It was three a.m., and I was wrapped in one of Niko’s bedcovers. My shivers were starting to recede, thanks in part to a glass of the dead man’s brandy in my hand. Holmes had one, too, and was making use of an ash-tray he’d found in the room next door—where his quick search had also given us a spare key, a suspicious absence of financial records, and a casual assortment of smuggled alcohol and tobacco. Though no indication of drugs.
“Is she in danger, Holmes?”
“Mrs Hudson? No.” He then spoilt the reassurance by adding, “At any rate, not immediately.”
“A man was killed in her home.”
“Yes, a man—not her. I believe the intention of laying a body literally at her door was to have her arrested. Although I cannot yet see if the arrest served merely to remove her from the playing field for a time, or was meant as a threat.”
“People don’t generally commit murder as a threat.”
“Some people do. And this was no random victim. Whatever the point of using Mrs Hudson’s sitting room may have been, someone wanted to be rid of Niko Cassavetes. That young man is the centre of this, somehow. A Greek sailor, come to Monaco some three years ago, hires himself out as an homme à tout faire, letting rooms from a family with a history of smuggling, who provide him a place to stash goods. He meets an English housekeeper with a criminal history, who’s in need of an income, and arranges for her to take rooms with that same smuggling family.”
“But Holmes, we’ve already agreed that the Riviera is a small village, especially in the off-season. Wouldn’t it be more extraordinary if a ‘fixer’ and a free-lancing housekeeper didn’t know each other?”
“To find Russian nobility joined with artistic Americans is not so preordained. That appears to be Niko’s doing.”
“But to what purpose? And what about Lillie Langtry? She must be Mrs Hudson’s nameless friend, who introduced her to Niko in the first place.”
“But not to Basil Zaharoff. The three of them seem to be old…acquaintances.”
“Well, I suppose I could return to Antibes and see what Sara and Gerald can tell me about Niko. Do you wish to join me?”
“I need to speak with Count Vasilev.”
“I’d bet Mrs Langtry would be happy to help you there. She seemed very taken with your moustache.”
Fortunately, he did not grace the remark with a reply, merely ground out his cigarette in the ash-tray, then took it and the glass back to Matteo Crovetti’s side of the quarters. I returned the borrowed wrap to the bed and followed, carrying the key that he had found.
“Will anyone notice if this key is missing?” I asked.
“Will it matter if they do?” So I used it to lock the door as we left, and dropped it into a pocket to return.
It was nearly four in the morning as we walked the silent lanes, our voices little more than murmurs. “I can take the train to Antibes tomorrow—later today, I mean—but I’d like to hear what Inspector Jourdain has to say. Do you think he’d mind my joining you?”
“No more than he minds speaking to me in the first place. But yes, you go back afterwards. I shall keep the room here at the Hermitage. Our business in Monaco is far from over.”
Parting already? I pushed down my disappointment. “I also want to see Mrs Hudson before I leave. I’ll ring Mrs Langtry first, to make sure she’s there.”
“No doubt the hotel exchange can connect you. Is there any reason for me to come?”
There was every reason for him to stay away, but I did not think it would ease matters to put it so bluntly. “No, I just wanted a chat without the guard listening in. Just to say hello. We can both go see her in a day or so.”
To my relief, he agreed, and I cheerfully tucked my arm through his as we walked through the pre-dawn city. At the Hermitage, our late entrance caused less distress than the dust on our clothing. Clearly, guests of the Hôtel Hermitage were expected to dress properly for all late-night excursions.
At a more reasonable hour, quite a long time after dawn, we rose and broke our fast with coffee and rolls. Inspector Jourdain was expecting us—or half of us, at any rate—in the park at ten. Though perhaps he would not appreciate a female person wearing evening dress, chalk-smeared trousers, or a frock that had been worn for scrubbing a floor. I sighed and rang down a third time to see if my French lady’s maid could summon yet more garments out of the air.
