Locked Rooms Part 15

"Quite. Yes, that should be fine." And if this relatively sensible child and her strong young escort with the bright blue motor weren't enough to keep Russell from harm, little would be. "And if I might ask one more favour: I believe Rus-Mary would be happiest if she did not know I'd been here. Collusion between husband and friend might prove . . . alienating."

"Right-o," she said cheerfully.

He stood up, taking her hand again, holding it for a moment so that he was bent over her almost like a courtier. Then he left, and Flo watched him go; he was, she thought, really pretty swell.

That, thought Holmes, took care of Sunday and Monday at the very least. Which left only the afternoon and evening to get through.

Walking towards the lawyer's office, Holmes noticed a news-agent's with a small sign in the window advising OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED. He wrote down Hammett's name, told the proprietor that he'd take anything the man could locate by the fellow, and was strolling up the street (for the seventh time) as Russell came out of Norbert's office, pulling on her gloves with little jerks of irritation.

"Holmes," she said in surprise when she spotted him. "What are you doing here?"

"I was finished with my business, and thought I might accompany you on this fine afternoon."

She looked at him sideways. "Holmes, I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather like to spend some time in the house on my own."

"But of course, that was merely the direction in which I was headed. You remember the Italian cafe we ate at the other day? The owner happened to mention that his great-grandfather was a childhood friend of Paganini and had a sheaf of the composer's early attempts at music. I thought I might add a section on my monograph concerning childhood patterns of behaviour that extend into maturity."

"Yes? I didn't know you had such a monograph in process; it sounds interesting."

So they walked the mile in amicable discussion of the nonexistent monograph, and after Holmes had seen her safely into the house (using the excuse of seeing if the 'phone and electrical companies had done their duties) he went off, whistling a brisk tune the Italian had composed for violin.

At the end of the block, he paused to look back at the house that was holding his wife, in both senses of the word. The place reminded him of one of those primitive societies so beloved of archaeologists, where a people had stood up from their breakfast and walked into nothingness. The kitchen cupboard still held the packet of coffee used the morning the Russells had climbed into their new Maxwell motorcar and driven away, now so stale that, when he had tried it the other morning, it had given him little more than a brown colour and a sour taste in the cup. The half-packed trunks in all rooms but Russell's bore mute evidence of a future that would not exist for three people. He wondered if Russell had found her mother's night-gown inside the laundry hamper.

He shook his head and turned his back on the house of the dead.

Holmes had no intention of visiting the Italian's cafe (although its owner did in fact own two or three sheets of music in what he swore was Paganini's hand). Instead, he set about a systematic interview of those inhabitants of Pacific Heights he hadn't yet spoken with.

Eighteen years in London is nothing-there, even eighty years after an event one might expect to find a high number of houses inhabited by the families' descendants. In San Francisco, however, particularly given the circ.u.mstances of the past two decades, this was not the case. He had already discovered this when he had questioned the immediate neighbours on Friday and discovered that only two of the eleven houses contained the same residents as they had in 1906. Those two had, admittedly, proved useful, one of them describing how the Russells had been among the first to move back into their damaged house, the other providing the name of the postman who had worked the streets for many years. It had been the postman-or mailman-who had come up with the piquant information concerning the Russell argument, a detail of which Holmes had been very dubious and which had necessitated an interminable round of enticing similar feats of recall, until he finally was forced to admit that the postal gentleman had a perfectly extraordinary memory, prodigious in its powers of retention when it came to t.i.t-bits of gossip.

He'd left profoundly grateful that the man had not delivered to Baker Street, and that he seemed to have not a sinew of the blackmailer's impulse in his makeup.

Still, the interviews with the neighbours had taken most of Friday morning, and hunting down the mailman the bulk of the afternoon. He could only hope that today's research proved more brisk.

It did not. Worse, the day's ratio of 1906 residents to newcomers was even lower than Friday's. Of the first ten dwellings to receive his enquiries, four had no idea who had lived in their house in the year of the fire; three knew the names but not their current location ("somewhere down the Peninsula" seemed a hugely popular dwelling-place for those who had fled the city); two were new householders in new houses, having bought cracked and leaning wrecks and built anew; and one alone had lived in that house at the time of the earthquake, and even recalled a period spent under canvas in the nearby park; unfortunately, that person had been twelve years old at the time, had been visiting from his home in that mythic land "down the Peninsula," and had been ushered back to that safe haven within days, as soon as motorcars could traverse the littered streets. The man remembered no-one named Russell.

