The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

‘Where else should I go?' she cried.

For the first time there was scepticism in his eyes as he studied her. Yet he was still gentle with her.

‘Come, now,' he said. ‘You would surely have done better to take your story directly to Scotland Yard. The Metropolitan Police can do more for you than I may. They have powers of investigation far beyond mine. You may walk there in fifteen minutes from here. I will give you the name of the very man whom you must see. Ah, there is something more, is there not? What is it that you cannot tell them?'

For a moment the young woman looked at her hands and said nothing. Then she breathed deeply and spoke. It was, Holmes later told me, as if she had expected to have the secret forced from her but knew not how to yield it.

‘Mr Holmes, when my sister met Dr Smethurst, he was already a married man.'

‘Do you mean that he deceived her by committing bigamy?'

Louisa Bankes shook her head.

‘No, Mr Holmes. He did not deceive her. When Bella lived at Rifle Terrace last autumn, Dr Smethurst and his wife were guests in the same boarding-house. They have been married many years, and Mrs Smethurst is quite twenty years older than her husband. She is now a woman of seventy and more. My sister knew all this, knew that he was already married.'

Holmes's keen eyes narrowed a little and he now stared at his visitor with fascination.

‘What possessed your sister to abet a wilful act of bigamy? It was almost certain to have been discovered before long.'

Louisa Bankes lowered her head until the frame of her bonnet almost concealed her face. Her words were now punctuated by sobs.

‘He told her it was to be their secret marriage and that there could be no harm in that … When old Mrs Smethurst died they would be man and wife in fact and law. Until then, if he and Bella should live together, a married name would protect her reputation. She believed him, Mr Holmes, and now she pays the price. You ask me to go to the police? The law would condemn the scoundrel who has ruined her but it would condemn my sister as well. If I could save her life in no other way, I would do it. You, Mr Holmes, are my hope that there is some other way.'

It was not a matter to which Holmes gave long thought. He stood up, as if to indicate that his mind was made up and the consultation at an end.

‘Very well, Miss Bankes. You may rely upon me to do everything I can. I must tell you that I can do little for your sister's reputation. However, if all is as you say it is, I will go down to Richmond at the first opportunity and call upon Dr Smethurst. I, at least, have no reason to spare your sister's feelings or his and he will know it. I shall give him the choice of leaving your sister at once and never seeing her again, or of being exposed as a bigamist. The law may or may not proceed against your sister; I think it may not. It is Dr Smethurst who is twice married. Against him, the courts are empowered to pronounce a sentence of fourteen years in a convict settlement. If what you tell me is correct, we may yet have him on the hip.'

II

Despite the urgency of Miss Bankes, Holmes did not go down to Richmond until he had satisfied himself of certain facts. On Monday, he walked as far as Battersea Church and there paid the clerk a shilling to read an entry in the parish register for the previous year. It recorded the marriage of Thomas Smethurst and Isabella Bankes on 12 December. Next morning, after a visit to Rifle Terrace, Bayswater, he summoned a cab for St Mark's Church, Kennington. Another shilling won him access to the parish register for twenty years earlier, from which he copied the record of a marriage between Thomas Smethurst and Mary Durham, now an elderly lady whom Holmes had seen an hour or two before at Rifle Terrace.

With copies of these two entries in his note-case, he took the half-hourly bus to Richmond from the White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly.

Dr Smethurst and Miss Isabella Bankes had set up their home in Mrs Wheatley's rooms at 10, Alma Villas, Richmond. Holmes had gathered from his visitor that theirs was a modest apartment of bedroom and sitting-room, in the latter of which the meals were served by the daughter of the family.

In answer to his knock, the door was opened by an aproned maid-of-all-work. Holmes handed her his card.

‘Dr Thomas Smethurst, if you please,' he said. ‘It is a matter of the greatest urgency.'

Holmes was taken aback to see that, when Dr Smethurst's name was mentioned, a look of consternation bordering on terror convulsed the girl's face.

‘You can't see Dr Smethurst,' she blurted out presently, ‘E've gone.'

‘Gone?' said Holmes, ‘And what of Mrs Smethurst?'

‘You can't see her,' the girl said hastily. ‘She's better since he went but the poor soul's still very weakly.'

