The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (67 page)

M. Malone

Regardless of the different handwriting, this effusion surely came from the minds of ‘Mr Bayne the Barrister', ‘A. O'Brien, Detective' and the rest of the incognitos. Beside me, Dr Neill's face was a study in quiet despair.

‘Tell me, Dr Watson,' the poor scholar asked plaintively, ‘what am I to do? I have never heard of Miss Clover. I have only twice in my life been in England and I was not here on 20 October!'

‘You should take this beastly letter to the police,' I said firmly, wondering as I spoke why the malicious devils had picked on this other-worldly soul.

‘Then to the police I suppose I must go.' There was no doubting the sincerity of his thanks. ‘I dread doing so, however.'

‘I do not see why you should.'

‘Because, sir,' said the mild-mannered American, ‘though there is not a word of truth in the accusations, I fear a public inquiry might be ruinous to a medical man. This scoundrel already thinks that he can frighten me into paying him because I know the damage that mere rumour and innuendo can do in our profession. The world, here and in my own country, will say that there is no smoke without fire.'

‘I believe you may rely upon the discretion of the English authorities in such matters.'

‘I am glad to hear you say so.' There was no mistaking the poor fellow's eagerness to believe me. ‘There is, however, something else I should like to share with you.'

‘Pray do.'

He looked more wretched than ever.

‘My practice has been in Ontario and Chicago. I am here for study leave, a week or two more, to pursue my research into the treatment of nervous disorders. Very few people in England know me. I am not Mr Frederick Smith nor Mr Sherlock Holmes, after all! This fact drives me most reluctantly to the conclusion that my blackmailer—if he be such—my persecutor anyway, is someone to whom I am personally known and who is known to me. Someone very close. Can it be otherwise?'

How often had I seen the keen eyes of Sherlock Holmes narrow as he probed such a confession further! I could only ask lamely, ‘Do you have any suspicion who it might be?'

He shook his head, then paused.

‘I hope—I believe—it could not be one or two men whose names have crossed my mind. Your advice that I should take this letter to the police is good and right, Dr Watson. My fear is that they would ask me the question you have put. That I might be persuaded to give them the name of a young man who might very likely prove innocent. That would not lie easily on my conscience, sir.'

If the blackmailer—or blackmailers—should be close to Dr Neill and known by him, we were surely very close to the answer of the Lambeth mystery. As cautiously as if I was on tiptoe behind an escaped cage-bird, I said, ‘Will you tell such a name to me?'

He hesitated.

‘Can you trust me in this matter, Dr Watson?'

I could scarcely say I would not trust him! I nodded.

‘Very well. I had hoped this afternoon to hear you say that you knew all about this business and had tracked the criminal down—or very nearly so. Well, that cannot be. Very good. Then allow me a little space to pursue my own inquiry. If my suspicions are correct, I will do all that you say. If they are not—then the police may have the letter for what good it will do. I confess I would rather be mistaken in my suspicions and return to America the week after next with matters as they stand. I will be guided by the event—and by you.'

There was little more to the interview than this. I had hoped Sherlock Holmes might return before its conclusion. However, my visitor stood up to take his leave. At the door, he turned and asked the question I had been dreading.

‘Tell me, Dr Watson, is it true that the crime of murder was perpetrated against this unfortunate young woman?'

As yet, only Holmes and I knew that she had lived and died. I did not relish sharing the information with any third person in the absence of my friend. My reply was true but less than candid.

‘The police know nothing of any such crime or any such person.'

There was no mistaking the relief on his face.

‘Then you persuade me that this is not blackmail, sir, but a jealous hoax! I have half a mind to tear up this foul letter and forget the matter.'

I stood there like a fool, not knowing how much to say.

‘Perhaps you should preserve the letter, Dr Neill, until the truth of the matter is known and in case you may receive another of these wicked communications.'

But that was as far as I could go.

IX

Holmes returned half an hour later, glowering. He pronounced the so-called skull of Jonathan Wild a fake. Taking up Dr Neill's card, he glanced at the writing on the back, and remarked sardonically that at least the American scholar had not written any of the blackmail letters himself. But at the mention of an address for Matilda Clover, he summoned Billy at once to whistle a hansom to our door.

