by william Todd
Her eyes widened. “Both!”
“And yet you found it in your heart to rent a room to the girl.”
Sensing Holmes’ sarcasm, she only replied, “As I said, she seemed a good girl. Pleasant. Has some trouble grasping English, but she is understandable enough. She keeps a small veg garden in the back for her cooking, keeps to herself, and pays on time. What more could a landlord want.”
“Indeed,” Holmes retorted dryly. “As I said, we are helping Constable Milks in this matter, and I was hoping to press upon your sense of civic duty and let us inspect her room.”
“Let no one say that I was an obstacle to the Crown.” She pulled out a ring of keys and picked one out from the six. “If you go around to the right side of the cottage, her door is the last one down. The rooms in the back have their own entrances. You can leave the keyring on her bed when finished, and I’ll retrieve it later.”
As Holmes unlocked the door, I gave a cursory glance over at Miss Mary’s garden, which was about thirty feet away at the back of the property against a fence. The dirt was soggy and bare, with bricks and stakes and a shovel thrown over the top of it. With the growing season all but over, all the vegetables had already been picked, the last of which having probably been used in that morning’s breakfast.
Once inside, the room was just as Mary said it would be—cluttered but not dirty. She had books in English, some Polish, pictures of her homeland and what I assumed was family, and true to her word, her writing desk was awash in blank cards, foolscap, and a half-used bottle of perfume.
“It looks like she enjoyed the theater, Watson,” Holmes said as he looked through the contents on her dressing table. “She has been to the Queen’s Theater in Crofton Barrow a few times, but most of these playbills are from her homeland, the last being—five years ago if I am reading the dates correctly.” He looked through a few of them. “And it seems our Miss Mary not only liked the theater but was part of it. I do not claim an extensive Polish vocabulary, but I am somewhat familiar with it. I am quite certain this particular scribble on at least three of these playbills are Mary Holowczak in the cast.”
“I wonder why she did not try her hand at theater here?” said I.
At that, there was a knock at the door that led to the interior of the home. Suddenly, the owner poked her head through the door. Rather sheepishly she said, “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation from the other side of the door, and she has, in fact, tried out for a few parts at the Queens. She and her sister both did. I overheard them preparing their auditions—”
Holmes put up his hand to stop her. “Her sister? No one mentioned a sister.”
“Her sister, Anna, poor thing, has been dead for two years, now. They both shared this room. She was accosted walking home one night from Crofton Barrow. No one knows who did it. She was found dead by her sister and the priest, who both went to look for her when she didn’t come home that night. Mary was in a bad way for some time, but eventually got over it, deciding that life had to go on for the living.”
Angry, Holmes lamented, “Why oh why, Watson, would we not be made aware of this vital information by the constabulary! Instead, we find out from the landlady!”
He handed the woman her key ring. “Thank you, madame. You’ve been most helpful.” Turning on his heels, he rushed for the door and exclaimed, “Come, Watson, we need to make haste before it’s too late!”
“Where are we off to?” I asked as we mounted the dog cart.
“We have one stop, then we need to get back to the hospital as quickly as we can make this old horse gallop.”
. . . .
When we returned to see Miss Mary, she seemed to have fully recovered from not only her faint but also the poisoning as well. Her colour was back, and she was out of bed and back in her clothes, looking alert. She was speaking to Constable Milks when we arrived.
“Ah, gentlemen, come to pay your respects? It looks like Miss Mary, here, will not only make a full recovery but leave hospital in record time. We are still trying to tie up loose ends, but I think we have this in the bag. The priest admitted that there was another friend who had been absent this morning, William Waverly, and I was just talking to Miss Mary as to any suggestions where we might look for him. It seems odd that on the day all his friends are murdered that he be absent. I believe the priest is the culprit, and Waverly might be a co-conspirator, though I admit a motive still eludes me.”
“I believe I may know where William Waverly is,” offered Holmes.
