A man and his father’s house?
Traces of the past.
Ironically, when I walked through my front door, Haruki was in better shape than I. My muscles seemed to have petrified on the drive back.
“You are injured! What happened?”
“Not injured, just sore. Riding horses is an activity one needs to do often in order to do at all. I’ll be fine after a bath and a drink. But I need to speak with Miss Pidgeon first. I’ll be right back.”
Miss Pidgeon’s reaction to my state was less overt than Haruki’s, but for her, the raised eyebrows were extreme. “Yes, I know,” I told her. “I won’t come in, but I wondered if you might possibly have time for a little job?”
One of the other advantages of having Miss Pidgeon so immediately to hand was her willingness to perform the odd task for me. I paid her, despite her protest, knowing that money was tight in her half of our little compound. I did try not to take advantage of her, although she claimed not to mind grocery-shopping and queue-standing. Still, her favourite tasks were those that involved the shelves of libraries.
Today’s job would be to her liking: a quick trip to the Oxford Town Hall. When I explained what was needed, she gave a brisk nod. “That is in fact highly convenient. I was just remembering that I needed to bicycle down to the lending library this afternoon. I can easily stop by the records office while I am there.”
I gave her solemn thanks, and watched her catch up her hat and an empty book bag.
Miss Pidgeon was not a terribly accomplished liar. But her bicycle tyres were crossing the gravel before my own kitchen door shut behind me.
Haruki was no more convinced by my claims of well-being than I had been by hers. She stood at the foot of the stairs watching me pull myself up by the handrail, but it was true: heat and a large brandy loosened muscles. An hour later, I pattered down the stairs again, conscious of a howling empty pit within.
“I’m starving. Do you want anything?”
Bread, cheese, pickle, and a slab of leftover beef pie vanished from my plate, followed by a bowl of bean soup (both the latter thanks to Miss Pidgeon), some biscuits with more cheese, and a handful of dried fruit. Haruki ate a bowl of cold rice with green tea poured over it.
I piled my dishes in the sink. As I was filling the kettle, Miss Pidgeon’s homely face went past the garden window. I gestured her inside—although as was her habit, she knocked before reaching for the knob.
“That was fast,” I said—the file in her hand and the look on her face told me she’d been successful, despite the hour.
“It was just on the edges, but yes, the house was there.”
She laid the file on the table and turned to go. “Wait, do have a cup of tea, Miss Pidgeon,” I said.
But no, she had dinner to put on, or a cat to feed, or something.
What was the equivalent of “house-proud” when it came to the job of being a good neighbour?
I allowed her to slip away, then bent to see what she had brought me.
“What is that?” Haruki asked.
“Well, Holmes and I saw the Darley house from the outside, but it occurred to me that if we could locate a valuation or survey of some kind in the local records office, it might give a description of the rooms. I would go down to Somerset House, but I don’t really have time for another trip to London, and I thought Miss Pidgeon might not mind having a quick word with her friends at the Town Hall. And look what she’s found.” I laid a page in front of my guest: a drawing of the house, both its main storeys, each room bearing a neat label.
The soft spring evening light faded over Oxford while Haruki and I pored over the house plan. Later, as the ground-floor lights in the houses around us began to shut off and the upstairs lights took their place, we chose clothing appropriate for a country house break-in. She had the basics, although she requested a coat that she could button over the sling. The result looked like a joke, but she said it was comfortable. I filled a rucksack with dark clothing for Holmes, spare torch batteries, a length of rope, and the like. While I waited for the pot of strong coffee to brew, I studied my companion’s child-sized hands.
With that arm, letting her inside the house would be risky: even someone capable of walking the Marconi wires on a ship might find it difficult to scramble from an upper-storey window without a full complement of functional limbs. Still, if she remained on the ground floor, she should be able to work a window-latch and drop out from there.
“I don’t have any gloves that will fit you,” I said.
“It is not cold.”