Unfortunately, she was unavailable. And her replacement, though armed with my measurements, was also armed with a peculiar sense of taste.
I had no time to protest, or even look too closely at the frock, I merely threw it on and bolted out of the door.
As we might have guessed, Jourdain kept us waiting. As we sat on the designated bench in a quiet corner of a dull park, I took my first look at what I was wearing. It had been chosen by someone with an Edwardian sense of taste. Either that, or a malicious sense of humour.
“I look like a chintz armchair,” I said.
Holmes glanced at the girly frock, and turned away—but not before I saw the brief quirk of his lips.
I plucked at the stiff sprig of lace on my inadequate bust, and sighed. “I suppose it could have been worse.”
“Yes?”
“At least the flowers aren’t too pink.”
“As a disguise, Russell, it is effectively misleading.”
“I hope I can make it to my room in the Cap before the Hon Terry spots me.”
“Mrs Hudson will be entertained,” he commented.
Inspector Jourdain was not, but then I didn’t imagine that sour face would find much in his world to amuse him. He was no more approving of Holmes’ trim suit than of my fashion atrocity, or indeed, my very presence.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
“My partner, Miss Russell.”
“That was not what we agreed.”
“Did you bring the files?”
“I cannot show you official police files.”
“Why not? I don’t need your interview notes, merely the photographs and anything of interest which your coroner may have found. He has done his autopsy, I trust?”
“Saturday morning.”
“I don’t expect he’s written up his report yet, but no doubt he at least gave you a verbal one?”
Jourdain hesitated—but if he hadn’t meant to show us what he had, why agree to meet?
With a show of irritation, he snatched an envelope from his inner pocket and slapped it down on the bench beside Holmes. Though when Holmes pulled out its contents fully within my view, the policeman drew breath as if to protest.
I found him staring at me with a look of outrage. Perhaps Holmes had been right: the dress disguised me, making me into a person who would faint at the photograph of a dead man. I gave the poor fellow an encouraging smile, and turned to the photos. The policeman lit a furious cigarette and began to pace up and down.
There were, as I had feared, only a handful of photos. The first, taken in situ, showed Niko Cassavetes, head resting on the little carpet Madame Crovetti had discarded, the rest of him surrounded by the black pool that I had spent the previous day removing. I found myself rubbing my fingertips as if his blood remained beneath my finger-nails, even though I’d worn gloves. He lay between the wall and a settee, face up but turned slightly onto his left side, left arm sprawled across the floor, wrist up, his right arm draped over his chest. He was wearing casual duck trousers and shirt-sleeves, the shirt either white or some pale colour, its sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. The photograph was not completely clear, but he appeared to have a single bullet hole directly over his heart.
Holmes thumbed through the other pictures, looking for an autopsy photograph of the victim’s back, and failed to find one. “Did the bullet go all the way through?”
“No,” I said. Jourdain’s pacing stopped. “I cleaned the room. There was no bullet hole in the wall or furniture behind him.”
The man’s eyes narrowed at this contradiction between my appearance and my words, but he nodded. “She’s right. The coroner dug it out of him.”
“The calibre?” Holmes asked in a patient voice.
“Nine millimetre.” The policeman then added, reluctantly, “Possibly the Browning Long.”
“Used by half of northern Europe’s police and military for the past twenty years,” Holmes remarked.
“I have a Browning myself.”
If the bullet had passed all the way through Niko’s chest, more blood would have pooled beneath him. It had not, but as I thought earlier, the stain was too wide for death to have been instantaneous. The heart had beat a few times before stopping, sending the blood welling up over his chest but not hard enough to spray the room with blood.
Holmes dug out his pocket magnifying-glass and bent over the earliest photograph, showing the body as the police had first seen it. “What did your analysts make of the blood-drying time?” he asked.
