The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (14 page)

The sergeant moved to the window to call something down to his constable. From the doorway, Holmes caught my eye, and I followed him out to a small yard in the back.

I did not bother to inquire after his train of thought as the police-sergeant had. He was deep into the puzzle—perhaps unable, as yet, to articulate precisely how the elements were connecting in his mind—and there would be no diverting or distracting him until he had found what he sought.

With a pipe-cleaning tool drawn from an inner coat pocket, he made short work of unlocking the basement's outer door.

“Be ready,” he admonished me as the door swung open.

Perhaps he believed the murderer was in subterranean hiding. I was prepared to be rushed the moment the light spilled in and announced our presence. Neither of us, however, expected to come upon what we did: a gleaming, well-appointed, unoccupied private museum.

Row upon row of glass cases shone softly in the light of a single gas-jet. Each was of professional quality, not the makeshift work one would expect of an amateur collector. Within the nearest lay crumbling notebooks, their anonymous covers closed. The farther vitrines displayed potsherds, beads, stone tools, and human bones. Most unsettling, however, were the nearest and longest cases, tightly sealed against the air. Their contents seemed at first to be three sprawling mud or clay lumps, but something in their shape suggested a human aspect, despite the extreme decay they had undergone. The substance of which they consisted did not appear ever to have been flesh—more like tree bark steeped too long in foul water—and there were no bones or cartilage. Yet I was certain these monstrous artifacts had once been human.

It was an extraordinary exhibit, a private collection of some
magnitude, though whether from one archaeological excavation or several, I could not tell.

“There are no tags or legends of any kind,” I said to Holmes in consternation. “Do you suppose this Richard Addleton stole these items from his work place?”

Holmes shook his head in a distracted way; he had perused the volumes in a low shelf, found them unilluminating, and begun to check the back and sides. “Hah!” he said at last. From under the clawfooted shelf he came up with a sheet of foolscap, balled up and cast aside, as if in anger, to roll out of view and be forgotten.

“A letter from the British Museum to Richard Addleton,” he announced. “It concerns a property near Trowbridge, and says that all funding has been withdrawn, no reason given.”

Holmes smoothed the paper, folded it in quarters, and slid it into an inner pocket. We slipped out of the strange private exhibit and back into the world of the present with a sense of surfacing. “I'm afraid we have a train to catch,” Holmes said to the sergeant.

“But I've just sent for the inspector!” the man replied, vexed. “He'll want to talk to you!”

“I will of course be available to the inspector as soon as I return,” Holmes said, whistling for a hansom.

The train to which Holmes referred was the next one bound for Wiltshire. As soon as we were settled in seats of relative privacy, I exclaimed, “What extraordinary events! I am well aware that you know, or suspect, far more than you are letting on, Holmes, but I cannot restrain myself from asking: Who killed the Addleton brothers, and how on earth do you expect to find some unnamed property near Trowbridge?”

Holmes waved a hand perfunctorily. “There was a map of Wiltshire over the mantelpiece,” he said. “For a locality so irrelevant to the personal history of lifelong Londoners to occupy so central a position in the household imbued it with import beyond the decorative. The letter merely confirmed it. Our destination was pinpointed on the map, although I have only the slightest inkling of what we may find there.”

“And the letter itself?” I asked. “Perhaps they quarrelled over the withholding of funds for some pet project.”

Holmes shook his head. “I estimate from the accumulation of dust that this sheet had been under the shelf for some months, and the quarrels, according to the house servant, began only after the missing brother took his leave. You are right on two counts, however: there was a pet project, as clearly evidenced by the basement display—and it was that project, or something germane to it, that caused them to fall out.” He allowed himself a nearly inaudible sigh. “Pity that the rift was so wide, and the project so controversial, as to cause one brother to kill another and then take his own life.”

Horrified, I said, “Surely it must have been the older brother, James, no matter what a loyal servant might have said.”

