We thanked her profusely and she accepted our gratitude with a slight smile, a nod, and a grunt; then she exited the flat after quickly inspecting the curtains in our sitting-room. “I need to wash these soon—your pipe and cigar smoke has turned them yellow,” she remarked.
After we ate the mid-day treat, Holmes went off on one of his capers, in disguise as an elderly mendicant with a salt-and-pepper beard and a pair of spectacles that had a crack diagonally across one of the lenses. I used the time while he was gone to complete my notes on a recent investigation Holmes had finished successfully involving the theft of the Bishopgate jewel collection.
Holmes returned to our quarters just in time to partake of Mrs Hudson’s delicious meal, he still in costume. It startled our landlady when she saw him seated at the table and for a moment she thought a street beggar was there in his place.
Later, after I had scoured the pages of the evening Star that our news agent delivered, I went up to bed, leaving Holmes in his lavender dressing gown engrossed in his reference books. I was restless and slept fitfully, dreaming and awakening to images of the bleeding troops in the Afghanistan campaign.
Morning came with a violent thunderstorm, so after we had toast and coffee, we donned our slickers and caught a London growler to Charing Cross Station for a train to the eastern terminus of the railway in Blackwall. By the time we reached our destination, knowing the address from the letter sent by Miss Addleton, the weather had improved, so we draped our slickers over our arms and approached the front door of the two-storey brick dwelling. Neatly-trimmed hedges, dripping with rain, surrounded the house and lined the walkway.
Amanda Addleton greeted me like a long-lost relative after I introduced myself, and she was amazed to meet Holmes, about whom she had learned from the magazine articles I had penned. I guessed Miss Addleton to be in her early forties. She wore her sandy-coloured hair braided in pig-tails, which accented her tiny ears and round face to the point that it made her appear unattractive. Her flowered dress was loose-fitting, save for the section around her wide hips.
“How is your brother?” I asked after we exchanged pleasantries.
“Physically, he seems fine, although he has lost weight since he relocated here. But his mental state is deteriorating,” she answered. “When I call him Ichabod or Captain, he sloughs me off and says Captain Ichabod Addleton is in his grave, strung up on the gallows for murdering his wife and daughter. ‘My name is William, William Shakespeare,’ he retorts. Then he goes back to his sheets of foolscap, repeatedly writing ‘O, ye scoundrel! Hath ye no shame?’ Occasionally, he cries—sobs, actually—and I can hear him all the way down here. He is a tortured soul now, once a brilliant tactician.”
She pleaded with me to try harder than Dr Paquet to revive her brother, suggesting that when we went face-to-face his memory of our association might shock him back to reality. I started up the steps to his rooms and listened at the door to the sound of a man moaning. I rapped gently and heard him tell me to come in.
“Who are you?” he demanded, and rose from the desk chair.
“I am your former charge in the Army unit, Dr John H Watson,” I replied, surprised at how unkind the years had been to him.
“And so you are. So you are, John. Put on a few pounds and turned grey around the temples, eh?” he noted. “I’ve been dead for almost two years now, executed for killing my darling Annabelle and my beautiful Daphne. I have been re-incarnated as William Shakespeare and I am writing a drama that depicts the life of Captain Addleton. I am stuck, though, at the beginning. I can’t seem to get past the opening lines. See for yourself.” He extended his hand, which held a sheet of foolscap, and paused for me to grasp it and read. “You are a writer, John, tell me what you recommend.”
“But I don’t understand,” I said. “Who is the scoundrel?”
“Why, it is Captain Addleton, of course,” he shot back.
“What makes him a scoundrel?”
The captain stiffened. “I can’t tell you that—it is a secret,” he responded curtly.
“Well, then, if you won’t reveal the secret, I don’t see how I can help you get beyond the opening lines,” I blurted.
He sat down at the desk again. “It is time for you to leave, John. I have things to do,” he concluded, and buried his head in the papers that were scattered in front of him.
