A Letter of Mary

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A Letter of Mary

by Laurie R. King

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St. Martin's Press

New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

FOR MY BROTHER

LEAHCIM DRAWDE NOSDRAHCIR

AND HIS FAMILY

FROM HIS SISTER EIRAUL EEL

EDITOR'S PREFACE

This is the third in a series of manuscripts taken from a trunk full of odds and ends that was sent to me a few years ago. The puzzle of its origin and why I was its recipient is far from solved. In fact, it becomes more mysterious with each manuscript I publish.

After the first of Mary Russell's stories (The Beekeeper's Apprentice) came out, I received a cryptic postcard that said merely: "More to follow." After the second (A Monstrous Regiment of Women), the following newspaper clipping arrived in the mail:

OXFORD PUNT FOUND IN LONDON

A group of Japanese businessmen on a river cruise yesterday caught and towed to Hampton Court a punt which police have determined originated at Folly Bridge in Oxford. In it were found clothing and a pair of glasses. The Thames Authority has no suggestion as yet how a punt could manoeuvre the locks and deeper stretches of river.

I rose to the challenge. A bit of research determined that the clipping was a filler in the London Times, dated three weeks before the book's publication date. The subsequent phone calls to England cost me an arm and a leg, but eventually I discovered that the clothing (trousers, sensible shoes, and a blouse) was that of a tall, thin woman, and it had been found carefully folded on the cushions, with the glasses on top. There was no suicide note. The pole was in the boat (a punt is not rowed or motorized, I gather, but shoved along with a wooden pole). Downstream from Oxford, the river becomes too deep for the punter to reach the bottom.

I even found out that the police dusted the thing for prints, which sounded like a joke until my informant told me how much a wooden punt costs nowadays. With a vague idea that this might someday help me find where my trunk had come from, I asked for a set of the prints. It took a while to clear this with the higher authorities, but I did after some months receive a copy of the forensic report, which informed me that they had been made by two people, both with long, thin hands, one of them slightly bigger and thus probably male, the other with a scar across one of the pads. The scarred ones had been found on the glasses.

Interestingly enough, the fingerprints taken from the sides of the punt match those on a filthy clay pipe that was in the trunk with the manuscripts.

I should also mention that the inlaid box described in the following pages does exist, although when it reached me, there was no manuscript inside. It did hold a pair of black-lensed glasses, a dainty handkerchief embroidered with the letter M, and a key.

The key, I have been told, is to a safety-deposit box. There is absolutely no way of knowing where that box is.

— Laurie R. King

... I would terrify you by letters.

— The Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 10:9

PART ONE

Tuesday, 14 August 1923-

Friday, 24 August 1923

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

— John Adams

ONE

alpha

The envelope slapped down onto the desk ten inches from my much-abused eyes, instantly obscuring the black lines of Hebrew letters that had begun to quiver an hour before. With the shock of the sudden change, my vision stuttered, attempted a valiant rally, then slid into complete rebellion and would not focus at all.

I leant back in my chair with an ill-stifled groan, peeled my wire-rimmed spectacles from my ears and dropped them onto the stack of notes, and sat for a long minute with the heels of both hands pressed into my eye sockets. The person who had so unceremoniously delivered this grubby interruption moved off across the room, where I heard him sort a series of envelopes chuk-chuk-chuk into the wastepaper basket, then stepped into the front hallway to drop a heavy envelope onto the table there (Mrs Hudson's monthly letter from her daughter in Australia, I noted, two days early) before coming back to take up a position beside my desk, one shoulder dug into the bookshelf, eyes gazing, no doubt, out the window at the Downs rolling down to the Channel. I replaced the heels of my hands with the backs of my fingers, cool against the hectic flesh, and addressed my husband.

"Do you know, Holmes, I had a great-uncle in Chicago whose promising medical career was cut short when he began to go blind over his books. It must be extremely frustrating to have one's future betrayed by a tiny web of optical muscles. Though he did go on to make a fortune selling eggs and trousers to the gold miners," I added. "Whom is it from?"

"Shall I read it to you, Russell, so as to save your optic muscles for the metheg and your beloved furtive patach?" His solicitous words were spoilt by the sardonic, almost querulous edge to his voice. "Alas, I have become a mere secretary to my wife's ambitions. Kindly do not snort, Russell. It is an unbecoming sound. Let me see." I felt his arm come across my desk, and I heard the letter whisper as it was plucked up. "The envelope is from the Hôtel Imperial in Paris, a name which contains distinct overtones of sagging mattresses and ominous nocturnal rustling noises in the wardrobe. It is addressed simply to Mary Russell, no title whatsoever. The hand is worthy of some attention. A woman's writing, surely, though almost masculine in the way the fingers grasp the pen. The writer is obviously highly educated, a 'professional woman,' to use the somewhat misleading modern phrase; I venture to say that this particular lady does not depend on her womanliness for a livelihood. Her t's reveal her to be an impatient person, and there is passion in the sweeps of her uprights, yet her s's and a's speak of precision and the lower edge of each line is as exact as it is authoritative. She also either has great faith in the French and English postal systems or else is so self-assured as to consider the insurance of placing her name or room number on the envelope unnecessary. I lean toward the latter theory."

As this analysis progressed, I recovered my glasses, the better to study my companion where he stood in the bright window, bent over the envelope like a jeweller with some rare uncut stone, and I was hit by one of those odd moments of analytical apartness, when one looks with a stranger's eyes on something infinitely familiar. Physically, Sherlock Holmes had changed little since we had first met on these same Sussex Downs a bit more than eight years before. His hair was slightly thinner, certainly greyer, and his grey eyes had become even more deeply hooded, so that the resemblance to some far-seeing, sharp-beaked raptor was more marked than ever. No, his body had only exaggerated itself; the greatest changes were internal. The fierce passions that had driven him in his early years, years before I was even born, had subsided, and the agonies of frustration he had felt when without a challenge, frustration that had led him to needles filled with cocaine and morphia, were now in abeyance. Or so I had thought.

I watched him as his long fingers caressed the much-travelled envelope and his eyes drew significance from every smudge, every characteristic of paper and ink and stamp, and it occurred to me suddenly that Sherlock Holmes was bored.

The thought was not a happy one. No person, certainly no woman, likes to think that her marriage has lessened the happiness of her partner. I thrust the troublesome idea from me, reached up to rub a twinge from my right shoulder, and spoke with a shade more irritation than was called for.

"My dear Holmes, this verges on deductio ad absurdum. Were you to open the envelope and identify the writer, it just might simplify matters."

"All in good time, Russell. I further note a partial set of grimy fingerprints along the back of the envelope, with a matching thumbprint on the front. However, I believe we can discount them, as they have the familiar look of the hands of our very own postal-delivery boy, whose bicycle chain is in constant need of repair."

"Holmes, my furtive patachs await me. The letter?"

"Patience is a necessary attribute of the detective's makeup, Russell. And, I should have thought, the scholar's. However, as you say." He turned away, and the sharp zip of a knife through cheap paper was followed by a dull thud as the knife was reintroduced into the frayed wood of the mantelpiece. There was a thin rustle. His voice sounded amused as he began to read. " 'Dear Miss Russell,' it begins, dated four days ago.

Dear Miss Russell,

I trust you will not be offended by my form of address. I am aware that you have married, but I cannot bring myself to assign a woman her husband's name unless I have been told that such is her desire. If you are offended, please forgive my unintentional faux pas.

You will perhaps remember me, Dorothy Ruskin, from your visit to Palestine several years ago. I have remained in that land since then, assisting at three preliminary digs until such time as I can arrange funding for my own excavations. I have been called back home for an interview by my potential sponsors, as well as to see my mother, who seems to be on her deathbed. There is a matter of some interest which I wish to lay before you while I am in England, and I would appreciate it if you would allow me to come and disturb your peace for a few hours. It would have to be on the twenty-second or twenty-third, as I return to Palestine directly my business is completed. Please confirm the day and time by telegram at the address below.

I believe the matter to be of some interest and potentially considerable importance to your chosen field of study, or I would not be bothering you and your husband.

I remain,

Most affectionately yours,

Dorothy Ruskin

"The address below is that of the Hôtel Imperial," Holmes added.

I took the letter from Holmes and quickly skimmed the singular hand that strode across the flimsy hotel paper. "A decent pen, though," I noted absently. "Shall we see her?"

"We? My dear Russell, I am the husband of an emancipated woman who, although she may not yet vote in an election, is at least allowed to see her own friends without male chaperonage."

"Don't be an ass, Holmes. She obviously wants to see both of us, or she would not have written that last sentence. We'll have her for tea, then. Wednesday or Thursday?"

"Wednesday is Mrs Hudson's half day. Miss Ruskin might have a better tea if she came Thursday."

"Thank you, Holmes," I said with asperity. I admit that cooking is not my strong point, but I object to having my nose rubbed in the fact. "I'll write to let her know either day is fine but that Thursday is slightly better. I wonder what she wants."

"Funding for an all-woman archaeological dig, I shouldn't wonder. That would be popular with the British authorities and the Zionists, would it not? And think of the attraction it would have for the pilgrims and the tourists. It's a wonder the Americans haven't thought of it."

"Holmes, enough! Begone! I have work to do."

"Come for a walk."

"Not just now. Perhaps this evening I could take an hour off."

"By this evening, you will be bogged down to the axles in the prophet Isaiah's mud and too irritable to make a decent walking companion. You've been rubbing your bad shoulder for the last forty minutes although it is a warm afternoon, which means you need to get out and breathe some fresh air. Come."

He held out one long hand to me. I looked down at the cramped lines marching across the page, capped my pen, and allowed him to pull me to my feet.

* * *

We walked along the cliffs rather than descending the precipitous beach path, and listened to the gulls cry and the waves surge on the shingle below. The good salt air filled my lungs, cleared my head, and took the ache from my collarbone, and eventually my thoughts turned, not to the intricacies of Hebrew grammar but to the implications of the letter that lay on my desk.

"What do you know of the archaeology of Palestine, Holmes?"

"Other than what we discovered when we were there four and a half years ago— which trip, as I recall, was dominated by an extraordinary number of damp and hazardous underground chambers— almost nothing. I suspect that I shall know a great deal more before too much longer."

"You think there is something to Miss Ruskin's letter, then?"

"My dear Russell, I have not been a consulting detective for more than forty years for nothing. I can spot a case sniffing around my door even before it knows itself to be one. Despite what I said about allowing you to see her alone, your Miss Ruskin— yes, I know she is not yours, but she thinks she is— your Miss Ruskin wishes to present a puzzle to the partnership of Holmes and Russell, not merely to Mary Russell, a brilliant young star on the horizon of academic theology. Unless you think my standard degree of megalomania is becoming compounded by senility," he added politely.

"Megalomania, perhaps; senility, never." I stood and watched a small fishing boat lying off shore, and I wondered what to do. The work was going slowly, and I could ill afford to take even half a day away from it. On the other hand, it would be a joy to spend some time with that peculiar old lady, whom I indeed remembered very well. Also, Holmes seemed interested. It would at least provide a distraction until I could decide what needed doing for him. "All right, we'll have her here a day sooner, then, on the Wednesday. I'll suggest the noon train. I'm certain Mrs Hudson can be persuaded to leave something for our tea, so we need not risk our visitor's health. I also think I'll go to Town tomorrow and drop by the British Museum for a while. Will you come?"

"Only if we can stay for the evening. They're playing Tchaikovsky's D at Covent Garden."

"And dinner at Simpson's?" I said lightly, ruthlessly ignoring the internal wail at the waste of time.

"But of course."

"Will you go to the BM with me?"

"Briefly, perhaps. I had a note from the owner of a rather bijou little gallery up the street, inviting me to view the canvas of that Spaniard, Picasso, that I retrieved for them last month. I should be interested to see it in its natural habitat, as it were, to determine if it makes any more sense there than it did in that warehouse on the docks where I found it. Although, frankly, I have my doubts."

