The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (30 page)

Having had enough of this, he reached for his violin case.

‘While you were out yesterday, I made some small improvements to my prelude and fugue on the theme of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” It is, I believe, now ready for Messrs. Augeners’ attention. Ah! I see from your expression that I have played it to you before, I think?’

‘Just the other evening.’

‘Nonetheless,’ he said happily, ‘you might care to hear it again.’

It was a cool midsummer morning, during the week in which the Poisons Bill was before a House of Commons select committee. After a glimpse of early sun, a thin mist had gathered over the pale blue Baker Street sky, even while I read a summary of the previous day’s proceedings from the parliamentary columns of the
Times
. I folded the paper and was about to say something to Holmes concerning the deficiencies of the new law, when he rose from his chair, stooped to the fireplace, took a cinder with the tongs, and applied it to the bowl of his cherrywood pipe. The red silk dressing gown made his tall, gaunt figure seem even taller and gaunter in the faint sunlight. Puffing at the pipe and staring down into the grate wit h his sharp profile, he spoke thoughtfully.

‘The season is passing, Watson, and it is high time we got away. Everywhere else the sun must be shining. In London, it might as well be February. Do you not feel it? Even the footpads of the East End will have deserted us for Margate sands. Life has become commonplace, the newspapers are sterile, audacity and romance seem to have passed for ever from the criminal world.’

I was well used to these periodic outbursts of self-pity.

‘We might take lodgings for a week or two at one of the Atlantic resorts,’ I said hopefully, ‘Ilfracombe or Tenby, perhaps. There is also a standing invitation from the Exmoor cousins at Wiveliscombe.’

He turned a tragic face to me and groaned.

‘One of those unwelcome summonses that call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.’

I thought it best to ignore this passing dismissal of my family. I said, rather brusquely, ‘Once the matter in hand is dealt with, you have no further commitments. You may travel where you please and for as long as you please.’

He groaned again.

‘The matter in hand! Oh, Watson, Watson! The Reverend Mr. Milner, Mrs. Deans, and her daughter Effie. A girl who was, I understand, a chambermaid at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton and was, I also understand, dismissed because someone saw her enter the room of a gentleman during the night. Really, Watson! Why should I care if a hundred chambermaids enter the rooms of a hundred gentlemen—or whether they are discharged from their employment or not? No one suggests that anything was stolen from this room—from any room, indeed. Merely that this young woman was seen entering during the night. That such a case should attract the least attention attests to the triumph of the banal in our society.’

‘You have often remarked, old fellow, that it is the banal and the commonplace that are the hallmarks of major crime.’

‘Well, well,’ he said grudgingly, ‘that, at any rate, is true.’

He went off to his room and for several minutes I heard him banging about, making a quite unnecessary disturbance. When he returned he had changed his dressing-gown for a black velvet jacket.

‘The Royal Albion Hotel.’ He sat down and sighed. ‘I smell the tawdry odour of its brown Windsor soup from sixty miles away.’

It was half past ten when a cab stopped below our windows and there was a sound of voices. When the Reverend James Milner had wired to make his appointment, he informed me that he and two members of his Brighton flock would take an early train from their seaside homes and be with us by eleven o’clock. He was, I gathered, superintendent of the Wesleyan Railway Mission in the town, ministering to the workers and families in the little streets that cluster round the lofty terminus of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway. Mrs. Deans and Effie had brought their trouble to him. In a most quixotic gesture, he had decided to announce the child’s trouble to the famous Sherlock Holmes.

They were an odd trio. Mr. Milner in his black cloth suit and tall white clerical collar lacked the more exotic qualities of other clergy and could only have been a plain Methodist minister. His sleek hair was prematurely gray, but his spectacles gave him a youthfully studious look. Mrs. Deans, in a flowery summer dress, came up our Baker Street staircase like a cruiser under full sail. Her round face and porkpie bonnet gave her the air of one who could hold her own. I could imagine this doughty person with her sleeves rolled up to drub the washing in its bowl or give what-for to anyone who exchanged cross words with her. When I heard that the terrace of cramped little houses in which the Deans family lived was called Trafalgar Street, I saw her at once as one of those formidable women who had sailed on HMS
Victory
to Nelson’s famous battle and had loaded the great guns for their menfolk to fire.

