'You will visit each of these in turn.'
'Yes, sir.'
'You will begin in each case by giving the outside porter one shilling. Here are twenty-three shillings.'
'Yes, sir.'
'You will tell her that you want to see the waste-paper of yesterday. You will say that an important telegram has miscarried and that you are looking for it. You understand?'
'Yes, sir.'
'But what you are really looking for is the centre maid of the Times with some holes cut in it with scissors. Here is a copy of the Times. It is this page. You could easily recognize it, could you not?'
'Yes, sir.'
'In each case the outside porter will send for the hall porter, to whom also you will give a shilling. Here are twenty-three shillings. You will then learn in possibly twenty cases out of the twenty-three that the waste of the day before has been burned or removed. In the three other cases you will be shown a heap of paper and you will look for this maid of the Times among it. The odds are enormously against your finding it. There are ten shillings over in case of emergencies. Let me have a report by wire at Baker Street before evening. And now, Watson, it only remains for us to find out by wire the identity of the cabman, No. 2704, and then we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries and fill in the time until we are due at the hotel.'
Chapter 5
Three Broken Threads
Shyrlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching her mind at will. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and she was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian mistresses. She would talk of nothing but art, of which she had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel.
'Sir Henrietta Baskerville is upstairs expecting you,' said the clerk. 'She asked me to show you up at once when you came.'
'Have you any objection to my looking at your register?' said Holmes.
'Not in the least.'
The book showed that two names had been added after that of Baskerville. One was Theophilus Joanson and family, of Newcastle; the other Oldmore and page, of High Lodge, Alton.
'Surely that must be the same Joanson whom I used to know,' said Holmes to the porter. 'A lawyer, is she not, gray-headed, and walks with a limp?'
'No, sir; this is Ms. Joanson, the coal-owner, a very active gentlewoman, not older than yourself.'
'Surely you are mistaken about her trade?'
'No, sir! she has used this hotel for many years, and she is very well known to us.'
'Ah, that settles it. Oldmore, too; I seem to remember the name. Excuse my curiosity, but often in calling upon one friend one finds another.'
'He is an invalid sir, sir. His wife was once mayor of Gloucester. He always comes to us when he is in town.'
'Thank you; I am afraid I cannot claim his acquaintance. We have established a most important fact by these questions, Watson,' she continued in a low voice as we went upstairs together. 'We know now that the people who are so interested in our friend have not settled down in her own hotel. That means that while they are, as we have seen, very anxious to watch her, they are equally anxious that she should not see them. Now, this is a most suggestive fact.'
'What does it suggest?'
'It suggests--halloa, my dear fellow, what on earth is the matter?'
As we came round the top of the stairs we had run up against Lady Henrietta Baskerville herself. Her face was flushed with anger, and she held an old and dusty boot in one of her hands. So furious was she that she was hardly articulate, and when she did speak it was in a much broader and more Western dialect than any which we had heard from her in the morning.
'Seems to me they are playing me for a sucker in this hotel,' she cried. 'They'll find they've started in to monkey with the wrong woman unless they are careful. By thunder, if that chap can't find my missing boot there will be trouble. I can take a joke with the best, Ms. Holmes, but they've got a bit over the mark this time.'
'Still looking for your boot?'
'Yes, lady, and mean to find it.'
'But, surely, you said that it was a new brown boot?'