duplicated. Good evening.'
We found the ambulance attendants working their way awkwardly down the narrow steps. At the front door Jones waited to let them out. A familiar cacophony came from the other side. Holmes reached into his rucksack for the small bottle, but I laid a hand on his arm.
'Let me try first,' I said. I cleared my throat, drew myself up to my full height (over six feet in those boots), and opened the door to face the pack. I put my hands on my hips and glared at them.
'Shame on you!' Seventeen jaws slowly shut, thirty-four eyes were glued to my face. 'Shame on you, all of you! Is this any way to treat agents of His Majesty? Whatever are you thinking?' Seventeen faces looked at each other, at me, at the men in the doorway. The wolfhound was the first to turn tail and skulk away into the dark, the Yorkie with the blue bow the last, but they all went.
'Russell, there are unexplored depths to you,' murmured Holmes at my elbow. 'Remind me to call you when ever there is a savage beast to be overcome.'
We saw the traitorous butler and his guards off through the gates and walked off down the dark road beneath the telephone line, and talked of various matters all the way home.
FOUR: A case of my own
What is petty and vile, is better than that which is not at all.
The Barker problem was the first time Holmes and I collaborated on a case (if one can consider it a collaboration when one person leads and the other follows instructions). The remaining days of the spring holiday went by uneventfully, and I returned to Oxford much invigorated by my hard labour under Patrick's eye and by having bagged my first felon. (I ought perhaps to mention that the night's work resulted in the capture of an even dozen of German spies, that Mr. Barker recovered his health, and that Mrs. Barker was quite generous in her payment for services rendered.)
When I returned to my lodgings house Mr. Thomas seemed to approve of my appearance, and I know that I returned to maths, theological enquiry, and the career of Ratnakar Sanji with renewed enthusiasm. I made it a point also to take exercise more often, walking into the hills surrounding the city (with a book in hand, of course) and did not find myself quite so exhausted when the year ended in June.
That spring and summer of 1918 was a time of intense emotions and momentous events for the country as well as for one female undergraduate. The Kaiser had begun his final, massive push, and the pinched and hungry faces around me began to look grim as well. We did not sleep well, behind our blackout curtains. And then, miraculously, the German offensive began to falter, while at the same time the Allied forces were taking on a constant flow of American transfusions, men and supplies. Even the huge and deadly May air raid on London did not change the increasing awareness that the German army was bleeding to death into the soil, and that after so many years of mere dogged existence, there was now a glimmer of future in the air.
I strode home in midsummer eighteen and a half years old, strong and adult and with the world at my feet. That summer I began to take an active interest in the running of my farm, and began to ask Patrick the first questions about farming equipment and our plans for the postwar future.
I found that in my absence Holmes had changed. It took a while to see that perhaps he was a bit taken aback by this young woman who had suddenly emerged from gangly, precocious, adolescent Mary Russell. Not that I was outwardly very different — I had filled out, but mostly in bone and muscle, not curves, and I still wore the same clothes and braided my hair in two long plaits. It was in my attitude and how I moved, and how I met him eye to eye (in conversation, but nearly so in stature). I was beginning to feel my strength and explore it, and I think it made him feel old. I know that I first noticed caution in him that summer, when he went around a cliff rather than launch himself down it. That is not to say that he became a doddery old man — far from it. He was just a bit thoughtful at times, and I would catch him looking at me pensively after I had done some exuberant thing or other.
We went to London a number of times that summer to see her limited wartime offerings, and I saw him move differently there, as if the very air changed him, making his muscles go taut and his joints loosen. London was his home as the downs never would be, and he returned relaxed and renewed to his experiments and his writing. If the summer before I went up to Oxford was one of sun and chess games under the open sky, my first summer home had a tinge of bitter in the sweet, as I realised for the first time that even Holmes was limited by mortality.
That awareness was at the time peripheral, however. Bitterness is an aftertaste that comes when the sweetness has had time to fade, and there was much that was sweet about that summer. Sweetness of all were the two cases that came our way.
I say two, although the first was hardly a case, more of a lark. It began one morning in July when I walked down to Patrick's house with an article I had read concerning a new mulching technique developed in America, and found him slamming furiously about in his kitchen. Taking the hot kettle from his hand before he injured himself, I poured it over the leaves and asked him what was the matter.
'Oh, Miss Mary, it's nothing really. Just that Tillie Whiteneck, down the inn? She was robbed last night.' The Monk's Tun, on the road between Eastbourne and Lewes, was popular with locals and holiday trippers. And with Patrick.
'Robbed? Was she hurt?'
'No, everyone was asleep.' Burglary, then. 'They forced the back door and took her cash box and some of the food. Real quiet about it — nobody knew until Tillie came down to start the stove in the morning and found the back door open. She had a lot in the box, too, more than usual. There were a couple big parties, and she was too busy to take the money down to the bank.'
I commiserated, gave him the article, and walked back to the main house, thinking. I put a telephone call through to Holmes, and while Mrs. Hudson went to fetch him I sat at the desk and watched Patrick move across the yard between the barns, his shoulders set in anger and depression.
When Holmes came on the line I came to the point. 'Holmes, didn't you tell me a few weeks ago that there has been a series of burglaries from inns and public houses in Eastbourne?'
'I hardly think two qualifies as a series, Russell. You are interrupting a delicate haemoglobin experiment, you know.'
'Now it's three,' I said, ignoring his protest. 'Patrick's lady-friend at the Tun had her cash box taken last night.'
'My dear Russell, I am retired. I am no longer required to retrieve missing pencil boxes or track down errant husbands.'
'Whoever took it just happened to choose a time when the box was much fuller than it normally is,' I persisted. 'It is not a comfortable feeling, knowing that the thief may be in the area. Besides,' I added, sensing a faint waver down the telephone line, 'Patrick's a friend.' It was the wrong card to play.
'I am so pleased for you that you can count your farm manager as a friend, Russell, but that does not justify dragging me into this little affaire. I believe I heard a rumour that Sussex now has a constabulary force. Perhaps you would be so good as to let them be about their work and let me be about mine.'
'You don't mind if I look into it, do you?'
'Good heavens, Russell, if time hangs so heavy on your hands and you've run out of bandages to wrap, by all means thrust your nose into this momentous crime, this upsurge of depravity on our very doorsteps. I only suggest that you not annoy the constabulary more than you have to.'
The line went dead. In irritation I hung up my earpiece and went to get out my bicycle.
I was hot and dusty when I reached the inn, not a very prepossessing figure, and I had practically to tug the sleeve of the village constable before I was allowed a glimpse of the scene of the crime. I positively itched to look more closely, but the good PC Rogers, proud of his outré little crime, had the better part of the downstairs roped off awaiting his inspector, and he would not hear of trespass. Even the owner and her workers and guests were forced to edge through the room behind a wall of potted palms, which were already suffering from the
