The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Such was the practical education of Sherlock Holmes. Small wonder that in later years he could assume the appearance or speech of common men, so that even his friends did not penetrate the disguise. On other nights he would turn to his books, threading some obscure avenue of research whose result would bring success to an investigation in a manner that astonished all who heard of it.

No man had so curious a library as Sherlock Holmes. You might look in vain for volumes that were in half the families of England. But if you sought industries peculiar to a small town in Bohemia, or unique chemical constituents of Sumatran or Virginian tobacco leaf, or the alienist's account of morbid individual psychology, or the methods by which a Ming is to be distinguished from a skilful imitation, he had only to reach out his hand for the answer. In far more cases, however, that answer was carried in his head.

On a shelf of the break-front bookcase, between works on the manufacture of paper and a set of the Newgate Calendar, I noticed that a number of volumes and two finely bound essays lay on their sides. They had been disregarded and gathering dust for some years. Their contents had been abstracted and stored in that precise and ordered mind. The slimmest volume was by Dr David Hutchinson and it had won the Fiske Fund Prize of the Rhode Island Medical Society in 1857: ‘What are the Causes of that Disease incident to Pregnancy, characterised by Inflammation of the Mouth and Fauces, accompanied by Anorexia and Emaciation?' Next to it were works of a similar kind by Abercrombie and by Professor Stoltz of Vienna, as well as fifty-eight accounts of related fatalities in Cartaya's ‘Vomissements incoercibles pendant la grossesse'.

In these volumes lay the clue to what Holmes called his first investigation, whose outcome meant life or death for its subject. By his pursuit of that inquiry, he brought his skill in scientific analysis to the notice of Scotland Yard. You may read a fuller account of Dr Smethurst's ordeal in the Notable British Trials volumes and in the newspapers of the day. Holmes, however, shunned the limelight. He preferred to remain ‘behind the scenes', for fear of embarrassing his patrons or revealing too much of himself.

His report, as I read it, had been drawn up for Mr Hardinge Giffard, whom history now knows as the great Lord Chancellor Halsbury. If that investigation of Dr Smethurst's crime did not bring public fame to Sherlock Holmes, it surely placed his skills before the nation's rulers. To that first case I now turn.

The Ghost in the Machine

I

As Holmes described the scene to me, it was a blazing Sunday afternoon at the end of May, a high sun beating hard on the still and empty length of Lambeth Palace Road. He readily confessed that business had been poor. After lunch on Saturday, he had shut himself in his room and set himself to work there until Monday morning, when he might have access to the laboratory again. The idleness of ‘Sunday observance' always made his active mind fretful and the time of which I write was one when a rigorous Sabbath was much in fashion. Among such pieties in the homes of Westminster, Holmes was pursuing the subtleties of murder by poisonous perfumes at the court of Louis XIV.

He was just then absorbed in the fate of the young Madame de Brinvilliers, who had not been permitted execution until she had first undergone the ordeal of the water-torture. Such vindictive aberrations of the human mind were irresistible to him. Yet he was not, as the phrase has it, lost to the world. Standing at his oak reading-desk, turning the crisp pages of a seventeenth-century folio volume, Holmes nonetheless heard the wheels of a solitary hansom cab in the quiet sunlit street outside. Without ceasing to read of Madame de Brinvilliers, he heard the same wheels stop beneath his window. There came the jangle of the bell and the voice of his landlady, Mrs Harris, in conversation with a female visitor. There were words of surprised recognition.

A door opened and closed on the lower floor. Ten minutes later it opened again and footsteps sounded on the stairs. There was a knock at Holmes's sitting-room door and Mrs Harris entered in response to his summons.

The good lady was flushed with apology at disturbing her lodger on a Sunday afternoon. Only the assurance that this was a matter of life and death, that it concerned her oldest and dearest friend, that speed was of the essence, could be offered in excuse. Her friend, Miss Louisa Bankes, would see Mr Holmes—and would see no one else.

Holmes listened, laid a silk marker in his folio volume, and closed the cover.

‘Dear me,' he said gently. ‘At all events one can't refuse a lady, and such a positive one at that. If she will take me as she finds me, I am at her service.'

