Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons

by James Lovegrove

  “The Brazilian wandering spider wanders no more,” he said.

  Mrs Stapleton moaned. Holmes knelt beside her, then summoned me over.

  “She has been bitten,” he said. “When she dropped the specimen jar, the spider escaped. It sank its fangs into her foot.”

  The bite marks were just above her heel, perilously close to the posterior tibial vein. I envisaged the venom racing through her bloodstream towards her heart. She was starting to shudder and her breath was coming in ragged gasps.

  I looked at Holmes. “I fear there is nothing I can do for her. If that species of spider is as deadly as you say…”

  “It is.”

  Abruptly, Mrs Stapleton went into convulsions. Her eyes bulged. She started foaming at the mouth. Truly repulsive retching sounds emanated from her throat.

  Her death throes lasted a full minute, until all at once she went limp. There was a rattle of escaping breath, and it was over.

  I closed the lids over her sightless eyes.

  “The poor woman,” I said. “Even after all she has done, it would be a hard man who did not feel some level of compassion for her.”

  “Do not forget that she was willing to kill Harry in just the same manner as she herself has been killed. She was hoist with her own petard, and there can be no more fitting end for her than that.”

  “I do not mean how she died. I mean how she lived, at least during the last few years. Alone in this godforsaken spot, with faded grandeur all around. Dwelling on the past and the slights inflicted upon her, whether real or imagined. Her bitterness festering until it became a hatred so blindingly intense, it could only be sated by the suffering of others.”

  “My sympathies lie elsewhere,” said Holmes. “Principally with young Harry there. Sir Henry, how is the lad?”

  Sir Henry had Harry clutched to his chest. He looked like a man who would never let go of his son again. He fixed Holmes with a glistening gaze and nodded. “He is safe,” he said softly. “He is safe, he is safe, he is safe.”

  At that moment, Dr Mortimer gave an agonised groan. He tried to sit up, but sank down again immediately.

  A swift examination revealed that my bullet had entered his chest between the fifth and sixth ribs. To judge by the blood on his lips and the wheeziness of his breathing, it had nicked a lung.

  “Can anything be done for him, Watson?” Holmes enquired.

  “If we can get him to a hospital, then possibly.”

  “There is no hospital for miles around, señor,” Suarez offered. “The nearest I know of is back at Puerto Limón. It is the same distance from here to there as it is from here to San José, but we will go quicker if we travel with the river’s current rather than against. But I have to ask, why not simply leave this man to perish? Is his life worth saving?”

  “If it means he eventually faces justice in an English court of law,” I said, “then yes.”

  “Where surely he will be sentenced to hang for his crimes,” said Grier.

  “I am not a judge. I do not get to decide who should live and who should die. I am a doctor, and if someone may be saved, I must save him.”

  “Even if it is someone who held power over my life?” said Suarez.

  “Even if it is someone you yourself shot?” said Grier.

  “Even then,” I said.

  “There are unresolved questions about this case,” Holmes chimed in, “and Mortimer can supply the answers. For that reason alone, Watson should minister to him.”

  So it was decided. Grier carried Mortimer down to the jetty and onto the steamboat. Soon Ramón had built up steam and we were heading away from that accursed spot, downriver, while above us the storm’s fury was abating yet further and a pale, watery sun had begun to shine through the clouds.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  MAKING A CLEAN BREAST OF THINGS

  I had made Dr Mortimer as comfortable as possible. I had bound up the bullet wound, and now he was propped up in a sitting position in a curtained-off sleeping berth at the aft end of the steamboat’s cabin. While his torso remained erect, blood would fill his lung less quickly.

  His face was corpse white, aside from the crimson-flecked lips. Every time he coughed, pink spittle sprayed.

  He had agreed to talk to Holmes. I was against the idea, arguing that he should rest and conserve his energy, but Mortimer was sanguine.

  “I am as well versed in medicine as you, Watson,” said he. “I know what sort of wound I have and what the prognosis is. I am never going to reach hospital. I am going to drown in my own blood within a matter of hours. Why not make a clean breast of things while I still can?”

