A Letter of Mary mr-3

by Laurie R. King

  "Yes, Patrick and Tillie were most helpful. He brought a load of essentials over from your house."

  "So I see. These chairs are certainly more comfortable than the seat of Lestrade's car. One of his springs is working its way loose, and I kept expecting to be impaled by it." I sipped my drink, closed my eyes, and sighed in satisfaction. "How can a day spent merely sitting be so tiring?" I mused.

  "Don't fall asleep, Russell. Tell me what you found, just an outline, and then I will allow you to retire."

  I told him, and though it was hardly an outline, it took no more than half an hour to give a summary of my day. Holmes filled his pipe thoughtfully.

  "She was not surprised or upset at the news of her sister's death?" he asked.

  "No, just that odd statement that she had felt her sister go shortly after midnight. What do you make of that?"

  "I wish I had been there. I find it difficult to work with secondhand information, even when it comes from you."

  "So why didn't you go?" I said irritably.

  "I am not criticising, Russell. There is nothing wrong with the way you gather information— far from it, in fact. It is only that I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half of a creature with two brains and four eyes. A superior creature to a single detective, no doubt, but it takes some getting used to."

  This easy and unexpected declaration shook me. For more than a third of my life, I had been under the tutelage and guidance of this man, and my existence as an adult had been shaped by him, yet here he was easily acknowledging that I, too, was shaping him. I did not know how to answer him. After a long moment, without looking at me, he went on.

  "I found some interesting things here today, Russell, but that can wait until tomorrow. To answer your question, I do not know what to make of Mrs Rogers's claim to a revelatory experience. Once, I would have discounted it immediately, but now I can only file it away, as it were, under 'suspicious.' You said that she seemed nervous, rather than upset?"

  "She dropped one stitch— not when Lestrade told her that her sister had died, but when he said that the death was not an accident— then another one after she realised who I was, and finally she turned a cable the wrong way round before telling us to leave. She'll have to pull it all out to return it to her normal standard of workmanship."

  "Suggestive. Anything else?"

  "Interesting little things. Trifles, as Sergeant Cuff would say. For one thing, the lady's a fan of yours. There were three copies of the Strand tucked into a basket next to her chair, two of them, I'm tolerably certain, were issues with Conan Doyle articles in them— one of the Thor Bridge case from last year, and the Presbury case from this spring. For another, I'd say she's had some sort of a maid until recently. Maybe just day help, but there was a fine layer of dust on top of the polished wood and metalwork. Perhaps two weeks' worth. Finally, her attitude toward her sister was not perhaps as affectionate as her letter might have indicated. There were whatnots on every surface, covering the mantelpiece, the tables, even the windowsills, but only four of them might have come from the Middle East, and those were all pushed behind something else. A very nice Turkish enamelled plate was under an aspidistra, for example, and I saw a lovely little Roman glass scent bottle behind the most disgustingly garish coronation cup I've ever laid eyes on."

  "Indicates a certain lack of affection, I agree. Or a severe lapse in taste."

  "And, of all the photographs and portraits— there must have been fifty, all in gnarly silver frames— there were only two which might have been of Miss Ruskin. One was a child of about six, and the other was one of those fuzzy romantic photographs of a girl of about eighteen. She was very pretty, by the way, if it was Miss Ruskin."

  "I thought she might have been. However, disapproval of one's sister hardly indicts one for her murder."

  "Particularly when the person is a frail woman in her sixties, I know. Nevertheless—"

  "As you say. We shall set Lestrade on the trail in the morning, and set ourselves to casting about in an attempt to find another trail or flush out a few suspects."

  "I believe you're mixing up two quite distinct methods of hunting, Holmes."

  "I often do, Russell. It doesn't do to restrict oneself until one is certain of the nature of the game. To bed with you now, before I have to carry you. I have some smoking to do."

  I rose wearily. His voice stopped me at the door.

  "By the way, Russell, how do you come to know anything about dropped stitches and the method of turning a cable?"

  "My dear Holmes, the good Mrs Hudson has instructed me in the rudiments of all the so-called womanly arts. The fact that I do not choose to exercise them does not mean I am in ignorance."

