The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (69 page)

Unworthy though it might be, I confess I was glad to hear the intellectual fog of Professor Ebing and poisoners as artists dispelled by the cold radiance of fact.

XI

Even before the Stamford Street inquest began, the death certificate of Matilda Clover had been examined and her place of burial was established as Lambeth Municipal Cemetery. Though it took its title from Lambeth, the burial ground was out at Tooting, under the new public health measures introduced by the Burial Act of 1852. On a raw morning, as the frost was dissolving into dew, Miss Clover's mortal remains were to be exhumed upon the orders of the Home Secretary. Holmes and I travelled by the South-West Railway from Victoria to Tooting, where Lestrade would be waiting to take us the short distance to the cemetery gates.

It had scarcely been necessary for the inspector to insist to the recipients of the blackmail threats that no public reference should be made to the anonymous letters. Lady Russell or Mr Frederick Smith, MP were the last people to wish their names tarnished even by innocent association with such crimes. The notes to the coroner might be shown to the jurors, if that seemed necessary, but no reference was to be made to them in the hearing of the press.

As our train pulled out of Victoria station, Holmes, with his sharp eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, opened the
Morning Post
and finished his reading of the day's agony column. The early hour of our start had deprived him of a leisurely survey of the day's press. At length he folded the paper, thrust it under his seat, and offered me his cigar-case as we passed through the damp leafless suburbs.

‘It is reassuring, Watson, is it not, to find so much continuity in this case?'

I wondered what he had in mind.

‘Continuity? I have seldom known a case more plagued by chaos, rumour, and inconsistency.'

He thought for a moment and said at length, ‘Take the letters, however. The composition of those sent to the coroner is plainly the work of the same author as the letter to Dr Broadbent. Yet the handwriting is not the same. However, the copperplate of the latest epistle is in an identical hand to that written to Mr Frederick Smith. The threads of this correspondence cross and cross again, do they not? It shows what I would call continuity.'

‘It only goes to prove,' I replied abruptly, ‘that these blackmailers are known to one another. They must be.'

‘Must they? Are they all known to one another—or is there one master to whom each individual servant is separately known?'

‘They share the same knowledge and the same style, as well as an identical method of extorting money.'

‘You are entirely right about that,' he said at once, ‘I could not have put it better.'

The answer seemed too plain to be held back.

‘We shall never progress, Holmes, until we accept that the letters are quite distinct from the murders. A maniac is poisoning these poor girls. A gang of blackmailers is exploiting the crimes. They know their victims did not kill any of the young women. Yet they know by experience that innocent people may be weak or foolish enough to pay for their good names. Most will not pay but what does that matter? One or two successes will make the attempts worthwhile.'

‘Your friend and client Dr Broadbent will pay, perhaps, or Dr Neill?'

I had expected this.

‘Both know they are innocent. Yet if, for example, it is rumoured that Broadbent went to court over such matters, the world would say there is no smoke without fire. In his position, reputation is everything. A scandal might destroy him, innocent or guilty. Being a figure of honour and principle that will not deter him. The extortionists picked the wrong man, of course, but they may be luckier next time.'

Holmes lay back in his corner seat.

‘And the fact that they accused Lord Russell of murdering Miss Clover almost a fortnight before she died? That, I suppose, was just a happy chance for them.'

‘No,' I had a good part of the answer now, ‘she was known to be dying of drink, but not dead. But if a man will pay to have his good name preserved, it scarcely mattered if she was alive or dead. How could he tell? He would implicate himself as much by asking questions. Indeed, why should Miss Clover not have been part of the conspiracy? Prostitution is a trade that runs easily to blackmail!'

Holmes drew the pipe from his mouth.

‘And when they told Mr Smith that Ellen Donworth had been poisoned, while the world still thought she died of drink, was that a happy chance for them?'

‘Anyone who was outside the York Hotel heard her say that she had been given gin with some white stuff in it by Fred. A rumour of poison would run round a neighbourhood like that. Blackmailers are not dealers in fact. They intimidate those who will pay and who ask few questions. They are not murderers.'

