Die Again, Mr Holmes Read online

  Then he said, “Now, Miss Janine, would you please tell us what you can of Detective Swafford? When did you inquire about him at Limehouse Station?”

  “I called on Boxing Day, but, as I said, they would not talk to me about him.”

  “You never saw him go into the station.”

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t go to Limehouse. I live in Kensington. Besides, he told me not to get too close.”

  “He wanted to marry you?”

  “Of course he did.”

  Holmes looked at her bare left hand. “But he did not provide an engagement ring?”

  She reddened. “John said he would need to save up for that. He hoped to have enough very soon.”

  “I see. Now please tell us about the last time you saw him. What happened? Please do not omit any detail, no matter how trivial it may seem.”

  “It was Christmas Eve. We went to a candlelight service in St. Philip’s Church. Ever so moving.”

  “What did he wear?”

  “Why, just ordinary clothes. White shirt, nicely-starched black tie, black overcoat. Perfectly respectable.”

  “Nothing to indicate that he was a policeman?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Nothing to indicate an association with Mr. Newman or his gang, the Bleeders?”

  “I wouldn’t recognize anything like that, I’m sure.”

  “What hymns did you sing?”

  “‘O Come All Ye Faithful,’ I remember that. And a German one, ‘Silent Night.’ I remember him saying it wasn’t like London. Nothing silent about nights in London.”

  “What kind of voice did he sing in? Tenor, baritone, bass?”

  “Oh, he was a tenor. Right enough. A nice clear tenor and very pleasant.”

  “Had you been to his home? Met his parents?”

  She shook her head. “He never brought that up. I was under the impression that his parents were dead. He did say something about a brother, though. A sailor. They were from a seacoast town, I think it was. He said he liked to hear the sound of the ocean as a boy.”

  “Please tell me where you were when he proposed marriage.”

  “Why, it was at the church. Christmas Eve.”

  “And where did you first meet Mr. Swafford?”

  “It was at a church tea.”

  “At St. Philip’s?”

  She nodded. “Just after Guy Fawkes, it was. I went with my mother. I don’t do much in the way of getting out on my own. She says she’s glad of the company, with my father gone.”

  Holmes raised an eyebrow. “Gone?”

  “Of the diphtheria. He passed away when I was only a little girl.”

  “And how old are you now?”

  “Eighteen, sir. My mother said it was time for me—”

  “I understand. So she took you to the church social at St. Philip’s.”

  “Very wholesome,” I interjected.

  “Please describe Mr. Swafford. Did you find him handsome?”

  “Well, not in the way of the actors on stage. But he is a strong-looking fellow. Not much fat on him, but strong. Wiry, you would say.”

  “His features?”

  “Oh, nice big dark eyes. A nice strong brown mustache. Nice dark hair. He’s very energetic, too, is John. I think he will go far on the police force.”

  “Thank you, Miss Janine. This will all be most helpful.”

  “How long do you think it will take to find him?”

  “It is too soon to know. But it would also be most helpful if you would please tell me everything you can about what John told you about Mr. Newman.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, of course you would want to know that. But can you not get that information from the police? Surely he would have made a report.”

  “He may not have had time for a report. If he went missing—indeed, truly missing—then it’s more likely than not his superiors at the Limehouse station do not know the latest points of his investigations.”

  “Will you promise not to get him into trouble?”

  “I cannot promise to conceal a crime.”

  She gave an embarrassed half-smile. “He said Newman’s gang continues to rule in Limehouse, even though Newman himself has been in prison for—well, at that time it was nearly two months.”

  “John thought this was unusual?”

  “Yes. He thought that Newman might have some secret plan to get away. He said Newman had offered two thousand pounds to whoever could manage his escape from prison.”

  “Did John know where Newman was getting such a large sum?”

  “John thought he knew but, of course, he didn’t tell me. He said that with such a lot of money involved he was sure to get a reward out of it. That was how he would be able to get me my engagement ring.”

  “And why did he say he was going to speak with me?”

  “He said there were some in the police force as couldn’t be trusted. So he was going to tell you about it. He said you were a man of integrity.”

  “Where did he say he was going, after the Christmas Eve service?”

  “He said he had to get back to work.”

  “On Christmas Eve?”

  “I didn’t know what he meant. I thought maybe he was going to write up a report or something.” Her eyes glistened with tears. “Oh, please find him, Mr. Holmes. When I first met him at the church tea, I poured out a nice hot cup of tea for him, and he just looked up at me with his big brown eyes, ever so grateful, and I just fell in love. I know we are meant for each other. Mr. Holmes, I shall be happy to pay you—”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “I don’t expect charity—”

  “Miss Janine, I shall probably be able to settle the question of Detective Swafford’s present whereabouts with a telephone call. Now, I should like to know where to report progress. How can I reach you?”

  She produced a card, which displayed her address. “We have a telephone as well. The number is on the card.”

  Holmes glanced at it briefly and then tucked it into his pocket as she left the tea shop.

  When we returned to Baker Street, Holmes telephoned Limehouse Station and spoke briefly with the sergeant on duty. He then took out Miss Janine’s card from his waistcoat and gave the number to the operator. I heard him speaking.

