As I crossed Matteo Crovetti’s half-tidy quarters next door, I was astonished to see dim light through the shutters. A glance at my watch confirmed that it was nearly sunrise.
That simplified matters. Mrs Hudson always rose early—at least, she had in Sussex. Did the same habits apply to Miss Hudson of Monaco? I gave a quick glance at the street outside before stepping out, then locked the former warehouse and eyed the neat little house next door. Was that light coming through from the morning room?
I decided I didn’t care, and walked up the pristine steps to rap on her door.
Sounds confirmed that I had not woken her. I raised my face to the little brass view-hole, and spoke when her eye appeared behind the grille.
“Hello, Mrs Hudson. Sorry to disturb you so early but—” The peep-hole shut and the door opened, my resolve sagging at the sight of her comfortable figure in dressing gown and slippers. Couldn’t I just…?
No, I could not. “Sorry to knock so early,” I said, “but there’s something I need to know.”
“Come in, dear, I just made tea; there’s plenty for two. I’ll fetch you a cup—make yourself comfortable.”
The left-hand door, the one that led to the formal parlour where Niko had died, was as firmly shut as it had been when I first saw it. I wondered if she’d been in there at all since she’d returned home. But the right-hand door to the cheerful morning room stood wide open, and while she went back to the kitchen, I walked through her pleasant retreat to unlatch the shutters and throw them open to the morning.
I stood in the brightness, aware of the expression my face wore. A smile, but a complicated one: pleasure from having solved a tangled problem—and delight from having got there before Holmes—was tempered by discomfort at the upcoming confrontation and the knowledge that I was going to hurt someone I loved. There was sadness, since my triumph meant her defeat. Beyond that, there was uncertainty, from the dilemma of what to tell Holmes.
It was an expression I had seen Holmes wear, when a case came to an end that was intellectually satisfying but emotionally painful.
It was also an expression that Mrs Hudson could not miss, when she walked in with another cup and a plate of buttered toast.
Her step faltered, then continued. She poured the tea with steady hands, arranging the milk and the toast within my reach, then resumed her seat and her own cup—but she would not meet my eyes, and her face had gone suddenly old.
“What is it you want to know, Mary?”
“Mrs Hudson, I don’t really want to know any of it. But I’m afraid I need to. So tell me: the colours in this room. Were they deliberately chosen, or was the decorating unconscious?” Her look of bewilderment was all the reply I needed. “I will take it, then, that the greys and touches of green were inadvertent?”
“Well, I did choose them,” she said. “They seemed pleasantly cool. This can be a warm climate.”
“I see.” I laid aside my cup and walked over to the little painting on the wall, that storm-filled sky above the undulating green hillside of Beachy Head. “The colours just happen to reflect the most important item in the room.”
I waited for her to laugh, to tell me that naturally, the painting was dear to her—that I had given it to her, that she treasured it…But she said nothing. I loved her for that, and yet I reached to take the painting from its hook, ignoring her tiny sound of protest.
“I found it in that little shop near the Eastbourne Library,” I said. “The cliffs near Birling Gap. A sentimental reminder of a long-time home, given to you by someone who loves you, and whom you love. A person who knows you so well, they know that you would never, ever, hide jewellery inside a pair of stockings or banknotes in the tea caddy. No more than you would answer your door without seeing who is there, or live in a house with a barred back exit.”
I carried the painting back to my chair and sat down, laying it on my knees with its brown-paper backing face up. I reached down to my boot-top for the sharp little throwing-knife I wore there, holding it poised above the paper.
“When is a cliff a bluff?” I mused. “And if a cliff, or a picture of a cliff, is used to hide something that no sensible person would hide there, does it become a double-bluff? No prudent and experienced woman would hide anything precious in her sock-drawer, in the flour canister, or at the back of a picture. Places any amateur sneak-thief knows to look.
“But what if one is dealing with the very opposite of the amateur sneak-thief? What if one fears, not a clumsy housebreaker, but a man with the very sharpest of eyes and the most devoutly suspicious of minds? A man who, moreover, has watched a woman’s every move for years, who has come to respect both her wit and her accumulated skill? In that case, wouldn’t a stupid act be the wisest?”
I lowered the needle-sharp point of the knife into the backing paper. Down one side, across the bottom, up the other. I folded the paper back, prised up the white card-stock below, and saw…
To be honest, I was not sure what I was seeing, other than it being old, and ornate, and formal.
“What is this?”
“That is what made Count Vasilev so eager to throw me from the boat—or at any rate, one very like that. There are two more underneath.”
I worked the top sheet out of its frame. It resembled an amusing trifle one would find in a market stall of decorative jumble—those ornate stock certificates from long-defunct railways or coal mines that closed a generation ago. In this case, it appeared to be a bearer bond from a rural English bank, with a face value of £50,000. It had to be a joke.
So she explained.
Back in another age, the year before one Clarissa Hudson came squalling into the world, an embezzler named Jack Prendergast had enlisted the help of a career criminal to convert the better portion of a quarter-million pounds sterling into four pieces of paper. For seventy years, the pages had been lost—until this past spring, when she happened to go looking, and found them. She knew they were worthless, they had to be—and yet, various men had thought them valuable enough to kill over. So, tentatively, she had handed one of the four over to a man who was once the Czar’s banker…
Only to discover that he also considered the piece of paper worth killing over.
She looked at the sheet in my hand—calligraphed, stamped, water-stained, and old. “I found them in the old rag dolly, the day I left Sussex. I never thought they would be worth anything. Perhaps a few francs as decorative items. Even now, I’m half convinced that the Count was lying about the money being in the bank in San Remo. Although why he’d persist with the act when it was clear he was going to kill me, I can’t think.”
“You told him you’d make sure his daughter was cared for.”
“Monaco and France will stop his accounts, until they are satisfied that the money in them is not from crimes. But no one else knows about the San Remo monies. They could sit there forever, unless her sanitorium hears of them. And if that fails, well, Lillie will step in and care for the girl.”
“Will she?”
“It was my promise. That is what friends are for.”
“It’s not a hospital for tuberculosis, is it?”
“No. Natalia’s problems are of the mind. And heart. Her mother and brothers were murdered before her eyes, and she was…Well, she was broken, by the War.”
Natalia Vasilev. A woman damaged by men, who might be saved by women.
After a time, my hands fitted the sheet back on top of its siblings. Tucked the cardboard behind it. Smoothed down the brown paper that curled away from its sliced edges.
“Mrs Hudson, I have to tell Holmes about this.”
“I would expect no less.”
I set the picture on the tea-table, face down, as cautiously as if it were a bomb. The lining paper refused to lie flat, however much my fingers smoothed it.
Slowly, I finished my thought. “I might not have to tell him right away.”
She said nothing. She may have stopped breathing.
I pressed my hand against the rising paper one last time, then slid the painting across the table towards her. “I don’t like keeping secrets from him. So I’d suggest you take care of this as fast as you possibly can.”
“Mary, I can’t ask you to do that. To lie to him. It’s wrong, and he’ll be very angry.”
“I know. But he keeps things from me. And sometimes—well. Sometimes a woman is a wife, and sometimes she’s a friend.”
In any event, Mrs Hudson was probably right: her three decorative pieces of paper with the absurd sums on them would turn out to be nothing but amusements.
Besides which, Holmes and I had a task in Roumania waiting for us. After this adventure of bearer bonds and smuggled Romanov gold, a problem of vampires would be something of a relief.