“Well spit it out, man. We need to speak to him.”
“Since he is dead and buried in Miss Mary’s garden, I doubt you will get much from him.”
Mary gasped, and Milks looked wide-eyed at Holmes. “What the deuce are you talking about, sir?”
“I shall put forth what I know, and Miss Mary will have to fill in some gaps if she is willing to oblige. I shall go first.”
Mary said nothing, only glowered at Holmes.
Holmes began his dissertation of the crime. “Over the course of the last two years you have been scheming to murder these five men, and what a patient schemer you are, my dear Miss Mary. One who could rival that of any in London, save a few unique specimens.”
“But why?” asked Milks.
“The why we shall get to, momentarily, with Mary’s help. Let us stick with the how for a moment. She poisoned the decanter with hemlock.”
“That much is known already, but the who in your deductions are a bit flawed Mr. Holmes,” said Milks. “Don’t forget why we are having this conversation in a hospital. Mary was poisoned, as well. Why would she poison herself? That is preposterous.”
“And you completely missed the fact that Mary was affected by a completely different poison. She had to poison herself with arsenic instead of the hemlock in the wine, and one small grain of arsenic, easily concealed was all she needed. Much can be gleaned by asking the right questions, constable. Father Harrison relayed that the men would often, as a puerile prank, drink all the wine in the chalice before she had a chance to partake. She knew if by chance they played that little game today there would be no more poisoned wine left to drink, so she would need a backup poison to throw authorities off her trail. For, as you say, why would anyone poison themselves knowing the outcome would be their own demise?
“Indeed, Mr. Holmes. Doing that would be tantamount to suicide. You have yet to show how it can be done and why.”
“Mithridatism is the how” my friend replied.
Milks hmphed at the statement but not before throwing an unflattering glance at the young woman, who had sat back down on the bed wearing a look of distress and anger. “What in the world is that?” he asked.
“Mithridates was an ancient king who constantly worried about being poisoned,” Holmes went on. “He conquered this burden by slowly ingesting small amounts of different poisons until his body built up an immunity to them. He did this with many poisons and so was impervious to their effects. Yet, when the Romans over-ran his kingdom, and he feared being paraded through the streets in humiliation, he tried to poison himself, but the attempt was fruitless. The legend has it that a friend finally ran him through with a sword.”
“And you are saying that she did this—made herself invulnerable to the poison hemlock?”
“Not just her,” Holmes responded with a wagging finger. “Father Harrison, as well.”
“They are in this together?” Milks asked in disbelief.
“No,” Holmes replied, “But she did not want the death of the priest on her conscience. He was innocent of the crime for which she was dispensing her justice. So, she made him resistant, as well.”
Milks interrupted, “Then he would be an accessory to the murders if he knew what she was planning and went along with it.”
“That would indeed be true, constable, if only he knew what Miss Mary was doing. I believe that she was secretly doing it through the czarnina soup she was serving at breakfast. It was the only thing they alone ate.”
“What on earth is that?” he asked.
“It is duck’s blood soup. As part of the legend, it is said the way in which Mithridates accomplished becoming immune was to feed each particular poison to ducks in increasing amounts, and whichever ducks did not die he would kill and drink their blood. Miss Mary’s method was a bit more tasteful than was the king’s.”
He looked upon the young woman with a grin. “Have I been correct thus far, Miss Mary?”
She said nothing, only stared blankly at the floor.
The constable shook his head, still in unbelief, but I could tell the reasons for not believing Holmes were quickly fading. “But she almost died. You saw how sick she was. I was told she fainted while in your company earlier. Poisoning yourself is an awful heady risk to take, knowing it might not work out the way you think it should.”
Holmes smiled in that confidently smug way he does when he is in possession of all the facts. “Poison is in the dose, constable. One grain of arsenic is enough to make one visibly sick and she was. She was genuinely ill the way a bad piece of beef makes one ill. But one grain of arsenic will not kill you. Some of what you saw was authentic, the rest was acting, of which Watson and I found she and her sister were quite fond. All this evidence was at your fingertips had you not stopped your investigation once the poison was found in Harrison’s coat pocket.”
