Chapter Eleven

It was both a challenge and an irritation to follow an individual such as Russell without being seen. Had she been another person, Holmes would simply have trailed along in her wake, confident that a young woman in the hold of social impulse and illicit alcohol would be oblivious of a tail. Russell, however, even without her glasses, normally had eyes in the back of her head.

Not that she’d noticed him following practically on her heels all those hours on Monday afternoon. Still, Holmes kept his distance. He had his taxi park down the street from the St Francis until Russell’s friend arrived, then followed behind, stopping a street down from where the gaudy, bright blue Rolls-Royce disgorged its passengers. He studied the motor’s driver closely, taking note of the noise he made and the speed with which he drove—outside of a city’s streets, the taxi would never have kept up with him—but noting also the way the apparently careless young man gave wide berth to a woman walking with her two children, and how he always kept both his hands on the wheel and spoke over his shoulder instead of turning his head to speak to the passengers in back.

When the blue car had been driven away by the club’s valet, Holmes paid off his curious driver and took up surveillance in a more or less illicit dive across the way from the cabaret, a small and dingy space with air that looked as if the fog had moved in. He used his thumb-nail to scrape a patch of paint from the window-glass, which looked to have been applied half-heartedly at the descent of Prohibition five years before, absently cleaned the grime from underneath his nail with a pen-knife, then settled in to his surveillance with a glass of stale beer before him on the table.

An hour passed. Motorcars came and went from the sparkling gin palace, music spilt out onto the street, the uniformed doorman chatted unconcernedly with two passing policemen (confirming Holmes’ suspicions that the police department in this town was not as free of graft as one might wish—a two-year-old would have known that the alcohol inside flowed like water). And slowly, he became aware that he was himself being watched.

The man was good. Holmes had taken no particular note of him when he wandered in, other than noticing how tall, thin, and tidily dressed he was. He was simply one thirsty man among a dozen others—but when the man settled into the dimmest corner, when he nursed two whiskeys over the course of the hour and seemed uninterested in the company, and particularly when he seemed to relax into his corner and displace less air than a normal man, Holmes’ antennae twitched. He pondered his options: keep guard over the street and Russell, or pursue this new avenue?

After an hour and a quarter, with a full glass on the table, Holmes rose and headed towards the back of the establishment, weaving slightly. He felt the other man come to attention in the dim corner, and smiled to himself as he heard the soft clink of coins being laid on the damp table: The man was preparing to follow if Holmes did not return in a reasonable time, but not immediately—he wouldn’t want to risk a face-to-face meeting in the hall-way.

The noxious facilities were out-of-doors, in the delivery yard that was closed up for the night. Holmes slipped past them to the yard’s wooden gates. The lock was a joke, and he let himself out into the ill-lit alleyway beyond, leaving the gates ajar.

Four minutes after he’d come through it, the back door to the speakeasy opened and closed. There came a stifled oath and the quick sound of a man hurrying across sloppy paving stones. The stranger shouldered his way out of the gate, took two steps—and came to an immediate halt at the clear sound of a trigger being pulled back, a dozen feet away.

         

“Are you armed?” the stranger heard, in the drawl of an Englishman.

After a minute, the American answered. “I’m not much of one for guns.”

“Does that mean no?”

“No, I don’t have a gun.”

“Take off your coats and toss them over here,” came the command. The tall American unbuttoned his overcoat and tossed it in the direction of the other’s voice, then did the same with his jacket, standing motionless in the cold in his shirt-sleeves. “I trust you’ll pardon me if I don’t take your word on the matter. Would you be so good as to turn and place your hands against the wall?”

The man hesitated, loath to turn his back to a gun, but he had little choice. He faced the wall and leant against it with his hands. The bricks were briefly illuminated by the flare of a pocket-torch, and in a moment a hand patted all the obvious places for a weapon, and one or two not so obvious. Then the light winked out and he stood in the dark, listening to the sound of his garments being gone through. The overcoat was a good one, and relatively new; he’d be sore to lose it.

