Elementary

by william Todd

  “If I can, surely, Mr. Holmes?”

  “There was a young lady who was unfortunate to have thought she witnessed a murder, I do not know her name, but I am sure you can get it from the hotel manager.”

  “It was Miss Forrester, Mr. Holmes. She was the first person we talked to.”

  “Yes, do you happen to know where she is at the moment?”

  “I am sure she is about somewhere. No one has left the premises.”

  “Thank you. Could you be so kind as to arrest her.”

  “Arrest her? For what reason?”

  “She played a part in this little ruse. I am sure if you tell her that Newbury implicated her before his death, she will come clean.”

  “I will certainly pass this along to Chief Constable Penhale. He is due back any moment.”

  “Where did he fly off to?” I asked.

  “He has been in Newquay arranging boats to go fetch the body at low tide. We sent word that the matter has been resolved, and we expect him back shortly.”

  “Wonderful, thank you,” said Holmes.

  When the constable left, he returned his attention to us. “That was the epiphany I had in the taxi.”

  “The woman?” asked Keene.

  “No, that was elementary. If there was no one to see him fall…”

  “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  “In a curiously roundabout way, yes, Mr. Keene. He needed a witness to see him fall. But one he could trust. He could not have just anyone or even a multitude of people witness it. That would greatly increase the chances of someone noticing a mannequin instead of an actual person. The particularly foggy morning only helped mask the charade. Oh, this was well-planned, well-planned indeed.”

  I contemplated Holmes’s proposition for a moment. “But she could have been an unwitting accomplice,” I finally replied after some thought. “If he knew that she would be preparing for breakfast and opening up curtains, he could have timed the stunt for her to be witness to it. He has been here a few times before. Certainly, he knew their routine.”

  “Capital, Watson! A well-contrived rebuttal. That was data I was not aware of but had expected, nonetheless. You are correct on all but one aspect. No one but she was up preparing for breakfast at 6 a.m. Certainly, it does not take two-and-half hours to prepare for breakfast in a hotel that holds roughly sixty guests and is not at capacity. No, I believe he befriended her and manipulated her, much the same way he did Miss Keene. In the end, these women were nothing more than pawns to Newbury, regardless of his professed affections to at least one of them. I would have had more sympathy for the man had he just paid his debts like a gentleman.”

  “Yet, you risked your life to save his,” I reminded.

  “I saw where the situation was headed, my dear fellow. I very much dislike self-executed castigation. I prefer physical transgressions be paid with physical judgment. The one to come is above my station.”

  “Do you think it was her footprints in the wet grass we saw along with his? Miss Forrester’s, I mean?”

  “No, both sets were his, one setting up his doppelganger and one as he left to set up for his target practice.”

  “And all this was happening while I was upstairs rooting through his room?” Keene asked.

  “You missed a lot,” said I.

  Holmes put out his cigarette and drank down the rest of what was surely by now cold tea. “Now, gentlemen, we come to the plat de resistance. I had all these pieces and knew not what to do with them, at first. How slow-witted I have been today. I can only blame my preoccupation with the bee symposium. But in the taxi, I realized that at low tide, when they recovered the body, the police would know they had been played. That meant Newbury only had until 11:30 this morning to get the money and leave the area before everyone would know he was still alive. All this came to me as I stared out the window at the dilapidated Wheal Kerrek in the distance. Then, the tapestry came to me, and the tunnel, then I knew in an instant where Newbury was.”

  “And now, here we sit,” I replied.

  “Not quite the ending I had hoped for,” lamented Rory Keene. “I had thought without any doubts whatsoever that Newbury had only been using my sister as some sort of scapegoat so he could make off with the money. It had never occurred to me that he might truly have feelings for my sister.”

  “In my experience,” I offered sincerely, glancing over at Holmes, “what one might call a handicap and something detrimental to the human condition only serves to make them a more special human being. Some people have a propensity to see that, many do not.”

