by Seamas Duffy
‘She is a bit of a busybody by all accounts, perpetually peering out from behind the chintz curtains and aspidistra,’ said Wills.
‘But, if time of death was midnight or later, how many neighbours would be up and about at that time? I see you are not convinced, Wills.’
‘I am keeping an open mind and noting everything you say,’ the Inspector replied noncommittally. ‘You do not subscribe to the theory that those wounds were made by teeth?’ he asked.
‘Frankly, I do not.’
‘But the surgeon’s report… .’
‘The surgeon’s note merely confirmed the spacing of the wounds; the idea of teeth marks had been put into his head,’ replied Holmes with a sidelong glance at the Inspector.
‘But what sort of weapon could produce such wounds?’ Wills asked.
‘A bradawl perhaps or something of that nature,’ I suggested.
‘Too narrow a point,’ argued the Inspector. ‘And there were two identical wounds, remember, side by side. It is impossible to imagine such a weapon having been used, for it would require a fair aim to pick out the jugular vein, and then to strike again a second time.’
‘Let us leave that question aside for the moment, and consider the motive,’ said Holmes. ‘It is pretty obvious, is it not, that Miss Farnham was worth more to Staunton alive than dead? Therefore, if he committed the crime, it could not have been for material gain, and I doubt whether he is a cold-blooded, calculating murderer. All the same, I want to have a parting shot at him.’
On our return to the morning room, Holmes indicated that he wished to speak to each of the residents privately. The Ellis girl, however, had since been put to bed with a sleeping draught. Without any preamble he asked the others, one by one, what Miss Farnham had been wearing when they had last seen her alive. Staunton replied airily that he took no notice of such worldly details, but the two women gave the precisely same answer calmly and unhesitatingly: a light grey woollen skirt, a plain white cotton blouse, and dark grey overcoat. With that, we left the strange household of the Aion Erospiti.
‘If we could discover what happened to those clothes Miss Farnham had been wearing, it would be a great help. However, I suspect they have been destroyed, probably burnt,’ said Holmes.
‘We could apply for a warrant to search the house.’
‘No, it should be a waste of time. Now for the neighbour, Mr Danvers Crane,’ said Holmes.
Sergeant Channon was making his way briskly up the path through the churchyard, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Some further important information has come to light,’ he said. ‘I have just come back from speaking to Mrs Kenny. She has quite come round now, though she is still very upset, but she was able to tell me something that may change your view of the case. Apparently there was some dalliance between Miss Farnham and one of the neighbours, this Danvers Crane chap, the schoolmaster – the one who was at the house this morning. It turns out that he did not go to school today as a result of the shock of the news.’
‘Most interesting,’ said Holmes.
‘He made no mention of this to me when I questioned him earlier,’ replied Channon. ‘He had courted Miss Farnham quite ardently for some time by all accounts, and Mrs Kenny thought that she seemed to be flattered by his attentions at first. But she broke off their relationship not long after she joined Staunton’s Order. First of all, he has practically no alibi, for he maintains that he was alone on Sunday evening at home, reading by the fireside, and that he never left the house. Secondly, he plainly lied to me earlier when I asked him how well he knew the dead woman.’
‘He has the motive then – jealousy!’ said Wills. ‘There is no doubt that he seemed very cut up about what had happened, but whether it was grief or remorse… .’
‘Then, you at least have come round to a theory of natural causes?’ asked Holmes.
‘Who is to say that his mind had not become unhinged by his separation from Miss Farnham, and that he turned to the darker powers?’ the Inspector replied.
‘Don’t go sharpening your wooden stake just yet, Inspector,’ laughed Holmes. ‘It is obvious that if Crane had designs upon Miss Farnham’s little fortune, he would also have a more material motive, and that is a rather powerful combination. My suspicions are aroused, too, by the fact that he was first on the scene. Does he live next door?’ asked Holmes.
‘No, two doors away.’
‘Then his hearing must be of the first order, if he heard Mrs Kenny screaming.’
‘He says he was in the garden at the time, and heard the commotion through the open bedroom window.’
‘How very natural, don’t you think, to wander around the garden first thing on a foggy, chilly November morning? Let us speak to him without further delay.’
Danvers was a respectable-looking fellow of middle age. Bearded and thin, almost pinched-looking, nervous and slightly ingratiating, but slow to take offence. He certainly bore the dazed and stricken aspect of someone lately bereft as he led us wearily into the house. He was adamant that after he had come back from bell-ringing practice on Sunday evening at nine o’clock, he did not afterwards leave the house.
‘It seems you did not trouble yourself to mention to Sergeant Channon about your former engagement to Miss Farnham,’ said Wills.
‘I did not think it was of any importance since it ended so long ago.’
‘When did you and Miss Farnham break off your engagement?’ asked Holmes.
‘We did not break it off; Ruth broke it off under the influence of that degenerate, depraved satyr,’ he said, concluding with a torrent of unprintable insults.
‘You did not answer my question.’
‘In June,’ he said, adding with pathetic bitterness, ‘the nineteenth, to be exact.’
‘And you did not meet her again?’
‘No.’
