“They, I take it, felt there was nothing suspicious about the death?” said Holmes.
“They were of the opinion that Hugh must have slipped on the balcony, pitched himself over the balustrade, and fallen to his death. To them, it was obvious.”
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” my friend asserted. “You, on the other hand, discern foul play.”
“My husband is—was,” she corrected herself—“a Calculator. That is a Category whose members, aside from being able to perform advanced feats of mental arithmetic, are known for a certain ruthlessness and practicality. He was not a bad man, but he tended towards brusqueness in his dealings with others. That, and his material success, earned him envy and enmity, from both rivals and slighted business partners.”
“He had many of the latter?”
“One in particular. Amos Pilkington, a Yorkshireman from whom Hugh purchased several mills as going concerns. Pilkington was supposed to oversee the running of those mills, but failed to hold up his side of the bargain, meaning Hugh had to do more of the work than was his due. In the end, Hugh edged Pilkington out of his seat on the board, for which he was rewarded with scorn and vituperation. Pilkington swore an oath that he would get even, although that was a year ago and in the intervening period he has done nothing to make good on the threat other than to instruct his lawyers to issue menacing letters and denounce my husband in public forums whenever the opportunity arises.”
“Was this Mr. Pilkington left out of pocket when he lost his job?”
“On the contrary, he was paid off handsomely, and what with that and the price Hugh gave him for a half-share in his business, he has been left sitting very pretty indeed. Yet that is clearly not enough for him, nor can he stand the thought that it was his own indolence and incompetence—and, moreover, his propensity for drinking—which obliged Hugh to relieve him of his position.”
“You believe he may be behind your husband’s seeming accident?” I said. “Inveigled himself secretly into your house and toppled him off the balcony, maybe?”
“Put it this way,” said Lady Arabella, “I would not be surprised. The trouble is, I know for certain that Pilkington is not in town. He keeps a pied à terre here, in Holland Park, but through mutual acquaintances I am given to understand that he has been ensconced at his country estate outside Harrogate since last Friday. There is one other, though, who has cause to hate Hugh.”
“Perhaps a disgruntled employee?” said Holmes.
“How astute of you. Are you sure you are a Typical, sir? I suspect you of a telepathic talent that you choose to hide from the world.”
“I am genuinely of no Category, madam. I merely make deductions based on the balance of probabilities. In this instance, it seems more than likely that your husband, who must have run a considerable workforce and who by your own admission could be brusque and unpersonable, would not command the unswerving admiration of all on his payroll.”
“A steeplejack, by the name of Charlie Gartside. Hugh had to fire him last week for carelessness. Gartside was charged with carrying out maintenance on the chimney at the Shoreditch mill. It so happened that during the course of his duties he dropped a hod of bricks, nearly killing a couple of loom operators below as they arrived for work. Had the women not been Achilles Category like yourself, Dr. Watson, I dread to think of the outcome. Anyone else would have been brained, rather than merely stunned. It was an accident, but nonetheless Hugh had no choice but to hand Gartside his papers.”
“Quite right,” said I.
“Gartside is, of course, an Icarus,” said Holmes.
“A flyer of some prowess and stamina,” Lady Arabella affirmed.
“Valued in his profession for his ability to work at great heights and his freedom from fear of falling from them. I begin to divine the outline of something here. Is there anything else about your husband’s death you can tell us? Any detail you may not have yet divulged?”
Her ladyship pondered, then said, “I cannot put my finger on precisely why I believe Hugh did not die through accident, other than to say that there was an odd aroma at the scene.”
Holmes leaned forward in his seat with avidity. “I should be interested to hear what it was that an Olfactory detected, with her unusually sensitive nose.”
“I may have been mistaken. In the grief and trauma of the moment, I was not at my most level-headed. It could be that I was imagining it.”
“But...?
“But I could swear I smelled burning.”
“Burning?”
“As of a fireplace, or a steam locomotive.”
“And this was not the ember of your husband’s cigar, still alight?”