  Though the sentiment was offered indirectly to Holmes, he had paid no mind to the remark. Instead, he wore a determined look as he scrutinized the plump philanderer at the table next to us with his face in the menu.

  Holmes at last stood and regarded us once more. “Now that this little affair has been handled, I am off to see if I can still get a glimpse of the rare cuckoo bee before it is too late.”

  “Well, I hope you can find some solace in what is left of the symposium. It is too bad that this has taken you away from the reason for your visit to Cornwall.”

  With a laugh and a wave of his hand my friend replied, “Nonsense, Watson. I couldn’t have asked for a better holiday.”

  Holmes grabbed his hat and tucked it up under his arm. But before he left, he tapped at the menu of stranger from the train beside us. “Give your masters a message from me. Tell them Mr. Newbury is dead, and the police have recovered the stolen money. You shall not collect a penny of the debt.”

  Without looking at him, the man asked, “And who should I say this message is from?”

  “Tell them they can thank this misfortune on Sherlock Holmes.”

  Once Holmes left the restaurant, the man got up himself and followed suit.

  “How on earth did Holmes know that was Newbury’s tail?” Keene asked taken aback.

  All I could do was shrug. “What happened to the lost settlement at Roanoke? Is there life on other planets? Will anyone ever decipher the Riemann Hypothesis? Count Sherlock Holmes’s abilities among the questions in life that may never be answered.”

  The End

  Elementary

  It was a cold, wet, and windswept Saturday evening nearing the Ides of March. The beginning of 1899 had seen some of the coldest and most inclement weather since that dreadful ‘year without a summer’, which was the impetus for author Mary Shelley’s infamous tale Frankenstein, at the pistol shot of the century. With but a few days of respite as the exception, the weather had been abnormally chilled and wet for the better part of a month that usually heralded in Spring with blooming flowers and a thawing sun. The temperatures as of late hovered just enough above freezing to keep the precipitation in liquid form, but Winter, it seemed, had no intention of letting the warmer months get a foothold in London. In fact, it was of sufficient brutality that my old war wound, which often gave me fits in the extremes of weather, was causing me some discomfort. I did my best to ignore it by reading the paper, while Holmes plucked ruefully at his violin. With my malaise and his boredom, it made for a peculiarly restless atmosphere—with an irritatingly out-of-tune E string intermittently thrown in.

  So, it was with much enthusiasm that we both rose from our chairs when there came the familiar knock at the door downstairs.

  “I do hope it is good news, Watson,” Holmes declared. “I am at my wits’ end in these cold and wet doldrums. Perhaps it is Lestrade in need of our help.”

  Stretching my aches as I folded the paper and placed it on the sideboard, I replied, “So you wish someone ill all for the sake of relieving your boredom?”

  My friend shot me a feigned, hurtful look. “Don’t be silly, Watson. I would settle for a simple blackmail, a tidy, little government conspiracy…a cipher. An unsharpened ax cannot chop wood.”

  As we heard the footsteps upon the floorboards Holmes perked an ear. “Those are the unmistakable strides of our
compatriot from Scotland Yard. Things are indeed looking up.”

  Holmes ran to the door and opened it just as Lestrade was about to knock. He was wet in his waterproof and looked miserable.

  “Ah, Lestrade, we thought it you coming up the stairs.” He ushered the man in with a long sweep of his bow. “A brandy? It is a night not fit for man nor beast.”

  Lestrade nodded a terse, yes, to me as I retrieved the glasses and brandy. “Yet, here I am,” he replied glumly then sneezed. His skin was grey, his cheeks sunk into his face, and the man had dark circles about his eyes as though he hadn’t slept in days.

  “You look unwell,” said I, as I poured the drinks.

  “A cold that seems to have taken to me like a lost dog.”

  “Shall I prepare you something for it?”

  He waved the statement off. “I have tried every bloody remedy out there with no results. And let me tell you, anyone with any amount of hair on his chest would be a fool to try porous plaster. Oh, application is the easy part. There is nothing in the instructions, however, to warn you of the hellish ordeal of taking it off if left to dry! No, this blasted thing will leave me when it’s good and ready. I am quite tired of the fight.”