  So the two men conversed while I looked on.

  It was Mortimer, not Holmes, who asked the first question.

  “When…?” He heaved a wet, sucking breath and tried again. “When did you know?”

  “That you and Mrs Stapleton were co-conspirators?” said Holmes. “You may congratulate yourself, Mortimer, on the fact that you both had me hoodwinked right up until Harry’s kidnap. Only then did I realise that Beryl Stapleton had been behind it all – the moth, the murder of Lady Audrey, the framing of Laura Lyons. I knew, too, that she had a male accomplice, thanks to the second set of footprints beside the hedge at Baskerville Hall. I let everyone think that I believed this colleague to be Antonio.”

  “But by the time Mrs Stapleton came back to England, Antonio was dead,” I pointed out.

  “We know that now, Watson, but it is of no consequence. It cannot have been Antonio at the hedge for one simple reason.”

  “Namely?”

  “It was Mortimer.”

  “How could you be so sure?” said Mortimer.

  “Your dog,” said Holmes simply.

  “Galen?”

  “Harry was playing with Galen when all at once the dog became aware of the presence of someone behind the hedge.”

  “That was intentional. The plan was that Galen would come over, Harry would inevitably follow, and then we could grab the boy.”

  “Of course it was intentional,” said Holmes. “In fact you summoned Galen to you, didn’t you? Mrs Barrymore spoke of a sound which she took to be a twig snapping underfoot. Her exact words were: ‘Crick-crack, it went. Like that’. I myself had heard a similar sound beforehand, when you and I, Mortimer, met at Crookback Samuel. It was the double cluck of the tongue which you use to bring Galen to heel. One might easily mistake it for the snapping of a twig.”

  “Dear me. Yes.” Mortimer coughed again, rackingly. The fit lasted a good twenty seconds. By the end, his lips were heavily bedewed with blood, which I wiped away with a handkerchief. “I thought that if I did it softly enough, Mrs Barrymore and Harry would not notice, while of course Galen, with his sharp ears, would.”

  “And if Mrs Barrymore went to investigate, as she did, Mrs Stapleton had a venomous centipede ready to put her out of action.”

  “Yes. Horrid thing, that centipede. Beryl purchased it from a dealer in exotic animals, a Mr Sherman of Pinchin Lane in Lambeth.”

  “He is known to us,” said Holmes.

  “You may have noticed that arthropods in general loomed large in her plans. A moth, a centipede…”

  “And that spider with which she threatened Harry and which ultimately proved her undoing. I presume she had developed an affinity towards such creatures owing to her husband’s interest in entomology. In that respect, they were a useful means of misdirection, intended to make us think that Jack Stapleton might still be alive.”

  “They were a kind of tribute to him, too. For all that he ill-used her, Beryl still loved Stapleton, in her way.”

  “And you loved her.”

  “I did,” Mortimer said.

  “Yet it is not love alone that drove you to do what you did,” said Holmes.

  “You know my true motivation?”

  “I have a fair idea. But first, let us turn our attention to how the two of you met. Mrs Stapleton told us it was by chance.”

  �
�She may have thought so, but it was not. I spied her one morning in Coombe Tracey, outside an estate agents. This was very soon after she came back to Dartmoor, just last January. She had changed. The years had not been kind to her. Yet who could forget those soulful dark eyes, those long lashes, that proud face? I will admit to being somewhat taken with her back in ’eighty-nine, when she was passing herself off as Stapleton’s sister. I even set my cap at her then, only for my approaches to be gently but firmly rebuffed. Now she was once more in my neighbourhood. I contrived to bump into her, as it were. We fell to talking. It turned out that she was looking for a place to live, somewhere off the beaten track. I was by then the tenant of Merripit House. I suggested she move in with me. She agreed. She made it plain that the arrangement would be a formal one only. I was not to get ‘ideas’. She also said she would be spending most of her time indoors. If she went out at all, it would be at night. This, she told me, was so that nobody would know we were cohabiting, and thus any suspicion of impropriety could be avoided.”

