A Study In Scarlet Women

by Sherry Thomas

  “Well, he was a true gentleman. He was always courteous to everyone. And considerate. We used to do all our own washing here, in the house. When Mr. Sackville saw how hard and rough the work was, he told me to have the laundry sent out—he’d pay for it.” Her voice cracked a little. “Now that was real kindness, that.”

  Her anecdote left an impression on Sergeant MacDonald. As they walked away from the house, after saying good-bye to Mrs. Cornish, he said, “A shame this Mr. Sackville died. He seemed a real gentleman.”

  “It would appear so. But if experience has taught me anything, those who knew the deceased are unlikely to speak ill of him so soon after his passing—especially not to a pair of police officers.”

  From Curry House, they were to head back to the village to call on Dr. Harris. But Treadles exclaimed softly, turned around, and rang the doorbell again.

  Mrs. Cornish opened the door. “Inspector, did you forget something?”

  “I did indeed, Mrs. Cornish. I forgot to ask where the Birtles live.” He and MacDonald could easily pay Becky Birtle a visit while they were in the area.

  “They live in Yorkshire.”

  “Yorkshire?” Young girls in service tended to find work nearby. Or they departed for the big cities via connections with family and friends. For Becky Birtle to travel from Yorkshire to a barely on-the-map village four hundred miles away was unusual, to say the least.

  “I worked in Yorkshire years ago and knew the Birtles. When Becky was old enough to work, they asked me if I had a place for her—they said they’d feel less worried if someone they trusted kept an eye on her.”

  “I see. Did you inform Becky that the police would like a word with her?”

  “I wrote her parents as soon as I heard. But I don’t expect to hear back from them before tomorrow.”

  “I see.”

  Treadles collected the Birtles’ address from Mrs. Cornish and made a mental note to find someone from the district’s constabulary to speak with Becky.

  Sherlock Holmes had better be uncannily brilliant in his conjectures about these deaths—or at least about Mr. Sackville’s. Or he and Treadles would both end up looking very silly.

  Very silly indeed.

  At Dr. Harris’s home, Treadles and MacDonald were pleasantly surprised to find not only Dr. Harris waiting for them, but also Dr. Birch, the physician who had attended Mr. Sackville on the latter’s deathbed.

  “Dr. Birch, Miss Birch, Mrs. Harris, and I play whist together quite often,” said Dr. Harris. “So we thought we’d make a party of it today, and save you gentlemen a trip to Barton Cross.”

  “Your thoughtfulness is most appreciated,” said Treadles.

  “I assume you will wish to speak to Dr. Birch first, since his intelligence is more germane to your case?”

  “That will suit us very well.”

  They were shown into Dr. Harris’s study. Dr. Birch was a lively man with a gleam in his eye. He responded to Treadles’s questions with quick, to-the-point answers. Yes, his doorbell had rung shortly after seven that day and he had to dash off a quick note to the proprietor of the village inn, where there was an elderly traveler waiting for him, in pain and in need of morphine. And since his dogcart was already hitched, he drove, following Tommy Dunn to Curry House.

  “It really was too bad that young Dunn couldn’t tell me anything relevant about Mr. Sackville, except that he couldn’t be roused and appeared to be in a bad way. Or I’d have been better prepared.”

  “You’d have brought strychnine?”

  “Most likely, if I’d suspected an overdose of chloral. And I would have if I’d been told about Mr. Sackville’s body temperature—that is a telltale symptom of chloral poisoning.”

  “Isn’t strychnine a deadly poison in itself?”

  “One of the deadliest. Administered to a healthy person, strychnine would cause fatal muscular convulsions. But that property makes it an effective antidote to chloral: It stimulates the heart’s function and stops the slide of decreasing body temperature.”

  “Now, doctor, do you believe the chloral that killed Mr. Sackville to have been self-administered?”

