The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part II

by David Marcum

  Shortly after luncheon, however, Stanley Hopkins was announced, and both Holmes and I greeted him as the old friend he had become through a succession of odd and once or twice dangerous adventures together. “So it’s the Lambeth case, is it?” said the inspector with a smile, as he sat easily in the chair where we had seen him so often before. “Well, you won’t find much in your line this time, Mr. Holmes. A dead girl in south Lambeth is nothing so unusual, you know. I say a ‘girl’ by habit, for so many of those we find dead on the streets are very young, as you know, but this one can’t have been less than thirty.”

  “The girls you find dead on the streets are not so often on the doorsteps of churches, or marked by torn pages from a Bible,” Holmes observed. “And I note that you speak of this particular girl as ‘the Lambeth case’, although there is, as you say, never any lack of cases in Lambeth.”

  “You have me there,” Hopkins grinned. “As a matter of fact, the matter has been on my mind all this week, although I have not been able to spare so much as a constable to look into it since Sunday afternoon. There was something just a trifle odd about the matter.”

  “The lack of a weapon, for example?”

  “I see you know a little about it already,” said the inspector. “That was certainly a striking feature, although it may mean nothing, for a knife is a valuable thing to some of the roughs who can be found on the streets thereabouts. I have a little time to spare this afternoon; would you care to ride down to Lambeth with me and see the place for yourself? I can’t offer to show you the body itself, for we had it buried on Wednesday in the usual way.”

  Holmes and I accepted the offer with alacrity, and as we rode through London and across Westminster Bridge, Hopkins gave us, in response to my friend’s request, a brief sketch of the personalities at the church of St. Nicholas the Elephant, apart from the church-officer, our caller of a few hours earlier. Ambrose Wallace, the churchwarden, Hopkins dismissed as an elderly busybody, and his wife as a nonentity. “The rector and his wife are another thing altogether,” he said, “and I gather that there has been a good deal of talk about them, although it may be no more than the usual gossip in any church, or any pub for that matter, when a young man comes to take the place of an old one. Mr. Brickward is no more than five or six-and-twenty, fresh from the theological college up in Durham, and of course a London parish is a difficult place for a man from the north. Then his wife is a northerner too, and she is said to be a sulky young woman, with a dark eye and a hot temper, who has been slow to seek friends and slower to find them. If Mrs. Wallace had not been nearby to take a motherly interest, she would be entirely without female company.”

  “An admirable thumbnail sketch,” said Holmes. “And she is the one who discovered the body, our client told us. I should be very glad to meet Mrs. Brickward.”

  However, when the carriage stopped in Moss Road and we rang the bell at the rectory, it was the Rev. Mr. Brickward himself who answered the door. I wondered at the lack of a maidservant, but Hopkins murmured to me that the girl who had been employed at the rectory had left the previous week with Mrs. Brickward’s screams of fury ringing in her ears. “A matter of burnt toast, I was told,” he added.

  “I may have a question or two for you, and also for your wife if she is at home,” Holmes told the rector, “but first, it would be a great kindness if you would allow us to see the interior of the church. I dare say these modern bricks conceal stonework and woodwork of some real antiquity and artistic merit, do they not?”

  Mr. Brickward, who at first had appeared far from gracious, brightened at once, and in a moment had snatched up a key and was escorting us to the north door of the church, chattering all the way about mediaeval tracery, Elizabethan carvings, and Georgian re-pointing. Inside the building it was so dark, even on a bright spring afternoon, that my eye could distinguish little, and when Mr. Brickward pointed into the gloom and spoke ecstatically about the foliated rood-screen, I nodded mutely. Holmes made even less pretence of taking an interest in the architecture, but made a beeline for the brass-and-oak lectern, where he pulled out his thick magnifying lens, struck a match, lit a stub of candle, and bent to peer closely at the great Bible which lay there. As he moved the flame from side to side, then up and down the open page of the book, I heard a gasp from the back of the church, and realized that the church-officer, our client, had joined us. I chuckled at his anxiety, knowing the care with which Holmes avoided so much as touching, let alone scorching, anything that might yield a clue to his extraordinarily keen eye.

