“His parents objecting to Mother being a Jew, hers outraged by his being a Christian. Holmes, I've told you all this.”
“And came here, to San Francisco, although his parents had long ago returned to Boston, the Russell family centre. California being, like the Colonies, a place one sent younger sons to try themselves, and with luck to add something to the family fortunes before they came back home to the castle.”
“I thought they'd first come here in 1900, after I was born.”
“Not at all. According to the account books in your father's study, they lived here from 1897 to 1899, before returning to England for your birth. They returned in May 1901. As we heard, they met the Longs eighteen months later, and as your honorary aunt told you, lived here, apart from the period of your brother's birth, until the summer after the earthquake.”
“At which time my mother got nervous about the house falling down around her and took my brother and me back to England. I know.”
“Whatever your mother was nervous about, it did not include houses falling down.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to two of your neighbours, your family moved back into the house ten days after the fire, at which time your mother seemed remarkably light-hearted about the damage, and sanguine about any future catastrophes.”
“Then why would she leave?”
“Precisely what they wondered. And why leave so precipitately, taking only a few bags, and following a loud argument?”
“An argument? My
“The postman heard it. He said it was unusual. Said, too, that to find your father's motorcar in the drive in the morning was most unusual. You do not remember any degree of discord between your parents?”
“I don't remember them fighting, no.”
“Yet they separated for large parts of the years between 1906 and 1912. What would have caused that if not marital discord? A child's health? Some threat here in California?”
“Threat from what?”
“In June 1906 your father also wrote the codicil to the will specifying that the house be closed to outsiders. Two months following the fire.”
“I imagine a catastrophe of those proportions would have caused many people to add codicils to their wills.”
“And two months following some incident that caused a shift in the relationship between your father and Micah Long.”
“Again, the experience of the fire itself could have done that. Or even Long's guilt and resentment that he had been seeing to the safety of my family when his own family was driven from their home and nearly killed.”
“That is true enough,” he conceded. He thought for a minute then asked, “And over the following years, whenever your father came to England, how did your parents seem?”
Russell looked uncomfortable at this autopsy of a marriage. “They seemed . . . normal. Well, when he first arrived we would all be somewhat stiff and formal. But within a few days everything would be fine. And Mother was always very sad when he left again.”
“So why leave, and so suddenly?” Holmes asked, but he was only musing aloud, not asking her.
“I was at school,” Russell said suddenly, as if a memory had been startled from her. “I came home from school one afternoon and found her throwing things into bags and telling me we had to go. I'd finished my exams, but I didn't even have a chance to say good-bye to my friends. I had to write home to Father from New York and ask him to send certain books I'd forgotten in the rush. I always assumed it was because they'd discovered the house wasn't safe to live in.”
“There was damage, but less than some of the neighbouring houses withstood. I think it more likely that the cause lay in some threat. Possibly linked to the happenings in the fire.”
“‘Possibly' this, ‘theoretically' that—you keep harping on some mysterious event of a criminal nature, Holmes. What sort of a crime are you imagining?”
“That I have yet to discover,” Holmes said calmly.
“Or even if there was one.” She rose and said coldly, “Holmes, I have things to do. I shall be out with Flo until late, so don't wait up for me. And please, I beg you, find something to keep yourself busy. This stirring about in my past is becoming a vexation.”
She walked away; he sat with his pipe, watching her retreat with hooded eyes.
Chapter Eleven
It was both a challenge and an irritation to follow an individual such as Russell without being seen. Had she been another person, Holmes would simply have trailed along in her wake, confident that a young woman in the hold of social impulse and illicit alcohol would be oblivious of a tail. Russell, however, even without her glasses, normally had eyes in the back of her head.
Not that she'd noticed him following practically on her heels all those hours on Monday afternoon. Still, Holmes kept his distance. He had his taxi park down the street from the St Francis until Russell's friend arrived, then followed behind, stopping a street down from where the gaudy, bright blue Rolls-Royce disgorged its passengers. He studied the motor's driver closely, taking note of the noise he made and the speed with which he drove—outside of a city's streets, the taxi would never have kept up with him—but noting also the way the apparently careless young man gave wide berth to a woman walking with her two children, and how he always kept both his hands on the wheel and spoke over his shoulder instead of turning his head to speak to the passengers in back.
When the blue car had been driven away by the club's valet, Holmes paid off his curious driver and took up surveillance in a more or less illicit dive across the way from the cabaret, a small and dingy space with air that looked as if the fog had moved in. He used his thumb-nail to scrape a patch of paint from the window-glass, which looked to have been applied half-heartedly at the descent of Prohibition five years before, absently cleaned the grime from underneath his nail with a pen-knife, then settled in to his surveillance with a glass of stale beer before him on the table.
An hour passed. Motorcars came and went from the sparkling gin palace, music spilt out onto the street, the uniformed doorman chatted unconcernedly with two passing policemen (confirming Holmes' suspicions that the police department in this town was not as free of graft as one might wish—a two-year-old would have known that the alcohol inside flowed like water). And slowly, he became aware that he was himself being watched.
The man was good. Holmes had taken no particular note of him when he wandered in, other than noticing how tall, thin, and tidily dressed he was. He was simply one thirsty man among a dozen others—but when the man settled into the dimmest corner, when he nursed two whiskeys over the course of the hour and seemed uninterested in the company, and particularly when he seemed to relax into his corner and displace less air than a normal man, Holmes' antennae twitched. He pondered his options: keep guard over the street and Russell, or pursue this new avenue?
After an hour and a quarter, with a full glass on the table, Holmes rose and headed towards the back of the establishment, weaving slightly. He felt the other man come to attention in the dim corner, and smiled to himself as he heard the soft clink of coins being laid on the damp table: The man was preparing to follow if Holmes did not return in a reasonable time, but not immediately—he wouldn't want to risk a face-to-face meeting in the hall- way.
