whip-hard constitution had not. I dismissed his halfhearted suggestion. 'A cold day on the moor would cripple him.' That Holmes might rely on police help or Mycroft's men was so improbable as to be unworthy of mention. 'I'll stay and see it through. Although I can't promise that I won't blow up that flipping tank myself at the end of it.'
'That's my Russell.' He smiled. I scowled.
'Will you go down to see Miss Baskerville yourself, to ask about the painting?' I asked him.
'I should like to know as well some of the particulars concerning the sale of the Hall. Yes, I shall go myself. Now, you have yet to tell me about Elizabeth Chase's hedgehogs.'
'One hedgehog, and it does not belong to her. It now resides in the garden of a friend of Miss Chase's in Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, where Miss Chase carried it to nurse it back to health after finding it on the twenty-eighth of July, its leg crushed by a fast-moving wheel and its back bitten by large teeth.'
'Aha!'
'Indeed. Moreover, she goes on to offer us one large and spectral dog with a glowing eye and a taste for scones.' To my great pleasure, this statement actually startled Holmes.
I told him about Elizabeth Chase's wounded hedgehog and about Samuel's encounter with the Hound, and after telling him I sat forward and pulled the map to me, marking with an X the spot between the stone row and the hut circles where she had heard the piteous cry of poorwee Tiggy and the place where Samuel had seen the dog. Holmes took the pencil and drew in the probable route of the coach as seen from Gibbet Hill, added a star shape to mark the adit in which he had found signs of life, and we studied the result: my X, his line, two Xs for the sightings of the coach in July, and a circle to show where Josiah Gorton had last been seen. All of them together formed a jagged line running diagonally across the face of the moor from Sourton Tor in the northwest to Cut Lane in the southeast, roughly six miles from one end to the other. The imaginary line's nearest point to Baskerville Hall was three miles, although the closest sighting, that of the courting couple, was more than four miles away.
I sat for a time in contemplation of the enigmatic line while Holmes slumped back into his chair, eyes closed and fingers steepled. When he spoke, his remark seemed at first oblique.
'I find I cannot get the phial of gold dust from my mind.'
'Did you give it over for analysis?'
'I looked at it myself in the laboratory. Small granules of pure gold—not ore—with a pinch of some high-acid humus and a scraping of deteriorated granitic sand.'
'Peat is highly acidic,' I suggested.
'Peat, yes, but there was a tiny flat fragment that looked as if it might have been a decomposed leaf of some tough plant such as holly or oak.'
'Wistman's Wood is oak.'
'So are a number of other places around the moor. I shall ring the laboratory later today, to see if their more time-consuming chemical analyses have given them any more than I found. In the meanwhile, I think I can just catch the train to Plymouth, although it may mean stopping there the night. Perhaps you could go and ask Mrs Elliott if Gould's old dog cart is available.'
'And if the pony can pull it.' Red was still in residence at Baskerville Hall.
Holmes went up to put his shaving kit and a change of linen into his bag, and I put the breakfast things back on the tray and took them into the kitchen. There I found Mrs Elliott, looking somewhat dishevelled.
'Oh bless you, my dear. I don't know what I'm going to do. Rosemary and Lettice have taken to their beds with sick headaches—from crying no doubt; they'd be better off working and keeping their minds off that silly man, but there you have it.'
'I'm sorry, Mrs Elliott. Is there anything I can do to help?' I asked hesitantly. 'Washing up or something?'
She looked shocked. 'That will not be necessary, mum. But thank you for the kind thought.' She would have to be in a sorry state indeed before she allowed a guest to plunge her ladylike hands into a pan full of dishes.
'Well, please let me know if there is something I can do. But I need to ask, can someone take Mr Holmes down to the station? He needs to catch the train to Plymouth.'
She looked up at the clock over the mantelpiece and hurriedly began to dry her hands. 'He'll need to step smart, then. I'll have Mr Dunstan hitch the pony to the cart.'
