The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (51 page)

‘Dear me,' he said in a tone of mild apology, ‘I believe I shall have to start back in a day or two. I had quite forgotten that there is a common-room meeting on Tuesday, at which we must elect a new Senior Tutor.'

Captain Dougal gave a smile that revealed, rather than hid, his contempt for such a milksop as this.

VI

As soon as Dougal was out of the room, the academic gentleness dropped like a mask from the face of Sherlock Holmes.

‘We must make our move, Watson, before that fellow twigs what we are up to.'

‘Why should he?'

‘If I knew the answer to that, old fellow, it would not concern me. Wait here.'

I saw him go out, across the bridge and into the first field. He stood by the hedge at a point where a rabbit had made its burrow, or more sinisterly, where an animal of some sort had dug. After a careful inspection, he came back.

‘I think that we must abandon the niceties of butterfly-hunting, go straight to Saffron Walden, wire Lestrade, and summon the assistance of the local police force. No, my friend, let us postpone explanations until we have Marden in our company. Once is enough.'

It was not Inspector Marden but his colleague Eli Bower who confronted us, a man who plainly loathed Holmes and his kind as much as Holmes distrusted him. Ten years later, Bower was to secure the conviction and execution of John Williams in the Hooded Man murder, which my friend always swore was a grave miscarriage of justice. We confronted this squat burly figure across the table where we had first met Marden.

‘For a start, Mr Holmes,' said Bower sternly, ‘I don't need your assistance in this matter. I have men enough to carry out any investigation and …'

‘Yet you have failed to do so!'

The inspector's colour deepened.

‘Who says I have not done so?'

‘This little fellow says so.' Holmes took the jar from his satchel, spread a sheet of notepaper on the table, and shook on to it the remains of the insect he had been studying.

‘What the devil might that be?'

‘The species is a phorid fly,' said Holmes deliberately, as if addressing a backward student. ‘The identification is confirmed by this telegram from Dr Cardew of the Natural History Museum, the leading man on the subject.'

‘I have a police-station to run, Mr Holmes! What should I care for flies or museums?'

‘Very little I should say, and very little about running a police-station either, it seems. Perhaps it will assist you if I add that the insect is more commonly known as the coffin-fly. This fragment to one side is the pupae sheath of a second specimen. In other words they are still breeding at the site.'

The mention of coffins brought Bower up short. He looked at the remains on the notepaper with a twist of revulsion in his mouth but also with a new respect.

‘Where did it come from?'

‘Coldhams Farm,' said Holmes casually. ‘Please listen, Bower, to what I have to say. The coffin-fly begins its disagreeable work at the time of burial. Some three years are required for it, or rather its maggots, to devour a corpse. When that is done, the colony dies in its turn. Whoever or whatever is buried at Coldhams Farm cannot, therefore, have been dead more than three years. Dougal has been in residence some four years. Death and burial therefore took place within the time of his occupancy. Do I make myself plain?'

Bower, so confident a few minutes earlier, was now like a trapped animal.

‘How did you get that thing?'

‘It came to me,' said Holmes equably. ‘A fox, a dog perhaps, had been digging by the shed in the farmyard. I confess I had been looking for such activity in and around the property. I noted a dozen sites, for the most part in the surrounding pasture, where the earth had been disturbed, had settled a little, and had then been subject to feral digging. A phorid fly would only get above ground if the excavation had been shallow with a means of egress. Whatever—or whoever—lies there, is not far down. Do I continue to make it clear to you?'

Inspector Bower did not growl his defiance, but looked as if he would like to.

‘I understand, Mr Holmes, that Inspector Marden has already explained to you that there is ample evidence of Miss Holland being alive and unharmed.'

Holmes looked at him coldly. Then he looked at his watch and said, ‘Miss Holland is dead. As dead as you and I will one day be.'

Before Bower could reply, there was a knock and a constable handed the inspector a telegram. I contrived to see at its foot the words,
LESTRADE, SCOTLAND YARD
. The capitulation of Eli Bower was now complete and unconditional, though scarcely graceful. He sighed.

