by David Fable
“Can you think of a quicker way to find someone than to put out the word that money is waiting for him?” answered Christopher in a droll manner.
“True. But you were not so candid when Wiggins asked about the axe.”
“Do you trust Wiggins?” he asked glancing over.
“I’ve unfortunately learned to trust few people.”
“But Wiggins?” he persisted.
“No. Not completely.”
“I think he knows more than he’s saying about Lilah. And I think it’s particularly curious that Holmes writes her into his will, and she disappears from the hospital the day after his murder,” said Christopher.
“All the more reason to find her.”
“I intend to, with or without Wiggins’s help,” Christopher said, determined.
“Wiggins is not a character to be taken lightly, Christopher.”
“He made that clear,” he said, without the slightest sign of intimidation.
I couldn’t help admiring Christopher for his quiet bravado. I wanted to tell him I was sorry for my resentment these last two days, that all the misdirected rancor and spite had drained from me in that torrent of tears after reading Holmes’s letter. Instead, I bid him goodnight and got out of the automobile.
8
I spent the next morning attending to arrangements for the funeral. Holmes had left his solicitor, Pearson, with no instructions as to how he wanted to be buried, so I became de facto arbiter of the event. I knew Holmes wouldn’t have wanted the state funeral that had been offered by the prime minister. That would have been too much pomp and ceremony for a man who tended to loath rituals of these sorts. But I felt the public should have an opportunity to show their respects, and so I agreed that a ceremony at Westminster would be appropriate, but we would exclude the military procession and lying in state, which had been ruled out in any event owing to Holmes’s head and facial injuries. Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, suggested that his body be cremated and taken back to his cottage in Sussex. I was happy to have him take that decision off my hands, and so it was determined that following a public funeral at the abbey, Mycroft would see to the remains. Having consulted on the list of speakers, I went downstairs to wait for Hudson, who had eagerly called that morning and said he wanted to get started at nine o’clock. I told him to be out front at ten and the Daimler was patiently waiting when I walked out my door.
The plan had been to drive down to Holmes’s cottage, start the process of going through his possessions and determine what information could be gleaned. We had been given permission by Lestrade to enter the cottage even though Scotland Yard had been unable to do a thorough inspection due to the abundance of bees that were swarming around the home when they had arrived the day before. Apparently, a few of Holmes’s hives had been disturbed, and clouds of the former residents were angrily buzzing around the grounds. They called in a beekeeper, and he suggested it would be best to let them settle down before trying to investigate the cottage.
The drive to Sussex would take two hours, and, as we began, Christopher regaled me with the research he had already done that morning.
“I visited the Hall of Records,” he said while weaving in and out of the Berkeley Square traffic. “There’s no record of an Alexander Hollocks or Delilah Church, either. I did find a John Hollocks of Essex born in 1837, a William Hollocks born 1874 living in Middlesex, married to Louise with three daughters and a son, and an Arthur Hollocks born 1867 who served in the infantry in Burma, was medaled for valor, has a wife, Ellen, and is a childless Londoner.”
“None of those sound too promising.”
“No birth certificate, census information, license to drive for Alexander Hollocks or Delilah. Nothing.”
“And that speaks to the manner in which a vast number of people exist in this city,” I said, not surprised.
“Understood. It is logical that there would be no record of birth if you were left on the steps of a church as a newborn. But in the interceding thirty-some year…? Why no records at all? She doesn’t appear to be an indigent. Where is the record of her son’s birth?”
“You assume he is her son. That is only what this man 'Hollocks’ stated to the hospital.”
“Wiggins confirmed she had a son.”
“True.”
“And the hospital was willing to release her to his care.”
“Also true, but she was there voluntarily. She could have left on her own accord.”
“We should have asked around at the hospital for a description of this Alexander Hollocks,” lamented Christopher. “Holmes would have thought to do it.”
“There’s time for that. I suspect Wiggins will find Lilah for us. Locating her is not our most pressing issue.”
“Perhaps, but this whole affair about Miss Church troubles me. Too many coincidences.”
“Maybe we’ll find something at Holmes’s place that can enlighten us.”
Christopher continued to mull over the matter as we bounced southward again on the uneven road through Kent to Sussex. The drive felt more tiresome than the day before, the road rougher. Soon, Christopher resumed showering me with more predictions of the future. He said that the Royal Navy was changing over from coal to oil, another harbinger of the ascension of petroleum, and that the First Lord of the Admiralty had received approval to build oil-powered battleships. I had met the First Lord at a state affair recently. He’s an earnest man named Winston from the illustrious Churchill line. He had a bit of a speech impediment and I urged him to take diction lessons if he desired to follow in his father’s footsteps as a preeminent statesman.
