“A suicide?” Grier asked the woman. “Whose?”
Holmes answered for her. “Unless I am much mistaken,” he said with a grim shake of the head, “it is that of Sir Henry’s persecutor. This is something I did not anticipate, and yet, in hindsight, perhaps I should have foreseen it.”
“To be wise after the event is not to be wise at all,” Grier chided him amicably.
Upstairs, they came upon a horrific scene. Mrs Lyons was slumped in her armchair, in her nightgown, as pale and still as only the dead can be. Her eyes stared sightlessly, half-lidded, while her jaw hung slack. Her arm hung over the side of the chair, and from it protruded a short length of rubber pipe. One end of the terracotta-coloured pipe was capped with a needle which had been inserted into a vein in the underside of her bare forearm. The other rested in the spout of a one-gallon oil canister.
The canister was filled to the brim with blood, and a significant quantity of the blood had spilled over from the spout. Streaks of it encrusted the canister’s side, while the rest had soaked into the rug beneath, drying to form a huge brown bloom around its base. The coppery tang of it filled the air, mingling with the cloying aroma of Mrs Lyons’s chosen brand of perfume in a way that even Holmes, hard-headed as he was, found nauseating.
Dr Mortimer presided over the body. His face was ashen grey and fixed in a look of appalled compassion.
“Mr Holmes, Mr Grier,” said he. “I would say I was glad to see you both, but as you can tell, this is hardly a joyous occasion.”
“It is not,” Holmes agreed.
“Once I saw the body, I had you brought here because I knew Mrs Lyons was a suspect in the Baskerville case. I felt you should be informed of her death immediately.”
“You were sensible to do so.”
“She was unwell, of course. Not in her right mind. But to commit such an act of violence upon herself… I cannot imagine the inner torment that must have precipitated it.”
“Were you the one to discover her like this?”
“No,” said Mortimer, “that misfortune fell to the tenant in the room below. The rug here, as you can see, became saturated with her blood. Some of it dripped through the cracks between the floorboards. Dark splotches began appearing in the plaster of the ceiling beneath. The tenant went to the landlady to complain, and it was she who first entered the room and found Mrs Lyons. I happened to catch wind of the incident as I was doing my early rounds. The whole of Coombe Tracey is abuzz with it. I dropped everything and came straight here.”
“I don’t know about you gentlemen,” said Grier with a polite cough, “but I am not comfortable standing around talking like this in front of that poor lady, not the way she is. It seems disrespectful, not to say ghoulish. With your permission, Doctor, Mr Holmes, may I cover her up?”
Both the other men nodded assent, and Grier took a sheet off the bed and draped it over the corpse.
“I have seen death before,” he said. “I’m sure we all have. But we should not carry on in its presence as if it is not there. Now the late Mrs Lyons is at least out of sight, if not out of mind.”
“Your sense of decorum puts us to shame, Grier,” said Holmes. After an appropriately contrite pause, he turned back to Mortimer and picked up his thread of questioning again. “At what hour did the tenant first notice the stains on the ceiling?”
“Around eight o’clock, I believe.”
“Then Mrs Lyons is likely to have killed herself perhaps three hours before that. I am estimating by the rate of blood flow and the time it would take for the canister to become full and the overspill to soak through the rug. Would you concur, Doctor?”
“I should think it likely, yes.”
“One may also infer that Mrs Lyons used the canister to catch the blood in the hopes of preventing it seeping through the floor. Or at any rate, seeping through too soon.”
“So that she would not be discovered before she was dead,” said Grier.
“Precisely. A delaying measure to guarantee the success of her endeavour. Even if the canister could not contain all the blood, it would hold enough that she would be dead well before the excess made its presence known to the tenant downstairs. Without the canister, the blood would have penetrated the floor far sooner, with the result that she might have been found just in time. Then someone might have been able to staunch the wound and pull her back from the brink of death.”
Mortimer gestured towards the desk where Mrs Lyons’s typewriter sat. “There is also this.”
Sticking up from the machine was a sheet of foolscap octavo vellum notepaper, upon which a short message had been typed.
