The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (65 page)

‘Not Mr Bayne the Barrister, I trust!'

‘Lestrade, my dear fellow. I have frequently observed that his boast of being able to manage well enough on his own is usually followed by a request that I should supply the deficiencies of the detective police.'

‘I doubt that we shall see him, Holmes. After his mood last night, I doubt it very much.'

I had scarcely finished my last slice of toast when the doorbell rang. Presently the familiar wiry bulldog figure appeared, as Holmes had predicted. The inspector seemed a little subdued this morning but by no means defeated.

‘Do sit down,' said Holmes, as genially as if the two men had not met for several months, ‘and tell us more news of the Lambeth murders.'

Lestrade looked a little uneasy as he said, ‘There is only one, Mr Holmes. Ellen Donworth, that is all. Sergeant Macintyre reported to Somerset House at eight this morning and went through the entries for two years past. It was a simple enough matter. There is no entry of the death of Matilda Clover, nor of Lou or Louisa Harvey.'

‘Good,' said Holmes, pouring coffee for the inspector. ‘Let us be glad of that at least. However, your investigation has plainly run into difficulties or you would not be here. Will you not tell us what they are?'

Lestrade sipped his coffee and stared at Holmes over the rim of the cup.

‘We are not in difficulties, Mr Holmes. Indeed, we have more evidence.'

‘Oh?' said Holmes sceptically. ‘Then let us be glad of that too.'

‘A further letter was received this morning by Mr Wyatt, the Surrey coroner. As a matter of courtesy, I thought you should be informed.'

‘Ah!' said Holmes triumphantly. ‘Our man has set a puzzle of some kind for you?'

Lestrade handed him a single sheet of paper and my friend read it out for my benefit.

‘
Sir
,

I am writing to say that if you and your satellites fail to bring the murderer of Ellen Donworth, alias Ellen Linnell, late of 8 Duke Street, Westminster Bridge Road, to justice, then I am willing to give you such assistance, as will bring the murderer to justice provided your Government is willing to pay me £300,000 for my services. No pay if not successful
.

A O'Brien, Detective
.'

Lestrade looked at us and asked quietly.

‘Well, gentlemen. What do you make of that?'

‘I think you might throw it in the fire,' I said at once. ‘I know, of course, you cannot do that but at least commit it to your files. There is nothing here but a wild goose-chase. Follow the evidence in the case.' Holmes shrugged.

‘Three hundred thousand pounds! I do not think I should ever be able to command a fee so large. If Mr O'Brien can obtain three hundred thousand pounds for a single case, he is a far better man than I. Perhaps, Lestrade, you should accept his offer.'

‘I call it an outrage,' I persisted, irritated by such facetiousness, ‘that the members of a bereaved family like Mr Smith's should be made sport of in this manner and the police put to such trouble by one criminal lunatic!'

‘Or two,' Holmes said quietly.

‘Or two?' Lestrade was half out of his chair.

‘Of course there are two.' Holmes contrived to look astonished and alarmed that the inspector should have missed this. ‘I feel sure, Lestrade, that you have not come without the letters to Lady Russell, to Mr Smith from Bayne the Barrister, and the enclosure to Ellen Donworth from H. M. B. Kindly look at them and tell me what you see!'

Self-consciously, Lestrade took the three sheets of paper from his case and made a pretence of reading them. Holmes poured ample salt upon the poor fellow's tail.

‘Great heavens, man! Did you truly not see the difference? Come, of course you did! You are merely teasing us! The letter to Frederick Smith and that purporting to be written to Ellen Donworth are in quite different hands. Copperplate can never quite disguise those slight temperamental flourishes!'

‘I see nothing,' Lestrade said uneasily.

Holmes sighed.

‘Very well. I daresay you do not. To the trained eye, however, it is evident that the epistle to Mr Smith was written by a right-handed scribe, the enclosure by one who is naturally left-handed. No right-handed man could compose that second epistle with such assurance while using his left hand. The acute angle of the backward slope has the character of one who is uniquely left-handed.'

