The Curse Of The Diogenes Club (31 page)

The Countess returned to her
bedroom to change for lunch and found Xenia waiting for her with
fresh news that merely added to the puzzle of who was guilty of
what.

A Matryoshka doll was found in
Mrs Klein’s bedroom. It was not exactly hidden but sitting openly
in a box of maquillage on the dressing table.

The news was exciting but it
made no sense. The only way Mrs Klein would have been able to
obtain a doll that hadn’t yet gone on sale was to receive one as a
gift. But from whom? Not Viscount Cazenove, not General de
Merville, not Sir James Damery – their dolls were all locked in
Major Nash’s desk. Did Major Nash give her a doll? Or did she
receive one from Prince Sergei?

Xenia also reported that Mrs
Klein did not return to her room early. She was spotted coming down
the stairs from the tennis court while play was in progress. She
proceeded into the long gallery then slipped behind the tapestry,
presumably to meet the baronet in the oratory that sat over the
porch.

That made sense. Major Nash
could easily have slipped out of the door at the end of the
tennys-play that led down to the oratory. If he locked the door
after himself, no one could follow.

Did they choose that spot for
their assignation knowing they would hear every rabid and ferocious
growl as the mad dog tore Mycroft to pieces?

Fedir had already relayed to
Xenia that no Matryoshka doll was found in the prince’s bedroom.
The room was thoroughly searched. He also reported that he spotted
Mrs Klein coming down the stairs from the tennys-play when everyone
was gathered around the front porch.

It stood to reason she had
slipped out of the oratory and climbed the narrow stairs to the
tennys-play and then returned to her room while everyone was
distracted. The major on the other hand had pulled on his clothes
and hurried down to the porch to see what was happening.

Was he disappointed that
Mycroft had survived?

What was the meaning of the
fleeting glance between Nash and Moriarty?

As soon as the Countess changed
into an afternoon dress of ice-blue figured silk trimmed with mink
around the hem and cuffs she hurried to the prince’s room to speak
to him before he went down to lunch.

Ivanchyk, the prince’s valet,
ushered her in. Prince Sergei was checking the time on his Breguet
gold timepiece against the carriage clock on the mantelpiece.

There was no time for
preliminary banter and no point pretending she was making a social
call, besides, Slavs tended to be straight-talkers when amongst
their own kymry. The Countess gestured for Ivanchyk to leave them,
excused her peremptory bluntness on the recent attack on Mycroft
Holmes then fired off some questions.

“Did you give Mrs Klein a
Matryoshka doll?”

“Nyet! What a strange thing to
ask!”

“When you visited the
princess’s hotel room on the day of her death – don’t ask how I
know - did you see a Matryoshka doll on the dressing table?”

“Da, what of it? What is the
sudden interest in Matryoshka dolls?

“Did you take the doll on the
dressing table when you left?”

“Nyet and nyet again! I have a
crate full of identical, worthless, peasant dolls back in London.
No one will be interested in buying one at the Paris Fair. Russia
will be saddled with thousands of useless, sentimental, mass
produced mementoes. Folk art! Ha! I could never understand what
Paraskovia saw in them. As soon as the Fair finishes they will be
consigned to the rubbish bin of history.”

“Had you ever met Mrs Klein
before coming to London?”

“Nyet, I met her for the first
time on the day of the ball. What has any of this got to do with Mr
Holmes? I thought we had been invited here to discuss the bombs
that threatened the life of that uber-useless son of that puffed-up
Saxe-Coburg popinjay?”

“When you were sitting in your
carriage in the carriage park did Mrs Klein at any stage join
you?”

He dropped his gaze and twirled
his gold wedding band. “I suppose Damery saw her getting into my
carriage. Da, she joined me in my carriage to offer me comfort. I
don’t need to remind you I had just lost my wife that same
day.”

“While playing tennis this
morning, did you notice when Mrs Klein left the court?”

“Da, she left a few minutes
after we were eliminated.”