"That's fine, then," I said politely. Suddenly, Holmes was not at my side but blocking my way, his hands on my shoulders and his face inches from mine.

"Admit it, Russell. You've been bored."

His words so echoed my own analysis of his mental state that I could only gape at him.

"You've been tucked into your books for a solid year now, ever since we came back from France. You might be able to convince yourself that you're nothing but a scholar, Russell, but you can't fool me. You're as hungry as I am for something to do."

Damn the man, he was right. He was wrong, too, of course— men have a powerful drive to simplify matters, and it would be convenient for him to dismiss the side of my life that did not involve him— but as soon as he said it, I could feel the hunger he was talking about, waking in me. I had in the past discovered the immense appeal of a life on the edge of things— walking a precipice, pitting oneself against a dangerous enemy, throwing one's mind against an impenetrable puzzle.

The waking was brief, as I ruthlessly knocked the phantasy back into its hole. If Dorothy Ruskin had a puzzle, it was not likely to be anything but mild and elderly. I sighed, and then, realising that Holmes was still staring into my face, I had to laugh.

"Holmes, we're a pair of hopeless romantics," I said, and we turned and walked back to the cottage.

TWO

beta

Shortly before midday on the appointed Wednesday, I drove my faithful Morris to the station to meet Miss Ruskin's train. It was four and a half years since we had met near Jericho, and though I would have known her anywhere, she had changed. Her chopped-off hair was now completely white. She wore a pair of glasses, the lenses of which were so black as to seem opaque, and she favoured her right leg as she stepped down from the train. She did not see me at first, but stood peering about her, a large khaki canvas bag clutched in one hand. I crossed the platform towards her and corrected myself— some things had changed not at all. Her face was still burnt to brown leather by the desert sun, her posture still that of a soldier on parade, her clothing the same idiosyncratic variation on the early suffragist uniform of loose pantaloons, tailored shirt, jacket, and high boots that I had seen her wear in Palestine. The boots and clothing looked new, and somehow ineffably French, despite their lack of anything resembling fashion.

"Good day, Miss Ruskin," I called out. "Welcome to Sussex."

Her head spun around and the deep voice, accustomed to wide spaces and the command of native diggers, boomed out across the rustic station.

"Miss Russell, is that you? Delighted to see you. Very good of you to have me at such short notice." She grasped my hand in her heavily calloused one. The top of her squashed hat barely reached my chin, but she dominated the entire area. I led her to the car, helped her climb in, started the engine, and enquired about her leg.

"Oh, yes, most annoying. Fell into a trench when the props collapsed. Bad break, spent a month in Jerusalem flat on my back. Stupid luck. Right in the middle of the season, too. Wasted half the year's dig. Use better wood now for the props." She laughed, short coughs of humour that made me grin in response.

"I saw some of your finds in the British Museum recently," I told her. "That Hittite slab was magnificent, and of course the mosaic floor. How on earth did they make those amazing blues?"

She was pleased, and she launched off on a highly technical explanation of the art and craft of mosaics that went far above my head and lasted until I pulled into the circular drive in front of the cottage. Holmes heard the car and came to meet us. Our guest climbed awkwardly out and marched over to greet him, hand extended and talking all the while as we moved inside and through the house.

"Mr Holmes, good to see you, as yourself this time, and in your own home. Though I do admit that you wear the djellaba better than most white men, and the skin dye was very good. You are looking remarkably well. How old are you? Rude question, I know, one of the advantages of getting old— people are forced to overlook rudeness. You are? Only a few years younger than I am, looks more like twenty. Maybe I should have married. A bit late now, don't you think? Miss Russell— all right if I call you that? Or do you prefer Mrs Holmes? Miss Russell, then— d'you know, you've married one of the three sensible men I've ever met. Brains are wasted on most men— do nothing with their minds but play games and make money. Never see what's in front of their noses, too busy making sweeping generalisations. What's that? The other two? Oh, yes, one was a winemaker in Provence, tiny vineyard, a red wine to make you weep. The other's dead now, an Arab sheikh with seven wives. Couldn't write his name, but his children all went to university. Girls, too. I made him. Ha! Ha!" The barking laugh bounced off the walls in the room and set the ears to ringing. We took our lunch outside, under the great copper beech.

During the meal, our guest regaled us with stories of archaeology in Palestine, which was just getting under way now in the postwar years. The British Mandate in Palestine was giving its approval to the beginnings of archaeology as a science and a discipline.

"Shocking, it was, before the war. No sense of the way to do things. Had people out there rummaging about, destroying more than they found, native diggers coming in with these magnificent finds, no way of dating them or knowing where they came from. All that could be done with 'em was to stick 'em in a museum, prop up a card saying SOURCE: UNKNOWN; DATE; UNKNOWN. Utter waste."

"Didn't Petrie say something about museums being morgues, or tombs?" I asked.

"Charnel houses," she corrected me. "He calls them 'ghastly charnel houses of murdered evidence.' Isn't that a fine phrase? Wish I'd written it." She repeated it, relishing the shape of the words in her mouth. "And during the war, my God! I spent those years doing nothing but stopping soldiers from using walls and statues for target practice! Incredible stupidity. Found one encampment using a Bronze Age well as their privy and rubbish tip. Course, the idiots didn't realise their own water supply was connected to it. Should've told 'em, I know, but who am I to interfere in divine justice? Ha! Ha!"

"Surely, though, most of the digs are more carefully run now," I suggested. "Even before the war, Reisner's stratigraphic techniques were becoming more widely used. And doesn't the Department of Antiquities keep an eye on things?" My rapid tutorial at the hands of one of the British Museum's more helpful experts at least enabled me to ask intelligent questions.

"Oh, yes indeed, improving rapidly, things are. Of course, there's no room for amateurs like myself now, though I'll be allowed to make drawings and notes when I get back. There's talk of opening the City of David, really exciting. But still, we get Bedouins wandering in with sacks of amazing things, pottery and bronze statuettes, last month a heart-stopping ivory carving, magnificent thing, part of a processional scene, completely worthless from a historical point of view, of course. He wouldn't tell us where in the desert it came from, so it can't be put in its proper archaeological setting. A pity. Oh, yes, that's more or less why I'm here. Where's my bag?"

I brought it from the sitting room, where she had casually dumped it on a table. She opened it and dug through various books, articles of clothing, and papers, finally coming out with a squarish object wrapped securely in an Arab man's black-and-white head covering.

"Here we are," she said with satisfaction as she displayed a small intricately carved and inlaid wooden box. She laid it in front of me, then bent to replace various objects into the bag.

"I'd like you to look at this and tell me what you think. Already gave it to two so-called experts, both men of course, who each took one look and said it was a fake, couldn't possibly be a first-century papyrus. I'm not so sure. Really I'm not. May be worthless, but thought of you when I wondered whom to give it to. Show it to whomever you like. Do what you can with it. Let me know what you think. Yes, yes, take a look. Any more tea in that pot, Mr Holmes?"

The box fit into one hand and opened smoothly. Inside was nestled, secure in a tissue bed, a small roll of papyrus, deeply discoloured at the top and bottom edges. I touched it delicately with my finger. The tissue rustled slightly.

"Oh, it's quite sturdy. I've had it unrolled, and the two 'experts' didn't coddle it any. One said it was a clever modern forgery, which is absurd, considering how I got it. The other said it was probably from a madwoman during the Crusades. Experts!" She threw up her hands eloquently, eliciting a sympathetic laugh from Holmes. "At any rate, the experts deny it, so we amateurs can do as we please with it. It's all yours. I started on it, but my eyes are no good now for fine work." She took off her dark glasses, and we saw the clouds that edged onto the brilliant blue of her eyes. "The doctors in Paris say it's because of the sun, that if I wear these troublesome things and stay inside all the time, it'll be five years before they have to operate. Told them there was no point in having the years if I couldn't work, but, being men, they didn't understand. Ah well, five years will get me going, if I can get the money to start my dig, and after that I'll retire happy. Which has nothing to do with you, of course, but that's why I'm giving you the manuscript."

I took the delicate roll from its box and gently spread it out on the table. Holmes pinned the right end down with two fingers and I looked at the beginning, which, as the language was Greek, began at the upper left. The spiky script was neat, though the whole eighteen inches were badly stained and the edges deeply worn, in places obscuring the text. I bent over the first words, then paused. Odd; I could not be reading them correctly. I went back to the opening words, got the same results, and finally looked up at Miss Ruskin, perplexed. Her eyes were sparkling with mischief and amusement as she looked over the top of her cup at me.

"You see why the experts denied it, then?"

"That is obvious, but—"

"But why do I doubt them?"

"You couldn't seriously think—"

"Oh, but I do. It is not impossible. I agree it's unlikely, but if you leave aside all preconceived notions of what leadership could have been in the first century, it's not at all impossible. I've been poking my nose into manuscripts like this for half a century, and though it's somewhat out of my period, I'm sorry, this does not smell like a recent forgery or a crusader's wife's dream."

It finally got through to me that she was indeed serious. I stared at her, aghast and spluttering.

"Would you two kindly let me in on this?" interrupted Holmes with admirable patience. I turned to him.

"Just look at how it starts, Holmes."

"You translate it, please. I have worked hard to forget what Greek I once knew."

I looked at the treacherous words, mistrusting my eyes, but they remained the same. Stained and worn, they were, but legible.

"It appears to be a letter," I said slowly, "from a woman named Mariam, or Mary. She refers to herself as an apostle of Joshua, or Jesus, the 'Anointed One,' and it is addressed to her sister, in the town of Magdala."

THREE

gamma

Holmes busied himself with his pipe, his lips twitching slightly, his eyes sparkling like those of Miss Ruskin.

"I see," was his only comment.

"But it's not possible—" I began.

Miss Ruskin firmly cut me off. "It is quite possible. If you read your Greek Testament carefully, ignoring later exclusive definitions of the word apostle, it becomes obvious that Mary the Magdalene was indeed an apostle, and in fact she was even sent (which is, after all, what the verb apostellein means) to the other— the male— apostles with the news of their Master's resurrection. As late as the twelfth century, she was referred to as 'the apostle to the apostles.' That she fades from view in the Greek Testament itself does not necessarily mean too much. If she remained in Jerusalem as a member of the church there, which after all was regarded as merely one more of Judaism's odder sects, all trace of her could easily have disappeared with the city's destruction in the year 70. If she were still alive then, she would have been an old woman, as she could hardly have been less than twenty when Jesus was put to death around the year 30— but impossible? I would hesitate to use that word, Miss Russell, indeed I would."

I drew several deep breaths and tried to compose my thoughts.

"Miss Ruskin, if there is any chance that this is authentic, it has no place in my hands. I'm no expert in Greek or first-century documents. I'm not even a Christian."

"I told you, it's already been seen by the two foremost experts in the field, and they have both rejected it. You want to send a copy to someone else, that's fine. Send it to anyone you can think of. Publish it in The Times, if it makes you happy. But, keep the thing itself, would you? It's mine, and I like the idea of your having it. If you don't feel comfortable with it, lend it to the BM. They'll throw it in a corner for a few centuries until it rots, I suppose, but perhaps some deserving student will uncover it and get a D Phil out of it. Meanwhile, play with it for a while, and as I said, let me know what you come up with. It's yours now. I've done what I could for Mariam."

I allowed the little conundrum to curl itself up and then placed it thoughtfully back into its box with the snug lid.

"How did it come to you? And the box? That's surely not first century?"

