A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [50]
He tossed his load down on a chair, where it burst open and began to leak garments that looked as unsavoury as they smelt. He fingered the scrap of silk on his breast.
"The Royal Order of Nigerian Blacksmiths," he said. "I am actually entitled to wear it, Russell. For services rendered." He eyed the dress I was systematically attacking, looked at it more closely in disbelief, and threaded his way past me and under my finished garments to our rooms. I heard the door of one of the phalanx of wardrobes click open, followed by the clatter of clothes hangers. I raised my voice a fraction.
"You know, Holmes, if Lestrade finds you've been impersonating a police detective, he'll be furious."
"One cannot impersonate what one is in fact, Russell," came his imperious and muffled reply. "Is anyone more a citizen of this polis than I? Is anyone more a detective? Where then lies the falsehood?" He reappeared, fastening the cuffs of a less dramatic shirt. "The pursuit of justice may be the trade of a few men, but is the business of all," he pronounced sententiously.
"Save it for the warders," I suggested, and bent down to rip out some threads from the back seam of a sleeve. "Did you find us rooms?"
"I found many things this day, including, yes, rooms. Two adjoining, ill-furnished and underlit rooms with a bath down the hall and back windows five feet above a shed roof. No bedbugs, though. I looked."
"Thank you. What else did you find?"
"An uninspired kitchen and mends in the curtains."
Very well, if he wanted to tantalise me, I would allow him to prolong the telling of what he had discovered while masquerading as a Yard detective.
"How did you find them? The rooms, I mean. Mycroft?"
"No, actually, the house belongs to a cousin of Billy's."
"Billy! I should have known. How is he?" Billy had come into Holmes' employ from the streets as a child and, as far as I could tell, remained willing to drop everything to serve his former master. A thought occurred to me, and I interrupted the description of Billy's ventures into the retail trade and his convoluted family life.
"Is he going to be keeping an eye on me?"
"Do you mind?"
With the morning's shopping successfully behind me and the knowledge of a husband who was no longer bored, I was willing to be benign.
"I don't want him following me about, no, but if he wants to loiter in the hallway listening for gurgled screams, he's quite welcome." I threaded a needle and started to mend the seam I had just picked out.
"He won't be following you, just available if you need auxiliary troops or messenger boys. He has turned into quite a sensible person." High praise indeed.
"That's fine, then. And you— you won't be coming back from Cambridgeshire every night, I take it?"
"I doubt it. It would look exceedingly odd for a member of the nation's great unwashed and unemployed to board the nightly five-nineteen for St Pancras. Too, I hope to worm myself into Mrs Rogers's affections to the extent of dossing down in her toolshed. I shall return Friday night. If you need to reach me before that, send Billy, or have Lestrade send a constable around to pick me up on a vagrancy charge."
"I assume Lestrade will have to agree to all this?"
"Oh yes. Unofficially, of course, but thanks to Mycroft, that will not pose a problem. Lestrade will take care that any police investigator who comes to one of the houses will either not know us or else be warned we're there and not to take any notice."
"Is there a telephone at the house of Billy's cousin?"
"You sound like a poor translation out of the French, Russell. But yes, there is a telephone at the house of the cousin of my friend. Utilize chez, feminine singular, masculine singular."
"And to his wife the unwashed tramp will telephone, is that not so?"
"But yes, with regularity the tramp his wife in the boarding house will telephone."
"Merci, monsieur."
"De rien, madame."
He walked over to where I stood,