‘And who is looking after her?'

‘I am,' the girl said proudly. ‘And Mrs Wheatley and Miss Wheatley, of course, and Miss Bankes—that's Mrs Smethurst's sister. And Dr Julius and Dr Bird both been and left.'

From the shadows of the hall behind the girl, a man's voice called, ‘Mr Holmes!'

The man appeared, a well-built ginger-headed policeman with a broad-boned face and a clipped moustache. Robert M'Intyre, Inspector of the Richmond Constabulary, was just then in his ‘private clothes' of frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers, a pearl-grey stock at his throat. Holmes recognised him from an earlier confidential inquiry, a matter of domestic robbery.

‘M'Intyre?'

The inspector waved the girl away.

‘What brings you down to Richmond, Mr Holmes?'

‘Miss Louisa Bankes is my client. Where is Dr Smethurst?'

M'Intyre cleared his throat discreetly and stepped out into the May sunlight.

‘We may talk outside, if it's all the same to you, Mr Holmes. It's not convenient indoors with only two rooms and the poor lady in the state she is. Just down here a little way, if you wouldn't mind.'

The two men walked a short distance along the pavement of Alma Villas.

‘Where is Smethurst?' Holmes demanded.

‘In a police cell, Mr Holmes, where he ought to have been weeks ago. He stands charged with the attempted murder of his wife. I think Dr Bird half suspected it last week. Yesterday they took samples of what she brought up in her sickness. They sent them to be analysed by Professor Taylor. He found arsenic, Mr Holmes. No two ways about that. Arsenic enough to kill her, if that sample was repeated throughout the vital organs. Dr Smethurst was arrested last night to appear at the police court this morning. Since he's been out of the way, I hear she's improved a bit.'

Holmes stood tall and gaunt in the sunlight for a moment.

‘Indeed?' he said thoughtfully.

M'Intyre turned back towards the house.

‘You know your own business best, Mr Holmes, but if your interest in this case is what I think it must be, you'd be wasting your time down here. We've got him, sir, and the lady is in the hands of doctors who will do all that can be done for her. And that's all about that.'

III

If ever Sherlock Holmes had reason to feel that a case had escaped him, it was during the hours which followed his return to Lambeth Palace Road. Thomas Smethurst had been removed from his investigation, or so it seemed. Mrs Smethurst—Isabella Bankes, as she was in truth—would recover or not, as the strength of her constitution and the skill of her physicians decreed. Whether the crime of bigamy would come to light, and whether Isabella Bankes would face prosecution as well as disgrace, were matters for others.

The best cure for his disappointments in life was always to be found in work. Holmes returned to the curious affair of the poisonous perfumes at the Court of the Sun King. He proposed a monograph upon this macabre subject. History records that the monograph was never written. He was meditating its contents on Thursday evening, two days later, as he walked back from the chemical laboratory of St Thomas's Hospital. Letting himself in at the front door, he sensed a chill silence about the house in Lambeth Palace Road. Having gone up the stairs, he had scarcely closed the door of his sitting-room and removed his coat and gloves when there was a knock. It was Mrs Harris. Her face was pale and, though the tears were now dry, their recent passage showed in her reddened eyes and haggard cheeks.

‘She's dead, Mr Holmes,' the landlady said abruptly, ‘Mrs Smethurst—Miss Bankes, that was. Passed away this morning. I heard from her poor sister just now.'

‘Then Dr Smethurst must stand trial for murder,' Holmes said softly.

‘They let him go back to her before she died, Mr Holmes.'

‘Let him go?' The tall sharp-profiled figure advanced a step towards Mrs Harris, as though he might seize her and hold her accountable for such judicial stupidity. ‘Let him go?'

‘At the police court, Mr Holmes. Dr Smethurst swore his wife was so poorly she might die that very day. He vowed it was inhuman to keep him from her in what might be her last hours. They bailed him to go back to her. She was better after he'd been taken away. They all said so. The doctors, Miss Louisa … And the day after they let him back, the poor soul was dead. They caught him again—but too late for her.'

Seldom, perhaps on no other occasion, had Sherlock Holmes been at a loss for words. That a man accused of attempting to murder his wife should be released to go back to her was beyond belief. Yet it had happened.

