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The Bloomsbury Guru: A Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery
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THE BLOOMSBURY GURU
A SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERY
THE SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERIES
The Last Moriarty
The Wilhelm Conspiracy
Remember, Remember
The Crown Jewel Mystery
The Jubilee Problem
Death at the Diogenes Club
The Return of the Ripper
Die Again, Mr. Holmes
Watson on the Orient Express
Powder Island
Murder at the Royal Observatory
THE SHERLOCK AND LUCY SHORT STORIES
Flynn’s Christmas
The Clown on the High Wire
The Cobra in the Monkey Cage
A Fancy-Dress Death
The Sons of Helios
The Vanishing Medium
Christmas at Baskerville Hall
Kidnapped at the Tower
Five Pink Ladies
The Solitary Witness
The Body in the Bookseller’s
The Curse of Cleopatra’s Needle
The Coded Blue Envelope
Christmas on the Nile
The Missing Mariner
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THE BLOOMSBURY GURU
A SHERLOCK HOLMES AND LUCY JAMES MYSTERY
BY ANNA ELLIOTT AND CHARLES VELEY
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2021 by Charles Veley and Anna Elliott. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Sherlock and Lucy series website: http://sherlockandlucy.com
eBook formatting by FormattingExperts.com
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE: AMY
CHAPTER 1: AMY
CHAPTER 2: AMY
CHAPTER 3: LUCY
CHAPTER 4: LUCY
CHAPTER 5: LUCY
CHAPTER 6: AMY
CHAPTER 7: LUCY
CHAPTER 8: LUCY
CHAPTER 9: FLYNN
CHAPTER 10: AMY
CHAPTER 11: AMY
CHAPTER 12: FLYNN
CHAPTER 13: AMY
CHAPTER 14: WATSON
CHAPTER 15: LUCY
CHAPTER 16: AMY
CHAPTER 17: WATSON
CHAPTER 18: FLYNN
CHAPTER 19: AMY
CHAPTER 20: WATSON
CHAPTER 21: AMY
CHAPTER 22: WATSON
CHAPTER 23: AMY
CHAPTER 24: AMY
CHAPTER 25: FLYNN
CHAPTER 26: LUCY
CHAPTER 27: AMY
CHAPTER 28: FLYNN
CHAPTER 29: WATSON
CHAPTER 30: LUCY
CHAPTER 31: FLYNN
CHAPTER 32: AMY
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
A NOTE TO READERS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PROLOGUE: AMY
9 Months Earlier
“I’m looking for a Mr. Thiel?”
The voice, accompanied by a light tap on the office door, made Amy startle and sit bolt upright. She tried to stuff the handkerchief she was holding into the top drawer of her desk.
The handkerchief was perfectly dry. She’d taken it out in hopes that she might be able to cry, now that she was finally alone. She wanted to cry. But she couldn’t. Her dry eyes burned, and her chest felt as though it were bound and locked.
She turned, already glaring at the individual who had interrupted what had at least been blessed silence.
“There are—were—only two people with the last name of Thiel who worked on Powder Island. So either you’re looking for my father, who is dead, or else you’re actually looking for me. Miss Thiel. Mr. Rexford’s personal clerk and overseer of the factory.”
The man’s look of astonishment was gratifying—or it would have been, if she had been in a mood to find anything gratifying.
He was a young man, somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty, with a tall, rangy build and light blond hair. His face was too long and square-jawed to be strictly called handsome. But he looked intelligent, with a pair of keen blue eyes that didn’t seem to so much look at the world as assess, evaluate, and catalogue it.
At the moment, though, he was gaping at her with a look of blank-faced astonishment.
“A woman.”
“With those sorts of skills in the art of deduction, it’s easy to see why you’ve attained the rank of …” Amy eyed him up and down, taking in his brown bowler hat, tan overcoat, and grey suit. “Inspector?”
She spoke more sharply than she’d really intended. For the past twenty-four hours, she had been patient with her mother’s loud wailings of grief. She would have been a horrible daughter if she’d been anything but patient, and her mother’s sorrow was no less real, just because she sounded like Marianne, the sister given to histrionic displays of feeling in the Jane Austen novel.
That was simply how her mother had been made: all heart and emotion and sentiment. Her father had been the one with the hard-headed common sense.
Amy was prepared for the unknown police inspector to be angry, defensive, patronising—or possibly all three. She had a wealth of experience in the typical male response to finding a twenty-four-year-old woman in a position of authority at a gunpowder factory.
But instead, after gaping at her another moment, he closed his mouth with a click. And then he frowned. “How did you know I was an Inspector? Or a policeman, for that matter?”
It wasn’t a challenge; he sounded honestly curious. So Amy told him.
