A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [31]
He did not respond to this, and I shifted to look over at him. His rather ferretlike features were without expression as he concentrated on the road ahead.
"But I was forgetting, you have yet to see any tie between her death and our house. Will you go with me later to her hotel room and to the corner where she was killed?"
"Certainly." He took a deep breath. "Miss Russell, let me make myself clear. You know that my father was with Scotland Yard and that he worked with Mr Holmes a number of times. You may not realise it, but he was greatly influenced by the way Mr Holmes worked. He really worshipped Mr Holmes, used to tell us kids stories about how he solved crimes against all odds, just by using his eyes and his head. Even now, he never misses an issue of the Strand when it has one of Dr Watson's stories in it. I'm not a child anymore, Miss Russell, but I know how much Scotland Yard owes to Mr Holmes. Things he did that looked crazy thirty, forty years ago are now standard procedure with us. Some of the men laugh at him, make jokes about his pipe smoking and violin and all, but they're laughing at all those stories Dr Watson wrote, and they don't like to admit that their training in footprints and the laboratory's analysis of bloodstains and tobacco ashes comes straight from the work of Sherlock Holmes. Even fingerprints— he was the first in the country to use them in a case. Miss Russell, when he says there was murder and a burglary was connected with it, then I for one believe him. I just have to find a way of laying it in front of my superiors. I must have some firm evidence to connect an apparent hit-and-run accident with your sitting room. No doubt we'll find it eventually, but I'd rather it be sooner than later, when the trail is cold."
This lengthy speech drained him of words for another two miles; then he stirred.
"Sounds to me like your friend handed you a right hornets' nest," he commented.
"My life was full enough without it," I agreed obliquely.
"Not that she could have known," he hastened to add, nil nisi bonum.
"I'm not sure. Oh, not the current ... business, not her death, but she must surely have known that the manuscript would prove a major headache. Owning a thing like that, it's no small responsibility."
"Do you mean you think it's real?" he asked cautiously, unsure whether he had a madwoman in the car beside him or if I was launched on some elaborate Holmesian leg-pull.
"Dorothy Ruskin thought it might be."
"Would she have known?"
"I trust her judgement."
"Oh." I could almost hear the whirs and whine of the desperate reevaluation process going on in his mind. "Responsibility"— his flailing grasp latched onto my word. "What kind of responsibility do you mean? That it's worth ... so much?" He could not bring himself to vocalise the sum I had only half-facetiously suggested.
"Not the money, no. If the thing were to convince me that it is real, then, you see, I am faced with a decision: Do I spend the rest of my life fighting to convince others of its truth? I told you that if it is what it appears to be, the repercussions would be considerable, but that is putting it mildly. The sure knowledge that one of Jesus' apostles was a woman would shake the Christian world to its foundations. Logically, there's no reason why it should, but realistically,