Laurie R. King

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Series: Russell & Holmes #19
Published by: Bantam Books
Release Date: June 10, 2025
Pages: 318

 
Overview

Mary Russell’s allegiances are tested by the reappearance of her long-lost uncle—and a tantalizing case not even Sherlock Holmes could solve.

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black-sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in years, and she's assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first place: he was involved—somehow—in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from a secure safe in Dublin Castle.

It was a theft that shook a government, enraged a King, threatened the English establishment—and baffled not only the Dublin police and Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes himself. And now, Jake expects Russell to step into the middle of it all? To slip away with him, not telling Homes what she’s up to? Knowing that the theft—unsolved, hushed-up, scandalous—must have involved Mycroft Holmes as well?

Naturally, she can do nothing of the sort. Siding with her Uncle Jake, even briefly, could only place her in opposition to both her husband-partner, and to his secretive and powerful brother. She has to tell Jake no.

On the other hand, this is Jake—her father’s kid brother, her childhood hero, beloved and long-lost survivor of a diminished family.

Conflicting loyalties and international secrets, blatant lies and blithe deceptions: sounds like another case for Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

---

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

First of all, none of what happened was my fault. Not really.

Well, wait. I suppose this is only going to work if I’m honest (mostly honest) with my intended reader. And also with myself? So, okay, I’ll come clean: some of it could be laid at my feet. But I swear, the business that had started as a prank and ended up rat­tling governments and destroying lives (my life most of all!) would have taken place whether I’d happened to be in London that long-ago summer or not. And I will say that if I’d been in charge, things would have gone a whole lot smoother, beginning to end, and a couple of men who ended up shot might not have been.

Because look, I take pride in my work. Too much, maybe, I sup­pose that’s part of the problem, but honestly, I do know what I’m doing. (Usually.) My mistake here was instead of setting it up and making the decisions, I took my eyes off of who could be trusted and left a couple of key steps to others. And they of course made the most idiotic decisions possible.

Yes, I of all people trusted the wrong man. No surprise, then, that things flew out of control. Before I knew it, I’d lost my family and friends and had to scurry off to parts of the world that weren’t quite so hot for me.

It could have been worse. (Not a whole lot worse.) At least I wasn’t in prison. (Or dead.)

And the world is an entertaining place. A few years went by, then more. I lived most of it far away from old friends and actual family. But I kept busy, and I certainly had the means to be wher­ever (and whoever) I wanted. I made new friends. Some became almost a new family.

However, I’m not good with unfinished business (that pride thing, again). So when I got word that the situation concerning this dangling piece of business might have changed, I began to wonder if I couldn’t combine it with some unfinished personal business as well, an absence that had nagged at me for a long, long time. One that had grown more troubling with the passing of each year, not less. I did keep track of her. A handful of times I arranged to catch sight of her from a distance, but it wasn’t the same.

Surely, I began to think, after all these years, things might have cooled down, the tracks grown muddy?

I did my research, I laid out plans (and back-up plans), I spent a long time thinking about the dangers involved, and the possible benefits. The first steps went well, then the next, and I began to think . . .

Late September, in a village near Paris. An artist—a sort of relation-by-marriage with a dubious past who was big in the art scene—was marrying a lady doctor, this small, redheaded woman from the wilds of Scotland. Odd place to find a gathering of the most avant of the garde, but they’d somehow managed to weed out the troublemakers before the champagne corks popped, and a couple of nice muscular sculptors had been assigned the task of tossing out the more obstreperous drunks and poets, both of which meant that no children or old ladies were trampled.

The doctor made a stunning bride, dressed in a gown that should have looked like something pieced together from a scrap basket, but managed to be a glory rendered in fabric. She shone. So did the artist—Damian Adler is his name, you may know it, and if you’re reading this, you may also know that he is the ille­gitimate son of the singer Irene Adler and the detective Sherlock Holmes. If you didn’t know it, well, there you go.

Anyway, between the shining bride and her beaming husband and the cutest little bridesmaid in the world—the artist’s daugh­ter—to say nothing of the spectacle made by the guests, half of whom were experimental artists and the other half were either equally modern writers or their wealthy but bohemian patrons—well, it made for quite a picture. Newspaper reporters were lined up in the dusty little road across from the house where the party was taking place, nudging each other when someone important flitted by, nodding their heads to the tunes of the jazz band.

That’s where I was, dressed like a reporter, waiting for a glimpse of a particular young woman, step-mother of the groom (funny thought, she being six years younger than him).

Before I go any further, it occurs to me that there’s something I should maybe make clear, especially if you were expecting that Mary Russell herself might be telling you this. If you were, I can understand—she is usually the one behind these stories, so it’s only natural to assume it would be her voice (her hand?) here. (Though truth to tell, the girl’s always been more likely to be the one taking on the guilt for some misdeed rather than the one de­nying it. She even thought she was responsible for the death of her family—a crazy idea I didn’t learn about until years later.)

