London.”
“Time will tell,” he said, and then he took his pipe out of his mouth and fixed me with a suspicious gaze. “Unless you were planning on a spot of independent criminal investigation?”
“No, Holmes. I told you, it’s only mild curiosity—in my field, not yours.”
“Another whim, Russell?”
“Another whim,” I said evenly, and as our eyes came together, I was made abruptly aware of how alone we were and of the silence of the building around us. At that moment, something entered the room, a thing compounded of the memory of our argument atop the hansom, of the intimacy of the hour and the place, of my thin and clinging blouse and his long legs stretched out towards the fire and of my growing sense of womanliness. I suppressed a shudder and cast about rapidly for a red herring. “Speaking of criminal investigation,” I said, reaching for my glass, “Veronica asked if there was anything I might do about her fiance Miles and his drug habit. Have you any suggestions?”
“Nothing can be done,” he said dismissively.
“He seems to have been a good man, before the trenches,” I persisted.
“Most of them were.”
“Surely there’s something—”
He jumped to his feet and circled his chair, ending up back at the fireplace, where he leant down to smack his pipe against the bricks and send the still-alight dottle spraying onto the coal and the hearth. His voice was high and biting now.
“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples. Besides which, even discounting my unfitness for temperance work, I refuse to act as the world’s nursemaid. If young men wish to inject themselves with heroin, I can no more stand in their way than I could stand in the way of a Boche shell in the trenches.”
“And if he were your son?” I asked very quietly. “Would you not want someone to try?”
It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked. Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.
He rotated his head slowly towards me, eyes cold, face rigid.
“That was unworthy of you, Russell,” was all he said, but the intonation of it brought me to my feet and to his side, and I laid my hand on his arm.
“Dear God, Holmes, I am sorry. It was cruel and thoughtless of me. I am so very sorry.”
He looked at my hand, covered it briefly with his own, and turned away to his chair.
“However,” he said, “you are right. It is irresponsible of me to say that I can do nothing, without having reviewed the case. If you would be so good as to give me the information on the young man, I shall think about what possible courses of action might be open.”
“I…” I stopped, at a loss. “His name is Miles Fitzwarren,” I began weakly, but broke off at his gesture.
“I know him,” he said, and corrected himself. “Rather, I knew him. I shall see what can be done.”
I might have been some tediously importunate client being dismissed with a scrap of comfort.
“Thank you, Holmes,” I said miserably, and went back to my chair.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him, slumped down, chewing at the stem of his empty pipe. My red herring had performed its function, but I knew that this particular old hound would not be misled for long before backtracking to the main scent. For the moment, he sat staring blindly past the mended toes of his woollen stockings, into the glowing coals. I knew him, however. I knew every movement and gesture of the man, the lines and muscles of his face that were more familiar to me than my own, the mind that had moulded mine, and I knew that when his thoughts returned from the contemplation of that particular byway, he would fix me with his all- seeing gaze and with a few deft words unearth the topic I’d been trying so desperately to divert him from. It would happen in a minute, and when it did, the peculiar chilling awareness, a presence almost, that had already passed through the room would return tenfold, and it would not be dismissed.
I waited tensely for him to look up, feeling the quivering silence build in the space between us, and it was a shock, as if an adder had appeared in the bathwater between my toes, to realise that for the first time in my life I was uncomfortable in the presence of Sherlock Holmes. He did not look at me, and I took it as a judgement, and I was sore afraid.
But in the end, he did not fix me with a steely eye; he did not even glance at me. Rather, he moved, with a calmness that in another person would have meant a total unawareness of any untoward currents in the room. He bent forward and placed his cold pipe on the table, then reached for the salt-stained boots drying on the hearth and began to put them on.
“I must go out,” he said. “I shall be back in three or four hours. You get some sleep, and I’ll wake you by eight if you’re not up already. It’s good to be out of the building by nine, when the office workers begin to arrive.” He finished tying his laces and stood up.
“Holmes, I—” I stopped abruptly, lost. What he said then made it apparent that he had not been unaware of the silence.
“It’s all right, Russell. I do understand. The bed is in the next room. Sleep well.”
He rested one hand briefly on the back of my chair as he went around it to the ventilation shaft, and one long finger brushed my shoulder. I wanted to reach up and grasp his hand and not let him leave, but I held myself still and allowed him to fold himself out through the wardrobe door. Then I sat and listened as a very different silence lowered itself onto the room.
The walls closed in, and the quiet was loud, and I was far from sleep. I went into the kitchen and did the washing up, wiped down the surfaces, made myself a cup of milkless tea, put his pipe on its rack, took a book from the shelves, and sat staring at the first page as the cup cooled. Sometime later, I remembered it and grimaced at the taste of the cold tannin, took the cup to the sink and dumped it out, washed it, dried it, put it away, and walked across the room to the internal door.
I looked at the bed a long time. In the end, I went back and took the throw rug from the back of the sofa, turned down the lights, curled up under the rug by the low glow of the fire, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.
SIX
Tuesday, 28 December
—Saint Augustine (354-430)
I had met Sherlock Holmes at a time when adolescence and the devastating circumstances of my orphaning had left me with an exterior toughness and an interior that was malleable to the personality of anyone willing to listen to me and take me seriously. Had Holmes been a cat burglar or forger, no doubt I should have come into adulthood learning to walk parapets at night or concocting arcane inks.
Over the years of my informal apprenticeship, I had learnt his trade, while at the same time pursuing my own academic vision. No doubt it made an odder combination than the two topics Margery Childe had remarked on, but if detecting was what I
