The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (50 page)

‘Professor' Holmes of Cambridge was also masquerading as an amateur lepidopterist. Therefore, next morning, we set out for Bishop's Stortford to procure a butterfly-net, a chloroform bottle, and a specimen case. Holmes then took the precaution of despatching a telegram to Lestrade at Scotland Yard. I caught only the last line.
REPLY CARE OF MARDEN, ESSEX CONSTABULARY, SAFFRON WALDEN STOP. LETTER FOLLOWS STOP
.

That afternoon, Holmes went off, conspicuously alone, in tweed-suit and gaiters, deer-stalker, magnifying-glass in hand, butterfly net upon his shoulder. His satchel contained the killing-bottle and specimen case. The hedges were bright with white flowers in May sun, the little rivers well-watered.

I made a survey of our quarters. Moat Farm, as Dougal called it, was surrounded by twenty feet of lawn. Beyond that, the entire plot was cut off by the moat, several feet wide and well-filled. A single footbridge crossed the water to the farm-yard, with its cowshed and an annexe for the pony-trap. Beyond a screen of trees lay a pond and barn, then the open stretches of flat pasture stretched to the very horizon.

Next morning, with sandwiches and a flask, we started together in our search for Purple Emperors and Marbled Whites. Once out of sight of the farm, Holmes took a field-path that led to the village of Quendon. A few minutes more and we had negotiated the hire of a horse and trap. By eleven, we faced Inspector Marden at the table of the interview room in Saffron Walden police-station. Marden was a tall cadaverous man with a look of gloom that might have graced a professional pall-bearer. Yet he was a decent enough fellow, who spoke quietly and made his arguments with care. Before he had finished, I was sure we must pack our bags and go home, for all the good we should do here.

‘I don't see it, Mr Holmes,' he said cautiously, ‘Miss Holland left Captain Dougal, as all his ladies seem to do sooner or later. There was talk at the time, there always is. Inquiries were made and they proved entirely to our satisfaction. We made them discreetly, of course. I don't suppose he or she knew of them.'

‘But not so discreetly made as ours may be,' Holmes said quickly, ‘for we are under the man's roof.'

‘So you may be, sir. A police force, however, is not to engage upon espionage. Nor, if you take my advice, will you.'

‘Where did she go?'

‘I understand she left Captain Dougal to travel abroad with another man. She was to join him on a yacht, I was told. Just before she left, Miss Holland bought new clothes accordingly. The captain had no reason to get rid of her, for as long as she was with him, her money was there.'

‘Did he have much need of it?'

Marden pulled a face.

‘I can't see he did, Mr Holmes. He owns the farm outright, or did when we made inquiries. Since then, he always seems well-breeched, as they say.'

‘And what of her money now?'

‘She does not draw directly at the bank, but then she never did. The last we heard, Miss Holland was drawing by cheque so that it went to wherever she might be or to whomever had to be paid. When necessary, she would write for a new cheque-book. Her family bankers are the National Provincial in Piccadilly. Her stockbrokers are Messrs Hart of Old Broad Street in the City of London. She dealt with them both long after she left here. Mr Hensler, her broker, and Mr Ashwin, the senior accountant of the National Provincial, both swore that the signatures on her cheques and letters match the specimen signature she gave at the bank a little before she left here. We asked advice from our handwriting experts. They confirm it.'

‘These signatures …'

‘Ah, yes, Mr Holmes. Your reputation goes before you.'

Marden managed a dry smile as he opened a drawer and shook several photographs from an envelope. They were exact confidential copies, taken from the files for our benefit. I could see plainly the specimen in the book and the signatures on the cheques. ‘Camille C. Holland'. There was a further photograph of a demure woman, slightly-built and pretty, her fine hair elegantly-coiffeured.

‘Golden-haired,' I said at a guess, feeling sure it was so.

‘So she was, Dr Watson, and may be still.'

Holmes studied the prints through his glass for several minutes. Then he looked up.

‘It pains me to say so, Mr Marden, but there can be no doubt that the hand which wrote the signatures upon the cheques is also that which provided the specimen in the book.'

‘There you have it, sir,' said the inspector philosophically. ‘If that is her signature, then she was certainly still alive a little while ago, two years and more after the rumours began.'