Anyway, no, this isn’t Mary you’re hearing from now.

My name is Jake, Jake Russell. (One of my names, at any rate.) I’m Mary’s uncle, her long-dead father’s kid brother. The closest living relative she has. A man she’s probably thought dead for many a year.

You’d think I’d find it hard not to race across the road when I saw her standing in that garden, smiling and strong and shining out the joy of the day—race across the road and plant myself in front of her and wait for her to recognise me.

Instead, I stepped back a little among the men with the cam­eras.

It was grand to see her. Less so to see the tall, thin, grey-haired man at her side. (I’d spent too many years avoiding him to be really comfortable.) But in fact, my primary feeling was one of regret.

The best thing I could do for my beloved niece would be to disappear again, permanently.

But then, I’ve never been one for sensible.

 

CHAPTER ONE

Russell

Damian’s wedding was proving something of a contrast to my own.

Holmes and I had wed by night, slipping like thieves into his family’s country-house chapel on a cold winter’s eve, holding our festivities with a few cherished friends while the house’s current master was away. Appropriate, perhaps, considering the partici­pants, but hardly boisterous.

This nuptial was halfway to riotous, a gay, tipsy crowd beneath the genial sun of a late summer’s afternoon, with half the artists of Paris and most of the village’s residents merrily jostling elbows and glasses. Francis Picabia and Gerald Murphy had cornered the village blacksmith and seemed to be discussing anvils. Sara Mur­phy was writing down the recipe for one of the dishes in Mme LaRue’s open-air banquet. Pablo Picasso’s intense eyes were drill­ing into the unfortunately damaged face of the village postmis­tress, making her giggle nervously. At the far end of the garden, a jazz band was setting up while two dark-skinned American women—one a Paris nightclub owner, the other a recently-arrived chorus girl—walked through some moves the dancer had brought with her from New York.

“Charming lass,” said a voice at my side.

I looked down at one of the bride’s brothers—Hugh, was it? No, this was the youngest, Gordon, his Scots accent barely dis­cernible under the weight of English Public School. In a group, all four bothers tended to revert: last night, the sound from the sit­ting room had resembled a pack of badgers gargling.

“Gordon, I hope you’re enjoying your first trip to Paris?”

“Thank you,” he said. “Indeed.”

I looked more closely, wondering if he was too terrified to speak. Then I noticed that his eyes had not moved from the musi­cal gathering at the end of the garden, and realised that he was not actually responding to my question, merely automatically flipping words in my direction.

“Would you like to meet them?” I asked. “The musicians and ladies?”

His face instantly turned the same colour as his hair, and badger-sounds came from his throat. I put down my glass and seized his wrist, steering him through the groups to where the two Americans were laughing with the jazz band.

I planted him there, made the key introductions, then faded away and went to claim another glass.

“Who is the girl?” asked a very different voice at my side, one whose Scots accent had become delightfully touched by French in recent months—tongue shifting forward in her mouth, her rolled R’s gone soft. Every so often, her gerunds included the G sound.

“Josephine something,” I replied. “A dancer just arrived from New York, came out to join a ‘revue nègre’ in the city. She seems very sweet.”

And lest young Gordon’s older sister feel that she should be protective, three more interested males had already drifted up the garden, including a couple of American writers: Scotty Fitzgerald (whom I had met that summer) and a friend of his named Hemingway. Under their barrage of masculinity, the boy’s inno­cent charm hadn’t a chance. I turned to her.

“You look magnificent, Aileen.”

She glanced down at the dress. “Nice, isn’t it? I couldn’t imagine how it was going to look until it came together. Though my mother may never forgive me for not wearing the family lace.”

The gown was, literally, a work of art, a collaboration by the new husband’s colleagues and friends, panels of brocade and silks in a dozen varieties of cream embroidered over with flowered vines. I’d never seen anything like it, and even on a woman nearly a foot shorter than I, it was breath-taking.

“I’m sorry she couldn’t make it over.”

“It’s a long voyage for her, and in any event, we’ll be there in no time.”

The three Adlers were headed over to Scotland for a grand­mother’s 90th birthday in early December. But not, apparently, for Christmas. A Henning family Christmas, the doctor had con­fided in us, was too much to demand of a new husband. It would be at least a year before she presented him with a kilt and inflicted him with a Henning familial assault by bagpipe.

“I’m glad all your brothers could come,” I told her.

She laughed. “I’m grateful Damian gets on with them. It must be quite a shock, for a man with nothing but a father—and the father’s wife, of course.”

“Don’t forget the uncle who never leaves London,” I added. Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, had predictably sent his regrets, and said that he looked forward to seeing the Adlers when they came to London for Boxing Day. His absence was probably just as well, considering the number of Topics Requiring Discussion that I was piling around his feet, like firewood at the base of a large stake.

“Do you have family, Mary? I mean to say, Damian told me that your parents and brother had died, but he didn’t know beyond that.”

