Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Read online

  We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

  “Producer’s assistant,” then, was my official job. My unofficial one—the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into—was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk—as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

  “Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?”

  “No, thank you.” I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex—basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver—onto the floor, and sat.

  “Mr Holmes is not with you?”

  “As you see.” Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

  “You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman, have you?”

  “Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?”

  “No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since the man has vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.”

  “No, we have not heard news of Mr Goodman.” The literal, if not actual, truth.

  “Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?”

  “I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.”

  “From your husband.”

  “Why?” Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

  “Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.”

  “Those skills being …?”

  “The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.”

  “And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated women type-writers.”

  “I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.”

  “Oh. Well, now you have me.”

  “Yes.” Definitely a sigh, this time. “Oh, it might as well be you.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Chief Inspector, one might almost think you had no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?”

  “Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is—” He ran a hand over his face. “I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.”

  “Ah. Politics.”

  “In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.”

  “Do we have a moving picture industry?” I asked in surprise.

  “Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War—all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re beginning to catch up, we no sooner produce a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour—a faint rumour, mind—comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that the man they’re backing may be bent.”

  I put the clues together. “Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to fund a picture; they mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?”

  “Worse than that—the Palace itself have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.”

  “I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.”

  “Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three years ago, they made a movie about guns, and—”

  “An entire moving picture about guns?”

  “More or less. This was shortly after the Firearms Act, and the picture was about a returned soldier who used his military revolver in a Bolshevik act, accidentally killing a child.”

  “The Bolshevist terror being why the Firearms Act was introduced in the first place.” The 1920 Firearms Act meant that every three years, Holmes and I were forced to go before our local sheriff for weapons permits, demonstrating that we were neither drunks, lunatics, nor children.

  “That and the sheer number of revolvers knocking around after the War waiting to go off. Which more or less concealed the fact that someone sold quite a few of said firearms in this country, unpermitted, shortly after the picture came out.”

  “What does that—”

  “Wait. The following year, Fflytte did a story about a young woman whose life was taken over by drugs—Coke Express, it was called. The month following its release in the cinema houses, we had an unusual number of drugs parties along the south coast.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And last year, one of their pirate movies was about rum-running into America. It came out in November.”

  “I was busy in November. What happened?”

  “McCoy’s arrest. ‘The Real McCoy’? The man’s made a small fortune smuggling hard liquor into the United States.”

  “Hmm. Is this perhaps the same studio that was making a film about Hannibal?”

  “Fflytte Films, that’s them.”

  “Odd, I don’t recall hearing about a sudden influx of elephants racing down the streets of—”

  “I knew this was a mistake. Never mind, Miss Russell, I’ll—”

  “No no, Chief Inspector, sit down, I apologise. Surely there must have been something more concrete to interest you in the case, even in a peripheral manner?”

  He paused, then subsided into his chair. “Yes. Although even that I can’t be at all certain about. We were beginning to ask some questions—in a hush-hush fashion, so as not to set the gossip magazines on fire—when the studio’s secretary went missing. Lonnie Johns is her name.”

  “When was that?”

  “Well, there’s the thing—it was only four or five days ago. And there’s nothing to say that the Johns girl didn’t just quit her job and go on holiday. The girl she shares a room with said it wouldn’t surprise her, that Lonnie’s job would shred the nerves of a saint.”

  “But Miss Johns didn’t say anything to her, about going away?”

  “The room-mate didn’t see her go—she’d just got back herself from a week in Bognor Regis.”

  “Any signs of foul play at the flat?”

  “Neither disturbance nor a note, although some of her things did seem to be missing, tooth-brush and the like.”

  “If the girl had run off to the Riviera with a movie star, she’d probably have told everyone she knew,” I reflected.

  “Normally, we’d barely even be opening an enquiry into a disappearance of a girl missing a few days, but time is against us. The entire crew is about to set sail out of England, and if we don’t get someone planted in their midst, we’ll lose the chance. And when my likely officers were unavailable, I thought, just maybe Mr Holmes would have a few days free to act as a sort of place-holder, until I could get one of my own in line for it. But never mind, it was only a—”

  “And in addition, if it does blow up in the face of a gaggle of blue-bloods and splatter them all with scandal, it would be nice if Scotland Yard were nowhere in sight.”

  “Miss Russell, I deeply resent the im—”

  “Chief Inspector, I have nothing in particular on at the moment. I’ll be happy to devote myself to the Mysterious Affair of the Coincidental Film Crew.”

