The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (71 page)

He leant back and laughed.

‘I have emptied his waste-paper basket left outside his door, my dear fellow, as the maid would have done in any case. It is as well I did, for the writing on this is identical to the letter received by Frederick Smith. My life upon it, Watson!'

‘That woman who wrote to Mr Smith also wrote a blackmail letter to Dr Neill? Why did Neill not mention it when he showed me the other?'

‘With that very question in mind, I searched the drawers of his desk. The reason he did not mention this envelope to you is that the woman did not write him a blackmail letter. The letter which matches this envelope, and which I took the precaution to scribble down, is a love letter.'

At that point I lost the thread completely. In Holmes's scrawl I could make out that the letter began ‘My dearest', referred to the provisions made for the lady in Dr Neill's will, and ended, ‘Your loving Laura.' The sender's address was merely ‘Chapel Street'. Perhaps the postmark on the envelope, if there was one, would reveal the rest. After this revelation, however, there could only be one answer to the Lambeth riddle.

‘Walter Harper and Laura, whoever she may be, must be in this together,' I said, ‘They are the blackmailers, perhaps with several others. The man blackmails Dr Neill, the woman seduces him into leaving everything to her in his will, and tries to blackmail Frederick Smith into the bargain! One way or another, they would strip Dr Neill as they mean to strip Dr Harper of Barnstable!'

‘Well,' said Holmes thoughtfully, ‘Dr Neill is your client.'

‘Our client!'

‘Your client, if you please. I have never set eyes upon him.'

‘Then I must tell him everything.'

‘You can scarcely do that without accusing me of housebreaking.'

‘That is true. Then what are we to do?'

Holmes chose a pipe from the rack and made a great show of lighting it.

‘To speak frankly,' he said at length, ‘I should like another corpse.'

‘I should have thought there had been enough corpses in this case!'

‘I have in mind a special kind of corpse, however. One that will answer when I speak to it. What I need, my dear fellow, is a talking corpse. I believe I could find one, if I had to.'

I gave it up. Next morning, the papers carried stern condemnations of a prank by medical students who had terrified respectable householders into believing that the Lambeth poisoner was about to kill half the neighbourhood with household gas. ‘Such humour in our physicians of the future,' wrote
The Times
, ‘is highly to be deprecated.'

XIV

All too soon, I was to learn why Holmes insisted upon the distinction between those clients who were mine and those which were his, and why he had referred facetiously to the Lambeth mystery as ‘this case of yours, which you stumbled upon one night in the Waterloo Road'. I woke on the second morning after our incognito excursion to read in the paper of the arrest of a suspect in Berkhamstead, on suspicion of extortion. Holmes himself had not yet risen. Indeed his place at the breakfast table remained undisturbed for a further half-hour. Nor was there any sign of him when the telegram arrived.

To wake Sherlock Holmes, when he was determined upon sleep, was next to a physical impossibility. Having been informed by Billy that an immediate acknowledgement of the wire was demanded, I tore open the blue envelope.

HOLMES WATSON BAKER STREET STOP
.
YOUR ENVELOPE AND TRANSCRIPTION RECEIVED STOP
.
ESSENTIAL YOU ATTEND HERE IMMEDIATELY TO SUBSTANTIATE EVIDENCE STOP
.
CONFIRM BY RETURN STOP
.
LESTRADE SCOTLAND YARD
.

I had not known that Holmes had already forwarded to Lestrade the purloined envelope and the scribbled copy of the letter to Dr Neill. However, I now answered the message in two words.
PROCEEDING FORTHWITH
.

Though this was less than accurate, it spurred Holmes into a more rapid consumption of breakfast and a foregoing of the newspapers. By eleven o'clock, our cab turned from the Embankment, where the trees were just coming into bud, and through the gateway of Scotland Yard. I confess that I looked forward with a certain vindictiveness to confronting the blackmailer of my client.

Those who have passed along the Embankment by the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police will know something of that curious structure, its towers and turrets of red brick banded with white, like a storybook castle of legend. Lestrade's quarters, though plainly furnished, had the size and spaciousness of a drawing-room, with a bay window overlooking the river.