I have had enugh. This, my campaign of terror, must end. I beg perdon for all I have done. Now I shall die as the lady Audrey died. If any of you have ocasion to think of me, remember me kindly.
L.L.
Holmes studied it without touching it.
“Poor spelling for a woman of Mrs Lyons’s background and breeding,” he opined. “Don’t you think, Mortimer? She struck me as an educated woman.”
“I agree. But don’t forget, she was in extremis when she wrote the note. The last thing she would have been thinking about was correct spelling. And if her fingers slipped on the keys and hit the wrong one now and then, well, that is hardly surprising. Her hands may well have been trembling.”
“Now let us consider this item.” Holmes turned his attention to a bottle of laudanum which stood on the floor at the foot of Mrs Lyons’s armchair, not far from the canister. “One of the ones you brought her, I take it.”
“It is,” said Mortimer. “Collington’s. My preferred brand. I can only assume she took a draught of it before inserting the needle into her arm, in order to deaden the pain.”
Holmes picked up the bottle and took it to the window to examine. He held it up to the light, then uncorked it and took a sniff.
“It smells of laudanum,” he said, “and just enough has been drunk to constitute a single dose – an amount sufficient to deaden pain, as you say, Mortimer, and also to calm the nerves so that she might go through with her plan.”
“‘It smells of laudanum’,” Grier echoed. “Were you expecting it to smell of something else?”
“Merely considering the possibility that it had been tampered with.”
“Poisoned, you mean? As in foul play?”
“I have to rule these things out, else I would not be doing my job.”
So saying, Holmes took a minuscule sip of the preparation, just enough to moisten the tip of his tongue.
“No,” he concluded. “It tastes of nothing other than laudanum.”
Setting down the bottle, he turned and scanned the room. His eye alit upon the oak wardrobe.
“Now then, gentlemen,” said he, grasping the handle of its door, “either I am about to deliver a tremendous coup de théâtre, or I am about to do something banal and ultimately rather anticlimactic.”
He threw open the door, glanced within, and stepped back with a grin of profound gratification.
Grier and Mortimer crowded in on either side of him to take a look.
Both men gasped in unison.
“Dear me!” said Mortimer.
“Is that what I think it is?” said Grier.
“It is,” said Holmes, “and this wardrobe is the only object in the room with the capacity to have contained it. At least, that was my supposition, and it has been borne out.”
Resting inside the wardrobe was an intricate confection of canvas and wooden dowels, all painted black. Holmes reached in, took it out, and laid it out upon the floor. Unfurled, it had the shape of a moth as tall as a man. For eyes, there were a pair of small lanterns, each fitted with a lens made of red glass and a wick that drew on a tiny reservoir of paraffin. Twin reels of horsehair fishing line were attached to the contraption.
“A kite,” said Grier, scratching his head in wonder. “Well, I’ll be damned. The thing was nothing but a large kite.”
“Not a real moth,” said Holmes, “
and certainly not your skinwalker were-moth.”
“A hoax.”
“Exactly.”
“Just as the Baskerville hound was a hoax,” said Mortimer. “My God. The devilry of it all. But how did you know, Holmes?”
“It was elementary, really. Let me explain. The sightings of the moth, including our own at Baskerville Hall, all took place on nights that had two things in common: they were clear and they were windy. They needed to be clear so that the moth could easily be seen, and they needed to be windy because, naturally, a kite cannot fly unless there is a strong enough wind. That the giant moth was actually a large kite with lanterns for eyes was a notion that had occurred to me early on in these proceedings, and when I saw the moth for myself from the window at the Hall, nothing about its appearance or its manner of flight suggested to me that I was wrong.”
“The patch of trampled grass you discovered out on the moor,” said Grier. “That wasn’t left by the moth’s ‘master’, but rather by its flyer.”