Jourdain’s lack of a response was in itself the answer: either no one had noticed, or Monaco had no such analysts. Probably both. I braced myself for a barrage of science and superiority that would leave both men with hackles raised, but to my surprise, Holmes drew a deep breath, held it, let it out—then merely mused aloud as he continued to scrutinise the dry, unsmeared drops and the trampled edges of the blood pool. “Those drops—hard surface, warm day, even in this humidity they would dry in less than an hour. The pool, of course, is another matter. There is some interesting work being done on the relative drying times of blood, taking into account temperature, humidity, surfaces, and so on. I could send that to you, if you like. However, that constable who was first on the scene might have noticed how dry it was when he arrived. Since, as you know, a standing pool of blood takes two or three hours to turn from very dark to brighter red, and another two or three hours for the edges of the pool to begin showing a dry rim. He may have had a chance to notice its state before the rest of your colleagues came in and…disturbed the scene.”
I waited for him to drive the point home—that a bright red pool that was only beginning to go dry at the edges suggested a shooting time of six o’clock at the earliest, while Mrs Hudson had been gone by four and did not return until after eleven. But again, discretion surfaced, and Holmes merely folded away his glass, dropping the subject of drying times entirely to turn his attention to the actual subject of the photograph. The dead man lay calm, lips together, his eyelids nearly shut over those extraordinary eyes. His hair looked even lighter than it had on the beach that day.
“More Pathan than Mediterranean Greek,” Holmes commented.
“Is that where those eyes came from? I did wonder.”
The hair on Niko’s forearms was similarly light—at the least, on his right arm, where the rolled-up sleeve lay well down from his elbow. At the shirt’s edge, the skin had a dark stain that did not appear to be a spatter of blood. A tattoo? The shape resembled a mermaid’s tail. His left arm lay stretched out across those boards that I had scrubbed: palm up, fingers curled, shirt pulled back to the fold of his elbow. Studying the musculature, one could see other signs—along with the tattoo—that despite his delicate build and good manners, this young man had been no bookish office worker. Holmes had described him as more personal servant than deck hand, but that arm had been accustomed to physical labour: the fingers were small but powerful, knuckles heavy, his palm crossed by minor scars. Even in its slack state, the veins and tendons of his wrist stood out, as my own had begun to do after three weeks of working sails.
I saw no tattoo stains on his left arm, though the image was clear enough to count each sun-bleached hair along the upper side of it. Though…I raised the photograph, squinting at the details. Halfway up the forearm, a patch of hair seemed to be missing. I sorted through the other photographs, but though they included one showing his nude chest—graced by another tattoo—none included the full length of Niko’s left arm.
Holmes passed the last photograph to me. This one came out of order, and showed Niko’s chest. He was lying on Mrs Hudson’s floor, but had been turned onto his back. On his left side, the shirt was saturated with blood, but the right side and shoulder were largely untouched. I could see none of the small black specks that resulted when a gun went off close to fabric.
“The shooter was not close,” Holmes said to the policeman.
“Probably ten feet or so away.”
“Just inside the doorway, then,” I noted.
“Most likely.”
“Why didn’t anyone hear the gunshot?” Holmes asked.
Jourdain reached out to sift through the photographs, stopping at the earliest in the sequence, showing Niko on the floor. His brown-stained finger tapped the back of the settee, where a sort of travelling rug had been tossed. A rug that hadn’t been there when I saw the room, and yet I had overlooked it in the photograph. “There were burn marks on that thing. Like might have happened if it was wrapped around a gun.”
“Would that muffle a gunshot?” I asked in surprise.
“Some. Perhaps enough to make it sound like a backfiring engine. We get a lot of those here, with all the hills.”
But with that unseemly burst of cooperation, Jourdain withdrew. The rest of his answers were terse and uninformative, and in a few minutes, he snatched back the photographs and shoved them into his pocket.
“I hope that satisfies you that we can manage this without outside help. Now, please, go away and allow me to do my work.”
He stalked off, the latest in a long line of policemen who disapproved of Sherlock Holmes and his techniques.