I went downstairs to relay the details of the short repartee to Holmes and Miss Addleton, who were in the dining room having tea. I shared a cup with them and was charmed when Miss Addleton praised my results as a minor breakthrough. Holmes gathered from my description of the dialogue that the guilt the captain harboured stemmed from an incident or a chapter in his marriage, which he wanted no one to discover.
“What propelled him over the edge, Watson, was the content of a parcel Miss Addleton recalls him receiving soon after he arrived here,” Holmes disclosed, adding that the package was left on the front stoop during the night and contained only the name Ichabod on the wrapping. “It felt heavy, as if it were a large book,” Miss Addleton further remembered.
“I saw a volume on his desk entitled A History of the Royal Army,” I interjected.
“Oh, my word!” exclaimed Miss Addleton. “That was a cherished birthday gift to him from Annabelle! But how did he acquire it? He came to live with me with only the clothes on his back. He had no belongings—they were all lost in the fire.”
“The book must have been what you found on your doorstep,” Sherlock Holmes stated to her. “It probably was salvaged from the ruins of the home at Knight’s Place, but by whom? Watson, please go upstairs and ask Captain Addleton if you can borrow the history briefly. Perhaps it has some inscription that would shed light on this little puzzle.”
I did as he asked, and when I requested the loan of the book, Captain Addleton informed me that it was too precious to remove from his sight, because his wife had sent it to him from the Great Beyond. To prove it, he showed me this scribbled message on the flyleaf:
“Ichabod,
“Here is your treasured history book that was spared by the fire. Come join me, for I shall love you through eternity.” There was no signature below the words.
I hurried downstairs and reported my findings.
“Obviously, the captain has a female admirer, but he is confused and can’t fathom the book came from her, not his deceased wife,” Holmes commented. “Imagine the irony if the book and the inscription pushed him over the brink.”
Miss Addleton was aghast at the concept of her brother being romantically linked to another woman. “He was devoted to Annabelle. It is possible, is it not, that he rejected the love of this other woman?” Miss Addleton queried rhetorically.
“Anything is possible,” Holmes replied soothingly. “But I suspect we have unearthed Captain Addleton’s secret.”
“Well, what do we do now?” she said, whimpering.
“To confront him today with the prospect of knowing about his private horror would likely do more harm than good,” I chimed in. “We have penetrated into his dark world deep enough for now. My friend and I will be leaving, but I can return in a few days to see the captain again. Besides, I need some time to think about the next session with him.”
Holmes agreed, and so we departed after I patted her softly on the forearm.
Once we were outside, Holmes suggested we take the train to Windsor Station and walk to Knight’s Place so he could satisfy his curiosity about the fire at the captain’s former residence.
“What do you expect to find there?” I wanted to know.
“Perhaps something the official police overlooked, or maybe a clue to the identity of the other woman—a piece of information that would aid you in your future conversations with Captain Addleton,” he speculated.
Our walk from Windsor Station, which was crowded with tourists, took us through mews and streets with park-like qualities until we reached Knight’s Place, where the great stone house of the Addleton family stood abandoned with i
ts roof collapsed and window frames charred from the thick smoke.
Holmes led the way in by shoving open the burned front door, which was ajar. “Be careful here, Watson, for the floor might not be intact,” he warned. Once inside, we marveled at the destruction of a once-comfortable drawing room, with paneled walls that were scorched so badly that we could not determine what kind of wood had covered the blocks of stone. We cautiously made our way past a huge fireplace with a granite mantel and into a dining hall, the ceiling of which was caved in, causing the chandelier to crash and shatter atop a table so large that a host could entertain a dozen dinner guests. Miraculously, the remainder of the floor was left untouched by the blaze, including the relatively small library, where Captain Addleton’s female admirer must have salvaged the history book.
