"Mice, Mrs Hudson. The country is full of them." He dropped a pipette into a jar and transferred a quantity of liquid into a clean beaker.
"Mice!" She was shocked. "In my kitchen? Mr Holmes, really.''
Holmes had gone too far, and knew it. "I do apologize, Mrs Hudson. Perhaps it was the cat?"
"And what call would a cat have for a needle and thread?" she demanded, unplacated. "Even if the beastie could work the latch on my sewing case."
"Perhaps Russell…?"
"You know full well that Mary's been away at University these four weeks."
"Oh, very well. Ask Will to change the locks on the doors." He turned his back with an optimistic attempt at finality.
"I don't want the locks changed, I want to know who it is. Things have gone missing from all the neighbours, little things mostly, but it's not nice."
I had been watching Holmes' movements at first idly, then more closely, and now I took a step into the room and caught at Mrs Hudson's sleeve. "Mrs Hudson, I'll help you with it. I'm sure I can figure out how to booby trap a camera with a flash. Come, let's go downstairs and decide where to put it."
"But I thought-"
"Come with me, Mrs Hudson."
"Mary, are you certain?"
"Now, Mrs Hudson." I tightened my grip on her substantial arm and hauled, just as Holmes removed his finger from the end of the pipette and allowed the substance it held to drop into the already seething mixture in the beaker. He had not been paying attention to his experiment; a cloud of noxious green gas began instantly to billow up from the mouth of the beaker. Mrs Hudson and I went with all haste down the stairs, leaving Holmes to grope his way to the shutters and fling them open, coughing and cursing furiously.
Once in her kitchen, Mrs Hudson's inborn hospitality reasserted itself, and I had to wait until she had stirred up a batch of rock cakes, questioned me about my progress and my diet up at Oxford in this, my second year there. She then put on the kettle, washed up the bowls, and swept the floor before finally settling in a chair across the soft scrubbed wood table from me.
"You were saying," I began, "that you've had a series of break-ins and small thefts."
"Some food and a bit of milk from time to time. Usually stale things, a heel of bread and a knob of dry cheese. Some wool stockings from the darning basket, two old blankets I'd intended for the church. And as I said, a couple of needles and a spool of black thread from the sewing case." She nodded at the neat piece of wooden joinery with the padded top that sat in front of her chair by the fire, and I had to agree, no cat could have worked its latch.
"Alcohol?"
"Never. And never have I missed any of the household money I keep in the tea caddy or anything of value. Mrs Prinnings down the road claims she lost a ring to the thief, but she's terribly absent-minded, she is."
"How is he getting in?"
"I think he must have a key." Seeing my expression, she hastened to explain. "There's always one on the hook at the back door, and one day last week when Will needed it, I couldn't find it. I thought he maybe borrowed it earlier and forgot to return it, that's happened before, but it could have been the thief. And I admit I'm not always good at locking up all the windows at night. Which is probably how he got in in the first place."
"So change the locks."
"The thing is, Mary, I can't help but feel it's some poor soul who is in need, and although I certainly don't want him to waltz in and out, I do want to know who it is so that I know what to do. Do you follow me?"
I did, actually. There were a handful of ex-soldiers living around the fringes of Oxford, so badly shell-shocked as to be incapable of ordinary social intercourse, who slept rough and survived by what wits were left them. Tragic figures, and one would not wish to be responsible for their starvation.
"How many people in the area have been broken into?"
"Pretty near everyone when it first started, the end of September. Since then those who have locks use them. The others seem to think it's fairies or absent-mindedness."
"Fairies?"
"The little people are a curious lot," she said. I looked closely to be sure that she was joking, but I couldn't tell.
Some invisible signal made her rise and go to the oven, and sure enough, the cakes were perfect and golden brown. We ate them with fresh butter and drank tea (Mrs Hudson carried a tray upstairs, and returned without comment but with watering eyes) and then turned our combined intellects to the problem of photographing intruders.
I returned the next morning, 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 (interrupted 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 peripherally aware of Holmes' voice raised to shout down the telephone 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 kidnapping, 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. "Nothing 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.