But after a minute the English voice said, “You may turn around again,” and in a moment, the two coats were flying out of the darkness at him. He put them on, grateful for the warmth, and coughed gently.

“Now your notecase—wallet, if you will.”

The American slid the leather object from his inner pocket and threw it across the alleyway, rather less concerned than at the loss of his coat. There wasn’t all that much in the wallet to lose.

The torch flared again, dazzling him at the same time it showed the Englishman the contents of the wallet and its various business cards and identifications. All but two of the cards were inventions that placed him in the employ of agencies ranging from insurance to newspapers. The two valid cards were those the Englishman unerringly pulled out.

“Pinkerton’s, eh?” he said. “And Samuel’s Jewelers.” The alleyway fell silent for a minute, then there was a faint click followed by the rustle of clothing, and the Englishman stepped out into the alley. Accident or intent placed him in a patch of light, and the American could see the man’s hands, the left one holding the wallet, the other outstretched and free of weaponry. “Holmes is my name, in the event you don’t know it already. Might I buy you a drink while we talk about why you’re following me?”

The American retrieved his wallet, looked at the open hand, and slowly extended his own. “The name’s Hammett, Dashiell Hammett. And I guess we might as well have a drink.”

         

They shook hands, with a certain amount of probing on both sides, and then Holmes released his grip and clapped Hammett on the shoulder. “I sincerely hope you do not wish to return to that … would it be called a ‘joint’ in American parlance? My palate may never recover.”

“You like our Volstead Act, huh? Sure, there’s a place up the street with liquor that’s never seen the inside of a bath-tub.”

“Actually, I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how civilised this city is when it comes to the availability of drink. I’d expected the whole country to be as dry as the Sahara.”

“This side of the country, it’s a bit of a joke, the cops don’t even charge much to turn a blind eye, but like you say, in some places, things are getting tough. Chicago—wow.”

Down the alley and out onto the street, and Hammett asked the question that had clearly been tormenting him since the moment he’d heard the trigger go back. “How’d you know I was on your tail, anyway? I’ve got something of a reputation as an invisible man.”

“Invisible, yes. But the Pinkertons might wish to reconsider their policy of sending out a man with a tubercular cough on surveillance, particularly on a cold night. When one hears the same cough coming from a lounger outside the St Francis, and later on the other side of a speakeasy, one begins to wonder.”

“Yeah,” Hammett admitted with chagrin. “It’s sometimes hard to sit quiet. But most people don’t notice.”

“I, however, am not most people.”

“I’m beginning to think that. C’mon, it’s down here.”

The place Hammett led him to was more neighbourhood pub than urban speakeasy; one table hosted a poker game and at another a friendly argument about boxing. There was even a darts board on the back wall. When they walked in, the man drying glasses behind the bar greeted Hammett as a longtime acquaintance.

“Hey there, Dash. Guy was looking for you earlier.”

“Evening, Jimmy. What sort of guy would that be?”

The man’s eyes slid sideways to take in Holmes, and his answer was oblique. “The sort of guy you sometimes work with, seen him with you once or twice a while back.”

“Well, he’ll find me if he wants me. I’ll have my usual, Jimmy. This is my friend Mr Smith. He’s got a doctor’s prescription you can fill.”

“What’s your medicament, Mr Smith?” the man asked as he reached for a bottle of whiskey, poured a glass, and set it in front of Hammett.

“No chance of a decent claret, I take it?” Holmes said wistfully.

“I could give you something red called wine, but I’m not sure a Frenchman would recognise it.”

“Very well. What about a single malt?”

The barman shook his head sadly. “The state of my cellar’s tragic, that’s all you can call it.”

“Never mind, I’ll take a—”

“Now, don’t be hasty. Said it was tragic, didn’t say it was completely empty. Just explaining to you why the good stuff’s limited and the price’ll make you wince.”

