Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (20 page)

Our time was almost up and I roused myself from contemplating worse horrors than any so-called ghost. There were questions I must ask, as a medical man.

“Mrs Grose, will you tell me about the deaths of the children?”

She nodded calmly. No doubt she had been questioned at the time.

“Flora was taken ill in London?” I prompted her.

“A week or so after the upset by the lake, I took the poor little soul to her mother's sister, Lady Camerton in London, away from Bly and its ghosts. But at Apsley Square the child grew feverish. Two days later an infection began in her throat and lungs. She was moved to the fever hospital. Then it became full-blown diphtheria. We thought she got it in London or travelling there. Now it seems both children probably caught it from the same source of infected water. The major wanted the best for her. But, most of all, he had wanted Miles kept away from Flora's illness.”

“You returned alone to Bly from London soon after the little girl died?”

“And Master Miles was gone by then. What a dreadful business that was! But they never thought of diphtheria in his case for there was no time. It was Miss Temple who smothered him in her madness. I grieve for her but it must be she who did it.”

“Can you be sure?” Holmes asked.

“Until the post-mortem they never knew diphtheria was in him—just feverishness. He'd had lung fever at school and thrown it off. He could have thrown off this. What happened that last day, I can only tell you as it was told to me. Master Miles was a little poorly but quite well enough to come downstairs. That counted against Miss Temple at her trial. They even talked of which new school he might go to.”

“And the rest,” Holmes interposed, “is in Miss Temple's journal.”

“So I understand, sir. They were in the dining-room talking of another school, when she saw Quint at the window. Just as she did before Evensong a few weeks earlier. She tried to stop Miles seeing that evil man. She was strong as a field-girl, governess or not. She held him tight, felt his pulse race with fear. He was white as chalk and cold sweat running from him. So I was told.”

Holmes kept his eyes on his notes as Mrs Grose continued. Then he said, “She says that she seized him and felt his heart flutter, not that he gasped for breath. She tells us his face looked ravaged by those eyes glaring through the glass. She too felt sick and faint. At the window was a spectre of damnation. She fought with that demon for the child's soul.”

The poor woman lowered her head and there were tears in her reply.

“Perhaps she fought the evil beyond the glass—but more the evil in the child, for evil there was. If the boy died for want of breath, I swear she could not know it. And when she went under, in her faint, she thought she heard Miles cry out, ‘Peter Quint—you devil!' Who did he mean was the devil—she or Quint? Either way, she held him tighter to protect him. Better he should die in her arms, I suppose she thought, than go to damnation with Quint. But when she came to herself, that devil had gone and the child's soul with him.”

After a moment's respite, Holmes spoke again.

“It grieves me, Mrs Grose, that we can bring you so little comfort. But let there be justice for Victoria Temple.”

“I hope so, sir. This has been an unlucky house. Masters and mistresses coming to grief. You'd never think it on a sunny afternoon like this. Sir Guy Mordaunt hanging from the cedar tree after his young wife's death. Harry Varley the poacher swimming the lake by night. The weed in the Middle Deep got his legs and held him, the poor fellow jumping like a trout for air but always pulled back, until he could jump no more,”

“You may depend on it, Mrs Grose, that I shall do all in my power to set Miss Temple free. When we meet again, I hope she will be with us.”

The poor woman looked a little flustered.

“I don't think you'll see me again, sir. The house will be shut up in a day or two. There's only me, the maid and the agent's man at the gate-house.”

“Then where will you go?” I asked politely.

She brightened at this.

“To my son. At Cwm Nant Hir, the valley of the long river, a sheep farm, among the mountains of Wales. I won't miss Bly without the children.”

At seven that evening we joined the London express. In the restaurant car, after dinner, two glasses of brandy stood before us. Holmes sighed.

“What would Professor Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research make of all this?”

“What the Court of Criminal Appeal may think is surely more to the point.”

