The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (26 page)

‘Then you had better know that he proposes to call here again to smash your face.'

Holmes turned and, despite his disguise, his features were a study in triumph as he put down the scraps of paper left for him and heard of the threat that had been made.

‘Splendid, Watson!' he said. ‘That will be Mr MacCowan, I expect. A most estimable man. To smash my face? That shows true feeling. And these slips of paper too! I had scarcely dared to hope for so many replies and such complete success.'

As he stood beaming at the scraps of paper in his hand, I had not the least idea what his outburst meant.

‘Do you mean, Holmes, that young Mr Wood is no longer in danger of being hanged?'

He looked at me with an air of surprise. ‘I should say, Watson, that he is in very great danger of being hanged. But that will be because he plays the conceited young ass in the witness-box and the jury takes against him. I think I can promise you that he will no longer be hanged on the evidence. He will have to do the job for himself.'

With that he turned to his bedroom to remove the goatee beard and the rest of his impersonation. Before leaving the room, however, he took a large sheet of paper which had been folded in his pocket. He threw it on the table and said, ‘Here, Watson. See what you can make of that.'

I saw columns of figures with dates beside them and the name ‘ELSIE' scrawled in pencil at the top. By now I was in something of an ill temper and decided that I would let Holmes explain the matter himself.

On his return, he rang for Mrs Hudson and warned her that we should receive a number of visitors in the next few days. The good lady was not to be alarmed if they included a desperate-looking man, who was in truth as amiable as an old family dog. There might also be a man who wished to smash the face of one or other of us, but he was really a most respectable fellow. There might also be a young lady of great presence and poise but with a certain past to live down. All were to be admitted at any hour.

III

For the first day we heard nothing. On the second, in response to a letter which Holmes or ‘Captain O'Malley' had written, there arrived at noon one of the ruffians whom I had encountered on our doorstep. He now strode into our presence with a great air of self-confidence. Holmes treated him like a Crown Prince.

‘Mr William Westcott? My name is Sherlock Holmes. May I introduce my colleague, the medical examiner Dr Watson? We are here on behalf of Captain O'Malley, who is abroad at this moment, as I explained in my card to you. What is your occupation, Mr Westcott?'

Our visitor lowered himself into a chair and the wooden frame of it creaked a little ominously under his bulk.

‘I'm a ticket-collector, Mr Holmes. Midland Railway at King's Cross.'

‘And the fact that you received my card and came here presumably means that you still live at 25 St Paul's Road? Is that not very close to where the Camden Town Murder happened?'

Our visitor was only too glad to share his moment of fame with us.

‘That's right, Mr Holmes. I must have left that morning about the same time as the murderer was seen leaving the house two doors down, being on the early turn that week.'

‘The early turn, Mr Westcott?'

‘At half past five. I always allow thirty minutes for the walk and five minutes for clocking in. It means I leave home at five to five on the dot.'

‘Just as well that you avoided the murderer,' said Holmes with a pleasant laugh, ‘though they say there was a policeman standing opposite the house.'

Mr Westcott's pouched and rubbery face creased in a grimace of indifference.

‘No policeman that I could see. And certainly no one leaving 29 just then. There was a cove coming down the road from the far end, same way as me. He walked after me but he wasn't a bit like the chap they arrested for cutting her throat.'

Holmes laughed again. ‘So you suffer no nightmares from the memory of the man who was following you.'

Mr Westcott's grin revealed gums that lacked most of the usual set of teeth.

‘I can look after myself, Mr Holmes. It'd take a mighty fine murderer to give Bill Westcott nightmares.'

There was laughter all round.

‘No,' said Holmes pleasantly. ‘And Mr Westcott didn't get a broken nose and a cauliflower ear from being a ticket-collector.'

Westcott joined in the laughter again.

‘Well now, Mr Westcott,' said Holmes more earnestly, ‘before we go further, perhaps you wouldn't mind just walking up and down the room a few times so that Dr Watson can make a note of your mobility.'

The chair creaked again as our visitor heaved himself up and began to pace between the fireplace and the door. He moved as if gathering energy for some great effort. The big man walked with his left arm swinging and crooked a little, his right shoulder hunched forward as if to protect his jaw. No one who saw him could sensibly doubt that this was the fellow whom one witness had seen, going about his innocent business in St Paul's Road at the time of the murder.