  “Thank you, I think that will do,” he called, joining us again near the doorway. “Now if Mrs. Brickward can spare us a moment, her clarification of one or two points might be most illuminating.”

  Mr. Brickward led us back along the path we had taken from the rectory, stepping carefully to avoid the stone flag on which I could still detect a pale brown stain that doubtless represented the dead woman’s blood. “Jennie!” he called as we entered the rectory. “Jennie, these gentlemen would like a word with you.”

  We took seats a little awkwardly in the parlour, all of us save Holmes, who propped his lean frame against a bulging bookcase beside the mantel and surveyed the heavily furnished little room with a keen eye. In a moment the rector’s wife appeared before us: a slight, dark woman, as Hopkins had said, neatly though inexpensively dressed in a pale blue costume. Dark shadows beneath her eyes reminded me of the strain this mysterious bloodshed, with the curious and even sinister desecration that had accompanied it, must be imposing on a young couple not yet much tried in the fires of life. It crossed my mind that the young rector, through his ecclesiastical training and no doubt an innately religious cast of mind, must have resources for facing the proximity of death that were not available to his more delicate wife. Seated together on a horsehair sofa, her little hand resting gently on her husband’s arm, they seemed a picture of courage in time of sorrow.

  Hopkins introduced us, Thomas Sexton adding with a note of pride in his voice that as church-officer he had taken the responsibility of asking Mr. Holmes to look into the affair. Holmes murmured a soothing word or two to Mrs. Brickward, then asked her to tell how she had found the body on Sunday morning.

  “I had slipped out of church during the last hymn,” she explained. “I know it seems dreadful of me, and I always do stay long enough to listen to John preach, but I do feel so alone in the middle of the congregation sometimes, and suddenly I thought, ‘I can’t bear to listen to Alleluia! Alleluia! one more time. I’ll just leave quietly and have a few things started for luncheon before Mr. and Mrs. Wallace arrive, since I don’t have Mary Ann to help me any longer.’ So I did that, and when I came round the side of the church to the rectory path, I saw the woman lying there on the stone step, with the blood splashed out around her like - oh, like a red cape!”

  Her low voice rose in pitch and her dark eyes seemed wider than ever; I saw her husband’s protective arm reach around her. “Mr. Holmes,” he said, “I hope you will forgive me if I say that my wife is overwrought; she is really not able to discuss this dreadful affair.”

  “I have only one other question of importance to ask,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Brickward, when did you first recognize Ellie?”

  The rector’s young wife stared at Holmes in horror, rose to her feet, gave a little shriek and crumpled to the floor.

  “It was obvious from the first that someone closely connected to St. Nicholas had killed the young woman,” Holmes explained as he, Hopkins and I rattled homeward in the inspector’s cab. “If you will forgive me for saying so, friend Hopkins, street brawls that end in sordid bloodshed are most unlikely to take place on a Sunday morning, when the public houses are closed and their denizens asleep in their lodgings or under Lambeth Bridge. As soon as I saw the place, I recognized that if there had been a body in Moss Road before the service began, someone among the good people of St. Nicholas would certainly have see
n it, perhaps the diligent Mr. Sexton himself. It followed that the murder was committed during the time of the service itself.

  “The most important indication, however, was the page from the church’s Bible. We may dismiss witchcraft - a suggestion which, I strongly suspect, Mrs. Brickward put forward as a desperate attempt at misdirection. Likewise it was apparent from the beginning that there must be an excellent reason for someone to have ripped a page from the great Bible in the church itself, when so many other copies of scripture are easily at hand.

  “You spoke, Watson, of a message being conveyed by the page. Indeed it was, but through no work of the printer or any divine hand. Asking myself why that particular page was torn from the volume, I looked in the volume itself to see what remained, and in the margins of the next page after the torn stub, my candle revealed deep and irregular impressions. It was not difficult to tell that words had been scrawled on the missing page, and I was able to read them: ‘John, I have returned. Meet me in Moss Road after the service ends. Ellie.’

