Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [84]
As the days went on, the tents began to sag, more men appeared, the children started to look more unkempt, and the women took on harried expressions. The grass turned to mud; sloppy tarpaulins draped possessions.
Then, five pages in, the small hand splayed across the page and Miss Adderley leant forward with a noise of satisfaction.
“Yes, I thought so. You see the figure in trousers there? If you look closely, you'll see it's a woman. That was Mrs Russell.” Holmes already had his magnifying-glass from his pocket and was bending over the page. “That lamp on the other end of the settee is quite bright, if you like,” she suggested.
He carried the album over to the lamp, resting the top edge of the book against the arm of the settee. He switched on the lamp, brought his glass into play, and Judith Russell looked back at him from over the years.
Her daughter's hair, eyes, and height all came from the father's side, but the tilt of the chin was instantly recognisable, and the tug of amusement at the corner of the mouth was exactly as Holmes had seen it a thousand times.
For the first time, Holmes felt a stab of regret, as a personal element entered the case: His wife's mother was a person he'd like to have met.
He shook off the distracting thought, and shifted the glass to one side.
Only to find, on a chair at the woman's side, feet dangling and a book in her lap, his wife as a small child. Her blonde hair was a bird's-nest of curls, and she was as utterly oblivious to her surroundings as ever she was when similarly bent over one of her Hebrew texts. His glass lingered here even longer before he tore it away and moved on.
The only indications of a younger sibling were the small tin cup and spoon piled with the other plates and a silver rattle discarded atop a sack of flour, although the closed tent door suggested a sleeping child within. Some days had clearly passed since the first photograph of the tent city—the wear on the grass alone told him that—and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had asserted themselves. Thus, hats and even skirts had given way to head-ties and the occasional trousers, and drying laundry peeped from the tie-ropes as the distance between park (with its water supply and living quarters) and home (where laundry might be decently hung to dry) grew ever more onerous; however, at the same time the demarcations between one family's quarters and the next had become more formalised: chairs lined up along the agreed-to boundaries, facing inward to the informal court-yard before each tent; one such division had even been neatly drawn with a line of white pebbles. “Streets” had formed themselves between the ranks of outdoor “drawing rooms”; children played there, a woman with a bucket of water walked away from the camera, and a man approached.
Holmes' interest quickened again, and he moved the glass over the distant figure. What came into focus was a tall, light-haired man with a moustache, eerily familiar despite his gender. His spectacles caught the light, his bowler hat blurred slightly as he returned it to his head, having raised it to the woman with the bucket. The photographer must have called his subjects to attention in some manner because several faces were raised towards the lens, including that of the man trudging up the hill.
The blond man's twill trousers were spattered with dark stains and one knee looked in need of mending. On his upper body he wore only a shirt, the collar missing, sleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal a clean bandage on one wrist. He appeared to hold himself erect by will alone, and Holmes did not need to see his face to know that it wore the look of a soldier in the trenches, the gaze both interior and far away. This man ached with fatigue and with the things he had witnessed, longed to collapse into sleep for a day and a night, yet equally clearly he was only here temporarily, for his shoulders were braced