Chapter 39
Goodman was in the breakfast room when I appeared early Saturday morning. I was dressed in clothing the housekeeper had chosen (and hastily altered during the night) from a wardrobe of items left behind by guests. None of them fit me well; none of them, I dared say, had been abandoned by accident.
My stand-in host was freshly shaved and wearing a suit of light grey wool with a public-school tie. His upper lip bore a pencil-trace of moustache; his nails were clean and clipped. The only vestiges of the woodsman were the emerald eyes and the unruly hair which, despite an application of oil, had a barely suppressed energy, as if any moment it would spring wildly upright.
“That’s a handsome suit,” I said.
“My cousin’s sister’s husband’s,” he replied, proudly looking down at the costume. He straightened the handkerchief in his breast pocket, brushed away an invisible crumb, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. When he rose, it became clear that the gentleman in question was an inch taller in the leg and an inch narrower in the shoulder.
Clothes, however, make the man. Certainly, Goodman moved differently in this garb, his spine straighter, the boundaries of his body tighter, as if braced against the press of crowds and the pounding of pavements. The butler motored us to the train station, and when I stepped away from the ticket window and looked around for my companion, I nearly looked past him. On a weekday he would be almost invisible in a crowd of young businessmen, until one noticed the eyes beneath the light summer hat, and the faint idiosyncrasy of an owl feather in its ribbon. The Green Man had become the Grey Man, the colour of the city around him.
The newsagent was laying out the morning papers, and I paid for a copy of The Times. We took our seats and when I spread the fold open, Holmes’ message reached out like a touch of the hand. I wondered how far from me he was now. If he might be stretched out with his feet to the fire of one or another of his bolt-holes, waiting for me to find him.
“Do you have a plan?” my companion asked.
“Yes. There’s a message here for me, telling me to meet him at the funeral. However, there are one or two places to go first.”
I was feeling rather like Holmes who, when frustrated by lack of progress in a case, was apt to shout, “Data! I require data!” Before I could go much further, I needed information and I needed assistance: For both, I knew where to go.
At Waterloo, Goodman and I disembarked and made our way out of the steamy cacophony towards the exit. Long ago, in his days as an active consulting detective on Baker Street, Holmes had employed an ever-changing tribe of urchins he called his Irregulars. The core member of these troops was a quick, clever, nimble-fingered, unhandsome child with a gin-soaked mother and too many fathers, whose work for Holmes re-shaped his life away from outright crime towards an eventual adult profession of enquiry agent.
Billy had proved quite successful in his work. He would have been even more so—financially speaking—had he not chosen to remain in the district where he had grown up. He now kept an office in a part of the South Bank that did not actually frighten away monied clients, but he still lived two streets from the house where he had been born, and had built his own army of operatives out of cousins, neighbours, and childhood friends, a good number of whom had felony records.
If anyone, Billy could provide both manpower and information.
South of the Thames, the business of empire is less politics and finances than goods and services; consequently, the London sprawl that lies below the busy riverfront is less comprehensively served by modern transport. Half a mile to the north, we might have transferred to the Underground; here, we set off into the familiar by-ways.
Except they felt not entirely familiar. Surely I had not been away for that long? Each step I took, the sensation of wrongness grew, until in the end I murmured to Goodman, “Come,” and stepped into a rather rundown café. He followed me to a table that was sticky with spilt breakfasts, and I ordered coffee from the harried waitress.
The coffee that arrived thirty seconds later had already been doused with cream and sugar. Goodman raised an eyebrow at his cup, but I just leant forward, trying to avoid a puddle of egg yolk, and told him, “There’s something wrong here.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. Then he raised his eyes from the liquid, which was developing an interesting scum of coffee dust and flecks of half-spoilt milk solids, and saw that I was not referring to the drink. He changed his agreement to a query: “Indeed? What?”
Good question. I did not know London as thoroughly as Holmes did, but I had spent many days in the city, and had been in this area any number of times, including eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. “I don’t know what it is, precisely. But the district feels wrong.”
Another man might have looked askance, but this was a man who knew his forest so intimately, he could run among its trees in the dark. “Something you’ve seen? Smelt?”
“Sounds,” I replied slowly. “And things not seen. Two streets back, generally on a Saturday one hears the racket of a piano teacher at one end of the houses and a young man drowning her out with a gramophone at the other; both of them were silent. And not only is the district generally quiet, but people are missing.” I craned to look out of the steamy window, and then indicated the corner opposite. “Every time I’ve been on this street I’ve seen an elderly Italian man perched on a high stool. He’s the lookout for an all-hours gambling racket upstairs.”
“Constabulary tidying?” he suggested.
I pursed my lips. “A police operation would not affect children. Where are they? It’s a Saturday morning, they should be all over.”
I paid for the untouched coffee and we went back out onto the street. As we walked, my senses were heightened: a shop door closed here that I had never before seen shut; the gang of adolescent toughs that normally inhabited an alleyway there, missing; a shopkeeper who hired his upstairs rooms to a couple of the local ladies, watching through his window with a wary expression; the street itself, normally boisterous and carrying an edge of threat, gone still and indoors.