The unfortunate inspector began to struggle a little.

‘Then why did you keep silent last night, Mr Holmes?'

Holmes shrugged.

‘I suspected that we should soon hear from our correspondent again, as has proved to be the case this morning. It is not in the nature of such compulsives to keep silent. I daresay I would have said something last night. Indeed I was about to do so when you informed me that you would be quite able to sift the problem for yourself.'

An uncomfortable silence followed this piece of temperament on my friend's part. Presently Holmes said, ‘I wonder why there are four?'

‘Why should there not be four letters as well as any other number?' I asked.

He shook his head.

‘No, Watson, you misunderstand. Why should the four letters have been written by four different people? The common experience of the criminal expert is that poisoning, whether for pleasure or expediency, proves to be a solitary occupation. At the most there is one accomplice. Here we have four people. Four letter-writers. Two of them must be known to one another, since their communications came in the same envelope. Indeed, all four
appear
to be united in a common enterprise.'

Lestrade's unease had grown to consternation but Sherlock Holmes was prepared to salt him a little more.

‘Very well, Lestrade. We find that the four letters are in different hands, despite an attempt at similarity of style. However, you may not have had leisure to examine this morning's epistle closely enough to see that it comes from a woman.'

‘A woman!' Lestrade's dark eyes suddenly appeared the size of marbles.

‘Oh, yes,' said Holmes, surprised that the inspector and I could have missed anything so obvious. ‘The script appears to be a woman's and, though this is sometimes simulated, I believe in this case it is genuine. A man who was imitating female script might copy well enough the usual rotundity of individual letters, even of complete words. Here however, even with my magnifying glass, I can detect none of those necessary breaks in a word or a letter which always occur sooner or later when another scribe merely imitates an unfamiliar hand. No, my dear fellow, this is too flowing—too much of a piece—to be anything but a female hand.'

‘You cannot say that!' Lestrade snapped.

‘I can and I do,' Holmes remarked jauntily. ‘I also say that while I was reading out the contents of the note just now, for Watson's benefit, I was able to make a close inspection of the watermark. It is Mayfair Superfine, much favoured by ladies for casual correspondence. That in itself is nothing, of course. A man might use it for disguise. However, as I held the paper I was conscious of the faintest air of white jessamine, imparted by the writer's wrist or sleeve. As I have remarked before, there are seventy-five perfumes which it is very necessary that the criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, of which this is one. I do not believe you will find that any man who murdered Miss Donworth would affect such a perfume as white jessamine upon his sleeve.'

‘Then we have a criminal gang of three men and a woman?' I exclaimed. ‘A gang of blackmailers? A gang of poisoners?'

‘Out of the question!' Lestrade said abruptly. ‘In the findings of Dr Stevenson, we have evidence of a single criminal degenerate. Crimes of this sort are committed by a maniac working alone. He knows, if he is caught, he will be hanged. He would not dare trust his neck to others, even by using them as his scribes. What you say, Mr Holmes, suggests strongly to me that the letters are from a group of mischief-makers. They are not the murderers but are merely exploiting a lust-murder committed by someone utterly unknown to them.'

Holmes shrugged and sighed.

‘Then you must explain to me, Lestrade, why two of the letters, in different hands, claim that Ellen Donworth was the victim of strychnine. Except for an unbelievable degree of coincidence, that fact could have been known only to her murderer at the time the letters were posted.'

‘Very well,' said the inspector desperately, ‘let us take it as a coincidence. I would remind you, Mr Holmes, how often you have said that when all the impossible explanations are discarded, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the answer.'

‘I think not,' said Holmes quietly. ‘When stated correctly, that is a principle known as Occam's Razor. However, I do not believe that old William of Occam would have thanked you for shaving with it in such a manner.'

This produced silence until Holmes spoke more gently, for the inspector's benefit.

‘Perhaps it would be better, Lestrade, if you were to recall how often in the past I have remarked that it is a capital error in our profession to reason in defiance of the facts, however little one may care for them.'

This quiet reprimand induced a silence that no one seemed inclined to break.

