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Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Tainted Canister
Thomas A. Turley
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2014 digital version by Andrews UK
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2014
Thomas A Turley
The right of Thomas A Turley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
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Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Tainted Canister
The death of Dr. Richard Anstruther was not widely reported in the London press and aroused little interest in the city. The man himself had been quite unknown to the public, although his work on tropical diseases (a product of his years in India) had begun to win admirers in the medical community. He left no family in England and few friends, having in his last years shunned society while pursuing his research. Moreover, the manner of his demise was soon determined to be unremarkable. My readers may therefore wonder why these annals of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the celebrated consulting detective, should contain a case that provided little scope for his rare talents and, indeed, hardly amounted to a “case” at all. My reasons for including it will become apparent as the tale proceeds, as will my reasons for withholding it from publication for so many years beyond my own demise. It is to my readers of the next millennium—if any should by then exist—that I offer this account and final reckoning.
It was early in the summer of 1894, some weeks after Holmes’ triumphant return from the exile that followed his final confrontation with Professor Moriarty. My friend was again out of England at this time, engaged in one of several cases of international importance that occupied him during that eventful year. I had agreed, meanwhile, to sell my practice and return to our old rooms in Baker Street; but the practice’s eventual buyer (who proved to be a relative of Holmes) had not as yet appeared. On that afternoon, a Tuesday, I sat alone in my consulting room, having spent the morning on an errand near the docks at Lambeth. My last scheduled patient had departed, so I was surprised when the maid announced another visitor. It was our long-time colleague, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.
I had seen little of Lestrade since his arrest of Colonel Moran for wilful murder. During the time of Holmes’ absence, our relations had gradually become a bit remote. He had genuinely regretted what we both assumed to be the great detective’s death, and for awhile he showed an unexpected courtesy by keeping me apprised of his more interesting cases. After several episodes of suspicious death, he even requested my services as medical examiner; yet, he treated my tentative efforts to put Holmes’ methods into practice with the same tolerant derision he had once shown toward their creator. While, in his better moments, Lestrade might have acknowledged Holmes as his superior, he was not prepared to accept Holmes’ assistant as his colleague. Thus, my participation in his cases grew less frequent, and prior to Holmes’ return I had not seen him for six months. Now, however, he burst into my consulting room with all his old ebullience of manner, and a veiled suspicion beneath the self-importance that I had not experienced before.
“Ah, Doctor! I’m glad not to have caught you at an inconvenient moment. Are there no patients who require your services today? I hope that does not bode ill for your practice.”
“Don’t worry; I had three appointments this afternoon before your arrival: two neuralgias and one incipient consumption. You do recall, Lestrade, that I intend to sell my practice and return to Baker Street?”
“Yes, indeed!” The inspector dropped into the chair I indicated, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm. “Won’t that strike terror into the hearts of our criminal classes: ‘the world’s greatest private consulting detective’ and his biographer reunited in the old H.Q.! I trust I may continue to be in at the finish of your cases, if only to arrest the miscreants and earn a footnote in your latest opus.”
“You may rely on it,” I assured him smoothly. “You know, of course, that Holmes is on the Continent. I believe that Mrs. Hudson expects him back in London by tomorrow night.”
“Oh, yes, Doctor, we at the Yard keep track of Mr. Holmes. Actually, this time it’s you I need to see. I’m afraid that one of your medical colleagues has met with an untimely end.” He gave me a keen glance, meanwhile accepting my silent offer of a glass of sherry.
“Indeed? And who is the unfortunate?”
“Richard Anstruther. I believe he was a friend of yours.”
“My God, yes!” I collapsed into the chair behind my desk. “Of Mary’s, too. He knew her when she was a girl.” And once asked her to marry him, I might have added, but I saw no reason to impart that fact to the inspector. “We were neighbours near Paddington Station when I first began my practice. He used to see my patients for me when I was away with Holmes.”
“But you’d not seen him for some time.” Although Lestrade appeared to state a fact, his face wore that bulldog look it sometimes got when he had clenched his teeth around some unwarranted assumption.
“Not often since he moved to Brook Street. In fact,” I added, forestalling an impending question, “I decided—quite upon the inspiration of the moment—to visit him last night. I waited at his home for perhaps half an hour, but he did not return.”
“That would explain why we found your calling card in his foyer.” With a reluctant nod, the inspector weighed this explanation. “What time was it when you left?”
“Just after ten o’clock, as I remember. Too late by then to pay a social call.” I could not help smiling at Lestrade’s air of disappointment. “I hope that this agrees with what his butler told you!”
