A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [12]
I stared unseeing at the tiny blur of blue light and slid gently into sleep. Oddly enough, my dreams were pleasant.
* * *
The next day, Thursday, The Times arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand. I looked up from the decapitation of my own egg and saw him staring at the page.
"What is it? Holmes?" I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.
IDENTITY SOUGHT OF
LONDON ACCIDENT VICTIM
Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. The victim was an elderly woman with deeply bronzed skin and blue eyes, wearing brown pantaloons and coat, a white blouse, and heavy, laced boots. If any reader thinks he may know the identity of this person, he is asked please to contact his local police station.
I sat down heavily next to Holmes.
"No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock."
In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.
"Shall we drive into Town, then?" I asked him. "Or wait for the noon train?"
"Go get the car out, Russell. I'll put a few things together and talk with Mrs Hudson."
I went and changed into clothes suitable for London, and fifteen minutes later I sat in front of the cottage in the running car. Holmes came around the side of the house, scraping something from the back of his hand with a fingernail, and climbed in. We drove to London in a car filled with heavy silence.
FIVE
epsilon
It was she. She looked, as the dead always do, unreal, and she lay absurdly small and grey on the cold table in the morgue. Her face was relatively undamaged, though the side of her head was a horribly wrong shape, and the faint remnant of a grimace was the only sign that this waxy tanned stuff had once been animated. The rest of her body lay misshapen under the drape, and when Holmes lifted it to examine her injuries, I turned away and studied a row of tools and machines whose purpose I did not want to know, and I listened to him asking his questions while I determinedly ignored my roiling stomach.
"An automobile. She fell down in front of it, then?"
"Yes, sir. Tripped over something and fell right into the street. As you can see, she had cataracts, so her night vision must've been bad. The PC was at the other end of his beat, didn't get there until he heard the screams of one of the witnesses. There were two, a young couple on their way home about twelve-fifteen Thursday morning. They were none too sober, though, and couldn't remember much other than the lady falling and the car squealing off. No registration number, a big black saloon car they said, but then they also said that they saw an old beggar on the street corner, which is hardly likely