The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (98 page)

The train jolted to a halt at the signal for a country crossing, and we sat in a silence broken only by the long escape of steam. Then we jolted forward again, and Holmes resumed.

‘Yet, Watson, what better target for the rustic voyeurs and scandalmongers than a serious-minded man, an industrious worker who professes to be devout? People love to sniff out hypocrisy, perhaps in the hope of drawing away attention from their own, for it is a universal vice. You saw for yourself that within hours of Gardiner's arrest, his guilt was being proclaimed in a waxwork display on the seafront at Great Yarmouth. The evidence alone must determine his fate.'

Sherlock Holmes had seemed to blow this way and that until I had no idea what was in his mind.

‘From all that we know so far, can you not decide whether you believe him guilty or innocent?'

He pulled a face at the trees and fields of Hertfordshire beyond the carriage window.

‘As to that, my dear fellow, I will tell you when I know him a little better.'

Mr. Wild and his instructing solicitor, Arthur Leighton, were waiting for us as the train pulled into Ipswich station. The horse and trap outside carried us through the streets of the country town to its prison gates. As there is a sad similarity to the fortress-like appearance of provincial gaols, so there is a common odour within them of sour humanity and despair. We were shown into a room where prisoners facing trial were permitted to consult their legal advisers. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, the burly rival of Holmes, stood beside a former military man who was now the prison governor. It was a dismal place, in reality a meanly furnished cell with a single barred window high in its opposite wall. A table and half a dozen wooden chairs were all the comforts that it contained. Even at noon, on this winter day, the white gaslight sputtered in lamp brackets along the pale green lime-washed walls.

Once the introductions had been performed, the governor addressed us.

‘Gentleman, the prisoner Gardiner and whatever other witnesses you may care to see shall be brought before you. I will grant you such privacy as I may. You have Inspector Lestrade with you, so I think we may dispense with a guard in the room itself. Two prison officers will be on duty outside the door. In the circumstances, however, Gardiner must remain handcuffed while he is with you. I respect your need for confidentiality and shall withdraw as soon as the arrangements have been made.'

He left the four of us—Wild, Lestrade, Holmes, and I—and went to order the escort to fetch Gardiner. The Scotland Yard man turned to my friend.

‘Well now, Mr. Holmes, this is a favour I should not have done for any man except yourself.'

Holmes gave him a quick and humourless smile.

‘My dear Lestrade, it is I who have undertaken to pay a favour and the recipient is the English legal system. Favour or not, let it be in respect of a man who deserves to hang if he butchered that poor girl but shall not go to the gallows when he is innocent. My mind is as open as I trust yours is. I must draw such evidence from witnesses and circumstances as will convince you that Gardiner did or did not murder Rose Harsent. You will inform your superiors or the solicitor-general accordingly. That is all I ask.'

‘The whole thing might be far better done in a court of law,' said Lestrade with a tired shrug. He drew up one of the plain wooden chairs to the table and sat down with his notes spread before him.

‘I would trust this man's life to you rather than to a jury,' said Holmes quietly. ‘That is the extent of my confidence in your love of justice.'

This seemed to catch Lestrade on the hop, as they say, and he sat there without speaking a word for the next few minutes. Holmes, Wild, and I had taken our seats next to him with one chair on the far side of the table for our witnesses. Almost at once the door opened and we heard the bustle of a large man being led between two escorts. Before us, in handcuffs, stood the accused whose life was now in our hands. William Gardiner was a finely built man of thirty-four with clear eyes and hair so black that he might have been of Spanish origin. His descent was, as I soon learnt, from those hard-working Huguenots who had sought refuge in Suffolk from religious persecution in France two centuries earlier.

It had been agreed that Ernest Wild should abandon his role as examiner to Sherlock Holmes and Lestrade. My friend looked up at the tall prisoner with his raven-black beard and said quietly, ‘Sit down, if you please, Mr. Gardiner.'

