Part 15 (2/2)

”A boy, in fact. And it's the daughter who is now asking me to make the enquiries.”

”What sort of enquiries?”

”Details about her parents. As I said, they died, in a motor accident some years later. In particular, she would like to know about the period in which the family was living in a tent.”

He picked up his tea to cover the intensity of his interest, sipping the smoky brew from the paper-thin teacup, larger brother of the child-sized model on the saucer beside her. But he need not have worried; she was sitting, head bent, brows furrowed in concentration. After a moment she said, ”Mr Holmes, would you be so good as to bring the sherry and two gla.s.ses from that cupboard over there?”

The sherry was dry and smelt of the Spanish sun, and under its influence, memory stirred. The tiny hand reached out for a silver bell and rang it. The door came open so quickly, it was evident that Mimi had been standing just outside it.

”Yes, Mum?”

”Dear, I need you to bring me the photograph alb.u.m of the fire. You remember where it is?”

”Yes, Mum.” The door shut, and silence fell, the old woman occupied with her inner images. In minutes the maid returned with a large morocco-bound alb.u.m, laying a white cloth on the table before she set the book before her mistress. She adjusted the book slightly and stood back. ”Would there be anything else, Mum?”

”No, thank you, Mimi.”

”Beg pardon, Mum, but Cook asks if you'll be wanting dinner delayed?”

The question was nicely phrased, Holmes thought. It served to ask Miss Adderley if she was going to need another place laid without setting the question out in the open, while at the same time reminding Holmes that it was getting on to evening and he'd promised not to tire the elderly woman.

He was the one who answered. ”You needn't delay on my behalf,” he said. ”I have an appointment before too long, and won't be staying. If we haven't finished our business by that time, perhaps I might impose on you for a second visit?”

The offer of a return pleased both women, the protective Mimi and the lonely Miss Adderley. Mimi sketched a curtsey and left them alone, the frail hand already lifting back the alb.u.m cover.

She turned half a dozen pages until she came to a photograph of the city burning. It had been taken from a hill above the downtown, long shadows indicating that it was early morning. The buildings were crisp and clear, those closer to the camera revealing their missing cornices, shattered windows, and huge cracks running up the brick. The streets were adrift with brick and rubble, the mounds studded incongruously with chairs and wardrobes that had been carried so far, then abandoned. Men and women stood about, staring up at the cloud of angry smoke billowing grey against the lighter sky. To one side, a dead horse lay in the traces of its wagon, half buried by the collapsed wall of a building.

After a minute, she turned the page.

The next photograph was at once shocking and oddly rea.s.suring. Again from a hilltop, again the fires raging in the background, but along the front of the picture, picnics were taking place. A group of young men, some of them hatless but all in ties and tidy suits, sat and lay back on their elbows on the gra.s.s around a cloth arranged with sandwich rolls and bottles of lemonade. In the centre of the photograph, with the smoke cloud huge and furious above them and the dapper young men glancing at them from the sides, stood a pair of young women-girls, really-dressed in their spring finery. Hats elaborate with feathers, new spring frocks, their postures shouting their awareness that the youths at their feet were of greater interest and importance than the city burning at their backs. It might have been an ill.u.s.tration of the careless self-obsession of the young, yet somehow it was not. For some reason, the posture of the young ladies and the ease of their admirers conveyed a sense of defiance in the face of catastrophe: One knew somehow that these young people were quite aware of the horrors creeping up on them, yet one suspected that they were merely biding their time until they might do something about it.

Rea.s.suring, the a.s.sertion of young strength in the time of the city's need.

Holmes found himself smiling, and she turned the next page, her fingers swiping back the tissue protector to reveal a refugee camp.

The profile of the hill on which the camp was laid was the familiar park a few streets away-Lafayette Park, little more than a gra.s.sy knoll with the incongruous house parked among the trees at the top, the whole of it two streets wide and two deep. In the first photo, the gra.s.s was a jumble of possessions-bedrolls and steamer trunks, strapped orange-crates and disa.s.sembled bed-steads. All the women wore the elaborate hats of the period, and most of the men were missing.

In the next picture in the sequence, a tent city had sprung up in front of the elaborate Victorian houses that faced the park. Here, the rising smoke was closer, possessions had been gathered into rough heaps, and a few canvas tents had been raised, the whiteness of their sides and the unbeaten gra.s.s around their bases clear signs that the photograph had been taken soon after they had been installed. The women were mostly bare-headed, and the men had returned, to stand about in their s.h.i.+rt-sleeves.

