A Letter of Mary (5 page)

I moved around to the other side, knelt with my cheek touching the kerb, and squinted up at the delicate, clean cut that lay approximately six inches up the base. It travelled about a third of the pillar box's circumference and was deepest on the side away from the lamppost.

I rose, threaded my way over to where Holmes was squatting, and told him what I had found. The difference with his find, I saw, was that the equivalent cut in the base of his lamppost completely encircled it. It was also not so deep, and on the far side, away from the pillar box, Holmes' finger traced a length of two parallel indentations. He stretched himself out on the pavement, creating a considerable obstacle, and pulled out his glass. After a minute, he grunted.

"A very fine wire, plied or wrapped. Perhaps even a heavy fishing line. Made up as a beggar, he sat against the wall, with the wire dropped in a loop around the pillar box, across the corner, and twice around the lamppost for extra leverage. The car was waiting just down the street, and when Miss Ruskin came along, the old beggar tightened the wire so it was held about six inches off the ground. She went down, the car came along, and in the confusion afterwards, nobody noticed the man clip the wire, take her bag, and slip away between the buildings. They'll find the car eventually, I expect, a stolen one abandoned somewhere. Let us see what the wall tells us."

Oblivious of the low curses and scandalised looks, Holmes picked himself up from the pavement and made his way to the wall. He hunkered down, with his glass dangling loosely from one hand, and studied the ground.

"About here, I expect. Yes, you see the threads?" I angled my head against the bricks until I could make out a faint fuzz on the rough surface. He fished a pair of surgical tweezers from an inner pocket, picked from the wall an invisible fibre, and held it in front of his magnifying glass. "It appears to be an unpleasant shade of green-grey wool. And here's a dark blue wool, longer staple, at head level for a man of average size. There was indeed a man sitting here begging— or sitting and waiting at any rate— that night, despite the young constable's dismissal of the drunken witnesses. Hold the envelopes, would you? There. No point in looking for fingerprints— he was certainly wearing heavy gloves or the trip wire would surely have cut him and left some nice blood samples, of which there are none. No hair, no cigarette ashes. Curse it! Yesterday we might have found something of value."

We stood up and the crowd of curious onlookers began self-consciously to move off. I finished marking the envelopes and slipped them into a pocket.

"Russell, a bit of footwork now. We need the restaurant she was coming from and the hotel she was going to. I shall take the former and meet you back here in an hour. Right?"

"You really don't think the police will have done this?" I asked plaintively.

"The official forces place an elderly accident victim far down the list in urgency. Having inserted a notice in the papers, they will wait for a response, or so that jovial gentleman in the morgue informed me. At the moment, there is an all-out push against a rash of pickpockets, and if the local police have got around to asking, they have not yet found anything. Surely we can do better than that."

I was forced to agree. We split up, Holmes to retrace Miss Ruskin's steps, I to continue on, in hopes of encountering her destination.

SIX

zeta

I was fortunate, in that the area was not wall-to-wall with hotels and short-term boardinghouses. The sixth one was distinctly second-rate, with pretensions, but my enquiry about an old lady in pantaloons and tall boots paid off. The man at the desk flicked his eyes over me appraisingly, and obviously he did not know what to make of my combination of wire-rimmed glasses, thick, old-fashioned hairstyle, tailored trousers and jacket, expensive silk blouse, and a gold band on my right hand, with no hat, no gloves, and flat shoes. He was forced to abandon all assumptions and treat me matter-of-factly, which was, of course, one of the reasons I dressed as I did.

"Yes, madam, the lady checked in on Monday afternoon. I saw her on Tuesday, in the afternoon, but I was off duty on Wednesday and Thursday."

"Is her key in?"

"Yes, madam, as well as a letter."

"Oh, I wonder if that's why she didn't meet me today at the restaurant? May I?" My tone and my waiting hand made it no question. He automatically held it out for my inspection, and I deftly took it from him. It had a Cambridge postal mark on it. I thrust it into my handbag and smiled at him. "Yes, it's mine. Very worrying, though. I hope she's all right. Do you mind if I have a look in her room, to make sure she's not ill, or perhaps left a note for me? She's very absentminded." I smiled vacuously at this non sequitur and held out my hand again for the key. The man had been off for two days but even so, it was astonishing that he had not yet heard that a woman had died half a mile away. The police could sometimes be terribly slow if they had no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary about an accident.