"Heavens no. Renaissance Italian, from the style of inlay, but I'm no expert on modern stuff. The two came together, though I added the tissue paper to stop it from rattling about. Got it about four months ago, just before Easter. I was in Jerusalem— had just come back from a visit to Luxor, Howard Carter's dig. Quite a find he's got there, eh? Pity about Carnarvon, though. Any road, I had just been back a day or so when this old Bedouin came to my door with a bundle of odds and ends to sell. Couldn't think why he came to me. They all know I don't buy things like that, don't like to encourage it. I told him so, and I was about to shut the door in his face when he said something about 'Aurens.' That's the name a lot of the Arabs call Ned Lawrence— you know, the Arab revolt Lawrence? Right, well, I knew him a bit when he was working at Carchemish before the war, at Woolley's dig in Syria. Brilliant young man, Lawrence. Pity he got sidetracked into blowing things up, he could have done some fine work. Seems to have lost interest. Oh well, never too late, he's still young. Where was I? Oh, right, the Bedouin. Turned out this Bedouin knew him then, too, and rode with him during the war, destroying bridges and railway lines and what not.

"His English was not too great— this Bedouin's, that is, not Lawrence's, of course— but over numerous cups of coffee, with my Arabic and his English, it turned out that he'd been injured during the war and now was finding it difficult to get work. A lot of these people are being crowded out of their traditional way of life and have no real skills for the modern world. Sad, really. Seems that was his case. So, he was selling his possessions to buy food. Sounds like the standard hard-luck story to convince a gullible European to hand over some cash, but somehow the man didn't strike me that way. Dignified, not begging. And his right hand was indeed scarred and nearly useless. Tragic, that, for an Arab, as you know. So I looked at his things.

"Some of them were rubbish, but there were half a dozen beautiful things: three necklaces, a bracelet, two very old figurines. Told him I couldn't afford what they were worth but that I'd take him to someone who could. At first, he thought I was just putting him off, couldn't believe I was not trying to buy at a cut price, but the next day I took him to a couple of collectors and got them to give him every farthing of their value. Amounted to quite a bit, in the end. He was speechless, wanted to give me some of it, but I couldn't take it, could I? I told him that if he wanted to repay me, he could promise never to be involved with digging up old things for sale. That'd be payment enough. He went off; I went back to my sketches for the dig.

"About a month later, late one night, he appeared again at my door, on site this time, with another bag. Oh Lord, I thought, Not again! But he handed me the bag and said it was for me. There were two things in it. The first was a magnificent embroidered dress, which he said his wife had made for me. The other was this box. He told me it came from his mother, had been in the family for generations, since before the Prophet came. I knew it wasn't that old, and he must have seen something on my face, because he took the box and opened it to show me the manuscript. That was what his family had owned for so long, not the box, he said, which had been his father's. He told me, if I understood him right— he would insist on speaking English, though my Arabic's better than his was— that it had been in a sort of pottery mould or figurine when he was a child. It broke when he was twelve, and the whole family was terrified that something awful would happen— sounds like a sort of household god, doesn't it? They hadn't known there was anything inside the figure. Nothing much happened, though, and after a while his father put the manuscript into a box he had been given by some European. It came to this man when his parents were killed during the war, and as he himself had no children, he and his wife decided to bring it to me. I tried to give it back to him, but he was deeply offended, so in the end I took it. Haven't seen him since."

The three of us sat contemplating the appealing little object that sat on the table amidst empty cups and the remains of the cheese tray. It was about six inches long, slightly less than that in depth, and about five in height, and the finely textured blond wood of its thick sides and lid was intricately carved with a miniature frieze of animals and vegetation. A tiny palm tree arched over a lion the size of my thumbnail; its inlaid amber eyes twinkled haughtily in a shaft of sunlight. There was a chip out of one of the box's corners, and two of the giraffe's shiny jet spots were missing, but on the whole, it was remarkably free of blemish.

"I think, Miss Ruskin, that the box alone is an overly valuable gift."

"I suppose it is of value, but it pleases me to give it to you. Can't keep it— too many things disappear when one is on a dig— and can't bring myself to sell it. It is yours."

" 'Thank you' sounds inadequate, but if you wanted to be sure it has a good home, it has found one. I shall cherish it."

An enigmatic smile played briefly over her lips, as at a secret joke, but she said, only, "That's all I wanted."

"Shall we have a glass of wine to celebrate it? Holmes?"

He went off to the house, and I tore my eyes away from the beguiling present.

"Can you stay for supper?" I asked. "Your telegram didn't say when you had to be back, and the housekeeper has left us a nice rabbit pie, so you wouldn't have to face my cooking."

"No, I can't. I'd like to, but I have to be back in London by nine— dinner with a new sponsor. Have to talk up the glory that was Jerusalem to the rich fool. Plenty of time for a glass of your wine, though, and a stroll over your hills." She sighed happily. "We used to come down to the coast every summer when I was a child. The air hasn't changed a bit, or the light."

We took our glasses and walked over the hills to the sea, and when we returned to the cottage, Holmes asked her if she wanted to see the beehives. She said yes, so he found her a bee hat and gloves and overalls, things he himself rarely used. She was at first nervous, then determined, and finally fascinated as he opened a hive and showed her the levels of occupation, the queen's quarters, the neat texture of the honeycombs, the logical, ruthless social structure of the colony. She asked numerous intelligent questions, and she seemed both relieved and reluctant to see the internal workings disappear again behind their wooden walls.

"Had a nasty experience with bees one time," she said abruptly, and pulled off the voluminous hat. "Lived in the country. My sister and I were close then, played lots of games. One was to leave coded messages, in the Greek alphabet sometimes, or little treasures— bits of food— inside this abandoned cistern. Must've been mediaeval," she reflected. "Storing root crops. We called it 'Apocalypse,' had to lift the cover off, you see? Happy times. Golden summers. One day, my sister hid a chocolate bar in Apocalypse, went back for it the next day, and a swarm of bees had moved in. Both of us badly stung, terrified. Apocalypse filled in. Seemed like the closing of paradise."

"They were probably wasps," commented Holmes.

"Do you think so? Good heavens, you may be right. Just think, all those years of hating bees, dispelled in an afternoon. Didn't know you were an alienist, Mr Holmes, among your other skills." She chuckled.

We made our way back to the terrace, where I served a substantial tea while she entertained us with stories of the bureaucrats in Cairo during the war.

Finally, she stood up to go. She paused at the car and looked over the front of the cottage.

"I can't think when I've enjoyed an afternoon more." She sighed.

"If you have another free day before you go, it would be a great pleasure to have you again," I suggested.

"Oh, won't be possible, I'm afraid." Her eyes were hidden again behind the black glasses, but her smile seemed somewhat wistful.

The drive into town was slowed by the number of farm vehicles about on a summer afternoon, but I had allowed plenty of time, and we talked easily about books and the uncluttered and unrecoverable pleasures of life as an Oxford undergraduate. Then she abruptly changed the topic.

"I like your Mr Holmes. Very like Ned Lawrence, d'you know? Both of 'em positively quivering with passion, always under iron control, both stuffed full of ability and common sense and that backwards approach to a problem that marks a true genius, and at the same time this incongruous tendency to mystify, a compulsion almost to obfuscate and to conceal themselves behind an air of myth and mystery. Ned's extravagances," she added thoughtfully, "are almost certainly due to his small stature and the domination of his mother and will bring him to a sticky end. He'll never have the hands of your man, though."

I was quite floored by this tumble of insight and information so placidly given, and I could only pluck feebly at the last phrase.

"Hands?" Was this some idiosyncratic equine reference to Holmes' height?

"Um. He has the most striking hands I've ever seen on a man. The first thing I noticed about him, back in Palestine. Strong, but more than that. Elegant. Nervous. No, not nervous exactly; acutely sensitive. Aristocratic working-class hands." She grimaced and waved away this uncharacteristic search among the nuances of adjectives. "Remember the Chinese ball?"

"The Chinese— oh yes, the ivory puzzle." I did remember it, a carved ball of ivory so old, it was nearly yellow. It could only be opened by precise pressure at three different points simultaneously. She had handed the ball to Holmes, and he had held it lightly in the palm of his left hand, occasionally caressing it with the fingertips of the other. (Holmes, unlike myself, is right-handed.) The conversation had gone on; Holmes had talked with great animation about his travels in Tibet and the amazing feats of physical control he had witnessed amongst the lamas, and his tour through Mecca, while he occasionally reached down to touch the ball. The magician's apprentice knows to watch the hands, though, and I was gratified to witness the gentle arrangement of thumb and two fingers that loosed the lock and sent the ball's treasure, a lustrous black pearl, rolling gently into the palm of his hand.

"So clever, those hands. It took me six months to figure out that ball, and he did it in twenty minutes. Oh, are we here, then?" She sounded disappointed. "Thank you for the afternoon, and do enjoy Mariam. I'll be interested to know what you think of her. Did I give you my address in Jerusalem? No? Oh, dash it, here comes the train. Where are those cards— in here somewhere." She thrust at me two handfuls of motley papers— a couple of handbills, some typescript, letters, sweet wrappers, telegram flimsies, notes scribbled on the corners of newspapers— as well as three journals, a book, and two glasses cases (one empty), before she emerged with a bent white cardboard rectangle. I poured the papers back into her bag, took the card, and helped her up into the carriage.

"Good-bye, my dear Miss Russell. Come see me again in Palestine!" She seemed on the edge of saying something else, but the whistle blew, the moment passed, and she contented herself with leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I stepped down from the train, and she was gone.

On the way home, I was in time to be greeted by a neighbour's dairy herd being brought down the narrow lane for the night. I took the car out of gear to wait and looked down at my hands. Competent, practical hands, with large knuckles, square nails, rough cuticles, ink stains, and a dusting of freckles. The two outer fingers of the weaker right hand were slightly twisted, a thin white scar almost invisible at their base, near the palm, one remnant of the automobile accident that had taken the lives of my parents and my brother and had left me with a multitude of scars, visible and otherwise, following weeks in the hospital, further weeks in hypnotic psychotherapy, and years in the grip of guilt-inspired nightmares. The hands on the steering wheel were those of a student who farmed during the holidays, ordinary hands that could hold a pen or a hay fork with equal facility.

Holmes' hands, however, were indeed extraordinary. Disembodied, they could as easily have belonged to an artist or surgeon, or a pianist. Or even a successful safe cracksman. As a young man, he had some considerable talent as a boxer, though the thought of putting those hands to such a use made me cringe. Fencing, yes— the nicks and cuts he had picked up left only scars— but to use those sensitive instruments as a means of pummelling another human being into insensibility seemed to me like using a Waterford vase to crack nuts. However, Holmes was never one to believe that any part of himself could be damaged by misuse, which only goes to show that even the most intelligent of men is capable of considerable feeblemindedness.

At any rate, his hands had survived unbroken. As Miss Ruskin had seen, his hands were direct extensions of his mind, the long, inquisitive fingers meandering about over surfaces, lightly touching a shelf or a shoe, until without apparent interference from his brain, they arrived at the key clue, the crux of the investigation. His bony hands were the outer manifestation of his inner self, whether they were probing a lock, tamping shreds of tobacco into his pipe, coaxing a complex theme from his Stradivarius, handling the reins of a fractious horse, or performing a delicate experiment in the laboratory. I had only to look at them to know the state of his mind, how an investigation or experiment was proceeding, and how he thought it might turn out. A person's life is betrayed by the hands, in the calluses and marks and twists of skin and bone. The life of Sherlock Holmes lay in his long, strong, sensitive hands. It was a life that was dear to me.

I looked up, to find the road clear of all but a few gently steaming cowpats, and the farmer's small son staring curiously at me over the gate. I put the car into gear and drove home.

