The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (62 page)

I walked out of the great railway terminus into a drizzling October evening, the gaslights of the busy street flickering and shining on the wet cobbles. It was a scene of market-stalls and flower-sellers, beggars and ragged children. Thinking of the welcoming fire in our Baker Street rooms, I turned towards the rank of two-wheeled hansom cabs and four-wheeled growlers.

Then I heard a scream, as sharp as any Jezail's knife at Maiwand.

‘Help me! Oh, God, help me!'

I cannot do justice to the intensity of it. How common and plain her words appear set down in print! Sometimes I hear that shriek again, in the quiet of the night. The terror of it, in a shabby thoroughfare of market-stalls and four-ale bars, returns as shrill as ever. It was a cry of agony, but more of panic. A physician who has witnessed the worst deaths might recognize it as heralding the cruellest ending of a life. Nothing in the butchery of men and beasts in battle lives with me as clearly as that sound.

The street from Waterloo Bridge to St George's Circus was so crowded at that hour on a Saturday night that, at first, I could not make out where the cry had come from. It was somewhere on the further side of the busy thoroughfare, not far from the double bar-room doors of the York Hotel. The pavement was lit through the windows by chandelier-light, clouded with tobacco smoke. I thought I heard a softer following cry. That was soon lost in the rumble and crash of barrels on a tarpaulined dray, turning out from the railway goods yard.

Then there came only the bursts of laughter and a snatch of music from the hotel's public bar, as the doors swung open and closed again. But that scream was not the cry of a young woman playing the fool. Crossing between the cabs and twopenny buses, I paused as I saw an unkempt girl staggering against the wall of the hotel, her arms clamped across her midriff. She was twisting and lurching as a drunkard might. Her voice was quieter now but with a terrible and sober appeal.

‘Help me! Oh, someone, help me!'

Before I could reach her, she had slithered down the wall and was sitting on the stained wet paving, a plump young woman with a frizzy mane of fair hair gathered roughly in a tail and worn down her back. I cannot say that she began to vomit, rather that she strove to do so without effect. By the time I reached her, the screams had stopped. She lay curled on the paving, still groaning more in fear than in pain.

In such a place and with such an appearance as hers, her profession was not in doubt. The street was crowded at that time of night and, even before I had reached her, several people were standing by and looking down at the poor creature. I pushed my way through.

‘Let me come to her. I am a doctor.'

This produced a murmur of interest among the spectators, as if the spectacle might be better worth watching. The poor girl's face was ghost-white with pain and her hair was plastered on her forehead by a sweat of agony. I tried to question her as gently as I could but she seemed not to hear me. Her eyes were motionless, staring in an uncomprehending horror. Then, through clenched teeth, there issued a series of shorter, rising hisses as the spasm came again. Her face was set hard in a rictus of convulsive frenzy. It was like that terrible death mask which is sometimes called the ‘Hippocrates Smile'. I could get nothing from her. It was as if she could not hear me. Having guessed her way of life and her occupation, I supposed that she was in a last stage of delirium tremens.

Kneeling down, I felt a pulse that was rapid and fluttering, which confirmed my supposition. The torment of alcoholism that she endured had brought on an acute cardiac distress. Her breath was still uneven and she was glistening with perspiration. I asked her what she had been eating or drinking, though the sweet spirituous odour of gin was strong upon her and on her clothes. Her reply was incoherent at first but then I made out that she had been drinking in the York Hotel with a man called Fred. She had drunk gin with ‘something white' in it.

‘Fred Linnell,' said one of the women in the crowd. ‘She's one of his girls. Lor' look at her! She's had her whack all right!'

The dying girl shook her head, struggling to deny the words. There was another scream, feebler this time. Her head went back and her knees came up abruptly into her stomach, as the shrillness fell to an inhuman grunting and jabbering. It was the first of several tetanic convulsions that I was to witness and I knew she would die on the pavement unless treatment was given at once.

Just then a market trader in cap and apron pushed though the crowd carrying a board from a trestle table. Two of his assistants were with him.

‘Get her home on this,' he said to them, ignoring me. ‘Number eight, Duke Street, off of Westminster Bridge Road. She's Nellie Donworth. Lodges with old Mrs Avens.'