The quality was fine, although the price did truly make Holmes wince. But he counted out his money and followed Hammett over to a quiet table, taking out his cigarette case and offering one to his companion. When the tobacco was going, the two men sat back with their drinks, eyeing each other curiously.

They were of a size, Hammett an inch or so taller, but he possessed the folded-up quality of the man whose height fit him ill, and was so emaciated that his suit, nicely cut though it was, nonetheless draped his shoulders like one of the shrouded chairs in Russell’s house; when he spoke, one was aware of the skull’s movement. By comparison, Holmes looked positively robust. Hammett’s thick, light red hair, combed back from his high forehead, showed a great deal of white at the temples, although he couldn’t have been more than thirty. His clothes were good, his collar white, his ever-so-slightly flashy tie was precisely knotted beneath a face composed of watchful brown eyes, thick brows, knife-straight nose, and a mouth that skirted the edge of pretty. Strangers seeing the two men at the table might have taken them for father and son; certainly their long, thin, nervous fingers were of a type.

“So,” the American finally broke the silence. “You want to tell me why you didn’t shoot me in the face back there?”

“Personally, I’ve always found leaving a trail of corpses inconvenient, although I admit it has been some time since I lived in America—perhaps strictures have relaxed in the past ten years. However, as it was I who got the drop on you, perhaps I should be permitted the first questions.”

“Fair enough. Shoot.”

“Clearly, the most fundamental question in our relationship has to be, Why were you following me?”

“I was paid to.”

“By the Pinkertons?” Holmes had had dealings with the American detective agency before; not all of them had gone smoothly. His manner gave away none of this, merely his familiarity with the company.

“By whoever hired the Pinkertons.”

“You don’t know the identity of your employer?”

“Nope. Which also gives you the answer to your second fundamental question.”

Holmes took a swallow of the passable single-malt Scotch, slumping back into his chair in a way that made the other man think the Englishman was enjoying himself, and said, “That question being?”

“Why didn’t I have my pal Jimmy there pull out his shotgun and take your pistol away from you?”

“Two men having a drink together, Mr Hammett—surely that indicates a truce agreement, even in these farthest reaches of civilisation?” Holmes rested his cigarette in the flimsy tin ash-tray and picked up his glass again, left-handed; it occurred to Hammett that, other than their hand-shake and when he’d been paying for the drinks, the Englishman’s right hand was always kept free and never more than a few inches from the pocket holding the gun.

Hammett gave a sudden laugh, his haggard face lighting up unexpectedly. “Mr Holmes, something tells me that you only trust a truce when it’s fifty pages long and freshly written in the other guy’s blood.”

Holmes gave a small smile. “Superior strength is indeed a desirable component of negotiation.”

“Fine then, let’s negotiate away—you with your gun, me on my home ground.”

“Am I to understand that your version of my ‘second fundamental question’ indicates a certain lack of trust in the very people who hired you?”

“Now why would you say that?”

“Had you been wholeheartedly committed to the cause of your employer, I suspect that you would have made a play for the weapon, either on the way here or with the bar-keep to back you up. Not that you would have succeeded, mind you, and in the process of demonstrating that fact someone might have been hurt, so I do commend your decision. However, I assert that your willingness to go along with abduction is somewhat unusual, considering the Pinkertons’ reputation for professional behaviour.”

Hammett scowled. “The Pinkertons are in it for the money, that’s true. And they don’t always look too closely at where their clients’ cash comes from. It’s one of the disagreements I’ve had with them over the years. Why I only work for them from time to time, nowadays.”

Holmes squinted through the smoke at the younger man, thinking over the man’s words. “If I hear you aright, you are telling me that you prefer to act in cases that suit your moral stance, and that this particular case you are on is making you suspect that your employers are not on the side of the angels.”

“Yeah, well, a man’s got to live with the person in the mirror.”

Especially, thought Holmes, when the man’s own mortality stood so clearly outlined at his shoulder.

