DATA! DATA! Ingrid awoke in the night, sat up with a jerk. She switched on the reading light. The Complete Sherlock Holmes lay in its usual place on the bedside table. She opened it to “A Case of Identity,” leafed through to a passage she’d highlighted: You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace. Yes, that was her, missing everything that was important. She went over her list: Who was the anonymous tipster? Where was Grampy? Where was the murder weapon? Add to that Bob Borum’s question: Why wouldn’t Grampy say where he was at the time of the murder? Those four questions buzzed around in her brain, bouncing off one another, refusing to add up to anything, just zooming faster and faster. Ingrid turned the pages to “The Five Orange Pips,” a strange story that ended up being about the Ku Klux Klan, and stopped at another highlighted passage: The ideal reasoner would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.