He greeted us a little more gruffly than usual, as he bade us take our chairs before his desk.

‘We are indebted to you, Mr Holmes, for the envelope and the transcription. How you came by these is not a matter for my consideration at this moment.'

‘The carelessness with which dustbins are emptied in certain quarters of London leads to many such scraps of paper blowing in the wind.' Holmes spoke with sufficient insouciance to indicate that he did not care twopence for Lestrade's ‘consideration' of his methods.

The inspector favoured him with a glance.

‘Very well, sir. Let us just say that it is thanks to your quickness of thought and action that the woman, Miss Laura Sabbatini, is in custody and that Mr Harper is watched by one of our officers.'

Holmes sighed and sat back in his chair with something of a small-boy's sulkiness.

‘I wish, Lestrade, that you had made better use of my poor offerings.'

Our host was mystified by this.

‘Play fair, Holmes,' I said, ‘Lestrade has compared and identified the hand on the envelope as being that of Mr Smith's blackmailer and the other paper as having come from Harper's own stationery. He has ensured that Harper cannot escape us. If Harper and Miss Sabbatini are not the entire gang, they are at least two of its leading members.'

‘What is more,' said the inspector indignantly, ‘I have complied with your request, Mr Holmes, that nothing concerning the letter or the envelope should be made public. I have done so against my better judgment.'

Holmes had been listening with eyes closed and fingertips pressed together.

‘I should find it hard to conceive of a more certain way of making those items public than by detaining a suspect within hours of receiving them.'

Again I came to Lestrade's defence.

‘Dash it all, Holmes, anything less than arrest or surveillance and the birds might have flown. The woman first and her friends in short order. It was the best move on Lestrade's part to bag one of them and keep another in his sights.'

He only seemed to sink further into gloom.

‘The bird or birds, as you so felicitously term them, have either flown already or are even now testing their wings. My dear Lestrade, I daresay you will recall my second request—that I should be allowed to put certain questions to your suspect before she was invited to make a statement or was charged?'

‘And that undertaking is now to be honoured, Mr Holmes.'

My friend nodded. When he looked up, his eyes were brighter but he scarcely appeared like a man who has lost a penny and found a shilling.

‘Then, if you please, we will have the lady brought in so that I may speak to her.'

Lestrade stepped outside and I heard him giving orders to one of his officers. There was a pause of some minutes and presently he came back, following a demure young woman of warm complexion, raven hair, and slim figure. She was modestly but finely dressed in a pale grey walking-gown, a matching hat and a light veil which she now put up. Lestrade brought a chair for her and she sat down. Holmes looked at her for a moment, then said, ‘Miss Sabbatini, my name is Sherlock Holmes. It is possible that you may have heard of me.'

‘Oh, yes!' she said eagerly, as if his was the first friendly voice that had spoken to her since her ordeal began. ‘Yes I have.'

‘Very well. I am not employed by the police. In any case, you are under no obligation to answer my questions or theirs. However, if you are willing to tell me what I want to know, it is possible that I may be able to save you a good deal of trouble.'

‘Yes,' she said again, though her hands gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles whitened, ‘by all means, Mr Holmes.'

‘In that case, Mr Lestrade, may we have the letter written to Mr Frederick Smith MP and the envelope addressed to Dr Neill?'

He stood up and these were handed to him. He held the blackmail letter to Mr Smith before her.

‘Did you write this letter, Miss Sabbatini?'

It took only a glance before she said eagerly, ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I wrote that.'

‘A letter blackmailing Mr Smith …'

‘Yes, but I did not mean to …'

‘We will leave that for a moment, if you please. Is this also your writing on the envelope addressed to Dr Neill at 103 Lambeth Palace Road?'

‘Of course. It is the same. It is how I always write.'

‘And you are, I believe, sole beneficiary under the will of Dr Neill?'

This startled her, for she did not see how Sherlock Holmes could know such a thing. Nor did Lestrade.

