by Margalit Fox
How did the murderer get in if Lambie is correct in thinking that she shut the doors? I cannot get away from the conclusion that he had duplicate keys. In that case all becomes comprehensible, for the old lady—whose faculties were quite normal—would hear the lock go and would not be alarmed, thinking that Lambie had returned before her time….That is intelligible. But if he had not the keys, consider the difficulties….If the old lady had opened the flat door her body would have been found in the passage. Therefore, the police were driven to the hypothesis that the old lady heard the ring, opened the lower stair door from above (as can be done in all Scotch flats), opened the flat door, never looked over the lighted stair to see who was coming up, but returned to her chair and her magazine, leaving the door open, and a free entrance to the murderer. This is possible, but is it not in the highest degree improbable? Miss Gilchrist was nervous of robbery and would not neglect obvious precautions….That a nervous old lady should throw open both doors, never look to see who her visitor was, and return to her dining-room is very hard to believe.
The absurdity of the police argument, Conan Doyle pointed out, became clear when the crime was envisioned from the killer’s point of view—a technique that Holmes often used to good effect:
He has planned out his proceedings. It is notorious that it is the easiest thing in the world to open the lower door of a Scotch flat. The blade of any penknife will do that. If he was to depend upon ringing to get at his victim, it was evidently better for him to ring at the upper door, as otherwise the chance would seem very great that she would look down, see him coming up the stair, and shut herself in. On the other hand, if he were at the upper door and she answered it, he had only to push his way in….And yet the police theory is that…he rang from below. It is not what he would do….If one weighs all these reasons, one can hardly fail, I think, to come to the conclusion that the murderer had keys.
To support the hypothesis that the murderer was no stranger, Conan Doyle conjured his behavior upon entering the flat: A stranger, he reasoned, would assume that Miss Gilchrist kept her jewels in her own bedroom. Here, too, Conan Doyle was able to induce narrative from negative action, for the intruder, he pointed out, clearly knew not to bother with Miss Gilchrist’s room: “Presuming that the assassin was indeed after the jewels, it is very instructive to note his knowledge of their location,” he wrote. “Why did he go straight into the spare bedroom where the jewels were actually kept?…Any knowledge gathered from outside (by a watcher in the back-yard for example) would go to the length of ascertaining which was the old lady’s room. One would expect a robber who had gained his information thus, to go straight to that chamber. But this man did not do so. He went straight to the unlikely room….Is not this remarkably suggestive? Does it not pre-suppose a previous acquaintance with the inside of the flat and the ways of its owner?”
Taking a further page from the Holmesian playbook, Conan Doyle imagined what would have happened if Slater had been the murderer—and described the complications that would arise:
It will be observed that save for the identifications, the value of which can be estimated, there is really no single point of connection between the crime and the alleged criminal. It may be argued that the existence of the hammer is such a point; but what household in the land is devoid of a hammer? It is to be remembered that if Slater committed the murder with this hammer, he must have taken it with him in order to commit the crime….But what man in his senses, planning a deliberate murder, would take with him a weapon which was light, frail, and so long that it must project from any pocket? The nearest lump of stone on the road would serve his purpose better than that. Again, it must in its blood-soaked condition have been in his pocket when he came away from the crime. The Crown never attempted to prove either blood-stains in a pocket, or the fact that any clothes had been burned. If Slater destroyed clothes, he would naturally have destroyed the hammer, too.
Even before Slater’s trial began, Conan Doyle pointed out, “the three important points of the pawned jewel, the supposed flight, and the evidence from clothing and weapon, had each either broken down completely, or become exceedingly attenuated.” What that meant—he is too gentlemanly to say it outright, but it pulsates between every line of his book—was that the prosecution had used any means necessary to drive home its preposterous case.
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TURNING TO THE TRIAL ITSELF, Conan Doyle dissected the courtroom arguments with the finesse of a forensic debater. “The Lord-Advocate spoke, as I understand, without notes, a procedure which may well add to eloquence while subtracting from accuracy,” he wrote drily. “If the minds of the jury were at all befogged as to the dates, the definite assertion of the Lord-Advocate, twice repeated, that Slater’s name had been published before his flight, was bound to have a most grave and prejudiced effect.”
He continued: “Some of the Lord-Advocate’s other statements are certainly surprising….The murder was committed about seven. The murderer may have regained the street about ten minutes or quarter past seven….Yet Schmalz says he was in at seven, and so does Antoine.”
