The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (61 page)

Holmes looked at him with a mixture of simulated surprise and undisguised contempt.

‘I do not deal in hypotheses, sir, but in facts. This man was a brute in his dealings with women and a thief in respect of their money.'

‘He was known here only for his loving affection to his wife.'

Holmes took from his pocket several papers.

‘With the assistance of the records office, I have spent my leisure hours in town before coming to Herne Bay by following up one or two of the bigamous wives, for there have been several beside the ones so far mentioned. You may have their statements. Miss Pegler of Bristol. “
The power was in his eyes. They were little eyes that seemed to rob you of your will!
” Here is another, cited in her divorce petition ten years ago by one of those whom he flogged into silence when he could be secure in no other way. “
Often he used to brag to me about his numerous women acquaintances. Once I met one of his victims and warned her to her face about him. She was greatly shocked. That night he came home and thrashed me till I was nearly dead
.” There, sir, is the true character of the man whom your jury acquitted of all blame.'

‘It does not prove the present case!'

Holmes seemed to look through Mr Mowll to a world beyond.

‘In the past three-quarters of an hour, in this room, the case against Henry Williams,
alias
George Joseph Smith, has been established beyond the least doubt.'

‘You have not done so!'

‘Perhaps, sir, I have not. But Constable Kitchingham certainly has.'

They stared back at him and Holmes continued.

‘To fill the bath three-quarters full, which Dr French and others observed to be the level, has taken Constable Kitchingham fifty minutes. It is unlikely that Bessie Mundy could do it faster—and her husband swore that he did not do it at all. Suppose Williams,
alias
Smith, has told the truth in his statement to the inquest. Then the couple rose at 7.30. The water was warm when Dr French tested it, therefore the bath could not have been filled earlier or it would have been stone cold. Let us allow that the husband went out, as he said, and returned at eight. We know it was not later, for at eight he sent his message to Dr French that he feared his wife was dead, and that Dr French received the message a little before 8.30.'

‘Oh, God!' said Coroner Mowll suddenly.

‘Precisely. The filling of the bath would have taken from 7.30 to 8.20 or thereabouts. Let us be generous to the husband and say it was only half filled. I have observed Constable Kitchingham and may tell you that it took him thirty-five minutes to reach the halfway point. If that is the case, even so the filling could not have been completed—let alone Mrs Williams undressed and in the bath—until five minutes after the message to Dr French saying she was dead. Not only was she was still alive when George Joseph Smith returned from the fishmonger, she had probably not even got into the bath when he sent for Dr French, saying that he feared she was dead!'

As so often, the chilling logic of Sherlock Holmes left his audience speechless.

‘Smith,
alias
Williams, is not a mere lady-killer,' said Holmes quietly, ‘but one of the most cold-blooded assassins that ever walked the face of this earth. You have much to answer for, Mr Mowll.'

‘I have nothing …'

‘Indeed you have. Miss Alice Burnham …'

‘I have heard of that, thanks to you, sir. There is a vast difference between a domestic tragedy and a swimming or bathing accident upon a public beach, as her father describes it.'

‘You may yet find them identical. Far worse, at the moment this bigamist, embezzler, and murderer is in possession of a young woman, Constance Maxse, who knows nothing of her danger …'

‘I did not swear it was epilepsy,' Dr French interrupted hastily, as Herne Bay began to break ranks, ‘only that I could not swear otherwise. There was only what I was told by the man and the woman. I had qualified only two years.'

‘His demeanour after his wife's death,' said Mr Hogbin, ‘his treatment of the poor dead body. Upon reflection it was callous and hateful in the extreme.'

‘I shall return to my office,' said Mr Mowll, ‘and seek advice.'

‘When you get there,' said Holmes equably, ‘you will find Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, waiting to give you a good deal of it.'

Before we left, I gave my professional counsel to Miss Lily O'Sullivan.

‘My dear young lady, if I may advise you, we must take you home at once by cab or carriage. It is essential that you should sustain no further exertion and that you should rest, preferably in bed, for the next day or two.'

She gave the shortest laugh I had ever heard.

