Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) (15 page)

Holmes’ brow was thunderously dark. “In which part of the house has this business occurred Lestrade, may I enquire?” The Scotland Yard detective pointed through the open front door; “Straight ahead and down a few steps – there’s a sort of semi-basement that used to be a store-room by the look of it. A young woman by the name of Dulcie Hobbs rents it, or perhaps I should say, used to rent it, for she’ll surely not be paying next week’s.”

At this news, which chillingly confirmed the terrible truth of Wiggins’ report, Holmes’ lean face turned pale with anger. Lestrade stared curiously at my companion. “May I enquire what your business is here in Chiswick Mr Holmes? How does it come to be that we were alerted by the landlady no more than a few hours ago, and yet you and the Doctor mysteriously appear shortly after – or will you have me to believe you were merely passing by and stopped out of sheer curiosity?”

My colleague pursed his lips and considered briefly. “No Lestrade, you are too shrewd by far to be deceived by such an improbable feint. The fact of the matter is that I am slightly acquainted with the young lady’s employer, for whom I am looking into a small problem – a trivial matter and certainly beneath your attention. Would you object if I were to look inside, purely from a professional standpoint you understand?”

The little detective shrugged and replied easily “By all means Mr Holmes; I have no objection whatever but I much doubt you will find anything here to excite your unusual interests. Once I have filed my report, and the coroner has examined the body, the case will be closed. Now if you will excuse me, I have some routine arrangements to make with the constables here. I shall join you in ten or so minutes.”

“That is very good of you Inspector, and I am sure you are right in all respects; oh, by the by, has anything been moved or disturbed? I do find the scene of any unusual incidence to be so much more instructive at the first viewing if all remains untouched since its occurrence.”

“Beyond the obvious of entering with the landlady’s key – the door was locked from the inside – checking the body for signs of life and performing a short search, there’s not much in there beyond a bed, a table on a rug and two chairs, a small stationery box containing some paper and envelopes and a wardrobe – all is just as it was.” Holmes nodded with satisfaction. “I am sure we shall find things just as you describe; however, it occurs to me that if the door was locked from the inside, would the key not most likely remain turned in the lock, so preventing the landlady’s key from being used?”

“Not so Mr Holmes; there you are in error. When we entered we discovered the key lying on the inner passage floor, no doubt inadvertently dropped by Miss Hobbs after locking up. You will find it upon the table where I have placed it.”

“Ah well, perhaps it is of no great consequence; come Watson, let us briefly examine the scene and see what we may learn.” We entered into a large airy entrance hall with a highly polished wood floor. To our left were ballustraded stairs to the upper floors, while straight ahead of us were three steps down to the room where these troubling events had taken place. As I had learned to do in such circumstances, I followed in Holmes’ wake, attempting where possible to follow his path unerringly that I might not risk contaminating or obliterating some faint sign or clue evident to him, but too subtle for my eyes or for my modest deductive talents to comprehend.

At the foot of the three steps Holmes examined the floorboards carefully, and ran his fingertips lightly over the smooth polished timber, muttering all the while under his breath as was invariably his habit when examining a scene of crime. Next he minutely scrutinised the brass lock-plate through his lens, then slowly pushed the door wide.

We entered into a short, gloomy inner hallway where the key had been discovered on the floor; to the left was a tiny dingy bathroom and on the right a small dimly-lit kitchen.

Ahead was a panelled and glazed half-open door to the main room, large and plain, sparsely furnished, scrupulously clean and tidy, but all in all, rather ordinary – ordinary, that is, but for a single object quite unspeakably out of place...

It was the body of Dulcie Hobbs – hanging by the neck on a rope suspended from one of the iron beams which spanned the room beneath the pitched roof.

Grotesquely, the body was slowly rotating, no doubt as a consequence of Lestrade’s recent attentions. Immediately beneath the appalling entity were an overturned chair and a shallow stationery box, evidently the components of the improvised gallows platform, kicked away at the final dreadful moment.

As we entered the room the body so happened to be facing away from us; I stood transfixed in horror as it slowly completed its ghastly silent pirouette like some grotesque puppet on a string, until for a few hideous seconds it stared straight towards us, before just as slowly turning away again.

Now there are quite singular differences between the physical trauma resulting from a judicial hanging, in which the victim drops a precisely calculated distance through a trapdoor, carefully computed according to body-weight, thus effecting virtually instantaneous death through massive dislocation of the upper vertebrae and severance of the spinal cord – and self-murder by hanging, whereby the suicide excruciatingly strangles to death by slow agonising degrees – typically perhaps ten or fifteen ghastly minutes may pass before death finally occurs.

The
post-mortem
differences between the two instances are so marked as to be immediately recognisable; in the former case, the cadaver will typically exhibit a substantially normal visage, a slight elongation of the neck, with the accompanying unnatural lack of upper vertebrae rigidity that follows such a severe dislocation.

By marked contrast, a suicide by strangulation exhibits a countenance distorted in agony, darkly suffused with blood, eyes bulging wide, and a swollen tongue protruding to an extreme degree, resulting from a long, slow and painful throttling.

It was certainly the latter which confronted us that gloomy winter afternoon, and as a medical man having viewed examples of both types of cadavers post-mortem, I had no doubt in my mind that this was a suicide by strangling.

I doubted that there was much more to be learned in this sad room beyond that which Lestrade had already gleaned, except perhaps for the unfortunate woman’s motive.

“Good God Holmes – whatever the woman’s past sins and errors, what manner of desperate circumstances could possibly have driven her to take her own life in such horrid a way?”

