A Letter of Mary

"I think so, Russell. I believe they have. But it is a fine thing to stretch to one's full height in a soft chair. As you would no doubt agree," he added. My normal five feet eleven inches was intimidating for many people, so Mary Small stood a full two inches shorter. My back, too, had ached since Wednesday.

Brandy and coffee arrived, and with them a certain reticence, a hesitancy to cut into the festive mood with the hard edges of information and analysis. We each sipped our coffee with undue attention, then gathered ourselves, until finally I put down my cup with a shade more clatter than necessary and cleared my throat.

"Ladies first, I suppose, particularly as I was so remiss over the dinner table. Also, it will allow me to go through my material before my brain gets too fuzzy. Very well, then: Wednesday. You know where the colonel lives, and as you all know London better than I, you also no doubt are aware that it is one of those backwaters that remains a village within the city, complete with shops on the high street and small-town gossipmongers. Mycroft, you may not know that the colonel lives in a large turn-of-the-century— the last turn, that is— house slightly removed from the village centre, in the remnants of what were once lovely grounds. Although he seems to be unpopular with some of the chattier, and therefore more inquisitive, shopkeepers, he is very much the village squire, in his own mind at any rate. He drinks in the local pub with the workers and the shopkeepers, and that is where I arranged to meet him. Quite by accident, of course, but it just so happened that I possessed the qualifications for a personal secretary and knew he needed one."

"A bit chancy, that, wasn't it," Lestrade asked, "depending on his needing a secretary?"

"With a big house and only two permanent staff, and considering the problem of hiring servants these days, I knew he'd be sure to need somebody. And Mary Small is versatile. If he had needed kitchen help or someone to scrub the floors, I would simply have lowered my accent a few notches and rubbed some dirt under my fingernails. I might have had some problem if he'd needed a valet, though," I admitted.

"You'd have managed somehow," Holmes commented dryly.

I continued with my narrative and told of the dinner, the work, the colonel, and his son. I found myself curiously hesitant to give specifics of the colonel's attitude towards me, and I gave the barest account of the son's attack (Holmes laughed when I described how I had retaliated; Lestrade and Mycroft winced), but I could see that Holmes read between the lines. I promised him wordlessly that I would go into greater detail when we were away from the others, and I could see that he received the message. The colonel's bedroom and its contents spurred considerable discussion, and by the time I finished with Gerald's traffic summons, it was after eleven o'clock. I dismissed the current day's events with two flat sentences, ignored a curious look from Holmes, and closed my mouth. After a moment, Lestrade looked up from his notes and broke the silence.

"You're saying, then, that you could see Colonel Edwards behind this?"

"I could, yes. I will admit that I rather like the man, though I detest a number of things about him, not the least his attitude towards women. He's appealing, somehow, and I can easily see him in charge of men who will do anything for him. Authoritative, yet slightly bumbling. Of course, it has to be at least in part an act— he was, after all, a soldier who spent the war years efficiently going about the business of getting his men to kill. In any case, yes, I can visualise him as the murderer of Dorothy Ruskin. Not just any woman, but that particular one, under those particular circumstances, yes.

"There is, I must say straight off, no evidence concrete enough to be called by the name. One might analyse the man's writing to the point of knowing what colour his necktie will be on a given day, but it counts for nothing before a jury. Here, in this room, however, I can say that there is a faint odour of brutality in his writing, a clear delineation of 'us' and 'them' and a subsequent disregard for 'their' rights and indeed 'their' very humanity. Particularly when 'they' are women. In more specific terms, though, points witnessed." I ticked them off on my finger. "First, there's his temper. He was not far from real violence with me, over a chance remark, and with Miss Ruskin he was faced not only with— point two— a woman who embodied everything he hates— independent, successful, intellectual, and with a sharp tongue she was willing to use— but, worse— point three— the knowledge that he had been tricked by a colleague, another man, who had deliberately put him in the humiliating position of being suddenly confronted by the fact of her gender, and knowing that there wasn't a thing he could do about it, that it was too late to deny her the funding for her project. I suspect, and he probably did, too, that his colleague and the man's friends within the organisation did it to laugh at him."

"I should have thought a military man would have more self-control than that," Mycroft objected. "Surely he must be driven to the brink of murder every day in this town, if he's so infuriated by women of that sort."

"He probably wouldn't have done anything other than storm furiously out of the restaurant and send off his resignation to the Friends, but for one thing: point four. I believe Miss Ruskin told him about the manuscript. You've heard it; it is very powerful. How would it have affected him? That document, even if its authenticity were never finally proven, would still turn the Christian world on its head. Mary Magdalene, an apostle of Jesus? To many people, the only thing more shocking would be if someone produced evidence that Peter was a woman, or Jesus himself. The colonel couldn't help seeing that, couldn't help being driven nearly insane by this woman, casually producing a document that would turn everything he stands for into a farce.

"I can see you have something you want to put in here, Inspector, but I'm nearly through. Can it wait? Good. Finally, there's the son. A current and, I think, valid, psychological theory says that a child reflects the subconscious, or unconscious, attitudes of the parent and that repressed hostilities and drives of the adult are often acted out openly by the offspring. Stripped of the jargon, it is simply that children absorb what their parents actually feel about someone or something, not just how the adult acts on the surface. Holmes, I think you used a version of this theory thirty years ago with the Rucastle case, didn't you? Obviously, the older a child becomes, the more tenuous the link becomes, and at twenty-one, Gerald Edwards can hardly be thought of as a child. However, his attitude towards Mary Small, a sweet young thing if ever there was, is positively predatory. Or, I should say, it was until yesterday afternoon. Even more revealing was the attitude Edwards took concerning his son's actions: slightly amused, somewhat proud parent looking on, exasperated, but not taking it any more seriously, and seeing no more need to apologise, than if his dog had anointed a neighbour's tree."

I had kept my voice to a dry recitation of the surface events, pushing away the uneasiness I felt remembering the actions, not of the son, but of the father. I told myself that it was merely the unexpectedness of the man's sudden fury that had taken me aback, and I decided not to mention it. Holmes would not need much of an excuse to pull me out of the Edwards house, and although a part of me would appreciate the gesture, I knew I had to remain there until my job was done.

My distraction functioned admirably, and I found myself faced by three variously affronted and indignant males. Their chivalrous attitude was nearly funny, but I thought it well to remind them who and what I was.

"Remember, Inspector," I said gently, "I have certain skills when it comes to the rough-and-tumble of life." I waited until I saw the recollection dawn in a familiar male look of quizzical half disapproval, and then I did laugh. He looked abashed, then chuckled unwillingly.

"You're right, I was forgetting. That lad with the knife— two years ago was it? You broke his arm well and truly."

"It was his elbow, and I didn't break it; he did it himself."

"Still could have been dangerous," he said, referring to the more recent escapade. "I mean to say, what if young Edwards had been able to, you know ..."

"Meet me on my own ground? I was quite certain he could not. One can tell, something in the way a person walks." I dismissed the topic. "At any rate, now you have my story. Colonel Edwards had a motive to kill Dorothy Ruskin and the organisational skills and experience to seize an opportunity and carry it out. He had the means, with both a driver and a son available to him; he was in the area when she was killed; he has no firm alibi for the period after her death, when her room was searched, or for the following night; and his son was not only not in Scotland, he was actually in the south of England the morning after our home was ransacked. Furthermore, the person who searched our papers was interested primarily in those written in foreign alphabets and those taken up with chemical and mathematical symbols, which to the uninitiated may resemble a language. The Greek was then discarded, but the pages they took away with them include a seventeenth-century fragment of the Talmudic tractate on women, a sixteenth-century sermon in old German script, a sampler or, more probably, practice page from some Irish monk's pen, which was Latin but so ornate as to be illegible, a Second Dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription— a copy, actually, dating from no later than the middle of the last century— and half a dozen pages of a Coptic text. As none of them were of any great value, and in fact several were my own transcriptions, I believe we can leave out the question of a mad collector of rare manuscripts. I only note that Gerald Edwards reads Greek and, I should think, Latin, but not Hebrew, certainly not the old German script, and I doubt that he has ever heard of Coptic."

"You are discounting the evidence they left behind, then, Russell?" Holmes asked quietly.

"Holmes, even twenty years ago the hairs you found would have been very near to a sure thing. Now, however— well, there's just too much common knowledge about detecting techniques to make me happy about having a case rest on five hairs and some mud. These days, even the butcher's boy knows about fingerprints and tyre marks and all those things that you pioneered— this lot certainly did, as they never took off their gloves. You've been too successful, Holmes, and what the police know, the criminal and the detective-story writer pick up very soon. Those hairs could conceivably have been put there for us to find."

"My dear Russell, as you yourself have admitted, I am not yet senile. It is obvious that those hairs could have been put there as red herrings. It is an attractive theory and even possible, but I fear I deem it unlikely." He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Now, if you are finished, I believe that Inspector Lestrade's shining eyes and position on the edge of his chair indicate a certain eagerness for the floor. What have you for us, Lestrade?"

"We've had an interesting week, Mr Holmes. First of all, we managed to find a nurse in the hospital where Mrs Edwards died. She had a clear memory of it for the simple reason that she was newly qualified, and it was her first death. It was childbirth that brought Mrs Edwards there. The baby, a girl, lived for less than an hour, and the mother followed her two days later. However, the man who brought her in? He was not a man, but a woman. The nurse remembers her very well, because 'she dressed and talked like a man, but wasn't,' in her words. She seemed very nervous, but she stayed to help Mrs Edwards in her confinement. The nurse had the impression that the stranger was an actress or a singer, and the reason she had to leave the next morning was that the show was moving on. She telephoned several times and talked to the nurse, seemed satisfied with her friend's progress, but suddenly Mrs Edwards took a turn for the worse, and she died that night of childbirth fever. The nurse was off duty when the woman next rang, and she was never heard from again."

"Did Colonel Edwards know all this?" I asked.

"Exactly my question, and the answer is yes. The nurse wrote a short report for the file, which the colonel read, and she later spoke with him about it when he went to see her in early 1919."

"So he knew that his wife had miscarried his baby while off with a mysterious female theatre person, had been with her for some time, in fact. Also that there was a file describing it all, which later conveniently disappeared."

"There's more. The nurse well remembered the baby— she was holding it when it died— and finds it hard to believe that its, er, gestational age was more than five months, six at the very most."

"And the colonel had been back at the front since the autumn," I remembered.

"November. Slightly over eight months."

"He couldn't have had a leave and the records lost?"

"Unlikely."

"How very sordid and ugly. One can't help wondering—"

"If he drove his wife to it, or if she drove him to what he is now?" interjected Lestrade with unexpected perception.

"Mmm. I'll have some brandy now, please, Mycroft. I feel rather cold." My shoulder ached, too, from the horse's strong mouth on the reins and the succession of long days, but I ignored it and concentrated on what Lestrade was saying.

"Next, we started working our way through all the travelling entertainers who were in York at the time, beginning with the legitimate theatre players and working our way down to the dancers in the nightclubs. Pretty close to the bottom, we came across an all-woman troupe that specialised in rude music-and-dance versions of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Yes, and it seems to have been as dotty as it sounds. People were hard up for entertainment during those years, but still.... Any road, the old, er, bat who managed it— Mother Timkins, she calls herself— is still alive by some miracle, running a, er, a house in Stepney."

"A 'house,' Inspector?" I asked. "Of ill repute?"

"Er, yes. Precisely. She did remember Mrs Edwards, though not by that name. The colonel's wife was with the Timkins troupe for five or six months, we finally determined. Joined at Portsmouth, was sick mornings for a couple of months, and had just started to, er, to 'show' when she died in York. The woman dressed as a man who took Mrs Edwards to hospital was probably Annie Graves, stage name Amanda Pillow. She and the Edwards woman were close."

"Lovers?" I asked bluntly. His delicacy was becoming irritating. He turned scarlet and consulted his notes furiously.

"Er, the Timkins woman seemed to think it possible, although there were a number of men, as well. Obviously, there had to be at least one." He cleared his throat again. "The, er, the interesting thing is that she told Colonel Edwards the two women were, as you say, lovers, when he went to see her in March of 1919. A month after he received his demob papers, that was."

"Four months before he was hospitalized for drink," I commented. "What happened to the Graves woman?"

"She was killed." We all looked up. "In June of that same year. She went off with someone after a performance, and she was found at four the next morning on a country lane thirty miles away. Dead about two hours. She'd been walking, stinking drunk and in five-inch heels, and was run over by a vehicle. Her body was down among the weeds in the verge, but it was quite visible as soon as it became light. They never found the car. Never found the person she'd gone off with."

Throughout my report Holmes had appeared to listen politely, which I knew, to my severe irritation, meant that he was taking in perhaps one word in three. With Lestrade's last revelation, however, he began to pay attention, and he was now looking affronted, as profoundly taken aback as if he had just discovered a distorting flaw in one of his instruments that threatened to cast doubts on the results of an experiment. He did not say anything, merely ground out his cigar and then tried to relight it.