FOUR

delta

For such a short and apparently uneventful episode, the visit of this passionate amateur archaeologist left behind it a disconcerting emptiness. It took a deliberate and conscious effort to return to our normal work, I to my books, Holmes into a laboratory that emitted a variety of odours late into the night, most of them sulpherous, all of them foul. I indulged myself in an hour of deciphering Mariam's letter before returning to the manly declarations of the prophet Isaiah, waved vaguely at Mrs Hudson's greeting and later at her "Good night, Mary," and worked until my vision failed around midnight. I closed my books and found myself looking at the box. Whose hands had so lovingly formed that zebra? I wondered. What Italian craftsman, so far from an obviously well-known and beloved African landscape, had carved this piece of perfection? I rested my eyes on it until they started to droop, then picked up the box and held it while I went through the house, checking the windows and doors. I then climbed the stairs.

Holmes did not look up from his workbench, just grunted when I mentioned the hour. I went down the hallway to the bath. He had not appeared when I returned. I put the box on the bedside table and turned off the lamp, then stood for some minutes in the wash of silver light from the moon, three days from full, and watched the ghostly Downs tumble in frozen motion to the sea. I left the curtains drawn back and took myself solitary to bed, and as I lay back onto the pillow, I realised that Holmes had not read the newspapers for at least three days.

The observation sounds trivial, a minor disturbance on the surface of our lives, but it was no less ominous than a stream's roil that, to the experienced eye, shouts of the great boulder below. Marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person's well-being. With Holmes, one of those indicators was his approach to the London papers.

In his earlier life, the daily papers had been absolutely essential to his work. Dr Watson's accounts are as littered with references to the papers as their sitting room was with the actual product, and without the facts and speculations of the reporters and the personal messages of the agony columns, Holmes would have been deprived of a sense as important as touch or smell.

Now, however, his newspaper habits varied a great deal, depending on whether the case he was on concerned the politics of France, the movements of the art world, or the inner financial doings of the City. Or, indeed, if there was a case at all. He regularly drove the local newsagent to distraction, and vice versa. For weeks on end, Holmes was content with a single edition of one of the London papers, and the Sussex Express for Mrs Hudson. When he was on a case, however, he insisted on nothing less than every edition of every paper, as soon as it could reach him, and for days the normal serenity of our isolated home would be broken by the nearly continuous arrivals and departures of the newsagent's boy, a compulsively garrulous lad with skin like a battlefield and a wall-piercing adenoidal voice.

During one of my absences the previous spring, Holmes had inexplicably changed from one of the more lurid popular papers to The Times, which to my mind has always been eminently suited to morning tea and a discreet scattering of toast crumbs. However, The Times is a morning paper, and it has to travel from London to Eastbourne, from that town to our village, and thence to us. It never reached us much before noon, and often considerably later, if the pimply-faced bicyclist had a puncture or encountered a friend.

If Holmes was at home when the newspaper arrived, he would react in one of two ways, which I had come to watch carefully, as a bellwether of his inner mind. Some days, he would spot the boy coming down the lane and rush down the stairs to snatch it out of whatever hand happened to carry it through the door, hurl himself into the frayed basket chair in front of the fireplace, and bury his head in it, moaning and exclaiming for the better part of an hour. Other days, he would ignore it entirely. It would lie, folded and reproachful, on the table next to the front door. He would pass it by without a glance, drop letters to be posted on top of it, pull a pair of gloves from the drawer beneath it, until eventually, that evening or even the following morning, he would retrieve it, glance through it in a desultory fashion, and discard it in disgust.

Those were the days I dreaded, the days when he was deliberately resisting the pull of London and all it had been to him. He was also unfailingly polite and sweet-tempered on those days— always a signal of great danger. An unread paper meant an unsettled mind, and to this day the sight of a fresh, folded newspaper on a polished surface brings a twinge of apprehension. And for three days, he had only glanced at his newspaper over breakfast.

I lay awake and looked at the box on the table beside the bed, seeing the indistinct sparkle of the moon reflected off the blue eyes of a diminutive monkey perched on a miniature wall, and I felt, frankly, peeved at the intrusion of yet another concern into an already-full schedule.

Holmes had little love for the, as he saw it, irrational pseudodiscipline of theology. He judged it a tragic waste of my mental energies, described it as a more debilitating addiction than cocaine, and bemoaned his inability to wean me from it. I ignored him as best I could, accepted this as the one area of serious mutual incomprehension, and only occasionally wondered if I had chosen it largely to maintain my identity against the tide of Holmes' forceful personality.

Twice since our marriage, cases had come up that demanded my attention as well as his. I had only recently realised that it was not past him to invent something of the sort in order to remove me from academia's clutches. Not this one, of course; it was too elaborate even for his devious mind. He would, however, take full advantage of it, now that an edge had been driven under my single-mindedness, to prise me from my work. A walk along the cliffs was not apt to be the only interruption Dorothy Ruskin's letter brought.

I stared unseeing at the tiny blur of blue light and slid gently into sleep. Oddly enough, my dreams were pleasant.

* * *

The next day, Thursday, The Times arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand. I looked up from the decapitation of my own egg and saw him staring at the page.

"What is it? Holmes?" I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.

IDENTITY SOUGHT OF

LONDON ACCIDENT VICTIM

Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. The victim was an elderly woman with deeply bronzed skin and blue eyes, wearing brown pantaloons and coat, a white blouse, and heavy, laced boots. If any reader thinks he may know the identity of this person, he is asked please to contact his local police station.

I sat down heavily next to Holmes.

"No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock."

In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.

"Shall we drive into Town, then?" I asked him. "Or wait for the noon train?"

"Go get the car out, Russell. I'll put a few things together and talk with Mrs Hudson."

I went and changed into clothes suitable for London, and fifteen minutes later I sat in front of the cottage in the running car. Holmes came around the side of the house, scraping something from the back of his hand with a fingernail, and climbed in. We drove to London in a car filled with heavy silence.

FIVE

epsilon

It was she. She looked, as the dead always do, unreal, and she lay absurdly small and grey on the cold table in the morgue. Her face was relatively undamaged, though the side of her head was a horribly wrong shape, and the faint remnant of a grimace was the only sign that this waxy tanned stuff had once been animated. The rest of her body lay misshapen under the drape, and when Holmes lifted it to examine her injuries, I turned away and studied a row of tools and machines whose purpose I did not want to know, and I listened to him asking his questions while I determinedly ignored my roiling stomach.

"An automobile. She fell down in front of it, then?"

"Yes, sir. Tripped over something and fell right into the street. As you can see, she had cataracts, so her night vision must've been bad. The PC was at the other end of his beat, didn't get there until he heard the screams of one of the witnesses. There were two, a young couple on their way home about twelve-fifteen Thursday morning. They were none too sober, though, and couldn't remember much other than the lady falling and the car squealing off. No registration number, a big black saloon car they said, but then they also said that they saw an old beggar on the street corner, which is hardly likely at that hour, on a quiet street, is it?" The young policeman's laugh rang out against the hard walls, and I fled to the WC down the hall.

When I came out sometime later, I found Holmes by himself in an office that adjoined the morgue. He was seated at a desk, before a neat pile of clothing, clothes that I had last seen upon the woman who now lay on the slab. Beside the clothes lay a large manila envelope, the flap of which had been opened and not yet tied closed again; next to the envelope was a piece of white typing paper, on which were arranged three steel hairpins and a metal button. I knew without looking that the objects would bear evidence of some kind, most likely that of the paint left by the car that had hit her. He looked up from his close examination of one of her boots when I came in.

"Better?"

"Thanks. I was all right, but it was a choice between leaving or hitting that giggling fool over the head with some unspeakable instrument. Can we go now, or are there more forms to sign?"

"Sit down for a moment, Russell, and have a look at her boots."

I did not sit down. I stood looking at him, and I saw the familiar, subtle signs of excitement in the flash of his deep-set grey eyes, the small smile on his lips, the way his fingertips wandered over the leather. The object in his hand had somehow transformed Miss Dorothy Ruskin from a friend who had died into a factor in a case, and I had a brief vision of him on the open hillside, with the wind in his sparse hair, saying that a case was sniffing about his door. It had not come with the woman's arrival, not for him anyway, but it looked very much as if it had come now, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to go home and walk the cliffs and mourn the loss of a good woman, not pick up the boot she had worn.

"What am I going to see on those boots, Holmes?"

Wordlessly, he held out the right one and his powerful glass. Reluctantly, I carried them over to the window. The boots were quite new, the toes only slightly scuffed, the soles barely worn. They were the sort that have holes for the laces along the foot, turning at the ankle into two long rows of protruding hooks— sturdy, comfortable, easy to lace up. I had a similar pair at home, though mine were of softer leather and had the new crêpe rubber soles. And no bloodstains. I held the glass over the lowest pair of hooks. Unlike the others, these were slightly crooked, and each had a minute nick at the underside, matching a hair-thin line in the leather which extended an inch on either side of the hooks. I concentrated on it, and the magnifier brought it into focus: Some thin, sharp edge had cut into the leather, caught from below against the two lowest hooks.

The other boot appeared at my side, and I took it. This was the left one, and it had a similar, almost invisible line, this time running at an angle across the toe, nearly obscured by the scuffs that lay beneath it. I placed the boots parallel to the edge of the desk and handed Holmes back his glass. The basement window looked up onto the street level, and I watched several pairs of feet walk by before I spoke.

"I don't suppose she could have had those marks on her boots when she was with us?"

Holmes paused in the task of securely folding the hairpins and button into the sheet of paper before replacing them in the large evidence envelope. "Is something the matter with your eyes, Russell? Those cuts are on top of everything else. There isn't even much dust in them."

"If she was tripped, then the car was deliberate." I took a deep breath and rubbed my shoulder. "Murder. I must say I wondered, a hit-and-run accident at that time of night. And her bag missing. It seemed unlikely."

"I should think so, Russell. I am relieved to hear that my efforts in your training have not been entirely in vain. I will go and ask the location of the corner where she was killed."

"And the witnesses?"

"And their addresses. Wait here."

* * *

We managed to shake off the helpful young laughing police constable and took a cab to the corner where Miss Ruskin had died. The early afternoon traffic was considerably greater than it had been at 12:15 in the morning, and we added to it as we stood on the corner and crouched down and examined walls and attracted onlookers. It was quite an ordinary corner, with a red pillar box on one side, a new electrical lamp standard on the other, and a blunt office building of dirty yellow bricks set back from the cobblestones by a wide pavement. I chose the pillar box and dropped to my knees in the lee of it, my back to the intersection so as to avoid being trodden on. Omnibuses, automobiles, motor lorries, and horse-drawn wagons rumbled past continuously two feet from my head as I bent down and ran my fingertips delicately over the bottom few inches of painted metal. The box had been painted in the relatively recent past. A woman stopped to post a thick stack of letters, and she stared down at me. I smiled politely, then reached farther around the base, staring blankly into the passing wheels, and my fingers encountered what I had hoped they would not.

I moved around to the other side, knelt with my cheek touching the kerb, and squinted up at the delicate, clean cut that lay approximately six inches up the base. It travelled about a third of the pillar box's circumference and was deepest on the side away from the lamppost.

I rose, threaded my way over to where Holmes was squatting, and told him what I had found. The difference with his find, I saw, was that the equivalent cut in the base of his lamppost completely encircled it. It was also not so deep, and on the far side, away from the pillar box, Holmes' finger traced a length of two parallel indentations. He stretched himself out on the pavement, creating a considerable obstacle, and pulled out his glass. After a minute, he grunted.

"A very fine wire, plied or wrapped. Perhaps even a heavy fishing line. Made up as a beggar, he sat against the wall, with the wire dropped in a loop around the pillar box, across the corner, and twice around the lamppost for extra leverage. The car was waiting just down the street, and when Miss Ruskin came along, the old beggar tightened the wire so it was held about six inches off the ground. She went down, the car came along, and in the confusion afterwards, nobody noticed the man clip the wire, take her bag, and slip away between the buildings. They'll find the car eventually, I expect, a stolen one abandoned somewhere. Let us see what the wall tells us."

