whose broad feet suggest a broad hand. We shall have to make enquiries as to the weather over the past weeks,” he added, folding away the pull-handle. “Their shoes left soil on the floor beneath their beds, but not enough to indicate they walked through actual mud.”
“And if they came in through the kitchen, you're right, that ground would be a morass after a rain. Did you find any signs of lamps, candles, torches, anything of the sort?”
“The woman had a carpet-bag she set down several places, which could have held anything. But I saw no signs of dripped wax or any impression of a lamp's base. I think it probable they did their work during the daylight, so as not to alert the aged but sleepless watch-dog across the way.”
“Coming in before dawn and leaving after dusk? I'd have thought that risky. Unless—”
“Yes,” he said. “It would be satisfying to discover that the full moon coincided with a dry spell, would it not?”
And so it proved, in a pleasingly neat confirmation of how the intruders came and went unnoticed. When we repaired to the hotel an hour or two later, for supplies, soap, and sustenance, enquiries at the desk were followed within minutes by a simultaneous knock on our door and the ringing of the telephone. Holmes went to the door, holding it open for the man with the laden tea tray, while I received the information that February had been wet more or less throughout, but two weeks of dry weather in the middle of March had been broken by rain the morning of the twenty-fourth. The March full moon had been the twentieth.
I thanked the manager, then: “Oh, and Mr Auberon? Could you please have someone look into train reservations to New York, the middle of next week? That's right, two of us. Sorry?” I listened for a minute, then asked him to hold on, and covered the mouthpiece with my hand.
“Holmes, he says the hotel has another guest who is planning a cross-country aeroplane flight to leave the middle of next week, and wants two partners in the enterprise. Might we be interested?”
The vivid memory of our recent, nerve-fraying night-time flight over the Himalayan foothills winced across his face, but Holmes' upper lip was nothing if not stiff. “Up to you,” he replied mildly, and returned to pouring the tea. I addressed myself to the telephone.
“Perhaps you could get the details of both, and we could decide which fits better with our plans. Thank you.”
Holmes brought me a cup of tea and a selection of sandwiches, settling down at the window with his own refreshment. He ate two sandwiches in rapid succession, then sat back with his cup. “Have you a schedule for the morrow?” he asked.
“Norbert's arranged various appointments in the morning, but I have the rest of the day free. Would you like to see something of the city? We could go out to the ocean and sun-bathe, if the sun comes out. And there's a famous salt-water baths out there as well, if you'd like those.”
He fixed me with a disbelieving gaze. “You wish to play the tourist?”
I kept the innocent expression on my face for as long as I could, but a slight movement of my mouth gave me away, and the answering relief on his face released the laughter. “Holmes, I wouldn't think of getting in the way of your glass plates.”
He shook his head with disapproval, but said only, “You shall ask Mr Norbert about the keys?”
“Certainly, and if he knows where I can find Mah and Micah.”
“You might also enquire if his watch-dogs saw anything out of the ordinary before the twentieth of March.”
“I shall.”
In the end, we did play the part of tourists, for that evening at least. We took a motorcar out to where San Francisco ended, and ate dinner at the Cliff House restaurant with the Pacific Ocean pounding at our feet, watching the sun go down. Wine again proved to be available, albeit decanted into an anonymous pitcher, and if the cooking was not as exceptional as the view out of the windows, the food was palatable. When we had finished our coffee, we walked down the steep hill and onto the sand, strolling along the beach. The wind had died down and the fog was lying well off-shore; it was quite pleasant.
At the far end, with the western sky darkening towards deepest indigo, Holmes settled onto a section of the sea wall that kept the sand at bay and took out his tobacco.
“Is this beach familiar to you?” he asked.
“It is, although the Cliff House I remember was a magnificently absurd Victorian monstrosity, so enormous and top-heavy it was a wonder that it didn't topple into the sea in the earthquake. We used to come here a lot with my father. Levi would build elaborate Gothic fortified castles using dribbled wet sand while I read a book, and my father would alternate between swimming and reading one of his dime novels. Which reminds me—do you know what I found on the shelves in the library?”
“Oh, Lord,” he said.
“Yes, three of the stories Conan Doyle published. Oh, Holmes, my father would have been so delighted by the situation. He had a very droll and complicated sense of humour—you saw the cat carving on the high shelf?” I explained to him my father's canary perch, and he chuckled around the stem of his pipe.
“Were the library books his?”
“A lot of them were in the house when he took it over. You see, his parents badly wanted him to remain in Boston, but he refused to leave California, and lived on his own here for years before they decided that, for the sake of the family name, if their son wasn't coming home, he might as well comport himself in as civilised a fashion as one could in the wilderness of San Francisco. They gave him the family house and its fittings to permit him to do so. I think they'd bought the books by the linear foot when they built the library—you know how it is, books look good on the shelves, even if they're never read. Actually, my father wasn't a huge reader himself—you may have noticed that many of those books still have uncut pages. He used to come home with a book he'd bought, spend half an hour skimming through it to extract the essence, and never look at it again.”
“Your mother was the reader, then?”
“A rabbi's daughter? Of course. Father used to say she was the brains in the family, but I think it was just that her intelligence was intellectual, his was practical. His mind grasped patterns—he could have been a superb chess player, if he didn't find the game so tedious. He loved gadgets, bought a new motorcar every year and tinkered with it himself. He was . . .” I thought a moment for a word that distilled his essence. “He was strong.”
“And your mother?”
“Mother was . . . alive. She was dark and bright and very funny—she had a much quicker sense of humour than Father did, and the infectious giggle of a child. She was orderly—she didn't mind if things were turned upside- down in the course of the day, but she liked to see them restored to their places eventually. She was a natural teacher, knew how to present things so they caught the imagination of a child. She taught us both Hebrew, through the Bible, and with me she used an analytical approach—how slight changes in grammar affect meaning, for example—whereas with my brother she concentrated on the mathematics. She and his maths tutor worked out a system for integrating math problems and Torah studies, using the Bible to build problems in calculus and such; I never did understand it. Looking back, she might have been worried that Levi would turn his back on his faith, and wanted to ensure that Torah was in his bones from early on.”
“Your brother was a brilliant boy, you told me.”
“Levi was a genius, an extraordinary mind.” I stared out over the water, white streaks appearing in the darkness as each wave peaked, then vanished with the crash of the surf. “He had three tutors. One for maths, one for Torah and Talmud, and one for everything else—he didn't care for history and English, but he could memorise anything, which served the same purpose as actual learning as far as he was concerned. I hated him, sometimes. I loved him, too, but he tended to dominate life, rather. It was always lovely to get one of the parents to myself. So relaxed. Actually, I think my parents were almost frightened by him. Certainly daunted—I would catch my father looking at Levi sometimes, as if wondering what sort of creature this was in his house.”
I stood, brushing the sand from my skirt. “That's about all I have of them, vague outlines coupled with specific incidents. But I believe you'd have liked them, Holmes. I'm very sorry you never had a chance to meet them.
“And now I think our driver may be getting nervous, that we've fallen into the sea.”
On Wednesday morning, I left Holmes at the front desk, puzzling the affable Mr Auberon with enquiries about
