The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (72 page)

Holmes pulled a face.

‘As to that, my friend, the evidence in your hands points rather away from Dr Watson's client than towards him. I daresay, however, that we may congratulate ourselves on the prospect of seeing him go to prison for the next fourteen years on charges of attempted extortion.'

Lestrade looked brighter than at any time since our arrival. But Holmes had not done with him.

‘May I remind you, however, that such a prospect diminishes with every minute that you sit here? Should Dr Neill evade us, it would not look well in the annals of Scotland Yard, when 103 Lambeth Palace Road is scarcely twenty minutes' walk away.'

XV

The behaviour of Sherlock Holmes on that spring day continued to veer between the unpredictable and the erratic. Had I not known him so well, I might have detected a taste of sour grapes as he wished me well with my case, and washed his hands of it. If proof of this were needed, it was surely provided by his positive refusal to accompany Lestrade and myself with half a dozen uniformed officers, in our descent upon Lambeth Palace Road.

‘My dear fellow,' he said humorously, ‘you will manage it well enough between you. And if you cannot, then I am sure my presence would make no difference. I shall return to Baker Street, to Mrs Hudson's admirable tea and cakes.'

‘Holmes! We must catch this fellow before it is too late.'

‘So you must, Watson. For me, however, the call of tea and cakes was ever irresistible.'

With that, he waved down a cab on the Embankment and was driven away. Lestrade looked after him in blank astonishment. So it was that I alone followed the inspector with his search warrant into the solid suburban terrace, while the uniformed men stood at the front and back to prevent an escape. There was not the least difficulty in entering Dr Neill's rooms for such apartments within a house are seldom locked when men live
en famille
. Of the fugitive, there was no sign. His possessions appeared to be in place, though Mrs Sleaper could not lay hands upon a Gladstone bag that was usually in the wardrobe. She had thought nothing of it when her ‘charming Dr Neill' had gone out that morning and she had heard him hail a cab for Charing Cross.

‘Which can only mean the boat-train for France, I suppose' said Lestrade gloomily, drawing out his watch. ‘I daresay he'd be there by now. They won't send him back neither, they never do. Sailing out of their ports, he could be anywhere tomorrow. And, of course, we can't stop their ships. Act of war.'

The search did little credit to Dr Neill, revealing as it did some disgusting photographs of young women, but neither did it produce evidence against him. There was a salesman's sample-case of medicines of the most ordinary kind. One drawer yielded several unfilled gelatine capsules, far more commonly used in America than in England for administering evil-tasting medicines. As for blackmail or murder, there was nothing.

‘We'll go through it with a toothcomb,' Lestrade said wearily, ‘carpets and boards up, furniture apart. Still, it looks to me as if we've lost him.'

As the search continued, I was apprehensive that the maid-of-all-work, Maisie, might recognize me as the gas company inspector of the other day. The one stroke of fortune in all this was that it proved to be her afternoon off, during which this good girl invariably walked with her ‘young man' in Battersea Park.

An hour and a half had passed in a fruitless ransacking of Dr Neill's rooms. I was about to follow Holmes to Baker Street, when I heard a commotion in the street. I went to the sitting-room window and saw that a cab had drawn up. Two unspeakable ruffians, who looked as if they had never in their lives until now ridden in a hansom, got out and slouched off. Then through its open doorway, very slowly, emerged the frock-coated and silk-hatted figure of Dr Neill. Behind him came Sherlock Holmes, holding at his side what looked very like my service revolver. So much for tea and cakes!

Dr Neill saw before him two uniformed police officers. With an inspiration born of terror, he turned and took Holmes by surprise, knocking him flat and diving back into the cab. From my vantage point, I saw Neill burst out of the far door and race across the road towards an alley between the opposite houses.

‘He won't get far down there,' Lestrade said confidently. A few minutes later, a dishevelled figure reappeared between two uniformed men, the handcuffs on his wrists.

I truly thought ‘this case of mine' was at an end. How mistaken I proved to be!

For the moment, Sherlock Holmes was as smug as the cat who has had the cream.

