The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (68 page)

‘Do you think she was poisoned?'

‘Course not!' said Lucy Rose scornfully. ‘Unless she poisoned herself with drink. The doctors didn't think she'd been poisoned, did they? Old Mattie used to booze enough for a couple of draymen together. How she screamed, though. Then she'd go into fits and twitch all over. Her eyes rolled about something terrible. It's only drink does that. The DTs.'

‘Did she say anything else?'

‘She said she was going to die. Well, she was right about that, wasn't she?'

The notion that this hard-faced little dollymop would be a friend to anyone was quite beyond me. However, Holmes played his part and slipped her two more sovereigns. She grinned at him.

‘You?' she said scornfully. ‘You're not a missioner! No more than I am.'

‘I assure you …'

‘You paid twice! Missioners is too bloody mean to pay twice! What you are …'

It pained me to see Holmes worsted by this little slattern.

‘What you are,' said Lucy Rose triumphantly, ‘is a newspaper man! A reporter! Ain't that it? They're the ones that pays for what they want to hear. Five sovs? Well, I hope it was worth it to you! What d'you want to know about it for?'

‘Dear me, young woman,' said Holmes amiably, ‘you have the makings of a true detective.'

‘You bet,' said Lucy Rose.

As we returned in the cab to Baker Street, I remarked that we should get nowhere in the face of such impertinence.

Holmes spoke quietly, looking out at the evening crowds who pressed homewards across Regent Circus.

‘Then how fortunate it was to have a medical man present. We might otherwise have been in danger of confusing an impertinent little minx with a vexed and frightened child. Might we not?'

I looked at him sharply. However, I got nothing more, except his comment that we must give a little help to our friend Lestrade, who seemed to have lost heart over the case.

X

My American visitor, Dr Neill, need not have worried. He was only one among several medical men to get a copy of the mad blackmailer's letter, which he had shown me. By the next morning's post I heard from Dr William Broadbent of Seymour Street, once a fellow student at Barts and now a successful oculist. Broadbent had received a similar communication. In this case, Mr Malone and his operatives had demanded £2,500 for suppressing their ‘evidence'. It was quite mad, of course. How should an oculist be in a position to administer strychnine? It was plain to me that whoever was behind this campaign of blackmail had very little knowledge of medicine.

Holmes seemed weary of the letters and more intent on pursuing the case of Matilda Clover. As for Dr Neill and Dr Broadbent, he referred to them with a certain heavy facetiousness as ‘your clients' or ‘these clients of yours', as if he was washing his hands of any responsibility for their complaints.

After three days, he was prepared to share his recent discoveries with Inspector Lestrade. But when we saw the Scotland Yard man again, it was under circumstances of such horror as I shall never forget. Two nights after our visit to the Lambeth Road, I felt that I had scarcely fallen asleep when I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes, standing over me fully dressed. I opened my eyes rather painfully against the light of the candle in his hand. The flame shone upon his eager stooping face and his expression left me in no doubt that something was badly wrong.

‘Get up, Watson! Lestrade is in the sitting-room and we must go with him at once. Bring your medical bag, you will certainly have need of it.'

I felt no sense of adventure, only a cold and certain dread. His words must mean Mr Bayne and his friends had taken another life. In my career, I had grown used to nocturnal alarms but had never answered one with such sick foreboding at what awaited me. I pulled on my clothes, picked up my bag, and went into the sitting-room. Holmes was already buttoned into his ulster with a cravat about his throat, fastening his travelling-cap with its ear-flaps, for this was a bitter night.

‘Stamford Street,' Lestrade said, as soon as I entered the sitting-room, ‘I doubt if much can be done for them but …'

‘Them?' I was aghast that there should be more than one.

‘Yes, sir. There are two young persons this time, doctor, both of the unfortunate class. We shall have to make haste before they are too far gone to tell us what has happened.'

The streets were clear and Lestrade's cab went full pelt through the lamplit city to the Strand, Waterloo Bridge, and Lambeth. Stamford Street ran behind riverside wharves and warehouses, from Waterloo Road to Blackfriars. Its broken and discoloured slum-terraces, whose doors opened on the pavement, were another Duke Street.