“So, you are saying she planted the poison on the priest? Why?”
Holmes sighed for when, even in the face of critical elucidations, the facts were not presenting themselves as clearly to the authorities as they were to him. With exasperation, he said, “This was her grand plan—please stop me, Miss Mary, if I stray from fact: She would elicit the affections of both Montfort and Waverly and play off them. She needed two men to make her plan work. She would eventually pick Montfort over Waverly as her beau, and Waverly would then become the scapegoat for everything else that happened. He seemed a bit of a bohemian, and came and went as he wished, so he would be the least likely of the friends to evoke concern for his absence. With Waverly gone from the group during the poisoning and whose affections were eventually spurned by Mary for Montfort’s, you now have a second viable suspect. With an alternative explanation of the facts, and with no obvious motive, she knew you would eventually have no choice but to let the priest go. It would have just been a waiting game. And to that end, she even gave you Waverly’s footprint in the entranceway. Even a cursory examination of the priest’s footwear would have shown the print wasn’t his. More proof that the man you would never find was setting up the priest for the fall. I do not think she had much time to hide it, so with a careful search of the grounds, I would wager the finding of that shoe.”
“All very elaborate,” Milks finally agreed, “but what was the end game here? That piece of information is still eluding me.”
“It is because Mary thinks that her sister died at the hands of these five young men.”
The young woman finally looked up, face reddened in anger. “They did kill her. I hear them. I hear their confessions to Father Harrison. I hear Will tell Father they pushed her out of wagon and left her to die. I wanted zemsta—revenge. I am patient woman. Two years it took, but I got revenge for my dear Anna.”
It was at this time that Father Harrison entered the room in the company of a constable.
Milks was on the verge of objecting that a suspect in four murders was out of his cell, but Holmes put up a hand to stop his protestations.
The priest said, “Dear girl, whatever you heard, you only heard part of the confession. What happened was an accident.”
Milks interjected somewhat perturbed, “We investigated that for weeks, and the whole time you knew what happened?”
“I cannot break the seal of the confessional. I will not divulge anything any of them told me of each person’s particular culpability, but I think I can say, without asking for guidance from the bishop, this much—Anna was walking home from Crofton Barrow. The boys, on their way back to the village themselves after a social gathering, offered her a ride, and she agreed. At some point, she became… uncomfortable sitting next to one of them and asked to change seats with the boy across from her. She stood to change seats. At that point, the carriage wheel hit a divot in the road. She lost her balance and fell from the wagon, landing awkwardly on her head. They stopped to render aid, but it was too late. She had broken her neck and died instantly in the fall. At the vehement request of one, they decided that it would be better for them to keep quiet. They’d all had a bit too much to drink, and one in particular was worried that because of some past indiscretions that involved the authorities, they might not believe the story. There was nothing they could do to save her, and there was no need for anyone to know of their involvement, even though, as I said, it was an accident.”
“And how do we know they were telling you the truth?” Milks asked.
Harrison said, “In confession, there is no reason to lie. Your confession is to God, not to me. God already knows the truth.”
“You are telling this now? Why did you not tell me this then?” Mary asked with anger lacing her words.
“They did not come to me until a month after it happened. By that point you had shown the beginnings of moving on with your life, and knowing the truth, even though it had been an accident, I felt your recovery from the loss of your sister would have digressed. Plainly put, I did not want to reopen such a fresh wound. I had no idea you overheard any of the confessions.”
“And now you find out that your revenge was for what, an accident?” Milks interjected.
Wiping away her tears, Mary replied, “Their silence alone was deserving of the noose.”
“Well this didn’t end the way I thought it would,” said Milks as he put Mary in cuffs. With a note of acquiescence, he then asked, “And where again did you say Waverly was?”
