The Murder of Mary Russell (28 page)

“I don't know,” Mrs Hudson said. “However, clearly this calls for tea and—”

“Tea!” Holmes' objection was very near to a shout, and he loomed above her.

Mrs Hudson drew herself up in all her six years of superior age, fixing him with one dark eye. “Mr Holmes, you are standing in
my
bedroom, at some unearthly hour, with what clearly is going to require some attention. Please leave. I shall come into the kitchen when I am decent.”

He gaped at her. Then, to Billy's astonishment, Sherlock Holmes turned obediently and went out. He even ran water into the kettle and placed it over the flame before dropping the sheaf of photographs onto the work-table and splaying them along it like a deck of cards.

Billy went to look over his shoulder: the police photographs of the scene. His gaze dwelt on the sickening black stain on the floor, smeared and trodden about—but that was not where Holmes' interest lay. Instead, he had his magnifying glass over one that showed the knife protruding from the wall.

When Mrs Hudson came in—having donned clothing and combed her hair in something under three minutes, although her feet were in bed-slippers—Holmes snatched up the photograph to thrust at her. She ignored him in favour of the tea caddy and a couple of brisk orders to Billy that sped matters along.

When the drink was brewed and a symbolic first sip taken, she returned her cup to its saucer and accepted the photograph.

“That's Mary's knife, in the wall,” she said.

“But look at it!”

“What am I not seeing?” she asked patiently.

“The angle. Don't go by the photograph, cameras lie. Is that what you saw? Actually
saw
?”

“A knife, sticking out of the wall? Yes.”

“No! The
angle,
Mrs Hudson! It's all in the angles. From the start the evidence contradicted itself—the dent, the bullet, and the knife. Think, woman. You have seen Russell practice a thousand times: is there any way a thrown blade could come to rest at that angle?”

“I thought you had determined the knife was stabbed into the plaster, not thrown there?” She handed the photograph to Billy, craning over her shoulder.

“But the angle!”

“Mr Holmes—”

“Look: you are standing at the wall with the knife in your hand. The table is to your right, the hive's cover is at your knees. If you drive the knife into the wall, what is the resulting angle?”

“Why would she—”

“Never mind why—let us look at the facts, not speculate on motivation. What angle?”

Clara Hudson took another fortifying swallow from her cup, then laid her hands in her lap and meditated upon the photograph. After a minute, she pulled open the table's shallow drawer and took out a paring knife, carrying it over to the bit of wall between the back door and that of her rooms. She held the handle in her fist, mimicking the act of stabbing it into the plaster. The result left her dissatisfied. She turned her wrist this way and that—then shifted the knife into her left hand and held its point against the wood.

When she turned, her face had changed.

“Ha! Ha!” Holmes crowed—and then something he'd never done, in all the years of their acquaintance: he leapt to his feet, clapped his hands on either side of her head, and delivered a kiss smack to the centre of her forehead.

In a swirl of dressing-gown, he dashed away, shouting for Billy to dress, they were headed for London.

“What about questioning the neighbours?” Billy called, but to no reply. He looked at the woman he had known longest in the world. “What just happened?”

“Someone drove that knife into the wall with their left hand,” she said.

“But, there's millions of left-handed people about!” he protested.

She merely shook her head. From upstairs, thuds gave evidence of a madman disrupting the contents of his wardrobe. “I'll do some egg sandwiches, but you'd best go and dress, lad. He'll set off for London without you.”

Billy even had time to swallow coffee before Holmes came pounding down the steps—dressed and clean shaven, humming some complicated tune beneath his breath.

“You will ring me,” Mrs Hudson said sternly as the two men went out of the door.

“Yes, Ma'am,” called Holmes meekly.

The engine protested at the hour, but caught at the second try. Once they had left the village and hit the main road, with Holmes his captive for the next two hours, Billy set out for some answers. “Why would Miss Russell have put the knife in the wall? Why even assume it was her—there's hundreds of left-handed people around. Maybe Samuel is left-handed. Or maybe he didn't want to let go the gun in his right hand.”

“Mr Mudd, you see but you do not observe.”

“Now, that's just irritating, that is.”