  “Miss Janine? Do you recall our meeting this afternoon? Yes, that is who I am, and I recognize your voice as well. I have spoken with a responsible party at your fiancé’s workplace and am assured that he reported for work this morning. No doubt you will be hearing from him in due course. Yes, it is no trouble at all. I wish you both well in the future.”

  He set down the receiver.

  “You were quite circumspect,” I said.

  “It is as well to be careful.”

  “You said nothing about Thomas Newman when you called the Limehouse Station.”

  “I shall make some inquiries on my own. And if Mr. Swafford wishes to give me information or ask for my guidance, he is welcome to do so. However, I do not think I shall hear from him. Twelve days have elapsed since he told Miss Janine of the matter, and he has neither called on me, nor written, nor sent a telegram, nor telephoned.”

  “Why not, do you suppose?”

  “I do not suppose. I observe that he mentioned my name, and the large sums involved in his investigation, and the possibility of a reward that would enable him to provide Miss Janine with an engagement ring. I believe that my name was an embellishment. A bit of corroborative detail. He would not be the first impecunious suitor to exaggerate his own importance and financial prospects when describing them to his intended.”

  We would soon discover how wrong Holmes was.

  3. AN UNCOOPERATIVE CLIENT

  Wednesday, January 5, 1898

  LUCY

  I gritted my teeth. “So you haven’t yet been in touch with the local police constabulary in Lincolnshire?”

  Under ordinary circumstances, I didn’t have to clench my teeth when asking questions of that variety. It was an impo
rtant point, but hardly the type of inquiry to arouse passionate feelings one way or the other.

  In this case, though, it was the fourth time I had made that identical inquiry, and I had yet to receive anything even marginally approaching a satisfactory answer.

  Lady Serena Lynley looked at me across the rim of her Spode china teacup.

  We were sitting together at a table in the tearoom of the very exclusive London ladies club to which she belonged—the type of institution which catered to ladies visiting London from the country. Here they could refresh themselves after an arduous day of shopping, or even stay a night or two if their errands in the city lasted more than a day.

  “I don’t trust that the police will take the matter seriously enough,” Lady Serena said.

  She was a tall woman of probably forty or forty-five, with a very slim, upright bearing. Her face was long, aristocratic and narrow, and her skin was slightly sallow, almost matching her drab blonde hair. Her pale-yellow morning suit with its tight-fitted bodice, puffed sleeves, and cream-colored velvet trim was no doubt the height of fashion, but studying her, I had the uncharitable thought that she looked as though she had been put through the laundry, and all her colors had faded in the wash.

  Even her eyes were a very pale blue, framed by colorless blond lashes.

  She set down her teacup and fluttered her hands.

  “After all, it’s hardly a criminal occurrence for a young girl to leave the position for which she’s been hired. Ungrateful, certainly, and a gross breach of the trust I invested in her, but not criminal. I don’t see that there is anything for the police to investigate, and besides, people in the country do talk so. The amount of gossip and scandal that circulates through our part of Lincolnshire alone is simply frightful. The police have no discretion, no discretion at all about that sort of thing. And I heard from my dear friend Charlotte Teal before she and her daughter-in-law left for Canada how very discreet you were during that dreadful affair with her son, and how I could absolutely rely on your discretion—”

  I stopped listening.

  This was exactly the response that I had gotten the first three times I had brought up the question of contacting the police.

  Lady Lynley would start waving her hands ineffectually and launch into a twittering speech in which the words scandal and gossip were each mentioned at least once, and discreet or discretion at three times minimum.

  “What can you tell me about Alice Gordon?” I asked.

  Lady Lynley blinked, possibly because I had just cut her off in the middle of saying discretion one more time.

  “Tell you about her? Well, she is—was—my personal maid. I hired her about a year ago.”

  She stopped.

  “And?” I prompted.

  A slight furrow appeared between Lady Lynley’s plucked blond brows. “What do you mean, ‘and’?”

  “What more can you tell me about her? If I’m to look for her, at the very least, I need to know her appearance. Do you happen to have a photograph of her?”

  Lady Lynley’s look of bemusement deepened. “Why would I have a photograph of my maid?”

  “Can you tell me what she looks like, then?”

  “Well.” Lady Linley looked blank another moment, then frowned. “She has blonde hair. And blue eyes.”

  The next time I had occasion to visit the dentist, I’d be able to tell him that I knew exactly how it felt to pull teeth with metal pliers.

  “How old is she?”

  Lady Lynley blinked again. “I don’t know. I never asked her age. Somewhere between … oh, I don’t know. Eighteen and thirty, I suppose.”

  “Blond hair, blue eyes, age between eighteen and thirty.”

  “That’s right.” Lady Lynley nodded.

  “And she went missing two days ago?”

  Lady Lynley nodded again. “Yes, on the 4th of January. It was very inconvenient, because we were hosting a dinner party that night, and Alice didn’t turn up to help me dress and arrange my hair. I had to call on the under-parlormaid to assist me, and the results were most unsatisfactory. Alice always had a particular skill with hairdressing.” Lady Lynley sighed.

