Now Sir Henry was on his feet. He was swaying somewhat after all the alcohol, but there was no denying the fire that burned within him.
“We must go as soon as possible,” he said. “To Portsmouth. And when there, we will book berths on the first ship headed for Costa Rica.”
“Can we not just wire the port authorities in Costa Rica,” said Grier, “and see to it that the Stapleton woman is arrested the moment she steps off the gangplank?”
“But what if they miss her? Or what if, anticipating just such a move, she disembarks early, in Honduras perhaps, or Nicaragua?”
“In that event, Henry, we ourselves would fetch up in South America with no greater likelihood of finding her than anyone else has. She could lose herself in that vast continent, never to be seen again.”
“But we would be there, rather than thousands of miles away in England. It would signally increase the chances of locating her and Harry.”
“I am not normally one to counsel inaction,” Grier said, “but I still feel that pursuing her across the ocean seems inordinately futile.”
“And I am not going to sit idle when there is something that can be done,” Sir Henry countered. “I would rather waste time on a bootless chase than stay here hoping that the bodies of international justice act in successful concert. I cannot leave my son’s fate to others. Benjamin, I beg you, come with me. I ask this in the name of our friendship and also in the name of our commonality as men ‘on the square’, for we are brothers in spirit just as Jabal and Jubal were brothers in flesh.”
This was clearly some sort of Masonic invocation which precluded any refusal from him to whom it was addressed. Grier bowed his head, then nodded.
“Very well, Brother Henry,” he said. “If that is your wish, I must accede to it.”
“And you, Mr Holmes,” Sir Henry said, turning to my friend. “I insist that you accompany us. I shall pay you, of course. I don’t care how much. Name your price.”
“The going rate will be fine, Sir Henry. I cannot abandon you, not after my failure to pre-empt the drastic measures that Mrs Stapleton has taken. This thing must be seen through to the end.”
“And you, Doctor?” Now it was my turn to feel the glassy-eyed vehemence of the baronet’s gaze. “Can I count on your support too?”
“If Holmes is going,” I said, “then so am I, willingly.”
“Then it is settled. I shall make the arrangements.”
“My only proviso,” I added, “is that Dr Mortimer is charged with looking after Mrs Barrymore in my absence.”
“Naturally. I shall have Barrymore go over to Merripit House straight away to convey that instruction.”
Barrymore returned, not simply with an assurance from Mortimer that Mrs Barrymore would be his patient, but with the man himself.
“What’s this I hear about an expedition to Costa Rica?” Mortimer said to Sir Henry. “You are chasing after Harry’s kidnapper? Then I must come too.”
“There is no need. I have marshalled an impressive force already.” Sir Henry waved a hand at the three of us.
“It is not open to negotiation. Harry is my godson. I swore an oath that, while I live, I would care for him. Would you have me go back on a promise? One made in church, moreover?”
“Well, when you put it like that… Objections, anyone?”
“Is there another doctor who can minister to Mrs Barrymore?” I asked Mortimer.
“I know of at least two whom I can call on, both excellent fellows,” said he. “And Galen can be kennelled with a friend of mine. That may not seem important to you but it is to me.”
“Then I am satisfied,” I said.
“Anyone else?” said Sir Henry, looking to Holmes and Grier. From each he got a nod of assent. “Welcome aboard, Mortimer. Now go back home and pack your things. We leave for Portsmouth in the morning.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
TRANSATLANTIC MANHUNTERS
The docks at Portsmouth were all bustle and clamour. Cranes swung, crowds milled, stevedores yelled, and every now and then there would come the deep moan of a ship’s horn, loud enough to make the eardrums ache. The air was filled with the brackish smell of seawater and hosts of gulls skirling and mewing.
Disembarking from the train at the dockside terminus, our five-strong band of transatlantic manhunters divided forces. Sir Henry, Grier and Mortimer went to collect the tickets for our voyage. Holmes and I went to the customs house.
