The Investigations of Sherlock Holmes

by John Heywood

  “His walking-stick - was it by the body when you arrived there?”

  “Yes, lying near him.”

  Holmes picked up from the table the newspapers our visitor had brought, and quickly glanced over them. “Can you tell me what progress the police have made in their inquiries? Have they made any advances on what is set out here?”

  “Unfortunately, very little progress has been made. At any rate, they have not apprehended the culprits.”

  “ ‘Nothing was found in the murdered man’s pockets,’ ” Holmes read aloud from the newspaper. “That is surely an exaggeration. Nothing of value, they probably mean. I do not suppose that the thieves troubled to take his pocket handkerchief.”

  “Well, you must ask the police inspector that, Mr Holmes, but I was told that nothing at all was left on his person.”

  “Hmmm. And they consequently take the view that Mr Mayne was set upon by some local ruffians, the motive being robbery. Is that your view of the matter?”

  “I am not a detective, Mr Holmes. It is your view of the matter I have come to hear.”

  Holmes smiled. “Nevertheless, I should be interested to hear what you think.”

  “I suppose a casual robbery is the likely explanation, and that seems to be the view taken by the police. But my wife and I have some doubts. There has never been any trouble in our part of the county from the kind of villains who would do such a thing. Poachers trouble us sometimes, of course, and there is the occasional scuffle among fellows returning from a long evening at the public-house in the village. As a magistrate I am accustomed to such outbreaks of unruliness, and I would not claim that our corner of the county is the Garden of Eden; but nor is it the Jago. We are not brutes who would smash in a man’s skull for a few pounds.

  “That is my story, Mr Holmes. My wife and I seek justice for Hugo Mayne. We are not satisfied that the police are doing all that can be done. If it was indeed a local man who killed Hugo, we want that man found and brought to justice. If it was not, we must know what really lies behind this cruel murder.”

  Ayres paused, as if wondering whether or not to speak out. Suddenly the words welled out: “My wife loved her brother, Mr Holmes. They were orphaned as children. In the cold and distant household to which they went, they had only each other to cling to for warmth and affection. You will understand that she feels his death very keenly, very keenly indeed. I try to comfort her, but I find that I cannot. She will not rest until we know the truth.”

  Holmes rose to his feet. ‘Thank you for bringing the death of your brother-in-law to my attention, Mr Ayres. It presents a number of singular points, which incline me to the view that you and your wife take; that although it may seem at first sight to be a simple robbery, there are signs that robbery hardly comes into it, and that we are dealing with an extremely complex murder. Its apparent simplicity may be an effect that has been deliberately created in order to draw attention away from the true nature of the crime. I shall be pleased to look into it for you.”

  “I am very glad to hear you say so, Mr Holmes.”

  “I will call upon you at Glebe House tomorrow morning, if that is convenient. Good day.”

  Once our visitor had left, Holmes lit another cigarette and sat for a while in silence, gazing unseeing into space. The dreamy, far-off look in his eyes was a sign, long familiar to me, that he had withdrawn his attention from his present surroundings and was concentrating his thoughts elsewhere.

  He put out his cigarette. “I am not sanguine about the chances of success, Watson. The scent is cold. Still, there are points of interest. The fact that the Mayne was armed is suggestive, is it not? And the fact that nothing was found in his pockets. And, indeed, the fact that he went down to the lake at all. How are you fixed, Watson? Are you able to leave the practice for a day and come down to Suffolk tomorrow? I should value your help.”

