Sherlock's Sisters

by Nick Rennison

  ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  ‘Your book is no longer in the library!’ I said crossly.

  Madelyn whirled with a smile.

  ‘Good! And now if you will be so obliging as to tell Peters to ask Miss Jansen to meet me in the rear drawing-room, with any of the friends of the family she desires to be present, I think we can clear up our little puzzle.’

  7

  It was a curious group that the graceful Swiss clock in the bronze drawing-room of the Marsh house stared down upon as it ticked its way past the half hour after eight. With a grave, rather insistent bow, Miss Mack had seated the other occupants of the room as they answered her summons. She was the only one of us that remained standing.

  Before her were Sheriff Peddicord, Homer Truxton, Dr Dench, and Muriel Jansen. Madelyn’s eyes swept our faces for a moment in silence, and then she crossed the room and closed the door.

  ‘I have called you here,’ she began, ‘to explain the mystery of Mr Marsh’s death.’ Again her glance swept our faces. ‘In many respects it has provided us with a peculiar, almost a unique problem.

  ‘We find a man, in apparently normal health, dead. The observer argues at once foul play; and yet on his body is no hint of wound or bruise. The medical examination discovers no trace of poison. The autopsy shows no evidence of crime. Apparently we have eliminated all forms of unnatural death.

  ‘I have called you here because the finding of the autopsy is incorrect, or rather incomplete. We are not confronted by natural death – but by a crime. And I may say at the outset that I am not the only person to know this fact. My knowledge is shared by one other in this room.’

  Sheriff Peddicord rose to his feet and rather ostentatiously stepped to the door and stood with his back against it. Madelyn smiled faintly at the movement.

  ‘I scarcely think there will be an effort at escape, Sheriff,’ she said quietly.

  Muriel Jansen was crumpled back into her chair, staring. Dr Dench was studying Miss Mack with the professional frown he might have directed at an abnormality on the operating table. It was Truxton who spoke first in the fashion of the impulsive boy.

  ‘If we are not dealing with natural death, how on earth then was Mr Marsh killed?’

  Madelyn whisked aside a light covering from a stand at her side, and raised to view Raleigh’s red sandstone pipe. For a moment she balanced it musingly.

  ‘The three-hundred-year-old death tool of Orlando Julio,’ she explained. ‘It was this that killed Wendell Marsh!’

  She pressed the bowl of the pipe into the palm of her hand. ‘As an instrument of death, it is almost beyond detection. We examined the ashes, and found nothing but harmless tobacco. The organs of the victim showed no trace of foul play.’

  She tapped the long stem gravely.

  ‘But the examination of the organs did not include the brain. And it is through the brain that the pipe strikes, killing first the mind in a nightmare of insanity, and then the body. That accounts for the wreckage that we found – the evidences apparently of two men engaged in a desperate struggle. The wreckage was the work of only one man – a maniac in the moment before death. The drug with which we are dealing drives its victim into an insane fury before his body succumbs. I believe such cases are fairly common in India.’

  ‘Then Mr Marsh was poisoned after all?’ cried Truxton. He was the only one of Miss Mack’s auditors to speak.

  ‘No, not poisoned! You will understand as I proceed. The pipe, you will find, contains apparently but one bowl and one channel, and at a superficial glance is filled only with tobacco. In reality, there is a lower chamber concealed beneath the upper bowl, to which extends a second channel. This secret chamber is charged with a certain compound of Indian hemp and dhatura leaves, one of the most powerful brain stimulants known to science – and one of the most dangerous if used above a certain strength. From the lower chamber it would leave no trace, of course, in the ashes above.

  ‘Between the two compartments of the pipe is a slight connecting opening, sufficient to allow the hemp beneath to be ignited gradually by the burning tobacco. When a small quantity of the compound is used, the smoker is stimulated as by no other drug, not even opium. Increase the quantity above the danger point, and mark the result. The victim is not poisoned in the strict sense of the word, but literally smothered to death by the fumes!’