The man hesitated, but just then a taxi disgorged a family with several small American noisemakers and numerous bags, and he dropped the key into my hand and turned to the harried-looking father. I made haste to disappear.

The lock on room seventeen was much used, but it showed no obvious signs of being recently forced or picked. I let myself into a perfectly ordinary room, with sagging bed, battered dressing table, and bath down the hall. Not knowing Miss Ruskin's habits, I could not know how her room might have looked when she walked out of it on Wednesday, and too, the maid would have been in to clean it. I pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and wandered over to the bed, whistling softly through my teeth— a habit that severely tries my husband, friends, and anyone working near me in a library. Nothing in the drawers next to the bed. The little travelling alarm clock on the table had stopped at 7:10, and I picked it up cautiously to give it a gentle shake. It began ticking again— it had just run down.

Comb on top of the dressing table, several white hairs in it. No cosmetics. A small jar of hand lotion, in which a probing hairpin found no hidden objects. I opened the wardrobe, and the first thing I saw was her khaki bag on a shelf inside. So she had come back here before her dinner appointment, long enough to leave her bag, if not to change her clothes. I lifted one handle and shone my pocket torch at the jumble within, but I couldn't see anything inside that looked immediately different from the glimpses I had had on Wednesday. Wait, though— both glasses cases were occupied. Of course— it had been nearly dark by the time she left the hotel for her appointment, so she would not have needed protective lenses. I let the handle fall. Clothes hanging up, nothing much in the pockets, an overcoat, another pair of shoes, lighter than her boots, but still quite sensible. Two much-travelled valises lay to one side, containing a tangle of clothes, objects, and papers that could as easily have been left in that condition by their owner as violently searched.

I went to the minuscule table next to the window. A pile of papers occupied one corner— the typed reports of a dig, along with several pages of artefact sketches and section drawings— next to three books, two on archaeological techniques and a recent one on Bible theory, and a large square magnifying glass. She would have no worry now about her cataracts, I thought, and suddenly I felt a harsh, red anger wash over me as the fact of her murder became real. I reached down and jerked open a drawer, looking blankly at its emptiness. I sat down, feeling equally empty, and stared out the window. A good woman, whom I liked a great deal and knew almost nothing about, had been carefully, deliberately, brutally murdered. Why? I took the letter from my handbag and contemplated the crime of interfering with His Majesty's postal service.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key in the door. I stood up quickly and shoved the purloined letter into a pocket, but it was not an irate desk clerk; it was the maid, a neat young woman with shiny brown hair, mop and cleaning rags in hand. She saw me and started to back out the door.

"I'm very sorry, miss ... madam. I thought the room was empty. I'll come back later."

"No, please, do come in. Please. Could you— do you have a minute? To answer a few questions? Would you mind closing the door? Thank you. I just was curious about my aunt, who is staying in this room. She didn't show up for a luncheon date, and I wondered if you had perhaps seen her today?"

"No, madam. I haven't seen anyone in this room for about a week. There was a nice young man here then, but no lady."

"This would have been in the last few days. Tell me, on Wednesday, was there much of a mess? Or Thursday? The reason I ask is that she sometimes gets very untidy, and I like to give a little extra to the help then."

She was an honest young woman, and she barely hesitated before answering.

"No, madam, not really a mess. On Tuesday, it was untidy, but nowhere near as bad as some. Wednesday, too, not as untidy. But yesterday, why, you'd barely know anyone had been in. To tell you the truth, I didn't even make up the bed yesterday, just straightened it a bit, 'cause I was in a touch of a hurry, as Nell didn't show up and we was shorthanded, like. I just straightened the bed and the papers and picked up some things from the floor."

I couldn't think of a way to make the next question anything other than what it was.

"Had she moved many things around between Wednesday and yesterday?"

