The Execution of Sherlock Holmes

by Donald Thomas

  ‘What about the blood with which he was covered when he arrived at Mrs. Dickenson’s?’

  ‘What blood?’

  ‘Precisely, my friend. There was none. Gardiner is said to have cut the throat of this young woman during a struggle in the kitchen. There was a struggle, of course, since Mrs. Crisp heard first of all a thud and then a cry soon afterwards. The thud, no doubt, was the staircase door banging back against the wall and the cry was the poor girl’s last utterance.’

  ‘I don’t entirely follow you, Mr. Holmes.’

  ‘I quite see that, Lestrade. The kitchen of Providence House is a small one, some ten feet by eight. The blood had spurted to the second step of the staircase. A man who grappled with his victim while he cut her throat, in a space as small as that kitchen, would have been covered by it. His shoes would have trampled it all over the kitchen floor. Forensic examination shows that there was not a speck of blood on Gardiner’s shoes or clothing, neither the clothing that had been washed nor that which was waiting to be washed. All his clothing was examined by Dr. Stevenson of the Home Office, a man who can not only detect blood on clothing that has not been washed but the remains of blood on clothes that have been washed. There was not a drop.’

  Lestrade said nothing, for Sherlock Holmes now held the floor.

  ‘What there was, however,’ my friend continued, ‘was a copy of the East Anglian Times under the girl’s head. Why? Is it likely that Gardiner would bring a paper to which he subscribed and the Crisps did not in order to leave it under her head? Then again, there was a medicine bottle with a label ‘For Mrs. Gardiner’s children.’ Is not that the first thing he would have taken away? Might it not be the first thing that another man would leave there to incriminate Gardiner? In which case the crime was committed by someone known to him, well enough known to be informed that the Gardiners of Alma Cottage subscribed to the East Anglian Times, rather than the Chronicle, which was taken in by the Crisps at Providence House.’

  ‘You tell me nothing I have not heard already.’

  ‘Then how can you hear it and still believe that Gardiner was the murderer of Rose Harsent? It can only be because no case has been built against any other man. That is not a good enough reason to deliver any poor devil to the hangman’s mercies.’

  Lestrade hung on like a plucky terrier to a thief ’s coattails.

  ‘Gardiner had ample time to burn a bloodstained shirt before his clothes were taken for examination three days later. If murder was his purpose, he might have gone barefoot into that kitchen and wiped away any prints as he left. Mammal’s blood, possibly human, was found in a crevice of his pocketknife. …’

  ‘Rabbits!’ said Holmes furiously. ‘Have you never heard of hulling rabbits? There is not a countryman who does not use his knife regularly to prepare them for the pot. I should find it far more incriminating if his knife was perfectly clean.’

  But Lestrade would not be stopped.

  ‘He has no alibi but for the time spent with Mrs. Dickenson. The Gardiners’ neighbour, Amelia Pepper, swears only that she heard the voice and step of Mrs. Gardiner after two A.M., not her husband. Rose Harsent may have met her death as late as four A.M. If she died the evening before, Gardiner had time to kill her at eleven P.M. and be back in Mrs. Dickenson’s sitting room forty-five minutes later.’

  ‘Then his wife is necessarily a liar.’

  ‘Not necessarily, Mr. Holmes, but she is his wife. There is not an insurance company that would take a wife as sole witness in a husband’s claim! If Gardiner killed that girl, he killed that girl. Not all your clever theories, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, can alter that!’

  ‘Very well. Then if he killed her, he must have had good reasons.’

  ‘He had good reasons, indeed,’ said Lestrade triumphantly. ‘He had such reasons as being the father of her unborn child and being determined to protect himself, his family, and his reputation by putting an end to it!’

  ‘Which brings us back to the Doctor’s Chapel and the scandal again,’ said Sherlock Holmes thoughtfully.

  ‘So it does.’