  I turned with dignity to my bed, smiling to myself at the soft laughter that followed me up the stairs.

  TEN

  kappa

  In the morning, the ambrosia of bacon frying heralded Mrs Hudson's return. By the time I dressed (in the day's clothes rather than a dressing gown, in deference to our guest's sensibilities), Lestrade was up, deep in conversation with Holmes outside on the flagstone patio. It was a magnificent morning, with the heat of late summer already in the sun. Somewhere I could hear the sound of farm machinery.

  "Good morning, Russell. Coffee or tea?"

  "As the coffee's here, I'll have that. I hope you slept well, Inspector, despite the lack of such luxuries as a bed and clean blankets?"

  "I could've slept on the bare boards in my car rug last night, but I was most comfortable on the mattress, thank you."

  "Russell, you will be pleased to know that your labours yesterday had the desired effect: The Chief Inspector is convinced. The marks on post and pillar box, plus the marks on Miss Ruskin's boots, equal justification for an investigation. Bacon and eggs are in the chafing dishes. I'll fetch more toast."

  "I'd like to see the box she gave you before I go, though, Mr Holmes," called Lestrade at his host's disappearing back.

  "So you shall, Lestrade," said Holmes as he took a rack of fresh toast from the hand of Mrs Hudson. "So you shall. I need to check the hives today anyway." He did not explain this apparent non sequitur to Lestrade, and I had my mouth full.

  After breakfast, Holmes went down to the hives with his tin smoker and a bag of equipment. Lestrade stayed with me at the table, finishing his coffee, and we watched Holmes make his methodical way up the row of hives, stunning each community into apathy with the smoke and reaching gloveless inside. At one hive, he paused to fix another frame for the honeycombs onto the existing ones. He did the same to the hive in which he had secreted the box, then spent some time bent over its innards with his pocketknife. Lestrade shook his head.

  "The best detective England has produced, and he spends his time with bees."

  I smiled, having heard this a number of times before.

  "He finds that the society of bees helps him understand the society of human beings. I think it's also a bit like the violin— it keeps one level of his mind occupied while freeing up other levels. More coffee?"

  I left him to his contemplation of life's oddities and took the plates inside to help Mrs Hudson with the washing up. Soon the men reappeared at the door, a small bulge in the pocket of Holmes' coat and a bee clinging dopily to his hair.

  "Kindly leave your lady friend outside, Holmes. She's next to your left ear."

  He brushed her off and came inside.

  "Let's take it into the laboratory, away from the windows. Lestrade," he said over his shoulder, "are you aware of the presence of three classes of bees in a hive? There are the workers, the females, who, appropriately enough, do all the work. The drones are the lowly males, who keep house and stand about gossiping and occasionally wait upon the queen. And finally, there is the queen herself, a sort of superfemale who is the mother of the entire hive. She spends her life laying eggs and killing any other queen who might hatch out, until she weakens and is herself killed, either by a new queen or by being smothered by a huge clot of h
er daughters when they see her growing old. If she dies accidentally, and if there are no unhatched queen cells, a worker can lay eggs, but she cannot make a new queen. A very educational society, Lestrade, if a bit daunting for a mere male. By the way, Russell, that new queen we got from your friend in Marston is doing very well. I may weed out a couple of the other hives and try replacing their queen cells with hers. Well, here is Miss Ruskin's little present, Lestrade, for what it's worth."

  He drew the lump from his pocket and removed the piece of oiled paper with which he had wrapped the box. Traces of wax showed where the industrious creatures had begun to incorporate this foreign object into their hive, but the box itself was untouched. He gave it to Lestrade, who turned it around in his hands, following with delight the parade of animals, birds, and exotic vegetation. I let him enjoy it for a while before I reached over to pull up the top and show him the papyrus.

  "I'll work on finishing the translation and then see if I can find any sort of a code or marks on it. It's very unlikely, but I'll try."

  Lestrade reached out and ran a thumb over the inviting surfaces, then glanced at the papyrus curiously.

  "I can see why you said it wouldn't fit easily into a book. Good luck with it, Miss Russell. Glad it's you and not me. I'd like a photograph of it and a couple of the box as well, if you would."

