Locked Rooms Part 30

"Flo, I really don't care if you haven't slept in a week. What did your father look like?"

"He used to be handsome once," she replied, and settled her back against the head-board in resignation, although I watched her closely to make sure she didn't fade into sleep again. "At least, that's what Mummy says, and the picture she has of him is kind of dreamy, in an old-fashioned kind of a way."

"How tall was he?"

"Oh, yes, his height. Poor Daddy, he was so sensitive about it. Used to wear shoes to make him taller. Oh, thank G.o.d!" she exclaimed as the house-maid backed in with a tray of coffee. "This feels like one of those horrible dreams you keep trying to wake up from and it drags you back."

"Just a little more and I'll let you go back to sleep," I said ruthlessly. "What about a ring?"

"A ring?" she said uncertainly, her cup paused in front of her mouth.

"A pinkie ring with a stone."

She took a gulp, gasped a little with the heat of it, then wheezed out, "How did you know that? He never used to, but when I saw him later, he had it. I always figured it meant he'd made it big after the divorce. Although it was a little flashy."

"You mean, he didn't wear the ring when you were small and they were still married, but he did later on? When did you see him, later?"

Her face took on a look of childish shiftiness and she glanced at the door, where the maid had just gone out. "I didn't."

"Flo, I know you saw him. When was it?"

"Mummy didn't like it."

"I won't tell her. When?"

She let out a gusty breath. "Just every so often. After the fire, I didn't see him for a long time, and when he came back he sort of scared me, his face I mean. But then I could see that it was him, and he told me that he'd gotten it rescuing people, so it was all right, sort of. Sad, I mean, and not nice to look at, but he was so brave and that mattered. But not to Mummy."

"Your mother wouldn't let you see him?"

"She didn't like it. They had a bad divorce, you know, and later on he kept asking her for money. But I didn't see why that should mean I couldn't see him. He was fun, you know?"

"Do you remember what years you saw him?"

"No."

"Flo, please. Try."

She screwed up her face again, thinking hard. "He was here for a couple of my birthdays-that's in September," she added, "the twenty-fifth. He was here for my tenth, and I think my twelfth-yes, it was pretty much every other year."

She was the same age as I, born in 1900. "And your fourteenth?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, he brought me a very pretty pearl necklace from Paris that year," she said happily. "I told Mummy they were good fakes that a friend had gotten tired of and gave me, but they're real, and they were from him."

I rubbed my face, suddenly tired. Flo's father, who had been my own father's close friend in his youth, whose crimes during the fire had driven the final wedge between them, had been here immediately before the accident.

"Tell me," I said, "do you know a woman, she might have been an acquaintance of your father's, who is taller than he is by several inches, and younger, with brown hair she wears up on her head?"

As descriptions went, it did not go very far, Flo's quizzical expression seemed to say. I began to tell her it was all right, but she surprised me.

"Not a friend, but his sister used to have long brown hair she wore up."

"Sister? The one who owns a night-club in Paris?"

"I don't know about that, but last I heard, she lived in Paris. She was actually his half-sister, that's what he told me, a lot younger than him. Didn't look a bit like him, and Daddy kind of flirted with her, which was a bit strange. Still, she was nice enough to me, sent me pretty things to wear. When Mummy didn't catch them and take them from me," she said, and yawned. She added, "Although she must be some kind of old maid, to be so devoted to her half-brother. Hung on his every word."

The "sister" sounded less and less like a blood relation, but I suppose it hardly mattered. "Do you have a photograph of either of them?"

"Sure, why? Mary, what is going on?"

I thought that I preferred her stupefied by sleep.

"I think your father may have been involved in something criminal."

"Oh, bunk! Have you been talking with Mummy? She's got crime on the brain when it comes to Daddy."

"No, I haven't spoken to your mother. May I see the pictures?"

I thought that the only hope was if I did not pause for explanations, but simply overwhelmed her with peremptory demands. It worked, in that it got her out of bed to pad in her pyjamas over to her childhood book-shelves and draw out a picture alb.u.m.

She'd hidden the photos of her father behind harmless snapshots of friends and holiday scenery. One of him, young and handsome, with hair as light as my father's (blond hair on a guest-room pillow, the machinery in the back of my mind noted: blond enough that his face would not show much of a stubble some days after it had been burnt) holding a black-haired baby girl in his arms: Flo had her mother's hair. The second photograph showed Robert Greenfield some years later, turning his scarred face slightly away from the camera as he lay on a deck-chair with some stretch of the Mediterranean behind him; a third showed him later yet, his body beginning to thicken and his hairline receding, standing beside a handsome, somewhat taller woman dressed in pre-war fashion-but when I took my eyes from their figures to study the background, my knees gave way and I had to fumble for a chair.