“Your doubts therefore explain why you came with me so willingly. To see if my side, as it were, suited your ethics more comfortably.”

“I thought I’d listen to what you had to say.”

Which suggested the possibility, Holmes reflected, that the man had not only willingly permitted himself to be taken in the alley, but might even have set it up with precisely that end in view. He raised a mental eyebrow, reappraising the thin man before him: It had been a long time since he’d come across that combination of intelligence and fearlessness.

Russell had it, and half a dozen others he’d known through the years.

One of whom had been Professor Moriarty.

“So, do I get to ask a question now?” Hammett said.

“You may ask.”

“Yeah, I know, and you might not answer. But that would be the end of a beautiful friendship, wouldn’t it?”

Again the faint glint of amusement from the grey eyes. “Your question being, Why didn’t I shoot you in the face when we met in the alley?”

“That’s as good a place to start as any.”

“I suppose one might say, better a known enemy than an unseen potential.”

Hammett blinked. “You have a lot of ‘unseen potentials’ around?”

“One, at least. Unless that was you who took a shot at my wife the other evening?”

The thin man’s jaw dropped as his features went slack for a moment, an expression of shock that only the most subtle of actors could produce at will; Holmes did not think this man an actor. “Your wife? I didn’t know—Wait a minute. Is that the girl you were following tonight?”

“In the dark green frock, yes. Although I don’t know that she has been a ‘girl’ in all the years I’ve known her.”

“And someone took a shot at her?”

“Wednesday night, about six o’clock, in Pacific Heights.”

“At the house?”

“So you know where her house is?”

Instead of answering, Hammett sat for a minute drumming the finger-tips of his right hand on the table while he studied the man across from him, weighing the fancy accent and clothes against the man’s undeniable competence and the vein of toughness Hammett could feel in him. Toughness was a quality that Hammett respected.

“Why’d you take those two business cards from my wallet?” he asked suddenly.

Holmes reached into his pocket and laid the scraps of pasteboard on the table, pushing them slightly apart with a long finger. “Because they’re yours. The others are fakes.” He looked into Hammett’s eyes, and smiled. “You’re an investigator, of some kind. The Pinkerton’s card was real because no sane investigator would disguise himself as an investigator. Of the others, all of them provided you with a front for asking questions—insurance, municipal water company, local newspaper, voting registry—except for the jeweller’s. Therefore, that is real, too.”

“Yeah,” Hammett told him. “I write ad copy for them, sometimes. Pays the rent.”

He looked at the cards for a moment, then his right hand clenched into a fist and beat gently once on the table-top, the gesture of a judge’s gavel, before the fingers spread out to brace his weight as he rose.

“Come on, I need to show you what I got.”

Holmes did not hesitate: Russell would simply have to look after herself. Outside the bar, Hammett threw up a hand to hail a passing taxi, giving an address on Eddy Street. Hammett knew the driver by name, and during the brief ride the two residents tossed around speculations concerning “the Babe’s” homers this season (Babe, Holmes eventually decided, being the name of a sports figure and neither an affectionate term for a female nor a mythic blue ox; from his earlier time living in Chicago he knew that “homer” referred not to a Greek philosopher but a baseball play—the home run); Harry Wills’s chances against Dempsey in the September fight that had just been announced (Wills and Dempsey apparently being professional boxers, not street thugs); the ludicrous conversation the driver had overheard recently between two passengers concerning the bridging of the Golden Gate, which both he and Hammett agreed would provide a huge opportunity for graft and never so much as a jungle foot-bridge to show for it; and the ever more lamentable state of the city’s traffic. Holmes contributed nothing but sat absorbing local vocabulary with his ears while his eyes studied the passing streets. He also noted Hammett’s careful survey of his surroundings before he climbed out of the cab, as well as the fact that the house number he had given the driver was down the street from the one they eventually entered.

He’d have been one of the better Pinkerton operatives Holmes had seen—if he’d been a Pinkerton.

The Eddy address was an apartment house. Just inside the door, the air was thick with the smell of alcohol.