At last, we arrived in Sussex with its narrow country roads. Holmes’s cottage was down a mile-long private lane with overhanging elm trees that created a tunnel of gold and green vegetation. The lane opened up to reveal a two-story stone structure with a broad meadow sloping from the backdoor down to the chalk cliffs and turbulent English Channel. Holmes had always coveted privacy and here he had plenty of it. On various points down the coast a few more similar cottages could be discerned. Their inhabitants would look like no more than specks from this distance.
Christopher parked the car, got out and scrutinized the surroundings as if it might yield some immediate clues. The place looked just as it had on my previous visits. It was an enviable setting, though, being a devoted city dweller, I would not have chosen this impressive stretch of isolation for my retirement. Holmes, however, had been quite content here for the past years, and I was content to be his guest on a number of occasions.
A stray bee buzzed past my shoulder as I made my way to the door and produced the key that Pearson had given me. I unlocked the front door and we entered. The first thing that struck us was a vibrating sound, as if a large furnace was in operation somewhere in the cottage. We walked from the entry into the main room of the home and saw the source of the vibration. Hanging from a hat rack was a solid mass of perhaps five thousand bees. It was the size of a watermelon, and the creatures seemed untroubled with their new environment as they busily burrowed in and out of the thick cluster of fellow insects. I myself was not so comfortable with the situation. It would be hard enough sorting through Holmes’s things, much less doing it while being careful not to arouse a swarm of bees. The next things that struck us was the abandoned torch lying on the carpet in front of Holmes’s rolltop desk and the fact that the back door was left wide open.
The bees, however, were the first order of business. Within five minutes Christopher had donned one of Holmes’s bee suits and returned with a pine needle–filled smoker. I watched through a side window as he laid a bedsheet under the cluster and then placed one of Holmes’s square, three-tiered wooden beehives on the sheet. He carefully administered three or four puffs of smoke to the top of the cluster and a large clump of the bees dropped like liquid to the floor and then lazily crawled through the slots into the comforting darkness of the wooden hive. After fifteen minutes, the process was complete and Christopher carried the hive into the backyard and set
it next to a dozen other hives, each perched on its own stump cut from a chestnut tree.
Christopher removed his helmet and walked over to me. “So shall we get down to business?”
“Absolutely,” I answered. “You can start by putting that helmet back on and opening the safe.”
On the back of the letter that Holmes had left me were instructions on opening a safe that was hidden in one of the stumps, beneath the middle beehive in the back row.
Christopher dutifully put the helmet back on and lumbered over to the hives once again. He had to sidestep the one fallen hive that had inexplicably landed in pieces on the ground and sent its inhabitants seeking shelter in the house. He carefully moved to the appropriate hive, lifted it off the stump and gently set it down on the ground. In the top of the stump was a notch that, when lifted, revealed a hinged section of the wood that flopped open. Hidden inside was a safe. Christopher opened it using the combination provided on the paper and extracted the contents, which consisted of an astonishing one hundred and ten thousand pounds in hundred-pound notes and numerous photographs and papers. He bundled it all in the bedsheet and we went inside to inspect.
“Perhaps this is what the murderer was looking for,” said Christopher as he dumped the money and documents on the pine dining table.
“Perhaps,” I responded.
“Was it typical for Holmes to keep this much cash around?” he asked.
“I cannot answer that with certainty. I never saw anything like it at Baker Street.”
Christopher produced two pairs of gloves from his pocket and handed a pair to me. “The sequence of events is becoming clear to me now. Whoever left Holmes’s body at that farm was in the process of driving him back here, probably in order to make his murder look like an accident. Perhaps he planned to stage a fall down the stairs or some other plausible cause of death. Unfortunately for him, he was forced to abandon that plan when he was followed by the police in Kent. He disposed of the body at the farm, yet he still came here.”
“Which tells us what?” I asked. So far I was following his logic. I wanted to hear his entire theory before contributing.
“It tells us he had a second purpose in coming here. He was looking for something.” He motioned toward the back door. “When he came in through the back way, he must have left the door open, and his torch attracted the swarm. He dropped the torch right there and fled. If the leaves weren’t three-inches deep in the driveway, I’m sure we’d find the same tire tracks we found at the granary.”
“So your theory is that he knocked over the beehive while stumbling around in the dark?”
“No. The hives are too far from the house for him to have knocked them over regardless of how dark it was, and it was quite dark that night. No moon at all. I checked the weather for the South Downs on the day that Holmes was murdered. A strong wind was blowing off the Channel in the early evening. You see that branch on the ground some twenty feet from the hives? It fell off the overhanging chestnut tree and onto that upended hive. Someone later dragged it aside. I’m not sure who or why.”