”The Army brought the tents over,” Miss Adderley said, ”I believe from Fort Mason. At first there were soldiers to set them up, but then they were called off to guard the downtown from looters and we were left to our own resources. Fortunately, a number of old soldiers lived in the area, so we managed. This was our tent, here.” A gnarled finger touched a taut white peak near the house at the top of the hill, then continued down to the bottom to turn to the next page.

Now, the Lafayette Park tent city was well established, peopled by an affluent group of refugees, long-skirted women with the occasional hat, their prized bits of furniture and statuary bulging the sides of the tents-a sofa here, two candelabra on a packing-case table there. All the children wore shoes, and the men, though still not as numerous as the women, invariably wore waistcoats and bowler hats.

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 gra.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 alb.u.m over to the lamp, resting the top edge of the book against the arm of the settee. He switched on the lamp, brought his gla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 s.h.i.+fted the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed since the first photograph of the tent city-the wear on the gra.s.s alone told him that-and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had a.s.serted 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 against the labours to come.

Speaking over his shoulder, Holmes said, ”I should like to borrow one of these photographs, if I may? I shall take care to return it undamaged.”

”Certainly,” the old woman replied.

Only then did Holmes stand upright, taking the alb.u.m back to the table to allow her to turn the remaining pages, none of which proved of any interest to him. He turned back to the picture showing Judith Russell, eased it out of its mounts, and laid it before the old woman.

”That is Judith Russell. What can you tell me about her?”

”A very fine young woman, full of spirit. English, she was-you'd have expected her to be one of those who found the conditions trying, who burst into tears and wrung their hands uselessly at the merest nothing. I remember, one silly young thing found lice in her son's hair a few days after the fire, and collapsed into utter hysterics. And it was Mrs Russell with her fancy accent who put the girl back together again, getting her calm, sending for the barber, helping her boil the child's bedding. Most of the families left fairly quickly, as soon as they could find other arrangements and store their valuables. Others moved in as soon as the tents went vacant, of course-persons whose homes were in areas less prosperous than Pacific Heights.” She laughed suddenly, her eyes sparkling. ”I remember when a bevy of ladies of the evening from the Tenderloin arrived and began to set up . . . Well, they were not made welcome by the local residents, and were sent on their way. A pity, really, they were much more cheerful than my neighbours by that point.”

”Miss Adderley, do you recall any incident in particular, involving a strange man coming to the Russell tent?”

”There may have been any number-my tent was in a different area of the park, and after the first days I spent most of my time down in neighbourhoods that needed help, serving soup and distributing bread.”

”I understand,” he said, taking care not to show disappointment. However, she was not finished.

”There was a thing I heard about, walking one morning with some of the women down to where the bread was distributed. I am not absolutely certain that it concerned the Russells, you understand, but I believe it may have. It had happened the previous evening, three or four days after the earthquake itself, because the fire was out and the rain had just started. Might that have been the Sunday? Yes, I believe so. At first, the rains were welcome-we gathered it in buckets, the children ran about wildly, all we ladies washed our hair. But that evening, very early, everyone retreated inside their tents-what with the huge relief of knowing that the fires were at an end, and the blessedness of having shelter, and general exhaustion, this visitor came and found most everyone inside, so that he'd had to ask his way. He stopped at one tent, and the woman's children were asleep so she stepped outside to answer him quietly. She said he was dressed like a tramp, all dirt and mismatched garments. However, that would have described most of us by that time, and underneath everything he seemed polite and nicely spoken, so when he asked where Charles Russell might be found, she directed him to the Russells' tent and stood in her door-way to see that he found the right one.

”As soon as she heard the little girl scream, she knew what had happened, and she felt just terrible. Not to have warned the man first, you see. He'd very clearly been caught in a fire, possibly some sort of explosion-you know how a puff of burning gasoline can singe off eyelashes? Well, that's what had happened to this poor fellow. Swollen eyes, raw-looking skin, and no hair at all, lashes, brows, and even the front part of his head that his hat didn't cover. And he'd smeared some sort of white ointment on it as well-he startled this lady, so he must have scared the little Russell girl half to death. I can't think . . . Why are you smiling?”

”My . . . client remembered what she called a 'faceless man.' I think you've just found him for me.”

”An apt description, I should think. We depend largely on hair for facial definition, do we not?”

”What about his beard?”

”I don't know that she mentioned a beard. But then, lack of a beard is not as startling as a lack of eyebrows, is it?”

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