The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (37 page)

‘Hold the lantern up, Watson, there's a good fellow.'

It was, I suppose, a four-foot length of board, several inches wide, that came clear. He handed it down. Five more of the same size followed until, as we looked up, only the waterproof felt separated us from the room above and the beam supporting the new partition wall.

‘She could not have done it from here, of course,' he said. ‘That felt is complete and uncut from one end of the two rooms to the other. We had best go back up.'

Back in the dressing area of Mrs Carew's bedroom was evidence enough to indict her, if not to convict her. It was as if, under the heavy waterproof felt, a stage trap-door had been opened. Though strong and thick in itself, the material sagged all the more for being at the centre of the flooring. The gap of half an inch under the supporting beam of the partition wall was now half a foot. By moving one or two pieces of furniture from the dressing area to the main bedroom, it was possible to make the felt sag further as the weight holding it in place was lessened.

‘I had supposed,' Holmes said, ‘that she must have had an accomplice. Her lover Harry Dickinson, for example. Yet she might have done it for herself. There is a gap under the partition beam that even I might get through.'

He took off his jacket, folded it, and eased himself under the beam, head-first and on his back. The bony knuckles whitened as the strong fingers gripped the beam from underneath as a support. Then his long legs were drawn after him and Holmes stood in the other room on the far side of the partition wall.

‘There was surely an accomplice,' I said, as we prepared to leave the house half an hour later. ‘Someone to see Edith Carew's signal that the nurse had gone, to draw the boards clear from underneath and to replace them when a second signal was given.'

‘Perhaps,' he said thoughtfully. ‘Yet it needed only the edge of a carpet on the other side to conceal the way in which the felt was sagging. In that case, she could have drawn the boards out much earlier, before she came up to her room for the night. I daresay we shall never know.'

‘Could a woman undertake so much?' I asked.

He chuckled in the darkness of the driveway as we made for the lights of The Bluff.

‘My dear fellow, your incredulity as to the resolve of the fair sex on these occasions never ceases to amaze me! Mrs Edith Carew was about to prepare a fatal dose of arsenic for her husband and chance the gallows for it. It was that night or never, if she was to let Mary Jacob hang in her place. Compared to such a gamble, I do not suppose that removing a few boards from the verandah or turning back a carpet and wriggling under a beam caused her the least hesitation.'

I had no doubt that he was, as always, correct.

We went at once to the British Naval Prison, where Holmes demanded—rather than asked—to see Mary Jacob. The poor little soul was, if anything, paler than before. I swear she was more frightened of Holmes than of those who would hang her.

‘Very well,' he said, as we sat at the bare table. ‘I see you have done as I asked and left everything in this room as it was. Before we go further, be so good as to fetch me the birthday present Mrs Carew gave you in September.'

Mary Jacob looked astonished.

‘How could you know that my birthday was in September or that she gave me a present?'

‘Never mind that,' he said gently. ‘Fetch it and show it to me.'

Mary Jacob got up and went to the little table by her bedside.

‘For God's sake, Holmes!' I said under my breath. ‘How do you know there was a birthday present?'

‘Because, my dear Watson, Edith Carew loathed her far too much to risk giving her a present on any other occasion. Even she could hardly ignore the girl's birthday. It fell, most conveniently, in September. The records of Somerset House confirm her date of birth. You must give me credit for sometimes following the strait and narrow path of the obvious.'

Miss Jacob returned and set down before us the bottle of Yardley's Lavender Water. Holmes unscrewed the top and sniffed at it, then he held it up to the light.

‘They have made it almost too easy for me,' he said wistfully to himself, then turned to his client again. ‘If I may say so, Miss Jacob, you have used a good deal of spirits of lavender in the few weeks since your birthday.'

She looked a little abashed.

‘There was an accident. It was upset on the dressing-table when the Chinese boy, Ah Kwong, was cleaning the room.'

‘Poor boy! No doubt the perfume seeped into all the drawers and among their contents,' Holmes said sympathetically. ‘And were you there when this unfortunate accident happened in the first week or so of October, Miss Jacob?'

‘No,' she said, seeming surprised. ‘Mrs Carew told me when I came back from running her errands down the town.'

