by John Heywood
We left her standing folorn in her doorway, and made our way down the stairs into the street.
“Of course, it was not James Garrity who entered that apartment yesterday.” Holmes was expatiating on the case as we walked briskly through the back streets of Walworth. “It is fortunate that yesterday was a wet day. Muddy prints had been left on the floor, faint, but visible. Whoever left them wore boots four sizes larger than Garrity’s. And did you notice the jammed drawers, Watson? They were jammed because they had been thrust violently back at an angle. Was it Garrity who slammed them back so clumsily, the neat young fellow who had waxed them until they glided in and out? I think not.”
Our way - the same way we had come - led us through a narrow defile into the Walworth Road, a broad highway where the street-traffic, human and equine, rushed along in a torrent.
“And what of the note?” I asked him. “Was that written by the young man?”
“Ah yes, the note. The note is interesting - a most suggestive piece of evidence. In form, its letters resemble those of Garrity’s hand as I saw it in his notebook. But they had been uncertainly made, with wavering strokes and one or two corrections. And the pressure was heavier than in the notebooks; quite a furrow had been dug into the paper with the pencil. Yet the table-top on which the note was found, a top of soft deal, showed no sign of bruising from a pencil, nor did any other likely surface. The pencil itself, by the way, was a carpenter’s pencil, as was apparent from the varying thickness of the line according to the angle of the stroke.”
“Perhaps I am being unusually slow, Holmes, but I can’t see what that tells us about the matter.”
“It tells us that the note was probably written elsewhere, earlier, and--”
“I still don’t see how it tells us that.”
“On what surface did he rest the paper to write?” he answered impatiently. “On nothing in the apartment, or some scoring would have marked it. Therefore, it was written elsewhere. Why? So that the writer could practise copying Garrity’s hand, I suggest. That hypothesis is borne out by the hesitant nature of the strokes and the number of careful little corrections.”
“But the front door, Holmes. It had not been forced; it had been unlocked. How to explain that, unless it was the son who unlocked it? Who else had a key?”
“Bravo, Watson! A most pertinent question. I suspect that the answer to it lies in the village of Great Mowl. That way lies Waterloo Station,” he said, pointing. “Are you still ready for the chase?”
“Of course, Holmes. But Great Mowl? I’ve never heard of the place. Where is it? And what has it to do with James Garrity?”
“It lies at the western end of the North Downs. Your other question I shall answer once we are on the train,” he replied, increasing his pace.
The train was not long to wait, and when we were seated Holmes was as good as his word. “As you are good enough to accompany me to Great Mowl, Watson, I owe you an explanation of our journey. I told you of my visit to see Armstrong and his men at Bromley yesterday, did I not? You will remember that there was some discrepancy between what the labourers told me about where Garrity was last seen, and what Armstrong told me. Armstrong was positive that young Garrity had been at Bromley for the first two days of the job, and then vanished. But Garrity’s workmates were a good deal less definite about it: not one of them could swear to having seen him on the Bromley site. They well remembered having seen him at the previous job, however. That job was at the vicarage of Great Mowl. So Great Mowl is now left as the last place where we know the lad was seen. What we will find there, I do not know, but it is where the scent leads, and we must follow.”
“And now, my dear fellow, I shall take a catnap. A busy day lies ahead of us, and we must be ready for whatever it may bring.” So saying he gathered his greatcoat around him and fell asleep, while the train, having left behind the suburbs of London, carried us through the fields and copses of Surrey.
We were the only passengers to alight at the little railway station of Great Mowl. How different it was, that quiet place, from the narrow back-streets of Walworth. The station was a mile from the village, and as we made our way to the vicarage we seemed to have gone back to another, older world; the unchanging world of old England, with its elms, its ancient church, its quiet fields and hedgerows. Whatever upheavals might threaten in the great world, whatever wars and empires might be won and lost, while these villages remain, England must remain too, for they are its heart. It was strange to think that our search for the dark, perhaps criminal secret behind the disappearance of young James Garrity should lead us to such a place. The lane from the station took us past fields at first, then a shop, a public-house, and a row of cottages, before bringing us to the village green, where our arrival was noisily greeted by the ducks on the pond. On one side of us stood the church, and on the other the gates of the vicarage. We walked through the gates and up a mossy drive, the trees on either side of us still dripping from last night’s rain. A house-keeper answered our knock at the door and admitted us into a small hall, where Holmes handed her his card to be presented to the vicar. We had but a few seconds to wait before she returned to usher us into the study, where a fire was already burning. The tall, willowy figure of the Reverend Nathaniel Flowerdew rose from behind his desk to greet us. “I am delighted to meet you, Mr Sherlock Holmes,” he enthused, beaming behind his spectacles and bowing. “Pray take a seat.”
“I hope we do not interrupt you.”
“Not in the least, my dear sirs, not in the least! I was merely scribbling a few stray thoughts upon Theocritus.” He closed the volume before him on the desk, wiped his nib and tidied together some stray papers. “Now, gentlemen, how may I help you?”
