Watson on the Orient Express, Page 2

  Holmes had already escaped, ostensibly to question the servants about their master’s having vanished. But I wondered whether his patience was as thin this morning as mine.

  “Did your husband seem worried when last you saw him, or had he been troubled recently?” I asked.

  Lady Harwell looked nonplussed; apparently having to consider the feelings of anyone else was a novel experience for her. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I overheard him shouting at someone over the telephone last week. Something to do with some outlandish foreign city or other.”

  Mycroft’s expression didn’t alter. Only if you knew him very well indeed would you be able to tell that Lady Harwell’s final words had caught his attention.

  “A foreign city? Do you recall which one?”

  “No. Only that it began with a B. Or was it a C?” Lady Harwell flicked a dismissive hand. “I really can’t be sure, I only remember thinking that it was somewhere my health would never allow me to travel on account of the heat. And of course, the dirt—really, some of these foreign countries have absolutely no concept of proper sanitation, or so I have heard—”

  “Quite so.” Mycroft cut in adroitly. “Do you know to whom he was speaking?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “And there is nothing else that you can recall? Did your husband ever … ah … discuss any matters relating to his work at the foreign office with you?”

  From the dubious tone of Mycroft’s voice, he shared my opinion that Lord Harwell would be more likely to march across London Bridge dressed as a clown. But the question had to be asked.

  “Oh, Gerald never spoke of his work to me,” Lady Harwell said. “He knew quite well that all those difficult foreign names and all the talk of complicated treaties and such might bring on one of my headaches. But he had been working longer hours of late. So inconvenient, because on several occasions it forced me to have to hold dinner until he came home, and once the roast beef was quite dried out and it disagreed with me dreadfully. But my husband was a very hard man. No compassion in him, even when I was awake half the night with pains in my stomach and flutterings around my heart—”

  Fortunately for my own sanity, Mycroft interrupted once again. “And we must not risk straining your health any further by continuing to trespass on your hospitality, Lady Harwell. Perhaps you might ask one of the servants to escort us to your husband’s rooms so that we may look through his belongings?”

  4. WATSON

  I stared through the portrait spy-hole at Sonnebourne as he spoke to the dark-haired assassin. My face flushed hot with anger. They were planning to kill Holmes!

  Sonnebourne went on, “When you have finished, arrange your own return passage. Stay away from London for a month. The repercussions will be extensive.”

  “Understood.” The voice was nasal, but businesslike, smooth, calm, confident.

  “Now take the next train to Dover, then the boat to Ostend. From there, the Wagons-Lits train to Paris. From there—”

  “The Orient Express.”

  “Quite so. The funds in the envelope will cover your expenses.”

  The man was about to stand, but Sonnebourne stopped him. “And one more thing.”

  The man froze, halfway to his feet. “Yes?”

  “Before you leave Constantinople, shoot the Torrance woman as well.”

  “Who?”

  Sonnebourne slid another photograph across his desk. “She will be somewhere near the Frenchman, possibly amongst his bodyguards, or near Holmes. Likely she will be looking for you.”

  “I am surprised. She helped me in—”

  Sonnebourne’s voice cut in, hard and cold. “She is working for Holmes.”

  The other man leaned over the photograph for a moment. Then he said, “As you wish. It will be done.”

  Both men stood. The interview was over.

  My heart pounded and a thousand questions filled my mind. Holmes, providing security for a French official in Constantinople? And working with the Torrance woman, the murderess we had been seeking for nearly half a year? I would have thought he would have had her arrested immediately, the moment he had found her. But working with her? And saying nothing to Lucy or me?

  No, that seemed impossible.

  But yet, I had to admit, Holmes had always played a lone hand. Besides, time had elapsed since I had seen Holmes. The Constantinople matter might have arisen after Sonnebourne’s thugs had abducted me. Holmes might also have located the Torrance woman during that time.

  But why would Holmes work with Mrs. Torrance?

