The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 6 AN ILL-TIMED LETTER

“Kiss me,” Miss Jean Leckie breathed in a husky voice. “Kiss me!” She and Conan Doyle were seated at a quiet table amongst the potted plants in the Tivoli’s fern room. All eyes in the restaurant turned toward them, watching. And yet, Conan Doyle did not care. Miss Leckie was leaning forward in her chair, so that her hazel-green eyes were all that filled his vision. She tugged insistently at his sleeve. “Kiss me, Daddy!” she breathed and Conan Doyle no longer resisted, but leaned into her face and pressed his lips against hers.

“Daddy! Dad-dee!”

Conan Doyle pried open his eyes and groggily dragged himself up from the pit of sleep. He was slouched in his writing chair, the Tivoli dining room jarringly replaced by his study and a desk strewn with pens and notebooks, the delicious dream still evaporating from the surface of his mind while an insistent hand jerked at his sleeve from below.

“Dad-dee. My soldier’s broken.”

He looked down to see Kingsley, his five-year-old son, yanking at his sleeve. The little boy was holding his very favorite toy: a windup soldier. Conan Doyle could tell from the gleaming red pout of the boy’s lip and eyes pooled to overflowing that his child teetered on the verge of hysteria.

“What is it, Kingsley?”

“My soldier’s broken Dad-dee. He won’t drum.”

Conan Doyle sighed and took the mechanical soldier from his son’s small hands. It was a tinplate guardsman with a painted red uniform and a black bearskin. When wound with the key in the middle of his back, the soldier would march forward in a grind of gears while a blur of mechanical arms pounded upon a tin drum.

“You haven’t overwound him again, have you?”

The little boy shook his blond head emphatically, but Conan Doyle suspected quite the opposite.

“Come, climb upon Papa’s knee and we’ll see if we can’t heal your poor wounded soldier.” The small boy clambered into his father’s lap. Conan Doyle gripped the key and gave it a gentle, experimental twist. It turned a few degrees, hit a hard stop, and sprang back when released.

Overwound.

“I’m afraid you have wound it too tightly, Kingsley. Daddy has told you before, you have to be careful winding it.”

“I need my drummer, Daddy! He beats his drum to scare away the monster who lives under my bed.”

Conan Doyle swallowed a grimace. The monster again. As a writer, he was all for encouraging a child’s imagination, but “the monster” was the cause of much bedwetting.

“Kingsley, I have told you there are no monsters under your bed. Monsters cannot enter our house. Daddy has expressly forbidden them.”

“Can you fix my drummer, Daddy? Can you?”

He hugged the little boy and said, “Well, let’s see. Papa will try his best, but I cannot promise.”

Conan Doyle rummaged a hand in his pants pocket and withdrew the small silver penknife he kept tucked there. The tinplate soldier was constructed in two halves held together by bent metal tabs. He worked the sharp knife blade under each tab in turn and levered them open. But when he eased the two halves of the soldier apart, there was a sproinnnnggggg as the tightly wound spring spat out like a metal tongue, uncoiling a spool of black spring steel that whiplashed across the floor.

“Oh, dear,” Conan Doyle said, struggling to push the spring back into the metal body.

“Is it broken, Daddy?”

“I’m afraid it is, Kingsley. But you’ve got lots of other toys to play with—”

“But I want my drummer!” Kingsley shrieked, his voice ripping on each syllable.

“Shush! Shush! Calm yourself. Daddy will take it to a shop when he goes to London and have it mended.”

During this exchange, Conan Doyle failed to hear the door open or footsteps until his wife spoke. “Arthur, I see you decided to return home at long last.”

He looked up in surprise. These days, his wife, Louise Doyle, or “Touie” as he affectionately called her, did not leave her bedroom very often. Five years earlier, she had been diagnosed with galloping consumption, the dread disease of the age, which carried off most of its victims within a matter of months. But thanks to Conan Doyle’s diligence, moving the family from Switzerland to Egypt to the rural climes of Sussex to find the most beneficent air, Touie had endured, although mostly as an invalid, bedridden and sickly. At times she hovered on the precipice of death, and Conan Doyle made sure his funeral clothes were cleaned and pressed. But at other times, she rallied. Touie had not left her room for a full month, so Conan Doyle was surprised to see her downstairs and dressed, although the apple-cheeked girl he had married was now emaciated, and her gaunt, hollow-eyed features held the deathly pallor of a consumptive. Even now, despite the efforts of her toilet, the smell of the sick room hovered about her.

“Touie, darling! You’re up.”

“I was concerned when the servants told me you had not slept in your bed last night.”

He caught the recrimination frosting her words and quickly replied, “I stayed at Oscar’s club. Had to sleep in a chair. Trains weren’t running because of the blasted fog.”

“Fog? Really?” his wife said, deepening the incrimination with a pause before adding, “We had no such fog.”

