The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (110 page)

So that was it! The last piece of the puzzle which Holmes's conduct had presented to me in the past few days had now fallen into place.

When we were alone together, my friend added an explanation which was not for Inspector Gregson's ears.

‘As for the letter of apparent reconciliation from Chamberlain to Gurney,' he remarked, ‘it required only a girl dressed as a chambermaid to enter the room while Gurney slept or was elsewhere. Whether she or Chamberlain himself carried out the exchange of papers, it was simple to take the key from the bureau drawer—the first place that any thief would look. It was then only necessary to replace whatever document was in that envelope with the letter that we found the other night. It required only the commonest black dress and white apron, purloined from an unlocked servants' cupboard on the landing, for Elvira Chamberlain to impersonate a hotel servant if she was challenged. In the dim light of an internal corridor, at midnight, the night porter saw a chambermaid, or rather a girl in a chambermaid's livery. The only girl who served these rooms was Effie Deans. Therefore, the fellow easily persuaded himself that he must have seen what Mr. Gurney might call a phantasm of the living—in the shape of Miss Deans.'

‘They appear to have found entering such rooms and opening bureau drawers rather too easy,' I said with a trace of skepticism.

Holmes laughed.

‘We may never know how, or when, one of them purloined the key to Gurney's room and made a wax impression. I swear that Chamberlain the burglar reconnoitered his victim's rooms at the start, saw the Nicodemus Pills and the way to be rid of his antagonist. Perhaps Elvira was able to do everything else with a passkey. However, I may tell you that with my burglar's kit at hand, I could open any of these old bedroom locks in a twinkling. At some point, I have no doubt, the sister replaced some ephemeral piece of correspondence by the effusive thanks that is in Gurney's correspondence box now and that Chamberlain marked with whatever date of receipt he pleased. In consequence, the world, including Mrs. Marguerite Lesieur, was intended to hear that the two men had made up their quarrel and that Chamberlain's reputation was restored. Had the villain's scheme worked, his benefactress would also have heard that the psychic investigator Edmund Gurney had, tragically, been found dead in a Brighton hotel bedroom from misuse of chloroform.'

‘Does all this make Madame Elvira a murderess?' I asked.

‘I suspect she is no more than her brother's dupe in the matter of the letter and that she knew nothing of the poison. That will be for a court to decide when the pair of them are tried for attempted murder. I have no doubt that if Chamberlain also entered Gurney's room at some point, which on the face of it seems almost certain, his principal intention was not to exchange the two letters but to inspect that counterfeit tin of Propter's Nicodemus Pills and to satisfy himself that Gurney was taking his prescribed doses of the capsules.'

Not all of this was revealed at the Central Criminal Court a few months later. Chamberlain was proved to have been previously convicted of a number of petty offences of dishonesty before the forgery of two letters of credit from the Midland Counties Bank, which had sent him to Pentonville prison for six months a few years earlier. The jury in the present case found him guilty of attempted murder by ‘arsenical poisoning,' but all mention of calomel was omitted. He went to penal servitude for seven years. Madame Elvira was not proved to have known of his intention and was found guilty of no more than breaking and entering the hotel room. She went to Millbank prison for six months.

As for our client, Effie Deans was taken back by the manager of the Royal Albion Hotel on the positive insistence of Sherlock Holmes. To be sure, the manager had reason to be grateful to us. However, the matter did not rest there. The owners of the establishment undertook that upon her seventeenth birthday, not that many months away, Miss Deans was to be promoted to the position of assistant housekeeper. This, in itself, was the first rung of a ladder to higher things than she or her parents had dreamt of.

Needless to say, we never saw the remote delights of Ilfracombe or Tenby with their respectable families building sand castles or riding the local donkeys. We were, as Sherlock Holmes was soon reminding me, far too busy for that and much too occupied to visit the Wiveliscombe cousins.

Yet for the man I believed we had saved, the drama did not end happily after all. A year or so later I picked up the
Times
one morning after breakfast, as wheels and harness rattled up and down the length of Baker Street. I was turning the pages of the newspaper when my eye was caught by a brief obituary column.