  “Evidently it was a message for Mr. Brickward, which he was to find when he looked at the Bible during the service on Sunday. The writer, this Ellie, cannot have anticipated that he would find it beforehand, presumably when he came in to see that all was in readiness for Sunday morning, or that he would tear it out, for fear that others might see it - still less that he would confide in his wife. On the contrary, she must have assumed that he would keep his wife in darkness, and even abandon her for the sake of the one who had ‘returned’.

  “Of course we do not yet know exactly what had been the relations between Mr. Brickward and this woman, but it is clear that despite her husband’s remarkable willingness to show her the letter, Mrs. Brickward perceived Ellie as a serious threat and was prepared to take drastic action to keep her from ever meeting her husband.

  “Taking the page from the Bible is not, of course, the same thing as murder, but the one led to the other. Again, the opportunity to be in Moss Road during the service is the vital indication. Mr. Brickward himself was, if I may say so, under close observation by the entire congregation throughout the service. Much the same must be true of Mr. Sexton, the church-officer.

  “Mrs. Brickward says that she left the service early, and that in itself might have given her the opportunity to find Ellie. It must have taken some little time, however, to have words with her, stab her dead, and conceal the knife somewhere. I dare say, your constables will find it in the cellar or kitchen-garden about the rectory if they take the trouble to search. More than that, however, she also needed a moment to burn the Bible page beside Ellie’s body.”

  “I cannot see why she took the trouble to do that,” Hopkins remarked.

  “I should think,” said Holmes, “that she intended her husband to recognize the remains of paper and to realize what had happened. Her heart told her that he would feel himself as much to blame as she, and the secret of Ellie’s death would bind them close together. Burning the page, of course, would also ensure that no stranger could read the pencilled message.

  “Doing all these things must have taken more than the few seconds by which Mrs. Brickward preceded other churchgoers into Moss Road, and for a moment or two I wondered whether the young woman had, in fact, been killed earlier than I thought. But then Mrs. Brickward herself gave us the explanation. You will recall her remark that the service had included the words ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ again and again.

  “It is many years since I was compelled to attend Sunday School classes as a boy, but I do recall being told with determination, as a matter of great importance in the mind of the maiden lady who instructed me, that in the austere season of Lent, those words are never used in the liturgy. Here we are in March, a fortnight before Easter, and so it is Lent. Mrs. Brickward cannot have heard the congregation repeating Alleluia! this Sunday morning - because the prayer book told them not to say it, and because she was not in church at all. I knew that she was not telling the truth, and the matter was settled. Unnoticed by the other churchgoers, for she had no friends to look for her, she was not in the church, but in Moss Road, where she waited for Ellie, killed her, and burned her last message to John Brickward.”

  “It seems very straightforward as you set it out,” said Hopkins. “If only I had had a few minutes to consider the case, I should have come to the same conclusion on Monday last, and you need not have been troubled.”

  “Ah,” laughed Holmes, “and so my hours have made good your minutes. It was a trivial matter, certainly, and yet not without interest, particularly for the novelty of the message written on a leaf of the Bible. Watson, I recall hearing that some device of the sort was used in one of the romance novels of your friend James Barrie. I must look into it one of these days, although I understand that his works are written in a Scots dialect which is perhaps more congenial to you than it is to me.”

  The Lady on the Bridge

  by Mike Hogan

  Sherlock Holmes pushed back his chair, stood, and laid his napkin on the table. “Settle up, would you, old chap? I have a small errand to run.” He weaved among the tables of the restaurant and disappeared through the main entrance doors.

  I pulled out my pocket book and sighed. Our finances, as often at the end of the month, were at a low ebb, but at Holmes’s insistence we had travelled from Baker Street to Sydenham on a blustery afternoon to take an early dinner at a fine French restaurant in the Byzantine court at the Crystal Palace. The decor was as highly stylised as the menu prices were highly inflated.