I nodded to his two assistants, for the girl could not be left where she was. I also took out my card and handed it to Jimmy Styles, as the stall-holder's name proved to be, first writing on it ‘delirium tremens', ‘syncope', and ‘8 Duke Street'.

‘Go as fast as you can to St Thomas's Hospital. Give this to Dr Kelloch, the house physician, or whichever assistant may be on duty. I shall need help at Duke Street. Ask them to send a four-wheeler, to get her to hospital. She lodges close, so we shall have her home before they arrive.'

I had written ‘syncope' to emphasize the urgency of the message, for it was now apparent that the poor heart must fail very soon under the distress of such extreme convulsions as were seizing her with greater frequency.

Styles went at a run between the traffic, past the railway terminus, towards the embankment of the dark river, where the hospital stood. His two men took up the board with the girl lying upon it, her body alternately limp and then drawn into a spasm. By the wine vaults on the corner, we turned into Duke Street, a squalid ill-lit alley behind the coal wharves. She was carried to her room on the first floor of a tenement and laid gently on an old brass bedstead covered by linen that was worn to rags.

There was little that I could do until Kelloch or his assistant came. I noticed a dark bottle on the stained wash-stand, labelled as bromide of potassium. Though it is a standard prescription for alcoholism, I dared not give it to her until I knew how much gin she had drunk, for fear I should do more harm than good. Instead, I sent down to the landlady for carbonate of sodium as a palliative.

I had hardly expected that Dr Kelloch would be able to come in person but fifteen minutes later a four-wheeler turned the corner and rattled into Duke Street, bringing his assistant, Mr Johnson of the South London Medical Institute. We had a hasty and murmured consultation outside the bedroom door, the purport of which, on my part, was that the unfortunate young woman should be conveyed to hospital without delay. Though Mr Johnson agreed, I could see that it was already too late.

So passed this young woman of the town, she who had depended for her bread upon prostitution in the streets of a great and cruel city, one of that legion of the lost whom we see about us every day. Like so many of her kind, she had sought oblivion in drink from her brutal way of life and from the squalid lodging houses that were the only home she knew. Like so many victims of drink's false comfort, she had paid the last terrible penalty that the body exacts for such brutish indulgence.

With these sombre thoughts, so different to the memories of military comradeship that had been woken earlier that day, I walked back to Waterloo and called a cab to Baker Street. The case now belonged to Dr Kelloch and Mr Johnson. I had no reason to suppose that I should ever hear of it again, except perhaps as a matter of courtesy. The bottle on the wash-stand, with its familiar ‘Bromide of Potassium' label, was evidence that Ellen Donworth was already ‘under the doctor' for alcoholism. The coroner seldom sees any reason for calling an inquest, when the cause of death is so plain.

I mentioned the young street-walker's tragedy to Holmes, as an explanation for my late return. However, he seemed disinclined to interest himself in the fate of this ‘unfortunate'. Somewhen during that night, in the darkest hours when the city had fallen silent, I woke with the memory of that terrible scream rising from the recesses of my mind. Unnerved by this, I vowed that I must put poor Nellie Donworth from my thoughts.

On the following morning, the bells of Marylebone Church pealed through a thin autumn sunlight. The streets and squares rustled with fallen leaves. Just before noon I received a wire from Dr Kelloch. He thanked me for my attention to the unfortunate girl but regretted to inform me that Ellen Donworth had suffered a final delirium tremens in the cab. In consequence of this, her heart had failed and she was dead upon arrival at St Thomas's Hospital. So, it seemed, a too-familiar Waterloo Road tragedy had come to its conclusion.

I did not mention her death to Holmes just then. What purpose would that have served?

II

Sherlock Holmes was the most precise and meticulous of men in word and thought, but the most careless and untidy being who ever plagued a fellow lodger. The tray which held his abandoned supper would lie casually on his work-table among piles of papers, or next to some unsavoury chemical experiment, designed to raise fingerprints upon a glass or to separate the contents of a poison-bottle into their constituents. An important clue in a case of homicide or adultery was apt to lie concealed, for safety, in the butter dish.

