A Study in Sherlock

by Laurie R. King

  “So I gather,” I said, watching his friend head for the building farthest away from the horse barn.

  “When I left for the war, Wishy was the best horseman in the county. Raised and trained thoroughbreds, won races. He was too big to be a jockey, of course, but he loved few things on earth more than to take a fast horse for a gallop in a meadow.

  “Unlike the colonel’s family, the Hanslows are close-knit, and Aloysius was an especially devoted brother. Adored his little sister. Gwendolyn. Five years his junior and bidding fair to become a beauty. Gwen was easy to adore. She was vivacious, smart, and if, like her brother, she was a chatterbox whose enthusiasm sometimes outpaced good sense, she was also, like her brother, generous and sweet-natured. She worshipped him.”

  He fell silent, his face set in lines of grief. He didn’t speak again until we were nearly to the stable doors.

  “Wishy saw it happen. One moment he was enjoying a pleasant spring afternoon, turning back toward the stable, when Gwen came racing toward him on a horse. She gave a great whoop, called out, ‘Look at me, big brother!’ and fell—for reasons no one has been able to explain to Wishy’s satisfaction—breaking her neck. She was dead before he reached her.

  “He didn’t blame the horse, and even refused his father’s demand that the animal be put down. But he sold all his horses, and razed his stables. A few months later, he became an automobile enthusiast.

  “He experienced one other change. Wishy’s mother told me that her son has been dressing like Sherlock Holmes—or his notion of Holmes—since shortly after his sister died. Her theory is that the idea of being like Holmes, able to solve mysteries, to explain the inexplicable, to see the small clue that has gone overlooked, makes Wishy more comfortable in a world that has battered him with its random misfortunes and senseless sorrows.”

  “You know, Slye,” I said after a moment, “where we were, one couldn’t help but think of the lost dreams and desires of fallen comrades, the theft from the world of their potential. But I think we sometimes forgot that even before the influenza pandemic, here at home there were losses that were no less bitter for being faced one by one.”

  “No.” He sighed. “But we must go forward, even with these hitches in our gaits. Let’s see what we can do for the colonel.”

  He pulled the stable doors open. There was straw strewn about in the center aisle, in a building that had not housed horses for five years.

  “From Carlton’s night of sleeping off a binge?”

  “No, someone trying to cover up parallel tracks of mud, unless I miss my guess,” Slye said.

  The car was in the fourth stall down, the one nearest the ladder into the hayloft. I thought we might need Hanslow to verify that it was the colonel’s Model T—and I supposed we’d have to take it out of the stables to do that—but there was no doubt in either of our minds that we had found the missing automobile. Slye bent to examine something on the floor of the stall, while I moved closer to the car.

  “Slye, there are bloodstains on the backseat!”

  He didn’t answer, and when I looked back at him he was standing stock-still, his face drained of all color, a look of abject terror on his face.

  I damned myself three times over for not thinking of the effect—the cumulative effect!—this day’s events might have on his mind.

  “Boniface Slye,” I said, quietly but firmly. “You are here with me.”

  He blinked, swallowed hard, reached a trembling hand up to his head, then held it up to me, palm out. There was blood on his fingers. “Slye!” I cried. “But how …”

  He looked up, and as he did, a drop of blood fell on his face. He looked back at me, and said in a faint voice, “Is it real, Max? Or am I imagining that it is raining blood again?”

  “It’s real, only—not what you’re thinking, Slye! The hayloft!”

  He seemed to come back to himself then, and we raced up the ladder. We found the colonel—alive, awake, and mad as fire, but in a seriously weakened condition. “Do what you can for him,” Slye said as I worked to remove the gag from the colonel’s mouth. “I’ll fetch your medical bag from the car.”

  “Robert!” the colonel croaked. “Help him.”

  “He’s being cared for, sir,” I said, taking his blindfold off and looking at his head wound. To my relief, it appeared that it had clotted, then reopened—perhaps as he stirred awake. Still, the bloodstain on the floor of the hayloft was large enough to be worrisome.