Trailing white smoke and steam across ripening cornfields, we rushed towards a slim gothic spire against a darkening sky.

“Odd that diphtheria was ignored by the defence,” Holmes continued thoughtfully, “with the threat of a wilful murder verdict still possible.”

“Diphtheria could not have gone far enough to cause death on its own. It merely weakened the child and made suffocation that much easier. That is all.”

He brooded on this for a moment, his lean profile reflected in the darkened window of the carriage. Then he brightened up.

“As always, we must bow to the evidence. I shall attend Somerset House tomorrow morning, to view the death certificate of Miles Mordaunt. I believe we must test your presumption that diphtheria could not have gone far enough to kill him on its own.”

It was dark across the marshes. The bright, square illumination of the carriage windows flashed on hedgerows and embankments as we thundered into the night.

6

T
he powers of memory exhibited by Sherlock Holmes would have been worth a whimsical monograph of the kind that only he could write. How any human being could have so encyclopaedic a recollection of so many divers facts was beyond me, and I no longer sought the answer. Once he had tried to explain it by saying that the only thing necessary was a passion for knowledge which made it impossible to forget. Then he tried to define it as a system, in which knowledge of one thing led by association to two more—and so on by geometrical progression. It seemed far simpler to accept that once his indomitable memory learnt a fact, he never forgot it.

None of this prepared me for the next day's bombshell.

On the morning after our return from Bly, I was later than usual coming down to breakfast. Holmes was seldom an early riser and I was not surprised to see the
Morning Post
unopened. But his knife, fork and plate had been cleared away. Therefore he had gone out even before the paper was delivered. Once the game was afoot, as he called it, there were nights when his head hardly touched the pillow before he was up and about again.

I finished breakfast and was reading the county cricket scores in
The Times
. The rasp of a wheel rim against the kerb indicated that a cab had pulled up. Slow and hollow hoofbeats signalled the driver's return to the Regent's Park rank. I waited to hear Holmes's key in the lock and his footsteps on the stairs, while I followed the report of yesterday's match at Bath between Middlesex and Somerset. As time ran out—ten to make and the match to win!—Hereward Douglas had hit a stylish half century for the visiting team.

Why was there still no sound on the stairs? I got up and drew back the curtain a little, looking up and down the street for any sign of Holmes. He was a hundred yards away, towards the park, in conversation with half a dozen of the ugliest little ragamuffins I ever saw. Four boys and two of their sisters, no doubt. This unsightly group was a detachment of his “Baker Street Irregulars,” as he called them. They were his spies in enemy territory. While they watched and listened, gathering intelligence or shadowing a quarry on our behalf, our opponents never gave them a second glance. He was either describing the details of their next assignment or arguing over their extortionate demands for payment.

The prestige of working for Mr Holmes, the Baker Street Detective, always carried the day with these little bandits. Several coins now passed from his purse to the tallest boy of the group. The balance would follow upon completion of their task. He turned back and strode towards the freshly polished brass of Mrs Hudson's doorstep.

Vigorously, as if he had just woken from a good night's sleep, he came up the stairs two at a-time and into our sitting-room. Action and activity were his great restoratives. His cap went skimming onto the hat-stand. He threw himself down in his fireside chair and greeted me with a broad smile. Then he drew a sheet of paper from his breast pocket.

“We have it, Watson! I shall be surprised if a competent Queen's Counsel cannot argue Miss Victoria Temple out of Broadmoor by next week.”

He produced a sheet of paper.

“What is that?”

“A transcript from Somerset House. Their doors were open at eight-thirty and I was the first applicant across the step. This is a transcript of the death certificate of poor young Miles Mordaunt—or rather the details which I have copied from it. Still appended to it was a post-mortem report.”

“How does it help Miss Temple? She has already admitted killing him. If she was so deranged that she did not know what she was doing or did not know it to be wrong, she will remain insane but guilty under English criminal law.”

“I shall take the liberty of calling that into question.”

