Dreaming Spies (37 page)

“No, no,” I interrupted. “That’s plenty close enough. I’m not actually looking for the Darley place. I met him a while ago and he told me about one of his neighbours who bred a particular kind of horse that last week another friend told me he was looking for, so I thought I might see if I could find it.”

Arrant nonsense, but any tradesman who dealt with the aristocracy had a wide acceptance of nonsense, and exotic horse-breeds was well within the realm of possibilities. We thanked him, assured him again
that we would be on the watch for anyone raising sheep on undisturbed pasture (“It’s the native thyme, you see? Dies off under the plough but gets into the beastie’s blood and waits for the oven …”), and made our escape from the sanguinary realms of the Market.

Turl; Broad; Magdalen; St Giles; Banbury—it takes nearly as long to name the roads as to drive them. We were back at the house before Miss Pidgeon’s lights were burning, although the sky was growing pale. My bleary eyes squinted at the gates, my numb hands steered the motor through without losing either headlamp. My body craved a large meal, a gallon of coffee, and sleep.

Maybe not the coffee.

Haruki heard us come in. Before our coats were off, she was swaying a path across the sitting room, fever declaring itself in her damp hair and pink cheeks.

I reached out for her forehead but she twisted away irritably. “Where have you been? You left hours ago. Look, it’s almost morning! You must have learned something?”

“Didn’t you get the note?”

“Note? Yes,” she said, “I found the note.” But it sounded to me as if she had forgotten it, and I wasn’t at all certain I wouldn’t need to catch her when she turned. She pulled Holmes’ old robe around her shoulders and went back to the fire, complaining peevishly if not entirely coherently. I tossed wood on the coals, then told her I would make tea. Two minutes later, I looked into the sitting room, and found she had fallen into an uneasy sleep.

Holmes looked up as I came in. I shook my head.

“You have a pet nurse?” he asked in low voice.

“A doctor, actually. She worked at the college before she retired. But our guest will have to be unconscious before she lets me ring the woman. It’ll have to be Miss Pidgeon.”

I almost laughed at the subtle shift on my husband’s features.

Men might walk cautiously around Miss Pidgeon, but in our absence, the woman would watch over Haruki like a mother wolf.

Morning newspaper
,

Coffee’s steam curls in the sun
,

Pink of wounded flesh
.

We ate a pair of hastily composed sandwiches as birdsong started up in the garden. On my way up the stairs, I looked in on Haruki, finding her turning restlessly on the settee, hair damp with sweat. I pulled a rug over her tiny form, then followed Holmes up to a bed inadequately shaded by the curtains. My consciousness shut down four heartbeats after my head hit the pillow—and I slept undreaming for a solid ninety-seven minutes.

The telephone jangled like a screech of Doom. I stumbled down the stairs and snatched it from the stand, making a gargling sound that the person on the other end interpreted as a greeting.

“Morning, Miss Russell. Billy here. I have the information Mr Holmes asked me for. About Bart Collins?”

I repeated the sound, which this time he took to be encouragement.

“Collins was shot three times with an automatic pistol, and Scotland Yard recovered two of the casings. So if you come across an automatic pistol somewhere, keep that in mind.”

“Good,” I croaked.

“I also have the precise location where he was shot. You want that?”

“Just. Wait. Yes.” I stuck the corner of the pad under the telephone stand to weight it, and scribbled down the information. It meant nothing to me. No doubt Holmes would be able to picture it in an instant.

I squinted at the page to make sure the marks were actually legible, then straightened. “Thank you, Billy, I’m not sure what—”

He interrupted me. “Another thing. I went past the Darley house this morning, just to be sure? And looking in, all the furniture was covered over. So they are actually gone, for a bit, anyway.”

“That’s very helpful, Billy. Thank you again.”

We both rang off. I yawned, and turned to face my audience of two. Holmes held out my spectacles; I traded him the scrap of paper. “That’s where Collins was found. Did you put the coffee on?”

Wordlessly, he moved towards the kitchen. I studied the remaining person, who looked surprisingly fresh and fit.

“Good morning,” I said. “You look—”

“Did you get it?” she demanded.

“Get what?”

“You went to London for information. Wasn’t that what the ’phone call was about?”

“May I have some coffee before the interrogation starts?” I begged.

Coffee, food, and sunshine. It was going to be a glorious spring day in Oxford, although I wasn’t sure I was in any shape to appreciate it.

But the brain cells began to pull themselves together, and we moved to provide Haruki with the promised information.

It does help, sometimes, to review a case aloud. As we talked, she sipped her tea and nibbled at a half piece of toast. A year ago, she’d looked fourteen years old: that morning, she looked older than I—although perhaps not older than I felt.

When we had finished, Holmes went upstairs to shave while I examined the patient’s arm. The torn stitches were healing, the skin was pinkly swollen, but there was no sign of dangerous poisoning.

She was lucky not to have lost the use of her arm—if not the arm itself.

I covered it with a waterproof wrapping so she could have a bath, and later restored the bandages.

Between one thing and another, it was nearly ten o’clock when she faced me with the question. “What do you plan next?”

“Holmes and I need to locate the Darley house.”

“Not the one in London?”

“Seems that they’re both off with friends. However, the Darley country house is not far from here, and we thought we’d go and take a look. Merely a reconnaissance,” I hastened to add. My local maps had showed a hamlet by name of Darley Holt, in the general neighbourhood of the places the butcher had given us—but in England, mere name was no guarantee of a family connexion. In any event, we could hardly drive up to the door and stare openly.

“You are not going to break in?”

“During broad daylight? No.”