“I was thinking of finger-prints. I could paint your fingers with shellac, but that’s both confining and uncomfortable. Or you could take great care to wipe down anything you touch.”
“Finger-prints will not be a problem,” she said.
I opened my mouth to remind her of how she’d underestimated the University’s constables. Then I decided against it. “See that you do,” I told her. “I have no wish for Holmes to spend his waning years behind bars.”
I poured the coffee into a flask, shoved it and a packet of sandwiches into the rucksack, and looked around my tidy scholar’s house, wondering if this would be the last time I stood here.
I tried not to think about what had happened the last time we’d gone after the Darleys.
The pub was closed. The headlamps played across its front as the wheels left the road’s metalled surface. The rear passenger door opened, and Holmes dropped inside, stinking of beer, tobacco, and stale sweat. The lingering traces of horse about him seemed almost fresh by comparison.
Wordlessly, I handed him the flask and sandwiches. With equal silence, he pushed the two counter-agents to ethanol down his throat. After a time, he capped the flask and I pointed out the pile of his clothing. His boots went away across the weed-choked gravel, then returned a few minutes later, diverting to the far back to stuff his old garments in among the tyre-irons.
The male person who re-joined us was considerably less oppressive.
“The local community believe that Thomas and Lady Darley are rather more intimate than one might expect of a young man and his stepmother,” he reported.
“But—they could scarcely bear to look at each other!” The moment the protest left my mouth I heard its absurdity: there can be more than one reason for two people to avoid one another’s gaze. “Oh,” I said.
“Indeed.”
“Well, that would certainly explain the weeds and the windows.”
Haruki spoke up. “Do you mean they are having an affair?”
“The Darley footman’s sister is married to the innkeeper’s younger brother,” Holmes said. “The footman likes to gossip, and country folk are happy to pass talk around.”
“Do you suppose …” Haruki’s voice trailed away.
“That they were involved while his father was alive?” I finished for her. “If not actively, they may have been considering it. They did take great care not to be seen together much.”
“I thought they simply did not get along.”
“Sons and second wives often do not,” I agreed.
“Shall we go?” Holmes asked.
“Look at this first,” I said. I gave him the sketch of the house and a torch to view it by.
“This is not your handwriting,” he noted.
“Miss Pidgeon went down to the Town Hall for me, and got lucky.”
“Ah,” he said. “Your Irregular.”
I laughed. “She would be secretly delighted at the title. Now, it’s possible that the Darleys keep the book, or even just the document, with them wherever they go, but that’s not likely. If it’s locked up in the London house, we’ll make other plans. But if it’s here, Haruki and I agree that it’s in a safe. And a safe is most likely either in the ground-floor room marked ‘office,’ or upstairs in his dressing room. If you’re right, that Tommy has taken over his father’s life along with his father’s wife, he’s probably moved into his rooms as well.” The two main bedrooms and their dressing
rooms were next to each other, allowing free passage between them without risking the eyes of guests or servants.
Not that one can keep private activities from servants for long.
“Lady Darley may have a jewel safe as well,” Holmes pointed out.
Great: two safes to open. Maybe three. “Are your hands steady enough for safe-cracking?” I asked.
“They will be, yes.” I hoped that was so. I could open a combination mechanism, but I lacked his vast experience, and frankly, his cool nerves. Hunching over a dial while listening for servants was not my idea of entertainment.
As I drove, he and I discussed our plan of attack, occasionally tossing a question at Haruki. I found the access lane across from the house that we had spotted from horseback that morning, its surface chewed by the hooves of livestock and the tracks and tyres of farm machinery. Holmes jumped out to open its gate. I shot through into the field and behind the stand of trees, shutting off the headlamps. Black clamped down. The engine’s cooling noises seemed very noisy in the stillness, and Haruki and I moved quietly as we climbed from the motor, letting the doors click shut.
