Mrs Hudson and the Samarkand Conspiracy Read online

  Mrs Hudson and the Samarkand Conspiracy

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part II

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Holmes & Hudson Mystery

  Copyright

  So much has changed since those days that sometimes I find it hard to believe I was ever such a young girl, dashing around Baker Street in so much haste, at the height of a sweltering summer. Hard too, in these different times, to imagine a desert city seething with spies, or the envoys of a great empire fleeing in disguise across steppes and seas and mountains, hunted by a ruthless enemy. All that belongs to another world, a lost world, the stuff of storybooks.

  But sometimes, when the temperature in my rooms becomes unbearable, I slip on my sensible shoes and take a walk along the Serpentine, to a particular bench, where I sit and look out over the water and see, not ducks or toy boats, but the minarets of Samarkand and the domes of Tashkent, and the dust of horses galloping towards the shores of the Caspian Sea. And perhaps, sometimes, if I close my eyes, instead of the laughter of children, I hear a band playing, and then a whistle, and the roar of a shuddering locomotive as it plunges at speed into the gaping mouth of a coal-black tunnel…

  And then I blink and stretch, and calm myself by watching the ducks’ careless manoeuvres.

  However warm it is, however sticky the season, it is never as warm as that one I remember.

  Part I

  Nothing Happens in Baker Street

  Chapter One

  It was so hot that summer you could have fried on egg on the pavement outside our front door. Or so Dr Watson declared, although I don’t think anyone would ever have attempted it; the pavements were too thick with dust, whirled up from the cobbles by the passing hansoms and coating everything and everybody, from the wilting flower girls to the dispirited sparrows; it crept under the starchiest collar and eddied under ladies’ skirts, so that by the end of the day, when you came to wash, you found yourself dirtier beneath your clothes than above them. It would have been a terrible waste of an egg.

  Mrs Hudson, who believed in clean aprons even in the hottest weather, had me running errands to the laundry twice a day, and three times on Tuesdays when the coal-wagon made its calls. But despite the dirt and the dust and the terrible smells that sometimes rose from the gutters, our shady kitchen – so much lower than the street – remained cool and soothing, a little sanctuary from the fevered world around us. And we avoided the worst of the coal dust, for that summer, from the beginning of July to the middle of September, Mrs Hudson refused to light a fire.

  ‘No need for one, Flotsam,’ she assured me. ‘With all our neighbours out of London and their houses all but empty, it would be foolish to heat up this house instead of theirs, wouldn’t it, my girl? We made similar arrangements in St Peter’s Square back in ’68, and it worked very well. So Mrs Johnson, the housekeeper at 197, is going to provide boiling water for all of us at pre-arranged times. Mrs Turner and Mrs McFarland will provide baths for those of us left below stairs, and the gentlemen can bathe next door, in the Jenkinsons’ rather grand porcelain tub. In return, we shall be generous with the iced white port, which all three of those ladies enjoy greatly, and come the autumn you and I will help with their airing and the parquet floors. And, as for cooking, well, Flotsam, fruit and salads are what’s needed this summer. Bread and cheese, cold meats, good chutney, plenty of Derbyshire water. A chilled soup from Lamington’s, perhaps, if the gentlemen wish it, and a good supply of light Moselle to wash it down. But I promise you one thing, Flotsam, whether Mr Holmes likes it or not, nothing hotter than a bunch of grapes is coming out of this kitchen until the weather breaks. And hopefully, before then, something will happen to distract our two gentlemen from this terrible heat.’

  But in Baker Street that summer, apart from the dust-spirals and the grumbling victorias, and the reluctant pedestrians hugging the shade, nothing did happen. It was far too hot for crime. Mr Holmes complained that London’s most significant villains had all left town, and that those who remained were too befuddled to be interesting. And Dr Watson, driven by days of sullen inactivity to brave the glare, reported that over in Scotland Yard, where the dust was even thicker, Inspector Lestrade and his colleagues had nothing to do but pore morosely over the documents of unsolved cases. Meanwhile, on the streets, our local bobbies spent their days perspiring into their uniforms and their nights breaking up the tavern brawls that sparked into life as soon as darkness fell.

