“Almost certainly.”

  “Almost.”

  He did not reply, being occupied with folding a pair of trousers under his chin.

  “It could be nothing,” I pointed out. “Even Damian said it could be one of his more thoughtless friends, playing a joke on him. Or a newspaper reporter, after a clever scoop about the artistic antecedents of Damian Adler.”

  “A reporter who broke in with a machete in hand?”

  “He didn’t actually use it.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at that, and dropped to his heels over the bag that held our books. “There are those who would relish finding a means of harming me through my family.”

  “Surely Damian can protect himself?”

  “And Dr Henning, and the child? While he is preoccupied with his work?” He dropped a book into the valise, frowned, and went to fetch his shaving kit.

  “Holmes, Damian was a soldier, and he’s far from stupid.”

  “True. On the other hand, the lad sounds halfway to convincing himself that the matter means nothing. That horrific events in his past do not mean that the future holds the same thing. And, incidentally, that the work his father has spent his life doing has nothing to do with the real world of Damian Adler.”

  “He couldn’t be that foolish.”

  “I won’t know until I speak with him.” He tucked a packet of tobacco into the case and started to buckle it shut.

  “Holmes? Take the revolver.”

  “You may need it.”

  “I’ll sleep with M. LaRue’s shotgun.”

  After a moment, he nodded and retrieved it from its concealed pocket. He then fastened the buckles and picked up the valise, giving me a very nearly apologetic smile. “Perhaps you’ll be able to raise some fingerprints from the knife.”

  He detoured long enough to deliver a brief kiss to the top of my head, and went out of the door.

  “Or perhaps,” I called at his retreating form, “the lascar and his two associates will come back, and I’ll have them all nicely bound and gagged when you return.”

  Chapter Five

  The sound of the motor faded from the kitchen. Mme LaRue and I looked at each other.

  “Have you a sheet of newspaper?” I asked.

  She fetched one from the stove-side kindling box, and I carried it outside to the café table, wrapping up the knife and bringing it back to the kitchen.

  “Mme LaRue, you said Damian made a drawing. Was it of the lascar—the burglar?”

  “Oui,” she said, and went on to tell me—in French—how he’d thought perhaps someone in the village might have seen the man, but although she and her husband had shown it among the neighbours, no one had recognised him.

  “Do you still have the drawing?”

  “Bien sûr. Un moment.” She walked out and came back to lay the torn-out page of a sketching block on the table.

  Rendered in pencil, it showed a man in the kind of loose garments worn anywhere from North Africa to India. More Bengal than Shanghai, I thought. He was bare-headed, and stood in a slightly crouched stance, as if startled and about to bolt and run. Both hands were visible: no knife, and if he’d been wearing it through his belt, it was well hidden by his tunic-length shirt. There was something in his left hand, but it looked more like a small torch than a weapon. His feet were bare, the toes splayed on the floor tiles.

  Most of Damian’s attention had been spent on the face: angular features, heavy eyebrows over dark eyes, thick black hair. No beard or moustache. He had shaded the skin to indicate a darker tone, like the two men who had been asking for information, although the face could be from anywhere between Istanbul and North India.

  Small exaggerated patches of graphite suggested smallpox scars, along with a thin, crescent-shaped scar along his right cheekbone.

  The drawing was precise and alive, although I had to wonder at the expression Damian had given him. The man seemed more alarmed than threatening—which could be actuality, or it could be an artist sacrificing exactitude to his need to deny fear. Or even to the wish of avoiding the cliché of a bloodthirsty foreigner. Still, I had no doubt that I would recognise the man if I passed him in the street.

  “Is there a photographic studio in the village?” I asked. “I should like to have reproductions made of this.”

  Mme LaRue regretted that there was not such a thing in Ste Chapelle, but the town of Délieux had one, and M. LaRue could easily take this when he returned from the train station.

  I thanked her, and set the drawing aside until I could find a protective envelope. When she had finished tidying away the lunch things, I assured her that I did not need any help getting around, but accepted her offer to bring me some of the dinner she was cooking for her husband. She urged me to keep the doors and shutters locked, lest the lascar return, then paused on the doorstep.

  “Mon frère,” she began, and then ran aground on an uncomfortable silence.

  “Who lives in the back,” I prompted.

  Her brother, it seemed, was among other things what passed for a night-watchman, chez Adler. Her brother was appalled that he had not kept the house from being invaded. He felt responsible. I should be aware, therefore, that Pierre was likely to be outside at all hours of the night, by way of protecting the house. I should not concern myself, were I to see a strange man. One with…injuries.

  “From the War, yes?” She gave a vague gesture to her face, and nodded. I assured her that I had seen such injuries, that I appreciated his diligence, and that I was not about to be frightened, now that she had warned me.

  “Though he probably shouldn’t try to come in without knocking.” I wouldn’t want to club the poor fellow with a crutch.

  “Oh, non! Non non, il n’entrerait jamais!”

  “Well, that’s fine, then. It’s very good of him to keep an eye on things.”

