Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [130]
Unfortunately, that address was in Canada.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I crossed London at its wet and dreariest, let myself into Mycroft’s flat, found it empty with no indication that either Holmes brother had been there since the morning, and decided that the cure for heaviness of spirit and head-ache—or at least the only cure to hand—was cleanliness. And as Mycroft had recently installed an elaborate and modernistic shower-bath (I believe it was becoming too much of an effort to heave himself out of the bath-tub, although I would never have said anything of the sort), I thought I might give it a try.
With trepidation, I stepped into the closet of this technological wonder and opened all four sprays. I stepped out of it a fervent convert. And beyond the invigoration was the discovery that long hair washed while standing upright did not become the usual mass of tangles. I was humming as I ran the comb through it.
My hair was little more than damp when my companions returned—together, which indicated that Holmes had reentered the investigation. I watched as he divested himself of coat and hat, and was pleased to see a near-normal range of motion. He had been very lucky; for the moment, all was well.
Dinner—sans business—and a fire, tobacco and brandy for the brothers, and we were ready for work. I sat on the floor with my arms around my drawn-up knees, and watched them speak. Mycroft was, in all things, slow and thorough, where his younger brother flew straight to the core. Together they were formidable, and I could not imagine that many details got past them unnoticed.
It was Holmes who set aside his impatience in order to tell me what they had discovered during the day. That amounted to: One of the clerks who was in a position to know more or less where one inquisitive Frenchman would be at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening had, interestingly enough, left his desk in the middle of the following morning, reporting that he had been taken ill. He had not gone home, however, and enquiries at his doctor’s surgery had drawn a blank as well.
The button Holmes had torn from his attacker’s coat had been traced to a Jermyn Street tailor, who said the button could have come from any of a hundred such coats the firm had made over the last seven years. The list included nearly a third of the men who had been at Justice for the shooting party, including Sidney Darling, the Marquis, and both Germans, as well as the late duke, Marsh’s brother Henry.
The Army records for Sidney Darling gave the picture of a competent officer who took great care to avoid the front lines. Staff officers invariably were granted a greater freedom of movement than line officers, and in the spring of 1918 Darling had been based less than twenty miles from Gabriel Hughenfort’s new regiment. Because Gabriel’s records had been lost—by accident or malice—there was no telling who was responsible for his transfer to the hard-pressed unit he had joined that March, but certainly Darling had been in a position to slip one more such transfer into the machinery of war. Similarly, he could have been the red-tab major who came to see the condemned man the night before Gabriel was taken out and shot by his comrades. To slip away from headquarters for a few hours in the middle of the night, particularly during the chaos of the summer’s shifting Front, would have presented small risk.
However, Ivo Hughenfort’s position as a suspect held many of the same points. With his family name to stand upon, he had quickly assumed a place in Paris collating information and writing daily briefings for the Commander-in-Chief. Ivo had been in a position to watch Gabriel, and indeed to nudge him from one place to