‘You have evidently discovered a good deal about us, Mr Holmes. However, you are correct. I am the sole beneficiary under his will. Why should I not be? We are engaged to be married!'

It was now the turn of Sherlock Holmes to look surprised but he quickly composed himself. Such engagements, after all, are easily made and easily broken on the part of the lady.

‘How long have you known Dr Neill?'

‘A year or so. We met in America when I was there with my parents.'

I confess that this demure figure, answering his questions so frankly, was not at all how I had imagined the blackmailer of my client. However, the bomb that had been ticking quietly under us all was now about to be detonated.

‘You admit that you wrote the letter to Mr Frederick Smith. Why?'

‘Why should I not? I wrote it because Dr Neill was too busy.'

‘Too busy? Busy with what?'

Now she turned away from Holmes and looked at Lestrade.

‘It is possible that you know something of this, Mr Lestrade, being a policeman. Dr Neill has a great reputation as a pathologist. He was retained some months ago on the advice of the Commissioner himself, Sir Melville MacNaghten, to advise the police about the poisonings in Lambeth.'

Lestrade looked as thunderstruck as any of us had been.

‘Pray continue, Miss Sabbatini,' he said, now trying to look as if he had known about the Commissioner's recommendation all along.

‘Dr Neill was extremely hard-pressed to discharge all these commitments, in addition to his work at the hospital. Documents came to him from the police and were then passed on by him to the coroner's office. It was essential that he should make copies of them for reference. There was a very great number. We were in Hertfordshire together, you understand, and they were to be posted to London as a matter of urgency. To help him, I copied out several in my own hand. The letter to Mr Smith was one of them.'

‘You have told me what I suspected from the first, Miss Sabbatini,' said Holmes gently. ‘We will leave it there for the moment, if you please. I shall confer with Inspector Lestrade upon your answers to my questions. However, I should be very surprised if your troubles are not at an end by this evening.'

Lestrade got up and escorted Miss Sabbatini to the door. As it closed, Holmes turned to me.

‘Your client, Watson! By now Dr Neill is probably on his way back to America, where he will no doubt find safety!'

Lestrade stood with his back to the door.

‘Safety from what, though, Mr Holmes?'

Holmes swung round on him.

‘Blackmail! Blackmail at least. Very possibly murder, though we do not yet know that he resembles the suspect or that he could have been in the place where any murder was committed. Who ever heard of such a gang of blackmailers? Was it not obvious from the first that this was a single-handed criminal? What had he to do but persuade other men and women to copy documents for him? To do so on the pretext that he was a medical consultant to Scotland Yard is, I confess, a nicer stroke than I should have thought him capable of.'

‘Not so fast,' Lestrade interrupted, ‘Miss Sabbatini might do it for love. How could he depend on the others?'

Holmes looked at him in despair.

‘Do you still not see it? Give me pen and paper, send me out into Lambeth, or Bermondsey, or the docks. There are communities from all over Europe and Asia who scarcely speak English, let alone write it. There are scribes who take down their letters for them but to whom English is almost or completely a foreign tongue. A man of moderate resource and intelligence could have any document copied for him by such a person, who would not understand more than a word or two of what it contained. I could bring you back confessions of my guilt in the Lambeth poisonings by this evening in a dozen different hands. Would you believe me then?'

Lestrade shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Holmes continued imperturbably.

‘If I were Dr Neill and I wanted to incriminate a man for my offences, I should choose such a one as Walter Harper. Unless he is much maligned, that young gentleman has used his father's money to live high upon the hog, as they say. I should wait my chance, enter his room, and purloin his notepaper for a few hours. I would take it to one of my dupes who would indite a blackmail demand to the young man's father. I should hope that the current rumours of Walter Harper's involvement in the deaths of two young women would lead the police to search his rooms. There they would find the same undoubted evidence of his complicity in blackmail as I have done. You see? Who better placed than Dr Neill to accomplish this? He knew Harper well, could follow his movements, and had access to his rooms.'

‘Very well, Mr Holmes. Then Dr Neill and he alone is our blackmail gang. Perhaps he is also our murderer.'