that it was too late to deny her the funding for her project. I suspect, and he probably did, too, that his colleague and the man's friends within the organisation did it to laugh at him.'
'I should have thought a military man would have more self-control than that,' Mycroft objected. 'Surely he must be driven to the brink of murder every day in this town, if he's so infuriated by women of that sort.'
'He probably wouldn't have done anything other than storm furiously out of the restaurant and send off his resignation to the Friends, but for one thing: point four. I believe Miss Ruskin told him about the manuscript. You've heard it; it is very powerful. How would it have affected him? That document, even if its authenticity were never finally proven, would still turn the Christian world on its head. Mary Magdalene, an apostle of Jesus? To many people, the only thing more shocking would be if someone produced evidence that Peter was a woman, or Jesus himself. The colonel couldn't help seeing that, couldn't help being driven nearly insane by this woman, casually producing a document that would turn everything he stands for into a farce.
'I can see you have something you want to put in here, Inspector, but I'm nearly through. Can it wait? Good. Finally, there's the son. A current and, I think, valid, psychological theory says that a child reflects the subconscious, or unconscious, attitudes of the parent and that repressed hostilities and drives of the adult are often acted out openly by the offspring. Stripped of the jargon, it is simply that children absorb what their parents actually feel about someone or something, not just how the adult acts on the surface. Holmes, I think you used a version of this theory thirty years ago with the Rucastle case, didn't you? Obviously, the older a child becomes, the more tenuous the link becomes, and at twenty-one, Gerald Edwards can hardly be thought of as a child. However, his attitude towards Mary Small, a sweet young thing if ever there was, is positively predatory. Or, I should say, it was until yesterday afternoon. Even more revealing was the attitude Edwards took concerning his son's actions: slightly amused, somewhat proud parent looking on, exasperated, but not taking it any more seriously, and seeing no more need to apologise, than if his dog had anointed a neighbour's tree.'
I had kept my voice to a dry recitation of the surface events, pushing away the uneasiness I felt remembering the actions, not of the son, but of the father. I told myself that it was merely the unexpectedness of the man's sudden fury that had taken me aback, and I decided not to mention it. Holmes would not need much of an excuse to pull me out of the Edwards house, and although a part of me would appreciate the gesture, I knew I had to remain there until my job was done.
My distraction functioned admirably, and I found myself faced by three variously affronted and indignant males. Their chivalrous attitude was nearly funny, but I thought it well to remind them who and what I was.
'Remember, Inspector,' I said gently, 'I have certain skills when it comes to the rough-and-tumble of life.' I waited until I saw the recollection dawn in a familiar male look of quizzical half disapproval, and then I did laugh. He looked abashed, then chuckled unwillingly.
'You're right, I was forgetting. That lad with the knife— two years ago was it? You broke his arm well and truly.'
'It was his elbow, and I didn't break it; he did it himself.'
'Still could have been dangerous,' he said, referring to the more recent escapade. 'I mean to say, what if young Edwards had been able to, you know ...'
'Meet me on my own ground? I was quite certain he could not. One can tell, something in the way a person walks.' I dismissed the topic. 'At any rate, now you have my story. Colonel Edwards had a motive to kill Dorothy Ruskin and the organisational skills and experience to seize an opportunity and carry it out. He had the means, with both a driver and a son available to him; he was in the area when she was killed; he has no firm alibi for the period after her death, when her room was searched, or for the following night; and his son was not only not in Scotland, he was actually in the south of England the morning after our home was ransacked. Furthermore, the person who searched our papers was interested primarily in those written in foreign alphabets and those taken up with chemical and mathematical symbols, which to the uninitiated may resemble a language. The Greek was then discarded, but the pages they took away with them include a seventeenth-century fragment of the Talmudic tractate on women, a sixteenth-century sermon in old German script, a sampler or, more probably, practice page from some Irish monk's pen, which was Latin but so ornate as to be illegible, a Second Dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription— a copy, actually, dating from no later than the middle of the last century— and half a dozen pages of a Coptic text. As none of them were of any great value, and in fact several were my own transcriptions, I believe we can leave out the question of a mad collector of rare manuscripts. I only note that Gerald Edwards reads Greek and, I should think, Latin, but not Hebrew, certainly not the old German script, and I doubt that he has ever heard of Coptic.'
