The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters (11 page)

“What Tex had to tell us disclosed a great deal,” Holmes muttered after the youngster had gone off to his chores. “I believe I shall call upon Sir Ethan Tarleton first thing tomorrow. For now, I shall resume my inspection of Mr Carroll’s effects.”

That evening, after Holmes had finished his research, we were readying for bed when Constable Roddy came with news that would keep us awake half the night.

“Sorry to trouble you gentlemen so late, but I thought you would want to know as soon as possible, Mr Holmes, that another headless body has surfaced,” he announced. “This one was found along a seldom-travelled path that leads from the outskirts of town past a shack inhabited by the village drunkard, George Beidler. It appears he is the victim, although we have no one to make a positive identification. Poor old George—he was harmless. Who would want to kill him? He could have been lying there a number of days, and if it were not for one of our residents taking a short-cut home tonight, the discovery could have been delayed even longer.”

“Take me to the scene of the crime immediately,” commanded Holmes, “because there may be clues that will vanish by morning.”

We rode in Roddy’s surrey about two kilometers on narrow roads and through a small forest, at the end of which was a cart path. When we were near the scene of the crime, Holmes ordered Roddy to stop so as not to disturb any evidence.

“As I have observed to Dr Watson on more than one occasion,” Holmes explained, “there is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.”

“If you walk up the path about a hundred paces, you will find the torso all in a heap in a dried pool of blood,” Roddy advised.

Holmes instructed both of us to remain in the surrey while he took a lantern from the side of the vehicle and proceeded up the path in the moonlight. We could see the glow of the lantern when he reached the site. The lantern remained stationary a few moments, then circled to the left and to the right, then back to the left, pausing for a length of time. Then the lantern travelled farther up the path about twenty paces and into the forest, where it disappeared from view for a short time.

When he returned, Holmes asked Roddy if the person who notified him of the crime had been on horseback, and Roddy answered in the affirmative.

“That accounts for the hoof prints, then,” Holmes said, adding: “There are three distinct sets of footprints. One set led away from the village, the footprints left by the victim. The second set belonged to you, Constable Roddy. And the last belonged to the killer. He is six feet tall and weighs approximately two hundred pounds. I determined this from the length of his stride and the depth of the track in the soft soil. He wears a new square-toed boot, size eleven, with cleats on the heels. He made his escape in a wagon under the cover of the forest. I lost the tracks of the wagon there.”

“But what of the motive, Mr Holmes?” Roddy wanted to know. “No one would steal from a drunkard—George had no valuables. He played cards at the pub for money to buy whisky. Could the culprit be a maniac who strikes at random for the thrill of it?”

“The motive is not clear to me yet, but I have a suspicion. However, it is too premature to discuss,” Holmes answered as we drove away. “You can arrange to have the torso removed to the doctor’s office. I have seen all there is to see here.”

After we arrived back at the farmhouse, Roddy excused himself to take care of matters at the scene of the crime, so Holmes and I went inside to change into our bed clothes. I retired for the night, but Holmes climbed into his purple dressing-gown, lapsed into a chair with his elbows on the arms, his fingertips together, and his eyes to the ceiling.

* * * *

I awoke in the morning to the sound of Holmes talking to Tex in the kitchen. They were preparing breakfast with a half-dozen fresh eggs Tex had gathered from the hen house and sausages they had retrieved from the ice chest.

Holmes informed Tex of the horrible finding on the cart path the night before, and Tex reacted with a wide-eyed expression.

“The monster just left him there for the buzzards, eh?” Tex said. “Constable Roddy said Mr Carroll was dumped in the river from the bridge for the fish to eat. There was a blood stain on the railin’.”

I also learned from their conversation that Tex would take Holmes on a buckboard into the village so Holmes could speak with the blacksmith, then over to the shack of the drunkard George, and on to the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.

I volunteered to clean up after them so they would not be delayed. I planned to walk the grounds afterwards to take in the warm sunshine and inspect the lay of the land.

“This is stimulatin’—bein’ with you while you solve the murders,” Tex said to Holmes as they seated themselves on the wagon. “Do you suppose ole George and Mr Carroll are lookin’ down with pride from heaven? That’s where they must be. Neither of ’em ever hurt a soul while they was on this earth.”