‘And even before you returned, poor Ah Kwong was dismissed for an act of clumsiness that was by no means his first.'

‘Yes,' she said earnestly. ‘But how could you possibly know that it was not the poor boy's first clumsiness or that it happened in the first week of October, unless someone else has told you?'

Holmes laughed, this time to reassure her.

‘You give me too much credit, Miss Jacob. I do not know such things: I merely guess them. Very often I am wrong. I hope, however, that you will keep the empty lavender-water bottle in a place where you may always see it, to remind you of a very narrow squeak.'

He got up and left the little room. Through the open door I heard him demanding—rather than requesting—the immediate release of his innocent client.

VIII

‘You knew from the first, Holmes!' I said as we left the building. ‘This whole business might have been cleared up without our having to leave Baker Street!'

‘Not quite,' he said with a sigh. ‘I was pretty sure from the second day after Dr Jacob visited us. The date of Mary Jacob's birthday, of course, I got from Somerset House. Then I went to pay a call on brother Mycroft at the Diogenes Club. Remarkable place for the
recherché
, Watson. I suppose you would scarcely credit that their reading room takes the
Japan Gazette
. The latest issues are a little delayed but they had the report in full of the inquest on Walter Carew. I had to be sure that Dr Jacob's information was correct—and so it was. Mrs Carew gave evidence that she had once bought Fowler's Solution from Schedel's European Pharmacy on The Bluff. Mary Jacob, as we have seen for ourselves, had a penchant for the more sensational type of fiction. Naturally she went to Maruya's in the town, a bookshop as well as a pharmacy. If only Mrs Carew had known that, when Fowler's Solution is prepared in Japanese pharmacies, spirits of lavender are not added, I doubt if I should ever have left Baker Street at all.'

The true financial cost of the investigation would have taken all the money from Dr Jacob's note-case and a good deal more. Holmes preferred to regard his expedition to Japan as a voyage of experience. He positively refused to take a fee of any kind from our client. His last meeting with Mary Jacob, however, was no more comfortable than the others.

‘You would do well to remember, Miss Jacob,' he said dispassionately, ‘that taking letters addressed to others and practising their signatures is a game in children and a crime in adults. I hope that you have learned that lesson thoroughly.'

The world knows the conclusion of the story. The case against Mary Jacob collapsed and the prosecution in Her Britannic Majesty's Consular Court at Yokohama was withdrawn. In that same court, Mrs Edith Carew was afterwards convicted of the murder of her husband. On a day of winter rain driving in from the Pacific Ocean, Mr Justice Mowat, who had sat beside Consul Troupe throughout the trial, placed the black cap upon his head and pronounced a sentence of such unusual jurisdiction that Holmes positively would not leave Yokohama until he had heard it.

‘The sentence is that you Edith Mary Hallowell Carew, be forthwith taken from the place where you now stand and be taken to the British Consular Gaol in Yokohama, and therein interned. And that on a day appointed by the proper authority, you be taken to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead …'

The sentence of death on Edith Carew, to be carried out at the British Naval Prison in the presence of the Consul, was forwarded to the Ambassador in Tokyo for confirmation. The Ambassador recalled, however, that on the day before her conviction, the Japanese Emperor had proclaimed a remission to all his subjects who were under sentence that day. It was accordingly ordered that Mrs Carew should be reprieved and sent to penal servitude with hard labour for life. She was brought home to Aylesbury prison to serve her sentence, from which she was released fourteen years later.

In the sunshine of what seemed like a spring afternoon, Holmes stared across the sparkling water of the natural harbour.

‘You see, Watson? It is just as I told you. The true mystery after all was not Professor Pepper's ghost nor the tensile strength and elasticity of materials as Professor Vanek of Budapest and other physicists had studied them. Our interest must be the mind that can purchase and measure death by spoonfuls day after day with a kindly smile and without the least remorse for the martyrdom of pain. Not death by a single blow, my dear friend, but by slow and deliberate torture. I confess that I find the new science of psycho-pathology deficient in its study of this most interesting of all states of the human mind. Our experience here ought not to pass without some commemoration of it. I wonder whether I might not spend the leisure of our homeward journey in writing a short monograph on so deserving a topic.'