  She was grateful that I understood, and explained again that Pierre was so happy to be permitted to continue in his small house, that he had loved Mme Adler when she was alive and he was honoured to be invited to serve her son, and she herself had been afraid that M. Damian’s wife-to-be and small daughter might be frightened by Pierre’s face and manner, but they had been so generous and…

  She was still speaking as I gently pushed her out of the kitchen door. I closed it. After a moment’s silence, her voice came through, reminding me to lock it. I turned the latch; her footsteps retreated.

  * * *

  —

  Had Holmes been there, I would not have admitted that my foot ached. But he was not, and it did, so I swung my way down the hallway to the rooms we’d been given, tossed Holmes’ strewn possessions into one corner, found a book, and stretched out on the bed with a sigh.

  It was a very pleasant room, an addition to the house so recent, one could smell the paint. The practicality and decisiveness of the building project made me smile. Over the course of six weeks the previous year, Dr Henning—Aileen, she’d said I was to call her—had gone from under-employed lady doctor to involuntary partner-in-crime to romantic interest of a wildly avant-garde artist, ending up in this patch of French countryside where she divided her time between treating the ailments of local farmers and bringing her fiancé’s inherited home into the twentieth century. I suspected that Damian Adler’s free-thinking way of life did not mean that he took over many of the household drudgeries.

  And now, it seemed, poor Aileen was on the run again. Truly, one never knew where one would find oneself when in the company of a Holmes.

  Or occasionally, where one might find oneself abandoned to her own devices.

  I opened the book, read half a page, and found my thoughts returning to Pierre, the Adler gardener, handyman, and self-appointed night-watchman. A nation full of damaged young men, left to eke out a living where they could, including a hut in the back garden of his sister’s neighbour. Though he’d lived there before he was injured, acting as resident muscle to an elderly American opera singer. Well, not elderly—she was only in her fifties when she died. She’d been three years older than Holmes, so would have been thirty-seven when Damian was born. Remarkably old for a first baby, perhaps, but plenty young enough to be…appealing.

  Holmes claimed he’d never suspected. That he’d been offended by her haughty declaration that she was going home to America, and had secretly agreed that it was past time for him to get back to his work in London. I believed him—although I suspected that, had it been a man who showed such uncharacteristic behaviour, he might have enquired further. Women had always been a blind spot in Holmes’ generally suspicious approach to the world—a consequence of his Victorian upbringing, perhaps, or of his mother’s early death by suicide and having spent his adolescence with a bereft father. A father who, come to that, had been even more catastrophically abandoned by the woman he loved.

  I’d always been curious about Irene Adler. Interest in one’s predecessor was only natural—but not exactly a comfortable topic of discussion with one’s husband. I hoped to learn a little more about her on this visit to the house that had been hers for twenty years. Just as I looked forward to learning more about her son, my (still such an odd thought) stepson who was five years older than I. Very probably the only child Holmes would have. Window into a life that might have been.

  And with the house lying empty around me, surely twenty minutes was enough to prop up a twisted ankle? I lowered my feet to the bedroom floor and retrieved the crutches to set off for a survey of the house—or at least its ground floor. Not the kitchen, though I might snoop through the cabinets at some point. I started with the sitting room which, beneath the modern trappings, had been laid out by Irene Adler.

  Chapter Six

  The sitting room took up one corner of the house, with two sets of wide casement windows on each of its outer walls. The windows, which M. LaRue had opened in order to push back the shutters and give the room light, had then been carefully locked again, as if an army of lascars waited to invade. The air was now stuffy, although I imagined that on Sunday night, the household had done as most French residents would do, namely leave the windows open but the louvred shutters locked, allowing the house to cool. As I crossed the room, using caution lest the crutches stub into the carpet underfoot, I noticed marks where the intruder had come through, at the front corner window. He must have stood in the flower-bed and used the long blade of that intimidating knife to jemmy open the shutter’s latch—hence a few bits of peeled-off paint and wood slivers on the floorboards.

  I opened the latches so I could lean out and see where the man had stood. The ground was soft enough to be disturbed, and a couple of the plants had been crushed, either by the intruder’s leap or the heavy shoes of those coming to look. I could see a pair of deep dents, some eighteen inches apart, that might have been made by naked heels leaping from window height, although they had been partly obscured by later visitors. The ground immediately below had a hole roughly the dimensions of the blade, probably where LaRue had retrieved it. I could see nothing of any interest as evidence, though I would go and look more closely later, when the sun was shining on this side of the house.

  I turned my back on the garden, letting the crutches hold my weight, to study the room from the angle the intruder had seen it (albeit briefly). The moon had been four days past full, plenty of light to get inside without using the torch. He probably switched it on once inside, since even a room furnished in the minimal modernist fashion has plenty of hazards to the unwary. So what would his beam have shown? Books on shelves and tables; paintings and prints on the wall; knick-knacks, framed photos, and a time-faded daguerreotype on the mantelpiece: some of those were probably valuable, but nothing that would call out to a common or garden burglar. The objets d’art arranged in the corner-piece étagère, for example—a piece of furniture that looked like a cross between a Chinese bird-cage and a futurist chair—would seem at first glance like knick-knacks, although nestled amongst the beach-side souvenirs, bird-nests, paper flowers, and much-loved toys were an exquisite Fabergé egg daubed with a smear of what looked (and, on closer examination, smelled) like chocolate, a Tiffany clock with its XI missing, and an enamelled elephant some three inches tall whose eyes could have been actual diamonds.

