office.” Lestrade looked exasperated. “I know, but you wouldn’t have let me come up if I’d just sent my name up, would you?”
“Why the—why on earth should I let you come up now?”
I leant forward to meet his eyes directly, then said clearly, “Fraud. Three women dead, probably murdered. Preventing a fourth woman’s death.”
We went to his office.
The room had not changed much in the two years since a marksman had come close to murdering me with a bullet through the window that overlooked the river. The dust was thicker, the walls grimier, but it was surprisingly neat, particularly when compared to Holmes’ rat’s nest of a study. I took the proffered chair, across the desk from him, and nearly quailed before his ferrety glower. Nonetheless, I had to see the list. I told him so, and he exploded.
“All right now, Miss Russell, I’ve been patient with you, God knows why, on a Saturday night when a Christian might expect to be at home. You keep hanging in front of my nose these little hints about how much information you have, but it’s me who talks. Another little technique you learnt from your teacher Mr Holmes, no doubt. I’m beginning to think you don’t know anything about this business at all.”
“Would I do that to you?”
“Why ever not?”
“Would I do that to Holmes?”
That gave him pause, because it was obvious that I, a person whom Sherlock Holmes had called his partner, would not voluntarily put my partner’s relationship with the police into jeopardy without very good cause.
“Please,” I asked, “please, just let me see the list, and then I’ll tell you all I can.”
He did not notice that I had not said “all I know,” but I thought he was going to refuse, anyway. However, in the end he went to his filing cabinet and withdrew, not a single sheet, but the entire file.
“God knows why I’m doing this,” he grumbled, throwing it onto the desk in front of me. I knew why: It was because of Holmes. I said nothing, however, and opened it gratefully. He went off and I vaguely heard the rattle of kettle and cups while I rapidly scanned the pale carbon copies and committed to memory the details of Iris Fitzwarren’s movements and possessions that last night of her life.
There was very little in it that was new, as Mycroft had given the information to Holmes, and Holmes to me. It was not politic to let Lestrade know this, however, and it was just possible something had slipped by Mycroft’s source. I read, and at the end of the pages, I sat back and reached automatically for the cup beside me, which startled me by being cool. Lestrade was in his chair, his heels up on his desk, reading another file and making notes in a notepad. He looked up.
“Find what you were looking for?”
“I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, Inspector.”
“You were skimming through that pretty fast.”
“I was reading. I have a couple of questions.”
“Just for a change,” he said sarcastically. He closed his file and put his feet on the floor.
“Er, yes. Did the beat constable make a regular round, or did he vary it?”
“It was regular. It is no longer.”
“I see. Also, is this list of the articles in her handbag in any order? Or just a list?”
“Let me see that.” He took it, glanced through it, handed it back. “It will be in the order he took the things from the handbag. The man who wrote the report is very particular that way.”
“I see,” I said again. The precise list had not been included in the oral information transmitted. I thought for a moment before I realised that he had spoken. “Sorry?”
“I asked you why it mattered, and if you do a Sherlock Holmes on me and tell me it’s perfectly elementary, I swear, you’ll never get so much as the time of day from me in the future.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t picked up that particular bad habit. I was just trying to come up with a reasonable explanation that would cover the facts. The constable wouldn’t have gone through her handbag, searching for identification, would he?”
He spoke through his teeth, which I noticed were small and pointed.
“Miss Russell, the only person who opened her handbag was the man who wrote that list.”
“Because, you see,” I hastened to mollify him, “she had a head cold.”
“Who?”
“Iris Fitzwarren. A bad cold. A terribly runny nose.” I wasn’t getting through to him. In a minute, he would hurl me out the door. I sighed to myself. “Inspector, why should a woman with a bad cold bury her handkerchiefs at the bottom of her handbag? There were none in the pockets of her coat, but two were underneath the compact and lipstick, and even underneath the paper with the name and address of the club. It’s possible she had her handbag open and rummaged around for something—that might explain why the heavier items were on top—but she would never have put her only handkerchiefs away at the bottom. It was a very bad cold, and on a miserable wet night like that, she would have been blowing her nose almost continuously. Plus, there’s the address, right on top. She didn’t need it after she got to the club at eleven-thirty, but when she was killed, it was found on top of everything else. Unlikely if she’d put it in, but just where it would be if her murderer had emptied her bag of anything incriminating, shovelled the stuff back in, and then slipped in a note for the police to find, a note which would either explain her death in a satisfactory way or incriminate Tommy Buchanan, or both.”
I watched his face covertly as I talked, seeing that although the significance of the handkerchiefs had escaped him, that of the note’s placement had not. My estimation of the official investigators rose slightly. I continued.
“Obviously, if the note had been deliberately put there, it becomes extremely unlikely that Tommy Buchanan had anything to do with it, or his thugs. However, it would have to be someone who knew about Buchanan and also knew…” I fell silent for a moment, then resumed slowly. “Someone who also knew about the style of murders linked with him. I assume that various people know about that, newspaper people, for example, even if they were stopped from printing the details?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Does the
“Two, I believe.” He was looking cross again, building up to another, no doubt final explosion, which I hastened to defuse.
“May I tell you a story, Inspector? It is not a long story, nor a pleasant one, and the amount of guesswork that has gone into it would horrify Holmes, but elements of it, I know to be the truth.” He eased back into his chair with an “at last!” expression on his face.
“It begins with the war and the perfectly appalling numbers of young men who were killed and crippled during those four years. At the beginning of the War, there were around six million men in this country of a marrying age, between twenty and forty. By the end of 1918, nearly a million of them lay dead. Another two million were wounded, half of them so badly damaged, mentally or physically, that they may never recover. Where does this leave some two to three million healthy young women who would ordinarily have married healthy young men and spent the rest of their lives caring for babies and husbands? The papers refer to them—us!—as ‘surplus women,’ as if our poor planning left us here while the men were removed. The women who ran this country, and ran it well, from 1915 to 1919, have now been pushed from their jobs to make way for the returning soldiers. Strong, capable women are now made to feel redundant in both the workplace and the home, and no, Inspector, this is not just suffragette ranting; this is the basis of our case…
“Have you met Margery Childe?”
“I have. A woman who was staying in her church went home to visit her husband, and got herself murdered.”
“What was your impression of her?”
“A nice woman, but strange.”
“Strange how?”
“It was… She didn’t seem to be listening to us. She answered our questions. She was polite, friendly even, but it was as if what we were asking weren’t important. As if we had interrupted something and she had her mind still on it while she was talking with us—but, you know, I didn’t get the idea that she was in any hurry to get back