‘Very well. What would you have me do?'

‘Gather every man you can and whatever equipment is available to you. Begin to search at once, starting under the shed where the pony-trap is kept.'

‘That cannot be done without a warrant!'

‘Then I suggest you lose as little time as possible in getting one.'

Before the afternoon was over, a justice's warrant had been obtained. Two serge-clad constables in gum-boots, assisted by a labourer, had cleared a shallow trench along one side of the shed. While Bower watched, his sergeant stood guard at the wicket gate of the bridge. A little after six, the digging stopped. A constable lifted an object, from which clay fell in scattered lumps. Despite the coating of earth, there was not the least doubt that this was a human skull.

The four diggers, the sergeant, Holmes and I gathered round.

‘Fetch Dougal!' said Bower to his sergeant. The proprietor of Coldhams Farm was ‘Captain' no longer. The sergeant and one of the constables crossed the little bridge and entered the house. There was a pause, during which I had a dreadful suspicion that Dougal might have taken his own life, that he might even now be dangling from a rafter in anticipation of the hangman's work. Then the face of the sergeant appeared at a bedroom window.

‘He must have got a plank over the moat on the far side, sir,' he called to Brewer. ‘He's done a bunk!'

Brewer's face went dark as thunder. Holmes turned to him.

‘I congratulate you, inspector. I confess I had underestimated your reading of the man.'

‘What?'

‘You are too modest,' Holmes said, his face as straight as a poker. ‘You might have put him under guard and got nothing from him. But you knew that a guilty man, given the chance, would bolt from such a terrifying revelation as this. You let him go, confident in your own ability to find him again easily enough. There are few officers, in my experience, who might play the game with such subtlety.'

Bower stared at him, uncertain whether Holmes was skinning him in fine strips or paying him a true compliment. He made no reply but shouted at the men to resume work, for there were more than two hours of daylight left. But those two hours revealed nothing more, nor did the whole of the next day. The site by the shed was exhausted without any further discovery. Worse still, I was obliged to tell Bower that this skull was too large to belong to a petite woman, five feet and two inches in height. Worse than that, for the inquiry he was pursuing, it was the skull of a man. Worst of all, I was more confident than not that its owner had died many years before Dougal's arrival at the farm.

‘Which scarcely matters,' said Holmes indifferently, ‘for if Miss Holland were not here somewhere, Dougal would surely not have bolted as he did.'

VII

Next day, Dougal's description was wired to every police force in the land, while Bower and his men searched what was now called Moat Farm. Every inch of the house was tapped and measured without result. Holmes and I found quarters ten miles away in Cambridge, at the University Arms. At Quendon, the diggers had taken over the farm-house, cooking and even sleeping there. The lawn was soon a trench fortification with Bower's constables working up to their waist in fenland slime. At the end of three days they had found nothing.

The moat seemed, to our earth-bound inspector, too good a chance to miss. In his mind he created a story of an argument or fight between Dougal and the little woman, as he called her. The brute killed her, by a blow of his fist or the thrust of his thumbs on her windpipe, and flung her body into this narrow moat.

‘Very good,' said Holmes coolly. ‘A little strange, however, that the body never came to the surface during decomposition.'

We watched them drain the moat and saw the constables digging away the filthy black mud of its bed. Bower was standing beside us as Holmes took a heavy stone with a sharp edge. Shouting to the diggers to stand clear, he tossed it down and heard it land with a thud in the bottom of the moat. It splashed the mud a little but remained in full view.

‘If a stone of that weight will not sink below the bottom of the moat,' he said reflectively, ‘you may be sure a human body did not. What remained of the skeleton, now that your digging has removed the sludge, would be lying in our view at this moment. It is not. Therefore, I suggest, Miss Holland was not thrown into the moat, either alive or dead.'

Bower glared at him. I think the word is not too strong.

‘And do you care to suggest, Mr Holmes, where we should look instead?'