“It may well have been. The smouldering stub of the cigar was lying nearby him, scorching the grass. Perhaps that was all it was. Yet I am convinced otherwise.”
LADY ARABELLA DEPARTED shortly afterwards, with assurances from Holmes that he would investigate her case. She told us she was going to stay with friends in Chelsea, but Holmes secured her permission to visit the house in Richmond so that he could survey the crime scene.
We set off thither by cab, post haste. It was a horse-drawn hansom rather than a somewhat cheaper rickshaw. Holmes preferred the smoother ride, even if it came at a premium and was accompanied by the racket of iron-shod hooves and the occasional unfortunate equine by-product. On the southward journey, we were overtaken several times by speeding Mercuries, human blurs weaving in and out of the traffic as they couriered letters, parcels and documents around the capital.
The Lanchesters’ mansion afforded a spectacular view of both Richmond Park and the Thames meadowlands to the west, all the way to Windsor Castle. In the clear summer sky, flyers could be seen hurtling through the blue firmament, exulting in their freedom from gravity like wingless angels. If I could have belonged to any Category but my own, I would have wished to be an Icarus. Yet I had good cause to thank providence for making me Achilles by birth, else I might not have survived my tour of duty as an army medic in Afghanistan. More than once a jezail bullet which might have taken my life, or at least wounded me gravely, had bounced off my impermeable skin with no more effect than a dried pea from a child’s pea shooter.
Having shown the butler a letter of introduction that Lady Arabella had drafted for us, we were permitted access to the back garden. The body had been removed, but the deep impression it had left on the lawn remained, as did the halo of blood spatters surrounding it, which had dried to a dark brown stickiness.
Holmes went down on all fours and inspected the spot minutely. He located Sir Hugh’s cigar stub and spent some time sniffing both the rind of ash at one end and the butt at the other, which still bore the imprint of the dead man’s teeth. Then he stood up and eyed the second-storey balcony from which the industrialist was supposed to have fallen.
“What do you observe, Watson?” he asked finally. “And note I said ‘observe,’ not ‘see.’”
I paused before answering. From experience I knew that I was being invited to look past the obvious and that, lacking Holmes’s perspicacity, I was apt to make a fool of myself if I were not careful.
“I see—pardon me, observe—a depression in the lawn commensurate with the body of an adult man plummeting from some height, and the attendant bloodstains resulting from injuries sustained upon impact. Nothing that I would not expect to observe.”
“Quite so, but you are failing to take into account volume.”
“Volume?”
“Mass, my friend. Quantity. Look how deep the depression is. Look how much blood there is and how far it has been flung. None of this suggests a fall from that balcony. Rather, it suggests a fall from a far greater altitude.”
“You mean...?”
“It is my view, based on the evidence, that Sir Hugh plunged not from the house but from at least three hundred feet up.”
“My God!” I cried. “You’re saying he was picked up, borne skyward and dropped.”
“Precisely. Murder, made to look as though it were mishap.”
“Then the culprit must be...”
“Tut!” My friend raised an admonishing finger. “Let us not jump to conclusions. No one is guilty unless it has been proved beyond all reasonable doubt that it cannot be otherwise. We must find the steeplejack Charlie Gartside and interrogate him thoroughly.”
FINDING GARTSIDE WAS not difficult for a man like Sherlock Holmes, with the services of the Baker Street Irregulars at his beck and call. This small army of street urchins counted every manner of Category among their number, including several of the Retentive persuasion, who forgot neither a face nor a place once they had committed it to memory. Presented with a name, they could tell you where the owner of that name had last been seen, what haunts he frequented and who his commonest associates were.
It was the head of the juvenile gang, Wiggins, who offered us Gartside’s likeliest whereabouts: a pub in Bethnal Green called the Mason’s Rest. In that seedy, sawdust-floored hostelry, Holmes and I cornered the aggrieved steeplejack, who responded to our approaches first with wariness and then anger.