"Furthermore," Lestrade continued, with a glance at his notebook, "there may be a slight discrepancy between when the colonel says he arrived home and when he actually did so. I say 'may' because the one neighbour who saw the car drive in has a most unreliable clock, which may or may not have been ten minutes slow or fast that night. According to both Colonel Edwards and the headwaiter at the restaurant, he left in his car just before midnight, no more than three or four minutes before. At that time of night, it takes eighteen minutes driving slowly and roundabout or eleven minutes direct and briskly to the Edwards home. The neighbour thought it was closer to twelve-thirty when he came home, but as I said, it's unreliable."

"Why did Miss Ruskin walk?" Mycroft asked. "Granted, it's not the worst area of London, but I should have thought a gentleman would have insisted on driving her, or at least have arranged a taxi."

"According to the restaurant's doorman, there was some disagreement outside the restaurant about just that, which ended with the lady simply walking off."

"Could you go over the maître d's story again?" I asked Lestrade.

"I was going to do that. He seems to have spent a couple of days thinking, and when I went back Thursday, he had a lot more to tell me. Remember, he told Mr Holmes there was some disagreement between Miss Ruskin and the colonel? Well, it occurred to me that for a headwaiter he was very unaware of what was going on in his restaurant, and I mentioned at our first interview that I might find it necessary to ask the local PC to patrol the area more closely, stick his head in occasionally."

"Coercion, Lestrade? Tut-tut," said Holmes in mock disapproval.

"Not coercion, just encouragement. It did serve to boost his memory, and he managed to give me a more detailed account of the three hours the colonel and Miss Ruskin were there, with certain gaps where he, the waiter, was off elsewhere, though it was not a busy night. The first half hour, he said, seemed pretty heavy going, long silences, much studying of menus. He got the impression that the colonel had been expecting her to be a man, remember, and that he was not at all happy about having to deal with Miss Ruskin. She, however, seemed to find it funny. Things did settle down, and they spent the next couple of hours going through a pile of papers she had with her. By this time, about eleven-forty, they'd both had a lot of wine and the colonel had drunk three g and t's besides. Unfortunately, this was one of the times when the waiter was out of the dining room, some kind of hubbub in the kitchen, apparently, and when he came back about ten minutes later, the two of them were staring each other down across the table, furious about something. He says he was worried because the colonel looked like a gentleman they'd had die in the restaurant four or five years ago, his face dark red and his eyes popping in his head. He was gesturing at some papers Miss Ruskin was holding, and was, in the waiter's words, 'considerably upset' over them. She seemed to be very sure of herself, and he heard her say a number of times something like 'Yes, it's possible.' A few minutes later, the colonel's chair fell over and the waiter looked up, to see him, I quote, 'standing over that old lady, looking for all the world like he was going to grab the papers away from her, or hit her, or something, but she just sat glaring up at him like a banty, and halfway to laughing. He stood there almost shaking, like he was about to explode with anger.'

"That's when he asked to use the telephone. He had the waiter bring him a double brandy in the manager's office and was closed up in there with the telephone for about ten minutes before he came back. He was calmer then, sat down and talked to her for another twenty minutes or so— uncomfortable talk, very stiff, and they seemed to be working themselves back up to the state they had been in before when all of a sudden, Miss Ruskin put her papers back into her briefcase, got to her feet, and left. Outside on the street, he offered to drive her to her hotel. Which offer she refused, and she died perhaps fifteen minutes later."

"Those words of hers—'Yes, it's possible'— are just what she told me that afternoon when I doubted the manuscript's authenticity," I said. "It sounds fairly conclusive that she showed him a copy of it."

"I agree," said Lestrade, then stifled a yawn that left his eyes watering. "Sorry. Haven't had a solid eight hours for two weeks."

"The Kent murders?" asked Mycroft with sympathy.

"That, yes, and yesterday I was down in Cornwall, where the child was killed. Nasty piece of work, that. Still, there was a witness, which should help. And as for your witnesses, Miss Chessman and Mr O'Rourke were no help at all. He had his back to it the whole time— climbing a drainpipe to nick a flower from a window box for his lady love— and she draws a blank and starts crying when it comes to details. Says she saw the old beggar sitting and Miss Ruskin walking up to the street corner, but after that, all she remembers is shiny black paint and the blood. She was pretty hysterical, I gather, by the last time I sent someone round, and worse than useless at the inquest. You saw we got an adjournment, did you?"

We had.

"Now, about Mrs Rogers. You'll understand, I hope, that this case has pretty low priority compared with two women knifed in Kent and a little boy horribly dead in Cornwall, which means that information is slow in coming in. All I have to add concerning Mrs Rogers is that her two sons have greying hair, since you asked, Mr Holmes. One is a sailor, like his father. He is not married— in this country at any rate— and has been out of the country since March. The other is married to an Italian woman; they have four sons and three daughters, ages fifteen to thirty-two. The two youngest and an unmarried daughter and her child live at home still, but the others are scattered from Lincoln to Bath. I had already begun to look at them before I got your telegram," he said with a faint touch of reproof, acknowledged by Holmes with a gracious nod.

"Three members of the family have criminal records, for what it's worth: The sailor son bashed someone over the head with a bottle in a brawl a few years back, got four months; a granddaughter, Emily, aged thirty now, was done for shoplifting seven years ago; and a grandson, Jason, age twenty-six, seems to have spent his youth with a bad crowd— housebreaking, picked up for passing stolen goods once, petty stuff, not brutal and never for bodily harm— but either he decided he wasn't much good at it and went straight or else he suddenly got much better, because he hasn't been touched in four years. And before you ask, Mr Holmes, most of the crew have dark hair.

"Finally, the ibn Ahmadi family and their grudge against Miss Ruskin. Preliminary reports—"

I interrupted him. "Who?"

"Ibn Ahmadi," he repeated, doing his best with the strange pronunciation. "Oh, sorry, I forgot what a solid week it's been. That's the family Mr Mycroft Holmes mentioned, who were done out of a piece of land in Palestine."

"Muddy," I offered, to his momentary confusion, the homophone suggested by Erica Rogers in the letter to her sister— a name foreign, multisyllabic, and sounding like mud. Before I could go further, he was nodding.

"Yes, muddy, like she said in her letter. There are no less than twenty-four members of the clan, if I may call it that, here in Britain at present, all but four of them male, every one of them, I'd wager, having black hair, with the possible exception of one old auntie of sixty-three years who was thoroughly draped and hidden. Questions are being asked concerning whereabouts, but it will be slow, I'm afraid, and less likely to be fruitful as each day passes."

"I fail to see any connection between the Ahmadi family and the ransacking of the cottage," growled Holmes. "Her death, perhaps, but could she have had something they wanted? Mycroft?" He seemed curiously uninterested in the question, merely as it were playing out a part written down for him.

The large figure of his brother stirred and leant forward in his armchair, his grey eyes on the balloon glass of brandy cradled in his enormous hand.

"I fear that I shall have to throw yet another scent in our paths by answering that in the affirmative." Holmes made a sharp, impatient motion that amounted to a derisive snort. His brother ignored him. "One of my ... colleagues succeeded in identifying the taxi driver who picked Miss Ruskin up from her hotel that Tuesday morning."

"No easy matter, that, in this city," I commented. His fat face took on a satisfied look, like a cat full of warm milk.

"I was pleased with that piece of work, true. Very fortunately, Miss Ruskin was not taken to a railway station or to the underground, but to a specific address here in London— a house. I had become interested in this case, so I went there myself, only to find that the family who lived in that house had no knowledge of such a woman. Nor did the four houses on either side. I was even more interested by now, and I took a leisurely stroll up and down, until I came across a house on the next street over that had all the signs of being other than a family dwelling: curtains tightly shut, signs of somewhat greater foot and bicycle traffic than the other houses, no wear on the front door at child level— all those small indications— you know them as well as I. The address was one which I recalled from a report that came across my desk a few months ago, minor organisations in London that in themselves seem harmless but which might nonetheless become linked with difficulties in the future. I knocked on the door and asked the man who answered if I might speak to whomever had been seen by Miss Dorothy Ruskin that Tuesday.

"He was, shall I say, hesitant about letting me in, and I was forced to make a few unfriendly and authoritative noises at him. After much dancing about, he went off and returned with the gentleman who seems to be in charge of the house, which is, as you might have foreseen, a unit of Weizmann's Zionist organisation. I will not trouble you with the whole of the following lengthy and highly interesting conversation. I will merely say as a précis that we found ourselves to have a number of mutual friends, and when eventually we returned delicately to the topic of Miss Ruskin, my new friend the rabbi was happy to admit that she had indeed been there, had brought with her a thick manila envelope containing a number of letters and papers from Palestine, and had, among other things, told the rabbi that the business of the ibn Ahmadi family's land was far from over and that she foresaw an escalation of hostilities, both within Palestine and without. She was concerned that this might become a ready rallying cause for a variety of unrelated grievances, and she wanted to warn her friends to be, as the saying goes, on the lookout."

"Inconclusive, but suggestive," commented Holmes grudgingly. "How long was she there?"

"Approximately two and one half hours. One of their men was going into town, and they shared a cab as far as Paddington, where she left him just before noon."

"Oxford," I cried at the name of the train station. "I told you she went to Oxford. Did you have any results with those names, Inspector?"

"None at all. The old man at the library was gone part of that day, and he didn't see her."

"Jedediah out sick? The place will collapse— he's been there practically since Thomas Bodley married Mrs Ball."

"His mother's funeral, I believe. She was one hundred and two."

"Ah, good. For a minute, you had me worried."

"Was there any more, Mycroft?" asked Holmes, as scrupulously polite as a concert pianist at a children's music recital.

"Just that I was allowed to examine the envelope of papers, and they were as they should have been, no personal documents, no will. That is all, Sherlock. The floor is yours."

Up to that point, I had immersed myself in the charade. I had stated my evidence factually, listened to Lestrade's contribution as if it were of some importance, and noted Mycroft's rumblings, but before Holmes opened his mouth, before he so much as sat upright, I knew what he was going to say. I could see all my hard-won efforts tumbling down, and I knew that it was an emptiness. I saw the body of the case against Colonel Edwards flash up and crumble away into a drift of ashes like the walls of a wooden house in a fire: Holmes had the case in his hands, and there was nothing for it. The rest of us— even Mycroft— were left scrambling on thin air, and I was suddenly furious, seized by a pulse of something disturbingly near hatred for this superior prig I had so irrevocably attached myself to. It lasted for only an instant, before common sense threw a bridge out across the morass of tiredness, resentment, and uncertainty, of the awareness of urgent work undone and the remnants of shame and confusion from the afternoon, and I stood again on firm ground. I only hoped that neither pair of all-knowing grey eyes had witnessed the moment's lapse. Holmes was completing the motion of sitting upright.

"Thank you," he said. "Lestrade, would you mind pulling that crate over from the corner? Just put it here, thank you." He leant forward, untied the grubby string, and removed the top with the flourish of a conjurer. Inside was a jumble of chromium-plated bits of metal, hunks of broken glass, a large slab of dented mud guard, and a sheaf of the inevitable evidence envelopes. My heart twisted at the sight, then started to beat heavily. I must have moved or made a sound, because Holmes looked at me.

"Yes, Russell, the murder weapon. Or rather, portions of it. I knew it would be there, once I knew that Miss Ruskin had been killed by a motorcar, and particularly when the machine was not found nearby, stolen, used, and abandoned. Why a motorcar, a method which took at least two persons to arrange and had all the attendant danger of the telltale damage? The person who thought of it had to have the vehicles both ready to mind and near to hand; plus, the means of repairing damage must be available to him. I knew I should find some such facility as a garage, and the only danger was how thoroughly they had covered their tracks. In this case, they were too sure of themselves— Jason Rogers had rid himself of the pertinent sections in a load of other scrap metal sold to a local dealer, from whom I retrieved them.

"Unfortunately, their carelessness went only so far. They did quite a thorough job of washing the wreck down before they set to repairing it. There are only three small deposits of what may be dried blood, the largest being here, inside the broken headlamp. Samples of black paint from the side of the mud guard are in the envelope— to be matched up against whatever you may find on the button and her hairpins in your evidence envelope— as well as several hairs and one tiny scrap of fabric that resembles closely Miss Ruskin's coat, all of which I found among the débris. Fingerprints were useless, all of them from people who work in the shop, and as Inspector Lestrade notes, most of the Rogers grandsons have black hair, including Jason and his younger brother Todd, who occasionally works in the shop. I did take samples from the back of Jason Rogers's chair, though, as you know, the most one can hope for is a probable match. I have been working on different tests for matching hairs, but I have yet to come up with the definitive one."