“Boot-leggers,” Hammett explained. “It’s not usually this bad, but they dropped a box last night.”

Upstairs, the Hammett residence proved to be a small, worn, scrupulously clean space with aggressively fresh air overcoming the reek of alcohol. Hammett left his coat on but dropped his grey hat onto the stand before he led his guest into the front room, closing its door quietly and crossing over to close the wide-open windows. “My wife’s a nurse,” he said. “Fresh air’s a religion to her. It’ll warm up in a minute.”

He took a half-full bottle from a cluttered table set against the wall, poured two glasses, and brought them to the chairs in the front window, picking up a limp rag-doll from one. He brushed its skirt straight and set it on the sofa, where it made a miniature third party to their discussion, then took the other chair and pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from his pocket. With the windows closed, a faint trace of ammonia did battle with the boot-legger’s accident: a child’s nappies.

Holmes took one sip of his drink, to demonstrate that the declared truce still held, then set the glass down firmly on the little side-table.

“Mr Hammett, you may at one time have been a Pinkerton operative, but you are no longer. For whom are you working?”

The man’s brown eyes flew open in surprise, and he held them open as a show of innocence. “Why do you say that?”

“Young man, you bring me here yet expect me to believe you an active operative? Do not take me for a fool. You receive an Army disability pension because of your lungs, and you have no doubt supplemented that from time to time with work for the agency, but you are a man who at times is so debilitated you cannot make it from one end of the apartment to the next without stopping to rest. At the moment you are attempting to support your wife and small daughter by writing for popular journals.”

The bone-thin fingers slowly resumed their movements, automatically taking a precise pinch of tobacco and arranging it along the centre of the paper without his looking. “You want to tell me how you know all that?”

“Eyes, man: have them, use them. The doll, a woman’s magazine on the side-table, two envelopes from the United States Army in a pigeon-hole, the Underwood on the kitchen table, and a pile of manuscript pages and copies of such literary works as Black Mask. Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer.”

“The Smart Set on the side-table is mine, not my wife’s,” Hammett asserted, but weakly. “I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional … debility?”

“A series of chair-backs have worn marks into the wall-paper where they are occasionally arranged to allow you to walk the thirty feet from chair to bath without falling to the floor,” Holmes told him dismissively. “Satisfied?”

Hammett’s eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes’. “You’re that Holmes, aren’t you? The detective.”

“I am, yes.”

“I always thought …”

“That I was a fictional character?”

“That maybe there’d been some … exaggerations.”

Holmes laughed aloud. “One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson’s florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle’s name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me—Doyle’s a dangerously gullible lunatic—but apart from the blow to my ego, it’s actually remarkably convenient.”

“You don’t say,” Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.

It was all a bit dizzying.

Fortunately, Holmes had his eye on the ball. “Now, will you tell me who hired you to follow me?”

“Okay. You’re right. But it was through the Pinkertons. I used to work for them, and like I said, I still do little jobs for them from time to time, when I feel up to it. I had a bad spell recently, but the rent’s due, so when one of my old partners there called and said they needed a couple nights’ work I said sure. But after I’d got the job, I began to wonder if he hadn’t thought the job stunk and decided to palm it off on me. Here, let me show you.”

He went to the table and opened the top drawer, pulling out a thick brown file folder, which he laid on the small table and flipped open, sliding the top piece of paper over to Holmes. On it was printed:

I wish to know all possible details concerning the whereabouts and interests of Mr. S. Holmes and Miss M. Russell, staying at the St Francis Hotel. She owns a house in Pacific Heights. I shall phone you at 8:00 on the morning of Tuesday, 6 May for news.

“That’s what I got, that and a ’phone call. Now, it’s not unusual to get a case over the ’phone, but I like to meet my clients face-to-face, and the lady didn’t seem all that eager to meet with me. Refused, in fact. And paid cash in an envelope delivered by messenger—not a service either, just a kid, a shabby one. The whole set-up made me feel pretty uncomfortable.”