We regret to announce the sudden death, by misadventure, of Mr. Edmund Gurney, Joint Secretary of the Psychical Society, author of
The Power of Sound
and other works. Mr. Gurney, who was born about 1847, was the son of the Rev. Hampden Gurney, late Rector of Marylebone. He received his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow after taking his degree as Fourth Classic in 1871. Mr. Gurney was the author of
Phantasms of the Living
and had published two volumes of essays. He suffered from obstinate sleeplessness and painful neuralgia, and succumbed to an overdose of chloroform, incautiously taken last Friday evening when alone at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton, whither he had gone for a night on business.

I passed the paper without comment to Sherlock Holmes. He was sitting in his black velvet jacket while very precisely dividing the leaves of a cigar butt in the butter dish with the aid of a small surgical knife, in pursuit of a case of robbery with violence. He made no immediate reply as he read the newspaper notice.

Presently I said, ‘My warnings about chloroform, such as they were, seem to have done him little good.'

He put the newspaper down, picked up the scalpel, and resumed his inspection of the cigar butt. Without looking up, he said, ‘Had it not been that Chamberlain is still serving seven years in Pentonville, I should have been haunted by the spectre of the professor crossing the threshold of that hotel room and dripping chloroform remorselessly onto the face of the sleeping victim until respiration ceased. I hold no very high opinion of coroners and their juries, as you know. You might murder half of London and they would bring in a verdict of natural causes. In Gurney's case, I assure you, they would have called it misadventure. Not suicide, you observe, and certainly not murder. The poor fellow's weakness was the centre of all that passed. Without that, Chamberlain would have got nowhere.'

‘I fear my advice to him was ill judged, for all the good it did,' I said quietly.

Holmes frowned at the work upon which he was engaged.

‘Then make amends now, my dear fellow, by warning the world against such pernicious habits. When you come to write up this little adventure of ours, which I fear will probably happen, play up the dangers of the practice and give it some such title as ‘The Mystery of the Brighton Chloroform-Eater.”'

As the reader will observe, I declined Holmes's advice in the matter of the title.

The Queen of the Night

1

It was not often that Holmes and I had a client whom we served twice, in quite different matters. Yet such was the case with Lord Holder. The events of this second inquiry followed at some little distance the Newgate Adventure, as my friend described it, early in 1902. More than once they hinted at the great criminal enterprise, frustrated by Sherlock Holmes on that occasion, which had involved the great but deserted prison as a command post of the underworld.

It was on a morning not long before the coronation of Edward VII that Holmes first mentioned Lord Holder. I confess I did not recognize the name of our intended visitor and said so. Holmes folded his newspaper and said,

‘You would know him better as Mr. Alexander Holder, of Holder & Stevenson, bankers of Threadneedle Street. He is now both a peer of the realm and an alderman of the City of London.'

At once my mind went back to the Case of the Beryl Coronet, one of our earlier investigations. Mr. Holder had been approached by an illustrious client whose name was of the noblest and most exalted. As security for a short-term loan, this client deposited a coronet of thirty-nine fine beryl stones, pale green shading into yellow and blue. It was one of the most precious public possessions of the Empire.

The sequel requires few words. While the coronet was in Mr. Holder's possession, there was a robbery—three jewels were broken from their settings and stolen. Suspicion fell on his son. Holmes proved the boy innocent, a youth of generous instincts, one of whom any father should be proud. Since then, the banker had been ennobled for his services to the nation, not least to patrician families who raised money in difficult times by pledging jewels and works of art.

When he entered our sitting room, I still recognised Lord Holder as our client in the former case. Though now about sixty, he remained a man of striking appearance. His figure was tall, portly, and imposing with a massive, strongly marked face and commanding figure. He was dressed in a somber yet rich style: black frock coat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut pearl-grey trousers.

After we had talked a little of his son, who had risen to become private secretary to Lord Milner in Cape Colony, he came to the purpose of his appointment.