‘I quite anticipated, Watson, the capital error of which you and Lestrade would be guilty. Great heavens, man! Since the papers appeared this morning, Dr Neill has known that Miss Sabbatini was arrested yesterday. Chapel Street, Berkhamstead. What more need he be told? He guessed that she would, however innocently, speak his name to the police and reveal his part in the letters. Did you suppose he would still be waiting for you in his lodgings at three in the afternoon? He fled, it would appear, almost empty-handed, which suggests a fine state of panic, does it not?'

‘Where else were we to start our search? And where did you find him?'

‘My dear fellow, the criminal investigator must hold in his mind certain data. He cannot, to be sure, carry the timetable for the entire railway system of Great Britain. At a minimum, however, he must have in his head such items as the departure-time of the boat-train from Euston to connect with the Transatlantic sailings of the White Star Line from Liverpool. You tell me that Dr Neill hails from Chicago. That would be his quickest route home, would it not? I grant that you might send wires for the arrest of Dr Neill—but I shall eat my hat with pleasure if that proves to be more than a
nom-de-plume
.'

Lestrade gave a start at this and Holmes continued.

‘I was already present at the great terminus of the North-Western Railway when Dr Neill's cab arrived in good time for the five o'clock train. Two friends of mine, whom you saw decamp from the cab just now, and whom, in deference to their own desire for anonymity, we will call “Cats-Meat” and “The Groundsman”, made a rendezvous with me there at the cab-rank. Dr Neill could not arrive too early, of course, for that increased the risk of his being spotted at such an obvious location. Once we saw him draw up, it was a simple matter. My two friends and your handy little revolver persuaded him to step back into his cab rather than out of it. Charing Cross? To be sure, he would take pains to let Mrs Sleaper hear him shout “Charing Cross” to the cabbie this morning, the better to put us off his trail.'

In the sequel to this, Dr Neill was taken to Bow Street police-station, whither Holmes, Lestrade and I accompanied him. He was brought before the desk-sergeant and charged with demanding money with menaces, contrary to the Larceny Act 1861. He seemed not the least concerned.

‘You have got the wrong man, of course,' he said genially, ‘but fire away. What I asked Miss Sabbatini to assist me with was all done for Mr Walter Harper, for some work of his. He it was who claimed to be devilling for his tutor who, in turn, was a police surgeon of some sort. Of the other letters I know nothing. There you have it, gentlemen. If he will murder girls in Stamford Street, he will hardly stop at blackmail. I was a fool, I suppose, not to twig him from the first.'

After that, he declined to say another word.

‘At the worst,' said Lestrade doubtfully, ‘I must release him as an innocent dupe.'

‘At the worst,' Holmes muttered, ‘he is the Lambeth poisoner.'

The evidence of that seemed to fade by the hour. Lestrade tried him by asking how it was that the blackmail demands relating to Ellen Donworth and Matilda Clover could have been written other than by the murderer, a day before anyone knew the first girl had been poisoned and almost a fortnight before the second one had died.

‘I guess,' said Dr Neill good-naturedly, ‘you would have to ask the man who gave me the letters to have copied. Walter Harper.'

That young man could no longer be left out of it. During the evening, Lestrade gave orders to what Holmes called his ‘minions' to bring Walter Harper to Bow Street.

‘For it amounts to this,' the inspector said grimly, ‘we may never convict Dr Neill of blackmail unless we first convict him of murder.'

So it was that on the following morning Dr Neill took his place in a line of men who stood the length of a wall in Bow Street yard. He was among twenty or thirty men, all dressed in suits and hats, the tallest at the centre of the line and the others falling away to either end, as if it had been a group photograph. Three witnesses attended. There had been time enough to bring Mrs Phillips from the house where Matilda Clover lodged. Lestrade's men had also found Sally Martin and Jenny Frere, two of those who ‘hunted in the same pack' with Matilda Clover. Unlike her friend Lucy Rose, they had been out with her every night for a week or two before she died and had seen the man she was with on the last night of all.

Sherlock Holmes still had an air of patient endurance, the courteous man who considers his time is being wasted but who is too well-bred to speak of it. He stood with Lestrade and two uniformed officers in a far corner of the sunlit yard. Mrs Phillips, like a galleon under sail, made her stately way down the line. She scarcely looked at Dr Neill but passed on and touched the shoulder of a shorter man almost at the end of the line. Sally Martin and Jenny Frere followed her. One by one they passed by Dr Neill, though Sally Martin paused and looked quickly at his boots. Then they walked on and touched the shoulder of another man. When they had gone Holmes favoured Lestrade with a look of worldly wisdom. For all three women had walked past Dr Neill and touched the shoulder of Walter Harper.

