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

could certainly throw it around. It was not a far reach to believe that he might cause a tap of gold to flow. They thought about it, and the weapons in their hands sagged a fraction.

“Your pride is your country,” I persisted in a gentle voice. “You can conquer the world from within.”

None of which actually meant anything: I was merely offering a stall and a distraction, desperately gambling that their blood might cool and dilute their single-minded intent.

Adam stepped forward. “My friends, the days that my uncle and my father were trying to remake are gone. The wind has shifted. If we deny this, if we shake our fists at the sky and tell ourselves that the wind is still at our backs, we will end up wrecked upon the shore, or worse, becalmed. If, however, we trim our sails and run with that new wind, who knows where it will take us? Us, and our sons and grandsons, bearing the blood of our noble ancestors.

“The pirate way gives all an equal voice and an equal share. The pirate way demands that the king be chosen. I ask that you trust my father’s blood, and follow me.”

When he ended, I half expected the film crew to burst into applause – then remembered that they did not understood Arabic, and in any event, had their hands full with knives. Adam’s followers, more inured perhaps to flights of Arab rhetoric, were not so instantly convinced, but they could not deny that a boy who could talk like this might be just the fellow to deal with the French authorities.

Grohe felt the shift in the metaphorical rigging first, and gratefully worked the unaccustomed blade back into its scabbard. One by one, others did the same. Three men at the far end looked at each other, looked at the guns they carried, and put them up.

Adam nodded, and gave a brief command that I did not hear, but that sent one of his men off at a run. When he faced us again, he was no longer a boy.

“Come,” he said.

We came. Through the medina we passed, the streets gone silent as word spread like a fire through dry grassland. Donkeys miraculously vanished, heaps of merchandise no longer filled the way, and I pushed the hood from my robe, allowing my European hair to shine out. When I glanced back, I could see the others doing the same.

Full points to Adam, the new pirate king of Sale, parading his foreign captives through the streets of his realm.

He led us, not to the closest gate in the walled city, but to the river entrance we had come by, half a lifetime before. Boats were already waiting, summoned by the new king’s runner. By the time the first of the boats had crossed the Bou Regreg – laden with the younger girls and their mothers, despite Edith’s furious protestations that she wanted to stay behind, to be a pirate, with Jack – a crowd had begun to gather on the Rabat side.

Finally, a small knot of us remained: Holmes, Annie, Will, and I, talking to Adam as we waited for the last boat to come back for us.

Or so I thought.

“I’ll send the film over with the luggage,” Will said.

Annie looked puzzled, Holmes (although he later denied it) did, too. I, however, merely asked, “What about the cameras?”

“I’ll keep one. They’ll be hard to find here, and Mr Fflytte owes me that much.”

“Will!” Annie protested. “You’re surely not thinking of staying behind?”

Holmes had caught up quickly. “I believe you’ll find that Mr Currie is concerned that if he comes within reach of the British authorities, he’ll find himself behind bars.”

“What? Will! No, not you – tell me you didn’t kill the poor girl!”

“Kill? Who? Me? I didn’t kill anyone! What are you talking about?” He looked confused, and frightened.

“Lonnie Johns,” I said.

“What, Lonnie? Good heavens, has she died?”

I remarked to my husband, “He’s a cameraman, not an actor.”

“I agree.”

“When did she die?” Will asked.

“No guilt in his eyebrows.”

“No avoidance of the eyes.”

“How did she die?”

I took pity on the man. “We don’t know for certain that she’s dead. The police suspect it.”

“They’re usually wrong,” Holmes commented.

“I wouldn’t say ‘usually,’ Holmes,” I chided.

“Then why the hell did you tell me she was dead? Accuse me of killing her?”

“To see your reaction. You smuggled guns, and drugs. If Miss Johns had discovered it, perhaps you’d have killed her.”

“I never!”

“But you did sell the guns and the drugs.”

Now he looked down, kicking at the dust with his boot. “Well, yeah. But it was just … lying there. Hale got all that stuff, for Fflytte. Nothing would do but that we had the real thing, for the camera. Insane, but it’s what he wanted. Only the three of us knew, the others thought it was washing-up powder or something. And then when we moved on to the next project, someone had to tidy after them.”

“And you always resented, just a little, that Fflytte’s name alone was on the credits.”

The Welshman’s face lifted, his eyes bitter and defiant. “Without me, Randolph Fflytte would still be scratching his head over that first camera. So yes, I will admit, I thought that picking up a little extra on the side might make up for it, just a bit. But I never hurt anyone.”

That was, I supposed, debatable. But I for one did not intend to tackle him and truss him for the next boat across the river. “You want to stay here in Morocco?”

“It’s warm. I like the food. The French can’t arrest an Englishman here. There are worse places to retire. And, somebody has to let these boys know how to deal with the actors and directors they’ll be meeting.”

Adam decided we had finished, and said to Holmes in English, “I will return your things by morning.”

Holmes replied in Arabic, “The ladies will be glad for their clothing, certainly. And do not forget your guards on the roof of the house.”

“Or those in the ground floor of the women’s quarters,” I added.

“The punishment for the men should be light,” Holmes suggested. “They were overcome by the artistry of women, a mistake they will not make again.”

“We are all overcome by women,” said the young pirate ruefully, and turned to the yellow-curled source of his overcoming (and of his guards’ overcoming, which I was glad he did not know). “Would you stay?” he pleaded. Holmes and I studied the river, although we did not move out of earshot. Neither Adam nor Annie seemed concerned with privacy; why should we be?

“I cannot,” she replied, her voice low with emotion. “Your people, your country, are beautiful, but they are too different from what I know. My heart tells me to try, but my head tells me that in the end, that difference would come between us. And I would not hurt you, not for the world.”

“I will come to you, then. Let me help my people for a few years, and then I will return to you.”

“No,” she said – just the tiniest fraction of a second too quickly. “Your people need you. I see that now, and I rejoice for them, even as I sorrow for myself. I can live with the hole in my heart, knowing that it is for a good cause.”

I couldn’t help giving her a quick glance, then looked away again, astonished: I’d have sworn her eyes welled with unshed tears.

Adam seized her hands, a shocking public demonstration for a Moslem male.

“You are as noble a woman as any man could desire, and I can only say, if your heart aches too much, when you are home, if you wish to return here and become my wife, I will be here.”

“You must not wait for me,” she answered firmly. “You must marry and have sons of your own.”

“Oh, I will. But I will always welcome you as another wife.”

I shot her another glance, but fortunately her head was down, studying their entwined hands, and when she