The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

by Marvin Kaye

  “That’s fine as far as it goes,” I agreed, “but why attempt to kill you? And if he were going to murder Mrs. Stapleton, why call upon me to save her? No. The only common link among the four of us is this: we all knew Stapleton before Holmes branded him a killer, when he was pretending to be a harmless bug collector!”

  “Oh, well done, Watson!”

  “But Stapleton died in Grimpen Mire,” Lestrade protested.

  I shook my head. “Mrs. Stapleton, you told Holmes that your husband had fled into that desolate swamp, yet we found hardly a trace of him. Impressed by that vast, trackless wilderness, Holmes deduced that Stapleton must have drowned. But no corpse was ever found.”

  “You believe that Stapleton’s still alive!” Lestrade gasped. “Do you honestly think that Holmes could have missed something like that?”

  “He didn’t,” I said with certainty, frowning as Warrington refilled Mrs. Stapleton’s glass. “If Holmes had a fault, it was his genius for concealing uncertainties, rarely telling even me what he had in his mind until the facts seemed irrefutable. I know that he investigated the details of that case long after it was over, which was unusual for him. One of the things he discovered was that Stapleton had a man-servant named Anthony who assisted him in his crime and later escaped to the Continent.”

  “You have it now! Run with it, old boy!”

  “But what if Beryl misdirected us that night, even as she is doing now?” I turned to glare at her and she dropped her eyes, a deep blush colouring her face. “Suppose it was old Anthony who died in the quicksand, and Stapleton who fled to Paris?”

  “Hmm,” growled Lestrade, impressed in spite of himself.

  “Imagine if Stapleton were still alive and plotting to inherit the Baskerville title and fortune,” I added. “Wouldn’t he be compelled to murder Sir Henry before he could marry and beget an heir? And who could stop him?”

  “Those of us who could recognize him on sight if he claimed to be the heir after Henry’s death!” Lestrade agreed grimly. “I see what you’ve done. A simple example of ‘Eliminate the impossible—’ ”

  “ ‘And whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution,’ ” I finished for him, echoing the man we both respected so much. “Stapleton never went near Grimpen Mire that night. He was much too intelligent to flee to a place from which there was no escape. While Sherlock and I searched for him, he made his way to the Continent, probably disguised as old Anthony. Having eluded the greatest detective in the world, he was free to resume a life incognito in Europe. When he heard that Holmes was killed, he must have gloated over the demise of his adversary, then began to scheme again how he would inherit the estate of Baskerville.”

  “Yes,” Lestrade added, “and he would have to hurry when he learned that Baskerville was marrying one of the Fecund Ferncliffes. Sorry, Sir Henry, but you must know how some people talk.” He was embarrassed and reached for a tall glass on a silver tray offered by a silent servant.

  “Don’t drink that!” I said. “I’m deadly serious. I wouldn’t trust anything served to us in this place.”

  Lestrade squinted critically at the violently foaming head of ale that stood before him. “Poison?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” I replied, trying to remember if I had sipped from the snifter that had appeared in my hand. “Who brought these drinks? Lestrade, see that no one leaves the room. I should think that—”

  “Beryl!” cried Sir Henry. The deep blush had become livid, suffusing her fine features. The glass fell from her hand and she fell back, shuddering.

  “She’s dead,” I told them a moment later. “Mute testimony to the potency of the poison in all our drinks. That can only mean—” With shocking quickness, a man brandished a pistol and leaped for the door. “Get down, Henry! Look out, Lestrade!” I had my own pistol in my pocket, but before I could pull it out a constable appeared from the other side of the door and wrestled down the old servant.

  “Warrington?” Sir Henry exclaimed, aghast.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” I said, bending down, “it is Stapleton in a wig and makeup.” A few tugs on his hair proved me right. I refrained from touching the envelope with traces of white powder found in his pocket.

  Lestrade pulled Stapleton to his feet and pushed him into the arms of the constable. “Take him away!”