  Pride of place, I noticed, was given to a tiny hand-made tea set with cups fashioned from acorn caps.

  The Fabergé egg alone would have made any burglar’s trip worthwhile. And two or three of the smaller paintings would have been worth something. I especially liked the one of two women from the back, shoulders nearly touching, grey head and blonde bent over an infant—and I saw it was signed: “EVernet-Lecomte,” and dated 1895. The artist was Camille’s son, Sherlock Holmes’ uncle, Charles Émile Hippolyte Lecomte (who had added the “Vernet” to his name for its saleability).

  However, the intruder had already been halfway across the room when Damian came in, and Damian seemed to have heard the actual sounds of his breaking in. Which would indicate that the intruder’s goal was not here, in the sitting room.

  His torch, however, was.

  I found it beneath a settee, flung away as he’d leapt for the window, overlooked thereafter. It was a task retrieving it, but after many curses I got one crutch behind it and pulled it into the open. With care, I lifted it onto a cushion without leaving my own fingerprints behind. Had it been on? The sliding switch appeared to be in the “off” position—even with it burning, he’d have been blinded when the room’s lights went on.

  I tried to reconstruct the moments following the break-in. Trip the latch, climb up to the sill—a place to check for fingerprints—and then inside. What then? Either put the knife down on the table or window-sill and take out the torch, or slide the blade into a sheath hidden by clothing. Either way, according to Damian’s sketch, his right hand was free as he crossed the room to the door, which had opened before he reached it.

  Then, after he and Damian stared at each other long enough for his face to imprint on the artist’s memory, instead of pulling his knife—or leaping over to where he’d left it—and using it to attack the householder who had disturbed him, he flung away the torch, scrambled out of the window, dropped or knocked the knife to the flower-bed, and disappeared into the night.

  Most likely, I thought, he had left the knife on the window-sill, and accidentally kicked it out as he fled.

  Shoes and transport must have been somewhere nearby, but unnoticed. A resident of this quiet village would have heard a motorcar’s arrival. And if he’d used a cycle, it would have been foot-powered and silent, not powered by petrol.

  The whole thing demonstrated an unlikely combination of skill and panic. Was he a thief, or an assassin? If burglary, then his target was both specific and something he knew with a brief glance was not in this room. And assuming this break-in was related to the questions the two foreigners had asked, then work by more valuable artists than the Vernets—including Damian Adler himself—could be found in any French villa or Paris hôtel particulier.

  On the other hand, if murder had been on his mind, whether he was a member of the Shanghai cult out for revenge or some enraged art critic in esoteric clothing, he had proved blessedly inexperienced and faint-hearted at the art of assassination. But what other options were there? A spy? For what purpose? Damian Adler held no secrets, had no politics at all, so far as I knew. Granted, his uncle Mycroft held political secrets enough for several families, but if an enemy had learned of the connexion and thought to use Damian to manipulate the British government through his uncle’s affections—a plot even Conan Doyle might have considered far-fetched—why send a trio of distinctly foreign men into the French countryside?

  What if their target wasn’t Damian, but Aileen Henning? She did not strike me as a woman with mighty secrets in her past. And yes, one might speculate that some personal threat had sent her to that obscure corner of Scotland, except I knew for a fact that she had not been in hiding, since any number of her brothers, sisters, cousins, and school friends knew precisely where she was.

  I shook my head. One could not construct bricks without mud, or a theory without data. The pool of data I had was so thin as to trickle through my fingers: Time to move on, Russell.

  The rest of the sitting room contained much of interest, but nothing related to the invasion of the home, so I fetched another sheet of newspaper and wrapped up the torch, leaving it on the kitchen table with the machete.

  The next room had been an office or library. It was still furnished with a heavy pigeonholed desk, reading chairs, and a peculiar mix of books, from a Victorian survey of women explorers to a racy French novel about a woman’s affair with a man half her age. However, it appeared as if the shelves were in the process of being cleared, and the packets and equipment spreading out across the glass-front bookshelves declared the room now a doctor’s surgery. Her patients’ complaints seemed mostly to involve sore throats, eye infections, minor wounds, and broken bones, but she was prepared for something more traumatic: syringes waiting beside a new-looking safe implied that it was her drugs cabinet, while a prominently placed valise was ready-packed with the equipment and drugs needed for a major accident. I helped myself to a roll of medical strapping tape, and hobbled on.

  Across the hallway from the office/surgery was a small, cheerfully tiled lavatory, either newly installed or comprehensively re-built. Beyond that were two doors. On the right was the guest suite we’d been given. I opened the door on the left.

  Another brand-new space, two storeys tall and covering nearly as many square feet as the rest of the ground-floor rooms combined. High windows on the north and east showed the sky and the tops of trees, making the room bright at any time. A small cast-iron stove in one corner for the winter, a paint-splattered scullery sink in the other for cleaning up, Damian’s studio would be the envy of half the artists in France.