“And Major Nash – did you
happen to notice when he left?”

“Da, he left shortly after the
final game commenced.”

“He did not leave first?”

“Nyet, she left first.”

“Did he leave by the main
stairs?”

“Nyet, he went through the door
at the end of the court.”

“Who do you think killed your
wife?”

“That I cannot tell you but if
you know about the Matryoshka doll on the dressing table then you
probably know about the bottle of laudanum. You probably know that
she was with child and the child was not mine. You probably know
she had several lovers.”

“Was Mycroft Holmes one of
them?”

Prince Sergei flinched and
regarded her coldly. “I thought for a moment you might be like
Zoya. She was Rusalka and Baba Yaga rolled into one, a formidable
witch, but you have still a lot to learn, Varvara Volodymyrovna.
This conversation is terminated.”

Disappointed and not sure if
she had even asked the right questions, the Countess hurried back
across the landing, noting that Mycroft had recovered his composure
and was in the great hall with the others. It was almost time for
lunch.

Parrhesia was the term that
Diogenes would have used for telling the truth.

Was the prince telling the
truth?

And if part of what he said was
true, did that make all of it true?

He had admitted to having Mrs
Klein in his carriage on the night of the ball. Of course, she
might have been offering comfort to the grieving prince, but the
sort of comfort Mrs Klein was reputed to offer was not generally
the sort you would offer in public. Not that there was anything
disturbing about that. Some people were more carnal than others and
Mrs Klein was on the hypersexual end of that carnal scale.

If it was true that the Prince
had not met Mrs Klein before the ball it was unlikely they had had
enough time to concoct any sort of scheme to kill Mycroft. That
brought her full circle back to the fact the person who wanted
Mycroft dead was a member of the Diogenes Club.

And what was she to make of the
bombshell statement about the doll? If the prince did not purloin
the Matryoshka doll, then who did?

It could only have been one
person – and it rocked her to the core.

Did Mycroft pocket the doll and
then pass it onto his ADC who then passed it on to Mrs Klein? But
for what purpose? Why give a doll to Mrs Klein? If Mrs Klein simply
wanted a Matryoshka doll because she had heard about them, she
could have asked the prince for one since he had a crate of them
back in London.

Was Mycroft (with the aid of
his loyal ADC) planning to implicate Mrs Klein in the murder of the
princess? Did Mrs Klein even know the princess? The prince had not
met the Spanish beauty before the day of the ball so it might be
deduced from that that the princess had not met her either. So why
would Mrs Klein want to kill a woman she had never met?

Did she consider the princess
as a rival? If the princess had several lovers on the go at the
same time did that make her hypersexual as well? Was there not room
for two hypersexual women in a city the size of London?

For Mrs Klein, sex was also a
weapon. She used it to humiliate, reward, and blackmail men. She
used it to further her ambitions and feather her financial nest.
Throughout history, women equated sex with power because it was the
only power they were permitted. Did Princess Paraskovia, an
attractive woman born to minor nobility who had experienced the
back-stabbing machinations of the royal Russian court, equate sex
with power too? The answer was obvious.

Sex, power, death… propelled
the Countess to her bedroom where she raced through the connecting
door to check if Mycroft’s Matryoshka doll was still in its
sock.

She was shocked to find that it
was. The sight of it threw her off kilter. She had hoped that Major
Nash had taken the doll and passed it to Mrs Klein because it was
the easiest explanation to swallow, but that was not the case, so
she had to come up with a new theory for how the Spanish widow
acquired her doll.

She was carefully stuffing the
doll back into the sock when the connecting door rolled back
silently. A frisson of panic unnerved her and she almost dropped
the doll a second time. She was expecting Major Nash and was
desperately trying to think up a convincing lie to explain herself
but it turned out to be Sherlock.

He had revised his earlier plan
to check Mycroft’s doll during the game of tennis. He had correctly
and fortuitously guessed that another attack on his brother was
imminent and that the most propitious time for that attack might be
while everyone was on the tennis court.

