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By Root 357 0

where Miss Ruskin had died. The early afternoon traffic was considerably greater than it had been at 12:15 in the morning, and we added to it as we stood on the corner and crouched down and examined walls and attracted onlookers. It was quite an ordinary corner, with a red pillar box on one side, a new electrical lamp standard on the other, and a blunt office building of dirty yellow bricks set back from the cobblestones by a wide pavement. I chose the pillar box and dropped to my knees in the lee of it, my back to the intersection so as to avoid being trodden on. Omnibuses, automobiles, motor lorries, and horse-drawn wagons rumbled past continuously two feet from my head as I bent down and ran my fingertips delicately over the bottom few inches of painted metal. The box had been painted in the relatively recent past. A woman stopped to post a thick stack of letters, and she stared down at me. I smiled politely, then reached farther around the base, staring blankly into the passing wheels, and my fingers encountered what I had hoped they would not.

I moved around to the other side, knelt with my cheek touching the kerb, and squinted up at the delicate, clean cut that lay approximately six inches up the base. It travelled about a third of the pillar box's circumference and was deepest on the side away from the lamppost.

I rose, threaded my way over to where Holmes was squatting, and told him what I had found. The difference with his find, I saw, was that the equivalent cut in the base of his lamppost completely encircled it. It was also not so deep, and on the far side, away from the pillar box, Holmes' finger traced a length of two parallel indentations. He stretched himself out on the pavement, creating a considerable obstacle, and pulled out his glass. After a minute, he grunted.

"A very fine wire, plied or wrapped. Perhaps even a heavy fishing line. Made up as a beggar, he sat against the wall, with the wire dropped in a loop around the pillar box, across the corner, and twice around the lamppost for extra leverage. The car was waiting just down the street, and when Miss Ruskin came along, the old beggar tightened the wire so it was held about six inches off the ground. She went down, the car came along, and in the confusion afterwards, nobody noticed the man clip the wire, take her bag, and slip away between the buildings. They'll find the car eventually, I expect, a stolen one abandoned somewhere. Let us see what the wall tells us."

Oblivious of the low curses and scandalised looks, Holmes picked himself up from the pavement and made his way to the wall. He hunkered down, with his glass dangling loosely from one hand, and studied the ground.

"About here, I expect. Yes, you see the threads?" I angled my head against the bricks until I could make out a faint fuzz on the rough surface. He fished a pair of surgical tweezers from an inner pocket, picked from the wall an invisible fibre, and held it in front of his magnifying glass. "It appears to be an unpleasant shade of green-grey wool. And here's a dark blue wool, longer staple, at head level for a man of average size. There was indeed a man sitting here begging— or sitting and waiting at any rate— that night, despite the young constable's dismissal of the drunken witnesses. Hold the envelopes, would you? There. No point in looking for fingerprints— he was certainly wearing heavy gloves or the trip wire would surely have cut him and left some nice blood samples, of which there are none. No hair, no cigarette ashes. Curse it! Yesterday we might have found something of value."

We stood up and the crowd of curious onlookers began self-consciously to move off. I finished marking the envelopes and slipped them into a pocket.

"Russell, a bit of footwork now. We need the restaurant she was coming from and the hotel she was going to. I shall take the former and meet you back here in an hour. Right?"

"You really don't think the police will have done this?" I asked plaintively.

"The official forces place an elderly accident victim far down the list in