The narrow road ran for a considerable distance. Long before we came to the house with ‘118' painted roughly in white on its door, we saw a little crowd outside. A uniformed constable in a tall helmet and carrying a bulls-eye lantern stood guard at the door. There was a four-wheeler waiting, ready to set off for the hospital, but with no sign of a doctor or an assistant. Small wonder that Lestrade had wanted my company, I thought. From the sounds of disorder that reached us you might have thought a mad party was going on in the house. A man was shouting and women were screaming but the shrillness was of pain rather than merriment.

As we got down from the hansom and went into the narrow house, two policemen with their helmets off appeared to be struggling with a pair of disorderly harpies, as if to get them into the waiting four-wheeler. But the sight of the pair suggested figures in some landscape of the damned, their faces plastered with the sweat of agony and their hair in disarray. Alice Marsh, as I later knew her to be, was covered by her night-clothes, kneeling on all fours over a chair in the hallway, clinging tighter at every attempt to move her. In the front room, Emma Shrivell lay prone on the sofa, where the second uniformed constable had just administered an emetic of warm water and salt, which now caused her to vomit spasmodically. Like her companion, she was wearing her night-clothes, as if she had woken suddenly from sleep.

Though it was hard to question the two policemen in the shrillness and shouting, I heard the first man, Cumley, say to Lestrade that he and Eversfield had been trying for the past ten minutes to get the two girls to the four-wheeler for St Thomas's Hospital. They had brought them with difficulty to the foot of the stairs, where both victims had resisted being moved further as they clutched the chair and sofa to themselves with the strength of pure terror.

If ever there was a vision of hell, it was in that house on that night. Alice Marsh seemed not even to understand what was said to her. Emma Shrivell, perhaps as a result of the emetic, was able to answer a little. For several minutes, until the rising cramp of another spasm robbed her of normal speech, she muttered her answers to my questions. She had eaten tinned salmon and drunk bottled beer with Alice Marsh and a man they had brought back to the house. He had offered them each a long slim capsule, promising that these would heighten their pleasure in the perversities that he proposed for the three of them. Later he had gone away. Soon afterwards the first plucking of their final agony began.

Alice Marsh was too far gone to identify her assailant. Emma Shrivell could only describe a man with dark hair and a moustache. Eversfield had first thought that the girls might be suffering ptomaine poisoning as a result of contamination in the tinned salmon. Believe that who may!

How little prepared is a retired army doctor to confront such a crisis in civil life! To stand in that cramped house, deafened by the noise and sickened by such sights, was a horror in itself for any humane person. Far worse, was the situation of a medical man. If this were another strychnine poisoning, nothing would save them. I could have given them morphia, but that would ease their agony very little and would prolong it for several hours. Indeed, as it later appeared, whoever had chosen these victims had once again mixed morphia with the poison. Strychnine alone would have killed them by now. To wish the two poor creatures out of this world so speedily will seem inhuman only to those who did not see their terrified grimaces or hear the sounds that filled the slum terrace on a winter's night. Was the devil who had devised this drama now haunting the shadows of the alleys and streets outside, listening with a mad delight to the result?

There was nothing more I could do. I insisted to Lestrade that the two young women must by any means be got to hospital where their final hours might be made more comfortable. By taking them to the four-wheeler one at a time, the two constables and I managed to get first Alice Marsh and then Emma Shrivell into the cab. They struggled and shuddered, shouting uncomprehended protests in our ears.

There is little more to add. I went with them as the four-wheeler rattled into the Waterloo Road, turned into Westminster Bridge Road and drew up at the hospital. Just as we came in sight of the river, Alice Marsh uttered a rising cry and fell into a fit. The next moment, the breath came from her in a long groan that emptied her lungs as she fell back against the cushions and died. Emma Shrivell was carried into the hospital entrance on a stretcher. I later heard that she had lived until eight o'clock that morning without adding another word to the evidence she had already given.

