The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (95 page)

I do not know why but this, of all things, broke his nerve. He trembled and he could not speak. He was, after all, a petty figure in the conspiracy—an impoverished teacher of languages, who now found himself terrifyingly out of his depth. Sherlock Holmes intervened, for all the world as if he were ‘prisoner's friend,' as they call it at courts-martial.

‘It will be too late once war has been declared, Herr Henschel. It is neck or nothing for you—here and now. You had best decide at once between prison and the hangman. Indeed, you may yet decide between prison and freedom, but you had best be quick about it.'

Henschel could not reply until he had taken a drink from his glass of water.

‘How can I choose? What is done is done.'

Holmes shrugged.

‘By continuing to do what you have done for several years. Transmit the signals that are given you to transmit. They will mean nothing to you, as you say, but they may save both your life and your liberty. The choice is yours. Life or death. Captivity or freedom.'

The choice, of course, was nothing less than betrayal of his paymasters, and I do not know who had given Holmes the authority to suggest it—possibly Alfred Swain himself. Henschel had a certain value. I am no expert, but I have heard that those who are experienced listeners can identify the very finger of the operator on the Morse code button! How long such a deception might be kept up, I could not tell. Yet every transmission that put the Germans in error was worth its weight in gold. At that moment the great bell of Big Ben, on its parliamentary tower, began to strike eight in the evening. The tolling was close to us and the reverberations long, loud enough to interrupt conversation. It came like a funeral knell for Karl Henschel. If he was not broken already, this broke him. He looked down at his hands in his lap and said:

‘Tell me what to do.'

There was a sudden relief in the room and we breathed more easily, for it is a terrible thing to send a young man to his death in such a way. Holmes crossed to the window and opened it a little for air in the warm August evening.

‘You may demonstrate your expertise for us,' he said coolly. Though it sounded casual enough, this was what he had been working for.

That night, even before the ultimatum to Germany expired, Henschel tapped out a brief message, repeated several times. I swear that he thought it a mere demonstration and had no idea that it was transmitted through the darkness to his friends in Berlin. Though it was encoded, I read the cipher and saw ‘
ENGLAND EXPECTS
.'

Six weeks earlier, among the falsehoods passed off on Preston and Dr. Gross, this had been the masterstroke of Sherlock Holmes. Admiral von Tirpitz's intelligence officers had been informed by their spies, who knew no better, that ‘England Expects' was the signal for launching Sir John Fisher's ‘Copenhagen,' the attack on Kiel by way of an invasion of Jutland with 15,000 Royal Marines. Now, on the third floor of Scotland Yard, above the Thames and the street lights of the Embankment, Karl Henschel tapped out that message. Far worse for Grand Admiral Tirpitz and the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet, the same message was echoed openly in a few hours time when war was declared and it was broadcast to the entire Royal Navy. Ships' captains opened their sealed orders and read its true meaning—merely that war had begun. Yet to those who listened in Berlin, it seemed that the air was alive with immediate orders to launch or support ‘Copenhagen' and the seizure of the Kiel Canal.

In the circumstances, what followed is scarcely surprising. It is a matter of history that not a single Royal Marine landed on Danish soil. Most of the ‘Marines' reported by Dr. Gross at Liverpool Street station were mere barrack-duty veterans dressed for the part on their train journey to the East Coast ports, to give the impression of an army on the move. The destroyers seen on the horizon were ships that passed in the night. It is also a matter of history that Helmuth von Moltke kept back from the Western Front 20,000 of his best troops in Schleswig-Holstein to protect Germany's Danish flank from this mythical attack. A month later, for want of those 20,000 troops at the Battle of the Marne, the great German advance on the Western Front was halted and beaten into retreat only twenty miles from Paris.