“I am remarkably unburdened by relatives,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and probably failing. “A few on my mother’s side, none of whom I get on with. My father’s parents are still alive, but they never approved of my mother—or me, really. I cut those ties when I rather dramatically left them a note and sailed off to England on my own at the age of fifteen.”

I’d walked away from my grandparents’ mansion with little more than a valise of clothes and a couple of books that I’d pur­chased myself: no mementos, no reminders of the life I was leav­ing behind. In the following years, I had built myself a new family, beginning with Holmes and Mrs Hudson, and now including Damian and his wife and child—and, I supposed, that very old woman who had appeared at the edge of the wedding ceremony before vanishing again. I was happy . . . but I did occasionally wish I felt more of an ancestral foundation beneath my feet.

“Your father was an only child?”

“Pardon? Oh, no, he had a brother. Younger.”

Aileen was studying my face. “You knew him.”

“Not as well as I’d have liked. He was . . .” I smiled. “Jake was a rogue and a ne’er-do-well, who was disowned by my grandparents when I was seven or eight. He used to send my brother and me the most peculiar and inappropriate gifts from all corners of the globe—a kit of explosive chemicals, a Maasai spear, the throwing knife I wear. Whenever he appeared, adventures were sure to fol­low. Sometimes he came to escape trouble. Other times, he’d leave for the same reason. My brother and I adored him. My mother called him ‘The Knave,’ and treated him like a beloved pet that kept chewing on the furniture. My father shook his head a lot. He was the responsible one in the family.”

“What happened to your uncle?”

“He just . . . disappeared.”

My last sight of Uncle Jake had been the Christmas when I was eleven, a visit that began with Mother opening the door to a familiar figure—then taking sharp step back when he’d thumbed up his hat-brim to reveal a spectacular black eye—and ended with a clever bit of criminality that involved two innocent minors.

The last time I’d heard from him was a brief letter that reached me on November 10, 1914. The War in Europe was raw and new, as was my own loss—father, mother, brother, all gone in an in­stant. I was in hospital when Jake’s well-travelled letter arrived, containing two playing cards that were a reference to our shared past. My heart has been ripped from its chest, his note said, and I did not doubt it. He loved my parents and my little brother. He said he would come, if I needed him. I did need him—I was all alone, in pain, wracked by guilt and desperate for a familiar face—but at fourteen, I was old enough to read between the lines: his hesita­tion most likely meant there was a warrant out for his arrest, for some crime or another. So, I did not ask him to come. I never had asked, though I’d thought about it scores of times over the years, mostly after glimpsing a familiar-looking head of hair across a crowd. He was sure to be dead, or in prison. But so long as I did not reach out to him—so long as I did not put a notice into the Times agony column and wait for him to see it in some distant corner of the globe—I could believe him alive, and happy, and getting up to the same criminal mischief that had seen him ban­ished from family conversation.

“I’m sorry,” Aileen said.

I pulled my thoughts away from darkness. Don’t spoil her day, I told myself, and summoned a laugh. “Whatever my Uncle Jake did, and wherever he died, I have no doubt that he lived life to the hilt the entire time. That’s nothing to be sorry about.”

She smiled, and lifted her near-empty glass. “To all the black sheep we have known and loved.”

Including, I thought but did not say, her newly-wedded hus­band. I raised my glass, and drank with her.

“Oh,” she said, “did your friend find you?”

“Which friend was that?”

“I didn’t get the name—he telephoned yesterday, when you and your husband were in town. Something about a reception in the city next week? I told him I thought you’d be leaving for England Monday, but he said he’d ring back tomorrow, for a chat.”

I shrugged. Probably one of the stray members of the Academie Français who had attached themselves to Holmes recently.

The band started up soon after that, and Aileen was claimed for the first dance by the groom. Halfway through the song, the pair separated long enough for Damian to snatch up little Estelle, and the three of them circled the temporary dance floor together, faces alive with laughter.

Perhaps it was the sheer physicality of their affection that caused me to lean my shoulder against the man who had come to stand beside me. He was reassuringly solid, and no one was look­ing in our direction. There was such a close link, I reflected, be­tween emotion and the body’s memories: comfort received on my mother’s lap—her arms, her warmth, her scent; comfort given the same way—my arms so tightly wrapped around that little dancing girl, as if arms alone could save her from an aeroplane falling to earth; reassurance and fear and rage battling for dominance, as I clung to an unconscious Holmes on horseback.

“It’s good to see Damian so happy,” I said to my husband.

“They are well matched,” he agreed.

The song ended, the next one began, and other couples moved forward to join the Adler trio.

“What were you and Aileen talking about?” Holmes asked.

“Her dress. Amazing piece of tailoring.”

“Something else. You looked . . . wistful.”

“Oh, she asked about my family. I spotted your mother, by the way. I’m glad she came, even if she left before anyone could see her.”

