Locked Rooms Part 4

Chapter Four.

I did not follow him. Truth to tell, I was feeling just a little shaky. did not follow him. Truth to tell, I was feeling just a little shaky.

I am a person to whom self-control is basic. Over the course of the past few years I had been shot, knifed, and forcibly drugged with a hypodermic needle; I'd had Holmes abducted from my side, been abducted myself, come within moments of being blown to a red mist, and recently faced down a tusked boar mad with rage, all the while eating peculiar foods, wearing impossible costumes, and sleeping in scores of highly uncomfortable situations. Yet I had never really deep-down doubted my ability to meet the peculiar demands of life with Holmes, because I had always trusted my body and mind to function smoothly together. Will and intellect, in easy harmony.

And suddenly, what I had imagined was control now seemed mere pa.s.sivity, what appeared to be harmony was merely a facade. I felt as if I were standing with my back braced against the door of an overstuffed cupboard, struggling to keep the avalanche of clutter inside from sweeping out and overwhelming me. Coming to this house had opened that door, and memories had begun to trickle out: Mah the cook, Micah the gardener. My mother's fingers brushing the door frame, her hand cupping the back of my head.

How many childhood memories does the average person retain? I suspect not many, and those either a generalised composite of experiences or striking events that lodge in the mind like boulders in a stream. And if the average person were to be told that those memories were unreliable, that the utterly familiar home never existed, that the vividly remembered fall from the tree never took place outside of dreams, what then?

That person would begin to mistrust his or her mind.

And that person would be right to do so.

Instead of going to the stairs, I turned the other way and found the library, tugging back one of the sheets to uncover a leather chair. I sat down, dimly aware of creaking floorboards overhead, more immediately interested in the ghosts this room might have.

It was a man's room. So I sat, waiting for my father.

I had been lucky in my parents, blessed for fourteen years to live in the vicinity of two lively, intelligent individuals who loved me, and each other, unreservedly. My self-imposed amnesia, if that is what it was, no doubt had its roots, as Holmes had said, with the double trauma of the accident that took my family's life.

My father had been driving a difficult piece of road in the autumn of 1914, a last family week-end at the lake-house before he enlisted and the war engulfed our lives. He had been distracted, and the motorcar had swerved, hesitated, and then plunged down the cliff into the sea. With the swerve, I had been thrown free; father, mother, and brother had sailed off the world and into the resulting flames.

I spent the rest of the autumn in hospital, and still bore the scars and twinges from my injuries. Worse than the scars, however, was the guilt that started up as soon as consciousness returned-not just the grinding offence of having survived when they had not, but the burning agony of knowing that I, myself, had been the cause of the accident. That I had distracted my father, by starting a loud and petty argument with my younger brother. That I had killed them, and lived to bear the guilt.

Impossible to live with the memory, impossible to leave it alone; within weeks, my young mind had learnt to suppress it during the daylight hours, although my nights had been haunted for years by the Dream, nocturnal memories of the sights and sounds of the car going off of the cliff.

Easier by far just to shove all the past into the same crowded cupboard than to pick and choose what to keep out on display and what to hide away. And because my mind, and my will, are both very strong, the door stayed so firmly shut that I managed to forget it was even there, until the ship had sailed out of the Bombay harbour and turned towards California, its prow a wedge, prising at the edges of the cupboard door.

My father had used this library daily. He had sat at that shrouded desk, taken a cigar from that enamelled box and clipped it with the tool that lay waiting, sat to read the newspaper in that other canvas-wrapped chair before that cold and empty fireplace. And being the kind of person he was, he would have allowed me free access, and I would have been in and out of this room at all times, with questions, with specimens of natural history, with discoveries and complaints and proposals. But was it a composite of experiences that told me this? Or was it hypothetical reasoning, a theory given flesh?

I did not know. Still, I felt that he had been here, once long ago, and that I had been with him, and for the moment, it would have to be enough. Leaving the leather chair uncovered, I absently adjusted a crooked painting and pushed a couple of misplaced spines back into place as I went out of the library on my way upstairs.