When we were alone together, while Lestrade left his office to give instructions for Harper's continued detention, Holmes turned from the window and said quietly, ‘You know, my dear fellow, that I would not for the world offend you?'

‘I daresay you would not intend to do so.' It was the best that I could manage.

‘All the same, I wonder if you would permit me to lend you a little assistance in this case of yours. You have managed it admirably to this point in many respects. Now, however, I cannot help observing that the threads of your evidence appear remarkably tangled. You would not sleep easily, I know, if you were instrumental in assisting Lestrade's blockheads to get an innocent man hanged.'

‘Once and for all,' I said irritably, ‘it is not my case—it is our case. And you may do what the devil you like with it!'

‘Capital,' he said with a smile. ‘Then we will return, if you please, to this matter of the talking corpse.'

XVI

For the whole of the next spring day we followed the arteries of pleasure lying just south of the river, a warren of streets and alleys where the mild sky was dulled by smoke and the tin thunder of trains echoed from every bridge and tall archway. Holmes began at Westminster Bridge, where the entrance canopy of Astley's Amphitheatre and Circus extends over the pavement. We followed the walls of the Canterbury Music Hall and Gatti's Palace of Varieties, whose blue and red placards boasted Head Balancers and Acrobats, Minstrels, and Performing Horses. We searched streets of brick terraces, darkened by soot and decay, upper floors painted with advertisements for cigars, confectionery, embrocation, and Old England Snuff. In the little windows of tobacconists' shops, the covers of the week's
Tit-Bits
and the
Police Budget
had yet to placard the news of Dr Neill.

It was early evening when we paid for our entrance to the Canterbury, whose interior was a domed oriental palace with gold-painted stucco adorning the boxes and galleries. Its speciality was the ‘Fish Ballet' performed by ladies in silver fleshings behind a thin gauze curtain drawn across the arch of the stage.

On his rare visits to the music hall, Holmes showed little interest in the performance. Life for him was at the rear, along the promenade bar, which looked on to the stage in front but whose windows at the back surveyed the streets below. The chatter and laughter, the clatter of glasses, the oysters served with brown bread and butter were all the entertainment he required.

It would be foolish to pretend that the majority of strollers in the Canterbury's Long Bar were other than counting-house clerks masquerading as top-hatted swells and discreetly-painted street-girls in cloaks and bonnets. Holmes and I sat with our plates of oysters and glasses of hock at a round marble-topped table while we watched the passing show. Hour followed hour and I was suddenly aware that we were sitting through the stage performance for a second—or perhaps third—time. Then he stood up, smiled, and to my dismay accosted one of the girls. To me, she looked indistinguishable from the rest.

‘Happy birthday, my dear!' he said jovially. ‘Happy birthday, Lucy Rose!'

‘Beg your pardon?' She swung round upon him, not best pleased, but Holmes continued to smile in sheer amiability.

‘We are a week early but our wishes are no less sincere! Happy birthday, Lucy Rose! Or perhaps I should say, happy birthday, Louisa Harvey!'

This brought me to my feet, which was just as well for the girl swung round and then was about to run. Finding me in her way she stopped and Holmes took her by the arm.

‘Have no fear, Louisa! We mean you no harm.'

‘What the devil is this?' I said to him with some little spirit, ‘You swore she was in Lambeth Cemetery!'

‘And so she was, were you not, my dear? Standing with the idlers by the railings, watching in dread as poor Mattie Clover's body was brought up.'

The keenness of his eye, in picking out a face from a crowd, was legendary but my astonishment must have been all too visible.

‘Watson, Watson!' he said softly. ‘How much the world owes to Somerset House and its register of deaths, which we have all been searching! But how much more to its register of births, where I alone have spent my leisure hours. 4 April is the young lady's birthday, if you recall. Now, there is no Lucy Rose born on that day, if the records are to be believed. But seventeen years ago, Louisa Jane Harvey uttered the first notes of a career which has brought her to where we find her now.'