"Well, please let me know if there is something I can do. But I need to ask, can someone take Mr Holmes down to the station? He needs to catch the train to Plymouth."
She looked up at the clock over the mantelpiece and hurriedly began to dry her hands. "He'll need to step smart, then. I'll have Mr Dunstan hitch the pony to the cart."
She ducked out through the door. I eyed the stack of unwashed dishes and left them alone, going up the back stairs to tell Holmes the cart would be ready. I found him just closing his bag, and reported on the time constrictions. He nodded and sat down to change his shoes.
"What do you wish me to do while you're away?" I asked. I was half tempted to throw together a bag and join him, for the sake of movement if nothing else.
"We need to know more about Pethering," he said. One set of laces was looped and tied, and the other foot raised. "I want you to—"
"Sorry, Holmes," I said, raising one hand. "Was that the door?" We listened, hearing nothing, and I went over to the window. There was a motorcar in the drive, but the porch roof obscured my view of the door, so, feeling a bit like a fishwife, I opened the window and put my head out to call. "Hello? Is someone there?"
After a moment a hatted, overcoated man came into view, backing slowly out from the porch and craning his head to see where the voice had come from.
"Inspector Fyfe!" I said. He found me and tipped his hat uncertainly. "Do come inside and warm yourself; the door is not locked. We'll be right down." I drew in my head and latched the window.
Holmes was already out of the room, and I did not catch him up until he was shaking hands with a still-hatted Inspector Fyfe in the hall. As I seemed to be playing hostess (or rather, in the temporary absence of Mrs Elliott and her disturbed assistants, housemaid), I took his coat and hat. Not knowing quite what to do with them, I laid them across the back of a chair and joined the two men at the fire.
Fyfe rubbed his hands together briskly in front of the smouldering fire, while Holmes squatted down to coax it back to life. "What can we do for you, Inspector?" I asked.
"I have some questions to ask Mr Baring-Gould about the man Pethering."
Holmes looked up. "What do you imagine Gould would know about him?"
"Well, I hope he knows something, because we can't find a trace of where he comes from or who he is."
Holmes' eyebrows went up. "I understood that he was a Reader at one of the northern universities. York, I believe Gould said."
"They've never heard of him. Nor do they have anyone on their staff who fits his description, an archaeologist or anthropologist or what-have-you, with a wife and young family."
"You interest me, Inspector. Mrs Elliott," he said, raising his voice, and indeed, when I turned to look, there she was in the door to the drawing room. "Would you be so good as to tell Mr Dunstan that I won't be needing the cart? I shall have to take a later train. And I believe the inspector could make good use of a hot drink." He swept the maps off the bench in front of the fire, uncovering the blithely sleeping tabby, and sat down beside the animal, gesturing Fyfe towards a chair. "Tell me what you do know about him, Inspector."
Fyfe settled onto the edge of the nearest armchair. "I'll be calling in Scotland Yard this afternoon," he said, sounding resigned about it. "We don't have the facilities here. Meantime, about all we know about Pethering, or whatever his name might be, is that he arrived at Coryton station on the Saturday afternoon, walked up to Lew Down to arrange a room at the inn, had some tea, and then came here to Lew House, where he stayed from 'round about six until you turned him out, which Miss—Mrs—which your wife says was a shade after midnight.
"He then returned to Lew Down and knocked up the innkeeper, who let him in. He came down from his room around ten o'clock Sunday morning, struck up a conversation with William Latimer, who stepped in to deliver a basket of eggs his wife had promised for Saturday but couldn't bring because one of their boys fell out of an apple tree and broke his arm, and she was away at the surgery getting it seen to. Latimer told Pethering about the sightings of the hound on the moor, Pethering got all excited and rushed upstairs to get his map. Latimer showed him where to look, and Pethering ran upstairs again, put on his heavy boots, and packed two bags—or one bag and a large rucksack. He left the bag with the innkeeper, and walked off down the high road in the direction of Okehampton.
"A farmer near Collaven saw him 'round about two o'clock, making for the moor. That's the last anyone saw of the man alive."
I retrieved the one-inch map from the floor and looked for Collaven. It lay at the foot of the moor, two miles north of Lydford and a mile from Sourton Tor, on the edge of the area so heavily marked by our pencilled lines and Xs.
"Where was he going?" Holmes asked.
"Latimer told him the hound had been seen near Watern Tor."
His elbows on his knees, Holmes gazed into the fire, fingers steepled and resting on his lips. "Why the hound?" he mused.
Before Fyfe could respond, the rattle of crockery heralded Mrs Elliott's approach. Holmes prodded the cat until it jumped down, tail twitching in disgust, allowing Mrs Elliott to put the tray on the bench. She had thoughtfully included a high pile of buttered toast and three plates, although Holmes and I had only recently eaten. Fyfe, however, ate nearly all of it, drinking three cups of coffee as well before he was through.
"What was that about the hound?" he asked, his voice rather muffled with toast.
"I was merely wondering, Inspector, why the hound should be making an appearance."
Fyfe swallowed. "I understood there'd been a number of sightings over the summer."
"Those were of Lady Howard's coach, which does indeed come complete with dog, but that does not explain why the dog should also appear sans coach."
Fyfe had suspended his toast in puzzlement. "I took it the hound referred to the Hound of the Baskervilles story."
"They are very different hounds, Inspector, separated by their time, their ghostly genesis, and their mission. It is as if Jacob were to have appeared in Isaac's tent to receive his blessing wearing Joseph's coat of many colours: not entirely impossible, one would suppose, but not terribly reasonable either."
"Different stories," I translated for the inspector, who was looking confused. "Everyone seems to be mixing up the two different hounds."
"The only question is," said Holmes, "whether or not the confusion is deliberate."
"Hardly the only question, Holmes," I objected mildly.
"No? You may be right. Tell me what the postmortem found, Inspector."
Fyfe hastily thrust the remainder of his wedge of toast into his mouth and reached into his pocket for a notebook. When the page was found and the toast was out of the way, he began to read. "A slim but adequately nourished male approximately thirty-seven years old, five feet six inches tall, distinguishing features a birthmark on his right shoulder blade the size of a shilling and an old scar on his left knee. Minor dental work—the description is being sent out—and otherwise in good health until someone cracked his skull open with a length of pipe." The last sentence had not depended on the notebook.
"Why pipe?" Holmes asked sharply. "Did the pathologist find traces?"
"No, I just said pipe to indicate the size and hardness. Could have been a walking stick of some dashed hard wood, or the barrel of a rifle, if the killer didn't mind mistreating his gun that way. 'Course, it'd make more sense than the other way around. I once had a gunshot that we thought was murder until we had the victim's hand-print off the end of the barrel—a shotgun it was, and he'd swung it at another man, and when the stock hit the other man, the gun discharged and took off the head of the man holding it. But that's neither here nor there," he said, recalling himself to the matter at hand. "Some blunt instrument a little thicker than your thumb, most likely from behind by a right-handed man. Went at a slight angle, up to the front." He drew a line just above his own hairline, clearing the ear and ending at his right temple. It could have been a blow delivered by a left-handed individual standing above the victim, if Pethering had been on his knees, for example, but Fyfe's simpler explanation was the more likely.