The photograph had been taken at the Lodge.

"Who's she?" I asked Flo, although I thought I knew already.

Flo squinted at the photo. "That's Aunt Rosa. Daddy's half-sister. She came to California a couple of times. Look at that hat-this must've been taken before the earthquake."

"When was her other visit?"

"h.e.l.l, I don't know. I was maybe eight or nine. Yes, that was when Daddy went away."

("Looked familiar," Mr Gordimer had told me-he had in fact seen her before, nearly twenty years earlier.) Flo pressed other snapshots into my hands and I was dimly aware of glancing at them, but when I looked up again she had gone back to her coffee and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, brushing her hair vigorously.

"I'm going to borrow this one, Flo," I said.

"Ninety-three, ninety-four," she chanted.

I put the others on top of the alb.u.m that lay on the shelf and walked towards the door. Her hair-brush clattered to the floor as she jumped off the bed and came after me.

"No, you can't borrow anything if you don't tell me why you want it. Here, give it back."

She made to grab it from me, but I held it out of her reach, looked straight into her eyes, and said, "Don't."

She took a sharp step back, her eyes going wide and hurt at the force of my tone. "I'll return it," I said, and walked out.

I heard her call my name as I went down the stairs, but I did not stop. Jeeves managed to get the door open before I could touch the handle, and I trotted down the steps, not in the least surprised to find Holmes seated on the wall beside the entrance gate, a slim book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

He watched me come down the drive, and when I handed him the photograph, all he said was, "Her father?"

"And a woman, who may or may not be the half-sister he claims. She runs a cabaret in Paris; he's lived there since around 1908."

"Very good," he said. "Now we have a chance to lay hands on them."

"If we're going to talk to the police, I think I ought to bathe first. I don't look like the most reputable individual."

"Let us go by the house on the way to the hotel and see if Long and Hammett are still there."

We set off walking, but on reaching the next street a taxi went past, slow and vacant. Holmes put up his hand and we climbed in, and he had the driver go past the house to fetch the other two men. Hammett came out with a bundle in his arms, wrapped in a torn piece of dust-cloth. When he settled in, he said, "I didn't know that you'd want to leave this in the house. If you don't want to trust the hotel safe, I can recommend a nice discreet bank for you."

On the way, Holmes asked the driver to stop at a photographic shop around the corner from the St Francis.

"You don't think we should give the photograph to the police?" I asked him.

"I'd prefer to have a copy of our own first."

"Or perhaps a number of copies," I said.

"Quite."

The driver paused at the edge of traffic for Holmes to run inside; he was back in moments. Once at the St Francis, as I turned on the taps in the bath-tub and went in and out of the rooms with my clean clothing, I listened to the three men discussing the case over the lunch that had been sent up. I shut off the taps and lowered myself into the hot water, lying on my back and allowing my head to submerge until only my face stood above the surface.

Alone at last with nothing but my breathing, I pulled out of my mind the small treasure Holmes and Hammett had given me the night before, and looked at it.

The brake rod had been cut.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Russell had not sent the motor off the cliff. Mary Russell's argument with her brother had absolutely nothing to do with it. The brake rod had been sawed nearly through and when my father had pressed his foot against the pedal to slow the car at the top of the hill, the rod had snapped and the motorcar had swerved to the right, directly at the abyss.

My only sin was being a survivor.

And survival, I thought, might be something I could live with.

After a while I raised my head above the water, and as I scrubbed the grime off my ankles and hands, I listened to the conversation in the next room, following the points of the discussion as they came up, one at a time.

"If Robert Greenfield had one key, he could've had two," Hammett said, his contribution to the question of the house break-in of the previous March. The sequence, I thought, was fairly clear, once one put Flo's information together with the telegrams from Watson and Mycroft.

In January, an American living in Paris-either Robert Greenfield or his "half-sister" Rosa-had picked up a copy of the London Times Times and seen a letter that indicated Mr Sherlock Holmes was taking a quick and urgent trip to the Continent. And as Mrs Hudson had specifically mentioned in her telegram to Holmes that she had received several telephone enquiries concerning our return, we could a.s.sume that for the price of a trunk call and a little bit of play-acting-no task for a woman accustomed to the cabaret stage-one of the two had prised the information from the chronically trusting housekeeper not only that Holmes and I were on our way to India, but that afterwards we were headed to California as well. and seen a letter that indicated Mr Sherlock Holmes was taking a quick and urgent trip to the Continent. And as Mrs Hudson had specifically mentioned in her telegram to Holmes that she had received several telephone enquiries concerning our return, we could a.s.sume that for the price of a trunk call and a little bit of play-acting-no task for a woman accustomed to the cabaret stage-one of the two had prised the information from the chronically trusting housekeeper not only that Holmes and I were on our way to India, but that afterwards we were headed to California as well.