“Is that the doll? Show
me?”

She passed him the doll and
went to the door that opened to the landing to make sure no one was
about to walk in on them. He studied it intently for a few moments,
pulling it apart before closing it up again and passing it
back.

“A cheap gimcrack,” he said,
sounding disappointed. “It doesn’t even fit back together neatly.
The wood has warped already and some of the paint is peeling.”

Yes, the dolls really were just
tawdry keepsakes, the sorts of things visitors to fairs buy –
cheap, colourful and novel. They are light to carry, they mark the
occasion, and twelve months later they are consigned to the rubbish
bin of history.

Sherlock was shimmying down the
drainpipe – having deemed the upper landing too risky to skirt
while everyone was gathering in the great hall - when Major Nash
knocked on her bedroom door.

“I came to let you know that
Mycroft is about to explain what happened on the porch.” He poked
his head in the door, not intending to come in, but noted at once
that one side of her triple bay window was wide open, letting in a
considerable draught, and that she seemed to be extremely
interested in the fog banking up around the half-timbered walls of
the house. “Let me close that window for you,” he offered, striding
across the room before she had a chance to forestall him. “The lead
casement can sometimes jam.”

She heard Sherlock leap the
last few feet to the ground and wondered if the major heard it too
as he pulled the window into place and secured the catch then
watched through the diamond-leaded panes as the figure of man
darted through the fog and disappeared. But he was too clever, too
cagey, to question her.

“Have you spoken to Miss de
Merville?” he asked blandly to deflect from his own suspicions. “Is
she coming to lunch?”

Feeling the mounting pressure
to solve the case as physical tension pressing in from all sides,
like the fog pressing in on the house, the Countess could not let
the moment pass. It was midday Sunday and they were running out of
time to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. It was now or
never.

“Why did you give a Matryoshka
doll to Isadora Klein?”

The look of mild shock on his
face could not have been feigned. “What?”

She repeated the question.

He continued to look stunned.
“Who told you I did?”

“No one – I surmised it for
myself.”

Shock turned to mild amusement.
“Because I renewed relations with her?”

“Because she has one in her
room
and
you renewed relations with her.”

Amusement morphed into avid
interest. “You searched her room? No! Let me rephrase that. Your
maid searched her room?”

“What difference does it make
who did the searching – did she receive it from you?”

“Where would I get one
from?”

“From the princess.”

“She only gave them to her
lovers,” he reminded.

“So you say. Who told you
that?”

He appeared to consider the
question, indicating he wasn’t sure what the right answer was,
surprising, because he was very good at having all the right
answers to hand at the drop of a hat. “Who do you think?” he
challenged.

There was only one answer. “How
would Mycroft know that unless he had been her lover too?”

“If you were as close to
Mycroft Holmes as you pretend to be then you would know how
ridiculous that accusation was.”

“Then how did he get hold of a
doll?”

In the blink of an eye he
understood that she had seen the doll inside the sock. “You
searched his drawer?”

“So did you. Or did you plant
that doll? Are you planning to implicate him in the murder of the
princess to deflect from your lover?”

A muscle in his square jaw
tightened and he bunched his fists aggressively as the cloak of
courtesy fell away. She tried to step around him but he blocked her
passage to the door, and an intensely handsome hulk of a man when
filled with bottled-up fury can be a formidable obstacle to
dodge.

Apprehension rising, she moved
quickly to the connecting door but he blocked that egress too.
There was a brief senseless struggle that only served to reinforce
his physical superiority, whereby he grabbed both her wrists and
pulled her into him. His voice was vibrating with anger and his
muscular powerhouse of a body was as taut as a drawn bow. “Don’t
get in my way,” he warned, bristling fiercely. “I’ve had enough of
your meddling.”

“Am I interrupting
something?”

Colonel Moriarty was framed in
the doorway and the tension in his face matched the tension in the
room.

Major Nash released his
vice-like grip and stormed past the colonel.