The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VI

by David Marcum

  Back in the hall, Lestrade walked up to Prescott, who was sitting in a posture of abject surrender, resignation, and shock, and demanded a cigarette of him. The latter directed the official to his overcoat, which was hanging from the cloak-rack. It was the work of a moment for Lestrade to advance to the rack and fish out the packet of cigarettes from Prescott’s overcoat pocket.

  “Woodbine!” said Lestrade, in a voice of triumph. “The man, either before climbing up or after climbing down the tree, has stood under it for a smoke to calm his nerves. This is conclusive.”

  “May I?” enquired Holmes, taking the packet of cigarettes from Lestrade and looking quickly within. “I agree,” he said in a voice of awful quietness: “It is conclusive.”

  “Well, well, Mr. Holmes,” said Lestrade, with some of his earlier cockiness returning. “Surely we do not need an expert to confirm that a packet of Wills Wild Woodbine cigarettes must indeed be expected to harbor Wills Wild Woodbine cigarettes in it!”

  “I would not, Lestrade,” replied Holmes, “presume to thus insult your - ah - intelligence, but I must protest that I was merely satisfying myself as to the truth of the proposition that one needs to take away four, not three, from ten in order to arrive at six. But here is Miss Addleton who I trust will not, despite the severe shocks she has sustained today, object to clarifying one or two issues for us. In particular, Miss Addleton, could you enlighten us on your late sister’s testamentary disposition, if any?”

  The lady responded with a sad gravity. “My sister has not, so far as I am aware, executed any formal will. As it happens, I was with her in her room after Sylvester left, at around five o’clock last evening, and I spent the time chatting with her till seven o’clock, as I do virtually every evening. In the course of that time, Violet walked over to her desk and typed out what she called her last will and testament. She left it unsigned, for she wanted me to first have it vetted by our solicitor before completing the formalities. You must know that according to the will of our late father, my sister and I have an equal share in the estate, consisting of this house and investments in stocks, bonds, and savings in the bank. In the will that Violet typed out last evening, she has left all of her share of the estate to finance the various small charities that St. Bartholomew’s Church has been struggling to support. I was naturally surprised by this seemingly sudden decision on her part, but despite our intimacy, we respect each other’s privacy, and I forbore to question her on it. Also, I presumed that she would have discussed the matter with Sylvester, for the will bears the stamp of the generosity of both spirits.”

  “I must confess I know nothing of any of this,” intoned Sylvester Prescott, in the tone of a man who must go through the motions of protestation though he does not expect to be believed.

  “May I trouble you, Miss Addleton,” asked Holmes, “to share with us a copy of your sister’s will?”

  “Yes, of course. I will fetch it from the safe in my room, where I put it away last evening, pending its examination by our solicitor later this week.” Miss Addleton walked over to her room, and returned shortly with a sheet of type-written paper. While Lestrade looked over it cursorily and confirmed that its contents were as Miss Addleton had summarized for us, Holmes’s subjected it to minute scrutiny under his lens for some minutes. “Interesting,” he murmured.

  “Interesting enough,” echoed Lestrade, “for it to constitute the last nail on the lid of Mr. Sylvester Prescott’s coffin. For, in addition to the circumstantial suggestiveness of the missing stopper and Prescott’s athleticism, and the material evidence of the fibre from his overcoat and the stub of the Woodbine cigarette, we now have a handle on his motive for this dastardly crime. As Miss Addleton surmises, it is very likely, despite his denial, that last evening Prescott was made aware of her intentions regarding the will by the older Miss Addleton. It would have been well-nigh impossible for him to wriggle out of his commitment of marriage, not least if he wished to avoid the expense and scandal and exposure that would surely follow from a possibility he could not afford to take the risk of discounting: Litigation arising from breach of promise. He needed to strike while the will was still unsigned. It would be an unredeemed burden to him to be married to a sick and dying woman, without the compensation afforded by his earlier expectation that her wealth, upon her dying intestate after her marriage, would pass into his hands.