“Time enough for that revelation,” he said—inaccurately, I thought, since the woman was a century old. “But why should my mother put you in a pensive state?”

“It wasn’t her. I was telling Aileen about Uncle Jake.”

“Were you?” He sounded surprised. I didn’t talk about him much, it was true.

“I suppose I’d been thinking about him. Family weddings, and all. And I saw someone who looked like him, out on the road.”

“That’s happened before.”

“Every so often. I suppose there are a lot of small, blond-headed men in the world. I’ll catch a glimpse of one and think it might be him, until I get closer and find that, rather than a middle-aged man, it’s a boy of fifteen, or a young woman in a suit. Or in this case, one of the photographers hoping for a shot of someone with a title.”

“The local gendarme is enjoying the task of keeping them all under control.”

“As much of a challenge as corralling cats, I’d have thought.”

“Alcohol is being applied to the problem.”

“And some of Mme LaRue’s canapés—yes, I saw.”

“I had a telegram this morning,” he said abruptly. “From My­croft.”

I turned to look at him. He did not take his eyes away from the merriment.

“Of congratulations, I presume.”

His mouth twitched, though it did not quite break into hu­mour: my flat tone told him that I did not actually believe that the wire had contained his brother’s congratulations on Damian’s wedding. “An old case has come to life. He wishes to consult.”

“Immediately?”

“I sent a reply giving him the date of our return.”

“Good.”

“Although we might wish to leave a day earlier.”

“So, tomorrow, then?”

He took a sip from the glass in his hand.

After a moment, I did the same. “I’ll finish my packing tonight. Let’s not forget to send Patrick a telegram in the morning, so at least we’ll have milk and a loaf of bread.” Or, knowing my farm manager, milk, bread, and enough supplies for a platoon.

At last, Holmes’ gaze slid down to mine. “I took the liberty to send that one, as well. Since the telegraph boy was already here.”

“Of course,” I said.

Well, I supposed that being taken for granted was better than arriving to a kitchen bereft of supplies.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Russell

Guests were still snoring when we left in the morning—draped on the sitting room sofa, in Aileen’s surgery offices, under the dining table, and around some trees in the garden—although the Adlers themselves were up, and looking remarkably chipper con­sidering how late the festivities had ended.

Or not ended, evidently, merely broken off for the night.

Mme LaRue had already been, leaving coffee and a small mountain of breads and fruits for our breakfast. We gratefully swallowed coffee, helped M. LaRue carry things out to the mo­torcar, and took our leave.

Little Estelle clung hard, first to Holmes, then to me. I told her we’d see her in a few weeks, when they came to London for the holidays. She wanted my promise that I would give her lessons in knife-throwing. I told her that would depend on her parents.

I had little doubt that she would talk them around to the prop­osition.

It was some very dark hour after a very long day when the taxi’s head-lamps illuminated our Sussex front door.

I had set off through that doorway in the first week of June, for a short trip to Venice that turned into a detour to the Riviera, fol­lowed by a case in Roumania, then the better part of a month in France. It was now the third week—no, the fourth—of Septem­ber, but other than a fresh layer of gravel in the drive, the house had not changed. No weeds had sprouted from the steps, no un­collected envelopes mouldered in the little protected stone porch. And yet, as always after one of our long and inevitably eventful times away, it felt like a different world.

Particularly as France’s beautiful autumnal warmth had suc­cumbed to the English cloud-bank halfway across the Channel. It was cold and wet, the kind of dispiriting rain that clearly had no intention of pausing much before April, except for brief forays into snow.

I had taken care to dig out the house key before leaving France, and now trotted through the drizzle to thrust it into the lock. It turned easily, the hinges gave no creak—and then I raised my head, startled at the trace of mustiness in the air. Why had Mrs Hudson let things . . . ? But no, Mrs Hudson was no longer here. I suppressed the moment of bleakness and had the kettle on and fire lit by the time the driver had dropped the last of the bags on our tiles.

The bed that we finally climbed into—fresh sheets, smelling of sunlight—seemed to sway, as the land tends to after weeks at sea. I told myself not to be ridiculous, the crossing had only been a couple of hours, and curled on my side. I listened to the rain, and the familiar creaks of the old house, and eventually slept.

Holmes was gone when I woke, but he came in through the kitchen door before the coffee had finished brewing, shaking the wet from his old overcoat before dropping it onto a hook by the door.

“How are the bees?” I asked.

“Surprisingly well. Though there must have been a wind-storm recently, my friend Miranker has tied down the two more exposed ones.”

“If you want to take a closer look, I’ll come out and hold the umbrella while you lift off the tops.”

“I’ll do that when it’s clear, tomorrow or the next day.”

I thought that forecast wildly optimistic, but there was no point in arguing. “You’re going up to London today?” Snapping to heel at Mycroft’s call, I thought but did not say.

“After I bath and shave.”

“Shall I telephone to Patrick and ask him to bring the motor around? Oh, and I found a note from him next to the coffee can­ister, to say that Tillie has some food for us and he’ll bring it by later.”

