The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (30 page)

Sir Edward sat upright. ‘An elephant rifle?'

‘Quite so,' said Holmes, ‘and you will no doubt be asked how many of the good folk in these charming villages go out in the evenings to shoot crows with an elephant rifle.'

‘This will not do, Mr Holmes!'

‘Very well,' said Holmes, ‘I will give you an argument, though it is not one I should care to use myself. Let us take a military rifle made by thousands and used by cadets or volunteer companies. The Martini-Henry is frequently of .452 bore, some were rebarrelled to various bores when the Lee-Enfield was brought in. It would be hard to prove that a Martini-Henry or any other particular gun had not fired a bullet as badly deformed as this one. The fact that the rifling is so defaced by a horse's hoof in this instance might suggest a badly worn Martini-Henry. Since the war, a Martini-Henry is the most common rifle to be found, as .455 is the most common calibre of ammunition.'

It was all the comfort that Sir Edward seemed likely to get. He walked with us to the door and Sherlock Holmes turned to him with fastidious courtesy.

‘I hope you will not think me precipitate, Sir Edward, if I tell you that I have now done almost everything that I can on behalf of your client and that I positively must withdraw from the case. I shall, of course, accept no fee.'

There was no doubt from his face that Sir Edward felt a dread that his defence of Ronald Light would prove to be built upon sand.

‘Withdraw, Mr Holmes? For God's sake why?'

‘It will be better if I keep my reasons to myself,' Holmes said quietly. ‘However, if I may offer a last piece of advice it is this. Mr Robert Churchill, the gunsmith of Agar Street in the Strand, has given evidence in many cases of this kind. His knowledge and skill are unparalleled. I must urge you to retain his services at once, unless you wish your client to be hanged.'

For all his forensic brilliance, Sir Edward Marshall Hall was baffled—and exasperated.

‘What can Mr Robert Churchill tell me that you cannot?'

‘I will only repeat,' said Holmes quietly, ‘that unless you retain his services at once, you are likely to see Mr Light hanged.'

At that moment, I thought I saw a glimmer of comprehension in the grey eyes of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Whatever it was that he comprehended was quite beyond me.

As we stood outside in the sunlight of Temple Gardens, I was almost dumbfounded. Never, in all our acquaintanceship, had Sherlock Holmes ever behaved in such a manner towards a client.

‘You have abandoned him!' I said incredulously. ‘Indeed, you have abandoned them both, Sir Edward and Ronald Light!'

He looked at me without expression. ‘On the contrary, Watson. I believe I may just have saved Mr Light from the gallows and Sir Edward from a terrible defeat.'

IV

As was too often the case when Holmes appeared to play the prima donna, he refused positively to discuss the matter with me. All the same, we attended the days of drama in the courtroom of Leicester Castle when Ronald Light stood trial for his life, charged with the murder of Annie Bella Wright.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall played a desperate game but he never played one with greater skill. The two young girls who claimed that Light had followed them were dismissed from the case. In their stupidity, the police had not asked them when they were followed but
whether
it had been on 5 July. That leading question was an end of their evidence. Worse still, the two girls had picked out Light from the men at the police station only after having first been given his description.

When it was known by the prosecution that Mr Robert Churchill was for the defence in the matter of the guns, it was supposed that Sir Edward had an ace up his sleeve. The Crown was content to call a local gunsmith of Leicester, Mr Henry Clarke. He was no match for the forensic power of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. In cross-examination, he agreed that the .455 bullet had been standard ammunition for at least thirty years past and had been made in thousands of millions. He agreed that the rifling marks on the bullet that killed Bella Wright were consistent with its having been fired either from a revolver or a rifle. He still maintained that it might have been fired from close range, passed through the young woman's head, hit the road, then risen and landed further on. He was not, however, able to find the mark on the bullet that would have been caused by the first of two such impacts with the road.

Having got so far in the matter of the gun, Sir Edward Marshall Hall did not call evidence for the defence on this point from Mr Robert Churchill or anyone else. Nor was this surprising. Ronald Light had escaped the gallows by a whisker. Later, Holmes handed me a summary of the report that Mr Churchill had made to Sir Edward, a document that the lawyer passed to my friend with a brief note of gratitude for his advice in retaining the famous gunsmith.

