The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (22 page)

‘In all the circumstances, old fellow, I should like this to be yours.’

The sterling silver was engraved with a crown and a single royal name followed by ‘R’ and ‘I’ for ‘Rex’ and ‘Imperator.’ In addition, as if this were intended for a recipient of exceptional merit, the case was further engraved on the back with the words ‘
ENGLAND EXPECTS
.’

Sherlock Holmes was not a man much given to holidays or to any form of travel for its own sake. I once made the mistake of assuring him that the Taj Mahal and the treasures of the Nana Sahib would merit a journey. He answered me in the words of Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, who had promised his friend that the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing.

‘Worth seeing,’ said Holmes with a sigh, ‘but, alas, not worth going to see. Life is too short to allow of making mere excursions.’

Apart from his professional visits, he was generally content to remain in London and, indeed, in Baker Street. The only exception he allowed was in his pursuit of archaeology and antiquity. The isles of Greece and the great sites of Troy or Mycenae were too far distant, but the Dark Ages of his own land held a fascination for him. During one of these expeditions, it was my own calling as a medical man that involved us in the strange mystery of the Peasenhall Murder.

Holmes had conceived a taste for the history of East Anglia with its flat landscapes running to the sea and its wide horizons above fields and waterways. Here the noble Saxons of Mercia had fought unavailingly against the Danish invaders twelve centuries before. It was, he said, unspoilt rural England at its best. Our visit was arranged for the first half of June. We were to make our headquarters for ten days at the Bell Hotel in Saxmundham, a grey brick structure adjoining the Town Hall. The Bell was a well-appointed hostelry, built just before the coming of steam, in the last days of horse-drawn mail coaches.

The train from Ipswich deposited us at a little station where one feels the fresh breeze from the North Sea hardly more than five miles distant. No sooner had we finished lunch than Holmes must be up and doing, as the saying goes, carrying out his inspection of the ancient parish church that stood close by. In his impatience, he was for all the world like a major-general reviewing a summer camp.

It was a bright afternoon when my friend introduced me to the ancient tower of Norman stones and flint. It rose beyond the great trees that lined a steep path from the town. Within the nave, there was a fine old hammerbeam roof and a charming mediaeval font carved with emblems of the Evangelists and supported by two dwarves carrying clubs. I noticed, however, that my friend stood longest by a grave in the churchyard that was marked with a skull and crossbones. Its inscription was carved in memory of Joel Eade, ‘whose soul took flight in 1720.’ The macabre suggestion that the poor fellow had been carried off by devils was precisely of the kind to attract Sherlock Holmes.

The rest of the day was uneventful, though the sight of the sky gave me some uneasiness. There had been rain the night before, and the dark clouds across the fields promised worse to come. As we sat down to our dinner in the comfortable hotel, the gathering winds outside assured us that a true storm was blowing up. It was an apt prelude to the horrors of the following day.

Until four o’clock next morning, the rain fell as if it never meant to stop, the wind driving against the windows of our rooms. By breakfast time, the gale had blown itself out and the rain had dwindled to a fitful drizzle. We had just risen from the table when our landlady bustled across the room; she was followed by a stranger in police uniform. It was the constable who spoke.

‘Dr. Watson, sir? Police Constable Eli Nunn. May I speak with you, Doctor?’

There followed a most vexing conversation. A medical man, like any other, wishes to take his holiday leisure without interruption. However, a young woman had been found dead that morning in the nearby village of Peasenhall. She had been six months pregnant, with no father to her child, and it was believed that she might have made away with herself. It was imperative that a doctor should attend before the police could move the body to a mortuary. Dr. Lay, the regular medical practitioner, was out on an urgent call, but some convenient busybody had noticed the name of another doctor in the list of guests at the Bell Hotel, Saxmundham! If I would be so good as to attend for a few minutes, it would then be possible for the police to proceed in their business.

It promised to be a most tiresome errand, but, in the circumstances, I could scarcely refuse. Nor, I believe, would Sherlock Holmes have permitted it! A pony and trap waited outside. Constable Nunn whipped up the horse and we bowled along the little Suffolk roads in a thin sunlight, which now followed the storm. Had I known what awaited me, I believe nothing would have induced me to climb into that trap.