“I am, as my card has told you, a private consulting detective, and this is my friend and colleague Dr Watson. I am presently engaged to look into the disappearance of one James Garrity. I believe he was involved in recent building work here in your vicarage as an apprentice.”
“That is quite possible,” answered the vicar. “We have recently been visited by a tribe of builders, of which he may well have been a member. They were engaged in building a conservatory on to the back of the house, a heated conservatory. It had long been a dream of mine, gentlemen. The conservatory is constructed according to a design of my own, based upon the Moorish pleasure gardens of Granada. Perhaps it would interest you to see it?”
“It would interest me very much,” answered Holmes, somewhat to my surprise. Flowerdew escorted us out of the study and down the hall to the back of the house. Passing through what had obviously been until recently the back door, we seemed to have been transported to the gardens at Kew. Under an elaborate iron-and-glass roof, we admired in succession, as the vicar brought them to our attention, Moorish spandrels, monstrous plants from the jungles of Burma or Peru, and an elaborate system of water-pipes designed to both hydrate and heat the whole. Holmes examined the work with apparent enthusiasm. He evinced an especial interest in the plumbing work, and followed the hot-water pipes where they ran round the low retaining wall upon which the glass-and-iron work of the conservatory rested. They led us down to a cellar, which, as we discovered, housed the furnace that heated them. Returning at last to ground level, we dutifully expressed, to Flowerdew’s delight, our admiration for his new conservatory.
“Were there any other building works carried out?” asked Holmes.
“This was the principal work, of course, but I also had the stable extended, and some repairs made to the kitchen garden wall. Would you wish to see the work?”
“If you have no objection. But do not trouble yourself unnecessarily, I beg you. We will escort ourselves.”
The reverend Flowerdew beamed, and rang the bell. “My housekeeper will show you round, gentlemen. Mrs Stamp, would you be good enough to show these gentlemen whatever they wish to see?”
“This way, if you plea
se,” she said, and led us out of the conservatory into the garden. Holmes asked her what she could tell us of young Garrity, but what she could tell us was little enough. Garrity, like many of the others, had been present on some days and not on others. When he was there, he was often to be seen with a note-book, counting bricks, sacks, lengths of timber, sheets of glass, and such materials, and jotting down the figures in his book. On the subject of Mr Armstrong she was more eloquent, stressing in particular his defects. Of these he had many, if Mrs Stamp was to be believed, the worst being the habit of constantly carrying a bag of shrimps from which he ate, leaving behind him wherever he went a trail of shrimps’ heads, without regard for those who might have to clean up behind him.
When we came to the kitchen garden, we found Mr Stamp, a stocky, red-faced man, digging over a muddy vegetable patch. At our arrival he looked up and stopped digging. The rain was starting to fall again, and all four of us adjourned to a nearby potting-shed. It was windowless and gave off a dusty, doggy smell, but it was dry. Stamp, in the earthy comfort of the shed, told us what he could about Armstrong and his team of builders. He shared his wife’s low opinion of them. Their language had been full of profanity, he told us, and their behaviour sinful; they were given to taking strong liquor and playing at cards. This sinfulness, and the wickedness of building exotic glass palaces, not natural in this country, had not gone unpunished. The day that the work had finished, a Chinese vase that had stood for years on the drawing-room mantelpiece fell when no-one was in the room and smashed to smithereens in the fire-place. At about the same time a ghost began to visit the cellar where the furnace was. Muffled groans and howls had been heard, and knockings in the night, and other such unearthly noises. Holmes and I wondered if we might be able to hear the ghost for ourselves, but it seemed we were too late; after a fortnight or so, the visitations had faded away. The presence of evil spirits seemed to be an idée fixe of the Stamps, for when the shower of rain passed, allowing us to emerge from our cramped shelter and move on to the stables, we were informed that there too the building work had raised malign spirits. They had entered the mare, to make her ill-tempered and unnaturally restless at night.
Holmes thanked the Stamps for their help, and they left us. He had borne their tales of the supernatural with great patience, and in this I had thought it best to follow his example, but I was not displeased when the stories came to an end and our search for the apprentice could continue in earnest. Holmes did not return immediately to the house, but stood for a while in the stable yard, as still as a statue, staring unseeing into the distance as he pondered the problem in hand. Soon his calculations were done, for all at once he sprang into action, peering with the greatest intensity at the brickwork, new and old, of the stable wall. That done, he strode on to the conservatory, and went straightway went down to the cellar, leaving me above. There being nothing I could do to help him at this point, I thought it better to let him alone in his work. I heard his steps as he scurried about below me, scraping and tapping. Eventually he surfaced, and we rejoined the Reverend Flowerdew in his study where Mrs Stamp had prepared coffee for Holmes and me. The vicar himself took an infusion of Earl Grey’s tea, as being less stimulating to the nerves. He was able to confirm what the Stamps had told us about the external building works done by Armstrong, but was less willing to confirm their tales of evil spirits. Though a reliable and god-fearing couple, they were excessively superstitious, he told us, much given to interpreting biblical references to the spirit in too narrowly literal a sense. As he pointed out, strange noises and unease in the horses were to be expected during building works, and scarcely required the spirit world as explanation. In any event, the Stamps’ quarters were in the back part of the house, next to the kitchen and scullery, so it was they who had been closest to the noise and disruption. “I am sorry to be so little help in these ghostly matters,” he smiled in apology. “Are your enquiries are bearing fruit elsewhere? Have you located the young person?”