“Alas, the evidence is all there, and whichever inspector turns up will have little trouble seeing it. The housekeeper was on holiday and the brothers were left to fend for themselves. The resulting meal was atrocious: eggs full of shell fragments, burnt rashers, toast the consistency of charcoal. A nervous, frightened man, with little kitchen experience and half out of his wits with fear of the deed he was about to do, would cook such a meal—knowing it would never be consumed, merely going through the motions to allay suspicion, and far more concerned with the coffee the housekeeper's absence had allowed him to poison.”

“Out of his wits, indeed, to drink of it himself,” I said.

“I am sure he intended it. And afterwards he tipped the mugs and drained the pot onto the floor, lest anyone else partake of his fatal brew. A man, therefore, who wished no one ill—whose crime was an act of deepest desperation. Something dire must have hung over his head, to push him to poison his own brother, quarrels notwithstanding. This was not a crime of rage, Watson, but of despair.”

“Perhaps he meant the poison for himself, and committed suicide when he realized that his brother had accidentally shared it.”

“Why, then, add the prussic acid to the pot and not simply his
own mug? No, it was no scene from
Hamlet
. His brother drank first, and when he stood up, knocking the chair back, our murderer ran to catch him before he fell, and staggered with him to the settee, where they died in each other's arms.”

“William, then, was the murderer,” I said slowly. “Unless Richard summoned us in hopes we would be first upon the scene.”

“Richard hoped we would aid him in unravelling their dilemma,” said Holmes. “He had no knowledge that his brother William had come up with his own, extreme solution.”

The tragedy of it, and the mental picture of their last moments, weighed on my heart for the rest of our journey.

The property in question turned out to be an estate some miles south of Trowbridge, near a small village where we succeeded in hiring a horse and buggy. We were denied access at the main gate by a surly attendant who refused to tell us the owner's name, and when we drove around the perimeter we found ourselves followed and were soon accosted by a gang of groundskeepers who warned us vehemently away.

There was nothing for it but to take lodgings in town. I had no doubt that Holmes would not be dissuaded, and we quickly made plans to return later that night, our circumnavigation of the property having had the advantage of revealing what appeared, from a distance, to be an excavation site. The connection to our strange private collection and the British Museum letter seemed indubitable. We had also noted the location of a concealed point of entry through a long hedge not far from the site.

We spent the remainder of the daylight making discreet inquiries in the village. I feared such activities would give away our clandestine plans, but the locals had a horror of the place, and when Holmes and I reconvened for a light supper we regaled each other with the tales we had collected. Legends of shadowy apparitions on the estate, witchcraft and druidism, dark demons on the loose who would suck the marrow from the bones of anyone foolish enough to venture on the grounds after dark. That such stories existed was
no surprise in the vicinity of a site of archaeological interest—located on an estate of mysterious ownership, to which access was denied to all but a few taciturn sentries. Any suspicious nocturnal activities would be likely to warp into tales of ghostly intrigue.

The landlord of the pub in which we secured rooms told us that the groundskeepers lived on the estate, but never ventured out after dark, which would certainly, we thought, facilitate our later entry. More than that he would not say, claiming it was bad luck to discuss the matter; but his wife confided, somewhat later, that there was known to be an ancient tomb on the site, an evil, haunted place from which terrible cries had once issued, now silenced, only the ghosts remaining. She suspected that we planned to return, and although she begged us to change our minds, she offered the use of a lantern should we persist in our mad course.

We set off on foot after full dark, the lantern unlit. When we had cleared the village, Holmes produced his small pocket lantern to light our way unobtrusively down the long curve of the road, through the hedge at last, and across the springy vegetation of a bog which showed no signs of ever having been cut for fuel. The legends of the unnamed estate had cost the locals many a cold night, it seemed.