One of the most damnable logical errors in the Lord Advocate’s speech, Conan Doyle pointed out, concerned the location of Miss Gilchrist’s jewels. Because the killer was ignorant of their precise location (he knew which room to search but not that the jewels were secreted in the wardrobe there), then, the Lord Advocate declared at trial, “that answers to the prisoner.” If the prosecutor’s assertion were rendered as a logical argument, as Conan Doyle knew, it would take this form:
The murderer was unfamiliar with Miss Gilchrist’s spare room.
Slater was unfamiliar with Miss Gilchrist’s spare room.
Therefore, Slater was the murderer.
“ ‘That answers to the prisoner,’ ” Conan Doyle parroted, adding, with barely veiled contempt: “It also, of course, answers to practically every man in Scotland.”
Examining the Crown’s other arguments, Conan Doyle took pains to deflate hyperbole. “The Lord-Advocate said that [Slater’s] change of name ‘could not be explained consistently with innocence,’ ” he wrote. “That may be true enough, but the change can surely be explained on some cause less grave than murder.”
Nor did the defense counsel escape Conan Doyle’s criticism. Though he was diplomatic in his treatment of Slater’s barrister, Alexander McClure, he did not ignore the deficiencies in his conduct of the case:
Where so many points were involved, it is natural that some few may have been overlooked. One does not, for example, find the counsel as insistent as one might expect upon such points as, the failure of the Crown to show how Slater could have known anything at all about the existence of Miss Gilchrist and her jewels, how he got into the flat, and what became of the brooch which, according to their theory, he had carried off….
Only on one point must Mr. M’Clure’s judgment be questioned, and that is on the most difficult one, which a criminal counsel has ever to decide. He did not place his man in the box….It certainly told against his client.
Conan Doyle did not limit his scrutiny to the human actors in the case. One of his finest forensic achievements came in his “interrogation” of objects connected with the crime: the half sovereign, the wooden workbox, the missing brooch, the jewelry on the dressing table. For it was in persuading those objects to speak that he furnished the first truly credible motive for Miss Gilchrist’s murder.
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SOME OF THE MOST vital witnesses to a crime are not people but things. As a doctor can cajole a limb or organ into yielding its story, or an archaeologist coax a pot shard into divulging a slice of history, so, too, can a detective persuade a mute object to testify to a past otherwise out of reach. Among fictional detectives, there is no one more skilled at the diagnostic reading of objects than Sherlock Holmes.
On
e of the most delightful diagnostic set pieces in the Holmes canon is found in an 1892 story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” Holmes has come into possession of a goose and a hat, both belonging to a man he has never seen. The hat in particular sets off a chain of abductive reasoning in the finest tradition of Zadig.
“What clue could you have to his identity?” Watson, now married and visiting Baker Street, asks.
“Only as much as we can deduce.”
“From his hat?”
“Precisely.”
“But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered felt?”…
He picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was characteristic of him. “It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”
“My dear Holmes!”
“He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect,” he continued….“He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house.”
Watson, dumbfounded, presses Holmes to explain.
For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. “It is a question of cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”
“The decline of his fortunes, then?”
“This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came in then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the band of ribbed silk and the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy so expensive a hat three years ago, and has had no hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the world.”
And so Holmes’s abductions continue, through the foresight (shown by the presence of a hat-securer), the moral regression (failure to repair the hat-securer), and the lime-cream (cut hair-ends in the lining).
“But his wife—you said that she had ceased to love him.”
“This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson, with a week’s accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose your wife’s affection.”…
“You have an answer to everything. But how on earth do you deduce that the gas is not laid on in his house?”
“One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance; but when I see no less than five, I think that there can be little doubt that the individual must be brought into frequent contact with burning tallow—walks upstairs at night probably with his hat in one hand and a guttering candle in the other. Anyhow, he never got tallow-stains from a gas-jet. Are you satisfied?”
Though he could not see them firsthand, Conan Doyle subjected the artifacts at the Gilchrist crime scene to similar interrogation. Where the police had seen only discrete objects, he saw a constellation: the half sovereign on the carpet beside Miss Gilchrist’s body, the jewelry in the dish on her dressing table, and, in particular, the workbox on the floor. What was significant about these things, he was the first to realize, was that they were where they were at all.