Author's Note

The stories in this volume are based upon historical events, over which the shadow of the Great Detective is allowed to pass. Apart from Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, almost all the other figures in the stories played the parts ascribed to them here, except where minor characters have been invented to give continuity to the narratives.

‘The Ghost in the Machine' alters little except for the introduction of Sherlock Holmes, as the scientific detective who saved Dr Smethurst from the gallows. The near-fatal error of the forensic investigators occurred in fact, as it does here in fiction.

In ‘The Case of the Crown Jewels', the explanation of the robbery is based upon the characters and activities of two gentlemen-crooks of the Edwardian period, Frank Shackleton and Richard Gorges. Gorges survived his imprisonment for shooting a policeman and died as a pauper in an institution in the 1950s. Sir Arthur Vicars and Peirce Mahony died in the circumstances described here. The Crown Jewels of Ireland have never been found.

‘The Case of the Unseen Hand' is based upon events in the history of the Third Republic, between 1894 and 1909. The main story is taken from Marguerite Steinheil,
My Memoirs
, Eveleigh Nash, 1912, which describes President Faure's ‘Secret History'. The account of the President's death, in bed with Madame Steinheil, was given by President Casimir-Périer to the French Ambassador to St Petersburg, Maurice Georges Paléologue. It was suppressed until the publication of Paléologue's
Journal de l'Affaire Dreyfus
, Librairie Plon, 1955. Gustave Hamard and Alphonse Bertillon were prominent figures in their respective branches of the Súreté. The criminal activities of the Comte de Balincourt and his three associates are described in Marguerite Steinheil's memoirs. There exists a heroic painting,
The Deathbed of President Faure
, in which the great statesman expires decorously with his ministers, family, and priests standing round. Madame Steinheil triumphed over the scandal and the double-murder prosecution. She was to die in England, at the seaside town of Hove in 1954, as the sixth Baroness Abinger.

Rumours of a morganatic marriage between the future George V and the daughter of Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour at Malta in 1890 circulated in the press until the specific allegations by Edward Mylius brought the case to court in 1911. The allegations referred to in ‘The Case of the Blood Royal' are in the Public Record Office at PRO KB28/704/1. The manuscript of the Prince's diary for 1888, cited in Kenneth Rose,
King George V
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983, and James Lees-Milne,
Harold Nicolson: A Biography 1930–1968
, Chatto & Windus, 1981, refers to the unnamed girl with whom he used to sleep at Portsmouth and another in St John's Wood, whom he shared with his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence. ‘She is a ripper,' he added. The death of the blackmailer Charles Augustus Howell—whom Conan Doyle presented as ‘Charles Augustus Milverton'—was reported by Oscar Wilde and by Thomas James Wise in
A Bibliography of the Writings of Algernon Charles Swinburne
, 1919–20. His death certificate more tactfully describes the victim as dying of ‘pneumonia'.

The defence of Robert Wood and the Green Bicycle Case were among the greatest triumphs of Sir Edward Marshall Hall as a defence lawyer. ‘The Case of the Camden Town Murder' and ‘The Case of the Missing Rifleman' make Sherlock Holmes the colleague of the great defender. Each criminal investigation took the form and had the outcome described in the two stories. The Camden Town killer was never caught. However, Walter Sickert's obsession with painting and drawing the subject led to suggestions of his involvement. Sickert (1860–1942) was a friend of the young artist, Robert Wood, who stood trial for the murder, and helped to raise money for Wood's defence. In Stephen Knight,
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
, Harrap, 1976, it is suggested that Sickert's dedication to the Camden Town Murder extended to an involvement in the Whitechapel murders of 1888.

The murderer of Bella Wright was never brought to justice. Marshall Hall's attitude to Ronald Light, before and after the trial, suggests that he believed Light had killed the girl, probably by accident. As counsel, he appears never to have discussed the case directly with his client except for a few minutes after Light had already entered the dock. A short story in the
Strand
magazine described how a single bullet from a hunter's rifle, intended to shoot the crow on the gate, might pass through the bird and kill Bella Wright. The story did not explain why the hunter would shoot crows with ammunition of .455 calibre or what weapon could be used for this.