Holmes assured Tex that George and Mr Carroll had gone to their rewards, and the two consulting detectives went off, smiling broadly.

I soon finished work in the kitchen, took up my walking stick, and began to stroll through the property. The horses cropping grass in the lush pasture picked up their heads and followed me for some distance along the barbed-wire fence line. They were magnificent, muscled creatures that Mr Carroll had brought with him from the Wyoming territory, which had attained statehood in 1890, the year he left for Europe with Tex.

One red roan mustang, when I reached the place where the fence turned at a right angle, snorted and stomped the ground just beyond the corner. Something there had disturbed the animal, and I went over to investigate. To my amazement, there was a patch of sod discoloured with what appeared to be dried blood near the base of a fence post.

Could this be the spot where Mr Carroll lost his life? I wondered. Holmes, I was certain, would be intrigued by what I had found and would want to see it for himself, so I marked the location with my bowler by placing it atop the post.

I continued walking until I reached a neighbouring barnyard, then reversed my direction when a tall, sturdy man about the age of thirty emerged from the grey, frame farmhouse to warn me in an unfriendly voice that I was trespassing on his land. I apologized and quickly made my way back onto the property of Mr Carroll. I attributed his demeanour to the fear the residents must have shared because a killer was prowling among them.

I took a different route back to our quarters, and when I entered, the Carroll home was unoccupied. Since Holmes and Tex had not yet returned, I decided to busy myself with some reading from the bookshelves in the sitting-room. I studied the titles in the classics section, and one volume in particular caught my eye,
Shakespeare Analysed
, by the British playwright Sidney Humphries. I took it down from the shelf, and to my surprise, the gap it left revealed the dial to a safe in the wall. How fascinating, I thought. “Holmes will be enthralled with yet this second discovery of mine,” I said aloud to myself. My inquisitiveness was heightened further when I learned that a button on the shelf, when depressed, caused the entire bookcase to swing away from the wall to allow access to the small hide-away safe. I returned the bookcase to its normal position.

I tried to concentrate on the book I had selected, but my anticipation of telling Holmes about my detective work prevented me from absorbing the words. So, I put
Shakespeare Analysed
back on the shelf. I began to pace back and forth across the room, much like Holmes’s habit when lost in thought.

Finally, at about two o’clock, I heard the horses and buckboard arrive at the front gate. Holmes came into the farmhouse alone, while Tex went on toward the barn to unhitch the wagon and cool down the team.

“Tex is a talker, to be sure,” Holmes started to say, but I interrupted him to tell him my news about the discoloured patch on the trail.

“Excellent, Watson!” he exclaimed. “It fits perfectly into my theory of this case! Now to the bookcase. Tex advised me that Mr Carroll kept important documents and Yankee dollars in a safe hidden behind the shelves.”

I was crestfallen, and my disappointment was obvious. “I discovered the safe while you were gone, and I wanted to shock you with it,” I informed Holmes when he asked me if he had said something to offend me. I showed Holmes the button and he pressed it.

The safe now exposed, Holmes placed his ear tightly against the door and began to turn the dial to the right and to the left. I knew he was proficient in the skills of a burglar, but I had been unaware that safe-cracking was a part of his repertoire.

“I heard the tumblers click,” he whispered after a few moments. He turned the handle and the safe opened. “Halloa!” he blurted.

Holmes marvelled at the contents. There was fifty thousand dollars in cash, deeds to all of Mr Carroll’s properties, a document from an orphanage in Wyoming, a carbonated copy of a forty-year-old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton, bank deposit slips, plus a will enscrolled with a date after Mr Carroll had relocated to the farmhouse outside the village.

“I was convinced a man of his stature would be careful to maintain such records,” Holmes stated. “The only question was where.” Holmes carried the documents to the desk, organised the papers that were already on it, and sat to examine the new ones, I looking over his shoulder. He fished inside his jacket pocket, withdrew his clay pipe and a pouch of shag tobacco, filled the pipe half way, lit it, and settled against the back of the chair. The smoke curled to the ceiling as Holmes read voraciously.

