on the effort. Above him on the roadway, the bow-legged man gave him a glance before turning to face the three young people emerging from the motorcar. The slick-haired driver tumbled over the side with the practiced agility of a monkey, trotting around to open the passenger door for the black-haired girl; the other young woman, the one with the absurdly short blonde hair, was standing up so as to follow. Holmes put his head back to the eyepiece.
Russell moved stiffly, as if she were in pain, or fear, climbing out of the car and onto the surface. She wrapped her heavy coat around her against the wind. Flo Greenfield said something, then reached out as if to take her arm, but Russell had stepped away from her in the direction of the precipitous edge. Holmes risked a quick glance down at the man near the water, but Hammett was still intent on his spider-act along the rocks.
Russell stood at the very lip of the cliff, leaning over the inadequate railing as she'd leant over the ship's rail the week before. Flo Greenfield picked her way near, but the shoes she wore were inadequate for the terrain, and she wobbled dangerously until her beau's arm flashed out to steady her. The two young people stood on secure ground, apparently pleading with their English companion, but Russell did not respond. She seemed hypnotised by the breaking waves, but Holmes could see the moment when her attention was caught by the figure far below: Her mouth came open in surprise and her hand came out, but to Holmes' immense relief, the bow-legged man stepped forward and took her arm, urging her back from the cliff. Holmes began to breathe again.
The driver of the delivery van seemed to be explaining Hammett's presence, and Holmes would have paid a great deal to be able to hear what he had to say. Whatever the explanation was, it did not immediately strike Russell as impossible; she looked at the man doubtfully, but her head did not go back into that intensely familiar posture of disbelief that allowed her to look down her nose at the offender. She just listened to the man, craned forward to see how far the grey-haired climber had got, then said something over her shoulder.
The three young people got into their motorcar and the bow-legged man into his, driving in procession down the long curve to where the cliff gave way to the beach. Holmes lifted his face from the eyepiece for a moment to rub the tension out of his muscles. When he pulled his hands away, Greg Tyson was walking quickly towards the car, brushing the sand from his trouser-legs. He jumped in behind the wheel and slammed the door.
“Do you want to scoot?” he asked.
“No, I believe the two motors will stop at the other end of the beach. No need to flee unless they continue down here—you are welcome to resume your reading material. However, be ready to move quickly.”
“Whatever you say.”
Both men in the closed car sat tensely until the two other vehicles had come to a stop far up the road, Tyson's hand hovering near the starter button. Holmes unfolded his legs and rearranged the tripod holding the telescope, pulling the curtains together until they brushed the very edges of his field of vision. He also reached into the Gladstone bag and took out a pistol, surreptitiously laying it beside his leg: He had no reason to believe that Hammett and his bread-truck assistant were on any side but that of the angels, but he had not lived this long by depending on trust. If either man made the slightest move against Russell, he wouldn't hesitate to make a dramatic entrance with engine roaring and gun blazing. He fervently hoped, for many reasons, that it would not come to that.
It took Hammett a quarter of an hour to sidle his way off of the rocks. He stumbled when his feet sank into the sand, then set off, hunched against the cold, staggering with the soft surface and his own exhaustion. His hair was awry and his light grey suit had suffered from the treatment, and he looked a far cry from the dapper man Holmes had met.
At the bread truck, Hammett accepted his hat and a flask from the driver, propping his back against the vehicle and ignoring the approaching newcomers. Eyes shut, he took a deep draught from the flask, then another, shuddering slightly in reaction. He handed the flask back to the bow-legged man, then peeled himself off the wall of the truck, wrenching open its cargo door to drop onto the floor where he sat, head bowed and feet resting on the ground, clearly gathering his energies. After a minute, his right arm reached surreptitiously around his back, as if scratching an itch at the belt-line, then he straightened. His hands came up to run through his hair, returning it to a semblance of order, then adjusted his neck-tie, dashed ineffectually at the stained knee of one trouser-leg, and finally shifted to his inner chest pocket to pull out his pouch of Bull Durham.
Hammett's fingers shaped the cigarette with an exaggeration of their normal care, and eventually lifted the object to his tongue to seal it. He was fumbling for his matches when the young blond swell who'd been driving the other car stepped forward and stuck out a hand with a lighter in it.
The lighter was sleek and gold, of a piece with the coat and the car; the blond man was maybe a year or two younger than Hammett himself, but he looked like a kid—family money and no responsibilities will do that for you. But Hammett bent to accept the light and sat there, eyes half shut, for the length of three or four steadying puffs. Then he moved the cigarette to his left hand, pushed his hat-brim up with the forefinger of his right hand, and at last looked up into the face of the tall blonde girl whom his new employer had been watching from the speakeasy on Friday night.
Mary Russell, married to Sherlock Holmes, gave him a smile meant to be reassuring. “That looked a rather dangerous climb.”
“Not something I'd do for fun, no.”
“So why were you doing it? If you don't mind my asking,” she added.
“What's it to you?” he said bluntly, putting the cigarette back to his lips.
After a moment, she said, “I know someone who was killed on that piece of hillside. It was odd, seeing you at the same exact place.”
“Yeah, well, as I understand it, there's a number of people that corner's killed. But my company's only interested in two deaths that happened last December. That the same accident as yours?”
“No.”
“Then I can't help you.”
“What's your company?”
“Mutual of Fresno,” he replied, reaching for his wallet and drawing out a business card with a salesman's automatic habit. “Somebody phoned in a tip to say we might've paid death benefits on an empty car. Always a problem, you see, when there's no body.”
“I see,” she said, looking at the card.
“Well,” he said, sucking the last draw from his cigarette and tossing it out onto the sand, “I'm afraid I didn't. Risked my neck and a case of pneumonia for absolutely nothing. And now, if there's nothing more I can do for you, I need a drink and a fire and a pair of dry socks.” He stood, tipped his hat, and threaded his long body into the back of the van.
Smooth, thought Holmes admiringly as he studied the scene through the lens. Not once had Hammett given away the presence of the object he had retrieved from the cliffside—even Russell had taken no notice of the man's surreptitious motions as he slid the thing from the back of his belt to the floor of the van.
Holmes would have liked to hear the conversation, but his lip-reading abilities were lamentably rusty, and in any case best suited to closer work. He had only been able to follow scraps of it—almost none of Hammett's words, since the man's face had been in profile much of the time, but what he had perceived of Russell's side of the brief exchange had reassured him oddly.
With his unlikely passenger stowed away, the bow-legged driver raised his own hat a fraction off his scalp, then slammed the cargo door and trotted around to the driver's side. The bread van started with a violent cloud of blue smoke, causing Flo and her young man to back hastily away, but Russell just stood and watched the vehicle back-and-fill into a turn before it accelerated up the steep hill north.
The three young people did not immediately climb back into their own vehicle. Instead, there was a discussion, during which Flo gestured towards the road ahead, Russell stared at the wake of the bread van, and Donny sat on his running board smoking a cigarette and watching the waves. Eventually, consensus appeared to be reached. Flo straightened and dug something from her pocket, offering it to Russell. At first Holmes thought it was a cigarette, but after Russell had shaken her head and turned away, the other young woman worked at the object for a moment, put something into her mouth, and followed Russell towards the gaudy car. Holmes risked one last glance at Russell's face as she sat down in the back, then swept the machinery away and tugged the curtains down to a crack.