We had a pleasant discussion of the prospects of Mr Westcott, ticket-collector and amateur boxer. Holmes was as good as his word. ‘Captain O'Malley' had spoken to several of his new friends at Romano's, from whom he had obtained the names of likely contenders for an amateur knock-out contest at the National Sporting Club in Regent Street. Before the eyes of wealthy connoisseurs of the noble art, Bill Westcott became the Camden Conqueror before the year was out.

‘How the devil did you find him?' I asked, when Holmes and I were alone again.

‘My dear fellow,' he said quietly, ‘that you of all people should ask that! When Mr Newton described the gait of the man whom the witness had seen, it could only be a boxer. You recall the shoulder hunched forward, the left arm crooked?'

‘Then MacCowan saw Mr Westcott come down the steps from 25 and not Wood from 29!'

Holmes shook his head.

‘We may even doubt that Mr MacCowan saw Mr Westcott or anyone else on the morning of the murder. He says there was a policeman standing on the far side of the road and Mr Westcott tells us there was not. Perhaps Mr MacCowan remembers the wrong morning. That is something we cannot prove. Yet I was sure that one witness had described a boxer. I judged it imperative to discover where that boxer had come from and who he might be.'

‘Romano's and the
Pink 'Un
!'

‘Precisely, Watson. I spent several agreeable evenings among sporting entrepreneurs who live on the art of such men as Mr Westcott. As Captain O'Malley, I passed as one of them. I advertised by word of mouth and in the
Sporting Times
for men to compete at the National Sporting Club. My informants had told me of such a contest yet to be announced, so I deceived no one. He could only have been a boxer, Watson. I am still amazed you did not see it from the start. Young Mr Robert Wood may have his genteel talents, but he would not last two minutes in the ring with Mr Westcott.'

For the rest of that day, Holmes divided his time between lounging in his chair, staring at papers which I swear he did not read, and pacing before the window.

‘Damn it, Watson!' he said several times. ‘Where is the fellow?'

‘You mean MacCowan?'

‘Of course I mean MacCowan. He is a witness in the case and I may not approach him. That would be contempt of court. I must make him come to me. If he does not, Mr Wood may still be lost.'

Despite Holmes's anxiety, the doorbell on the following morning announced the arrival of this second visitor. Mr Robert MacCowan was not, in truth, the type to go about smashing faces. When the door was opened to him by the redoubtable Mrs Hudson, the wind quite left his sails and he murmured no more than a wish to see Mr Sherlock Holmes, for ‘Captain O'Malley' had been kept exclusively for practitioners of the noble art.

Indeed, when Mr MacCowan was shown up, he proved to be a tall and rather thin fellow with a shock of fair hair and a face haggard beyond his years. I placed his voice as that of a Norfolk man, though Holmes afterwards assured me it was Suffolk.

‘Mr Holmes?' he said plaintively. ‘I have a bone to pick with you.'

‘Indeed?' said Holmes. ‘I understand that my face was to be smashed.'

‘So it ought to be,' said MacCowan. ‘So it should be for what you have done. You were in the Eagle at Camden Town station. You were in the Rising Sun in the Euston Road. Where else you might have been I can't say. But everywhere that you were, you put about the story that I had lied as a witness to the police, and to the justices, and to the coroner's jury. I'm a man that hasn't had regular work the last eight months and if such stories are told about me I may never work again.'

Holmes motioned the tall, sad man to a chair.

‘Come, Mr MacCowan, please sit down. If it is in my power, as I believe it is, to procure employment for you, rest assured that I shall do so. I have never called you a liar. I have simply offered a harmless wager or two that events referred to in your witness statements did not take place.'

MacCowan, who had half sat down, stood up again and was not yet mollified.

‘That's as good as to call me a liar.'

Holmes stood as well.

‘We may all of us be mistaken or confused in our recollections, Mr MacCowan. It does not make us liars, I hope.'

‘You had no business, Mr Holmes. None whatever to say such things in a public place.'

The amiability went from Holmes's eyes and there was the faintest suggestion of a hiss in his breath. His hand, half-way to his pipe with a spill from the fire, froze in mid-gesture.