Oblivious of the low curses and scandalised looks, Holmes picked himself up from the pavement and made his way to the wall. He hunkered down, with his glass dangling loosely from one hand, and studied the ground.

"About here, I expect. Yes, you see the threads?" I angled my head against the bricks until I could make out a faint fuzz on the rough surface. He fished a pair of surgical tweezers from an inner pocket, picked from the wall an invisible fibre, and held it in front of his magnifying glass. "It appears to be an unpleasant shade of green-grey wool. And here's a dark blue wool, longer staple, at head level for a man of average size. There was indeed a man sitting here begging— or sitting and waiting at any rate— that night, despite the young constable's dismissal of the drunken witnesses. Hold the envelopes, would you? There. No point in looking for fingerprints— he was certainly wearing heavy gloves or the trip wire would surely have cut him and left some nice blood samples, of which there are none. No hair, no cigarette ashes. Curse it! Yesterday we might have found something of value."

We stood up and the crowd of curious onlookers began self-consciously to move off. I finished marking the envelopes and slipped them into a pocket.

"Russell, a bit of footwork now. We need the restaurant she was coming from and the hotel she was going to. I shall take the former and meet you back here in an hour. Right?"

"You really don't think the police will have done this?" I asked plaintively.

"The official forces place an elderly accident victim far down the list in urgency. Having inserted a notice in the papers, they will wait for a response, or so that jovial gentleman in the morgue informed me. At the moment, there is an all-out push against a rash of pickpockets, and if the local police have got around to asking, they have not yet found anything. Surely we can do better than that."

I was forced to agree. We split up, Holmes to retrace Miss Ruskin's steps, I to continue on, in hopes of encountering her destination.

SIX

zeta

I was fortunate, in that the area was not wall-to-wall with hotels and short-term boardinghouses. The sixth one was distinctly second-rate, with pretensions, but my enquiry about an old lady in pantaloons and tall boots paid off. The man at the desk flicked his eyes over me appraisingly, and obviously he did not know what to make of my combination of wire-rimmed glasses, thick, old-fashioned hairstyle, tailored trousers and jacket, expensive silk blouse, and a gold band on my right hand, with no hat, no gloves, and flat shoes. He was forced to abandon all assumptions and treat me matter-of-factly, which was, of course, one of the reasons I dressed as I did.

"Yes, madam, the lady checked in on Monday afternoon. I saw her on Tuesday, in the afternoon, but I was off duty on Wednesday and Thursday."

"Is her key in?"

"Yes, madam, as well as a letter."

"Oh, I wonder if that's why she didn't meet me today at the restaurant? May I?" My tone and my waiting hand made it no question. He automatically held it out for my inspection, and I deftly took it from him. It had a Cambridge postal mark on it. I thrust it into my handbag and smiled at him. "Yes, it's mine. Very worrying, though. I hope she's all right. Do you mind if I have a look in her room, to make sure she's not ill, or perhaps left a note for me? She's very absentminded." I smiled vacuously at this non sequitur and held out my hand again for the key. The man had been off for two days but even so, it was astonishing that he had not yet heard that a woman had died half a mile away. The police could sometimes be terribly slow if they had no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary about an accident.

The man hesitated, but just then a taxi disgorged a family with several small American noisemakers and numerous bags, and he dropped the key into my hand and turned to the harried-looking father. I made haste to disappear.

The lock on room seventeen was much used, but it showed no obvious signs of being recently forced or picked. I let myself into a perfectly ordinary room, with sagging bed, battered dressing table, and bath down the hall. Not knowing Miss Ruskin's habits, I could not know how her room might have looked when she walked out of it on Wednesday, and too, the maid would have been in to clean it. I pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and wandered over to the bed, whistling softly through my teeth— a habit that severely tries my husband, friends, and anyone working near me in a library. Nothing in the drawers next to the bed. The little travelling alarm clock on the table had stopped at 7:10, and I picked it up cautiously to give it a gentle shake. It began ticking again— it had just run down.

Comb on top of the dressing table, several white hairs in it. No cosmetics. A small jar of hand lotion, in which a probing hairpin found no hidden objects. I opened the wardrobe, and the first thing I saw was her khaki bag on a shelf inside. So she had come back here before her dinner appointment, long enough to leave her bag, if not to change her clothes. I lifted one handle and shone my pocket torch at the jumble within, but I couldn't see anything inside that looked immediately different from the glimpses I had had on Wednesday. Wait, though— both glasses cases were occupied. Of course— it had been nearly dark by the time she left the hotel for her appointment, so she would not have needed protective lenses. I let the handle fall. Clothes hanging up, nothing much in the pockets, an overcoat, another pair of shoes, lighter than her boots, but still quite sensible. Two much-travelled valises lay to one side, containing a tangle of clothes, objects, and papers that could as easily have been left in that condition by their owner as violently searched.

I went to the minuscule table next to the window. A pile of papers occupied one corner— the typed reports of a dig, along with several pages of artefact sketches and section drawings— next to three books, two on archaeological techniques and a recent one on Bible theory, and a large square magnifying glass. She would have no worry now about her cataracts, I thought, and suddenly I felt a harsh, red anger wash over me as the fact of her murder became real. I reached down and jerked open a drawer, looking blankly at its emptiness. I sat down, feeling equally empty, and stared out the window. A good woman, whom I liked a great deal and knew almost nothing about, had been carefully, deliberately, brutally murdered. Why? I took the letter from my handbag and contemplated the crime of interfering with His Majesty's postal service.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key in the door. I stood up quickly and shoved the purloined letter into a pocket, but it was not an irate desk clerk; it was the maid, a neat young woman with shiny brown hair, mop and cleaning rags in hand. She saw me and started to back out the door.

"I'm very sorry, miss ... madam. I thought the room was empty. I'll come back later."

"No, please, do come in. Please. Could you— do you have a minute? To answer a few questions? Would you mind closing the door? Thank you. I just was curious about my aunt, who is staying in this room. She didn't show up for a luncheon date, and I wondered if you had perhaps seen her today?"

"No, madam. I haven't seen anyone in this room for about a week. There was a nice young man here then, but no lady."

"This would have been in the last few days. Tell me, on Wednesday, was there much of a mess? Or Thursday? The reason I ask is that she sometimes gets very untidy, and I like to give a little extra to the help then."

She was an honest young woman, and she barely hesitated before answering.

"No, madam, not really a mess. On Tuesday, it was untidy, but nowhere near as bad as some. Wednesday, too, not as untidy. But yesterday, why, you'd barely know anyone had been in. To tell you the truth, I didn't even make up the bed yesterday, just straightened it a bit, 'cause I was in a touch of a hurry, as Nell didn't show up and we was shorthanded, like. I just straightened the bed and the papers and picked up some things from the floor."

I couldn't think of a way to make the next question anything other than what it was.

"Had she moved many things around between Wednesday and yesterday?"

She looked at me sharply then, and I could see that she was as quick as she was honest. She studied me for a minute, and her face changed as she put together the drift of my questions with the news that the desk clerk had lacked.

"Are you— why are you asking me this? Who are you?"

"I'm a friend, not a niece. And yes, she died Wednesday night."

The young woman sat down suddenly on the tightly made bed and stared at me.

"The old lady who was run over?" she whispered. "I didn't know ... I never thought ... They just said an old woman...." The standard response: not someone I know.

"Yes. I saw her earlier that day, and I want to know what she was doing the rest of the day. Her family wants to know." It was a small lie, and might even have been the truth. Fortunately, she believed me. I returned to my question. "She came back here on Wednesday evening, but I don't know for how long. Did the room look as though she had been here for long?"

This appeal to her professional expertise had its effect. She stood up and surveyed the room.

"On Wednesday, now, I made the bed, dusted, straightened the wardrobe. Put out fresh towels. There was a cup on the dressing table. I took that away. The papers were all over the table, so I tidied them, put the pencils in the drawer. That was about all. Then yesterday— let me think. Did the bed. It looked like she'd made it up herself, but it wasn't smooth like I likes to see it, so I tightened it up. I replaced one towel that was next to the washbasin in the corner. Closed the wardrobe— it was standing open. Picked up the magnifying glass— it had fallen under the desk. That was about all."

"The papers and books weren't moved?"

"No, they were right here on Wednesday." She glanced at them, then looked more closely. "That's funny. Oh, I suppose she must have read them and put them back herself. There was a page on the top with some funny drawings— of this little, like a statue of a fat woman, with no clothes. I remember it had big, you know." She sketched a gesture of abundance at her front and blushed. "And I looked at the page under it, too, just curious, you know. You won't tell Mr Lockhart? The manager?"

"Of course not. What was under the drawing of the figurine?"

"Another drawing, of a horse and a kind of cart."

I looked at the papers, but the top four sheets were all typescript. I thumbed through the stack carefully and halfway down the pile found the page with three drawings of a fertility figure, and several pages further on the drawing of the war chariot. I held them thoughtfully.

"In the same place, you say? But she had looked through them and put them back straight."

"Funny, isn't it? She wasn't that tidy with them Tuesday and Wednesday."

"Yes, well, perhaps she was embarrassed when she realised what a mess she'd left."

"Maybe," she said dubiously. Working as a maid in an hotel no doubt made one sceptical of the human generosity of spirit.

"Well, thank you, Miss ..."

"I'm Sally, madam, Sally Wells."

"And if her family want to reach you again, what days do you work?"

"I have Saturday afternoon and all Sunday free, madam. Oh, madam, that's not necessary. No, I couldn't take that. Well, maybe part of it. Thank you, madam."

"It's I who thank you, Miss Wells. For the family, that is. You've been most helpful. No, I don't think you need clean in here for the next two or three days, until we can remove her things. And it would be best if you could remain ... discreet, until then. It wouldn't do to have people trooping in and out of here. I knew you'd understand. Thank you again, Miss Wells."

Downstairs, I dropped the key on the desk and asked how long Miss Ruskin had paid for the room.

"I believe she was planning on leaving us this afternoon, madam."

"The room will be needed until Sunday," I said firmly, and took a bank note from my bag. "Will that cover it?"

"Yes, indeed it will, madam, but—"

"Good, then I'd like the room left as it is until then, please. No one is to enter it."

"Very good, madam," he said dubiously. "May I ask, did madam find her aunt?"

"Oh yes, I found her, I'm afraid. Now there's the problem of what to do about her."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. Good day."

I ignored his uncertain protests and questions, turned, and walked quickly out onto the street. As I approached the corner where Dorothy Ruskin had died, I saw the spare figure of Holmes, leaning against the ugly yellow wall from which he had extracted the wool fibres. He was reading a newspaper, the Morning Post by the look of it. At the sight of his shoulders, my heart lifted— he, too, had been successful. I waited for a gap in the traffic and stepped briskly down from the pavement.

Halfway across, my momentum faltered. Within the space of two steps, I came to a frozen halt, mesmerised by the sight before my eyes. The vertical edge of the approaching kerb was splattered by what looked like a glaze of reddish brown paint but which I knew with utter certainty most horribly was not. The street and the paving stones had been scrubbed down, but the edge had been overlooked, and the sun caught with nauseating clarity the thick blobs of colour, broken in the middle by lines where the sluicing water had made runnels, fading after a few feet to smears and splashes and drips. The strip of stained paving loomed up huge across my vision, and for a brief instant I seemed to glimpse white hair falling in a circle of streetlight, starting to rise, a flare of headlamps and a dimly seen figure crouched against the wall, heard a roar of sudden acceleration and the squeal of tires and the heavy wet sound of metal meeting flesh, and the roar built into a dizzying, pounding noise in my ears that took over all sight, thought, awareness.

I have never fainted in my life, but I would have done so on that street corner had it not been for the abrupt pain of an iron grasp on my arm and Holmes speaking fiercely in my ear.

"Good Lord, Russell, are you trying to reenact the accident? Come, you need to sit down. There's a café down the street."

