The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (101 page)

If Gardiner's life was in the hands of Sherlock Holmes, I was never so grateful for my friend's reputation. It seemed plain from the two scowling figures that PC Eli Nunn had given Wright and Skinner little choice as to whether they attended this interrogation or not. A request from Holmes had been as good as a bench warrant from a High Court judge.

I stood with Nunn and Holmes a little apart from the others, while we discussed how the experiment was to be carried out.

‘I must tell you, sir,' said Nunn apologetically, ‘that we have already carried out a test of our own. On 28 July last, I stood behind the hedge up there, where these two young men claimed they were hiding on the evening of the alleged incident in the chapel. For the purposes of the test, Wright and Skinner went into the chapel, the door was closed, and, as I had instructed them, each in turn read out the first ten verses of the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Genesis, the story of Onan.'

‘Thank you,' said Holmes, interrupting him. ‘I am familiar with his story.'

‘Then I must tell you, sir,' said Nunn reluctantly, ‘I could hear every word.'

My friend was remarkably unruffled by this.

‘You do not surprise me in the least. Which other officer was in the chapel with these two when they read from the Book of Genesis?'

‘None, sir. There was no need. I saw fair play by making sure the door and every window was shut.'

‘But not by having an official witness in the chapel, where these two scoundrels could read or shout as loudly as was necessary to make their voices carry to you? Nor by choosing some other passage with which you might be unfamiliar but one whose words you expected to hear?'

Nunn was a decent fellow, I felt sure, and I was sad to see him cut down like this. I would have preferred him as an ally rather than an antagonist, for I cannot believe he liked Wright and Skinner any better than we did.

‘No matter,' said Holmes reassuringly, ‘we will return to these things later. For the moment, let us carry out an examination of the
locus in quo
.'

He handed me his travelling-cape and walked once round the outside of the little building. Then he began to inspect the door, windows, and ventilation. The white-painted door was unlocked and opened easily as he knelt down and studied the lower edge, where Gardiner swore it had stuck fast on the night when Rose asked him to slam it for her.

‘You see, Watson?'

‘I see nothing.'

‘Precisely. You see nothing because this door has been repainted. It is now eighteen months since the night of the alleged scandal, and the state of the paint suggests to me that it has yet to see a single winter before this one. In other words, it has only been painted after the murder. No doubt that was done to conceal something else that had been done to it before. Now, if you will be good enough to run your hand down the edge of the door where it meets the frame, you will feel that the upper stretch is smooth because the new paint is built upon a previous coat. Down here, however, you can feel the grain of the wood quite easily. In other words, at the bottom of the door someone had planed away the swollen surface so that it would close and lock more easily. After the murder, someone else painted the door, concealing what had been done. It may have been by chance, but it made a liar out of William Gardiner when he first told the story of slamming the swollen door because it had stuck—told it when his only witness was now dead and buried.'

‘Those two wastrels have something to answer for!' I said angrily. Sherlock Holmes straightened up from his inspection.

‘Let us not jump to conclusions. On its own, this does not mean that Gardiner has told the truth in every respect. However, in his story of the swollen chapel door, it seems he has spoken the entire truth and that someone has tried to make him appear a liar.'

‘Of course! Skinner described himself in court as an odd-job man for Mr. and Mrs. Crisp. Surely that would make him the odd-job man for the chapel as well, would it not? He planed the door to make Gardiner seem a liar and then painted it to conceal what he had done.'

‘No doubt, if it can be proved.' My friend was busy with the three square windows, each made up of small leaded panes.

‘You will recall the words of Skinner at the trial, “We heard rustling about and the window shook.”‘ Holmes turned to me. ‘Be so good as to shake that window, if you please.'

I was not sure quite what he had in mind, but there was no way of causing any vibration, except by vigorous contact with the glass or the glazing bars. The window frame was set solidly in the wall and nothing else would do. Holmes looked through it into the interior of the little building.