“It was where the person flying the kite stood, yes, using these reels of fishing line to control it,” said Holmes. “In order to ascertain the truth beyond any doubt, I decided to avail myself of Frankland’s telescope. I had to wait until the next time the weather conditions were right, as they were last night. The telescope enabled me to observe the moth in sufficient detail to confirm what I suspected. The kite might look plausible enough when seen from a distance with the naked eye, but not to the eye aided by a telescope’s magnifying power.”
“The purpose of the bogus moth, then,” said Mortimer, “was to sow fear and panic.”
“Yes, in the hearts and minds of the local populace,” said Holmes, “and especially in the heart and mind of one Sir Henry Baskerville. To him, it was a second sinister beast attacking and killing his near kin, which caused him to relive the horrors associated with the first. And of course, the creature being a moth this time, that would seem to implicate the lepidopterist who assailed him the last time, namely Jack Stapleton.”
“Pure misdirection, in other words,” said Grier. “The real culprit being Mrs Lyons here.”
“The proverbial ‘woman scorned’. Mrs Lyons, in case you didn’t know, Grier, had a brief flirtation with Sir Henry that went nowhere. In her mind, however, it was far more than that. Sir Henry jilted her, so she believed, and she could not get over it. For years she brooded upon the perceived insult. It grew and grew in her thoughts, gaining such towering, tormenting proportions that in the end she decided she had no choice but to wreak vengeance upon him. Thus began a grim, elaborate vendetta. Mrs Lyons built the moth kite and began flying it ostentatiously at night so that it would be seen and rumours about it would start to circulate among Dartmoor’s more superstitious denizens. At the same time, she set about harming and killing sheep by extracting various quantities of blood from them. This, one may infer, was designed both to foster the illusion that the moth was a vampiric entity preying on living creatures and to serve as rehearsal for the perhaps more complicated task of exsanguinating a human being.”
“Lady Audrey.”
“She was Mrs Lyons’s ultimate target, the woman who, in her view, stole Sir Henry from her. Mrs Lyons would have conducted covert surveillance on Baskerville Hall for some time and established that Lady Audrey liked to take twilight walks alone on the moor. Then all she had to do was lie in wait for her beside the rock known as Crookback Samuel, spring out, overpower her, and carry out the act of bleeding her dry, using this very apparatus we see here. It is called a cannula, is it not, Doctor?”
Mortimer confirmed this with a nod.
“Doubtless she brought with her a receptacle into which she drained off Lady Audrey’s blood for later disposal, having done the same beforehand with the sheep she had practised on,” Holmes said. “Doubtless, too, the receptacle was this very canister. At two gallons it has the capacity to hold practically the entire volume of blood from an average person. Not quite all of it, as we can see, but enough to account for a fatal degree of blood loss. That way, there would be few or no bloodstains on the ground and it would look even more as though her alleged monster moth sucked its victims dry.”
“Cunning,” said Grier.
“Mrs Lyons was nothing if not that,” Holmes said. “Consider the cigarillo stub I found at Crookback Samuel, secreted in a fissure. She chose to smoke that particular kind of cigar while she lay in wait for Lady Audrey because cigarillos have distinct connotations of South America, whence Jack Stapleton hailed originally. She expected that the police would find it, although in the event they did not and I did. Like the moth, it was yet another way of deflecting everyone’s thoughts towards Stapleton.”
“We were blaming Stapleton for everything, and all along it was Mrs Lyons’s doing.”
“Since the majority of moth sightings and attacks were centred around Coombe Tracey, it seemed to me that the person behind them might be a resident of that town. Knowing that Sir Henry and Mrs Lyons had once been if not lovers then at least romantically involved, I went to Coombe Tracey in order to ascertain whether she still lived there as she used to. She did, and she seemed rather unhappy to see me. Whether or not it worried her that Sherlock Holmes was investigating the case, she continued flying her moth kite regardless at Baskerville Hall.”
“To what end? To keep Sir Henry scared?”
“Yes. Her thirst for revenge was such that killing Lady Audrey did not sate it. She wanted the man who had supposedly abandoned her to suffer further. To her, he was just another in a series of men who had abused her trust. What she did not foresee, however, was that Sir Henry would take the drastic step of draining the Grimpen Mire. That was when her plan started to unravel. Word must have reached her concerning the great engineering project out on the moor, and she realised the game was up.”
