The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (35 page)

Holmes looked her in the eye.

‘I think you had better explain why Mrs Carew should stop your mother's letters.'

The tears had dried and there was a look of triumph on the girl's face.

‘They never told you? Mrs Carew lived in Somerset, near Glas-tonbury, before she married. My people were at Langport in those days, a little way off. She didn't know where I came from until after I arrived out here because I wrote from my brother's in Surrey. I was a doctor's sister, that's all she knew. Now she's frightened that I'll hear about her from home, how she's never been any better than she should be. I might have told Mr Carew. I might have told all her precious friends on The Bluff and at the Club, as well as the ones at the Race Course and the tennis courts. Oh yes, I was her servant right enough. But I had a mother who knew who my father was, which hers never did!'

‘Quite,' said Holmes coolly, ‘but why stick the fragments of the torn letters together?'

‘To show to Mr Carew, if Mrs Carew went on treating me as she did. Perhaps then he would love me and not her. Let him see what a fool she and Mr Dickinson were making of him. He'd turned a blind eye before, but this time he was ready to divorce her.'

‘Really?' said Holmes, with the least flicker of interest. ‘Why, then, did you practise writing Mrs Carew's hand and her signature? And the writing of Annie Luke?'

‘Annie Luke was just a name I heard from Mr Carew. A young lady from Devonshire that he knew once in the days before he was married.'

‘And Mrs Carew's writing?'

‘I was going to pay her out,' the girl said miserably. ‘He was never going to love me, after all, was he? And then I found out about the disease he had and how I'd been deceived by him. I was going to pay them both out. I thought I could write to Mr Dickinson, pretending to be Mrs Carew. I should tell him that I couldn't see him again because I knew about the disease Mr Carew had. Let them show their faces on The Bluff after that!'

Holmes sat back and stared at her for a moment. Then he said, ‘I much fear, Miss Jacob, that you have just supplied almost all the motivation necessary for the Crown to establish a case of murder against you.'

There was horror in her eyes as the trap seemed to open under her.

‘You won't tell them? Oh, God, you won't!'

‘I am not retained, Miss Jacob, to supply the deficiencies of the Consul's investigators. I shall not repeat so foolish a story as the one you have just told me. However, it is now plain that our only hope is to attack the circumstantial evidence. I have but one question to ask you.' She watched him, half doubting and half hoping. ‘Were you in Mr Carew's room at about eight thirty on the last evening of his life?' Holmes demanded simply. ‘Think carefully before you answer. Two reputable and independent witnesses swear that they saw you standing before the medicine cabinet.'

‘No!' It was a shout rather than a cry. ‘I was in the garden.'

‘Alone, no doubt?'

‘I was reading a book!'

‘Reading a book in the dark?'

‘No. I was sitting on the verandah seat, under Mr Carew's window, where the seat and the lantern is. I liked to sit there alone and read.'

Holmes stood up and walked across to the window-ledge as the girl watched him. He picked up two novels.
The Play Actress
and
A Romance of Two Worlds
by Marie Corelli.

‘A book like these?'

Mary Jacob seemed puzzled. ‘No,' she said. ‘Those were left here for me, from the Club library.'

Holmes rippled the pages, sniffed, and put them down.

‘What happened while you were sitting there, reading your book, at about eight thirty?'

‘I was asked that,' she said. ‘There was a bang from up above, in Mr Carew's room, like someone pulling the window shut. Something fell on the grass. A piece of wood or stone, even loose paint perhaps. It was too dark to tell.'

‘What did you do?'

‘I just looked up, I suppose.'

‘And what else?'

‘Mrs Carew must have heard the bang as well. She opened the curtain facing across the little lawn from the nursery side and shone the big lantern to see what was happening. Then I heard her call Rachel and the other girl.'

‘You know that Mrs Carew has deposed that when she shone the light out, you were not sitting on that seat, nor were you anywhere else to be seen until five or ten minutes later when you were in the nursery?'

‘But I was there!' the girl cried, the tied length of dark hair swishing on the back of her dress as she looked from one to the other of us.