‘Ha! Much chance of that! I should miss two performances tonight.'

‘But to take part in them is unthinkable, in your present state of distress.'

Her eyes sparkled.

‘Oh,' she said, as if understanding at last. ‘You mean this?'

I saw again the gargoyle of the drowning maiden, the dreadful bulging eyes, the swelling cheeks, the blood stagnating in her face.

‘You never knew? Mr Holmes never told you?' She grinned at me, but it was not a smile. ‘That's part of my act, that is. I can stay under for two minutes or more, if I have to. Only Mr Holmes thought it might look better the way he and I did it. Pleased to meet you. Ta-ta.'

I was so overcome, as she flounced off to change her dripping costume, that I almost said ‘Ta-ta' in return. I managed my half-bow only just in time.

We remained in the Royal Hotel to see what Lestrade might accomplish. By 4
P
.
M
. a warrant had been issued, in respect of bigamy, larceny, and murder, for the arrest of George Joseph Smith,
alias
George Baker,
alias
George Oliver Love,
alias
Henry Williams,
alias
Charles Oliver James,
alias
John Lloyd, described as a gymnasium instructor and general dealer. Lestrade had discovered from the criminal records that the wanted man served two years in the Northamptonshire Regiment, teaching gymnastics. Small wonder that poor Bessie Mundy was no match for those powerful hands.

That evening after dinner we looked out from our room across the darkening sea and waited in the hope that Lestrade might have time to pay us a visit before his return to town on the late train.

‘He can only be tried for one murder at a time,' I said thoughtfully. ‘The evidence in the case of Bessie Mundy is strong but not conclusive. There is almost nothing, except perhaps the filling of the bath, that might not be overturned. Even there, to hang a man because he has the time wrong by twenty minutes … It is a cruel thing to say of the poor girl, but if only Alice Burnham had died at home, rather than swimming …'

He shook his head in despair.

‘Watson! Watson! Of course she died at home, not on the high seas! It is one of my greatest blunders that I did not go to her father at once. However, he could not even bring himself to attend the funeral of that one person in the world whom he loved. So I had hoped, knowing that he could not bear to hear of the tragedy nor to speak of it since it was first reported to him, that I could spare him in this investigation. It was not to be.'

He spread out on the table by the window two telegram forms, one the copy of a message he had sent to Mr Maxse, and one which he had received in reply that afternoon.

TELEGRAPH AT ONCE TEXT OF NOTIFICATION TO YOUR FRIEND CHARLES BURNHAM BY HIS SON-IN-LAW OF THE DEATH OF ALICE BURNHAM STOP
.
REPLY PAID TO HOLMES
,
ROYAL HOTEL
,
HERNE BAY
.

How had the scoundrel broken to the father the news of his beloved daughter's death?

ALICE DIED YESTERDAY BATHING NORTH SHORE STOP
.
SMITH CONNAUGHT STREET BLACKPOOL
.

Reduced to the form of a telegraph message there was also the report of the inquest cut from a few lines at the foot of a column in the local press.

NORTH SHORE TRAGEDY: INQUEST VERDICT
:
A VERDICT OF ACCIDENTAL DEATH WAS RETURNED AT THE INQUEST ON ALICE BURNHAM
(25)
OF CONNAUGHT STREET
,
NORTH SHORE, WHO WAS DROWNED LAST TUESDAY WHILE BATHING
.

‘Unfortunately, the word “bathing” has two meanings and two pronunciations,' said Holmes quietly. ‘Such was the deceit practised on the unhappy father. The head of the inquest report was snipped out and the rest withheld, so that Smith might persuade him his daughter had died in a swimming accident, when the truth was he had drowned her in her bath. Remember, the murder of Bessie Mundy was already to his credit by then. Therefore, the fewer questions the better.'

‘Those telegrams will do no good,' I said, ‘if he can only be tried for one murder and the jury know nothing of the other wives.'

Holmes sat down and lit his pipe.

‘From my brief and hardly satisfactory experience of student law, Watson, I recall something known as system. It is true that a man may only be tried for one murder. However, where he is charged with others but not tried for them, they may be brought into the case to show evidence of “system”.'