“Thinking that perhaps you were being brought into something less than legal?”

“That there was something shady here, and I don’t like being played for a chump.”

“ ‘Played for a chump’,” Holmes repeated to himself as he bent over the note with his pocket magnifying-glass. “A flavourful sample of the vernacular. Hmm. What can you tell me about your telephone caller?”

“Woman, like I said.”

“Woman, or lady?”

“I guess I’d call her a lady, if we set aside the question of whatever it is she’s up to. Anyway, she talked like someone who’d been educated. In the South—deep South, that is.”

Holmes’ head snapped up from the handwritten note. “A Southern woman?” he said sharply. “From what part of the South?”

“That I couldn’t say. Not Texas, deeper than that—Alabama, Georgia, maybe the Carolinas, that sort of thing. Slow like molasses, you know?”

But Holmes was not so easily satisfied. “Did she use any words that struck you as slightly unusual?” he pressed. “What about her vowels—what did her a’s sound like? Did she employ any hidden diphthongs?”

Hammett, however, could be no clearer than he had been; Holmes shook his head and returned to the note, leaving the younger man to feel that he had let down the Pinkerton side rather badly.

“You getting anything out of that?” he asked, sounding a trifle short.

“Very little,” Holmes admitted, but before Hammett could make a pointed display of his own impatience, Holmes continued. “Criminals print because it conceals everything about them up to and including their sex. I see very little here, other than the obvious, of course: that she is right-handed, middle-aged, in good health, and educated; that she is probably American—hence the profligate scattering of full-stops—but has spent long enough in Europe that ‘six May’ rather than ‘May six’ comes to her pen; that said pen is expensive and probably gold-nibbed but the ink is not her own, as it shows an unfortunate tendency to clump and dry unevenly. The paper itself might reward enquiries from the city’s stationers, although the watermark appears neither remarkable nor exclusive. And I should say that, behind its careful formation of the letters, the lady’s hand betrays a tendency toward self-centredness such as one sees in the hand of most career criminals.”

“The lady’s a crook? Well, that sure narrows things down in a town this size.”

“I shouldn’t hold my breath,” Holmes agreed, folding his magnifying-glass into its pocket and handing back the brief note. “Businessmen and even mere social climbers often display the same traits.”

“You don’t say?” Hammett mused, holding the note up into the light as if to follow the track of the older man’s deductions.

“Graphology is far from an exact science, but it does reward study.” Holmes sat back in the chair, took out his pipe and got it going, then fixed his host with a sharp grey eye. “So, Mr Hammett, am I to understand that you wish to terminate your employment with the lady from the South?”

“Not sure how I can do that; I took her money.”

“Have you spent it?”

In answer, Hammett opened the file again and took out the envelope that gave it its thickness, handing it to Holmes. “I opened it to see how much there was, and since then it’s sat there, untouched.”

Holmes opened the flap and ran his thumb slowly up the side of the bills within, taking note of their number and their denomination. His eyebrow arched and he looked at Hammett, who nodded as if in agreement.

“Yeah, way too much money for a couple days’ trailing.”

“But as, what is the term? ‘Hush money’?”

“You can see why I got nervous.”

Holmes dropped the envelope back in the file; Hammett flipped the cover shut as if to put the money out of sight. “What I can see,” said Holmes, “is that I’m dealing with a man who prefers to choose his employer.”

“Mr Holmes, I’ve got a family. I’m not a whole lot of good to them, the state I’m in, but I’d be a lot less good in prison.”

Despite Hammett’s explanation, Holmes thought that the threat of gaol was less of a deterrent than the young man’s distaste for villainy. As unlike Watson as a person could be physically, nonetheless the two were brothers under the skin—and he had no doubt that, like the externally sensible Watson, Hammett’s fictional maunderings would lay a thin coating of hard action over the most romantic of sensibilities.

“Very well, Mr Hammett. How would you like to work for me instead?”