The distance was greater than I had expected. We went through the charming village of Sibton with its ruined abbey and cottages in pink and cream, before coming to the more remote and workaday settlement of Peasenhall. I could not help wondering whether Eli Nunn’s choice had fallen on me because someone at the hotel had let slip that I was in the company of the famous Sherlock Holmes.

Presently, Constable Nunn reined in the horse outside Providence House, a well-built residence in the main street of Peasenhall, a village that seemed little more than a single long street. We were escorted to the back and entered by a rear conservatory, which in turn led into a small kitchen, about ten feet by eight. A narrow flight of stairs led upward from one corner, so that the servants might reach their attics without appearing on the main staircase. Someone had draped linen over the only window, which cast a further gloom on the scene.

The moment I stepped into the kitchen from the conservatory, I smelt a strong odour of paraffin and a nauseous taint of burnt flesh. Then I looked down and saw the body of a girl lying across the floor on her back. She was wearing her stockings and a nightdress that had been partly charred, as had one side of the body itself. The cause of her death was never in doubt, for there was a wound extending from under the angle of the right jaw across to the left jaw, completely severing the windpipe. Another wound below the angle of the right jaw ran upward underneath the chin. Either of these injuries would have been fatal, but there was also a puncture wound near the breastbone. I also noticed that the door of the little staircase had been thrown back with such violence, presumably in a struggle of some kind, that it had broken a bracket of the narrow wall shelf.

How anyone but a thoroughgoing village idiot could imagine that this was a case of suicide defied explanation. If the poor girl had inflicted either of the throat wounds upon herself, she would certainly not have lived long enough to carry out the second. Indeed, the blood that had spurted from the wounds had splashed the little stairway to the second step. It needed no examination to tell me that she was dead, but I satisfied myself that she was almost cold and that rigor mortis was well-nigh complete.

‘She has been dead for at least four hours,’ I said, turning to Constable Nunn, ‘and possibly for much longer, since a body will cool more slowly in summer temperatures.’

The worst aspect of all was that the murderer—for this was murder if ever I saw it—had apparently tried without success to set fire to the place. In the event, the body and its linen were only charred on one side. A broken paraffin lamp lay on the floor, where it had presumably fallen at the moment of her death or a little before. Perhaps the oil from this had caught fire, but it would probably not have been enough to cause such damage to the body or the clothing as we now looked upon it. Where the rest of the paraffin had come from, I could not say.

My presence at the scene made very little difference. A few minutes after our arrival, Dr. Charles Lay, the village physician, returned from his visit to Sibton, and I handed the investigation to him with considerable relief. Though one grows accustomed to the horrors of medical life, there was much about the death of this poor young girl in so brutal a manner that shook me more than I would have expected. Sherlock Holmes stood quiet as a statue and said nothing. However, he accompanied me when I stepped out into the back garden to confer with Dr. Lay. He stood apart a little as we held our conversation and then approached me.

‘There are two curious pieces of evidence in this matter, Watson. I fear they may yet lead the Suffolk constabulary far from the truth. Did you not observe them?’

‘I can’t say that I did,’ I replied rather impatiently, for the whole thing seemed plain enough to me.

‘There was a newspaper folded under the young woman’s head and it had been charred a little in the abortive fire. It was a copy of the
East Anglian Times
for the day before yesterday. We must assume that the murderer put it there—but why? There were also fragments of a medicine bottle scattered on the floor. One of them included the neck of the bottle with the cork so well jammed into it that it appears immovable. Another fragment of the bottle had a label with writing upon it. Unless I am much mistaken, it read ‘Two or three teaspoonfuls, a sixth part to be taken every four hours—For Mrs. Gardiner’s children.’ The ink had run a little but I believe that was the inscription. I gather the name of the owners of this house is Crisp, not Gardiner.’

‘Perhaps it contained paraffin to add to the blaze,’ I said a little irritably. ‘Mrs. Gardiner may have something to answer for.’

Holmes looked across the little garden towards the rear door of the house.