Movement, faces peering, a deep and shaky breath and the roaring sound fading, Holmes' grip on my upper arm.

"Now sit down. I'll return in a minute."

Seated. Seeing the intricacy of white threads, interwoven, over, under, over in the cloth; two small perfect crumbs; the distorted face of an immensely pale blond woman in spectacles from the bowl of a spoon. I closed my eyes.

The gentle iron fingers returned, on my shoulder; a rattle of china came from in front of me. "Drink this." A hot cup was between my inexplicably cold fingers; scalding rich coffee and the fumes of brandy hit my throat and head in a rush of life. I sat for some minutes, eyes closed and two strong fingers steady on the back of my wrist. The urge to tremble lessened, then passed. I took a deep breath, glanced over at my companion, and reached for the coffee spoon to give my hands something to do.

"Did you have any of your breakfast this morning, Russell?" I shook my head briefly. "I thought not. Here, eat. Then we can talk."

Plates began to appear, and I forced some warm bread and oniony soup into my throat, and after a few swallows it was easier. Over the cheese, I looked up with a crooked smile.

"I'm sorry, Holmes. I saw ... there was blood on the kerbstone."

"Yes, I noticed. There is no need to apologise."

"I feel extremely foolish."

"The violent death of a good person is a severely disturbing thing, Russell," he said calmly. "Now, what did you find?"

In a moment, with an effort, I matched his tone.

"Her room. A maid, who told me without telling me that the room had been searched, carefully, between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. Papers disturbed, bed undone and remade, that kind of thing. And, a letter." I pulled it from my pocket and gave it to him. "I couldn't decide whether or not to open it. You decide."

He did not answer, only put it carefully in an inside pocket. He put his hand in the air and asked the waiter for a bill and a cab.

"Where are we going now, Holmes?" I felt weak but was not about to let him know.

"A visit to Mycroft's rooms is, I believe, in order."

I was surprised. I had expected him to answer by saying Scotland Yard, or one of the half-dozen bolt-holes he kept throughout the city— but Mycroft? His corpulent, indolent older brother might indeed throw some light on the matter at hand, were it to be connected with the arcana of international politics rather than mere civil crime. However, we had as yet no indication that this might be the case, and until we did, I could see no point in consulting him.

I voiced my objections, and when I had finished, I added, "And aside from that, Mycroft will not be at home for some hours yet."

Unruffled, Holmes laid a generous tip on the white cloth and escorted me to the door with that formality that masks an iron command.

He was silent in the taxi. I watched him covertly while the food and the purposeful movement of the taxi did their work and everyday reality took root, and by the time the housekeeper had let us into Mycroft's unoccupied rooms, I had recovered sufficiently to begin worrying about the effect this episode would have on Holmes. I sank into a soft chair and let Holmes pull up his chair and take out his tobacco. I cleared my throat.

"I really am most sorry for that lapse, Holmes," I said quietly. "As you know, it is difficult for me to be indifferent when it comes to an automobile accident. I'm afraid that my imagination got the better of me for a moment."

"Enough, Russell. Everyone is allowed a weakness, even a woman of the twentieth century. You have no need to convince me that you are no squeamish and fainting female. Now, if you are quite finished laying your abject humility at my feet, perhaps you would be so good as to give me the details of your investigation. Then I think you may be interested in mine."

A thin haze of blue smoke filled the room by the time I finished. We sat for a few minutes, and then he stirred.

"That her papers were rifled is, of course, suggestive. I thought that might be the case. And I agree: It is most likely that the room was searched after she died. Had there been a chance of her returning to the room, they would have been more careful about returning the papers to their proper order. I think you might at some point have another look at her bag, to see if your memory of its contents on Wednesday differs from what remains in the hotel. Not immediately. Would you like a glass of wine, or some tea? No?" He rose and went over to the cabinet, rattled bottles, and added a swoosh from the old-fashioned gasogene to his glass, then came back and stretched his long legs out to the cold fireplace. "I, too, was not entirely unsuccessful. It did take me some time to uncover the restaurant, which was in an alleyway eight streets down. I walked past it twice. Fortunately, the maître d' had been on duty Wednesday night as well, and he remembered our lady. And the gentleman she dined with was a regular. Fellow by the name of Colonel Edwards, and the man even gave me the address, for a small consideration. The colonel and Miss Ruskin were at the restaurant for nearly three hours, and it was the waiter's impression that they were having a rather intense discussion that seemed to focus on some papers she had brought. He said that the colonel appeared to be very upset and even had to leave the room for a while, ostensibly to make a telephone call, but more, the waiter thought, to have a drink by himself and get back under control. Miss Ruskin, he said, was, if anything, amused rather than angry. Also, he told me that the colonel seemed unaware that his guest was to be a woman and that he was very taken aback when they first met. Incidentally, the man remembers that she had a large brown leather briefcase, which she took with her when she left. He even noted the brass letters DR on the top, because they were his initials, as well."

"So, whoever ran her down paused long enough to take her papers with them. Or rather, the beggar did, I suppose, rather than the driver. Those two witnesses must have been very drunk indeed." My own brain seemed sluggish, and my eyes felt hot and tired.

"Russell, I have a proposal to make." I eyed him through the smoke and the failing light. "I propose that you allow me to interview the colonel and whichever of our young couple I can lay my hands on, while you stay here, take a rest, and talk to Mycroft about it all when he comes in."

I began automatically to object, then reconsidered. Action for the sake of proving myself capable was at least as ridiculous as abject humility. It was a measure of my state of mind that I agreed to his proposal without much argument.

SEVEN

eta

Despite my intentions of using the time for careful introspection, I ended up inspecting no more than the backs of my eyelids. I woke at dusk from macabre dreams of leather briefcases and clouded blue eyes on a marble slab, to find myself on the bed in Mycroft's guest room, the sound of voices coming from the sitting room. I washed my face many times with cold and hot water, pushed the pins back into my hair, and went out to join my husband and his brother.

"Good evening, Russell. I hope you slept well."

"Not terribly. Hello, brother Mycroft. You're looking well."

"Good evening, Mary. A glass of sherry, or some tea?"

"It's late for tea, but I am thirsty. Do you mind?"

"Not at all." He rang the bell. "Sherlock was telling me about your mysterious visitor and the day's adventures. Most intriguing."

"Good Lord, was it only this morning that we read about it? It seems a week ago."

The housekeeper came to the door, and Holmes went to ask her for tea. He returned to the chair between Mycroft and me and reached for the inevitable pipe. Mycroft took a cigar from an elaborate chased silver humidor.

"Do you mind, Mary? Thank you." He set to the ritual of clipping and raising a cloud of perfumed smoke and finally had it going to his satisfaction.

"How does it take you, Sherlock? Could it have been simple robbery? Might she have had something of value?"

"Insufficient data, I fear, Mycroft. Russell— ah, here's your tea. No, don't get up. There. Biscuit?" I declined. "Do have one of those sandwiches, at least. They may be your supper. Russell, I did succeed in reaching Colonel Edwards, just before he left for a weekend shoot in Berkshire, but he gave me a few minutes. He and Miss Ruskin spent the time reviewing her proposed dig, looking through photographs of the site and the location of the exploratory trenches. He was 'favourably impressed,' and he intends— or perhaps I should say intended— to recommend that his organisation support the project."

"What organisation is that?"

"Something called the Friends of Palestine, a group of retired military officers and churchmen. They raise money to support various projects, mostly in the Holy Land. From what he said, I gather it's a combination of drinks club and Bible-study group."

"Men only?"

"Men only. In fact, he admitted that he was surprised when D. Ruskin turned out to be a woman."

"Didn't do his homework, then."

"Apparently not. He did appear to be genuinely shocked at hearing of her death, though it didn't put him off his weekend. He has a garage normally inhabited by three cars, only two present this evening, neither showing signs of any recent repairs. According to the driver— calls himself the chauffeur— the third car is a roadster that belongs to the colonel's son, who is in the machine on his way to Scotland at the moment, some sort of informal motoring competition called a rally. Sounds a considerable danger to livestock and unsuspecting Scots pedestrians. The tyre marks are of an appropriate width for a roadster rather than a saloon car, and several marks on the wall on that side indicate black paint from a low-slung mud guard and a driver who is either exceedingly careless or often intoxicated."

"Speaking of intoxicated, any trace of the witnesses?"

"Miss Chessman and Mr O'Rourke left directly from their respective offices to catch a train for her parents' house near Tonbridge. Her neighbour, who should know better than to trust an old man asking questions, said that Miss Chessman was severely upset over an accident she had witnessed in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Or, to use the neighbour's au courant phrasing, she was severely traumatised by the event and was, in her neighbour's judgement, not far from a nervous breakdown. What I suppose Watson would term 'brain fever.' End of relevant data."

"And the letter?"

"Ah yes, the letter. This must go into the hands of Scotland Yard very soon. Will Chief Inspector Lestrade and his colleagues believe that Sherlock Holmes has possessed the thing and not opened it? Never. Therefore, we may as well steam it open. Is there hot water left in that pot?" I picked it up and sloshed it about by way of an answer. "Good. Toss the biscuits out and pour the water into their bowl. Have you done this before, Russell? Yes, of course you have. Then you know that impatience is not the thing. Too much steam, too fast, warps the paper and tells a tale. Slow, see? Here comes the end. Good-quality glue and paper make it easy. That knife, please, Mycroft— Wipe off the butter first, man! That's better. Come, now, just a bit more— there. I think I'll use tweezers on this, in case the Yard decides to look for prints. Probably useless— the paper's a bit on the rough side— but mustn't take the chance of confusing their poor little heads. Move the tray, please, Russell. Thank you."

Holmes laid the letter down on the table, and we all bent over it. He automatically noted the more obvious characteristics.

"Woman's hand, fussy. Dated Wednesday, would have arrived yesterday. Not old enough to be from the mother, who must be in her nineties. Perhaps a sister."

We read:

Dear Dorothy,

It was so very lovely to see you over the weekend. It made a deep impression on Mama (you may not be able to tell, but I can). I hope you can return before you have to leave, though I will understand if you cannot.

I am writing because shortly after you left, two gentlemen came here looking for you, something regarding a donation to your project in the Holy Land. They told me their names, but I'm afraid I can't remember them, as they were very long and foreign. Perhaps I should have written them down, but I was a bit flustered and could hear Mama calling from upstairs. But you must know them, as they knew you. They were both very dark and tall and looked a bit like the photographs you sent of the people who worked on your excavations, those same sharp noses. Very proper, though— educated gentlemen in proper suits. One of them had a name that sounded something like mud. At any rate, I wanted you to know in case they hadn't reached you. They seemed particularly anxious to see you before you left and seemed disappointed they had missed you. I told them that you were going down to Sussex to see Mr Holmes and his wife and that a telephone call there might be possible. I also told them the address of your hotel in London.

I'm afraid I gave them rather short shrift, as Mama was waiting for her bath. I hope they didn't think me rude, and I hope they give you lots of money, which they obviously have, as they drove off in an enormous shiny black saloon car, complete with uniformed driver.

Please write to tell me what the Holmeses were like. I imagine an extraordinary couple. But then, we may see you on Saturday, with any luck.

Your loving sister,

Erica

"Oh God, Holmes, I can't bear the thought of telling that woman that her sister was— that her sister is dead. Isn't it time to turn this over to the police?"

However, Holmes was not listening. He frowned over the pages in his hand, then thrust them at his brother.

"What do you make of the writing, Mycroft?"

"I admit that you are my superior in graphological analysis, Sherlock, but this is not exactly what I might have expected, either from the contents of the letter or from a sister of the woman you described. The lack of education in words and writing indicates only that Miss Ruskin achieved what she did through the sheer force of her mind, but still, I should have expected a greater degree of intelligence and independence here."

"But she's clever— look at those overstrokes!"

"Clever, yes, but with an undercurrent of anger that wells up in the full stops."