‘She had heard of you from your notice in the column of the paper and, seeing your address was here, must have your opinion,' Mrs Harris assured him.

‘And no doubt she has heard a little from you, Mrs Harris,' Holmes said kindly. ‘Well, we must not keep her waiting. Will you not show your friend up?'

It had seemed to him better that their interview should take place in his sitting-room, where he might more easily discuss the troubles of Miss Louisa Bankes without inviting Mrs Harris's presence.

The landlady returned a moment later in company with a slight but pretty woman, auburn-haired and about thirty-five years old. Her high-boned face was animated by the glance of quick grey eyes, though she looked at that moment flustered rather than animated.

‘Thank you, Mrs Harris,' Holmes said courteously, in just such a manner as gave the landlady no alternative but to withdraw. He looked again at Miss Bankes and thought that she was possessed of the prettiest face he had seen under a bonnet for many a month.

‘Mr Holmes?' she said before he could offer her a seat, ‘I beg you to excuse my arrival in this fashion. I have read your notice in
The Times
on several occasions and had half persuaded myself to communicate with you some weeks ago. Now I fear it may be too late. It would have been more proper, I know, to write to you. But a letter could not reach you until Tuesday and the matter cannot wait. I knew I could reach you by way of Waterloo or the White Horse Cellar every half-hour and that I must do so at once.'

‘By all means,' Holmes said gently. ‘Pray sit down, Miss Bankes. Try the sofa, and tell me what it is that cannot wait until Tuesday. Pray, take your time.'

Louisa Bankes swept across the room. The sofa was the only article of furniture that would comfortably accommodate such full, cream skirts, a tribute to the crinoline still somewhat in fashion. The day was warm and yet she shivered as she drew about her the rose mantle edged in crimson. She faced Holmes, as if undecided how to begin, sitting with her back to the window.

‘Mr Holmes,' she said at last, ‘you will think me melodramatic, I know. You may even think me hysterical. I have come here because I must have your help on behalf of my sister. I believe she is being murdered.'

She paused and Holmes looked at her keenly but not unkindly. He crossed to the window and stared down at the hansom cab, which still waited outside. For a moment he said nothing. Then he turned to her.

‘I take it,' he said gently, ‘that your sister is living with her husband at Richmond or thereabouts. You believe that for some time he has been poisoning her. She is, I assume, married to a doctor.'

Louisa Bankes looked up at him with something like fear in her eyes.

‘Then you know!' she cried.

‘I do not know, Miss Bankes. I deduce certain possibilities from what you have just told me.'

‘But I have told you nothing!' she protested.

Holmes settled himself in the chair on the opposite side of the fireplace.

‘On the contrary,' he said, ‘you informed me that you might have come at any half-hour to Waterloo or the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. The Richmond bus comes at the half-hour to the White Horse and the Richmond train every half-hour to Waterloo. Their routes do not cross elsewhere, except Richmond. Your demeanour suggests that you have come directly from a scene of great distress. You do not tell me that your sister has been murdered or is
going
to be murdered. You say that she
is
being murdered. A murder which is part accomplished surely suggests poison. When a woman is being poisoned and even her own sister is unable to prevent it, the guilty hand is very close to her indeed and is in all probability her husband's. It is true, of course, I cannot swear that your sister's husband is a doctor, but that is far the most common profession in such cases.'

The poor young woman bit her lip and then looked up.

‘You are right, though, Mr Holmes. He is a doctor.'

‘You had best tell me the circumstances,' Holmes said quietly.

Louisa Bankes kept her eyes steadfastly upon him, as if to convince him of her sincerity and, indeed, her sanity.

‘My sister Isabella is a little older than I, Mr Holmes, but was also unmarried until December. Up to September, we had lived together in Notting Hill. The house was mine. Then she suggested that it would be better for us to live apart. There was no quarrel between us. I made no objection, though I feared there might be an association of which she was ashamed and wished to keep from her family. From September until November she lived at a boarding-house in Rifle Terrace, Bayswater. Among the other guests was a medical man of about fifty, Dr Smethurst. I cannot tell you whether his presence was the reason for her moving there. After some weeks, the familiarity between them grew so scandalous that the landlady, Mrs Smith, asked my sister to find other accommodation. Bella moved to Kildare Terrace, nearby. On the twelfth of December, she married Dr Smethurst at Battersea Church and they set up home at Alma Villas, Richmond, in furnished rooms. Bella became ill soon afterwards, first with biliousness and then with dysentery. It is his doing, Mr Holmes.'