But the old detective said no more. Instead, he scrunched the travelling rug against the window and settled his head into it. In seconds, he was snoring, leaving Billy to wrestle with the conundrum of the knife in the wall, all the way to London.

The sun rose at four o'clock. It was full daylight when Holmes spoke, passing through Camberwell. “You remember how to find Mycroft's flat?”

“Is that where we're going?”

“It's either there or Oxford.” He sat up. “You made good time.”

“We've missed most of the traffic. Will your brother be awake?”

“If not, he soon will be.” There came the rustle of paper, then: “I thought Mrs Hudson made us sandwiches?”

“I ate them.”

“Yes?”

“And drank the coffee.”

“Well. Good thing we're headed to Mycroft's.”

Mycroft's doorman had little luck with stopping their invasion, or even delaying them much. Holmes strode through the entrance foyer to the lift, hauled the gate shut the instant Billy's heels had cleared it, and worked the controls without waiting for the lift-man. A pulse of the hand against his leg betrayed his impatience with the dignified ascent, and he slammed back the lift's gate before its rise was finished. Down the hallway, around the corner, fist up—and the door opened before he could pound.

About the last expression William Mudd might have expected on the face of a dead woman was one of exasperation. Even if the dead woman was Mary Russell.

Miss Russell in a dressing gown, hair awry, a bandage on one arm: very much not dead.

I
opened the door to my husband, much aggrieved at my days of waiting. “Where the
deuces
have you been?” I exclaimed. “I expected you—oomph!” then “Ouch!”

The embrace was as brief as it was emphatic, and left Billy open-mouthed as Holmes stepped away from me—one hand lingering on my shoulder.

I felt a bit open-mouthed myself at this unprecedented public display. I looked a question at Billy, saw his confusion, and returned my attention to my husband. “Holmes, what on earth is wrong? Did you—oh. Oh, dear Lord. You didn't see my message?”

“Not until a quarter after three this morning,” he said.

I was appalled. “And you thought—what about Mrs Hudson?”

“I told her I would telephone. Patrick is with her, and a relatively competent constable.”

A voice came from the depths of the flat. “Perhaps we might move this discussion behind the door? The neighbours do complain so.”

I raised my voice to include my brother-in-law, who had been nearly as unwilling a participant as I in the three days of my residency. “Mycroft, they thought I was dead.”

“Most inconvenient,” said his voice from behind me. “Good day, Mr Mudd. Sherlock, do you require coffee, or strong drink?”

I
watched Holmes' growing impatience as his brother fiddled with his new patent coffee contraption (which, frankly, produced a beverage indistinguishable from the boiling-beaker-and-old-sock method we used over our laboratory's Bunsen burner) and carried the laden tray out to the sitting room, arranging it beside the platter full of sweets and savouries he had summoned from the depths of his pantry.

The big man stood back, decided the offering was sufficient, and brushed the labours from his hands. “If you will excuse me, I am expected at the Palace for breakfast. The
Gazette
goes to press in the afternoon.”

Billy's eyes narrowed as he watched Mycroft leave. I explained, “The next issue of the
London Gazette
contains the King's birthday list—of honours? Mycroft is usually called upon to vet the names, to save the Palace any potential embarrassment. Would you like to pour the coffee, Billy? I'll have cream in mine.”

“How much of that blood on the floor was yours?” Holmes asked.

“Not a lot. How much did you add to it?” I looked pointedly at his wrist: he had winced slightly as his arm came into contact with me at the door, and the edge of his cuff betrayed a dressing in need of attention.

“Two and a half ounces.”

“A remarkably precise measurement.”

“It went into a beaker.”

I eyed the bloodstain: either something was interfering with his usual fast healing, or the blood-letting had taken place quite recently. Yet if he thought I had been abducted or murdered…“Seems a bit nonchalant, Holmes, to be conducting experiments while one's wife is missing.”

“I was attempting to determine the blood type of the dried sample on the floor.”

“Oh, how interesting,” I said. “Were you trying to apply Schiff's work on serum—”

“I don't believe this,” Billy growled. “Miss Russell, where the devil have you been?”

“Here, mostly. I thought I left a clear sign that I was well, and I figured that Holmes…but evidently not.”

“Start at the beginning!”

