The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (7 page)

Griffin—who had been summoned first—had concluded his examination.

" 'He has been dead for about two hours,' said the doctor. 'But for the life of me I can't

understand how he died.'

"I had moved round to the other side of the bed, composing myself to pray, when I caught

sight of Trelawney's gold watch, gleaming in a ray of morning sunlight. The watch was a stem-

winder, without a key. It lay on a small marble-topped table, amid a litter of patent-medicine

bottles and liniment-bottles which diffused a strong odour in the stuffy room.

"We are told that in times of crisis our minds will occupy themselves with trifles. This

is so, else I cannot account for my own behaviour.

"Fancying that the watch was not ticking, I lifted it to my ear. But it was ticking. I gave the

stem two full turns until it was stopped by the spring; but, in any case, I should not have

proceeded. The winding caused a harsh noise,
cr-r-ack,
which drew from Dolores an unnerving

scream. I recall her exact words.

" 'Vicar! Put it down! It is like—like a death-rattle.' "

For a moment we sat in silence. Miss Dale turned away her head.

"Mr. Holmes," said Ainsworth earnestly, "these wounds are too recent. May I beg that you

will excuse Miss Dale from any further questions tonight?"

Holmes rose to his feet.

"Fears are groundless things without proof, Miss Dale," he observed. Taking out his

watch, he looked at it thoughtfully.

"The hour grows late, eh, Mr. Holmes," remarked Lestrade.

"That did not occur to me. But you are right. And now, to Goodman's Rest."

A short journey in the vicar's carriage brought us to a pair of lodge gates opening into a

narrow drive. The moon had risen and the long, glimmering avenue stretched away before us, all

mottled and barred with the shadows of the great elm trees. As we swung round the final curve,

the golden cones of light from the carriage-lamps gleamed faintly on the face of a gaunt, ugly

mansion. All the drab-painted window-shutters were closed against the casements, and the

front door was shrouded in black crepe.

"It's a house of gloom, all right," said Lestrade in a subdued voice as he tugged at the

bell-pull. "Hullo! How's this! What are you doing here, Dr. Griffin?"

The door had swung open and a tall, red-bearded man, clad in a loose-fitting Norfolk jacket

and knickerbockers, stood in the entrance. As he glared fiercely from one to the other of us, I

noted the clenched hands and heaving chest that told of some fearsome inner tension.

"Must I get your permission to walk a mile, Mr. Lestrade?" he cried. "Isn't it enough

that your cursed suspicions have roused the whole country-side against me?" His great

hand shot out and siezed my friend by the shoulder. "You're Holmes!" he said

passionately. "I got your note, and here I am. Please God that you live up to your

repute. So far as I can see, you are all that stands between me and the hangman. There,

now, what a brute I am! I've frightened her."

With a low moan, Miss Dale had buried her face in her hands.

"It's the strain, it's—it's everything!" she sobbed. "Oh, horror unthinkable!"

I was really very annoyed with Holmes; for, while we gathered round the weeping girl

with words of comfort, he merely observed to Lestrade that presumably the dead man's

body was inside. Turning his back on us, he strode into the house, whipping out a pocket

lens as he did so.

After a decent interval, I hurried after him with Lestrade on my heels. Through a door

on the left of a great dark hall, we caught a glimpse of a candle-lit room piled high with

half-withered flowers and of Holmes's long, thin figure stooping over a white-shrouded form

in the open coffin. The candlelight twinkled on his lens as he bent down until his face was

only a few inches above that of the dead man. There was a period of absolute stillness

while he scrutinized the placid features beneath him. Then gently he pulled up the sheet and

turned away.

I would have spoken, but he hurried past us swiftly and silently with no more than a

curt gesture towards the stairs. On the upper landing, Lestrade led the way into a bedroom

with massive dark furniture that loomed up gloomily in the light of a shaded lamp burning

on a table beside a great open Bible. The sickly stuffiness of funeral flowers, as well as the

dampness of the house, followed me everywhere.