Four sets of eyes scowled down into the box of mechanical jumble, wishing with varying degrees of intensity for the evidence to be there. Finally, Lestrade folded up his notebook and took up the piece of string.

"I'll give it to my lab people, Mr Holmes, with thanks. I don't think I'll ask how you came to have the stuff, though."

"Oh, it's all quite legal and above board, Lestrade, I assure you, part of a shipment of scrap purchased by a newly formed company called Sigerson Limited. You shall receive the billing invoice in the morning. You may be less happy with my methods of obtaining a certain letter. Do you have it, Russell?"

I had worn the letter in my undergarments most of the day, but now I took it from my handbag and gave it to Lestrade, who raised his eyebrows at its gouged, ink-splattered appearance. His eyebrows nearly disappeared beneath his overly long hair as he read it, and he whistled softly and handed it to Mycroft.

"Seems to me that Colonel Edwards is less and less likely, wouldn't you say, Mr Holmes?"

"It looks that way, I agree." His voice was bland, and he did not look at me. I felt another irrational and momentary surge of irritation, as if someone had dismissed my prize thoroughbred as being not quite up to the rest of the field.

"Mycroft's Arabs strike me the same way," I said, sounding regrettably peevish. Holmes glanced at me then, amused, and rose to his feet.

"I think that brings us up-to-date. When shall we four meet again?"

"If it's in thunder and in rain, I'm going to throw Miss Small's accursed shoes out the window and wear my Wellingtons," I grumbled. "Not tomorrow— I'll be back late. Tuesday?"

It was agreed, and we dispersed.

* * *

Holmes and I drove back with few words. He had to return the cab to its owner, and as it was still raining hard, he stopped in front of the boardinghouse to let me out. I looked out the window at the unwelcoming door, with my fingers on the car's door handle.

"You won't be long?" I asked. It would be just like him to disappear again for some days.

"Twenty minutes. If he's there, I'll have him drive me back."

I nodded and moved to open the door. His voice stopped my hand.

"You know, Russell, one of the damnable things about working in partnership is that one has to take the other person's proprietary feelings into account— Russell proponit sed Holmes disponit. It's not everyone who will put up with being run roughshod over in the course of the chase and then be willing to brush himself off and set to again as if nothing had happened. It was one of Watson's most valuable strengths as a partner, his doglike devotion. However," and here he turned his face towards me, though there was not enough light to reveal his expression, "you will no doubt have noticed that I did not consider this a strength when it came to a permanent partnership."

It was a generous apology, for Holmes, and I grinned at him.

"Woof," I said, and ducked out into the rain.

PART FIVE

Monday, 3 September 1923-

Wednesday, 5 September 1923

The poet's pen ... gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.

— Shakespeare

NINETEEN

tau

I never tire of Oxford. Cambridge is stunning, of course. Cambridge is sweet and ethereal, and the air in Cambridge bubbles in the mind like fine champagne, but I cannot imagine getting any work done there. Oxford is a walled city still, and within her black and golden, crumbling, scabrous, aged, dignified, and eternal walls lie pockets of rarefied air, places where, turning a corner or entering a conversation, the breath catches and for an instant one is taken up into ... if not the higher levels of heaven, at least into a place divine. And then, in the next moment, there comes an eddy of grit, and the ghostly echo of mediaeval oxcarts is heard rumbling down past Christopher Wren's bell tower on their way from Robert D'Oilley's castle to his grand bridge over the river. Even in Oxford University's holy of holies, the Bodleian Library, there comes an occasional grumble and whiff of the internal combustion engine.

The grit that morning was palpable, for the haze that softened the sunlight of what might otherwise have been a shimmering morning was the result of burning stubble in the surrounding countryside, and even at the early hour of my arrival, the black skeletal remains of the hard stalks rained gently onto the city, forming drifts that swirled up at the passing of motorcars. I saw no washing hung up to dry that Monday morning as I walked into town from the train station, along the sluggish canal, under the shadow of the otherworldly castle mound, looking in its vernal leaf more like a setting for Puck and Titania than it did a hillock for undergraduate picnics overlooking the prison, then past the decrepit slums of Greyfriars and out onto the deceptive everyday face of the most beautiful high street in any city I have seen, dodging carts, autos, trams, and bicycles, the town centre strikingly incomplete without its normal complement of fluttering black gowns, like a friend with a new and extreme haircut. Up the High towards the tantalising curve, but before entering it, at the very foot of St Mary's wise divinity, I made an abrupt turn north, and there, oddly satisfying in its scorn for a deliberate and formal perfection, was the quadrangle with the rotund earthiness of the Radcliffe Camera in its centre, bounded on its four sides by the tracery of All Souls on my right, the height of St Mary's at my back, Brasenose College on the left giving nothing away, and before me, where there should rightly have been trumpets and gilt, the unadorned backside of the Bodleian and the Divinity School. I was home.

I had come here for three purposes. The first, I dispatched within two hours: Although modern Egyptian history is not my field, once one knows the basic techniques of research, no field's fences or unfamiliar terrain make much of a barrier. I skimmed half a dozen books and brought the colonel's wavering scholarship back to earth, noted two contrary arguments and a nice apothegm I would steal for him, and then abandoned Egypt, to proceed with my own, considerably more appealing projects. I began in Duke Humfrey's.

My tools were a broad-nibbed pen, an unlined notebook, and a page with twenty words written on it. On a quick tour of the room, I spotted three familiar heads: a good beginning. I gathered up two of my fellow students, approached the third figure, a don whose subject was church history, and explained my need.

"I wonder if I might ask your help with a little project of mine," I began. "There's this fairly old piece of manuscript that I think may have come from a woman's hand. I have a friend who's something by way of an expert on handwriting— you know, he can tell you whether the person is right- or left-handed, old or young, where and how much he was educated, that sort of thing— and he said that if I were to collect some samples of men and women writing Greek and Hebrew, which is what the manuscript is in, it would give him a paradigm for comparison."

"What great fun," the don exclaimed, his eyes sparkling through bottle-glass lenses. "Do you know, just the other day I dug up a sheaf of letters in Bodley, and as I was reading through them, two of them struck me as somehow ineffably feminine. They're Latin, of course, but if you do come up with anything on your project, you might be interested in seeing these others. Any particular phrase you want written?" he added, reaching for his pen.

"Yes, here's the list, and do use this pen— it'll keep the samples uniform." His eyebrows rose at the selection of words, but he wrote them neatly and handed back the pen and book. The other two did the same. I made note of their identities on each page, thanked them, and left them to their books.

Academia being what it is, the reactions of everyone else I approached during the course of the day's investigations were quite predictable. Intensely curious and intellectually excited, particularly over my chosen words (which in Greek included Jerusalem, Temple, Rachel, madness, confusion, and Romans, and in Hebrew the words for day, darkness, land, and wilderness), they were nonetheless loath to trespass on my personal research. As a result, all helped, except one ancient of days who was having a flare-up of arthritis in his writing hand, and all demanded to see the results of my little project as soon as it was published. By early afternoon, I had a filled notebook. Furthermore, by late afternoon, I had a clear idea of what Dorothy Ruskin had done on the missing Tuesday, and by evening, when I prepared to turn my back on the town centre, I had a vastly renewed sense of vigour and purpose. For all of those things, I felt profoundly grateful.

I made my late supper of a meat pie and half a pint of bitter at the Eagle and Child, and took the train back to London. It was nearly eleven o'clock when I said, "Evening, Billy" into the empty corridor and heard his reply through the door. I was hardly surprised that the room next to mine was empty. It had taken me some days to get back into the rhythm of a case, but I had now remembered it, and I no longer expected Holmes to appear but for brief snatches of consultation, reflection, and sleep.

I went down the hallway to the bathroom and washed away the day's grime, checked to see that I had an ironed frock for the next day, and settled down at the little window table with a lamp and the notebook. Shortly after midnight, I heard a key in the door of the adjoining room, and a moment later the grizzled, disreputable face of my husband leered at me from the connecting door, one eye drooping and sightless, teeth stained brown and yellow, lips slack.

"Good evening, Russell, hard at work, I see. I'll be with you in a moment." He pulled back into his room. I closed my notebook and walked over to the doorway to lean against the jamb with my arms crossed, watching him as he discarded the disguise. There was a lift to his shoulders and a gleam in his eyes that I rarely saw at home, and he looked and moved like a man twenty years younger as he tossed his clothing into an untidy heap in the bottom of the wardrobe, replacing it with his usual spotless shirt and soft dressing gown, then bent over the mirror to remove his eyebrows and scrub off the makeup. He was back in his own proper element.

My face must have reflected my thoughts, for he caught my eye in the mirror and began to smile.

"What amuses you, my wife and colleague?"

"Oh, nothing, Holmes. I was just wondering about the bees."

He looked startled for a moment, and then he began to laugh softly.

"Ah, the bees, yes, and the pottering beekeeper. Even an old hound occasionally stirs to the sound of a distant horn. I do wish you would not snort, Russell; it is really most unbecoming. I suppose you would like me to shave," he added, examining his chin thoughtfully.

"I only snort at snortworthy statements, Holmes, and yes, please do. Unless you intend to spend the night on the streets."

"There has been quite enough of that in the last week, thank you. I have been very cold without my Shunammite."

I studied him as he stropped the ivory-handled cutthroat, with a jaunty flick of the wrist at the end of each stroke.

"You must have been heartily sick of that snowstorm, Holmes. From Genesis to First Kings, just to escape the missionaries."

"Oh, no, I only reached the twenty-eighth chapter of Leviticus on that occasion. I appropriated a pair of skis as soon as the snow stopped." He reached for the shaving mug and began to whip the brush furiously about.

"I didn't know you could ski."

"I learnt. It was less hazardous duty than the missionaries."

"Coward. You might have learnt something from them, such as the fact that Leviticus has only twenty-seven chapters. Now, if you will excuse me, I shall go and warm the bed."

Sometime later, I thought to ask what he had been doing that day.

"I have been reading my Bible."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Sorry, was my arm over your ear?"

"It must have been— I could have sworn I heard you say you were reading your Bible. You don't even own one."

"I did, I was, and I do. Now. Thanks to your friend the colonel."

"Holmes—"

"Do not ruffle your feathers; I shall explain. I have spent the evening in the company of a number of unfortunate gentlemen who, like myself, are willing to participate in a rudimentary Bible study, provided their stomachs are not empty at the time."

I sorted this out.

"The colonel's church runs a soup kitchen."

"Got it in one. There seems to be a certain degree of affection on the part of the unfortunates towards their benefactors, judging from the way they lowered their voices for the more ribald of statements concerning King David and Abishag, his human hot-water bottle."

"That doesn't surprise me. But how did you find him? Did you follow him all day?"

"Hardly. I began in the bookstore-cum-printshop that produced the tract on women you found on the colonel's bookshelf. In the course of our conversation, the owner told me of a lecture being given in the afternoon on the topic of 'Women in the Church.' I went and sat two rows behind Colonel Edwards."

"Not dressed as one of the unfortunates, I think."

"By no means. I was a highly respectable gentleman with a neat little beard. A most informative lecture, Russell. You would have found it quite stimulating."

"No doubt," I agreed politely. "So, you followed him to the church, changed yourself into that character with the eye, and allowed him to serve you soup and try his best to save your soul."

"Essentially, yes. It was truly a most amusing day."

"Amusing, but was it absolutely necessary to douse yourself in the scent of cheap gin? It is very off-putting."

"I apologise. It was a means of adding corroborative detail and artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

Before I could decide whether or not to pursue this obvious conversational red herring, he picked up the questioning himself.

"And you, Russell. How was your day?"

"Highly satisfactory, thank you, from beginning to end. Despite the fact that it's between terms in Oxford, I have sixty-seven writing samples. I also picked up the information the colonel wanted. Bought two books, one of them out of print since 1902. Had a nice chat with a few friends over a pie and a pint, and met an odd man named Tolkien, a reader in English literature at Leeds who has a passion for early Anglo-Saxon poetry and runes and such. And, oh yes, I found where Miss Ruskin was on that missing Tuesday afternoon."

His reaction was gratifying, and he was no longer relaxing towards sleep.

"Well done, Russell. I hoped you might dig that one out. Wait, let me get my pipe."

He came back, wrapped himself in his dressing gown, and pulled the chair over next to the bed, settling down like a cat, with his legs tucked beneath him.

