A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [84]
"A bit chancy, that, wasn't it," Lestrade asked, "depending on his needing a secretary?"
"With a big house and only two permanent staff, and considering the problem of hiring servants these days, I knew he'd be sure to need somebody. And Mary Small is versatile. If he had needed kitchen help or someone to scrub the floors, I would simply have lowered my accent a few notches and rubbed some dirt under my fingernails. I might have had some problem if he'd needed a valet, though," I admitted.
"You'd have managed somehow," Holmes commented dryly.
I continued with my narrative and told of the dinner, the work, the colonel, and his son. I found myself curiously hesitant to give specifics of the colonel's attitude towards me, and I gave the barest account of the son's attack (Holmes laughed when I described how I had retaliated; Lestrade and Mycroft winced), but I could see that Holmes read between the lines. I promised him wordlessly that I would go into greater detail when we were away from the others, and I could see that he received the message. The colonel's bedroom and its contents spurred considerable discussion, and by the time I finished with Gerald's traffic summons, it was after eleven o'clock. I dismissed the current day's events with two flat sentences, ignored a curious look from Holmes, and closed my mouth. After a moment, Lestrade looked up from his notes and broke the silence.
"You're saying, then, that you could see Colonel Edwards behind this?"
"I could, yes. I will admit that I rather like the man, though I detest a number of things about him, not the least his attitude towards women. He's appealing, somehow, and I can easily see him in charge of men who will do anything for him. Authoritative, yet slightly bumbling. Of course, it has to be at least in part an act— he was, after all, a soldier who spent the war years efficiently going about the business of getting his men to kill. In any case, yes, I can visualise him as the murderer of Dorothy Ruskin. Not just any woman, but that particular one, under those particular circumstances, yes.
"There is, I must say straight off, no evidence concrete enough to be called by the name. One might analyse the man's writing to the point of knowing what colour his necktie will be on a given day, but it counts for nothing before a jury. Here, in this room, however, I can say that there is a faint odour of brutality in his writing, a clear delineation of 'us' and 'them' and a subsequent disregard for 'their' rights and indeed 'their' very humanity. Particularly when 'they' are women. In more specific terms, though, points witnessed." I ticked them off on my finger. "First, there's his temper. He was not far from real violence with me, over a chance remark, and with Miss Ruskin he was faced not only with— point two— a woman who embodied everything he hates— independent, successful, intellectual, and with a sharp tongue she was willing to use— but, worse— point three— the knowledge that he had been tricked by a colleague, another man, who had deliberately put him in the humiliating position of being suddenly confronted by the fact of her gender, and knowing that there wasn't a thing he could do about it, that it was too late to deny her the funding for her project. I suspect, and he probably did, too, that his