“Your boots, for one thing. You may be wearing plainclothes, but those are policeman’s boots if ever I saw them. For another, you’ve a notebook and pencil in your pocket, the sort that policemen carry to take notes during their interviews. And for a third point, you’ve a button that must have been taken off of a policeman’s tunic on your watch fob, instead of the usual sort of pendant or coin.” She pointed to the small embossed charm that dangled from the end of his watch chain. “I assume it must be a memento from your early days on the force?”
He looked reflexively down at the button, then back up at her with a look that mingled both surprise and … surely that was a look of respect in his gaze.
It was the entirely ungrudging nature of that respect that led her to add, with a small smile, “And fourth, to be strictly honest, I suppose I ought to tell you that Scotland Yard telephoned to my uncle’s house this morning and said that they would be sending an inspector out here to the factory this afternoon.”
And she had leapt at the chance of getting away for a while—even though anyone would have supposed that Powder Island would be the last place on earth she would wish to be.
The inspector stared at her another moment, then seemed to recollect himself. “Yes—that is, my name is Gregson. Tobias Gregson. Inspector.” He belatedly took his hat off, bowed, and then gave her a rueful smile. “Do you think we might begin this conversation again, before it attains the rank of my second-most humiliating memory in all my time on the force?”
“Second most? What ranks as first on the list, then?”
“Ah.” He smiled again. “That would be the time tha
t a child of six succeeded in creeping up behind me and tying my boot laces together while I was meant to be guarding a crime scene in Covent Garden. I tried to take a step and toppled over like a felled oak tree. It was a salutary lesson in not thinking too complacently of my own powers of observation—a lesson in which I apparently still need a refresher course, however.”
Amy laughed—which was a mistake. It seemed to crack something open inside her chest, opening the door to every feeling she’d been stuffing down and out of sight.
Her father would have liked Tobias Gregson.
To her utter horror, she felt her eyes flood with tears. Of course, now she was suddenly able to cry.
She fumbled in the drawer for her hidden handkerchief. “I’m sorry.”
She was fully prepared for Inspector Gregson to display the usual male horror when confronted with female tears.
Her uncle and cousin had looked approximately as comfortable as cats in a room full of rocking chairs when confronted with her mother’s grief these past days.
But when she looked up at him, the inspector was looking at her with … it wasn’t pity in his expression. She would have resented that. Instead, he looked back at her with a sober and entirely matter-of-fact sympathy in his blue gaze.
“You needn’t apologise,” he said. “I’m the one who’s sorry. Both for the loss of your father, and for coming to trouble you with questions at such a time.”
The words were simply said, but so completely sincere that Amy felt tears prickle behind her eyelids all over again.
She took a shaky breath. This wouldn’t do. She wasn’t the sort to give way to her feelings. Her father’s daughter. That was what her mother had always called her. Hard-headed and practical, just like him.
“It’s all right, I understand.” She wiped her eyes again. “You must get very tired of having to interview weeping and bereaved family members. I suppose you have to do this sort of thing all the time.”
Inspector Gregson paused before answering, then spoke with the grave, careful deliberation that she was beginning to realise was characteristic of him.
“Those who knew the victim best are always the most vital witnesses in any case involving suspicious death. But as to whether I ever tire of it—” he shook his head. “Well. I will not lie and say that it is an aspect of my job which I consider easy. And yet I have the feeling that if I were ever to reach a point where I was unaffected by the grief of a victim’s loved ones—well.” He cleared his throat. “In that case, I think I should have to conclude that I was no longer fit to carry out the duties of my profession.”
Amy’s eyes met his. Her heart skipped, and she felt a buzz of something like an electric current race through her veins, all the way out to the tips of her fingers.
No.
She stood up as though by changing position she could somehow get away from the horrifying thought that had just struck her, like an additional shock of electricity.
No, no, no.
She wasn’t herself right now. She was off-balance, not only because of her father’s death, but by the way it had happened—the explosion that had torn her own life apart as surely as it had reduced the factory building to rubble and ash.
But she was practical and sensible and hard-headed above everything. She didn’t believe in things like sentimentality or love at first sight—or if she did, they were for other people, never for her.
She was almost engaged to her cousin Rex, not because she loved him, but because their marriage would make sound business sense.
There was no possible chance—none whatsoever—that she could have fallen instantly and irrevocably in love with a plain, square-jawed police inspector named Tobias Gregson.
CHAPTER 1: AMY
Sherlock Holmes’s grey eyes regarded Amy with a gaze that seemed to bore through her. “I believe that I may have an assignment for you,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“Do you plan to remain in London for the immediate future?”
“Until the trial at least.” Amy forced herself not to flinch over saying the word. In a little over a month’s time, she would be called to give evidence at the murder trials of both her cousin and her uncle. “And possibly afterwards.”
“I see. And the running of the factory?” Mr. Holmes asked.
“Is being seen to by a very competent foreman whom I hired.”