So it was with some surprise, while the October light turned to dusk under plum-coloured rain-clouds, that I returned from a consultation at the fever ward of the military hospital to discover Holmes putting our Baker Street sitting-room into unaccustomed order. A full three days had passed since the tragedy of Nellie Donworth and I had heard nothing further from Dr Kelloch or Mr Johnson.

As I entered the room, I noticed that the work-table was unusually regimented. Indeed, Holmes had so far forgotten himself as to arrange the cushions in the arm-chairs. A window had been opened at the top to air the fumes of black tobacco. He glanced up as I came in.

‘Be so good as to turn the settee to the fire a little. Look lively, my dear fellow! We are to have a visitor.'

‘Oh, indeed,' I had heard nothing of a visitor that morning. ‘And cannot Mrs Hudson …'

‘If you will recall, Watson, the week has reached Wednesday afternoon. On that feast of Woden, Mrs Hudson is accustomed to take tea with her married sister in Clapham. Be so kind as to pass me that other antimacassar.'

‘What visitor? And why so suddenly?'

‘A wire from Lady Russell,' he said firmly, adjusting the angle of a chair to the hearth. ‘She comes suddenly because the matter is urgent. Why else?'

My consultation at the military hospital had been long and difficult. I was not best pleased to find a quiet evening disturbed in this manner.

‘A good many of the English aristocracy bear the name of Russell,' I said rather shortly. ‘Which is this? The law lord's baroness? Surely not the prime minister's widow?'

He looked up at me, as he carried a laden waste-paper basket to conceal it quickly in a far corner of the room.

‘Neither of them. Our visitor is Mabel Edith, Countess Russell. I daresay that even you must have heard of her.'

‘I wish I had not. She is one young lady with whom our practice could well dispense.'

‘Balderdash,' he said, brushing his hands together smartly, to indicate that his domestic chores were complete.

‘You may call it balderdash, Holmes. I am told, on the best authority, that her mother Lady Scott was divorced by Sir Claude for reasons one does not usually discuss. Reardon, at the club, assures me that her ladyship's sister works to this day as a masseuse in Cranbourn Street. Walk past and you will see the building at the corner. The ground floor is occupied by that rogue Arthur Carrez, selling certain French books and Malthusian devices, which have several times drawn the attention of the Metropolitan Police upon him.'

Holmes straightened up and looked round him, as if he had not heard a word that I had spoken. He seemed satisfied that the room was fit to receive his young visitor. Then he said, ‘It is neither her mother, nor her aunt, who seeks our help, Watson. This young woman herself is in trouble. She asks our advice.'

‘That does not surprise me in the least. Advice about what, may I inquire?'

He shrugged in his off-hand manner. ‘Oh, a little blackmail. Money demanded with menaces. And murder, of course. We could hardly do without that could we? We have been too idle of late. I confess that even the most insignificant problem would have been welcome in these stagnant autumn days. This one may prove far from insignificant.'

I still feared the worst. The newspaper public had lately been treated to stories of the scandal attending this young woman and her husband, Earl Russell. Frank Russell, as he preferred to be known, was in his early twenties. He had been brought up by his grandfather, the great prime minister, after the death of his parents. His career at Oxford had been brief. He was dismissed in a few months by the master of his college for what was politely described as ‘disgusting conduct'. Then, while his brother Bertrand absorbed symbolic logic at Cambridge, Frank Russell threw himself into the pleasures of a certain type of London society.

In no time, that notorious harpy Lady Selina Scott had her claws into this weak young man. Rumour insisted that, at twice his age, she wanted him for herself! The idea was so preposterous that she thought it better to have the young fool enticed into marriage by her daughter, Mabel Edith. Within the year, a splendid wedding in Eaton Place was followed by unedifying court action. The young bride alleged depraved conduct by her lord. She demanded, and got, her separation with a handsome settlement. Since then, she had kept a prudent distance from respectable society, occupying a suite at the Savoy Hotel.

I was still pondering this half an hour later when Holmes crossed to the window.

‘Holloa! Holloa! Here we are, Watson!'