The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (73 page)

He held her so gently by one arm but she might as well have struggled against a steel trap.

‘What d'you want with me?'

‘The truth,' he said a little more sternly. ‘The truth you have kept to yourself too long. The truth you owe to Matilda Clover. The truth about Dr Neill.'

There was no more resistance in her now. She sat down at the little marble table as suddenly as if her legs might not have supported her. She said nothing. Holmes snapped his fingers at the waiter for three glasses of sherbet.

‘Come,' he said, sitting opposite her, ‘tell the truth and he will never more be free to harm you. Keep it hidden and he will be set at liberty to find you.'

She breathed deeply for a moment, then said, ‘I was so frightened!'

‘You were with Matilda Clover when the two of you met him, of course.'

Louisa Harvey, as I must now call her, nodded.

‘As I supposed,' Holmes said. ‘This man thought he had murdered both of you. But Matilda was alive two weeks later. And you escaped him. How?'

‘It was the Alhambra in Leicester Square,' she whispered, ‘the long bar, like this one. He asked my name and said he came from America and was working at the hospital. I was to spend the night with him off Oxford Street, a hotel in Berwick Street. Later we went to the Northumberland public house near the Embankment and Mattie was there. He wanted us both. He said he had special stuff that made it more frisky. Something he got through being a medical man. He gave us each two long pills. I pretended to take mine but switched them to the other hand and then threw them behind me. He made me open my hand to show I'd swallowed them. But I was rid of them by then. Mattie slipped hers in her pocket. He promised to meet us later at the hotel, saying he'd got an appointment at the hospital first. I waited but he never came.'

Holmes gave a long sigh.

‘He is, I daresay, certifiably insane. It will not help him, of course, for the law has its own very peculiar definition of insanity. I do not doubt, however, that the great Dr Maudsley would find his brain most instructive, when our prisoner has no further use for it himself.'

‘I was so frightened!' the girl exclaimed, not listening to him. ‘I kept to the house and never went out. Then I walked out one night, and in Stamford Street I saw him again. He didn't see me, I think, being too far away. Later I heard that two girls died there and I was so scared he might find me at Ma Phillips's. I ran off to Brighton and worked at the bar in Mutton's. I'd been there ever since, until yesterday. Yesterday I came back, thinking perhaps he might be gone to America by now. When I heard your voice behind me, saying my real name like that, I nearly died of fright, thinking it might be him.'

‘Let us hope,' said Holmes reassuringly, ‘you will not need to die of anything at all for many years to come. It is plain to me that your poor friend Matilda kept the two pills he had given her and later, perhaps for a lark after she had drunk that half-bottle of whisky, she took them. But her murderer could not know that she had kept them so long or that you had never taken them at all. So he accused one of his dupes of killing you both, when you were still both alive.'

He turned to me and I was surprised to see his face relax in a smile.

‘Tell me, Watson, does not our young friend make a very charming corpse?' The girl gave a start at this but he went on, ‘Louisa is the talking corpse whom I promised would sooner or later provide the solution to our case.'

I was about to ask how long he had known all this and kept it from me. But I was so relieved to hear him refer to ‘our case' at last that I let the matter drop.

At Bow Street, after we had relinquished charge of Louisa Harvey to a police matron, Lestrade was waiting for us. He was not quite pacing up and down but his difficulty in avoiding such exercise was plain.

‘Another letter!' he said furiously. ‘Postmarked in Holborn last night at 10
P
.
M
. and therefore sent at least four hours after Dr Neill was taken into custody!'

Holmes read the sheet of paper, chuckled, and then handed it to me.

‘Very good!' he said merrily. ‘Very good indeed! Is it not, Watson?'

Dear Sir
,

The man you have in your power is as innocent as you are. I gave the girls those pills to cure them of their earthly miseries. Others might follow Lou Harvey out of this world of care and woe. Lord Russell had a hand in the poisoning of Clover. If I were you, I would release Dr T. Neill or you might get into trouble
.

Yours respectfully Juan Pollen, alias, Jack the Ripper
.

BEWARE ALL
!
I WARN BUT ONCE
!