In Robert Churchill's opinion, the bullet that killed Bella Wright had been fired from a Webley Scott service revolver and no other weapon. Not only had the victim been shot by a revolver of the type for which Ronald Light possessed holster and ammunition, she had been shot from such close range that the bullet had scarcely begun to gather speed. No hunter shooting crows with a rifle had killed her. If Mr Churchill had given such evidence in court for the Crown, Ronald Light would surely have been hanged.

‘My dear Watson,' said Holmes equably, the night after Light's acquittal on the grounds that the lingering effects of shell shock had unnerved him from going to the police when first suspected, ‘I quite thought you had grasped my reasons at once.'

‘Your reasons for what?'

‘I withdrew from the case in order that Sir Edward might retain the services of Mr Robert Churchill. It is a simple matter of legal procedure. Mr Churchill is perhaps the greatest expert on firearms this country has ever known. If the defence retained him, the Director of Public Prosecutions could not. Sir Edward was good enough to suggest that my expertise might equal Mr Churchill's and it would be ungracious to argue over that. By my withdrawal, he was able to ensure that neither of us gave evidence for the Crown. He dared not put Mr Churchill in the witness-box once he had read his report. Yet he had deprived the other side of that advantage.'

‘For God's sake, Holmes! You have saved the girl's murderer from the gallows?'

He stretched out his legs and laughed.

‘There is no murderer, Watson! Why do all of you fail to grasp that essential point? Somewhere in the Leicester canal or a similar hiding-place lies the Webley Scott revolver once issued to Lieutenant Ronald Light. It is not the weapon of a murderer, though it killed Bella Wright. He was, I imagine, playing the fool with it to impress or amuse her. To his horror, it went off, the bullet hitting the stonework of the road, glancing upwards and passing through her head. It is the only angle consistent with the wound and therefore the only likely explanation. Light knew that his record in the army had not been of the best. His conduct with young women was much the same. It was a dreadful accident, not a murder, but who would believe him now?'

‘And the carrion crow?' I asked sardonically. ‘Did he shoot that before he killed Bella Wright—or afterwards?'

Holmes smiled to himself.

‘Not far away, under those same muddy waters that hide the revolver, there lies a rifle. Not an elephant-gun to be sure. Not even a gun of .455 calibre. Perhaps an old Martini-Henry used by lads or even their fathers to take pot-shots at crows and the like. Far more likely a rook rifle. It belonged to some other young man who fled from the scene of the tragedy in terror. Imagine him concealed behind the sheep-trough as the crow lands on the gate. He sights the bird and shoots it. Then he gets up and continues on his way to the gate itself. Looking over, he sees the most dreadful sight, the poor girl dead upon the ground, the bicycle beside her.'

‘And where is Ronald Light?'

‘There is no one to be seen, Watson. For this young woman was shot at about nine o'clock and it is now ten minutes later. The fellow with the gun thinks what Sir Edward made the jury think. The bullet from his rifle passed through the crow, hit the road and glanced up, passed through the girl's head and came to rest. A .455 bullet! It would have blown a crow to pieces.'

‘It is what Sir Edward himself thinks, as well as the jury,' I said firmly.

‘Then he really is quite mistaken, Watson. The lad—for rook-shooting is a game for lads—saw what he had done. Or, rather, what he thought he had done. He did not stop but took to his heels in terror with the phantom of the hangman at his back. For how was he to prove that it was an accident and no murder?'

‘Two shots at once? Something of a coincidence, surely?'

‘Two shots, Watson, at an interval of ten or fifteen minutes. Not so much of a coincidence in such splendid hunting country on a fine summer evening.'

In what was to become known as ‘The Green Bicycle Case', the explanation that Holmes expounded was the only one to explain the features of the case. For five or ten minutes we sat either side of the fireplace, smoking and thinking.

‘Then what do you think of Ronald Light in the end, Holmes? What judgment will you pass on your former client?'

‘I only think, Watson, that he is one of the luckiest young men alive. Lucky to be alive and not hanged by the neck in Leicester gaol.'