‘I have business indeed, Mr MacCowan. I have such business when an innocent young man stands in the shadow of the gallows, that I will stop at nothing to see that business completed.'

He lit his pipe, tossed the spill into the grate, and continued.

‘Moreover, Mr MacCowan, I do you a service if I save you from making a fool of yourself in the witness-box.'

‘I don't need saving, Mr Holmes. I know what I saw. I saw that man!'

‘If you will not sit down, Mr MacCowan, I shall. Which man was that?'

‘Which man? The man I picked out in the police station yard. The man I saw standing on those steps of the house with two lights shining down on him. Robert Wood.'

‘And what about the second man, Mr MacCowan? The one who was standing opposite the house when you passed at five minutes to five on the morning of the twelfth of September?'

MacCowan's shoulders moved in a pretence at laughter. ‘The policeman? You don't think he cut her throat!'

Holmes put his pipe down. ‘I am quite sure that he did not. How was this policeman dressed?'

MacCowan scowled at him. ‘Same as they all are. And he'd got his cape on, it being a wet morning.'

Only those who knew Sherlock Holmes well would have noticed the slight dropping away of tension in his body as he felt the prey within his grasp.

‘And yet, Mr MacCowan, on this wet morning as you call it, from midnight until the next midnight, the reports tell us that not a single drop of rain fell upon the whole of London.'

MacCowan was first disconcerted, then scornful.

‘I never said it was raining, Mr Holmes. It was damp, murky.'

‘Ah,' said Holmes, taking up his pipe again. ‘Quite so. Murky and misty. Poor visibility. Without the lights, you might scarcely see across the road.'

He stood up and handed his visitor the sheet of paper headed ‘ELSIE' with its columns of dates and figures.

‘What's this?' MacCowan asked. ‘Who's Elsie?'

‘The goddess of light,' said Holmes quietly, ‘EL … C … The Electric Company. Those, my dear sir, are the times at which street lights all over London were turned off automatically on the morning of the twelfth of September when Emily Dimmock met her death. If you will look just down here, you will see that the lamps in St Paul's Road, Camden Town, were turned off at five thirty-nine
A
.
M
., sixteen minutes before you claim that two of them shone brightly enough to identify Mr Robert Wood, despite the distance and the murk of the morning.'

MacCowan blinked, like a man hit hard but still on his feet.

‘Then I was earlier than I thought. I was at the Bread Company in Brewery Road to look for work at five o'clock. I must have passed down St Paul's Road earlier. I come from home, Hawley Road in Chalk Farm.'

‘Indeed,' said Holmes coldly. ‘It is noted by the gatekeeper that you arrived at the V. V. Bread Company in time to be one of the first group of workers taken on that morning at five o'clock precisely. I have checked that for myself. You may also care to know that the distance from Hawley Road to Brewery Road is half a mile—29 St Paul's Road is at the mid-point. I grant that a man may take a little longer than he first thinks to walk such a distance. I am a little puzzled, however, as to how a man in possession of full health and who says he was not delayed in any manner could take almost twenty minutes to walk a quarter of a mile—half the distance from Hawley Road to Brewery Road.'

MacCowan sat in silence, looking at his hands.

‘Come,' said Holmes a little more kindly. ‘Either you passed the house at five minutes to the hour, when you cannot have seen the man who left because there was no light to see him by. Or else you passed no later than twenty minutes to the hour, when the lights were on and when you cannot have seen him because, according to this evidence, he did not come out for another fifteen minutes.'

MacCowan caught at a straw. ‘There were other lights, Mr Holmes, that's what you'd know, if you weren't so bloomin' clever. Lights from the railway that runs by the street. I didn't just exactly notice at the time where the light was from. There's lights all along that railway and they keep 'em on.'

Holmes nodded. ‘So they do, Mr MacCowan, and those lights may have been on at five minutes to five. If you were to measure, however, you would find that the railway line on to which the lights shine is forty feet below the level of the road. Moreover, there is an unbroken line of houses opposite the one we are discussing, shielding it from any reflection. There cannot possibly have been any light of any kind shining upon 29 St Paul's Road by which you could identify any man leaving the house.'