The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (31 page)

Holmes appeared not to hear it as he turned another page of his folio and settled morosely upon the next paragraph. Standing by the window, I moved the curtain a little and looked down into the street. An empty cab was just moving off with the driver's ‘Yah-yah-poop!' to the horse and a flick of the reins. From what I could see, the man who stood awaiting an answer to his summons was a stranger to us. The gas had already been lit in the house, so that the fanlight of the door beat full upon the gleaming shoulders of his waterproof, which ran with steady rain. There came an exchange of voices in the hall and the light knock of Mrs Hudson at our door.

‘A gentleman, Mr Holmes,' the good lady said unnecessarily. ‘Mr Jacob has no appointment but begs you will see him on a matter of the greatest urgency.'

How many times had I heard these words, or their like? Holmes looked up from his calculations and his face seemed brighter.

‘Very well, Mrs Hudson. If Mr Jacob takes no more than half an hour of my time, I will listen to what ails him.'

Our housekeeper closed the door and presently, after our visitor had been relieved of his waterproof in the hall, we heard a heavy tread upon the stairs. A broad-shouldered fair-haired man of thirty or so entered the room, well built but with a wan, sensitive, clear-cut face. His blue eyes seemed the brighter for the dark shadows round them.

Holmes watched him cross the room and then stood up to take the visitor's hand.

‘Please,' he said, indicating the vacant chair by the fireplace. ‘Please take a seat, Dr Jacob, and tell me how I may be of service to you.'

Our visitor went, if that were possible, a little paler on being addressed as ‘Doctor'.

‘You know me, Mr Holmes?'

‘I had never heard of you until a few minutes ago,' Holmes said reassuringly. ‘That you are a doctor is, I fear, betrayed by the double deformation which the side pocket of a jacket acquires from carrying the two metal tubes of a stethoscope with the ear-pieces overlapping the edge of the cloth. This is my colleague, Dr Watson, before whom you may speak freely. I have had ample opportunity of observing the ill effects of that medical instrument upon his tailoring.'

Dr Jacob seemed relieved by this simple explanation. He sat down.

‘All the same, Mr Holmes, it is disconcerting to be seen through so easily.'

Holmes stood before the fireplace with legs astride, arms folded, one elbow cupped in the other hand.

‘Come now, Dr Jacob. I mean you no harm. It is a matter of inference only. I cannot be sure of everything. I am very probably wrong. I should say, however, that you had not long moved to the house in which you live and that it is conveniently near to the railway station. You travel up to Victoria or, possibly, Waterloo. Victoria, I think, is more likely. I am already persuaded that the matter on which you have come to see me is indeed of great urgency. It evidently involves someone dear to you who is far away. The worst news of her reached you yesterday, somewhen following lunch. After a night that was passed in waking rather than sleeping, you decided this morning that you must come here in person and ask me to undertake a long journey on behalf of this lady. I regret that I cannot promise I shall be able to oblige you.'

It would scarcely be too much to use the cliché and say that our visitor's mouth fell open with astonishment and the poor devil's eyes started.

‘You cannot know, Mr Holmes! Someone has surely been here before me. One of the Carews!'

Holmes sat down on the sofa and crossed his long legs comfortably, as if this would reassure Dr Jacob.

‘No one, I promise you,' he said kindly. ‘I know nothing of any Carews. I observe only that you came by cab to our door, so that your shoes are scarcely wet. Yet they show that you have walked a little in the rain earlier today. They have dried since then, so it cannot be in the last fifteen or twenty minutes. If you went on foot from your own house to the station, the condition of your shoes suggests that the distance cannot have been great. However, the wet has caused particles of stone or shingle to adhere to the uppers as they dried. Some are little more than husks. I have experience of those and I recognise them as sea-dredged aggregates. They are used very commonly on roads of new houses in Surrey and Sussex, conveniently close to the channel dredging. One finds them on byways not yet adopted by the local council and not yet treated with tarmac. Therefore, I assume you cannot have lived long in your present home, and that it is in Surrey or Sussex, near the station.'