‘Dear me, that’s very strange, because you see, Miss Farnham distinctly mentions in her diary that—’
‘Her diary?’ A rictus of alarm crossed the features of Mr Danvers Crane. Holmes pressed home his advantage.
‘Amongst her personal effects was a diary in which she records meeting with a certain person on these dates,’ said Holmes, passing Crane the same slip of paper he had shown Staunton.
The man turned pale. ‘Yes, that was me,’ he stammered. ‘I realize now that I ought to have told the Sergeant. It was very foolish of me not to. We met a few times in secret, late at night so that the neighbours would not know. I had hoped that she might reconsider. I tried to make her see sense. I flattered myself to think that I had begun to have some influence over her and tried to reason with her. I pointed out to her how many other young women Staunton had ensnared. This swine is unfitted to use the word Christian; it is a hideous blasphemy. I couldn’t bear to think of Ruth as one of his heifers!’
‘And so you put her beyond his reach?’ asked Holmes.
‘No! I could never have harmed a hair of her head.’
‘You have lied in your answers to the police, you have no alibi for the time of the murder, and you have at least two motives for committing it.’
‘Are you suggesting that I did it? How can you possibly imagine that any human hand was behind this? You must know what happened.’
‘I know what was placed in the house for Inspector Wills to find when he arrived.’
‘What do you mean?’ he retorted.
‘That whoever committed this murder would have had all the time in the world to dispose of the real evidence and arrange this theatrical farce. Was it by chance alone that you happened to be in the garden at the time that Mrs Kenny arrived?’
‘No, I was tending the hives. I am a keen apiarist—’
‘Tending the hives in November?’
‘Yes, there is still work to be done.’
‘Such as?’
‘These are not native bees; they require some feeding and the queen is still laying worker brood. And the hives still have to be hefted throughout the winter.’
; ‘And you chose first thing in the morning to do that?’
‘It is too dark by the time I arrive home from school.’
‘You went to meet her on the evening she was murdered, did you not?’
‘No.’
‘Come, Sir, it is obvious that a meal was prepared for two people – Ruth Farnham was going to share it with you, was she not?’
‘Yes. But I did not go. I swear I didn’t. We were to have dinner together. Ruth wanted us to carry on as friends, but I just couldn’t face that. I knew that it was too late for her to change her mind.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Because Miss Collins, who has the dressmaker’s shop, told me on Saturday evening that she delivered the wedding gown to Miss Farnham. I knew at that point it would be futile to try to dissuade her. I never kept the appointment; I swear this is true!’
Wills had been following this exchange with alacrity and signalled to Holmes to step outside. The Inspector made it clear that he was for arresting Danvers Crane on the spot.
‘No, I should not do that, Inspector, for at present you only have evidence of the most circumstantial kind. Any half-decent counsel would tear it to pieces. You may have the opportunity and the motive on your side, but you lack the corroborating evidence, that one piece of unshakable, incontrovertible, damning proof which will have the jury nodding in agreement and will send your killer to the scaffold. Could you demonstrate how this man committed the crime? No, you cannot. What was the weapon and where is it now? How did he dispose of Miss Farnham’s bloody clothes and so on?’
‘But the man has told us a pack of lies – he continued to meet the dead woman and we now find he was invited to her house on the evening of her death. That’s misleading the police for one thing.’
‘Indeed, but it is not necessarily material to a charge of murder. I exhort you, Inspector, to have some patience. I cannot say yet if Crane is the murderer, but a vague idea is beginning to form in my mind. If you must do something, then charge him with giving you false information and leave it at that. I should much prefer it if you implied that you accepted his story, subject to your further inquiries. But I shall have to leave you to make up your own mind upon it.’
‘Does that mean you are returning to Baker Street already?’ asked Wills despondently.
‘Not immediately. I have a desire to stretch my legs. Doctor Watson will tell you that I like to soak myself in the atmosphere of the place; I find it helps to be in empathy with the surroundings of the events, especially ones as dramatic as these; and then again, one never knows what one might discover.’
At these words, the Inspector glanced at my friend strangely. I had caught that look on the faces of many people from time to time. It seemed to say: ‘these very clever people all have a touch of madness.’
‘The doctor and I shall take a train back to town, so if you would meet me at, say, five o’clock, I expect to have some advice for you by then. Shall we say … yes, why not that cheery-looking little café at the tramway terminus?’
We left the Inspector looking rather glum, and then we rambled for a couple of hours through the pleasant neighbourhood. We began by walking along the rippling Salmon’s Brook, which separated the churchyard from the cricket ground, followed it down to the riverbank by Cook’s Ferry, and returning by a green lane adjacent to the railway. I said barely a word to Holmes during this time and made no attempt to interrupt his thoughts, for I sensed that he was turning over the facts of the case in his mind. Finally, we went into the café and obtained no little diversion by reading the press reports of the affair, for by now the news-vendors were shouting the headlines of the ‘Edmonton Horror’ from the street corners.