Holmes nodded. He put away his glass and picked up his hat.

‘You are a busy man, inspector, and we will take up no more of your time. I shall communicate with Lestrade directly.'

As Marden led us to the police-station entrance I felt a mixture of regret for my friend's disappointment and relief that we might see our comfortable quarters in Baker Street that evening. As we stood with the inspector upon the steps, Holmes said casually, ‘Tell me, did your informants recall any other event about the time Miss Holland attended the bank to sign the specimen book?'

Marden looked blank for a moment, then he nodded.

‘There was one matter, though of little relevance. Just before this, her younger nephew's little girl had died. Miss Holland was much affected by the child's death and wrote very kindly to her nephew. However, Mr Holland recalled that his aunt did not attend the funeral. Perhaps she feared questions about her removal to Quendon, or suspicions that she had taken a lover. I fear that will not help you much, Mr Holmes.'

‘I daresay not,' he remarked cheerfully. On walking back to the waiting horse and trap, I noticed with misgiving that his step was far jauntier than upon our arrival. When we were out of earshot of Inspector Marden, he turned to me.

‘She is out there, Watson!' he said softly, ‘I thought so once—and now I know it!'

V

How he could know anything of the sort from Inspector Marden's answers was quite beyond me. Holmes, as usual, preserved an infuriating silence upon the matter, which was usually the prelude to some startling discovery. That afternoon, he set off alone again with his net and satchel. As he passed the wicket gate of the bridge across the little moat and strode towards the sunlight of the pale green fens, he had altered nothing in his dress or physical appearance. Yet, suddenly, he was every inch the professor from Cambridge, as if he could never have been anything else.

He returned half an hour before dinner. There was not a butterfly to be seen in his killing-bottle, for he abominated the destruction of such beautiful creatures. Instead, there reposed the remains of a most unpromising insect which appeared to be a cross between a daddy-longlegs and a dark brown moth. I am no expert on the vast insect population of the English fields and had not, so far as I was aware, ever noticed this one in my travels. Holmes said nothing further and I was not disposed to inquire. When I went to rouse him from his room, as the gong sounded downstairs, I found him with the creature lying on a square of white paper, his pipe in his mouth and his magnifying-glass closely applied to the remains. From time to time, he would jot a note and then resume his scrutiny.

Jaded by the collapse of our adventure, I retired after dinner with a copy of the
Lancet
and an article upon Richet's discovery of abnormal sensitivities to the anti-diphtheria serum, a matter of possible interest in my own practice. A little after ten o'clock, I was aware of voices below me, a burst of dull-witted laughter, a gate closing, and then silence. Absorbed in my journal, I paid no attention. A moment later there was a thundering on my door. Before I could reply, Holmes had thrown it open.

‘Get up, Watson! Quickly, man! We must make the most of every minute.'

‘To what end?'

‘To search the house, of course! We are alone here for the moment, unless Miss Holland—or rather some other woman of his—should be a prisoner or a corpse within these walls. He has gone out with those two young women, his servants. I swear that they and the others are up to their games again, no doubt at a more discreet distance during our tenancy. I believe we may count on an hour at least before his return.'

With the greatest reluctance I heaved myself out of bed and followed him. It seemed a further waste of our time. Each room was just what it appeared to be. The dining-room, the parlour, the kitchen, the master's bedroom, the servants' attics, even the cellar. Not a door was locked or bolted to prevent our progress. This was scarcely the lair of a secretive and hunted man. To be sure, we did not know what furniture had belonged in the first place to Dougal, Miss Holland, or any of his other mistresses. The same was true of women's clothes which hung in one of the wardrobes of the spare room. Though some were of a size to fit the petite figure of Camille Holland, as she had been described to us, others would have done justice to the ample forms of his servant-girls.

‘The clothes will tell us little,' Holmes said impatiently, ‘but there is something here that will hang him more surely. I know there is.'

As he spoke he was opening, inspecting, closing again, a series of round hat-boxes at an upper level of the mahogany tall-boy.

‘We shall have to give up presently,' I said anxiously, ‘he will be back.'

Just then he gave a cry of triumph. In his hand was a bottle of liquid, which might have been the very colour of Miss Dougal's artificially-golden hair.