"And the hooks on the t-bars, why, I don't believe I've seen such tenacity since the time—"

"Holmes!"

"Yes, Russell?"

"We have to give this to the police. To Scotland Yard."

"She's quite right, Sherlock," said Mycroft. "Much as it goes against your grain, it is their job, and they might take it amiss were you to withhold it from them. They have become quite competent at legwork, you know. I can also make enquiries over the weekend. Fellow at the club knows everything and everyone in the Middle East. He may have some idea of what's going on."

I was tempted to ask how a fellow member of a club dedicated to noncommunication and misanthropy had managed to make known his peculiar talents, but I was distracted by Holmes, who had risen and was pawing vigorously through a desk drawer, finally to emerge with paper, pen, and a pot of glue. He shrugged as he bent to daub the flap of the envelope.

"Very well, if two minds greater than mine own agree, I can only plead force majeure. Russell, would you be so good as to write a note to Lestrade to accompany this virtuously unopened letter?" He paused to examine his handiwork, then bent to reapply a microscopic quantity of glue to a recalcitrant bubble, and continued. "You will tell him that we happened to come across it and thought it might have come from the sister whom Miss Ruskin mentioned during her visit to us. Also stress that he is to do nothing about contacting the lady until he has seen us, and invite him to join us in Sussex at his earliest convenience. Throw in whatever threats or entreaties you consider appropriate, and tell him I said it would do him good to get out of London." He ran a nail along the edge and angled the envelope to the light critically. "You should also mention that a Yard photographer might prove a useful companion. I can do any necessary fingerprints myself."

I looked up from my paper.

"Sorry?"

He lifted his eyes, and his face went carefully, dreadfully blank. He glanced at Mycroft, then looked down at the somewhat overworked envelope in his hands.

"What a noble mind is here o'erthrown," he remarked conversationally, and keeping his voice light, added, "Russell, that theology of yours is rotting your brain even more rapidly than I had anticipated. You did read the sister's letter."

"But you don't think ..." I trailed off as he raised his face to mine, a face awful in judgement and disappointment.

"What else am I to think, Russell? She visits us, she dies violently, her papers are searched, and her briefcase is stolen. Someone has asked after us and been given our address. It is possible they found what they sought, but if not, can we be anything but their next goal? I only hope that when they didn't find what they were looking for, they didn't vent their irritation on the furniture."

I felt my brain begin sluggishly to move, and my heart sank.

"The box. Oh, Holmes, I left it on the dining room table."

"You left it there, Russell. I did not."

"You moved it? Why?"

"No particular reason. Call it tidiness."

"You? Tidy?"

"Don't be rude, Russell. I put it away."

"Where? No, let me guess." He winced. "Sorry, poor choice of words. Let me deduce. When I went to get the car, you went out the back and came around the house. The toolshed?"

"How utterly unimaginative," Holmes said, offended.

"Sorry, again. The hole in the beech? No— oh, of course. You were scraping off a stinger— you shoved it into one of the beehives." How ridiculous, the relief engendered by a mere nod.

"Not shoved, Russell, gently placed. The third hive from the end is making queen cells at a tremendous rate, so I thought I might give them something else to think about. They've also been very active of late, and most people would think twice about putting a hand in there, even at night."

"Except you. But do you mean to tell me that you anticipated ... visitors, even this morning?"

"Merely a precaution."

My warming brain gave another, more alarming lurch.

"Mrs Hudson! Good Lord, she's there alone. We must warn her!"

"She is not there. I telephoned from the café and told her to take a day or two away. She's with her nephew in Guildford."

"You knew then? Already?"

"We do not know that anything has taken place. We are merely talking about likelihoods," he said with asperity, and placed the envelope in a breast pocket. I began to laugh.

"My dear Holmes, if I hear you use the word senility again, I shall stuff it down your throat. You are still too fast for me. I didn't see the possibilities until I read the letter."

He did not laugh, merely looked at his brother.

"You see why I married her, Mycroft? The exquisite juxtaposition of ladylike threats and backhanded compliments proved irresistible." He turned back to me, and his voice and face hardened. "Russell, if you were occasionally to raise your sight from your Hebrew verbs doubly weak and irregular and your iota subscripts, you might take more notice of the world around you. Your preoccupation with your studies could kill you."

He was dead serious, and Mycroft's fat face mirrored the grim expression of his brother. My voice was small in response.

"Yes, I see. Could we go home now?"

"Do you wish to equip yourselves with some of what the Americans would call 'firepower' before you go?" suggested Mycroft with the air of a housewife offering provisions for a journey. "Or, given an hour, I could arrange an escort."

"No escort, thank you, Mycroft. I've never much fancied myself as a leader of men, and this is no time to begin. Your old revolver would be a welcome addition, on the stray chance that Mr 'Mud' or one of his companions has chosen to wait for us to appear. I should doubt it, but still ..."

"Quite," his brother said with an admirable lack of concern, and heaved himself upright. He padded out of the room and returned a short time later with a huge and, I was relieved to see, well-oiled pistol, which he handed to Holmes along with a box of ammunition sufficient to withstand a minor invasion of the southern coast. Holmes gave the weapon a cursory inspection and inserted it and the box with difficulty into his pockets.

We took our leave of Mycroft, found a taxi, retrieved the car, left the letter and its covering note at Scotland Yard, and plunged into the darkening countryside of south England, our noses turned for home.

Shortly after midnight, the car's headlamps caught the final signpost. The hedgerows pressed close on either side. A fox with something white in its jaws flickered away into the dark. For the last hour, Holmes had been either stiffly asleep or engaged in a silent contemplation of events. In either case, I interrupted him.

"Do you wish to collect Patrick and another gun as we go past the farm?" My own farm, and its manager, lay a few miles before the cottage. "Or, we could stay there tonight...."

"Do you wish to do that, Russell?"

Damn the man, he would not even use a sarcastic tone for the question, only stating it simply as a request for information. One of the most difficult things about marriage, I was finding, was the absolute honesty it demanded. I thought for a mile or so.

"No, I don't. I admit to a certain, shall we say, uneasiness about walking into a dark cottage. That blood on the kerb ... disturbed me. But it is my house now, and I find myself distinctly resentful at the thought of being made afraid to enter it. No, I do not wish to stay at the farm tonight. However, I should like to stop and pick up a shotgun. It would give me great pleasure to deposit a load of bird shot into the backside of anyone who had anything to do with Miss Ruskin's death."

The seat beside me began to shake oddly, and I looked over, to see the gleam of white teeth: Holmes laughing silently.

"That's my Russell. Let us stop and find you a mighty blunderbuss, and go liberate our castle."

* * *

There was, of course, no one there. With a pounding pulse, fighting down the all-too-vivid memories of the night four years earlier when Holmes and I had nearly died in an ambush inside this house, I stood tensely for what seemed to be hours, watching two of the cottage's doors while Holmes entered the third. No prey was flushed, and soon the entire cottage was blazing with light and Holmes was standing at the front door. Fingers clumsy with relief, I broke the shotgun and went to join him.

Since that morning, I had seen the dead body of a woman I respected and liked, had found evidence of the fact that her death was murder, seen her blood on the street, batted back and forth about London, and spent several hours driving country roads, topped off with twenty minutes outside of a dark house tensely awaiting the sounds of violence. It was now far after midnight, and I stood at the door and looked in at the desolation and the ruin that was my home.

Not one book remained on its shelf. Chairs were turned upside down, their springs exposed, vomiting stuffing onto the floor. Desk drawers had been methodically emptied out onto the middle of the floor, where the carpets had been pulled up. Most of the baseboard was lying loose, prised away from the wall by a crowbar I recognised from the toolshed. Pictures off the walls, the contents of baskets and boxes jumbled together, sewing thread and tobacco, case notes, newspaper clippings, and firewood all lay in a huge mound in the centre of the room. Even the curtains had been ripped from their rods and tossed carelessly on top. I had not been in San Francisco during the great earthquake, but I had seen photographs of the results of that catastrophe, and that was precisely what the room looked like. A huge impersonal giant had shaken the room vigorously, and left it.

"So. I take it they did not find what they were looking for and took it out, as you said, on the furnishings." I was numb, too shocked to be upset, and my voice was matter-of-fact. I was also feeling the first stirrings of rage, a deep, hot bubble that grew and seethed and steadied me. This is my home, I kept thinking. How dare they do this to my home? I moved around the room, stepping over a fireplace poker and some manuscript pages from the book Holmes was writing. I picked up a few books, straightened bent pages, placed them on the shelf. I reached down and took a photograph of my mother from under the coal scuttle. It had been roughly wrenched from its frame and then dropped. I put it on another shelf. Footsteps came from upstairs and Holmes appeared at the doorway, white feathers clinging to his trouser legs.

"For heaven's sake, what are you doing, Russell? That is evidence, and we'll need to look at it in the morning. Not tonight. It would be exceedingly foolish to examine the place without light, and the house batteries would run down before we got halfway through. It will have to wait until morning. It also looks as though we shall need to make use of your farm after all. There are no beds remaining here."

PART TWO

Saturday, 25 August 1923-

Monday, 27 August 1923

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

— Goethe

EIGHT

theta

Saturday morning dawned clear, but I did not witness it. Long hours later, the growing strength of the light outside penetrated even the north-facing room I was in and tugged at my brain, and I began to crawl towards consciousness. I rolled over to greet the occupant of the other side of the bed and nearly fell out onto the floor. Holmes was missing. This in itself was not unusual, but that the other half of the bed seemed to be missing as well woke me. I raised myself up on my elbows and surveyed the room.

For a moment, my surroundings fell on a blank mind. This was my old room, the north garret room in the house dominated by my aunt, my only refuge from her presence. This was my old narrow bed. Why was I here? Where was Holmes?

Holmes. Beds. Gutted mattresses. Upturned bookshelves and Dorothy Ruskin. I flung back the bedclothes and found my watch. Nearly eight o'clock! Ignoring yesterday's unsuitable clothes, I pulled old friends from drawers and wardrobe, jabbed pins into my hair, and ran downstairs, to find Patrick frying bacon on the old black cookstove.

"Good morning, Miss Mary," he said, using his name for me since I was fifteen. "I drove Mr Holmes over to the cottage at first light. He asked would you please take some hot coffee when you go, and my camera. The thermos bottle is on the table," he added. "I'm just making you some bacon sandwiches, and Tillie boiled up some eggs before she left. Give me a ring if you need anything else," he shouted after me.

If anything, the cottage looked worse by light of day. Holmes had used his hours well, though, and when I came in, I found various chalk marks on the floor and walls in preparation for the police photographer. I greeted him with a greasy sandwich, and we found two relatively undamaged chairs.

"Has Lestrade rung yet?" I asked.

"He should be here in an hour or thereabouts. They received another telephone call, from one of Miss Ruskin's friends at the British Museum who had seen the police notice, but Lestrade agreed to keep the case in his hands until he'd seen me."

"He'll hold back from notifying the sister?"

"He was unhappy and sceptical, but he said he would not give it to Cambridgeshire until he'd seen the body and heard what I had to say."

The body. Life achieving a distance from the ugly fact of violent death. The thought must have shown on my face.

"Best to keep the mind clear, Russell. Emotion can confuse matters all too easily."

"I know." I pushed it away and waved my sandwich at the room. "How could Lestrade be sceptical with this?"

"Unfortunately, it looks like simple burglary with a touch of vandalism thrown in."

"Burglary? Oh God, what did they take? Not your violin? And the safe?" The violin was a Stradivarius, bought ages before from an ignorant junkman at a ridiculously low price. The safe, well hidden, held a number of small valuables and appallingly toxic substances.

"No, the violin they took from its case and threw down, before ripping out the lining of the case. A scratch is all. They missed the safe. They did get your mother's silver, Mrs Hudson's jewellery, and some treasury notes that were in a drawer. Fortunately, the vandalism was not too vicious, mostly throwing things about."