She ducked out through the door. I eyed the stack of unwashed dishes and left them alone, going up the back stairs to tell Holmes the cart would be ready. I found him just closing his bag, and reported on the time constrictions. He nodded and sat down to change his shoes.
'What do you wish me to do while you're away?' I asked. I was half tempted to throw together a bag and join him, for the sake of movement if nothing else.
'We need to know more about Pethering,' he said. One set of laces was looped and tied, and the other foot raised. 'I want you to—'
'Sorry, Holmes,' I said, raising one hand. 'Was that the door?' We listened, hearing nothing, and I went over to the window. There was a motorcar in the drive, but the porch roof obscured my view of the door, so, feeling a bit like a fishwife, I opened the window and put my head out to call. 'Hello? Is someone there?'
After a moment a hatted, overcoated man came into view, backing slowly out from the porch and craning his head to see where the voice had come from.
'Inspector Fyfe!' I said. He found me and tipped his hat uncertainly. 'Do come inside and warm yourself; the door is not locked. We'll be right down.' I drew in my head and latched the window.
Holmes was already out of the room, and I did not catch him up until he was shaking hands with a still-hatted Inspector Fyfe in the hall. As I seemed to be playing hostess (or rather, in the temporary absence of Mrs Elliott and her disturbed assistants, housemaid), I took his coat and hat. Not knowing quite what to do with them, I laid them across the back of a chair and joined the two men at the fire.
Fyfe rubbed his hands together briskly in front of the smouldering fire, while Holmes squatted down to coax it back to life. 'What can we do for you, Inspector?' I asked.
'I have some questions to ask Mr Baring-Gould about the man Pethering.'
Holmes looked up. 'What do you imagine Gould would know about him?'
'Well, I hope he knows something, because we can't find a trace of where he comes from or who he is.'
Holmes' eyebrows went up. 'I understood that he was a Reader at one of the northern universities. York, I believe Gould said.'
'They've never heard of him. Nor do they have anyone on their staff who fits his description, an archaeologist or anthropologist or what-have-you, with a wife and young family.'
'You interest me, Inspector. Mrs Elliott,' he said, raising his voice, and indeed, when I turned to look, there she was in the door to the drawing room. 'Would you be so good as to tell Mr Dunstan that I won't be needing the cart? I shall have to take a later train. And I believe the inspector could make good use of a hot drink.' He swept the maps off the bench in front of the fire, uncovering the blithely sleeping tabby, and sat down beside the animal, gesturing Fyfe towards a chair. 'Tell me what you do know about him, Inspector.'
Fyfe settled onto the edge of the nearest armchair. 'I'll be calling in Scotland Yard this afternoon,' he said, sounding resigned about it. 'We don't have the facilities here. Meantime, about all we know about Pethering, or whatever his name might be, is that he arrived at Coryton station on the Saturday afternoon, walked up to Lew Down to arrange a room at the inn, had some tea, and then came here to Lew House, where he stayed from 'round about six until you turned him out, which Miss—Mrs—which your wife says was a shade after midnight.
'He then returned to Lew Down and knocked up the innkeeper, who let him in. He came down from his room around ten o'clock Sunday morning, struck up a conversation with William Latimer, who stepped in to deliver a basket of eggs his wife had promised for Saturday but couldn't bring because one of their boys fell out of an apple tree and broke his arm, and she was away at the surgery getting it seen to. Latimer told Pethering about the sightings of the hound on the moor, Pethering got all excited and rushed upstairs to get his map. Latimer showed him where to look, and Pethering ran upstairs again, put on his heavy boots, and packed two bags—or one bag and a large rucksack. He left the bag with the innkeeper, and walked off down the high road in the direction of Okehampton.
'A farmer near Collaven saw him 'round about two o'clock, making for the moor. That's the last anyone saw of the man alive.'
I retrieved the one-inch map from the floor and looked for Collaven. It lay at the foot of the moor, two miles north of Lydford and a mile from Sourton Tor, on the edge of the area so heavily marked by our pencilled lines and