‘The only way to shake the window from inside would be to strike directly at the glass, preferably at about the level of the windowsill. Yet there is a fixed seat running just beneath it on the inside. That would make it almost impossible to hit the window accidentally while standing up. Sitting down, one would almost have to hit it with the back of one's head. Tell me, what else would produce such an effect?'

I lost his drift for a moment and he laughed.

‘Come, Watson! Surely, a servant girl doing her duty, cleaning the chapel with vim and vigor—including its windows! That is something they may have heard and adopted it for their story. If anything moved that window, it was Rose Harsent and her duster!'

He had not done with the small leaded panes.

‘Consider these little panes of glass. Seven up and five across. There are thirty-five of them in a space the quarter of our sitting-room window in Baker Street. They do not suit a chapel, where all should be light and airy and delicate. Where else would you find such things as these? I will tell you where, my dear fellow. In the grim walls of lunatic asylums and prisons. In those unhappy places from which it is judged best that no sound of grief or frenzy shall be heard. What, then, of the lowered voices of a man and woman in intimate conversation?'

He turned from the window and looked at a small and narrow flap of metal, angled downward from the wall, level with the middle of the window and a few feet from it. For the first time since our arrival, I heard him chuckle and guessed that all might yet be well.

‘See here, Watson. This is an old friend. The ventilator system. How extraordinary that a few months ago the mysterious death of the great novelist Emile Zola from charcoal poisoning should have taken us to France to examine just such forms of apparatus as this! Because there could be no proper intake of air through their windows, the good Congregationalists of Peasenhall installed a form of tube. I know it well. Devised by Mr. Tobin of Leeds. This model made by a rival is known as the Hopper.'

He pressed the metal flap that projected downward from the wall and I heard it click, as though it was now shut. Taking the lip of metal, he then opened it again.

‘A small catch inside does the trick. Within this flap is a draft-proof boxed-in ventilator. Imagine it as a square drainpipe on a larger scale. It is made of perforated zinc but lined with wood. The air passes from the outer world though this inlet and so through the wall. It then turns a corner downward, drawn by the warmer air within the building, which naturally rises upward in the room. At floor level the incoming air turns again and is released into the interior. It may be assisted by a fan of some kind, though I think not in this case.'

He closed the outside flap again with the same click.

‘Now, my dear fellow, with the ventilator closed, the door shut, and with windows that cannot be opened, no conversation in a normal voice could be heard distinctly—if at all—even where we are standing. Those two louts were six feet above us and nine feet further away, crouching behind a hedge. Even an exclamation or a casual cry would be so indistinct that its location would not be certain at such a distance. With the ventilator open, it might be possible to hear voices without being able to detect what they were saying. I doubt even that, since the sound would have to enter the tube low down on the inside wall. It must then pass along deadening wooden surfaces, against the flow of air, and round two corners before it reached anyone outside. Even if it was audible when it did so, the flap outside would direct it downward, not upward to the bank and the fence.'

‘Then we have them!' I said exultantly.

He shook his head.

‘Not as securely as we need to or as surely as I mean to have them when they are brought in to be questioned.'

6

Once again it was Holmes and I who sat with Lestrade and Mr. Wild at a table, this time inside the Doctor's Chapel. Its interior suggested the plain and humble devotion practised there. The walls were merely whitewashed over, and it was evident that they had been built of simple cob, as country folk call their mixture of clay, gravel, and straw. Sherlock Holmes sat at the center of our ‘inquisition.' If he had been the patient inquirer at Ipswich gaol, he was now the avenger, seeking justice for William Gardiner. He knew the truth, but it was another matter to prove it.

Mr. and Mrs. Crisp came in first. Conversation through the ear trumpet of old ‘Tailor' Crisp, as they called him, was almost impossible. It was his wife who submitted to the courteous but direct questioning of Sherlock Holmes.

‘Tell me, Mrs. Crisp, I presume you do not leave the chapel unlocked at all hours?'

‘No, sir. It is always locked when not in use.'

