The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (38 page)

‘The Case of the Yokohama Club' involved criminal proceedings little reported in England but carried verbatim in the
Japan Gazette
in 1896–7. Mary Esther Jacob was prosecuted at the instigation of Edith Carew before the Court of the British Consul at Yokohama, on a charge of having murdered her employer, Walter Carew. The evidence against her was such as the story describes. The case collapsed suddenly when further evidence was uncovered against Mrs Carew. Edith Carew was tried and sentenced to death by the same court in Yokohama but reprieved as a result of the intervention of the British Ambassador in Tokyo. She was brought back to England and was released from life imprisonment in Aylesbury gaol in 1911. The stage-magicians described in the story were well-known figures of Victorian entertainment. The ghost illusion is described at length in Chapter 6 of J. E. Robert-Houdin's
Secrets of Stage Conjuring
(1881).

Some further light is shed on the lives of Holmes and Watson. It has long been known that Holmes retired in 1903 to a life of bee-keeping on the southern slopes of the Sussex Downs, near the coast at Cuckmere Haven, taking with him Mrs Hudson as housekeeper. It is not surprising that, after a while, he should have missed his old acquaintances and the stimulus of criminal investigation. His services to the nation also required his presence in London. As several of these stories indicate, he took on the Baker Street rooms again when they fell vacant, alternating professional work in London and retirement in Sussex until after the First World War.

Dr Watson's first two marriages interrupted his residence in Baker Street, which ended at last with his third marriage in 1902. He was, however, the guest of Sherlock Holmes during weeks when the third Mrs Watson was absent from London ‘on family business' and when the two men were engaged in such matters of national importance as the disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels.

For Linda

Ilia quae libros amat, a libris quoque amatur

Fragment De Popina Candelarum

Contents

The Two ‘Failures' of Sherlock Holmes

The Case of the Racing Certainty

The Case of the Naked Bicyclists

The Case of the Sporting Major

The Case of the Hygienic Husband

The Voice from the Crypt: The Case of the Talking Corpse

Notes

The Two ‘Failures' of Sherlock Holmes

A Fragment of Biography by John H. Watson MD

It is an acknowledged truth that Sherlock Holmes loathed with his whole bohemian soul the reputation of being a ‘schoolbook hero'. This thought must have occupied me unconsciously one evening, while I was thinking of how I should introduce the cases which follow. Nothing seemed to suit my purpose. Then, as I sat there, I heard in my mind that familiar voice.

‘Watson! If you are an honest man, you will record this also and set it against my successes!'

Well, I am no believer in ghosts! Still, this set me wondering where I had heard those words before. A moment later, I had it. More than thirty years had passed since Sherlock Holmes stood by the sunlit windows of Regent Street, shaking his head and uttering these very thoughts. We had been left, like a pair of fools, watching our quarry vanish from sight in a hansom cab with no means of pursuit. It was the first skirmish in a dark narrative of family misfortune, given to the world as
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.

In the next few weeks, as the world knows, we faced the beast with the blazing fangs in the lee of the rainswept Dartmoor rocks. We tracked John Stapleton of Merripit House to his slow death in the foul ooze of the Grimpen Mire. Yet that sunny moment in Regent Street was recalled by Holmes when he knew better than any man how close the end of his own life must be.

‘If you are an honest man, Watson, you will set these records against my successes!'

He was sitting on the plain wooden stairs that led up to the Baker Street lumber-room, holding out to me several folded legal documents and a notebook. On the cover of the book, in ink now tarnished by damp, he had written simply, ‘A Tabular Analysis of Hyoscin as a Homicidal Poison.'

Long before this, he had tried retirement and soon wearied of it. The simple life of bee-keeping on the Sussex downs was not for him. Having protested so much that he longed for rural solitude, he returned to Baker Street and took on his old rooms again. The excitement of life as a ‘consulting detective' was as necessary to him as the vice of cocaine and a good deal less injurious. When his hands were idle, the drug mania laid claim to him. I never knew him to have the least need of narcotics when his mind was occupied.