“This means Mr Carroll adopted Tex when he was thirteen years old, just before they sailed for England,” Holmes summarised. “And he has bequeathed to Tex all worldly possessions. We must inform Tex promptly.”

We went to the barn as Tex was feeding the horses their evening meal. He was startled and befuddled by the information.

“Golleee,” he intoned. “Now I know why he treated me like a son. But why do you suppose Mr Carroll kept it such a secret?”

“I don’t know for certain, Tex,” Holmes replied, “but perhaps he wanted to avoid you becoming haughty and arrogant, like the disposition we found in the son of Sir Ethan Tarleton. Whatever the answer, your adoptive father took the secret to his grave.”

“This changes everythin’,” Tex went on. “I have greater responsibilities now. I’m not sure I can handle them.”

“You have a few years to prepare,” Holmes added. “The will stipulates you inherit Mr Carroll’s wealth and properties when you reach the age of twenty-one. For the time being, it is all in the hands of a trustee in America.”

We all returned to the farmhouse for supper, and Tex peppered Holmes with questions about the future.

“Right now,” he said, “there’s the matter of payin’ the field hands. And to be honest, I’m a little short of money myself.”

Holmes told him there was enough in the safe to care for those needs. “With guidance from the trustee, you will have no worries,” Holmes said.

After we ate and were refreshed, Holmes asked me to lead him to the patch of sod with the suspected blood stain. “There is ample sunlight left to go there, perform a test, and be back here before dark,” he surmised.

Although I was tired, I agreed, and we set off on foot toward the post where I hung the derby. Under the evening sun, the spot was less pronounced than in the morning. Holmes produced a leather case from his jacket pocket, and inside were several small vials containing various liquids. He removed one from the case, plucked a few blades of grass from the stained patch, and immersed them into the clear solution in the vial. “If the liquid turns yellow, then it is blood on the grass,” he informed me. It did. “Mr Carroll met his end here, then,” Holmes conjectured, “before he reached the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.” Holmes pointed over the rise ahead and said the Tarleton farm laid just beyond it.

“Then it was someone from the Tarleton homestead who shooed me away today,” I mentioned to him, and I told him of my encounter with the tall, sturdy fellow.

“More than likely that was Sir Ethan’s son, Zachary,” Holmes guessed. “I, too, found him unfriendly. He erroneously advised me that by living in the Carroll farmhouse I was trespassing on land that rightfully belonged to his father now. He contended the written agreement between his father and Mr Carroll spelled out the ownership in no uncertain terms.” Holmes said Sir Ethan Tarleton was of little help in the investigation because he suffered from dementia and had a weak heart that kept him bedfast most of the time. “His memory is dysfunctional,” Holmes revealed during our walk back to Mr Carroll’s farmhouse.

* * * *

At mid-morning the next day, Holmes and Tex took the buckboard to the office of the magistrate, the keeper of records for the county. On the way, they were to pick up Constable Roddy, who would obtain a writ to gain possession of the original of the old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton. Holmes suspected the agreement on file with the magistrate might have been altered recently.

“I shall explain when I return with the document,” Holmes said when I went to the front gate to see them off.

To pass the time while they were gone, I opened the volume entitled
Shakespeare Analysed
and was soon mesmerised, acquiring the knowledge for the first time that there existed a hypothesis that The Bard was not a single person but actually a collection of playwrights using the pseudonym William Shakespeare. I thought it preposterous, recounting in my head many of the quotations from the dramas and trying to imagine that they were the handiwork of more than one genius.

Time passed quickly, for I was still absorbed in the author’s analysis when Holmes, Roddy, and Tex walked through the door in the middle of the afternoon.

“It is as I suspected, Watson,” Holmes announced. “Take the carbonated copy of the agreement from the desk and compare it to the original. A page has been substituted which contradicts what is in the copy. Notice the watermark—the depiction of the fool in the floppy cock’s comb cap and the collar with five peaks, each bearing a jingle bell. He is in a different position on the bogus page of the original. The fool is at the centre right on the other three genuine pages, and at the bottom left on the substituted page.