The moonlight was thin. We followed Holmes’ shielded torch across the rutted soil to the gate, working its latch shut lest some farmer’s herd take a stroll. In the silent night, we stumbled along uneven ground towards the road.
Rather, two of us stumbled. Haruki had eyes like a cat. She seemed to pay little attention to the torchlight, yet her feet met the uneven ground as if it was midday. She did not even seem much bothered by having one arm strapped to her side.
We lesser mortals made it to the metalled surface without planting our faces in the mud, then continued more quickly up the road and down the drive to the Darley house. Altogether, a walk that might have taken six or seven minutes in daylight had only taken twice that.
Country houses generally had substantial locks on the front door, designed for giving reassurance to the family, and more practical locks on those doors used for the comings and goings of servants throughout the day. We circled to the back, and were inside within minutes.
The lurid gleam from Holmes’ torch reassured us that no scullery maid slept before the fire. We moved on into the house. Miss Pidgeon’s work proved invaluable, allowing us to anticipate what we would find around each corner. We first established that the ground floor was unoccupied, then went through the gun room, which contained enough armament for a revolt—everything but an automatic pistol. We re-locked the gun-room door, explored the office enough to see that it had no safe, then left our small companion to search the remainder of the ground floor while Holmes and I headed upstairs.
At the foot of the formal stairway we paused. The hands of the grandfather clock showed two minutes to midnight; weeds and unwashed windows cautioned that no one would have rushed to repair a creak in the stairs. So we waited for the clock’s hands to click forward, then trotted up the stairs with its gong to hide any underfoot creaks.
The house was a squared U, its left-hand wing (here on the upper storey, the guest rooms) somewhat longer than the right, which housed the servants. The flat bottom of the U, downstairs a drawing room and the office, up here held the suites of the house’s master and mistress (appropriate terms, here). These rooms faced the drive, while the guest and servants’ wings looked out onto garden and stableyard, respectively. A long corridor hugged the inner wall of the U, with paintings and doors on one side and windows to a formal courtyard garden on the other. A short length of side-corridor across from the stairway ended in the big arched window over the portico, making the U of hallway more of a squat Y. This truncated corridor separated the main bedrooms to our left from the guest rooms to the right.
We turned left.
Six rooms lay along this section of the house: two suites, each with bedroom, dressing room, and a bath and lavatory. Having established that they were empty, we then stuck our heads in all the other doors on the first floor, other than the baize marking the servants’ wing, but all the beds were empty.
Holmes started on Tommy’s quarters while I headed for Lady Darley’s perfumed bower, trying not to sneeze. Her bed was wide and soft, its coverlet a riot of embroidered Chinese flowers. The walls were covered in pale blue watered silk, with long curtains of a slightly darker shade. A glance behind the curtains showed a pair of French doors and their diminutive balcony.
Her jewel safe was in the dressing room. It was a steel monstrosity that Holmes could have stood in without having to stoop—probably designed to store the household plate when the family was away, rather than just tiaras and necklaces. I eyed the mechanism, and went in search of my husband.
Tommy’s safe was much smaller, and the mechanism simpler—Holmes had the door open already. I looked in over his shoulder, and realised that “Lord Darley’s safe” would have been a more accurate description.
“So Tommy did take over more than the title,” I murmured.
The steel box held the possessions that Darley the Younger would wish to keep from the eyes of servants every bit as much as his father had. I was prepared for the pornographic photographs, having been through Lord Darley’s rooms before, and there was little need to hold the reels of film to the light to guess what was on them. But the files were the clincher: the Prince Regent of Japan had not been Darley’s only victim.
Many of the files were old, their letters and photographs so outdated as to be useless as a source of blackmail in these free-and-easy times: few would pay to be saved from a mild embarrassment. Holmes left those where he found them, although he did tuck two envelopes and a file into his shirt-front, their contents having political revelations whose stir would be further-reaching.
