The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (36 page)

The answer came to me at once, as I thought.

‘She had a key, not to the landing door but for the communicating door directly into Mrs Carew's room. If the nurse saw her coming out of Mrs Carew's room, she would suspect nothing.'

Holmes paused on the staircase.

‘Unfortunately, Watson, she would be suspected at once. She might unbolt and unlock the party-door to the other bedroom and she might lock it after her. But there is no means known to criminal science by which she might fasten the bolts on the far side of the door. No means, either, by which she could have got out of Mrs Carew's room unseen in order to be in the nursery a few minutes later. It will not do, my dear fellow. Perhaps we shall have better luck if we examine the scene.'

It was a chill sensation to enter the bedroom where Carew had endured the agony and delirium of his last days. There was the bed, as if it had scarcely been re-made. There was the table beside it and the dressing-room area made out of what had once been the verandah. There was the fatal medicine cabinet with its mirror on top. To see the wall of glass, which the window formed, with its fanlight at the very top, was to see the impossibility that Mary Jacob could ever have come or gone by that route. A professional burglar would not have given it a second glance.

Holmes spent a little while examining the window and the medicine cabinet with its wooden-framed triple-mirror on top, his fingers delicately turning and adjusting the glass as he did so. I gave my attention to the communicating door in the partition wall between the two bedrooms. It remained locked and bolted. Door and frame had been painted long before Carew's death and there was no sign of any chip or blemish that indicated an attempt to tamper with the fastenings.

Holmes seemed content with all that he had found.

‘Be so good, Watson, as to stand on the landing with the bedroom door locked and the key in your pocket. When you hear the window bang, look through the keyhole and see what you may see. Do not, on any account, unlock the door.'

‘And you, Holmes? What of you?'

‘I shall go down to the garden and smoke a pipe.'

‘What if the window should not bang?'

‘As to that,' he said with a smile to himself, ‘I think I may promise you that it will.'

Before I could register a further protest, he had made his way down the stairs and vanished. The house was silent and in almost complete darkness as all light faded from the garden. I waited for what seemed an interminable time but was perhaps no more than five minutes. I was about to give up and go down to the garden when there was the unmistakable rattle or bang of the bedroom window, so unexpected by now that it made me jump. If I hesitated, it was no more than two or three seconds before I was down on one knee and peering through the keyhole of Carew's room. There, standing before the mirror of the medicine cabinet and smoking his pipe was the figure of Sherlock Holmes.

VI

I twisted my head and tried to see through the tiny aperture how the devil he could have done it. Then he moved from my field of vision, for the keyhole gave a very imperfect prospect of the room as a whole. Then he came back, and then he went for good. I waited several minutes like this, kneeling and trying to see where he might be, until my heart jumped as a voice behind me said, ‘My apologies for startling you, Watson. I can scarcely believe, though, that this is your first encounter with Professor Pepper's ghost. I flatter myself that they would hardly have done it better at the Egyptian Hall.'

Holmes, whom I had just seen through the keyhole of the locked door, was now standing behind me. I struggled to my feet and turned upon him.

‘Who the blazes is Professor Pepper?'

Ignoring my question, he took the key from me, unlocked the door, and laughed.

‘To tell the truth, I half suspected something of the sort when Dr Jacob first told the story in Baker Street. Then I thought perhaps they lacked the expertise. It was the window banging and something being thrown out that convinced me.'

We stood in Carew's room once more and now Holmes lit the lamps.

‘Picture yourself, Watson, sitting on that garden bench. Above you, the window bangs and something is thrown out. What is your natural reaction?'

‘To wonder what the devil is going on.'

‘Be more precise.'

‘Well,' I said, half suspecting a trick, ‘I should look up to see who it was and what had happened. Then I might look for what had fallen, if I could find it.'

‘Excellent!' Holmes said, rubbing his hands. ‘It is what any sensible person would do. How long would you look up?'

‘A minute or two, until I could see what the matter was.'

