Laurie King - Pirate King - A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

From cameraman to costumer, at least a dozen members of Fflytte Films had consistently worked together for five years or more. Another twenty individuals had come and gone in various projects. Sister two, “Bonnie,” had acted in half a dozen Fflytte films over the years – although one would never know it by the way Fflytte and Hale treated her, which was with the same mild lack of interest that they used to address any of the girls. Mrs Hatley, whose daughter “June” was the victim of an involuntary hair-cut, had herself acted in four or five Fflytte productions, including one so early, it was before Fflytte Films actually existed. Daniel Marks’ first Fflytte production was the 1919 Quarterdeck , and since then he had appeared in five others, in various hair colours and styles, with facial hair or clean-shaven, peering through spectacles or not.

The only people I had eliminated for certain were Bibi, who had worked in America for the past few years, and the six of her “sisters” who were under eighteen: Surely I could omit children from my list of suspects?

I had compiled a rough list of those whose careers spanned the years that troubled Lestrade, but before I investigated the shell-shocked camera assistant and the petite redheaded Irish lass whose needle produced costumes ranging from Elizabethan collars to beggars’ weeds, I wanted to eliminate the two men in the best position to manipulate the company. By breaking into their rooms.

In my experience, hotels generally count on the presence of doormen and desk personnel to repel potential burglars. All one need do is become a guest of the hotel, and defences are breached.

My choice of targets was a toss of the coin: Hale, or Fflytte? Granted, I could not envision Fflytte wasting any energy on an enterprise not directly connected with the making of films; on the other hand, I could well imagine our director simply not taking into account that the laws of nations applied to him, so why not dispose of the drugs or guns that one had assembled for the purpose of a realistic (damn the word!) film by selling them? I might imagine Hale involved in a surreptitious criminal second career, but he must surely be aware of the consequences were it to be uncovered – and in any event, why then encourage a newly hired assistant to watch for untoward activities?

It might help to know if Lonnie Johns, the missing secretary, had been located yet. Back in Lestrade’s office, the woman’s unexplained absence had a sinister flavour, but the longer I lived in her shoes, as it were, the more sensible a tear-soaked flight to a Mediterranean beach or the Scottish highlands sounded.

My choice was made by the hotel’s cleaning staff: As I came out of the lift, they were coming out of Hale’s room. I walked around the corner, waiting for them to disappear into Fflytte’s room next door.

They went in – and they came out rapidly, moving backwards, blushing and apologising and making haste to get the door shut between them and whatever had startled them. Or rather, whomever. Three middle-aged Catholic ladies stood in the hallway, given over to a shared gale of stifled laughter, then scuttled down the corridor to the next room. Where they knocked loudly before letting themselves in.

When no one popped instantly from the director’s room, I sidled down the corridor and applied myself to the latch. Less than thirty seconds’ work put me inside Hale’s suite. I took off my shoes to pad silently through the four rooms, checking for a sleeping guest or a particularly diligent cleaner, but all I found were the sitting room, a bedroom, a second bedroom from which the furniture had been stripped, and a bathroom with fittings considerably more elaborate than those in my room on the floor below. No missing secretary stuffed into a traveling-trunk; no packets of unsold cocaine in the sock-drawer. Yes, there was a small hand-gun in the bedside table, but I had no way of knowing where it had come from.

In the suite’s second bedroom, the bed and dressing table had been replaced with a desk, a laden drinks cabinet, four comfortable chairs – and a small mountain of wooden file cabinets, which I had last seen going out the door of the Covent Garden office. They were held shut with locks. I laid my shoes on the desk, and got to work.

Because Fflytte Films spent so much of the year in locations around the globe, Hale was in the habit of carrying his office with him. The file cabinets bore labels, 1 through 12, and as I’d expected, the last two bristled with details concerning Pirate King , while the files in the first were concerned with early films. I started with 3, looking for the year of Lestrade’s earliest suspicions.

I quickly realised two things. First of all, these files were not complete – which made sense, because trailing every scrap of paper around the world would make for cumbersome travel indeed. And second, that even with the condensed files of the earlier drawers, my search would take me a lot more than the hour at hand.

Take Small Arms . The picture was three years old and Hale still carried around a dozen folders concerning its making; several were about the personnel (mostly actors, type-written pages annotated by Hale and Fflytte); four covered technical matters. (Film used; problems encountered; letters from cinema-house managers; carbon copies of letters to cinema-house managers – most of these were complaints over the speed at which they had run the film; and one long, furious, epithet-dotted complaint from Will-the-Camera over the impossibility of working with small children who are supposed to lie dead but keep smirking and giggling and peer into raw film canisters and ruin a day’s shooting and burst into tears whenever an adult shouts at them, with a strongly worded postscript asking that he be given a budget for laudanum. It did not specify whether the drug was for himself or for the young actors.) One file contained distribution records; another held details on the sites used; and the slimmest of all had chaotic notes on the history of Small Arms , in Fflytte’s hand, which looked to have been made with an eye to an eventual autobiography.

No receipt for the illicit sale of a large number of revolvers.

I put the last Small Arms folder into place and reached for Hannibal , but before I could get tucked into a lamentation on working with elephants, the sound of a key hitting the door had me slapping the drawer shut and leaping for the desk.

Hale walked in to find me with a shoe in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. I jumped, nicking the ball of my thumb and dropping the implement.

“Ow!” I gasped, and stuck the wound into my mouth. “Heavens, you startled me!”

“What are you doing in my rooms?” he demanded.

“Fixing my shoes.” I pulled out the thumb, looked at it, and shook it in a demonstration of pain.

“No, I mean-” He looked down at my oozing wound, then at the shoe. “What’s wrong with your shoes?”

“Their soles. Haven’t you noticed how deadly those pavements are?”

I directed his gaze to the sprinkling of tiny black divots lying on his blotter. He frowned. “But why are you here?”

I checked the scratch, which had already stopped bleeding, and retrieved the tool to bend over the sole again. “I know, you didn’t give me a key, but I didn’t know the Portuguese words for knife or wood rasp or corkscrew , and I knew you’d at least have one of those, so I came up to see if maybe you’d followed me back and I found the cleaning crew just leaving-” I looked up, feigning alarm. “Please don’t tell on them. They’d lose their jobs and they’re such nice ladies, and they’d seen us talking downstairs so they knew I worked for you.”