of a newlywed couple who had been separated in the hours after the quake and driven apart further by the track of the fire. Each had spent days convinced that the other was dead, until a chance encounter with a mutual friend had led the husband to his wife. On the obverse were several small articles no more than a paragraph or two long: the theft of a number of Army tents from Golden Gate Park; an infant rescued from wreckage; a dog gone mad with grief; the burnt body of a policeman amid the charred ruin of a house; and the departure from San Francisco of the great tenor Caruso. Holmes set aside the Photostats, for further consideration.
Later in the day he'd tracked down that other source of inside knowledge into a neighbourhood, the Pacific Heights milkman of 1912. He'd been forced to hare across town twice in the process, wasting huge blocks of time, and all for nothing. The man might as well have been deaf and blind for all he knew about the Russells, or anyone else for that matter. Now, if Holmes could tell him of any unusual standing orders the family habitually placed, he might remember. . . .
It happened in every investigation, hours wasted. Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite tediousness, he reminded himself, and scraped out his cold pipe into the motor's ash-tray, filling the bowl anew.
Friday had also seen the utter collapse of Russell, knocked flat by the news of Dr Ginzberg's death. All in all, not a good day, Friday.
But not without its bright points. Mrs Hudson's answer, typically long-winded, had finally come into his hands during one of his cross-town trips on Friday:
MR HOLMES GLAD TO HEAR FROM YOU AND SORRY FOR THE DELAY I WAS VISITING MY FRIEND MRS TURNER IN SURREY. DR. WATSONS HOUSEKEEPER SAYS HE IS AT THE BADEN SPAS BADEN GERMANY FOR HIS ARTHRITIS POOR MAN WHAT A MARTYR HE IS. I TOOK YOUR BROTHER SOME ELDERBERRY WINE HE LOOKS WELL. SEVERAL PEOPLE RANG TO ASK WHEN YOU WERE RETURNING PLEASE DO LET ME KNOW. LOVE TO MARY. MRS CLARA HUDSON
Seeing that Watson was off taking the cure, Holmes had hesitated before sending his request.
But only briefly. After all, someone had to interview the ship's pursers about the mysterious Southern woman, and although he would naturally have preferred to do it himself, he was far from home, and the idea of letting it lie for weeks until he could do it himself made his skin crawl with impatience.
So he'd sent it:
WATSON URGENT NEED ENQUIRIES STAFF ESPECIALLY PURSERS ON P AND O SHIP MARGUERITE DOCKING MARSEILLES SATURDAY EVENING. WOMAN POSSIBLY FROM SOUTHERN UNITED STATES ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT US DURING JANUARY RUN AND WHO LEFT AT ADEN. ANY AND ALL INFORMATION VALUABLE BUT CHIEFLY DID SHE KNOW WE WERE CALIFORNIA BOUND QUERY DID SHE ARRANGE OWN FURTHER TRAVEL QUERY WAS SHE WITH ANYONE QUERY AND FINALLY HER NAME AND DESCRIPTION QUERY. SORRY OLD MAN. HOLMES.
Only later in the morning, cooling his heels waiting for the milkman, had it occurred to him that Watson could as easily have made a leisurely journey to London on Thursday and intercepted the ship when it arrived there. He nearly turned back and sent another missive to say that Thursday would do, but in the end he did not.
Knowing Watson, Holmes reassured himself, he'd have left Baden immediately, and the second telegram would miss him anyway.
And the information received from Mrs Hudson provided its own form of solace. Mycroft had been ill since the winter, and it was good to know that Mrs Hudson had found him well.
Watson and Mycroft would come through, he reassured himself, and set a match to his pipe.
He wished he could be as certain about his other assistants, who were abundant if somewhat questionable. He was accustomed to working with Irregulars, to be used and discarded when their purpose was served. He was also well acquainted with the problems of finding reliable help, particularly as he was generally forced to draw from a pool of candidates consisting of society's dregs: One was less likely to find honour amongst thieves than simple thievery, and one developed the habit of not placing too much weight on any one helpmeet.
