Secrets From the Deed Box of John H Watson, MD (The Deed Box of John H. Watson MD)

by Ashton, Hugh

  -oOo-

  The next morning saw Holmes, Lestrade and myself standing at one end of Gilbert Place, with two of Lestrade’s colleagues having taken their place at the other end. It was a raw, chill morning, and a light rain had started to fall. Holmes was wearing his warm travelling ulster, but I was forced, being relatively unprepared, to share the shelter of Lestrade’s umbrella, which he had fortuitously brought with him.

  At length the door beside the bookshop opened, and the man we had come to know as James Phillimore stepped out into the street. As we had seen him on the previous day, he was smartly dressed, but after taking a few steps, he appeared to realise his lack of any protection against the rain, and turned to re-enter the house.

  “Now!” cried Lestrade, and dashed forward. As our quarry reappeared, this time holding an umbrella, he laid a hand on Gérard’s shoulder. “Jean-Marie Gérard, I am arresting you on charges relating to the death of one Jules Navier, and others related to the theft of jewellery.”

  Somewhat to our surprise, the tall man’s face appeared to take on a look of relief. “I thank you, sir,” he replied. “The last few days have been a cauchemar– how you say, a nightmare, for me. Believe me, it is a weight from my mind that you have come.”

  Lestrade raised his eyebrows. “Then you will have no objection to telling us your story down at Scotland Yard?”

  “I will not say it will be a pleasure,” replied the other. “But it will be a relief to do so.”

  Once at Scotland Yard, the Frenchman sat facing Holmes, Lestrade and myself, with a policeman recording his words.

  “I understand that this will be evidence in the court,” he began, “but I wish to make a clean chest of the facts and to lay them before you.

  “First, I want to tell you that I am responsible for the death of Jules Navier, but I was sorely provoked, I assure you. Maybe you know something of him? He was a patissier of genius – a true artiste of the dessert – but he was not a man to be trusted. Maybe you do not know this, but among those of us at the top of our professions, there is a great rivalry. My English friend, Francis Smith, who now styles himself as François Lefevre, which is the name by which I now think of him, once stole one of my creations when we worked together in Paris, and started to claim this recipe as his own. It was a mere trifle, an amuse-gueule, and it helped him in his career.” He shrugged. “C’est la vie. It happens, and we live with it. My friend Lefevre was a good friend in all other respects – he helped me when I was in trouble with my restaurant several times, and he helped me to obtain my present position at the G— Hotel. But still, the offence stayed inside me and I thought about it still.

  “Navier was a gift from Heaven for my work at the Hotel. My previous patissier had left me to return to his home in Avignon some months before, and his replacement was far from possessing the same level of skill. So when Navier came to me, this reaffirmed my position as a true chef de cuisine in the Hotel. His meringues...” Gérard kissed the tips of his fingers. “His profiteroles and éclairs. Beyond compare.” He seemed lost in a reverie before continuing. “He was the man, I was sure, who could help me obtain the famous recipe for canetons à la mode russe that Lefevre had devised in the past. That dish had won plaudits from the whole of the culinary world, and many had tried and failed to replicate it. I knew of Lefevre’s habit of adding the final touches himself, which he kept as a secret, and I knew that his book of recipes was stored in his desk, from hints he had dropped, although he had never told me outright. I wished to serve the course at a special dinner to be given by the Russian Ambassador in honour of a visit by the Archduke Alexei next month, but I needed to perfect it before then, and accordingly determined to place it on the menu.

  “I procured a skeleton key from a friend – I will tell you more of such friends in a little while – and gave it to Navier with my instructions. He was only to remove the single recipe and copy it onto a sheet of paper. However, when he delivered it to me at my rooms in Soho, he discovered me working on the commode which I have just sent to France.”

  “That commode will never reach France,” Holmes told him. “It and its contents have been seized, and Vicks was arrested yesterday.”

  “I cannot pretend to be sorry,” replied Gérard. “I have been living the life of a dog for too long. Let me explain the whole sorry business to you. In my youth, I did several bad things, and the results are still with me. There are two men in France. They do not bear my name – rather they bear that of a noble family – but they are my sons nonetheless. The powerful family whose daughter I seduced – I see no reason to hide this from you gentlemen – offered me the choice of death or making over to the family an annual payment of a large sum of money. Which would you have chosen? By hard work, and with the help of my friends, I could scrape together the money, leaving me almost penniless at the end of each year. Lefevre helped me leave France – mon Dieu, I can almost say that I escaped the country – and come to England, where I believed I was safe.

  “Then one day I had a visit from a Frenchman, who introduced himself as the attorney for the family I had wronged. “‘Now you are here in this country,’ he said to me, ‘you are in a better position to make the payments. You will tell us the names of your wealthy patrons at the Hotel before they visit you. We have friends who will visit their houses, and deliver the proceeds to you. You must then send these to France, in whatever way you think best. Otherwise, steps of a kind described to you in the past will be taken.’ You have no idea, gentlemen, how much that speech frightened me. I could read death in his eyes, and I knew that there were those, even in this city, who would take my life for a few sous.