“What, I’m being accused of murder, is it?” he declared. “I resent that!”
He made to flee, levitating from his barstool and making for the door. I barred his way, and he flew at me headlong, fully expecting that he would knock me flat. An Achilles, however, once he plants his feet, is not just invulnerable but more or less immoveable. Gartside came off the worse for the collision.
When Holmes had righted him and plied him with a glass of gin, Gartside became somewhat more amenable. My friend mollified him by telling him that while he had both the motive and the means to kill Sir Hugh Lanchester, Holmes himself had doubts about his guilt.
“I would say that, on the face of it, you could have done the deed,” he said, “but somehow you are too obvious a suspect. It is almost as though someone would like us to believe you sneaked up on Sir Hugh from above while he was taking the air last night, swooped on him unawares, snatched him up into the sky and let him go.”
“Last night?” said Gartside. “I wasn’t anywhere near Richmond last night. I was here, at home, just round the corner.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Yes. No,” he amended. “I live alone. No wife, no family, just me. I was in from eight onward, asleep by ten. I have an attic room, which I enter by a skylight. Hardly anyone sees me come and go.”
“So there is no one who can provide you with an alibi?”
“I don’t think so. Oh, Lord, this is bad, isn’t it? But it’s not true. I didn’t do nothing. I mean, I held a grudge against Lanchester, ’course I did. Taking my job from me like that, all for a silly slip. Nobody got hurt, did they? Accidents happen. Not something a man should lose his livelihood over. Word’s got around now, though, ain’t it? My reputation is gone. My name is mud. Nobody else will hire me, the man who the high and mighty Sir Hugh Lanchester sacked. I’m ruined. But...”
“But you’re innocent of Sir Hugh’s murder.”
“As the driven snow. You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Holmes. Someone’s setting me up. It has to be that. Someone wants me to take the fall for Lanchester’s fall. You see that, don’t you?”
“A SINGULAR CASE,” SAID Holmes as we left the Mason’s Rest, Gartside ’s plaintive plea still ringing in our ears.
“You don’t reckon Gartside’s lying, then?”
“Oh, it’s perfectly possible, Watson. He tried to escape, after all, when we initially confronted him. That is indicative of guilt. Then again, no one takes well to accusations of murder, least of all the innocent. I am persuaded that his protestations are in earnest. We haven’t yet got to the bottom of this puzzle, otherwise I would even now be sending a Mercury to Scotland Yard with an invitation to come to Bethnal Green and collar Gartside.”
“So who is responsible, if not Gartside?”
“Do you recall, Watson, a recent case similar in many of its aspects to this one?”
I racked my brains. “I fear I do not.”
“It was quite the cause célèbre a few months back. The actress who was crushed to death by her lover, a Hercules stagehand? Had her skull mangled and her ribcage shattered like twigs by his bare hands? He went to the gallows for it, but proclaimed his innocence right up until the moment the scaffold opened beneath his feet.”
“Ah yes, it’s coming back to me. The girl was with child, was she not? And it was established that he slew her in a fit of rage, having decided that the baby was not his.”
“There were rumours that she had been carrying on with another man, an aristocrat.”
“Yes, the Earl of Bracewell. The stagehand all but accused him of the murder at the trial, but the nature of the actress’s death meant the finger of blame could only be pointed at someone with Hercules-level strength. The Earl of Bracewell is a Mover, if I remember rightly, albeit with telekinesis of a very low grade. He can manipulate small objects with his mind, but hasn’t the power to crush a person to death.”
“Yes. Bracewell is no paragon. He is known for cheating at games, be it roulette or tennis, using his telekinesis to divert the ball in his favour. He’s a rake and a profligate, too, but the actress’s murder could not surely have been his doing, and must have been the stagehand’s handiwork. A Crown Court jury came to that conclusion, at any rate. There is also the case of the Whig politician, Albert Filey.”
“The chap who drowned in the Thames?”