  In Miss Mack’s voice was the throb of the student before the Creation of the master.

  ‘I should like this pipe, Miss Jansen, if you ever care to dispose of it!’

  The girl was still staring woodenly.

  ‘It was Orlando Julio, the medieval poisoner,’ she gasped, ‘that Uncle described –’

  ‘In his seventeenth chapter of The World’s Great Cynics,’ finished Madelyn. ‘I have taken the liberty of reading the chapter in manuscript form. Julio, however, was not the discoverer of the drug. He merely introduced it to the English public. As a matter of fact, it is one of the oldest stimulants of the East. It is easy to assume that it was not as a stimulant that Julio used it, but as a baffling instrument of murder. The mechanism of the pipe was his own invention, of course. The smoker, if not in the secret, would be completely oblivious to his danger. He might even use the pipe in perfect safety – until its lower chamber was loaded!’

  Sheriff Peddicord, against the door, mopped his face with his red handkerchief, like a man in a daze. Dr Dench was still studying Miss Mack with his intent frown. Madelyn swerved her angle abruptly.

  ‘Last night was not the first time the hemp-chamber of Wendell Marsh’s pipe had been charged. We can trace the effect of the drug on his brain for several months – hallucinations, imaginative enemies seeking his life, incipient insanity. That explains his astonishing letter to me. Wendell Marsh was not a man of nine lives, but only one. The perils which he described were merely fantastic figments of the drug. For instance, the episode of the poisoned cherry pie. There was no pie at all served at the table yesterday.

  ‘The letter to me was not a forgery. Miss Jansen, although you were sincere enough when you pronounced it such. The complete change in your uncle’s handwriting was only another effect of the drug. It was this fact, in the end, which led me to the truth. You did not perceive that the dates of your notes and mine were six months apart! I knew that some terrific mental shock must have occurred in the meantime.

  ‘And then, too, the ravages of a drug-crazed victim were at once suggested by the curtains of the library. They were not simply torn, but fairly chewed to pieces!’

  A sudden tension fell over the room. We shifted nervously, rather avoiding one another’s eyes. Madelyn laid the pipe back on the stand. She was quite evidently in no hurry to continue. It was Truxton again who put the leading question of the moment.

  ‘If Mr Marsh was killed as you describe, Miss Mack, who killed him?’

  Madelyn glanced across at Dr Dench.

  ‘Will you kindly let me have the red leather book that you took from Mr Marsh’s desk this evening, Doctor?’

  The physician met her glance steadily.

  ‘You think it – necessary?’

  ‘I am afraid I must insist.’

  For an instant Dr Dench hesitated. Then, with a shrug, he reached into a coat pocket and extended the red-bound volume, for which Miss Mack had dispatched me on the fruitless errand to the library. As Madelyn opened it we saw that it was not a printed volume, but filled with several hundred pages of close, cramped writing. Dr Dench’s gaze swerved to Muriel Jansen as Miss Mack spoke.

  ‘I have here the diary of Wendell Marsh, which shows us that he had been in the habit of seeking the stimulant of Indian hemp, or “hasheesh” for some time, possibly as a result of his retired, sedentary life and his close application to his books. Until his purchase of the Bainford relics, however, he had taken the stimulant in the comparatively harmless form of powdered leaves or “bhan
g”, as it is termed in the Orient. His acquisition of Julio’s drug-pipe, and an accidental discovery of its mechanism, led him to adopt the compound of hemp and dhatura, prepared for smoking – in India called “charas”. No less an authority than Captain EN Windsor, bacteriologist of the Burmese government, states that it is directly responsible for a large percentage of the lunacy of the Orient. Wendell Marsh, however, did not realise his danger, nor how much stronger the latter compound is than the form of the drug to which he had been accustomed.

  ‘Dr Dench endeavoured desperately to warn him of his peril, and free him from the bondage of the habit as the diary records, but the victim was too thoroughly enslaved. In fact, the situation had reached a point just before the final climax when it could no longer be concealed. The truth was already being suspected by the older servants. I assume this was why you feared my investigations in the case, Miss Jansen.’

