the Timkins troupe for five or six months, we finally determined. Joined at Portsmouth, was sick mornings for a couple of months, and had just started to, er, to 'show' when she died in York. The woman dressed as a man who took Mrs Edwards to hospital was probably Annie Graves, stage name Amanda Pillow. She and the Edwards woman were close.'
'Lovers?' I asked bluntly. His delicacy was becoming irritating. He turned scarlet and consulted his notes furiously.
'Er, the Timkins woman seemed to think it possible, although there were a number of men, as well. Obviously, there had to be at least one.' He cleared his throat again. 'The, er, the interesting thing is that she told Colonel Edwards the two women were, as you say, lovers, when he went to see her in March of 1919. A month after he received his demob papers, that was.'
'Four months before he was hospitalized for drink,' I commented. 'What happened to the Graves woman?'
'She was killed.' We all looked up. 'In June of that same year. She went off with someone after a performance, and she was found at four the next morning on a country lane thirty miles away. Dead about two hours. She'd been walking, stinking drunk and in five-inch heels, and was run over by a vehicle. Her body was down among the weeds in the verge, but it was quite visible as soon as it became light. They never found the car. Never found the person she'd gone off with.'
Throughout my report Holmes had appeared to listen politely, which I knew, to my severe irritation, meant that he was taking in perhaps one word in three. With Lestrade's last revelation, however, he began to pay attention, and he was now looking affronted, as profoundly taken aback as if he had just discovered a distorting flaw in one of his instruments that threatened to cast doubts on the results of an experiment. He did not say anything, merely ground out his cigar and then tried to relight it.
'Furthermore,' Lestrade continued, with a glance at his notebook, 'there may be a slight discrepancy between when the colonel says he arrived home and when he actually did so. I say 'may' because the one neighbour who saw the car drive in has a most unreliable clock, which may or may not have been ten minutes slow or fast that night. According to both Colonel Edwards and the headwaiter at the restaurant, he left in his car just before midnight, no more than three or four minutes before. At that time of night, it takes eighteen minutes driving slowly and roundabout or eleven minutes direct and briskly to the Edwards home. The neighbour thought it was closer to twelve-thirty when he came home, but as I said, it's unreliable.'
'Why did Miss Ruskin walk?' Mycroft asked. 'Granted, it's not the worst area of London, but I should have thought a gentleman would have insisted on driving her, or at least have arranged a taxi.'
'According to the restaurant's doorman, there was some disagreement outside the restaurant about just that, which ended with the lady simply walking off.'
'Could you go over the maitre d's story again?' I asked Lestrade.
'I was going to do that. He seems to have spent a couple of days thinking, and when I went back Thursday, he had a lot more to tell me. Remember, he told Mr Holmes there was some disagreement between Miss Ruskin and the colonel? Well, it occurred to me that for a headwaiter he was very unaware of what was going on in his restaurant, and I mentioned at our first interview that I might find it necessary to ask the local PC to patrol the area more closely, stick his head in occasionally.'
'Coercion, Lestrade? Tut-tut,' said Holmes in mock disapproval.
'Not coercion, just encouragement. It did serve to boost his memory, and he managed to give me a more detailed account of the three hours the colonel and Miss Ruskin were there, with certain gaps where he, the waiter, was off elsewhere, though it was not a busy night. The first half hour, he said, seemed pretty heavy going, long silences, much studying of menus. He got the impression that the colonel had been expecting her to be a man, remember, and that he was not at all happy about having to deal with Miss Ruskin. She, however, seemed to find it funny. Things did settle down, and they spent the next couple of hours going through a pile of papers she had with her. By this time, about eleven-forty, they'd both had a lot of wine and the colonel had drunk three g and t's besides. Unfortunately, this was one of the times when the waiter was out of the dining room, some kind of hubbub in the kitchen, apparently, and when he came back about ten minutes later, the two of them were staring each other down across the table, furious about something. He says he was worried because the colonel looked like a gentleman they'd had die in the restaurant four or five years ago, his face dark red and his eyes popping in his head. He was gesturing at some papers Miss Ruskin was holding, and was, in the waiter's words, 'considerably upset' over them. She seemed to be very sure of herself, and he heard her say a number of times something like 'Yes, it's possible.' A few minutes later, the colonel's chair fell over and the waiter looked up, to see him, I quote, 'standing over that old lady, looking for all the world like he was going to grab the papers away from her, or hit her, or something, but she just sat glaring up at him like a banty, and halfway to laughing. He stood there almost shaking, like he was about to explode with anger.'