That had been perhaps the biggest surprise in all of this. Well, second only to the revelation that her uncle and cousin were killers. But Amy had fully expected to throw herself into work in order to distract herself and even recover. She had always taken pride in keeping the factory running with flawless efficiency.
It had been an almost physical blow to discover that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with the place now. The first time she’d tried sitting down at her desk, her throat had closed off and her heart had hammered so violently she had thought for a moment that she was actually going to die.
The factory workers and their families would be all right. She had made absolutely certain that the foreman she hired was both honest and competent for the job. But then she had fled.
“Mother and I are staying in a hotel near Salisbury Square,” she told Mr. Holmes.
Her mother liked being in London. She loved attending matinee plays at the theatres, shopping in the new department stores … Amy, on the other hand, felt as though she was going to lose her mind if she didn’t find something constructive to do with her time.
“So what would you like me to do?” she asked.
“There is an Indian swami—a Hindu religious teacher—who has in the past year set up shop in London, offering classes to those who wish to attain spiritual enlightenment through the art of meditation. I would like you to attend one of those classes.”
Amy didn’t know what her face looked like, but something of what she felt must have been plain.
Mr. Holmes had given her a mildly amused look and said, “You feel the assignment is an insult to your intelligence, Miss Thiel? I can assure you, I am quite serious—as serious as the investigation which I am asking you to undertake.”
Amy opened her mouth, but Mr. Holmes went on before she could get a word in.
“Swami Basava is, or so he claims, an ascetic, who has renounced all personal possessions and has taken a vow of poverty. However, his mission—the Institute of the Western Dawn—is by no means averse to accepting donations from those who have been aided in their quest for enlightenment by the swami’s instruction.” Mr. Holmes’s gaze rested on her, and Amy once again had the uncomfortable sensation that he could read the thoughts passing through her mind as easily as another man might read the newspaper. “Now you will say—and you would be quite correct—that there is nothing criminal in that. If people are credulous—or to put it more charitably, grateful—enough to donate to the Western Dawn, why should they not be free to do so?”
“Yes. But if that were all there was to the affair, then Swami … Basava, was it? would hardly have attracted your attention.” Amy felt she had to do something to prove that she wasn’t entirely slow witted. “What has happened? Did a particularly grateful student of the Western Dawn leave all their money to the institute in their will? And then die under odd circumstances?”
She thought there was a faint look of approval in Mr. Holmes’s gaze as he inclined his head. “Yes, you are correct—or at least, partly correct. One month ago, a Miss Violet Airdale was so transported by her attendance at Swami Basava’s meditation classes that she decided to make a will, which was duly registered at Somerset House, in which the Institute of the Western Dawn was left all her worldly goods.”
“Had Miss Airdale a significant amount of money to leave?”
“Quite significant. She was a spinster—an eccentric, by all accounts—of some forty years of age, who came into a considerable fortune upon the death of her father, whose only child she was. She rejected numerous offers of matrimony, electing instead to travel the world—Egyp
t, Italy, the Far East—before ultimately settling in London.”
“You speak of her in the past tense. I assume, then, that she is dead?” Amy asked.
“That, Miss Thiel, is precisely the question to which we are trying to find an answer. Miss Airdale had no immediate family. What she did have, however, was a loyal maidservant, a faithful old retainer who had been a part of her father’s household, and thus had been with her almost since girlhood. It was this maidservant—Rose Spragg, by name—who reported Miss Airdale missing to the police some ten days ago. The police have investigated, as they are obliged to do in all such missing persons cases, but found no trace of Miss Airdale.”
“I see.” Amy frowned. “And you think of course that the Institute of the Western Dawn may have had something to do with her disappearance.”
“It is a sordid but nevertheless accurate statistic that a majority of criminals can be identified by applying the question: cui bono? In other words, who benefits by the victim’s death?”
“But in this case, we don’t know that Miss Airdale is actually dead. Surely if the Institute were to commit murder in hopes of profiting by her death, they would have taken steps to ensure that there was no doubt that she was, in fact, deceased. If this swami or someone else associated with him is guilty, then why hasn’t Miss Airdale’s body been found?”
Mr. Holmes put the tips of his fingers together. “That, Miss Thiel, is precisely what we need to find out.”
“So you want me to go to the Institute … undercover? Is that the right word? Try to get in as a convert, then find out everything I can about Miss Airdale?”
“If you are willing, yes.”
“I’m not unwilling.” Amy tried to choose her words carefully. “But—”
“But you wished for an assignment that would be of direct help in bringing down the organisation that has targeted our mutual friend Tobias Gregson?”
CHAPTER 2: AMY
Amy willed herself not to flush under the steadiness of Mr. Holmes’s gaze. But there was no point in lying, not when he was clearly intelligent and observant enough to see the truth.