The pattern held with a depressing reliability. At the end of four hours, Holmes had drunk enough tea to bring him to sympathy with the Boston rebels, found the coffee no better, taken to refusing the offers of a "quick one" through concern for his liver, and come up with a mere handful of residents who had been present at the time of the quake. Five of them had remained in the city during the weeks that followed; three of those had fled the approaching flames as far as Golden Gate Park; the other two had lodged with friends in relatively undamaged houses in other parts of the city. The maids who opened the doors to him suggested that a visit in the morning might be more productive, and he reluctantly agreed, although Sunday was often a difficult time to interview persons of this cla.s.s, for reasons different from those on a week-day.

Then, when the afternoon sun was going soft with the incoming fog, he met Miss Adderley.

Chapter Thirteen.

Miss Hermione Adderley was ninety if she was a day, and might have admitted to ten years more if he'd been her doctor, or priest. She was well guarded by a butler who looked nearly as old, and a house-maid in her late forties who bore a striking resemblance to the butler. All three had spines as straight and unbending as one of the gleaming bra.s.s pokers arrayed beside the ten-foot-wide marble fireplace, and Holmes would never have got inside had he been mere trade. But the old lady, whose shoes had the unbent look of those whose owner spent most of her waking hours in one chair or another, was fiercely curious about the world outside her window, and before the fragile old man at the door could turn the visitor away, the maid was behind him, whispering in his ear.

Disapproval and suspicion stiffened every thread of the butler's spotless black suit, but its wearer stood back, bowed Holmes in, and accepted hat, walking-stick, and overcoat, handing them over to the maid. He then picked up the gleaming silver tray from the polished teak table, held it out for Holmes' card, and showed the visitor into the room to the left of the door-way. His gait as he went to take his mistress the card told Holmes that the man was a martyr to rheumatism, but he crossed the freshly waxed marble floor without event and was back in moments, murmuring that Holmes should come with him.

The old lady in the brocade chair was so tiny her head did not clear the chair's oval back, and her creaseless shoes rested on a needlepoint ha.s.sock. Her hand in his felt like a bird's foot, so delicate he was afraid to close his fingers lest he leave bruises. But her cornflower blue eyes were undimmed by age, her pure white hair soft but full, and the myriad wrinkles that made up her face seemed to quiver with interest.

"Mr Holmes," she said in a high, thin voice, "from London. Pray have a seat so I don't get a neck-cramp looking up at you. How do you find London these days?"

He settled onto a chair across the bay window from her, trying to arrange his knees so his legs didn't rise up around his ears. "I left London in January, when a person would find it cold and dreary. I imagine that in April it is most pleasant."

"And are the fogs as bad as ever they were?"

"So long as the town continues to heat its homes, there will be yellow fogs."

"I have very fond memories of your 'pea-soupers,'" the old woman confided. "We spent some months there when I was a young sprig of a thing, and I escaped the eyes of my governess under the blessing of just such a fog. I had a beau," she explained, one eyelid lowering in a manner that would have been coquettish had it not also been self-mocking.

Holmes laughed aloud, and the old blue eyes danced. Tea was brought then, and as the maid poured and offered the sugar, she surrept.i.tiously watched the visitor. Whatever she saw in him a.s.suaged her suspicion; her spine relaxed and with it her tongue, so that before she left them, she raised an admonitory finger and said to Holmes, "Now you watch that she doesn't get over-tired. And if she tells you she wants you to take her out dancing, she's not allowed out on a Sat.u.r.day night."

"I hear, and obey," Holmes said with a small bow of his head. When the door had closed again, Miss Adderley picked up her child-sized eggsh.e.l.l cup.

"Mimi has lived in this house her whole life. I think she forgets that I'm not actually her grandmother. Her mother worked in the kitchen, and Hymes-the butler-is the child's grandfather. So, Mr Holmes, what brings you to San Francisco and to my door?"

Holmes a.s.sembled his words with care, aware that too long a story would tire his hostess cruelly, and too little would not satisfy her.

"I am acting on behalf of a woman whose family was here at the time of the earthquake and fire."

"This would have been 1906?"

"Yes."

"I ask because the city shakes and burns with regularity. I remember the 1865 quake vividly."

"No, this was the recent one. Her parents have since died, but she wishes to know more details about the weeks following the fire. They had a house here in Pacific Heights, and I believe lived in a tent for some time."