‘And if you saw nothing—or nothing that signified?'

‘I should go on with what I had been doing, if all I had heard was a window banging.'

‘Just as Mary Jacob did. Suppose now that you are guarding a room with the door locked. Inside is a man alone, lying asleep, between life and death, his very existence in peril from assassins. The nurse is absent. Inside the room the window bangs. What would you do?'

‘I should try at once to see what was going on in there.'

‘But how? You cannot open the door and you have no means of seeing through the window itself.'

‘The keyhole, of course.'

‘Precisely.'

‘But what if I were to run for help without bothering to look?'

‘You might, Watson. But if there were two of you, the chances that one at least would look through that keyhole are doubled. It is well-nigh inconceivable that one of you would not do so before running for assistance. Is it not the instinctive thing to do, just as Mary Jacob's instinct would have been to look upwards?'

This was all very fine but I was getting a little weary of the joke and I knew nothing of Professor Pepper or his ghost. Holmes took from his capacious pocket a copy of a book which he had purloined, apparently, from the library of the Yokohama Club.
Secrets of Stage Conjuring
by J. E. Robert-Houdin, published by George Routledge at London in 1881. He pointed to a page which appeared full of geometrical figures and a tribute to Professor Pepper of the London Polytechnic.

The principle of the stage illusion was simple enough. A figure stood below the stage at the level of the orchestra pit, concealed from the audience and looking upwards. Also at that level, hidden from the audience, a bright light shone directly upon the figure's face. The face looked up at a sheet of glass, angled as a fanlight might be. The result, in the darkness of the surroundings, was to produce a perfect replica of the face. The darker the surroundings, the more vivid the image.

‘The principle is simple, Watson, but the art is making the image perfect. It is as you see your own ghost outside the window of a railway carriage when you travel at night.'

He opened Robert-Houdin's book again. In its pages was a slip of paper, which recorded that the volume had been borrowed from the club library on 8 September last by Edith Mary Hallowell Carew.

‘I am a little surprised that she should have needed it,' said Holmes quietly, ‘for Edith Mary Hallowell Porch, as she was then, was a devotee of the magic arts. A witness at her wedding was Miss Julia Ferret of the Recreations Japonaises, as that performance of wizardry is known in England. She assisted at a famous performance in Yokohama by Josef Vanek, the Professor of Physics at Budapest, who forsook his laboratory for the stage.'

Holmes had constructed his own geometrical plan of the trap laid for Mary Jacob. He had drawn it up with the precision of Euclid or Pythagoras. The pebble, stone, or other object, had hit the window quite gently above Mary Jacob's head, and fallen on the ground. The sound, as the glass and frame vibrated, had caused the girl to look up, where the fanlight was open at an angle. What more natural than that Edith Carew might draw the curtain back at the noise and a stream of electric brightness be directed across the narrow lawn?

As Mary Jacob tried to discern what had happened in the room of the man who had once been her lover, her face was reflected in the square of fanlight glass, clear as day in the darkness. From the glass it was caught in one side of the triple mirror and caught again in that other side, which had been carefully angled so that it filled the view from the keyhole of the door. That Mrs Carew should ‘put the mirror straight' when she visited her husband would cause the nurse no unease whatever.

‘Stop a minute, Holmes,' I said insistently. ‘I grant you Professor Pepper's illusion works well enough, for I have seen it myself just now. I daresay Edith Carew had the skill to attempt it. But this is not a theatre. She could not be sure that Mary Jacob would sit on that bench at that time or that she would look up at the sound. She could not know that the nurse would leave the room or that the two servant girls would look through the keyhole.'

I thought that my friend looked at me in a little disappointment.