There was a pause and I saw the emotions contending behind the prisoner's quiet demeanour. It must have been many months since anyone had done him the courtesy of addressing him as ‘Mr.' Gardiner. Though he was wearing prison handcuffs, he managed the chair easily enough. Holmes looked him directly in the eyes and Gardiner held his interrogator's gaze. His manner was not hostile, but utterly confident.

‘My name is Sherlock Holmes. To my right is Inspector Lestrade and on my left is my colleague Dr. Watson. Mr. Wild is already familiar to you. You know who we are and why we are here?'

‘I do, sir,' said Gardiner in that strong, quiet voice that seldom wavered except under the emotion of questions respecting his wife, children, or religion. ‘I know all that, and my gratitude to you is unbounded.'

Holmes sat back in his chair, a little brusquely as it seemed to me. ‘We are not here to earn your gratitude, but to serve justice. If you are innocent, we shall do all in our power to demonstrate it. If you are guilty, that shall also appear.'

‘Then we are at one in our purpose, sir,' said Gardiner in the same firm but quiet voice, ‘and if the truth shall indeed shine through all this, I have nothing to fear.'

Only then did his eyes cease to search those of Sherlock Holmes and look down at the table. Sitting in that drab and tainted cell, I thought that the power of Gardiner's personality seemed at times almost to dominate Holmes and Lestrade. Either this was a man whose piety and decency were an example to us all, or one of the devil's own breed in his cunning and dissimulation. The next two or three days would tell.

Holmes took him through the course of his life, eliciting how one of nine pauper children born in the workhouse had by dint of hard work become foreman carpenter at Smyth's Seed Drill Works in Peasenhall. He had taken a loving wife from the Primitive Methodist congregation at Sibton, two miles away, and accepted salvation through its faith. He rose through the ranks of the chapel as he had done at the works. At thirty-four, this pauper child was assistant steward, Sunday school superintendent, choirmaster, and organist, though the choir was a mere dozen voices and organ-playing little more than an accompaniment of chords on the harmonium. It was in this Methodist chapel that William Gardiner, the married man, had met Rose Harsent, who was twenty years old at the time. It seemed that she had been brought to the primitive faith by her former suitor, though their courtship had now ended. Miss Rose had been a member of Gardiner's little choir and had asked him to teach her the harmonium.

Among his other accomplishments, he could read well and write passably, though his penmanship lacked a number of refinements. His reputation with his employers was such that two years earlier he had been sent to manage the firm's stand at the Paris Exhibition and had written several letters to them reporting on the event. It was said among some of his more envious neighbours that he had ‘done well for a workhouse brat.'

‘Very good then,' said Holmes, when all this ground had been cleared. ‘Now let us come, if you please, to the night of 1 May, thirteen months before the murder. It was the evening that gave rise to so much talk about you and Miss Rose Harsent, was it not? Tell us what you did and where you were between seven and nine o'clock.'

Gardiner held his gaze once more.

‘That is easily done, sir. I had been driving Mr. Smyth on business that afternoon, over to Dunwich. He will vouch for it that we were late back. We came to the drill works again just after seven that evening. I rubbed down the horse, which is my job, and gave him his feed. Yet the animal would not take the bait to start him eating. I thought I should leave him a while and then, if he still would not eat, I must report the matter to Mr. Smyth. Home I went and had my tea at seven thirty, as my wife will tell you. The walk is a quarter mile or so and not more than six or seven minutes.'

‘At what time do you usually have your tea?' asked Holmes.

‘Normally, sir, I have my tea at six. On this occasion, it was a little before eight when I finished the meal and about five minutes after that when I was ready to go out again. Then I went back to the drill works to attend to the horse, to see if he had eaten. I found that he had. I would have reached the works very soon after eight o'clock, I daresay not much more than five minutes past. I came out again about eight fifteen. It was then that I saw Miss Rose Harsent standing by the gate of what we call the Doctor's Chapel, which she cleaned every week. I did not see Wright hanging about then. If he was there, he was concealed from me. Rose was in service with Mr. and Mrs. Crisp at Providence House. That chapel was Congregational. Mr. Crisp being one of the deacons, cleaning it was part of Rose's duties.'