In all the investigations which Sherlock Holmes and I had undertaken, I confess I had never felt so badly shaken as by this double homicide. There had been murders enough but none as malicious and brutal as these two. Many criminals of our acquaintance had killed out of passion or for gain, sometimes for jealousy or avarice, but never with such hideous and cruel triumph.

Holmes, when he looked back on the events of this case, was more intrigued than repelled by the criminal mind behind them. He would quote the Renaissance tyrants or ‘Philippe the Poisoner' as the Regent of France for Louis XV had been called. These men had poisoned their victims to clear the way to the seats of power. The Comte de Sade's depravities of this sort at Marseille had been mere aphrodisiac experiments. Other young sparks of the
ancien régime
had been content to persuade the Marquise Gacé that she had drunk an incurable poison which they had concealed in her glass. For several hours, they relished her terrors and despair until she realized that it was a mere trick. This time, however, we confronted what Holmes laconically described as ‘a great original'.

‘I regret, Watson, that the demands on my time do not permit of a little monograph upon the subject of “The Poisoner as Artist”. I think, however, I shall write a few lines to the good Professor Krafft-Ebing. I must put him on the trail of that rare mental type whose pleasure lies in obtaining by poison a complete possession of the victim's body and all its functions, controlling every nuance of thought and feeling. It is a significant lacuna in the great professor's otherwise admirable systematization of psychopathology.'

We were at breakfast several days after the deaths of the two poor girls when Holmes delivered himself of this deplorable observation. I drew open my copy of
The Times
newspaper as a refuge from such conversation and merely said, ‘It is quite enough, Holmes, that we must deal with such a scoundrel. You had far better leave it there.'

He sighed, as if I should be his despair.

‘I have thought for some time, Watson, that you have no appreciation of this case. Without it, you will never arrive at the truth. Among poisoners, I am bound to say that even the great Dr William Palmer of Rugeley or the curious Catherine Wilson, whose last moments I witnessed at a time when executions were still a public spectacle, came woefully short of our present antagonist.'

To me, this was utterly heartless. I was about to say, in no uncertain terms, that I had done my best for two dying girls, while Holmes had airily discussed the finer points of the crime with Lestrade. To talk of the degenerate beast who had killed them—as an artist!—was beyond endurance. Perhaps it was well that we were interrupted by Mrs Hudson with Lestrade at her heels. Before our housekeeper could say a word, the inspector was in the room and holding a sheet of paper towards us.

‘As you'll both be witnesses at the inquest on the two young women, Mr Holmes, you'd both of you best see this first. It came for Mr Wyatt, the Southwark coroner, through the post first thing this morning. It's our man, or one of them, from first to last. Perhaps this time he's gone too far. Perhaps there might be something in it that will give him away.'

I hardly knew whether to feel hope or despair at the sight of it. Holmes read the letter. He looked up, raised his eyebrows, and handed it to me, saying, ‘If there is a word of truth in this, Watson, perhaps one of those clients of yours might prove a useful source of information.'

‘
Dear Sir
,

I beg to inform you that one of my operators has positive proof that a certain medical student of St Thomas's Hospital is responsible for the deaths of Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, he having poisoned those girls with strychnine. The proof you can have on paying my bill for services to George Clarke, detective, 20 Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, to whom I will give the proof on his paying my bill
.

Yours respectfully
,

Wm. H. Murray

I noticed that ‘Murray' had been copied from the Metropole Hotel circular.

‘Tell me, Lestrade,' said Holmes thoughtfully, as I handed the letter back, ‘you and I remember something of George Clarke, do we not?'

Lestrade's face tightened.

‘What I remember is Clarke left the Metropolitan Police under a cloud, fifteen years ago, as a senior man. Went to be landlord of a public house in Westminster. Still, we can be sure he has nothing to do with this Murray.'

‘May we? And why is that, pray?'

There was no mistaking the satisfaction on the inspector's face.

‘George Clarke, Mr Holmes, was gathered to his fathers three months ago. Dead. Gone to his long, last home, wherever that may be.'