Holmes was nowhere to be seen, but I heard a movement from further overhead: the attic. I stood in the door of my parents' room, looking in warily, not certain if I was ready for the intimacy of a married couple's bedroom. However, the room did not feel particularly private, not with the afternoon sun streaming in through the south window where Holmes had drawn back the curtains. The dust of his pa.s.sing still hung in the sunlight, m.u.f.fling the rainbows cast by the prismed gla.s.s of the window onto the white cloths covering the dressing-table. He had also left a trail of footprints on the boards, coming and going and, by the looks of it, circling into various corners as he searched for anything out of the ordinary. Two white-painted wicker chairs sat in the bay window to my left, arranged on either side of a small, high table just large enough for a cup-laden tray. I had a vivid picture of the two occupants sitting in the morning sunlight, sharing their coffee at the start of the day; again, was it memory, or imagination?

I moved across to the lumpy dressing-table, cautiously raising its protective cloth to reveal hair-brush, powder, manicure implements, crystal scent bottle. My hand hovered above the delicate gla.s.s stopper of this last, pulled by the powerful memory stimulus the aroma might hold, held back by the fear that it might be more than I could endure. Either that, or nothing at all, which would be even more unbearable. Instead, my hand came down on the long red lacquer-ware box beside it, tipping open the top to reveal a collection of hair- and hat-pins and the single carved ivory chop-stick that she had used to tease loose portions of hair. It was a lovely thing, and I ran my thumb across the worn carvings before I closed the top of the box and withdrew my hand.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I would envelop myself in my mother's scent. Or the next day.

Instead of the bottle, my hand reached out for a picture, one of half a dozen tarnished silver frames lying face-down on the table's linen cloth. The one I lifted first was the largest, and showed my brother and me when Levi was on the cusp of walking-perhaps a year old, which would have made me six. But instead of the usual studio setting of curly-headed children before a painted rose bower or atop a bored Shetland pony, we were dressed in elaborately formal Chinese costumes, high-necked, glossy as only silk could be, the frogs of the front fastenings intricately worked. My brother and I stood before some kind of shelved cabinet, ornately carved although out of focus, and although he looked merely bewildered, my expression indicated that I appreciated the joke; I could see why my mother had chosen the photograph for her dressing-table.

I ran my thumb over the blackened frame, thinking it looked familiar. Slowly, it came to me: I had this one's twin at home, in Suss.e.x, lying (also face-down) in a drawer under some meaningless papers; rarely glimpsed, never forgotten. My own photograph showed the entire family, not just its younger generation, but as I studied the arrangement of pictures on my mother's dressing-table, I began to suspect that mine had once balanced the other frame on this surface. I could even see where it had once stood, in the large empty s.p.a.ce on the right-hand side of the table. Whoever had packed the trunk of clothing and effects that accompanied me on the boat to England in 1915 had come in here and removed the portrait from my mother's collection, that I might take something of them with me.

I placed the picture back upright on the cloth, and one by one, set the others upright as well. My father appeared, stretched out on a travelling-rug laid across a very English-looking stretch of pebbly beach, eyes closed behind his spectacles, the blonde infant tucked under his arm similarly asleep; my dark-haired brother as a small baby was next, his face surrounded by a cloud of lace in our mother's arms, a peculiarly enigmatic expression on her features; me by a lake, shovel in one hand, mud to my waist, a look of great stubbornness on my face. Then a surprise: a pair of strangers who could not possibly be related to me.

I knew who they were, though: Their shades had just visited me downstairs, in the kitchen and just outside its door. Mah and Micah, siblings or, I thought, studying their broad, foreign faces more carefully, a married couple. And if their employment here had struck me as unlikely, how much more so their presence in my mother's collection of intimate family portraits?

I sat down on the padded bench before the dressing-table with the small photograph of two middle-aged Chinese people in one hand, looking between it and the larger one of my brother and myself in Oriental costume. The edge of the carved cabinet could be seen in both photographs; they had been taken in the same room.