  May 26, 1893

  With Sir Henry safely back in the arms of his fiancée, this afternoon I sat with Lestrade in my study. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “Start at the beginning, Watson.”

  “The poor woman’s wounds,” I replied. “I assumed at the time that Sir Henry was responsible and called upon me because he’d injured her. But when I’d had time to reflect on it, I realized that such depravity is the result of what is, for lack of a better way of putting it, an English schoolboy’s vice. I have seen such injuries in men who as boys were caned for infractions at school (and who are not?) and then acquire a taste for it. It is shocking, but after a time some are not satisfied with a simple birching and cultivate a proclivity for the lash.”

  “Good God,” Lestrade said, and took a gulp of tea. “That’s the sort of thing only a doctor would know.”

  “But Sir Henry was raised in Canada,” I went on. “Like Americans, in Canada they brand cattle and horses, but it is a mark of ownership because they can’t afford fences, as I understand it. It’s not deliberate cruelty. And while that didn’t eliminate Sir Henry, it made it seem less likely that he would be such an enthusiast. So I cast about for another explanation and remembered that Beryl Stapleton had been beaten by her husband in just such a way. When I realized that the woman was Beryl, the rest became clear.”

  “In the beginning,” Lestrade inquired, “even though she’d been beaten, Beryl misled Holmes by telling him that her husband had run to Grimpen Mire?”

  I nodded.

  “And although he beat her again, she didn’t warn you or Sir Henry that the murdering fiend was back. She had the gall to come in here and lie to our faces, trying to blame poor Sir Harry!” He shook his head, baffled.

  “Be kind to her memory, Lestrade. She recognized Warrington as her husband and was frightened by him. And, I suspect, loved him. Yet as soon as she learned that Stapleton had returned to London, she came to the club to warn Sir Henry. If someone other than Warrington had seen me to the front door that night, and if they hadn’t recognized each other, she might have succeeded and poor Mortimer might still be alive. Stapleton must have traced her to her room and threatened her into silence.”

  “He abused her and he murdered her, yet she never said a word against him. I’ll never understand women!” He was outraged, his lip curling in an angry sneer. Knowing his spouse, who was called by everyone, including the Inspector himself, “Mrs. Lestrade,” I knew he was telling the truth.

  Few men, certainly not Lestrade nor the average reader of The Strand could comprehend why I privately suspected that Beryl Stapleton was bound by more than just love. I was sure that, as some are addicted to drugs, she was doomed by what amounted to a sexual addiction to her husband, painful and humiliating as it must have been.

  I came to a decision. “Lestrade, I must implore you to see that not one word of Holmes’s involvement in this case ever comes before the public. I don’t care how you manage it.”

  Lestrade agreed. “I’ll not mention old Sir Charles and the earlier case. I’ll see that Stapleton is charged only for his wife’s and Dr. Mortimer’s murders. He’ll be hanged, if there’s any justice. The name of Sherlock Holmes will never be uttered at the trial.”

  “Excellent. Try not to mention me, either.”

  “What is the matter with you, Watson?” he asked. “It was you who solved this difficult case. You’ve sent a master criminal to his just reward. Why not take credit for it?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh, maybe just a small footnote, Watson,” and I recognized the voice of my own vanity.

  “When the Hound of the
Baskervilles was killed and Sir Charles’s murder solved, Holmes called it one of the greatest cases of his career,” I explained. “I shall publish it as such someday, in memory of him. Just because he didn’t live long enough to work out this—this postscript, I’ll not have it made public that he erred.”

  “Suit yourself.” Lestrade shrugged. “I respect your loyalty.”

  “But the truth is so perfect. The lie will be incomplete, unsatisfying,” the voice pleaded.

  “Be quiet!” I said firmly. “This is the end of it.”

  Lestrade frowned, hurt, thinking that I was talking to him.

