Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [76]
A name, or perhaps the way in which she'd said it, caught at his attention from the spate, and he paused on his way to the bath-room to listen. “—and a friend of Flo's friend Donny, who's a few years older than she is, was very kindly sitting out a dance with me and I mentioned what I had been doing today—or yesterday, I suppose—and he said that he remembered her.”
“Remembered whom?” asked Holmes, just to be sure.
“Are you not listening to me?”
“I was pulling my vest over my head.”
Sure sign of her state of mind was the ready way in which she accepted it, without even stopping to consider. “I was talking about Dr Ginzberg. Apparently she was rather well known in the city before . . . Anyway, this friend of Donny's—his name was Terry, I think, or was it Jerry? I don't know, the music was rather loud—he said he remembered that people used to say she was good at getting her patients to remember things, ‘mesmerism,' he called it although that's rather an old-fashioned name—even when I knew her she called it ‘hypnosis.' You remember her techniques, Holmes.”
“I remember you made use of them yourself on the Chessman woman, last summer, for just that purpose.”
Russell's head dropped back against the padded head-board, and for a moment her face went quiet. “Good Lord, only last summer? What a long time ago it seems, since that afternoon poor Miss Ruskin came to tea and gave us her inlaid box. And then we had your friend Baring-Gould, then Ali and—” As if she had become aware of the unshed tears trembling in her eyes, her head snapped forward, her eyes dried instantly, and she was away again. “You're right, although I'm terribly clumsy at hypnosis compared to Dr Ginzberg. She was so gentle and convincing, she'd have you recalling what you had for dinner on your sixth birthday. But in any case, Jerry or Terry remembered that she was something of a celebrity in town, so that when she was . . . when she died, people talked about it for weeks, and it was in all the papers.”
Holmes looked at his wife's hands, wringing each other with enough force that he could hear the sound from across the room; she was completely oblivious to both sound and gesture. “So I was thinking, Holmes, if it made such a stink at the time, surely the police would still have the file open. I mean unless they've decided she fell and hit herself on the head with the statue. Which going by what I heard tonight would only be likely if they were paid to decide that, did you know, Holmes—”
He walked into the bath-room and shook tooth-powder onto his brush, but even with the noise of the running tap and the brush, he could hear the words spilling out of the next room. Drugged, drunk, hysterical, or simply infected by the mood of a flock of partying flappers, he couldn't know, but it was tiresome and it was worrying and it was not Russell, not at all.
At last, near dawn, she slept. Holmes, who had spent most of his life in complete disregard of the hours of light and dark, wondered if age was beginning to slip up on him, for the long hours they'd kept the past few days had left him feeling light-headed with exhaustion. So he, too, slept, so deeply he did not hear her rise, dress, and go out.
It was past ten o'clock when the door opened again. This time, he came awake swiftly.
“Russell?”
“Good heavens,” she said. “Are you still asleep? Sorry, I felt sure you'd gone out and I missed seeing you.”
“How long have you been up?” A faint heaviness at the edges of his voice gave away his sleep-clogged state, and he cleared his throat to rid himself of it.
“Oh, two or three hours,” she answered cheerfully: If that was true, she had slept for less than three hours, in spite of which she showed no signs of hang-over. She was probably still intoxicated. “It's a lovely morning, a bit of fog earlier but it looks to be warm today. I'll just fetch what I came for and leave you.”
“That is not necessary, I was on the edge of waking. Have you had your breakfast?