‘Charles Henshaw' tapped out the signals given him for the rest of that great war. For how long those who listened believed him it is impossible to say. Dr. Gross was briefly interned and then allowed to live at liberty in Oxford. Outrageous though this might seem, Sherlock Holmes insisted that it was the best policy. Preston, the spy in the Admiralty, was suddenly alone and without understanding why. He knew only that the instructions and the money that had awaited him every week at Charing Cross cloakroom ceased to appear from the moment of the war's beginning. He might have inquired of Dr. Gross or Karl Henschel, but, thanks to the ingenuity of the German espionage system, he did not even know their names, let alone where they might be found. Frightened and bewildered, he went on with his work as a naval draftsman, watched by those he never saw. His disloyalty in peacetime would lie within reach of the gallows if he continued it in wartime. The temptation to be a spy had gone forever. Once again, Holmes insisted there must be no arrests, no headlines to tell our enemies that their agents had been unmasked. Only by this means could Karl Henschel be used as the means of undermining German intelligence with his false reports.

What the full consequences were, who can say? It is certain that the diversion of 20,000 troops from the Battle of the Marne saved Paris and France, if not England. The battle cruisers of the Royal Navy suffered considerably at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. How much greater their losses would have been had the secret documents concocted by Sherlock Holmes and Jackie Fisher not found their way into the hands of Tirpitz and his staff is a matter of conjecture. Certain it is that my friend was absent for an entire afternoon at Windsor soon after the outbreak of war. He returned and would say little. After a little while he took from his pocket a fine silver cigarette case. Presently he handed it to me.

‘In all the circumstances, old fellow, I should like this to be yours.'

The sterling silver was engraved with a crown and a single royal name followed by ‘R' and ‘I' for ‘Rex' and ‘Imperator.' In addition, as if this were intended for a recipient of exceptional merit, the case was further engraved on the back with the words ‘
ENGLAND EXPECTS
.'

The Case of the Peasenhall Murder

1

Sherlock Holmes was not a man much given to holidays or to any form of travel for its own sake. I once made the mistake of assuring him that the Taj Mahal and the treasures of the Nana Sahib would merit a journey. He answered me in the words of Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, who had promised his friend that the Giant's Causeway was worth seeing.

‘Worth seeing,' said Holmes with a sigh, ‘but, alas, not worth going to see. Life is too short to allow of making mere excursions.'

Apart from his professional visits, he was generally content to remain in London and, indeed, in Baker Street. The only exception he allowed was in his pursuit of archaeology and antiquity. The isles of Greece and the great sites of Troy or Mycenae were too far distant, but the Dark Ages of his own land held a fascination for him. During one of these expeditions, it was my own calling as a medical man that involved us in the strange mystery of the Peasenhall Murder.

Holmes had conceived a taste for the history of East Anglia with its flat landscapes running to the sea and its wide horizons above fields and waterways. Here the noble Saxons of Mercia had fought unavailingly against the Danish invaders twelve centuries before. It was, he said, unspoilt rural England at its best. Our visit was arranged for the first half of June. We were to make our headquarters for ten days at the Bell Hotel in Saxmundham, a grey brick structure adjoining the Town Hall. The Bell was a well-appointed hostelry, built just before the coming of steam, in the last days of horse-drawn mail coaches.

The train from Ipswich deposited us at a little station where one feels the fresh breeze from the North Sea hardly more than five miles distant. No sooner had we finished lunch than Holmes must be up and doing, as the saying goes, carrying out his inspection of the ancient parish church that stood close by. In his impatience, he was for all the world like a major-general reviewing a summer camp.

It was a bright afternoon when my friend introduced me to the ancient tower of Norman stones and flint. It rose beyond the great trees that lined a steep path from the town. Within the nave, there was a fine old hammerbeam roof and a charming mediaeval font carved with emblems of the Evangelists and supported by two dwarves carrying clubs. I noticed, however, that my friend stood longest by a grave in the churchyard that was marked with a skull and crossbones. Its inscription was carved in memory of Joel Eade, ‘whose soul took flight in 1720.' The macabre suggestion that the poor fellow had been carried off by devils was precisely of the kind to attract Sherlock Holmes.

The rest of the day was uneventful, though the sight of the sky gave me some uneasiness. There had been rain the night before, and the dark clouds across the fields promised worse to come. As we sat down to our dinner in the comfortable hotel, the gathering winds outside assured us that a true storm was blowing up. It was an apt prelude to the horrors of the following day.

