretched out into the distance. Holmes folded the map away and set both feet on the floor, intent now. He'd read the newspaper report that suggested where the crash had happened, and he had studied the maps closely until he had narrowed down the possibilities to one.

“Drop your speed somewhat,” he said to the boy in the front. “Not as if you're watching for something or about to stop, but as if you're under direction from a nervous passenger.”

“Got it.” The car's progress became more stately, and Holmes resumed his hat and sat back. It would take very sharp eyes indeed to see the vehicle as anything but the means of an elderly gentleman's progress.

Half a mile from the spot where he had decided it happened, the road climbed, then abruptly turned and dropped away at the same time. Young Tyson's foot came down hard on the brake pedal, and Holmes nodded grimly to himself.

Near the top of the hill, a battered bread-delivery lorry—truck, as they called them here—had been pulled into an inadequate flat space on the eastern side of the road. On the other side, overlooking the sea, stood a short, bow-legged man with close-cropped hair, his garments tossed by the wind. His knees were against the guard-rail as he craned to look over the edge. As they went past, Holmes raked the figure with a glance, then resumed his straight-ahead gaze, frowning slightly.

At the bottom of the hill the waves had deposited a small beach, a golden crescent of sand. At the far end of it, two people were making their way up the sand to the road, a picnic basket and bright blankets in their arms, heads ducked against the wind. Even from a distance, Holmes could see their Model T rock with the wind.

Holmes spoke to Tyson in a taut voice. “Park where those two young people are just leaving, but turn around on the other side of them so as to be facing north. I want to have an open view of the cliff.” The young man nodded, performed the turn and, once the Model T had left, eased cautiously off the road onto the edges of the sand. As he slowed, Holmes said, “Pull your wheel a few more degrees to the right and go forward ten feet.” When he had done so, Holmes dropped the back window and looked out at the cliff, seeing what he had feared. With a shake of the head, he told the boy to shut off the motor.

“We shall be here for an hour or two, possibly longer. You may stay or go, as you like; if you remain in the motor, you must keep quite still; if you go, you merely need to stay within the sound of my voice.” While speaking, Holmes had retrieved the Gladstone from the floor and yanked open the top. He now drew out a stubby brass telescope, not new but with the polish of care, which Auberon had conjured up for his guest. Laying it on the seat, he went back into the bag and took from it a tripod with extendable legs, which he set up on the floor, arranging his long legs around it. He fastened the telescope onto the tripod, raised it so it reached the height of his eyes, and leant back to examine it. The sun was well away from any reflective portion of the instrument, but he tugged the velvet drapes a few inches closer together, rendering the interior invisible.

Only then did he lower his eyes to the eyepiece and put his hand to the adjustments.

A six-foot-two-inch man with tubercular lungs was hanging from the cliff face while waves were reaching up to catch at his feet.

Damn the man, thought Holmes, angry and apprehensive; what was he trying to prove? That he was better than the famous Sherlock Holmes? A sickly man with a family to support, risking his neck for the sake of what? The faint possibility of ten-year-old evidence? He'd been told to look at the wreckage, which very clearly was not on the rocks, and to interview the locals, which equally clearly the man standing up on the road was not.

As Holmes watched the thin figure pick his way from one precarious hand-hold to the next, he felt precisely as he had whenever he had placed Watson in danger—a thing he'd generally done as inadvertently as he had this man. Scarcely breathing, he watched the man on the cliff, expecting at any moment to see those long arms flail and the body crash down into the foam: one assistant shot, another smashed; this case was proving hard on the Irregulars.

Ten minutes later, the young man in the driver's seat shifted and the hillside scene leapt and danced through the lens.

Holmes said coldly, “Mr Tyson, you may feel free to get out and watch the sea-birds.”

After a minute, the door opened and the abashed lad got out, shutting it with care. Holmes settled again to the eyepiece.

Taking into account his poor physical condition, Hammett was making a remarkably thorough job of his investigation of the cliffside. With an intervening decade of high waves and Pacific rain, there could be little evidence left among the rocks, but twice now Holmes had seen the man pick his way cautiously towards some invisible object. The first time, hanging like a three-legged spider, he had worked some object loose with his fingers, examined it (to all appearances completely unconscious of the precariousness of his stance) and tossed it away. The second time he had pulled something from his back trouser pocket and gouged at a crack in the rocks, retrieving some long, narrow object; that, too, he held close to examine, only this time he kept it, lifting his coat to secure it through the back of his belt.

His greying hair and coat-tails tossed wildly in the wind as he continued to scan the rocks, and Holmes found himself muttering under his breath: “Hammett, it must be damned cold out on that exposed rock; this won't be doing your lungs a bit of good. The tide's on its way in and in another ten minutes you'll get wet. Look, man, I'm not your father; you've nothing to prove to me.”