'You are discounting the evidence they left behind, then, Russell?' Holmes asked quietly.
'Holmes, even twenty years ago the hairs you found would have been very near to a sure thing. Now, however— well, there's just too much common knowledge about detecting techniques to make me happy about having a case rest on five hairs and some mud. These days, even the butcher's boy knows about fingerprints and tyre marks and all those things that you pioneered— this lot certainly did, as they never took off their gloves. You've been too successful, Holmes, and what the police know, the criminal and the detective-story writer pick up very soon. Those hairs could conceivably have been put there for us to find.'
'My dear Russell, as you yourself have admitted, I am not yet senile. It is obvious that those hairs could have been put there as red herrings. It is an attractive theory and even possible, but I fear I deem it unlikely.' He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. 'Now, if you are finished, I believe that Inspector Lestrade's shining eyes and position on the edge of his chair indicate a certain eagerness for the floor. What have you for us, Lestrade?'
'We've had an interesting week, Mr Holmes. First of all, we managed to find a nurse in the hospital where Mrs Edwards died. She had a clear memory of it for the simple reason that she was newly qualified, and it was her first death. It was childbirth that brought Mrs Edwards there. The baby, a girl, lived for less than an hour, and the mother followed her two days later. However, the man who brought her in? He was not a man, but a woman. The nurse remembers her very well, because 'she dressed and talked like a man, but wasn't,' in her words. She seemed very nervous, but she stayed to help Mrs Edwards in her confinement. The nurse had the impression that the stranger was an actress or a singer, and the reason she had to leave the next morning was that the show was moving on. She telephoned several times and talked to the nurse, seemed satisfied with her friend's progress, but suddenly Mrs Edwards took a turn for the worse, and she died that night of childbirth fever. The nurse was off duty when the woman next rang, and she was never heard from again.'
'Did Colonel Edwards know all this?' I asked.
'Exactly my question, and the answer is yes. The nurse wrote a short report for the file, which the colonel read, and she later spoke with him about it when he went to see her in early 1919.'
'So he knew that his wife had miscarried his baby while off with a mysterious female theatre person, had been with her for some time, in fact. Also that there was a file describing it all, which later conveniently disappeared.'
'There's more. The nurse well remembered the baby— she was holding it when it died— and finds it hard to believe that its, er, gestational age was more than five months, six at the very most.'
'And the colonel had been back at the front since the autumn,' I remembered.
'November. Slightly over eight months.'
'He couldn't have had a leave and the records lost?'
'Unlikely.'
'How very sordid and ugly. One can't help wondering—'
'If he drove his wife to it, or if she drove him to what he is now?' interjected Lestrade with unexpected perception.
'Mmm. I'll have some brandy now, please, Mycroft. I feel rather cold.' My shoulder ached, too, from the horse's strong mouth on the reins and the succession of long days, but I ignored it and concentrated on what Lestrade was saying.
'Next, we started working our way through all the travelling entertainers who were in York at the time, beginning with the legitimate theatre players and working our way down to the dancers in the nightclubs. Pretty close to the bottom, we came across an all-woman troupe that specialised in rude music-and-dance versions of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Yes, and it seems to have been as dotty as it sounds. People were hard up for entertainment during those years, but still.... Any road, the old, er, bat who managed it— Mother Timkins, she calls herself— is still alive by some miracle, running a, er, a house in Stepney.'
'A 'house,' Inspector?' I asked. 'Of ill repute?'
'Er, yes. Precisely. She did remember Mrs Edwards, though not by that name. The colonel's wife was with