Upstairs, every part of the hallway connecting the bedrooms was covered in soot, even the interiors of the rooms and their furniture, which were otherwise unscathed. “Curiously, Watson, the fire seems to have been concentrated in the two lower rooms—not up here where a faulty chimney would have done the most damage,” Holmes observed. “Let’s make a closer inspection of the drawing room.”
As we descended to the bottom of the staircase, Holmes got down on his hands and knees to examine the baseboard with his magnifying glass. “Hmmm. Ah ha,” he said under his breath. He followed the glass all along the baseboard to the fireplace, repeating, “Ah ha,” then stood erect. “My suspicions were correct, Watson,” he announced finally in a low voice. “This fire was the handiwork of an arsonist. The burn pattern on the baseboard is in the form of splashes—see here, and there, and over here. An accelerant, probably lamp oil, was used to ignite the flames. As usual, the authorities botched the job, and because of their bungling, a double-homicide has gone unpunished.”
“The captain!” I shouted excitedly. “He insists that he murdered his wife and daughter!”
“That has yet to be determined, but it does undoubtedly cast Ichabod Addleton in an inauspicious light,” Holmes postulated. “Come, we shall have a further look in the library, but be wary of where you step—the floor is weak in spots.”
I asked Holmes as we gingerly approached the study if we should go to Scotland Yard with the information. “If justice is to be served, I believe that is our only alternative,” he said reluctantly. Once inside the library, Holmes was drawn immediately to the hand-carved, grimy, mahogany desk, and he began opening the drawers after first examining the miscellaneous papers on top. “Nothing of interest to us here so far,” he judged. He came upon a locked bottom drawer and opened it easily with the barrel-and-bit key he always carried on a ring attached to his trouser belt loop.
Inside the drawer was the captain’s service revolver, resting on several pieces of correspondence. Holmes dropped his hand in, placed the revolver on the desktop, removed the letters, and started at once poring over them. “The first one is from Annabelle,” he revealed, “telling her husband, affectionately, how much she and Daphne appreciated the opportunity he gave them to visit their relatives on the Continent over an extended period. These other four are steamy love notes with a distinctly different style of handwriting than Annabelle’s. Compare them, Watson, to the handwriting you saw on the flyleaf of the history book.”
“It appears to match,” I told Holmes, regretfully, after I glanced over his shoulder.
He placed the weapon back in the drawer, neatly folded the correspondence, and tucked it into his inside jacket pocket. “Enough of this burglary business,” he intoned, “for we have a solemn duty to convey the facts to the Yard.”
We rode in a hansom to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service at Whitehall Place and went through the rear public entrance, where Holmes requested a meeting with Inspector Tobias Gregson. Holmes had once described him as the smartest of the Scotland Yarders, quick, energetic, but conventional. “With Inspector Gregson,” Holmes said to me while we waited, “we have as good a chance as any for a reasonable discussion. It is a delicate task for an outsider to instruct the authorities on how they went wrong.”
After a short while, Inspector Gregson appeared in the lobby and clasped Holmes’s hand warmly, saying it had been a long time since their last encounter. “Dr Watson, I have been reading your accounts of your confederate’s triumphs, but I’m eager to learn about one of his failures, too,” he said to me, smiling.
“They are few and far between, and not nearly as intriguing,” I retorted.
We accompanied him to his office, and once inside, he addressed Holmes. “I assume this is not a social call, so what can I do for you?”
Diplomatically, Holmes explained the situation in detail, after which Tobias Gregson excused himself to look up the file on the fire at Knight’s Place. When he returned in more than a few moments, his expression was dour. “I apologise for the delay, gentlemen,” he began, “but I had to assure myself that our records were accurate. It seems there was no investigation of the deaths because the constables on the scene made the determination that the fatalities were accidental due to an accumulation of creosote in the lower portion of the chimney. Among us, I consider this negligent. However, it can be rectified. I shall report our conversation to my superiors and I believe a probe will ensue now. I thank you both for bringing this matter to my attention.”
On the way out, Holmes inquired if I carried my discharge card from the Army.