  Muriel Jansen was staring at Madelyn in a sort of dumb appeal.

  ‘I can understand and admire Dr Dench’s efforts to conceal the fact from the public – first, in his supervision of the inquest, which might have stumbled on the truth, and then in his removal of the betraying diary, which I left purposely exposed in the hope that it might inspire such an action. Had it not been removed, I might have suspected another explanation of the case – in spite of certain evidence to the contrary!’

  Dr Dench’s face had gone white.

  ‘God! Miss Mack, do you mean that after all it was not suicide?’

  ‘It was not suicide,’ said Madelyn quietly. She stepped across toward the opposite door.

  ‘When I stated that my knowledge that we are not dealing with natural death was shared by another person in this room, I might have added that it was shared by still a third person – not in the room!’

  With a sudden movement she threw open the door before her. From the adjoining ante-room lurched the figure of Peters, the butler. He stared at us with a face grey with terror, and then crumpled to his knees. Madelyn drew away sharply as he tried to catch her skirts.

  ‘You may arrest the murderer of Wendell Marsh, Sheriff!’ she said gravely. ‘And I think perhaps you had better take him outside.’

  She faced our bewildered stares as the drawing-room door closed behind Mr Peddicord and his prisoner. From her stand she again took Raleigh’s sandstone pipe, and with it two sheets of paper, smudged with the prints of a human thumb and fingers.

  ‘It was the pipe in the end which led me to the truth, not only as to the method but the identity of the assassin,’ she explained. ‘The hand, which placed the fatal charge in the concealed chamber, left its imprint on the surface of the bowl. The fingers, grimed with the dust of the drug, made an impression which I would have at once detected had I not been so occupied with what I might find inside that I forgot what I might find outside! I am very much afraid that I permitted myself the great blunder of the modern detective – lack of thoroughness.

  ‘Comparison with the fingerprints of the various agents in the case, of course, made the next step a mere detail of mathematical comparison. To make my identity sure, I found that my suspect possessed not only the opportunity and the knowledge for the crime, but the motive.

  ‘In his younger days Peters was a chemist’s apprentice; a fact which he utilised in his master’s behalf in obtaining the drugs which had become so necessary a part of Mr Marsh’s life. Had Wendell Marsh appeared in person for so continuous a supply, his identity would soon have made the fact a matter of common gossip. He relied on his servant for his agent, a detail which he mentions several times in his diary, promising Peters a generous bequest in his will as a reward. I fancy that it was the dream of this bequest, which would have meant a small fortune to a man in his position, that set the butler’s brain to work on his treacherous plan of murder.’

  * * * * * *

  Miss Mack’s dull gold hair covered the shoulders of her white peignoir in a great, thick braid. She was propped in a nest of pillows, with her favourite romance, The Three Musketeers, open at the historic siege of Porthos in the wine cellar. We had elected to spend the night at the Marsh house.

  Madelyn glanced up as I appeared in the doorway of our room.

  ‘Allow me to present a problem to your analytical skill, Miss Mack,’ I said humbly. ‘Which man does your knowledge of feminine psychology say Muriel Jansen will reward – the gravely protecting physician, or the boyishly admiring Truxton?’

  ‘If she were thirty,’ retorted Madelyn, yawning, ‘she would be wise enough to choose Dr Dench. But, as she is only twenty-two, it will be Truxton.’

  With a sigh, she turned again to the swashbuckling exploits of the gallant Porthos.