The records of many unpublished adventures lay in the lumber-room, to which he would retire each day after lunch and remain until the winter afternoon darkened. The tin box, which formerly reposed among the bric-à-brac of his bedroom, had been carried up to this attic level on the orders of Mrs Clatworthy, his resident nurse. This good woman vowed repeatedly that she would not be ‘answerable' if her patient's bedroom were not put into better order.

But where the box went, Holmes followed at every opportunity. It contained a mass of papers, most tied in bundles with red ribbon and each representing a case long concluded. Some dated from a time before I had first met him. Others dealt with matters ‘for which the world is not yet ready', to use the familiar phrase by which he forbad publication. Two or three recorded his ‘failures'.

One afternoon, he had retired to make a survey of these records. I went up at five o'clock to help him down to the sitting-room again, as the October light faded. He was sitting on the stairs, which declining strength obliged him to use as both chair and desk. His head was bowed over a black-letter legal parchment from one of the bundles, on which he had written in his own hand, ‘The Case of the Naked Bicyclists.' He handed it to me without a word, so that I might replace it in the box and turn the key. While I did so, he made his way slowly but unaided down to our rooms.

I took the document he had handed me and gathered up a number of other papers whose red tapes he had not even bothered to tie again. Here and there I noticed some familiar copperplate script. It was usually the hand of a legal clerk, more often than not Mr Bowker, from the chambers of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. That ‘Great Defender' had performed almost as many wonders in the court-room as Holmes the ‘Great Detective' accomplished outside it, many of them when the two men worked in harness.

Among the writing on the briefs, I caught sight of
R v. Crippen and Le Neve
, then
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Esq. v. John Sholto Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, and R v. Oscar Slater
. More perfunctorily, in Holmes's own writing upon the back of a legal brief, was ‘The Yarmouth Beach Murder.'

Some of these names recalled his most difficult clients. Yet no other man would have regarded his efforts as a failure. I recall the summer of 1910 when, on the recommendation of Edward Marshall Hall, Dr Crippen's attorney called upon Holmes in the preparation of that famous murder defence.

All the world knew that Hawley Harvey Crippen had poisoned his faithless and violent wife, burying her dismembered body under the cellar floor of their house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Kentish Town. ‘Belle Elmore', as Cora Crippen called herself on the music-hall stage, might have been a bullying slattern, but the little doctor surely put the rope round his own neck by his conduct after her death. He fled to America on the cargo liner SS
Montrose
, taking his demure young mistress Ethel Le Neve, whom he disguised to little effect by dressing her as a boy. Even before their arrival in Quebec, the Hilldrop Crescent cellar had revealed its macabre secret to Scotland Yard. The fugitives were pursued by wireless telegraph and fast passenger liner. Inspector Dew came aboard the
Montrose
off Quebec, disguised as the pilot, and arrested the two fugitives before they could leave the ship.

The drama of the chase turned the trial into the most celebrated criminal case for fifty years past. Mention the words ‘cold-blooded murderer' and the world thinks at once of ‘Dr Crippen'. How different was the truth!

Holmes was retained as the greatest ‘criminal expert' on the rarer and more recent types of poison. He begged that Crippen would confess the truth, by admitting that Ethel Le Neve was present in the house and, indeed, in his bed, when the hyoscin was administered to Cora Crippen. The properties of this hypnotic drug, which derived from the deadly nightshade plant, were then not commonly known. However, it was used by physicians in a small dose as a sleeping draught or to treat delirium tremens.

In pursuit of the truth, Holmes shut himself away in the chemical laboratory of St Bartholomew's Hospital. While the rest of the world took its August holidays, he worked among shelves of bottles, benches and retorts, test-tubes and Bunsen burners. By several gruesome and malodorous experiments, he first proved that some of the hyoscin in Mrs Crippen's body was of animal origin and had been produced naturally by the decomposition of her corpse. Then he established beyond any question that a fatal dose in a woman of her size and weight would be between .25 and .5 of a grain. The amount found in Mrs Crippen's body was .29 of a grain. It was a very narrow margin of suspicion. Take away the amount produced naturally by the decomposition of her body, and there was no sufficient proof that Dr Crippen had administered even the minimum fatal dose to a woman so well-built, let alone that he had intended to kill her. The case against him was reduced from proof to mere speculation.