‘I fail to see, Mr Holmes, what is good about an event of this kind.'

‘Only, Lestrade, that there are so many explanations of the message that it hardly merits thought. Oh, very well. If nothing else will do, Mr Slater hears a rumour of the arrest and the crime, then enjoys a little revenge on the Lambeth constabulary. A dozen malcontents might do it. Set it aside, my dear fellow.'

So, next morning, Louisa Harvey looked from a window into the Bow Street yard where the men were drawn up again. Unlike the previous witnesses she confessed herself too terrified to confront her would-be murderer face to face.

She picked out Dr Neill at a glance.

‘And is there no other man in that line whom you have ever seen before?' Holmes asked gently.

She shook her head. He directed her attention to young Walter Harper.

‘Not that one?'

Again she shook her head.

‘No. He is quite like a boy that goes with the girls here in London, and down at Muttons in Brighton. All the same, he ain't the one.'

‘Then you identify only Dr Neill?'

‘Dr Neill? Oh, no! I don't see any Dr Neill.'

Lestrade uttered a gasp of dismay, audible to everyone in the room.

‘Just now, you picked out one of those men as Dr Neill, miss!'

A third time she shook her head, more emphatically.

‘Not as Dr Neill.'

In that instant my spirits also sank, as our carefully-wrought solution to the Lambeth murders seemed to disintegrate. Then a miracle occurred.

‘You never asked,' said Louisa Harvey reproachfully. ‘You only asked if I'd know his face. That's him. But that's not his name. ‘Least not the one he told me. He's Dr Cream. Funny sort of name, Cream, the sort you'd remember. He showed me a letter he'd had from America. Addressed to him at Anderton's Hotel in Fleet Street. It had Dr Cream on it. No doubt of that.'

Holmes turned slowly and accusingly to Lestrade.

‘He arrived at Euston the other day with no luggage. Whatever he took with him must have been deposited and was waiting there. I take it your men have by now searched the cloakroom at Euston for any article belonging to Dr Neill?'

The inspector's face was, to coin a phrase, an arena of conflicting emotions.

‘A Gladstone bag was missing from his rooms, according to Mrs Sleaper. That has been sought for in the cloakroom and the lost-property office …'

‘And not found,' said Holmes patiently. ‘Perhaps they would be better employed searching for a Gladstone bag whose ticket-holder is Dr Cream.'

A little after nine o'clock that evening, Scotland Yard became possessed of a Gladstone, containing the passport and personal effects of Dr Thomas Neill Cream. Long before the first police dossiers crossed the ocean, the bound notebooks of Sherlock Holmes yielded several entries from the Chicago press, recording suspicious deaths among Dr Cream's female patients and a prison sentence imposed for the death by poison of a male patient, Daniel Stott, of Grand Prairie, Illinois.

XVII

Such was the conclusion of the Lambeth poisonings, thanks to Sherlock Holmes and his ‘talking corpse', who had survived such a villainous design against her life. Holmes himself seemed little surprised that there were such degenerates as would put their victims to an agonizing death as a matter of entertainment. He would shrug and talk again of Roman emperors, Renaissance princes, the Marquise de Brinvilliers at the court of Louis XIV, as if they were the most common thing in the world. However, he spared me the observation that when a doctor went wrong, he was the worst of criminals.

Yet, after all, this was not quite the conclusion. Once the name of Dr Cream was revealed, a good deal else followed. He was not American by birth but Scottish. So far as he had a medical speciality it was in the trade of abortion. His dealings were with women of the streets in Chicago and from one of these he had contracted a disease which affected his body and mind alike.

As soon as Holmes heard this, he needed no other explanation. Dr Neill, or Dr Cream, or Dr Neill Cream as he was now generally known, was a man with the fury of an avenger, the inspiration of a demon, and the skill of a torturing fiend. All the murder and all the blackmail had come from that one perverted genius, which lay disguised behind the shallow geniality of his mild manner. There are men who commit crimes as terrible as his, to the astonishment of those who know them. How can a man so amiable and self-effacing be the murderer of half a dozen young women? In his case, however, once the truth about him was known, it fitted a pattern that had been half-visible all the time.