“I’m afraid the bringer of that word was me,” said Mortimer. “I mentioned it to Mrs Lyons just yesterday.”
“This left her with only one available course of action, as she saw it. She flew the moth kite one more time outside the Hall, as a sort of last hurrah, a final twist of the knife. Then she came back home and…” Holmes gestured towards the corpse. “Well, need I say more?”
“But, Holmes,” said Mortimer, “you saw for yourself the state Mrs Lyons was in when you met her just a few days ago. You even said she seemed too enfeebled to have committed the energetic and violent acts you describe.”
“It was all an imposture, nothing more,” said Holmes. “You were wholly taken in by her, Doctor, and to some extent so was I. But not entirely. I have an innate scepticism about people that has stood me in good stead in the past. Everyone, in some way or other, is a dissembler. Even me, when I have to be.”
“Still, I find it incredible that I could have been so easily misled.”
“And indeed you might. But then, if it isn’t impolite to point this out, you were rather smitten with Mrs Lyons, weren’t you?”
The physician bowed his head, as if in embarrassment.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Holmes continued. “You are a bachelor, very eligible and perhaps somewhat unsophisticated, and Mrs Lyons was a divorcee, handsome, a woman of the world. She played the part of damsel in distress, and you, the dashing, gallant GP, came riding to her rescue. In the end, she had you wrapped around her finger. You treated her gratis, brought her medicine, became her companion and confidant… She had you believing she was weaker and more dissipated than she really was, precisely in order to throw off suspicion. If her own doctor thought her too ill to have committed any kind of crime, then what better alibi could there be?”
“What an idiot I have been,” Mortimer lamented, burying his face in his hands. “How gullible. She used me. To her, I was no more than a tool in her scheme, like that kite.” He kicked the moth-shaped contraption in a fit of pique, snapping one of the dowels that gave it structure and rigidity.
“I am sorry that you had to learn about it this way.”
“No, no, don�
�t be. Your sympathy is appreciated but undeserved. I ought to have known better.”
“At any rate,” said Holmes, “my work here would appear to be done. We have a culprit. We have what is tantamount to a signed confession. Little remains beyond alerting the police with regard to Mrs Lyons’s death.”
“Already done,” said Mortimer. “An inspector is on his way over from Exeter even as we speak.”
“Excellent. Then Grier and I shall bring Sir Henry the glad tidings that the danger to him and Harry is, at long last, behind them.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A CONCLUSION?
“And that is precisely what we did, Watson,” Holmes said, as he brought his narrative to a close. “The moment Sir Henry learned the sorry saga of Mrs Lyons and her kite, he broke down crying. His tears were sadness mixed with pure relief.
“‘To think,’ he said, ‘if I had only been more sensitive towards that woman, my Audrey would still be alive.’
“‘As I understand it,’ said I, ‘you could not have been more of a gentleman. It was Mrs Lyons’s own twisted, envenomed mind that caused all this misery, Sir Henry. You are not to blame yourself for any of it.’
“At that point, Harry entered the room. ‘Why are you crying, Daddy?’ he asked.
“Sir Henry pulled the boy to his bosom and sobbed. Soon Harry was sobbing too, even if he did not know quite why.
“‘I swear, my lad,’ said father to son, ‘that I will be better to you from now on. You will have your old daddy back.’
“‘And the Bammows?’ Harry said, sniffing hard. ‘Can they come back too?’
“‘Of course they can, if they are willing. I shall send word to them at once, telling them that all is well again and begging them to resume their positions. Everything is going to be as it was, Harry. We shall both of us be happy, and so will your mother, as she looks down on us from heaven.’
“I quit the room, leaving the two Baskervilles to their touching reconciliation. I felt that a visit to old Frankland was in order, so I made for Lafter Hall. News of the death had already reached the late Mrs Lyons’s father, and he consented to see me but was so overcome with grief he could scarcely speak.
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 14