  VIOLET STRANGE

  Created by Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)

  First published in 1878, The Leavenworth Case was one of the earliest of all American detective novels. Its author was Anna Katharine Green, a Brooklyn-born writer who turned to fiction after failing to make much of a mark as a poet. Her story of a rich man’s murder and its investigation by a detective from the New York Metropolitan Police Force named Ebenezer Gryce proved popular and significant in the later development of crime fiction. (Agatha Christie was later to cite it as an influence on her when she was beginning her career.) In the course of a long life, Green went on to write more than thirty other mystery novels including such titles as A Strange Disappearance, Behind Closed Doors and The Step on the Stair. A number of these featured Ebenezer Gryce, who thus became one of the first series characters in detective fiction, and Green also created a prototype Miss Marple in Amelia Butterworth, a nosy spinster with an eye for crime. In 1915, in her late sixties, Green published a volume of short stories, The Golden Slipper and Other Stories, which introduced another character to her readers. Violet Strange is an attractive young woman, a debutante who is at home amongst the upper echelons of New York society. She also leads a secret life as a professional sleuth, investigating crimes of all kinds to provide herself with an income of which her father knows nothing. The Violet Strange stories may not be as pioneering as the longer fiction Green wrote decades earlier but they are all well-written and entertaining reads.

  AN INTANGIBLE CLUE

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘Not studied the case which for the last few days has provided the papers with such conspicuous headlines?’

  ‘I do not read the papers. I have not looked at one in a whole week.’

  ‘Miss Strange, your social engagements must be of a very pressing nature just now?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘And your business sense in abeyance?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You would not ask if you had read the papers.’

  To this she made no reply save by a slight toss of her pretty head. If her employer felt nettled by this show of indifference, he did not betray it save by the rapidity of his tones as, without further preamble and possibly without real excuse, he proceeded to lay before her the case in question. ‘Last Tuesday night a woman was murdered in this city; an old woman, in a lonely house where she has lived for years. Perhaps you remember this house? It occupies a not inconspicuous site in Seventeenth Street – a house of the olden time?’

  ‘No, I do not remember.’

  The extreme carelessness of Miss Strange’s tone would have been fatal to her socially; but then, she would never have used it socially. This they both knew, yet he smiled with his customary indulgence.

  ‘Then I will describe it.’

  She looked around for a chair and sank into it. He did the same.

  ‘It has a fanlight over the front door.’

  She remained impassive.

  ‘And two old-fashioned strips of parti-coloured glass on either side.’

  ‘And a knocker between its panels which may bring money some day.’

  ‘Oh, you do remember! I thought you would, Miss Strange.’


  ‘Yes. Fanlights over doors are becoming very rare in New York.’

  ‘Very well, then. That house was the scene of Tuesday’s tragedy. The woman who has lived there in solitude for years was foully murdered. I have since heard that the people who knew her best have always anticipated some such violent end for her. She never allowed maid or friend to remain with her after five in the afternoon; yet she had money – some think a great deal – always in the house.’

  ‘I am interested in the house, not in her.’

  ‘Yet, she was a character – as full of whims and crotchets as a nut is of meat. Her death was horrible. She fought – her dress was torn from her body in rags. This happened, you see, before her hour for retiring; some think as early as six in the afternoon. And’ – here he made a rapid gesture to catch Violet’s wandering attention – ‘in spite of this struggle; in spite of the fact that she was dragged from room to room – that her person was searched – and everything in the house searched – that drawers were pulled out of bureaus – doors wrenched off of cupboards – china smashed upon the floor – whole shelves denuded and not a spot from cellar to garret left unransacked, no direct clue to the perpetrator has been found – nothing that gives any idea of his personality save his display of strength and great cupidity. The police have even deigned to consult me – an unusual procedure – but I could find nothing, either. Evidences of fiendish purpose abound – of relentless search – but no clue to the man himself. It’s uncommon, isn’t it, not to have any clue?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Miss Strange hated murders and it was with difficulty she could be brought to discuss them. But she was not going to be let off; not this time.

  ‘You see,’ he proceeded insistently, ‘it’s not only mortifying to the police but disappointing to the press, especially as few reporters believe in the No-thoroughfare business. They say, and we cannot but agree with them, that no such struggle could take place and no such repeated goings to and fro through the house without some vestige being left by which to connect this crime with its daring perpetrator.’