Garment of Shadows

Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

Laurie R. King

Bantam (2012)

Rating: ****

Tags: Historical, Fiction, Traditional British, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths

Laurie R. King’s
New York Times
bestselling novels of suspense featuring Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, comprise one of today’s most acclaimed mystery series. Now, in their newest and most thrilling adventure, the couple is separated by a shocking circumstance in a perilous part of the world, each racing against time to prevent an explosive catastrophe that could clothe them both in shrouds.
In a strange room in Morocco, Mary Russell is trying to solve a pressing mystery:
Who am I?
She has awakened with shadows in her mind, blood on her hands, and soldiers pounding on the door. Out in the hivelike streets, she discovers herself strangely adept in the skills of the underworld, escaping through alleys and rooftops, picking pockets and locks. She is clothed like a man, and armed only with her wits and a scrap of paper containing a mysterious Arabic phrase. Overhead, warplanes pass ominously north.
Meanwhile, Holmes is pulled by two old friends and a distant relation into the growing war between France, Spain, and the Rif Revolt led by Emir Abd el-Krim—who may be a Robin Hood or a power mad tribesman. The shadows of war are drawing over the ancient city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he’s learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell searches for her
self,
each tries to crack deadly parallel puzzles before it’s too late for them, for Africa, and for the peace of Europe.
With the dazzling mix of period detail and contemporary pace that is her hallmark, Laurie R. King continues the stunningly suspenseful series that Lee Child called “the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.”

Review

'The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today' LEE CHILD

About the Author

Laurie R. King
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of twelve Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels
A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch,
and
Touchstone
. She lives in Northern California.

Garment of Shadows
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Laurie R. King

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Laurie R.
Garment of shadows : a novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and
Sherlock Holmes / Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90755-1
1. Russell, Mary (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators— India—Fiction. 3. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. British— Morocco—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.I4813G37 2012
813′.54—dc23     2011047287

www.bantamdell.com

Jacket design: Joe Montgomery
Jacket art: Debra Lill

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Author’s Preface

Epigraph

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

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

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Author’s Afterword

Editor’s Note

Dedication

Acknowledgments and Notes

Glossary

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

A
UTHOR’S
P
REFACE

It should be noted that sections of this volume of my memoirs depict acts and thoughts of people that took place in my absence. I chose the Godlike point of view because I thought it less distracting for a reader. In fact, those sections reflect testimonies pieced together out of disjointed segments and off-hand remarks given over the course of weeks, and even years.

If this style of narrating my memoir causes readers to interpret the following as fiction, so be it. It would not be the first time.

—M
ARY
R
USSELL
H
OLMES

I have attached a glossary of unfamiliar terms at the end.

—MRH

… the breath of Chitane
Blows the sands in smoky whirls
And blinds my steed.
And I, blinded as I ride,
Long for the night to come,
The night with its garment of shadows
And eyes of stars.

—EBN EL ROUMI

P
REFACE

T
he big man had the brains of a tortoise, but even he was beginning to look alarmed.

Sherlock Holmes drew a calming breath. Then another.

It had seemed such a simple arrangement: If Mary Russell chose to submit to the whimsy of Fflytte Films as it finished its current moving picture, that was fine and good, but there was no cause for her husband to be tied down by her eccentricities—not with an entirely new country at his feet. He’d never been to Morocco. After some complex marital negotiations, he promised to return, at an agreed-to time and place, which was here and today.

Except she was not there.

He started again. “So she left her tent that night. After dark.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“And was still gone the next morning.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“She spoke to no one, merely left a brief note to say that she was going to Fez.”

The man nodded.

“The filming ended. The rest of Fflytte’s crew came back here. No one thought this odd. And all you have to say is that my wife was last seen walking into the desert in the company of a child. Three days ago.”

Morocco might be a small country, but it was plenty big enough to swallow one young woman.

Russell
, he thought,
what the devil are you up to?

C
HAPTER
O
NE

I
was in bed.
A
bed, at any rate.

I had been flattened by a steam-roller, trampled under a stampede of bison. Beaten by a determined thug. I ached, head to toe, fingers and skin. Mostly head.

My skull throbbed, one hot pulse for every beat of my heart. I could see it in the rhythmic dimming of an already shadowy room. I wanted to weep with the pain, but if I had to blow my nose, my skull might split like an overripe melon.

So I lay in the dim room, and watched my heart beat, and ached.

Some time later, it came to me that the angle of the vague patch of brightness across the opposite wall had changed. Some time after that, an explanation slipped out between the pain-pulses: The sun had moved while I slept. A while later, another thought: Time is passing.

And with that, a tendril of urgency unfurled. I could not lie in bed, I had to be somewhere. People were depending on me. The sun would go down: I would be late.

Rolling onto my side was like pushing a motorcar up a hill. Raising myself up from the thin pad made me cry out—nearly black out—from the surge of pressure within my skull. My stomach roiled, my ears rang, the room whirled.

I crouched for a long time on the edge of the bed. Slowly, the pounding receded. My vision cleared, revealing a snug, roughly plastered room; hand-made floor tiles; a tawny herringbone of small bricks; a door of some dark wood, so narrow a big man might angle his shoulders, a hook driven into it, holding a long brown robe; a pair of soft yellow bedroom slippers on the floor—
babouches
, my mind provided: new leather, my nose told me. The room’s only furniture was a narrow bed with a rough three-legged stool at its head. The stool served as a table, its surface nearly covered with disparate objects: in the centre stood a small oil lamp. To its left, nearest the bed, were arranged a match-box, a tiny ceramic bowl holding half a dozen spent matches, a glass of water, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that appeared to have been trod upon. The other side of the lamp had an even more peculiar collection: a worn pencil stub, a sausage-shaped object tightly wrapped in a handkerchief, some grains of sand, and one pale stone.