A Letter of Mary Read Online Free PDF Page B

newspaper on a polished surface brings a twinge of apprehension. And for three days, he had only glanced at his newspaper over breakfast.

    I lay awake and looked at the box on the table beside the bed, seeing the indistinct sparkle of the moon reflected off the blue eyes of a diminutive monkey perched on a miniature wall, and I felt, frankly, peeved at the intrusion of yet another concern into an already-full schedule.

    Holmes had little love for the, as he saw it, irrational pseudodiscipline of theology. He judged it a tragic waste of my mental energies, described it as a more debilitating addiction than cocaine, and bemoaned his inability to wean me from it. I ignored him as best I could, accepted this as the one area of serious mutual incomprehension, and only occasionally wondered if I had chosen it largely to maintain my identity against the tide of Holmes' forceful personality.

    Twice since our marriage, cases had come up that demanded my attention as well as his. I had only recently realised that it was not past him to invent something of the sort in order to remove me from academia's clutches. Not this one, of course; it was too elaborate even for his devious mind. He would, however, take full advantage of it, now that an edge had been driven under my single-mindedness, to prise me from my work. A walk along the cliffs was not apt to be the only interruption Dorothy Ruskin's letter brought.

    I stared unseeing at the tiny blur of blue light and slid gently into sleep. Oddly enough, my dreams were pleasant.

    * * *

    The next day, Thursday, The Times arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand. I looked up from the decapitation of my own egg and saw him staring at the page.

    "What is it? Holmes?" I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.

    IDENTITY SOUGHT OF
    LONDON ACCIDENT VICTIM

    Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. The victim was an elderly woman with deeply bronzed skin and blue eyes, wearing brown pantaloons and coat, a white blouse, and heavy, laced boots. If any reader thinks he may know the identity of this person, he is asked please to contact his local police station.

    I sat down heavily next to Holmes.

    "No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock."

    In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.

    "Shall we drive into Town, then?" I asked him. "Or wait for the noon train?"

    "Go get the car out, Russell. I'll put a few things together and talk with Mrs Hudson."

    I went and changed into clothes suitable for London, and fifteen minutes later I sat in front of the cottage in the running car. Holmes came around the side of the house, scraping something from the back of his hand with a fingernail, and climbed in. We drove to London in a car filled with heavy silence.

    FIVE

    epsilon

    It was she. She looked, as the dead always do,