A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [38]
I must have drifted off, because I was startled when Holmes spoke.
"Shall I abandon you here, Russell, in the arms of Nature's soft nurse?"
I smiled and stretched deliciously on the rocky ground. Holmes caught the box and handed it back to me when I sat up.
"William Shakespeare must have been an insomniac," I declared. "He has an overly affectionate fixation on sleep that borders on obsession. It can only have stemmed from privation."
"A hungry man dreaming of food? You sound like the jargon-spouting neighbour of Sarah Chessman, with her traumatic experiences and neuroses."
"Who better qualified than I for the spouting of psychological jargon?" I muttered, and then sighed and accepted his hand to haul me upright. So much for escapism.
"What next, Holmes?" I asked, grasping the nettle along with his hand.
"I intend to go for a leisurely promenade of the neighbourhood and drink numerous cups of tea and glasses of beer. You, meanwhile, will be bent slaving over your scrap of ancient paper. I trust my eyes and spine will be in considerably better condition than yours by evening," he said complacently.
"You will bring up the topic of our Friday-night visitors in the course of each conversation, I trust?"
He flashed me a brief sideways smile.
"I am relieved to see that your wits are back to their customary state. I admit that on Friday I was somewhat concerned."
"Yes. Friday was not a good day," I agreed ruefully. "Tell me, Holmes, what did you find Saturday morning to produce that exhibitionist display of omniscience you gave Lestrade? Some of it was obvious, the footprints and the hairs you found, and I take it the inferred cashmere scarf and camel-hair coat came from threads?"
"Where he laid his outer garments across a leg of the overturned kitchen table, which has a rough place on it where that monstrous puppy belonging to Old Will once attempted to eat the table. The dents in the floor came from a loose nail in the heel of the shoe, which does not occur with a quality piece of footwear. That they were both right-handed could be deduced from the pattern of how the objects fell when swept from the shelves, from the angle of the knife blades— two of them— in the soft furniture, from the location of the ladder, so that the right hand would have stretched for the last books, and from the foot that each man led with on climbing the ladder. There was an interesting smudge of mud on the alternate lower rungs, by the way, still damp when it was left there. It is not from around here, but must have been picked up earlier in the day. A light soil, with buff-coloured gravel in it."
"You'll do an analysis?"
"When the microscope is functioning, yes. However, the stuff is not immediately recognisable, so it will be of value only when we find its source."
"And the men? You said the leader had grey hair and stayed in the car?"
"Yes, that was most remarkable. I could not at first think why the two gentlemen kept going in and out, with much greater frequency than was required for the theft of our few belongings. Then I found the one grey hair, about three inches long, lodged in a sheaf of papers taken from your files. The pages had been dropped near the door, not next to your desk. It looked to me as though several armfuls of papers had been taken out of the room for examination and then brought back."
"Sounds pretty thin to me, Holmes. It could have belonged to anyone— you, Mrs Hudson, one of the cleaning women. Even one of my older tutors."
"The hair has a wave, and I think that a microscope will reveal an oval cross section. Mine is thin and straight, Mrs Hudson's