"Once I knew her college, it didn't take long," I told him. "The dean was in, and I just asked her if there might be any particularly close friends of Miss Ruskin's about. She knew Miss Ruskin herself and was surprised that I should be asking. 'Isn't that a coincidence,' she said. 'I saw her only, oh, less than two weeks ago. I happened to be heading down the Cornmarket and I looked up and there she was. I couldn't stop to talk, unfortunately, but it was she. Her sight is getting very bad, poor thing, isn't it?' No, she didn't know. I told her, and she was rather upset, but not shocked. I suppose hearing that one of the older alumnae had died must be a common enough occurrence for her. At any rate, she gave me the names of five people whom she knew to be friends of Miss Ruskin— three in the Oxford area and two in London. I was lucky— three of the five were on the telephone. One said she had spoken with Miss Ruskin but hadn't seen her. Another was in Canterbury, and the third was not aware that Miss Ruskin was in the country. That left one in Oxford and one in London. I took a taxi up the Woodstock Road to the fourth friend, but I found her house shut up tight. I stood about scratching my head and looking lost until one of those nosey neighbours with see-all lace curtains at the windows came out to tell me that dear, sweet Miss Lessingham was in hospital with a broken hip, had been for three weeks now, though she was doing considerably better. So, I backtracked to the Radcliffe Infirmary and found that yes, indeed, 'dear Dorothy' had spent some hours with Miss Constance Lessingham, her onetime tutrix and lifelong friend. Had, in fact, spent the entire afternoon there at her side, reading to her and helping her write a number of letters, before leaving to catch the eight-ten to Paddington.

"You should have seen her, Holmes, lying there in that hospital bed in her mobcap, like a thin Queen Victoria, regally accepting the ministrations of nurses, doctors, friends, grandchildren of her old students, you name it. She must be ninety-five if she's a day, but completely aware, not in the slightest fuzzy. I told her about the manuscript, and she was fascinated. Nothing would do but that I should recite it to her— twice: once in the original, then in translation. I felt like I had just been through a viva voce when she finished with me. It must have tired her, too, because she fell asleep for about ten minutes.

"When she woke up, I told her that Miss Ruskin had died, and how. At first she didn't say anything, just stared out the window at the clouds, but then two tears came, just two little drops on that tiny wrinkled face, and she said, 'That makes seventy-one of my students who have predeceased me, and at every one, I've thought that it just doesn't seem right. They were my children, you see, and a mother should never have to outlive her babies.' She was quiet for a minute, and then she sort of chuckled and said, 'Well, that's what I get for being too stubborn to die, I suppose,' and she returned to the manuscript. I asked her several questions, on the chance that Miss Ruskin had told her something, but so far as I could tell, they had just talked about archaeology and mutual friends. Sorry there wasn't more to the missing afternoon."

"At least it fills in a distressingly large hole in her schedule. I assume that her departure from Oxford and her ten o'clock return to the hotel match up?"

"They do, I'm afraid."

"Never mind. Tomorrow is another day."

"Are you returning to Cambridgeshire tomorrow?"

"No. The work there is finished." He did not mean the wallpaper.

"Good."

"Go to sleep now. I shall finish this pipe, I think."

"Stay here."

"I won't disturb you?"

"To the contrary."

"Ah. I have felt your absence as well, Russell. Sleep well."

I drifted away into confused thoughts of indomitable old ladies and monocled young aristocrats, and the heavy pipe smoke seemed to tingle on the inside of my right wrist. In the muzziness that comes just before sleep, the incongruous statement Holmes had made earlier came back to mind, and I knew where I had heard it.

"Good Lord, Holmes!" I exclaimed, brought up out of sleep.

"Yes, Russell?"

"Since when do you go in for Gilbert and Sullivan?"

"Of all the unpleasant acts I have been forced to perform in the course of an investigation, trailing a suspect who was addicted to light opera and vaudeville was one of the most depraved. I might ask the same of you, Russell."

"The girl who lived down the hall had a beau in a D'Oyley Carte production of the Mikado when it came to Oxford, and she dragged me along."

"Was that the hypochondriac whose bandages we stole?"

"No, the one with the brandy that tasted of petrol."

"That explains it, then."

"Good night, Holmes."

"Mmm."

TWENTY

upsilon

The following morning, I woke at first light, to find Holmes still curled up in the chair, his eyes far away. The only signs that he had moved during the night were the saucer on the arm of his chair (heaped with burnt matches and pipe dottles), the faint stir of the curtains (where he had thoughtfully cracked open the window to prevent our suffocation), and the small notebook of writing samples on the bedside table (which I had left in the chest of drawers). I could almost see the thin film of greasy smoke on the walls, and I shuddered as I pulled the blankets back over my head in protest.

"You look like a vulture sitting there, Holmes," I growled. Four hours' sleep makes me irritable. The last of the objects I had noticed galvanised a faint activity in my brain cells.

"What is your judgement on the writing?" I asked with eyes firmly closed.

"Your papyrus is definitely from a woman's hand."

"Good. Wake me at seven."

There was no answer, but a minute or so later, a horrible, cold, bristly male person insinuated itself into my cozy nest, stinking faintly of cheap gin and strongly of stale tobacco.

"My dear, sweet wife," it murmured into my tightly blanketed ear.

"No!"

"Russell, my dear."

"Absolutely not."

"Wife of my age, I am going to give you another opportunity to solve this case of yours."

"At this very moment?"

"This afternoon."

I pulled the bedclothes down a fraction and eyed him.

"How?"

"You will go to see Miss Sarah Chessman."

"The witness?" The blankets fell away. "But she's been questioned a number of times. She can't remember a thing."

"She couldn't remember for the police, no." His voice was curiously, ominously gentle. "Perhaps she needs to be asked by someone who knows how best to release answers that lie buried deep in the mind."

I knew instantly what he was talking about, and a cold finger trickled up my spine.

"Oh no, Holmes," I whispered. "Really, no. I couldn't. Don't ask that of me. Please."

"I am not asking anything of you, Russell." His voice was steady and soft, and he knew precisely what he was doing. "I simply thought that if it helped her remember what happened that night, you might think it worthwhile. It is your decision."

"You— Holmes, you utter bastard. Goddamn it, why don't you do it? All you do is play dress-up and prune roses and root around nice tidy automobile salvage yards while I vamp that man and dodge his son's slimy hands, all for nothing, and then you tell me to go mucking around in someone else's nightmare and— oh God." I sat back against the head of the bed and took a deep breath. "Sorry. I am sorry, Holmes. You're right. You're always right, damn you." I turned to him, and lay listening to the steady rhythm of his heart and lungs. "We're down to very little else, aren't we?"

"I honestly do not know. I ought to have kept the evidence I gave Lestrade and worked on it myself. I am seized by the idea that they will make some terrible missteps. Police laboratories can be either as inexorable as doomsday or as flighty as a cage of butterflies, and one never knows. We can wait and see what they produce with those bits of chromium and enamel. Juries do so like motives, though. I cannot escape that thought. But you are right, Russell, there is no reason to rush into the interview with Miss Chessman. No reason at all. And even if the laboratory finds nothing concrete enough to convict on, there is still a choice. Always we have the choice of turning back. The woman is already dead, and I cannot see anyone else being killed if her murderer isn't caught."

I raised up and looked at him, and I saw myself reflected in his grey eyes.

"I can't believe I heard that," I said. "You must believe me fragile indeed to have even thought of it. Of course we go on. We have no choice. The choice was made weeks ago, when we invited her to Sussex. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though."

"No, it does not mean that. You'll think about seeing Miss Chessman?"

"I'll go this evening, when she gets home from work."

He said nothing, just warmed me until it was time for me to leave for work. Why I was returning to the Edwards house, I was not certain, as it was fairly obvious now that the trail led elsewhere. Partly, it was that I had said I would be there, and explanations on the telephone might prove difficult. There was also the fact that I did not wish to waste the work I had done in Oxford the day before, and I felt some responsibility to the book. Mostly, though, it gave me something to do to take my mind off of the cold pit in my stomach. I dreaded my own past and the pain that could well be dredged up while helping Miss Chessman recover her memories of Dorothy Ruskin's death. Coping with Edwards and son would keep the cold sweats at bay.

I determinedly kept the colonel to the book all morning, and by the time Alex rang for lunch, I had given him the outline, two sample chapters, and the name of an editor whom a friend in my college had recommended for the purpose. Over lunch, I told the colonel that I was being called back home and would have to leave London by the end of the week, most terribly sorry. I was glad that young Gerald was not around.

"Mary, look, is it because—"

"No, Colonel, it is not because of anything you have or have not done. Or your son, for that matter. I have enjoyed working here, and I hoped more would come of it. In fact, I think we could have become friends." A statement, I realised, that gave a half truth, an emphatic truth, and, to my own surprise, a further truth. "I did not realise that my prior commitments would return to claim me quite so soon, and I'm sorry about it all."

"No apologies necessary, Mary. You are a most mysterious lady, though. I wish I had come to know you better. Would that be possible, do you think?"

"Colonel, I doubt that you'd like what you learnt. But, yes, perhaps I shall reappear, mysteriously, if you like. Now, I wanted to talk to you about that fifth chapter. I really do think you should consider a few pages on family structure and the subtler powers of the woman in Egyptian society...."

TWENTY-ONE

phi

At 5:20, my week's pay in my handbag, I stood outside the building where Miss Sarah Chessman lived. Seven minutes later, I saw a woman matching her description alight from a crowded omnibus and clack purposefully down the street towards me, a small woman with glossy shingled hair, wearing clothes that had been carefully tailored for a woman who weighed a few pounds more than she did just now. The deliberate set to her jaw and shoulders made me wonder how long she could stretch her reserves, and as she drew near, I could see the pallor of her skin and the tautness next to her eyes and the slightly haunted look I had often, in the past, seen in my own mirror. She took out her key, and as she moved past me to the door, I held out a meaningless but official-looking card which Lestrade had prepared for me.

"Miss Chessman?" I asked politely.

She jumped as if I had screamed at her, and when she looked up from the card, she had on her face a look of pure loathing.

"Oh, bloody hell, not again!"

She jammed her key into the lock, slammed the door violently open, and stalked into the building.

"Miss Chessman?" I called after her.

"Come in, for Christ's sake. Let's get it over with. But it's the last time, do you hear? Absolutely the last time."

I followed her up to her tiny flat and closed the door behind me. The room was painfully neat, and the way in which she went automatically to the wardrobe to brush her coat and hang it up and to place her hat on the shelf told me that it was not a temporary tidiness, but a permanent state. Like its occupant, the room was glossy, smooth, and designed to allow no one entrance without permission. Both room and woman were very different from the teary, newly affianced flosshead I had expected to find. This was going to prove even more difficult than I had anticipated.

She was, however, nervous and could not quite hide the fact. She went to a cupboard and poured herself a drink, straight gin, without offering me anything. She took a large swallow, went to a table near one of the two windows, took a cigarette from a japanned tin box, and made a great show of inserting it into a holder and lighting it. She stood and puffed and drank and looked down at the passing cars, and I waited motionless, hands in pockets, for her to gain control of herself. Finally, she stubbed the cigarette out in a spotless ashtray and went back to the drinks cupboard. She spoke over her shoulder.

"I've already told you people everything I can remember. Three nights last week and once on the weekend, one bloody set of police after another. You'd think I'd run her down, the way the questions come."

"I'm not from the police, Miss Chessman." The mildness of my reply turned her around, and she ran her eyes over me as I stood there patiently. "The card was given me so you would know I was here with their permission."

"Then who are you? The newspapers?"

"No." I had to smile at the thought.

"Who, then?"

"A friend."

"No friend of mine. Oh, you mean a friend of hers, that woman?"

"Of that woman, yes."

I thought for a minute she would tell me to go, but abruptly she threw up one hand in a lost little gesture, and seemed even smaller.

"Oh, all right. Sit down. Can I give you something?"

"A small glass of the gin would be nice." I did not intend to drink it, but it established the community of the table. She brought it and her own refilled glass and sat opposite me. I thanked her.

"Really," she said, subdued, "I cannot help you. I've told everyone everything I can remember. You're wasting your time."

"She was my friend," I said simply. "You were the last person, aside from her murderers, to see her alive. Do you mind awfully, going through it again? I know it must be very painful for you, and I'll understand if you can't bring yourself to do it."

Her face softened, and I caught a glimpse of the person her friends saw, when her formidable defenses were down. She would have few friends, I thought, but they would be lifelong.

"Do you know, you're the first person who has said that to me? Every other one acted like I had all the feelings of a phonograph record."

"Yes, I know. I should hate having to be a policeman, having to grow all hard and impersonal to keep from being eaten up by it all. I'm sorry they were so awful to you."

"Oh, well, it wasn't that bad, I guess. The worst of it was the way they wanted every last detail, where was I standing, and where was the beggar sitting, and did the screeching sound come after she fell or as she was falling, and all the time all I could think of was the sound of—" She stood up and went for another cigarette, then pulled the harshness back up around her voice. "It's stupid, really, but I keep thinking of the time when I was nine and I saw my dog get crushed under a cart. Try telling a Scotland Yard chief inspector that." She laughed, and I knew that she would not help me, not in the way I needed her to help me, unless I could shatter that smooth surface. It would cost me a great deal to buy her cooperation, and there was no guarantee that the results would be worth the expense. I studied her glossy, smooth hair and well-cut clothes, and felt too tall and unkempt and poorly clothed, and I knew again that I had no choice. I exhaled slowly.

