Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) (17 page)

However, it seemed I would have to be patient a little longer...

“But first things first Watson, it is essential that I solve a small but vital conundrum. Be so good as to hand me the page of fragments from your pocket-book.” I tore out the requisite leaf and passed it to him, whereupon he took it to his desk and proceeded to snip the page into small pieces, which he spread upon a blank sheet of writing paper. Once again silence reigned in the cosy parlour for perhaps an hour or more, while Holmes was deeply engrossed in positioning and repositioning the scraps of paper, punctuating his deliberations with small grunts of exasperation, and occasionally of approval.

*        *       *

At length he sighed contentedly, leaned back in his chair, skeletal white fingers laced behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling with a small smile of satisfaction. I waited expectantly for the revelations that were without doubt imminent.

“You know Watson, in all the years I have spent plumbing the infinite depths of man’s iniquity to man, I have never ceased to marvel at the unfailing and predictable superficiality of his intellectual processes, which failing leads inevitably to incompetent observation, unscientific or even non-existent deduction, and ultimately to a flawed conclusion!

“Such, my dear Watson, is the charge I would lay at the door of the industrious, well-intentioned but sadly, somewhat inept Lestrade.

“Consider, he receives a report that a young woman has hanged herself in her rooms in Chiswick; from this point on he is more or less settled on his conclusions. Upon his arrival he finds the door locked from within, a solitary young woman hanging from a beam, no apparent signs of entry – already his case is almost proven. And yet it is the most capital of mistakes to form a conclusion without the benefit of the available evidence.

“Now further imagine his exquisite satisfaction when he retrieves a few charred scraps of paper from among many hidden in the cold ashes, and without thought or hesitation he triumphantly arranges them to form a fragmentary suicide note which tidily but quite erroneously confirms the circumstances he believes he perceives.
Et voila
– his case is complete!

“In short, he chooses selectively from the available facts to support the conclusion he sees – the surest way to err in any scientific observation.

“I, by contrast, observe, analyse and then deduce from all the evidence without bias, that it may freely tell its tale. And if that tale is incontrovertibly and unambiguously one of murder and not of suicide, even though at apparent variance with the perceived circumstances, why, then it must be the truth.

“The evidence therefore defines the crime, and not
vice versa
.”

I winced ruefully at Holmes’ excoriating appraisal of Lestrade’s ability, and by inference, mine too, for initially I also had reached the same conclusion as the Scotland Yarder.

“Let me now relate you to within a whisker, precisely what occurred in Chiswick, Watson. At around ten o’clock, Bormanstein or whatever his real name, arrived by hansom along with his rather muscular wall-eyed support. Bormanstein tells the cabbie to wait, as they know their brutal business will not be over-long in completing.

“They walked up the newly cinder-strewn path and entered using the keys Bormanstein has already procured for himself from Mrs Smith. Note the weather now – rain and sleet.

“They crossed the hall to Dulcie Hobbs’ door, leaving faint damp footprints of cinder ash upon the floor – which Mrs Smith scrupulously cleaned the following morning but she did not polish the steps down to Hobbs’ rooms, thus the prints which I discovered outside her door, and inside her room.

“Bormanstein stealthily attempted to enter using his key but is defeated by Hobbs’ key being already in the lock, but he is prepared for this eventuality. Taking from his pocket a slim wooden dowel – the same I found charred in the fire-grate, he applied a bead of glutinous gum Arabic to its tip, inserted it in the lock and, engaging the end of the other key, carefully and silently rotated it until it could be pushed out of the lock, whereupon it fell softly onto the small mat below; this is where Lestrade later found it. Lestrade missed the distinctive traces of gum Arabic left on its tip and on the escutcheon-plate.

“Bormanstein unlocked the door, entered silently, and then relocked it with his own key from the inside for he has desperate and exceedingly private business at hand. He found her lying on, but not in the bed, most likely dozing or asleep; he confronted Hobbs with the blackmail demand that she had sent him.”

My bewilderment must have showed, for this was the first I had heard of such a note.

Exasperatedly Holmes cried “The fragments in the fireplace Watson! They were no more a suicide note than they were a laundry list or a sonnet by Shakespeare!

“It is my certain conviction that they were the charred remains of a blackmail demand. Step over here and see if you think I have solved the rest of our word puzzle.” I peered over Holmes’ shoulder and examined the fragmentary words he had assembled upon his desktop though what I saw seemed even less illuminating than Lestrade’s presumed suicide note:

I noted that Holmes had re-ordered the fragments retrieved by Lestrade, and inserted several further pieces, although why he had placed the whole in this particular sequence was still a mystery to me. Holmes chuckled at my evident confusion. “Consider the first three fragments Watson, and tell me what they might originally have said.”

“Well, ‘ONEY’ could only be ‘HONEY’ or ‘BONEY’ or... ‘MONEY’? But who would say ‘I have had enough honey, or stranger still,
enough money
? And what is this reference to ‘RICE’? The other fragments I can make nothing of.” Holmes reached for a soft lead pencil and boldly scrawled in some additional characters between the fragments.

“No doubt some minor parts were entirely consumed, but I believe this represents the spirit of the original note when it was written.” I re-examined the page with his additions...