‘That at least is correct,' Dr Jacob said. He seemed relieved to discover that scientific deduction, rather than witchcraft, had revealed so much of him.

‘Furthermore,' Holmes said quietly, ‘you came here by cab. The square of pasteboard shaped by the cloth of your waistcoat pocket is, I believe, a railway ticket, but not a metropolitan one. It is in any case merely a return half. The underground railway line from Waterloo to Baker Street is very convenient and generally faster than a cab. Not so from Victoria. I am inclined to think you came from Victoria Station. As for your purpose, I suppose it merely by the weight and size of the notecase in your inner breast pocket, which appears—once again by the deformation of the suiting—to be more than amply filled. I beg you will take care, Dr Jacob. It is an invitation to thieves and footpads to carry so much money with so little concealment. I observe from your face that you slept badly last night and that, though perfectly clean-shaven yesterday, the hand that held your razor has been less certain today. I infer that whatever ill news you received reached you yesterday, too late to bring you here at once.'

Dr Jacob stared at him bright-eyed but said nothing. He seemed mesmerised, or perhaps a little fearful, at the performance which Holmes was giving for his benefit.

‘I do not wish to be presumptuous,' Holmes concluded, ‘but I should be surprised if you had not come here today in the expectation of paying in advance a large sum in cash. That a cheque will not suffice and that the sum is so large suggests to me both that the matter is urgent and the expenses far greater than would be justified unless the investigation involved foreign travel of some kind. Put all these things together and I infer that only some person dear to you and now in great peril would explain them in their entirety. That the person is a lady is, I confess, mere conjecture. Yet nine times out of ten, in such circumstances as these, it is so. She is not your wife, I think. Either you would be with her or you would be on your way to her before now. A daughter, at your time of life, would be too young. A sister, shall we say? Or perhaps a cousin? A sister, I think, is the more probable.'

For the hundredth time, as it seemed to me, I saw emotions of astonishment and relief cross the face of a client, like clouds driven in succession over a windy sky. For a moment, Dr Jacob seemed too overwrought to speak. At last he said, ‘It is my sister, Mr Holmes. She is the youngest of us, as I am the eldest. You are correct in every detail of your account. In the last few minutes you have convinced me that everything said about you is true. You alone can save her, if any man may.'

‘And where is your sister, Dr Jacob?'

‘She is in Yokohama, where she is very likely to be hanged.'

The name of Yokohama fell like a thunderbolt into the room. In my mind I had thought of Paris, Berlin, perhaps even Rome or New York, as the probable scene of the drama. But Yokohama! It was impossible, surely, that Holmes would contemplate such a commission?

My friend got up and walked to the window, the curtains still open, and stared out into the street.

‘Yokohama!' he said at last, very softly but with an excitement that was unmistakable. He gazed out into the dismal London night, deeper in thought than I had seen him for a long time. ‘And very likely to be hanged!'

It was raining more heavily now and the gaslight of the room shone dimly out through the streaked and dripping glass, falling upon the pavements and the black ribbon of the wet street. Holmes kept his thoughts to himself a moment longer. In the silence, the air was full of the sounds of rain, the thin swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the eaves, and the swirl and gurgle down the steep gutters and through the sewer grating. At last he turned round.

‘Dr Jacob, before we go further, I should be very glad if you would tell us slowly and quietly of your sister's difficulty and how it is that you think we might help her. I must tell you, however, that I am a criminal investigator and not a worker of miracles.'

So we heard the story of Mary Esther Jacob and the late Walter Raymond Hallowell Carew. In brief, Carew was a married man and Miss Jacob was thought to have been his mistress, one of many in the course of his colonial career. The man had led a rackety sort of life in the Malay Straits Settlement, Hong Kong, and last of all in the English colony at Yokohama. For some time before his death in October 1896, he had been Secretary and Manager of the Yokohama United Club, where English and American officers and businessmen were wont to gather. Seven years ago, he had married Edith Mary Porch in England and taken her to the Straits Settlement. There he spent several years as a Treasurer in the Colonial Service. Brandy and soda had very nearly killed him in such a climate. Then both he and his bride had fallen ill with malarial fever and, after a spell in Australia, they had come to Yokohama. Neither was ever in perfect health and medication was regularly prescribed for them.