‘System?'

‘Yes. The other cases may not be used to suggest that he committed the murder for which he is tried. But they may be used to show that, if he did commit it, he did not do so accidentally.'

‘To stop a verdict of manslaughter?'

He chuckled in a manner that would chill the blood of the greatest optimist.

‘In this case, Watson, to ensure that the jury knows every abomination in the career of this reptile. Leave those telegrams on the table a moment. The boards outside our door creak in a manner that betrays a constabulary boot. Come in, my dear Lestrade! We have something here that may interest you.'

As the world knows, George Joseph Smith was tried at the Old Bailey in the first summer of the Great War for the murder of Bessie Mundy. By a choice irony, our friend Sir Edward Marshall Hall was briefed for this hopeless defence. Despite Sir Edward's best efforts and arguments, evidence of system was admitted. With that, his client was doomed. The jurors listened with visible horror to the stories of young women, living and dead, three of them at least drowned as ‘Brides in the Bath'.

On a warm August morning, in an early stillness when the rumble of guns on the Western Front could be heard dimly in Hyde Park, George Joseph Smith was led to the execution shed in the yard of Chelmsford Gaol, attended by the chaplain, governor, warders, and the two silent figures of Pierpoint and Ellis. So faltering was his progress that the drop was two minutes late in falling open under him.

That evening, as he took his old-fashioned chair in Baker Street, rum and water in his glass, Holmes sighed and said, ‘We have saved Miss Maxse from an early death, Watson, though not, I fear, from a fate worse than death. Be so good as to pass me the
Morning Post
. There is a curious series of incidents in which live rats and rabbits have been deliberately introduced into the plumbing of some of the most elegant addresses in Mayfair and St James's. Such a diversion is, I suspect, the tactic of a master-criminal bent on the greatest robbery of the age. As such, it deserves our attention.'

The Voice from the Crypt:

The Case of the

Talking Corpse

I

Of all the problems submitted to Sherlock Holmes in the years of our friendship, there were few indeed where I was the means of introducing the case to his notice. There was certainly no other experience of mine to compare with a series of grotesque murders which afflicted Lambeth and the shabby areas of the Waterloo Road in the final decade of the last century.

Holmes was wont to argue that the eccentricity or singularity of a criminal is always a clue. Conversely, ‘The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.' There was no lack of eccentricity or singularity in the present investigation. The apparent lunacy of the murderer led him to correspond cheerfully with Scotland Yard, offering to solve the mysteries for money, if the police themselves could not do so.

Our antagonist also appeared to possess a gang of assistants, all as mad as he—and women were among his accomplices. It even seemed we might be wrong in supposing the actual killer and tormentor of the fair sex to be a man! May not a woman have a grudge against the poor creatures of the street? With so much singularity, if Holmes was right in his hypothesis, such maniacs should have been easy enough to catch. Unfortunately, a long passage of time was to prove otherwise.

Let me begin at the beginning. One fateful Saturday evening, I had arrived at Waterloo Station after an informal reunion of several old friends. We had served together in the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, during the Afghan campaign a dozen years before. Fowler, Osborne, Scott, and I had been subalterns in the draught that was sent up from the depot at Peshawur to the forward encampment of Khandahar. My own military career was short and inglorious. I was detached to the Berkshire regiment for the coming battle of Maiwand, where a Jezail bullet shattered the bone of my shoulder and grazed the subclavial artery. Nor was that the worst. At the base hospital of Peshawur, I was first a convalescent from my wound and then, more dangerously, a victim of enteric fever. How I came home an invalid and made my first acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes is described in my account of the Brixton Road murder, made public under the somewhat sensational title of A
Study in Scarlet
.

More than ten years later, in the mess at Aldershot, the four of us talked much of these things. As I returned from that convivial luncheon, it was as if the gullies and bare mountain ridges of Afghanistan rather than the tenements and warehouses of Nine Elms and the Waterloo Road rose before my eyes. The sound of the well-lit trains thundering into the great terminus under fiery pillars of steam might have been distant salvoes of our artillery covering the withdrawal to Jellalabad.