“I'll ring you if I'm going to be delayed past Wednesday,” she said, but the door had closed on the final words. She frowned; he'd seemed merely distracted, but perhaps he was in truth affronted by her abandoning of him for Flo and the cabin.
No, she decided in the end; it was merely a piece of academic investigation that had caught his imagination, nothing more.
More cheerful than she'd felt in some time, she went to dress and consider an appropriate wardrobe for a none-too-rustic cabin in the woods.
Holmes, in the meantime, made straight for the front desk. Auberon handed his guest the heavy Gladstone bag Holmes had left there earlier, and after informing the manager of the change in their departure date, Holmes lowered his voice to ask, “Is my car here?”
The gentleman responded in kind. “Around the back, Mr Holmes, as you requested.”
One man's palm lifted slightly from the polished surface of the desk and, so smoothly it might have been rehearsed, the other's palm came down and slid the note away. Before it had reached Auberon's pocket, Holmes was halfway to the kitchen.
He passed through that steamy cacophony with scarcely a glance from the white-clad workers, slipping out of the delivery door into the passage-way through which flowed the great hotel's supplies. A shiny Pierce-Arrow with velvet curtains across its back windows was idling off to his right, its driver immersed in a garish journal entitled
“Morning, sir,” said the young man at the wheel. Holmes opened his mouth to ask if this connoisseur of pulp fiction had read anything by Hammett, then changed his mind at the number of complicated conversational path- ways this would open up. Instead he said merely, “What's your name, lad?”
“Greg Tyson, at your service.”
“The name's Holmes. Auberon told me you were a relative.”
“His wife's nephew. And he told me that you needed a fair bit of driving today and a lot of shut mouth afterwards.”
“An accurate description. You know the coast road south?”
“Know it well, sir.”
“I shall let you know when to stop.”
“Very good,” the boy said, and set out to provide what Holmes had required, both the driving and the closed mouth.
Holmes dropped his soft hat on the dark green leather of the seat beside him and went about making himself comfortable, tucking one foot beneath him, loosening his overcoat, and arranging the travelling-rugs behind him. When he had got things as close to a nest of cushions as he was about to achieve in a motorcar, he took out his tobacco pouch—cigarettes were for social occasions and for stimulation, but a pipe was for thinking. And a peaceful review of the past seven days had become increasingly necessary.
He'd rather have stayed to see Russell safely into the motorcar with Flo Greenfield and her friend Donny, but from what he'd seen of that young man and his blue motorcar, once pointed on the road out of town, there would be no catching him up. And Holmes very much wanted to be in front of the carload of merrymakers.
No, he would have to trust that nothing would happen to Russell before her new friends arrived, and that they would quickly out-distance any potential pursuers. Russell was safely out of the way for the next three days.
By the time she returned to the city, he intended that their as-yet-unidentified opponents would no longer be in the equation.
He grimaced with the irritation of it. Cases were far more congenial when there was no personal element in them, and this sensation of being his wife's fond fool was highly unsatisfactory. Urging her to eat, fretting about her safety—he must put Russell out of his mind before the distraction could interfere with rational thought.
The case had started slowly, but was now progressing somewhat, despite the distances it involved in both time and place. While Russell had been immersed with her solicitor and business affairs, he had been occupied with things far more demanding than Paganini sheet music.
Tuesday morning, their first in San Francisco, he had used the time while she was busy with Henry Norbert to get the lay of the land, assembling maps and creating the initial contacts among the local vendors of newspapers and flowers, the shoe-shine boys, the local policemen, and the all-important street-sweepers: his eyes on the world.
He had also succumbed to a growing urge and laid out the beginnings for a line of enquiry into some unfinished business. This had begun with a trip to the P. & O. Line's offices. With considerable difficulty, he had finally determined that the ship on which he and Russell had sailed to Bombay in January, the
That damnable incident in Aden bothered him mightily. He wanted to be quite certain that the falling balcony was just an accident.
He still was not sure what had driven him to appeal to those two for assistance—an ill Mycroft and an arthritic Watson. No doubt it was at least in part due to the unexpected and highly disconcerting absence of his partner-wife's usual competence; in her mental absence, he had turned to her predecessor.
In any case, turned to Watson and Mycroft he had; there was little point in agonising over the why of it.
With past events cared for as best he could, he turned to present concerns, and cast out for information regarding Russell's city, family, and history. With a visit to the offices of the
Most of Wednesday had been spent at the house, first in a quick survey of the house records—the financial accounts he found shelved in the library, a set of garden journals from Mrs Russell's morning room. Then he had taken out the graph paper and measuring tape Auberon had provided for him, going over the house inch by inch until he was satisfied that no rooms hid between the walls. His knees had suffered and his lungs filled with dust, and he had scarcely finished before the sound of a gun-shot had drawn him inexorably to the front door where he'd stood, his blood running cold as he strained for the sound of another shot or of wailing, only breathing again when his wife and her new acquaintance had appeared at the gate. He'd enjoyed meeting Mr Long, although he rather wished the means of their introduction had been somewhat less dramatic.
Thursday morning he had continued to unearth the family's past, examining the social registers for the early years, interviewing neighbours and post office employees. In the afternoon he had finally got those burnt scraps between glass, although he'd had to put off scouring the newspapers for the pertinent articles until the following day. That night being free, they had passed up the cinema offering of Harold Lloyd and the advertised “SF Musical Club High Jinks” at the Palace Hotel in favour of a small, private recital of
Friday morning had been spent digging through mountains of old newspapers, at the
