The Moor - Laurie R. King [90]
Sure enough, in less than two minutes my bedroom door opened, quietly but surely, and Holmes came in, wearing the dark suit of London with an inexplicable quantity of mud and grass clinging to the ankles. He closed the door, turned, and stopped dead.
"Good Lord, Russell, what have you been up to?"
I had almost forgotten the state of my face, but whatever he saw behind the bruises and contusions had him by my side in a few rapid steps.
"What?" he demanded. "What is it?"
I did not give him his answer until some time later, but then, I did not need to. Holmes was always very satisfactory at determining, with a minimum of clues, what in a given situation was the required course of action.
***
There are times when verbal communication, vital as it may be in a partnership, is insufficient; this was one of those times. I clung to him, and even slept for a while towards morning before finally, reluctantly, stirring.
"Pethering is dead," I told him. He jerked and I felt him looking at my forehead. "No, there is no relationship to my injuries—I got those in a fall up on the moor." I gave him a brief sketch of my trip across Dartmoor and a slightly more detailed description of my impromptu visit to Baskerville Hall, then went on to the previous day's sequence of events, starting with theology at dawn and ending with meaningless words on a page at midnight. Once, I might have been too ashamed to tell him about my exaggerated response to the death of a scarcely known nuisance, but we had been through too much together for my overreaction to cause more than a pang of embarrassment in the telling. Or perhaps I was just too tired to care.
"They will do an autopsy?" he asked.
"Fyfe said they would do."
"And he's preserved the marks on the ramp?"
"They had a tarpaulin over it."
"Better than nothing at all, I suppose. Plaster casts of the heel marks?"
"I doubt it."
"I shall have to insist."
I laughed shortly. "I don't know how much influence you'll have down here. Certainly the name of Sherlock Holmes' wife is nothing to conjure with."
"Ah, poor Russell, forced to ride along in her husband's turn-ups. It is a backward area, with no respect for women's brains. Never mind; we'll both have to resort to Gould's influence before we're through."
"It is very impressive, that influence. He had a law-abiding dairyman assaulting a police constable, just for the asking."
"I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice. Tell me about Ketteridge."
I told him everything I could remember about my hours in Baskerville Hall. He listened intently, asking no questions, and when I had finished he rose and, wrapping his dressing-gown around him, went to stir the fire into life. Having done so, he took up his pipe and lit it, puffing thoughtfully down at the newly crackling flames.
"You handled it well," he said unexpectedly.
"At least I didn't fall apart until I was alone."
"That is all one may ask of oneself."
"I suppose. I feel stupid."
"Human," he corrected me.
"God, who would be a human being?" I said, although I was beginning to feel somewhat better about the episode and its effect on me.
"I've often thought the same," he commented drily, and then returned to business. "You have no idea who Ketteridge might have been escorting so anxiously off the premises?"
"None."
"No smell of perfume, for example, or of cigarettes? The night he was here, Ketteridge mentioned that he smokes only cigars, and his fingers did not give lie to it."
"No perfume. Cigarettes, yes, but I think Scheiman smokes them."
"I believe you are right. Do you know, that entire ménage interests me strangely. Tell me: When Ketteridge allowed you the brief tour of the banqueting hall, did you