"May I tell you something?" My soft question brought her attention around to my face, and what she saw there brought her, wary, back to the chairs. I told her then the story I had given to only two other people in my life. It was a simple story, a terrible story, of an automobile that strayed from its side of the road and what happened when it met another automobile at the top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and what happened to the only survivor, the child who had been the cause of it: me.

It was a cruel thing to do, telling her that tale with the hideous, ever-fresh guilt lying naked in my face and voice. My coin was pain, my own pain, and with it I bought her. By the time I finished, she was, unwillingly, in my debt, and I knew that the drained starkness in her face was a reflection of my own.

"Why are you telling me this?" It was almost a whisper. "What do you want from me?"

I answered her indirectly but honestly.

"You have to remember that I was only fourteen. For several weeks, I ranged from states of near catatonia to violent fits of self-destruction. And amnesia. I could not remember the accident at all, not while I was awake, until a very good and amazingly sensitive psychiatrist took me on. Yes, you begin to see the point of it now. With her help, I learnt to get it under control, at least to the point that I could take it out and look at it. The nightmares took longer, but then I ... didn't have her help for more than a couple of months."

"Do you still have nightmares?" This was more than idle curiosity asking.

"Not of the accident, not anymore."

"How did you get rid of them?"

"Time. And, I told someone who cared. That took a long time."

"To tell?"

"To work up to the telling."

I waited while she fussed with another cigarette. Her short hair fell perfectly from the razor-sharp line down the centre of her scalp.

"What did she do to make you remember? The psychiatrist?"

"A number of different things, many of which would be inappropriate here. Are you by any chance expecting your fiancé this evening?"

My question confused her, but she answered willingly.

"Yes. He said he'd be here at six-thirty." It was five past.

"After he gets here, with your permission and his, I'd like to think about something, a little experiment. Have you ever been hypnotised?"

Her eyes grew slightly wary.

"Hypnotised? Like with a swinging watch, 'you are getting sleepy,' and that? I was at a party once where someone was doing it, making people walk through the fountain and such, but they were all pretty tipsy to begin with."

"What I'm talking about is quite different, and that's why I'd like your friend here before we make any decisions. I don't want to hypnotise you, and I certainly don't want to make you jump into a fountain or bark like a dog. What I should like to do, with your full cooperation, is to help you hypnotise yourself, so you can root around for any minor details you may have forgotten about that night. You know, sometimes the mind works a bit like those straw Chinese finger tubes, where the harder you pull against them, the more difficult it is to get loose. Having the police hammering away at you has only made the mind put up a wall to protect itself, and the idea of hypnotism is to allow you to relax and see through some peepholes in the wall." This was an entirely inadequate explanation, but its homeliness would satisfy and reassure. "You would be in charge, not I, though I'd like to have Mr O'Rourke here so that you feel perfectly safe about it."

"You won't make me do anything I don't want to do?" She didn't like the idea of relinquishing control any more than I would.

"I'm not certain I could, even if I wanted to," I lied, and then I returned to the truth. "You'd be aware and in control at all times, you could stop whenever you want, and Mr O'Rourke would be there to make certain of it."

"How long would it take?"

"Between one and two hours, I should think. If you are interested in doing it tonight," I said, shifting gently from the conditional and vague to a future and definite, "you ought to have something to eat first, and use the lavatory." I could see the simple details reassure her further.

"Tommy— Mr O'Rourke— is bringing some sandwiches. We were going for a picnic supper," she said noncommittally.

"I could come back tomorrow, if you like."

"No, it's all right. Actually, you've got me interested in it."

Mr Tommy O'Rourke arrived early with sandwiches and fizzy lemonade and an expression of deep mistrust when he saw me. By this time, Miss Chessman's apprehension had given way to a degree of enthusiasm, and she explained and chattered in between bites. I turned down the offer of food, took some coffee when it was made, and then sat down to explain the process so they would both know what to expect. When I had finished, Miss Chessman excused herself for a moment and left the room.

"How do you feel about all this, Mr O'Rourke?" I asked.

"D'you know, I think it may be a good idea. She's in a real state about it all, and I think ... well, if she could feel she had helped some, instead of blaming herself for not being able to help, she'd feel ... I don't know. She hasn't been sleeping at all well, I don't think." He was incoherent, but his concern was unmistakable.

"You understand that she may, to a certain extent, relive the accident? That she may go through the horror again, but I'll help her to lay it to rest, and you mustn't interrupt? It could be hard on her to be interrupted just then."

"I understand. Do I need to sit in the corner or anything?"

"Small noises and movements will not distract her, but please don't address her directly unless I ask you to.

"So, Miss Chessman, all ready? You will need to be comfortable. Lie down if you like, or sit in a chair that supports your head fully. Yes, that should be fine. A pillow, perhaps? Good. Shoes off? No? Very well." My voice became gentle, unobtrusive, and rhythmical.

"As I said, Miss Chessman, the idea of the exercise is to allow you a certain amount of distance between the world around you and the world you carry within you. We do this by steps, ten of them, by counting backwards from ten. Each of the ten steps takes you a bit further down into yourself, and when we come back up, we reverse the process. At ten, you are fully alert, relaxed, your eyes are open, and you can talk normally. Further down, between approximately six and three, or two, you may find speech inconvenient, distracting. In that case, if I ask you a question, I should like you to raise this finger, just slightly, to indicate yes"— I touched her right forefinger—"and this finger, just slightly, to signal no." I touched her left forefinger. "Do that now, please, for yes. That's right. And for no. Good. We are at ten now, all ten fingers relaxed and warm. You may leave your eyes open if you wish, or close them at any time. It does not matter in the least, though many people find it helpful to concentrate on a single object" ( ... one pink plaster rose on a pale yellow ceiling ... ) "as they walk down the ten steps. Noises from the room or your body's little reactions will not distract you, just nudge you a bit further towards the next step. We are at ten now, like your ten fingers, I want you to feel them one at a time as I count them, beginning with one." I touched the last knuckle of each finger in a slow cadence, numbering each one in turn, but I broke the rhythm after nine. An instant after I should have touched the last finger, it twitched ever so slightly, and I smiled to myself. This lady would not only walk through a fountain; she would probably undress first if I asked her. Intelligent, well-defended people are often the easiest to manipulate. I made a mental note to add a caution before I brought her back up from the trance.

"Very well, you are now fully relaxed, and you understand what we're doing, and in fact, when we're finished, you'll be able to do it all yourself. It's actually a very useful thing to know— for when you're going to the dentist, especially. I once had nine teeth worked on, and by walking down the steps first, I didn't have to be bothered by the discomfort; I could answer the dentist's questions, and afterwards I didn't have any pain, because my body had already acknowledged it. So you can see what a useful thing it is, and very easy, really, you've already made the step to nine, a small step, very easy, wasn't it? Just that bit more relaxed, your hands feel a bit heavier— feel your thumb joint, how heavy it is?— heavy and warm, even the tips of your fingers, down to nine, just under the surface now, and your face is beginning to relax now, your eyes and your mouth, like the feeling you get after a day of physical work, when you can sit back and relax, very tired, but a good tired, a satisfying tired, a tired that you feel at eight o'clock at night, in front of a warm fire with a hot drink, after eight hours out in the fresh air, but it's evening now, and you can relax and be satisfied."

Hypnotism is all rhythm and sensitivity, and I guided her down, never taking my eyes from her, never mentioning the night we were aiming for, always building her confidence and relaxation. In twenty minutes, we had passed through the yawning and twitching phases and were at four. Her eyes had fluttered closed. Tommy O'Rourke had not moved.

"Four, a nice balanced number, four limbs, four corners to a square. A dog has four legs, and I'd like you to do something in a minute, with your right hand, as we move down to three, only three steps now, three points in a triangle." I talked about three for a while; then, when she was firmly settled, I said, "I'd like you to make your right thumb meet your right middle finger in a circle, but you don't want to rouse yourself to do it; you want to let the two fingers do it, let the two tips of the two fingers come together all by themselves because it's the most natural thing for them to do. You can feel how they want to touch, can't you, if you just allow them. Just think about how it would feel to make a circle with those two fingers."

I spoke very slowly now, increasing the silences between the phrases. I was myself more than halfway into a trance, and as I spoke, I could hear another voice in my ear, saying the words I was about to pronounce, a woman's light voice with a slight German accent, speaking to a severely traumatised adolescent whose problems were considerably greater than those of Sarah Chessman's. The voice in my mind fell silent, and I stopped talking for a minute and watched the beginnings of the involuntary muscle control in her hand, jerky at first, as her unconscious mind took control of the muscles of the thumb and finger and brought them together, slowly, inexorably, into the light joining that would be like an iron link to pull apart. O'Rourke watched the eerie movements, and I felt his eyes on me, but I had no attention to spare him, and he subsided again into his chair.

"There is now a circle, one circle, and you can feel it now, one deep, quiet circle of now and then, and you can look into this circle because you are in it, and it is in you, this one circle, and you are on the bottom step, and that is as far as we can go now, and you are free to talk as you want and think as you want, and whenever you are here, you need feel only safe and sure of yourself, and nobody can touch you here; no one can ever ask you to do anything you don't want to. It's your step, Sarah, yours alone, and now you've found it, you can come back to it anytime you want, but just now, let's explore a bit, if you want to, and you can tell me all about the dinner you ate two weeks ago, on Tuesday night it was, you remember. It was a nice dinner, wasn't it, and if you want to tell me, I'd like to hear about it."

Her mouth made a kind of chewing motion two or three times, as if tasting the words, and then she spoke, her voice low and flat, slow at first, but quite clear.

"Tuesday night, we went to Matty's house for dinner. I wore my blue dress and we took a taxi because it isn't far and it was raining." She was launched, and she continued on in monotonous detail until I finally eased her out of Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, then the afternoon.

"And now it's Wednesday evening. You've come home from work, and Tommy's coming to pick you up at— what time did he say?"

"Half seven. We're going to a posh restaurant to celebrate our six-month anniversary, and there's a flaming pudding at the next table, so I order that, and Tommy orders champers." I let her go on again for some time before giving another touch to the reins of her narrative.

"And now it's later, and you're leaving the restaurant, and you're full of lovely food and happy with Tommy, and where do you go?" My voice was light and calm. O'Rourke, across the room, was beginning to tense up, but she was not; deep in the hypnotic state, she did not anticipate anything.

"We walk to the pub where we met, back in February, and we see some friends who got married in June and we go to their house and laugh and drink and Solly has some great new records from America and we dance and then the neighbours pound on the floor and we have to leave."

"And you set off walking and you're humming the music, aren't you? And you're still dancing along, and you love Tommy and the feel of your arm in his, and you cuddle a bit here and there because there's no one on the street, and in the light from the streetlamp Tommy sees a pot of red flowers up under somebody's window...."

"And he starts to climb up the drainpipe to get me one, and I say, 'Oh, Tommy, don't do that, silly boy. Stop it. There's somebody coming and she—' "

It came upon her as suddenly as it had that night, and she went rigid, her mouth and eyes staring wide, and I went down beside her and spoke forcibly (The sound of the voice with the German accent was deafening. Surely she couldn't hear me over it; surely O'Rourke would stand up and come over and demand to know who it was saying, "Mary, your clever eyes can remember—"), into her ear.

"Tommy can't see, Sarah, but you can; your clever eyes can remember— it's like something in a cinema house, isn't it, on the screen, but slowed down, no more real than that, a car on the screen, coming out of the darkness and hitting her and tumbling her around, and it drives around the corner and then that dirty-looking beggarman stands up and he moves and he does something. He does something; he bends down and he is doing something with his hands. What is he doing, Sarah?"

"He ... He ... stands up. He isn't old. Why did I think he was old? He stands up like a young man and he goes to the pillar-box and he has ... he has something in his hand. He has a pair of scissors in his hand, and he bends down, and then he ... he's winding yarn into a ball, and he picks up his briefcase that's lying on the street and he turns his back on the ... on that ... She's not dead; she just moved. Tommy, she just moved, and the man walks off. He turns and sees us and he starts to run and the car is waiting for him and the door is open, someone in the front seat is leaning back to hold it open, a small person, wearing ... I can't see, but he falls into the car, the back seat, and it starts driving away while his leg is still out of it, and then the door swings shut and the car is gone around the corner, and we go and see, but she's dead now. Oh God, how horrible, she's dead, oh God."

"Sarah," I interrupted, "The car, Sarah, look at the car going around the corner. What are the numbers on the registration plate at the back of the car?"

"That's funny, isn't it? There aren't any numbers on the back of it."