  “Well, I need hardly tell you that I complied. The first set of jewellery arrived as had been planned at my Soho lodgings.”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Holmes, “but I am puzzled as to why you adopted two names and two addresses.”

  “It was because the name of Gérard had become hateful to me, though it was the name I used at the G—Hotel and was the name of my birth. And the Soho lodgings where I had been staying had likewise become a place where I could no longer live as I wished. I therefore adopted a new name and a new identity as James Phillimore.

  “But to return to my story. I gazed at the trinkets that had been given to me by one of the lowest of the low, and asked myself how I was to send them to France without drawing the attention of the authorities to them. I could, of course, have carried them myself, but my work at the Hotel was too demanding to allow for that. It was then that I had my coup de tête, my brainwave. My father had been a cabinetmaker by trade, and before I apprenticed myself in the kitchen, I had received instruction from him in the art. It occurred to me that there are many possible hiding-places for small valuable objects in old pieces of furniture, and I accordingly arranged for the purchase of such pieces, to be delivered to me in my person as Phillimore at Bloomsbury. My background enabled me to choose fine pieces that would arouse no suspicion were they to be exported. There would be little point in my selecting rubbish to send to France, eh?

  “Once the first piece had been delivered, I examined it closely to determine how best to secrete the gems. I removed the portion of the piece of furniture on which I was to work – the leg of a table, for example – and carried it to my rooms in Soho. There, I kept tools and materials allowing me to construct hollow hiding places and false bottoms to drawers and the like. I had no wish to do the work at Gilbert Place, feeling it safer to separate the furniture and the work I was doing on it, in order to remove suspicion.

  “I communicated with the shipping agent, Vicks, through messages placed in the Daily Chronicle. He would send a carter to remove the furniture from Bloomsbury, and from then on, the matter was out of my hands. I explained to my neighbours who remarked this traffic that I was in the business of exporting old English furniture to France, and this seemed to be accepted as an explanation.

  “About six or seven such deliveries had been made over the period of about a y
ear, when it all came to an end less than a week ago. As I say, I had asked Navier to purloin the recipe, given his knowledge of the workings and the geography of the Club where Lefevre works, and so he did, but he went much further than I had instructed him, or indeed, than I would ever have desired.

  “‘Voici, here you are,’ he told me, handing over the whole book to me. I was completely flabbergasted, gentlemen. This was not what I had wished, and I told him so in no uncertain terms. There was no way that I could return the book to my friend without confessing my guilt in acquiring his recipe. I am afraid I lost my temper with Navier, and called him names which I will not repeat here, even though I have my doubts as to whether you would understand the French words involved.

  “As I was berating Navier, I noticed his eyes stray towards the work I had been doing; boring a hole in the thickness of the wood into which I would insert a bag usually used for bouquet garni in the preparation of bouillon, but in this case stuffed with the jewels from the pieces that comprised the latest haul. Navier saw this, as I say, and also saw the gems, which I had foolishly left on the table beside the tools.

  “‘I am sure the police would be interested in your new hobby,’ he sneered. ‘Maybe I can be persuaded to keep your activities a secret,’ he added, with a meaningful leer. Needless to say, I was overcome with fear with the thought that I might be discovered. Navier and I haggled over terms, and we came to a financial disposition that, while satisfying his greed, was highly unsatisfactory to me. We arranged that he was to visit my Soho rooms the next night, and I would pay him the sum demanded in return for his silence.

  “I returned to Bloomsbury that night, carrying the piece of wood in which I had concealed the bag containing the gems, and sick at heart. To be the victim of one blackmailer, Mr Holmes, is a wretched state. To be the victim of two such rogues is to be placed in a condition beyond despair. I was at my wits’ end. The next morning I was walking to my work at the Hotel, when I noticed a familiar plant growing in one of the London squares. I had been chastised by my mother as a child for attempting to eat the berries of belladonna, and it had remained as a strong memory throughout my whole life. The similarity of the berries to some of those we used in our desserts struck me, and I swiftly denuded the bush of its fruits, placing them carefully in my handkerchief. I had no definite plan in my mind, other than that I knew that I could use these. Since I was alone in the kitchen, I swiftly concocted my plan, and produced some sweet tarts, which I decorated in the privacy of my office with the berries I had picked earlier.

  “Later, Navier came in, and the scoundrel had the infernal impudence to wink at me as he settled down to work. I could bear his rudeness, as I knew what was in store for him later. I left the Hotel ay my usual time, and made my way to my rooms in Soho, carrying a large meat cleaver with me. When Navier arrived to demand his money, I offered him one of the tarts I had prepared previously, on the pretext that they had been presented to me by an applicant for a post in the kitchens as samples of his work. I told him that I wished to know his professional opinion, and played on his vanity. The fool took me at my word, and greedily devoured two, which, I felt, would ensure his demise.

  “And so it transpired. Soon after eating the second, he started to sweat and breathe heavily. His eyes bulged, and he struggled for breath, as I watched him. Believe me, gentlemen, it gave me no pleasure to see him die, other than the fact that I was ridding my life of a poisonous reptile. In less than an hour, he was dead, and I was now faced with the prospect of disposing of the body.

