The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VI

by David Marcum

  Without a further word, Holmes strode over to the table on the far side of the room and began setting up his laboratory. I watched him curiously and, I must admit, a little disbelievingly. Yet there was something about him which made me know he was speaking the truth. His movements were languid, with none of the tension and high energy which came when his mind was occupied with a problem.

  I departed for the post office, my head heavy with wistful thoughts, the morning fog dissipating around me. My friend’s reaction to the letter concerned me greatly. Rarely had Holmes exhibited such feelings as fear. Or maybe, I considered, it was remorse. As had been the case with Mr. John Openshaw, and would be with Mr. Hilton Cubitt of Ridling Thorpe Manor, Brew was a client whom my friend had failed. It also concerned me that a night dedicated to the case had apparently yielded no results. Could it be that his abilities were beginning to desert him? Perhaps he had found all answers to the case so elusive that he had used the letter as an excuse to abandon his investigation.

  The days which followed gave me no reason to believe otherwise. Holmes occupied himself with his scientific pursuits, beginning a monograph on the polyphonic motets of Lassus, and I was kept busy with my practice. The newspapers quickly forgot about the perplexing death of Erasmus Brew and turned their attention to other sensational matters.

  The next time I visited Holmes at his invitation, two Saturdays hence, he was without another case. I was so concerned that I decided to confront him on the issue.

  “Holmes,” I said, as he was bent over his chemistry set, “failure is not necessarily a negative occurrence. For instance, Newton failed at school. One mustn’t be disheartened by such a thing.”

  My friend continued applying his instruments in silence and, for a moment, I did not think he would answer. “What are you wittering about, Watson?” he asked mildly.

  I sighed. “I’m merely pointing out that your inability to solve the Erasmus Brew case is not - ”

  He looked up at once, his eyes aflame. I realised I had made a faux pas. It is not permissible to refer to an embarrassment, after all. Standing straight, a thin smile curved into place. “You believe I failed,” he said. “My dear Watson, you do gravitate towards the most ridiculous conclusions.” I looked on confusedly as he fetched his hat and stick from the stand. “We are due to be somewhere.”

  I was as baffled by his behaviour as I was by the sealed room which had played such a devilish trick on Erasmus Brew. You may countenance my astonishment as I realised it was to this very house that Holmes now led me. With a timorous chill, I clambered out of the dogcart and watched wordlessly as he knocked on the door. It was soon opened by Inspector Bradstreet, tall and triumphant, and clearly eager to see my friend.

  Holmes led us both into the study, where I stood nervously and eyed the old and withered armchair, stippled with dust and loosened threads, and the rickety table which Brew had pushed against the door for his own pitiful protection. Holmes called for the housekeeper, and the poor woman looked shocked when she saw him, as though it were a distressing reminder of her employer’s death.

  “Mrs. Haggerty, thank you for permitting us,” he said graciously. “Inspector, arrest her.”

  Bradstreet stared widely at my friend as though he had cried out a curse. “What do you mean?” he said. “This dear lady is - ”

  “A cold-blooded killer, yes,” said Holmes.

  The old lady was staring at Holmes herself but it was through a mask of cold and clear calm.

  “Mrs. Haggerty, you told us your husband, Levi, had grown ill with scurvy, and that you had wanted him to return to his birthplace of Altnaharra, Sutherland, to die, but that he would not leave his employer. I am afraid that was a lie. I had an associate of mine, Langdale Pike, go there and search the parish records and determine whether a man named Levi Haggerty had been born in the hamlet between sixty and seventy years ago. According to my correspondence, there was no man by the name of Haggerty born there during that time. There was, however, a man named Levi. Levi Cotter.”

  “Cotter!” I exclaimed. “That was the name of Brew’s man who had saved him all those years ago.”

  “I believe that man and this lady’s husband were one and the same,” said Holmes. “I researched Levi Cotter. He left Scotland in his twenties to find work in London, had married Beryl Haggerty, and lived with her in Bethnal Green.”