  "Did the camera appear, Holmes?"

  "It did, but in rather too many pieces to be of any use. Patrick's should be good enough for the purpose, though."

  "That reminds me, Mr Holmes, can you give me a list of everything they took? We can send it around to the stolen-goods people, have the shops look out for the things. Probably hopeless, but still."

  "Quite. I made a list last night, Lestrade. It's on the table by the door. Be careful not to bump the table," he added. "One leg is loose."

  "Right." Lestrade handed me the box and glanced at his watch. "Good Lord, I must run. I'm meeting someone at one o'clock. I'll be in touch tomorrow."

  "I'll be interested to know what you uncover about Mrs Rogers's background. And I want to see if your print man finds anything in the hotel room."

  "In this case, Mr Holmes, it's a print lady," he said primly, and with a tip of his hat to me, he closed the door.

  Holmes and I regarded each other, and the noise and the tumult of the last two days gradually settled into the quiet house like dust from a shaken rug.

  "So, Holmes."

  "So, Russell."

  He nodded once, as if in agreement, and we returned to our dreary task, in this case the laboratory, where, by great good fortune, none of the broken beakers and jars had combined to form explosives, corrosives, or poisons. We used heavy gloves, but we still had blood on our hands when the afternoon came and Holmes tipped the last dustpan load into the bin. We pulled off our gloves, inspected the damage, and threw gloves, brush, and the pan itself into the bin and slammed down the lid.

  "Lunch al fresco, Russell, is definitely called for. Fresh air and sensible conversation in a place free of broken test tubes, white-haired eccentric ladies, and Scotland Yard inspectors."

  We removed ourselves from the cottage to a spot notable only for its lack of scenery and difficulty of approach, then applied ourselves to my thick sandwiches (Mrs Hudson had despaired of teaching me to slice bread and meat thinly) and glasses of honey wine. The summer had been a good one, warm enough to dry hay, wet enough to water the fields. In a month, I should return to Oxford for half of each week. We hadn't much time.

  I lay back and watched one thin cloud hang unmoving in the firmament while Holmes put the things back into his rucksack. Dorothy Ruskin, a strong woman who would find it easy to make enemies. Her sister, a widow, left to care for an old woman in a decrepit house. A retired colonel, his absent son, and whomever else she may have met in London. Then there were the two Arabs and their driver in the black saloon car, and whoever had searched our house. I shifted to avoid the sharp edges of a rock beneath my shoulder blade and was jabbed by one corner of the box, which I had thrust into a capacious trouser pocket. I stretched out my leg and fished for the box. I am not an acquisitive person; indeed, some people would say that the fortune I controlled was wasted on me. However, this artefact captivated me in ways I could not begin to explain. I held it up before my eyes. The peacock's tail was lapis lazuli and some green stone. Jade? Turquoise? I rested it on my stomach with my hands over it and closed my eyes to the hot sun.

  I must have drifted off, because I was startled when Holmes spoke.

  "Shall I abandon you here, Russell, in the arms of Nature's soft nurse?"

  I smiled and stretched deliciously on the rocky ground. Holmes caught the box and handed it back to me when I sat up.

  "William Shakespeare must have been an insomniac," I declared. "He has an overly affectionate fixation on sleep that borders on obsession. It can only have stemmed from privation."

  "A hungry man dreaming of food? You sound like the jargon-spouting neighbour of Sarah Chessman, with her traumatic experiences and neuroses."

  "Who better qualified than I for the spouting of psychological jargon?" I muttered, and then sighed and accepted his hand to haul me upright. So much for escapism.

  "What next, Holmes?" I asked, grasping the nettle along with his hand.

  "I intend to go for a leisurely promenade of the neighbourhood and drink numerous cups of tea and glasses of beer. You, meanwhile, will be bent slaving over your scrap of ancient paper. I trust my eyes and spine will be in considerably better condition than yours by evening," he said complacently.

  "You will bring up the topic of our Friday-night visitors in the course of each conversation, I trust?"

  He flashed me a brief sideways smile.

