intrusion of yet another concern into an already-full schedule.
Holmes had little love for the, as he saw it, irrational pseudodiscipline of theology. He judged it a tragic waste of my mental energies, described it as a more debilitating addiction than cocaine, and bemoaned his inability to wean me from it. I ignored him as best I could, accepted this as the one area of serious mutual incomprehension, and only occasionally wondered if I had chosen it largely to maintain my identity against the tide of Holmes' forceful personality.
Twice since our marriage, cases had come up that demanded my attention as well as his. I had only recently realised that it was not past him to invent something of the sort in order to remove me from academia's clutches. Not this one, of course; it was too elaborate even for his devious mind. He would, however, take full advantage of it, now that an edge had been driven under my single-mindedness, to prise me from my work. A walk along the cliffs was not apt to be the only interruption Dorothy Ruskin's letter brought.
I stared unseeing at the tiny blur of blue light and slid gently into sleep. Oddly enough, my dreams were pleasant.
* * *
The next day, Thursday,
'What is it? Holmes?' I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.
IDENTITY SOUGHT OF
LONDON ACCIDENT VICTIM
Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. The victim was an elderly woman with deeply bronzed skin and blue eyes, wearing brown pantaloons and coat, a white blouse, and heavy, laced boots. If any reader thinks he may know the identity of this person, he is asked please to contact his local police station.
I sat down heavily next to Holmes.
'No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock.'
In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.
'Shall we drive into Town, then?' I asked him. 'Or wait for the noon train?'
'Go get the car out, Russell. I'll put a few things together and talk with Mrs Hudson.'
I went and changed into clothes suitable for London, and fifteen minutes later I sat in front of the cottage in the running car. Holmes came around the side of the house, scraping something from the back of his hand with a fingernail, and climbed in. We drove to London in a car filled with heavy silence.
FIVE
It was she. She looked, as the dead always do, unreal, and she lay absurdly small and grey on the cold table in the morgue. Her face was relatively undamaged, though the side of her head was a horribly wrong shape, and the faint remnant of a grimace was the only sign that this waxy tanned stuff had once been animated. The rest of her body lay misshapen under the drape, and when Holmes lifted it to examine her injuries, I turned away and studied a row of tools and machines whose purpose I did not want to know, and I listened to him asking his questions while I determinedly ignored my roiling stomach.
'An automobile. She fell down in front of it, then?'
'Yes, sir. Tripped over something and fell right into the street. As you can see, she had cataracts, so her night vision must've been bad. The PC was at the other end of his beat, didn't get there until he heard the screams of one of the witnesses. There were two, a young couple on their way home about twelve-fifteen Thursday morning. They were none too sober, though, and couldn't remember much other than the lady falling and the car squealing off. No registration number, a big black saloon car they said, but then they also said that they saw an old beggar on the street corner, which is hardly likely at that hour, on a quiet street, is it?' The young policeman's laugh rang out against the hard walls, and I fled to the WC down the hall.
When I came out sometime later, I found Holmes by himself in an office that adjoined the morgue. He was seated at a desk, before a neat pile of clothing, clothes that I had last seen upon the woman who now lay on the slab. Beside the clothes lay a large manila envelope, the flap of which had been opened and not yet tied closed again; next to the envelope was a piece of white typing paper, on which were arranged three steel hairpins and a metal button. I knew without looking that the objects would bear evidence of some kind, most likely that of the paint left by the car that had hit her. He looked up from his close examination of one of her boots when I came in.
'Better?'
'Thanks. I was all right, but it was a choice between leaving or hitting that giggling fool over the head with some unspeakable instrument. Can we go now, or are there more forms to sign?'
'Sit down for a moment, Russell, and have a look at her boots.'
I did not sit down. I stood looking at him, and I saw the familiar, subtle signs of excitement in the flash of his deep-set grey eyes, the small smile on his lips, the way his fingertips wandered over the leather. The object in his hand had somehow transformed Miss Dorothy Ruskin from a friend who had died into a factor in a case, and I had a brief vision of him on the open hillside, with the wind in his sparse hair, saying that a case was sniffing about his door. It had not come with the woman's arrival, not for him anyway, but it looked very much as if it had come now, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to go home and walk the cliffs and mourn the loss of a good woman,