‘And you know that Rachel and her companion both swear that they heard the window bang and saw you in Mr Carew's room at the very same moment?'

‘They're lying!' she cried again. ‘Mrs Carew gave him poison in the night!'

Holmes looked at her coolly.

‘You also know that one or other of the nurses was with Mr Carew the last two days before he was taken to hospital, except for occasional intervals of a few minutes each? Mrs Carew could not have come out on to the landing to go into his room without being seen by the two servants. The other door in the wall between the two rooms was locked and bolted on Mr Carew's side. No attempt was made to force it. The only arsenic in the house was in his room, in the medicine cabinet. You were the only person seen there, apart from the nurses.'

Mary Jacob sat before us, abject and exhausted.

‘I was never in that room,' the poor girl said helplessly, ‘not that night, not that day, not the night nor the day before that!'

‘I fear that will not answer in the court,' Holmes said, though his voice was not unkindly. ‘We must see what better can be done.'

‘And the nursery amah and the other girl who say that they saw me? What of them?'

‘Well,' said Holmes drily, ‘I imagine they are very likely to be believed.'

At this she bowed her head over the table and began to weep, arms hanging down in dejection, not attempting even to cover her face.

‘I beg you will not cry,' said Holmes irritably. ‘Listen to me! I shall return this evening. It will be quite late. Until then, you are to leave every article in this room where it is at the moment. Do you understand?'

The poor girl looked up, not understanding in the slightest, but she nodded.

‘Do as I say,' he said more gently. ‘The next hours are of great importance.'

I was used to the insouciance of my friend on such occasions but as the cell door closed behind us on the picture of fear and dejection that Mary Jacob presented, I could curb my feelings no longer.

‘Is that all?' I asked him, as we walked away towards The Bluff.

‘Naturally,' he said, with a shrug of his thin shoulders. ‘What else can there be? If Miss Jacob was not in the room on that last night, she could scarcely have put three grains of arsenic in Carew's brandy and soda. If she was in the room, then she was quite certainly the person who did so. I imagine the case hinges on that.'

‘For God's sake, Holmes! How could you? You might as well have told the poor child that she was going to the gallows and have done with it!'

He was not the least put out. ‘Left to your detective skills at present, Watson, that is precisely where she would be going.'

‘Stop a minute,' I said with malign satisfaction. ‘While you were busy browbeating that poor girl, you quite missed the most important clue in her defence.'

‘I daresay,' he murmured, walking on, but I stood still and made him stop, turn and listen to me.

‘When the window banged and something fell, Mrs Carew drew back the curtain of the opposite room in a second or two and shone the big lantern out. Even the servants agree.'

‘Well?' he asked quietly. ‘And what if she did?'

‘Don't you see it, Holmes? For that to have happened in a second or two, the lantern must have been already lit. No woman sitting in a nursery or in any such room keeps a big outdoor lantern lit. It would take fifteen or twenty seconds at least for her to prepare it, light it and shine it out, not two or three. Surely she must have known beforehand that the window of the upper room would bang at that moment. But how could she know? What would be the purpose in knowing?'

He looked at me kindly. ‘My dear Watson, I owe you a most profound apology. I had quite begun to think that the enervating air of Yokohama had sapped your powers of observation and deduction. And now, if you please, we will try the luncheon at Wright's Hotel in the town. I am a little weary of the Club and Her Britannic Majesty's Consular Kingdom. The prospect of meeting counsel for the prosecution would be more agreeable than another encounter with Mr Rentiers. Indeed, though Mr Lowder is the prosecutor, he has agreed with Mr Scidmore that we may inspect the scene of the crime this evening. I think it probable that your questions about Mrs Carew's curious conduct will then be answered.'

‘Would it not be better to go in full daylight?'

‘I think not,' said Holmes firmly. ‘This was a crime of darkness and had better be examined under such conditions.'