  Suddenly I saw the connection.

  Sonnebourne.

  If Mrs. Torrance was to be in Constantinople, and Sonnebourne had arranged my kidnapping …

  Holmes might want her help, both to protect the Frenchman, and to locate and rescue me.

  But was I correct in my reasoning?

  I realised that I could not waste precious seconds trying to understand the implications of what Sonnebourne had said. I had to escape. And in a few moments the man called Clegg would return. He would expect to find me still asleep.

  I had one chance.

  I moved away from the portrait and waited beside the door, keeping away from the doorknob.

  It was less than a minute before I heard a key turn in the lock. The door opened.

  A stocky man in a white laboratory coat stepped inside. He was looking away from me.

  I hit him from behind, striking the back of his neck with all the force I could command. He went down hard and fast and most important, quietly. He lay on his side. I recognised his close-cropped hair and meaty, slab-like face, now slack-jawed and unconscious, and felt a moment’s satisfaction. He was one of the three men who had abducted me from my surgery.

  I hurried to the window and pushed away the drapes. I could see outside.

  Daylight.

  At least I knew it was morning, and not evening.

  I was on the ground floor. The window overlooked a road and a park beyond. The park looked vaguely familiar. Had I been in the area before? Or were these lingering after-effects from the drug that had kept me incapacitated?

  Then I caught myself. No time to think or puzzle. I returned to the man I had knocked down and rummaged briefly in the pocket of his lab coat. I found a card case with cards bearing a name: Clegg. I also found a key to the door through which he had entered. I locked the door from the inside and pocketed the key, returned to the window and drew back the heavy curtain. The window was of the French style, really a double door, and it was locked. I tried the key. It worked. The door opened.

  I stepped through onto the gravel border between the house and the lawn. I was free. I closed the window and re-locked it from the outside, then hurled the key as far away as possible into some bushes.

  The road between the park and where I stood was busy with a flow of carriages, trams, carts, and the occasional omnibus.

  I knew one thing. I had to get back to Baker Street, or to a police station where I could telephone Holmes.

  Along the road, a hansom cab clattered by at a leisurely pace. I thought of hailing the cabman.

  But did I have funds to pay him? I patted my trousers pocket, where I keep my wallet. It was not there. Inside my jacket pocket, however, I could feel an envelope thick with papers. My fingertips brushed over a wax seal.

  Where had that come from?

  I was on the point of pulling out the envelope and breaking the seal when I saw, on one of the cross streets that ends perpendicular to the park road, a uniformed policeman on foot patrol, wearing the familiar helmet and swinging his baton. I felt a surge of relief and even exhilaration. I would make my way to him and explain everything. He would take me to his police station. I would telephone Baker Street from the station to let Holmes know my whereabouts and warn him of Sonnebourne’s plot.

  If Holmes had not already left for Constantinople.

  I ran towards the policeman. A young dark-haired fellow with a drooping moustache, he
stared at me.

  “Where am I?” I felt foolish but had to ask the question.

  “Why, Lavender Hill, Sir. That’s Clapham Common over there.”

  “Take me to your station. I must make a most urgent telephone call to Sherlock Holmes.”

  “You better follow me, then.”

  He turned around. Then he paused. “Better walk in front of me, sir. You’re not looking very steady on your pins, you know. Station’s about a half mile.”

  We had gone perhaps two or three blocks when he said, “Turn left, sir. This here’s Gowrie Road. Bit quicker.”

  I looked behind, wondering if we had been followed, but Clegg was nowhere to be seen.

  “We’re about half-way, sir,” the policeman said.

  I nodded and set out once again, picking my way along a narrow, trash-littered walkway between decrepit row houses. Few people were on the pavement, but several loungers slumped on the front stoops. They took no notice of us. Still, I was glad that I had the policeman at my back.

  Then I felt a rush of wind behind me, and something hard connected with my skull. I saw only darkness. For one fleeting moment the void seemed, somehow, familiar.