Holmes, his brows drawn into two hard black lines, was crawling on all fours under the

windows, examining every inch of the floor with his lens. At my stern word of injunction

he rose to his feet.

"No, Watson! These windows were not opened three nights ago. Had they been opened

during so heavy a storm, I must have found traces." He sniffed the air. "But it was not

necessary to open the windows."

"Listen!" said I. "What is that strange noise?"

I looked over towards the bed, with its curtains and high dark canopy. At the head

of the bed my gaze fastened on a marble-topped table littered with dusty medicine-bottles.

"Holmes, it is the dead man's gold watch! It lies upon that little table there, and it is still

ticking."

"Does that astonish you?"

"Surely, after three days, they would have allowed it to run down?"

"So they did. But I wound it up. I came up here before I examined the dead man

downstairs. In fact, I made this whole journey from the village to wind up Squire

Trelawney's watch at precisely ten o'clock."

"Upon my word, Holmes—!"

"And see," he continued, hastening to the small table in question, "what a treasure-

trove we have here! Look at this, Lestrade! Look at it!"

"But, Holmes, it is only a small pot of vaseline such as you may buy at any chemist's!"

"On the contrary, it is a hangman's rope. And yet," he finished thoughtfully, "there

remains that one point which continues to puzzle me. How was it that you were able to

avail yourself of Sir Leopold Harper?" he asked suddenly, turning to Lestrade. "Does he

live here?"

"No, he is staying with some friends in the neighbourhood. When the post-mortem was

decided on, the local police looked upon it as a bit of luck that the best-known expert in

England on medical jurisprudence should be within reach, so they sent for him. And a

fine time they had to get him to do it," he added with a sly grin.

"Why?"

"Because he was in bed with a hot-water bottle, a glass of hot toddy, and a cold in his

head."

Holmes threw his arms in the air.

"My case is complete," he cried.

Lestrade and I looked at each other in amazement. "I have only one more instruction to

give," said Holmes. "Lestrade, nobody must leave this house tonight. The diplomacy of

detaining everyone here I leave to you. Watson and I will compose ourselves in this room until

five o'clock tomorrow morning."

It was in vain, considering his masterful nature, to ask why we must do this. While he settled

into the only rocking-chair, it was in vain to protest that I could not even sit down on the

dead man's bed, much less take a brief nap there. I objected for some time. I objected until—

"Watson!"

Cleaving through my dreams, that voice roused me from slumber. I sat bolt upright on

the quilt, feeling much dishevelled, with the morning sun in my eyes and the dead man's

watch still ticking near my ear.

Sherlock Holmes, with his customary catlike neatness of appearance, stood watching me.

"It is ten minutes past five," said he, "and I felt I had best awaken you. Ah, Lestrade," he

continued, as there came a knock at the door. "I trust that the others are with you. Pray

come in."

I bounded off the bed as Miss Dale entered the room followed by Dr. Griffin, young

Ainsworth and, to my astonishment, the vicar.

"Really, Mr. Holmes," cried Dolores Dale, her eyes sparkling with anger. "It is intolerable

that a mere whim should keep us here all night—even poor Mr. Appley."

"It was no whim, believe me. I wish to explain how the late Mr. Trelawney was cold-

bloodedly murdered."

"Murdered, eh!" blurted out Dr. Griffin. "Then Inspector Lestrade wants to hear you.

But the method—?"

"Was diabolical in its simplicity. Dr. Watson here was shrewd enough to call my attention

to it. No, Watson, not a word! Mr. Appley gave us the clue when he said that if he had

practiced medicine he might absent-mindedly have removed a patient's gall-stones. But that

was not all he said. He stated that first he would have chloroformed the patient. The

suggestive word was
chloroform."

"Chloroform!" echoed Dr. Griffin, rather wildly.

"Exactly. It might well suggest itself to a murderer, since only last year, in a famous

murder-trial at the Old Bailey, Mrs. Adelaide Bartlett was acquitted from a charge of poisoning

her husband by pouring liquid chloroform down his throat as he lay asleep."

