marriage and my own.
We quartered the ground around the Giant's feet for two hours, gathering bits of paper, cigarette ends, the odd stub of food from the lunch of hikers' picnics, anything that might have been left in recent days. Holmes, bent double with his strong magnifying glass, found some odd dark grey crumbs, a substance that puzzled him although I thought they looked like pebbles, or even gristle from someone's sandwich. Halfway between the figure's feet, a metre from the edge of the blood, he found an untrampled smear of ash, which he gathered assiduously. He spent a long time near a wide rock protruding from the ground a dozen feet from where the woman had died, measuring and sketching a pair of indentations in the ground below it that suggested someone had sat there, and gathering two envelopes of material-a black thread and a few grains of sand, both of which seemed to me as remarkable as lumps of coal in Newcastle or fish scales in Billingsgate.
My own contribution to the evidence envelopes were: the wrapper from a packet of Italian almond-and-oat biscuits, blown down the hill; a delicate handkerchief embroidered with the letter I, or perhaps
We continued along the footpath past the Giant to the village of Folkington; there, finding nothing more suggestive than an assortment of cigarette stubs.
“Do you want to knock up the people who live along here?” I asked him.
He studied the nearby buildings, then shook his head. “We need to see the body first, then we can decide. In any event, I should think that the police will have questioned them already.”
Returning, we followed the ridge-top path above the Long Man, an area littered with archaeological curiosities-an old flint mine, a couple of quarries, several barrow mounds, and traces of the Roman ridge road. I sat down to remove a pebble from my shoe; Holmes settled beside me, scowling at the magnificent view that stretched out at our feet: hillside, trees, the Cuckmere valley, the Weald beyond. Church-bells drifted across the freshening air. Were it not for the thought of what awaited us, I should have been ravenous.
“Did I give you the booklet by Alfred Watkins on British track-ways?” he asked; before I could respond, he continued. “Developing an earlier work by a madman named Black, theorising that Britain has certain innate geometrical lines that connect prehistoric monuments and the later Roman roads. Ley lines, Watkins calls them, the human landmarks reflecting the organisation of the land itself.”
Aimless chatter like this, often nonsensical, was the way Holmes distracted himself. I knew from what.
“You've found no sign of the child Estelle, here or in London?” I asked. It was not really a question, but Holmes shook his head.
“It is lamentably easy to dispose of a small body,” he said. “Add to that the inescapable human fact that the younger the child, the more attention it attracts. If this woman was Yolanda Adler, I think it unlikely that we shall find her daughter alive.”
A spasm of pain ran through the beautiful morning, and I was grateful when Holmes launched himself straight down the near-vertical hill to the path near the Giant's feet.
It was near nine o'clock and the sun was well up in the sky. I craned my neck for a last look at the figure, then turned towards the lane where we had left the motor. Ten steps along the path, Holmes dropped to his knees and pulled out his glass.
It might have been a heel-mark, the dent left by a shoe “inadequate for the footpaths,” as the newspaper had put it. It might also have been the mark left by a walking-stick or a sheep, but Holmes found several more of them, and traced the dimensions of the clearest one onto a piece of paper before resting a stone over it, in case he wanted a plaster cast.
“It would suggest that she came here willingly,” I said to Holmes' bent back.
“It would suggest that she came under her own power,” he corrected me. “That is quite another matter.”
It was five minutes before ten when we located the office of the local coroner, which was in fact the doctor's surgery. The clamour of bells calling the faithful together faded around us. I ran a hasty comb through my wind- blown hair and checked the state of my hands and skirt before following Holmes to the door.
The man who answered was clearly intending to join a church service before too long-either that or he had a remarkably formal attitude towards his job. He introduced himself as Dr Huxtable, and shook Holmes' hand, then mine.
“Come in, come in, I was just making certain that all was ready for you. Come, here's my office, have a seat. Would you like tea? Coffee?”
The tramping had made me thirsty, and I slipped my grateful acceptance in before Holmes could turn him down. The doctor got up from behind his desk and went out of the room, which made Holmes grimace, but we heard a woman's voice, so he was not about to do the task himself. And indeed, he was back in a moment.
“My wife will bring the tea, the kettle's just boiled. And I have to say, it's an honour, sir, to have you in my surgery. My wife feels the same-she was, in fact, rather hoping to be permitted to meet you, when I told her that you were coming. So, you said you thought you might know this young lady. Is this to be one of your mysterious cases, to be written up in
“I could hardly reveal the details of a case, if in fact she is a part of one, could I?” Holmes said repressively.
“No, no, of course not, I certainly agree, it's not to be thought of. Perhaps I should point out, however, that I am a duly sworn servant of His Majesty, in my role of coroner, which may qualify me for, well…”
Holmes just looked at him.
The door opened, fortunately, and the doctor's wife came in, staring so avidly at Holmes that she nearly missed the edge of the desk with the tea tray. I caught the corner and shoved it back into balance, and she gave a startled laugh at the sudden rattle of cups. “Oh! My, how silly of me, I nearly had it all on the floor.”
I regretted my craving for tea, and by way of compensation took a heavy lacing of milk and gulped the still-hot liquid. Holmes fielded inquisitive remarks like a tennis champion, and the moment my empty cup hit the saucer, he got to his feet.
“Shall we go and see what you have?”
The muscles of a corpse, a day and a half after death, have gone through rigor mortis and slackened again. Even with the relative coolness of the room's stone walls, the decomposition of summer had begun to change the shape of her face and taint her pale skin. Her eyes and mouth had been leached of colour, her black hair lay flat and damp against her head, and the sheet that covered her diminished the outlines further; nonetheless, there was no question.
This was Yolanda Adler.
Holmes reached out for the sheet at her chin; I turned sharply away to lift the other end and examine her feet.
They were tiny, neat, and nicely kept, although they bore signs of having spent much of their life bare or in ill- fitting shoes. In recent years they had fared better, and showed few of the calluses and bunions that many women suffer. However, she had recently walked some distance in ill-fitting shoes: Her toes and heels were blistered.
“May I see the clothes she wore?” I asked.
“Oh, we burnt those awful things.”
We both turned to stare at him, speechless. Huxtable looked back and forth between Holmes' narrowed grey eyes and my widened blue ones, and spluttered his protest. “They were dreadfully blood-soaked, I couldn't have them around the place, really I couldn't. A nice frock, my wife has one very like it-didn't want her to think of it every time she went to put hers on. And she had some very pretty, you know, underthings, but-”
“You even burnt her under-garments?” Holmes demanded in outrage.
“Between the bloodstains and having to cut them off of her, there was nothing left, so I put them into the furnace rather-”
“Have you never heard the term evidence, man?”
“Yes, of course, but the police had taken their photographs, and they had the description of the garments, even a tag in the back of the frock-from Selfridges, like my wife's. I never thought to ask.”
“What about her shoes?” I asked.
He turned from Holmes' frigid condemnation with gratitude. “Yes, oh certainly I have those, and her stockings as well, those were silk and not much stained at all, so I kept them, for when the body was claimed. And the hat, of course. Do you-”