There, Holmes asked to see the passenger manifest for the SS Görlitz. The clerk on duty, a puffed-up little man with a tight gutta-percha collar and steel-rimmed spectacles, balked at first. Ships’ records were not for public scrutiny, he said. Holmes then produced a warrant he had had sent to him from London by Lestrade, granting the bearer the rights of a police official and permitting him to view any and all documents he requested. This rather took the wind out of the clerk’s sails.
The manifest revealed that a Mrs Pearl Merripit and son Harry were aboard the Görlitz, and that they were scheduled to disembark at Puerto Limón in Costa Rica in eleven days’ time.
“Mrs Stapleton did not wrack her brains too hard when coming up with false identities,” I remarked dryly.
“In Harry’s case, it was sensible to keep his first name the same,” said Holmes. “A child his age would be confused if asked to change it and would not readily answer to anything else. In her own case, she merely exchanged one kind of precious gem for another, and borrowed the name of her former Dartmoor home. Not what one would call cryptic, but enough to throw off most pursuers. Anyway, as I said yesterday, a woman and small boy travelling together are a comparatively rare sight, even if they are passing as mother and son. Mrs Stapleton must know this and realise that it marks them out, meaning there was no requirement for her alias to be anything but serviceable.”
“She may realise that, but does she realise Sherlock Holmes is on her trail?”
“It would not surprise me in the least. Beryl Stapleton has shown herself to be a wily and resourceful adversary. She was aware that I was investigating Lady Audrey’s murder, and hence she must have foreseen it was likely that my services would be called upon when Harry subsequently went missing. She is counting on the fact that she has a significant head start on us and that once she gets to Costa Rica she will be on home territory. She knows the lie of the land there, she can blend in among the indigenes, and that will be to her advantage.”
“But Harry cannot blend in so easily. He has dark features but not dark enough to pass for a Latin. Nor does he speak Spanish.”
“And that will be to our advantage,” said Holmes. “A pale-complexioned, Anglophone child will stand out from the crowd.”
Joining our colleagues again, we climbed aboard the RMS Aegean. Sir Henry had booked us First Class cabins, and the comfort and opulence of the accommodation was in stark contrast to the conditions I had endured when last I undertook a lengthy ocean journey, travelling back from Afghanistan to this very port. My cabin aboard the troopship Orontes had been little better than a monk’s cell. At the time, however, I had been so debilitated by my war wound and subsequent bout of enteric fever that I had hardly cared how salubrious my surroundings were. All I had wanted was to get home.
After settling in, I went out on deck. The Aegean’s cargo of mail, chinaware, silverware and dry goods had been loaded, her hatches were battened down, and now her mighty coal-fired engines were rumbling, sending deep, church-organ vibrations through the ship from stem to stern. Exhaust fumes began purling from her three smokestacks in huge columns, and in short order the hawsers were cast off from their mooring bollards and withdrawn. A tugboat towed the steamer away from dock and out into the harbour waters, then detached itself, gave a merry toot on its whistle, and left the larger vessel to make her own way. Back on the dock, handkerchiefs fluttered and hats waved as people saw off friends and relatives.
The Aegean sailed with stately slowness out through the pinch-point entrance to the port, passing between the Round To
wer on the left and the fort blockhouse on the right, and onward into the Solent. Gathering speed as she circumvented the Isle of Wight, she was soon riding the swells of the English Channel westward at a good fifteen knots, forging into a hefty headwind that drove the outpourings from her smokestacks backwards in a single, swirling, grey-black plume.
All this I observed from a vantage point at the bow rail, feeling the sense of exhilaration that often attends a departure to sea. For all that we were on a mission of the utmost gravity, there is still nothing quite like the sense of limitless possibility one has when venturing out onto the open main. The horizon stretches before one – the rim of the planet! – and the vastness of the Earth is laid bare. One may go anywhere. Anything might happen. Even the thought of our destination, South America, a continent as yet unvisited by me and forbiddingly unknown, was not as daunting as it might otherwise have been.
I was watching the Dorset coast slide by to starboard, a narrow strip of rust-brown cliff and shingle beach, when Holmes appeared beside me.