  “Untie me so that I can kill that damned bitch and her brother!”

  “I’ll untie you, but you must try to lie quietly. Sheriff Anderson is here, and he hasn’t let your niece and nephew move an inch since he arrived.”

  “Ah. Good man, Anderson.” He studied me a moment and said, “What the hell happened to your face?”

  “Ruined by the same thing that ruined your manners.”

  He gave a crack of laughter, and was still overcome by mirth when Slye brought my kit up a few minutes later. Slye raised his brows.

  “Hysteria,” I said.

  “A lot of that going around,” he said, which set the colonel off again.

  Eventually we had him cleaned up, stitched up, and comfortably ensconced in his bed. He had refused to go to the hospital, even when I tempted him with the idea of being closer to his son. “I’m not going to be able to do a damn thing for him there today, while I can still help Anderson here. If I go to that blasted hospital, they’ll drug me sure as hell, and you know it.”

  Sheriff Anderson got a statement from him, and told us that Carlton had been located.

  “It was a plan that might have worked,” Slye said to the group assembled in the parlor. Sheriff Anderson, Carlton Wedge, the Simmses (now each handcuffed and under the eye of a burly deputy), Wishy, and I had been joined by the colonel, as tough an old bird as I ever care to meet. “You owe your life to your housekeeper and a grocery boy, Colonel Harris.”

  “We were never going to kill our uncle!” Anthony protested, even as his sister told him to shut up.

  “I may not have every detail just right, but I believe I can come close enough,” Slye said. “Last night, Anthony met Carlton and easily tempted Carlton to drive him to an abandoned barn where Anthony had hidden a few bottles of gin. Carlton, unaware that the drinks poured into his tumbler were spiked, woke up many hours later, wondering who had tied him up, and with no clear recollection of the previous evening’s events. He was able to free himself, and was found by the sheriff’s deputies as he wandered down the road to the village, thinking he must have left his car there.

  “Carlton will be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that dear old cousin Anthony was setting him up to be falsely accused of murder.

  “The Simmses planned to lure Robert Harris and Colonel Harris to a small lane on a seldom-traveled road. They knew the regular schedule of the household from previous recent visits. Rawls, the housekeeper, the cook—all recall finding the two of you being extraordinarily curious about their routines. The delivery boy from the village came by in the early morning. So matters would be taken care of a little later in the morning—not too late, or Carlton might awaken or be found away from the place where he was supposed to be committing a crime.

  “What did they tell you when they called this morning, Colonel?”

  “Alice told me that they had met Carlton in the village and told him I wanted to send him to an asylum. Said he’d gone off his head and was going to kill himself on one of the abandoned lanes.”

  “What!” Carlton said.

  “It was an important part of the plan that the colonel be lured away from the road, to lessen the chance of something felonious being seen by inconvenient witnesses who might come driving up the hill. So Carlton’s Model T was taken to the end of the lane. And Alice waited with the Rolls to keep an eye on things.”

  “Not quite,” said the colonel. “She was there to point the way, and hurry us along by exclaiming that Anthony had run down the lane to try to intervene. But she got into
my car with us, and rode with us to where Anthony was lying in wait for us. It had started to rain by then, quite hard.”

  “Which might, I suppose, have been seen as an aid to their plan: kill the colonel and his heir, make it appear that Carlton was the guilty party, and sit back and inherit. They needed to be sure that the bodies would be found—missing persons cases are hell on probate—so they would leave Carlton’s car to point the way. The rain would make it seem that Carlton’s vehicle got stuck in the mud.”

  “It did get stuck!” Anthony said. “And we didn’t know how the old bastard had left his will, so we weren’t going to kill him until we were sure.”

  “Anthony! Shut up!” Alice screamed at him.

  “Oh, I was supposed to believe that Carlton clubbed me from behind while you two stood and watched? There must be a passel of nincompoops on your father’s side of the family.”

  “All sorts of things went wrong, didn’t they?” Wishy said. “Robert didn’t stay to help you, sir?”