Holmes affected not to notice the anger. In his most friendly manner he said, ‘I observe a line of young trees on the far side of the yard. You see? They run from the moat to the pond. I should guess they were planted two or three years ago. The level of the earth along that line stands somewhat higher than the yard. That is often the case when digging, or rather filling-in, has occurred. Something lay along that line. It was dug up, or at least filled in, about three years ago and trees were planted. You may find that of interest.'

There was a steely triumph in Bower's narrow eyes.

‘We found it of such interest, Mr Holmes, that we inquired about it two days ago. There was a drainage ditch from the farm-yard to the pond. Dougal had it filled in and trees planted upon it. It was done at a time when Miss Holland was still alive and they were living amicably together here for weeks afterwards.'

‘Dear me,' said Holmes, unruffled by the disappointment. ‘Then it would hardly seem to warrant digging.'

‘My very thought, Mr Holmes.'

Holmes turned to the inspector with eyes that seemed to look straight through him.

‘And perhaps it was Captain Dougal's very thought, as he chose the place to dispose of the body of the woman whom he had just foully murdered.'

Bower was a little rattled by this but not defeated.

‘Now,' said Holmes politely, ‘we will take ourselves off. We shall return by train to Cambridge for the night and be with you again tomorrow.'

Bower did not look best pleased at this promise of our return. However, we had made ourselves comfortable at the University Arms and turned out on that fine evening to stroll along King's Parade in the late May sunshine. As we did so, a tradesman of some kind passed us, tipped his hat and said, ‘A very good evening to you, Professor Holmes, sir.'

I scarcely liked the sound of this, but my companion gave a slight self-conscious smile and would say nothing.

We returned next morning to watch the progress of the digging by the line of trees. At one end, where the topsoil was removed, the drainage ditch had been filled in by blackthorn cuttings. This loose-packed layer was cleared by two men with pitch-forks, the surrounding earth being sodden with sewage and liquid manure from the yard. Then there came a shout from one of the diggers. He held up his fork, from one of whose prongs dangled a piece of old cloth.

We gathered round that spot, knowing yet dreading what might be underneath the blackthorn. I heard the fork strike something solid. The labourer stooped and drew out a small boot from the muddy soil. From where I stood, I saw inside the boot the delicate bones of a human foot. The work went on more cautiously. Soon we were looking down at a shape, little more than the half-clad skeleton of a woman, face-downwards with her head turned slightly to one side. On one side, where the body rested against the mud, almost everything had been destroyed. On the nearer side, the corpse had been sheltered from the mud by the cuttings of the bushes, its state of preservation much better. By the end of the afternoon, the poor woman's remains lay upon a trestle-table in the greenhouse. A wire hair-frame was found in the muddy grave, the twin of that found by Holmes in the hat-box. From that moment, ‘Captain' Dougal's number was up.

We returned to Baker Street the next day. That evening, we received our usual visit from Lestrade. After the horrors of Moat Farm, as Coldhams was now universally called, it was a relief to be among homely surroundings and friendly faces. Lestrade settled himself, took a long pull at his glass, and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I suppose you have had something of an adventure. But how you persuaded that cuss Eli Bower to start digging, when his face was set against it, I do not know. He is the most stubborn and dogged fellow, as a rule.'

‘I was able to show him where he might find a skull,' said Holmes innocently. ‘After that, the rest followed.'

‘So that was it! Well, you may put that skull from your mind. It has been examined by the pathologist and is far too old to have anything to do with Dougal. Dr Watson was right about that.'

‘And what of Dougal?'

Lestrade's face assumed an expression of humorous self-importance.

‘That is my news. This afternoon, Detective-Inspector Henry Cox of the City of London police was duty officer at the Bank of England. He was called discreetly to the office of the bank secretary at the request of the clerk. It seems that Mr Sydney Domville, of Upper Terrace, Bournemouth, had presented fourteen ten-pound notes to be changed for gold sovereigns. There were irregularities in nine of these notes, for they could not be traced as issued to Mr Domville. They had, however, been issued through the Birkbeck Bank account of Samuel Dougal.'