Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [107]
“Into Lyons, yes, although not, naturally, into this hotel, an institution not suited to a simple man of the cloth. I led him into the slums and lost him there. I spent three weeks here, back in the nineties,” he explained. “That sort of neighbourhood changes little in three decades.”
My hair rescued from disarray, my day shoes changed for evening wear, a gossamer Kashmir wrap with silver beads transforming my plain dark dress into formality, I placed my arm through his and went to dine.
Subdued piano music and the distance between the tables made it safe to speak. After we made our choices and approved the sparkling young Rhône in our glasses, I recounted my day. When I had finished following our pair to their hide-out near the gare, I paused to let the waiter clear our soup plates.
“It’s so nice when things go as easily as that,” I remarked. “It was as if nothing could go wrong: She couldn’t see me behind her, she didn’t leave while I was in the lavatory, her taxi didn’t take off while I was still hunting for one. Sometimes things go right.”
“Too much so, you think?”
I began to protest indignantly, that I should certainly have noticed if the woman had been leading us by the nose, but instead I paused, to do his question justice, before I shook my head. “She’d have had to know me, know my level of skills, in order to set it up so precisely. You might have been able to ensure I followed you without its seeming planned—might have—but not a stranger.”
He nodded, accepting my conclusion. We suspended my report long enough to appreciate properly my sole and his Coquilles St. Jacques, before I picked up with my tale in the afternoon. “With her and the boy safely out of the way, I began the rounds of shopkeepers and neighbours, with a story for each of them that was more style than substance. You know the routine: indignation and a demanding of rights for the strong woman, the impression of tears and lace handkerchiefs for the older women, hints that somebody will get it in the eye for the young men drinking at the bar. Madame’s only lived here for eight or nine months—came from Clermont-Ferrand, one of them thought; or Bourges, thought another; although a third swore he had seen her before, in the old city, a good two years ago.
“So I showed the photos, as we agreed, of the family she had either swindled or lost, depending on the story of the moment. No, no, they’d never seen any of those peculiar-looking English people.” I went into as much detail as I thought necessary—the delivery boy who thought Phillida resembled a woman who’d lived in the next street, the old man who believed Terèse Hughenfort a bad mother because the boy had once talked back to him, and a string of other statements that most likely meant nothing, but might potentially have some frail significance. The next course came and my duck was but a collection of bones and sauce by the time I came to the really interesting part.
“By this stage I was showing the pictures to anyone who would pause long enough to look. One mother in the fruiterer’s took pity on me and glanced through them, told me sorry, and then her young son and his friend wanted to see what she’d been looking at. They recognised the house.”
“What, Justice Hall?”
“None other. It would seem that young master Thomas has a photograph of Justice Hall that he hides from his mother. The boys couldn’t mistake that fountain.”
“He hides it from his mother?”
“A man gave it to him, they said, a month or two ago, along with a story that his father lived there, and some day would come and claim Thomas.”
“Which could be nothing more than the phantasy of a fatherless boy, but for the picture, which had to come from somewhere.”
“I thought you’d find that provocative. Particularly considering that shortly after that, Thomas’s hair went dark. But half an hour after that interview, I found a man who could identify Sidney Darling.”
It was a night for being demonstrative: Holmes was seized by such glee that he snatched my hand from its resting place on the table and kissed it briefly,