It took another twenty-five agonising minutes, during which time Hammett had found one other item of interest, nearly fallen down the cliff twice, and shifted upwards on the cliff three times to keep free of the wave splashes, before he finally threw back his head to study the return route.

From where he stood, the cliff must have appeared nearly vertical, because he then pulled back to survey the terrain to his right. He appeared to stare straight into Holmes' lens for a moment before it became clear that he was merely estimating the possibilities of the beach route. The horizontal must have appeared preferable, because in a minute he waved widely at the bow-legged man who had been pacing to and fro on the cliff-top road all this time, and pointed towards the sand.

Immediately, the other man waved his response and turned away to the bread van—only to leap back at the unexpected approach of another motor.

A sleek blue motorcar driven by a fair-headed boy, with two young women passengers. He'd been right: Russell had insisted on coming by this route. He'd also been right that she wouldn't succeed in getting that car-proud young man to relinquish the wheel.

Holmes raised his face from the instrument and lifted the curtains to one side so as to see unimpaired. The gaunt man was beginning to work his way along the cliff above the line of wetness, his entire being concentrating on the effort. Above him on the roadway, the bow-legged man gave him a glance before turning to face the three young people emerging from the motorcar. The slick-haired driver tumbled over the side with the practiced agility of a monkey, trotting around to open the passenger door for the black-haired girl; the other young woman, the one with the absurdly short blonde hair, was standing up so as to follow. Holmes put his head back to the eyepiece.

Russell moved stiffly, as if she were in pain, or fear, climbing out of the car and onto the surface. She wrapped her heavy coat around her against the wind. Flo Greenfield said something, then reached out as if to take her arm, but Russell had stepped away from her in the direction of the precipitous edge. Holmes risked a quick glance down at the man near the water, but Hammett was still intent on his spider-act along the rocks.

Russell stood at the very lip of the cliff, leaning over the inadequate railing as she'd leant over the ship's rail the week before. Flo Greenfield picked her way near, but the shoes she wore were inadequate for the terrain, and she wobbled dangerously until her beau's arm flashed out to steady her. The two young people stood on secure ground, apparently pleading with their English companion, but Russell did not respond. She seemed hypnotised by the breaking waves, but Holmes could see the moment when her attention was caught by the figure far below: Her mouth came open in surprise and her hand came out, but to Holmes' immense relief, the bow-legged man stepped forward and took her arm, urging her back from the cliff. Holmes began to breathe again.

The driver of the delivery van seemed to be explaining Hammett's presence, and Holmes would have paid a great deal to be able to hear what he had to say. Whatever the explanation was, it did not immediately strike Russell as impossible; she looked at the man doubtfully, but her head did not go back into that intensely familiar posture of disbelief that allowed her to look down her nose at the offender. She just listened to the man, craned forward to see how far the grey-haired climber had got, then said something over her shoulder.

The three young people got into their motorcar and the bow-legged man into his, driving in procession down the long curve to where the cliff gave way to the beach. Holmes lifted his face from the eyepiece for a moment to rub the tension out of his muscles. When he pulled his hands away, Greg Tyson was walking quickly towards the car, brushing the sand from his trouser-legs. He jumped in behind the wheel and slammed the door.

“Do you want to scoot?” he asked.

“No, I believe the two motors will stop at the other end of the beach. No need to flee unless they continue down here—you are welcome to resume your reading material. However, be ready to move quickly.”

“Whatever you say.”

Both men in the closed car sat tensely until the two other vehicles had come to a stop far up the road, Tyson's hand hovering near the starter button. Holmes unfolded his legs and rearranged the tripod holding the telescope, pulling the curtains together until they brushed the very edges of his field of vision. He also reached into the Gladstone bag and took out a pistol, surreptitiously laying it beside his leg: He had no reason to believe that Hammett and his bread-truck assistant were on any side but that of the angels, but he had not lived this long by depending on trust. If either man made the slightest move against Russell, he wouldn't hesitate to make a dramatic entrance with engine roaring and gun blazing. He fervently hoped, for many reasons, that it would not come to that.

It took Hammett a quarter of an hour to sidle his way off of the rocks. He stumbled when his feet sank into the sand, then set off, hunched against the cold, staggering with the soft surface and his own exhaustion. His hair was awry and his light grey suit had suffered from the treatment, and he looked a far cry from the dapper man Holmes had met.

At the bread truck, Hammett accepted his hat and a flask from the driver, propping his back against the vehicle and ignoring the approaching newcomers. Eyes shut, he took a deep draught from the flask, then another, shuddering slightly in reaction. He handed the flask back to the bow-legged man, then peeled himself off the wall of the truck, wrenching open its cargo door to drop onto the floor where he sat, head bowed and feet resting on the ground, clearly gathering his energies. After a minute, his right arm reached surreptitiously around his back, as if scratching an itch at the belt-line, then he straightened. His hands came up to run through his hair, returning it to a semblance of order, then adjusted his neck-tie, dashed ineffectually at the stained knee of one trouser-leg, and finally shifted to his inner chest pocket to pull out his pouch of Bull Durham.