  “Sylvester Prescott, I now arrest you, in the name of the law, for the willful murder of Violet Addleton.” With the magnificent fair play of the British law, Lestrade added: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will - ”

  “One moment, Lestrade,” interposed Holmes. “I beg you not to act in haste. I would urge you to consider again the possible merit of your earlier hypothesis of suicide.”

  “What is this, man?” enquired Lestrade angrily. “You play games with me. You disputed my initial conclusion of suicide and convinced me of an alternative theory of murder, which you now dispute, only to return to my original inference of suicide.”

  “I play no games, Lestrade,” replied Holmes’s sternly. “And I will have you remember that I did not ever dispute your conclusion of suicide. Let me refresh your memory. The two queries you addressed to me were: One, did I challenge your inference of suicide, and Two, was there any reason for not seeing suicide as the only possible rational explanation of the victim’s death? My explicit response to your first query was in the negative: I made quite clear that I did not necessarily challenge your inference. As for the second query, all I did was to provide you with a rational explanation of the facts of the case which did not depend on the suicide theory, and which accounted for the complication of the missing stopper, for which you seemed to have no room for explanation in your story of suicide. I suggested that my explanation constituted a rational account of the facts as they presented themselves; I did not suggest it was a true account. That conclusion is one that you have arrived at by yourself, and I beg that you will not lay it at my door.”

  “What, then, Mr. Holmes? If it is neither this nor that, what is it that are we dealing with?”

  “What we are dealing with, Lestrade, is a diabolical scheme of abetted suicide of a woman, and the subtle implication of an innocent man in murder. Let me now sketch for you a completely fresh version of the matter, one that should account for all the known and salient facts of the case. The explanation I shall furnish this time, I maintain, is not only rational, but also true.

  “At the heart of the matter is a woman frustrated in love. I hold no particular brief for the notion that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ For one thing, it strikes me as being gratuitously offensive to women that the proposition should be seen as being applicable only to that sex. For another, and though Watson will, with justice, doubt my qualification for pronouncing sensibly on affairs of the heart, it is my belief that for any person in love - man or woman - there is one thing worse than having one’s love scorned by the object of one’s affections, and that is having one’s love ignored. Mr. Prescott, not only were you unaware of Miss Mabel Addleton’s love for you, but, to her utter and irreconcilable dismay, you fell in love with her sister, Violet.

  “The sense of being wronged by the months of torment she had suffered finally succumbed to Mabel’s implacable pride when she was confronted with the imminent prospect of the marriage of her sister to the man that she, Mabel, not only loved, but believed she had a prior claim upon. I have no doubt that the time from five to seven of last evening was spent by Mabel subtly but compellingly convincing her sister that it would be an act of gross selfishness on her part to marry Sylvester Prescott, and that the only honourable course of action open to her would be for her to take her own life. No doubt, the younger sister also supplied the older one with the means of executing the deed: It would have been a simple enough matter for Mabel to procure a phial of laudanum from over the counter at any chemist’s store an
d pass it on to Violet.

  “In the course of the time spent with her sister, it would, again, have been a simple matter for Mabel, with her back to her sister, to open one of the windows, plant those two threads of fibre on the branch of the elm. The threads likely extracted earlier in the day from Prescott’s overcoat on the cloak-rack while he was with the senior Miss Addleton, and then shut and latch the window. Equally simple would have been - unbeknownst to her sister while the latter was lying on the cot - for Mabel to use the type-writer, on some pretext, to type out that bogus will which we have just seen. By the time she left the room last evening, Mabel knew that she had worked sufficiently on her sensitive sister’s mind to ensure that she would take her own life that night with an overdose of laudanum.