“Let him come with that, I’ll ring down for a taxi.”

In an hour, he was gone. The house was empty, as it had been before we left in June. Short of miracles, Mrs Hudson, our long-time housekeeper, would never again bustle around the kitchen, taking the coffee-pot from my hand, scolding me about some sin I had committed to her best knife or saucepan. I was going to have to hire some help—either that, or be reduced to Holmes’ cooking and my own burnt offerings. Or put up with the girl Lulu’s inane chatter.

I winced, and instead picked up the telephone to let Patrick know that I was home. It took some time, since the Exchange was simply thrilled to hear we were back, and wanted all the details as to where we had been and what we had done—and oh, did I know that while I’d been away. . . .

But in the end, she put me through to my farm manager, and I told him that he needn’t hurry with Tillie’s excellent food, since Holmes was sure to be away until evening at best. More likely, I thought, a day or more. He hadn’t taken a valise, but there was no need, not when he had a brother’s flat and numerous bolt-holes in Town.

“You’re sure?” Patrick’s rural accent was stronger than I remem­bered. “He’s not just gone around the corner for a time?”

“No, he went to London. At least, he dressed for London, took his good umbrella, and rang for a taxi to take him to the station.”

“Ah. Good,” he said, and rang off.

That was odd, I thought, returning the earpiece to the stand. Did he think I was lying to him? Or—that Holmes might have been lying to me?

I stared at the device for a moment, then shrugged, and set about the task of hauling trunks and emptying valises.

Two dusty hours later, I was interrupted by the crackle of tyres on gravel. I shoved the last empty valise onto its shelf, paused in the lavatory long enough to clean my hands, and trotted down the stairs.

The little viewing window was filled with the side of Patrick’s greying head. I pulled the door open and greeted my old friend, an uncle in all but blood, with an affectionate hug. “It wasn’t locked, you should have come in.” A thing I’d said a score of times, but as far as Patrick Mason was concerned, this house belonged to Holmes, unlike my own farmhouse a few miles away. “Lovely to see you, come in, get out of the cold.”

With his usual deliberation, he scraped his clean shoes on the coir mat, but said, “So, Mr Holmes is not here, then?”

“I told you he wasn’t. Patrick, what is going on?”

Instead of stepping inside, he turned back towards the motor he’d parked directly in front of the door. “It’s fine,” he called, “you can come.”

“Patrick, what on earth are you up to, I thought you—”

The figure who emerged must have been crouched down on the backseat, out of view of the house. He emerged, shut the door, and turned.

A short, middle-aged man with cornflower-blue eyes and sun-tanned skin, wearing a crisp white shirt and a beautifully cut suit that was modern without being extreme, with a golden-brown overcoat that could only be vicuña. He planted a pair of gleaming shoes—as bespoke as the suit—on the gravel drive and raised his head, tipping back his hat with his thumb so as to see me unim­peded.

It was the gesture that strangled the words in my throat, that caused the house around me to shudder in reaction. Beneath the jaunty hat-brim was a small, blond man I’d seen in my imagina­tion so many times over the years, yet not in fact. Not since the winter of 1911.

Uncle Jake.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Russell

The boyish figure on my doorstep was showing his years. Fifty . . . four now, I realised, the nonchalant tilt of the head, the gleam of mischief in his blue eyes tamped down by the same burdens that had sketched wrinkles in his face and added half a stone to his waistline.

Fourteen years. Where have you been?

He waited. Patrick waited, too, for me to draw myself up in anger and accuse my uncle of abandonment. To charge him with betraying the profound affection my mother had had for him, of failing the responsibilities left behind by his brother.

Silence, other than the drip of rain and the complaint of a sea-bird.

Perhaps it wasn’t only the burden of years that was stifling the mischief in his face. Perhaps uncertainty, apprehension. Fear, even.

Fourteen years.

Jake was not the only one to have had his heart ripped from his chest by the motorcar wreck that killed my family. He had aban­doned a bereft and badly injured young girl, forcing her to piece herself together as best she could, all alone. To retreat across the sea in search of the only scraps of comfort she had, under the care of a woman who loved her not, in a house on the lonely Downs on the edge of a country wracked by War.

But in the end, I did the only thing I could do: I walked past Patrick to wrap my arms around my only uncle. Patrick nodded in relief and went to put on the kettle.

With his apprehension about how I would react set aside for the moment, something of Jake’s perpetual youth returned. Oh, when he dropped his hat on the rack by the door I could see the silver glints among the gold of his hair, and when his overcoat joined the hat, I thought his shoulders had lost some of their confidence. Certainly the lines beside his eyes were not entirely due to laugh­ter, but his attitude was as I remembered, the ease with which he faced the world coming to the fore.

“That was you I saw, in Ste Chapelle, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Among the newsmen.”

