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Tell it to Holmes, nagged a voice. Watch his brief flare of irritation give way to sympathy, understanding. Live with that, will you? If you don’t get it open tonight, there’s tomorrow, isn’t there?

I carried a chair over, flapped my hands about vigorously to wake them up, rubbed my fingertips firmly against the brickwork to increase their sensitivity, and then bent my entire body and mind to the problem of opening that safe.

I was soon dripping wet, more from the tension than from the coals at my knees. In half an hour, the quivering of my back muscles had spread to my hands, and I had to break off and do a series of noiseless calisthenics.

An hour crept past, then two, and still I bent with my cheek against the fireplace, my eyes shut, my whole being concentrated on the square inch of skin that caressed the dial. By this time, I could work only for ten minutes before the trembling of my muscles made it impossible to continue, and for two minutes I would stand, stretch, lie limp on the sofa, exercise violently, and then return to my work. The thought of Holmes’ sympathy drove me back at first, but later it was simply mindless determination, and I suppose I should have still been sitting there when Margery walked in, but that at 5:20, three hours and six minutes after I had begun, the giddy sweetness seized the dial and the mechanism opened itself to my shaking hands.

I sat back and scrubbed my face with both hands, and neither face nor hands felt connected to the rest of me. I took my spectacles out of my pocket and put them on, then carried the contents of the safe over to the desk to examine them.

Margery Childe’s secrets were few, but they were potent. My visual memory is normally excellent, but I could not trust my mind in its present state, so I took a piece of paper from the desk and, using Margery’s pen, wrote down the details of her hidden life. In chronological order they were:

A marriage certificate, to a Maj Thomas Silverton, 23 May 1915.

A Military Cross with its purple and white ribbon.

A telegram beginning, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, dated 3 November 1916.

A second marriage certificate, this one in French, dated 9 December 1920—just less than two months ago. Margery was listed by her maiden name alone, no mention of Silverton. Her husband was named Claude de Finetti, with an address in London. His given occupation was the French equivalent of our gentleman.

A will, autograph by Margery and witnessed, on 19 December 1920, by Marie and another whose name was unfamiliar but whose writing was that of an uneducated woman. In it, Margery left one half of everything she owned to her husband, the other half to the maintenance of the New Temple in God.

Another will, written by the same hand that had signed the wedding certificate as Claude de Finetti, dated and witnessed as Margery’s was, leaving everything to his wife, Margery.

I looked long at the man’s writing, at the signatures of a name that was not his own, at the script of an opportunist and a sensualist and an expert at deceiving the world, at the amorality in his m’s and the deception in his t’s, at the cruelty and the self absorption in his upswings and his loops, and I knew, without a fragment of doubt, that I was looking at my captor. Claude, I thought, we have you now.

There were also four brief letters addressed to “My darling wife” and signed just “C.” I glanced at the first, and jerked back as if burned. My immediate impulse was to throw them onto the fire, my second to put them away unread, but I obviously could do neither, and so I reluctantly ran my eyes across his pen strokes. They were, one might say, love letters, were one to grant the word love the broadest possible definition. I made dutiful note of what few pertinent details they contained (“last Thursday”; the name of a play; a restaurant) and folded them up with hands that felt dirty. They did, however, serve to explain Margery’s oddly fervent references to self-abnegation and discipline.