A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [87]
"November. Slightly over eight months."
"He couldn't have had a leave and the records lost?"
"Unlikely."
"How very sordid and ugly. One can't help wondering—"
"If he drove his wife to it, or if she drove him to what he is now?" interjected Lestrade with unexpected perception.
"Mmm. I'll have some brandy now, please, Mycroft. I feel rather cold." My shoulder ached, too, from the horse's strong mouth on the reins and the succession of long days, but I ignored it and concentrated on what Lestrade was saying.
"Next, we started working our way through all the travelling entertainers who were in York at the time, beginning with the legitimate theatre players and working our way down to the dancers in the nightclubs. Pretty close to the bottom, we came across an all-woman troupe that specialised in rude music-and-dance versions of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Yes, and it seems to have been as dotty as it sounds. People were hard up for entertainment during those years, but still.... Any road, the old, er, bat who managed it— Mother Timkins, she calls herself— is still alive by some miracle, running a, er, a house in Stepney."
"A 'house,' Inspector?" I asked. "Of ill repute?"
"Er, yes. Precisely. She did remember Mrs Edwards, though not by that name. The colonel's wife was with the Timkins troupe for five or six months, we finally determined. Joined at Portsmouth, was sick mornings for a couple of months, and had just started to, er, to 'show' when she died in York. The woman dressed as a man who took Mrs Edwards to hospital was probably Annie Graves, stage name Amanda Pillow. She and the Edwards woman were close."
"Lovers?" I asked bluntly. His delicacy was becoming irritating. He turned scarlet and consulted his notes furiously.
"Er, the Timkins woman seemed to think it possible, although there were a number of men, as well. Obviously, there had to be at least one." He cleared his throat again. "The, er, the interesting thing is that she told Colonel Edwards the two women were, as you say, lovers, when he went to see her in March of 1919. A month after he received his demob papers, that was."
"Four months before he was hospitalized for drink," I commented. "What happened to the Graves woman?"
"She was killed." We all looked up. "In June of that same year. She went off with someone after a performance, and she was found at four the next morning on a country lane thirty miles away. Dead about two hours. She'd been walking, stinking drunk and in five-inch heels, and was run over by a vehicle. Her body was down among the weeds in the verge, but it was quite visible as soon as it became light. They never found the car. Never found the person she'd gone off with."
Throughout my report Holmes had appeared to listen politely, which I knew, to my severe irritation, meant that he was taking in perhaps one word in three. With Lestrade's last revelation, however, he began to pay attention, and he was now looking affronted, as profoundly taken aback as if he had just discovered a distorting flaw in one of his instruments that threatened to cast doubts on the results of an experiment. He did not say anything, merely ground out his cigar and then tried to relight it.
"Furthermore," Lestrade continued, with a glance at his notebook, "there may be a slight discrepancy between when the colonel says he arrived home and when he actually did so. I say 'may' because the one neighbour who saw the car drive in has a most unreliable clock, which may or may not have been ten minutes slow or fast that night. According to both Colonel Edwards and the headwaiter at the restaurant, he left in his car just before midnight, no more than three or four minutes before. At that time of night, it takes eighteen minutes driving slowly and roundabout or eleven minutes direct and briskly to the Edwards home. The neighbour thought it was closer to twelve-thirty when he came home, but as I said, it's unreliable."
"Why did Miss Ruskin walk?" Mycroft asked.