His face twisted in self-reproach. “Oh, I knew that was a bad idea. Not enough of a crowd, and me the only blondie. I saw you do a double-take on the doorstep and got out of there right quick. Hey, this is nice.” He stood surveying the house’s main room, where Holmes and I spent most of our hours together. A room of comfort, practicality, solidity.

“Come through to the kitchen, Patrick’s making tea. But that couldn’t have been the first time you found me, in Ste Chapelle?” Not if he’d been keeping close enough track to know that Holmes had a son, who the son was, and that he was marrying in a village outside of Paris. In fact—“Was that you who telephoned on Fri­day and talked to Aileen?”

“’Fraid so. I needed to know how long you’d be there, before I set off across the Channel.”

“For years, I’ve been thinking I was imagining things—but I haven’t been, have I?”

“No, you probably did spot me once or twice. Every so often I would sneak up from a distance, just to see how you were.”

One could hear America in his voice, Boston modified by the West—though more in his words than in the accent itself, which had settled somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. I’d met enough con men like my uncle to know that the accent itself would shift, according to his audience.

The thought made me sad. And the reminder of what Jake was made me realise why Patrick had been acting so oddly on the telephone. I turned my eyes to my farm manager, at the sink spooning tea leaves into the large ceramic pot.

“You didn’t want Holmes to see Jake until he’d had the oppor­tunity to explain himself to me,” I said.

The kettle had just come to a boil. Patrick methodically poured it over the leaves, stirred it three times, replaced the top, and car­ried it to the wooden work-table, already laid with cups and ac­coutrements. “He asked me. And I thought . . . your mother would have given him the chance.”

Since boyhood, Patrick had loved my mother, that exotic bird from the wilds of London whose Jewish family had, unlikely as it seemed, taken for themselves a farm as a summer cottage on the Sussex Downs. And he well knew the soft spot my mother had for her wayward brother-in-law. Some men might have harboured resentments for half a lifetime. Patrick was not such a man.

I shifted my gaze to my blood relation, seated on the other side of the table from me. He was watching Patrick pour the tea, but when he reached out to take the cup set before him, the fingers of his right hand gave a brief tremble before coming down to meet the porcelain. I wondered if something about this conversation was making him nervous—or if those shakes were another sign of ageing. And with that, I noticed that both Patrick and I had been speaking with slightly raised voices, an almost unconscious re­sponse to the small tip of the head and look of concentration from someone whose hearing was less than perfect.

It was a melancholy thought: my Peter Pan of an uncle suc­cumbing to the years.

However, sadness and the regret of age notwithstanding, it was not hard to piece together the outlines of what was going on here.

When I was very young, I knew my uncle as a person who swept in on a wave of excitement and life, in a way my more stolid father did not. We all knew when Father would be coming home and when he would leave again for California, but none of us could ever guess when Jake might blow our way—literally, once, in a hot-air balloon across the Channel. Birthday presents from my father would be a heavily-hinted-at book in a shop’s colourful and precisely folded paper; from Uncle Jake, an Ecuadorean shrunken head wrapped in butcher’s paper thick with stamps from a previously unheard-of part of the world. Treats from Fa­ther would be a visit to our favourite ice-cream shop; from Jake, it could be anything from a tin of candied insects to a box of exotic American breakfast cereal or a delicate basket of wild strawber­ries. My father taught me to throw a cricket ball; Uncle Jake, a knife.

I began to suspect the darker truth behind his light-hearted visits that final year, when he appeared at our farmhouse door in the winter of 1911, very much the worse for wear. Later, I would have recognised the signs of a beating, but even at the age of eleven, I could feel the currents of apprehension and disapproval in how my parents approached him. And it was during that visit that Jake had pulled my brother and me into one of his schemes—not exactly a criminal one, but one that could have had severe re­percussions to two small Jewish children in a rural community.

A scheme that even Levi knew could never be told to our par­ents.

Then later yet, in the long years where thoughts of him were retrospective, a form of mourning, I would wonder about his his­tory and personality. How much of his—to be frank—criminality was rooted in being younger and smaller than his brother? Did he, like his Biblical namesake, always feel that he was following, and that the only way to win their father’s blessing was by cheating? Was his boundless energy, like that of T. E. Lawrence (whom he resembled in a number of ways), a compensation for his relative weakness? I was certain that my father and uncle had loved each other, but I was a child then. If there was rivalry, I might not have seen it.

All of which meant that if Jacob Russell had come to Patrick—his niece’s farm manager, his sister-in-law’s childhood friend—before making an approach, and if said childhood friend had taken great care to check on the absence of the house’s other resi­dent, there was a reason.

“Oh, Uncle Jake,” I said. “What trouble are you in now?”