‘Well,' he said thoughtfully, ‘if they are not, someone else certainly is.'

‘I believe,' I said boldly, ‘that I may have your blackmailers before long. At least their ringleader. Dr Neill may be a rich American but he is naturally known to only a handful of people in England. He believes the threat comes from someone close to him. It must be so. Let that be our way forward.'

‘My dear fellow!' he said in gentle admiration. ‘You will have this case concluded before we know where we are.'

But now I could face him on his own ground.

‘The last letter, addressed to the inquest on Marsh and Shrivell, says that the two girls in Stamford Street were murdered by a medical student.'

‘Very well.'

‘You agree that it was written by our blackmailers?'

‘As it would seem.'

‘In the hope of it being read out at the inquest so that rumours may begin?'

‘Quite possibly.'

‘Then I will make a wager with you. After the inquest, there will be another letter. It will be sent either to a wealthy medical student, or perhaps to his family. It will accuse him of the murders, for which the writer has proof, and demand a large sum of money for his safety. Will you believe me then?'

He stared at me as if something had distressed him.

‘My dear friend, I should never disbelieve you. To disagree is another matter. However, after your success with your clients, I daresay you are closer to the truth of this terrible business than anyone could imagine.'

‘They are not my clients,' I said shortly. ‘They are our clients.'

He laughed and shook his head.

‘Oh no, Watson! I have never met them! How can they be my clients? It is only right that you should have clients of your own. You have long experience and ability. You deserve them, if I may say so, as much as they deserve you.'

A few minutes later, with a grinding of steel on iron, the train rounded a curve and drew into Tooting station. Lestrade, in formal black, was waiting with a cab. The cemetery, behind its plain railings adjoined a main road. Within the gates were the private family plots with crosses and obelisks, weeping Niobes and marble angels. Further off lay the burial ground of the poor, the common graves whose occupants were dug up after twelve years and their scant relics burnt on cemetery fires at night. Green canvas screens had been erected on the frosted grass round one of these graves. The diggers were already at work. As we entered the gates, a crowd of happy urchins ran beside the cab and saluted us with cries of ‘Body-snatchers! Burke-and-Hare! Burke-and-Hare! …'

‘Encouraging, is it not,' Holmes remarked, ‘to see how ignorance and illiteracy may be redeemed by a knowledge of the criminal heroes of our past?'

Such was the jumbled burying of the poor that a number of coffins were raised and opened before that of Matilda Clover was found. Holmes and Lestrade watched the gravediggers from a distance as the damp morning turned to a cold drizzle and the piles of yellow London clay grew taller at each new excavation. The railings along the edge of the cemetery were now lined by idle children and their elders. Lestrade glowered at them, then turned to Holmes.

‘And what is to be done about Louisa Harvey, Mr Holmes? Whom no one could find, dead or alive?'

‘I really do not know,' said Holmes indifferently. He gestured across the expanse of the cemetery. ‘I daresay I could find her, if I was obliged to.'

There was no mistaking that this gesture irritated Lestrade.

‘One thing we are quite sure of, Mr Sherlock Holmes, is that she is not here. That has been investigated through and through, since Miss Clover was run to earth.'

‘Oh, she is here,' said Holmes in a far-away wistful tone, ‘I have no doubt of that. She is certainly here.'

‘In this cemetery?'

‘Where else?'

‘I don't see how you can say that, Mr Holmes!'

‘I can, Lestrade. I begin to think, you see, that Louisa Harvey and I are quite old friends.'

‘Old enough for her to be in the cemetery!' Lestrade said angrily. He stamped off to take a pull at his flask against the raw cold and to shout at a pair of his subordinates who were idling by the canvas screens.

I tried to recall the heroines of our past adventures and could not match a single one to the mysterious Louisa Harvey. I endeavoured to press Holmes about his assertions but it was useless. He watched patiently in the growing mist until a call and a signal from the diggers marked the discovery of Miss Clover.