I liked this less and less, until I decided that to go farther into Southwark risked walking into a trap.
Three streets from Billy’s home was a greengrocer’s with a public call-box. I stepped into it, fed in my coin, and listened to the buzz of the ring.
A voice answered, a male on the uncomfortable brink of manhood, whose control slid an octave in the first two syllables of his reply.
“Is that young Randall?” I asked. “This is Mary Russell. Is your father—”
The voice cut in, so tense it warbled. “Pop said to tell you: Run.”
“But I need to see him,” I protested.
“He’s where you first met. Now, run!”
I dropped the telephone, grabbed Goodman’s hand, and ran.
Chapter 40
Down the street we flitted, diving into a courtyard slick with moss from a communal well and ducking through the narrow covered walk at the far end. I did not think we had been seen, but as I scuttled through the damp passage, I pulled off my cardigan and yanked the blouse from the skirt’s waistband, letting it fall to my hips. The first ash-can I came to, I snatched up the lid and stuffed inside the cardigan and both our hats. Then I seized the back collar of Goodman’s jacket, stripping it from his back in one sharp yank, and would have added it to the other things had Goodman not grabbed it back and bundled it under his arm, then retrieved as well the feather from his hat. I dropped the lid on the bin, palmed my spectacles, and made for the street, slowing to a brisk but unexceptionable walk as we emerged from the alley. With a convenient piece of choreography, a red omnibus stood at the kerb twenty feet away. I pulled Goodman inside, paid the conductor, and scurried up the curve of stairs.
With a hiss and a judder, the ’bus pulled out. To my great relief, there was no shout raised from the pavement below, no pounding of feet. We took our seats, and when I put my spectacles on, I found that Goodman no longer resembled the s
uccessful young office worker he had when we started out: Hatless and in his shirt-sleeves, he looked even younger than he had, and decidedly rakish. He looked … not entirely trustworthy. More a part of our surroundings than I did.
His eyebrows were raised.
I explained. “The person on the telephone was the son of the man I wanted to see. The father runs an enquiry agency, and he’d left a message for me: to run.”
“How far?”
“At the moment, I am to meet Billy—the father—at a park on the other side of the river, although we have a stop to make first. After that, we’ll see. Are you sure you don’t want to—”
“I will stay.”
I nodded, by way of thanks, and kept my head down as we crossed over the bustling river traffic and entered the city proper.
The place where Billy and I had first met was a small green square not far from the theatre district. That was in 1919, when an evening at the opera with Holmes had ended with Billy bashed unconscious and the old-fashioned carriage he was driving left in shreds. After that auspicious beginning, I had met him perhaps a score of times, and although I did not know him well, we had, after all, been trained by the same man. However he and his son were communicating, he would not be surprised if I took an hour to make a two-mile journey, especially not following that urgent warning.
So instead of going directly there, we rode the ’bus through the crowded shopping districts, disembarking two streets away from one of the handful of bolt-holes Holmes still maintained across London. Each of them was well hidden, nearly impregnable, fitted with an alternate escape route, and well equipped with food, clothing, basic weaponry, sophisticated medical supplies, and the means for disguise. Revealing them to strangers was unheard-of, grounds for shutting the place down. This would be the only time I had done so.
This bolt-hole was on the Marylebone Road around the corner from Baker Street, and had originally been wormed into the space between a discreet seller of exotic undergarments and a firm of solicitors. It had been threatened a few years earlier when the merchant of stays and laces had died one day amongst his frothy wares, but to my amusement, the business that opened in its place was a medical firm with a speciality of cosmetic surgery that, as the need for patching together soldiers faded, had turned to tightening sagging skin and removing unsightly bumps on noses. As I’d commented to Holmes, if ever our disguises failed us, we could now pop next door and have our faces altered.
Inside the building vestibule, I let the frosted-glass door shut behind us and told Goodman, “I am not going to make you cover your eyes, since you’d probably find this place blind, but I’d like a promise that you’ll forget where it is, or even that it exists.”
“What place is that?”
“Thank you,” I said, and stretched up to press the triggering brick. On the other side of the vestibule, the wall clicked, and I pulled open the glass-fronted display case to climb through. With his bark of amusement, Goodman followed: up a ladder, sidling down a tight corridor, across a gap, and through the back of a disused broom-cupboard.
I could, I suppose, have left Goodman nearby and returned, supplied with the means of concealment—we would not find much clothing here for a man his size, anyway, although his thick hair might keep the hats in the cupboards from settling over his ears. I was glad he’d kept the jacket. But I brought him … I was not altogether sure why I was bringing him, other than I found his presence strangely reassuring, like a warm stone in a cold pocket.
Reason enough to open this secret place to him.
It was a relief getting into clothing that was not only clean, but fit me: a lightweight skirt and white blouse; a jacket that could be reversed to another colour; shoes so ordinary as to be invisible in a crowd; and two scarfs, orange and eau de Nile, so as to instantly change the appearance of hat, blouse, or jacket. I sat before the big, brightly lit looking-glass to change the shape of my face and the colour of my hair, replaced my spectacles with those of another shape and material, slipped a modern and nearly unreadable wrist-watch onto my left wrist and a row of colourful Bakelite bracelets onto my right, and screwed on a pair of screamingly bright earrings to match.
