Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [84]
The dinner showed signs of having been hastily stretched to accommodate twice the number as originally planned for, the soup rather more liquid and the meat somewhat more thinly sliced than they might otherwise have been. When we were freed from our places, I made for Holmes.
“I am not going to be segregated with the ladies,” I informed him. “If you wish to join the men at their cigars, you shall find me upstairs in Marsh’s rooms.”
I was not surprised when he accompanied me from the room. Somewhere nearby, Gershwin was giving over to a painful attempt at “Kitten on the Keys.”
Once outside the din, I leant up against the wall to catch my bearings. “Did you notice,” I asked Holmes, “the men in that room?” For a post-war gathering, there had been an astonishing percentage of whole and hearty young men.
“Not a missing limb or a gassed lung among them,” Holmes agreed, adding, “and half the guests are using cocaine.” (I kicked myself for my innocence: I had thought it merely high spirits.) A raised shrieking and bellows of male laughter followed us from the Hall; Holmes grimaced. “And these are the men for whom Gabriel Hughenfort died.”
I knocked lightly on Marsh’s door and then opened it, following the call of “We’re in here” through to the sitting room, where we stepped into an utterly unexpected cosy domestic scene: Iris before the fire with a book on her knees, Alistair across from her, Marsh stretched out on his right side on a leather sofa. They had been listening to her read—from, I was amazed to see, The Wind in the Willows. Iris waited until we were inside, then calmly finished the section before placing a marker in the book and putting it to one side.
Alistair came over to shake Holmes’ hand and to pull us up a couple of chairs. He had been out of the room earlier when Holmes stopped in and was, he said, glad to see him. Earlier, Alistair had still been too covered with Marsh’s blood to determine if he’d been injured himself, but now I could see that some of the gore had indeed been his own. What he had dismissed as “a few pellets” looked to have been closer to a score; one pellet had gouged a line across his forehead, missing both the eye and the soft temple by mere inches. His jaw had a pair of sticking-plasters, but his left hand and forearm had received the brunt of the spray. Hand and wrist were bound in gauze, and although he tried to act as though nothing was wrong, he could not help favouring the arm. Holmes took the chair from him and set it in the circle; we all sat down. Holmes was, I knew, wary of the extra woman in our midst, and uncertain as to the extent to which we would include her in our knowledge and our discussions.
Marsh took care of that question right off. “Iris is to be trusted,” he said bluntly. “Anything you have to say, she may hear as well.”
Holmes dived in with equal bluntness. “You are aware that this was no accident,” dipping his chin at Marsh’s state—a curiously Bedouin gesture.
“I thought it unlikely. The boy is not a careless child, and two shots went off on top of each other. Even with the shock of being hit, it seemed wrong. Then when I saw the shot the butcher dug out of me, I was certain. Assuming that Peter was still using my gun.”
“It was in his hand when I saw him,” I answered. “How is the shot different?”
“I always load my own cartridges for that gun. Its pellets are larger and smoother than those the doctor took out.”
“So. A gun, aimed at you, ready to go off as soon as the boy could be brought to shoot behind him,” Holmes said. “Too far away, as it turned out, most fortunately. An opportunistic crime, not a meticulously planned one, and it went awry. Who could it have been? Two men, I think. Or one very quick one.”
“Well, it wasn’t Iris, at any rate,” I joked. “I could see her the whole time.”
“I had already assumed that,” Marsh replied.
“I should hope so,” Iris retorted.
“Had you