  “And can you tell me anything else about her? Where her family is from, for example? Anything about her interests or ambitions?”

  Lady Lynley drew herself up, an affronted look crossing her narrow features. “Certainly not! I am not in the habit of asking my staff for details about their personal lives.”

  I nodded, bending over the small notepad I had brought with me and pretending to jot down a note—which had the obvious benefit of helping me to not upend the teapot over Lady Lynley’s silly aristocratic head. And the not-so-obvious benefit of allowing me a moment to study her from under my lashes without her being aware that I was doing so.

  “So why is it that you want to find Alice?” I asked. “You must have some reason for being concerned about her.”

  I continued to scribble meaninglessly in the notepad, but I watched Lady Lynley’s face as I asked the question.

  A shadow of something hard crossed her features—annoyance or vexation, although whether it was because of me or the missing maid, Alice Gordon, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Well, I hired her as my maid. I feel a certain degree of responsibility to make sure that she has not gotten herself into some kind of trouble,” she finally said.

  I made another note. “Mmmm.” I had found that sometimes a vague murmur of agreement followed by silence would prompt people to fill that silence with more talk.

  In this case, Lady Lynley simply sat, fiddling with the edge of the lace tablecloth.

  On the surface, everything about her, from the plume of ostrich feathers on her hat to the onyx buttons on her boots, proclaimed her a typical member of the aristocracy—the class of landed gentry born into the lap of pampered luxury, who never did anything so vulgar as a day’s work in their lives.

  But that wasn’t the full picture.

  Her accent was quite good. Almost as good an impression of an upper-class English accent as I could do, and I’d not only spent years training as a vocalist and actress, I’d had the private tutelage of Sherlock Holmes, who could sound like a native in any language, from Bahasa Indonesian to Hindustani.

  But she still—just ever-so-slightly—over-emphasized her h’s. Habit had been more like, hhabit—a mark of someone who’d grown up dropping her h’s in the manner of a working-class Londoner and had trained herself out of it.

  The club tearoom had a pianist playing soft music in one corner, and I’d noticed the way that Lady Lynley’s head unconsciously tilted in that direction, her body starting to sway just a little in time to the melody until she stilled the motion.

  I caught myself doing the same thing, after nearly three years of almost nightly musical performances at the Savoy Theater.

  If Serena Lynley hadn’t been an actress or dancer of some variety before her marriage to Lord Lynley, then I deserved to have Holmes disown me as both his investigative partner and his daughter.

  A ballet dancer in a second-rate company would be my guess. Her high-button boots were very fashionable—and no doubt incredibly expensive—with slender heels and narrow toes. But I’d seen the way she winced just slightly with every step when she came in to meet me, her feet clearly protesting in the way they would if she’d spent her youth dancing en pointe, stressing the tendons and bones.

  I set my pencil in the crease of my notebook, and folded the book shut to hold it in place.

  “What exactly is it that you’d like me to do?”

  “Well—” Lady Lynley made vague fluttering motions with her hands. “I thought that perhaps you could ask about—investigate—whether there is any sign that Alice has indeed come to London? Just quietly—discreetly, mind you. There must be places where you could look—places where girls of Alice’s type might be found?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “You missed another two ‘discreets.’” That had only been one.

  Lady Lynle
y looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind.”

  There was no reason that this case—not even a case, really; at most a potential case—should be setting off faint alarm bells inside my mind.

  A maidservant deciding that she’d had enough of her employer and deciding to seek her fortune elsewhere was—as Lady Lynley herself had said—hardly a matter for criminal investigation.

  And a bare twenty minutes of Lady Lynley’s company had already persuaded me that if I had been in Alice Gordon’s place I would have jumped with both feet at practically any chance of alternative employment.

  And yet I couldn’t shake the cold, unpleasant feeling that was currently crawling along the length of my spine. I’d had the same feeling before in the course of joining my father’s investigations, and it generally meant that something was very, very wrong.

  Lady Lynley had expressed absolutely no affection for her former maid. The only note of genuine regret I’d heard in her voice was for the loss of Alice’s skill at arranging hair.

  And yet—despite the fact that she was avoiding involving the police at all costs—she had traveled all the way from Lincolnshire to London, a journey of three hours by train, just to speak with me about a maid whom she barely knew and didn’t appear to particularly care about.

  It didn’t make sense.

  “I could make a few inquiries, certainly,” I said slowly. “Although I can’t entirely promise no police involvement. My husband is a police sergeant with Scotland Yard. If I discover any evidence that harm has come to Alice or that she’s gotten involved in any sort of criminal activity, I’ll have to tell him.”

  Depending on circumstances, I would probably have reported the matter anyway, but I especially didn’t keep secrets from Jack.

  Lady Lynley raised her brows and she caught her breath—though not, it appeared, at the idea that Alice might be in danger.

  “Your husband?” Her eyes narrowed, a look of appraisal in their depths. “You could easily have married someone of a much higher social standing, too; you’re quite pretty, and many of the aristocracy don’t mind American wives. And yet you married a policeman? How very … broad-minded of you.”