  The following morning Holmes and I took the train to Suffolk. At the station a four-wheeler was waiting to take us to Glebe House. We jogged along at a lively pace through the quiet lanes until we came to a drive with a small lodge on the corner. In we turned and drove more slowly along, raising a swirl of dust behind us. To our right lay meadows, and on the left a lawn edged by topiary trees in the formal, stilted manner of a hundred years ago. We followed the drive where it lay between an avenue of majestic old cedars, leading to a great stone gateway whose pillars framed our first view of Glebe House. Bushes of rhododendron on either side led down to the front of the house. There we were admitted and shown into the morning-room, where Edward Ayres and his wife greeted us. Mrs Ayres was a handsome lady, silver-haired and very pale in complexion, the whiteness of her face made more striking by the black of her mourning. Her manner, though polite and graceful, was distrait, as if her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Holmes wished first to visit the lake where Hugo Mayne had been found. The groom Mottram, who had discovered the body, was appointed to be our guide. We found him waiting for us outside the front door, the same man who had just driven us from the railway station. He led us through the formal garden, whence we jumped down a ha-ha and crossed the field that led down to the lake. The lake was crossed at its narrowest point by a mossy stone bridge, and Mottram pointed out to us where, near the foot of the bridge, he had found the body. Holmes quickly looked about him, darting here and there, examining the broken branches of bushes and the bloodied leaves, getting down on all fours to peer at footprints in the damp earth, inspecting the path and parapet of the bridge, and looking into the water.

  “Have you found anything out, sir?” asked Mottram.

  “I have found out that a herd of policeman recently passed this way, trampling everything in its path,” came the reply. “I do not think there is anything more to be learned here. Let us return to the house.”

  As we made our way back, Holmes chatted with the groom about the dead man. Mayne did not keep a horse of his own, we heard, but he occasionally rode with the hunt on a mare of Ayres, and was, despite his injuries, a fearless horseman. He was an occasional visitor to the stables, exchanging information of varying reliability with Mottram about forthcoming races. Both men liked a modest gamble, and Mayne often carried with him a hip-flask from which the two, and the stable-boy if he was there, would celebrate the outcome of their bets or find solace for them. Holmes asked our guide to show us Mayne’s apartment. We were led to the ground floor of a tower, a later addition to the original building, built on to one side of the house, with large French windows facing the garden. The groom opened the French windows for us and then left us to examine for ourselves what had been Mayne’s home for the last twenty years of his life. In we went; and in stepping over the threshold, I had the sensation of stepping into the dark continent itself. Native trophies, antelope-hide shields and assegais adorned the walls. A sinister fetisch figure stood upon the desk, and the desk itself stood upon a lioness-rug, glass-eyed, the lips curled back in a snarl to reveal discoloured fangs. A basket in the corner, fashioned from an elephant’s foot, bristled with umbrellas, walking-sticks, knobkerries and a sheaf of spears. Holmes looked around him and threw out his arms in a gesture of despair. “What am I to do here, Watson? Everything has been tidied away since the burglary. Any signs as to what happened here have been systematically destroyed, first by the local police and then by the maid.” He turned to the French window. “Let us hope that we can at least see how they entered.” He took out his magnifying lens and examined minutely first the edge of the door frame, and then the door itself, turning the key in the lock to and fro. “No fresh scratches on the strike plate or the bolt,” he pronounced. “The burglars did not have to force an entry.”

  “You mean that Mayne left the window open when he went down to the lake to meet his death?” I asked.

  “Either that, or the intruder had a key.” Holmes fell to looking over the room’s contents, the trophies on the wall, the papers, the books
in the small book-case, the walking-sticks, searching everywhere, it seemed, for a clue, and, to judge from his reaction, finding very little. For want of anything else to do I glanced through some of the books. They told the same story as the spears and knobkerries, the story of years passed in the untamed wilds of Africa.

  “Anything of interest there, Watson?”

  “Nothing unexpected; ‘Early Travels in South Africa’, a medical guide, that sort of thing. Here’s a book of poems - ‘Songs of Sentiment’. What are these pinkish wafers between the leaves? Oh, I see, they are old rose-petals. And there’s an inscription on the fly-leaf: ‘Hugo Mayne, from F.C.’ Well, so the old adventurer had a softer side, once!”

  Holmes gave a snort of amusement. “Well done, Watson! I can always rely on your keen nose for an affair of the heart. Have the goodness to ring the bell, will you? I should like to talk with the maid.”