“Well, the house is in Sussex, darling. It’s precisely for the healthful air that I chose to move the family here—”

“Did you attend your meeting? The Society for Psychical Research, wasn’t it? The first Monday of the month?”

“Yes, I did, and it was most edifying.”

“I am quite sure.” She eyed his apparel pointedly. “You do not normally dress in your finery to attend a Society meeting.”

Kingsley began to squirm and so did Conan Doyle. “Kingsley, get down. Daddy is trying to talk to Mama.” He slid the boy off his lap.

“Daddy, what about my soldier?”

Conan Doyle irritatedly snatched the toy from his little boy’s grip and set it down on his writing desk. “Daddy will have it mended. Now go and find out what your sister’s up to. Go on.” He chivvied the boy from the room with a wave and a paternal look.

Louise Doyle sank wearily onto the edge of a leather armchair. From the look on her face it was clear the interrogation was only just beginning.

“After the meeting, did you go for supper with one of the members?”

“Ahhhh, let me think. Um, yes… yes I did.”

“A gentleman… or a lady?”

At that moment, Florence, the maid, entered the study bearing a letter on a silver salver.

“A letter arrived for you, sir. By first post.”

“Thank you, Florence.” He bade her to place it on the desk with an impatient wave, but she obstinately remained hovering by the door. “A-a-a lady, as a matter of fact. A medium. Yes, quite fascinating. Our conversation, that is. We discussed séances and—”

“She must be a very pretty lady for you to wear your best suit and take the time to wax your moustaches.”

“Pretty? I–I didn’t really notice. I — no, I’d say she was, if anything, a little… frowsy. You know, the spinsterly type.”

“A spinster, indeed? I know many of the members of the Society. Might I recognize the unmarried lady’s name?”

“No, ah, no. Probably not. She only recently joined. Ah, I believe her name was Jean. Yes, Jean… Leckie, or something like that.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” Florence interrupted. She held up the envelope. “That’s who the letter is from, a Miss Jean Leckie.”

Something deeply wounded flashed across Louise Doyle’s face, but she reined it in behind a tight smile. “How interesting. You two had dinner just last evening and here she has already sent you a billet-doux. She sounds very keen.”

“Hardly a billet-doux, darling,” Conan Doyle said with an uneasy chuckle. “What ever must Florence think? A billet-doux, indeed!”

To make matters worse, the letter had arrived in a lilac envelope, an incriminatingly feminine color. But even as he waffled, Conan Doyle realized he had a possible bolt-hole: he could reveal the fact that he’d been called in to consult on a murder. But then this was no ordinary murder — it was an assassination, and one he had been officially proscribed from speaking about — to anyone. A logjam of sentences crowded Conan Doyle’s throat and suffocated there.

Louise Doyle rose unsteadily from her chair, eyes gleaming, her pale features cinched in a broken smile. “Well, Arthur. I’ll leave you to read your letter in private. I think I can guess exactly what kind of message it is.”

And with that, his wife tottered from the study, helping herself along the way by leaning on every piece of furniture that came to hand.

The maid flushed and fidgeted. She handed the letter to her master, bounced a quick curtsy, and muttered, “I’d best be getting on with the ironing” and fled the room.

That had been a disaster. But now it was over, Conan Doyle felt his spine unratchet a cog or two. Still, his hands shook with excitement as he slashed a letter opener beneath the flap and tore open the envelope. At the sight of exquisite feminine handwriting, his heart quickened and he fought to focus his mind as he read the short missive.

As his eyes tripped over the elegant flourish of her signature, a thrill surged through him. It seemed shockingly forward, but then Conan Doyle reasoned, times were changing and Miss Leckie was of a generation where the old rules of chaste female decorum seemed laughably twee. He rose to his feet, dithering. If he left now, so suddenly, it would be clear that his departure was in response to the letter. But then the image swam up in his mind of Jean’s graceful neck, the doeish eyes, and the baying hound of desire slipped free of its leash. Suddenly energized, he rushed from the study and galumphed up the staircase to his room. If he hurried, he might just catch the 10:45 train back to London.

Minutes later, Conan Doyle was pedaling his three-wheeler bicycle along the tree-lined lane that ascended in a long, sweeping curve into Haslemere. He was standing on the pedals, thighs burning, as he muscled up the final hill before the train station, when he was snatched from his reverie by a wisssshthump… wisssssshthump…

Suddenly, he was overtaken by a man in a flapping canvas coat, goggles and a backward cap, sitting astride a fiery broomstick — a steam-powered bicycle. Conan Doyle was an enthusiastic cyclist, and had published articles on the benefits of exercise and mental relaxation afforded to him by cycling, but now he cursed his tricycle, which by comparison seemed ponderous and lumbering. The steam cyclist swooped effortlessly up the steep hill dragging a wispy vapor trail of steam. Conan Doyle felt a stab of envy and grumbled to himself, “I shall have to get one of those.”