Effie Deans, the subject of this consultation, was probably no more than fifteen or sixteen, a chubby or cherubic girl with a cluster of fair curls under a blue straw boater. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that her prettiness was clouded by apprehension.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr. Milner, once Holmes had sat us all down, ‘what may be a matter of sport to the rest of the world is life and death to the honor of Miss Deans and her mother.’

Mrs. Deans nodded emphatically. The minister continued.

‘Effie Deans has been dismissed from a post that she had held for almost two years, sent away without a reference or a character, for an offence which she cannot have committed. The gentleman in question made no complaint against her—indeed, it seems he was not even questioned. A hotel porter claims that he saw her enter the room during the night. He reported the matter and she was dismissed next day, despite her most positive denials. I have known her as a good, honest, and truthful girl, who attended the Wesleyan Mission Sunday school every week of her childhood.’

Holmes had been staring at him with a curiosity that was discourteous, if not hostile.

‘Unfortunately, Mr. Milner, what you know her to be is not the issue. Let us keep to the facts. If Miss Deans is as bad as Jezebel, it matters nothing so long as she was not there and did not enter that room. If she was there and did enter it, she may be as good and truthful as you like, but she was guilty of the fact and was properly dismissed. Let us have no more of Sunday school, if you please. It will not get us very far.’

Holmes was in an unfortunate mood. He should never have mentioned Jezebel, to judge by the look on the face of Mrs. Deans and the flush that rose from her neck to her cheeks. No Baker Street detective was to say such a thing of her daughter. Before Milner could add a word, she let fly.

‘See here, Mr. Holmes! It’s not just that my Effie is a good girl and wouldn’t have done it. She was at home all night and
couldn’t
have done it!’

He admired her spirit.

‘Excellent, madam! You have, if I may say so, an unerring grasp of the laws of evidence. Pray continue.’

The Reverend Mr. Milner was out in the cold now.

‘Well, sir,’ Mrs. Deans went on, ‘she come home as usual close on half past eight that evening. Don’t take my word for it. We had the Todgers.’

‘Todgers, madam?’

‘Them that live next door. Had them in for a hand or two of whist and Beat-Jack-out-of-doors, also a glass of shrub and a pipe.’

I swear I saw in my mind Mrs. Deans smoking her pipe with the rest.

‘I assume they were not with you until two in the morning?’

‘Near midnight. They saw her all the time. Then we went to bed. She went to her little room in the attic. To get out, she comes down through the room where Alf and I sleep. I laid awake an hour and more with my stomach after the shrub. How could she come down and I not see nor hear her? How could she unbolt the downstairs door and go out without I hear her—or without Alf seeing it when he gets up at three? Which he must do to go on early turn at the railway goods yard at four. And don’t tell me, Mr. Holmes, that I can’t prove what I say. Do I look the sort that’d let her daughter go out on the streets at one or two in the morning and never say a word?’

‘No, madam,’ said Holmes uncertainly, ‘indeed you do not. In any court proceedings, however, you will be asked the following question: Why should this porter, whoever he was, say that he saw your daughter entering a guest’s room at one or two o’clock that morning, if he could not have done so?’

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him.

‘Yes, Mr. Holmes! Oh, yes! I’d like him asked that question! I’d like him asked good and proper, in such a way as he wouldn’t forget being asked for a very long time!’

If ever a woman had captivated Holmes in a quarter of an hour, it was Mrs. Deans. The Reverend Mr. Milner had given up. His parishioner was doing his job far better than he could have done it for himself. Holmes stretched out his long thin legs, and when he looked up, his eyes were brighter than I had seen them for a long time.

‘It seems,’ said Mr. Milner hastily, ‘that the night porter said he recognized her in part by her uniform, the black dress, white apron, and white cap. Of course, that might have been worn by someone else, though it is not clear why anyone else wishing to enter the room should have bothered to put the uniform on. Whoever did so can hardly have expected to do it without disturbing the occupant.’

