Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

“He swore he’d be down here, he insisted that we had to work on a scene, although really it’s a rotten hour, I must look absolutely hell.” She paused for me to deliver a stout rebuttal of the devastation of her looks, but I merely chewed my toast and turned on her a pair of bovine eyes. Bibi glared. “I mean, it’s all very well for people like you to be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour, but it’s just not a part of my regime, don’t you know? Daniel said to be here so here I am, only he’s done a bunk, and I can’t think where he’s got to.”

I stopped chewing. “ ‘People like me.’ ”

“Oh, I don’t mean …” she said, although clearly she did mean. She waved her manicured fingers to indicate my appearance, but had just enough sense to grasp that she stood on the edge of danger. Instead, she stamped her little foot and half turned away, looking, if not for Daniel Marks, at least for someone with the authority to produce him. Without further word, she wandered off.

My appetite seemed to have wandered away, too. I dropped the remains on my plate, swallowed the last of my coffee, and went to see what other disaster awaited me.

I got twenty feet when it dropped on me. Rather, he dropped on me.

Major-General Stanley (or Harold Scott, the actor playing the Major-General – Hale’s habit of calling the actor by the role was contagious) came across the lobby on the shoulders of a pair of uniformed hotel employees. I exclaimed and stepped forward, but again, there was a singular absence of blood. Except in the whites of the good gentleman’s eyes – and then the smell hit me, and I halted.

The Major-General, however, shook off his supporters to stagger in my direction, weaving from side to side as if he’d just come off the ship. “My dear Miss Russell!” he exclaimed. “How superb to see you. Come and have a drink with me.”

I dodged his grasp, saw him begin to overbalance, and stepped back inside his stinking embrace to keep him from falling. He beamed happily into my face for a moment, then frowned. His eyes took on a faraway look, and I wrenched myself out from under – there are things the job of film assistant most emphatically does not cover. Fortunately for the Major-General, the two young men reached him before he hit the floor. Unfortunately for them, they were not as quick in the techniques of avoidance as I.

I left them exclaiming in disgust as they more or less carried the now-reeking Yorkshireman towards his room, while a platoon of mop-wielders took up formation behind them.

I cast a despairing glance at my wrist-watch: It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. We had been in Lisbon just under twenty-four hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SAMUEL: Permit me, I’ll explain in two words:

we propose to marry your daughters.

MAJOR-GENERAL: Dear me!

THE PAVEMENTS OF Lisbon were a sea of cream-coloured stones with patterns picked out in black. The streets of Lisbon range from mildly sloping to positively vertiginous. The stones are invariably worn smooth. That morning, I wore shoes I’d purchased in London after Hale’s unwitting snub to my fashion sense – the sturdy pair I had worn the night before were steaming on the radiator.

Two steps outside the hotel door, my feet went out from under me. I was saved by the ready hand of a doorman, who was probably stationed there for that express purpose. After that I went more cautiously until I discovered that a sort of ice-skating gait best kept me upright. Other pedestrians seemed not to have a problem. Perhaps it was these shoes?

I skated along the rain-slick Avenida da Liberdade for a while, barely glancing at the fine boulevard with its statues, fountains, plantings, and black-and-cream mosaic pavement. Electric trams clattered past, Lisboans skipped merrily up the glassy footways, and I reached the remembered kink in the road before my foot came down on a sodden leaf and I went down again, this time catching myself on a lamp-post. After that, I tottered. A tiny, hunched-back, ninety-year-old woman with a walking stick tapped briskly past. Two chattering women bustled past balancing baskets of fish on their heads; one of them was barefoot.

The Maria Vitoria theatre evicting us in the afternoons required that we get an early start in the morning. I expected that I would be the first one there, since I’d already got the clear impression that Lisbon’s clock was two or three hours canted from that of London: Here, 10:00 p.m. made for an early dinner.

To my surprise, the outer doors were unlocked and I could hear voices. I shook the rain from my coat and hat, following the sound.

Three hats occupied the centre of the second row of seats, looking like the set-up for some Vaudeville jest: The one on the left barely cleared the seat-back; that in the middle was exaggeratedly wide and battered even in outline; the one sticking up on the right bore the perfect shape of the best in British haberdashery.

Fflytte on the left, Hale on the right, and between them La Rocha. All three were intent on the man occupying the stage.

In the seat behind La Rocha, straight-backed and hatless, sat Fernando Pessoa.

I draped my outer garments on the seat at the beginning of the row and sidled along to sit next to our translator. He gave me an uncertain smile before returning his attention to the conversation in front of him which, although it was in English, gave indications that it might require his services at any moment.

“No,” Hale was saying, “we only need twelve pirates.”

“Have more,” La Rocha’s incongruous high-pitched voice urged. “I have many.”

Fflytte, his eyes on the stage, said in a distracted manner, “We only have thirteen daughters.”

La Rocha stared down at the small man. Then he turned to his lieutenant from the previous evening, whose big figure was planted on the edge of the stage. “Treze filhas! E mais homen que parece.”

Pessoa’s back went straighter and his mouth came open as he prepared to spring into action, but he paused at the pressure of my hand on his sleeve.

“There may be a slight misunderstanding,” I suggested: La Rocha’s meaning had been clear in his tone of voice, if not his words, and I did not think relations would be improved by a translation of “He’s more of a man than he looks.” I leant forward to explain. “Mr Fflytte does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the story.”

The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “Entendo. Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen piratas.”

“Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”

Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”

“ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”

“O aprendiz de pirata,” Pessoa contributed.

The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage. “Aprendiz,” I heard him mutter. “De pirata.”

The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.

I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.

“No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”

“Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.

“Not the clothing, the skin.”

“This, too, can be changed.”

“No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”