"All right, Sarah, look back at the beggarman. He's standing up now, Sarah; he's standing up and taking a step toward the pillar box, and he's wearing a hat, isn't he, a knit cap, and it's dark on the street, but the streetlamp lights up his face from the side. See how it hits his nose? You can see his nose clearly, the shape of it. And his chin, too, against his coat, and when he turns his head, the light falls on his cheeks and his eyes. You'll never forget the shape of his eyes, even though you can't see the eyes themselves. They're in the shadows, but his face, Sarah, you can see his face, and you'll never forget it. You'll remember him even when you've walked back up the steps, won't you, Sarah, because you're a clever girl, and Tommy's here to be with you, and that was a good woman who shouldn't have died, and you want to remember everything. Even if it hurts, like a sad movie, you can remember."

Her face was faintly surprised as she stared into the room, and slightly relieved, but not afraid or horrified. I continued, "You have it now, the moving picture of the beggar standing up and the people inside the car, and you can hold on to it now, like a clear cinema film. You can run it anytime you want; you can bring it back up the steps with you. Shall we go, then? One step now. You want to turn around now, and step back up onto step number two. It's as easy as breathing, slow and steady, taking that one section of the circle with you, up to number two, and then to three, the third step." I watched to see when she was firmly on each level before proceeding. "And to four, four steps up, you feel like you're waking up, though you haven't been asleep. You're halfway back now, at five."

She took a deep, shuddering breath at six and stretched at eight, and her eyes found Tommy and she smiled at ten. I sat back, limp, and closed my eyes. My blouse was clinging to my back with the sweat, and my neck and shoulder throbbed with fire.

Miss Chessman, in contrast, looked better than she had three hours before. Her eyes were clear, and she seemed rested. She smiled tentatively at me.

"Is it still clear in your mind?" I asked her. The smile faded, but her answer was even.

"It is. Funny I couldn't remember it before."

"Shock does that. I'd like to telephone a friend from Scotland Yard. He'll listen to your story without making you feel like a gramophone record, and he'll bring some photographs to see if any of them match the man you saw. Is that all right? I know it will be late when you finish, but it's best to do it while you're fresh, and he can fix it with your employers so you don't have to go in early."

"I don't mind. It would make me feel good to be doing something to help that woman. I mean to say, I know it's too late to help her, but—"

"Fine, then. Is there a telephone?"

"Down the hallway to the right."

I slumped against the wall as I waited for the connexion to Mycroft's number. Holmes answered it at the first ring, and I tried to keep the exhaustion from my voice.

"Hello, husband. Would you please ring Lestrade and tell him to bring his photographs along? I'll wait for him, then get a taxi back to Mycroft's when they're through with me."

"You got it?"

"As you say, I got it."

"It was hard?"

"In my humble opinion, psychiatrists are not paid enough. I'll be back as soon as I can."

But Holmes arrived even before Lestrade, and we left them to it, and I stumbled off to Mycroft's guest-room bed without even waiting to see which of Lestrade's sheaf of portraits Sarah Chessman picked out.

TWENTY-TWO

chi

It was light in the room, despite the curtains, when a small noise woke me. After a moment, I spoke into my pillow.

"It occurs to me that I am condemned rarely to awaken normally under this roof. I am usually disturbed by loud and urgent voices from the sitting room, occasionally by a particularly horrendous alarm clock at some ungodly hour, and once by a gunshot. However," I added, and turned over, "of all the unnatural noises which serve to pull me from slumber, the rattle of a cup and saucer is the least unwelcome." I paused. "On the other hand, my nose tells me to beware a detective bearing coffee, rather than the more congenial beverage of tea. May I take this as a wordless message that my presence is required, in a wide-awake state?" I reached for the cup.

"You may. Lestrade is sending a car for us. He has made an arrest. Two arrests."

"The Rogers grandsons?"

"One Rogers grandson, and one friend of a Rogers grandson. A friend who has been known to carry a long and unfriendly knife, whose taste in clothing is towards the extreme, and who has in the past had contact with the long arm of the law over such varied disagreements as stolen property, driving a car in which a pair of unsuccessful bank robbers attempted to make their escape, and an argument over a lady in which blood was shed, but no life lost, at the end of the aforementioned knife."

"And Erica Rogers?"

"She has been brought down from Cambridgeshire for questioning. It took some time to arrange a nursemaid for the mother."

"Why, what time is it?"

"Five minutes before eleven o'clock." I'd slept for twelve hours.

"Good Lord, the colonel will think I've walked out on him. I told him I'd stay until Friday."

"I took the liberty of telephoning him at eight o'clock, to tell him you would not be to work today. He wished you well."

"Yes. I have some explanations to make there, I fear. But why the coffee?"

"Your presence is requested by Mrs Erica Rogers."

"Mrs Rogers? But why?"

"She told Lestrade that she would not make a statement without you present. My presence, though not required, is to be permitted."

I shook my head in a futile attempt to clear it.

"Does she know who you are, then? That her gardener and the hero of 'Thor Bridge' are one and the same?"

"It would seem so, although I could have sworn she did not know while I was there."

"But why me?"

"She did not tell Lestrade why, just that you must be there."

"How extraordinary. And Lestrade didn't object?"

"If it persuades her to make a statement, no. She's a stubborn old lady, is Mrs Erica Rogers."

"So I gathered. Here, take my cup. I must bath if I'm to deal with her."

* * *

Inspector Lestrade's office was not the largest of rooms, and with seven people seated there on that warm morning, all of whom were to some degree anxious, it became a claustrophobe's nightmare and stifling besides. Not everyone present had bathed that morning, and the windows were totally inadequate.

On closer inspection, two people presented a front of cool composure. One was Holmes, inevitably; the other was Mrs Rogers, who shot us a glance that would have stripped the leaves from an oak tree before turning back to face Lestrade. Her solicitor was red-faced and damp-looking, and I thought that his heart was probably not in the best of condition. Lestrade was without expression, but the furtiveness of his eyes and the nervous way his small hands shuffled his papers made me think that he was apprehensive about the coming interview. The young uniformed policeman to his side held his notebook tightly and clasped a pencil as if it were an unfamiliar weapon— recent graduate of a stenographer's course, I diagnosed, and fished my own pad out of my bag to hold it up unobtrusively, raising an eyebrow at Lestrade. He nodded slightly, looking marginally relieved. Holmes and I took the last two chairs, next to a stiff police matron who looked anywhere in the room except at Mrs Rogers. When we had seated ourselves, Lestrade began.

"Mrs Rogers, I asked you to come down here today so I could take a statement from you concerning your movements on Wednesday the twenty-second of August, the night your sister, Dorothy Ruskin, was killed by an automobile, and on the night of the twenty-fourth, when the house belonging to Mr Holmes and his wife was broken into and certain objects were stolen."

"Inspector Lestrade." The corpulent solicitor's voice informed us that he was a busy man and found this unnecessary intrusion on his time rather annoying. "Am I to understand that you are charging my client with murder and theft?"

"Suspected murder and burglary are being investigated, Mr Coogan, and we have reason to believe that your client may be able to assist us in this investigation." Lestrade was cautious in his choice of words, but he would make a poor poker player. Everyone in the room knew what a sparse hand he held. Erica Rogers, on the other hand, was completely inscrutable.

"Inspector, my client has no objection to helping in a criminal investigation, so long as she is not the subject being investigated. As far as I can see, you have little to connect her with Miss Ruskin's death, save their blood relationship. Is that not the case?"

"Not entirely, no."

"Then what evidence have you, Inspector? I believe my client has the right to know that, don't you?"

"I'll tell you what evidence they have, Timothy: They have nothing, nothing at all." Mrs Rogers's voice was as hard and as scornful as her old vocal cords could make it, and I saw the young constable go white and drop his pencil, while my hand scribbled automatically on. "They have a box of wrecked parts from the front of some motorcar that was brought into my grandson Jason's shop for repair, and they have the story of a woman who was drunk at the time but miraculously recovered her memory after being mesmerised, who described a person fitting Jason's general description. That is nothing, Chief Inspector. I had no reason to kill my sister, now did I? Yes, I thought her digging holes in the Holy Land was a waste of time, but I can't see you taking that in front of a judge and jury as some kind of a motive for murder. And as for the two of you"— she swung around to where Holmes and I sat and stabbed at us with her eyes—"I wanted you here so you could see just what your prying and nosing about get you: nothing. You, young lady, though I don't know that lady is the right word for you, you come poking your nose into my sitting room, pretending to be all sympathetic and helpful. You should be home scrubbing your floors or doing something useful.

"And as for you, Mr Basil, or Sherlock Holmes, or whoever you are, I hope you're proud of yourself, the way you wheedled your way in my door, ate my food, slept in my shed, took my money, and then used my generosity to spy on me. Can you imagine how I felt when Mr Coogan here shows me a photograph of Mr Sherlock Holmes and I see it's old Mr Basil, who's been working in my potato patch? Inside my house? It made me feel dirty, it did, and I have half a mind to have you arrested for it."

"I beg your pardon, madam," broke in Holmes, in his most supercilious manner, "but with what do you imagine I could be charged? Impersonating an officer, in my ancient tweeds? Hardly. Fraud? With what did I defraud you? You hired me to do work; I did the work, at, I might say, considerably lower wages than I generally pay my own workers and in considerably poorer conditions. No, madam, I broke no laws, and had you consulted your expensive legal counsellor before threatening me, he would have told you that."His voice turned cold. "Now, madam, I suggest that you stop wasting the time of these officers of the law and continue with your statement."

Her eyes narrowed as she realised what she had been harbouring in the unshaven person of Mr Basil. She glanced at Lestrade and Mr Coogan, then down at her hands, which held no knitting.

"I have nothing to say," she said sullenly.

"I'm afraid I shall have to insist, Mrs Rogers," said Lestrade.

"Then I want them out of here," and she jerked her head at us.

"Mrs Rogers, you asked for them to be here," protested Lestrade. "You insisted on it."

"Yes, well, I've had my say, and now I want them gone."

Lestrade looked at us helplessly, and I folded my notebook and stood up.

"Don't worry about it, Chief Inspector," I said. "You can't be held responsible for the whims of other people. Or for their lack of manners," I added sweetly. "Good day, Mrs Rogers, Mr Coogan. I shall be down the hall, Chief Inspector, borrowing a typewriter."

As we went through the door, Mrs Rogers fired her final peevish shot at Holmes.

"And you made a rotten job of the wallpaper, too!"

* * *

It took only a few minutes to type a transcription of my shorthand, and it took Lestrade only slightly longer to receive Mrs Rogers's statement. He was sitting slumped at his desk, staring at it morosely, when we returned to his office. He straightened abruptly, glanced at Holmes and away, and fumbled with unnecessary attention at lighting a cigarette.

"How could she have known our evidence? Or lack of it?" He said finally.

"Did you leave her alone with that young constable who was taking notes?" enquired Holmes.

"He sat with her on the way down from Cambridgeshire, but— Good Lord, he told her? But how could he be so stupid?"

"With Mrs Erica Rogers, I shouldn't wager that you wouldn't have told her yourself, if she started in on you. She's a very clever woman. Don't be too hard on him."

"I'll have him back on the streets, I will." He seized his anger like a shield and would not look at us.

"What of the two men?" I interrupted impatiently. "Holmes said you had arrested them. What were their statements like?"

"Actually, we, er, we've decided not to arrest them just yet. Yes, I know, I thought we would, but we've let them go for the time being. Maybe they'll get cocky and hang themselves. There was nothing in those statements, nothing at all. The two of them were out both those nights, testing the engines on two cars. No alibis whatsoever, but they shut their jaws like a pair of clams after they recited their story, and they'll say nothing more."

"That doesn't sound like the Jason Rogers I met," commented Holmes.

"It's the old granny's doing, I'm sure of it. She's a cunning old witch, is that one, and she's put the fear of God into him to shut his trap. She was right about the need for a clear motive, though how she figured it out, I cannot think. Must have been her— Coogan didn't seem to have brains enough to pound sand down a rat hole. Without either a motive or harder evidence than buttons in a burn pile, five hairs that bear a passing resemblance to theirs, some smashed auto parts with a tiny bit of dried blood, and the fact that she got rid of a shelf full of murder mysteries, we'd be fools to give it a try. The only thing that's the least bit firm is the mud on your ladder, which matches the wet patch outside her potting shed, but even Coogan wouldn't have much trouble making a jury laugh at that. I'd rather go for Miss Russell's colonel, or Mr Mycroft's Arabs. I won't make an arrest yet, but we'll keep a very close eye on those boys. They may try to sell the stuff they took from you. If granny keeps an eye on them, they won't, but we can always hope. We'll get them, Mr Holmes, eventually. We know they did it, and we'll get them. Just, well, not yet." He ran out of words, then looked up from the intent study of his hands like a schoolboy before the headmaster, mingled apology and dread on his face, and shrugged his shoulders. "Without a motive, we'd be fools to make an arrest, and we've been over the inheritance with a nit comb— no insurance, no big expenses to make anyone need cash now. Wouldn't seem to make any difference if Dorothy Ruskin died now or twenty years from now. Her stuff from Palestine should arrive in the next week; we'll go through that. May find a new will or a handful of diamonds in there." His attempt at laughter trailed off, and Holmes stood up and clapped him on the shoulder with an uncharacteristic bonhomie.