  He looked shocked. “You mean you’ll do it?”

  “I just said I would.”

  “I thought you’d laugh in my face.” He gave me a suspicious scowl. “You aren’t a ‘fan’ of
the cinema world, are you?”

  “By no means.”

  “And yet you seem almost eager to take this on.”

  Motion pictures, or Mycroft? I reached out to snatch the folder from his hand. “My dear Chief Inspector, you have no idea.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  PIRATE KING: Away to the cheating world go you,

  Where pirates all are well-to-do.

  FROM LESTRADE’S OFFICE, I went directly to that of Fflytte Films. It overlooked the friendly confusion of the Covent Gardens flower mart, where I dodged sweepers, buckets, carts, heaps of pulped blossoms, and a dark and winsome young lady aiming a heather sprig at my lapel.

  At the top of a flight of stairs, I found a door standing open, a ring of keys protruding from its lock. Inside, the chaos was nowhere near as colourful as that on the street outside, and the cries of vendors had been replaced with a raised telephonic voice from an inner office. I followed it to its source.

  “—don’t care what he says, the alcohol is to go into the hold, not in his quarters. Yes, I know it’s not your job to search him, I’ll take care of that, you just— That’s right, into the hold, and we’ll worry about his rooms on the day. Great, thanks.”

  The telephone clattered onto its stand, and I rapped my knuckles against the half-open door, then repeated it when I realised that the man’s muttered epithet had hidden my first attempt.

  Geoffrey Hale, the general manager of Fflytte Films, raised his head from his hands, presenting me with a pair of cornflower blue eyes in a face too young for the white of his hair—or, what I had thought was white hair, but with a closer look became merely very pale blonde. He was in his late thirties, and would have been quite attractive but for his haunted expression. “Yes?” he said, a syllable that tried for irritable but came out more than a little fearful.

  “I’ve come about the position,” I replied. “Sir Malcolm—”

  For Hale’s benefit, I began to trundle out Lestrade’s manufactured story, which in point of fact was a reasonably efficient means of inserting a person (male or female) into Fflytte Films. In the manner of all things English (particularly things in any way connected to the House of Lords) it had drawn its particulars from the old-boys network: a luncheon conversation at a club; Hale bemoaning the abrupt loss of his secretary-assistant and going frantic over the number of hours required to grease the machinery of a moving picture company; the old boy/luncheon mate saying that he might know someone, if Hale didn’t require a person who knew the industry; Hale answering that he’d hire a myopic orang-utan if the chimp could take dictation and manipulate a telephone.

  And here I was, with three of those four characteristics.

  (That, in any event, was how Hale remembered it. According to Lestrade, it had begun the other way around, with Lestrade actively hunting for a man with links to Fflytte or Hale; on finding one, he had arranged for the old boy to invite Hale to lunch, drawing the scent of a potential assistant before his nose.)

  (That, at any rate, was how Lestrade remembered it. However, knowing the House of Lords and its fondness for meddling in the lives of those who actually worked for a living, I thought it equally possible that Lestrade had been handed the plan ready made: Here’s our suspicions, the peers had told him; here’s what your man is to do; here’s the path we’ve paved for him to get there.

  It had been a set-up from the beginning, although there was no knowing at this point how many layers of deception there were: Hale definitely was being manipulated, Lestrade possibly, me almost certainly. Even that conveniently missing secretary had the faint odour of red herring, a ploy designed expressly to attract the attentions of the police. And if Lonnie Johns was safely tucked up for a quiet holiday in the south of France, it was more likely that the House of Lords was paying her bills than Scotland Yard.

  Apart from which, Lestrade was not a good enough liar to manufacture a false concern for a missing girl.)

  (Only some days later, as I leant miserably over the storm-tossed railing, desperately searching for something to bring my mind up from my stomach, did it occur to me that Mycroft’s threatened trip to Sussex had been an oddly convenient piece of timing. And once that idea had swum to the surface, a great cloud of morbid thoughts boiled up in its wake: Since the notion of Mycroft Holmes doing the bidding of any number of Lords was laughable, it suggested that the House of Lords were not the instigators of this investigation, but the puppets of Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft had moved them: They had moved Lestrade: Lestrade had moved—

  Which in turn suggested that Mycroft had wanted me to do this, but knew that if he were to ask me directly, I would refuse.