Take this Hammett fellow, for example. He appeared to be an ideal Irregular (apart from his chronic infirmity), a man whose ready knowledge of the ground, and especially the underground, could save an employer a great deal of superfluous footwork. However, the niggling question of whether he might be too good to be true had already cost Holmes a hurried trip cross-town Saturday morning, returning to the telegraphist's near the P. & O. offices to request that they retain any messages for him there, and not (as he had arranged earlier) have them delivered to the St Francis. A local ex-Pinkerton might well have as close an agreement with the Western Union boys as he had with the taxi drivers, and if Hammett was in fact currently under employment, that employer was likely to be the very subject of the telegrams from Mycroft and Watson. Better to keep them from leaving the telegraph office under any hands other than his own.
And then there was Tom Long, another convenient assistant dangling before his nose, tantalising in his intelligence, experience, and personal commitment to the cause. If, that is, Tom Long was what he appeared to be.
Or even the driver of this motor. Tyson, as with the motor, had been provided by the hotel manager, Auberon. Driver and vehicle made for an unlikely pair—the motor had been chosen to give an impression of an aged employer out for a sedate drive, but beneath the livery and cap he wore, its driver was a bright young man with carroty hair and a cheeky grin. Tyson's own motor, according to Auberon, was of a colour to match his hair, along with chrome-yellow seats and a throaty engine—ill suited for the sort of surveillance they were conducting today. Tyson appeared to be a simple young man with a passion for motorcars and a deplorable taste in literature; on the other hand, he could conceivably be an agent of the faceless enemy, planted on Holmes by yet another agent, Auberon.
Even Henry Norbert bore a question mark above his head, as the lawyer knew more than anyone else about Russell's business, whereabouts, and life in general. He had keys; he was in a position to manipulate the Russell fortunes; and he might indeed know more about the Russell past than he was saying.
The only person Holmes could be sure of was currently
So, here he was, Sherlock Holmes on his own again with the dubious assistance of an unlikely trio of Irregulars: a cadaverous Pinkerton who ought to be abed, a diminutive Chinese bookseller with a wide knowledge of arcane topics, and a red-headed modern-day barrow-boy trying out for a part in one of Conan Doyle's bits of airy nonsense. His most reassuring partner at the moment was good old Watson, halfway across the globe and launched on another desperate dash across Europe on the business of his longtime friend.
Holmes smiled around the stem of his pipe at the image of his erstwhile partner, thinner of hair and stouter of girth, limping with bulldog tenacity across a crowded German railway station. If anyone could intercept the
Soon, however, he would need another pair of hands and feet—very soon, if Watson had succeeded in catching the ship in Marseilles. Whom to trust? The storyteller, the bookseller, or some sturdy young man picked at random from the street?
With luck (a commodity in which Holmes placed no trust whatsoever) today's outing would settle at least one of those questions.
And in the meantime, he would hold up for consideration four points.
First, those burnt scraps they had salvaged from the fireplace, from a document written on the machine in Charles Russell's study. The surviving words made it clear that the document had concerned matters of some import: “Army . . . looters . . . stolen . . . executed”—these were not from the draught of a chatty family letter.
Two: That they were burnt, and so close to the source of their writing, indicated a certain urgency, or at the very least an emphatic quality, in the act of destruction. A more sanguine individual would merely have carried them off rather than risk discovery through lighting a fire in the fireplace of a vacant house.
Two points did not an hypothesis make, but taken with the third—that persons unknown had broken into the Russell house with, to all appearances, the sole purpose of destroying that document—they formed a shape. And the shape was one that Holmes had studied closely the whole of his professional life: blackmail.
Point four: Although the victims of blackmail often turned on their tormentors, he could not recall a single incident when a blackmailer had deliberately killed his victim.