  A homely woman of advancing years answered the call. She was the housekeeper for Mr Mayne’s apartment, she told us. The staff had been sitting down to their dinner that fatal evening when the boy was called upstairs. He came down to tell them of the murder before running off to fetch the police. She, accompanied by the footman, had gone straightaway to Mayne’s quarters, and found them in chaos. She had only half an hour earlier prepared Mr Mayne’s dinner-table for when he should return from his walk; now all was in a state of utter disarray. In the largest room, which served as sitting room and study, the desk had been ransacked, its drawers pulled out and emptied onto the floor. The little locked drawer containing Mayne’s revolver was unlocked and empty. Mayne had no safe in his rooms; she supposed he kept his documents and valuables in his London bank (a supposition later confirmed by Ayres). For all the mess they had made, the thieves had not found much to take beyond a box of cigars, an ivory paper-knife and a wallet containing, no doubt, some bank-notes and coins. The house-keeper was not able to say how much money, but as Mr Mayne was a gentleman who enjoyed a wager, she supposed it might have held as much as thirty pounds. As for the rest of Mayne’s apartment, the bedroom had also been entered, to much the same effect; the wardrobe doors stood open, and the contents of the bedside cabinet emptied onto the floor, but nothing was missing. So it was with the kitchen; cupboards had been opened and jugs and cups inside them knocked over, drawers had been pulled out, but nothing was taken except a carving knife. Holmes wondered if the intruders might have taken some small item whose absence the housekeeper had missed, but she was quite firm that it was not so; she had been housekeeper to Mr Mayne for sixteen years, she told us, and knew every single item in the suite. He then asked about Mayne’s usual habits, and in particular about his gun and his movements about the grounds. He had no rifle, a useless item to a man with only one arm. His revolver was always kept locked in the top drawer of his desk. He never normally carried it; the only time she could remember his having done so was years before, when a violent gang of house-breakers had terrorised the neighbourhood. At that time he had taken his pistol with him on his evening walks; when the gang was broken up, his pistol went back into its drawer. As for the evening walks, they were regular but unpredictable: regular in that he was an indefatigable walker, and unpredictable in that there was no pattern to his walks, no time or route that he favoured. He might walk before dinner, or after; he might walk alone, or with Mungo, the dog, or with Mottram the groom, or with a guest, if he had one. He might walk around the fields and circle back, or go down beyond the lake to the village and take a drink or two with friends or strangers in the public-house before returning home. The one unchanging constant was that he walked. If a day came that did not see him stumping jauntily somewhere about the grounds, it was likely to be a day of one of his periodic visits to London.

  Holmes’s final question concerned several cases of wine which stood in the kitchen. They had arrived that very morning, we were told, and in the confusion and upset caused by Mr Mayne’s death had not yet been taken down to the cellar. Holmes glanced at the delivery note accompanying them; it listed wines of the highest quality, and a correspondingly high price, from a vintners in St James’s. Did the housekeeper know how and when they had been ordered? They must have been ordered, she thought, about ten days earlier, when Mayne had gone down to London. He had stayed there overnight and returned the following day in excellent humour, bringing with him several boxes of the best cigars, and telling her to expect a delivery soon of some fine Burgundy and Champagne wine. He had even brought back a box of bon-bons for her, she added, the memory of his act of kindness obliging her to dab her eyes with her kerchief. What had occasioned this sudden largesse, she could not say; she could only guess that perhaps Mr Mayne had been lucky at the horse-races. Holmes had been sitting quiet during the housekeeper’s account, throwing out an occasional question when further elucidation was required, but otherwise suffering with remarkable patience the many digressions in her narrative (digressions which I have omitted from my summary of her testimony). Finally he thanked her for her help, and she, wishing us God-speed with our search for Mayne’s murderer, returned to her duties.

