The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (27 page)

Robert MacCowan left our rooms still blustering yet with a dreadful light of fear in his eyes. He had nailed his colours to the mast before the coroner's jury and the magistrates. Nothing could save him, in a few weeks' time, from a public martyrdom at the hands of Edward Marshall Hall in the witness-box of the Central Criminal Court. Yet Sherlock Holmes was as good as his word. Captain O'Malley retained sufficient influence among his sporting friends to obtain for Mr MacCowan a place as table-waiter at Romano's, through whose famous window we once or twice glimpsed him in the years that followed.

We had one other visitor, the saddest of all. She was a dark-haired young woman of delicate beauty and moral frailty, the artist's model, Ruby Young, who had been Robert Wood's mistress. She came because, in her fear, she believed that she had now betrayed her lover to the gallows. As soon as the murder was reported in the press, Wood had asked her to swear a false alibi that they were together the night of Emily Dimmock's death and had not parted until 10.30 near Brompton Oratory.

Uncertain what to do, dreading that the false alibi she had given might make her an accomplice in murder, she had confessed to the police. With tears, she now pleaded with Holmes to assure her that she had not done a terrible wrong.

‘Not in the least,' Holmes said airily. ‘You have done Mr Wood a great service.'

She looked up at him. ‘But it was I who asked him to meet me and led the police to him!'

‘Madam,' said Holmes, ‘consider this. Emily Dimmock was seen alive at ten thirty
P
.
M
. by Joseph Lambert the bookseller, and by others in the bar of the Eagle, in the company of Mr Wood. She ate a meal soon afterwards and met her death three hours after consuming it, to judge by the state of digestion of the food found in her stomach. She cannot have died before 2
A
.
M
. at the earliest. The degree of
rigor mortis
in her body when it was first examined suggests that she more probably died at about 5
A
.
M
.'

‘I did not know,' she said simply.

‘Nor could Robert Wood have known anything about the medical evidence when he asked you for an alibi,' said Holmes firmly. ‘It was not public knowledge until the coroner's inquest. Consider his dilemma beforehand. He was a young man who knew that questions would be asked by the police of all those who had been seen with Emily Dimmock on the last evening of her life. He was also a young man who dreaded that his family, with whom he still lived, would hear that he kept the company of prostitutes in the public houses of Camden Town and the Euston Road. That was the reason why he wanted an alibi for Wednesday evening. Not murder! Do you not see it, Miss Young? The alibi for which he asked you, covering the evening until half past ten, was useless to him as a defence against a charge of murdering Miss Dimmock in the small hours of the morning. But only the murderer himself would have known that at the time when you were asked for a false alibi. Therefore, the murderer was not Robert Wood.'

The world knows the conclusion of the story. The case against Robert Wood was not dropped, despite Mr Arthur Newton's best efforts. Our young artist went on trial at the Central Criminal Court in December 1907, where the great defender, Edward Marshall Hall, cut up the witnesses for the Crown into very thin slices, as the saying goes. Robert Wood was acquitted and left the court to the cheers of the crowds outside. The unfortunate Ruby Young was jeered and chased down the street for her betrayal of her lover, as the London mob believed.

The name of Sherlock Holmes was not mentioned directly at the trial. Yet his shadow fell upon it in consequence of the visits we had received from the belligerent Mr MacCowan and the tearful Miss Ruby Young. Those who care to read the proceedings in the Notable British Trials volume that contains the case of Robert Wood will find a comment by Mr Justice Grantham at page 149, with reference to a complaint by MacCowan.

I learn now that MacCowan was a witness before the magistrates. If the persons who are guilty of causing the annoyance are brought before me, they will not forget it in a hurry—that is all I can say. It is intolerable that witnesses should be subjected to attack and abuse for giving evidence, and if the person responsible is brought into this Court, it will be some time probably before he goes free.

Holmes insisted that he had not interfered with the witnesses in the case. One and all had come to him of their own free will, even MacCowan. He had not obliged them to seek him out. Perhaps my friend was a little disingenuous. They walked into a trap, which he had baited with great care. So far as the courts of law acknowledged his existence, Mr Justice Grantham's comments on my friend's investigation of the murder of Emily Dimmock was as close to the wind as Sherlock Holmes ever sailed.