“Turncoating has never had much appeal, Mr Holmes.”

“Have you spent any of the lady’s money?”

“I told you I hadn’t.”

“Has she given you a means of getting into contact with her?”

“That note was it. The boy brought it with the money, stuck it in my hand, and left. When I phoned my buddy to ask what the hell it all meant, he hadn’t a clue, didn’t know who it was, just some woman who needed a job done that he couldn’t take on right away.”

“Then you’ve done no more than keep the lady’s money safe for a few days until you might return it with your regrets. Is that not so?”

Hammett sat in thought, not caring for the situation, torn between the implied but undeclared contract represented by the money in the folder and the undeniable pull of curiosity. And another thing: “You think this has something to do with the person who took a shot at your wife?”

“Pacific Heights is an unlikely venue for a random madman with a gun,” Holmes pointed out grimly.

“Yeah, you’re right. Okay, Mr Holmes, I’ll take your job, so long as it doesn’t involve outright betrayal. If it turns out that coming to me is what opens that lady up for a fall, I’m telling you now that I’m going to stand back and take my hands off both sides of it.”

“Your rigid sense of ethics, Mr Hammett, will have done you no good in the world of the Pinkertons. But I agree.”

The two men shook hands, and Hammett reached for the bottle again to seal the agreement.

“So, where do you want me to start?”

“First, you need to know what might be called ‘the full picture,’ ” Holmes said, rapping his pipe out into the ash-tray and pulling out his pouch. “It would appear to have its beginnings a number of years ago, when my wife’s family died on a road south of the city.”

Hammett scrabbled through the débris on the table and came up with a note-book and a pen, which he uncapped and shook into life. His cigarette dangled unnoticed from between the fingers of his left hand as he hunched over the note-book on his knee, listening. After a few minutes, however, his occasional notes stopped, and his back slowly straightened against the chair-back, until finally he put up a hand.

“Whoa,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re laying pretty much everything out in front of me.”

“More or less,” Holmes agreed mildly.

“Her father’s job, the falling balcony in Egypt—”

“Aden,” Holmes corrected.

“Aden. Do you honestly think all that’s got anything to do with what’s going on here?”

“Do I think so? There is not sufficient evidence one way or the other. But the balcony was a recent and unexplained event, and the possibility of its being linked should not be ignored.”

“If you say so. But really, are you sure you want me to know all this?”

“If you do not know the past, how can you know what of the present is of importance?”

“I just mean—”

“You mean that, seeing as our initial meeting was adversarial, I ought not to trust you too wholeheartedly.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Mr Hammett, are you trustworthy?”

The thin man opened his mouth to answer, closed it again, and then began to chuckle. “There’s no answer I can give to that—‘yes’ would probably mean ‘no,’ and ‘no’ would mean I’m a complete boob, and ‘I don’t know’ means you’d be a damned fool to trust me with so much as a butter-knife.”

Holmes was smiling in response. “Precisely.”

“So what you’re saying is, ‘It’s my look-out, shut up and listen’?”

“Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction.”

“Okay, it is your look-out. So I’ll shut up and listen.”

And he did, attentively, his dark eyes alive in that gaunt face. His occasional grunt and question told Holmes all he needed to know about the man’s brains, and he told Hammett even more than he had originally intended. Very nearly everything.

It was late when they finished, or early. Hammett took out his package of Bull Durham again, glancing over his notes as his fingers sprinkled the tobacco and rolled the paper, every motion precise.

Eventually he nodded. “Yeah, I can see that you need another set of hands here.”

“And eyes. In the normal run of events, those would belong to Russell—to my wife. However, of late she has been … indisposed.”

“Too close to things to see clearly,” Hammett suggested.

“It is temporary, I have no doubt. But until she returns to herself, she is …” Again Holmes paused, searching for a word that might be accurate without being traitorous; he was unable to find one, and finished the sentence with a sigh and the word “unreliable.”

“So what do you want me to do first?”