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Jake

The last time I’d been face to face with Mary, she was a kid, all skinned knees and fraying braids and bent-out-of-shape spectacles. Since then, like I said, I’d only seen her at a distance, usually while I was hiding behind some post-box, wall, or false beard. Three times down here at the end of the world, five or six times around her Oxford college. Once, I’d snuck into the back of a lecture hall to hear her give a talk. (Not a clue what it was about—there was a lot of Latin, and half the old men in the audi­ence walked out.) And once, I’d spent an afternoon watching her come and go from a dotty women’s club in London. (The club was dotty, I mean—though come to think of it, some of the women were pretty odd.) Now, sitting across a table from her, with the leisure to look into her eyes, she was . . . well, I could only hope the old man she’d married appreciated her.

(He’d seemed to, the times I glimpsed them together.)

I could see her mother in her. Or maybe it was just the expres­sion on her face, one that Judith had turned on me any number of times. More like a fond but long-suffering mother with a mis­chievous son than a woman and her husband’s besotted brother.

Oh, you silly boy, what have you done now?

What had I done? Nothing much. (Yet.) (Although, sure, I’d done a lot, to bring matters to where they were now.)

“It’s kind of a long story,” I told my niece.

As I’d hoped, Patrick Mason took that as a signal to leave. Mary saw him to the door, telling him to thank Tillie and that she’d return the dishes in a few days, while I looked with resignation at the cooling tea in my cup. Far too early in the day to go looking for a bottle of something to ease the aches. (And the coming con­versation.)

I rose to put the kettle back over the heat. If I couldn’t have a stiff drink, at least I could have something hot.

But when Mary came back in, she looked at the kettle and said, “Do you actually want more tea?”

I moved the kettle off the heat. “What else have you got?”

She pulled a bottle from one cupboard and two glasses from another, and although it wasn’t the spirits I might have chosen, at least it didn’t seem to be ginger ale or grape juice. (The Prohibition lunatics hadn’t come to plague England, thank God.) “Let’s sit in front of the fire,” she suggested, and led me to the sitting room.

She settled into a worn basket chair that creaked and popped as she wrestled the cork from the bottle. I sat in a nice quiet arm­chair, having pulled it closer to the flames. (I’d been spending time in warm places.) (Warm in both senses, come to that.)

“Mead,” she said as she put a glass of the pale liquid on the low table between us. “Honey wine. It’s what Holmes gave me, the day we met.”

And having thus firmly (and deliberately, I had no doubt) sum­moned her absent husband into the room, she took a swallow and sat back in the chair. I gave a wry toast to the missing brewer and tried a tentative sip. Not bad (for something that looked like ba­by’s piss). I ventured a larger swallow.

“Very nice,” I said. “Summery.”

“What’s happened to you?” she asked abruptly. “I can tell that your back hurts. Is it related to the shake in your hands?”

Damn, I thought, the girl is both sharp-eyed and quick as hell. Take some care, Jake, my boy. “Nothing serious. I got blown up, just a little.”

“Blown—how do you get ‘just a little’ blown up?”

“By moving fast in the other direction when the thing went off, of course. It was months ago, I’m fine.”

“Is that why you’re having problems with your hearing?”

(Hell.) “It’s not that bad. And the ringing’s nearly gone.”

“When Holmes had a bomb go off near him, it was months before his hearing cleared.”

“You see? It’ll be fine.”

She didn’t look convinced. She also looked like she was having to push herself not to be too sympathetic. “You were injured when you showed up at our door the last time I saw you, too. That was fourteen years ago.”

There was an edge to that last phrase, although I couldn’t tell if she was aware of it. (She probably was.)

“Seems like a lifetime,” I said mildly.

“More than half of mine, in fact,” she replied. This time, her voice had gone from edged to pointed.

“I was in Bolivia.” (Why the hell had I told her that? Well, too late to take it back.) “Not then—later, when I heard about the ac­cident. I couldn’t leave—literally could not. I had to give a note to a friend who was headed for Southern California, and asked him to put two playing cards in it, so you could be sure it was from me. Did it reach you?”

“The eight of hearts and the jack of spades.”

“That’s right, the cards you helped me beat that innkeeper with.” I smiled at the memory. “Did the bas—the slimy creature ever show up again?”

“I never saw him. But that food Patrick brought? It was cooked by the woman who bought the inn from you.”

“Yeah, I heard you tell him to thank Tillie—wondered if it was the same woman. I’m glad she’s still around. Though I’ve been here since Saturday, you’d think he might have mentioned her.”

“He and Tillie are seeing each other. He probably would prefer that she keep her distance until he’s sure what you’re up to.”

“Fair enough,” I had to admit. “Fair enough.” (I doubt I’d let me close to a nice lady like Tillie Whiteneck, either.)

“You said you had a lengthy story. I don’t know how long Holmes plans to be away.”

“Yes.” I had somehow already emptied my glass, so I reached out for the bottle and poured a generous dose of the old man’s distilled summer (the rattle of glass against glass made me curse under my breath—but then, the rattle of glass against glass illus­trated why I was here in the first place.) Go slow with that wine, I told myself. Parts of this story needed to be handled with, shall we say, delicacy?