  "I am relieved to see that your wits are back to their customary state. I admit that on Friday I was somewhat concerned."

  "Yes. Friday was not a good day," I agreed ruefully. "Tell me, Holmes, what did you find Saturday morning to produce that exhibitionist display of omniscience you gave Lestrade? Some of it was obvious, the footprints and the hairs you found, and I take it the inferred cashmere scarf and camel-hair coat came from threads?"

  "Where he laid his outer garments across a leg of the overturned kitchen table, which has a rough place on it where that monstrous puppy belonging to Old Will once attempted to eat the table. The dents in the floor came from a loose nail in the heel of the shoe, which does not occur with a quality piece of footwear. That they were both right-handed could be deduced from the pattern of how the objects fell when swept from the shelves, from the angle of the knife blades— two of them— in the soft furniture, from the location of the ladder, so that the right hand would have stretched for the last books, and from the foot that each man led with on climbing the ladder. There was an interesting smudge of mud on the alternate lower rungs, by the way, still damp when it was left there. It is not from around here, but must have been picked up earlier in the day. A light soil, with buff-coloured gravel in it."

  "You'll do an analysis?"

  "When the microscope is functioning, yes. However, the stuff is not immediately recognisable, so it will be of value only when we find its source."

  "And the men? You said the leader had grey hair and stayed in the car?"

  "Yes, that was most remarkable. I could not at first think why the two gentlemen kept going in and out, with much greater frequency than was required for the theft of our few belongings. Then I found the one grey hair, about three inches long, lodged in a sheaf of papers taken from your files. The pages had been dropped near the door, not next to your desk. It looked to me as though several armfuls of papers had been taken out of the room for examination and then brought back."

  "Sounds pretty thin to me, Holmes. It could have belonged to anyone— you, Mrs Hudson, one of the cleaning women. Even one of my older tutors."

  "The hair has a wave, and I think that a microscope will reveal an oval cross section. Mine is thin and straight, Mrs Hudson's considerably thicker and quite
round."

  "Which only leaves several dozen possibilities." I nearly laughed aloud at the expression on his normally sardonic features, which were caught between sheepishness and indignation.

  "It is only a working hypothesis, Russell." With dignity, he held the garden gate open for me to pass through.

  "It seems perilously close to a guess to me, Holmes."

  "Russell!"

  "It's all right, Holmes. I won't tell Lestrade the depths to which you stoop. Tell me about the knives."

  "There is no 'guess' about those," he said with asperity. "Both were very sharp, and the one carried by the person with a loose nail in his shoe and an excess of hair oil was shaped to the suggestion of violence. The other was a more workmanlike blade, shorter and folding by means of a recently oiled hinge. It was wielded by the man in the round-toed boots and tweed suit."

  "The flashy dresser carries a flashy knife. Not the sort one would wish Mrs Hudson to encounter." I lowered my voice, as we were nearing the house.

  "No," he agreed dryly. "Mrs Hudson's talents are many and varied, but they do not include dealing with armed toughs."

  "We won't hear from Mycroft today, or Lestrade?"

  "Tomorrow, I should think. We cannot decide our actions until we have news from them, but I expect that we shall find ourselves moving our base of operations into London for a few days and incidentally giving Mrs Hudson a holiday. Sussex is a bit too distant from Colonel Edwards, Erica Rogers, and various mysterious Arabs."

  "Meanwhile, the neighbours."

  "And you, the lexicon."

  "This case is wreaking havoc with my work," I muttered darkly. Holmes did not look in the least sympathetic, but was, on the contrary, humming some Italian aria as he left the house, walking stick in hand, cap on head, every inch the country squire paying visits on the lesser mortals. I opened my books and got to work.

  Truth to tell, although I would not have admitted it to him, I regretted the interruption not at all. I thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon of immersing myself in Mary's letter, and I found it immensely exciting to see the lacunae fall before my pen, to turn the first choppy and tentative phrases into a smooth, lucid translation. This was original work in what appeared to be primary source material, a rarity for an academic, and I revelled in it. When Holmes walked in, I was astonished to find that I had worked nonstop for four hours. It felt like one.