“What so often leads the police astray in the Holmes stories,” two American scholars have written, “is that early in the investigation of a crime, they tend to adopt the hypothesis which is most likely to account for a few outstanding facts, ignoring ‘trifles’ and thereafter refusing to consider data that do not support their position.” That, Conan Doyle now realized, was exactly what the Glasgow police had done in positing robbery as the motive for Miss Gilchrist’s murder. He wrote:
One question which has to be asked was whether the assassin was after the jewels at all….When he reached the bedroom and lit the gas, he did not at once seize the watch and rings which were lying openly exposed upon the dressing-table. He did not pick up the half-sovereign….His attention was given to a wooden box, the lid of which he wrenched open. (This, I think, was “the breaking of sticks” heard by Adams.) The papers in it were strewn on the ground. Were the papers his object, and the final abstraction of one diamond brooch a mere blind?…Presuming that the assassin was indeed after the jewels, it is very instructive to note his knowledge of their location, and also its limitations….If it were the jewels he was after, he knew what room they were in, but not in what part of the room. A fuller knowledge would have told him they were kept in the wardrobe. And yet he searched a box. If he was after papers, his information was complete.
As a craftsman of mysteries, Conan Doyle immediately recognized the missing diamond brooch as a red herring. The intruder, on hearing Adams ring the doorbell, very likely slipped it into his pocket before sailing coolly out of the flat. Diamonds were objects of widespread Victorian obsession, as the literature of the period amply reflects. Consciously or not, the killer seized upon precisely the right piece of jewelry—one that would become the focus both of the police investigation and of the public’s fascination with the case. The brooch for which Oscar Slater was almost hanged was, the diagnostician Conan Doyle realized, no more than a worthless symptom.
By focusing instead on the workbox and its rifled contents, Conan Doyle gave the case its first genuine motive. Why, he asked himself rhetorically, would an intruder disdain jewelry to go after papers? “It might be said,” he wrote, “that save a will it would be difficult to imagine any paper which would account for such an enterprise.”
His conjecture would prove correct. Though the fact would not be well known until 1914, members of Miss Gilchrist’s family had begun wrangling over her estate even before she died. Afterward, they began quietly accusing one another of her murder.
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THE CASE OF OSCAR SLATER was published on August 21, 1912, and went on sale for sixpence: Conan Doyle deliberately kept the price low to ensure as wide a readership as possible. “Since the publication…I have received numerous letters from correspondents all over the country urging me to use any influence I have in getting the authorities to reconsider the trial,” he wrote the next month. “I trust, therefore, that by pointing out to the British public the possibility and probability of a miscarriage of justice having been perpetrated…I have awakened a more general interest in the case, and, if the British public agree with my views, it is for them to see that the case is reopened.”
In publishing his book, Conan Doyle was attuned to the charge that he was acting as a murderer’s apologist. “I may seem to have stated the case entirely from the point of view of the defence,” he wrote. “In reply, I would only ask the reader to take the trouble to read the extended evidence….If he will do so, he will realise that without a conscious mental effort towards special pleading, there is no other way in which the story can be told. The facts are on one side. The conjectures, the unsatisfactory identifications, the damaging flaws, and the very strong prejudices are upon the other.” Or, as Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
In short, Conan Doyle concluded, “I do not see how any reasonable man can carefully weigh the evidence and not admit that when the unfortunate prisoner cried, ‘I know nothing about it,’ he was possibly, and even proba
bly, speaking the literal truth.”
But for all the Holmesian acumen of The Case of Oscar Slater, for all its cool lucidity and quiet outrage, it may simply have come too soon: Miss Gilchrist’s murder was still fresh in public memory, and many still considered Slater guilty. Despite the fact that “each clue against Slater crumbles to pieces when examined,” as Conan Doyle later wrote, his book had little immediate effect, and Slater remained where he was.
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BY THE TIME THE BOOK appeared, Slater’s paranoid desperation, so evident in 1911, seemed to have been replaced by a measure of acceptance. “As to my case, I have long ago resigned myself to the inevitable and as nobody else but the Almighty can help me, I have put all under His protection,” he wrote to his parents in August 1912. “A force of will is the best medicine against grief. I have finally made up my mind, not to brood too much over my miserable situation.” The next year, he wrote them: “I am happy to say that I am feeling strong and healthy, both bodily and mentally, and I am submitting to my fate with fortitude.”
Slater’s newfound resolve was just as well, for there would be no significant developments in the case for two years. Then, in 1914, a secret document in the files of the Glasgow police would cast suspicion on someone Miss Gilchrist had known for a very long time.
* Conan Doyle doesn’t mean “only,” of course. The other explanation for Lambie’s strange behavior, as he well understood, was that she was involved in the crime, or at the very least knew the killer. Though he had to exercise suitable restraint in print, it is clear from his private correspondence that he believed the latter hypothesis to be well within the realm of possibility.