The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (109 page)

‘19A + 1C. 19th to the 28th of June,' Holmes murmured. ‘To obtain this effect, it is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily. Watson, we must go at once! Let us pray we are not too late.'

‘Back to Brighton?'

He looked at me as if I had lost my senses and hailed another cab as it came sailing down from Piccadilly.

‘To Brighton? By no means! To Kentish Town, driver! Fortess Road! As fast as you can go!'

If the race to follow Chamberlain had been a madcap drive, this was worse. We flew down Dover Street, across Oxford Street to the Euston Road, up the Hampstead Road, through Camden Town, and presently drew up in Fortess Road. Throughout the journey Holmes had been muttering to himself, as if for fear that he might forget, ‘It is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily.'

We had stopped outside the North London Manufactory of Propter's Nicodemus Pills. It was a drab redbrick building whose signboard was visible through a veil of soot. Holmes led the way, demanding to see the proprietor upon a matter of life and death and uttering threats of prosecution before the fact upon a charge of attempted murder.

The proprietor was not there, or if he was he had taken shelter. We were shown into the office of the manager, a room that had a good deal to do with ledgers and invoices but little with the healing of the sick. It was just the accommodation I had supposed that vendors of quack medicine would inhabit.

Holmes ignored the invitation to take a chair. He stood before the manager, the aquiline profile now hawk-like and the eyes burning, as it were, into those of his adversary. He did not even inquire the man's name.

‘Listen to me,' he said quietly, ‘and think very carefully before you reply. Unless I have the truth now, it is very probable that you may face a charge of attempted murder and not impossible that you may be tried for murder outright. This is my colleague, Dr. Watson of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He will recognize any attempt at evasion or imposture, and in that event you will be in very serious trouble.'

The manager looked at first as though he thought Holmes was an escaped lunatic of some kind. After the brief introduction of my name, however, he began to appear gratifyingly frightened.

‘I am Jobson and I have done nothing!' he said.

‘Very well, Jobson who has done nothing, listen to me. Have you at any time in the past few months sent to your regular customers a complimentary sample of an improved version of Nicodemus Pills?'

Jobson looked as if this might be a joke or a trick.

‘No,' he said at length, ‘of course not. We don't send out complimentaries.'

‘Let me give you the wording. The box of twenty improved capsules is ‘designed to prevent the nighttime restlessness that may previously have been consequent upon their use. To obtain this effect, it is of the utmost importance that the capsules should be taken in the order indicated, twice daily.”'

‘I never heard of such a thing.' To look at Mr. Jobson was to believe that he spoke the truth.

‘What are the principal ingredients of your Nicodemus Pills?'

‘The largest is milk sugar, then liver salts, cream of tartar, liquorice, arsenic in homeoepathic dose, cantharis similarly, coffee, sarsaparilla.…'

‘Calomel?'

It was evident from Jobson's eyes that he had not the least idea what this was.

‘A substance derived from mercury,' I said quickly, ‘used as a rule for laxative purposes.'

‘Never,' he said earnestly. ‘That would never do.'

‘Nor do you use gelatine capsules for your potions?'

‘The price,' he said, ‘would be too high. Our powders are compressed into tablet form.'

Holmes looked at me. His eyes were gleaming with triumph.

‘Very well,' he said, ‘our cab is waiting for us. You may expect, Mr. Jobson, to hear from Scotland Yard. I daresay Inspector Tobias Gregson will want a word with you in the course of his investigations.'

Holmes stopped the cab at the first post office and wired again to Gregson, instructing him to meet us at all costs upon our return at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton. If that was impossible, he was to send the ‘most competent' of his men on a matter of life and death.

We cabbed it direct to Victoria and then caught the Pullman to Brighton. Even so, it was six o'clock by the time of our arrival and the summer sun was already declining across the tract of sea beyond the canyon of Queens Road and West Street below us. We reached the Royal Albion as the early dinner guests were sitting down to their meal. Among them was the sad, dishevelled figure of Edmund Gurney who, presumably, still knew nothing of my ministrations to him during the previous night.