After a minute I reached out to prop up the remaining pictures. The first showed a curly-headed blonde girl of about five, bony knees drawn up into a large wooden chair, a book spread out in her lap, squinting in concentration at the pages. Portrait of a young scholar: Miss Mary Russell at her books. And finally, like a familiar face in a crowd, the picture of my house in Suss.e.x. It had been a vacation cottage during the periods we lived in England, and I had insisted on going back there when I was orphaned, to the place where happiness had once lived.

Not that I had found happiness still in residence when I returned: Instead, I got my aunt. But I had held to myself the sensation of refuge, and restored the house to it when I came of age and turned that so-called guardian out. Clearly, my mother, too, had treasured the summer weeks there on the Downs.

My reverie was broken by motion. I looked up, and nearly dropped the pictures before my mind interpreted the ghost it was seeing as Holmes' reflection in the filthy looking-gla.s.s.

"Holmes! You startled me. Did you find anything?"

"Dried sc.r.a.ps of soap in the bath-room dishes, beds still made up, two half-packed trunks here and one in the child's room, and in the attic entire townships of mice. What have you there?"

I handed him the picture of Mah and Micah for his examination, watching his reflected face, seeing his eyes flick from the Chinese faces to the ornately wrought frame, then to the identical frames that graced the family pictures.

"Provocative," he said after a minute, and gave it back to me.

"Why were you so interested in my father's dressing-table?" I asked.

"That was not I."

Startled, I looked into his dim reflection, then swivelled around on the bench to stare at the swirl of footprints I had taken to be his. This time, I saw: At least two other people had walked through this room, one with feet slightly smaller than Holmes', the other's considerably smaller. I slid the photo into my pocket and went to see what had interested the intruders.

The other dressing-table, which had neither seat nor mirror, stood just outside the door to the bath-room. That it belonged to a man was clear even under cover, since the shapes were those of a man's hair-brushes and a clothes brush, and little else. Kneeling in front of it, I could see that the dust on the top had been recently disturbed; I duplicated the disturbance now, folding the cloth back to reveal a small drawer. It did not take a magnifying gla.s.s to see the marks on its bra.s.s lock.

"Looks pretty amateurish," I remarked.

"They might as well have set a chisel to it," he agreed.

By habit, I hooked my finger-nails under the edge of the drawer in case of finger-prints, and tugged. It slid open freely, releasing a faint odour of cedar and revealing a handful of small coins, a set of black shoe-laces, some pen nibs, and an a.s.sortment of collar-studs, the normal debris of the male animal. If there had been anything of import in the drawer, it was not there now.

I swivelled on my heels to study the prints. The people who made them had spent some time gathered around my father's steamer trunk, then one of them-the smaller feet-had investigated his bed-side table. Not, however, my mother's, which was decidedly odd. Unless, of course, they were not simply sneak-thieves, and had already found what they were after.

"When do you suppose those footprints were made?" I asked.

"Within the past month, or two months at the most."

"Did you find where they got in?"

"Judging by the traces of soil there and here, I should say they came in through the kitchen door."

I twisted to look up at him. "I saw no fresh soil there."

"You were . . . distracted."

"I did see the soil, but I'd have said it was old. And I'm certain the kitchen door showed no signs of tampering." That I definitely would have noticed.

"No," he agreed.

I slid the drawer shut, let the cloth fall over it, and got to my feet. "Which means that either their locksmith's talents deteriorated, or they had the one key and not the other. I shall have to ask Mr Norbert just how many sets of keys there were."

The rest of the house held neither ghosts nor clues. Even my bedroom might have belonged to a stranger, its fittings and knick-knacks curiously apt rather than familiar. I picked from a shelf a tiny porcelain baby-doll, all unruly brown hair and a lacy robe, which fit most satisfyingly into the palm of my hand. I had not been a child who played with dolls, but I vaguely thought that a friend had given me this one; perhaps I had kept it through affection for her rather than for the object itself. I put it back on the shelf, dusted off my hands, and continued through the upstairs rooms.

Each room showed signs of a recent pa.s.sage through it, with disturbed objects and footprints in the dust. And not just footprints.