‘Quite so,’ said Holmes thoughtfully. ‘What do we know of the gentleman who occupied the room? He was alone, I take it?’

‘He was talked about in the town during the weeks since he came there.’ Mrs. Deans had once again got in ahead of the Reverend Mr. Milner. ‘A spiritual gentleman. Always seeing ghosts, he said. Something to do with the Society for Cyclical Research.’

‘Society for Psychic Research,’ Mr. Milner said quickly. She stared at him, then turned back to Holmes.

‘They say he saw that many ghosts, he had to put himself to sleep at night with clarasomething from a smelling bottle. My girl could still smell it next morning. And he had a rumpus with the showfolk at the Brighton Aquarium. Professor Chamberlain and Madame Elvira that do tricks with ghosts and guessing. He thought he was superior to all that tommyrot. The Brighton papers wouldn’t print his letters nor theirs for fear of being took to court.’

I looked at Holmes. An extraordinary change had gradually come over his face during these exchanges with their hints of ghosts and fraud. His eyes were shining like two stars with a hint of enthusiasm ill-contained. His hands gripped the arms of the chair and I almost thought he might spring from it. The Reverend Mr. Milner got in his twopenny-worth at last.

‘The gentleman in question is a spiritualist,’ he said quickly.

‘Mr. Edmund Gurney is a scholar and a gentleman who resents the cheapening of his beliefs by the mind-reading entertainments, mesmerism, and trances at the Aquarium, as do all those who take a sincere interest in such matters. His own work for the Psychical Research Society is at a far superior level. He is, I understand, a classical scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, a friend of Dr. Frederick Myers and his circle. He is certainly a musicologist and has written upon the theories of sound. His particular interest appears to be in what are called phantasms of the living. That is to say, the possibility that we may have a vision of those we know or love at a crisis in their lives, not infrequently at the moment of their deaths. It is the case of a man who sees at the end of his garden path the figure of a friend whom he had believed to be still in India. He then hears that the friend was, indeed, still in India and that he had died at the moment of the apparition.’

Holmes had listened to this last revelation with eyes closed and fingertips pressed together. He now looked up.

‘Mr. Edmund Gurney sounds an admirable gentleman. I cannot believe that it is any of his doing that Effie has been dismissed. Indeed, if what you say is true, Mrs. Deans, it seems that he sleeps with the aid of a soporific and may well not have known any thing of this incident. This is a curious and, indeed, intriguing inconsistency. My dear Mr. Milner! My dear Mrs. Deans! My dear Miss Effie, if I may so address you. You may count upon this difficulty of yours receiving my fullest and most immediate attention. This enigma is almost more than I had deserved!’

‘You will take the case?’ Milner asked nervously.

‘Mr. Milner, I could not do otherwise. Indeed, you may depend upon Dr. Watson and myself being in Brighton by this evening. You yourselves must return there forthwith. I shall ask Mrs. Hudson to summon the boy. A wire must go to the post office at once engaging rooms for us.’

Milner eased his starched clerical collar with a forefinger.

‘In the matter of your fee, sir. My friends are scarcely in a position. …’

‘We will not talk of a fee, if you please. Some things, my dear Milner, are more than money to me.’

‘Then where shall we find you? Where will you stay?’

Holmes, mystified by the question, looked at him.

‘Where else should we put up but at the
locus in quo
?’

This stumped all three of them.

‘Why,’ said Holmes blithely, ‘at the Royal Albion Hotel, Mr. Milner. We may even learn to relish its cuisine.’

The change that had overtaken Sherlock Holmes since his sullen mood after breakfast would hardly have been believed by those who did not know him well. He had pined for adventure and challenge. Now that this had presented itself, if only in the form of a dismissed chambermaid, he was transformed by an excess of energy. Though he sometimes used to talk of retiring to the Sussex downs and keeping bees, I swear he could not have endured it for more than a fortnight.

That afternoon we took tea in the Pullman car of the express that whirled us to Brighton, the sunlit fields and downs of Sussex spinning away from us, the sun glittering on the sea ahead. The light was in his eyes again. He hummed or sang quietly some battle hymn of his own throughout the journey until our train drew into Brighton and we felt a light ocean breeze on our faces.