  “Navier’s clothing was distinctive, marked with the name of the G— Hotel, and it was essential, I believed at that time, that the body and the clothing were separated. It disgusted me, but I stripped the body of its clothing. Then I turned to the business of dismembering the body. I had brought the heaviest butcher’s cleaver I could find from the kitchen and a set of overalls, such as are used by those who clean the kitchens. I donned the latter to protect myself from the blood that I was sure would otherwise splash my clothes. It had been a long time since I had done any heavy butchering, and I was nauseated with my work and with myself. I had intended to dispose of the body in small pieces, but found myself unable to continue the ghastly work. Accordingly, I wrapped the cleaver in the clothes and the blood-soaked overalls, tied them into a bundle and made for the Embankment, where I hurled the package into the river.”

  “We will ask you to identify the place later,” Lestrade broke in for the first time.

  “I will be happy to oblige,” replied Gérard. “Once I had disposed of the weapon and the clothes, I knew inside myself that I could never return to the room with the limbs and body of Navier. I could not force myself to enter, and I knew that for ever more that room of horror would be closed to me. I shut myself in my room in Gilbert Place, in my character of James Phillimore. I cared nothing for the kitchen at the G— Hotel. I cared nothing for anything in my life. I knew that the hotel would never connect James Phillimore with Jean-Marie Gérard, and I was safe from the direction of my work. I still had the gems and the commode in which they were to be delivered, so I made arrangements for their delivery, which it appears you intercepted.”

  “One thing,” Holmes asked. “When did you become aware that you had left this,” holding up the notebook, “in the room with Navier’s body?”

  “I realised it as soon as I returned to Bloomsbury on that fatal night. I knew it was there in the drawer, and I had no stomach to return for it. The fact that it would be discovered filled my dreams, such as they have been for these past terrible nights.”

  “It is a sad tale, to be sure,” said Holmes, “and I cannot but consider that you were provoked, but you are guilty of the most serious of all crimes – that of taking a human life.”

  “I am well aware of that,” said the wretched man, “and I am now prepared to take whatever consequences may arise.”

  -oOo-

  It was some two months later that Holmes put down the newspaper and sighed. “Life, Watson. How cruel it can be.”

  It was unlike Holmes to make remarks of this sort, and I enquired what had caused him to speak in this way. By way of answer, he passed over the copy of the newspaper, in which two items on the same page caught my eye.

  The first told of the sentencing to death at the Old Bailey of Jean-Marie Gérard, who had been found guilty of the murder of Jules Navier. The other, a mere footnote at the bottom of the same page, told of the discovery of the body of one François Lefevre, alias Francis Smith, who had apparently hanged himself in his room at the Club where he was employed as chef. No note was found, and no motive could apparently be ascribed for the deed, but for my part, I put it down to his grief at the sentence passed on his friend, whose trial had been widely publicised, and for whose death he somehow felt at least in part responsible as the result of his past actions.

  THE BRADFIELD PUSH:

  This story was the first I discovered in the deed box that came to my hands via a circuitous route, from the vaults of a London bank to my present home in Kamakura, Japan.

  Handwritten in a vile, almost illegible, doctor’s writing, these brittle yellowing pages revealed a previously unpublished chronicle of Sherlock Holmes as I gingerly turned them.

  The timing of this adventure would appear to be some little time after the events described in A Study in Scarlet, but before those of The Sign of Four (given Watson’s open admiration of Miss Eileen O’Rafferty, which would seem to argue that Miss Mary Morstan had yet to enter his life). As such, this story is interesting to scholars and followers of the great detective’s exploits who can now see the younger Holmes in action.

  -oOo-

  Of my adventures with the famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, the one I relate here commenced, I believe, in perhaps the most unusual fashion of all.

  The events described took place close to the beginning of my friendship with Holmes, at a time when I was still lodging in Baker Street with him, and he had yet to attain the
national fame with which he is now associated. Cases were not coming to his door as frequently as he would have wished, and as a consequence I was forced to endure what seemed to my unmusical ears to be endless scrapings on his fiddle as he whiled away the hours. At other times my nostrils were assailed by the odour of mysterious and evil-smelling experiments in chemistry, one of which also assaulted my ears, and left ineradicable brown stains on Mrs Hudson’s carpet, as a glass retort of some nameless liquid that he was heating over the gas shattered with a loud explosion.

  Holmes swiftly tugged at the window and opened it in order to clear the noxious fumes that had resulted from the accident, remarking wryly, “If I believed in a Divine Providence governing such things, this would be a sign to me that I should cease this particular analysis.” He and I attempted to clean up the worst of the disorder, following which he suggested that we leave the house for a while. “Come, Watson, when we have restored some order from this chaos, let us take the air and exercise our critical faculties in the analysis of our fellow-citizens, rather than that of inanimate salts.”

  I assented readily. The weather was a glorious October day, warmer than the season would suggest, and I felt it would be beneficial to the health of both Holmes and myself if we were to take some more healthful air into our lungs than that which currently filled the room.

  Accordingly, in less than thirty minutes, we were promenading along Regent Street, with Holmes’ low voice providing a commentary on various passers-by.