"As did a number of us, in Lafayette Park."

"Ah. You were here, then?"

"I was. And Hymes, and Mimi, and the rest. We had a staff of, let me see, seven at the time. It was normally nine, but the footman and an upstairs maid had just eloped."

"Did you by any chance spend some time in the park yourself?"

"Certainly. Best time of my life, those three weeks, an absolute lark. Other than the bathing facilities, but then, an old lady doesn't need to be too fussy about her toilette. No, Hymes found a tent somewhere, the Army I think, and Mimi and three of the others moved in with me. Hymes stayed in the house, at first to fight any fire that might blow in, and later to discourage any looters. I told him not to be silly, that it didn't do any of us any good if he saved the house only to have it fall down on his head, but he wouldn't listen, nor would the other men. They buried the silver, in case of robbers-silly boys, they lost one of the spoons for the longest time, unearthing an entire flower bed before they came across it in the branches of a rose-bush-and took turns watching over the house and over me at the park. They enjoyed the adventure, too-we even had concerts while we were there, around a grand piano one of the families had pushed through the streets from the other side of Van Ness. Yes, everyone was quite restless for a while after we moved back inside."

"So, you lived in the park for about three weeks?"

"Twenty-three days, I believe it was."

"The people I'm interested in were named Russell. Charles was an American, would have been in his early thirties, tall, blond hair. His wife-"

"His wife's name was Judith. English girl, Jewish I think. And weren't there children?"

"Two."

"A little girl, and a baby. Can't remember if the baby was a boy or a girl."

"A boy, in fact. And it's the daughter who is now asking me to make the enquiries."

"What sort of enquiries?"

"Details about her parents. As I said, they died, in a motor accident some years later. In particular, she would like to know about the period in which the family was living in a tent."

He picked up his tea to cover the intensity of his interest, sipping the smoky brew from the paper-thin teacup, larger brother of the child-sized model on the saucer beside her. But he need not have worried; she was sitting, head bent, brows furrowed in concentration. After a moment she said, "Mr Holmes, would you be so good as to bring the sherry and two gla.s.ses from that cupboard over there?"

The sherry was dry and smelt of the Spanish sun, and under its influence, memory stirred. The tiny hand reached out for a silver bell and rang it. The door came open so quickly, it was evident that Mimi had been standing just outside it.

"Yes, Mum?"

"Dear, I need you to bring me the photograph alb.u.m of the fire. You remember where it is?"

"Yes, Mum." The door shut, and silence fell, the old woman occupied with her inner images. In minutes the maid returned with a large morocco-bound alb.u.m, laying a white cloth on the table before she set the book before her mistress. She adjusted the book slightly and stood back. "Would there be anything else, Mum?"

"No, thank you, Mimi."

"Beg pardon, Mum, but Cook asks if you'll be wanting dinner delayed?"

The question was nicely phrased, Holmes thought. It served to ask Miss Adderley if she was going to need another place laid without setting the question out in the open, while at the same time reminding Holmes that it was getting on to evening and he'd promised not to tire the elderly woman.

He was the one who answered. "You needn't delay on my behalf," he said. "I have an appointment before too long, and won't be staying. If we haven't finished our business by that time, perhaps I might impose on you for a second visit?"

The offer of a return pleased both women, the protective Mimi and the lonely Miss Adderley. Mimi sketched a curtsey and left them alone, the frail hand already lifting back the alb.u.m cover.

She turned half a dozen pages until she came to a photograph of the city burning. It had been taken from a hill above the downtown, long shadows indicating that it was early morning. The buildings were crisp and clear, those closer to the camera revealing their missing cornices, shattered windows, and huge cracks running up the brick. The streets were adrift with brick and rubble, the mounds studded incongruously with chairs and wardrobes that had been carried so far, then abandoned. Men and women stood about, staring up at the cloud of angry smoke billowing grey against the lighter sky. To one side, a dead horse lay in the traces of its wagon, half buried by the collapsed wall of a building.

After a minute, she turned the page.

