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By Root 329 0

night; and his son was not only not in Scotland, he was actually in the south of England the morning after our home was ransacked. Furthermore, the person who searched our papers was interested primarily in those written in foreign alphabets and those taken up with chemical and mathematical symbols, which to the uninitiated may resemble a language. The Greek was then discarded, but the pages they took away with them include a seventeenth-century fragment of the Talmudic tractate on women, a sixteenth-century sermon in old German script, a sampler or, more probably, practice page from some Irish monk's pen, which was Latin but so ornate as to be illegible, a Second Dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription— a copy, actually, dating from no later than the middle of the last century— and half a dozen pages of a Coptic text. As none of them were of any great value, and in fact several were my own transcriptions, I believe we can leave out the question of a mad collector of rare manuscripts. I only note that Gerald Edwards reads Greek and, I should think, Latin, but not Hebrew, certainly not the old German script, and I doubt that he has ever heard of Coptic."

"You are discounting the evidence they left behind, then, Russell?" Holmes asked quietly.

"Holmes, even twenty years ago the hairs you found would have been very near to a sure thing. Now, however— well, there's just too much common knowledge about detecting techniques to make me happy about having a case rest on five hairs and some mud. These days, even the butcher's boy knows about fingerprints and tyre marks and all those things that you pioneered— this lot certainly did, as they never took off their gloves. You've been too successful, Holmes, and what the police know, the criminal and the detective-story writer pick up very soon. Those hairs could conceivably have been put there for us to find."

"My dear Russell, as you yourself have admitted, I am not yet senile. It is obvious that those hairs could have been put there as red herrings. It is an attractive theory and even possible, but I fear I deem it unlikely." He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Now, if you are finished, I believe that Inspector Lestrade's shining eyes and position on the edge of his chair indicate a certain eagerness for the floor. What have you for us, Lestrade?"

"We've had an interesting week, Mr Holmes. First of all, we managed to find a nurse in the hospital where Mrs Edwards died. She had a clear memory of it for the simple reason that she was newly qualified, and it was her first death. It was childbirth that brought Mrs Edwards there. The baby, a girl, lived for less than an hour, and the mother followed her two days later. However, the man who brought her in? He was not a man, but a woman. The nurse remembers her very well, because 'she dressed and talked like a man, but wasn't,' in her words. She seemed very nervous, but she stayed to help Mrs Edwards in her confinement. The nurse had the impression that the stranger was an actress or a singer, and the reason she had to leave the next morning was that the show was moving on. She telephoned several times and talked to the nurse, seemed satisfied with her friend's progress, but suddenly Mrs Edwards took a turn for the worse, and she died that night of childbirth fever. The nurse was off duty when the woman next rang, and she was never heard from again."

"Did Colonel Edwards know all this?" I asked.

"Exactly my question, and the answer is yes. The nurse wrote a short report for the file, which the colonel read, and she later spoke with him about it when he went to see her in early 1919."

"So he knew that his wife had miscarried his baby while off with a mysterious female theatre person, had been with her for some time, in fact. Also that there was a file describing it all, which later conveniently disappeared."

"There's more. The nurse well remembered the baby— she was holding it when it died— and finds it hard to believe that its, er, gestational age was more than five months, six at the very most."

"And the