police matron. He chose one item—a set of picklocks—and examined it with expert fingers.
“Were there any injuries other than the scratch on your arm?” he asked politely.
“Nothing much. I have a bad shoulder.”
He studied first my left shoulder, then the other, and though his jolly facade gave nothing away, I thought he knew quite well who I was and why my shoulder was bad. I had saved Holmes’ life, and my own, at the cost of a shattered collarbone. Two years later, chips of bone continued to work their way to the surface with depressing regularity. He nodded.
“Some of these things are illegal,” he continued conversationally.
“For the common citizen,” I agreed. “And some of them only become illegal when they are used.”
“Hmm. And you’re not a common citizen.”
“If I wanted to commit burglary, or even murder, Chief Inspector, I should hardly need to resort to bits of machinery.”
I met his eyes evenly.
“It wasn’t an accident, then,” he said after a moment.
“I told you it was not.”
“But you didn’t intend to break his arm.”
“I warned him clearly what would happen if he moved. And he moved. If he hadn’t attacked us with murder so obviously in mind, I might just have knocked him out. As it is, he’ll not be knifing women for some long time. One more thing, and then I will leave. Scotland Yard is looking into the murder of Iris Fitzwarren. You might offer them tonight’s little episode to chew on.”
I stood up and gathered my belongings.
“We will need to have you sign your statement, Miss Russell.”
“Tomorrow, Inspector. I’ll come in in the morning. Just, please, don’t let that man get away from you.”
“No,” he said simply. I felt a tiny flicker of warmth for the man. “Until tomorrow, then, Miss Russell.”
“Good evening, Chief Inspector.”
My reputation, or more probably that of Holmes, had followed close on my heels, and the path through the station was lined with curious eyes. At least there were no reporters to battle and outwit, and before I got to the front entrance, I knew there would be none waiting outside, either.
The fog had closed in. Such a mild monosyllable,
I made my way out the door and down the remembered four steps, patted my way down the front of the station a few feet, and allowed my shoulders to slump back against the bricks. God, I was tired, weary to the marrow of my bones. My right shoulder ached with the damp and the wrenching it had received, the two cuts on my left arm throbbed along with it, and my head pounded with the reaction of violence, received and committed, followed by two hours of verbal fencing with Inspector Richmond, with nothing in my stomach but sour Camp coffee. I leant my poor trampled hat back against the wall, aware of a trembling that threatened to surface from deep within my body, and tried to summon the energy to walk one and a half blind miles to my unwelcoming flat.
I always hated what Londoners called with such wry pride their “particulars,” their “peculiars,” their “pea soupers,” like the beaming parents of some uncontrollable and pathologically destructive brat. Myopia is too close to a permanent state of fog to make for any entertainment in finding one’s self groping through the streets with hands outstretched, with the additional irritant of having to be constantly wiping one’s spectacles and wondering if it would not be simpler to dispense with them entirely until such time as the Thames deigned to melt back into its solid banks and its fluid state. Also, truth to tell, I have always been a bit of a claustrophobe, and the edginess that comes from suppressing an irritating and irrational fear, combined with my current far-from-irrational caution about venturing into a London bristling, for all I knew, with knife-wielding youths all too willing to pick up where their colleague had left off, made me regret that the chief inspector had not decided to keep me locked up overnight. Perhaps I ought to turn myself in, I thought in disgust. Fling my picklocks on the charge desk and myself into the burly hands of the sergeant on duty. I wiped my spectacles with my handkerchief and replaced them on my nose, then moved the white linen square slowly away from my eyes. Standing as I was directly under the entrance light of the station, at arm’s length the handkerchief was only a vaguely lighter streak in the soup. From up the street came a heavy thud and a metallic screech, followed immediately by two frightened shrieks, one female and one equine, and two male voice began to curse each other hugely. Taxi and cart colliding, I diagnosed, and sighed.
In response, a voice spoke from the gloom on my right.
“Russell?”
I jerked and the handkerchief dropped from my hand, lost forever in the Stygian depths of the pavement, but had he been standing nearer than the ten feet or so that separated us, I believe I should have flung my arms about him and kissed him. As it was, I had to content myself with merely grinning— idiotic, considering the ambiguity of my feelings about the man over the past few weeks. But the lift in my heart could not be denied, as if the door to my own house had suddenly opened up before me on the street.
“Damn it, Holmes, how do you do that? I swear you must have psychic powers, or the best conjuring manual in the business.”
I heard his footsteps come up to me as surely as if it had been a clear spring morning, and an impression of his face swam into view.
“Just a brother, with ears in many places. Mycroft reached me an hour ago with the message that the police had a dangerous young woman in custody. I came on the Underground, which is still operating, if slowly. Had you not emerged in another half hour, I should have gone to your rescue, but I thought it might be less complicated were I to let you talk your own way out. You were not injured?”
“Not seriously, either by the man with the knife or by the metropolitan police, thank you. What are you doing back in town? You said yesterday you were going back to Sussex for a few days.”
“I never left, although town has seen nothing of Sherlock Holmes.”
I had a sudden brief vision of Holmes moving crablike through the city, sidling through the background of scenes in first one guise, then another.
“Basil the driver?”
“Some of his cousins, perhaps,” he agreed. “I decided that the experiments awaiting me were of less importance than the business I have here.”
“And I am keeping you from it.”
“You are it.” Before I could consider whether to be warmed or forewarned by this, he went on. “You said you were going up to Oxford for a few days. Have you changed your mind?”
“Holmes, I can’t change my plans. I promised Duncan.”
“Quite. In that case, I shall assume the London end of the investigation until you return. Not, perhaps, inside your Temple, but nearby. Although, come to think of it, they may need a casual workman. Perhaps even a cleaning woman.”
“Holmes, I’d rather you didn’t.”
“No? You may be right. It is, after all, your investigation. Is there some way I can be of service?” he asked politely, as if he might actually consider standing in the wings awaiting an invitation. I nearly laughed.
“At the moment, I fear, I am more in need of skills domestic than investigative. I am cold, Holmes, and I am hungry.” I could not, of course, see his expression, but I did not think he smiled at my unintentionally plaintive words. He just turned and, tucking my right arm through his left one, began to stroll into the curry yellow night.
He did not even demand speech of me, but as we made our way—or rather, as he surefootedly steered me— through what my ears and nose told me were streets punctuated by narrow and unsavoury passageways, he told me a lengthy tale of a long-ago experiment into sensory deprivation—namely, living for eight unbroken weeks as a blind man, wearing completely opaque lenses and led about by the young urchin Billy.
At a conjunction of walls which, if invisible, had a familiar feel in its echoes, Holmes took out a key and the wall again opened. I greeted the Constable politely and the Vernet as an old friend, ate the food Holmes set before