  ‘Well then, Lestrade? Had we not better have an understanding between us? We have done enough sitting about in chairs. Let us take this matter of the chapel au serieux and fight the battle there, at the scene of the scandal. Shall we do that as soon as the principals can be gathered? I believe we shall have you back in London in no time at all.’

  ‘We might do that, Mr. Holmes. I will go this far. If you can disprove absolutely the scandal of the Doctor’s Chapel, you shall have your way. For then the motive of the murder falls to the ground. I do not see how you can do it, but I will go that far to meet you.’

  ‘There must be sound tests of what, if anything, can be heard behind the hedge.’

  ‘They have been tried.’

  ‘They must be tried again. And there must be an examination of the two youths who claim to be witnesses of immoral conduct between Gardiner and Miss Harsent.’

  ‘That has been done. Wright and Skinner have said all that there is for them to say.’

  ‘Nonetheless, Lestrade, I shall require George Wright, Alfonso Skinner, and Mr. Crisp, who was deacon of the chapel and who with his wife employed Rose Harsent.’

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Crisp? What have they to do with it now?’

  Holmes let out a long sigh, which may have been of satisfaction or relief.

  ‘You see, my dear fellow? It seems they have not said all they have to say. I believe, Lestrade, this is another of our cases in which you and Scotland Yard will live to thank me for my assistance.’

  5

  The rain had cleared before midnight, and by dawn the clear sky had laid down a frost to accompany our visit to the Doctor’s Chapel at Peasenhall. For the number of us who were to gather there, we might have hired a charabanc. Peasenhall consists of the main road, which they call the Street, and a road running south from it at the midpoint, which is Church Street. The Doctor’s Chapel is two hundred yards down Church Street, reached through a narrow iron gate on the south side. Beyond this lies the equally narrow path that runs along by the building, overlooked on the other side by a tall bank topped with a hedge and a hurdle fence.

  The chapel itself is a small structure with the appearance of a single-storey thatched cottage. It has three square windows and a plain door on this southern side. I doubt if its pews would accommodate fifty worshippers. It is surrounded and overhung by trees which give way to open fields a little distance beyond. Such was the scene of the scandal, upon whose proof or disproof the fate of William Gardiner must now depend.

  Waiting for us by the door were PC Nunn, with a face of the severe but thoughtful type, Mr. Crisp, with an ear trumpet and walking stick, and his wife, who was, as they say, a stout body of fifty or so. We were introduced to them. The other two witnesses present were the Peeping Toms of the scandal, merely indicated to us as they stood apart sullenly. William Wright and Alfonso Skinner now wore their Sunday best.

  I confess that I did not like the look of these two from the start. Wright was a sallow, even swarthy young man who looked entirely out of place in a suit and cravat. His heavy jaw and the morose stare of his dark eyes gave him a mingled look of malice and Neanderthal stupidity. Skinner was quite the contrary, a more dangerous antagonist. He had a sharp, impatient manner, hair closely cropped, and narrowed eyes that stared without emotion. I swear that those eyes would watch suffering with indifference, would look on without either anger or compassion. In all my experience with Sherlock Holmes, I had seldom had the sense so strongly of men who would crush their victim as a matter of habit, hardly caring whether they did so or not. If it was necessary for William Gardiner to be hanged in order that they should be safe from prosecution over their perjury, I wager they would send him to the gallows as readily as they would order a chicken to be slaughtered for Christmas.

  If Gardiner’s life was in the hands of Sherlock Holmes, I was never so grateful for my friend’s reputation. It seemed plain from the
two scowling figures that PC Eli Nunn had given Wright and Skinner little choice as to whether they attended this interrogation or not. A request from Holmes had been as good as a bench warrant from a High Court judge.

  I stood with Nunn and Holmes a little apart from the others, while we discussed how the experiment was to be carried out.

  ‘I must tell you, sir,’ said Nunn apologetically, ‘that we have already carried out a test of our own. On 28 July last, I stood behind the hedge up there, where these two young men claimed they were hiding on the evening of the alleged incident in the chapel. For the purposes of the test, Wright and Skinner went into the chapel, the door was closed, and, as I had instructed them, each in turn read out the first ten verses of the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Genesis, the story of Onan.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Holmes, interrupting him. ‘I am familiar with his story.’