“You’re probably aware,” I began, “that certain periods of your uncle’s past have been a bit . . .”

“Criminal?” she supplied dryly.

“Chequered,” I finished. “Even before your Granddad blew a fuse and flat-out disinherited me, I’d dabbled my fingers in a few, well, questionable dealings. More for the challenge of it than the actual money, though every time the dollars were cut off, money would become more of a consideration. A self-defeating kind of a circle, you’d have thought, but old Dad seemed to think that a young man needed to take on some of the family responsibilities. Poor judgement of character on his part.”

“You stole from Granddad?”

I blinked at the speed at which she’d put those facts together (and set my glass to the side). “That’s awfully blunt,” I objected. “I’d rather think that I claimed a little of my inheritance while I was still young enough for it to do me some good. This was the year before the thing I’m trying to tell you about—and I swear, God’s honest truth, I wasn’t going to steal his precious dollars, I was going to put them back—with interest, mind—and then show him what I’d done, with an offer to tighten up his system so none of his other employees could do the same thing. Benefitting the company in the long run, you see?

“Except I had a slight misadventure before I could set things tidy again, and he discovered it—not even him, it was your father who spotted it, damn his sharp eyes, and told Dad rather than coming to me. Not that, if he had, I’d have been able to . . .

“Anyway, water under the bridge. And once it was back in the coffers he forgave me, more or less. But to make a long story short, it felt like a good time to hit the road for a while and let things cool down. This wasn’t long after the San Francisco quake and fire spooked your mother into going home to England with you and your brother. I saw her as she was leaving New York, and told her I’d go out to help your father for a few weeks, but when I got there, I found something going on that was making him short-tempered—something more than your mother’s absence and a city in chaos, I mean. I never learned what it was, but we were getting on each other’s nerves, so once the house was in some kind of order, I got on a boat and headed for Europe.

“I started in London and more or less worked my way south as the summer faded. London isn’t at its best in late summer, so after a while I went over to Paris with a friend, poking around muse­ums, hearing some new music, getting myself introduced to rich people. Who can sometimes be interesting, despite what you’d think. Anyway, my friend had business in London, so I went south, to Spain and then to Italy. Italy was great—there’s nothing like a country run by a church to make it easy to pick up odd jobs on the side. And they had a brand-new casino up on the Riviera in San Remo, with a very comfortable hotel right on the water—lots of things to do, plenty of friends to make.

“But I don’t tend to spend too much time in one place, not when I’m working, so when my London friend wrote to say would I like to visit him in Dublin, I said sure. I got there in March, I think it was. Springtime anyway. You been to Dublin, Mary?”

“Once,” she said.

“Nice town. Wide streets, pretty buildings, if you steer clear of the slums. This was well before the Easter Rising, of course, and the troubles in the north and the partition and all that. Dublin was England across the Irish Sea, that great castle squatting in the middle. You know the Russell family came from Ireland?”

“But not Dublin. Somewhere in the south, wasn’t it?”

“Outside of Waterford, mostly. Grandpapa washed up in Bos­ton with his sacks of gold a generation before the famine began, well before all the starving peasants showed up. The Russells were loyal to the Crown, despite everything—until your father and I came along, that is. Charlie usually kept quiet about politics when the rest of the family was in earshot, but I wouldn’t. Made for some lively family dinners.”

“But that’s not why you were banned, was it?”

“No, the slam of the family door happened the year after this thing I’m telling you about, and I hadn’t been home for a while before that. Though I guess politics was always around the edges. And come to think of it, I suppose my republican leanings did have something to do with—”

She slapped her glass down with a crack (my own drink nearly ended up all over my new suit—guess my nerves weren’t in the best of shape). “Wait. You went to Dublin the spring after the earthquake: that makes it 1907. And it was the following year that Grandfather disowned you, after some act too dreadful to be told to the children—even Mother wouldn’t talk to me about it.

“Uncle Jake, were you—did you have something to do with the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels?”

(Damn, but the girl was fast.) “Well, I . . . sort of. I was on the periphery, to start with. And then afterwards a little more, and then things got a bit out of hand, and it was kind of like walking next to a painter’s ladder, you pick up splashes that are hard to get off.”

“The Irish Crown Jewels? Uncle Jake, what were you thinking?”

“They weren’t really Crown Jewels, you know, just Regalia that the King was going to wear for some idiotic—”

“Oh, Jake! How could you? I suppose you had them broken up and sold to keep you free to play?”

“Wait, now, I—”

“People were ruined over that. The insult of it damaged rela­tions between Ireland and the Crown forever.”

“Well, relations were pretty—”

“For God’s sake, Jake—Holmes himself worked on that case!”

I waited, to make sure she wasn’t about to go for my throat. She’d got to her feet at some point and was panting as if she’d just come running in, so I made my own voice nice and calm when I replied to that last and greatest of her accusations.

“Yes,” I said. “I know he did.”