IV

After the acquittal of Robert Wood, no other person was brought to trial for the Camden Town murder. Detective Inspector Arthur Neil and his assistant, Sergeant Page, had gathered all the evidence available to them. If it did not point to Wood, it seemed to point to no one. Yet there was a curious epilogue, if one may use the word for so bizarre a conclusion.

In the attic of our Baker Street diggings, the first lumber-room alone remained orderly enough to have been a work-room. Holmes had a horror of destroying documents, especially those connected with his past cases. Yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them. From time to time one or other of us had occasion to go up to this first room. On the wall hung a painting, which was curtained in red velvet, as if to protect it from the light. I had once seen what lay beneath and had no wish to repeat the experience.

Thereafter, Holmes was the only person who ever drew that curtain back. It veiled a painting by a friend of Robert Wood and was the only token of thanks that Holmes ever received from the young man. The artist was the impressionist painter Walter Sickert, more famous in later years than he was at the time for his studies of low life. This canvas was a horror. It showed Emily Dim-mock as she was found with her throat cut on 12 September 1912. Other studies from Sickert's
Camden Town Murder
series have long received public display and general interest. Holmes judged that this item had best remain curtained from innocent eyes. On his visits to that lumber-room, he once told me, he would stand with the curtain drawn back, smoking his pipe as he gazed at the image on the canvas and pondered what manner of man was, in truth, the Camden Town murderer.

Several years after the case was concluded, Holmes met Walter Sickert for the first time during an artists' dinner of some kind at the Café Royal. There was a good deal of boastful talk, which led Sickert to assert that ‘a painter cannot paint something of which he has no experience'.

My friend was struck by this remark. A few weeks later, he secured an invitation to the artist's studio in Camden Town. It was there that he saw a portfolio of drawings on the same subject and purchased one inscribed
Persuasion
, in which a man sits on a bed, a woman lying across his lap and his hands obscurely round her throat, either in a caress or an act of strangulation. The painter afterwards became sensitive to questions about his ‘Camden Town murders' and changed the title of the series to ‘What Shall we Do for the Rent?'

Holmes sought occasion over some other matter to invite Inspector Neil to our rooms. In the course of the visit, he displayed a few souvenirs including the snuffbox of Sèvres porcelain which had belonged to President Faure and the diamond tie-pin which he had brought home with him after a visit to Windsor in 1890. Then the two men went up to the lumber-room.

I did not accompany them but noticed that Inspector Neil came down a good deal paler than he went up. Guessing the cause of this, I poured him a glass of brandy and soda, setting it on the little table by his chair.

‘A nasty daub, that painting,' I said reassuringly, ‘and all the worse for being in a blotchy impressionist style. If it were mine, I should burn it.'

Sherlock Holmes intervened. ‘Robert Wood, after he was released, acted as the model,' he said.

Neil looked up at him. ‘That's not it. I saw Wood's likeness clear enough. That's not it.'

‘What is it, then?' I asked.

‘That room of hers, where she died!' he said. ‘It's as we found it, in every detail! I'm no artist, Dr Watson, and I know little enough about the ways of art. But he has got that room and the girl herself as plain as if it were a photograph!'

‘Do you say,' asked Holmes innocently, ‘that a painter cannot paint something of which he has no experience?'

Neil stared into his glass.

‘I can't say that, Mr Holmes. You might, if you understand art. I know little enough of such things—and where's the evidence now? Wood never denied he'd been to her room on earlier nights—and he might have described it to anyone. But Dr Watson is right. If that thing were mine, I should take it off its hook and burn it before I looked at it again.'

Holmes made a sympathetic sound but, from his eyes, I could see that for him Walter Sickert's daub now took on the quality of a true work of art.