  Had it not been for a deranged sultan, a foreign spy and a peculiar piece of railway timetabling in a remote corner of Europe, we might all of us have gone mad before the end of August.

  The morning Mrs Hudson sent me to St Pancras to ask about ice was as hot and breathless as any other. It was that part of the summer when the pace of the city slowed and the streets were less frantic, and I made my way to the station past grand houses closed up for the summer, and past shops that were barely less quiet, the shop-keepers leaning in their doorways with folded arms, or sheltering in deep shade beneath their awnings. By the time I reached St Pancras my crisp, new petticoat was limp and clinging, my summer skirt already streaked with grime.

  There, beneath the station’s thrusting tower, I found my old friend Scraggs, the grocer’s boy, selling overpriced paper fans to desperate passengers. Business was brisk, but his face was flushed and his forehead dripping, although it was barely nine in the morning.

  ‘Hottest day yet, Flot,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘or so I’m told by the lad who shines the station master’s boots. And what brings you to this particular part of the furnace?’

  ‘I’ve come to see the iceman,’ I told him. ‘And then I’m to go to Fotheringill’s for raspberry syrup.’

  ‘Ah! One of Mrs Hudson’s summer punches!’ He grinned happily. ‘Then I’ll make a point of dropping in later on.’ He paused to dab his brow with a shirt sleeve. ‘What I don’t understand, Flottie, is why you’re all still here. Old Sherlock could afford to get out of town, couldn’t he?’

  It was a very fair question. Ours was, by now, the only front door on our side of Baker Street that had not been bolted for the season. But the great detective remained stubbornly at his post. Since his sensational triumph in the affair of the opera-singer’s lizard, he had barely ventured beyond his own study, waiting in vain for the challenge that would rouse him from his torpor. Listless and out of sorts, he passed the hours staring at his fingertips or playing ‘The Arab’s Farewell’ on the violin with such intensity of feeling that Dr Watson had to beg him to stop.

  ‘I’m not sure Mr Holmes feels the heat,’ I explained to Scraggs, ‘and, besides, he says he needs to stay where he can be found.’

  Scraggs didn’t even attempt to reply to this. He merely shook his head in bewilderment and pointed out that, so great was the heat in Trafalgar Square, even the pigeons had left for the country.

  And I couldn’t blame them. By the
n, the long days of breathless, unstirred heat had turned London’s streets into open ovens, the brick and stone still hot to the touch long after the sun had set. And the nights were worse than the days. People kept their windows closed to exclude the dust and the stench, and because the air outside was hotter than the air within. But the stillness of those sweltered rooms pressed down so heavily upon the occupants that, all across the city, sleep came and went in restless, ragged fragments. Nearly all the travellers who approached Scraggs for fans had about them an air of long-suffering weariness.

  ‘So, Flot, if you’re going to be here all through the summer, you could go to the Survivors’ Ball. It’s at the Mecklenberg Hotel this year.’

  The Survivors’ Ball! He said it very casually, rearranging the fans on his tray as he spoke, and he didn’t look up when I laughed. Because the Survivors’ Ball was, in those years, a hugely famous institution, and the grandest, poshest, most spectacular event that anyone in service could ever imagine attending. It was organised by old Lady Townsend, who never left London during the summer months, and took place every year on the last Saturday of August. It had begun as a simple thank-you dinner for her own servants, a reward for surviving summer in the city. Gradually it had grown to include the households of other aristocratic families, until it had become the stuff of legends, and the object of a thousand below-stairs fantasies. Its fireworks were spectacular, its orchestra the very finest, and the food was as sumptuous as the most lavish London banquet. All the grandest families subscribed.

