Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [79]
“That won’t be necessary,” he told her, his eyes narrowed against the probe in his ribs. “Just keep them in the centre block and I won’t hear you.”
“Are you sure, my dear? I don’t mind if you—”
“Phillida, please. Go back to your party.” She started to say something, but in the end just turned and left the room.
After a while, I told Marsh, for distraction more than anything, “The boy—not Roger, but the other one—is devastated. He thought he’d killed you.”
“I thought he had too, for a moment,” he said with a glimmer of dark humour. “I’ll see him when this butcher is finished.”
The doctor seemed unoffended. Perhaps he actually was deaf, I speculated, but his next words proved he was not. “When I’m finished, you will rest. No interviews with guilt-ridden laddies.”
Marsh acted as if the medical man had not spoken. “Would you also ask Ogilby to send trays up for us? I don’t imagine either Iris or my cousin will much care for a formal dinner. Have yours sent up too, if you like.”
The annoyed doctor bent to his task again, and Marsh withdrew into himself. Distraction, I saw, was clearly impossible; I might as well go and try the hot water supply for a bath. Even if I succumbed to the temptation of dinner on a tray, I should prefer to be clean for it.
First, though, a responsibility: I tapped Alistair on the arm and gestured with my head towards the door. He handed the bright light to Iris, and followed.
I spoke in a low murmur, for his ears only. “This looks like an accident.”
He looked back steadily. “That is how it appears.”
“Still, it might be good for you to remain in this room tonight. And, if a tray comes with food for him alone . . .”
There was no need to finish the sentence, I saw. However: “It would also be as well for you to watch your own back, too. You and he were standing side by side, after all.”
He did not appear even to have heard what I was trying to say, but I did not push the issue. I could only trust that his protective alertness would extend out from Marsh’s person to cover his own.
“I will see you in a little while,” I told him. “I’ll be in my room, if you need anything.”
Just before I left, a voice followed me. “Peter,” Marsh said. “The boy’s name is Peter. Tell him to come and see me later.”
So before I retreated to hot water and privacy, I hunted down one worried boy to reassure him that his victim was well and had asked to see him after dinner. Both parents looked grateful, and I climbed the steps again, meditating on the powerful, potentially devastating commitment to the future made by parents.
Until I had my hand on the door-knob of my room, I had forgotten about my letter to Mrs Hudson concerning the appropriate wear for a formal country house dinner. For about half a second, I thought about finding someone who might know whether she’d sent it, and whether in the confusion anyone had fetched it from the station, but then I decided not to bother. A tray would do me fine. I turned the knob and walked in.
And there the dress lay, tossed on the bed by a remarkably careless house-maid. I looked at the heap of crumpled grey silk, and knew in an instant that no Justice Hall house-maid could ever have abandoned such a dress in such a state. Which left only one possible culprit.
“Holmes?” I called.
“Russell,” answered the voice through the connecting door to the shared bath-room. “What on earth is going on out there? The place sounds like an overturned beehive.”
I followed the voice through the steam-filled bath-room and found my partner and husband seated on the edge of the dressing-table bench, threading studs through his shirt. I went and sat beside him, leaning into his shoulder with affection.
“Oh, Holmes, it’s so very, very good to see you.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Does something need to have happened for me to be glad to see you?”
“When it is said in that tone of voice, yes. You sound like a besieged subaltern seeing his lieutenant heave into view.”
“You’re right. It is relief as well as pleasure. Someone shot Mah—Marsh.