“Of course, Dr. Watson.” Belatedly, it occurred to him that the two of us had captured criminals together for a decade. “And I’m bound to say there’s very little evidence that Dr. Anstruther did not die a natural death. Heart failure, by the look of it.”
“Ultimately, heart failure is the cause of every death,” I noted in my medical capacity. “Was there anything about the body that led you to think otherwise?”
“Nothing definite,” Lestrade parried, before caution fell victim to his natural loquacity. “He died in bed, apparently alone, without any evident wounds or signs of trauma. Pending the autopsy, of course. Based on his condition, I really couldn’t see why Merrick called us in.”
Merrick, Anstruther’s manservant since his days in India, had risen to the dignity of butler when the practice moved to Brook Street. “Well, he was undoubtedly devoted.” I waited, knowing there was something Lestrade had not told me. His face could seldom maintain the wooden impassivity appropriate to his profession
.
“He said there was a cry, late in the night.” Grudgingly, the inspector yielded up his clue. “It woke him, but he heard nothing else and fell asleep again almost immediately. He wasn’t sure about the time. Merrick’s old, and his room is located one floor up from Anstruther’s, in the opposite wing. It would have taken more than a half-heard cry to make him get up and investigate.”
“Anything else?” By now, I was flattering myself that not even Holmes could have extracted more information from a police inspector.
“His face. A look of terror, Doctor, such as I’ve not seen on any other corpse that I’ve examined. It fair frightened me, I tell you, even after all these years.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “that result can be disturbing. But it’s far from uncommon in cases of sudden cardiac arrest. If Anstruther woke and found himself in the middle of a heart attack, it could easily account for the cry that Merrick heard. I can’t imagine anything more terrifying.
“Would you like me to examine the body?” I suggested. “Anstruther was rather young for heart trouble, and so far as I know his health was generally good. There may be something to Merrick’s impressions after all.”
“No . . . I don’t think so, Doctor.” Inspector Lestrade’s hesitation was just palpable. “We have our own man looking into it. But I’d be obliged if you’d tell Mr. Holmes about the matter as soon as he returns. We’d like him to examine ‘the scene of the crime’ on Thursday morning.” Lestrade invested this penny-dreadful phrase with a comical significance, signaling that our mutual interrogation was finally at an end. Taking his departure, he shook my hand with no want of cordiality.
“Probably there’s no crime at all,” he chuckled, “but we may as well make use of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, now that he’s come back to us. We at the Yard thank Heaven for it, Dr. Watson, every day.”
“As do I, Inspector.” Closing the door behind him, I extinguished the lamps in my consulting room, pondering our absent friend’s return.
Although the account I had given to Lestrade was accurate enough, there was much more that I could have told him concerning Richard Anstruther. Most of my information came from my late wife, who knew the man for fully half of her brief term on Earth. Mary told me of him soon after we were married. We had just received a note from Anstruther, stating that he had recently purchased another practice in the neighbourhood and asking to make my acquaintance. My new wife seemed both embarrassed and obscurely pleased.
“He is an old friend of mine, you see, John, or—well—perhaps a little more than that. I met him first in Edinburgh, after I caught measles at Mrs. Parker’s boarding house. He was only a medical student in those days, but already quite sure of himself and (in the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl) terribly dashing. I must admit that my recovery from a simple case of measles was protracted!” She blushed and smiled at me; my own smile was a trifle forced.
“Did you see much of him?”
“Yes, for awhile. I was very young, of course, and we were severely chaperoned. Then my father telegraphed that he was coming home from India; and, as you know, he did come home but disappeared before I ever saw him. After that, I was far too frantic to have thoughts of romance, and Richard and I fell out of touch. I learned, much later, that he had taken his degree and gone to India himself, as an army surgeon. Just as you did in Afghanistan, my dear.”
“And with no lovely young lady at home pining for me, I can assure you!”
“Oh, John! I didn’t pine for him. I didn’t see him for six years, until after he returned from India. By then, he had almost passed from my mind.”
“But you had not from his.”
“Well, no. In the spring of ’85, after I had been with Mrs. Forrester for some time as governess, I heard from him again. Richard wrote that he had left the army and was opening a small practice in Kensington. He asked to visit me, and Mrs. Forrester—who was always very kind—had no objection. In fact, she rather encouraged us, even at the risk of losing her children’s governess.”
“Happily for me, it appears that she did not.”
“Indeed.” Mary now looked more troubled than nostalgic. “Something had changed about him, John. Of course, I was no longer a silly girl myself, so I regarded him with more maturity. But he was different, too. Richard had always been ambitious—telling me of the great medical discoveries that he would make one day—and in India he seemed to have learnt a great deal about fevers. Yet, individual patients no longer seemed to matter to him, as surely they should to any doctor. He talked now of building great clinics and research centers, of inoculating millions against mass epidemics; but never of saving just one man, one woman, one child. There was an arrogance in him that I had never seen before, an impatience to escape the ‘mundane chores’ (his words) of general practice and ‘get on with his career.’ But the kind of career that Richard wanted requires money, and he had none.”