Holmes watched him like a falcon through the open door of the dining room, though what he was waiting for was not yet plain. If there was such danger, why did he not go and speak to the man? We took armchairs in a corner of the lobby, by a dwarf palm growing in a copper tub. Gurney was coming to the end of his dinner. He poured a glass of water from the carafe, opened a little tin on the table beside him, and took out a gelatine capsule, which was the last of the complimentary set of Propter's Nicodemus Pills. My own view remained that if the others had done him no harm, there was no reason why this one should.

Holmes sprang from the chair beside me, crossed the dining room in a few swift strides, and with a blow of his arm knocked the tin and the capsule from Gurney's hand. The invalid Gurney sat ashen and quivering with shock at the sudden attack. Other guests were motionless and silent, all staring in one direction. It was a complete study of still life, the lean and menacing figure of Holmes included, as he leant forward towards his victim. The shock was broken by a voice from the hallway behind me.

‘Mr. Holmes, sir! Mr. Holmes!'

I turned and saw Inspector Tobias Gregson in his three-quarter topcoat and carrying his hat in his hand.

5

As the three of us sat together in our room later that evening, Inspector Gregson put his glass down and said, with a further shake of his head, ‘It was an assault, Mr. Holmes. It was as surely an assault upon the man as any that I have ever witnessed.'

‘Gurney held death in his hand, Gregson, as surely as if he held a bomb that was about to explode.'

‘And how can you say that, when you do not know what might be in the capsule?'

Holmes held a flame to his pipe.

‘I have no doubt, my dear fellow, as to what is in that capsule, none whatever. When it is analyzed it will be found to contain calomel. At a guess, I would say about ten grains of calomel.'

‘Well, ten grains of calomel would not kill him,' I said reluctantly. ‘At the worst, it would upset his digestion.'

Holmes ignored this, refusing to rise to the bait. In the silence that followed, it was Gregson who began to tell a story that at first seemed to have little to do with the events we had witnessed.

‘As to Professor Chamberlain and Madame Elvira, Mr. Holmes. Upon receiving your wire and the theatrical program with the photographs of the two performers, I made one or two inquiries. Forewarned is forearmed, gentlemen. Madame Elvira's photograph meant nothing to me, I must confess. Professor Chamberlain, however, I recognized. Indeed, we have our own photograph of him in the Criminal Record Office. Nothing to do with second sight, I assure you, but everything to do with forging two letters of credit on the Midland Counties Bank. He served six months for that, but he almost escaped us before the trial by taking passage for North America. He was brought back from Quebec at our request.'

‘Then I trust your men will also be in Southampton early tomorrow morning,' said Holmes quietly. ‘It would not do for Chamberlain to elude you a second time in that manner.'

‘Two of my men will be watching the liner
Bretagne
from the moment she docks until the moment she sails again for Cherbourg and New York. He will not get far on this occasion.'

‘Then you had better watch out for his accomplice,' my friend interposed. ‘His partner in crime may already be aboard the
Bretagne
. I have no doubt that Madame Elvira slipped across the Channel to France today and that she travelled by train to Cherbourg. She is either waiting for him there or possibly has boarded the
Bretagne
already for the outward crossing to Southampton.'

By little more than a flicker, Gregson's eyes betrayed that he had taken no precautions as to Madame Elvira. He sipped his whisky again and then resumed.

‘Yesterday afternoon, gentlemen, I also spent an hour at the Pinkerton bureau in London inquiring as to the American antecedents of Joshua D. Chamberlain. Though he is an Englishman born and bred, he has spent a considerable amount of time in the United States. I was told a most interesting story. While there, a year or so ago, he made a profound impression on Mrs. Marguerite Lesieur of Philadelphia, the middle-aged widow of the railroad builder. He persuaded her of his powers of communicating with the dead when assisted by a medium. This was Madame Elvira, who proved to be his sister. Mrs. Lesieur was generous in return and promised greater rewards to come. Chamberlain is clever. He demurred at first and returned to England, pursued by her letters at every post. In the end, Mrs. Lesieur set up the Psychic Research Society of Philadelphia and made it the means of offering him a handsome reward.'

‘And then he was unmasked in England?' I asked.

It was Holmes who now took up the tale, looking at me and shaking his head.