“Bidding fond adieu to the old country, eh, Watson?”
“Who knows how long it will be until we see England again. A month?”
“I hope we shall return with Beryl Stapleton in custody, and Harry and his father reunited, well within that span of time.”
“So do I. I am looking forward to us achieving the desired outcome of our journey, of course. But, churlish as it may sound, I am also concerned about the effect the frequent and sometimes lengthy leaves of absence I take are having on my career. I think some of my regular patients are beginning to despair. One even called me his ‘semi-physician’ the other day. It was meant as a joke, but not entirely.”
“There is always Verner and his proposal,” Holmes reminded me. “He is offering an excellent price for your practice.”
“And I am giving it serious thought.”
“It would leave you with a tidy sum which, husbanded wisely, would yield enough money to live on. Although,” he added, “the reduction in income might also oblige you to find more modest lodgings than that rather palatial Kensington townhouse you currently rattle around in.”
“Lodgings such as, perhaps, the upper floors at 221B Baker Street?”
“Why, the idea never occurred to me, Watson,” said Holmes with a sly grin. “But now that you mention it, would it be so bad? You and I together again in the old digs? If you gave up general practice, you would have more time to write, too. You are forever complaining that I am solving cases faster than you can chronicle them, and Newnes at The Strand is badgering you for more tales.”
This vision of the future was, like the view from the ship’s prow, bright, broad and breezily pleasing.
“No need to make a decision just yet,” Holmes went on. “But perhaps by the time we get back home…?”
I nodded. “Somewhat changing the subject,” I said, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. You have been castigating yourself over your supposed failure to prevent Beryl Stapleton kidnapping Harry. What was it that should have tipped you off to her next move?”
“You must understand, Watson, I did not know what she would do. Nobody could have predicted it. Nor did I even know with absolute certainty that Laura Lyons was not the true culprit behind Lady Audrey’s murder. There were a couple of anomalies at the scene of her supposed suicide, however, that nagged at me. The suicide note, for one.”
“With all the spelling mistakes.”
“Exactly. It would seem as though Mrs Lyons had typed it herself. Yet who types a suicide note? Something as personal as that – one’s last, melancholy proclamation to an uncaring world – surely cries out to be handwritten. However, if we set that objection aside for the moment and assume Mrs Lyons chose neatness over passion, what about the misspellings? ‘Enough’ was spelled E-N-U-G-H.”
“A missing ‘O’ could easily be excused as a typing error,” I said.
“Yet the letters, as they are, give a close approximation of the word, the kind that a person whose mother tongue was not English might think is correct. Now consider the other two misspellings.”
“One was ‘perdon’, was it not?”
“And the other ‘ocasion’. These, respectively, were meant to be ‘pardon’ and ‘occasion’. But they are also the equivalents of those words in Spanish.”
“Gracious! Is that so?”
“Now, perhaps you will cast your mind back to ’eighty-nine, and the anonymous message of warning that Beryl Stapleton sent to Sir Henry in London. What form did it take?”
“It consisted of words clipped from The Times, all save the last, ‘moor’. That was the only word which had not appeared in the previous day’s edition of the paper and thus had to be appended by hand.”
“Obviously the use of typeset words was intended to disguise the identity of the note’s sender. But perhaps Mrs Stapleton also employed that method because she was unsure of her written English. Any misspellings might have given the game away.”
“And she typed Mrs Lyons’s suicide note for much the same reason, so as to avoid writing in her own hand.”
“Which we might have recognised as not being Mrs Lyons’s,” said Holmes. “Even if you or I were not familiar with that lady’s handwriting, someone like Dr Mortimer would be. However, Mrs Stapleton’s uncertain grasp of our language on paper was in evidence in the misspellings.”
“So that was one of the two anomalies at the scene,” I said. “What was the other?”
“The bottle of laudanum. When I held it up to the light, its colour looked a little fainter than such preparations usually are, and when I tasted it, it seemed somewhat weak.”