Until four o'clock next morning, the rain fell as if it never meant to stop, the wind driving against the windows of our rooms. By breakfast time, the gale had blown itself out and the rain had dwindled to a fitful drizzle. We had just risen from the table when our landlady bustled across the room; she was followed by a stranger in police uniform. It was the constable who spoke.

‘Dr. Watson, sir? Police Constable Eli Nunn. May I speak with you, Doctor?'

There followed a most vexing conversation. A medical man, like any other, wishes to take his holiday leisure without interruption. However, a young woman had been found dead that morning in the nearby village of Peasenhall. She had been six months pregnant, with no father to her child, and it was believed that she might have made away with herself. It was imperative that a doctor should attend before the police could move the body to a mortuary. Dr. Lay, the regular medical practitioner, was out on an urgent call, but some convenient busybody had noticed the name of another doctor in the list of guests at the Bell Hotel, Saxmundham! If I would be so good as to attend for a few minutes, it would then be possible for the police to proceed in their business.

It promised to be a most tiresome errand, but, in the circumstances, I could scarcely refuse. Nor, I believe, would Sherlock Holmes have permitted it! A pony and trap waited outside. Constable Nunn whipped up the horse and we bowled along the little Suffolk roads in a thin sunlight, which now followed the storm. Had I known what awaited me, I believe nothing would have induced me to climb into that trap.

The distance was greater than I had expected. We went through the charming village of Sibton with its ruined abbey and cottages in pink and cream, before coming to the more remote and workaday settlement of Peasenhall. I could not help wondering whether Eli Nunn's choice had fallen on me because someone at the hotel had let slip that I was in the company of the famous Sherlock Holmes.

Presently, Constable Nunn reined in the horse outside Providence House, a well-built residence in the main street of Peasenhall, a village that seemed little more than a single long street. We were escorted to the back and entered by a rear conservatory, which in turn led into a small kitchen, about ten feet by eight. A narrow flight of stairs led upward from one corner, so that the servants might reach their attics without appearing on the main staircase. Someone had draped linen over the only window, which cast a further gloom on the scene.

The moment I stepped into the kitchen from the conservatory, I smelt a strong odour of paraffin and a nauseous taint of burnt flesh. Then I looked down and saw the body of a girl lying across the floor on her back. She was wearing her stockings and a nightdress that had been partly charred, as had one side of the body itself. The cause of her death was never in doubt, for there was a wound extending from under the angle of the right jaw across to the left jaw, completely severing the windpipe. Another wound below the angle of the right jaw ran upward underneath the chin. Either of these injuries would have been fatal, but there was also a puncture wound near the breastbone. I also noticed that the door of the little staircase had been thrown back with such violence, presumably in a struggle of some kind, that it had broken a bracket of the narrow wall shelf.

How anyone but a thoroughgoing village idiot could imagine that this was a case of suicide defied explanation. If the poor girl had inflicted either of the throat wounds upon herself, she would certainly not have lived long enough to carry out the second. Indeed, the blood that had spurted from the wounds had splashed the little stairway to the second step. It needed no examination to tell me that she was dead, but I satisfied myself that she was almost cold and that rigor mortis was well-nigh complete.

‘She has been dead for at least four hours,' I said, turning to Constable Nunn, ‘and possibly for much longer, since a body will cool more slowly in summer temperatures.'

The worst aspect of all was that the murderer—for this was murder if ever I saw it—had apparently tried without success to set fire to the place. In the event, the body and its linen were only charred on one side. A broken paraffin lamp lay on the floor, where it had presumably fallen at the moment of her death or a little before. Perhaps the oil from this had caught fire, but it would probably not have been enough to cause such damage to the body or the clothing as we now looked upon it. Where the rest of the paraffin had come from, I could not say.

My presence at the scene made very little difference. A few minutes after our arrival, Dr. Charles Lay, the village physician, returned from his visit to Sibton, and I handed the investigation to him with considerable relief. Though one grows accustomed to the horrors of medical life, there was much about the death of this poor young girl in so brutal a manner that shook me more than I would have expected. Sherlock Holmes stood quiet as a statue and said nothing. However, he accompanied me when I stepped out into the back garden to confer with Dr. Lay. He stood apart a little as we held our conversation and then approached me.