  ‘But, Scraggs,’ I pointed out with a smile, ‘I would never receive a ticket, and neither would you. We’d have to find employment in much grander homes first. I believe Lord Brabham’s household all used to go, back when he used to stay in London all summer with the stud books. But now he closes down the house in Bloomsbury every August. And I don’t know anyone else who ever goes.’

  ‘Well, you never know, Flot…’ Scraggs looked up from his fans, and instead began to examine a locomotive that was building up steam on a nearby platform. ‘If I thought you’d like to go… I’m very friendly with the boot boy at Lady Townsend’s, you know. And ever since I helped him out with that bunion cream, old Perkins the butler thinks of me as a favourite son.’

  ‘Really, Scraggs!’ I laughed again. ‘Last time I saw you and Mr Perkins together, he was throwing a rotten cabbage at you!’

  He had no option but to smile at that.

  ‘But fondly, Flottie. Very fondly.’

  He turned back to me, and we grinned at each other.

  ‘And he missed, remember, which shows his heart wasn’t really in it. Anyway, think about it, Flot. Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘if it’s true about Mrs H’s punch, I’ll be around about four. Unless the points melt before then, and all the trains get cancelled. But I don’t think that will happen. Reliable things, railways.’

  He paused and both of us considered the hissing locomotive in front of us – fifty tons of hefty, ponderous iron.

  ‘Solid,’ Scraggs pointed out. ‘Predictable. A locomotive may run late every now and then, Flot, but you always know where you are with trains.’

  And I smiled. I thought so too.

  * * *

  I returned to Baker Street that morning considerably hotter and considerably dirtier than when I left it. But if I had hoped to rest – and a lie-down in my under-garments in the cool of my little box bed would have been very welcome – Mrs Hudson had other ideas. I found her in the shadiest corner of the kitchen, chopping cucumbers. It was something she could do with breathtaking speed, and apparently without effort, her roundly muscled forearms barely moving, only the slightest twitch of her wrist setting the blade a-blur. Even one of the giant cucumbers sent to us from Petworth was reduced in seconds to a series of perfect, paper-thin discs.

  ‘More sandwiches,’ she explained. ‘Mr Holmes has a fancy for them, and if they serve to keep him off the violin until lunchtime, they will be performing a service to us all. You can take them up in a minute or two, Flotsam, but, first…’ She gestured with one elbow towards a pitcher and bowl on the kitchen table. ‘There’s fresh water there, and I’ve put out a clean flannel for you.’

  The water was miraculously cool. I cupped my hands and buried my face in it, then held the damp flannel to the back of my neck until I could feel little droplets creeping down my spine. By the time I was finished, the sandwiches were ready, arrayed in a delicate spiral around a Wedgwood platter, each one of them so thin they were practically translucent.

  The sandwiches reached Mr Holmes just in the nick of time, for I found him pacing his study listlessly, violin in hand, a look of indecision on his face.

  ‘Come now, Watson, you decide. Is it to be “Merry Maids of Maidstone” or “The Fairy of the Glen”? I am proficient in both.’

  Dr Watson managed only a grunt in reply. For weeks the study’s shutters had not been opened beyond a quarter, and the room was swathed in a soft, seductive gloom, but it was still unbearably hot. Dr Watson’s armchair had been turned towards the window in the hope of attracting a cooling draught – a vain hope, I was certain, for any breeze from the street that reached him there must certainly have been hotter than the stale air within. He brightened considerably at my entrance.

  ‘Ah, Flotsam! We were just speaking of you. And refreshment too! Excellent.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Mr Holmes concurred, ‘you are most welcome. It is the time of day when we require your assistance. Dr Watson will do the post if you take on the press. But he may bring greater attention to the task if you were to recharge his glass.’