‘Not quite, I think. It is evident that he and his sister took to the stage. They were ignored at first by those like Gurney and Myers whose interests in psychic phenomena were sincere. When Gurney came to Brighton for a month's convalescence, the performances of Professor Chamberlain were drawing crowds of holidaymakers for the fun of the thing. Gurney, however, at once saw the man as a charlatan and all he stood for as a mockery of true interest in unexplained psychic phenomena. We know that there was a bitter and probably libelous exchange of letters sent to the local newspapers. Chamberlain dared not sue, of course. He would have been proved a liar, and news of that must sooner or later have reached Philadelphia. Rumours of his quarrel with Gurney would inevitably reach occult circles in London. From there, they might easily cross the Atlantic in letters to like-minded spiritualists in Philadelphia and elsewhere. As a result of his cheap and demeaning vaudeville acts in Brighton, Chamberlain stood to lose everything that Mrs. Lesieur had promised him.'

Holmes paused, reached for the whisky decanter, and refilled Inspector Gregson's glass.

‘Matters had gone almost too far for Chamberlain to retrieve his position, unless.…'

‘Unless, Mr. Holmes?' Gregson asked.

‘Unless Edmund Gurney were to recant and confess his belief in these frauds. Chamberlain might say that Gurney had recanted. He might announce it all over Philadelphia, but of course Gurney would deny it and reveal him as a liar as well as a charlatan. It was necessary for Chamberlain that Gurney should recant and then be in no position to deny it.'

‘Because he had taken calomel?' I asked skeptically.

‘No, my dear Watson. Trickery is Chamberlain's trade and he was more diabolical in planning Gurney's death than in contriving any of his stage effects. Whether he learnt this art of murder from the Comte Bertrand's account of Napoleon or whether that merely refreshed his memory, I cannot tell you. Certain it is that he had that nobleman's account of the St. Helena poisoning with him for the past six weeks—borrowed from the St. James's Library. The dates are stamped in the two volumes.'

‘I have lost you, Mr. Holmes,' said Gregson, ‘with the Comte Bertrand and Napoleon.'

‘Very simply, inspector, if the Comte Bertrand is to be believed, the Emperor Napoleon was murdered on St. Helena. Probably it was done at a distance by the command of his enemies in Paris. He was given arsenic in his medication over a period of time. It was not enough to kill him, indeed it may have stimulated his system a little. Yet arsenic in such doses very often produces both restlessness, as in Gurney's case, and constipation. One night the Emperor Napoleon was prescribed a remedy for these afflictions. Ten grains of calomel to be taken with a glass of wine and a biscuit. After a night of severe sickness, he was dead the next day. None of these facts is in dispute.'

‘But he did not die from calomel, surely?' I persisted.

‘No, Watson, indeed he did not. The secret that our modern judges at murder trials have so far prevented the press from reporting is this. The effects of arsenic, given in moderate doses over a period of time, are of questionable benefit but not fatal. Let us suppose, at the end of a few weeks, the victim is then given a single but sufficient dose of calomel—ten grains would be ample. The chemical reaction with arsenic in the stomach will create mercury cyanide, which kills quickly. Not only does it kill quickly, it also removes the traces of arsenic and is almost impossible to detect on postmortem examination by methods at present known to us. Hence the continuing debate as to the proximate cause of the Emperor Napoleon's death.'

Gregson and I looked at him in silence. Holmes drove his argument home.

‘This devil Chamberlain worked it to a nicety. From London he sent the complimentary box of Propter's Nicodemus Pills in capsule form. He had, of course, bought a box of the pills and substituted gelatine capsules, nineteen filled with a moderate dose of arsenic and the last with a heavy dose of calomel. They were to be taken in order, so that the calomel would be swallowed last. To take capsules in a prescribed order is so common nowadays that the victim would think nothing of it. Chamberlain had also ordered a printed slip from a jobbing printer, who would not think twice about an apparently innocent prescription of this sort. The empty capsules themselves were readily available from any pharmacy, as was the calomel. Even the arsenic will present little difficulty until the new Poisons Bill becomes law. No alarm would be raised until tonight, when Gurney took the last capsule with its calomel—or rather until tomorrow morning when his body was found. By then Chamberlain and his sister would be far away. Moreover, the overwhelming probability is that death in his case was likely to be attributed to an overdose of chloroform. Such a pernicious habit was the perfect cover.'