  ‘Then I must tell you, sir,’ said Nunn reluctantly, ‘I could hear every word.’

  My friend was remarkably unruffled by this.

  ‘You do not surprise me in the least. Which other officer was in the chapel with these two when they read from the Book of Genesis?’

  ‘None, sir. There was no need. I saw fair play by making sure the door and every window was shut.’

  ‘But not by having an official witness in the chapel, where these two scoundrels could read or shout as loudly as was necessary to make their voices carry to you? Nor by choosing some other passage with which you might be unfamiliar but one whose words you expected to hear?’

  Nunn was a decent fellow, I felt sure, and I was sad to see him cut down like this. I would have preferred him as an ally rather than an antagonist, for I cannot believe he liked Wright and Skinner any better than we did.

  ‘No matter,’ said Holmes reassuringly, ‘we will return to these things later. For the moment, let us carry out an examination of the locus in quo.’

  He handed me his travelling-cape and walked once round the outside of the little building. Then he began to inspect the door, windows, and ventilation. The white-painted door was unlocked and opened easily as he knelt down and studied the lower edge, where Gardiner swore it had stuck fast on the night when Rose asked him to slam it for her.

  ‘You see, Watson?’

  ‘I see nothing.’

  ‘Precisely. You see nothing because this door has been repainted. It is now eighteen months since the night of the alleged scandal, and the state of the paint suggests to me that it has yet to see a single winter before this one. In other words, it has only been painted after the murder. No doubt that was done to conceal something else that had been done to it before. Now, if you will be good enough to run your hand down the edge of the door where it meets the frame, you will feel that the upper stretch is smooth because the new paint is built upon a previous coat. Down here, however, you can feel the grain of the wood quite easily. In other words, at the bottom of the door someone had planed away the swollen surface so that it would close and lock more easily. After the murder, someone else painted the door, concealing what had been done. It may have been by chance, but it made a liar out of William Gardiner when he first told the story of slamming the swollen door because it had stuck—told it when his only witness was now dead and buried.’

  ‘Those two wastrels have something to answer for!’ I said angrily. Sherlock Holmes straightened up from his inspection.

  ‘Let us not jump to conclusions. On its own, this does not mean that Gardiner has told the truth in every respect. However, in his story of the swollen chapel door, it seems he has spoken the entire truth and that someone has tried to make him appear a liar.’

  ‘Of course! Skinner described himself in court as an odd-job man for Mr. and Mrs. Crisp. Surely that would make him the odd-job man for the chapel as well, would it not? He planed the door to make Gardiner seem a liar and then painted it to conceal what he had done.’

  ‘No doubt, if it can be proved.’ My friend was busy with the three square windows, each made up of small leaded panes.

  ‘You will recall the words of Skinner at the trial, “We heard rustling about and the window shook.”’ Holmes turned to me. ‘Be so good as to shake that window, if you please.’

  I was not sure quite what he had in mind, but there was no way of causing any vibration, except by vigorous contact with the glass or the glazing bars. The window frame was set solidly in the wall and nothing else would do. Holmes looked through it into the interior of the little building.

  ‘The only way to shake the window from inside would be to strike directly at the glass, preferably at about the level of the windowsill. Yet there is a fixed seat running just beneath it on the inside. That would make it almost impossible to hit the window accidentally while standing up. Sitting down, one would almost have to hit it with the back of one’s head. Tell me, what else would produce such an effect?’

  I lost his drift for a moment and he laughed.

  ‘Come, Watson! Surely, a servant girl doing her duty, cleaning the chapel with vim and vigor—including its windows! That is something they may have heard and adopted it for their story. If anything moved that window, it was Rose Harsent and her duster!’

  He had not done with the small leaded panes.