  I turned and looked at the old lady with some shock. Her brows were knitted, her eyelids heavy, and she was staring dreamily at the floor.

  “He worked as Brew’s man for many years,” continued Holmes, “even as he became ill. It is my belief that Mr. Cotter had asked Brew if he could retire and receive a small amount of money which would allow him to return to his birthplace and see out his final weeks. He even reminded Brew of the time he saved his life and would consider it a debt discharged. But Brew was an arrogant, heartless, miser of a man whose parsimony can still be witnessed in this very room. He refused, not wanting to let a servant go, and certainly not wanting to pay for services he would not receive.

  “After Mr. Cotter died, his wife,” he gestured to the old lady lamely, “was not only bereaved, but hungry for revenge.” He stared at her squarely and her head lifted, the dull eyes meeting his. “You worked up some references and offered yourself as his replacement. Someone to cook and clean and fetch him tea. You had never met Brew, so he did not know you, though you gave only your maiden name to avoid any connection to your husband. And, as the months turned into years, you dreamed of killing Erasmus Brew. You just did not know how to do it. Ideally, you wanted him to know he would soon die. To look at his life and fear his death. Just as your husband had.

  “The letter was the only way to do this. The apology was a conceit; an excuse to let Brew know that his death was near. Like all murderers, you needed an alibi. To do this, it was necessary that the murder was somehow committed after you had left the house. But how could this be achieved?”

  I looked at Holmes curiously, keen to know whether he had truly uncovered the truth. His eyes shone with the excitement of all grand revelations, his stance erect and surging with energy.

  “If one takes everything but the body out of the equation - the guards outside, the lock, the barricades - then the murder must have happened in precisely the same way. All the lock tells us is that no one could have entered. The only logical explanation is that Brew did it himself.”

  “But you said it wasn’t suicide,” I pointed out.

  Holmes nodded calmly. “That’s correct,” he said. “Brew presumably wished to stay in the room for a long time and did what anyone else would do upon entering a room. He sat down.” With a bony finger, he indicated the threadbare armchair in the corner. “In this chair, in fact, and sliced his back on the sharp knife placed there.” He jerked the chair around so the back was exposed. Like the rest of it, the knitting was withered and weak. He poked a finger through a hole and it appeared at the other side, where he wiggled it playfully. “The blade was slid through,” he explained, “balanced on the threads. The pressure of his body against it caused it to move upwards slightly, free of those threads, and when he stood up the knife came with him.”

  I shook my head in wonderment. “Holmes, that’s remarkable,” I said.

  My friend lifted a hand to silence me. “That is not all,” he added. “Panicking, Brew tried to reach the door and get help, but he couldn’t make it through the barricades that he himself had placed there. Defeated, he died slumped in the middle of the room.”

  I registered this bleak information in silence. “How perfectly terrible,” I said hollowly. “I presume this lady also sent you that letter. The one apparently penned by the assassin, apologising for making you the next target.”

  “Mrs. Cotter was worried I would solve the case and wanted to scare me from it,” he said. “I needed her to believe she had done so. I rather feared she wo
uld try and distract me by killing another to give more credibility to her fictitious assassin.”

  I frowned. “Why not just have her arrested?”

  “I did not yet have the proof,” he said with a shrug. “I only have it now because I instructed Spriggs and his friends to visit Brew’s solicitor and offer their help to clear out his belongings. I knew from what I had seen in here that Brew was not only a miser, but an inveterate hoarder who never turned out any of his possessions. Not even letters, which he would pile up in a small room upstairs. They sifted through them and discovered one from Beryl Cotter in which she begged Brew on her husband’s behalf. Spriggs wired me about it earlier this afternoon, and I arranged for the inspector to meet us here.”

  Inspector Bradstreet chuckled. “If you ever want to join the Yard, Mr. Holmes, there will be a place for you.”