“How?”

He sighed.

“Because she never killed anyone. The great pity, Watson, is that I was not invited to attend Miss Temple's trial. I could have saved the lawyers on both sides so much trouble.”

On these occasions, he was quite insufferable.

“What trouble, for God's sake?”

“She was found guilty of suffocating the child. But the postmortem evidence here shows that the primary cause of death was cardiac arrest. Not suffocation.”

“Cardiac arrest at the hands of Miss Temple? What of it? All deaths—including all those occasioned by murder—end in cardiac arrest. The question is how they are brought about!”

He beamed at me and clasped his hands.

“Like everyone else, I had first believed Miss Temple's confession in her journal. She hugged a delicate boy tightly enough and long enough to suffocate him. Without her intervention, any slight initial diphtheritic infection would not have killed him at that point and might well have yielded to treatment. Her conduct was what the law calls the
novus actus interveniens
, the new act which changes the course of events.”

This legal subtlety was merely an irritation and I told him so. His smile grew a little warmer as he continued.

“Our simple rustic coroner never went further than the story in her journal. Miss Temple had confessed to murder, therefore it must be so. My dear Watson, I have also been through the post-mortem report of the fever hospital, separately and minutely. As a result, I am quite convinced that Miss Temple could not have murdered Miles Mordaunt because the child she hugged to herself was already dead. There were too many mind-doctors at her trial and too few specialists in contagious diseases.”

He had a trick up his sleeve, but for the life of me I could not see what.

“It will not help her, Holmes! Let us suppose she frightened a delicate child violently enough to cause heart failure. By legal precedent, it is unlawful killing to frighten a victim to death, even by impersonating a ghost. What else is her nonsense of an evil spirit at the dining-room window but such an act?”

He relaxed his smile.

“The boy was in the very early stages of diphtheria.”

“We already know that. The very early stages would not kill him. They will certainly not exonerate Miss Temple.”

He shook his head indulgently.

“I believe, my dear friend, that an item of your medical training has escaped your memory for a moment. It certainly eluded the simple country physician at Bly. The equally simple coroner's jurors were content to believe Miss Temple's confession in her journal. Accordingly, they returned a verdict of homicide against her.”

“What is your alternative?”

“Curiously, while diphtheria may take its course over several days or a week, it can also kill at once and without warning. It can even kill without any previous symptoms.”

This was too much.

“I have treated diphtheria for twenty years and I have never met with such a case!”

He stood up without replying and walked across to the long bookcase, extending from floor to ceiling. Its rows of scrapbooks and volumes of reference made up his library.

“Nor, perhaps, have you ever heard of Professor Stresemann. If you are not too weary after yesterday's journey, let me show you the relevant section in his admirable volume on forensic pathology,
Das Lehrbuch für Gerichtsmedizin
. Among others, he cites two recent cases of patients feeling a trifle feverish, as Miles Mordaunt did. Like him, they were not apparently suffering from any serious or specific illness. The idea that they were in the grip of diphtheria would have seemed alarmist. They resembled precisely the reported state of Master Mordaunt. Nothing was done. Both victims were found dead a few hours later with no previous suspicion that they had contracted the disease.”

“Impossible!”

He drew his volume from its shelf and continued his explanation as he turned to the page.

“The only reason, my dear fellow, that you have never known such a case is that diphtheria was not diagnosed. Like the boy, Stresemann's cases were in the early stages of the infection which might still have yielded to treatment. A diphtheritic deposit had gathered in the throat but that would not have had time to be fatal. However a further autopsy revealed unexpected diphtheritic deposits in the bronchi. These deposits travelled suddenly and rapidly from the throat down the bronchi, the congestion created by this then causing cardiac failure. Everything in the case of the poor child at Bly corresponds with Professor Stresemann's description and findings.”

Not for the first time, my friend's random erudition was a cause of personal annoyance. I tried to cut him short,