  “Dr. Harris and I spoke about it and we saw absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t have been so,” Dr. Birch answered confidently. “The chloral that Dr. Harris prescribed for Mr. Sackville was in the form of grains. It is very difficult to force a man to ingest anything he doesn’t wish to—and there were no signs of violence anywhere. The only explanation that makes sense is that Mr. Sackville miscounted the number of grains and paid for his mistake.”

  The bespectacled Dr. Harris was more deliberate in his demeanor than Dr. Birch. But he confirmed without hesitation that Mr. Sackville’s gastric episodes had been ongoing, nothing unusual. And that he had indeed prescribed the chloral, for Mr. Sackville’s insomnia.

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Sackville in a professional capacity?” asked Treadles.

  “Six weeks ago. He had a persistent cough and was worried that it might turn into pneumonia.”

  “It didn’t, I presume?”

  “No. Once the weather turned warmer, the cough cleared.”

  “He didn’t consult you about his gastric attacks?”

  “He mentioned them from time to time, but he was resigned. He’d been suffering from them since he was a young man and had accepted that they would continue to plague him for as long as he lived.”

  “I see,” said Inspector Treadles.

  He was about to ask another question when Dr. Harris said, “His new cook showed far greater interest in his digestion than he did. She came and conferred with me once, on her half day no less. Interesting woman. She wanted to cure Mr. Sackville of his ‘tummy aches’ by modifying his diet to exclude those items that could be proven to irritate his innards.

  “Her plan was to start with one item known to be fine for him to eat and then add in other items one by one, with at least forty-eight hours between each addition, so that any single item that set him off could be pinpointed and eliminated right away—very sound methodology, that. But Mr. Sackville scoffed at her suggestion. He might suffer abdominal turmoil once in a while but he was still a man who like a good supper and a proper pudding with every meal. Having so limited a diet for any length of time was unthinkable for him.”

  “So Mrs. Meek attempted to enlist the weight of your professional opinion in persuading Mr. Sackville to change his mind?”

  “Precisely. I commended her for her dedication and initiative—I wish my own cook thought half so much of my digestion. But if I’ve learned anything in my years of dealing with patients it’s that it is nigh impossible to change a grown man’s habits. I told her I’d put in a word with Mr. Sackville the next time I saw him—but I never did see him again.”

  “A shame,” said Treadles. “Let me now ask you the same question I posed to Dr. Birch. Do you believe that Mr. Sackville died because he took the wrong number of chloral grains?”

  Dr. Harris took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief. “Let me tell you a secret, Inspector: Dr. Birch is a terrible player at whist—he would be hopeless if it weren’t for his sister, who is formidable on a green baize table. But as a physician, he is thoroughly observant and exceptionally competent and would have made a successful name for himself in the city if he didn’t greatly dislike city life. So if he tells me that there was no sign the chloral got into Mr. Sackville by force or trickery, then I will gladly take his word for it.”

  Treadles sighed inwardly. With every interview, Holmes’s first foray onto the public stage looked more likely to be a stumble rather than a triumph. So much for the hope that his genius would carry Treadles to widespread acclaim, thereby bolstering Alice’s social standing.

  “On the other hand,” Dr. Harris went on, “as much as the most obvious explanation seems the most logical and likely, I am unea
sy about accepting the theory of miscounted grains of chloral.”

  Treadles sat up straighter. “Oh?”

  “Years ago, while I was still a student at medical school, a good friend of mine committed suicide by ingesting chloral. His death left a lasting impression.” The physician donned his glasses again and looked meaningfully at Treadles. “In my own practice I never dispense vials with more than eight grains of chloral inside.”

  Treadles’s fingertips tingled: He remembered the vial in Mr. Sackville’s nightstand, still with two grains of chloral left. “I take it eight grains do not amount to enough to kill a man.”

  “Precisely. Mr. Sackville’s insomnia was sporadic rather than frequent. He sent for a vial a few times a year. If one assumed that he sent for more when he’d run out, then there wouldn’t have been enough chloral at Curry House to harm him.”

  Sergeant MacDonald, who had been largely bent over his notebook, glanced at Treadles, surprise and excitement in his eyes. Treadles felt that same flutter in his stomach. “Is it reasonable to assume that he sent for more only when he ran out?”