Exactly what drove the pair into action could only be guessed at-and I noticed that Holmes in the next room made no attempt to do so, although Long and Hammett happily argued about the possibilities: Hammett proposed that the hair-trigger of Greenfield's guilty conscience needed only the tiniest pressure to perceive us as being on their trail; Long thought it likely that the changes in international relations since the War ended meant that France would be more willing to extradite a resident foreign criminal. Personally, I suspected that Flo's father, now a man in his middle fifties, was simply tiring of Europe, wanted to come home, and knew that if he were to be linked to that dead policeman, he would be a fugitive for the rest of his life. He'd tried, back in 1914, to enter the house, and been thwarted by the watch-dogs. This was his last chance to clean matters up.

In any case, the two had reacted instantaneously, scrambling to locate an aeroplane for Rosa-not Robert, whose memorable scars would surely attract the attention of his fellow pa.s.sengers and, as far as he knew, be recognisable by me. A brief conversation with a ticket-agent would have told them that the only P. & O. boat whose sailing coincided with our hasty departure from Southern England was the Marguerite, Marguerite, which would be in Port Said on the Tuesday. The aeroplane got Rosa there before us. She boarded as Lilly Montera, kept a low profile, and asked questions of various porters and pa.s.sengers concerning our status and confirming our San Francisco destination. In Aden, the last port before India, she left the boat. which would be in Port Said on the Tuesday. The aeroplane got Rosa there before us. She boarded as Lilly Montera, kept a low profile, and asked questions of various porters and pa.s.sengers concerning our status and confirming our San Francisco destination. In Aden, the last port before India, she left the boat.

It was just possible that the aeroplane had continued south after leaving her at Port Said, taking Robert to Aden, where he had set up a desperate and unsuccessful attempt at murder. I was still unconvinced that the falling balcony had not been an accident, but it shouldn't be hugely difficult to find out if he was there.

After Aden, either she alone or the two of them would have caught the next boat out, sailing directly to California, no stops along the way-or if she had sailed alone, he would have met her here. They had come to my house by night, aware of the watch-dogs across the street-and as Mr Hammett had pointed out, there was nothing to have kept Greenfield from making a copy-ten copies-of the key before ostentatiously handing the original over to my father back in 1906. (As I worked at my nails with the brush, I made a mental note to have all the locks changed, as soon as possible.) The two of them had spent the daylight hours inside the house searching for anything that might incriminate him; they'd found Father's letter eventually, in the library or my parents' bedroom or in Mother's desk-wherever Father had stashed it before setting off for the Lodge that fateful week-end in 1914. However, the doc.u.ment had led them no closer to the two boxes, and in the end they had given up the search. They had burnt the letter in the fireplace, along with some related newspaper articles, and rested in the beds upstairs until the full moon was bright enough to guide their departing steps. It must have been frustrating, I mused in the cooling water, to know the boxes were out there in the garden, but be unable to locate them.

"Do you think he would have done what he did, had he realised that the entire family was in the car?" This was Long's voice, and the thought gave me pause. Yes, Father's letter had said that he intended to go to the Lodge by himself. He would have told his friends that, and . . . and perhaps I had mentioned to Flo that my father was going but we were not. It was something I would have done-my adolescent self would have complained in either case: If I'd gone, I was being forced to go; if I hadn't gone, I was being left behind. And Flo's father had been in town just then, with a pearl necklace for her fourteenth-birthday present. She could have pa.s.sed on the information I had provided. . . .

But sooner or later, after Father had died, Greenfield would have returned to silence Mother. He knew his old friend, knew that Charles Russell would have told his wife what he'd found in the back garden. What Greenfield had done later to the others who might have known, the Longs and Dr Ginzberg, proved that sooner or later he'd have come for Mother.

Probably not Levi, an infant during the fire, only nine at the crash. And possibly not me-I had, after all, lived unmolested in England all those years. But when I grew up and married the world's most ruthlessly efficient detective, it must have caused my father's old friend many sleepless nights. And with the codicil of the will drawing near its conclusion, with it would go twenty years of enforced isolation from snooping strangers-a new owner would surely take the jungle to the ground, and below. And then in January, when I turned with that efficient detective towards California, would have been the final straw-my presence here couldn't be risked.