"Of course we see that, Lestrade. Never mind, you'll get them eventually. Patience is a necessary virtue. Keep us informed, would you?"

We collected our possessions from Mycroft, and we slunk home.

PART SIX

Wednesday, 5 September 1923-

Saturday, 8 September 1923

The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.

— The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 3:6

TWENTY-THREE

psi

It was a sorry pair of detectives who rode the train south towards Eastbourne. I felt dreary and drained and utterly without interest in matters criminal or academic. Holmes, controlled as ever, looked merely determined, but there lay about him the distinct odour of brutally quenched campfire.

With an effort, I pulled myself out of this stupor. Oh goodness, Russell, I expostulated, it's hardly the end of the world, or even the end of the case. A temporary check in the hunt, no more. Lestrade will surely ...

I had not realised I was speaking aloud until Holmes shot me a frigid glance.

"Yes, Russell? Lestrade will surely what? Oh yes, he will surely keep his ear to the ground, but he will also certainly be caught up in these other cases of his, and time will pass, and if he does lay hands on the link of evidence he so desires, it will be only through sheer luck."

"For heaven's sake, Holmes, she's just an old granny, not a Napoléon of crime."

I should have known that the phrase would tip him over the edge into an icy rage.

"It's a damned good thing for Lestrade's lot that she's too much a middle-class English woman to turn her hands to crime. Napoléon went to war, but she's satisfied herself with one brief, self-righteous campaign, and now she's captured her goal— whatever the deuces it might have been— she's entrenched. The police will never prise her out on their own. No, I ought never to have listened to you and Mycroft. If we'd kept Scotland Yard out of it, I might have got to her without giving warning, but now it's going to mean weeks, months of delicate, painstaking, cold, and uncomfortable work, and I tell you honestly, Russell, I'm feeling too old and tired to relish the thought very much."

His last bleak phrase deflated any reciprocal anger I might have summoned. I sat while he fished a crumpled packet of Gold Flakes from his pocket and lit one. He looked out the window; I looked at the cigarette.

"Since when have you taken to gaspers again?" I asked mildly, more mildly than I felt, seeing the sucks and puffs of nervous anger.

"Since I first laid eyes upon Erica Rogers. She's not the only one with premonitions." That cut it. I took a deep breath.

"Holmes, look. We will get her. Give me a week to tie things up in Oxford, and then we can go after them. Or to Paris, or Palestine, if you think there's anything there."

He snatched the cigarette from his lips and dashed it to the floor, ground it under his heel, and immediately took out the packet again.

"No, Russell, I'll do this myself. I can hardly expect you to sacrifice your firstborn for the cause."

I was furious and crushed and obviously superfluous in the compartment, so rather than making matters worse, I left and walked up the train to stand staring out the window at the gathering clouds and sea drizzle.

This was by no means the first failure Holmes had had, but it rankled to be defeated by a woman of no great wits, her lumpish grandson, and a small-time crook. Holmes, too, had been touched by Dorothy Ruskin, and it was hard not to feel that we had let her down. The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.

I knew, however, that what disturbed him most was the thought that he had failed me. He knew the affection and respect I had had for Dorothy Ruskin, and it could only have been devastating to know that all his skills were not enough. I did not hold him to blame, and I had tried to make it clear that I did not, but nonetheless, for the first time he had on some level failed me.

However, I had to admit that he had been right, yet again, back there in the compartment: Were I to lay down my academic career, even temporarily, in order to expiate my guilt and bolster his ego, it could well prove damaging to the strange creature that was our marriage. On the other hand, were I to lay the books aside out of my own free choice— well, that was another matter entirely.

I had known Holmes for a third of my life and had long since accustomed myself to the almost instantaneous workings of his mental processes, but even after two years of the intimacy of marriage, I was able to feel surprise at the unerring accuracy of his emotional judgement. Holmes the cold, the reasoner, Holmes the perfect thinking machine, was, in fact, as burningly passionate as any religious fanatic. He had never been a man to accept the right action for the wrong reason, not from me, at any rate: He demanded absolute unity in thought and deed.

Oh, damn the man, I grumbled. Why couldn't he just be manipulated by pretty words the way other husbands were?

* * *

The train slowed. I climbed down and walked back along the platform to help Holmes with the bags. We got the car running, I drove back to the cottage, and we went about our separate tasks, with barely a word exchanged— not in anger, but in emptiness. He went out late in the afternoon. After an hour or so, I laced on my boots against the wet grass and followed. I found him on the cliff overlooking the ocean, one leg dangling free, the smell of a particularly rancid brand of tobacco trailing downwind. We sat in silence for some time, then walked home.

That evening, he picked at his dinner, drank four glasses of wine, and ignored the accumulation of newspapers spilling from the table near the door. Later, he sat staring into the fire, sucking at an empty pipe. He had aged since that fragrant August afternoon so long ago, when we had drunk tea and honey wine and walked the Downs with a woman who would be dead in a few hours.

"Have we overlooked anything?" I had not meant to speak, but the words lay in the room now.

For a long moment, he did not respond; then he sighed and tapped his teeth with the stem of the pipe.

"We may have done. I don't know yet. I begin to doubt my own judgement. Not overlooking things used to be my métier," he said bitterly, "but then they do say it's notoriously difficult to see what one has overlooked until one trips over it."

Like a taut wire on a street corner, I thought, and thrust it away with words.

"She told me that afternoon that it was the most pleasurable day she could remember for a long time, coming here. At least we gave her that." I shut my eyes, encouraging the brandy to relax my shoulder and my tongue, to push back the silence with a tumbling stream of reminiscence. "I wonder if she knew it was coming. Not that she seemed apprehensive, but she mentioned the past several times, and I shouldn't have thought that like her. She used to come here as a child, she told me. She was also fond of you. Perhaps fond is not the right word," I said, though when I looked, he didn't seem to be listening. "Impressed, perhaps. Respectful. She was intrigued by you. What was it she said? 'One of the three sensible men I've ever met,' I think it was, grouping you with a French winemaker and a polygamous sheikh." I smiled to myself at the memory.

"I'll never forget meeting her at her tell outside Jericho, coming up over the edge and there's this little white-haired English woman glaring up at us from the bottom of the trench, as if we had come to steal her potsherds. And that house of hers, that incredible hotchpotch of stone and baked-earth bricks and flattened petrol drums, and inside a cross between a Bedouin tent and an English cottage, with great heaps of things in the process of being classified and sketched and a silver tea service and a paraffin heater and block-and-board shelving sagging with books and gewgaws. She had a handful of exquisite pieces, didn't she? Like that ivory puzzle ball." I sipped my brandy, so lost in the memory of those exciting few weeks in Palestine that I could almost smell the dusty night air of Jericho.

"Do you remember that ball? Odd, wasn't it, that she should have a Chinese artefact? Such a lovely thing it was, with that pearl buried in it. She mentioned it, come to think of it, when I was driving her back to the station. You made quite an impression on her, the way your hands seemed to figure it out by themselves while you carried on with some story about Tibet. I wonder what happened to it? It looked so incongruous on those bare planks, like the silver tea set complete with spirit burner pouring Earl Grey tea through the silver strainer into rough clay—"

I stopped abruptly. Something had changed in the room, and I sat up startled, half expecting to see someone standing in the doorway, but there was no one. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped the spilt brandy from my hand and the knee of my trousers, then took up the glass again to settle back into the cushions, but when I turned to my companion to make some sheepish remark about the state of my nerves, the words strangled unborn. Meeting his eyes was like brushing against a live electrical wire, a humming shock so sudden, my heart jerked. He had not moved. In fact, he sat so still in his chair that he looked as if he might never move again, but his eyes glittered out from the hardened brow and cheekbones, intent and alive.

"What did you say, Russell?" he asked quietly.

"How incongruous the ball and the tea set looked—"

"Before that."

"How she saw your hands as an extension of your mind when—" I stopped. The barest beginnings of a smile lurked in the grey eyes opposite me, and I continued slowly, "when you opened the ball."

"Yes."

"Dear God in heaven. Master of the Universe, how could I have been so unutterably dense?"

"Bring the box, will you please, Russell?"

I flew up the stairs to the heap of bags I had thrown in a corner and returned with the gleaming little depiction of paradise that was the Italian box. I held it out to Holmes. He took up his heavy magnifying glass, and after a minute he shook his head in self-disgust and handed both objects to me. Once I knew to look, I could easily see that the decorative carved line forming the lower border was not just a surface design, but a crack, no wider than a hair. The box had a secret base, but there was not the remotest hint of a latch or keyhole.

"I'm not going to tear this box apart, Holmes," I said, though we both knew that it might come to that, and the realisation brought a sharp, almost physical pain.

"I shall endeavour to prevent that from becoming necessary," Holmes said absently, absorbed in the box.

"Do you think you can open it?"

"Dorothy Ruskin thought I could. She may have been impressed by my parlour trick, but I doubt that it led her to endow me with godlike abilities. I don't suppose she made offhand mention of any of the box's attributes, as a help?"

"Not that I remember."

"Then it should not be terribly difficult. Ah, here. May I borrow a hairpin, Russell?"

He found the tiny pressure points fairly quickly— two of the giraffe's jet spots and one of the monkey's eyes had infinitesimal and unnoticed dents in the adjoining wood— but beyond that he was wrong, it was difficult, extraordinarily so considering the age of the thing. After two hours, he had found that by pressing in a certain sequence with varying pressures, he could loosen the bottom, but it would not come free. I went to make coffee, and when I brought it in, he was looking as frustrated as I have ever seen him.

"Leave it for a while," I suggested, pouring.

"I shall have to. The nearness of it is maddening." He stood up, stretched the kinks from his back, placed his right hand gently on the box, and leant forward to take his cup. We both heard the click, and we looked down at the thing, every bit as astonished as if it had addressed us. He gingerly spread his fingers around it and lifted the top and sides away from the base. A clockwork intricacy of brass latches and gears lay revealed and, pushed down between the works and the wooden side, a tight roll of paper resembling a long, thin cigarette, tied in the middle with a length of black thread. Holmes picked it out with a fingernail and held it out to me. I rubbed my suddenly sweaty palms on my trousers, then took it.

It was a letter, tiny, crowded words on half a dozen small sheets of nearly transparent onionskin paper, and I had a sudden image of Dorothy Ruskin bent over her hotel table with the magnifying glass. I read her words aloud to Holmes.

"Dear Miss Russell,

Were I not blessed with the ability to appreciate the humour in any trying situation, this one would verge on the macabre. I sit here at my shaky desk in a distinctly third-rate Parisian hotel, writing to a young woman whom I met but once— and that several years previously— in the hopes that she and her husband will choose to make enquiries should I die a suspicious death whilst in my homeland, despite the fact that I will have given them no hints, no clues, no reason to believe that someone wants my death. Indeed, I am not at all sure that I do have reason to believe it.

A peculiarly amusing situation.

I have spent several days trying to imagine the circumstances under which you will read this, if indeed you ever do. Are you investigating my death? What a queer sensation comes with writing those words! And if your answer is in the affirmative, how might I respond? 'I'm pleased to hear that' seems inappropriate, somehow. And yet, if that is what you are doing, if that has led you to this letter, it would give me the— surely satisfaction is not the right word?— of knowing that my inchoate, illogical fears were entirely justified.

Again, a most peculiar situation.

But, enough meandering. I intend to visit you in your Sussex home and leave with you this box, the manuscript, and, incidentally, these contents of the secret compartment. I shall have to find a means of planting in your mind the possibility that the box can be opened and do so casually enough to be natural, yet firmly enough that you remember it later if the need should arise. If I have failed in the first instance, and your curiosity has led you to open the box while I am still alive, then I beg you, please, to replace the following document in the box and have a good laugh over the imagination of an old woman. If I fail in the second instance and you do not remember my dropped hints, well, then, I am writing this for the chance, future amusement of a total stranger, and my precautions have been for naught.

It is ridiculous. It is foolish of me, and I am not accustomed to doing foolish things. I have no evidence that I will die, no signs or portents or threatening letters in the post. And yet ... I am filled with a strange dread when I think of crossing the Channel, and I want to turn for home, to Palestine. I cannot do that, of course, but I also cannot ignore this odd, compelling feeling of menace and finality. It is not death that I fear, Miss Russell. Death is a person with whom I have some passing acquaintance, and if anything, it is a motherly figure who holds out forgiving, welcoming arms. I do, however, dread the thought that my work, my life, will die with me. If I return to Palestine, I intend to work out more fully the details of how my estate, minor as it may be, might best be put to support the archaeological effort there. This letter is merely insurance. I have no time to have a proper will drawn up, so I have written and signed a holograph will, witnessed by two of my fellow guests in this hotel. It clearly states my wishes and intentions regarding the disbursement of my estate. You will please take it to the appropriate authorities, whom, no doubt, you know better than I.