  Desperate

  Business

  In the preceding section, Murder seldom raised its sanguine head, but the following quartet of adventures is rife with terrorism and wholesale slaughter. One tale was clearly suppressed for reasons of supreme tact and delicacy, whereas the French and Irish cases indicate reservations on the part of Holmes and Watson both. Perhaps most curious of all is “The Adventure of the Dying Ship,” which ought to have been published in The Strand, save for intervention from a completely unanticipated jurisdiction.

  Readers of The Resurrected Holmes (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) will recall the incredible botch a certain “Beatnik” author made of the story of the French assassin Huret, which Watson first mentioned in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge.” My scholarly colleague J. Adrian Fillmore concluded that the case was too well known in the newspapers of the era for Watson to bother writing up himself, but the manuscript we found in the lower compartment of his tin dispatch-box proves there was another reason why the story did not appear in print: one that concerns an important character in the following tale, Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944). Ida Tarbell was one of America’s leading muckraking journalists. In 1904, she wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company, which led to the exposure of malpractice and the prosecution of that firm.

  The Adventure of the Boulevard

  Assassin

  BY KATHLEEN BRADY

  On the third morning of October the disaster Holmes had prophesied occurred. A bomb exploded in a Paris police station with such force and brutality that part of the body of one of the unfortunate victims was found dangling from a gas fixture in the shattered room.

  Until then, most Parisians thought the danger had passed. The anarchists who terrorized the city in the late spring had been silent for months. Raw fear had faded to a general wariness that year of 1894. Most inhabitants of that marvelous capital had lived so long with feelings of dread that they could no longer identify their own anxiety. It was as if they had a chronic ache that seemed to fade because they simply learned to accommodate it.

  Holmes and I came to be in Paris on that fateful day because a few weeks before, over breakfast in London, he made a decision. I was buttering the toast that the excellent Mrs. Hudson served on her little silver rack and Holmes was sitting with his right leg at an angle to the table reading the weather reports in The Times. He let the newspaper fall to the floor and turned his full attention to his rashers.

  “The calm is about to end,” he said. “The anarchists will come out of their holes with the approach of winter, Watson. They could not handle explosives safely during the hot months of summer because even the slightest rise in temperature can provoke a sudden detonation that will explode the operator into a score of pieces.” He poured himself a second cup of tea. “We shall assist the Paris police whether they want it or not. On second thought, I shall set things in motion so that the Palais de Justice shall actually invite our help.”

  And so it came to be. Holmes’s diplomatic contacts were such that he quickly received an official invitation. French officials were fairly frantic with eagerness to have Holmes come help them.

  The task, to be fair, was impossible. Not even the esteemed Sherlock Holmes could tear out anarchism by its root. It had no root, no organized plan. It was an idea, a belief, a cause. There was no central conspiracy, only individual anarchists who believed in absolute freedom of the individual. They opposed every restraint, and believed as their social philosopher Proudhon did that “property is theft.”

  Building by building, anarchists tried to claim private property for the common ownership of all by blowing it to bits. In the process they murdered, as if by accident, people in the streets. First they dynamited a department store, then a bank, and finally one of their number assassinated the president of France. Over the steamy summer, the violent acts ceased as the wretched malcontents stewed in the torrid heat and made their plans.

  Holmes and I settled into a hotel near the Palais de Justice on that fatal morning. We finished our croissants and café au lait and were longing for Mrs. Hudson’s bacon and tea when we received an American journalist who came to interview Holmes for a new magazine. Normally, Holmes would not have considered granting an interview but this person represented a new type that Holmes thought he should become familiar with. She was an American spinster living in Paris on her own and supporting herself, God knew how, as a free-lance writer.

  Her name was Ida Tarbell and she was from Titusville, Pennsylvania, the capital of America’s oil industry. Holmes assaulted her with questions that she answered, hoping, I suppose, that eventually he would get around to answering hers.