'That's when he asked to use the telephone. He had the waiter bring him a double brandy in the manager's office and was closed up in there with the telephone for about ten minutes before he came back. He was calmer then, sat down and talked to her for another twenty minutes or so— uncomfortable talk, very stiff, and they seemed to be working themselves back up to the state they had been in before when all of a sudden, Miss Ruskin put her papers back into her briefcase, got to her feet, and left. Outside on the street, he offered to drive her to her hotel. Which offer she refused, and she died perhaps fifteen minutes later.'
'Those words of hers—'Yes, it's possible'— are just what she told me that afternoon when I doubted the manuscript's authenticity,' I said. 'It sounds fairly conclusive that she showed him a copy of it.'
'I agree,' said Lestrade, then stifled a yawn that left his eyes watering. 'Sorry. Haven't had a solid eight hours for two weeks.'
'The Kent murders?' asked Mycroft with sympathy.
'That, yes, and yesterday I was down in Cornwall, where the child was killed. Nasty piece of work, that. Still, there was a witness, which should help. And as for your witnesses, Miss Chessman and Mr O'Rourke were no help at all. He had his back to it the whole time— climbing a drainpipe to nick a flower from a window box for his lady love— and she draws a blank and starts crying when it comes to details. Says she saw the old beggar sitting and Miss Ruskin walking up to the street corner, but after that, all she remembers is shiny black paint and the blood. She was pretty hysterical, I gather, by the last time I sent someone round, and worse than useless at the inquest. You saw we got an adjournment, did you?'
We had.
'Now, about Mrs Rogers. You'll understand, I hope, that this case has pretty low priority compared with two women knifed in Kent and a little boy horribly dead in Cornwall, which means that information is slow in coming in. All I have to add concerning Mrs Rogers is that her two sons have greying hair, since you asked, Mr Holmes. One is a sailor, like his father. He is not married— in this country at any rate— and has been out of the country since March. The other is married to an Italian woman; they have four sons and three daughters, ages fifteen to thirty- two. The two youngest and an unmarried daughter and her child live at home still, but the others are scattered from Lincoln to Bath. I had already begun to look at them before I got your telegram,' he said with a faint touch of reproof, acknowledged by Holmes with a gracious nod.
'Three members of the family have criminal records, for what it's worth: The sailor son bashed someone over the head with a bottle in a brawl a few years back, got four months; a granddaughter, Emily, aged thirty now, was done for shoplifting seven years ago; and a grandson, Jason, age twenty-six, seems to have spent his youth with a bad crowd— housebreaking, picked up for passing stolen goods once, petty stuff, not brutal and never for bodily harm— but either he decided he wasn't much good at it and went straight or else he suddenly got much better, because he hasn't been touched in four years. And before you ask, Mr Holmes, most of the crew have dark hair.
'Finally, the ibn Ahmadi family and their grudge against Miss Ruskin. Preliminary reports—'
I interrupted him. 'Who?'
'Ibn Ahmadi,' he repeated, doing his best with the strange pronunciation. 'Oh, sorry, I forgot what a solid week it's been. That's the family Mr Mycroft Holmes mentioned, who were done out of a piece of land in Palestine.'
'Muddy,' I offered, to his momentary confusion, the homophone suggested by Erica Rogers in the letter to her sister— a name foreign, multisyllabic, and sounding like