The body was removed to a shed near the chapel, which became an improvised mortuary. Here Dr Stevenson, on behalf of the Home Office, waited for it with an enthusiasm bordering on the unseemly. The coffin was opened and the well-preserved body of a prematurely-aged young woman was revealed to us.

Until the afternoon, Stevenson was busy in the shed with scalpel, saw, and specimen jars. For all my medical experience, I can never quite accommodate myself to the post-mortem sounds, the cutting of flesh that imitates a rending of tent canvas and the sawing of skull or bones that is crude carpentry. When it was over, Dr Stevenson had filled an array of jars labelled ‘Brain of Matilda Clover', ‘Intestines of Matilda Clover' and ‘Stomach of Matilda Clover'.

Sherlock Holmes, as might be expected, witnessed all this with the curiosity and relish of a true investigator. At the end, he looked at Stevenson who caught his glance, shook his head, and said, ‘No doubt of it.'

He took a glass slide, touched a rod to it, and held it out to Holmes.

‘Taste that!'

Holmes extended a forefinger. I could not watch, but turned my head away. When I looked again, the lips of Sherlock Holmes were moving like a man savouring the rarest nectar. He stopped and stared at Dr Stevenson.

‘Strychnine!' he said, like a happy child.

XII

For all the good it did, we might as well not have found Matilda Clover. So far as I could see, the discovery of strychnine offered not a single clue as to the identity of her murderer. Lucy Rose's description of the thickset visitor with a moustache and a bowler hat might fit a hundred thousand men in London.

Holmes lapsed into another of those irritating moods that enveloped him during certain investigations. He took to his violin and the Beethoven concerto again. He smoked, massively. He attempted to goad me repeatedly by referring to the Lambeth murders facetiously as ‘This investigation of yours …' or ‘This case, which you have so nearly brought to a successful conclusion …' and to our visitors as ‘These clients of yours …' He had surely washed his hands of the whole business. Such work as he did was at his chemical table, where he continued his experiments into base coinage. His attempts at electro-plating gave our sitting-room the sour and acid smell of a battery-charger.

‘Do you,' I had asked abruptly next evening, ‘still maintain that Louisa Harvey is in Lambeth Cemetery?'

‘No,' he said quietly, not looking up from his weighing of tiny metal.

‘So, yesterday …'

‘
Varium et mutabile semper femina
, Watson. The adorable change and variety of womankind.'

‘You mean she has dug herself out and walked off?'

‘Something of the sort,' he said, touching the scales gently with his little finger.

There was no point in discussing the matter further. I became silent and more morose. I could not conceal my chagrin when we received a report next morning that twice the lethal dose of strychnine had been found in Matilda Clover's body. I still wanted to hold to my belief that we faced two distinct sets of criminals. Yet how could the blackmailers know a fortnight in advance that Matilda Clover would die of strychnine poisoning, unless they murdered her?

The alternative, which Sherlock Holmes apparently embraced, seemed to me equally absurd. We must believe that a gang of men and women, the authors of the various blackmail notes, had perpetrated these four murders and others beside. According to their threats, there was at least one other body, though Louisa Harvey was not to be found in the register of deaths at Somerset House under any spelling of her name. Under what sobriquet, then, had she been buried in Lambeth cemetery?

For three days this state of affairs persisted. Then, on the third evening, we heard the measured tread of Lestrade's boots upon the stairs and the familiar bulldog figure in the pea-jacket and cravat appeared in our doorway.

‘Lestrade!' said Holmes, in gentle admiration. ‘Do come in and take a chair, my dear fellow. We have missed your visits of late, have we not, Watson? I daresay that the matter of Matilda Clover and Louisa Harvey is keeping you busy just now.'

The inspector sat down scowling and ignored the offer of the cigar case.

‘I don't come to talk about those persons, Mr Holmes. We have another letter and I think we may have our blackmailer.'

‘Dear me,' said Holmes softly, ‘you have quite stolen a march upon us all this time. Pray, do explain.'

‘Read this!' Lestrade said sharply. Each in turn we read the curious letter, addressed to Dr Joseph Harper of Barnstaple.