‘Were I to commit a murder and attempt to burn the body,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I do not think I should wedge the cork so tightly in a bottle of paraffin that I could not withdraw it quickly at the critical moment. I would, at the very least, make sure of that.’

I was too much affected by what I had just witnessed to pay much attention to my friend’s forensic niceties.

During the remaining ten days of our stay at the Bell Hotel the murder of Rose Harsent, as her name proved to be, at twenty-three years old seemed to pursue us. It had seemed natural to me that the little community of Peasenhall should prefer a verdict of suicide by a poor girl who was six months pregnant with no father to her child rather than that one of its own members should stand accused of both the paternity and the murder. The facts made nonsense of this, however. So, at least, the coroner’s jury found.

For the next week our good landlady at the Bell Hotel lost no opportunity to bring us the latest gossip. I cannot dignify it by the name of news. What neither Holmes nor I had realised was that what the newspapers now called ‘The Mystery of the Peasenhall Murder’ had been preceded a year earlier by ‘The Great Peasenhall Scandal.’ Our hostess described this earlier sensation with more relish than seemed quite decent.

She told us that two Peasenhall youths, George Wright and Alfonso Skinner, belonged to that unsavoury class of Peeping Toms, whose amusement it is to spy on courting couples and the like. This pair of scoundrels let it be known that on the evening of 1 May, they had witnessed grossly indecent and dishonourable conduct between Rose Harsent and William Gardiner, a married man who was father of six children and who had risen to the position of foreman at Messrs. Smyth’s Seed Drill Works in the village.

The alleged incident had taken place at a building in Peasenhall that they call the Doctor’s Chapel, a Congregational chapel presided over by a local worthy, Mr. Crisp of the ill-fated Providence House. Rose Harsent was a servant at the house and it was part of her duties to clean this nearby chapel. Hence she had need of the chapel key from time to time. William Gardiner and his family lived two hundred yards further down the main street, at Alma Cottage. This industrious foreman was also a leading light of the Primitive Methodist connection at the pretty village of Sibton a couple of miles to the east. Rose Harsent sang in the choir at Sibton.

Once the scandal reached his ears, William Gardiner denounced it as a disgusting falsehood. He confronted his two slanderers, as he called them, who scornfully stood their ground. Gardiner then asked the superintendent minister of his congregation, Mr. Guy, to hold a chapel inquiry into the allegations. This was done, his accusers were heard but disbelieved, and Gardiner was exonerated. The minister and his elders thought the accusation ‘trumped up,’ nothing but ‘a tissue of falsehood,’ and reinstated Gardiner, who had resigned as a matter of honour from his positions as steward, choirmaster, and Sunday school superintendent when the story first reached him.

He now went to a solicitor and began proceedings for slander. Unfortunately, he then dropped these proceedings. His explanation was that Wright and Skinner had no money, that even if he won he must bear all the costs. He had no funds for this. On reflection, he also thought Rose Harsent would not be ‘strong enough’ to face the ordeal of the witness-box and cross-examination. Innocent or guilty of the scandal, her reputation must be indelibly tarnished.

All the same, it looked bad for William Gardiner when he withdrew the slander action. It seemed halfway to an admission of guilt. His wife Georgina never believed the charge, for she said her husband had been at home with her during the time when he was alleged to have been with Rose Harsent at the Doctor’s Chapel. Rose had been the friend of Mrs. Gardiner and continued to be so after the scandal, an ally who came regularly to the house, and a coreligionist at Sibton chapel. Throughout the entire affair, however, Georgina Gardiner’s evidence, true or false, was ridiculed by spiteful locals as that of a wife protecting her husband, herself, and their six children.

Naturally, Gardiner became the first suspect in the subsequent death of Rose Harsent. Worse still for him, various ‘evidence’ or tales now emerged from the year when the gossip ran riot before the murder. I recalled that Holmes had seen the name Mrs. Gardiner written on the label of the broken medicine bottle beside the body. Yet Mrs. Gardiner explained that she had given Rose the bottle, which then contained camphorated oil for a throat complaint. No doubt it might later have held paraffin, used by the intruder in the attempt to start a fire.