Billy had never spoken to me in that tone before. I glanced at Holmes, who was sitting remarkably close to my side. He nodded. I settled my coffee onto my knee, and started at the beginning.

“I was in my study on Wednesday morning when I heard a car in the drive. At first I thought it might be Mrs Hudson and Patrick returning for something, but when I looked out of the window…”

I told them about seeing the strange motor, it pulling close to the door because of the rain showers, and my introduction to the man who called himself Samuel Hudson. I took some time describing his almost-impudent manner: strutting through the sitting room as if I were an estate agent and he the prospective buyer.

“Anyway, he'd seemed surprised to see me, which suggested at least a possibility of criminal intent. Then I found myself reacting to him as if I knew he was a threat. Very odd. At any rate, all indications were that he was, if not her actual son, at least a close relative. I decided to see what information I could get out of him. So I offered him tea, and went to put on the kettle. When I came out, intending to ask if he preferred Sultana biscuits or lemon loaf, I found myself looking into the working end of a revolver.”

Holmes' disapproval verged on outrage. “You did not notice he was armed?”

“He was wearing a large overcoat, and it must have been in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. I was to his left.”

“Yet despite your body's reaction to this man, you returned to the sitting room unprepared?”

“Surely you know me better than that, Holmes? However, if I'd gone in with a drawn revolver of my own, he'd have started shooting and then I'd have had to join in—window glass everywhere, furniture ruined, the panelling full of holes. Mrs Hudson would have been very cross.” Billy's mouth had dropped again, so I amended my frivolous tone. “Besides, I'd have got no answers from him. He hadn't come just to shoot
me,
or I'd have been dead already. Presenting an apparently harmless face for a while longer might tell me what he wanted.”

Holmes grunted, and reached for his tobacco.

“I'll confess it's an uncomfortable sensation to have a gun aimed in one's direction. But he did seem to be after something—some
thing
—and I didn't think he was going to shoot me if he thought I was helping. When he asked me where Mrs Hudson kept her possessions, I took him to her rooms. He sat me in the chair and went through her desk, but didn't find what he was after. Although he did take her passbook. And broke that saucer I had repaired for her last year, out of spite.

“I then suggested the storage under the stairs, so we went there and I took out the box of her sister's whatnot. By the way, Holmes, we really have to figure a way to store a weapon in there without offending Mrs Hudson's sensibilities.”

“You did have your knife?”

“Yes, but—anyway, I took the box into the sitting room and dumped it onto the table, but it wasn't there, either. He was looking for something paper: a passbook, legal forms, a letter. He seemed to think he'd sent it accidentally from Australia last year, along with that other rubbish—it sounded as if he hadn't known at the time what it was. But whatever he was looking for wasn't in the box, and I couldn't remember seeing anything like that in it when it arrived last winter.

“So: failure. Which left him with two choices: shoot me then, or hold his gun on me and use me as a means of pressuring Mrs Hudson when she arrived. He became overwrought, describing how horrible his mother had been to him. Maybe he wanted me to understand why he had to kill me. I had just decided to get the drop on him when he said something that stopped me cold.”

I fixed my gaze on Holmes. “You and I, we've never really talked about Mrs Hudson. Who she is, how she came to work for you. I know some of it, I've extrapolated more over the years”—(God forbid I should admit to guessing)—“but it's clear that you do not want to discuss it. Now, I don't mind that our housekeeper has a history, but I do think the time has come for you to explain it a bit more. Because the thing her son told me, waving that gun around in my face? He said he intended not just to ruin our lives, but to see Mrs Hudson hanged for murder.”

Holmes knew what I was talking about, I could see that. Worse, Billy knew as well.

“So, he wasn't lying, then. Is her name actually Clarissa?”

“It used to be,” Holmes conceded.

I appeared to be the only one required to start at the beginning here. “Anyway, I could tell that he believed she was guilty of some major crime, and I could also tell that he was working himself up to shoot me. So I waited until he was distracted, then went for him. With my knife. Although, just as I did so, when it was too late to stop, he was saying something about how I would have to do.”

“His precise words?” Holmes demanded.

I'd had three days now to reconstruct Samuel Hudson's final words. “He said, ‘I'll have to take
you
back and see if you'll do.' ”

“ ‘Do' for what?” Billy asked. “Back where?”