V

That afternoon saw Holmes in one of the queer humours that overtook him unpredictably from time to time. He seemed to lose all interest in the investigation, quite indifferent to the fate of Mary Jacob, and took himself off to the library of the Yokohama Club. He sat in the depths of a green leather chair, absorbed in the trashier type of fiction that graces such colonial outposts as this one. He flipped through volumes of games and sports which, under normal circumstances, would not have lightened his most jaded mood. Even the bound volumes of the
Japan Gazette
, as the English paper is called, occupied him for some time.

After all this, I found him in a better mood than at any time since our arrival. He had spent a pleasant hour interrogating the librarian on the excellence of George Meredith's fiction, the fine intellectual cruelties of the great novelist. It was evident that the club librarian had never read
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
or any other of the author's works but he committed the unwise sin of pride in pretending at first that he had done so. Holmes found him out at once but never revealed the discovery to his victim, enjoying fine sport at the poor fellow's expense. Before long, the guardian of literature was only too happy to discuss any other topic under the sun than the works of Holmes's favourite novelist. I left my friend to his amusements until the time when we were to collect the keys that Mr Lowder had left for us. We made our way on foot to 160 The Bluff, part-way down the hill.

Since the death of her husband, Mrs Carew had taken rooms at the Continental Hotel, as if the memories of the final ghastly days at the villa were too much for her. The Carew villa was a modest house in a garden of trees and lawn, befitting the Secretary and Manager of the Yokohama United Club. It was built on three sides round a narrow lawn. Carew's room was on the second level, at the end of one of these narrowly separated ‘wings'. It looked across to the rooms of the other wing, one of which was the nursery.

In the past few years, there had been minor structural alterations to the building. The two adjoining bedrooms of Carew and his wife had once been a large single room but a substantial partition wall with a communicating door had been inserted. The verandah of each bedroom had been glassed in to form a dressing-room area, though at ground level the verandahs of the lower rooms had been retained. The metal-framed windows of the dressing-rooms above could not be opened, except for a fanlight at the top, some two feet square. Under Carew's room was the wooden seat where Mary Jacob claimed she had sat when the window banged and when his wife had shone her light across the strip of garden to see what the noise might be. She had not seen Mary Jacob sitting there, nor had the other witnesses.

Holmes and I stood on the narrow lawn between the two wings of the house, looking at the wooden seat and at Carew's window on the floor above.

‘However else our client entered Carew's bedroom, she did not pass through the door from the landing while it was guarded by the two angels of truth from the Mission School.'

‘Could she have reached it from the garden?'

‘I think we may say, Watson, that for Mary Jacob to have entered the room from the garden, she must have had a ladder or, at least, a rope. Picture her climbing up and finding no way in but by the fanlight of the dressing-room window. I daresay she could get through an opening of that size, though she must have fallen to the floor. Perhaps, as she did so, the fanlight banged after her. The sound was heard. A light was shone. But where was the ladder or the rope? And how can she be one moment half-way through the fanlight with nothing to aid her descent into the room, and within a split second—as long as it takes to crouch and look through a keyhole—she has fallen or dived silently from the opening, tumbled on to the floor without making a further sound, picked herself up, rearranged her dress, and is standing before the medicine cabinet without a hair out of place.'

He betrayed his feelings no more than by a certain twitch of the mouth.

‘It could not be done,' I said with a little irritation. ‘If there was a rope she must also draw that up or kick away a ladder. Far more likely that she got into the room earlier and hid there, waiting her chance until the nurse was away for a few minutes. She might take her bottle of poison and pour it into his drink or his water-bottle then.'

‘Admirable, Watson,' he said, leading the way into the house as dusk deepened in the garden, ‘and how did our cunning murderess get out of the room again? A bright light was shining on its exterior. Mrs Carew and the other servants were hurrying up the stairs by this time. The nurse was coming back, for Rachel Greer and her companion heard her as they were going down the stairs in answer to Mrs Carew's summons. Yet Mary Jacob must have got out, for she was seen in the nursery a few minutes later. Could she have scrambled up five feet of window-glass unaided, gone feet-first through the fanlight, got down eighteen feet to the garden in the glare of the light, unseen and without making a sound? She was not seen doing so, and no sound was heard by any of the witnesses, therefore she was invisible and inaudible.'