  “Robert’s no fool. I’m sure he knows that if a man finds himself unarmed and outnumbered, he must put some distance between himself and the attacking force!”

  “So Anthony shot him in the back,” I said. “And in the head, though fortunately that bullet merely grazed him. I’ve talked to Dr. Smith, and he assures me Robert will recover. You, on the other hand, Anthony, are doubtless going to the electric chair.”

  “No! No! I have no gun. It was Alice! And it’s no use telling me to shut up, Alice, because I won’t!”

  “What happened after she shot him?” Slye asked.

  “It was miserable out there, but I trussed up the colonel while Alice tried to hunt down Robert. Then she came running back, says there’s no time to lose, the delivery boy is coming up the hill—she told me to put the colonel in his car and hide it in the horse barn, and wait there for her. She went tearing off, then took the Rolls up the road at lightning pace. I waited until the delivery boy went past, then took the car up along the service road out to the barn. We knew the servants would be busy talking to the lad on the other side of the house, getting the village gossip, and wouldn’t see us. And I did just as she asked—even carried the old bugger up into the hayloft, and that wasn’t easy, I tell you!

  “I really thought we might pull it off. She had even thought to bring a change of clothes for each of us, so that by the time we went into the house, we didn’t look so disheveled or damp.”

  “But the Rolls is designed to be noticed,” Slye said, “and was noticed by the delivery boy, which made the staff wonder why it took so long for you to enter the house. Not only that, the housekeeper caught sight of the colonel’s car, and wondered what was keeping him.”

  “You got the floorboard of the Rolls muddy!” Wishy said, as if this was the worst offense of all.

  “Must I listen to this fake Holmes?” Alice shouted.

  The room fell silent. Then Slye said, “Yes, for it would do you good. He has an excellent head and a genuine heart, both of which you lack.”

  Carlton Wedge, as it turned out, felt himself to be at rock bottom, and was eager to take the colonel up on his offer to undergo treatment for alcoholism. We helped them find a facility worthy of their patronage.

  Dr. Smith began driving out to Slye’s place, asking me to consult with him on some of his cases. I find the work interesting, but not as interesting as helping Slye to recover, and with the little problems that come his way.

  Aloysius Hanslow still dresses like Holmes and invites us to come with him whenever Sheriff Anderson calls. Wishy has stopped flinching when he looks at me.

  Slye continues to improve, although those moments in the colonel’s horse barn caused a minor setback. He talks of returning to the city, which he was never wont to do before now.

  For the time being we are in the country, where old men tell young boys of war, and some of us who’ve seen it hope it never comes again, knowing it always will.

  Jan Burke is the author of fourteen books, including Bones, which won the Edgar for Best Novel, Disturbance, and The Messenger. Her novels have appeared on the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists and have been published internationally. She is also an award-winning short-story writer.

  In college a boyfriend urged her to read The Hound of the Baskervilles, which soon led to the purchase of the entire Canon. Though she ultimately came to her senses about the value of the boyfriend, Burke’s admiration of Sherlock Holmes only grew over the years, and she believes the respect for the power of physical evidence in Conan Doyle’s writing not only influenced her own writing, but also laid the groundwork for her later advocacy for the improvement of public forensic science. In 2006, Burke founded the Crime Lab Project, a nonprofit organization supporting public forensic laboratories throughout the United States.

  A SPOT OF DETECTION

  Jacqueline Winspear

  The boy was ill. He knew he was ill, and the fact that the school matron had sent him home—and Matron rarely sent anyone home—meant his demise could be imminent. The spots on his chest itched, worse than the itch caused by crushed rosehips when Weston—the sniveling rat, Weston—pushed a handful down the back of his collar. This morning he’d scratched and itched throughout Latin and into Algebra. And then after lunch the itch went from his chest to his legs, and then began to be apparent above the collar of his cornflower-blue-and-black uniform blazer. He’d wheezed and coughed well into Geography, and finally laid his head on the desk as if begging for mercy. But at least that was better than home, where there would be only his mother, Aunt Ethel, and his grandmother for company, with the occasional visit from his ill-tempered Uncle Ernest, who only ever talked about money and how much the family was costing him. He sighed and the sigh made him cough again. It was a long walk from school to the house and no one had offered to accompany him; he was, after all, expected to act like an Englishman, and the stiff upper lip—even one with a giant teasing spot on it—was not permitted to wobble. Once home, his mother would send him to bed and that would be that. The school would not let him rest though; work would be sent in a brown paper parcel for him to complete from his sickbed. He was second to last in his class to come down with measles, so he knew what to expect.

