Mrs Hudson's Case by Laurie R. King Page B

Saturday, with a variety of equipment. Borrowing a hammer, nails, and scraps of wood from old Will, the handyman, and a length of fine fishing twine from his grandson, by trial and error Mrs Hudson (in terrupted regularly by delivery boys, shouts from upstairs, and telephone calls) and I succeeded in rigging a trip wire across the kitchen door.
    During the final stages of this delicate operation, as I perched on the stepladder adjusting the camera, I was periph erally aware of Holmes’ voice raised to shout down the tele phone in the library. After a few minutes, silence fell, and shortly thereafter his head appeared at the level of my waist.
    He didn’t sneer at my efforts. He acted as if I were not there, as if he had found Mrs Hudson rolling out a pie crust rather than holding out a selection of wedges for me to use in my adjustments.
    “Mrs Hudson, it appears that I shall be away for a few days. Would you sort me out some clean collars and the like?”
    “Now, Mr Holmes?”
    “Any time in the next ten minutes will be fine,” he said generously, then turned and left without so much as a glance at me. I bent down to call through the doorway at his retreating back.
    “I go back to Oxford tomorrow, Holmes.”
    “It was good of you to come by, Russell,” he said, and disappeared up the stairs.
    “You can leave the wedges with me, Mrs Hudson,” I told her. “I’m nearly finished.”
    I could see her waver with the contemplation of rebellion, but we both knew full well that Holmes would leave in ten minutes, clean linen or no, and whereas I would have happily sent him on his way grubby, Mrs Hudson’s professional pride was at stake. She put the wedges on the top of the stepladder and hurried off.
    She and Holmes arrived simultaneously in the central room of the old cottage just as I had alighted from the ladder to examine my handiwork. I turned my gaze to Holmes, and found him dressed for Town, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves.
    “A case, Holmes?”
    “Merely a consultation, at this point. Scotland Yard has been reflecting on our success with the Jessica Simpson kid napping, and in their efforts to trawl the bottom of this latest kidnapping, have decided to have me review their efforts for possible gaps. Paperwork merely, Russell,” he added. “Noth ing to excite you.”
    “This is the Oberdorfer case?” I asked. It was nearly a month since the two children, twelve-year-old Sarah and her seven-year-old brother Louis, had vanished from Hyde Park under the expensive nose of their nurse. They were orphans, the children of a cloth manufacturer with factories in three countries and his independently wealthy French wife. His brother, who had taken refuge in London during the war, had anticipated a huge demand of ransom. He was still waiting.
    “Is there news?”
    “There is nothing. No ransom note, no sightings, nothing. Scotland Yard is settling to the opinion that it was an outburst of anti-German sentiment that went too far, along the lines of the smashing of German shopkeepers’ windows that was so common in the opening months of the war. Lestrade believes the kidnapper was a rank amateur who panicked at his own audacity and killed them, and further thinks their bodies will be found any day, no doubt by some sportsman’s dog.” He grimaced, tucked in the ends of his scarf, buttoned his coat against the cool autumnal day, and took the portmanteau from Mrs Hudson’s hand.
    “Well, good luck, Holmes,” I said.
    “Luck,” he said austerely, “has nothing to do with it.”
    When he had left, Mrs Hudson and I stood looking at each other for a long minute, sobered by this reminder of what was almost certainly foul murder, and also by the revealing lack of enthusiasm and optimism in the demeanour of the man who had just driven off. Whatever he might say, our success in the Simpson case two months earlier had been guided by luck, and I had no yearning to join forces in a second kidnap case,