  This brisk utterance made more sense to me than you might suppose, for latterly a routine had been established. More often than not, after Mr Holmes had smoked his third pipe of the morning, I would be summoned to his study, where Dr Watson and I would read aloud any items of interest we were able to discover in that day’s post-bag, or in the late editions of the morning’s newspapers. It felt a great honour to be trusted with such a task, and I longed to discover some fascinating curiosity that might capture my employer’s interest and restore him to his usual vigour. But never had I met with any success.

  That morning, too, there proved to be slim pickings. The front pages of the newspapers were largely given over to diplomatic rumblings in Persia, and to rumours that poor growing conditions in the hop fields of Kent might lead to future beer shortages.

  ‘Well, Holmes,’ Dr Watson began, his countenance glum, ‘I can’t say today’s post is looking very promising either. There’s a bill from my tailor, but that won’t interest you. And one from that chap who sends you organs in jars. But from potential clients…’

  He tailed off with another grunt, and fanned himself for a moment with a sheet of writing paper, one of several, of various sizes and hues, that were stacked beside his chair.

  ‘For instance, here’s another one about a missing cat,’ he continued, gathering himself and peering at the paper in his hand. ‘And this one here, the one on pink notepaper, is from a woman who claims she can identify the whereabouts of any felon we happen to be seeking using only playing cards and a divining rod.’

  ‘Do you know, Watson…’ Mr Holmes was eyeing the platter of sandwiches. ‘The nutritional value of a cucumber sandwich is almost negligible, thus making these, in all practical terms, next to useless.’

  He selected a sandwich from the platter and examined it carefully, then took a little bite.

  ‘And yet there is, nevertheless, something strangely restorative about their consumption. They elevate the spirits in mysterious ways, in ways that would appear to defy all rational explanation. Is there anything else, my friend?’

  ‘Two more from householders convinced their servants are pilfering from them, and two from servants who feel their employers are unfairly withholding their wages. Oh, and one here from a woman in Yorkshire who wishes to know what brand of tobacco you smoke.’

  ‘Astonishing.’ The detective shook his head and sighed deeply. ‘Now what abo
ut you, Flotsam? Have the gentlemen of the press managed to unearth any items that might interest us?’

  I had taken the armchair commonly occupied by Mr Holmes himself, and had spread the newspapers across my lap.

  ‘Very little, I’m afraid, sir. Three more stabbings, all in public houses.’ I said it timidly, knowing my employer’s scorn for such things. ‘And a gentleman in Clapham has slain his brother-in-law with a reproduction Viking battleaxe.’

  Mr Holmes rolled his eyes as though such acts of barbarity, even when committed with historical weaponry, were intended purely to vex him.

  ‘Watson, please tell me you have come across something better.’

  ‘Well, Holmes, there’s an undertaker in Somerset who has been sold a potato that resembles the Kaiser. He believes it to be evidence of a German plot against the nation. Oh, and this very last one is from a lady in Hampshire whose husband keeps losing his spectacles. Not sure what she expects you to do about it though, Holmes. Find ’em, I suppose.’

  Mr Holmes stopped pacing and closed his eyes.

  ‘Sometimes, Watson, I feel we would be better to seal up our letterbox and have the Post Office redirect all our mail directly to the bottom of the Thames.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ I interrupted, trying to conceal my sudden excitement. ‘Please, sir, here’s something that’s a bit different. I know it isn’t really any concern of ours, but even so…’

  Despite my efforts to the contrary, my excitement must have been evident in my voice, because Mr Holmes opened his eyes and cast an appraising glance in my direction.

  ‘Read on, then. Flotsam. Read on.’

  It was only short, a Stop Press item on the front page of The Clarion.

  Predeál, Rumania. Railway officials report express train missing in Carpathian Mountains. Rumanian officials state special charter from Bucharest to Cluj entered tunnel in Tömös Pass, Monday morning. Witnesses confirm train never emerged. Local service which followed passed through tunnel without impediment. Officials report tunnel single track throughout, no branches or sidings.