Before the sun set that afternoon, the cab bore us across Westminster Bridge, the river so crowded by coal-barges at high water that you might almost have walked from bank to bank. On Holmes's instructions, we turned into the Lambeth Road, where the Waterloo trains shook a low plate-iron bridge overhead and the blue sky was veiled by sulphurous vapour from the engine-stacks. We drew up at the corner of Hercules Road, by a grim mock-Venetian tenement of Orient Buildings. The character of the area was spoken for by the manner in which several shabbily-dressed but feather-boa'd young creatures paraded outside its entrance.

Ahead of us, on the Lambeth Road, stood a row of plain-fronted terraced houses, crusted and blackened by railway soot, with the Masons Arms public house beyond them. Holmes led the way to a door, with the number ‘27' painted upon it, and rapped the tarnished knocker. As he did so, I noticed that his ulster was unbuttoned at the neck. Either his own collar was oddly disarranged or he now wore the clerical collar of a clergyman. The effect was the same, either way.

The door was opened by a woman of about sixty, wearing a white apron with shoulder-straps over a plain beige dress. Her ginger hair, grown thin from constant colouring and artificial curling, was fluffed out so that one saw a ghostly vision of her pale head through it. She looked at us, attempted a smile, then seemed to think better of it.

‘Good morning, madam,' said Holmes punctiliously, though the fastidious nostrils flared just perceptibly. ‘My name is William Holmes of the South London Mission. This is my colleague, Dr Watson.'

I had never heard him use his other baptismal name as a
nom-de-guerre
before.

‘I believe,' he said to the grim-faced housewife, ‘that Miss Matilda Clover lived here at the time of her death?'

‘Perhaps she did,' said the woman suspiciously.

Holmes became uncharacteristically deferential.

‘May I take it that you are the lady of the house, Mrs …?'

‘Phillips. Mrs Emma Phillips.' She still looked less than pleased by his missionary appeal.

Undeterred by her surliness, Holmes drew out a small black notebook and smiled at her.

‘Mrs Phillips. Quite so. Miss Clover was under our care, so far as we were able to help her. She came from a respectable family in Kent, much afflicted by her way of life and the manner of her death.'

‘I never knew!' said Mrs Phillips, plainly astonished.

‘You may take it from me that it was so. Her people are most anxious that those, like your good self, who were friends to her in her last days should not be left out of pocket in respect of any little debts or contractual obligations incurred by Miss Clover …'

Until he began to talk of money, the woman's expression had generally remained that of a feral creature defending its burrow. Now her face and voice softened.

‘Is it insurance, then? Friendly society?'

Holmes appeared to consult a notebook, whose pages I could see were blank.

‘One might say that it comes to the same thing. Tell me, it was in this house that Miss Clover died on 20 October last?'

‘Oh, yes! Definitely this house.' I could almost hear in her voice a fear that perhaps she might be disqualified from whatever good things were about to be offered. ‘She died here all right! In the top bedroom that she rented a few weeks before. Back in October. To be precise, very early on 21 October. DTs and heart failure. Drunk an entire bottle of brandy the night before, not to say what else. Took very bad about three in the morning, died just after eight. And if you'd known her, you'd only be surprised it hadn't happened before!'

Indeed!'

‘The doctor's assistant was here most of the time. Foreign-sounding young gentleman but quite agreeable. You could ask him. He made a report to Dr Macarthy and they gave her a certificate. Would it be much, the money? See, she had two rooms at the top of the house, in the attic, and there's still rent not paid for her last five weeks, let alone the time since, for which notice was never given.'

‘I shall certainly make a note of that,' Holmes said enthusiastically, pencilling something on the blank page of the notebook.

‘And the clearing up of the room! Not very nice, at all! Sick? I should say she was sick! By the bucketful! This money, would it be cash? See, unless it was in cash, you'd have to pay me as Mrs Emma Vowles—not Phillips.'