I could only shrug my ignorance. “Holmes, does that sound to you as if—”

“—he had a partner? Yes.”

“Perhaps even a superior: there's a bit of the dog-bringing-home-a-bone air about the phrase—but that was all he got out before, well…”

“The knife.”

“Yes.”

“Your arm was cut, too.”

I pushed back my left sleeve, revealing the bandages over the shallow, jagged slice that Mycroft's pet medico had stitched when I arrived; the arm hurt, but was healing. It would not be my first scar. “I had to put the knife up my sleeve when I was getting the box from the storage shelves. But I keep that blade extremely sharp, and what with carrying the box and keeping the tip of it away from the fabric so it wouldn't fall to the floor—well, flesh is soft.”

Looking at their faces, I was glad the wound was concealed by a tidy bandage: even the doctor had been angry over how close I'd let the blade come to something vital.

As it was, Billy's chief concern was a different matter. “You went after a gunman with nothing but a three-inch-long blade?”

“Nearly four. And he wasn't expecting it.”

“I'll bet.”

“Also, Mrs Hudson had polished the floor.”

“He dropped the gun,” Holmes said, “and it went off.”

“Right. The bullet's somewhere under the table.”

“In the bookshelf, actually. The gun also left a dent in the floor where it landed.”

“I imagine it did.”

“When did the lamp fall?”

“Oh, that was before. He recognised it as belonging to Mrs Hudson, and tossed it in the bin.”

“And some pages of
Dombey and Son
fell out.”

“He flipped through it. Whatever he was after wasn't there.”

“Well, that clarifies some of the more distracting details.”

“I tidied up the box of Mrs Hudson's things a bit, and put them back under the stairs, but I was afraid to spend any more time cleaning. So I…left the rest.”

I stared into the fire, caught up in those terrible minutes: gazing down at the figure on the floor, turning away to the only task my mind could come up with, that of neatly packing away Mrs Hudson's rifled possessions in the storage beneath the stairs. Taking my time with every page and piece of it, until the sounds had stopped.

I could feel the two men watching me. I knew there would be a frown of concentration between Holmes' eyebrows. I knew precisely when the penny dropped in his mind.

His question was gentle. “How long did it take Samuel Hudson to die?”

My throat closed up. “I couldn't…I had to…”
Breathe.
One deliberate breath: in, out. “I was afraid of what he might tell the police. About Mrs Hudson.”

“How long?”

“Not long, really. It just felt like forever. He…His noises were…” Outside, London was waking, the day getting under way, but in that sitting room, the only sound was the settle of the dying fire. “Mycroft's doctor agreed, that even if I'd left the knife in place, he'd have died before reaching a hospital.”

I felt Holmes' hand on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. “This was self-defence.”

“It felt like murder.”

Billy chimed in. “It was not.”

But it was. “In any event, I took my time putting away Mrs Hudson's box, then went upstairs to wrap some gauze around my arm. By the time I came back down, he had…stopped. Of course, he'd bled all over, stupid of me not to think of that. And as I said, I was going to clean it up but I looked at the clock and I thought,
Which is worse: leaving blood for Mrs Hudson, or having her come in and find her son?

“So, I took one of the old blankets and dragged him out to the car. Managed to fold him inside the boot. And I was about to drive away when it occurred to me—God, why does the brain just stop functioning in times of stress? It occurred to me that I should leave a message, so you would have some idea what happened. I couldn't very well leave a note saying, ‘Gone to London with…' ”
With the corpse of Mrs Hudson's son.
“For one thing, I couldn't imagine her keeping the police out of it. And for another, there was that statement he'd made about me ‘having to do.' If I was his second-best target, it suggested either you or Mrs Hudson was the person he was after. So I left messages that you would read but no one else would notice. I just didn't imagine it would take you three days to read them. What happened?”

“A series of well-meaning unintended consequences, beginning with a constable's scrub-brush on the footprints—”

I winced.

“—and continuing when Mrs Hudson permitted Lestrade to take the knife down and away—”

“Good Lord.”

“—then coming to a climax with the unfortunate coincidence that Samuel Hudson and Mary Russell share a blood type.”