The Murder of Mary Russell (23 page)

C
hief Inspector Lestrade walked into the kitchen and held out the knife with the dried blood on it. “Mrs Hudson, are you certain this is Miss Russell's?”

“Chief Inspector, I told you: it looks like hers, but I do not know that sort of weapon intimately enough to tell one from another. And with the blood…”

“Yes. But when you say—”

Mrs Hudson stood up sharply and began to clatter the delicate cups onto the tray. “Enough. I can say no more until Mr Holmes comes.”

“Why won't you help me?” he demanded.

“I have helped you, as much as I may without consulting Mr Holmes.”

“Mrs Hudson! There's a young woman gone, perhaps dead, and you—”

She slammed a cup against the table and it shattered in all directions. “You think I don't
know
that? You think I saw the floor and thought,
Oh, mercy me, someone has dropped a bottle of preserves
?”

Lestrade hastened to retreat before the old woman's climbing voice broke into sobs. “No, no, I understand, he's your boss. But he's not here, is he, and…Mrs Hudson? What have you—oh dear, watch out for—”

He snatched up a tea-towel to catch the blood welling from her finger. She wrapped the wound, then began to gather the porcelain shards.

“I'll get those,” he said. “Please. Do you have a plaster?”

Without answering, she turned and left the kitchen. As she hunted through the little medical kit for the scissors, she could hear the sounds of porcelain shards dropping into the bin.

When she came back, eyes dry and gauze snugly wrapped around the offending finger (plasters being a bit newfangled for the Holmes household), a different sound drew her attention.

“What is—oh dear Lord, no!” Mrs Hudson bolted towards the sloshing noise in disbelief, to find one of Lestrade's constables with a bucket, wiping bloody footsteps off the sitting-room floor. Fear and heartache took welcome relief in fury as she stormed across the room to snatch the rag from his hand. “What are you
doing
?”

The man scrambled to his feet. “I thought—he said…”

She whirled on Lestrade. “Did you order this?”

He eyed the dripping cloth. “I didn't want—”

“Sir, I—” said the constable.

Mrs Hudson overrode them both. “Did you order this man to clean up the evidence, Chief Inspector? Or did the fool come up with that idea on his own?”

“Mrs Hudson, we have our evidence.” His voice was that of a man well experienced with soothing irrational old women. “We have many photographs.”

“Oh, for God's sake. Take your men and leave.” She looked down at the mess on the floor: all those footprints, all that evidence that Mr Holmes would have flung himself on like a dog on a scent, reduced to a smear. She had not wept at seeing the blood on the floor, but the thought of having failed him brought her near to collapse.

Lestrade nodded at the constable, who went in search of a dry cloth for his hands.

“Mrs Hudson, you really must—”

“Chief Inspector, are you going to arrest me?”

“What?”

“Your father would have,” she said bitterly.

“I think my father would have had more sense than that,” he protested.

“Then you don't think I…did
this
?” she demanded, her voice breaking at the last word.

“Of course not!”

“Then go. Please.”

“Mrs Hudson, I need to ask—”

“Sir, I have told you what I know: I came home, I saw this, I telephoned to the police. When Patrick and I left for market this morning, I expected no visitors. So far as I know, neither did Mary. I thought she would be here working when I returned. Your associates have been here for hours and found nothing. Shouldn't you be out asking the neighbours what they saw?”

“The local men are doing just that. But—Mrs Hudson, what is it you're not telling me?”

“Oh, Chief Inspector. There are so many things I cannot tell you.”

The small man's pinched features took on an expression of mingled dread and outrage. “Oh, no. This isn't something to do with Mr
Mycroft
Holmes, is it? State secrets and the rest?”

She raised startled eyes. “How on earth should I know that?”

“Well, if it's not those kinds of secrets you're keeping, then what?”

“The kind Mr Sherlock Holmes will need to give you himself. Now, please, may I be alone for a while?”

Chief Inspector Lestrade, hauled down from London over the disappearance and possible murder of the wife of Sherlock Holmes, stared at the old lady. The perfect image of the housekeeper, with her trim white hair and her work-worn hands, innocence shouting out from those dark eyes. He might as well arrest Queen Mary.

Lestrade gave up, and grabbed his hat from the rack. “You ring me as soon as Holmes gets here,” he ordered.

“After he and I have spoken,” she corrected.

No point in protesting: the woman had too long a history in the life of Sherlock Holmes to be pushed around. But as he yanked open the front door, her voice came, oddly hesitant. “Sir, once Mr Holmes has seen…You are finished with the room, aren't you? I can clean, after…”

He looked back at her. Lestrade had known this woman most of his life, as had his father before him. Nearing seventy, must be, but the kind of woman who'd keep her backbone until she was tucked in her coffin. Mrs Clara Hudson was not one to display her grief, not one whose face would show what it felt like to scrub up the blood of a woman she'd raised like a daughter.

For a man who claimed not to care much for women, Mr Holmes sure found some strong ones.

“Yes,” he said gently. “I think we're finished. I'm leaving a constable here. Ask him to help you when you're ready.”

“That won't be necessary, Chief Inspector. My knees are quite up to the task.”

