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The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(92)

By:CPirkis & Janice Law & Kristine Kathryn Rusch


                “Let me think,” I said to myself, over a reflective pipe, with feet poised on the fender. “How would Hilda herself have approached this problem? Imagine I’m Hilda. I must try to strike a trail by applying her own methods to her own character. She would have attacked the question, no doubt,”—here I eyed my pipe wisely,—“from the psychological side. She would have asked herself”—I stroked my chin—“what such a temperament as hers was likely to do under such-and-such circumstances. And she would have answered it aright. But then”—I puffed away once or twice—“she is Hilda.”

                When I came to reconnoitre the matter in this light, I became at once aware how great a gulf separated the clumsy male intelligence from the immediate and almost unerring intuitions of a clever woman. I am considered no fool; in my own profession, I may venture to say, I was Sebastian’s favourite pupil. Yet, though I asked myself over and over again where Hilda would be likely to go—Canada, China, Australia—as the outcome of her character, in these given conditions, I got no answer. I stared at the fire and reflected. I smoked two successive pipes, and shook out the ashes. “Let me consider how Hilda’s temperament would work,” I said, looking sagacious. I said it several times—but there I stuck. I went no further. The solution would not come. I felt that in order to play Hilda’s part, it was necessary first to have Hilda’s head-piece. Not every man can bend the bow of Ulysses.



                             As I turned the problem over in my mind, however, one phrase at last came back to me—a phrase which Hilda herself had let fall when we were debating a very similar point about poor Hugo Le Geyt: “If I were in his place, what do you think I would do?—why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”

                She must have gone to Wales, then. I had her own authority for saying so.… And yet—Wales? Wales? I pulled myself up with a jerk. In that case, how did she come to be passing by Basingstoke?

                Was the postmark a blind? Had she hired someone to take the letter somewhere for her, on purpose to put me off on a false track? I could hardly think so. Besides, the time was against it. I saw Hilda at Nathaniel’s in the morning; the very same evening I received the envelope with the Basingstoke postmark.

                “If I were in his place.” Yes, true; but, now I come to think on it, were the positions really parallel? Hilda was not flying for her life from justice; she was only endeavouring to escape Sebastian—and myself. The instances she had quoted of the mountaineer’s curious homing instinct—the wild yearning he feels at moments of great straits to bury himself among the nooks of his native hills—were they not all instances of murderers pursued by the police? It was abject terror that drove these men to their burrows. But Hilda was not a murderer; she was not dogged by remorse, despair, or the myrmidons of the law; it was murder she was avoiding, not the punishment of murder. That made, of course, an obvious difference. “Irrevocably far from London,” she said. Wales is a suburb. I gave up the idea that it was likely to prove her place of refuge from the two men she was bent on escaping. Hong-Kong, after all, seemed more probable than Llanberis.



                             That first failure gave me a clue, however, as to the best way of applying Hilda’s own methods. “What would such a person do under the circumstances?” that was her way of putting the question. Clearly, then, I must first decide what were the circumstances. Was Sebastian speaking the truth? Was Hilda Wade, or was she not, the daughter of the supposed murderer, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman?

                I looked up as much of the case as I could, in unobtrusive ways, among the old law-reports, and found that the barrister who had had charge of the defence was my father’s old friend, Mr. Horace Mayfield, a man of elegant tastes, and the means to gratify them.

                I went to call on him on Sunday evening at his artistically luxurious house in Onslow Gardens. A sedate footman answered the bell. Fortunately, Mr. Mayfield was at home, and, what is rarer, disengaged. You do not always find a successful Q.C. at his ease among his books, beneath the electric light, ready to give up a vacant hour to friendly colloquy.