  5. LUCY

  Three quarters of an hour later, we were back in the carriage that had driven us to the Harwell estate in Kent. Mycroft took up nearly the whole of one seat, while Holmes and I sat in the one opposite.

  Mycroft waited until we had rattled down the poplar-lined drive and were back on the turnpike road that would return us to London before regarding Holmes from under half-lowered lids.

  “Now then, Sherlock. Your impressions?”

  Holmes drew his pipe from an inner pocket and tamped tobacco down into the bowl. I could see the marks of his anxiety for Watson in the lines of strain around the edges of his mouth and the grey shadows beneath his eyes. If he’d slept more than a handful of hours since Watson’s kidnapping, I would be astonished.

  But he responded without pause or hesitation to Mycroft’s question. “My impression—backed up by the testimony of several of the Harwell House servants—is that Lord Harwell and his lady are both singularly unpleasant people. They are strenuously disliked among their staff, he perhaps even more than she, and their servants stay on only due to their willingness to pay first-class wages. The gardener to whom I spoke had a wealth of unflattering epithets to apply to Lady Harwell regarding her dissatisfaction with a nosegay of roses on her breakfast tray earlier this week. Evidently, she used a quibble over the roses’ colour as a basis for threatening to fire him from his position. ‘Fat ruddy harpy’ was the least profane of the terms which the gardener used to describe her. Now, as to the missing man himself,” Holmes went on, “I will pass over the usual particulars of height, weight, etcetera, which you no doubt have been able to infer as well as I. To begin, then, Lord Harwell is a man of expensive tastes, prone to attacks of gout, likely due to over-indulgence in those tastes. He is fond of claret wine, and imbibing several glasses of the beverage after dinner frequently sends him stumbling up the stairs to his bedroom. The scuff marks on both the toes of his evening dress shoes and the carpet on the stairs were quite distinctive. He has an equally strong predilection for gambling on the races at Epsom Downs and has had the misfortune to back several losing horses of late. His hair is thinning, which is causing him increasing alarm. He has a sportsman’s affection for dogs, but a horror of cats.”

  “Capital, Sherlock, capital.” Mycroft rested both hands on the top of his walking stick and regarded Holmes across the space of our carriage, his eyes slightly narrowed. “Really, I have very little to add. Beyond the facts that he has recently dismissed his valet and hired a new one, that he suffered an accident in childhood that left him with a slight weakness in his right leg so that he walks with a limp—oh, and of course he recently visited a dentist in Harley Street to have a tooth extracted.”

  Holmes put the tips of his fingers together. “His right incisor, surely.”

  There was, I knew, a strong tie of affection between the Holmes brothers, but one-upmanship in the matter of logical deduction was also inevitable when the two of them were involved in the same case. Some of their deductions I could follow—such as Holmes’s observation about Lord Harwell’s fears of baldness, as demonstrated by the ten different brands of hair pomade I had counted on his dressing table. As to others of their conclusions, I had to admit frankly that I had no idea of the clues that lay behind them.

  “She was the one who brought money into the marriage,” I put in. “Lady Harwell, I mean. Lord Harwell may have the ancestral title and estate, but she is the one with a fortune large enough to keep the estate maintained.”

  Holmes’s eyes unfocused briefly in concentration, then he nodded. “The wedding photo of the two of them on the parlour mantle,” he murmured. “Well spotted.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the photograph, Lady Harwell’s wedding gown and veil had been of the same outrageously expensive, flawlessly upper-class make as the clothes she had worn today. Lord Harwell’s morning suit and top hat, on the other hand, had been clearly new, but of decidedly inferior quality: cheaper imitation goods masquerading as the genuine article.

  I didn’t add that Lord Harwell had almost certainly married Lady Harwell for her money; Holmes and Mycroft would undoubtedly have reached the same conclusion. I also didn’t mention the small assortment of pristine, entirely unused children’s books I had seen crammed half-guiltily away at the bottom of one of the parlour bookshelves.

