I hoped not. I truly hoped not.
I went to our room a short time later. As I was brushing my teeth, Holmes came in, looking for his pipe.
“You're staying up?” I asked, unnecessarily: The pipe meant meditation.
“I need to read Testimony.”
“What did you make of Lofte's information?”
“Which part of it?”
Very well; if Holmes was going to be obtuse, I could be blunt. “The part of it where Damian's wife was married to a murder suspect, Holmes. Did Damian know that she was married before? That she had a child by Hayden? That she's been attending his church? That the illustrations were for the man's book?”
“I believe he knew, yes.”
“But why would he go along with it? And why not tell you?”
“I should imagine that he did not tell me for the same reason he attempted to conceal his wife's unsavoury past: He feared that if I knew who she had been, I should assume her to be a gold-digger of the worst stripe and wash my hands promptly of the business. It is, after all, more or less what I assumed when I first encountered Damian's mother.”
“But isn't that precisely what this woman is-was?”
“You do not admit to the possibility of reform?”
I started to retort, then closed my mouth. Yolanda Chin had been a child when she was forced into a life of prostitution; she was not yet an adult when she married a middle-aged Englishman, who turned out to be a crook, and perhaps much worse. Did I have any reason to think that Yolanda herself was a criminal? I did not. Did I have any reason to believe she was betraying Damian, in any way but attending her first husband's church? I did not.
Holmes saw the internal debate on my face. “It is easier to picture the boy as a victim of an unscrupulous adventuress, but I see no evidence of that, Russell. He loved her. Still does, if you are correct and he does not know she is dead. My son loves his wife,” he said simply. “That is the point at which I must begin.”
“And yet you think he knows. About her continuing attachment to Brothers?”
“He knows. One must remember, the Bohemian way of life is not a surface dressing with Damian.”
I thought about that, and about the denizens of the Café Royaclass="underline" two couples, leaving arm in arm with the other's spouse; Alice, Ronnie, and their Bunny; the Epstein household of husband, wife, husband's lovers, and their various children; the manifold permutations of the Bloomsbury Group, with lovers, husbands, wives' lovers become husbands' lovers and vice-versa; all of it determinedly natural and open, all of it aimed at a greater definition of humanity.
Yes, Damian could well know, and knowing, permit-even approve of-his wife's continued liaison with a man to whom she had once been married.
I had to laugh, a little sadly. “I'm a twenty-four-year-old prude.”
“And thank God for it.”
“Still,” I said, “I'd have thought that if Damian knew about Yolanda's links to Brothers, he'd have looked to Brothers when she disappeared.”
“Yes, well, I believe he may have done so. On the Wednesday night, he left the hotel for a time. It appeared to be an attack of claustrophobia.”
“He's claustrophobic?” I pictured the room Damian and Estelle had shared at the walled house, its two large windows wide open to the night. “Did he leave for long enough to get up to the walled house and back?”
“By taxi, yes.”
I woke early the following morning, saw the vague pre-dawn shape of Mycroft's guest room, and turned over again. Then I noticed how quiet it was. In London. Drat: Sunday again.
I was on my third cup of coffee when first Holmes, then his brother emerged. Mycroft was cheerful, or at least, as cheerful as Mycroft got, but Holmes shot a dark look at the windows in just the way I had earlier.
Sundays were most inconvenient, when it came to investigation.
Still, it was not a total loss. For one thing, at ten after eight, interrupting our toast and marmalade, a set of discreet knuckles brushed at the door. I went to answer, and found “Mr Jones,” a thick packet in his hand. He peered around me to check that Mycroft was in before he handed it over.
I took it to Mycroft. He tore it open, removing a note; as he read it, his face went enigmatic, and I braced myself for bad news.
“The pathologists for Fiona Cartwright and Albert Seaforth report that there was no indication of Veronal grains in the stomachs of the two victims.”
“They missed it,” I declared.
“Perhaps with Miss Cartwright, but the Seaforth examination appears to have been quite thorough. He was not given powdered Veronal to render him unconscious.”
He handed me the reports, which indicated that Fiona Cartwright had drunk a cup of tea at some point before she shot herself, and Albert Seaforth had taken a quantity of beer. I had to agree, if powdered Veronal had been there, the pathologist would have found it. Which meant that as far as the drugs Brother used, we were back to square one.
“Still,” I said, “he must have drugged Seaforth in some manner. I can't see a man this size just sitting down and permitting his wrists to be slit.”
“Veronal comes in liquid form as well,” Holmes commented. “I imagine he required the powdered form for Yolanda because he could stir it before-hand into the nut pâté. It would be a simple matter to dribble some from a bottle into a cup of tea in a busy café or a pint in a pub, but it would require sleight-of-hand to do so on an open hillside.”
A truly macabre image: a man casually handing a pâté-laden biscuit and glass of wine to the woman who had once been his wife, sitting on the grass with a picnic basket at their feet, the Long Man at their backs, and a waiting knife on his person.
Mycroft handed the remaining contents of the envelope to Holmes. They were photographs, both the reproductions of the Shanghai newsman's shot of “Reverend Hayden,” and two rolls of film that Holmes had taken at the murder sites. He divided them into four piles, one for each site, removing those that showed the great monoliths of Stonehenge. We pored over them, separately and together, but other than illustrating some very attractive pieces of English countryside, they told us little.
“Lonely places to die, all of them,” I remarked.
“One supposes they were chosen, in part, for that reason,” Holmes replied.
“Well, if he'd wanted to commit his acts in a prehistoric site surrounded by people, he'd have been hard put to find one. Most of those that survive are in remote areas-central England may once have had as many standing stones and dolmens and such as Cornwall and Wales still do, but central England has more people needing stones for houses and walls.”
“Certainly I found these sites most inconveniently located.”
I did not mention that I had heard his sigh of relief when settling into bed the night before, hours after I'd gone to sleep.
I swallowed my last bite of toast and picked up one of the Shanghai reproductions, which still looked familiar, but still did not tell me why. “I'm going up to Oxford, I shall be back before dinner. Holmes, promise me you won't vanish again, please?”
“I shall endeavour to be here by six o'clock tonight,” he announced, adding, “Not that I shall have much luck in the daylight hours.”
“You're hunting down where our man got the other sedative?” It was not so much a shrewd guess as the voice of experience, for when it came to London 's underbelly, Holmes grasped any excuse to keep me clear of it.
“Drugs sellers tend not to take a Sunday holiday,” he said.
“I shall take your word for it. And, Mycroft, are you-”
“I shall begin enquiries as to the history and whereabouts of Reverend Brothers. But you, Mary, what are you doing in Oxford?”