Some accounts of the case were exaggerated beyond belief. The Middlesex Chronicle led with ‘Churchyard Vampire Strikes’ whilst the North London Advertiser called it ‘The Bloodsucker Murder’; the Eastern Argus, which had produced a special feature for the evening edition, referred to ‘grave robbery and blood sacrifices’. The Pall Mall Gazette mentioned the victim’s connection with the Divine Order of the Purple Rose – or the Erospites as they called them – and lampooned Staunton as the ‘Brimsdown Messiah’. The Standard made a wide sweep which included mention of the Rosicrucians, messianic cults, millenarian sects, and the prophecies of Joanna Southcott – although the writer managed to comically mix up the words ‘gravely’ and ‘gravelly’ in one passage, which somewhat spoilt the solemn effect. The Evening Post was generally more sceptical and reported the incident only as a ‘mysterious death’ and avoided mention of the empty crypt and coffin. The Globe article deplored the credulity of the populace, blamed the public hysteria which attended the case on the influence of the shilling shockers, and excoriated the author of a recent sensational work on the subject. The Telegraph fulminated against what it saw as one of the drawbacks of mass literacy.
‘It seems to have become the habit,’ I remarked, ‘to ascribe a goodly proportion of crime to the influence of cheap literature.’
‘Indeed,’ said Holmes, laughing and tossing the papers aside with a smile of contempt, ‘it is a view which is surprisingly prominent amongst the magistracy. If only it were so simple, Watson. Rather, it has always struck me that the attraction of such literature to the lower classes lies precisely in its contrast with their own dreary lives, not in its similarity to them.’
Wills and Channon arrived promptly at the hour, the former bearing an air of frustration and impatience.
‘You won’t stay for tea, then?’ Holmes asked.
‘No, thank you. I really just wanted to ask if you had discovered anything.’
‘Yes, I discovered that the brook was far too shallow.’
‘For what?’
‘Come along, surely it is not difficult to conjecture.’
‘You said you might have some advice for me,’ Wills persevered.
‘Try to find out if either Staunton or Crane has lit a fire outdoors since Sunday night. You know the sort of thing, burning twigs or bits of garden rubbish. I think it unlikely, but let me know immediately by telegram if you find out that either of them has.’
‘You’re thinking of the dead woman’s missing clothes, I suppose, that they may have been burnt.’
‘As it happens, I was not. They could be very easily disposed of. In fact, something hasn’t turned up which I had expected to turn up.’
‘Is there anything in particular to which you would direct my attention?’ said Wills as he turned to go.
‘Yes, the empty coffin – that is what holds, or rather held – the key to this entire affair.’
‘The empty coffin! Are you serious?’
‘Perfectly so.’
‘But you have ridiculed my theory that anything had come out of the coffin!’
‘The coffin, Inspector,’ replied Holmes mysteriously, ‘and we have until Friday, then all may be lost.’
‘But why Friday?’
‘Think of the date, Inspector.’
‘You mean the pattern of the dates in Miss Farnham’s diary?’
‘I have given you a number of suggestions: you really must use your own faculties of reasoning,’ was all he would say to the bemused Inspector, who eventually departed with a look of frustration. We wandered down to the low-level station where our four-carriage train arrived punctually. Holmes had deliberately chosen the quieter line by which to return, in order that we could be undisturbed, though it was a longer journey and meant a change at Shoreditch. We found an empty carriage in the deserted train easily enough, then the level crossing gates swung across, the signal cleared, and the whistle screamed. As we chugged on slowly, I looked out upon the cemetery with its mysterious headstones and exotic inscriptions, and remarked to my friend that our case must surely be unique in the history of crime.
‘Hardly that, Watson, hardly that,’ he replied to my surprise. ‘On the contrary, during our perambulations I was guided towards my preliminary conclusions largely by recalling the precedents
.’
‘Precedents! You mean this has happened before?’
‘Of course, you are well aware of my conviction that there is nothing new. A similar case occurred in Forfarshire some years ago, and farther back in Quimper in the days of the Second Empire.’
‘You told Wills that the coffin held the key,’ I said in an attempt to draw him out. ‘What did you mean?’
‘Only that he should pay attention to apparently trifling details – and I noticed that young Channon’s ears pricked up when I mentioned that. Something came out of that coffin, Watson, and has not returned. If my view of the case is correct, it shall, nay, must return.’
‘Something came out … you cannot possibly believe this!’
‘Can’t I?’ he smiled mischievously.
‘Really, Holmes, you are a most trying individual at times.’
‘If you would apply your own powers of analysis – powers which you habitually underestimate – then you would no doubt reach the same conclusion as I. Tell me, Watson, there have been recent medical advances in what might be called the artificial reconstruction of the human form, have there not?’
‘Why, yes,’ I replied, somewhat taken aback at the direction which his thoughts now seemed to be taking. ‘There have been a number of articles in the Lancet on successful applications of such techniques. Developments in both rhinoplasty and otoplasty have been the subject of some recent remarkable expositions based on the seminal work by Herr Dieffenbach. It is not a subject that I thought would have held your interest.’
‘You would be surprised, then.’
‘Some theorists have gone so far as to postulate the novel idea that given the requisite evolution and refinement of present practice, an entire human being could be manufactured from—’