  “Earlier today, when we broke into the room of death, you will recall that Miss Mabel was the first to rush to her sister’s body on the cot. It would have been a moment’s work for her, while she was engaged in embracing her sister, to abstract unnoticed that stopper and hide it in some inner recess of her dress, to be disposed of later and at leisure downstairs. The combination of having Sherlock Holmes on the case and causing the stopper to disappear was a linked master-stroke. You will not be offended, Lestrade, when I say that it would have called for a - shall we say - subtler mind than the Metropolitan Force has been wont to display to see the significance of the missing stopper. (Indeed, you did not even register the fact that the stopper had disappeared.)

  “I suppose I should perceive it as a compliment to my logical faculties that I was so entirely relied upon to note and mark the importance of the stopper’s absence at the scene of death. Not that it would have mattered if I had missed it. Mabel Addleton would still have succeeded in abetting a suicide virtually tantamount to murder, in preventing a marriage she could not abide, and in escaping any trace of suspicion of her own role in the matter. If the suicide theory had gained conclusive currency, no doubt we would have heard some account from Mabel of Violet having confided last evening in her to the effect that she had, upon serious reflection, decided to change her mind about the marriage with a view to sparing her fiancé the hardship of having her as a millstone round the neck. This sign of a conflicted mind would strengthen the plausibility of the thesis of suicide.

  “An added windfall would have been for the object of our schemer’s affections to hang for a crime he did not commit. I was to be the means to that end. For it was safe to predict that once the intrusion of an outside force was entertained, any trained reasoner would be bound to look for evidence of the intruder’s presence on the elm tree outside. Such evidence was helpfully planted by the schemer, and came into my possession - because I looked for it. Nay, because I was led to look for it.

  “I would also draw your attention to those other little bits of apparently innocuous information or speculation that were conveyed to us, and would conduce to the theory of murder by Prescott. There was that artfully concealed reference to his athleticism, and, later, the apparent tribute to his generosity of spirit which camouflaged the suggestion that he would have known of his fiancée’s unsigned will. The truth is that Sylvester Prescott was sound asleep in his home last night, whereas the falsehood hinted at is that he was attending to a murder here at the time. Resort has been had to each of the legal offences of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi.

  “The downfall of the criminal mind is often to be found in the vice of excess, the inability to resist the temptation of gilding the lily. I refer, in the present instance, to that cigarette stub under the elm tree. A smoked cigarette will always betray signs, at least under microscopic investigation, of its having been held in the smoker’s mouth. The stub in question displayed no such evidence when I examined it under the magnifying glass. Clearly, it had been burned and then stubbed - never smoked. It is not hard to imagine what actually happened. The cigarette was burned, stubbed, and tossed under the tree by Miss Mabel Addleton after she excused herself from her sister’s bedroom upstairs and came down.

  “All she had to do was extract one of the cigarettes which she knew from past experience could be found in an overcoat pocket of Prescott’s, conveniently accessible on the cloak-rack; To burn and stub it, and to toss it, while we were upstairs, from the pathway perpendicular to the one by which we later approached the elm tree. Watson will testify to the fact that Prescott had, in the cab on our way from Baker Street to Hampstead, opened a fresh packet and distributed three cigarettes from it among the smokers in the cab - Watson, himself, and me. No other cigarette from that packet could possibly have left it. Prescott’s packet of tens should have had exactly seven cigarettes left in it when I examined it a few minutes ago, but I found only six - whence my observation addressed to Lestrade on an elementary problem in arithmetic of subtracting one number from another.

  “I trust you will concede that my case is complete.”

  Miss Mabel Addleton’s composure was admirable.

  “All of this is doubtless very fascinating, Mr. Holmes,” she said, in a tone of caustic sarcasm, “but I have failed to note a single piece of evidence attesting to any suppression of a truth or suggestion of a falsehood of which I may have been guilty.”

  “Indeed, Miss Addleton? Why then,” said Sherlock Holmes’s in a voice of chilling sternness, “Why then did you lie about your sister having typed that testamentary document last evening when she did nothing of the sort?”

