not pick up the boot she had worn.
'What am I going to see on those boots, Holmes?'
Wordlessly, he held out the right one and his powerful glass. Reluctantly, I carried them over to the window. The boots were quite new, the toes only slightly scuffed, the soles barely worn. They were the sort that have holes for the laces along the foot, turning at the ankle into two long rows of protruding hooks— sturdy, comfortable, easy to lace up. I had a similar pair at home, though mine were of softer leather and had the new crepe rubber soles. And no bloodstains. I held the glass over the lowest pair of hooks. Unlike the others, these were slightly crooked, and each had a minute nick at the underside, matching a hair-thin line in the leather which extended an inch on either side of the hooks. I concentrated on it, and the magnifier brought it into focus: Some thin, sharp edge had cut into the leather, caught from below against the two lowest hooks.
The other boot appeared at my side, and I took it. This was the left one, and it had a similar, almost invisible line, this time running at an angle across the toe, nearly obscured by the scuffs that lay beneath it. I placed the boots parallel to the edge of the desk and handed Holmes back his glass. The basement window looked up onto the street level, and I watched several pairs of feet walk by before I spoke.
'I don't suppose she could have had those marks on her boots when she was with us?'
Holmes paused in the task of securely folding the hairpins and button into the sheet of paper before replacing them in the large evidence envelope. 'Is something the matter with your eyes, Russell? Those cuts are on top of everything else. There isn't even much dust in them.'
'If she was tripped, then the car was deliberate.' I took a deep breath and rubbed my shoulder. 'Murder. I must say I wondered, a hit-and-run accident at that time of night. And her bag missing. It seemed unlikely.'
'I should think so, Russell. I am relieved to hear that my efforts in your training have not been entirely in vain. I will go and ask the location of the corner where she was killed.'
'And the witnesses?'
'And their addresses. Wait here.'
* * *
We managed to shake off the helpful young laughing police constable and took a cab to the corner where Miss Ruskin had died. The early afternoon traffic was considerably greater than it had been at 12:15 in the morning, and we added to it as we stood on the corner and crouched down and examined walls and attracted onlookers. It was quite an ordinary corner, with a red pillar box on one side, a new electrical lamp standard on the other, and a blunt office building of dirty yellow bricks set back from the cobblestones by a wide pavement. I chose the pillar box and dropped to my knees in the lee of it, my back to the intersection so as to avoid being trodden on. Omnibuses, automobiles, motor lorries, and horse-drawn wagons rumbled past continuously two feet from my head as I bent down and ran my fingertips delicately over the bottom few inches of painted metal. The box had been painted in the relatively recent past. A woman stopped to post a thick stack of letters, and she stared down at me. I smiled politely, then reached farther around the base, staring blankly into the passing wheels, and my fingers encountered what I had hoped they would not.
I moved around to the other side, knelt with my cheek touching the kerb, and squinted up at the delicate, clean cut that lay approximately six inches up the base. It travelled about a third of the pillar box's circumference and was deepest on the side away from the lamppost.
I rose, threaded my way over to where Holmes was squatting, and told him what I had found. The difference with his find, I saw, was that the equivalent cut in the base of his lamppost completely encircled it. It was also not so deep, and on the far side, away from the pillar box, Holmes' finger traced a length of two parallel indentations. He stretched himself out on the pavement, creating a considerable obstacle, and pulled out his glass. After a minute, he grunted.
'A very fine wire, plied or wrapped. Perhaps even a heavy fishing line. Made up as a beggar, he sat against the wall, with the wire dropped in a loop around the pillar box, across the corner, and twice around the lamppost for extra leverage. The car was waiting just down the street, and when Miss Ruskin came along, the old beggar tightened the wire so it was held about six inches off the ground. She went down, the car came along, and in the confusion afterwards, nobody noticed the man clip the wire, take her bag, and slip away between the buildings. They'll find the car eventually, I expect, a stolen one abandoned somewhere. Let us see what the wall tells us.'
Oblivious of the low curses and scandalised looks, Holmes picked himself up from the pavement and made his way to the wall. He hunkered down, with his glass dangling loosely from one hand, and studied the ground.
'About here, I expect. Yes, you see the threads?' I angled my head against the bricks until I could make out a faint fuzz on the rough surface. He fished a pair of surgical tweezers from an inner pocket, picked from the wall an invisible fibre, and held it in front of his magnifying glass. 'It appears to be an unpleasant shade of green-grey wool. And here's a dark blue wool, longer staple, at head level for a man of average size. There was indeed a man sitting here begging— or sitting and waiting at any rate— that night, despite the young constable's dismissal of the drunken witnesses. Hold the envelopes, would you? There. No point in looking for fingerprints— he was certainly wearing heavy gloves or the trip wire would surely have cut him and left some nice blood samples, of which there are none. No hair, no cigarette ashes. Curse it! Yesterday we might have found something of value.'
We stood up and the crowd of curious onlookers began self-consciously to move off. I finished marking the envelopes and slipped them into a pocket.
'Russell, a bit of footwork now. We need the restaurant she was coming from and the hotel she was going to. I shall take the former and meet you back here in an hour. Right?'
'You really don't think the police will have done this?' I asked plaintively.
'The official forces place an elderly accident victim far down the list in urgency. Having inserted a notice in the papers, they will wait for a response, or so that jovial gentleman in the morgue informed me. At the moment, there is an all-out push against a rash of pickpockets, and if the local police have got around to asking, they have not yet found anything. Surely we can do better than that.'
I was forced to agree. We split up, Holmes to retrace Miss Ruskin's steps, I to continue on, in hopes of encountering her destination.
SIX
I was fortunate, in that the area was not wall-to-wall with hotels and short-term boardinghouses. The sixth