  Holmes looked appalled. “I am sure that will never happen.”

  I suppressed a wry smile, but Bradstreet did not seem to have perceived the slight. “You are better than you give yourself credit for,” he said waggishly.

  He called in his sergeant, who took Mrs. Cotter née Haggerty tenderly by the wrist.

  “Treat her kindly, sergeant,” said Holmes. “This lady may suffer for her crime, but she has already suffered something far worse.”

  I left the house a lot less nervously than I had entered it. The shadows and walls of that windowless room had seemed so menacing before, but it had no hold now. We clambered back into the dogcart, and as the horse began to trot us away, I reflected with amusement on how my friend had worried me so. I also considered my own feelings about joining him on a case once more. It is true that it had seemed strange initially, particularly as I had become used to such a quiet domestic existence. But, I now decided, there was always room in my life for two things which so often meant the very same.

  Glorious adventure and Sherlock Holmes.

  The Adventure of the Traveling Corpse

  By Nick Cardillo

  “...and Mathews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross...”

  - Sherlock Holmes, “The Empty House”

  One evening in the early spring of 1890, Sherlock Holmes and I decided to walk back from the opera, finding the warm weather inviting for the time of year. Holmes was in a cheerful mood - much to my relief - and we had taken to spending time together at the end of each week. Having moved out of our Baker Street digs, I made it a conscious effort to see more of my old friend and - with my wife visiting friends in the country - I reasoned that tonight would be a perfect opportunity to take my friend up on his offer of visiting the opera and taking in a show.

  As we made our way towards Baker Street, I could hear Holmes hum the music under his breath almost note-for-note. His uncanny ability for mental cogitation was unparalleled as compared to any other man I have known. Rounding the corner into Baker Street, I was about to make mention of the fact when he stopped dead in his tracks and pointed towards our rooms with his stick.

  “The light is on,” he said.

  “Is that so curious?” I asked. “Perhaps it’s Mrs. Hudson tidying up, or Billy is going about, doing a few errands?”

  “Possible,” Holmes replied, “but unlikely. Our landlady is a creature of habit, and with it being nearly nine now, I am sure that she is recessed in the kitchenette as she always is this time of night. As for Billy, the young boy’s off in the country visiting an aunt. He left early this morning. No, my dear Watson, the light emanating from our sitting room can mean only one thing.”

  “A client?” I asked.

  “A client! Come - let us not keep him waiting for much longer!”

  Practically sprinting the rest of the way, Holmes opened the front door and stepped into the foyer with the zeal of a truly determined man. Preparing to ascend the stairs to the sitting room, his attention and mine were arrested by Mrs. Hudson, who came bustling out of the kitchen.

  “There’s a woman upstairs to see you, Mr. Holmes,” she said.

  “Yes, Mrs. Hudson,” Holmes said. “I could see the light from the street. Thank you for showing her up.”

  “She seemed most insistent,” our landlady replied.

  A grin crossed Holmes’s stern face. “Excellent. Come along, Doctor. I value your assistance greatly.”

  Following Holmes up the stairs, I entered behind him as he flung open the door to our rooms with flair. Removing his top hat and gloves, he strode into the room as I closed the door behind him. Our client was a rotund, red-faced woman in her early fifties. She was well dressed, but a look of absolute disbelief and horror had crossed her face.

  “Good evening, madam,” said Holmes, “I am Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend and colleague, Dr. John Watson.”

  The woman had almost jumped from her seat upon our entering, and Holmes had to ease her back into her seat on the sofa.

  “You are obviously distressed, madam,” he said. “I shall endeavor to help you.”

  Holmes eased himself into his chair. “I see that you have just come in on the 8:12 from Birmingham.”

  “Yes,” the woman sputtered. “How on earth did you know that?”