“You’re going now?”

“Yes.”

“I will come with you.”

I had expected that. “Your arm may be better, but you’re in no shape to wander about the countryside with us. In any event, where we’re going, you’d stick out like a bandaged thumb.”

“Only during the daytime.”

“Well, more so during the day,” I conceded.

She thought over what I had said. “If you give me your word that you will come back after your reconnaissance, I will stay. But if you go out again tonight, I shall come with you.”

“Let’s see how it—”

“I will come. A team of three is better than two, for the purpose of invading a home. And if you avoid me, I will not be here when you return. I think you would rather I be with you than pursuing matters on my own, in directions you can neither control nor anticipate.”

True. The consequences could be disastrous. It was also true that having a third person keeping watch permitted the other two to devote their fuller attentions to a search. And if the house was like most of its kind,
there would be a vast enough square footage to keep all three of us occupied.

I nodded in agreement. “If you stay quiet today, and
if
we decide to go in search of the book later, we will take you with us.”

However, I made a mental note to check the boot of the motorcar before I drove off this morning, just in case.

There are any number of disguises available to a person wishing to make enquiries in the countryside. A laden wagon and bad shoes are necessary for itinerant smiths or sellers, but short of that, it is a matter of small, key flourishes. A pair of strong binoculars transforms any set of tweeds into the garments of a devout birdwatcher. A ridiculous hat, a well-used Ordnance map, and a voracious appetite mark one as a committed rambler.

However, we did not think the Darleys the kind of people known to move among the eccentrics, which left out ramblers and birdwatchers.

“I’m afraid it’s horses, Holmes.”

I had a riding outfit folded away in a cedar chest, and Holmes had portions of the necessary clothing, but in the end, he had to make a quick trip down the Turl for proper riding trousers. As he was waiting, Miss Pidgeon and I cast around for the other essential part of our outfit: horseflesh.

When Holmes rang to say that his trousers had been provided and donned, I checked the car boot, then circled through Oxford, pulling to the side along the High so Holmes could jump in, before continuing across Magdalene Bridge and out through Headington. I wound along country lanes and villages to the stables kept by one of the late don’s former students, where we found a lot of fat horses in the care of three thin sisters.

We chose our mounts first by their lack of distinctive appearance, and second by the recommendations of the sisters. We let them saddle the beasts, but earned their approval by double-checking the girths ourselves before mounting up. We headed north, Holmes’ saddlebags bulging unbecomingly with Ordnance Survey maps.

It had been too long since I had been on a horse. My hip sockets always forgot how very wide horses’ backs were, and my legs how much work it was to perch in the stirrups for hours on end. We had the sense to stop well before Darley Holt to fall from the saddles and stagger around for a while, returning the circulation to our limbs. The horses looked askance at this behaviour, but it did mean that when we remounted and rode the last ten minutes, we were able to drop from our saddles with the proper degree of insouciance.

We did not need to stay for luncheon at the public house, once we had the information we needed—that new friend of ours, Lady Darley: she had a house around here, didn’t she? And where might that be, precisely?—but the smells from the kitchen would have been tempting even without the exercise, and the beef pie was almost worth the effort of getting to it.

We rode on, our aches nicely anaesthetised by drink. Between the maps and the local informants, we found the manor house without much problem.

It seemed small for an earl’s estate, although as we came nearer, the truth of the matter emerged: what looked like a simple Georgian block from the front actually had a pair of wings extending out the back, one side substantial, the other less so. It was two storeys high, with possibly a third tucked under the roof slates. The front door was graced by a grand portico with tiny upper-floor balconies on either side. Both balconies had French doors; between them, a wide arched window topped the portico like a tea cosy. Fortunately, the Victorian improvements had ended with those unsuccessful architectural fillips, so the house merely came across as slightly abashed, rather than actively shamefaced.

Vines crept up iron trellises on either side of the portico; a lawn suitable for garden parties stretched out alongside; in the distance, a few acres of woodland rose up, marked on the map as Darley Grove. A trio of ancient beeches partially blocked the stables, but as we rode on, the low buildings came into view. They appeared to be stables and kennels, with nearly as much square footage as the house’s ground floor. Walls and out-buildings hinted at a sizeable kitchen garden behind the house, but fields rolled out on all sides: the estate of a fox-hunting man.

Although perhaps not at the moment. Holmes climbed down and bent over his horse’s front hoof as if in search of a stone, while we listened intently, but in vain, for evidence of hounds. We continued up the lane that wrapped around the house and its paddocks. This time, he dismounted and handed me the reins, to walk along the road behind me and stand as if relieving himself. In fact, we both listened and, this time, breathed in the air moving down from the house.

Birds sang; lambs bleated; the odours of spring lay all around. But we could catch neither the smell nor the sound of dogs.

“They do still have horses,” I noted.

“The viscount and Lady Darley did go for a ride in Hong Kong,” Holmes recalled.

Idly, I reflected on the change of titles: Viscount Darley was now the Earl of Darley, but what about his stepmother? The countess—Darley’s wife—old Darley, that is—wasn’t she now the “dowager”? Perhaps that depended on whether or not Tommy had married. I imagined that Charlotte, Lady Darley, would wince at the word “dowager.”

A figure came out of the stables block with a bucket. He crossed the gravel yard to the back door, which he pushed open but did not enter. A few seconds later, a woman came to take the bucket, standing for a time in conversation. She then closed the door. The man returned to the stables.

“What do you think?” I asked Holmes.

He shook his head. “It looks too quiet for them to be in residence. But if even one of them was home, or if they drove up while you were in the yard, you’d be trapped.”