‘You went across the road to her?'

‘No, sir. She called me over and said that she had finished her cleaning but could not get the chapel door to close, so that she might lock it. She had been a friend to Mrs. Gardiner and me for a few years, so naturally I went to help. The door was an old one and I found that the rain had swollen it at the bottom. I caught hold and gave it a good slam, enough to close it so that it might be locked. We came back down the path together, for the chapel stands back thirty yards from the road. That is the distance they have now measured. We walked together a little way to Providence House, a few minutes, half of my way home. We talked of chapel matters as we went, choosing hymns for the anniversary and so on. I left her at the corner, saw her go into Providence House, and walked the rest of the way home, just a couple of minutes more. And that was all there was to it, sir, no matter what they may say. My wife will tell you that I was home before half past eight.'

Inspector Lestrade had been fretting to get his own question in.

‘What of the young man, George Wright, who tells a different story?'

‘I saw him twice, sir. When I left the Seed Drill Works and went home to my tea, just before seven thirty, he was hanging about the gate of the works. He was there, still hanging about, when I went back about half an hour or so later. I knew him, of course, for he is a labourer at the works, but I never stopped to say more than a word as I passed.'

‘And that is all?'

‘And that is all, sir.'

‘Not quite,' said Lestrade ominously, ‘for this is not a court of law and the suspicion still stands against you. What do you say to the allegations of Wright and Skinner? Please do not tell me that it is all a lie from beginning to end, for that will not do in this room. William Wright swears on his oath in court that he saw Rose Harsent enter the Doctor's Chapel about seven thirty that evening. He saw you follow her a few minutes later. Contemptible though it may be, he then went to fetch his young friend Alfonso Skinner to have some fun, as he put it, by spying on you and the young woman. At about eight o'clock these two youths crouched down behind a hedge, on a high bank near the southwest window of the chapel. They have sworn in court that they heard your voice and that of a young woman, whom they later saw to be Rose Harsent. They heard the sounds of an act of gross indecency.…'

Gardiner's face was tight as canvas under full sail and dark as indigo.

‘It is.…'

‘Kindly do not interrupt me,' said the Scotland Yard man calmly, ‘and in your own best interests do not tell me again that it is a foul lie unless you can show that to be true. These two young men heard the two of you clearly enough. Your voices were plain enough for Skinner to make out the exact passage from the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Genesis which you and Rose Harsent used to describe your misconduct. Wright left his friend for about ten minutes during the time that you were in the chapel with the girl. He came back and stayed another fifteen minutes. He was in time to hear the rest of your conversation and to see you both leave. From where they were hidden, they were able to see the girl leave first and then to watch you following her.'

Gardiner would keep silent no longer.

‘It is an abominable falsehood! By all I hold sacred, it is! A libel on holy scripture as surely as on my reputation! Why should they do such a thing to me? I never in my life wished them harm.'

Sherlock Holmes intervened.

‘One moment, Lestrade. Is it said that Mr. Gardiner and the girl left the chapel together?'

Lestrade turned over several pages of his papers.

‘According to Skinner, Rose Harsent left and Gardiner followed a few minutes later. The girl went on ahead to Providence House, he says, while Gardiner came out, tiptoed across to the other side of the road, and took the same direction. Skinner followed him in turn. I daresay, Mr. Holmes, your cases are in a superior class to this kind of thing. For your information, however, guilty parties in conduct of this kind seldom leave the scene of their amours together.'

For some reason that was not plain to me at that moment, a look of relief appeared on the face of Sherlock Holmes. Before he could speak, however, Gardiner burst out again.

‘Those two young men say they hid behind that hedge about twenty minutes after eight. I was on my way home from the chapel by then. Skinner says they were there about an hour, and Wright too, except for the ten minutes he was away walking about the road. I was at home before all that. He says he was there for an hour and Wright was there three-quarters of an hour. As my wife will tell you, I was with her all the time that this wickedness was supposed to be happening at the chapel. She knows it, and for that reason she never believed a single word that these slanderers spoke.'