‘What of it?' I said furiously. ‘If she left that behind it still proves nothing.'

He looked at me pityingly and produced from the hat-box a pad of golden hair, a tortoise-shell comb and a wire hair-frame upon which the hair and comb would have been worn. He placed the pad upon the frame, added the comb and we saw again the back of Camille Holland's head as it had appeared in Inspector Marden's photograph.

‘She left them behind,' I said hopefully. ‘What can it signify? She had no need of them. To whom else would they be of any use?'

He paused and said, ‘To the woman who visited the National Provincial Bank in Piccadilly, when the form with a specimen of her hand was signed in Miss Holland's name.'

‘They had seen her before. They would recognize an imposture. Ashwin at the bank knew who she was. A pad of hair would be no disguise.'

Holmes sat down on the bed.

‘I was certain of it, as soon as Marden described the death of her nephew's child.'

‘What the devil has that to do with it?'

‘If I did not know you better, my dear fellow, I should believe that the country air had addled your brains. Think, man! What does a woman do when there is a bereavement in her family?'

‘She attends the funeral and makes herself useful, but Miss Holland did neither.'

‘Quite so. What else?'

‘She goes into mourning.'

‘In what form?'

‘I daresay black crape, weeds anyhow, mourning jewellery, a veil …'

As soon as I said it, the whole thing was clear.

‘Exactly!' He sprang from the bed and paced about the room. ‘Miss Holland in mourning garb attended the bank that she and her family have used for a generation, though she seldom visited it. Her little niece was dead, a fact which the very newspapers might confirm and Mr Edmund Holland would, in any case, be obliged to refer to at some point. Mr Ashwin knew this lady by her dainty form, the golden hair-pad supported by the wire frame and the familiar comb. The veil was not too heavy to prevent her features being dimly discerned but enough to make them somewhat indistinct. Her voice was quiet in her grief and a little thickened, perhaps, by tears. With a proper sense of delicacy, Ashwin left her to sign the form in her own time.'

‘If it was so.'

‘If it was? My dear fellow, you heard Marden say that the child's death was the only other event remembered at the time of the visit to the bank! I am concerned at what may not be remembered. Was this other Camille Holland able to write in a passable imitation of the true signature? It would not have to be of the finest quality. Convinced of her identity and seeing her shaken by grief, even Mr Ashwin was convinced. Or was there a sympathetic female companion or male escort who formed the actual signature? Was Dougal himself somewhere at hand? Whatever the answer, when the work was done the form was inserted in the file of papers for her account and became her signature so far as the bank was concerned.'

He stared at the open hat-box, closed it, and replaced it on its shelf in the tall-boy. Then he turned to me again.

‘That child's death was a gift from the gods for him—or rather from the devil. The only true part that the devil has had to play in all his schemes! How easy it must have been! At any other time, the imposture would have been plain. But the bank's knowledge of the child's death and the evidence of their own eyes that showed them the woman in mourning was a perfect coincidence.'

‘If she was murdered by him …'

‘She is out there, Watson, lying in this dark night, somewhere beneath the dank fenland, while Dougal and his naked trollops caper upon their bicycles above her.'

‘I was about to ask whether you had concluded that she was murdered before or after the visit to the bank.'

‘As to that, my friend, I have an open mind. After the visit, I expect.'

I was relieved to find him a little less dogmatic and this made me bolder.

‘More to the point,' I said, ‘if she is out there as you say, how are you to find her body in mile upon mile of fenland stretching from here to Cambridge, supposing that by this time there is anything left to find?'

He smiled.

‘I should not allow that to disturb your rest, Watson. I have an extremely clear idea of how this investigation will end. I believe I know where she is.'

Then we had a day of Holmes at his worst. He would do nothing but lounge in a basket chair in Captain Dougal's conservatory, reading the papers and then purloining my copy of the
Lancet
, which I had scarcely begun. This continued all day. Next morning, while we were at breakfast, a boy in a blue uniform came running over the bridge and handed an envelope to Captain Dougal. Dougal brought the telegram to Holmes at the breakfast table. He made no pretence of courtesy, standing by the table as my friend read it. Holmes put it in his pocket.