The Case of the Missing Rifleman

I

In order that the reader may understand more readily the investigation that follows, it may be as well if I say something of the origin of the inquiry. It was the second case in which the path of Sherlock Holmes crossed that of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, thirteen years after the trial of Robert Wood for the Camden Town Murder. On this later occasion, however, there was to be a certain bruising of vanity in both parties.

The mystery dated from the summer of 1919, the first after the Great War, a time when a good number of young men and their officers were returning to civilian life from the army and the trenches of the Western Front.

A few miles to the east of the town of Leicester lie a number of little villages connected by a network of small country roads or lanes. Once these were farming communities—now they supply labour to the factories and industries of Leicester itself. Annie Bella Wright was a respectable young woman of twenty-one who worked in a rubber factory and was engaged to a naval stoker. On 5 July 1919, she came off the night shift and cycled home the few miles to the little village of Stoughton, where she lived with her parents. She went to bed and, after several hours' sleep, got up to finish writing some letters. She posted these at about 4
P
.
M
.

At 6.30 that evening, she took her bicycle and set off for the hamlet of Gaulby, three miles away, to visit her uncle, Mr Measures, and his son-in-law, Mr Evans. By the time that she arrived at their cottage in the centre of Gaulby, Bella Wright had a companion, a young man riding a green BSA bicycle. Safely inside the cottage, she assured her uncle that this young man was a perfect stranger, who had overtaken her as she was cycling from Stoughton and had engaged her in conversation on the remainder of the short journey. Mr Measures clearly remembered that his niece had said to him, ‘Perhaps if I wait a while he will be gone.'

When Bella Wright left her uncle's house, however, the young man had returned, as if he had been waiting for her. ‘Bella, you
have
been a long time,' he said pleasantly. ‘I thought you had gone the other way.' The two of them rode off together, the time being about a quarter to nine and the summer evening still light. Half an hour later, Bella Wright was found lying dead less than two miles away in the Gartree Road, which was not her direct route home. Her head had been badly injured and the first doctor who was called thought she had died as a result of a bad fall from her bicycle. Next day, a policeman who searched the narrow country road at the point of the incident found a spent .455 cartridge on the ground, seventeen feet from where her body had been lying. A post-mortem revealed the entry wound of a bullet in her left cheek, just below the eye, and a larger exit wound at the top of her head.

A curiosity near the scene of the crime was the discovery of a carrion crow, lying dead in the adjoining field, about sixty feet away. It was described at first as being gorged with blood, which was presumed to have come from the dead girl's wound. The amount that the bird had consumed was said to have caused a surfeit from which it had died. There was a field gate on to the road a few yards from where the girl's body lay. Between the white-painted gate and the body were what appeared to be twelve bloody claw-tracks, six in each direction, as if the bird had moved to and fro between the gate and the corpse.

A description of the man on the green bicycle and of the machine itself was issued by the police. A reward was offered for information. Many months passed and nothing more was heard, except from two girls of twelve and fourteen, who had been cycling in the lanes nearby. They agreed that, earlier on 5 July, a man riding a bicycle came towards them, smiled and spoke to them as he passed. Having gone by, he stopped, turned his bicycle and began to follow them. The girls, feeling uneasy at his interest in them, reversed their own direction and rode home towards Leicester.

It was little enough to go on. The summer ended. Winter came and went. The investigation got nowhere and the Leicestershire county police were not helped by a complete lack of any apparent motive for the killing. Bella Wright had been neither robbed nor assaulted in any way. Why should any individual, the rider of the green bicycle or not, shoot dead a blameless and industrious young woman?

Holmes had followed the scanty newspaper reports with a vague interest but, in truth, there seemed little that even he could have done with such disjointed scraps of evidence. His attention was caught at last when he read, in March 1920, that a man had been arrested and charged with the murder of Bella Wright. The accused was an assistant master at a school in Cheltenham, a former engineer who had been an officer of the Honourable Artillery Company, invalided out of the service with shell shock at the end of the late war. Until his appointment to the school two months earlier, he had lived with his widowed mother in Leicester. Yet even this information was nothing to the expectation that glinted in Holmes's eyes when he saw that the young man, Ronald Light, was to be defended by Sir Edward Marshall Hall.