“Laudanum comes in all shades, from beer brown to pale amber, and no brand tastes quite like another. Some are sickeningly strong. Others are more palatable. In a few instances, the maker cuts cost by diluting the mixture.”
“And for that reason, I could not be sure that the laudanum had been watered down by someone other than the maker, Collington’s.”
“Yet you suspected it might have been.”
“Mrs Stapleton could have forced Laura Lyons to consume a large quantity of it, in order to subdue her. Mrs Lyons, in her fragile state, would not have put up much resistance. This happened during the small hours of the morning, so she would have been in bed and perhaps still drowsy from an earlier, self-administered dose. Mrs Stapleton surprised her and tipped the liquid down her throat, perhaps stopping up her nose so that she had no choice but to swallow. With the additional laudanum in her body, Mrs Lyons would swiftly have fallen into insensibility. Mrs Stapleton then topped up the bottle with water to make it look as though only a small amount, a reasonable single dose, had been drunk. That way one might well infer that Mrs Lyons had had a palliative nip of laudanum before typing her note and opening a vein in her arm.”
“After drugging Mrs Lyons,” I said, “Mrs Stapleton set her up in her armchair and bled her dry, then prepared the suicide note.”
“She also planted the moth kite in the wardrobe. All this was done to frame Laura Lyons for crimes she herself had committed. I wonder whether I might have detected the telltale odour of white jessamine in the room, as I did in the hedge at the Hall, had there not been other smells masking it.”
“You mean the reek of blood and death?”
“And of Mrs Lyons’s own perfume. If I had caught that scent, perhaps I would have divined Mrs Stapleton’s involvement in the case earlier and thus saved us a great deal of trouble and heartache. But,” he added with a philosophical grimace, “there is nothing to be gained by such speculation. We are where we are.”
“What I am curious to know is how Mrs Stapleton got into Mrs Lyons’s lodgings in the first place.”
“That is a very good question, Watson, and one I am not fully able to answer, although not for want of trying. While I was waiting for Lestrade’s reply to my telegram yesterday morning, I didn’t waste the time. Instead, I used it profitably by taking myself to the boarding house
. There I conducted a brief interview with the landlady. I asked her if anyone had entered the property during the small hours on the night Mrs Lyons committed suicide. The landlady lives on the ground floor and would surely know if there had been any such visitor.”
“And was there?”
“She told me she had heard nothing untoward that night, but then admitted that she is both a heavy sleeper and somewhat deaf. She maintained that the front door is always locked at eleven sharp, but every resident has a key for it. Her lodgers are permitted to come and go at all times, even late, provided they tread lightly and close the door softly so as not to disturb their fellows and her.”
“I see. So it is conceivable that Mrs Stapleton could have forced the lock on the front door, or picked it.”
“And then, having sneaked upstairs, she entered Mrs Lyons’s rooms by the same means,” said Holmes. “We must assume, from the timing of events, that she went to the boarding house straight after terrorising Baskerville Hall for a second time with her moth – the same occasion on which I was able to identify the moth as a kite from atop Lafter Hall. She realised she had taken her ‘giant vampiric insect’ charade as far as it could go, and now she must cut her losses and pin the blame for everything on a hapless, unwitting innocent, someone who was a likely candidate because she had a connection to Sir Henry that was both direct and inimical.”
“I can see how it all fits,” I said, “but that is only because we know now that Mrs Stapleton was the agency behind it. Those two anomalies you refer to are both tenuous, too slight to base any kind of useful conclusion on. The misspellings in the suicide note could have been just that, misspellings. It was impossible to tell with absolute certainty that the laudanum had been watered down. In and of themselves, they gave you nothing to go on. They were incidental, perhaps coincidental.”
“I have built successful cases upon far smaller minutiae,” Holmes said. “Thoughts of Beryl Stapleton did enter my head at the time. The stumbling block, for me, was simply that I could not fathom why she might harbour any ill will towards Sir Henry Baskerville, let alone a detestation so intense it might provoke her to murder. I still cannot. If one has a suspect but no motive, then one may as well not have a suspect at all.”
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 18