The next photograph was at once shocking and oddly rea.s.suring. Again from a hilltop, again the fires raging in the background, but along the front of the picture, picnics were taking place. A group of young men, some of them hatless but all in ties and tidy suits, sat and lay back on their elbows on the gra.s.s around a cloth arranged with sandwich rolls and bottles of lemonade. In the centre of the photograph, with the smoke cloud huge and furious above them and the dapper young men glancing at them from the sides, stood a pair of young women-girls, really-dressed in their spring finery. Hats elaborate with feathers, new spring frocks, their postures shouting their awareness that the youths at their feet were of greater interest and importance than the city burning at their backs. It might have been an ill.u.s.tration of the careless self-obsession of the young, yet somehow it was not. For some reason, the posture of the young ladies and the ease of their admirers conveyed a sense of defiance in the face of catastrophe: One knew somehow that these young people were quite aware of the horrors creeping up on them, yet one suspected that they were merely biding their time until they might do something about it.

Rea.s.suring, the a.s.sertion of young strength in the time of the city's need.

Holmes found himself smiling, and she turned the next page, her fingers swiping back the tissue protector to reveal a refugee camp.

The profile of the hill on which the camp was laid was the familiar park a few streets away-Lafayette Park, little more than a gra.s.sy knoll with the incongruous house parked among the trees at the top, the whole of it two streets wide and two deep. In the first photo, the gra.s.s was a jumble of possessions-bedrolls and steamer trunks, strapped orange-crates and disa.s.sembled bed-steads. All the women wore the elaborate hats of the period, and most of the men were missing.

In the next picture in the sequence, a tent city had sprung up in front of the elaborate Victorian houses that faced the park. Here, the rising smoke was closer, possessions had been gathered into rough heaps, and a few canvas tents had been raised, the whiteness of their sides and the unbeaten gra.s.s around their bases clear signs that the photograph had been taken soon after they had been installed. The women were mostly bare-headed, and the men had returned, to stand about in their shirt-sleeves.

"The Army brought the tents over," Miss Adderley said, "I believe from Fort Mason. At first there were soldiers to set them up, but then they were called off to guard the downtown from looters and we were left to our own resources. Fortunately, a number of old soldiers lived in the area, so we managed. This was our tent, here." A gnarled finger touched a taut white peak near the house at the top of the hill, then continued down to the bottom to turn to the next page.

Now, the Lafayette Park tent city was well established, peopled by an affluent group of refugees, long-skirted women with the occasional hat, their prized bits of furniture and statuary bulging the sides of the tents-a sofa here, two candelabra on a packing-case table there. All the children wore shoes, and the men, though still not as numerous as the women, invariably wore waistcoats and bowler hats.

As the days went on, the tents began to sag, more men appeared, the children started to look more unkempt, and the women took on harried expressions. The gra.s.s turned to mud; sloppy tarpaulins draped possessions.

Then, five pages in, the small hand splayed across the page and Miss Adderley leant forward with a noise of satisfaction.

"Yes, I thought so. You see the figure in trousers there? If you look closely, you'll see it's a woman. That was Mrs Russell." Holmes already had his magnifying-gla.s.s from his pocket and was bending over the page. "That lamp on the other end of the settee is quite bright, if you like," she suggested.

He carried the alb.u.m over to the lamp, resting the top edge of the book against the arm of the settee. He switched on the lamp, brought his gla.s.s into play, and Judith Russell looked back at him from over the years.

Her daughter's hair, eyes, and height all came from the father's side, but the tilt of the chin was instantly recognisable, and the tug of amus.e.m.e.nt at the corner of the mouth was exactly as Holmes had seen it a thousand times.

For the first time, Holmes felt a stab of regret, as a personal element entered the case: His wife's mother was a person he'd like to have met.

He shook off the distracting thought, and shifted the gla.s.s to one side.

Only to find, on a chair at the woman's side, feet dangling and a book in her lap, his wife as a small child. Her blonde hair was a bird's-nest of curls, and she was as utterly oblivious to her surroundings as ever she was when similarly bent over one of her Hebrew texts. His gla.s.s lingered here even longer before he tore it away and moved on.

The only indications of a younger sibling were the small tin cup and spoon piled with the other plates and a silver rattle discarded atop a sack of flour, although the closed tent door suggested a sleeping child within. Some days had clearly pa.s.sed since the first photograph of the tent city-the wear on the gra.s.s alone told him that-and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had a.s.serted themselves. Thus, hats and even skirts had given way to head-ties and the occasional trousers, and drying laundry peeped from the tie-ropes as the distance between park (with its water supply and living quarters) and home (where laundry might be decently hung to dry) grew ever more onerous; however, at the same time the demarcations between one family's quarters and the next had become more formalised: chairs lined up along the agreed-to boundaries, facing inward to the informal court-yard before each tent; one such division had even been neatly drawn with a line of white pebbles. "Streets" had formed themselves between the ranks of outdoor "drawing rooms"; children played there, a woman with a bucket of water walked away from the camera, and a man approached.

