Locked rooms

to her half-brother. Hung on his every word.”

The “sister” sounded less and less like a blood relation, but I suppose it hardly mattered. “Do you have a photograph of either of them?”

“Sure, why? Mary, what is going on?”

I thought that I preferred her stupefied by sleep.

“I think your father may have been involved in something criminal.”

“Oh, bunk! Have you been talking with Mummy? She's got crime on the brain when it comes to Daddy.”

“No, I haven't spoken to your mother. May I see the pictures?”

I thought that the only hope was if I did not pause for explanations, but simply overwhelmed her with peremptory demands. It worked, in that it got her out of bed to pad in her pyjamas over to her childhood book- shelves and draw out a picture album.

She'd hidden the photos of her father behind harmless snapshots of friends and holiday scenery. One of him, young and handsome, with hair as light as my father's (blond hair on a guest-room pillow, the machinery in the back of my mind noted: blond enough that his face would not show much of a stubble some days after it had been burnt) holding a black-haired baby girl in his arms: Flo had her mother's hair. The second photograph showed Robert Greenfield some years later, turning his scarred face slightly away from the camera as he lay on a deck-chair with some stretch of the Mediterranean behind him; a third showed him later yet, his body beginning to thicken and his hairline receding, standing beside a handsome, somewhat taller woman dressed in pre-war fashion—but when I took my eyes from their figures to study the background, my knees gave way and I had to fumble for a chair.

The photograph had been taken at the Lodge.

“Who's she?” I asked Flo, although I thought I knew already.

Flo squinted at the photo. “That's Aunt Rosa. Daddy's half-sister. She came to California a couple of times. Look at that hat—this must've been taken before the earthquake.”

“When was her other visit?”

“Hell, I don't know. I was maybe eight or nine. Yes, that was when Daddy went away.”

(“Looked familiar,” Mr Gordimer had told me—he had in fact seen her before, nearly twenty years earlier.)

Flo pressed other snapshots into my hands and I was dimly aware of glancing at them, but when I looked up again she had gone back to her coffee and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, brushing her hair vigorously.

“I'm going to borrow this one, Flo,” I said.

“Ninety-three, ninety-four,” she chanted.

I put the others on top of the album that lay on the shelf and walked towards the door. Her hair-brush clattered to the floor as she jumped off the bed and came after me.

“No, you can't borrow anything if you don't tell me why you want it. Here, give it back.”

She made to grab it from me, but I held it out of her reach, looked straight into her eyes, and said, “Don't.”

She took a sharp step back, her eyes going wide and hurt at the force of my tone. “I'll return it,” I said, and walked out.

I heard her call my name as I went down the stairs, but I did not stop. Jeeves managed to get the door open before I could touch the handle, and I trotted down the steps, not in the least surprised to find Holmes seated on the wall beside the entrance gate, a slim book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

He watched me come down the drive, and when I handed him the photograph, all he said was, “Her father?”

“And a woman, who may or may not be the half-sister he claims. She runs a cabaret in Paris; he's lived there since around 1908.”

“Very good,” he said. “Now we have a chance to lay hands on them.”

“If we're going to talk to the police, I think I ought to bathe first. I don't look like the most reputable individual.”

“Let us go by the house on the way to the hotel and see if Long and Hammett are still there.”

We set off walking, but on reaching the next street a taxi went past, slow and vacant. Holmes put up his hand and we climbed in, and he had the driver go past the house to fetch the other two men. Hammett came out with a bundle in his arms, wrapped in a torn piece of dust-cloth. When he settled in, he said, “I didn't know that you'd want to leave this in the house. If you don't want to trust the hotel safe, I can recommend a nice discreet bank for you.”

On the way, Holmes asked the driver to stop at a photographic shop around the corner from the St Francis.

“You don't think we should give the photograph to the police?” I asked him.

“I'd prefer to have a copy of our own first.”

“Or perhaps a number of copies,” I said.

“Quite.”

The driver paused at the edge of traffic for Holmes to run inside; he was back in moments. Once at the St Francis, as I turned on the taps in the bath-tub and went in and out of the rooms with my clean clothing, I listened to the three men discussing the case over the lunch that had been sent up. I shut off the taps and lowered myself into the hot water, lying on my back and allowing my head to submerge until only my face stood above the surface.

Alone at last with nothing but my breathing, I pulled out of my mind the small treasure Holmes and Hammett had given me the night before, and looked at it.

The brake rod had been cut.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Russell had not sent the motor off the cliff. Mary Russell's argument with her brother had absolutely nothing to do with it. The brake rod had been sawed nearly through and when my father had pressed his foot against the pedal to slow the car at the top of the hill, the rod had snapped and the motorcar had swerved to the right, directly at the abyss.

My only sin was being a survivor.

And survival, I thought, might be something I could live with.

After a while I raised my head above the water, and as I scrubbed the grime off my ankles and hands, I listened to the conversation in the next room, following the points of the discussion as they came up, one at a time.

“If Robert Greenfield had one key, he could've had two,” Hammett said, his contribution to the question of the house break-in of the previous March. The sequence, I thought, was fairly clear, once one put Flo's information together with the telegrams from Watson and Mycroft.

In January, an American living in Paris—either Robert Greenfield or his “half-sister” Rosa—had picked up a copy of the London Times and seen a letter that indicated Mr Sherlock Holmes was taking a quick and urgent trip to the Continent. And as Mrs Hudson had specifically mentioned in her telegram to Holmes that she had received several telephone enquiries concerning our return, we could assume that for the price of a trunk call and a little bit of play-acting—no task for a woman accustomed to the cabaret stage—one of the two had prised the information from the chronically trusting housekeeper not only that Holmes and I were on our way to India, but that afterwards we were headed to California as well.

Exactly what drove the pair into action could only be guessed at—and I noticed that Holmes in the next room made no attempt to do so, although Long and Hammett happily argued about the possibilities: Hammett proposed that the hair-trigger of Greenfield's guilty conscience needed only the tiniest pressure to perceive us as being on their trail; Long thought it likely that the changes in international relations since the War ended meant that France would be more willing to extradite a resident foreign criminal. Personally, I suspected that Flo's father, now a man in his middle fifties, was simply tiring of Europe, wanted to come home, and knew that if he were to be linked to that dead policeman, he would be a fugitive for the rest of his life. He'd tried, back in 1914, to enter the house, and been thwarted by the watch-dogs. This was his last chance to clean matters up.

In any case, the two had reacted instantaneously, scrambling to locate an aeroplane for Rosa—not Robert, whose memorable scars would surely attract the attention of his fellow passengers and, as far as he knew, be recognisable by me. A brief conversation with a ticket-agent would have told them that the only P. & O. boat whose sailing coincided with our hasty departure from Southern England was the