The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

Holmes watched keenly the examination and cross-examination of the witnesses. Smethurst was defended by Mr Parry, of a famous Welsh legal family. Parry was a well-fleshed man whose wig sat as tight on his head as a soldier's cap. He was eloquent in speech but failed everywhere in his attempts to pierce the armour of evidence against his client. When Dr Todd said that there was no arsenic found in the body at the autopsy, Parry thought he had him. But Dr Todd retorted that there was no arsenic because the organs were heavy with chlorate of potass, given by the murderer deliberately to flush the poison from the body once it had done its work. The unfortunate defence counsel was now left with the charge that Smethurst had not only killed Isabella Bankes, but had done it in the most devilishly cruel and cunning manner. Mr Parry, as Holmes remarked, had sewn up his client tighter still.

The damage inflicted by the witnesses for the Crown was made infinitely worse by those whom Mr Parry called for the defence. Dr Richardson and Dr Rodger swore that, if Isabella Bankes had died of the poison, arsenic would have been found at the postmortem. Unfortunately, as the Crown proved at once, Rodger and Richardson gave such evidence as a paid profession and had both testified in similar terms on behalf of Palmer, the notorious ‘Rugeley Poisoner'. Dr Richardson, indeed, had once inadvertently poisoned one of his own patients.

The sight of Thomas Smethurst's destruction was more ghastly than any melodrama at the Hoxton Britannia. The Lord Chief Baron informed the jury that the case against Dr Smethurst was circumstantial. They were not to convict him on one piece of it alone. They must add one at a time to the scales of proof and see on which side they came down. Yet, after such a trial, there was no doubt that they must come down on the side of guilt with a crash like the gallows trap falling open under the accused man's feet. The jurors brought him in guilty half an hour later.

Smethurst made a long rambling plea for his life, only to hear the Lord Chief Baron tell him that he would be taken to the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol in a week or two, where all the world might see him, and there be hanged by the neck until he was dead. The wild, unkempt figure in the dock, broken by the ordeal of his trial, cried, ‘I declare Dr Julius to be my murderer! I am innocent before God!'

Such fierce moments were like the finest brandy to the soul of Sherlock Holmes. All this time, however, he had been watching another man who spoke not a word in the proceedings. Mr Hardinge Giffard was junior counsel for Smethurst, behind his leader Mr Parry. His face was gentle and pale, trimmed by a line of dark whiskers. The future Lord Chancellor Halsbury had yet to make his way at the English bar. Yet Holmes already knew something of him and divined the massive intelligence that would one day fill library shelves with successive volumes of
Halsbury's Laws of England
. As the court rose, Holmes took a card and wrote upon it, ‘Your client is plainly innocent. If you will allow me, I believe I can prove it.'

V

It is no disparagement of Mr Hardinge Giffard to say that, for all his forensic skill, he was mystified by the note. Though he was for the defence, he once told me that he thought at first the case against his client was as conclusive as any he had known. Dr Smethurst had seduced Isabella Bankes and bigamously married her. By his own account he had administered all food and medicine to her in her sickness. No other hand than his could have held the arsenic and antimony revealed by the analyst's reports just before the victim's death. Neither substance was present in any medicine prescribed for her. Smethurst had been seen by another physician, experimenting with poison upon the sparrows. He had prevented the woman from being seen by her own sister and by her family doctor. He had obliged her to sign a will, leaving everything to him, a will written in his own hand. When Miss Wheatley came to witness it he pretended to her it was some other legal document to which her name was to be affixed. The attorney, Mr Senior, intervened, telling him it was most improper to let the witness sign the paper thinking it was something else. Everything about Thomas Smethurst stank of fraud, connivance—and murder.

‘Your client is plainly innocent. If you will allow me, I believe I can prove it.'

Mr Hardinge Giffard might have dismissed the offer as preposterous. That he did not shows the glimmer of the great Lord Chancellor of our own times in the young and penniless barrister of those days. Next evening, he called upon Sherlock Holmes in his rooms. No appointment had been made and Holmes was at his reading-desk with the gaslight white above him when his visitor was announced.

‘Mr Giffard,' he said softly, shaking the young lawyer's hand, ‘I had been expecting you.'