  Holmes grinned cheekily but made no comment. He tossed his violin and bow onto a side table and offered Lestrade a seat by the fire, which he gladly took after he removed his coat and placed it on a hook on the mantle to dry out.

  I gave us each a glass of brandy, and we sat down, anxious to hear what conundrum had brought Lestrade to us.

  Holmes gave the inspector a querying look. “So, what brings you to our digs on a dreary, despicable night like this?”

  Lestrade retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose before beginning. “There’s been a murder not too far from here. A professor from City of London University over in Northampton Square was killed in his flat. He and his wife live a few streets away from the university on Paget. According to the missus, she was knitting in bed, which is her custom, while the husband, a Mr. Harold Austin, was tinkering around with chemicals in a self-made laboratory he has in the loft above the flat. The wife said she heard what she thought was an explosion upstairs. She roused herself to investigate and was bowled over by an unknown man as she rounded the corner to the steps leading up to the loft. Before she could regain herself, he had bounded the entrance stairs and ran out the front door.”

  Holmes interrupted, “She did not know who it was with whom she collided?”

  “She says not. Apparently, he entertains students frequently in his laboratory, and she pays no mind to their comings or goings, which according to her, they do at all hours. She is certain, though, that when she retired for the evening, he was alone. At her husband’s request, she leaves the door unlocked for certain students to pop in, and he locks up before retiring himself.” He took a robust swallow of brandy then went on, “At any rate, after recovering herself, she looked in on her husband. She found him slumped over in his chair where he’d been writing out formulas of some sort. He had a single gunshot wound in his back. By the time she had rushed to his side he was dead.”

  Holmes, who had thusly locked his fingers together as he listened unfurled his index fingers and began tapping them together impatiently. “That sounds rather straightforward, Lestrade. Surely, this is something well within your realm of reasoning to resolve. What need of us do you have?”

  The veiled sarcasm was not lost on the inspector, and he replied irascibly, “Because chemistry was not one of my academic strongpoints, if you must know, Holmes! I know you have a fondness for that sort of muckety-muck and decided you might be of help in some capacity as it may relate to his death.”

  “He was a chemist,” my friend replied, “yet, it seems to me physics played the larger part in the man’s demise. How can my erudition help in solving this little affair?”

  Lestrade gulped down the rest of the brandy and held it out to me for a refill, which I obliged. He then said, “Because according to his wife, his experiments of late had taken a darker, less traditional route. She swears he had become fascinated with alchemy and was dabbling in different archaic formulas. And to that end, the intruder was holding a piece of paper in his hand as he ran off.”

  “Alchemy? How ludicrous,” I replied as I poured. “No one in their right mind believes that nonsense. It is more superstition than science. I would have thought that a university professor would not stoop to such a medieval practice.”

  Holmes held out a quieting hand. “Do not be so judgmental, Watson. Many famous scientists dabbled in alchemy, most notably our countrymen Roger Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton.”

  My eyes widened in surprise. I had never heard such a thing and said as much. Holmes replied to my skepticism by saying, “I am not saying that any rational scientific mind would believe such a thing as making gold from baser elements, but I will, however, remind us all here that many inventions were discovered, albeit serendipitously, by the diligent practice of that dark science.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  Holmes replied as he counted them off on his long fingers, “Gunpowder, Prussian Blue, many of the poisons we know today, glass and ceramics, and for the fairer sex, cosmetics. These are but a few discoveries made by practicing alchemy. I can go on if you wish. The list is quite substantial.”

  Lestrade finally broke into the conversation as he wiped his nose, “So what you are saying is that maybe this man wasn’t so much looking for how to turn lead into gold as he was possibly looking for the impetus to a new discovery or invention?”

  “Quite right,” said Holmes rather defeatedly. “It is possible and, indeed, probable that he was dabbling in alchemy only to ignite some more meaningful discovery that had been eluding him. I daresay many in the field are nothing more than frustrated inventors. It is a shame that modern chemistry has succumbed to the allure of the prostitute of commercialism.”

