John Adams - The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"Mrs Hudson, there you are! I was beginning to think you'd gone out."

"Hello there, Mary. I'm surprised to see you back down here so soon. Mr Holmes isn't back from the Continent yet, I'm sorry."

"Actually, I came to see you."

"Ah, Mary, such a pity, but I really can't have you in. I'm taking advantage of Mr Holmes' absence to turn out the house, and things are in a dreadful state. You should have checked with me first, dear."

A brief glance at her tidy, uncovered hair and her clean hand on the door made it obvious that heavy housecleaning was not her current preoccupation. Yet she did not appear afraid, as if she was being held hostage or something; she seemed merely determined. Still, I had to keep her at the door as long as I could while I searched for a clue to her odd behaviour.

Such was my intention; however, every question was met by a slight edging back into the house and an increment of closure of the door, until eventually it clicked shut before me. I heard the sound of the bolt being shot, and then Mrs Hudson's firm footsteps, retreating towards the kitchen.

I stood, away from the house, frankly astonished. I couldn't even peer in, as the sitting-room windows overlooking the kitchen had had their curtains tightly shut. I considered, and discarded, a full frontal assault, and decided that the only thing for it was stealth.

Mrs Hudson knew me well enough to expect it of me, of that I was fully aware, so I took care to stay away that evening, even ringing her from my own house several miles away to let her know that I was not outside the cottage, watching her curtains. She also knew that I had to take the Sunday night train in order to be at the Monday morning lectures, and would then begin to relax. Sunday night, therefore, was when I took up my position outside the kitchen window.

For a long time all I heard were busy kitchen sounds-a knife on a cutting board, a spoon scraping against the side of a pot, the clatter of a bowl going into the stone sink. Then without warning, at about nine o'clock Mrs Hudson spoke.

"Hello there, dear. Have a good sleep?"

"I always feel I should say 'good morning,' but it's nighttime," said a voice in response, and I was so startled I nearly knocked over a pot of herbs. The voice was that of a child, sleep-clogged but high-pitched: a child with a very faint German accent.

Enough of this, I thought. I was tempted to heave the herb pot through the window and just clamber in, but I was not sure of the condition of Mrs Hudson's heart. Instead I went silently around the house, found the door barred to my key, and ended up retrieving the long ladder from the side of the garden shed and propping it up against Holmes' window. Of course the man would have jimmy-proof latches. Finally in frustration I used a rock, and fast as Mrs Hudson was in responding to the sound of breaking glass, I still met her at the foot of the stairs, and slipped past her by feinting to the left and ducking past her on the right.

The kitchen was bare.

However, the bolt was still shot, so the owner of the German voice was here somewhere. I ignored the furious Scots woman at my back and ran my eyes over the scene: the pots of food that she would not have cooked for herself alone, the table laid for three (one of the place settings with a diminutive fork and a china mug decorated with pigs wearing toppers and tails), and two new hairbrushes lying on a towel on the side of the sink.

"Tell them to come out," I said.

She sighed deeply. "You don't know what you're doing, Mary."

"Of course I don't. How can I know anything if you keep me in the dark?"

"Oh, very well. I should have known you'd keep on until you found out. I was going to move them, but-" She paused, and raised her voice. "Sarah, Louis, come out here."

They came, not, as I had expected, from the pantry, but crawling out of the tiny cupboard in the corner. When they were standing in the room, eyeing me warily, Mrs Hudson made the introductions.

"Sarah and Louis Oberdorfer, Miss Mary Russell. Don't worry, she's a friend. A very nosy friend." She sniffed, and turned to take another place setting from the sideboard and lay it out-at the far end of the table from the three places already there.

"The Oberdorfers," I said. "How on earth did they get here? Did Holmes bring them? Don't you know that the police in two countries are looking for them?"

Twelve-year-old Sarah glowered at me. Her seven-year-old brother edged behind her fearfully. Mrs Hudson set the kettle down forcefully on the hob.

"Of course I do. And no, Mr Holmes is not aware that they are here."

"But he's actually working on the case. How could you-"

She cut me off. Chin raised, grey hair quivering, she turned on me with a porridge spoon in her hand. "Now don't you go accusing me of being a traitor, Mary Russell, not until you know what I know."

We faced off across the kitchen table, the stout, aging Scots housekeeper and the lanky Oxford undergraduate, until I realized simultaneously that whatever she was cooking smelled superb, and that perhaps I ought indeed to know what she knew. A truce was called, and we sat down at the table to break bread together.

It took a long time for the various threads of the story to trickle out, narrated by Mrs Hudson (telling how, in Holmes' absence, she could nap in the afternoons so as to sit up night after night until the door had finally been opened by the thief) and by Sarah Oberdorfer (who coolly recited how she had schemed and prepared, with map and warm clothes and enough money to get them started, and only seemed troubled at the telling of how she had been forced to take to a life of crime), with the occasional contribution by young Louis (who thought the whole thing a great lark, from the adventure of hiding among the baggage in the train from London to the thrill of wandering the Downs, unsupervised, in the moonlight). It took longer still for the entire thing to become clear in my mind. Until midnight, in fact, when the two children, who had from the beginning been sleeping days and active at night to help prevent discovery, were stretched out on the carpet in front of the fire in the next room, colouring pictures.

"Just to make sure I have this all straight," I said to Mrs Hudson, feeling rather tired, "let me go over it again. First, they say they were not kidnapped, they fled under their own power, from their uncle James Oberdorfer, because they believed he was trying to kill them in order to inherit his late brother's, their father's, property."

"You can see Sarah believes it."

I sighed. "Oh yes, I admit she does. Nobody would run away from a comfortable house, hide in a baggage car, and live in a cave for three weeks on stolen food if she didn't believe it. And yes, I admit that there seems to have been a very odd series of accidents." Mrs Hudson's own investigative machinery, though not as smooth as that of her employer, was both robust and labyrinthine: she had found through the servant sister of another landlady who had a friend who-and so forth.

There was a great deal of money involved, with factories not only here and in France, but also in Germany, where the war seemed on the verge of coming to its bloody end. These were two very wealthy orphans, with no family left but one uncle. An uncle who, according to below-the-stairs rumour collected by Mrs Hudson's network of informants, exhibited a smarmy, shallow affection to his charges. I put my head into my hands.

It all rested on Sarah. A different child I might have dismissed as being prone to imaginative stories, but those steady brown eyes of hers, daring me to disbelieve-I could see why Mrs Hudson, by no means an easy mark for a sad story, had taken them under her wing.

"And you say the footman witnessed the near-drowning?" I said without looking up.