Hammett's fingers shaped the cigarette with an exaggeration of their normal care, and eventually lifted the object to his tongue to seal it. He was fumbling for his matches when the young blond swell who'd been driving the other car stepped forward and stuck out a hand with a lighter in it.

The lighter was sleek and gold, of a piece with the coat and the car; the blond man was maybe a year or two younger than Hammett himself, but he looked like a kid—family money and no responsibilities will do that for you. But Hammett bent to accept the light and sat there, eyes half shut, for the length of three or four steadying puffs. Then he moved the cigarette to his left hand, pushed his hat-brim up with the forefinger of his right hand, and at last looked up into the face of the tall blonde girl whom his new employer had been watching from the speakeasy on Friday night.

Mary Russell, married to Sherlock Holmes, gave him a smile meant to be reassuring. “That looked a rather dangerous climb.”

“Not something I'd do for fun, no.”

“So why were you doing it? If you don't mind my asking,” she added.

“What's it to you?” he said bluntly, putting the cigarette back to his lips.

After a moment, she said, “I know someone who was killed on that piece of hillside. It was odd, seeing you at the same exact place.”

“Yeah, well, as I understand it, there's a number of people that corner's killed. But my company's only interested in two deaths that happened last December. That the same accident as yours?”

“No.”

“Then I can't help you.”

“What's your company?”

“Mutual of Fresno,” he replied, reaching for his wallet and drawing out a business card with a salesman's automatic habit. “Somebody phoned in a tip to say we might've paid death benefits on an empty car. Always a problem, you see, when there's no body.”

“I see,” she said, looking at the card.

“Well,” he said, sucking the last draw from his cigarette and tossing it out onto the sand, “I'm afraid I didn't. Risked my neck and a case of pneumonia for absolutely nothing. And now, if there's nothing more I can do for you, I need a drink and a fire and a pair of dry socks.” He stood, tipped his hat, and threaded his long body into the back of the van.

Smooth, thought Holmes admiringly as he studied the scene through the lens. Not once had Hammett given away the presence of the object he had retrieved from the cliffside—even Russell had taken no notice of the man's surreptitious motions as he slid the thing from the back of his belt to the floor of the van.

Holmes would have liked to hear the conversation, but his lip-reading abilities were lamentably rusty, and in any case best suited to closer work. He had only been able to follow scraps of it—almost none of Hammett's words, since the man's face had been in profile much of the time, but what he had perceived of Russell's side of the brief exchange had reassured him oddly.

With his unlikely passenger stowed away, the bow-legged driver raised his own hat a fraction off his scalp, then slammed the cargo door and trotted around to the driver's side. The bread van started with a violent cloud of blue smoke, causing Flo and her young man to back hastily away, but Russell just stood and watched the vehicle back-and-fill into a turn before it accelerated up the steep hill north.

The three young people did not immediately climb back into their own vehicle. Instead, there was a discussion, during which Flo gestured towards the road ahead, Russell stared at the wake of the bread van, and Donny sat on his running board smoking a cigarette and watching the waves. Eventually, consensus appeared to be reached. Flo straightened and dug something from her pocket, offering it to Russell. At first Holmes thought it was a cigarette, but after Russell had shaken her head and turned away, the other young woman worked at the object for a moment, put something into her mouth, and followed Russell towards the gaudy car. Holmes risked one last glance at Russell's face as she sat down in the back, then swept the machinery away and tugged the curtains down to a crack.

“Mr Tyson, please remain where you are. Slump back into your seat and look bored with your lot in life, and watch the blue motor go past as if it was the most interesting thing that has happened in an hour.”

The sound of a starter and an engine catching reached them, then the car was in gear and accelerating onto the road. It roared past, and away, until the beat of waves against the shore was the only sound. Holmes pulled the velvet curtains aside a fraction with one finger to peer out, not entirely certain that Russell wouldn't have chosen to solve the disagreement by staying behind, but the road and the hillside behind it were empty of humanity.

He settled himself onto the green leather, sliding the pistol back into the Gladstone. As he began to unfasten the telescope from its tripod base, he said to the boy, “Now we return to the city.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

Greg Tyson radiated a palpable sense of outrage all the way back to the hotel, clashing gears in a way the big car had never before experienced and taking corners at speeds that made its tyres squeal in protest. His potentially thrilling outing had fizzled into anticlimax like a damp firecracker.

And here he'd thought he had a real Philo Vance in his backseat.