attacker to join us. Although by the appearance of his overcoat, I should say this happened far from here.”
It was true. Ali’s incongruous city suit had been stiff with dried blood, his shirt collar saturated to the shoulders. Whatever had brought him here, desperation might well follow on his heels.
When the doctor had gone and Mrs Hudson was tut-tutting over the ruined clothing, Holmes picked up his hastily abandoned pipe, knocked it out, and began to tamp fresh tobacco into the bowl. I went through the house to secure the doors and windows and draw the curtains, just in case.
“It has to be something to do with Mahmoud,” I said when I came back. “Ali would not have come to England without him, and would not have come to us for help except if Mahmoud were in grave danger.”
“It is difficult to imagine the one Hazr without the other,” Holmes agreed. He got the pipe going, then resumed his three-week-old newspaper.
“But, shouldn’t we do something? He may sleep for hours.”
“What do you propose?”
“We could telephone to Mycroft.”
He did lower the paper a fraction to consider the proposition, then shook his head.
“My brother is in London, unless he’s left since this morning. If Ali wanted Mycroft, he’d have stopped there. He wanted us, which meant that either he thought we would not respond to a mere telegraph or telephone message, or secrecy was foremost. No, Ali came from Berkshire to see us, not to speak with Mycroft. We shall have to be patient.”
The unused portion of a return ticket in Ali’s pocket had revealed a journey from the farthest reaches of Berkshire, a rural station I’d never heard of called Arley Holt. It seemed likely that he had been injured during his journey’s break in London. It was also more than possible that the wound had been not accident, but active threat; something, after all, had prevented him from seeking medical attention when he disembarked in Eastbourne, miles from our door.
Ignorance is always frustrating, never more so than when accompanied by the feeling that it obscures the need for action. Holmes and I wore our patience like a pair of horse-hair shirts, prickly and ill-fitting, and while we kept our eyes on the printed word, our ears were turned towards the stairs, eager for the slightest sleep-befuddled query.
It did not come. Mrs Hudson abandoned her scrubbing brush and retired to her quarters. The fire burnt low. Mid-night approached, with no movement from the guest room.
Finally, Holmes rattled his paper shut with an air of finality and fixed me with a gaze. “And the cares that infest the day,” he pronounced, “shall fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently sleep away.”
We took ourselves to bed, but not to silent sleep; nor was the air filled with the music from the first part of his misquotation.
I had forgot how emphatically Ali snored.
Two of us in the house slept little.
Morning came, the aroma of coffee trickled its way up the stairs, and still the Hazr snores rattled the windows. Not until after eight o’clock did they abruptly cease. Holmes and I looked at each other. Mrs Hudson came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron and cocking her head at the ceiling.
“Shall I make another breakfast, then?” she asked.
“Either that or send for the undertaker,” I answered, but then a rattle of movement came from the bedstead over our heads, followed by the thump of feet hitting the floorboards. They stopped there, either through dizziness or because Ali noticed that he was more or less naked. Holmes folded his newspaper (he’d worked his way up to the previous week) and rose.
“If you would like to make a pot of tea, Mrs Hudson, Russell will bring it up. I’ll find our guest a dressing gown. Give him a minute, Russell, to get his bearings.”
I was not certain whether Holmes was referring to the inevitable confusion following a head injury, or to the specific discomfort this man might feel after having tumbled into the arms of a woman he’d spent the better part of six weeks insulting, ignoring, and mistrusting. Our relationship had become considerably more jovial after I had come close to killing him a couple of times (accidents both, I hasten to say), but I might still not be the person Ali Hazr would have chosen to pick him up following a moment of vulnerability.
To be fair, I had to permit him to resume his mask of omni-competence. Whatever had driven him to the extremity of seeking aid, it would only further complicate matters to begin with inequality. So I allowed Holmes to trot off upstairs without me. I did not even snatch the tray from Mrs Hudson’s hands, but meekly waited for her to rearrange the biscuits into an aesthetic design before I took up the refreshment and carried it upstairs.