“I suggest, Watson, that this reconstruction, or something very close to it, explains events rather more logically than Lestrade’s presumed suicide theory. It explains the nonsense of writing a suicide note, then promptly incinerating it, which appears to strike Lestrade as not in the least bit strange. It further clarifies the odd notion that someone should write in such cheerful and optimistic vein to their sister one day, send their affectionate respects to their mother and then take their own life the very next evening! It also explains the oblique reference to her anticipating imminent funds to the tune of £100. Which finally provides a most compelling motive for Bormanstein’s need to silence her.

“The ambitious but imprudent woman thought to sell her silence for an additional £100, but Bormanstein guaranteed it for the trivial cost of a length of hempen rope! It was a most reckless and foolish move on Hobbs’ part to threaten such a dangerous man, for her job was already done, she had become expendable, and he would certainly not tolerate a mere foot-soldier jeopardising his entire elaborate operation in which he has already invested significant time and resources and doubtless, not inconsiderable financial disbursement.

“He would also be perfectly aware that blackmailers are rarely satisfied by a single payment; inevitably, further and larger ones would follow the first successful demand.

“And thus he sought to conceal her callous execution with the subterfuge of an elaborately staged suicide, which illusion Lestrade immediately accepted, but it does not serve; it does not serve in the least part at all!

“And in passing Watson, you might pause to consider just how many criminals we have traced, even seized, in some manner of close association with the female of the species.

“And the best proof of this may be had at Scotland Yard any day, where if you ask whichever officer of the establishment how they take most villains, he will tell you –
at the houses of the women
. And thus we draw closer.”

I listened enthralled but chilled, as Holmes revealed the cold, inexorable steps of logic that underpinned his deductions and the more he spoke, the more credible became his explanation, and the more ludicrously improbable appeared Lestrade’s (and my own!) hasty conclusion.

He continued. “From this point, events moved rapidly. Perhaps Hobbs pleaded for her life; if so it was surely to no avail. Her time on earth was already as good as ended; Bormanstein is decided upon his plan of action – for he has come prepared with a hangman’s rope, and twine to secure her hands and wrists.

“One of them, probably the wall-eyed bruiser, seized Hobbs. To prevent her screaming they cast around for something with which to gag her. They espied her still damp overcoat and scarf hanging neatly and logically to dry on a hook by the wardrobe. The red woollen scarf was swiftly stuffed in her mouth – hence the red wool fibres I discovered upon her lips, tongue, and deep within her throat.

“While one of them secured her wrists and ankles with strong twine to thwart her struggles – this the cause of the chafing which I noted but which was missed by Lestrade – the other moved the heavy mahogany table from the rug to a position under the beam. Climbing thereon, and leaving several cinder-smudged footprints, he was then able to reach up to the beam and tie on the prepared gallows noose.

“The table was then replaced, but not precisely as it was – hence the four deep impressions which I observed now revealed in the thick carpet – not by itself conclusive, but nonetheless suggestive.

“The terrified woman now had mere minutes to live, and she must surely have comprehended the awful means of her end, for she would have observed these measured preparations being made for her heartless, coolly-calculated and cold-blooded elimination.”

It may be because such gruesome matters are his routine stock-in-trade, or perhaps because he has become inured through years of plumbing the limitless depths of human evil, or perhaps his mathematically logical mind precludes any personal or emotional response to the shocking findings of his own deductions, but regardless, Holmes delivered his chilling narrative as clinically and dispassionately as if he were reading aloud a passage from a learned paper on some aspect of forensic science.

“And now there is little more to tell, Watson. They callously lifted the gagged and bound woman up, inserted her head in the noose, and then they stood back and waited.

“Indeed so composed were they that one of the pair enjoyed a small cigar while they waited for her agonised death throes to subside – I discovered a stub and three separate and distinctive ashes from an unusual cigar of Indian manufacture on the hearthstone. The cigar I find noteworthy for its country of origin.

“At length Hobbs’ agonised death-throes turned to spasmodic twitches, then finally she expired – it is time to dress the stage, but it was also now that fatal blunders were committed. Our foe was cunning, but not astute enough to deceive me. The scarf was extracted from the dead woman’s mouth, but instead of being replaced upon the hook, for some inexplicable reason – perhaps of haste or guilty concealment – it was carelessly thrown into a dark corner, illogically far from the door and the wardrobe, and quite at variance with the extreme tidiness of the rest of the room and the orderly neatness of the wardrobe.

“An upturned chair and the tumbled stationery box were placed beneath the victim’s feet, but no-one troubled to check that the two combined would have been tall enough for her feasibly to have committed suicide unaided. Finally, the bindings were removed from the body and thrown with the gum-Arabic dipped dowel into the still glowing embers of the cooling fire, along with the now redundant blackmail note, where they started to smoulder; satisfied with their work Bormanstein and his thug left the room and headed for the outer door.

“Unnoticed by them the fire was even then dying fast and they would have done better had they applied a match to the note, for now the rain and sleet outside intensifies – you may recall I peered up the flue? As I expected, it follows a straight vertical path and there lacks a cowl on the chimney pot, which allows heavy rain to fall straight onto the fire. And thus the increasingly rain-spattered paper charred, but only slowly, leaving legible fragments; the twine merely scorched, the sleet and rain became heavier still and the fire was finally extinguished. Bormanstein had not, as he confidently supposed, destroyed the last piece of evidence linking him to Hobbs.