So, had Greenfield seen the entire family when we stopped at Serra Beach, and cut the brake line nonetheless? Or had he seen only the motor, after Father had dropped the three of us at the cafe, with none but its driver walking away?

I sat very still, scowling unseeing at the soap-dish. There was something in that thought, a presence in the back of my mind very like that which had pushed at me beside the lake the other morning at dawn, something (They died . . .) (They died . . .) that I was not seeing. that I was not seeing.

(Something . . .) But Long's voice broke into my mental search and I lost the train of thought.

"My father was not happy with the idea of concealing the box, but he did so, because he trusted Charles Russell."

Yes: After the fire, the relationship between my father and him had changed, as if something (something was there waiting to be noticed something was-but no, I had lost it again) . . . as if some event had forced a degree of distance in their former intimacy and mutual respect.

I pulled the plug and dressed, in trousers and a clean shirt-no need to appear as an heiress today. When I joined them, Long was just leaving, as his a.s.sistant needed to be away during the afternoon and he did not like to close the bookstore unless it was necessary.

"I am very willing to stay and help with anything," he offered, but Holmes shook his head.

"I shall bring some copies of the Greenfield photograph by your shop. If you would care to distribute them throughout Chinatown, that would be a great a.s.sistance."

While Holmes walked Mr Long to the door, I picked up a rather dried-looking sandwich and ate it hungrily, washing it down with tepid coffee. Why was it, I reflected, that when one's appet.i.te did return, there never seemed to be anything the least bit interesting to eat?

But I filled my stomach while Holmes and Hammett debated how best to go about the next step, namely, suggesting to the police with their superior resources that they might help us find Greenfield and his half-sister. I piled my things onto the serving tray and went to fetch some boots from the wardrobe, and was sitting at the table lacing them up when the telephone beside me rang.

It took me a moment to understand the voice, as there seemed to be a minor riot going on in the background. "Mr Auberon? Is that you?" I said loudly. "Can you repeat what you said?"

"I'm very sorry to disturb you, madam, but there are some children here who are insisting that they-"

"We'll be down in an instant, Mr Auberon. Tell them that we'll be right down."

I grabbed my coat and headed towards the door, which Holmes already had open, driven there by the urgency of my tone. "It's your Irregulars," I told him.

His face lighted with joy, and as he galloped down the corridor towards the lift he cried, "Come, Russell-the game's afoot!"

Hammett, catching up his coat and walking beside me with more decorum, looked at me askance. "He actually says that?"

"Only to annoy me," I told him, and all but shoved him towards the opening lift door.

The dignified St Francis doorman was attempting with ill success to keep at bay an affront of urchins, denizens of the streets wearing an interesting a.s.sortment of extreme and ill-fitting raiment. Upon seeing Holmes, they dodged around the poor man's outstretched arms like so many football forwards and came up short before Holmes, bouncing up and down on their toes and squeaking in excitement.

One long, commanding adult hand went up, and they settled instantly back onto their feet, quivering like retrievers ordered to sit.

"Mr Garcia, you have something to report?"

The lad whipped off his cloth cap and all but saluted. "Hey, mister, sir, they came to the house, and we followed them!" His response set off the others, who chimed in with great enthusiasm but little intelligible detail. He shushed at his fellows with no result, then started slapping at them with his cap. This had the desired effect; rebellion quelled, he turned back to Holmes. "They headed down Market Street. I've got some of my gang on them, but you need to hurry."

Holmes laid a hand on the boy's shoulder and turned him towards the entrance, calling over his head to the doorman, "Taxi, please! Now, Mr Garcia, tell me who came and what they did."

In bits and s.n.a.t.c.hes, interrupted by contributions from the others and by the process of piling three adults and what proved to be only three children into the taxi, we learned that the boy on the fire-escape duty had heard a noise from the apartment hall-way just a little before eleven o'clock. Looking in, he had seen a man bent over the lock of the Hammett door, and behind him a woman, looking up and down the hall-way nervously. It had taken the man several minutes to breach the lock (this was imparted with scorn, and the aside that the lad telling this part of the story had an uncle who could have done it in half the time). They had been inside the apartment just a few minutes, and come out with the woman slipping something into her hand-bag. They had pulled the door to behind them, and left in a hurry.

Master Garcia and seven of his boys had been arrayed in wait. They followed as far as Market Street and saw the two turn west; Garcia had then divided his troops: two with him to summon help, the others to follow their quarry.