Justice Hall

we might one afternoon call upon her? When the boy was home from his studies, say, and free to join us for a visit to the seller of ices?

Mme Hughenfort was a woman easily reached through an appreciation of her son. With no whisper of hesitation, she gave Holmes the address that no Hughenfort had been able to discover. He noted it down in a fussy hand, closed and tucked away his miniature note-book, and thanked her.

At the station, we retained our small, battered valises but assisted Madame in transferring her bags to the hands of a porter, and we stayed with our new friends, chatting amiably, until both were safely within a taxi. There we paused, ever polite, until she had given the driver her destination.

Her voice reached us clearly through the glass.

Holmes kept no bolt-hole in Paris, but he knew the city well enough to give our own taxi driver the name of a large, busy hotel frequented by commercial travellers, across the street from Mme Hughenfort’s chosen accommodation. Our hotel occupied nearly half of a city block, and had entrances on three streets; no-one would notice a couple of suddenly defrocked priests passing through the lobby, and no maid would unpack the younger priest’s highly irregular female garments from the larger valise.

We took adjoining rooms, shed our identifying black garments, changed into more usual attire, and passed through the lobby separately to meet in a nearby brasserie, whose front windows just happened to overlook the front door of Mme Hughenfort’s hotel.

We did not expect to see her. Digging up information on the woman’s personal life was the purpose of accompanying her to Lyons, where there would be neighbours and shopkeepers to be questioned. However, less than twenty minutes later I glanced up from my soupe a l’oignon and nearly tipped the rising spoonful onto my shirt-front.

“Holmes—look!”

Strolling in our direction, looking the very essence of a French provincial family in the big city, came Mme and Thomas Hughenfort, accompanied by a swarthy man not much taller than she and equally stout. She did not look coquettish enough for it to be a recent friendship, and for a moment I thought the man might be a brother, come to fetch his sister and nephew home safely from the capital city. Certainly the boy seemed, if not overjoyed to see him, at least accepting of his presence, and even responded to one jovial folly with a grudging smile. But then the fingers of the two adults intertwined surreptitiously, in an exploration that was more foreplay than greeting, and I knew this was no brother.

“Russell,” Holmes said with an urgent note in his voice, “I believe they are coming this way. The two of us might trigger a memory; I suggest one of us leave quickly.”

I was already on my feet and dropping my table napkin on my chair. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel,” I told him, and slipped out of the door while the trio was still crossing the street.

My own three-star luncheon was a baguette and some cheese in a park, feeding the crumbs to the pigeons. I then went into a few shops to add to my meagre possessions. Back in the hotel, with nothing at hand but the Testament, I had just reached the Book of Romans, and was struggling with Paul’s arguments concerning justification by faith, when a key scraped in the lock of the next room. I lowered my book and waited. Holmes popped through the shared door.

“On your feet, Russell. The lady’s decided that she was indiscreet, that the wicked English, being capable of anything, could have stooped to subverting the priesthood to prise her address out of her. She and the boy will take the train today; the good monsieur, about whom I know only that he calls himself Tony, will turn the tables and lie in wait for the priest, in order to follow him to Lyons on the afternoon train tomorrow.”

I burst into laughter at the convoluted plot. “He didn’t suspect the priest of being anything but?”

“Apparently not. Nor has it entered their heads that a person in a cassock may smile and smile and be a woman. Their innocence is, I have to say, both charming and encouraging.”

“What time is the train?”

He glanced at his pocket-watch. “You have twenty-three minutes to reach the station.”

I handed him the Testament and began throwing off one set of clothing and pulling on another, pinning my hair to support my new hat, dabbing on powder, colouring my lips, and generally changing into another woman. The cassock, men’s shoes, heavy spectacles, and the rest of that persona were already in the valise I had brought here. My other clothing, English and French, went into my newly purchased leather suit-case. I turned my overcoat so the plain cloth was inside and the fur without, and dropped it nonchalantly over my shoulders. Holmes copied the address Terese Hughenfort had given him and slipped it into my handbag along with a city map he’d picked up somewhere.

“Where shall I meet you?” I asked him.

“Take a room at the Hotel Carlton. I’ll find you there. And as an alternate, at noon in the new basilica. Now, be off.”

I had no trouble getting a ticket to Lyons, taking my seat in first class, and gazing out of the windows until Mme Hughenfort appeared, struggling with luggage and a foot-dragging son. Neither, I would guess, was happy to have their Parisian holiday cut short.

They sat in the second-class cars. Which was fine with me; all I intended to do was follow them, with luck to the address I had in my bag, and watch to see where they went next. I suspected they would merely gather a few things and retreat to a friend’s house until Monsieur Tony caught them up, but it would be best if we did not lose them until we were certain.

When we were under way, I unfolded the map of Lyons that Holmes had put into my bag and located the address, then that of the hotel, and finally the tourist landmarks thoughtfully noted by the mapmaker. Would she believe the two priests intended to be on the next day’s train? Or would she go straight to a safe place? I decided she would go home first. Else why go to Lyons at all, if outright disappearance was the goal? I did not think she was suspicious enough to panic, merely not to be at home when the two priests rang her bell. She would, no doubt, count on the ungentlemanly Tony to follow the scoundrels to their own lair and put the fear of a vengeful God into them. My mind’s eye was taken up for a moment by the scene of Holmes in soutane and clouded spectacles blithely picking his way across the bustling gare while the prosperous and swarthy Monsieur Tony tip-toed along behind the pillars to keep him in view, taking up a hard third-class bench and settling in behind a newspaper so as never to take his eye off the dubious priest.

The vision faded, and I bent over the cartography of Lyons.

At the gare in Lyons, my first-class status and relative lack of bags meant that I was shut into my taxi before my quarry had joined the queue. I had the driver pull up, half a block away, and I gave him some story about my mentally disturbed sister-in-law who couldn’t be trusted to find her way home but insisted on trying. He accepted this blague (men do, I’ve found, accept the most arrant nonsense from a well-dressed woman) and sat with the motor idling. Mme Hughenfort eventually got her taxi, and passed us, going towards the city centre.

We pulled in behind her and followed her through the narrow Presqu’ile and into the quiet area north of the busy centre, where her taxi pulled up in front of a block of flats with shops on the street level. I had my driver continue on slowly; when I saw the two travellers go through a door, I told him to take me to the Carlton.

Despite the hour, they had a room for me “and my husband, who will be arriving tomorrow, or possibly Saturday.” I went up, washed the travel from my face and hands, turned my coat to present a bland cloth facade to the world, and went back down and through the dark streets to the Hughenforts’ front door.

I had seen a brasserie across the street and up a bit—not ideally placed for my purposes, but seated at the window, I thought I should be able to see if a taxi pulled up in front of her building. It took the maitre d’ twenty minutes to produce the requested window table, but I did not think it likely their stop at home would be that brief.

So it proved. I no sooner took my seat than a glance out at the street showed a familiar dark-haired boy with a laden shopping bag coming out of a grocer’s. The shopkeeper locked the door behind the boy and tugged down the shades; the boy walked up the steps and into the building.

The Hughenforts would, it seemed, be stopping the night at home. I ate my lamb cassoulet and drank two glasses of Moulin-a-Vent, then returned to my hotel, where I slept very well indeed.

In the morning I was back at my brasserie, its evening linen and herbs-and-garlic odours given way to