A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [44]
"You've looked at the museums, for the missing Tuesday?" I asked.
"I have a man on it, working his way through a list of the more likely museums and libraries. I don't suppose she mentioned anything to you?" he asked without much hope, and I answered.
"No, she didn't, sorry. Did you try Oxford? She did say something in a very general way about being there."
"I haven't been able to spare a man for it yet, but I did direct the local force to begin enquiries. Nothing to date."
"If it would help, I could give you the names of some people in Oxford who might know if she'd been in town. There's an old man in the Bodleian Library who's been there forever and a day; he's sure to know her. It might save a few hours if you could reach them by telephone. Not that the old man would talk on the infernal machine."
"Couldn't hurt." Lestrade flipped to a blank page in his lined notebook, and I wrote down several names and where they might be found. He looked in satisfaction at my scrawl, then turned back to his place.
"Wednesday, she reached you at midday, which means she had very little time in the morning to see anyone, though the hotel was not certain just when she left. She came back to the hotel for a very short time Wednesday night, apparently to change bags, but not clothes, and met the colonel for dinner at nine o'clock."
"Tell us about the colonel," suggested Holmes, who looked deceptively near sleep in the depths of his armchair. Lestrade flipped pages, dropped ash onto his trouser leg, and cleared his throat again.
"Colonel Dennis Edwards, age fifty-one, retired after the war— a widower with one son, aged twenty-one. He was in and out of Egypt before the war, and in 1914 he was posted to Cairo. Went into Gallipoli in March of 1915, and stayed until the end, the following January. Given a fortnight's home leave and then was shifted to the Western Front. Decorated in 1916 when he pulled three of his men out of a collapsed trench under fire. Wounded in March of '17, spent six months in hospital, and returned to active service until the end of the war. There seems to have been some unpleasant business about his wife, though the exact story is hard to pin down. She died in York in July of 1918— he was in the thick of things at the Marne— though why York, nobody seems to know, as she had no family there. The boy, by the way, didn't go to her during the school holiday— he'd been sent off to an aunt up in Edinburgh."
"What did she die from?" I asked.
Lestrade rumpled his hair absently, thus adding another endearingly unattractive characteristic. "Funny thing, we haven't been able to find out. The hospital moved their offices three years back, and some of the records went missing. All they've been able to come up with is one of the older nurses, who remembers a woman by that name dying either, she says, of pneumonia or childbirth fever; she can't remember which. She thinks the woman was brought in by a handsome young man but couldn't swear to it. Don't know if I'd trust her if she could, anyone who can't even remember whether a patient was in the maternity ward or in with the respiratory diseases. However, it does seem that Mrs Edwards was brought in by a man, according to the one piece of paper the hospital found relating to her admission, but he signed his name as Colonel Edwards. The real colonel was, as I said, in France, had been for more than eight months, and the signature was not his."
"There are distinctly unpleasant overtones in all of this." Mycroft's distaste spoke for us all.
"Nothing conclusive yet, but I'd have to agree. Seems the colonel found the circumstances of his wife's death too much to take, too, on top of everything else. He was demobbed in February of 1919, and five months later he spent seven weeks in hospital, with a diagnosis of severe alcoholic toxaemia. They dried him out and sent him home, and after that he straightened out. He got himself involved with the local church and from there met this