Before we left the bedroom, however, there was something I had to know. 'Holmes, why did you tell me you'd met Baring-Gould during the Baskerville case?'
'I did not. I merely said that I had used him during the case.'
'You deliberately misled me. Why didn't you want me to know he was your godfather?'
He paused in the act of brushing his hair and looked over at me, startled. 'Good heavens, he is, isn't he? I had completely forgotten.'He turned back to the mirror slowly. 'Extraordinary thought, is it not?'
With that, I had to agree.
***
Mrs Elliott was up and ready for us, although Baring-Gould was not. I had not expected he would be, after the rigours of the day before; I could only hope he had not suffered from the unwonted expenditure of his limited energies.
The chimney in the dining room was still not functioning satisfactorily, so we had been served in the drawing room with the painted Virtues looking down at us, and there we remained for our council. I had to wait until Holmes had tamped and lit and puffed at his pipe, a delaying nuisance that had not grown any easier to bear over the years. I swear he did it deliberately to irritate me.
'Holmes,' I growled after several long minutes, 'I am going to take up knitting, and make you sit and wait while I count the row of stitches.'
'Nonsense,' he said with a final dig and puff. 'You are quite capable of talking and counting at the same time. Am I to understand that you wish to hear the results of my sojourn?'
'Holmes, when I left you on Monday, you were going to northern Dartmoor and returning here two days later. It is now Saturday, and the only word I have had were secondhand rumours of a hasty trip to London. I've told you about Pethering's death and my visit to Baskerville Hall; I see no reason to go into my trip over the moor and my conversation about hedgehogs with the witch of Mary Tavy parish until you've given me something in return.'
'Ah, I see you've met Elizabeth Chase.'
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a husband whom I might astonish.
'Holmes,' I said sternly.
'Oh very well. Yes, I went onto the moor, and no, I was not blown to bits; I was not even lightly shelled. I even missed the worst of the storm on the Tuesday. I asked farmwifes, shepherds, three stonemasons, two thatchers, a goose girl, and the village idiot whether or not they had seen a ghostly carriage or a black dog, had heard anything peculiar, noticed anything out of the ordinary. All but the village idiot gave me nothing but nonsense, and he gave me nothing but a smile.
'The testing ground for Mycroft's secret weapon (which, by the way, is a sort of amphibious tank) is to the east of Yes Tor, down to Black-a-ven Brook. It's a pocket of ground difficult to overlook except from the army's own observation huts, but I did find a patch of hillside outside the artillery range with an adit showing signs of recent use.'
'An adit being a horizontal mine shaft,' I said tentatively, dredging up the word from somewhere in my recent reading. Holmes nodded. 'Not an active mine, I take it?'
'By no means. Its entrance was heavily overgrown and nearly obscured by a rock-fall.'
'How did you find it?'
'I smelt it.'
'You smelt…?'
'Coffee. Whoever spent time in there brewed coffee, and threw the grounds at the roots of the whortleberry bushes growing near the entrance.'
'Good heavens.'
'Extraordinary oversight, I agree,' he said, which was not quite what I was exclaiming about, but I let it pass. 'The rest of his debris he simply threw back into the shaft—eggshells, greasy paper, tins, apple cores—but the coffee dregs went out in front. Presumably he was in the habit of drinking it at his front door, as it were, and dashing out the thick remnants in the bottom of his cup where he stood. As you are aware, Russell, habit is the snare by which many a criminal is caught.'
'How recently was he there?'
'Two or three weeks, I should say. Not more. And to anticipate your question, the new tank was last tested seventeen days ago.'
'Suggestive,' I agreed. 'But that does not explain five days and a trip to London.'
'Patience,' counselled my husband, one of the least patient individuals I have ever met. 'I returned here late on Tuesday, spent a pleasant evening with Gould, and on Wednesday a lad arrived with the name of the people we were looking for.'
'The London hikers?'
'Not quite, although he had found the farmhouse where they stayed. Unfortunately, being an informal hostelry, they do not keep records of their guests, and as the two Londoners had not made advance arrangements, there was little evidence as to whence they came. However, they were a memorable pair, even without the tale of the ghostly carriage they brought with them down the hill: young, the man perhaps twenty-eight, the woman a year or two younger, who impressed the farmwife as being a 'proper lady,' or in other words, wealthy. The man, on the other hand, had a heavier accent, and seemed much more shaken by the idea of seeing a ghostly carriage on the moor than his wife was. He also had a bad limp and one 'special shoe,' and at some point during the stay told the farmer that he was studying to become a doctor.'
The limp, the nerves, and the student's advanced age gave him away as a wounded soldier. I asked drily, 'You mean to say you didn't get his regiment?'
'But of course. Not from the farmer, although he did give me the name of the village where the future doctor was injured during Second Ypres, and the War Office could have told me his regiment and thence his identity. However, I thought it simpler to phone around the teaching hospitals and enquire after a young man missing part of his foot. I found him straight off, at Bart's.'
'So simple,' I murmured.
'Regrettably so. Do you have the maps?'
'Upstairs. What is left of them.' I trotted up and retrieved the pile, some of them pristine, hardly unfolded. Those for the north quarter had seen hard use, and I pulled open the still-damp sheets with care and laid them across the padded bench that sat in front of the fire. There happened to be an elderly cat upon it, but the animal did not seem to mind being covered up. No doubt, living in the Baring-Gould household, it had seen stranger usage.
He pored over the maps for a long time, then said, 'Do we have the one-inch-to-the-mile here?'
I dug through and found it. He laid it out, found Mary Tavy and the nearby Gibbet Hill, and then took out a pencil. Using the side of a folded map as a straight edge and pulling the map to one side to find a flat place, he began to draw a series of short lines, fanning out from Gibbet Hill and touching the tops of half a dozen peaks and tors to the northeast of the hill. These were, I understood, the tors and hilltops visible from the peak.
'It was dark, and their sense of direction was sadly wanting, but they were quite definite that whatever they saw was to the northeast, that it wrapped around a hill, going from right to left, and after a minute or two disappeared behind a tor—probably, they thought, Great Links or Dunna Goat.'
'And what exactly was it they saw?'
'A pair of lights, old-style lanterns rather than the new automobile headlamps, mounted on the upper front corners of a light-coloured square frame. They had with them a strong pair of field glasses.'
'As if two lanterns on a coach built of bones.'
'As you say.'
'How would you judge them as witnesses?'
He shrugged. 'Ramblers,' he said dismissively. 'The sort of young people who would read up on the more arcane myths and legends of an area and spend a week traipsing about, raising blisters and searching for Local Romance.'
'Holmes, that sounds perilously close to what I have been doing this last week.'
He looked startled. 'My dear Russell, I was certainly not drawing a comparison between your search for information and the self-indulgent—'
'Of course not, Holmes. Did they see a dog, or any person either inside or driving?'