  “That, Mr. Holmes, is merely an assertion, for which you have adduced no proof.”

  “Very well, then, Miss Addleton. Here is the proof. Your sister did not type this will because she could not have done so, for she employed her left hand in all activities involving dexterity (as Lestrade here will certify to my having deduced from her handwriting,) whereas the will is a document typed by a right-hander. ‘Handedness’, for a trained analyst, can be inferred from a specimen of typing just as easily as from a specimen of writing. You lied to us when you said you saw your sister typing the will. There is, I am afraid, no way out of that.”

  There was dead silence for a while in the room following Holmes’s statement, even as all the colour drained away from Mabel Addleton’s face.

  Lestrade cleared his throat. “You must come with us to the station, Miss.”

  “Mabel - ” said Sylvester Prescott in a voice hoarse with strain, when Miss Addleton cut him short.

  “Not a word, Sylvester,” she said. “Very well, Inspector Lestrade. May I be given a moment to fetch my shawl and put together a few of my effects before we leave for the police station?”

  Lestrade inclined his head, as Mabel Addleton withdrew into her room. When she had not returned five minutes later, the Scotland Yard man wished to know if he had not waited long enough for the lady.

  “You can wait forever, Lestrade,” observed Sherlock Holmes’s in a low voice. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you found the mortal remains of Miss Mabel Addleton in her room, with an empty phial of laudanum by her side, and answering, even now, to a Higher Tribunal than any she would have answered to upon this earth.”

  Such, indeed, proved to be the case.

  “It is best so, Mr. Prescott,” said Holmes’s gently, as he patted the broken man on the shoulder and led him slowly to his brougham. “You have the training and mental make-up of a philosopher. I wish with all my heart that you will find the resources of mind and spirit to eventually recover from this terrible tragedy, and emerge a stronger, wiser man from it.”

  As we settled in our own hansom cab to return to Baker Street after taking leave of Lestrade, Holmes enquired: “Is there any other little point that might require clearing up?”

  “Well, Holmes,” I said, “as a medical man, I was surprised to hear you say that right- or left-handedness could be inferred from typing just as well as from writing. I should doubt that that is possible.”

  “And you should be right to be sceptical, Watson,” said Holmes’
s with a slight smile. “I was playing a weak hand, without an iota of anything like concrete evidence, as opposed to the plausibility of a certain line of circumstantial reasoning, on my side. That remark about the scientific validity of deducing dexterity from a specimen of type-writing was bluff, sheer bluff, Watson. It succeeded, though, in trapping the lady in a virtual confession.”

  For the rest of the journey, Sherlock Holmes was is in a gravely silent and thoughtful mood. Just as we turned into Baker Street, he said, “As we leave behind that house of sorrow in Hampstead, I trust you will not deem it unduly cynical on my part if I were to suggest that the day’s tragedy confirms for us the truth of this observation: ‘I’ve known a hundred kinds of Love: All of them made the loved one rue.’ It is a sentiment of precocious wisdom, due to a woman who died long before her time. I refer to the writer and poet Emily Brontë.”

  The Tetanus Epidemic

  by Carl L. Heifetz

  The solitude of the sitting room was interrupted by a loud, sharp baritone voice. It called my name from the bottom of the steps leading up to the door of the quarters I shared with Sherlock Holmes. It was very unusual, as most visitors asked for my colleague. However, Mr. Mycroft Holmes clearly said, “Dr. Watson, I need your services immediately.”

  The senior Mr. Holmes’s ponderous steps caused the stairs to squeak due to his immense weight. However, he seemed to be in better physical shape that I supposed, since he reached the doorway in a brief time.

  I quickly got to my feet, reluctantly laying The British Medical Journal on the table next to my arm chair. Mycroft strode into the center of the room. After shaking hands with my unexpected visitor, I invited him to sit across from me, and offered him a cigar and a whisky-and-soda.