‘And you—that is to say you and your husband—have the key?'

‘We do, sir.'

‘How many copies of the key are there?'

‘Two copies, sir. We hold them both. The one in use is with other keys in a drawer of the desk, kept locked, and a spare key is kept in the safe. That is in case the first should be lost.'

‘Rose Harsent would be given the key from the drawer when she went to clean the chapel on Tuesday evening and would hand it back it to you when she had finished?'

‘Exactly so, Mr. Holmes.'

‘Always on the same night?'

‘As soon as she got home from the chapel or a very little later.'

‘Why was the chapel cleaned on a Tuesday, Mrs. Crisp? I should have thought it might have been more likely to be cleaned on a Saturday, ready for Sunday service.'

‘Saturday is a busy day, sir, and the chapel deacons hold their meeting on Wednesday. I like to have it cleaned on Tuesday, for the deacons next day, though the work is not always done as late as the evening. First thing on Wednesday morning, about half past eight, Mr. Crisp and I go down Church Lane and satisfy ourselves that everything is in order and the place properly cleaned for the evening meeting and prayers. By going early, it gives time to have anything put right that needs putting right.'

‘And when you went to the chapel first thing on the morning after the alleged scandal, everything was as you expected? The chapel had been cleaned?'

‘It had, sir. Even the numbers on the hymn board had been changed as usual and the hymn books put in order.'

‘And you are quite sure that you entered by using the key that was in the desk drawer?'

‘It was the only one we had ever used, sir. The other had never left the safe. Naturally, it was where I put it the night before, when the girl handed it back. I can't say exactly what time that was, for I had no reason to remember until the murder. It might have been as late as nine o'clock that she gave it me, because she was sometimes back and busy in the kitchen before I came in. Not later than nine, though. If it had been later than about nine, I should have wondered where she was. She was a good girl and dependable, except for whatever put her in the family way.'

‘Very well,' said Holmes. ‘The time of her return is of great importance, Mrs. Crisp. However, you must not let us persuade you to say anything that you do not accurately remember. There is one thing more. When she returned that evening, was her dress as it normally might have been?'

‘Indeed it was, sir. By the time I saw her, she had put away her shawl, and of course she would not wear a bonnet to go so short a distance.'

After Mr. and Mrs. Crisp had withdrawn, Wright and Skinner entered together. Whether Eli Nunn had sent them both at once or whether they had insisted upon this, in case one might contradict the other in his absence, I could not tell. A meaner-looking pair of bullies I had never seen. I do not say they would lie in wait to garrotte a man for his purse, but, I thought as I looked at them then, they would blast the reputation of man or woman without a second's thought. Skinner, I think, was the worse of the two.

One by one they told their stories again. Wright, who was loitering in Church Street, had seen Rose Harsent go up the path to the chapel at seven thirty that evening, and Gardiner had followed her at about seven forty-five. Wright had gone to Skinner's lodgings about eight o'clock and urged him to come and watch some fun. They arrived outside the chapel at eight fifteen or eight twenty and crept up along the raised bank until they might crouch behind the hedge. From there they could look down at the southwest window of the chapel. Skinner had remained in position for about an hour. Wright had been absent for about ten minutes during this time, but they had both been there when the couple in the chapel went their separate ways home.

Skinner gave the more complete version of what he alleged had happened in the chapel, though both agreed that it was getting too dark to see distinctly through the window. Skinner heard a woman's voice, which he could not recognize, say ‘Oh! Oh!' At that point Wright went away for about ten moments. Skinner heard the woman say, ‘Did you notice me reading my Bible last Sunday?' The man, whose voice was allegedly that of Gardiner, said, ‘What were you reading about?' ‘I was reading about like what we have been doing here tonight. Chapter thirty-eight of Genesis. It won't be noticed.'

‘You may save yourself the trouble of being coy with us, Skinner,' said Lestrade. ‘Onan spilling his seed upon the ground, you mean?'