A new-cut entrance to the mound was shored up by timbers. The work had been abandoned some months ago, judging from the weathering of the wood, which corresponded to Holmes's estimate of the age of the Museum letter. The interior confronting us was a dark, endless throat. I was not prone to conjuring imaginary demons, but in my memory still resided the inexplicably human-looking shapes in their sealed vitrines, and I rather wished I had brought my pistol.

Holmes lit the lantern, and we entered a long stone passageway with a downward incline. There was an unmistakable scuttling sound from somewhere deep within the tomb. Holmes suddenly halted, but not in response to the sound: rather, he had spied something incongruous about a thinner section of stone wall.

“It's been moved several times, once recently,” said he, examining
the arc of smoothed earthen floor. “Come—let's find out what's behind it.”

With Holmes's prodigious strength, the two of us managed to slide the rock in its carven path. Within was a side passageway. The lumber that maintained the structural integrity of the passage was decades older than that at the entryway, afflicted with rot and sagging at many points. I cautioned against an infirm ceiling, but Holmes forged onward, undeterred by physical danger.

We were stopped at last by what appeared to have been a cave-in. “They were trying to continue digging,” Holmes said. “See here, and there, where tunnels were started and abandoned. The bog was too soft to hold open, but they continued to try, it seems—and there, where the soil tumbled down—a more recent hand was at work there, and there . . .” He did not finish, but instead knelt down and set himself to continuing the half-finished, small-scale excavation.

An hour later, something that had once been human emerged from the damp peat. Then another. And a third.

They were the size and shape of men—larger precursors of what we had seen in the Addleton exhibit. But only the one-time flesh remained; the bones were entirely gone.

“I cannot countenance it,” I said. “How in the world were the bones removed?”

“In fact, Watson, it is quite simple,” Holmes said, “though chemically extraordinary. These bodies were preserved from oxygenation by the medium of the bog. Fleshly elements were replaced by the earthen elements iron and sulfur, while the bones dissolved in the acidic water. Quite the opposite of the conventional process of decay. It is as I suspected when I saw the contents of those vitrines. These bodies will jellify rapidly now that they have been exposed to the air. But some chemical solution might be found to retard such decay, and I suspect that the Addletons, or their colleagues, used such a solution on the creatures we saw in the exhibit.”

“Which must have come from here,” I supplied.

“I have no doubt of it.”

“How long, then, have these bodies been buried?”

“That, Watson, is the question. This tunnel is not Neolithic, though the barrow itself most certainly is. This tunnel was dug sometime in the last quarter-century. So who, then, are these men?” He paused, eyes narrowed, and then pounced on a metallic glint I had not noticed—a small tin box recently shoved into the peat.

“Open the box, Watson,” Holmes whispered, “and make as much noise about it as you can.” As I followed his directions, the rusty hinges emitting a gratifying shriek, Holmes melted into the shadows of the main passageway.

Before I could study the documents, there came a cry and a scuffle from deep within the barrow. I stuffed the papers into my vest, snatched up the lantern, and ran down into the heart of the tomb.

Holmes was holding a white-haired man in an iron grip. The man was gibbering in unintelligible gasps, but at last he managed to say, “Let me go, please. I can not run now that your friend has blocked the way.”

Holmes complied, and we stood there for a moment staring at each other, the only sound our laboured breathing.

At length Holmes said, “James Addleton, I presume?”

The man nodded. The resemblance to the two poor souls in Bloomsbury was unmistakable.

Holmes questioned him, but the man would say nothing, certain we were Government men sent to assassinate him. Only when Holmes convinced him of our identities did he relax somewhat. “My little brother Richard,” he said, “has a great respect for your work.”

“The papers in the box,” Holmes began again—no doubt he had heard me riffling through them and deduced the contents. “They pertain to this excavation?”

“Scandal!” Addleton burst out. A tic picked up a wild rhythm in his cheek. “Scandal that could rock the very foundations of government. A great man ruined. My heart breaks to think of it!” The man was filthy from what must have been a week here underground.
What he lived on I will never know; but he had clearly confronted some demons of his own, and they were getting the better of him.