I went back downstairs and found Holmes in the library with a book, sitting in the leather chair I had uncovered. He had carried one of the candelabras in here from the dining table and filled it with candles; drips of wax on the floor-boards traced his progress along the shelves. The candles, half-burnt, now stood on top of the desk, but still gave sufficient illumination to the shelves that I could see that the dust-lines where the books had stood no longer coincided with the edges of the books.

I picked up the candle-stick and held it close to the shelf: dust along the tops, faint disturbance along the top ridge of some of the spines-the intruders had pulled the books back to look behind them, but not removed each one to rifle through the pages. It was something of a relief, for to have laboriously searched each book, then scrupulously replaced it on the shelf, would have indicated a particularly organised and potentially dangerous sort of mind. These people were just looking in the more obvious places.

But for what?

I put the candelabrum back on the desk, pinched out the flames, and gently pulled back the wrap of the other chair, allowing the cloth to slump gently to the floor. I sneezed and sat down.

"Any idea what they were searching for?"

"Something of his rather than hers. There is no safe in the house?"

"Not so far as I know. I know they kept Mother's jewellery in the bank, and had to remember to retrieve it in time when she wanted to wear it."

"I should say your intruders did not know that, going by the universal disturbance of the picture-frames."

And I'd thought time had misplaced them. As if to redeem myself, I asked, "You noticed that the two guest-room beds had been disturbed?" In response, he patted his suit coat, telling me that his inner pocket held envelopes of evidence. "Hairs?"

"Short grey on the one, long brown on the other."

"How long?"

"As long as yours-as yours used to be," he said, resigned to the necessity of my scant haircut, but not the fact.

"A woman? Good Lord."

He closed the book on his knee. "Russell, what precisely do you intend to do?"

"I don't know, Holmes," I said, taking off my spectacles to rub at my irritated eyes. "I really don't know."

After a while, he opened his book again and I went into the kitchen, unlocking the back door to step out into the wilderness. As I stood there on the damp, subsiding bricks, my naive determination to restore my family's home to its former glories faltered beneath the enormity of the task. What was I thinking? It would take weeks, months to bring the house and gardens to a state of liveability, and what then? I had no intention of moving back to California.

Restoring the house would not restore my family.

Better to sell it now, before the building wormed its way into my affections. Let someone else worry about the brambles and the mice. Let someone else love it.

And as if to lay an omen of blessing on the decision, a small piece of Nature's magic whirred past me, a flash of red more brilliant than a maharaja's rubies, moving so fast I could not easily focus until it paused, hovering to drink from the pendulous blossoms of a fuchsia: a humming-bird. I hadn't seen one since I was a child, and I gaped at it with a child's wonder. When it darted away, I was aware of a smile on my face.

I returned to the library, and spoke to Holmes' back. "As I see it, there are two separate problems here. One is the house itself and what to do with it. The other concerns the puzzles we've found here-not necessarily the break-in, as nothing seems to be missing other than the mezuzah, but I've decided that I wouldn't mind, after all, knowing something more about my family. About the years I spent here. It is, after all, my past. I'll give it a week, in between my appointments with Mr Norbert. And then we'll leave and I'll tell Norbert to sell it once the restrictions are lifted, two years from now."

Holmes turned to look at me, and there it was again, that raised eyebrow of omniscience, asking me to reconsider some hasty judgement. I thought I knew what he was after this time, however, and sighed to myself. He'd been too long without intellectual challenge and itched to uncover more about the house's invasion.

"Holmes, they didn't take anything, they didn't damage anything but the lock on the desk." The eyebrow remained arched, and I raised a hand in surrender. "But please, go right ahead and investigate, if that's what you want to do."

"Very well," he said, depositing the book on the small table and getting to his feet. "I shall begin by applying myself to the finger-prints on your father's dressing-table."

"You brought your print kit?" I asked, surprised. His magnifying gla.s.s and evidence envelopes went everywhere with him, but the tin box containing powders, brush, and insufflator created unnecessary bulk in the pockets, unless he antic.i.p.ated needing it. But his only response was yet another unreadable yet disapproving look as he went out of the door.