“I think I know where he is, Mr Flowerdew.”
The vicar looked at Holmes aghast. He was clearly shaken by my friend’s reply, and indeed I was astonished by it myself. Holmes had said nothing to me to indicate that he had the least idea where Garrity might be found.
“I think I know, but I am not yet certain,” he continued. “A few questions to the Stamps will confirm or deny my suspicions. Would you be good enough to call them?”
Flowerdew rang the bell. We all waited. The room seemed very quiet; one could hear every crackle of the fire. It was a long, awkward wait, and I for one was relieved when Mrs Stamp came in. Flowerdew cleared his throat. “Mr Holmes would like a few words with you and Stamp,” he said. “Where is your husband?”
“He’s just taking his dinner, sir. Will I fetch him?”
“If you please.”
She went out, and reappeared with her husband. They stood before us.
“You told me just now that you thought your quarters were haunted,” said Holmes. At his words the Stamps looked uncomfortable, Mrs Stamp glancing at the vicar, and Stamp looking down at his boots while he chewed the remains of his dinner.
“Please tell me again, if you would, what signs of haunting you noticed.”
It was Stamp who replied. “We heard groaning, sir, as from a distance, muffled--”
“Where were you when you heard these sounds?” interrupted Holmes.
“It was in our own quarters.”
“Always there? Nowhere else?”
“I do believe so, yes,” answered Stamp sheepishly, while Flowerdew favoured me with a secret smile, as if to say, “Notice that the haunting was audible only to the gullible.”
“ ‘Groaning’ ”, repeated Holmes. “What other sounds did you hear?”
“There was a hollow metallic striking noise, and - well, sir, it’s hard to say, whispery scraping noises, sometimes, and at other times a kind of far away thumping.” Mrs Stamp leaned towards her husband and whispered in his ear.
“There may also have been a kind of howling, or inhuman shouting,” he added. “Or then again, it may have been a fox in the night.”
“Where did these sounds originate?”
“They came up from the bowels of the earth.”
“Thank you. And can you and your wife remember when these noises started?”
“When the man Armstrong and his men up and left, that very night.”
“Remarkable! And when was it quiet again?”
“Well, there, it is not so easy to say, exactly, as it faded away, as you might say, over two or three days. In all it was perhaps a week before the spirits quietened down, and left us.”
Holmes turned to Flowerdew. “I believe you heard nothing of all this?”
“That is correct, Mr Holmes,” came the answer.
Holmes nodded to the priest and turned again to the Stamps: “Thank you. Your answers have been very helpful. Tell me, Stamp, have you a sledgehammer? Good. Please fetch it, and bring a lantern too.”
When the pair had left the room, Holmes spoke in a sombre tone. “Mr Flowerdew, I am very close to the end of my enquiry. In order to confirm my suspicions, and reveal the truth, I must ask you to allow a part of your property to be destroyed. The damage will be small - a matter of a few bricks - and readily repaired. Do we have your permission? May we settle this question once and for all?”
The vicar blanched at this sinister turn of events, but offered no objection. “Of course, Mr Holmes, if you consider it necessary,” he answered in a wavering voice. “I would not wish to stand in your way.” At this point Stamp returned, carrying lantern and hammer, and stationed himself by the door awaiting orders.
“I fear that the object of my search lies in the cellar, behind the furnace,” announced Holmes. “I suggest we go down.”
And so we did, in solemn procession; Holmes, Flowerdew (holding a handkerchief
to his face), myself (holding the lantern), and, stumping along behind us, a fearsome hammer over his shoulder, Stamp. We descended the little stairway, all of us but Stamp ducking our heads to avoid the roof. It was a tiny cellar, some two yards high, two yards across and perhaps three deep. We were cramped in the little space, and the poor vicar was obliged to stoop lest he strike his head against the ceiling. He made a most unhappy figure, hunched up, his shadow from the lamp-light looming on the wall behind him, his handkerchief still pressed to his mouth as he glanced fearfully about him. Holmes had us stand back by the wall, and beckoned forward Stamp. At a nod from Holmes, Stamp swung back his hammer and struck. The brickwork shook, and I felt through the soles of my boots the earthen floor shake. Again he struck, and again the brick wall shook, cracking this time, but still it held. At the third blow, the hammer crashed clean through. A cloud of black flies swarmed out into the cellar, accompanied by a foul stench, forcing us all to back away instantly; but Holmes soon came forward to the hole and, his hand covering his face, wrenched out a few more bricks. He called for the lantern, and I came forward, and held it up to the hole. We peered into the chimney space; in the swaying shadows and light it was possible to make out a corpse sitting on the floor of the cavity, its knees drawn up, chin on chest, crawling with maggots.