  Later, when I was not in quite such a vulnerable position, I decided that it was a ridiculously convoluted, Heath Robinsonian piece of machinery, a bit much even for Mycroft. My brother-in-law was sly, but he was practiced enough to know that setting a fox before Lords might take the hunt in any direction.

  One thing I was certain: If plot there was, Holmes had not been in on it.

  But all the doubt and suspicion came later, when it was too late. Had I put the pieces together earlier, I would not have found myself standing before Geoffrey Hale’s chaotic desk in his Covent Garden office that November afternoon, laying out the story Chief Inspector Lestrade had provided for me.)

  “—so I don’t actually know anything about the picture industry, but a friend mentioned this and I’m between projects just at the moment and I thought it sounded like a lark. I’m a whiz at type-writing,” I added with a bright smile.

  I was none too certain how Hale would feel about the person being thrust towards his manly breast—one Mary Russell, who, although well dressed and reasonably energetic, was far too young for the sort of placid maternal secretarial authority that his typhoon-struck offices cried out for, who moreover admitted that she knew exactly nothing about co-ordinating a film crew. But before I could finish my prepared explanation, dawn came up across his unshaven features and he rose as if to fling himself at my feet.

  I hastened to stick out my hand, forestalling any greater demonstration; he clasped it hard and pumped away with hearty exclamations.

  “Oh how utterly jolly, a life-saver in sensible shoes, you are so very welcome, Miss—what was it? Russell, of course, like the philosopher, although I’d guess looking at you that you’re a dashed sight more practical than him. Oh, Miss Russell, you can’t believe what a mess things have got into here—I had a perfectly adequate assistant who seems to have upped and left, just as we’re about to set sail. Both literally and figuratively.”

  “Er,” I said, retrieving my squashed hand and glancing down at my shoes, which were the most fashionable (and hence impractical) I owned. “Do you want to see some letters of recommendation or something?”

  “You speak English and you’re dead sober at two in the afternoon, what else could I ask for? You know your alphabet?”

  “I know several alphabets. And shorthand.” Holmes, when going undercover, could disguise himself as anything from garage mechanic to priest; I was forced into the more womanly rôles of secretary or maid. (Although after one stint in the kitchen of a manor house, I tried to avoid being hired as cook; still, the fire had been quickly doused.)

  “And you have a passport, and no small children or aged grannies needing you at home? If you spoke with Malcolm, you’ll know that we will be away from London for some weeks? Although we’ll try our best to be home by Christmas.”

  That was either a gross and self-delusional underestimate, or a blatant lie designed to soothe a nervous would-be employee. But I did not blink. “I am aware that the job entails travel, yes.”

  “Perfection. Can you start with these?”

  He stabbed the air with a desk spike impaled with more than four inches of paper. Avoiding the wicked point, I extracted the object from his hand. “You want me to begin immediately?”

  “Absolutely. That is, could you?” he asked, recalling his manners with an effort.

  “I could
, although it might be good if I had some idea what you’d like me to do.”

  When he flung himself out of the office six minutes later, late for a meeting with a last-minute addition to the cast on the other side of town, I had not much more of an idea. However, I soon discovered that by identifying myself as “—with Fflytte Films,” the voice in the earpiece would instantly break in with the urgent business at hand, much of which had to do with unpaid bills. At 6:40 that evening, I reached the bottom of the spike, having taken care of roughly half its problems and transferred the remainder onto a single sheet of lined paper for consultation with Hale. With that in hand, along with another page holding a list of cheques needing to be sent, I locked the door with the abandoned keys, and set off for Hale’s home.

  At 7:00 that morning, Mrs Hudson’s coffee in hand, I’d neither heard of nor cared about Geoffrey Hale, Randolph Fflytte, or the business of putting a moving picture before the great British public. Twelve hours later, I felt I had been intimately involved for weeks.

  Geoffrey Hale was the lifelong friend, long-time business partner, and (another inevitability in English business arrangements) second cousin of Randolph Fflytte himself. Hale was the man who enabled the director’s vision to inhabit screens around the world. Hale was the one to assemble cast and crew, negotiate with the owners of cinema houses and would-be filming sites, and in general see to the practical minutiae of taking a film from initial discussion to opening night. Hale was the one to ensure that the actors were sober enough to work, that the actresses had enough flowers and bonbons to soothe their delicate egos, the one to make certain that the country house where filming was to take place actually possessed four walls and a roof.