  Holmes waved his hand dismissively. “I observed the upper part of a train ticket protruding from your glove. I also find that it is quite invaluable to have an in-depth knowledge of the London train schedules, and judging by your presence here and your flushed appearance, I should judge that whatever has brought you to my doorstep happened very recently - perhaps just after your arrival in the city. Therefore, your train just arrived. The 8:12 seemed like the most likely option then.”

  “Well, that’s splendid,” she said. “Absolutely splendid.”

  “Quite commonplace, madam,” Holmes replied. “Now then, please lay all of the facts of your case before me.”

  He eased back in his seat and placed his fingertips together before his face.

  “Well,” the woman began, “I suppose I ought to begin by letting you know just who I am. My name is Louisa McGinty and - just as you said - I live in Birmingham. I have only been to London a hand-full of times in my life, Mr. Holmes, but if what happened to be me this evening is anything to go by, then I cannot say that I shall be returning anytime soon.

  “Well, I have two children. They have gone off and made their way in the world, both of them moving to London. I lived then with my husband until his death last year and, finding myself alone, I was invited down here for a week with them. I am not fond of uprooting myself, but the prospect of seeing them both again was something I could not pass up and decided upon it. So I bought my ticket and made arrangements to stay with my son in Piccadilly Circus. I boarded the train and arrived precisely on time at Euston Station.

  “By some misfortune my son - and my daughter for that matter - was indisposed this evening, and he was unable to collect me at the station. I was therefore on my own in this strange city and found myself unable to catch a cab from the station. So, not knowing how far of a walk it was, I decided that I’d start off on foot and hopefully run across someone who might be able to tell me how to get to Piccadilly Circus, or perhaps even better, to find a cabbie willing to drive me there.

  “I had gone a few blocks and had entered a residential neighborhood. I fear that the street name has escaped me completely, but it was a fashionable part of town. Despite the nicety of the vicinity, I couldn’t help but feel a little unnerved by it all. I was alone in this city with little idea of where to go. And then, as if all of my prayers were answered, I saw a hansom at the end of the street. I started towards it and... well, Mr. Holmes, that’s when it happened.”

  “When what happened Mrs. McGinty?”

  “From one of the houses, I saw two men exit. They appeared to be carrying a large object but, as I drew closer, I could tell distinctly that it was a body! I stopped dead in my tra
cks for fear that the duo would see me, but they seemed too occupied in their present endeavor. Together, they hoisted the body into the hansom, and while one man jumped inside as well, the other took up the reins, cracked the whip, and the cab disappeared into the night.

  “Well, reasonably enough, I was at my wit’s end, Mr. Holmes. With little notion what to do, I hurried back the way I had come. I needed help at once and, fearing that the police may laugh at my story - I am after all a dotty old woman from the country not used to life in the city - I remembered hearing of your name, Mr. Holmes. I managed to find a cabbie and, asking for 221 Baker Street, I arrived on your doorstep.”

  The woman drew in a deep breath as she concluded her story.

  “Remarkable,” I said. “It’s utterly fantastic.”

  “That is how I feared that Scotland Yard would react,” Mrs. McGinty replied. “Though I am sure that the police take all cases of murder seriously, I feared the possible ridicule which might come with this outlandish tale of mine.”

  “There is nothing outlandish about your story, Mrs. McGinty,” Holmes replied. “In fact, I am certain that your case ought to be handled with the utmost sincerity. I am more than happy to take on your case, but I require one or two things from you.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Holmes.”

  “You say that you had no idea what street or neighborhood in which you found yourself when you witnessed the men disposing of the corpse,” Holmes said, “but do you believe that you’d would be able to retrace your steps from Euston Station?”

  “I really couldn’t say, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. McGinty replied. “I could certainly try, but it was dark, and I have never been good with direction.”

  “Do you think that you would recognize the street, should you find yourself in it again?”

  “That question I do believe I can answer in the affirmative.”

  Holmes grinned. “Excellent. One last question, though I fear it is a long shot: Did you happen to see the number of the hansom into which the two men climbed?”