  And Holmes’s attention had not been on the food. Even as we were ushered into the room, his eyes had flickered around as if looking for someone, and between courses he had glanced at his pocket watch as if gauging whether he had time to make a rendezvous.

  I requested the bill and peered at a note in tiny print explaining that the charge had been calculated according to a Continental system by which a seven-per-cent gratuity had been added. It occurred to me as I received my change from the sharp-eyed waiter that a gratuity should be precisely what the word suggested, a token of appreciation from a satisfied customer, not a levy. However, under the supercilious gaze of the waiter and with the maître d’hôtel, hovering with an elderly couple anxious to possess our table, I made a swift mental calculation and left an appropriate amount in the saucer as a ‘tip’. The waiter peered at the thru’pence coin and its ha’penny companion with disdain, the maître d’hôtel sadly shook his head, and the gentleman waiting for our table shared a condescending half-smile with his lady companion. Undaunted, I stood and marched to the entrance of the restaurant, where I found Holmes leaning against an iron pillar deep in his Evening News.

  He folded the newspaper and tucked it under his arm. “Nothing yet, but there is still the final edition.”

  I frowned. “What are you expecting?”

  “Did you take the receipt?” he asked.

  I handed it to him. “The price included a seven-per-cent charge for service. It was clear from the attitude of the restaurant staff that a further amount was expected as a tip.”

  Holmes considered. “Fourpence three-farthings would have been an adequate addition to the charge to make it consistent with your usual practice. Come.”

  I followed him out of the restaurant, counting surreptitiously on my fingers, and into one of the huge galleries in the iron-framed glass building. A crystal fountain glistened in the sunlight streaming through the tremendous glass walls and curved ceiling high above us, and I stood in awe as I gazed at the long vista before me. Tall trees brushed the ceiling of the central nave, and massive monuments from antiquity and gigantic engines from the present day occupied the aisles and transepts.

  I looked for Holmes and found him reading his paper in the shade of a palm tree in what was clearly a Roman or Greek themed exhibition. A dozen ladies sat before a row of plaster statues of naked, ivy-leaved young males, while a spade-bea
rded gentleman discoursed on features of ancient sculpture. One young lady seated at the end of the row of students flicked her eyes along the line of sculptures and then past them to me. I blinked at her, and she smiled. It would have been boorish in the extreme not to return such a charming smile, however inappropriately offered, and I - “

  “Watson?”

  “The Palace is a virtual university,” I said as Holmes led me away. “A very useful institution, especially for young ladies of artistic inclinations.”

  Desiring to smoke after our meal, Holmes and I strolled the extensive gardens on what had become a balmy, early spring evening and found a bench where we sat, lit our pipes, and watched the Palace come alive with glittering electric lights.

  The sky darkened and Holmes looked at his watch, tapped out his pipe and stood. He led me to a gate to one of the special garden exhibits, where he displayed our restaurant receipt to an attendant and we were waved in, gratis.

  A newspaper boy ran up to Holmes holding out a copy of the Evening News late edition. Holmes grabbed it from him and flicked through the pages in the light of a gas lamp, humming softly to himself. He folded the newspaper in half and held his hand out to me. “Pencil?”

  I reluctantly gave Holmes my propelling pencil and peered at the boy. On one invasion of our rooms by Holmes’s band of ragamuffins, his Baker Street Irregulars, I had lost not only my propelling pencil, but a signed score of The Lost Chord by Sir Arthur Sullivan. I was understandably wary of nefarious activity by any boy under Holmes’s direction.

  Holmes ringed a paragraph in the paper and handed it to me, then he leaned down and fixed the newspaper boy with his steady gaze. “You know what to do?” he asked.

  The boy grinned up at Holmes, turned and sped away.

  “In the Personals,” I said, holding out my hand for my pencil. “To Ajax. ‘Seven is impossible - Tower Bridge at nine; agent must wear red carnation and carry a newspaper. One Fearfully Wronged’.”