‘So now he faces the gallows in earnest,' he murmured.

‘And no worse than he deserves, the devil!' said Mrs Harris bitterly.

The letter that Holmes was now obliged to write to Miss Louisa Bankes was, he always maintained, the most difficult of his life. He had failed her and would accept no fee, of course. She had come to him very late. To prevent the tragedy which occurred had been well-nigh impossible. But it was his profession to triumph over impossibilities—or rather it was his temperament. ‘Failure' was the word that now sat heavily in his thoughts during the warm summer, like a raven on his shoulder. He did not, as in the tedium of inactivity, resort to cocaine. In his gloom, he spent a week or more confined to his rooms, sometimes brooding, sometimes stirring the air with passages of Haydn or Mendelssohn on his beloved violin.

IV

London's summer season with all its frivolities had come and gone by the time that Dr Smethurst stood trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of Isabella Bankes. Sherlock Holmes could give no simple reason for his determination to witness the proceedings. He had, of course, never set eyes on Thomas Smethurst and was fired by a curiosity to see what manner of man this might be. There was, however, a less commendable reason. Holmes was a ‘gourmet'—I think the word is not too strong—for the sight of human beings in bizarre and desperate straits. To see the prey struggling in the toils of the law, a law that would surely tighten a noose round the man's neck, was a stimulation of his nerves to rival music or opium.

Better for him, perhaps, had he stayed away. What Holmes found in that courtroom was not at all what he had expected.

Smethurst himself was an unprepossessing man in his early fifties, square-set with ragged brown hair and a moustache. How any woman could have contemplated such a wretch, except with feelings of compassion for his shabbiness, was beyond comprehension.

Those who remember the Central Criminal Court before Newgate was pulled down and the area rebuilt may recall how like a theatre it seemed. The jury sat in an opera-box on one side, the defendants on the other. The stage was occupied by the judge, his chaplain and the sheriffs. Where the orchestra might have been in a theatre were benches for counsel and spectators. Here it was that Holmes, with a keen appetite for such living spectacles, watched hour by hour the destruction of the man in the dock. In those days, a defendant was still not permitted to give evidence in his own case. Smethurst stood at the dock-rail, wild-eyed, and watched his own death meticulously prepared.

Holmes never denied that he had gone there relishing the prospect of sport. Minute by minute the presumption of guilt grew stronger. Smethurst had bigamously married the dead woman. No sooner were they lodged at Alma Villas than her violent sickness began. He had refused the assistance of any other doctor until he could hold out no longer. In his own hand, he wrote out her will, summoned a lawyer, and stood over his victim while she signed it. Of that will he was the sole beneficiary. He then found repeated reasons for preventing her sister coming to see her. It was reported that ‘Mrs Smethurst' was seen to look at her husband in terror.

There was a murmur of disgust in the court when Dr Bird described seeing Smethurst place small quantities of prussic acid on scraps of bread, throwing them out for the sparrows, seeing what quantity was enough to kill them and what was not. Dr Bird, who had been summoned by Dr Julius for a second opinion on the ailing woman, concluded after a few days that the patient was not suffering from biliousness nor from dysentery. Her symptoms were not those of any natural disease but of slow irritant poisoning. Three days before her death, samples were taken. Analysis by means of the Reinsch Test showed quantities of arsenic in her body sufficient to kill her.

Worse still, at the post-mortem, Dr Todd discovered the presence of the corrosive poison antimony in the kidneys. True, the quantity was not great but it could not be explained by any medicine that had been prescribed. For good measure, Dr Todd swore that he had never before seen on the face of a corpse such an expression of terror as that in which the features of Isabella Bankes had frozen during her death agony. Her entrails had been in an advanced state of inflammation and ulceration. Death had been brought on by exhaustion from vomiting, and from starvation caused by inability to keep a mouthful of food in her stomach, so long as Dr Smethurst tended her.

By his own admission, Smethurst alone had administered food and medicine to the deceased. When he was first arrested, she had improved in his absence and was even able to retain a little food in her stomach. When he returned, she died. At the post-mortem, it was also discovered that the woman was between five and seven weeks pregnant. He had killed not only his ‘wife' but their unborn child.