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such a fuss over an irritating insect like Pethering?
seventeen
As the drift tin was exhausted, and the slag of the earlier miners was used
up, it came to be necessary to run adits for tin, and work the veins.
 A Book of Dartmoor
« ^ »
Insect or not, the squashing of him left me distinctly queasy, on and off
during the day. Baring-Gould withdrew to his room, leaving Inspector Fyfe
little scope for questioning apart from me. When we had been over it all so
many times even he was thoroughly sick of it, he left.
A few minutes later the housemaid Rosemary slipped in and placed a tray on the
table beside the chair where I sat trying to summon the energy to rise.
 Mrs Elliott thought you could maybe use a coffee, she murmured, and slipped
out again.
Bully for Mrs Elliott, I thought, to offer as refreshment a change from the
endless cups of tea we had been swilling all day. A bracing cup of coffee to
celebrate the (however temporary) repelling of constabulary boarders, and
along with it, I was amused to find, a selection of three kinds of freshly
baked biscuits that explained the odours that had wafted in from the door that
connected the drawing room to the kitchen. If Mrs Elliott chose to work off
her upset by indulging in an orgy of baking, it was fine with me.
I wandered nervously in and out of rooms until I found myself in
Baring-Gould s study, where I retrieved the manuscript copy of Further
Reminiscences from the heap of papers where I had left it. Being handwritten,
I thought, the going would be slow, but distracting enough to take my mind off
the events of the day. And so it proved when, that is, I could keep my
attention on the pages at all. Time and again I caught myself staring blindly
into space, and wrenched my thoughts back onto Baring-Gould s writing. His
early parishes did not seem to have been successes, and his marriage was
touched upon so lightly that it would have been easy to miss it entirely. The
manuscript was, in fact, the least revealing autobiography I had ever read,
being much more concerned with the minutiae of European travel and the
triumphs of antiquarian explorations than his relationship with his wife or
the birth of his children. Belgian art, the history of Lew, a trip to
Freiburg, lengthy letters to his friend and travelling companion Gatrill,
ghost stories, love philtres, and thirty pages on the collecting of folk songs
were occasionally interesting, often tedious. The only thing that caught my
attention was a brief mention of gold, but when I reread the passage I saw
that he was talking about Bodmin Moor, some distance to the west, and I read
on as he described being first lost in the fog and then sucked up to his
shoulders into a bog.
The long day dribbled to a close, punctuated only by a solitary dinner (I very
nearly asked if I might join the others in the kitchen, but decided it would
be too cruel) and an eventual adjournment upstairs not to bed, which would
have been futile, but to allow the servants to close up the house for the
night.
Three times during the day I had my coat on and stood at the door, ready to
set off up the hill to the village post-office telephone, and three times I
took off my coat and went back to my book before the fire. If this case were
to be given over to Scotland Yard, a word in Mycroft s ear would cause a
memorandum to travel sideways, across two or three desks, until it finally
reached the desk of a man who could pick up the telephone and arrange for one
of the more sympathetic Yard men to be sent.
But what if that did happen, what if they even sent Holmes old friend
Lestrade himself? Would it make any difference if the official investigator
was friendly or not? In fact, would it not actually be better if the Holmes
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partnership was disconnected from the police forces, allowing us to get on
with our own investigation without undue interference? (Assuming, of course,
that Holmes reappeared to take up his share of the burden. The man s penchant
for disappearing at inconvenient moments was at times maddening.)
In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was
only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself
upstairs at an appropriate hour.
By one o clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat
watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire.
By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I
did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the
dead man s head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and
prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack
of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.
At three o clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant
alarm: heart pounding, mouth open, I strained for a repetition. It came, and I
instantly swung my feet off the bed and was reaching for a heavy object when
my brain succeeded in asserting itself against the adrenaline. It was unlikely
that a burglar or would-be murderer would have a key to the front door.
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]