Holmes repeated the name and wrote ‘Emma Vowles' and ‘not Phillips' in the little book.

‘Five weeks' rent, you say?'

‘Just that, except there being no notice given, of course. And the room not fit to use.'

‘Shall we say six weeks? I see no reason why we should not advance cash today. I wonder if there are any other outstanding liabilities that her friends might know of. Did she have a particular friend who might have helped her out?'

Emma Vowles,
soi-disante
Phillips, pulled a face. Then she shook her head.

‘One, p'raps, lodging in this house as well. You can see her now, if you like. She moved into the attic rooms herself, after Mattie Clover was gone.'

‘If you would not mind,' Holmes said courteously.

We followed the woman up the stairs with their smell of damp plaster and rotting carpet until we came to a door in the low-ceilinged attic level. Mrs Vowles tapped on it and went in without waiting. We heard her say,

‘There's two missionary gentlemen, anxious to see all poor Mattie's debts are settled. I suppose you'd know.'

We heard a murmur from the occupant of the room. Mrs Vowles stepped back, opened the door wider for us, let us pass and said, ‘Here you are then …'

‘Lucy Rose,' said the girl's voice. She stood up from the trestle bed on which she had been sitting, a faded Pre-Raphaelite dove, the face plain and scrubbed, the hair in two braids, a look of weariness in her eyes, as if our presence made no difference to her one way or the other. The last fading of a bruise might just be seen on her right cheekbone. The room itself was all too familiar, its frayed carpet, plain washstand with jug and basin, a single chest of drawers, low windows cob-webbed and stuck fast by old paint.

The Reverend William Holmes took her hand gently.

‘Lucy Rose? You were a friend to poor Mattie Clover.'

‘We were friends,' she said guardedly, drawing her hand away, ‘not close, though.'

‘Well,' said Holmes, smiling at her, ‘I hope we are all her friends. There is a little money put by which her family would like her friends to have.'

He counted three sovereigns from one hand to another and then gave them to her. She took them without a word of thanks or comment. Holmes looked about him.

‘How long have you lived like this?'

‘Three years,' she said with a shrug. ‘I'm a distressed milliner, ain't I?'

‘I see. And how old are you, my child,' inquired Holmes the Missioner.

‘Twenty.'

He nodded, as if he believed her. Then he said, as though struck by a pleasant thought, ‘And when is your birthday?'

‘My birthday? What do you want to know that for?'

He smiled again, as if at her foolishness, ‘You were kind and good to Mattie. I believe her mother would like to be kind to you. Next year, Lucy, will be your twenty-first birthday, a very special one. How nice it would be for her mother if she could send you something to commemorate it. If it does not offend you, that is.'

‘It doesn't offend me,' she said, staring up at him, ‘I just can't see why anyone'd want to do that.'

‘Because they are good and kind Christian folk,' said Holmes.

She shrugged.

‘Well, fourth day of April it is, if that matters.'

‘Tell me,' Holmes said with an air of quiet concern, ‘what happened on the night that she died? Were you with her?'

I feared the girl might refuse to discuss this but Holmes had pitched the question with great skill, suggesting that he only wanted the information to comfort someone else.

‘She came back with a man,' said Lucy Rose indifferently. ‘She was always bringing men back. I saw him in the hall, so did Mrs Phillips and her sister, but they turn a blind eye to that sort of thing in a place like this.'

‘What did the man look like?'

‘Well, he had his back to the light but he was quite stout-built with a brown moustache. A bit red-faced like a navvy. He was wearing a top-coat and bowler hat. They went up to the room, then she comes down and goes out for some beer. I went to bed, but I heard them go down about an hour later. She opened the door, he said “Good night,” and she said “Good night, dear.” That's all.'

‘I see,' said Holmes, in the tone of a disappointed man returning a bribe to his pocket.

‘Until about three in the morning,' she said hastily, ‘then I woke up and heard screaming. She'd wedged herself over the end of the bed, pressing her stomach down to get ease from the pain. First thing she said was someone must have poisoned her with some pills she took, not wanting to get in the family way.'