"But, deuce take it! Trelawney swallowed no chloroform!"

"Of course not. But suppose, Dr. Griffin, I were to take a large pad of cotton-wool

saturated in chloroform, and press it over the mouth and nostrils of an old man —a heavily

sleeping man—for some twenty minutes. What would happen?"

"He would die. Yet you could not do that without leaving traces!"

"Ah, excellent! What traces?"

"Chloroform tends to burn or blister the skin. There would be burns, at least very small

burns."

Holmes shot out a long arm towards the marble-topped table.

"Now suppose, Dr. Griffin," said he, holding up the tiny pot of vaseline, "I were first

softly to spread on the face of the victim a thin film of such ointment as this. Would there be

burns afterwards?"

"No, there wouldn't!"

"I perceive that your medical knowledge leaps ahead and anticipates me. Chloroform is

volatile; it evaporates and quickly vanishes from the blood. Delay a postmortem

examination for nearly two days, as this was delayed, and no trace will be left."

"Not so fast, Mr. Sherlock Holmes! There is—"

"There is a slight, a very slight possibility, that an odour of chloroform may be detected

either in the room of death or at the post-mortem. But here it would have been hidden by the

thick pungency of medicine and liniment. At the post-mortem it would have been hidden by

that bad cold in the head from which Sir Leopold Harper suffered."

Dr. Griffin's face seemed to stand out white against his red beard.

"By God, that's true!"

"Now we ask ourselves, as the vicar might,
cui bono?
Who profits from this dastardly crime?"

I noticed that Lestrade moved a step closer to the doctor.

"Take care, curse you!" snarled Griffin.

Holmes put down the ointment and took up the dead man's heavy gold watch, which seemed

to tick even more loudly.

"I would draw your attention to this watch, of the sort known as a gold hunter. Last

night I wound it up fully at ten o'clock. It is now, as you see, twenty minutes past five."

"And what of that?" cried Miss Dale.

"It is the exact time, if you recall, when the vicar wound up this same watch on the

morning you found your uncle dead. Though the performance may distress you now, I beg of

you to listen."

Cr-r
—
r-ack
went the harsh, rasping noise as Holmes began slowly to wind it up. On and on

it seemed to go, while the stem still turned.

"Hold hard!" said Dr. Griffin. "There's something wrong!"

"Again excellent! And what is wrong?"

"Deuce take it, the vicar made only two full turns of that stem, and it was fully wound up!

You've made seven or eight turns, but it still is not wound!"

"Precisely so," returned Holmes, "but I do not emphasize this particular watch. Any

watch, if it be wound up at ten o'clock in the evening, cannot possibly be fully wound on the

following morning with only two turns."

"My God!" muttered the doctor, staring at Holmes.

"Hence the late Mr. Trelawney did not go to bed at ten o'clock. Surely, considering his

badly disturbed nerves and the continued thunder-storm, it is far more likely that he sat up

reading his Bible until an unearthly hour, as the vicar said he sometimes did. Though he

wound up his watch as usual, he did not retire until three o'clock. The murderer caught him in

a heavy sleep."

"And therefore?" almost screamed Dolores.

"Therefore—since one person tells us he saw Trelawney asleep at ten-thirty, at

midnight, and again at one o'clock—that person has told us a provable and damning

falsehood."

"Holmes," cried I, "at last I see the direction in which all this points. The culprit is—"

Jeffrey Ainsworth sprang for the door.

"Ah, would you!" shouted Lestrade. He hurled himself on the young man, and there was a

snap of closing handcuffs.

Miss Dolores Dale ran sobbing forward. She did not run towards Ainsworth. Instead she

rushed into the outstretched arms of Dr. Paul Griffin.

"You see, Watson," concluded Mr. Sherlock Holmes, as that night we sat once more in

Baker Street, refreshing ourselves with whisky and soda, "the probable guilt of young