‘My dear Watson, you have not grasped it, after all. The solution to this mystery depends very little on Professor Pepper's ghost and almost entirely on the operation of the criminal mind. Edith Carew is a cold-blooded poisoner. I have thought so from the first. The arsenic was obtained well in advance, through Mary Jacob as an innocent messenger. This was no crime of passion but a calculated act of cruelty. What if the ghost illusion had failed? It was probably one of a dozen stratagems. Perhaps some had already been tried and had failed. If this one had not succeeded, there would have been others. Sooner or later, by whatever means, she would rid herself of the husband who stood between her and a guilty liaison with a younger man—Henry Vansittart Dickinson. A husband, Watson, who had not only possessed himself of her money for his own pleasures and his vices but also threatened her with a vile and incurable disease.'

So far I could follow him. The rest was sheer impossibility.

‘What you say, Holmes, may acquit Mary Jacob. It cannot convict Edith Carew. When she knew that she had trapped Miss Jacob, she must have acted at once to commit murder. Yet it is impossible that she could ever have got near Carew again. That last night she went into her own room. The nurse was alone with Carew, absent once or twice for only a few minutes. Edith Carew could not come out on to the landing because Rachel Greer and Hanauye Asa would have seen her. She could not have gone through the communicating door between the two rooms because it was locked and bolted on Carew's side. How, then, could she have put three grains of arsenic into Carew's brandy and soda or anything else he drank?'

‘I should say, Watson, that she put three grains into each vessel, so that whether it was his brandy and soda, his drinking water or his medicine, he was done for. She had ample time to wash out the glasses and bottles next day, after they had removed him to hospital but before arsenic was suspected.'

‘But how could she do it, if there was neither door nor window by which she could enter the room?'

Holmes stared at the partition wall. ‘By doing what Professor Vanek used to do every night in front of several hundred people,' he said. ‘In a house as casually constructed as this, a child might almost do it.'

VII

In my mind's eye, I can still see the wall with its communicating door as it had been built between those two rooms. The rooms had a common floor of planking, which ran lengthwise, parallel with the windows. Where it formed the floor of the dressing-room area it ran over the verandah at ground level. To install the partition wall, they had first laid a strip of stout rubberised felt across the boards of the dressing-rooms to insulate the carpets from the winter damp or cold of the verandah beneath. Then they had laid a heavy beam across the boards, wall to window, and constructed a lath and plaster wall upon this. It might not be the way of building in London but it was solid enough in such a climate as this.

It was impossible that Edith Carew or an accomplice could have passed through that wall or the communicating door while the nurse was absent. Nor could there have been a way over the wall without breaking through the ceiling. There was a tiny gap between the supporting beam and the floorboards with their insulating felt which it traversed. That gap was not half an inch. It would have been possible, of course, to have taken up the floorboards, climbed down to the verandah and climbed up into the other room through a gap on the far side. To reach the floorboards, however, would have required cutting through the felt, which ran in a single length across both dressing-room floors under the beam.

‘If it was done,' I said a little morosely, ‘I'll be hanged if I can see how. Edith Carew or her accomplice could not have gone through that wall, over it, or under it without leaving traces of the damage they caused. And there are none.'

‘But then, my dear fellow,' said Holmes gently, ‘you are no physicist—and Professor Vanek was. Once Mary Jacob was compromised, Edith Carew knew that she must strike her blow that night.'

‘How?'

He beckoned me from the room and we went down the stairs. Holmes took a lantern from the hall and lit it. We stood in the verandah that ran along the narrow lawn, just under the dressing areas of the bedrooms. The ceiling of the verandah, if one can call it that, consisted of what were now the floorboards of those dressing-rooms, nailed down on several joists. The lower surface of the boards, like the rest of the verandah, had been painted white.

Holmes stood on the bench where Mary Jacob had sat. He stretched his thin arms upwards and the boards under the partition wall of the two rooms shifted a little.

‘I thought as much,' he said, screwing his face up and looking at them more closely. ‘Edith Carew could not risk being seen to tamper with them afterwards or even asking someone else to do so. The floorboards at the centre have been prised up from the joists. There are no nails holding them down.'

He moved one a little and there was a fall of tiny debris. Wood scraped on wood as he drew one end of the first board down at an angle.