Then I turned to the man who had watched the entire process (less the actual changing of garments) with the bewitched curiosity of a child. “Shall we go?”
Any other man might have demanded, “Who the devil are you?” This one picked up his straw hat, adjusted the owl feather in the ribbon that matched his new breast handkerchief, and opened the door to the broom-cupboard.
We approached the little park a bit after mid-day, strolling up and down the surrounding district, lingering on a street-corner while I made ostentatious glances at my watch, and finally meandering towards the park, swinging hands like a pair of young lovers.
Being hand in hand with Robert Goodman, even as part of a disguise, ought to have been an uncomfortable sensation—I was, after all, a married woman. Yet I found that the press of his palm and the grip of his fingers possessed not the least scrap of adult, or perhaps masculine, awareness. It was like holding the hand of a taller, more muscular Estelle: companionable, child-like, and providing an ongoing and subtle form of nonverbal communication. His hand told me when he was alert, when he decided a passer-by was harmless, when he was amused by the antics of two children shrieking their way around and around a tree. His palm against mine spoke of trust and ease. And his fingers threaded through mine told me when he spotted Billy, slumped on a bench with a newspaper draped across his face.
I tightened my own fingers briefly, letting him know that I had seen the sleeping figure, and cleared my throat loudly as we passed the bench. The newspaper twitched. Five minutes later, Billy came around the back of the washroom building.
He looked tired, and I thought his unshaven face was more necessity than disguise. He had been living rough for some days; a darkness about one eye testified to recent physical conflict.
“You can’t stay in Town, and you mustn’t go to Mr Mycroft’s funeral,” he blurted out. His voice was pure raw Cockney, which happened only when he was upset.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Billy,” I said calmly.
“I mean it,” he insisted, stepping forward in what I decided was an effort to intimidate me into obeying him—which would have been difficult even if he was not three inches shorter than I. Goodman put his hands into his pockets, looking more interested than alarmed.
“Billy, what is going on? Why did you tell me to run? And why have all the criminals in Southwark gone to ground?”
“You noticed.”
“It was hard to miss. Are they all under arrest?”
“No, just as you say, gone to ground. I told ’em to hike it.”
“But why?”
“There’s something big up. I don’t know what it is, but there’s coppers in the rafters, sniffing under the dustbins, listening in at the windows.”
“You’re sure they’re police?”
“Nah, that lot’re not police, but they’re not honest criminals either. They’re hard men, that’s what they are, and they’re looking for you and Mr ’Olmes.”
“Is that why you had Randall tell me to run? Because someone was listening at your windows?”
“I didn’t want to be the one to lead you to ’em. I’ve been sleeping away from home for three days now because I was afraid they’d follow me to you. I wouldn’t risk that.”
“You’re a good friend, Billy,” I said, which was both the unvarnished truth and an attempt to calm him down. “But tell me about these men. If they’re not police, who are they?”
“They’re working with the police, but they’re sure as sin not local boys, or even the Yard.”
“So, it’s some kind of a criminal gang moving into new territory?”
“No,” he said in an agony of impatience. “They’re not a gang—or they are, but not criminals.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A criminal gang wouldn’t pick me up
for questioning and then let me go. But Scotland Yard wouldn’t threaten my family if I didn’t cooperate. Randy’s the only one left at home, and that’s because he’s decided it’s time to play the man.”
I had to agree, this sounded very wrong. “I see what you mean. When did this start?”
“Thursday.”
“The day after Mycroft was …” It was hard to say the word. Billy’s face went even darker.
“I heard about that first thing in the morning, and they were at my door an hour later. They let me go at tea-time and I bundled my family off to—” He glanced at Goodman for the first time, suddenly aware of a new hazard.
“Sorry,” I said, and made the introductions. The two men shook hands, Billy eyeing the owl feather with curiosity. “Well, Billy, I suggest you collect your son and join your family until we get this sorted. Holmes should—”
He cut me off. “I’ve sent the family away, but that doesn’t mean I’m hiding. This is my town, they can’t pull me in and beat me up and expect to get away with it. When I’m finished for Mr Holmes I’ll go home and sit tight.”
Goodman stirred, putting together the bruises on Billy’s face with the situation as a whole.
I smiled at the irate Cockney. “Somehow it doesn’t surprise me to hear that.”
“And I don’t think Mr Holmes knows about it—any rate, he didn’t on Tuesday. I told him that Mr Mycroft hadn’t been seen of late, but that was all I knew.” The H had returned to Holmes.
“You’ve talked to Holmes?”
“Down the telephone,” he said. “And there’s another thing. He was phoning from Amsterdam—”
“Amsterdam?”
“That’s what he said. And I know I’m probably not up on this modern machinery,” Billy admitted, “but the timing’s dead fishy. Mean to say, he rings me Tuesday, there’s hard men in the neighbourhood Wednesday, Mr Mycroft dies late Wednesday, and I’m picked up and questioned Thursday.”