  Mortimer paused, gathering his strength.

  “I was content with that,” he said. “I hoped proximity would lead to warmth being kindled between us. It did, to a certain extent. Beryl kept to herself, I went about my daily business, but gradually an intimacy flourished, as it almost inevitably will when a man and a woman are at close quarters for any period of time. I had been unable to establish why she had returned to Dartmoor. I had a hunch about it, but it wasn’t until one evening in spring that the truth came out. She was in a dark, melancholy mood that day, and confessed all. What had happened in Costa Rica. Her various family tragedies. The loathing she now felt for Sir Henry and for you two gentlemen. It was Sir Henry whom she wished to suffer most of all. She would hurt him, she said. She would let him know the pain she had known.”

  “And you agreed to be her ally,” said Holmes.

  “Let us say that her needs and mine converged. Besides, by then I was wholly infatuated with her. Even if I had not had a vested interest in her scheme, I would still have gone along with it.”

  “A vested interest?” I remarked. “Is this the ‘true motivation’ to which you referred a moment ago? So you had another reason for acting as accomplice to Beryl Stapleton besides merely wishing to curry favour with her.”

  “We shall come to that shortly, Watson,” said Holmes. He fixed his attention back on Mortimer. “Your role, originally, was to help cover up Mrs Stapleton’s crimes. You started this by volunteering to prepare Lady Audrey Baskerville’s death certificate. Any sign that Lady Audrey had been subdued before her blood was drained – bruising around the nose and mouth, say, resulting from the application of a chloroform-soaked cloth – you could conveniently omit from your report. You also had access to a potential scapegoat in the shape of Mrs Laura Lyons. You were her physician. You were an habitual visitor to her lodgings. You even gave the impression to me that you were more than just her doctor; that you were an ardent admirer of hers.”

  “You yourself offered the suggestion, Mr Holmes. I merely went along with it. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I suppose my thinking was that you were better off believing my interest in her was amorous. It would excuse my somewhat unprofessional overzealousness towards her.”

  “Whereas, in truth, you needed frequent access to her because you and Mrs Stapleton knew that at some point you might well require a hapless third party to pin blame for your crimes on. I presume you had a key to the front door of the boarding house and also to the door to Mrs Lyons’s rooms. You’d borrowed her set of keys one day, while she was in a laudanum-induced stupor, and had copies made. This enabled Mrs Stapleton to enter the house at night undetected, drug Mrs Lyons and kill her.”

  “You are right.”

  “With hindsight, Mortimer,” I said, “your constant eagerness to become involved in the case does seem rather telling.”

  “Agreed,” said Holmes. “At every turn, there you were, playing the role of concerned citizen, the troubled friend, the solicitous godfather.”

  Mortimer essayed a wry smile. “Why would you not think it was merely your old ally Dr Mortimer, acting out of concern for Sir Henry, as he had the last time?”

  “Indeed I did at first,” said Holmes. “And no doubt I was supposed to continue thinking that when you showed yourself so keen to accompany us on our expedition to Costa Rica. Naturally you would be anxious about Harry, your godson. By then, however, I was already certain that you and Mrs Stapleton were in cahoots.”

  “So why did you agree I should come with you? Why did you not simply denounce me then and there?”

  “I felt it was better to have you by my side, where I could keep an eye on you. If all else failed, you could have been persuaded to give up Mrs Stapleton’s whereabouts in Costa Rica, which you must have known . What I did not foresee – and this is a source of great regret to me – was that you would make an attempt on Grier’s life and try to make Sir Henry seem culpable. This was to deflect attention away from yourself, was it not?”

