Authors: Laurie R. King
“You’re right, I was forgetting. That lad with the knife—two years ago was it? You broke his arm well and truly.”
“It was his elbow, and I didn’t break it; he did it himself.”
“Still could have been dangerous,” he said, referring to the more recent escapade. “I mean to say, what if young Edwards had been able to, you know…”
“Meet me on my own ground? I was quite certain he could not. One can tell, something in the way a person walks.” I dismissed the
topic. “At any rate, now you have my story. Colonel Edwards had a motive to kill Dorothy Ruskin and the organisational skills and experience to seize an opportunity and carry it out. He had the means, with both a driver and a son available to him; he was in the area when she was killed; he has no firm alibi for the period after her death, when her room was searched, or for the following night; and his son was not only not in Scotland, he was actually in the south of England the morning after our home was ransacked. Furthermore, the person who searched our papers was interested primarily in those written in foreign alphabets and those taken up with chemical and mathematical symbols, which to the uninitiated may resemble a language. The Greek was then discarded, but the pages they took away with them include a seventeenth-century fragment of the Talmudic tractate on women, a sixteenth-century sermon in old German script, a sampler or, more probably, practice page from some Irish monk’s pen, which was Latin but so ornate as to be illegible, a Second Dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription—a copy, actually, dating from no later than the middle of the last century—and half a dozen pages of a Coptic text. As none of them were of any great value, and in fact several were my own transcriptions, I believe we can leave out the question of a mad collector of rare manuscripts. I only note that Gerald Edwards reads Greek and, I should think, Latin, but not Hebrew, certainly not the old German script, and I doubt that he has ever heard of Coptic.”
“You are discounting the evidence they left behind, then, Russell?” Holmes asked quietly.
“Holmes, even twenty years ago the hairs you found would have been very near to a sure thing. Now, however—well, there’s just too much common knowledge about detecting techniques to make me happy about having a case rest on five hairs and some mud. These days, even the butcher’s boy knows about fingerprints and tyre marks and all those things that you pioneered—this lot certainly did, as they never took off their gloves. You’ve been too successful, Holmes, and what the police know, the criminal and the detective-story writer pick
up very soon. Those hairs could conceivably have been put there for us to find.”
“My dear Russell, as you yourself have admitted, I am not yet senile. It is obvious that those hairs could have been put there as red herrings. It is an attractive theory and even possible, but I fear I deem it unlikely.” He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Now, if you are finished, I believe that Inspector Lestrade’s shining eyes and position on the edge of his chair indicate a certain eagerness for the floor. What have you for us, Lestrade?”
“We’ve had an interesting week, Mr Holmes. First of all, we managed to find a nurse in the hospital where Mrs Edwards died. She had a clear memory of it for the simple reason that she was newly qualified, and it was her first death. It was childbirth that brought Mrs Edwards there. The baby, a girl, lived for less than an hour, and the mother followed her two days later. However, the man who brought her in? He was not a man, but a woman. The nurse remembers her very well, because ‘she dressed and talked like a man, but wasn’t,’ in her words. She seemed very nervous, but she stayed to help Mrs Edwards in her confinement. The nurse had the impression that the stranger was an actress or a singer, and the reason she had to leave the next morning was that the show was moving on. She telephoned several times and talked to the nurse, seemed satisfied with her friend’s progress, but suddenly Mrs Edwards took a turn for the worse, and she died that night of childbirth fever. The nurse was off duty when the woman next rang, and she was never heard from again.”
“Did Colonel Edwards know all this?” I asked.
“Exactly my question, and the answer is yes. The nurse wrote a short report for the file, which the colonel read, and she later spoke with him about it when he went to see her in early 1919.”
“So he knew that his wife had miscarried his baby while off with a mysterious female theatre person, had been with her for some time, in fact. Also that there was a file describing it all, which later conveniently disappeared.”
“There’s more. The nurse well remembered the baby—she was holding it when it died—and finds it hard to believe that its, er, gestational age was more than five months, six at the very most.”