I brushed off the crumbs and swallowed the last of my coffee from a cracked cup.

"To work, then. Shall I take a few photographs before I start putting things away?"

"Lestrade might appreciate it. You'll have to give them to him to develop, though. Not much has survived of the darkroom."

Seventy-five minutes later, I had restored a quarter of the books to their places, dragged two disembowelled chairs out into the garden, nailed up a piece of wood across the broken kitchen window, and was starting on the baseboards when the inspector's car drove up.

"Where do all these flipping hay wagons come from?" he shouted jovially from the open door, and then: "My, my, my, what have we here? Making yourself unpopular with the village toughs, Mr Holmes?"

"Hello, Lestrade. Good to see you again." Holmes climbed down from the ladder and dusted off his hands. I said nothing, as I had a mouthful of nails, but nodded and went back to plying my hammer on the baseboard.

"Mr Holmes, you said you had evidence of a murder for me to look at. Have you a dead body under that pile of rubbish?"

"Not here, Lestrade, this is purely secondary. If you'd like to have your man set to in the kitchen, when he's through we can offer you a cup of tea. I've marked the few possible prints, though I think we'll find that our visitors last night wore gloves. Here, Lestrade, take this chair; it still has four legs." He did not see, or ignored, the look of patient humour that passed between the two men and the photographer's shrug before he took his bulky equipment into Mrs Hudson's normally spotless kitchen.

Lestrade settled gingerly into the chair and pulled out a notebook. Holmes returned to his armfuls of papers, I to my nails.

"Right, then, Mr Holmes. Would you care to tell me what this mess of yours has to do with Miss Dorothy Ruskin, and what the deuces a 'demeter archaeopteryx' is?"

Holmes looked at Lestrade as if the man had begun to spout Hamlet's soliloquy, and then suddenly his face cleared.

"Ah yes, the telephone connexion was a bit rough, wasn't it? No, the phrase was 'amateur archaeologist,' Lestrade. Miss Ruskin's passion, the archaeology of the Holy Land."

"I see," said Lestrade, who quite obviously did not. He went on, with the air of licking a pencil. "And Miss Ruskin was a friend of yours?"

"More of Russell's, I should say. She came to see us Wednesday, gave Russell a box and a manuscript, stayed to tea. She then returned to London and got herself killed." His voice drifted off as he studied one of the pages in his hand. Lestrade waited with growing impatience.

"And then?" he finally prompted.

"Eh? Oh, yes. We know only the outlines of 'what then.' She returned to her hotel room, exchanged her bag for her briefcase and went to dinner with a man who didn't know her, left the restaurant, walked into a simple but effective trap, and died. Her briefcase was stolen and early on Thursday her hotel room searched, and the following evening they came here and searched this house, with rather more enthusiasm and violence than they had talent."

"They?"

"You are looking for at least three individuals," Holmes said absently, his attention again absorbed by the paper. "Two of them stand five feet nine or ten inches, thirteen stone or thereabouts; at least one of them has black hair, both are right-handed, and one of them fancies himself as a flashy dresser, with a tendency towards the extreme in footwear, but betrays himself by purchasing inferior-quality goods— hence the dents in the floor"— he gestured vaguely towards a clear patch of boards—"and by the fact that he bites his fingernails. The other is a man of simpler tastes, wearing new boots with rounded toes, a brown tweed suit, and— kindly note, Russell— a dark blue woollen knit cap. One of them sports a neck scarf of white cashmere and a camel-hair overcoat— probably Pointed Toes. Of the third party, the director of the operation, I can say only that he has unfashionably long grey hair and displayed an entirely unwarranted confidence in the abilities of his confederates by remaining in the car while the house was being ransacked." He rattled off the final information in an uninterested rush and turned to wave the paper at me. "I say, Russell, do you remember that forgery case we handled two years ago? I'm suddenly struck by the fact—"

"Mr Holmes!" Lestrade bristled in irritation, and Holmes looked at him in surprise.

"Yes, Lestrade?"

"Who are these men?"

"I've just told you."

"But who are they?"

"My dear Lestrade, I bowed beneath the concerted authority of the only two people in the world, aside from my sovereign, who have any influence over me, under the insistence that Scotland Yard ought to be given a chance to prove themselves capable of hunting down the murderers of Dorothy Ruskin. I have told you who they are. You need only find them." He turned imperiously away from the near-frantic police detective, shot me a glance that was perilously close to a wink, and dropped to the floor amidst his papers, his right knee tucked under his chin.

Lestrade looked torn between tearing his thinning hair in despair and storming angrily out. I relented and explained what he had seen but not truly observed.

"They were looking for a piece of paper, Inspector Lestrade. When they didn't find it amongst her things, they came here, possibly assuming that she was bringing it to us."

"What sort of paper?"

"That, we don't know yet."

"Then how do you know it was a piece of paper?"

Holmes made a rude noise. I ignored him.

"The way they searched, both here and in her hotel room. The books were shaken out before being dumped, the pictures taken from their frames, carpets pulled up, our various files carefully gone through and a number of pages stolen."

"But you said she left you some papers?"

"A single manuscript page, but it's made of papyrus. It wouldn't have fit into a book without being folded, which would damage it."

"Would they have known that?"

"Lestrade," exclaimed Holmes from his nest of débris on the floor, "that was a most perceptive question. Russell, I do believe a cup of tea would come most welcome to all concerned and that Mr Ellis is finished in the kitchen. Would you be so good ..."

I accepted my charge and waded out to the kitchen, where I scraped a handful of tea leaves and some sugar from the floor, found a kettle, though no lid, and four mostly unbroken cups. By the time I had found the bread under a saucepan and trimmed the grimy outside from a piece of cheese, the situation was beginning to amuse me. I hunted for an unbroken jar of relish or pickle, discovered triumphantly a large bottle of pickled onions, and thus assembled a rather strange but quite edible meal.

"Holmes?" I called.

"Yes, Russell."

"I'd like to get this cleared up before Mrs Hudson returns. She'll be back tomorrow, you said?"

"Yes."

"Shall I ring Tillie and see if she can send over a pair of her girls to help? Or would you prefer to keep this out of the mouths of the village gossips?"

"I'd rather, if you think we can do it ourselves."

"Probably a good idea. I could ask Patrick to come over with Tillie tonight for a while. That might help, and they wouldn't talk."

I poured the boiling water over the leaves, ignoring a few stray sultanas that clung to the tea, and took the tray into the sitting room. I didn't like the look on Lestrade's face, and I glanced quickly at Holmes for confirmation.

"Yes, Russell, the good inspector has his doubts."

"Now, Mr Holmes, that's not entirely true. If you say there's something in this, I'll believe you. What I said was that I'm going to have trouble convincing my superiors that there's a case here. An old lady has an accident and your house is turned upside down, but deliberate murder? It's a damned awkward— pardon me, Miss Russell— it's an awkward way of committing murder, with a car. Takes some explaining to do."

"I say, Lestrade, you are coming along nicely. That's twice in the past half hour," Holmes began, but I smothered his words with anger.

"Somebody killed her, you can't deny that, and drove off."

"Oh yes, no doubt about that, and that's where it'll lie unless I can take it further. Look, it's like this. We're badly overstretched at the moment, and we've had no fewer than three cases in the last year that have cost us the earth in time and money, with nothing to show— one turned out to be suicide, one an accident, and the third we finally just had to let go for lack of any hard evidence. There's been no little criticism about the Yard, and from up high, too. We're all walking about on tiptoes down there."

"You will go talk with her sister, though?"

"Now, that's another thing. Why all this bother about her sister? It's not right, my delaying her being notified like this. Normally, one of the Cambridge force'd go and tell her. And aside from that, how'd you know the letter was from her? There was only her address on the envelope. Opening letters, now, Mr Holmes, that's an offence. Interfering with the post."

"Why, Lestrade, who else could it have been from but the sister she'd been staying with? We weren't interfering with it; on the contrary, we were making absolutely certain that you received it. In fact, you owe us a favour for bringing it to your attention so promptly."

The younger man fell on this red herring, led astray by Holmes' deliberate air of bland innocence. His narrow face pulled in suspiciously.

"What sort of a favour?"

"I want you to take Russell with you when you go to see Erica Ruskin."

I was surprised but said nothing.

"I can't do that, Mr Holmes."

"Of course you can. Besides, you should have a woman there. Women are so much better at comforting the bereaved, don't you find?" He shot me a warning look, and I closed my mouth so hard, my teeth hurt. "Lestrade, you know you'd have to take another person with you anyway. Russell's not strictly to the rules, but call her a consultant."

Lestrade looked as if he'd rather call me something less polite, and I could see that he was not impressed with my father's smudged shirt and the rat's nest of hair atop my grimy face. He was momentarily forgetting that he had seen me in a number of guises, ranging from a lady of the evening to a blind beggar and a chic young heiress, and once as Dr Watson. No, come to think of it, he had come in later on that particular case. Nonetheless, surely he should trust me to dress the part.

"I will change my clothes and look presentable, Inspector, if you will give me twenty minutes," I said mildly.

"Better get started, Russell," said Holmes. "The good gentlemen are nearly finished here."

"Now just one minute. I haven't said I'd go to see the woman, now have I? I've got work up to my ears already. Why should I jaunt on up to the wilds of Cambridgeshire and fight the hay wagons just so your wife can watch me give an old lady some bad news about her sister? Be reasonable, Mr Holmes."

"She was murdered, Lestrade," Holmes said evenly.

"So you say."

"Precisely. So I say." The two men measured each other over the gouged tabletop, until finally Lestrade let out an explosive breath.

"Oh, very well, Mr Holmes. For you, I'll go, and I'll take her with me. But I don't have time to come back down to this godforsaken wilderness. She'll have to get back on her own."

"I believe I can manage the train, Inspector. Twenty minutes."

Precisely nineteen minutes later, I walked into the sitting room in what Holmes calls my "young lady" guise. The blouse was a bit crumpled, but the unfashionable skirt looked as dowdy as ever and my hair was wrapped tightly around my head and covered with a cloche hat. I pushed a thin notebook and pencil into my ridiculous bag. Lestrade glanced at his watch and stood up.

"Right. Ellis should be finished with the toolshed."

"Send me prints of the photographs, would you, Lestrade? Russell, did you give your films to Mr Ellis?"

"I did. See you later, Holmes. Watch out for the marmalade on the pantry floor."

I turned to leave and nearly walked into Lestrade, who was bent over in a contortion, peering fiercely at the patch of boards Holmes had earlier indicated. He straightened hurriedly and left. I followed him to the door, then stopped to look back at the room. A swath of bare floor cut through the débris. Holmes stood amidst the ruins, rolling up the sleeves of his collarless shirt.

"Don't look so grim, Russell."

"Ring Patrick, Holmes."

"I'll have him meet you at the station."

* * *

Tony Ellis had finished with the photography and was loading his equipment into the back of the car. Lestrade handed him a bag. I was surprised to see that he had no driver.

"I'll drive back, Tony. Miss Russell is coming with us."

Mr Ellis glanced at me but said nothing as he went to the front of the car and cranked the starting handle for Lestrade. After several attempts, the elderly engine shuddered to life, and he came around and climbed into the narrow back seat. He looked absolutely exhausted, and I was not surprised when I heard snores erupting from the back before we had gained the main road.

"Your Mr Ellis seems to have made a night of it," I commented, though, truth to tell, there was no sign of alcohol about him.

"He's been working for nearly thirty-six hours. We were over in Kent yesterday night when your message reached me. We'd started off with the car, so now we're stuck with it. Can't exactly tuck it into the overhead rack, can you? Ellis offered to come down with me— he doubles as a driver when we're shorthanded."

"Generous of him to volunteer."

"He wanted to meet Mr Holmes."