  “Reasonable enough, since I could dispatch a vial back within minutes.”

  “But in the end there was more than enough chloral at Curry House,” Treadles pointed out, doing his best to keep his voice even.

  Dr. Harris set his hands at the edge of the desk and leaned forward. “Which to me suggested two possibilities. One, he had been purposefully accumulating chloral. Keep in mind though, the last time he had a vial from me was shortly after I saw him six weeks ago. Is it not odd, if he planned to kill himself, to wait that six weeks? Not to mention he never struck me as a man who had the least desire to die before his time.”

  Treadles exchanged another look with Sergeant MacDonald. “And the other possibility?”

  Dr. Harris exhaled and clasped his hands together. “Let’s just say that I for one was not sorry that Mr. Sherlock Holmes of London took the trouble to write to the coroner.”

  Treadles’s breaths came faster. He had to remind himself that he mustn’t get carried away—not yet. “You made no mention of your unease at the inquest, doctor.”

  “I was never asked any question except whether I’d prescribed chloral for Mr. Sackville.”

  “Given your misgivings, Dr. Harris, do you believe that it is a coincidence that Mr. Sackville happened to die on a day you were away?”

  “That did give me pause.” Dr. Harris looked down for a moment at his hands. “I haven’t told anyone this, but at the inquest, had the letter from Mr. Holmes not been read, I would have said something about my suspicions, even though I was most reluctant to do so.”

  “Of course. I understand that reluctance—it’s a small village and the glare of the public would immediately focus on those closest to Mr. Sackville.”

  Dr. Harris nodded. “I was both baffled and relieved when Mr. Holmes connected Mr. Sackville’s passing with deaths in the wider world—since that would exonerate members of his household.”

  “Would someone who isn’t from around here know that you’d be gone that day?”

  Dr. Harris blinked. “I can’t be sure.”

  “But people from the village would know?”

  “They know that I travel to London once a month to meet with old friends from medical school, have dinner together, and talk about interesting cases we’ve come across—they more than I. Afterward, it’s usually late enough that I stay overnight and start back early in the morning.”

  “Does it always happen on a fixed day?”

  “Usually it falls in the middle of the month and I put a note on the church bulletin to that effect. Dr. Birch looks after my patients in my absence, as I do in his. But this isn’t the sort of place where one expects to hear frantic knocking on the door in the middle of the night. In fact, the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Mr. Sackville’s death were the first time Dr. Birch had cause to bestir himself for one of my patients when I was away in London.”

  They thanked him and walk out of his house.

  “I see you’ve something in mind, Inspector,” said MacDonald, after taking one look at Treadles.

  “I hope you still have ink in your pen, sergeant,” replied Treadles. “We are going back to Curry House.”

  Mrs. Cornish’s brows shot up as she opened the door to Inspector Treadles and Sergeant MacDonald one more time.

  “Inspector. Sergeant. Did you forget something after all?”

  “No, indeed, Mrs. Cornish. More questions came to mind after we spoke to Dr. Birch and Dr. Harris. Would it be all right for me to take a few minutes of Tommy Dunn’s time—and a few minutes of yours?”

  “Certainly. Tommy is in the garden, I believe. Should I have him come in?”

  “No, we’ll be happy to speak to him in his natural habitat.”

  Mrs. Cornish pointed the policemen in the direction of the walled kitchen garden. Tommy Dunn, digging in a corner of the garden, was surprised but not alarmed to see them. “Something I can do for you, Inspector?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dunn. Do you remember what exactly Mrs. Cornish said to you, when she came to ask you to fetch Dr. Harris?”

  Tommy Dunn thought for a moment. “She said, ‘Quick. Get on that horse and go get Dr. Harris. Mr. Sackville is badly off. We can’t wake him up and I don’t think there’s much time.’”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Did she mention Mr. Sackville’s temperature?”

  “No. She came running in her dressing gown and she was out of breath. So I knew something must have happened. I’d ought remembered if she told me he was really cold. I wouldn’t forget.”

