and dogs eat them. No ram was slaughtered.” Lestrade's chair squealed back. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have an investigation to run, and I'd like to keep one step ahead of the papers. Artists,” he declared, shaking his head as he put on his hat. “Interviewing artists makes me bilious.”
Rather to my surprise, he did not plant a uniformed constable over us, to ensure that we did no mischief to his office.
“How long before he suspects, do you suppose?” I asked Holmes in a low voice.
“That you and I were both looking for Yolanda Adler long before she died? He will know by the time he has interviewed the neighbours.”
“What do you suggest we tell him then?”
“I suggest we keep out of his way until he is no longer interested in the question,” he replied, and opened the older, thicker file. But first, I had to know:
“What was that about a ram, Holmes?”
“Found last spring, at a stone circle in Cumbria called Long Meg and her Daughters.”
“Was that in the paper this morning? I didn't see it.”
“You did not read the letters.”
“Oh, Holmes, not another outraged farmer?”
He did not answer me. There were times I had some sympathy for Lestrade's opinion of Holmes' techniques. I pulled towards me the crisp, new folder labelled with the name of Yolanda Adler, and gingerly opened the cover.
I was grateful that it did not yet contain the details or photographs of the autopsy, although it did have a sheaf of photographs from the hillside where she had been found. Her frock was indeed beyond repair, and I supposed that if I were faced with that garment, I might be tempted to rid myself of its unfortunate juxtaposition of sprigged lawn and dried gore.
When I had finished with the thin offering, Holmes pushed across the section of the Fiona Cartwright file that he had read. I picked up the pages with interest.
Fiona Cartwright was a forty-two-year-old, unmarried secretary and type-writer, originally from Manchester. She had moved to Poole shortly after the War when her employer, Fast Shipping, opened a branch there. When the owner, Gordon Fast, died in 1921, the business was sold and Miss Cartwright was replaced by a younger woman.
Since then, she had worked at a series of secretarial jobs, and the previous summer had registered with an employment agency that had placed her in eight temporary positions during the autumn and winter months. The agency had arranged an appointment for Miss Cartwright with a new client, Mr Henry Smythe, on Monday, 16 June, but never heard back from Miss Cartwright to say whether or not she had taken the position.
Mr Smythe was a salesman travelling in paper goods, from “somewhere in the north” (according to the agency), who telephoned from an hotel in Poole requesting secretarial assistance for the two or three days he was in town, specifying (again, the agency) “a lady who was not too young and flighty.”
Mr Smythe had not been heard from again: A note at the bottom, dated that morning, indicated that Lestrade had ordered an enquiry into Smythe's company and his whereabouts.
Miss Cartwright's brother, still living in Manchester, described his sister as “down” over the lack of permanent employment and “troubled” by her dull future, although very recently she'd written a rather odd letter home about the importance of heavenly influence on human life. “She liked funny old religious things,” he said. “I thought she meant that the tides of fate were turning, and that she'd get a job soon.”
Reading between the lines, even Fiona Cartwright's brother believed it was a suicide.
The description of the autopsy was cursory, spending less time on describing the path of the single bullet than it did the presence of the weapon beside her, and agreeing that the verdict should be suicide. Stomach contents were dismissed as “normal,” whatever that meant, and the state of her epidermis was similarly categorised with the incongruous phrase “no signs of violence.” There was, however, one oddity: She had a deep cut in the palm of her left hand, unbandaged and fresh.
Holmes flipped over the covers of Yolanda Adler's file.
“What do you make of that cut on Fiona Cartwright's hand?” I asked him.
“The coroner seems to think she received it in a fall climbing to the place where she died. With no photographs, no details of the scene, not even the question of whether her clothes were blood-stained from the cut, all we can conclude about her death is that the coroner is incompetent. Shall we go?”
I put the Cartwright file together, then glanced at my watch. “I'd like to see about the shoes Yolanda wore, before Lestrade gets around to it. The shop should be open.”
“And I must compose an anonymous letter to Damian's lawyer in Paris, advising him that the police may call. Shall we meet back at my brother's?”
“How about the Cafe Royal instead?”
He raised his eyebrows. “We shall have our passports stamped for Bohemia. At one o'clock, then, Russell.”
On foot and by sardine-tin omnibus, my steps took me out of Westminster and past the Palace to the Brompton Road again, although not as far down as the meeting room for the Children of Lights.
Harrods is a meeting place for another kind of worship, that of excess in all its glory. Under the stoutest of circumstances, I can tolerate twenty minutes inside its decorative doors before my fingers begin to twitch and my eyes scan the endless halls for an exit. But then, I am not a person who considers browsing through shops a recreational activity.
Even with a specific objective in mind-ladies' shoes-it did not prove simple. Did I wish walking shoes, riding boots, ballet flats, shoes for the hunt, shoes for tennis-ah, heeled dress shoes. Daytime, evening wear, or for Court?
I eventually tracked down the department featuring the Cardiff designer: There sat the shoe, glossy and unsullied by grass or bloodstains, the small, pointless bow at the back a bit of frippery that should have looked pathetic but instead struck me as oddly brave. One of the VAD nurses I knew during the War had painted her lips with care each morning before stepping onto the ward, to cheer up the boys, she said. This shoe in my hand had the same attitude.
“A lovely shoe, that,” said a voice at my shoulder.
“Not, however, for me,” I said.
“It is also available in a patent black.”
I put the shoe down and turned to give the woman a smile. I could see from her encouraging expression that she had already glanced at my feet, and knew that the only way I could be wearing this shoe would be if I ordered a pair made to fit.
Although, this being Harrods, she could probably arrange that as well.
It would almost be worth it, to see Holmes' expression.
“Actually,” I said, “I am trying to find a person who purchased just this shoe recently. Is there someone who would be able to help me?”
She reached out to shift the display model, rectifying my deliberately careless placement of the shoe against its mate. The proprietary gesture confirmed what I suspected: This woman
“I rather doubt that would be possible,” she answered.
“Let me explain. My sister is two years older than I, and received all the family elegance and little of its common sense. This spring, while I was out of the country, she fell in with a man of dubious background. Very good looking, you understand, and enormously plausible, but not, shall we say, out for my sister's best interests. Lally- that's what we call her, her name's Yolanda-always wants to believe the best of a person, and I've always been around to keep her from doing anything too stupid, until now.
“I must speak with her, but this man denies that she is with him. I even managed to track them to an hotel in Paris this past week, but they had just left. No doubt they caught wind of my search. The only trace of them was a shoe under the edge of the bed, just one shoe. This shoe.”
The woman had gone from mistrust to the edge of enthrallment-still uncertain, but wanting to believe, wanting the romance of one of her shoes in the midst of a tale of misplaced love and sororal fealty. One thing might bring her onto my side.