Sherlock Holmes, though he seemed to wash his hands of the investigation, had not taken his eyes from it for one moment. It exhibited to him a degree of human depravity which Professor Moriarty or Colonel Moran, or even Charles Augustus Milverton the arch-blackmailer, could scarcely have matched. Dr Neill Cream, as I now call him, was mad as well as bad, to an extent which these other villains had never been.

A man in his middle years, however evil his course of life may have been, will generally show some development of character. The Lambeth murderer offered not the least sign of remorse, never a murmur of repentance during his weeks in the death-cell of Newgate gaol. We were assured by Lestrade that the poor wretch sang and danced and capered like a music-hall clown to while away his last hours. When he conversed, it was merely to boast of his amorous conquests and to claim the murder of still more victims. It was as if his mind had been driven into one narrow and terrible track by the very exposure of his guilt. He no longer made any attempt at geniality or gentility, nor did he show the least fear at the prospect which he faced.

Sherlock Holmes was of the opinion that Dr Neill Cream should have been reprieved, in order that this specimen of morbid psychology might be investigated by the alienists. He was mad, of course, by the standards of psychopathology. However, the English law takes its definition of insanity from a period fifty years before when either a man must have been unable to know what he was doing or, if he did know, he did not know it to be wrong. The cold-blooded destruction of the victims in this case made nonsense of such a plea.

In those days, of course, there was no Court of Criminal Appeal. A prisoner's only hope was a recommendation by the Home Secretary for a reprieve from the gallows to life imprisonment.

A week or two went by. I woke one November morning to find that a thick yellow fog had settled upon London. It was scarcely possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the outline of the opposite houses. A greasy, heavy brown swirl of vapour drifted past us and condensed in oily drops upon the glass. Sherlock Holmes pushed back his chair from the breakfast table and gazed at the weather which promised to keep him immured for several days to come. Then he glanced at his watch and his mood lightened.

‘I had almost forgotten, my dear fellow.'

I put down the paper.

‘Forgotten what, Holmes?'

‘That client of yours, Watson. They hanged him at Newgate a full two hours ago. I cannot claim that I have always given full satisfaction to those clients who have been good enough to consult me, but I do not think that I have ever contrived to get one of them hanged.'

Notes

The Two ‘Failures' of Sherlock Holmes

i. Marshall Hall's view of the Crippen case is given in Edward Marjoribanks,
The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall
, Victor Gollancz, 1929, pp.277-84. Marshall Hall believed that, had the defence been entrusted to him, ‘Crippen would have been convicted of manslaughter or of administering a noxious poison so as to endanger human life.' Such a course, however, might have imperilled Ethel Le Neve's defence. ‘Crippen loved Miss Le Neve so tenderly and wholeheartedly that he wished her to escape
all
the legal consequences of his association with her. He had, indeed, brought the tragedy upon her, but to ensure her complete scathelessness he was willing to die for her.' Marshall Hall's great rival, F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, wrote of Crippen, ‘He was, at least, a brave man, and a true lover.'

ii. Both George Lewis and Oscar Wilde's friend Robert Ross considered that a prosecution of Lord Queensberry for a criminal libel on the playwright was ill-advised. Lewis's view was that Wilde should tear up the insulting card and forget about it. However, goaded by Lord Alfred Douglas and encouraged by his solicitor Charles Humphreys, Wilde swore out a warrant for Queensberry's arrest on 1 March 1895. Cf. Richard Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
, Hamish Hamilton, 1987, pp. 411-13.

Wilde's purloining of other men's epigrams is described in G. M. Young,
Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
, Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 163n.

The Case of the Racing Certainty

The career of Harry Benson and William Kurr as international swindlers is combined with the exposure of corruption at Scotland Yard in George Dilnot (ed.),
The Trial of the Detectives
, Geoffrey Bles, [1930]. The book contains a transcript of the 1877 trial. Following this scandal, the Detective Police of Scotland Yard was restructured as the Criminal Investigation Department, or C.I.D. A Special Branch was also created, principally to counter the threat from Sinn Fein, as well as an independent power of prosecution in the office of Director of Public Prosecutions.