A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [89]
We had.
"Now, about Mrs Rogers. You'll understand, I hope, that this case has pretty low priority compared with two women knifed in Kent and a little boy horribly dead in Cornwall, which means that information is slow in coming in. All I have to add concerning Mrs Rogers is that her two sons have greying hair, since you asked, Mr Holmes. One is a sailor, like his father. He is not married— in this country at any rate— and has been out of the country since March. The other is married to an Italian woman; they have four sons and three daughters, ages fifteen to thirty-two. The two youngest and an unmarried daughter and her child live at home still, but the others are scattered from Lincoln to Bath. I had already begun to look at them before I got your telegram," he said with a faint touch of reproof, acknowledged by Holmes with a gracious nod.
"Three members of the family have criminal records, for what it's worth: The sailor son bashed someone over the head with a bottle in a brawl a few years back, got four months; a granddaughter, Emily, aged thirty now, was done for shoplifting seven years ago; and a grandson, Jason, age twenty-six, seems to have spent his youth with a bad crowd— housebreaking, picked up for passing stolen goods once, petty stuff, not brutal and never for bodily harm— but either he decided he wasn't much good at it and went straight or else he suddenly got much better, because he hasn't been touched in four years. And before you ask, Mr Holmes, most of the crew have dark hair.
"Finally, the ibn Ahmadi family and their grudge against Miss Ruskin. Preliminary reports—"
I interrupted him. "Who?"
"Ibn Ahmadi," he repeated, doing his best with the strange pronunciation. "Oh, sorry, I forgot what a solid week it's been. That's the family Mr Mycroft Holmes mentioned, who were done out of a piece of land in Palestine."
"Muddy," I offered, to his momentary confusion, the homophone suggested by Erica Rogers in the letter to her sister— a name foreign, multisyllabic, and sounding like mud. Before I could go further, he was nodding.
"Yes, muddy, like she said in her letter. There are no less than twenty-four members of the clan, if I may call it that, here in Britain at present, all but four of them male, every one of them, I'd wager, having black hair, with the possible exception of one old auntie of sixty-three years who was thoroughly draped and hidden. Questions are being asked concerning whereabouts, but it will be slow, I'm afraid, and less likely to be fruitful as each day passes."
"I fail to see any connection between the Ahmadi family and the ransacking of the cottage," growled Holmes. "Her death, perhaps, but could she have had something they wanted? Mycroft?" He seemed curiously uninterested in the question, merely as it were playing out a part written down for him.
The large figure of his brother stirred and leant forward in his armchair, his grey eyes on the balloon glass of brandy cradled in his enormous hand.
"I fear that I shall have to throw yet another scent in our paths by answering that in the affirmative." Holmes made a sharp, impatient motion that amounted to a derisive snort. His brother ignored him. "One of my ... colleagues succeeded in identifying the taxi driver who picked Miss Ruskin up from her hotel that Tuesday morning."
"No easy matter, that, in this city," I commented. His fat face took on a satisfied look, like a cat full of warm milk.
"I was pleased with that piece of work, true. Very fortunately, Miss Ruskin was not taken to a railway station or to the underground, but to a specific address here in London