  For some minutes after she had gone Holmes sat brooding, in his grey eyes the dreamy look I had learned to associate in him with extreme mental concentration, his brow furrowed as he brought into focus some difficulty that eluded solution. He spoke his thoughts aloud. “Something happened,” he said. “Why did he suddenly have all that money to spend? Why did he go down to the lake, where he never normally went? Why did he carry his revolver? Something happened to bring about these changes. What was it?” He leapt to his feet. “No good sitting here trying to spin out theories on insufficient data. More information is required, Watson. Perhaps Edward Ayres will be able to supply it. Let us search him out!”

  We found our host in the library, where he invited us to join him. The library of Glebe House was a vast room, three of its walls covered by dark, deeply-carved bookshelves that rose to the frieze of the ornate plaster ceiling. In the middle of one wall was a stone fireplace, above which hung the portrait of a bewigged man with his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. The room was lit by a pair of unusually high bay windows in the opposite wall. I was seated by one of these windows, which afforded me a fine view of the grounds, from the parterre, in which a gardener was working, to the field down to the wooded lake where Hugo Mayne had met his death, and beyond the lake to the village with its church spire and the distant plains stretching away to the horizon.

  “Are you one of the executors to your brother-in-law’s will, Mr Ayres?” asked Holmes.

  “I am.”

  “I should like to see his cheque-book together with a statement of recent payments, if you have one.”

  “Your luck is in, Mr Holmes. As executors we demanded full statements of account from his bankers.” He went to an escritoire, unlocked a drawer and took out a sheaf of papers. “They are somewhere here ...” he said, leafing through them. “Ah, these are they!” He handed the papers to Holmes.

  “Thank you. Just the last month’s figures should be enough.” Holmes glanced down the columns. “I find no mention here of any payment to the vintners who supplied the wine that arrived for Mr Mayne this morning. Nor any cheque made to them,” he added as he flicked through the cheque-book. “Do you know if he had an account with them?”

  “He did not.”

  “And no recent payments into his account, I see. Did he have another banking account, do you think? Perhaps in a different name?”

  “I think not, Mr Holmes. We have uncovered nothing of the sort in his papers, and I can see no reason why he should have one. My brother-in-law was not a secretive man.”

  “I see. That is curious. No cheque drawn on his bank, no account with the wine or tobacco merchants, and yet he bought himself cigars and wines fit for a king.”

  “Indeed he did, and not only for himself. He gave me a box of Havanas, and my wife a handsome muffler.”

  �
�Paying ready cash for all these things, evidently. Can you account for this sudden liberality?”

  “Liberality from Hugo needs little explanation. He was an open-handed man. As to where he found the money, that is more difficult to say. My guess would be at the race-track.”

  “Ah, his housekeeper was of the same opinion. Now,” said Holmes, settling back in his chair, “I must ask you to cast your mind back over the last month or so, if you would, and tell me of any unusual circumstance that comes to mind, in particular anything that might pertain to Mr Mayne. Did he receive any visitors? Did he make any visits himself?”

  “He had no visitors that I know of, no. But he did go away to London at the end of the last month. He stayed for one night. That was two days before he was found dead.”

  “Do you know where he stayed?”

  “He always stayed in his club.”

  “Which was his club?”

  “The Capricorn.”

  “Were such visits unusual for him?”

  “No. He visited London perhaps half-a-dozen times a year. He had both friends and business interests there.”

  “I see. And in the main house; did you have many guests or visitors? Anything out of the usual way of things?”

  “Very little, Mr Holmes. We lead a quiet life here. Friends to dinner occasionally, of course, mostly neighbours. Hugo joined us for many of those evenings. But they were nothing out of the way - quite the opposite. Our guests were all old friends, people we had known for years.

  “At the beginning of last month we held a luncheon-party, as we always do, in the garden and library. The weather was fine, luckily. Hugo was there, of course. Not that he stayed for very long. He went back to his own suite early, and I can’t say I blame him. The whole thing became somewhat of a bore, to be honest. We see pretty much the same old faces every year.”

  “No newcomers at all?” asked Holmes.