Holmes' interest quickened again, and he moved the gla.s.s over the distant figure. What came into focus was a tall, light-haired man with a moustache, eerily familiar despite his gender. His spectacles caught the light, his bowler hat blurred slightly as he returned it to his head, having raised it to the woman with the bucket. The photographer must have called his subjects to attention in some manner because several faces were raised towards the lens, including that of the man trudging up the hill.

The blond man's twill trousers were spattered with dark stains and one knee looked in need of mending. On his upper body he wore only a shirt, the collar missing, sleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal a clean bandage on one wrist. He appeared to hold himself erect by will alone, and Holmes did not need to see his face to know that it wore the look of a soldier in the trenches, the gaze both interior and far away. This man ached with fatigue and with the things he had witnessed, longed to collapse into sleep for a day and a night, yet equally clearly he was only here temporarily, for his shoulders were braced against the labours to come.

Speaking over his shoulder, Holmes said, "I should like to borrow one of these photographs, if I may? I shall take care to return it undamaged."

"Certainly," the old woman replied.

Only then did Holmes stand upright, taking the alb.u.m back to the table to allow her to turn the remaining pages, none of which proved of any interest to him. He turned back to the picture showing Judith Russell, eased it out of its mounts, and laid it before the old woman.

"That is Judith Russell. What can you tell me about her?"

"A very fine young woman, full of spirit. English, she was-you'd have expected her to be one of those who found the conditions trying, who burst into tears and wrung their hands uselessly at the merest nothing. I remember, one silly young thing found lice in her son's hair a few days after the fire, and collapsed into utter hysterics. And it was Mrs Russell with her fancy accent who put the girl back together again, getting her calm, sending for the barber, helping her boil the child's bedding. Most of the families left fairly quickly, as soon as they could find other arrangements and store their valuables. Others moved in as soon as the tents went vacant, of course-persons whose homes were in areas less prosperous than Pacific Heights." She laughed suddenly, her eyes sparkling. "I remember when a bevy of ladies of the evening from the Tenderloin arrived and began to set up . . . Well, they were not made welcome by the local residents, and were sent on their way. A pity, really, they were much more cheerful than my neighbours by that point."

"Miss Adderley, do you recall any incident in particular, involving a strange man coming to the Russell tent?"

"There may have been any number-my tent was in a different area of the park, and after the first days I spent most of my time down in neighbourhoods that needed help, serving soup and distributing bread."

"I understand," he said, taking care not to show disappointment. However, she was not finished.

"There was a thing I heard about, walking one morning with some of the women down to where the bread was distributed. I am not absolutely certain that it concerned the Russells, you understand, but I believe it may have. It had happened the previous evening, three or four days after the earthquake itself, because the fire was out and the rain had just started. Might that have been the Sunday? Yes, I believe so. At first, the rains were welcome-we gathered it in buckets, the children ran about wildly, all we ladies washed our hair. But that evening, very early, everyone retreated inside their tents-what with the huge relief of knowing that the fires were at an end, and the blessedness of having shelter, and general exhaustion, this visitor came and found most everyone inside, so that he'd had to ask his way. He stopped at one tent, and the woman's children were asleep so she stepped outside to answer him quietly. She said he was dressed like a tramp, all dirt and mismatched garments. However, that would have described most of us by that time, and underneath everything he seemed polite and nicely spoken, so when he asked where Charles Russell might be found, she directed him to the Russells' tent and stood in her door-way to see that he found the right one.

"As soon as she heard the little girl scream, she knew what had happened, and she felt just terrible. Not to have warned the man first, you see. He'd very clearly been caught in a fire, possibly some sort of explosion-you know how a puff of burning gasoline can singe off eyelashes? Well, that's what had happened to this poor fellow. Swollen eyes, raw-looking skin, and no hair at all, lashes, brows, and even the front part of his head that his hat didn't cover. And he'd smeared some sort of white ointment on it as well-he startled this lady, so he must have scared the little Russell girl half to death. I can't think . . . Why are you smiling?"

"My . . . client remembered what she called a 'faceless man.' I think you've just found him for me."

"An apt description, I should think. We depend largely on hair for facial definition, do we not?"

"What about his beard?"

"I don't know that she mentioned a beard. But then, lack of a beard is not as startling as a lack of eyebrows, is it?"