“Buried in the garden behind the cottage where she rents a room. His will be the corpse with the missing shoe.”
I would have laughed at Holmes’ remark had the situation not been so grim.
Holmes pulled out the card and handed it to Milks. “I believe she enticed Waverly to her room with this note. It is one of many cards you will find in Harrison’s desk in the rectory. She made the cards to teach them all her native language. When Waverly saw the one word, he knew its author and where to go. When he arrived, it was probably nightfall. When she saw him coming down the walkway to her door, she called him back to the garden where she struck him with a brick or a shovel and quickly buried the body in a grave she no doubt had already dug for him in the fresh, loose soil while she awaited his arrival.”
As Milks led Mary away, she stopped momentarily in front of Father Harrison. She looked so sorrowful. “If you knew I hear some of confession, would you have broken the seal and tell me truth about my Anna, then?”
The priest thought for a moment then said, “No.”
Milks led her away and said over his shoulder, “You’re free to go Reverend.”
When we were alone, Holmes engaged Father Harrison. “You lied to her. You would have relayed everything had she asked.”
“You are right, Mr. Holmes, but why let her know that her fate could have been changed. She would spend her remaining days wondering what if instead of what now. For her, the what now is more important and what she needs to focus on.” He sighed a deep, sorrowful sigh. “If I had known this was to be the ending, I would have forsaken my vows altogether to save those six souls. I can’t help but feel I have let them all down.”
“Yet, on at least one occasion you were seen in a heated discussion with the girl in the front alcove. My guess is you saw how she was playing both men and warned her of the possible consequences?”
“You are correct, once again, Mr. Holmes. It was not fair to her or either man doing what she was doing. One or all would have ended up hurt in the end. Now, I must live my life having seen just how hurt all would end up being. I shall end my days on my knees in prayer over t
his ordeal.”
“Then you are a better shepherd than you give yourself credit for,” replied my friend earnestly.
. . . .
Holmes was unusually quiet as we rode back to Phin’s cottage. I felt—and I knew Holmes felt—that sometimes justice seemed incomplete. An innocent man was almost incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and a young woman, grieving the death of her sister, would hang for five deaths that did not have to happen. Too many crimes went unpunished or the wrong people punished due to powerful influences, mere folly, or both. He had many times mentioned writing a volume on his methods of deduction once he retired to his beekeeping in Sussex. It was at times like this that I wondered why he waited. The world would be without the great detective someday, yet it was now—and would always be—in dire need of his services.
To break him from this silence I spoke up for there were questions I needed answered. “Indulge me, Holmes. When did you begin to suspect Mary in all of this?”
“Poison is a woman’s preferred method of murder, Watson, so I tended towards Mary from the beginning. And when I learned of Waverly’s temperament, I knew he could not be the murderer. He would have bludgeoned a man before resorting to poison. Once I was provided a motive all the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly into their rightful places.”
“And how on earth did you know Waverly was buried in Mary’s garden?”
Two things, Watson,” said he with a satisfied air. “It was a convenient place in which the earth was already disturbed that wouldn’t throw suspicion, and the middle of the garden was a full five inches higher than at the perimeter. In my experiments while at university before we were introduced, I discovered five inches is precisely the amount of displacement for a body of average build.”
After a brief silence, he added, “Thank you, Watson.”
“For what?”
“I prefer facts over feelings and was at a precipice. Those perfectly timed questions have brought me back.”
When we finally walked through the door into Phin’s cottage, wonderful aromas filled the air. Phin emerged from the kitchen, apron affixed, sweat beading on his forehead, a bit out of breath. “I am sorry, John, but salad and cold meats just will not do for us old friends. I took the liberty to use my new press on a duck, and these exquisite fragrances are the result. My mouth is watering at the thought. Please sit at the table. I have a first course that we can enjoy, and you can tell me how your investigation went. It will be like old times.”