As she paused, Holmes asked, ‘May I ask, Miss Bankes, whether your sister is a wealthy woman?'

‘Not wealthy, Mr Holmes, but she has a comfortable income on capital of eighteen hundred pounds. It is the interest on a mortgage.'

‘I see,' Holmes said. ‘Pray continue. What of your sister's health in the past?'

Louisa Bankes shivered once more and then composed herself.

‘My sister had been in good health before her marriage, except that she sometimes suffered from bilious attacks. They were not frequent and never severe. I had no suspicions of Dr Smethurst until last month. Then, on the eighteenth of April, I received a letter from him telling me that Bella was really very ill and that she had asked for me to come to her. See here.'

She opened her bag and drew out a folded sheet of notepaper. She handed it to Holmes. He glanced at it, repeating aloud the phrases which caught his attention.

‘“You will greatly oblige by coming alone … breathe not a word of this note to anyone …” Curious instructions, Miss Bankes. Did you visit your sister?'

The woman gave a half-sob at the recollection.

‘I did, Mr Holmes, on the very same day. She was lying in bed, looking so pale and weak, scarcely able to move. She saw that I was alarmed at the sight of her and she said to me, “Oh, don't say anything about it to anyone. It will be all right when I get better.” '

Holmes frowned. ‘A very singular caution, Miss Bankes. And have you seen her since?'

Louisa Bankes shook her head and drew several more folded sheets of notepaper from her bag.

‘Everything I received afterwards was written by Thomas Smethurst,' she continued. ‘In the next letter, on the following day, he tells me that Bella passed a very bad night. The excitement of seeing me had brought back the vomiting and purging. A doctor had been called and had forbidden any further visits. A few more days passed and then he wrote again, saying that I might see her in a week's time. But, when that week had passed, he sent me these.'

She handed the other letters to Holmes, who once again read out the ominous phrases.

‘“Dearest Bella begs of you to wait a little longer before calling upon her …”; “I much regret the state of the case will not yet admit of your seeing her …” '

Louisa Bankes broke in upon the reading.

‘How can it not admit of my seeing her, Mr Holmes? Until last autumn, when this wretch stole his way into her affections, we had lived together. Sickness or health was all one in our sisterhood. Today he writes again and warns me that I had best take lodgings close to them but must not come to the house. What does it mean, except that she is to die and I am not to see her until the end?'

Holmes studied this last letter, a look of concern in his sharp eyes. Then he handed back the pages.

‘You have reason for suspicion, Miss Bankes. However—'

‘“However”, Mr Holmes? Before you say “however”, let me add this. I myself have done everything to see my sister, without avail. Then I begged him at least to let our family physician, Dr Lane, examine her. He refused to have Dr Lane in the house. In desperation, two days ago, I lay in wait and spoke to Susannah Wheatley, the daughter of the landlady at Alma Villas. I asked her how Bella was. She told me that she feared for my sister and that Bella had signed a will drawn up by Dr Smethurst. Miss Wheatley had witnessed it. Surely, Mr Holmes, he has imprisoned her there to take her life as a means of possessing himself of her money.'

Holmes said nothing for a moment, then he looked up at his visitor.

‘During an illness of such length and gravity, your sister has been seen by other medical men?'

Louisa Bankes looked back at him wide-eyed in her despair, ‘Dr Julius and his partner Dr Bird have both seen her. But Thomas Smethurst is a doctor too. Do you not think he could make poison appear as some disease? Dr Bird and Dr Julius are both led to believe that she has dysentery.'

Holmes said nothing for a moment, then the keen eyes settled upon her again.

‘Answer me one question, if you please, Miss Bankes. If all is as you say, why have you come to me?'