  I did feel a prick of sympathy for her, though. Married to a husband who had probably gotten bored with her five minutes after their wedding photo had been taken. Wanting children, but never having any. And women of her class were never trained for or encouraged in any kind of profession, either; her parents would have died in a collective fit of horror if as a girl she’d ever mentioned wanting to attend university classes or find a job.

  It was in many ways no wonder that the Lady Harwells of this world now found nothing better to do with their time than lie on a sofa eating chocolates and complaining of their own ill health.

  “And now,” Holmes said, “Perhaps you will be so good as to tell us, Mycroft, why Lord Harwell’s disappearance is a source of so much alarm.”

  “And what Constantinople has to do with the matter,” I added.

  Both Holmes and Mycroft looked at me. There was little resemblance between the Holmes brothers, but now their brows were lifted in identical expressions of surprise.

  “Lady Harwell said that the name of the city she heard her husband mention began with either a B or a C. And that it made her think of heat and dirt and crowding. Lord Harwell’s diplomatic assignment was Egypt, but she would surely have remembered if the city was Cairo. Even if her husband never spoke to her of his work, she surely would have heard the name before. Constantinople isn’t especially close by, but it is in that part of the world and the next largest city with a name starting with C. And you clearly wanted to know very much whether Lady Harwell had overheard anything more than just the name of the city.”

  Mycroft nodded acknowledgment. “Lord Harwell was not personally known to me, save by reputation. I may say that based on that reputation, I had grave reservations about his fitness for diplomatic assignment. But unfortunately, my opinions are not always heeded at the foreign office. Of late, our government has been working to finally resolve the ambiguities left in the treaty governing the Suez Canal, the majority interest in which, as you are no doubt aware, is owned by France. Lord Harwell was in possession of details regarding a secret meeting that is being organised in Constantinople for that purpose.”

  “And you believe that to be the cause of his disappearance?” Holmes asked. “Whether because he has turned traitor and decided to sell the state secrets of which he is in possession, or because a foreign power has kidnapped him in order to extract those same secrets?”

  “Precisely. And although our visit to Harwell House was informative, I cannot say t
hat it has tipped the scales of my opinion substantially in one direction or the other. Harwell may be a traitor to his country. He may be dead or a prisoner. I should say that either possibility is equally plausible.”

  6. WATSON

  I woke with no idea where I was or how long I had been unconscious. I was aware of a hard bench beneath me, and a cold stone wall that I was slumped against. Faint grey light came from a small window above me. I blinked. Saw the iron bars.

  To my right was a metal door, painted grey, with a small view-portal, opened. “Where am I?”

  I heard a voice, a man’s and only barely respectful. “Lavender Hill Police Station, of course. You don’t remember being arrested, Lord Harwell?”

  I said, “I wish to make a telephone call.”

  A young inspector unlocked the door and escorted me to an interview room at the rear of the station. Inside the room was a massive oak table and several chairs. A door with a window led to the street outside. A telephone hung on the wall. I moved towards the telephone, about to lift the receiver.

  “A few questions first, Milord,” the inspector said.

  “Such as?”

  “You might start by explaining how you came to be found unconscious this morning, with two dead men, in the alleyway behind Gowrie Road.”

  “I know nothing about that.”

  “Nothing about Gowrie Road, Milord?”

  “I was walking near there when someone struck me from behind. Then I woke up here.”

  “Why were you walking near Gowrie Road, Milord?”

  I shook my head. It ached with a dull throb. The effects of the blow, I thought. “Do not address me as ‘Milord,’” I said. “I am John H. Watson, M.D., friend and associate of Sherlock Holmes. And I must telephone him immediately.”

  In answer, the young inspector produced a thick envelope with a broken wax seal. “Taken from your coat pocket, Milord.”