Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [111]
“What do you suggest?” I asked him.
“I propose to return to the scent I was working before Mme Hughenfort led us astray.”
“Interviewing soldiers?”
“One in particular, although not a soldier. The chaplain who wrote that letter of condolence to Gabriel’s father. Hastings said he’d known Gabriel, and may well have sat with Gabriel his last night. I wrote to him before we left for France, and hope to collect his answer in the morning. Considering the bureaucratic tangle the boy appears to have been caught up in, the companion of his last hours may know more than the commanding officer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the morning, however, there was no letter waiting at the small tobacconist’s shop that Holmes used for a convenience address. He scowled absently at the woman who ran the shop, then turned on his heel and left the cramped, fragrant little place. I threw a couple of soothing phrases at her and scurried after him; when I caught him up, he was deep in thought and I decided that he had been unaware both of his scowl and its effect.
“We may as well go to Sussex,” he declared. “I left at least three vital letters unanswered, a week and a half ago.”
So we went to Sussex, to tidy up the many things left dangling by Alistair’s arrival and precipitate demands. We spent the night under Mrs Hudson’s care and returned to London, and the tobacconist, in the morning. She still had no letters, and she bristled and protested in florid Cockney that she couldn’t be expected to produce a letter that never came. Holmes seemed not to think it an unreasonable expectation, and on that note we left the shop.
“I shall go to Dorking,” he declared.
“Even though the Reverend Mr Hastings may be absent?”
“The letter will have dropped through his letter-box more than a week ago. If he were away, a housekeeper would have sent it on to him. Of course, he may be ill, or out of the county; on the other hand, he may have had other, more subtle reasons for failing to respond.”
Such as being long dead, I thought, but did not say.
“Dorking is not so remote as to constitute an unreasonable waste of time,” he decided. “Come, Russell,” and so saying, he threw up his hand to summon a passing taxi cab.
The Reverend Mr Hastings’ cottage was at the end of a lane that ran from the high street towards open downland. With a ruthless hand at the pruning shears the cottage might have presented a more friendly face, but between the untrimmed ivy and the overgrown bushes in the garden, the house windows looked dully out like the eyes of a long-unshaven prisoner of war. There appeared to be no-one at home, but I thought it would look the same way even if the entire Women’s Institute had been gathered inside. We picked our way up the weedy gravel path and rang the bell.
No sound followed the clamour, but the house seemed to grow watchful, and the image of a wary prisoner returned more strongly.
Holmes pulled the bell-knob again, and the sound died away a second time, but now there was something else: a scuffling noise, coming slowly down an uncarpeted hallway. The door opened, and we looked into the face of the prisoner himself.
Tall, so gaunt as to make Holmes seem fleshy, clean-shaven to reveal the furrows and hollows of his seven decades and more, he was dressed in an ordinary, old-fashioned suit gone shiny at the knees, but there was something about his stoop and his gaze that caused me to glance involuntarily at his ankles. He wore no shackles—at least, no tangible ones—but he stood nonetheless with the posture of an old lag at hard labour.
“The Reverend Mr Hastings?” Holmes asked. He took the man’s silence for an answer. “My name is Holmes. I wrote to you concerning—”
“I feared you would come,” the man interrupted. His voice was hoarse, either from injury or disuse. “You should not have done so.”
“There are questions to which I must have answers,” Holmes replied, his tone gentle.
“Questions that ought to remain unasked.”
“Nonetheless, I must insist.”
Hastings neither denied Holmes’ right to insist nor asserted his own right to refuse. Instead,