And your spirit,
Lestrade did not say. “As you like. In any case, there'll be a man here. Oh, and we'll be placing a tap on the telephone line, in case a ransom demand comes. That means the exchange will be watching your calls,” he explained, “and we'll listen to anything of interest. We might be able to trace its source.”

Well,
she thought as she locked the door behind him,
it's a good thing I already talked to Billy.

Outside on the gravel drive, Lestrade had a word with the men, dispatching some of them back to Eastbourne, giving orders to the one who would keep watch. Before climbing into his car, he glanced back at the house and saw Mrs Hudson's figure just inside the bay window, her back to him. The aged shoulders were clenched, the white head bent to study the sitting-room floor. A motion from higher up caught his eye: the breeze tugging a dust-cloth, left hanging from an upstairs windowsill. Sure sign of the proud housekeeper's distraction, that she'd laid it there to dry in the sun, and forgot.

The Chief Inspector climbed into his motorcar and told the driver to take him to Eastbourne.

When the police detective had left, Mrs Hudson stood for a long time, staring down at the two pools of blood. The smaller one was completely dry now; the larger one, crimson at first sight, had gone a sickly red-brown. The second time in her life she'd stood over a loved one's drying blood and known herself responsible.

For if this was not Mary's, then where was the girl?

And if it was not the fault of Clara Hudson, whose was it?

Clara Hudson: a woman with a history of failure and crime, dragged from her moral gutters and shown how to stand upright—and
this
was how she repaid him? First bringing her past to his door, then being away when it arrived?
My fault
.

She picked up the constable's bucket and filled it with fresh water, then got on her knees to finish the destruction of the footprints. She worked numbly, keeping thoughts at bay by an intense focus on the work: wiping and rubbing with the rag, emptying the bucket whenever the water took on a trace of pink, using a tooth-brush to scrub the last traces from the cracks in the floorboards.

It took hours. Every time she thought of Mary—Dead? Dying? Bound and gagged in a cellar somewhere?—she scrubbed the harder.
My fault,
whispered the brush.
My fault my fault my fault my—

The telephone blared through the silent house. She dropped the brush and tried to rise, gasping at the bolt of pain. At the second ring, she managed to get to her feet, and picked up the earpiece on the third.

Her voice was none too certain.

“Clara, dear, is that you?” the earpiece asked.

She sat down, hard, on the little bench beside the door. Her head was spinning.

“Clara?”

Her arm moved to lay the receiver back on its stand, but she caught herself. Clearing her throat, she summoned Mrs Hudson's voice. “Hello, Ivy, I was dusting, and must have breathed some in. I'd love to have a chat, but I was just…look, my hands are a bit full just at the moment, can I ring you back in a day or two? Good, take care.”

She hung up, silencing Ivy's voice from the earpiece. She rested for a moment, but when her thoughts resumed their downward spiral, she got stiffly up and went to change the water in the bucket.

She stopped cleaning at the very edge of the dull, dry blood. Arms, shoulders, spine, hips: all on fire, all grating and stiff. She had to use the settee to pull herself upright like someone in her nineties, and wondered if she was going to cry again.

No: perhaps not.

She retreated to the kitchen, closing the door to the sitting room, wishing she could close the door on her own thoughts as easily.

(
myfaultmyfaultmyfaultmy—
)

Would it be hours, or days, before help arrived? She could scrub no more, not on her knees, but there were other ways to keep busy.

Through that night and into the next morning, she employed most of those ways. She polished the old house down to the bone, leaving her so exhausted, she even managed a little sleep in Thursday's pre-dawn hours.

The house was so damned silent.

She cleaned: stove, tiles, windows, ceiling.

She cleared: pantry, spice cabinet, the backs of her cupboards, the depths of her wardrobe and chest of drawers, ending up with two boxes and three pillow-cases of items for the church sales.

She baked: six loaves of bread, three pies, and several batches of shortbread to pack up and send to Dr Watson, currently in…New York, was it? She ate none of it, forcing down half an egg and some dry toast.

She mended everything she could find, laundered all she could lay hands on, polished the silver and the crystal.

Three times, she approached the garden-party strawberries, intending to cook them into preserves, and three times she let the cloth drop over them again, unable to accept the finality of it.

Thursday morning, twenty-two hours after she had come home to blood on her floor, the waiting ended. She was at the front door, reassuring the bored constable that his superiors were certain to call him home soon, when she heard the small tick of the kitchen door closing. She ended the conversation quickly, telling the young man that she would bring him a sandwich later on, and hurried through the sitting room to the kitchen.

It was empty, but the door to her quarters was ajar.

She paused long enough to light a low flame under the kettle: one thing Clara Hudson had learned from the past forty-five years was that any catastrophe could be softened by tea.

Mr Holmes stood in the centre of her private sitting room, his body braced like a soldier awaiting the over-the-top whistle.

“Mrs Hudson, what is it?”

The question told her how he'd heard: if Billy had found him, he'd know already.

“You saw the notice in the papers?” she asked.

“The agony column, yes. And then your dusting cloth signal at the upstairs window. What has happened?”