“And the colonel had been back at the front since the autumn,” I remembered.
“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 experiement. 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. “Granted, it’s not the worst area of London, but I should have thought a gentleman would have insisted on driving her, or at least have arranged a taxi.”
“According to the restaurant’s doorman, there was some disagreement outside the restaurant about just that, which ended with the lady simply walking off.”
“Could you go over the maître d’s story again?” I asked Lestrade.
“I was going to do that. He seems to have spent a couple of days thinking, and when I went back Thursday, he had a lot more to tell me. Remember, he told Mr Holmes there was some disagreement between Miss Ruskin and the colonel? Well, it occurred to me that for a headwaiter he was very unaware of what was going on in his restaurant, and I mentioned at our first interview that I might find it necessary to ask the local PC to patrol the area more closely, stick his head in occasionally.”
“Coercion, Lestrade? Tut-tut,” said Holmes in mock disapproval.
“Not coercion, just encouragement. It did serve to boost his memory, and he managed to give me a more detailed account of the three hours the colonel and Miss Ruskin were there, with certain gaps where he, the waiter, was off elsewhere, though it was not a busy night. The first half hour, he said, seemed pretty heavy going, long silences, much studying of menus. He got the impression that the colonel had been expecting her to be a man, remember, and that he was not at all happy about having to deal with Miss Ruskin. She, however, seemed to find it funny. Things did settle down, and they spent the next couple of hours going through a pile of papers she had with her. By this time, about eleven-forty, they’d both had a lot of wine and the colonel had drunk three g and t’s besides. Unfortunately, this was one of the times when the waiter was out of the dining room, some kind of hubbub in the kitchen, apparently, and when he came back about ten
minutes later, the two of them were staring each other down across the table, furious about something. He says he was worried because the colonel looked like a gentleman they’d had die in the restaurant four or five years ago, his face dark red and his eyes popping in his head. He was gesturing at some papers Miss Ruskin was holding, and was, in the waiter’s words, ‘considerably upset’ over them. She seemed to be very sure of herself, and he heard her say a number of times something like ‘Yes, it’s possible.’ A few minutes later, the colonel’s chair fell over and the waiter looked up, to see him, I quote, ‘standing over that old lady, looking for all the world like he was going to grab the papers away from her, or hit her, or something, but she just sat glaring up at him like a banty, and halfway to laughing. He stood there almost shaking, like he was about to explode with anger.’
“That’s when he asked to use the telephone. He had the waiter bring him a double brandy in the manager’s office and was closed up in there with the telephone for about ten minutes before he came back. He was calmer then, sat down and talked to her for another twenty minutes or so—uncomfortable talk, very stiff, and they seemed to be working themselves back up to the state they had been in before when all of a sudden, Miss Ruskin put her papers back into her briefcase, got to her feet, and left. Outside on the street, he offered to drive her to her hotel. Which offer she refused, and she died perhaps fifteen minutes later.”
“Those words of hers—‘Yes, it’s possible’—are just what she told me that afternoon when I doubted the manuscript’s authenticity,” I said. “It sounds fairly conclusive that she showed him a copy of it.”
“I agree,” said Lestrade, then stifled a yawn that left his eyes watering. “Sorry. Haven’t had a solid eight hours for two weeks.”
“The Kent murders?” asked Mycroft with sympathy.
“That, yes, and yesterday I was down in Cornwall, where the child was killed. Nasty piece of work, that. Still, there was a witness, which should help. And as for your witnesses, Miss Chessman and Mr O’Rourke were no help at all. He had his back to it the whole time—climbing a drainpipe to nick a flower from a window box for his lady
love—and she draws a blank and starts crying when it comes to details. Says she saw the old beggar sitting and Miss Ruskin walking up to the street corner, but after that, all she remembers is shiny black paint and the blood. She was pretty hysterical, I gather, by the last time I sent someone round, and worse than useless at the inquest. You saw we got an adjournment, did you?”
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 granddaugter, 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.