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By Root 278 0

— a house. I had become interested in this case, so I went there myself, only to find that the family who lived in that house had no knowledge of such a woman. Nor did the four houses on either side. I was even more interested by now, and I took a leisurely stroll up and down, until I came across a house on the next street over that had all the signs of being other than a family dwelling: curtains tightly shut, signs of somewhat greater foot and bicycle traffic than the other houses, no wear on the front door at child level— all those small indications— you know them as well as I. The address was one which I recalled from a report that came across my desk a few months ago, minor organisations in London that in themselves seem harmless but which might nonetheless become linked with difficulties in the future. I knocked on the door and asked the man who answered if I might speak to whomever had been seen by Miss Dorothy Ruskin that Tuesday.

"He was, shall I say, hesitant about letting me in, and I was forced to make a few unfriendly and authoritative noises at him. After much dancing about, he went off and returned with the gentleman who seems to be in charge of the house, which is, as you might have foreseen, a unit of Weizmann's Zionist organisation. I will not trouble you with the whole of the following lengthy and highly interesting conversation. I will merely say as a précis that we found ourselves to have a number of mutual friends, and when eventually we returned delicately to the topic of Miss Ruskin, my new friend the rabbi was happy to admit that she had indeed been there, had brought with her a thick manila envelope containing a number of letters and papers from Palestine, and had, among other things, told the rabbi that the business of the ibn Ahmadi family's land was far from over and that she foresaw an escalation of hostilities, both within Palestine and without. She was concerned that this might become a ready rallying cause for a variety of unrelated grievances, and she wanted to warn her friends to be, as the saying goes, on the lookout."

"Inconclusive, but suggestive," commented Holmes grudgingly. "How long was she there?"

"Approximately two and one half hours. One of their men was going into town, and they shared a cab as far as Paddington, where she left him just before noon."

"Oxford," I cried at the name of the train station. "I told you she went to Oxford. Did you have any results with those names, Inspector?"

"None at all. The old man at the library was gone part of that day, and he didn't see her."

"Jedediah out sick? The place will collapse— he's been there practically since Thomas Bodley married Mrs Ball."

"His mother's funeral, I believe. She was one hundred and two."

"Ah, good. For a minute, you had me worried."

"Was there any more, Mycroft?" asked Holmes, as scrupulously polite as a concert pianist at a children's music recital.

"Just that I was allowed to examine the envelope of papers, and they were as they should have been, no personal documents, no will. That is all, Sherlock. The floor is yours."

Up to that point, I had immersed myself in the charade. I had stated my evidence factually, listened to Lestrade's contribution as if it were of some importance, and noted Mycroft's rumblings, but before Holmes opened his mouth, before he so much as sat upright, I knew what he was going to say. I could see all my hard-won efforts tumbling down, and I knew that it was an emptiness. I saw the body of the case against Colonel Edwards flash up and crumble away into a drift of ashes like the walls of a wooden house in a fire: Holmes had the case in his hands, and there was nothing for it. The rest of us— even Mycroft— were left scrambling on thin air, and I was suddenly furious, seized by a pulse of something disturbingly near hatred for this superior prig I had so irrevocably attached myself to. It lasted for only an instant, before common sense threw a bridge out across the morass of tiredness, resentment, and uncertainty, of the awareness of urgent work undone and the