  Lestrade then replied cryptically, “Well then, I think it all the more prudent that you see his laboratory. There is something you need to see.”

  “And what about this intruder who rushed from the flat?” I asked.

  Lestrade shrugged. “As it so happened, a beat constable, Parker is his name, was just up the street when he heard the shot. He saw the blackguard running from the place, gave chase, but there was too much ground to make up, and he was lost in the rain. We did a house to house to see if anyone saw anything. With but one exception, no one seemed to have paid any mind to the gunshot. It was only when they heard the scream did they choose to be nosey and look through their windows, but by then the murderer had absconded. In the meantime, Mrs. Austin, as mentioned, relayed that some of his students had been up in his little laboratory over the previous weeks so we are also ascertaining who they were, where they are, and rounding them up for questioning.”

  Lestrade rose and redonned his waterproof. “So, are you too engrossed in your own affairs to brave the elements and come give me your take on things?”

  Sherlock gave me a look. “What say you, Watson? Are you willing to embrace a choleric Mother Nature, or do you prefer the comfortable boredom of Mrs. Hudson and the Times?”

  Of the two evils, I made my decision. “I’ll get my jacket and wellies.”

  After relaying our plans to Mrs. Hudson, we were off.

  . . . .

  The fifteen-minute jaunt down Baker Street was a quiet one, only momentarily coming to life when Lestrade coughed or sneezed or blew his nose. Holmes sat in quiet introspection, head bowed, resting his chin on his breast. Lestrade, like myself, had known Holmes for many years and knew he was not to be bothered with idle chat while in this contemplative state. I can only speculate that Holmes was turning in that great head of his how such an ancient and dead practice could lead to a person’s untimely death in this modern age of scientific advancement. Intermittently, Lestrade and I would exchange glances in that silence then resettle our eyes out the window, watching the sheeting rain maul at the landscape of t
he Great City.

  The professor’s flat was only a short walk from the college, at the corner of Paget and Rawstorne Streets, with the entrance on Paget. The weather was kind enough to have slowed to an occasional drizzle, however, the wild wind still stung at any exposed skin.

  The three of us alighted the taxi.

  Taking in the surroundings, Holmes surveyed the area with a keen eye.

  Pointing to a partially opened door with a sturdy constable sentried at its side, Lestrade said, “Our dead alchemist is up these stairs.”

  Surprisingly, Holmes replied, “I think I shall nibble on the morsels out here before sitting down to the meal within.”

  “Suit yourself. You won’t mind if I wait inside for you then? No need for this cold to turn into pneumonia.”

  “Which way did the intruder run?”

  Pointing, Lestrade said, “According to Parker, he first saw him on the opposite-side corner of Rawstorne and Paget, over there, while he was walking down Rawstorne from the opposite direction. He then gave chase. The man must have been young and fit to outrun Parker; he seems a sturdy and vigorous fellow, himself.”

  “Indeed,” Holmes replied, and the manner and tone was such that I did not believe for a moment that he was agreeing with the inspector in his assessment of either the vigor of the constable or the sex of the intruder. Sherlock Holmes would agree with another’s assessment only when he came to that same conclusion himself and not a moment before.

  The inspector went inside the Austins’ flat to wait for us while I followed Holmes up to the intersection of the two streets. Here, Paget ended at Rawstorne, so the murderer only had two options in his escape –left or right. Holmes looked left, up Rawstorne, I assume taking in the environs in which the constable came onto the scene, then right, down the opposite way the scoundrel made his escape. I noticed his acute eyes paying particular attention to the streetlamps, which lit the corners of the streets but did not reach the spaces between them. He then looked up at the buildings surrounding us. What he was looking for was anyone’s guess. I would have thought more could be gleaned from the crime scene inside the flat, but Holmes knew this foul business better than anyone, and I am not one to needlessly question the sometimes circuitous routes he took in the ministrations of his detective work.