He also removed two letters in foreign writing, one of them in Arabic (which he read) and the other in Bulgarian (which he did not).
There was a gun here, as there had been beside Thomas Darley’s bed, but both were revolvers, not automatic pistols. No Bashō. No Hokusai. No Japanese books at all, other than a racy little thing featuring Samurai and geishas in unlikely positions that I was tempted to steal until I pictured Mrs Hudson’s reaction.
“Anything?” said a voice behind us, causing me to drop the book and Holmes to crack his head on the door.
“You’re supposed to be downstairs!” I hissed.
“There is nothing down there,” Haruki said. “I thought I could be of some use up here.”
“If we need to get out fast, you’ll never manage with that arm.”
“What, from one storey up? I could jump that far with no arms.” I frowned at her left arm, but having seen her on the ship’s wires, it was hard to argue. “What have you found?”
Nothing, was what we had found. Holmes rose. “That dial stood on nineteen,” he told me, and walked through to Lady Darley’s rooms. I arranged the files and erotica as they had been, closed the door, turned the dial to 19, and went to see how Holmes was getting on.
Haruki sat on her heels beside him, holding the torch while Holmes, eyes closed, focussed all his attention on the play of the dial beneath his fingers. Her face was serene, patient, as it had been that day in the Prince Regent’s garden. As her father’s face had been, three days before …
She was such an enigma. She looked like a child; she was far too trusting, she had rushed unthinking into an unknown place, and paid the price. Yet where someone her age ought to be chewing her fingernails, here she was waiting for this relative stranger to do an unlikely job. I wished her father were there, to ask. I wished her father were there, to see her, trim and confident with one arm in a sling.
The steel behemoth gave a small sigh, and Holmes reached for the handle. Haruki rocked smoothly back and stood, thumbing the shield off her torch so we could look within.
We gaped in astonishment. The vast space was almost empty. A couple of leather and silver devices whose purpose I did not want to know; a dozen jeweller’s cases containing diamond necklaces, diamond tiaras, and a diamond bandeau; decorative boxes that held an asso
rtment of rings, earrings, bracelets, and lesser necklaces, and that was all.
We examined every box, searching for false compartments. There were none. At the end, we shut the door and turned as one to look at the dim outlines of bed, settee, decorative table, and a pair of waist-high Chinese urns on either side of the curtains, with the French windows overlooking the Oxfordshire countryside.
We spread out to search. Holmes went over to the twin urns, Haruki began opening drawers, and I—I reluctantly turned my light to the bed, then its table. In its drawer lay a lace-trimmed handkerchief, a velvet eye mask with elastic band, a tube of lavender-scented hand crème, and a pair of cotton gloves that reeked of lavender. Next came a small silk bag with a decorative button which, when I opened it, contained pretty much what I had expected. Below that was a small Morocco-leather notebook with a tiny silver pen on a ribbon. This I picked up eagerly, only to find many of the pages torn away, and the remaining ones covered with housekeeping memoranda and notes for future shopping expeditions: Stockings. Mrs T’s hat—feather? Send furs. Guest room linens?
Unless the countess used some diabolically clever code, these were just notes.
The little notebook had concealed another volume, this one an illustrated edition of the Burton Kama Sutra. Very thoroughly illustrated—but as I glanced through them, my amusement faded. I looked more closely, turning one page, then another, mirth turning to something nearer shock. On the surface, they were simply randy pictures, fit companions to the hearty and cheerful coupling of Mr Burton’s text. Then the eye caught an unexpected shape, an odd expression, and the pictures turned … nasty. Graphic and brutal and more about pain than procreation, the images were appalling. They made me want to scrub my eyeballs.
I flipped shut the cover, taking an involuntary step back. Could Lady Darley …? Was it possible to look at those images and not see … what I saw? And if that was possible, if she was in fact innocent enough to see nothing but a nice, sexy, exotic romp, who could have been cruel enough to play that kind of a joke on her?