“I have it in my wallet, as always,” I answered.
“Excellent,” he said. “You can escort me as a guest for dinner at the Veterans’ Club. This is a Monday. Miss Addleton advised me that her brother played cards with a regular group of close friends every Monday and Friday night. We shall interrogate those friends tonight and ascertain if her brother can establish an iron-clad alibi for the date on which the tragedy occurred. If he cannot, I fear his destiny is sealed.”
The menu at the club was limited but appetising. Holmes and I ordered the beef brisket with buttered potatoes and broccoli, then shared a decanter of brandy afterward to await the gathering of comrades at the gaming tables in the recreation room off the dining hall. Our waiter pointed out the cluster of men with whom Captain Addleton once had enjoyed rounds of poker until the club closed at midnight. Holmes approached them and politely begged their pardon for interrupting, then informed them of his purpose for asking his questions.
Three of the participants remembered that a police sergeant intruded on their game the night of the fire and broke the news to Captain Addleton that his wife and daughter had died from smoke inhalation. “Ichabod was rattled and slumped in his chair,” recalled one of the men, a Mr Wetherington. “He had been here the entire time until then, which was about eleven-thirty,” Mr Wetherington stated positively. “It was such a shock, I shall never forget it—I knew both women, had been to their home,” he lamented. “I understand that Ichabod is still grieving.”
“Yes, he stays with his sister in Blackwall and never leaves his rooms,” Holmes confirmed.
“Pity. We could do with his wit again,” Mr Wetherington confessed, remorseful that his companion had been absent so long.
“Tell me, if you would,” Holmes went on, “did Mr Addleton ever mention that he had an enemy, or was there someone who held a grudge against him?”
They all shook their heads no.
“Did he ever talk of any women in his life besides his wife and daughter?” Holmes wanted to know.
“Now see here!” a Mr Price protested. “Just what do you mean to imply by that question?”
Before Holmes could respond, Mr Wetherington named Sally, the Addletons’s housekeeper. “Ichabod would sometimes regale us with her shenanigans,” he related, then grinned. “She was like a second daughter to him. I met her also when I visited Ichabod—a raving beauty, she is.”
After a few parting words, Holmes and I boarded the Underground for our trip back to Baker Street, where he decided during a chat in the sitting-room that identifying the arsonist was more urgent than any of hi
s other pending cases. “They are incidental when contrasted against this one,” he allowed.
And so it was early the next morning that we took the train again to Blackwall, where Miss Addleton apprised us of the whereabouts of Sally, whose last name was Wiggins. After the fire, Sally went to work as a fashion model for Herrod’s Department Store in Stafford, having vacated the apartment she shared with her grumpy father and moved in with a roommate at a flat on Priory Street in the East End. Holmes and I next traveled to Stafford to interview the young woman, and we were ushered by the store proprietor to his finely decorated suite on the fifth floor.
“At the moment,” he said, “Miss Wiggins is showing a new line of gowns from Paris to a group of ladies belonging to the Westminster Society. I can arrange for her to come here afterward. In the meantime, gentlemen, please help yourselves to some coffee or tea over there on the salver.”
Soon, she appeared in the doorway, and we both rose, cups in hand and stunned by her elegance—long, wavy blond hair caressing her shoulders, sparkling blue eyes, an angelic face with an upturned nose, and a perfectly curved figure that fitted tightly into a flattering, pale-green evening dress, which sensuously flowed over her bare ankles.
Holmes, charming her with a compliment, spoke of the purpose of our calling, and she reacted with distress. “The murder of Annabelle and Daphne?” she repeated breathlessly. “I can’t understand. Who would want to kill Annabelle and Daphne?”
“And possibly the man of the house, as well,” Holmes added. “Not many people knew he would be away playing cards the night the fire was set.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Miss Wiggins ejaculated. “They hadn’t a foe in the world. Who would do such a thing?”
“That is what I hope you can assist us in discovering,” Holmes told her.
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 16 Page 11