“Do you know anything about motorcars?”

“They have four wheels and tip over real easy—when I’m driving, anyway. I usually ask a friend to drive me.”

“You don’t like guns and you don’t like motorcars. Are you certain you’re American?”

“I’ve hurt people with both of them, didn’t like the feeling.”

“Very well, then; ask a friend to drive you.”

Holmes reached into his inner pocket and pulled out his long leather note-case, taking from it a slip of paper with some notes in a small, difficult, but precise hand: his handwriting. “This is what I know about the motorcar crash. What we’re looking for is evidence of foul play, any evidence at all. The police report is quite clear that it was an accident, so the best we can hope for is a faint discrepancy.” He watched to see if Hammett looked puzzled, but the man was nodding.

“Something that smells off.”

“Quite. It is, after all this time, highly doubtful that there was enough of the motor to salvage, and even less of a chance the wreckage has anything to tell us, but it is just possible that no-one could decide what to do with the thing, and either left it on the cliffside or pulled it up and hauled it into a corner until its ownership was decided. The convolutions of the American legal system,” he added, “occasionally have inadvertent benefits.”

“Can’t you just ask your wife’s lawyer what happened to the car?”

“I’d rather not bring him into it.”

“I see. You’d rather pay me to go down on a fool’s task and look at a ten-year-old burned-out hulk.”

“It is an avenue of enquiry that must be pursued to its end, no matter how soon that end is reached.”

Hammett studied the piece of paper for a moment with a faint smile on his expressive mouth, then he picked it up without comment and tucked it away in his note-book. Sure, investigating the car might be a red herring designed for nothing more than getting him out of town for a couple of days, but what of it? There was trust, and there was stupidity, and despite his snooty accent, this Holmes was no jerk.

And the Limey’s money couldn’t be any dirtier than the pile of bills in the file.

As if he had followed the line of thought, Holmes addressed himself to the leather wallet again, pulling out five twenty-dollar notes and laying them onto the table. “That should be sufficient as a retainer. You see, I do not make the mistake of paying too generously.”

“No, Mr Holmes, I don’t think you make too many mistakes. Anything other than the car you want me to be getting on?”

“That is the first order of business, I think. Oh, but Hammett? You saw my wife tonight. Well enough to recognise her again?”

“Girl with glasses, her height, hair, and posture—she doesn’t exactly fade into the crowd. But if she was sitting, had a hat on? I don’t know.”

“Quite.” Holmes bent his head for a moment in thought before he slid two fingers into the note-case, this time drawing out a photograph—or rather, a square neatly snipped from a larger photograph. Reluctantly (Reluctant to show it to me? wondered Hammett. Or to show he had it at all? The Englishman seemed a person who would not reveal his affections readily.), Holmes slid it across the table for Hammett to examine.

It was of a young woman on a street, clearly unaware of the camera. Her head was up, showing a determined chin and graceful neck. The day had been bright but not sunny enough to make her spectacles throw shadows or reflections, so that behind the wire frames were revealed a pair of light-coloured eyes. Her hair was fair and gathered on top of her head in a way Hammett hadn’t seen in years—and hadn’t seen on the woman getting out of the car the night before.

“She’s cut her hair since this was taken?”

“Yes,” Holmes said, with a trace of regret that made Hammett’s mouth curve again, although he did not comment.

“And her eyes—blue or green?”

“Blue. And to American ears, she speaks with a pure English accent.”

Hammett handed the photograph back across the table. “Okay,” he said, making it a question.

Tucking the photograph back into its hold, Holmes said, “I showed you this because I think it possible that Russell will decide to travel in the same direction you are going, sometime in the next day or two. It would be as well if she didn’t take too much notice of you.”

“I hear you.” Hammett put the money into his own wallet, dashed the last contents of his glass down his throat, and stood up to shake the hand of his new employer. “Mr Holmes, this has been an interesting evening.”

Grey eyes looked into brown, understanding each other well.