“Impressive reasoning. I cannot find fault with it, except for the remarkable coincidence of it. I wonder what the murderer was looking for.”
“I suggest we try and find out.”
We put on our gloves and went to work. I looked through the paperwork in the rolltop desk and Christopher began sorting through the documents he had found in the safe.
After a few minutes, he announced, “Look what we have here.” I turned to see him walking toward me from the pine table waving a document in his gloved hand. “This is a grant deed for this cottage dated May 31, 1903. The grantor was a Hermes Hollocks.”
“Yes. I remember now that I asked Holmes who the former owner was and he said he had purchased it from a Frenchman who had returned to Brittany. I don’t think he mentioned the name.”
“That Frenchman seems to have been this Hollocks fellow.”
“So what do we make of that?”
“I make of it more than a coincidence that this man and Lilah Church’s supposed son have the same last name.”
“What else did you find in that batch?”
“Not much. A couple of contracts for land purchases he transacted with Mycroft and some receipts for personal loans that he made. Did you know he once lent Gregson money?” asked Christopher
“No I did not. But I don’t find it particularly surprising. They had a mutually beneficial relationship for many years and on a Scotland Yard salary I can understand how Gregson might come up short now and then. These are matters that Holmes would never have spoken of. He rarely discussed money.”
“It was a five-thousand-pound loan. Pretty substantial.”
I suddenly became uncomfortable with this conversation. I felt that Holmes’s privacy was being invaded and like a reflex I felt that it was my job to protect it. “Why don’t you go down to the constabulary and see if they have any information on this Hermes Hollocks? I will keep on going up here, and, if I find anything pertinent, I’ll show it to you.”
“The two of us can do both, can’t we?” said Christopher earnestly. “I feel if there’s questioning to be done, we should do it together. We have the time.”
“Actually, we don’t. I have to get back to London to take care of some arrangements this afternoon. When you come back around for me, I shall be ready.”
Young Hudson stood there puzzling through my logic. He was obviously reticent to proceed without me or have me proceed without him. He hesitated long enough that I was about to tell him the truth; that I felt that these aspects of Holmes’s world should still be kept a private matter and that I felt discomfort with his analytical peeping into his affairs.
“As you wish,” said Christopher before I could turn my thoughts into words. “Certainly I defer to your judgment.”
He laid the deed down on the dining table, quickly slipped out the back door and pulled off his gloves. “I will return for you before two o’clock.”
I bid him adieu and moments later heard him drive off. I gazed out the window at the chalky cliffs and the windswept English Channel and thought about Holmes looking out at that view during all those solitary years.
I resumed my search of the desk. In the bottom drawer I found some photographs. Many were of Holmes and myself. There were photos of our walking tour of Spain, others at Lestrade’s promotion party at Scotland Yard, the races at Ascot, a rugby match, a commencement speech at Eton. In the same drawer I found Holmes’s checkbook and checkbook register. The records dated all the way back to 1907. There were only two parties to whom Holmes personally wrote checks during all that time. One was Mrs. Hudson. They were for thirty-five guineas a month, the rent on Baker Street B. The check was reduced to fifteen guineas in September of 1910, presumably because we hadn’t lived there for years and used only the attic for storage. The second party to whom he wrote a monthly check, in the sum of twenty-two guineas, was someone named Beatrice Smithwick. For as long as I can remember, Holmes had an accountant in Marylebone handle his household finan-cial affairs, otherwise those bills might never have been paid. Holmes had never been much for the banal details of day-to-day life, but these two drafts he had written faithfully on the same day of every month.
9
CHRISTOPHER
I was a bit surprised that Doctor Watson was sending me on this errand without him. I thought we were operating as a rather good team and should do all aspects of the investigation together. Apparently, Doctor Watson did not agree. I had the distinct impression that he wanted me out of the way while he investigated Holmes’s cottage. During the last few days, I had sometimes been made to feel as if I was an intruder and, quite honestly, it hurt my feelings. It was a childish reaction and, admittedly, I had to bear much of the responsibility for my own status. I struggled to comport myself in the manner that Watson found appropriate, but occasionally I heard myself getting annoyingly chatty as I was taken with the exhilaration of being “on the case.” P
erhaps it was my youthful exuberance that gave Watson pause. Perhaps I was not demonstrating the proper gravity he thought required, but in all honesty, even with my most concerted effort, I could never be the staid Victorian gentleman that Watson was. I was born to the twentieth century, a changing world that would be documented in color and moving pictures. A world I believed would be less about manners and more about merit. In any event, I resolved to work harder to win Watson’s confidence.