  ‘Consider these little panes of glass. Seven up and five across. There are thirty-five of them in a space the quarter of our sitting-room window in Baker Street. They do not suit a chapel, where all should be light and airy and delicate. Where else would you find such things as these? I will tell you where, my dear fellow. In the grim walls of lunatic asylums and prisons. In those unhappy places from which it is judged best that no sound of grief or frenzy shall be heard. What, then, of the lowered voices of a man and woman in intimate conversation?’

  He turned from the window and looked at a small and narrow flap of metal, angled downward from the wall, level with the middle of the window and a few feet from it. For the first time since our arrival, I heard him chuckle and guessed that all might yet be well.

  ‘See here, Watson. This is an old friend. The ventilator system. How extraordinary that a few months ago the mysterious death of the great novelist Emile Zola from charcoal poisoning should have taken us to France to examine just such forms of apparatus as this! Because there could be no proper intake of air through their windows, the good Congregationalists of Peasenhall installed a form of tube. I know it well. Devised by Mr. Tobin of Leeds. This model made by a rival is known as the Hopper.’

  He pressed the metal flap that projected downward from the wall and I heard it click, as though it was now shut. Taking the lip of metal, he then opened it again.

  ‘A small catch inside does the trick. Within this flap is a draft-proof boxed-in ventilator. Imagine it as a square drainpipe on a larger scale. It is made of perforated zinc but lined with wood. The air passes from the outer world though this inlet and so through the wall. It then turns a corner downward, drawn by the warmer air within the building, which naturally rises upward in the room. At floor level the incoming air turns again and is released into the interior. It may be assisted by a fan of some kind, though I think not in this case.’

  He closed the outside flap again with the same click.

  ‘Now, my dear fellow, with the ventilator closed, the door shut, and with windows that cannot be opened, no conversation in a normal voice could be heard distinctly—if at all—even where we are standing. Those two louts were six feet above us and nine feet further away, crouching behind a hedge. Even an exclamation or a casual cry would be so indistinct that its location would not be certain at such a distance. With the ventilator open, it might be possible to hear voices without being able to detect what they were saying. I doubt even that, since the sound would have to enter the tube low down on the inside wall. It must then pass along deadening wooden surfaces, against the flow of air, and round two corners before it reached anyone outside. Even if it was audible when it did so, the flap outside would direct it downward, not upward to the bank and
the fence.’

  ‘Then we have them!’ I said exultantly.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not as securely as we need to or as surely as I mean to have them when they are brought in to be questioned.’

  6

  Once again it was Holmes and I who sat with Lestrade and Mr. Wild at a table, this time inside the Doctor’s Chapel. Its interior suggested the plain and humble devotion practised there. The walls were merely whitewashed over, and it was evident that they had been built of simple cob, as country folk call their mixture of clay, gravel, and straw. Sherlock Holmes sat at the center of our ‘inquisition.’ If he had been the patient inquirer at Ipswich gaol, he was now the avenger, seeking justice for William Gardiner. He knew the truth, but it was another matter to prove it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Crisp came in first. Conversation through the ear trumpet of old ‘Tailor’ Crisp, as they called him, was almost impossible. It was his wife who submitted to the courteous but direct questioning of Sherlock Holmes.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs. Crisp, I presume you do not leave the chapel unlocked at all hours?’

  ‘No, sir. It is always locked when not in use.’

  ‘And you—that is to say you and your husband—have the key?’

  ‘We do, sir.’

  ‘How many copies of the key are there?’

  ‘Two copies, sir. We hold them both. The one in use is with other keys in a drawer of the desk, kept locked, and a spare key is kept in the safe. That is in case the first should be lost.’

  ‘Rose Harsent would be given the key from the drawer when she went to clean the chapel on Tuesday evening and would hand it back it to you when she had finished?’

  ‘Exactly so, Mr. Holmes.’

  ‘Always on the same night?’

  ‘As soon as she got home from the chapel or a very little later.’

  ‘Why was the chapel cleaned on a Tuesday, Mrs. Crisp? I should have thought it might have been more likely to be cleaned on a Saturday, ready for Sunday service.’