There was no disputing Carew's vices. He had begotten children by a number of women before his marriage. One was even supported afterwards out of his wife's money. The couple also had two children of their own and Miss Mary Jacob, previously living with her brother, had gone out to Yokohama as nursery governess. Another infection from which Carew suffered was of the venereal type, a case of gonorrhoea known only privately until the report of the inquest upon him at the Royal Naval Hospital at Yokohama in October last.

Mrs Carew was little better than her husband, he playing the part
of mari complaisant
, so long as his own pleasures were not interfered with. Edith Carew had found lovers easily in the foreign settlement area of Yokohama. Her husband shrugged at this. The couple even gave such men the nicknames of ‘The Ferret' or ‘The Organ Grinder'. The latest young man prepared to give his life for her was Harry Vansittart Dickinson, a clerk at the Yokohama branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Letters of a compromising kind had passed between Dickinson and Mrs Carew for several months, in which the young man urged the errant wife to seek a divorce and become his own bride.

The story of Mary Jacob in such a flashy and sickly household was one of the oldest in the world. It was not long before the inexperienced young governess believed herself in love and became Carew's mistress. This adulterous
ménage
was broken up several months later by the death of the man himself. He had been ailing for several years, since the venereal infection had occasioned a stricture. Far worse, his drinking had brought on symptoms of an incipient cirrhosis of the liver. He could no more resist brandy and soda than he could ignore a pretty servant. With the easy credit and bonhomie of the Yokohama Club, those who sent him on colonial service to cure his drinking had better have sent him to Hades as an escape from summer heat. The state of his liver grew worse and the doctors in Yokohama threatened him with acute jaundice. Carew ignored them. He preferred to put his faith in self-prescribed ‘tonics' containing a homoeopathic dose of arsenic as well as sugar of lead.

After his death, Miss Jacob fled the house, as if on suspicion of poisoning a lover who had spurned her. It was certain that during the last weeks of her residence Carew's health grew rapidly worse and he lapsed into delirium. He had died on 22 October, having been taken to the British Naval Hospital at Yokohama a few hours previously. His final illness had lasted for about a fortnight but he had grown suddenly worse in the last twenty-four hours.

The inquest found that Carew had died from arsenical poisoning. What motive was there for murder? Mrs Carew enjoyed freedom in her married life to do as she pleased and had little reason to murder her husband. However, Mary Jacob had far greater cause for vengeance when she discovered that the lover who had cast her off might also have infected her with a dreadful disease.

The suspicions of Carew's doctors had been roused very late. In the last two days they forbad any member of the household to be alone with the invalid. They appointed nurses of high character, one of whom was always in attendance. Yet as late as the last night, when the nurse was away from the room for a few minutes, two servants had seen Mary Jacob standing before the medicine cabinet in the sick man's room. The bedroom door had been locked to prevent this very thing. Miss Jacob must surely have kept or copied a key given her by her lover in happier days. Next day he was dead from a final and fatal dose of arsenic, the equivalent of a one-ounce bottle of Fowler's Solution of Arsenic. Three such bottles were found almost empty in the house. Miss Jacob alone, it seemed, had found the opportunity and motive to do away with him.

‘It is most unfortunate, Mr Holmes,' Dr Jacob added, ‘that after Carew died, my sister went to the chemist to ask for the return of the order-form for the last bottle of Fowler's Solution. It was written in her own hand, you see. She swears that Carew ordered it and that she merely wrote his instructions.'

Unfortunate! If anything further were needed to put the noose round young Miss Jacob's neck, she had surely provided it by going to beg back this paper written in her own hand! Holmes seemed unperturbed, however, and asked about the behaviour of Carew himself during these last weeks, so far as Dr Jacob knew of it. The dead man's final words offered little comfort to our client.

‘I have taken a whole chemist's shop today,' the witnesses heard Carew gasp as he waved away the glass, despite the pain that consumed his entrails. ‘I do not want more medicine. I want a brandy and soda.'