I truly thought that Holmes had saved Dr Crippen. If only the doctor would admit the fact that he had smuggled Ethel Le Neve into the house on that fateful night, his life was as good as saved. Hyoscin, in its anaesthetic dose, abolishes the memory of events, so that one who is rendered unconscious by it comes round with no memory of having been unconscious. Was this not the weapon of the adulterer rather than the murderer? Strychnine or aconitine were a killer's weapons. Was it not plain, Holmes argued, that Crippen merely intended to use a non-fatal dose of hyoscin to render his wife unconscious while Ethel Le Neve was on the premises and in his bed? In the event, the dose had proved lethal by a very narrow margin of miscalculation. Surely a man who hoped to kill his victim would have administered a far larger dose to make sure of the result.

The work that Holmes had done in the chemical laboratory certainly appeared to disprove any motive or intent to murder. Logic, too, seemed to rebut the case for the Crown. One look at Miss Le Neve was enough to convince those who saw her that she was too timid to be Lady Macbeth or Queen Clytemnestra. Poisoning is a planned murder, not one committed in the heat of the moment. If Dr Crippen were the cold precise killer that the prosecution alleged, would he risk his neck while there was a witness like Miss Le Neve in the house, when he might as easily have done the deed in secret? He would certainly have been far better without his young mistress as an accomplice, for Ethel Le Neve could not have held out for two minutes under a police interrogation.

Holmes insisted to Dr Crippen's attorney that a first-rate defender like Marshall Hall would persuade a jury to find the accused man guilty only of manslaughter. Indeed, it might be no worse than a conviction and a short prison sentence for the lesser offence of administering poison so as to endanger life.

Would that it had been so! What peals of victory would have rung through the halls of the Central Criminal Court and the pages of the morning papers! Sherlock Holmes, the Great Detective, would be trumpeted as the saviour of Dr Crippen, the most notorious defendant in a trial for murder! Yet the fruit of triumph turned to ashes of ‘failure' almost at once.

I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard that Dr Crippen would have none of it! Why the devil not? The answer was simple. He loved Ethel Le Neve more than his own soul. Nothing would persuade him to admit that she was anywhere near the house at the time of Cora Crippen's death. When he heard of the suggestion that her presence was to be put in evidence, he refused to let his solicitor brief Marshall Hall to defend him.

That solicitor, Arthur Newton, and Sherlock Holmes argued with Dr Crippen in vain. They assured him that the door of his prison cell would open to set him free, if only he would admit that Ethel Le Neve was in the house on the night of his wife's death. The stubborn fellow shook his head. Suppose, for reasons that even Marshall Hall could not foresee and despite all that the great advocate could do, the jury took against him? The defence would fail. The verdict would be murder and, far worse, his young mistress would be an accomplice. Ethel Le Neve would be hanged as surely as he.

There was never such a ‘disappointment' for Sherlock Holmes. Crippen loved this young woman so tenderly that he was determined to shield her to the last with his own life. He would have nothing said in his own defence that might imperil her. A lesser defender than Marshall Hall was found for him and the services of Sherlock Holmes were dispensed with.

Dr Crippen went to the gallows and Miss Le Neve was saved. Among the Crippen papers in the tin box is a letter to Holmes, the prison ink darkened and the paper a little yellowed. It was written by the condemned man on the night before his execution. ‘In this farewell letter, written as I face eternity, I say that Ethel Le Neve has loved me as few women love men, and that her innocence of any crime, save that of yielding to the dictates of the heart, is absolute …'

Holmes could never read that letter without a moistening of the eye and a certain gruffness in the throat. Not Eloisa and Abelard, nor Tristan and Yseult, let alone a mere Romeo and Juliet, could hold a candle to Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. To my friend, Dr Crippen was ever afterwards ‘a gallant little gentleman'. Holmes insisted on making the terrible journey to Pentonville to see the condemned man, late on the last night. He told me that the only time the poor fellow's courage failed was when they brought him a final telegram from the young woman. His request, that two of her letters and her photograph should be buried with him by the prison wall, was granted. He died declaring his innocence of any intention to murder his wife, something which Holmes never doubted. Wrongly hanged he may have been, but he had his reward when Ethel Le Neve was acquitted of any part in the crime.