  “Sir Henry was a loose cannon. It was just about conceivable that he might have attacked Grier in some kind of inebriated fit of madness. And you, then, would be so preoccupied with that matter, you would be distracted, your focus diverted. You would think Sir Henry so deranged that he might be prepared to do anything, go to any extreme, even to the point of staging the kidnapping of his own son. Such was my logic, at any rate. It was not a well-thought-through plan, but it was the best I could manage in the circumstances.”

  “I was not fooled,” Holmes said. “However, I still needed you compliant and acquiescent, so I played along with the charade. I did ensure that you were occupied for the rest of the voyage, charging you to look after Sir Henry along with Watson, so that you would have little opportunity to attempt another similar trick.”

  “I presume Watson was in on it.”

  “Oh no, he was none the wiser. I have a tendency to keep Watson in the dark when it comes to my little ruses. It is safer that way. Honest fellow that he is, he is bad at keeping secrets.”

  “I am well accustomed to being your unsuspecting dupe,” I said with a resigned sigh.

  “Then, as we began the journey up the Rio Banano, you grew ever more desperate,” said Holmes to Mortimer. “You sabotaged Suarez’s launch twice, and finally, when that proved an ineffective deterrent, unmoored it.”

  “Again, though, you did not point the finger at me,” said Mortimer.

  “As long as we were making progress, there was no call for it. You may have inconvenienced us somewhat, but in the end we still got to where we wanted to be. I would rather you had not taken Suarez hostage at the Garcia mansion. That did somewhat complicate matters. Nevertheless, all was resolved.”

  “In hindsight, I would rather I had not taken him hostage either. It is the reason I am in this position now, with death’s cold breath on my neck. I simply wanted to help Beryl in any way I could.”

  “And now we come to the heart of it,” said Holmes, “why you joined forces with Mrs Stapleton in executing her plan of revenge. It is connected with who you really are.”

  “Who he really is?” I said, frowning. “You mean there isn’t anyone called James Mortimer? He is a fraud?”

  “No, Watson. The man you see before you is indeed a country medical officer by the name of James Mortimer. It just happens that he shares near-consanguinity with the greatest villain you or I have ever known.”

  Holmes gestured towards the occupant of the sleeping berth.

  “You are looking, old friend,” he said, “at the stepbrother of Professor James Moriarty.”

  Chapter Forty

  DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM

  I stared at Dr Mortimer.

  “How?” I said. “It is surely not possible. Absurd. Professor Moriarty’s stepbrother?”

  Mortimer gave a nod. The effort this demanded of him was enormous. It was plain, even to the inexpert eye, that he did not have long left. The life was visibly ebbing out of him
.

  “It is true,” he said.

  “But your connection to him was never mentioned when we first knew you.”

  “The subject never came up. Why would it? Five years ago, few people outside academic circles had ever heard of Professor Moriarty. As far as anyone was aware, he was nothing other than a scientist and philosopher who had suffered a fall from grace. He was not yet renowned as the ‘Napoleon of crime’, as you have dubbed him, Holmes. He was not the notorious creature we all now know him to have been, the shadowy, unseen presence at the heart of the London criminal underworld, with a network of agents all across the country doing his bidding. Back then, even I had not the faintest idea of the truth about him. To me, he was always just James, my stepbrother.”

  “Moriarty’s mother, I take it, remarried after his father died,” said Holmes.

  “That is correct. James was six years old when his father passed away. His mother then met my father, Stephen Mortimer, a widower whose first wife had died in childbirth, delivering me. They were wed and were a happy couple. The coincidence of each having a son named James was forever a source of amusement to them. James and I grew up together and were close, despite the disparity in our ages. We scarcely regarded ourselves as stepbrothers. We called ourselves ‘the Brothers James’ and were quite inseparable. Even when we were at separate schools, we wrote to each other constantly. James was a prodigy and always seemed destined for great things. He excelled in exams, whereas I was of average ability, scholastically speaking. His teachers often spoke of him in whispers, as though his extraordinary mental gifts merited hushed reverence. It was no surprise that he went into academia, nor that he should write his groundbreaking treatise on the binomial theorem at the tender age of twenty-one.”