He took the visitor's hat and coat, laying them on a table at one end of the sitting-room. Then he gestured him to a chair, beside which on a small table lay a cigar box, a spirit case, and a supply of soda water in a gasoque.

Mr Giffard lowered himself into the chair.

‘Mr Holmes, time is very short. The law now holds Dr Smethurst guilty of murder and will proceed to execution at once.'

‘Your client's guilt is a proposition which I take the liberty to doubt,' Holmes said smoothly.

‘Nevertheless, in a week or two he will die as a felon. You tell me that you believe you can prove his innocence …'

‘I have not the least doubt that I shall.'

At that moment, Mr Giffard changed tack, as he might have done with a witness under cross-examination.

‘Why should you take such interest in his innocence or guilt?'

There was a quick movement of Holmes's face, an impatience which many, who knew him only a little, thought was a smile or humorous quirk.

‘I was engaged upon an inquiry into Dr Smethurst's treatment of Isabella Bankes, at the request of her sister. It was too late. The
soi-disante
Mrs Smethurst died before I could properly begin.'

‘So I am told.'

Holmes stood up, poured his guest a glass of brandy, preferred the cigar box and left Mr Giffard to judge the gasoque for himself.

‘When I began, Mr Giffard, I first established the facts. After all, one does not care to make libellous accusations. I verified the two marriages of Dr Smethurst, one valid and one bigamous. I consulted the copy of the will deposited at Doctors Commons.'

Hardinge Giffard put his glass down.

‘Impossible, Mr Holmes. Miss Isabella Bankes's will is not proved yet, let alone registered.'

The same impatience tweaked Holmes's lips.

‘Her father's will, Mr Giffard. By that will, Miss Bankes had eighteen hundred pounds, on the interest of which she might live. It was hers to do with as she pleased. She also held a life interest in five thousand pounds, which at her death would pass to other members of her family: a brother and several sisters. The income from it died with her. Curious, is it not, Mr Giffard? A man may be the blackest rascal but will he destroy a woman who is worth four times as much to him alive as she is dead?'

‘Perhaps he did not know of her father's will,' Mr Giffard said quietly.

‘Perhaps he did not,' Holmes said. ‘But if he did not kill her for money, what else? Bigamy? He had only to run off, back to his first wife, if necessary. He had only to avoid marriage to Miss Bankes in the first place by sweet promises. Did he kill her because she was carrying his child? He had only to desert her, as men desert women in such circumstances a thousand times a day. No, Mr Giffard. There is no good nor sufficient reason why Thomas Smethurst should murder Isabella Bankes. No reason whatever why he should run his head into the hangman's noose on that account.'

Holmes paused and a look of dismay darkened his visitor's face.

‘And is that all of it, Mr Holmes? If it is, then you will not save him. Supposition will no longer do. There must be irrefutable proof of his innocence.'

Holmes leaned back in his chair, his long legs stretched out, and touched the tips of his fingers together.

‘Suppose, Mr Giffard, suppose there was no arsenic in her body, at any time.'

As Holmes relaxed, Hardinge Giffard sat upright.

‘There
was
arsenic, Mr Holmes. Professor Taylor found arsenic. Dr Todd tested the substance and confirmed that it was arsenic. Mr Barwell tested it and agreed that it was arsenic. What good will it do to pretend that it was not?'

Holmes shrugged. ‘Very well,' he said, as if resigning himself to defeat. ‘Let us agree that it was arsenic. I never doubted it for a moment.'

There was a pause while Mr Hardinge Giffard sought words to extricate himself with the least possible discourtesy and find his way to the street outside.

‘What more have you discovered, Mr Holmes?'

‘Beyond the obvious fact that your client is innocent, very little,' Holmes remarked. ‘I can prove it but not without your assistance.'

‘What would you have me do?'

‘The samples that were taken from Miss Bankes before her death, those in which arsenic was found—I take it that the untested portion of the specimens is still available?'

‘No doubt it is.'

‘I should like it brought to the chemical laboratory of St Thomas's Hospital. It will be made up into solution, under supervision. I will show you your client's innocence in the presence of anyone who cares to be there. Professor Taylor, if you wish, Dr Todd, the Lord Chief Baron himself.'

‘When is this to be?'

‘Dear me,' said Holmes. ‘On any day before your client is hanged, I suppose.'