  She was intelligent, and not outwardly a blue-stocking. In fact, she tried to ask her questions in an intelligent manner in that flat, uninflected way Americans have of speaking. Holmes was not at all surprised to learn that Miss Tarbell had studied biology and chemistry and had a sound grasp of scientific methods of investigation. She was about thirty-five years of age, uncommonly tall and uncommonly thin, with dark hair and a complexion browned by riding in the open air atop Parisian omnibuses. She tried to ingratiate Holmes for the sake of her story, and she had a nice open smile. I wondered why she had never married. In short, I liked her. Having been the butt of some of Holmes’s inquiries myself, I had some sympathy for her. When she insisted that The Great Detective figure her out for himself, Holmes did the usual trick of deducing where in Paris she lived—Rue Sommerard on the Left Bank—and the type of person she sat next to on the omnibus that morning.

  “Yes, but what can you tell about me, Mr. Holmes?” she inquired.

  I knew she had made a blunder that would rebound on her. “You have few funds, madame. Probably your editors are not paying what they owe you. Obviously, they like your work because interviewing me is a coveted assignment. Normally, that would go only to a reliable, and possibly gifted, journalist. I see you are low on money because your serviceable black dress is fading at the seams. The cut of your clothes shows that you are a woman of taste and would surely go to a dressmaker if you could. You have tried to make this dress seem less worn by colouring its frayed seams with ink.”

  “Holmes!” I cried, astonished that even he could behave in such an ungentlemanly manner. I was embarrassed to be privy to such rudeness and to her humiliation, but Miss Tarbell, to her credit, smiled a tight, rueful little smile and confirmed that his deductions were correct. She took notes of his deduction for her readers and regained her composure as she carefully incised every shaming word he had said in her notebook. As Holmes’s official biographer, I know enough about writing to know she knew she was getting a terrific story, even if it was all at her own expense.

  Perhaps the authorities rapped, but I cannot be sure. I know the three of us jumped as the door to the suite flew open and a policeman burst in. The concierge trailed just behind to act as interpreter. Holmes and Miss Tarbell spoke fluent French, but even I could interpret what the policeman said. “There has been another explosion. This time in the police station at the Boulevard des Italiens. You are wanted, Mr. Holmes. Please follow me.”

  I do not remember if we spoke during our ride there, although it went very quickly because we travelled in a carriage identified as that of the police. Never had I witnessed such devastation as we found at the scene. In Afghanistan there was much torn flesh and I myself was wounded, but I had
never seen a building so destroyed, with an impossible section of its skeleton structure revealed where the stony muscle of the wall had been blown off.

  We mounted a narrow, spiral staircase, made of ironwork. In the hallway on the second floor between two large windows, the body of a young clerk sat on a bench. He had no head. Where it had rested, his neck was a bloody, frothing pulp. We entered what had been until half an hour before the Inspector’s office. That official was found still living in the corner, but there was nothing I could do to save him. Flesh had been ripped from his skull and his eyes were blasted from his head. Later, when his pockets were turned out, splinters from the metal casing of the bomb would be found embedded in the coins.

  I surmised that the tiny islands of flesh in the pools of blood on the floor were his. The intestine that dripped blood from a gas bracket seemed to have come from the charred black body in the corner. What was left of the man’s uniform indicated he had been a sergeant. Across from him was yet another corpse. His torso was a red crater and his trousers were grey like those of someone from the world of commerce.

  To my amazement, I noted Miss Tarbell was with us still. Her face was drained white and if she had eaten anything that morning, she would have given it up in the carnage around us. However, she looked no worse than Holmes, who bolted from the ravaged room. I knew him too well to think he was being sick. I was stunned, and indeed too winded, to move as quickly as he, but I saw where he went and followed him to the sidewalk.

  Holmes abandoned the body of one policeman as useless to his inquiry and stretched out to a second man in time to hear the dying man murmur “Darmaux.” That word was his last. I was kneeling on the pavement, feeling his pulse, and when I turned my head from the dead man I saw that the hem of Miss Tarbell’s faded black skirt was darkened now with blood. It was a dark day, stone-coloured with approaching rain. Were I to paint one of those nonsense modern paintings they turn out nowadays, I would do it in leaden, smoky tones with splashes of crimson, for it seems to me everything that day was hopeless grey except for taunting splashes of red.