He added a little brandy to his soda. Half an hour later, he yawned and stretched.

‘I believe you have found our little adventure in Leicestershire one too many for you, Watson. Just now you thought I had protected a murderer. I assure you, I have done no more than to save a fool. If you should ever include the case in those romantic fictions of yours, you will find it easier to compose if you first hit upon a good title. I will give you one. You will not talk of bicycles, nor revolvers and cartridges, nor the habits of the carrion crow. You will call it simply, “The Case of the Missing Rifleman”. That will explain it completely.'

He puffed at his pipe and said no more. The rest of the world speculated on whether the single bullet that killed Bella Wright passed first through the body of the carrion crow. To Holmes, it was far simpler. There were two bullets. The coincidence of two guns being fired in hunting country within fifteen minutes on a summer evening was trivial compared with the coincidence of a single bullet passing through such a remarkable trajectory. The perversity of his opponents in the debate produced only a shrug from Holmes at the hopelessness of arguing with frailer intellects, who were driven to suggest that the deed must have been done by a lad shooting rooks with an elephant gun! As for Sir Edward Marshall Hall, it seemed a certain awkwardness had been generated between us by this disagreement, for he never communicated with either Holmes or myself again.

The Case of the Yokohama Club

I

Looking back on the career of Sherlock Holmes, it is plain that the years from 1894 to 1901 were those during which his services were in the most constant demand. Each new case of public importance or private investigation came close on the heels of the last. Gone were the easy-going days of the eighties, when he would lean back in his chair after breakfast, unfold his morning paper at leisure, and fold it again ten minutes later with a lament that it presented few possibilities to the mind of the criminal expert.

Our rooms in Baker Street now received visits from the great and the humble alike. One week our inquirer might be an emissary from Windsor, Downing Street, or one of the chancelleries of Europe. Next week it would be a poor widow-woman or an old soldier with nowhere else to turn. Holmes worked, as he said often, for the love of his art. Yet his instincts and his sympathies were with the weak rather than the mighty. Distress was never turned away from his door.

During these busy years, the manner of his life was everything that a healthy man's should not be. The needle and the cocaine, his chosen implements of self-poisoning, lay conveniently to hand in their drawer. He would spend such hours of recreation as his engagements allowed shut away from sunshine and fresh air, breathing the fumes of some chemical experiment or playing his favourite Haydn and Mendelssohn on the violin. That was all the solace he knew, apart from his pipe. So great was the burden of work that even his rivals in the detective profession were concerned for him.

‘Mr Holmes will run himself into the ground, if he keeps up this rate,' said our Scotland Yard friend Lestrade to me after one of our shared adventures. From observation, I was bound to agree. Yet I knew from experience that nothing was more useless than to offer advice to Holmes in medical matters.

With such calls upon his energies, it might seem remarkable to those who knew him only by reputation that he should have given so many weeks of his time in 1897 to an investigation that took him to the other side of the world. Perhaps he was moved by the plight of a young woman—little more than a schoolgirl—facing death at the hands of an arcane and unjust law. Perhaps he also saw from the first how easily a private wrong of this sort might become a scandal and a public disgrace to the British Crown, if her execution were to take place. Whatever the reason, his interest in the story began, as so many of our inquiries did, in the familiar surroundings of Baker Street. For convenience, I have gathered the disparate events that followed under the title of ‘The Case of the Yokohama Club'.

Those who remember the London autumn of 1896 may recall that it rained as if it never meant to stop. It did not wash away the city fog but reduced it to an oppressive mist. As the days shortened, the lowering skies in the west seemed to bring perpetual twilight and it was dusk by three in the afternoon.

On such an afternoon towards the end of the year, as the sunset faded before tea-time, Holmes was sitting at the table with a large folio pharmacopoeia open before him and a test-tube of malodorous green liquid in the rack to one side. His long thin back was curved and his head was sunk upon his breast in the attitude that had always suggested to my mind a large and gloomy bird of grey plumage with a black top-knot. I was about to break in upon his thoughts when the sudden clang of the doorbell forestalled me.