VI

With that, the case was at an end—or so it seemed. In the following weeks, the tenuous thread that had connected Inspector Lestrade with the ghostly murderers was to grow more slender, until it seemed to vanish altogether. No more letters were received from murderers or blackmailers. No further clues were gleaned from those which had already arrived. The criminal gang appeared to have shut up shop, as Holmes remarked with a rare absence of concern.

Somerset House was visited by a more senior officer and its records more meticulously checked. No one with the name of Matilda Clover was found in the register of deaths for twenty years past. No entry existed for Lou or Louisa Harvey. The Lambeth murder ceased to be of interest to the press. Even Sherlock Holmes appeared to turn his attention elsewhere.

Once, the inspector thought he had his man in the person of Mr Slater of Wych Street, Holborn. Slater's ways were odd to say the least. He was wont to cross Waterloo Bridge from lodgings near the Strand and make a nuisance of himself in Lambeth, urging repellent suggestions on street-women there. Two of them resented him more than most. Eliza Masters and Elizabeth May swore that this man who molested them was the very person they had seen with Ellen Donworth, not an hour before I had found her dying outside the York Hotel.

Holmes and I were invited to attend the identification parade at Bow Street police station, an event which promised to end the Lambeth mystery once and for all. The two young women walked down the line of men drawn up in the corridor. Each picked out the shabby figure of Mr Slater, a little too easily as it seemed to me. They were thanked and sent on their way.

Lestrade cautioned Slater that he would now be questioned in the matter of the death of Ellen Donworth. He did not look in the least apprehensive, merely surprised. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘All right then, if you like.'

When asked to account for himself on that fateful Saturday evening in October, Slater reminded Lestrade that he had been detained by a police officer that morning on a complaint by a respectable young woman in Lower Marsh, twelve hours before Miss Donworth's death. Lestrade had been told nothing of this by the Lambeth division and so suspected a trick. However, Slater coolly recalled that there was no magistrates court to deal with him on a Saturday, so that he had been detained in a Lambeth police cell until Monday morning, then bound over to keep the peace. It was quite impossible that he could have had any connection with the young woman's death. This, as Holmes privately observed, was a fact which Lestrade and ‘A' Division of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard could have established to begin with, had they cared to communicate with ‘L' Division, a few hundred yards away on the other side of Westminster Bridge.

Holmes was both furious and yet triumphant in the face of such official incompetence. For several days, he referred bitterly to ‘A' Division as ‘Lestrade's Gendarmerie', giving the words a comic opera pronunciation. Then he turned his attention again to other things, declining as he said to supply the deficiencies of Scotland Yard.

It seemed that we faced, as Samuel Johnson once said, a conclusion in which nothing was concluded, until the events of a fine cold morning a month or two later. It was, I suppose, a little before noon when the bell rang below us. I glanced down from the window and saw the uniform cap of a Post Office boy with a telegram. A moment later, Mrs Hudson was before us with the blue envelope on her salver. Holmes opened it, read it, and handed it to me.

HOLMES, 22 1B BAKER STREET, W
.

PREPARE TO COME AT ONCE STOP
.

LAMBETH MURDERER THREATENS MASS POISON STOP
.

POLICE OFFICER ON WAY TO FETCH YOU STOP
.

LESTRADE, SCOTLAND YARD
.

‘You may tell the boy there is no reply,' Holmes said smoothly to our anxious housekeeper.

By the time we were at the door, a cab was drawing into the pavement with a helmeted constable inside. A few moments later we were bowling down Baker Street towards Regent Street and Trafalgar Square. The matter was plainly of great secrecy. We did not speak to the constable, nor he to us.

From Trafalgar Square we turned at great speed into Northumberland Avenue, past the imperial fronts of grand hotels or offices, and under chestnut boughs. Our hansom rattled towards the glitter of the Thames, almost as far as the rear entrance of Scotland Yard. But then the constable tapped sharply on the roof of the cab and it drew up outside the fine entrance and marble steps of the Metropole Hotel. Why we had been brought to such a place as this, I had not the least idea.