As I said, I have no evidence whatsoever that anyone seeks my death, other than this persistent, irrational hunch. It may be that I will succumb to illness or an accident. It is also quite possible that I may survive England to return home, have my solicitor in Jerusalem draw up a new and complete will, and write to tell you of the box's hidden opening, feeling foolish when I do so. In any case, I will not accuse anyone from beyond the grave, as it were, and even the enclosed will can hardly be used to indict a person who otherwise appears blameless. If it points a surreptitious finger, so be it.

You will no doubt ask yourself why, if I intend to change my will, I do not do so openly. I have asked myself the same question, and although there are several valid reasons for it, they boil down to two: First, I need to witness the state of my family's affairs before I can make any final decisions; second, I am quite honestly torn between the absurdity of my premonitions and the urge to action. This is a compromise, and puts it into the hands of God. That I say this would certainly amaze some of my acquaintances, but I think that you, Miss Russell, will understand when I say that faith in a divine force and the ability to think intellectually are not necessarily incompatible. I am tired, I am uncertain, and therefore I will arrange this all so that God can make the final decision.

I should dearly love to see your reaction to that, and I admit to a sense of frustration and regret when I realise that I will not witness the machinations by which this letter again sees the light of day. However, the pleasures of imagination will fill the spare moments of my next days.

Thank you, Miss Russell, Mr Holmes, for your faithfulness to me, a near stranger. The box and the manuscript are not to be regarded as payment, for I would have given them to you in any case, and I know that payment would be neither required nor accepted. I hope that Mary's graceful hand brings you as much pleasure as it has me.

Yours in friendship,

Dorothy Ruskin"

The will began: "I, Dorothy Elizabeth Ruskin, being of sound mind and body," then went on to state simply that the entirety of her estate was to go to support the archaeological effort in Palestine, with specific names and locations given.

* * *

When a copy of the will was shown to Erica Rogers, she said nothing, but that night she suffered a massive seizure and spent the remaining months of her life in a nursing home, next to her mother. When agents from Scotland Yard went to arrest the grandson and his accomplice, Jason Rogers escaped. His body was found the following day by two hikers, in the wreckage of a very expensive car that did not belong to him. The problem of Erica Rogers's apparent alibi was solved during the subsequent interview with Jason's wife, when she confessed tearfully that she had taken Erica's place in the home for the two nights Mrs Rogers was away, caring for old Mrs Ruskin and turning the lights on and off at the appropriate times. She, however, was not charged with participation in the actual murder, as it became obvious that she had been accustomed to do just as her husband ordered.

The other partner in the killing, whose name was Thomas Rand, never confessed his part in the murder, but he was eventually brought to trial, convicted, and hanged.

Lestrade came down from London himself to tell us about Rand's arrest, wishing, I think, to remove the aftertaste of failure from his mouth in front of the headmaster. He came for tea, looking more dishevelled than ever and yet oddly more competent for it, and he recited each detail of the evidence against Rand, up to and including the man's possession of my camera, my odds and ends of manuscripts, and Mrs Hudson's jewellery.

"Only one thing I can't figure," he said finally. Holmes shot me a sardonic glance.

"Glad you've left me with something to explain, Lestrade," he growled, which remark alone put half an inch on Lestrade's stature.

"It's Mrs Ho— Miss Russell's papers. If they weren't looking for the manuscript, the pie— what'd'ya call it?"

"Papyrus," I said.

"Right. If they weren't looking for that, why cart about all the things written in a foreign alphabet and steal half of them? You can't imagine Jason Rogers or his friend would know Greek, or know about the value of that letter, and I wouldn't have thought it was the old lady's style, either."

"Ah," said Holmes, "but there you would be wrong. What Erica Rogers was looking for was very much in her, as you say, 'style.' The day Miss Ruskin was here, she happened to mention that in their childhood she and her sister— the daughters of a minister, remember— used to play a game of hiding coded messages in a place they called 'Apocalypse,' because the top came off. The verb apocalyptein, I believe Russell could tell you, is Greek for 'uncover,' " he added helpfully. "It's very likely that the 'code' was simple English written in the Greek alphabet. I recall doing just that myself, with Mycroft. Did you play that game with your brother, Russell?"

"Yes, though we used Hebrew, which was a bit trickier."

"Remember, too, that Erica Rogers was an enthusiast of Watson's thrilling nonsense. When she heard that her sister was coming to see me, her suspicions must have positively erupted. It was indeed very much in her 'style' to believe that her sister would write an encoded will, or a will written in one of the several foreign languages she spoke, and then lodge it with the Great Detective for safekeeping."

"But that's absurd— beg pardon, Mr Holmes."

"Elaborate and ridiculous and utterly unlike something Dorothy Ruskin might do," he agreed. "But very much in Erica Ruskin's style. A woman who would arrange an elaborate murder involving a beggar disguise and an automobile, who would anticipate the possibility that the death might not be accepted as a road accident and move to cloud any investigation by arranging to make it appear that she had remained at home, and then even think to plant a letter to her sister implicating an imaginary but plausible group of Arabs named Mud— a woman with a mind like that would not hesitate to believe that her sister could write a will in Serbo-Croatian and lodge it on the top of Nelson's Column. Real penny-dreadful stuff, and not, I think, completely sane. Scotland Yard is going to have to look into the influence art has on true crime one of these days, Lestrade, mark my words."

Lestrade wavered, decided to take the remark as a joke, and laughed politely.

"Inspector," I asked, "have you an idea of the value of the Ruskin estate yet?"

He told us, and Holmes and I glanced at each other.

"Yes," said Lestrade, "more than you'd have thought, and taken as a whole, an amount worth fighting for. When Dorothy Ruskin came back here from Palestine, she must have told her sister, either directly or by something she said, that she had decided to make a new will and put the money into her archaeological projects. Erica Rogers might have put up with seeing the third part of their father's money that had already been divided up poured into a lot of holes in the ground, but she drew the line at having half of old Mrs Ruskin's money follow it. If the old lady died first, Dorothy Ruskin would inherit her share and it would be gone. Therefore Dorothy Ruskin had to die before their mother. I imagine Mrs Rogers said something to that effect to her grandson Jason, and he then brought in a friend who was experienced at this sort of thing. And," he added thoughtfully, "they then decided to retrieve the money Dorothy Ruskin already had, by finding and destroying the new will. If they'd been satisfied with just the old lady's money, we'd never have got on to them."

"Greed feeds on itself," commented Holmes.

"I'm not sure, though, why the three of them thought the will was here."

"Miss Ruskin probably hinted that it would be," I said. "According to her hidden letter, that is what she planned to do to us, bring us the box and drop hints that it had a secret. I expect she did the same thing to her sister, trailing her garment to tempt her and point her at Sussex. Had Erica Rogers been honest, she'd have ignored it completely."

"Miss Ruskin laid a trap."

"You could say that. A trap that could only be sprung by the presence of criminal intent."

"Not very nice of her, neglecting to mention your part in the arrangements."

"The woman had an incredible faith in us, I agree. And not an entirely warranted faith, at least when it came to me. Her sister's ears were much sharper than mine at hearing nuances."

"The search of our cottage did catch our attention, though," said Holmes benignly.

Lestrade shook his head.

"So elaborate. And almost suicidal. Why not come to us in the first place, or even to you, bring it out in the open? As mad as her sister, in a way."

"I think it began simply— in a conviction— and grew. And yes, immensely single-minded, practical people do seem mad. But, you may be right about one thing: I don't think she much cared for the chance she had of living blind."

A short time later, Lestrade's local police driver arrived to take him to the train. Before he left, Holmes congratulated him, so that going down the drive to the waiting car, his shoe leather was floating several inches above the gravel. Holmes shook his head sourly as we watched the driver negotiate the ruts and stones and peace began to settle again onto our patch of hillside.

"What is wrong, Holmes? I'd have thought you would be as cock-a-hoop as Lestrade, snatching a solution from the jaws of befuddlement as you did."

"Ah, Russell, I had such hopes for this case," he said mournfully. "But in the end, it all came down to greed. So commonplace, it's hardly worthy of any attention. Do you know, for a few days I allowed myself to hope that we had a prime specimen among cases, a murder with the pure and unadorned motive of the hatred of emancipated women. Now, that would have been one for the books: murder by misogyny," he drawled with relish, and then his face twisted. "Money. Bah!"

* * *

Two days later, I took the train to London to see Colonel Edwards. I dressed carefully for that meeting, including my soft laced-up boots, which brought me to well over six feet in height. I arrived back late in the afternoon, and while Mrs Hudson went to heat more water for the teapot, I walked over to stand at the big south window that framed the Downs as they rolled towards the sea, to watch the light fade into purples and indigo and a blue in the heights the colour of Dorothy Ruskin's eyes. Small noises behind me told of Holmes filling and lighting his pipe— a sweetly fragrant tobacco tonight, an indicator of his temper, as well. Mrs Hudson came in with the tea. I accepted a cup and took it back to the window. It was nearly dark.

"So, Russell."

"Yes, Holmes."

"What did your colonel have to say?"

I took a contemplative sip of the steaming-hot tea and thought back to the man's reaction as he saw his gentle, hesitant, stoop-shouldered secretary climb out of the taxi as Mary Russell Holmes. I could feel a smile of pure devilment come onto my lips.

"He said, and I quote, 'I always felt there was more to you, Mary, but I must say I hadn't realised just how much more.' "

I grinned as I heard the sounds behind me, then turned, finally, to take in the sight of Sherlock Holmes collapsed in helpless laughter, his head thrown back on the chair, pipe forgotten, uncertainty forgotten, all forgotten but the beauty and absurdity of the colonel's elegy.

PART SEVEN

A woman seldom writes her mind but in her postscript.

— Richard Steele

POSTSCRIPT

omega

The letter that lay at the heart of our investigation, the little strip of stained papyrus that was written in a hurried moment some eighteen and a half centuries before I first laid eyes upon it, preserved by simple peasants in a vague awareness of its importance, passed within its clay amulet during the formative years of Islam into a branch of the family that followed the Prophet, kept in the heart of generations of believers over centuries of war and wandering until a simple act of generosity on the part of an Englishwoman brought it to light, is still in my possession. In the decades since it came to me, the scientific study of documents has made huge strides, from the chemical analysis of writing materials to radiocarbon dating to the grammatical analyses of the words themselves. Not one of these tests has taken me substantially further than Holmes' graphological conclusion or my own intuitive conviction that the thing was real. Certainly none of the tests that I have thus far been able to conduct or oversee has cast any degree of doubt on Mary's letter. As yet, I have found no indication that it is other than what it seems: a hasty, affectionate letter written by a woman of considerable wisdom and strength to a bewildered but much-loved sister, at a moment when the writer realised that her world was coming to a violent, catastrophic end.

It pains me, even now, to know that I have failed Mariam; I feel I have betrayed her trust. Rational factors count for little, and the promise I made to Colonel Edwards on that final afternoon all those years ago, a promise to delay publication of Mary's letter, need not have been said; the fact is, sheer cowardice kept me from revealing the letter Dorothy Ruskin gave into my keeping, abject terror at the thought of the battle I should be in for, a battle that would have consumed my entire life and all my energies. I have kept it safe in a bank vault; I shall hand it over to another, but I am not proud of my actions.

I admit, as did Dorothy Ruskin, to a degree of frustration in knowing that I will never witness the reaction when Mary's letter comes to light. It will not be released until a minimum of ten years after my death: I gave that promise to Col. Dennis Edwards to atone for my actions against him, and although the temptation to break my word has been great, I shall not. I do, however, like the previous owner, receive a great deal of amusement when I picture the results of the letter being made public.

I suppose that the Christian world at the close of the twentieth century will be better equipped to deal with the revelations contained in Mary's letter than it was in the century's earlier decades. As Miss Ruskin noted, presupposed notions of the rôle of women in leadership during the first century need to be discarded before the idea of Mary of Magdala as an apostle of Jesus and a leader of the Jerusalem church sits easy in the mind. Archaeologists, male and female, are pointing us inexorably in that direction, and presuppositions are teetering: We know that women were heads of synagogues in the early centuries of the Common Era and that adaptations to the Roman expectations concerning the Godhead were considerable as the nascent Church moved away from its troubled birthplace and struggled to carve a place for itself in the empire.

Perhaps before too many years, my heir will judge the world ready to see Mariam's letter. I do not know if I envy her, or pity her.

* * *

Death, and life, and the written word that binds them. The first letter to hit my desk brought with it an all-too-brief refluorescence of a friendship and led to the deaths of four people. The next letter gave life to a voice which the world had lost for more than eighteen hundred years. And a last letter, reaching out from the grave to assert the will of its writer and ensure the continuance of her life's work, coincidentally condemned those who would have brought that work to an end. The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.