  “Did it not occur to you that Dr. Harris wouldn’t be home? From what I understand, he posts the date he’d be gone to London on the church noticeboard.”

  “Can’t say I read the church noticeboard on the regular. It’s all about on which days the altar flower ladies meet and whatnot.”

  They thanked him, returned to the house, and followed Mrs. Cornish to her office. As they passed before the kitchen, Mrs. Meek stuck her head out, a worried expression on her face. “Everything all right?”

  “Inspector Treadles has a few more questions, that’s all,” answered Mrs. Cornish, if a bit tightly.

  As she offered Treadles and MacDonald seats and tea, she didn’t seem so much nervous as rattled—perhaps it had not occurred to her that the matter was serious enough to merit a return visit.

  “Mrs. Cornish,” said Treadles, “would you mind recalling for us exactly what you told Tommy Dunn, when you tasked him to fetch Dr. Harris?”

  The housekeeper frowned, whether in surprise or concentration Treadles could not tell. “I can’t promise I remember what I said word for word, but it would be along the lines of ‘Hurry! Jump on that horse and go get Dr. Harris. Mr. Sackville is in a bad way. We can’t wake him up, he’s going cold, and there’s no time to lose.’”

  “You are certain you mentioned his temperature?”

  “Yes.”

  Treadles felt a glance from MacDonald. “Dr. Birch specifically laments that he wasn’t told of it and that was the reason he was ill prepared to deal with an overdose of chloral.”

  Mrs. Cornish’s frown deepened. “It must have slipped Tommy Dunn’s mind then.”

  “You think so?”

  “He’s young and not used to handling emergencies. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mind went blank after he’d heard that Mr. Sackville was in a bad way—he thought the world of Mr. Sackville.”

  “I see. Now did it not occur to you that Dr. Harris wouldn’t be home? I believe the day and time of his absence is posted on the church bulletin.”

  Mrs. Cornish sighed. “That’s one thing that’s nagged at me ever since that day. I did realize it, but not until Tommy Dunn was at least five minutes gone. The thing was, Dr. Harris
didn’t go at his usual time of the month. We’re used to him being gone around the middle of the month. But this time he was gone at least a week ahead of his regular day. And it was only after Tommy Dunn was too far to hear me shout that I remembered reading about the change on the noticeboard the day before, on my way to the railway station.”

  “When was the change announced, did you know?”

  “Must have been after Sunday, or the vicar would have said something from the pulpit.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Cornish.” Treadles rose and inclined his head. “This time we are truly going, I promise.”

  “So one of them is lying?” asked Sergeant MacDonald, as they made their way back to the village of Stanwell Moot.

  They rode on bicycles that they had brought from London. The bicycles eliminated the need for the local constabulary to provide transportation for Scotland Yard, but more to the point, cycling happened to be an activity Treadles greatly enjoyed, and which was much more difficult to indulge in London. Here in the country the breeze was fragrant, the sun pleasantly warm, and there were no mobs of pedestrians or speeding carriages to contend with.

  There were, however, occasional mud puddles to avoid and Treadles guided his bicycle around one before answering MacDonald. “I don’t think one of them has to be lying. It’s quite possible, as Mrs. Cornish said, for a young man unaccustomed to emergencies to not hear everything he’s been told. My mother used to say that if she sent me to the shop to get five things, she’d be lucky if I returned with three.”

  MacDonald reached out a hand and let his fingertips brush the bright green leaves of the hedge. “So after a whole afternoon of interviews, we’ve Dr. Harris’s suspicions and nothing else.”

  “But that’s a very fine set of suspicions.”

  MacDonald was unconvinced. “Is that enough to get the coroner’s jury to return a verdict other than accidental overdose?”

  It was patently not enough.

  “Well, we still have a few days left for that.” They were near the village. The hedgerows dropped away and a wide vista opened up, green fields and shining sea, with the village’s church tower rising up to an unblemished sky. “And if all else fails, we’ve got ourselves a holiday on the Devon Coast.”