I was at something of a loss to know where to begin myself, so in default, I walked in the direction of the first room we had entered, my mother's morning room. I had my hand on the door-k.n.o.b when Holmes' voice brought me up short.

"I shouldn't go in there while the kitchen door is standing open," he commanded. "The draughts might prove destructive, and I haven't any gla.s.s plates."

With that Delphic utterance, he continued climbing the stairs, leaving me with my hand on the k.n.o.b and many questions on my lips. Draughts? Gla.s.s plates? What on earth was he on about?

Slowly, I put it together. Gla.s.s plates, used for the preservation of fragile doc.u.ments. Doc.u.ments, such as burnt papers. Burnt papers, such as a drift of trembling black ashes in an otherwise pristine fireplace.

Ah.

Was I being very stupid, or was he being unnecessarily scrupulous? I could not answer that, so I went back to the library to begin a methodical archaeology on my father's desk.

An hour or so later, during which Holmes had b.u.mped about all over the upstairs, he came back in, brushing ineffectually at his sleeves with hands even grimier than mine. I looked up from my reading, blinked, and realised it was nearly dark. I reached for the lamp and switched its control, but without result. I closed the book and sat back.

"Any joy?" I asked him.

"They wore gloves."

"All the best-dressed villains wear gloves," I commented by way of commiseration.

"However, they remained in the house long enough to require sleep on the guest-room beds. Separate rooms, if you were wondering."

That they had slept in the beds seemed to please him. "They took off their gloves to sleep?"

"Possibly. But for other activities as well." With a smile, he took an oversized envelope from his pocket and held it for me to see. Inside lay the flowered porcelain pull-handle from a flush water-closet, detached from its chain.

"But surely there are layers of prints on it?" I asked.

"Oh, I'd say the maid your parents employed was a fine woman who took pride in her work. No short-cuts in her cleaning. Mrs Hudson would approve." Purring with satisfaction, he looked down at his unlikely treasure. "One lovely hand-print, from palm to finger-tips, each one clear and precise."

"Well done, Holmes." Now all we had to do was ask the population of San Francisco to give us a comparison, I reflected-but no need to be churlish and say it aloud. "The man's or the woman's?"

"By the slim size of the fingers, hers. Her shoe size and length of stride suggest a height of slightly over five and a half feet, whereas her grey-haired companion is a short man, two or three inches under five and a half feet, whose broad feet suggest a broad hand. We shall have to make enquiries as to the weather over the past weeks," he added, folding away the pull-handle. "Their shoes left soil on the floor beneath their beds, but not enough to indicate they walked through actual mud."

"And if they came in through the kitchen, you're right, that ground would be a mora.s.s after a rain. Did you find any signs of lamps, candles, torches, anything of the sort?"

"The woman had a carpet-bag she set down several places, which could have held anything. But I saw no signs of dripped wax or any impression of a lamp's base. I think it probable they did their work during the daylight, so as not to alert the aged but sleepless watch-dog across the way."

"Coming in before dawn and leaving after dusk? I'd have thought that risky. Unless-"

"Yes," he said. "It would be satisfying to discover that the full moon coincided with a dry spell, would it not?"

And so it proved, in a pleasingly neat confirmation of how the intruders came and went unnoticed. When we repaired to the hotel an hour or two later, for supplies, soap, and sustenance, enquiries at the desk were followed within minutes by a simultaneous knock on our door and the ringing of the telephone. Holmes went to the door, holding it open for the man with the laden tea tray, while I received the information that February had been wet more or less throughout, but two weeks of dry weather in the middle of March had been broken by rain the morning of the twenty-fourth. The March full moon had been the twentieth.

I thanked the manager, then: "Oh, and Mr Auberon? Could you please have someone look into train reservations to New York, the middle of next week? That's right, two of us. Sorry?" I listened for a minute, then asked him to hold on, and covered the mouthpiece with my hand.

"Holmes, he says the hotel has another guest who is planning a cross-country aeroplane flight to leave the middle of next week, and wants two partners in the enterprise. Might we be interested?"