“None other. Another apparent death by misadventure, like Sir Hugh’s, although suicide was not ruled out by the coroner. He plunged from the parapet of Westminster Bridge one foggy night last December. If the impact didn’t kill him outright, the freezing water would have in no time.”
“Wasn’t there a scandal surrounding him? Something about him rigging a vote?”
“You misremember. It was Filey himself who was accusing one of his political opponents of stuffing the ballot boxes at a by-election. He promised to produce unequivocal proof, but died before he could. There was talk in some of the papers of a cover-up, a conspiracy to silence Filey, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps the fellow was under such intense pressure and scrutiny that he simply cracked.”
“But you think otherwise. You think that that case, and the actress one, and now Sir Hugh’s death, are all connected. They’re all part of some wider pattern.”
“What’s interesting about the Honourable Albert Filey is that his brother, with whom he was on very poor terms, was a Poseidon. If anyone could have drowned him by main force, it would have been someone who was at home in the water as he was on land. No charges were pressed, no arrest was made, but the feeling persisted in a certain stratum of society that the other Filey—Cecil, I believe, was his name—might have been responsible. The two had had a falling out. Fraternal hatred spiralled out of control. Sibling spite soured into homicide. In the event, as if to give the hearsay validity, Cecil Filey took his own life not three weeks later. Drank arsenic. Intolerable remorse, it was assumed.”
“If I follow your line of reasoning,” I said, “it would appear that people are being implicated in murders they did not commit. That’s the common thread that’s emerging here. A Hercules, a Poseidon, an Icarus—in each instance someone is being made to look the obvious culprit, in order to deflect attention away from someone else.”
“That is indeed how it looks. The question remains, however, who is doing this and how are they accomplishing it? Watson, if you will kindly see your own way home, I would like to wander alone a while and ruminate. There may be a single solution to all three cases, and if I can alight upon it, I may yet save Charlie Gartside from becoming a third innocent victim of a dastardly scheme.”
IN THE EVENT, I did not see Holmes or even hear from him for a full twenty-four hours. I was visited at noon the next day at my practice by a Mercury messenger, who presented me with a note in my friend’s handwriting summoning me to an address in Shadwell. I gave the messenger a shilling, an
d he thanked me in speech so rapid and garbled that I couldn’t make out one word in three, before racing off at such speed he seemed to vanish.
The address turned out to be an engineer’s workshop. “My investigations have brought me inexorably to this place,” said Holmes as he met me outside, “the doorstep of a scoundrel as ingenious and villainous as any we have encountered in our adventures together. I fear I shall have need of your invulnerability, old friend, and perhaps also your service pistol, which I am glad to see you have brought along, judging by the bulge in your jacket pocket.”
“Your note implied I might need it.”
“I pray my instincts are wrong,” said Holmes, “yet I fear they are not. Let us go in.”
The engineering workshop looked much like any other of its ilk, a barnlike premises that housed machinery and tools— lathes, drills, bandsaws. Its sole occupant was also its sole proprietor, one Algernon Roxton, according to the hoarding above the entrance.
Roxton was a small, sallow-complexioned individual with thinning mousy hair and an unprepossessing face which seemed set in a permanent sneer. Some childhood disease—polio, I adjudged—had left him with a withered left leg, a defect he had remedied by fixing an elaborate metal brace to the limb which cunningly utilised pistons and springs to lend support and an almost full range of motion. He came towards us with scarcely a limp, the brace creaking ever so slightly as he walked.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his hands hidden behind his back, “how may I be of assistance?”
“You may assist us,” replied Holmes, “by confessing, Mr. Roxton, to at least three counts of premeditated, cold-blooded murder. It will go easier on you, and save us all a great deal of bother, if you do.”
To Roxton’s credit, he scarcely even batted an eyelid. Instead, he whipped his hands out from behind him. In one was a kind of claw-like gauntlet, which he slipped over the other. It hissed with power as he flexed the fingers.
Reaching for Holmes with this device, he attempted to grasp my friend’s neck.
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