  The sweat beaded across his forehead and trickled in rivulets from his neck down the gully that was his spine. Not long to go now, he thought. He rubbed his eyes, which were running as much as his nose, and he swayed a little, trembling with fever. As he lingered on Margaret Street trying to garner fortitude for the last half-mile, raised voices seemed to ricochet past his aching ears. At first he thought he had experienced some sort of hallucination. He cupped an ear and listened. Yes, he had definitely heard some level of discord, and the point of origin of the fracas appeared to be the upper floor of one of the three-story terraced houses that flanked his route. He shook his head to clear a mind befuddled by blocked sinuses. The voices, coming from somewhere above and to the left of him, were raised again, and now, as he looked up, squinting in an endeavor to ascertain the source of the row, he saw the shadows of a man and a woman silhouetted at the window of an adjacent house. One of them had raised a hand, but as the fever made everything around him seem disjointed, he was not sure if the hand belonged to the man or the woman, or whether it was simply something that floated in the air. Then the voices reached a crescendo.

  “You are nothing but a philanderer, a thief, and a … a … a thoroughly nasty piece of work. I wish I had never met you.”

  “And that, madam, is a sure case of the pot calling the kettle black!”

  “Don’t you ‘madam’ me, you lout!”

  The boy crinkled his eyes and pushed back his woollen school cap. It itched across his forehead. Silly, these English school caps—and at his age. Tiredness seeped through his being like waves at the seashore, and it made him think of the ocean; cool, cool water lapping over him, and how it might feel as it washed across his hot, sticky skin. Itch-itch-itch, scratch-scratch-scratch. Then there was a
scream. A scream so loud, he thought everyone must hear. But there was no one else on the street to be alarmed, though at that very moment a brand-new shining motorcar bumped and blasted its way toward him, barely allowing margin for a costermonger’s horse and cart. That’s when he thought he heard a gunshot. Crack! Crack! it went, into the air. Then it was gone, and there was no more screaming and yelling. And no more shadows.

  “Fell down right in front of me, he did, missus. Luck’ly, he knew where he lived, told me the address right off when I asked him—mind you, I had to shake him a bit. Looks like he’s got a touch of the measles. Nasty, them measles. Had ’em when I was a lad.”

  The coster helped the boy across the threshold, whereupon the mother took charge, her manner of speaking causing the man to look up as she pressed a few pennies into his hand.

  “Long way from home, aren’t you, missus?”

  “This is our home now, sir. Thank you for assisting my son—now I must get him to bed.”

  She closed the door, and at once she and the boy’s aunt—there was no father present—helped him upstairs to his room at the front of the house. Having removed his school uniform, they laid him out on the bed, washed him with warm water and carbolic soap, and daubed the livid rash with calamine lotion before sending for the doctor. The boy remembered little of this, though he could, when he was on the mend, remember trying to press the point that he thought someone had been shot on Margaret Street. His words served only to convince the women of the severity of his fever, and the dangers inherent in a bout of childhood measles, which, they thought, would never have come to pass had mother and son remained in America. This was the 1900s now, after all, and London seemed a backward place to an immigrant from across the Atlantic, even though there was family here to help. It was to be some days before the illness became a source of boredom for the boy and a slight nuisance for the mother and aunt.

  “He’s on the mend, but I do wish he’d stop going on about hearing a gunshot on Margaret Street. The coster said he saw him collapse after the motorcar backfired and the horse shied, so of course it must have sounded like a shot from a gun to a sick boy.”