“Nor has he now, I should suspect. He has taken a step backward by leaving Kensington and joining us here.”
“He was always worried about money. His family is rather wealthy, I believe. They have a large estate in northern India, near Darjeeling, and his two brothers are both well up in the I.C.S. But Richard was the youngest son, and apparently he was on bad terms with his father. Then, too, it seems he took to gambling, while out in India, and continued after coming back to England. I’ll tell you one thing about Richard: he never would have said ‘thank God!’—as you did, my noble darling—when I lost the Agra treasure!”
Throwing up her hands in self-disgust, Mary turned away to gaze out our parlour window at the magpies on the lawn. “I shouldn’t speak of him in this way, John, least of all to you. I did love him once, you know, and he very much wanted us to marry. But as time went on, I discovered that I’d never really known him, or—if I had—that he’d become a different man. Not one whom I could ever marry. Finally, I took my courage in both hands and told him so.”
“And how,” I asked gently, joining her at the window, “did he react to your decision?”
“Oh, badly, very badly, especially at first. He had seemed ‘the great research physician’ for so long by then that I didn’t realize he would be so hurt. Yet, in the end, he wished me well and said he hoped one day to be worthy of me. That was almost two years before we met, my dear. I swear to you that I’ve never heard a word from him since then. It seems very strange that he should come here now.”
Yet, when Richard Anstruther did come, he and Mary reestablished a fond, if guarded, friendship that seemed to assuage old wounds without opening any prospect of new ones. Toward me he was cordial from the first, insisting that I call him “Richard,” just as Mary did. In our shared profession, we soon developed a mutual respect, although I could at times see indications of the traits my wife deplored. He could treat patients cavalierly, becoming snappish or overbearing with those who were vague about their symptoms or failed to follow a prescribed course of treatment. But he was a brilliant clinical physician, and as a diagnostician I have never seen his equal.
Except for dinners and an occasional concert, we saw relatively little of Anstruther in a social way. He would sometimes attend the afternoon card parties that Mary loved and I detested. To my surprise, he was fascinated by my detective work with Holmes and even sought an invitation to visit that unsociable creature, although of course my friend did not oblige him.
Before long, Anstruther had volunteered to cover my practice during my many absences from London. Churlishly, I at first suspected some secret intention in his offer, but such unworthy fears proved groundless. During the years that we were all together, there were often moments when I observed a yearning glow in Richard’s eye for his lost love, or a resentful glance—quickly suppressed—at some gesture of tenderness between us. Even so, his conduct never afforded me the slightest reason for objection, or even anxiety, as Mary’s husband. Toward myself I saw on
ly a sincere personal and professional regard; and toward his former sweetheart a restrained, almost brotherly affection that in no way compromised her position as my wife.
Such was our situation by the middle of December in that fateful year of 1891. For me, it had been a dismal season, my first Christmas since the loss of Holmes. My mind inevitably retrogressed to the ghosts of other Christmases, particularly one several years before, when we had scoured London for the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle. Now, the body of my incisive, tireless, and ultimately merciful companion in that search lay somewhere beneath the Fall of Reichenbach. Even with the passing of six months, I still could hardly credit it.
I had called on Anstruther one afternoon to extend my seasonal felicitations, and also to thank him for his gifts to Mary and myself. We expected to present our own to him when he joined us for Christmas dinner, less than a week away. It was, I recall, a cold and windy day, spitting a light snow. Entering the front gate at Anstruther’s, I saw that a tall, elderly gentleman of the military type was just departing. We met on the walkway, but the greeting I intended died in my throat when he turned a baleful glare upon me. Quite unaccountably, the cold, grey eyes above his broad mustache seemed for one moment to hold a furious and unrelenting hatred. As I stared in astonishment, he turned away and passed me by without a word. Recovering on Anstruther’s doorstep, I wondered whether I had encountered the original of Mr. Dickens’ Christmas miser. Then Merrick opened the door and greeted me, and I forgot the man.
Fortunately, Anstruther himself was in fine spirits, having made a discovery that he hoped would greatly advance his work with Indian fevers. He took me to the microscope and began a lengthy discourse on the significance of what I saw. Some of it I failed to grasp at first, and it was nearly an hour before he was satisfied enough to let me go. At the door, he shook my hand with unusual warmth, saying that one day we would do great things together.
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