Holmes made no reply, but gestured for me to remain at the doorway; slowly, almost balletically, he walked the perimeter of the room minutely examining the three large casement windows, the small fireplace, the wardrobe and its meagre contents; on a brass hook upon the wall hung an overcoat, which Holmes felt with his fingertips; next he explored the heavy mahogany table, the key thereupon at some length with his lens, the few papers lying there, and then with his back to me, the mean little bed. I was amazed that he yet appeared to pay little or no regard to the most grotesque occupant of the room – still almost imperceptibly moving as if reluctant to relinquish the last signs of life.

“Surely Holmes there is little more to be learned here except...” Like an owl, without moving his torso, he rotated his head almost half around in an instant and placed one finger to his lips. Gravely he said “You could not be further from the truth Watson; there is
everything
to be learned here!” Meticulously he examined the rest of the room, particularly the wood floor between the door and the table, until finally he went to gaze up at the now, mercifully, immobile body.

After minutely scrutinising the hands and the feet – where he took particular notice of the soles of the shoes – he positioned a chair close to the awful object and stepped up, from which elevated viewpoint – he being over six feet in height – made the closest and most microscopic examination with his lens of the face and neck, paying particular regard to the gaping mouth and distended tongue, or so it seemed to me. Using his Penang Lawyer, he appeared to take approximate measurements of the body and the rope, and the gap between the feet and the wooden floor.

Frowning, he leapt down and darted directly to a far dark corner of the room where he examined closely a red woollen scarf apparently discarded on the floor and hitherto unnoticed by me. With a single sharp ejaculation “Aha!” he straightened and then, with no heed for his attire, kneeled among the cold ashes in the small fireplace and proceeded to rake through them minutely with his bony fingers, winnowing out fragments of ash and other charred detritus which appeared much to interest him, then laid them carefully within his folded white kerchief.

Finally, he peered up the chimney flue, then turned and beckoned me to join him at the table where Lestrade had arranged some small scraps alongside the key from the entrance hall floor. “What do you make of that Watson?” He passed me his lens and I scrutinised the scorched fragments as arranged by Lestrade, some almost illegible. With some difficulty I made out:

“Good Lord above Holmes! It certainly looks like a suicide note does it not? I can decipher most of it but what of this ‘A HUN CHASES M’ – surely that ‘M’ must have been ‘ME’!” Or might it perhaps have been... MORIARTY?” And then it struck me! “ ‘A HUN’ – Bormanstein? Or von Huntziger – surely it must be one of the pair Holmes? And ‘DULC’ ‘OBBS’ is without a doubt the remains of her signature!”

He snorted with derision; “My considered view is that the fragments – a small selection only from those available – there are more in the grate, reference neither of your ‘Huns’.

“I quite agree that when these selected scraps are organised thus they perhaps appear to be the last tragic words of a desperate suicide, but consider Watson what, commonly, is the intended purpose of a suicide’s note?

“Surely you would agree it is intended to announce to an uncaring world the troubled reasoning behind your sad decision to quit this life in total anguish – a last defiant, angry or despairing statement before taking the desperate, final step into eternal oblivion?” I nodded my assent.

“If so, then pray tell me why someone would trouble to write such an anguished note, only to destroy it before committing to the final act?” I was unable to answer. “And what of this Watson?”

He passed me one of the papers from the table; it appeared to be a short letter from the dead woman to one Molly Hobbs, resident in Brightlingsea. “Read it aloud if you will Watson.” The script was not lengthy:

Chiswick, London W

My Dearest Moll,

How much I look forward to seeing you next week dear sister! I have obtained six whole days of leave from my employers, so meet me at the railway station at eleven o’clock on Saturday next and we shall go for gin and water at The Queen’s Arms! What a grand time of it we shall have! Be sure to dress up for the most elegant swells! Afterwards we shall have the finest jellied eels and mash with plenty of liquor!

And as a particular delight I shall treat us both to pretty new bonnets at Hopgoods the milliners, as I expect to be in funds by then to the sum of one hundred pounds! Can you imagine my dearest Sis – I believe I have never seen so large a sum of money in my life!

Your loving sister

Dulce

PS: My best duty to Mum

Holmes raised his eyebrows and fixed me with an inquisitorial look. “Construe, if you please, Watson.”

“I surmise that notwithstanding its cheery tenor, and the optimistic anticipation of somehow coming into a large sum of funds, this unsent letter clearly proves that within hours of writing it some devastating news arrived, or some event must have occurred after she wrote this Holmes, and before she could post it; something so terrifying that she felt compelled to take her own life?”

There was a silence for some moments. Holmes looked up from picking through the scraps of detritus he had gathered in his kerchief.

“Masterly my dear Watson! Quite brilliant; you surpass yourself to the very highest degree.” I basked momentarily in this unaccustomed praise, which helped to take a little of the sting out of some of his more acerbic comments upon my earnest endeavours to record his cases. My pleasure was to be short-lived. After a brief pause, he resumed.

“Indeed, I do believe that had you not so excelled in the medical profession, I declare that you might well have enjoyed a career at the Yard as lamentably undistinguished as that of the blundering Lestrade!

“No, do not look so downcast old friend, but exactly like the meticulous though unimaginative Lestrade outside, even now planning to write a confident report of a suicide you and he, as have I, have seen everything necessary to deduce what truly occurred in this room sometime between ten last night and, most likely, eleven o’clock at the latest, yet you have both signally failed at the last hurdle – that critical final leap of simple scientific deduction. You, like he, have committed that most cardinal of sins by shaping the significance of the evidence to fit with the apparently obvious end-result, now hanging there before us. However, that she died on a gibbet of her own devising beggars belief, and flies in the face of all the evidence and all reason!