VI

Three days later, on an afternoon in late August, a distinguished company had assembled in the Chemical Laboratory of St Thomas's Hospital. Holmes was on familiar territory and was master of the scene. So many of his days had been spent in this lofty riverside room, lined and littered with countless bottles and apparatus. Though he was a hunter all his life, most of his quests so far had been among these broad low tables with their retorts, test-tubes and the blue flames of the little Bunsen lamps.

Like a host greeting his guests, he led the visitors to a table on which apparatus had been set up for the Reinsch Test. A quantity of solution from a sealed bottle, in which the specimens taken from Isabella Bankes had been dissolved, was poured into a glass vessel. The liquid was pale blue in colour.

‘Gentlemen,' said Holmes, introducing the apparatus to his onlookers like a stage magician at the Egyptian Hall, ‘the Reinsch Test is simplicity itself. Our solution of the specimen is boiled in a vessel which contains copper gauze. If arsenic is present in any quantity, it will collect as a grey substance upon the gauze. If it appears, simple treatment with nitric acid will confirm that it is, indeed, arsenic. That, Dr Taylor, is a fair summary I believe.'

‘It is, Mr Holmes,' the professor said. ‘In this case, however, you have also considerable quantities of chlorate of potass. This will tend to damage the copper gauze. However, after two or three pieces of copper gauze have been used, the chlorate of potass will have been exhausted. Then you will see whether you have arsenic or not.'

The light blue liquid was heated three times in all, a separate piece of copper gauze being used on each occasion. The first two pieces of copper gauze were corroded by the chlorate and no sign of a dark-grey substance appeared on them. A third time, Holmes took a new piece of gauze and applied the flame of the lamp. In the quiet room above the Thames it was hard to imagine that whether a man was to be strangled by a rope noose in a few days' time depended upon the outcome of such an academic test.

For a few minutes, the pale blue liquid shimmered and then boiled. Holmes drew the flame away. The bubbling ceased and the copper gauze was clearly seen again. It was almost completely coated with a dark-grey sludge. The sense of doom, for Thomas Smethurst, hung heavy in the air. It was Dr Taylor who broke the silence. He spoke courteously but emphatically.

‘When you test that substance with nitric acid, Mr Holmes, you will find that it is arsenic. Enough arsenic to kill the poor woman twice over. There can be no doubt.'

‘No doubt at all,' Holmes agreed.

‘Then there is an end of the matter,' Mr Hardinge Giffard said, astonished at the speed of Holmes's apparent failure. ‘There is no more to be done.'

It was an awkward moment, some of those present feeling sorry for Sherlock Holmes in his disappointment, others resentful at having their time wasted by a trick that failed. They seemed about to turn and leave without another word.

‘One moment, if you please!' said Holmes and they turned back to him again. He addressed Dr Taylor. ‘Did you attempt to establish the presence of arsenic by the Marsh Test?'

Dr Taylor frowned. ‘Mr Holmes, there is arsenic on the copper gauze. You may see it for yourself. You acknowledge it is there in quantity enough to commit murder. What need is there of the Marsh Test or any other experiment?'

‘There is the greatest of all needs, Dr Taylor. The need of a man who will in a few days be hanged for a murder he did not commit, for a murder that was never committed by anyone.'

Dr Taylor could not quite bring himself to leave. ‘Next you will tell us that she died of natural causes,' he said irritably.

‘Oh, I think it very likely that I shall, doctor,' Holmes said imperturbably. ‘Indeed, I may tell you that now.'

‘And that she never consumed arsenic?'

Holmes gave a quick, impatient smile. ‘I should wager that Isabella Bankes never consumed arsenic in her life.'

There was a murmur of laughter at the absurdity of his claim. I would have given a good deal to have been in that chemical laboratory during the next few minutes. Holmes had set up the apparatus for the Marsh Test on the next bench in the laboratory. Like the Reinsch process, the Marsh Test is essentially simple. Arsenic is the easiest poison to detect in a body because it vaporises readily. A white fragment may be dried and tested simply by a detective officer. Placed in a sealed tube and heated, it will vaporise and then condense on the inner surface of the tube. In nine times out of ten, when this occurs with a suspect specimen, it will prove to be arsenic.