Holmes had built up the fire in the guest room and was seated on the low bench at the foot of the bed. The room’s armchair held Ali, clad in a warm dressing gown and a pair of Holmes’ pyjama trousers that extended past his toes. He looked up at my entrance and watched me set the tray down on the small table by his side. I poured him a cup. He added milk (rather to my surprise, as Arab tea is taken black) and two sugars, then drank thirstily. I refilled his cup and pulled the foot-stool up to the other side of the fireplace. A quick glance at the pillow confirmed that he’d bled, but not profusely, and none of the stains looked fresh.
The second cup followed the first down his throat, and he set it onto the saucer with the barest tap. Ali glanced at me briefly, and away.
“The English beverage,” he commented, which might have sounded like disparagement had he not drunk it so greedily. I decided this was his version of Thank You. His hand went to his scalp, exploring the surface of the bandage. “Someone has put in stitches.”
“Six,” Holmes told him. “One of our neighbours is a retired surgeon. And in case you are concerned, he knows well how to keep a confidence.”
“Good. I . . . apologise for my state yesterday night. I do not remember too clearly, but I have the impression that my arrival was somewhat more . . . dramatic than I had intended.”
The drama of his arrival the previous evening, however, had been nowhere near as startling as the words he had just pronounced. And not only the words themselves (Ali Hazr, apologising?) but their delivery.
My first clear impression of Ali all those years before, seen by the light of a tiny oil lamp in a mud-brick hut near Jaffa, had been: Arab cut-throat. Glaring eyes and garish embroidery, knife as well as revolver decorating his belt, his very moustaches looking ferocious—from his flowered head-dress to his red leather boots, Ali Hazr had been in that first moment what he remained the entire time: a Bedouin male, proud member of a haughty race, fiercely indisposed to tolerate anyone but Mahmoud, his brother in the deepest sense of the word. Touchy and arrogant, his hand reaching for his knife at the slightest provocation, in his attitude towards us Ali had veered between mortal threat and withering contempt. Passing the tests he and Mahmoud had set us, becoming a companion worthy of their trust, had been a profound source of pride that I had never acknowledged, even to Holmes. I had, in truth, been a different person when Ali and Mahmoud Hazr finished with me.
I looked at the man in the chair, and other than the colours of the tie draped over the bedstead, I could perceive little of that vivid personality now. His erect spine, and perhaps the darkness in his eyes, but the flash was missing from their depths, the aura of simmering violence well and truly damped down. With the gap in his front teeth bridged, even his oddly ominous lisp was gone, his once-heavy accent no more than a faint thickening of gutturals and a subtly non-English placement of the words on the tongue. Had Holmes not trained my ear, I might have thought our intruder merely an ordinary, tame English gentleman. Ali Hazr had shaved away far more than facial hair in transforming himself into this.
As I studied him, those black eyes glanced up at me again, and in that brief moment of contact I felt a spark in them, and read in his half-familiar mouth a distinct grimace. He knew what I was seeing—or rather, not seeing —and it was a face he was not happy about showing. His current appearance was no mere disguise.
“I think I should introduce myself,” he said. I had the impression he spoke through gritted teeth. “My name is Alistair Hughenfort. Alistair Gordon St John Hughenfort. Although even as a child, my family called me Ali.”
Holmes’ head jerked up and I, frankly, stared. Hughenfort? He must be joking. The Hughenfort name was a thing to conjure with, a noble name in the fullest sense of the word, one of a thin handful of the nation’s families that had actually stepped onto England’s shores at the side of William the Conqueror. Half the European wars had a Hughenfort leading some vital charge—and half the rebellions had a younger Hughenfort somewhere in there as well. But as an assumed name, it would have been like disguising himself as the Prince of Wales. It could only be the truth. Holmes shook off the historical details and went for the main issue.
“And Mahmoud?”