‘Gentlemen, the matter at issue is a delicate one. May I ask what you know of the imitating or, indeed, counterfeiting of sapphires and Brazilian diamonds?'

Holmes took the pipe from his mouth and frowned.

‘They are two very different things, my lord. A good reproduction of sapphires may be obtained by using cobalt oxide. The process is similar to the imitation of rubies and often more successful. A Brazilian diamond of the first water would be impossible to imitate with any success. Even a close examination by a retail jeweller would reveal the fraud at once. A casual glance need not betray, certainly not in some lights. However, the deception could not be kept up for more than a short period of time and certainly could not be depended upon.'

I turned to our visitor.

‘Why do you ask, my lord?'

Our visitor looked distinctly uncomfortable.

‘Since I know that everything said here will remain in confidence, I shall try to explain my unease. You are, I imagine, aware of the Earls of Longstaffe?'

I laughed at this.

‘Anyone who reads the racing papers or the gossip columns could not be unaware of them.'

‘Our firm has for many years been bankers to the family, most recently to the present Lord Adolphus Longstaffe, as we were to his father, Lord Alfred, before him. There has frequently been occasion to advance money against security until such time as funds could be raised by the sale or mortgage of a further portion of the Longstaffe estate.'

‘A sale more often than a mortgage, I fear,' said Holmes, gazing at his pipe.

‘The Longstaffe family suffered greatly from the depredations of the late Lord Alfred. It is common knowledge that his way of life in the German spa towns, not to mention Paris and Biarritz, left the estate crippled by debts and claims against him in the courts. He died in Baden-Baden, I believe, at the gaming tables with a hock and seltzer in one hand and not a single lucky card in the other. I fear that his successor, Lord Adolphus Longstaffe, has continued in much the same way,' he continued.

‘I fear so, Mr. Holmes. We customarily hold certain family jewels for safekeeping and, when necessary, as security until the value of land can be realized. Among these is a splendid royal clasp, the so-called Queen of the Night, bequeathed by William IV to his favorite, the young Lady Adeline Longstaffe, seventy years ago.'

‘I am aware of the Queen of the Night,' said Holmes in a quiet voice. ‘When the clasp was shown in the Paris Exhibition, the catalogue gave a specification of its extreme dimensions as three inches laterally and vertically.'

His long, slender fingers drummed on the arm of his chair absentmindedly.

‘I fear I am a stranger to this treasure,' I said frankly. Lord Holder turned to me.

‘Lord Adolphus Longstaffe as the senior member of his family is herald to the Prince of Wales, or to any heir-apparent to the throne. It is a ceremonial rank only. The neck of the robe covering his lordship's tunic on great occasions bears this clasp, the Queen of the Night, whose value is perhaps greater than most state jewels. As with so many priceless ornaments, even the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the royal crown, the gem is not large. You might hold it on the palm of your hand, but not quite in it.'

‘I am still not entirely clear what it is, other than a clasp at the neck of his cloak.'

‘A fine Brazilian diamond, Doctor,' said Lord Holder patiently, ‘a twelve-sided rhombic dodecahedron, set among sapphires of the deepest blue. There is also a small silver clip. This enables the diamond to be detached and worn alone, if so desired. The great Koh-i-Noor—the River of Light in the royal crown—is said to weigh one hundred eighty-six carats, though there has been some dispute of late. Estimates of the Queen of the Night may also vary, but it cannot be less than one hundred forty carats. The entire clasp is a work of art, a brilliant star among midnight blue, as well as a jewel. Like any treasure of that nature, the workmanship makes it almost impossible to put a realistic value on it. It is, quite simply, beyond price.'

‘From where did it come?'

Holmes intervened.

‘You may believe if you choose, Watson, that the star came from the looting of the Portuguese vice-regal palace by European mercenaries during Brazil's wars of independence. It is said to be the ransom paid for the viceroy's life and the vicereine's honour. I prefer the tale of it, being wagered and lost against a woman's affections, during a game of faro played between a royal brother and a future prime minister in the presence of the Prince Regent at Carlton House.'