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done. From up at the top, it looked to me like the waves would push things in
behind a couple of those rocks, and it seemed worth a look. I took a piece of
wire from the truck and went to see. Or are you asking about whether I'm not
too weak to be doing things like that?"
"Clearly you were not. But I mistrust derring-do even more than I mistrust
cowardice. With a coward, one at least knows where one stands. With a fool,
anything can happen. And most frequently does. "
"It's not derring-do, just common sense. " Seeing Holmes' sceptical eyebrow,
the younger man sighed and picked up his fork, pushing the half-eaten chop
around on the plate. "Look, this disease I have, it respects toughness. In the
TB ward, it was the ones who babied themselves who died the fastest. The ones
who got on with life had the best chance of shaking it. I sleep a lot, but I
don't baby myself. "
Holmes studied the young man's features, bone-thin but unbending, and his
shoulders relaxed.
"I suppose I've been called reckless myself, from time to time. But don't risk
your neck again for the sake of my case, you hear? In any event, what have you
learnt?"
"I guess your wife's father was something of a nut about cars, " Hammett said,
his irritation fading as his attention returned to the plate. "The Maxwell
dealer remembers him well, one of his first and best customers. Seems Russell
bought a new car every year from 1908 until this one that killed them, which
he picked up about two weeks before the war broke out in Europe middle of July
1914. The owner seemed to think Russell might even have intended to ship this
one out to Boston, where his family was going after he enlisted. "
"Not to England?"
"Said Boston, because England might not be the safest place for a while.
Looking back, I'd say your father-in-law was a clever man. "
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It was true: In the summer of 1914, most of the world had thought the war
would be over by Christmas, and most men would not have hesitated to send an
English wife home to her family.
The waitress decided that her customer had eaten as much of his dinner as he
was going to, and without being asked she set two thick white mugs of coffee
on the table, removing the half-eaten dinner with a shake of her head. Hammett
wiped his fingers on his table napkin, took a swallow of the coffee, and
picked up something from the seat of the chair beside him, laying it on the
table between them.
"You know what this is?" he asked.
"This" was a pair of bent and rusted steel rods, although it did not take a
very close examination to see that they had originally been two parts of a
still-longer whole. The longer of these two sections, about
eighteen inches from the still-attached ball joint to its broken end, was
pitted from long exposure to the elements; grains of sand still nestled in the
rough surface. Holmes fingered its uneven end: not merely broken, but half
sawed through, then twisted hard to shattering.
The other piece was slightly shorter, just over a foot long, and although it,
too, was rusted, its lack of pitting and sand indicated that it had spent its
life in a slightly more protected environment. One end was a twin with that of
the longer piece half sawed, half wrenched apart. Its other end, however, was
neatly, and freshly, sawed through.
Hammett gestured at the tidy end of the shorter piece. "I didn't think we
really needed to haul the whole thing around, so I just cut off the hunk we
needed. Seemed to me the two ends said it all. "
Holmes laid the two pieces of rod on the table, the broken end of the rusted
one resting against the broken end of the cleaner.
"I have long feared it might be something of this order. Yes, Mr Hammett, I
know what this is. I spent some time as a garage mechanic in Chicago, just
before the war broke out. A little case for His Majesty. That's a brake rod,
or rather the better half of a brake rod, and I agree, you were right to cut
it off as far as evidence is concerned, there's no need to drag around a piece
of steel half the length of a motorcar. Which side of the motor was it from?"
"The left. "
"So whoever did it knew they would be travelling south on that road. "
"I... Yes, I suppose they would have. "
"No supposition involved. Failure of the left-side brake rod under pressure
would cause the motor to swerve to the right, and with that hill-top turn it
didn't even require an on-coming motor to break the rod. " Russell's father
would have braked hard at that spot in any event-without the other motor,
without two squabbling children in the back. Mary Russell's disagreeable
behaviour had nothing to do with it.
"Whoever did it was clever, " Hammett agreed. "And according to my guy, if
it'd been cut all the way through, your Mr Russell would never have made it as
far as the top of that hill without crashing. "
"Although I'd have thought he'd had to have been a remarkably cautious man to
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drive all the way from San Francisco with brakes in that condition. "
Hammett's starved-looking face relaxed into a satisfied grin. "They stopped
for lunch in Serra Beach. That little town about a mile before the hill. "
"Parking the motor out of sight?"
"Actually, he left the car at the garage while they ate, to be filled up and
to have a slow leak in one tyre repaired. The man took the wheel off and fixed
it, and once I'd jogged his memory it all came back to him, because when he'd
first heard about the accident, the day it happened, he'd been scared to
death thought maybe he'd failed to tighten the rim bolts enough. He even went
out to see, and was hugely relieved to see the burnt-out shell, turned turtle,
with all four wheels safely in place. "
"And this cleaner half of the brake rod was in his possession?" Holmes nudged
the stub with one finger.
"Yeah. A week or so after the accident, he and his older brother, who ran the
garage, took a pair of draught horses up and hauled the wreck off the rocks.
Because it had landed upside-down, the fire had just erupted into open
air poof, hot and fast and it's over and his older brother thought they might
be able to salvage some of the engine parts. Which, as it happened, was true.
The chassis is still around the back of the garage, the bones of it, and
pretty thoroughly picked over. The brother, by the way, died in a racing-car
crash, the summer of 1920. "
"The man doesn't remember anyone interfering with the machine, while it
waited?"
"Nope. Wheel off, patch it up, wheel on, then fill 'er up and shift the car
around to the side. "
"Was it common practice, for the Russell family to pause there on their way
south?"
"I don't know, but it would've made sense to stop there halfway along, let the
kiddies stretch their legs. "
"A thing anyone might have anticipated. "
"Yeah. " Hammett's eyes came down to the twisted lengths of rod, and he shook
his head. "Killing a woman and a kid in that way. I'd sure like to help you
solve this case. "
Until the man had come up with these two lengths of rusted steel, Holmes
thought, there hadn't been a case to solve. He owed him a great deal, already.
Too, he could not see that a man working for the other side would have given
him the only hard evidence the case had yet generated. This new lieutenant of
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