'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.
'Russell, haven't your eyes fallen out yet? Shall I tell Mrs Hudson to leave our food in the oven while we have a swim?'
'Holmes, your genius continually astounds me. May I have another ten minutes?' There was no need to ask for the results of his interviews— it was in the look of dogged persistence he wore.
'Take fifteen. I don't mind climbing that cliff in the dark.'
'Ten. You get together some towels and the bathing costumes.'
Forty minutes later, we lay back in the shallow pool left by the receding tide, and I asked him what our neighbours had said.
'They saw nothing.'
'That is very peculiar, in the countryside.'
'Due entirely to a piece of bad luck. There was a 'do' on at the Academy that evening, to welcome the new director, and the area was crawling with formal black automobiles, brought in from Brighton to ferry guests from the station. Several of them ended up in impassable lanes and farmyards before the night was through. Ours might have had another county's registration code on its number plates, but if so, nobody noticed.'
'You should have—' I bit it back.
'Yes?'
'Hindsight. We should have had Old Will or Patrick come and keep watch that night.'
'I had thought of that, but decided against it. Having enthusiastic amateurs involved is a terrible responsibility, and usually a liability. Neither of them would have been able to resist a confrontation with the intruders.'
'You're probably right. Old Will certainly.'
'I even considered, briefly, asking Constable Perkins to come out and sit in the bushes.'
'My goodness. Desperate times indeed.'
'I decided the measure was too desperate. Had I been absolutely certain they would come, I might have resorted to his involvement.'
'He would have fallen asleep anyway, and we'd be no further along.'
With which judgement we concluded our conversation, indulged in a vigorous sprint through the dusky waters, which I won, and climbed the cliffs for our late and well-earned supper.
After we had polished off Mrs Hudson's supper, down to scraping the bowls of the lemon custard, and after I had helped with the washing up, Holmes lit a small fire to dry my hair, and I told him about the letter. I sat on the hearth rug with my back to the heat, the pages of my translation spread out on the floor, Holmes curled up before me in his frayed basket chair, with his face half-illuminated by the flames, and I read him my translation of Mary's letter. As I did so, I seemed to hear the woman's calm, melodious voice through the open French windows, a murmur beneath the distant rumour of the incoming waves on the rocky shore.
'I have to admit, Holmes, that Miss Ruskin was right. There is something profoundly moving about this
