“It proves you haven’t been smoking today, for one thing. If you’d lit up from this” — Holmes pinched the pouch between his fingers — “then you’d know what I mean.”
“You’re crazy,” said Lestrade.
“Not so crazy that I didn’t get suspicious this morning when you didn’t rush on the set to load up from my humidor.”
“I was late.”
“Like the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime who did nothing, you didn’t either. In the dog’s case it didn’t bark because it knew the villain. In your case you didn’t go near that humidor because you knew what it contained.”
“Guesses,” laughed Lestrade uneasily.
Holmes crinkled the pouch and then handed it to Evans. “Not at all. This isn’t just plain tobacco. I added peppercorns and cayenne this morning. And that’s what I smell in here.”
Wallace’s eyes went wide and then he bolted from the set.
“After him!” I cried.
“Don’t worry,” said Holmes. “My Irregulars are guarding the exits.”
I stood in awe.
When a trio of “Irregulars” dragged the struggling Wallace back before us, and Sergeant Evans had taken charge of him, a confession literally spilled out. “Damn you, Brundage!” he screamed. “I should have had that part. I’m twice the Sherlock Holmes you’ll ever be.”
I now had my doubts about that.
“The only thing I’m sorry about,” muttered Wallace, “is that I killed the wrong man.”
“Poor deluded fool,” said Sherlock Holmes as a policeman led the man away in handcuffs. “The English stage is one thing, Watson, television quite another. Strange, isn’t it, that a man would let the promise of fame turn him into a psychopath?”
“Only one thing wrong, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Sergeant Evans, speaking up for the first time. “We would never have been able to get a conviction with just a little doctored tobacco as evidence. These days, with civil rights and high-powered lawyers, you need a confession, and sometimes even that isn’t enough.”
“Quite so,” said Holmes, loading his pipe from his own pigskin pouch and then lighting up. “I was fully aware of that. That’s why I extracted the confession.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right job,” Sergeant Evans said with a sigh and wandered away.
“This is one case, Holmes,” I said, “that I must add to my annals.”
“Good old Watson,” he said.
Over the studio loudspeaker our director’s voice reverberated. “Stand by, gentlemen. We’re re taping in two minutes.”
“Come, Watson, come!” Brundage cried. “The game is afoot!”
The Long Corridor of Time
by Ruth Rendell[12]
Geoffrey Gilmour was twice as old as Marion Craig when they became engaged, and after their marriage he seemed to feel older and older...
A subtle, tantalizing story whose mood grows more somber, more uneasy, more frightening, with each page...
On the evening of their first day, when they had hung their pictures and unpacked their wedding presents — tasks they hadn’t cared to entrust to her mother or to the moving men — they went for a walk in the square. They walked along the pavement in the September twilight, admiring the pale gleaming façades of the terraces which, now divided into flats, had once been the London residences of the very rich. Then, when they had completed their little tour and had examined all four sides of the square, Marion took his hand and led him toward the wilderness of trees and shrubs which formed its center.
It was a gloomy place where only the tall trees — a plane, a walnut, and a catalpa — seemed to flourish. A few attenuated rosebushes struggled for life in the shadowy corners, their wan flowers blighted with mildew. Marion put her hand on the gate in the iron railings.
“It’s locked,” she said.
“Of course it is, darling. It’s a private garden for the tenants only. The head porter gave me our key just now.”
“Do let’s go in and explore it.”
“If you like, but there doesn’t seem much to explore.”
She hesitated, holding the key he had handed her, looking through the railings at the small patchy lawn, the stone table, and the wooden seat. “No,” she said. “Tomorrow will do. I am rather tired.”
He was touched, knowing how anxious she always was to please him. “It’s hardly the sort of garden you’ve been used to, is it?”
She smiled but said nothing.
“Do you know, darling, I feel very guilty. I’ve taken you away from the country, from all your country things — your horses, the dogs — everything. And all I’ve given you is this.”
“You didn’t take me, Geoffrey. I came of my own free will.”
“Hmm. I wonder how much free will we really have. If you hadn’t met me, you’d be at the university now — you’d have your own friends, young people. I’m twice your age.”
“Oh, no,” she said seriously as they walked back to the terrace where their flat was. “I’ll be eighteen next week. You were twice my age when we got engaged and I was seventeen and five months. Exactly twice. I worked it out to the day.”
He smiled. The head porter came out, holding the door open for them. “Good night, madam. Good night, sir.”
“Good night,” said Geoffrey. So she had worked it out to the day. The earnest accuracy of this, a sort of futile playfulness, seemed to him entirely characteristic of the childhood she hadn’t quite left behind. Only five or six years ago perhaps she had been writing, with comparable precision, inside exercise books: Marion Craig, The Mill House, Sapley, Sussex, England, Europe, The World, The Universe. And now she was his wife.
“He called me madam,” she said as they went up in the elevator. “No one ever did that before.” With his arm round her and her head on his shoulder she said, “You’ll never be twice my age again, darling. That isn’t mathematically possible.”
“I know that, my love. You’ve no idea,” he said, laughing, “what a tremendous comfort that is.”
It wasn’t true, of course, that he had given her nothing but a dusty scrap of London shrubbery to compensate for the loss of The Mill House. He asked himself which of her friends, those schoolgirls who had been her bridesmaids, could expect even in five years’ time a husband who was a partner in a firm of stockbrokers, a five-room flat in nearly the smartest part of London, a car of her own parked in the square next to her husband’s Jaguar, and a painting for her drawing-room wall that was almost certainly a Sisley.
And he wouldn’t stand in her way, he thought as he looked in his bedroom glass before leaving for work, scrutinizing his dark head for those first silver hairs. She could still ride, still have parties for people her own age. And he would give her everything she wanted.
He glanced down at the fair head on the pillow. She was still asleep and on her skin lay the delicate bloom of childhood, a patina that is lighter and more evanescent than dew and is gone by twenty. He kissed her tenderly on the side of her folded lips.
“It bothers me a bit,” he said to Philip Sarson who came out as he was unlocking his car. “What is Marion going to do with herself all day? We don’t know anyone here but you.”
“Oh, go shopping, go to the cinema,” said Philip airily. “When I suggested you take the flat I thought how handy the West End would be. Besides, married women soon find their hands full.”
“If you mean kids, we don’t mean to have any for years yet. She’s so young. God, you do talk like a Victorian sometimes.”