She looked at me sharply then, and I could see that she was as quick as she was honest. She studied me for a minute, and her face changed as she put together the drift of my questions with the news that the desk clerk had lacked.

"Are you— why are you asking me this? Who are you?"

"I'm a friend, not a niece. And yes, she died Wednesday night."

The young woman sat down suddenly on the tightly made bed and stared at me.

"The old lady who was run over?" she whispered. "I didn't know ... I never thought ... They just said an old woman...." The standard response: not someone I know.

"Yes. I saw her earlier that day, and I want to know what she was doing the rest of the day. Her family wants to know." It was a small lie, and might even have been the truth. Fortunately, she believed me. I returned to my question. "She came back here on Wednesday evening, but I don't know for how long. Did the room look as though she had been here for long?"

This appeal to her professional expertise had its effect. She stood up and surveyed the room.

"On Wednesday, now, I made the bed, dusted, straightened the wardrobe. Put out fresh towels. There was a cup on the dressing table. I took that away. The papers were all over the table, so I tidied them, put the pencils in the drawer. That was about all. Then yesterday— let me think. Did the bed. It looked like she'd made it up herself, but it wasn't smooth like I likes to see it, so I tightened it up. I replaced one towel that was next to the washbasin in the corner. Closed the wardrobe— it was standing open. Picked up the magnifying glass— it had fallen under the desk. That was about all."

"The papers and books weren't moved?"

"No, they were right here on Wednesday." She glanced at them, then looked more closely. "That's funny. Oh, I suppose she must have read them and put them back herself. There was a page on the top with some funny drawings— of this little, like a statue of a fat woman, with no clothes. I remember it had big, you know." She sketched a gesture of abundance at her front and blushed. "And I looked at the page under it, too, just curious, you know. You won't tell Mr Lockhart? The manager?"

"Of course not. What was under the drawing of the figurine?"

"Another drawing, of a horse and a kind of cart."

I looked at the papers, but the top four sheets were all typescript. I thumbed through the stack carefully and halfway down the pile found the page with three drawings of a fertility figure, and several pages further on the drawing of the war chariot. I held them thoughtfully.

"In the same place, you say? But she had looked through them and put them back straight."

"Funny, isn't it? She wasn't that tidy with them Tuesday and Wednesday."

"Yes, well, perhaps she was embarrassed when she realised what a mess she'd left."

"Maybe," she said dubiously. Working as a maid in an hotel no doubt made one sceptical of the human generosity of spirit.

"Well, thank you, Miss ..."

"I'm Sally, madam, Sally Wells."

"And if her family want to reach you again, what days do you work?"

"I have Saturday afternoon and all Sunday free, madam. Oh, madam, that's not necessary. No, I couldn't take that. Well, maybe part of it. Thank you, madam."

"It's I who thank you, Miss Wells. For the family, that is. You've been most helpful. No, I don't think you need clean in here for the next two or three days, until we can remove her things. And it would be best if you could remain ... discreet, until then. It wouldn't do to have people trooping in and out of here. I knew you'd understand. Thank you again, Miss Wells."

Downstairs, I dropped the key on the desk and asked how long Miss Ruskin had paid for the room.

"I believe she was planning on leaving us this afternoon, madam."

"The room will be needed until Sunday," I said firmly, and took a bank note from my bag. "Will that cover it?"

"Yes, indeed it will, madam, but—"

"Good, then I'd like the room left as it is until then, please. No one is to enter it."

"Very good, madam," he said dubiously. "May I ask, did madam find her aunt?"

"Oh yes, I found her, I'm afraid. Now there's the problem of what to do about her."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. Good day."

I ignored his uncertain protests and questions, turned, and walked quickly out onto the street. As I approached the corner where Dorothy Ruskin had died, I saw the spare figure of Holmes, leaning against the ugly yellow wall from which he had extracted the wool fibres. He was reading a newspaper, the
Morning Post
by the look of it. At the sight of his shoulders, my heart lifted— he, too, had been successful. I waited for a gap in the traffic and stepped briskly down from the pavement.