“Although, while the fact he insisted that he be invited along to the auction makes a link to Robinson a little more likely, it does not explain why he should be involved in the killing of Salah. You are not suggesting that he also had some role in the assault on the dead man ten years ago?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Inspector!” Holmes snapped. “Salah would hardly have had dinner with Hopkirk if that was the case, and would certainly have mentioned it during their altercation. No,” he continued, more thoughtfully, “I think that Hopkirk became involved with the murder purely by chance. I am sure he was exactly where he and Julieanne Schell said he was while the murder was being committed: in the room in the east wing of the house with his lover. But I strongly suspect that when he went to dispose of his cigarette out of the window, he happened to see Robinson bringing Salah’s corpse round. Perhaps he even saw Reilly hiding in the snow, but I cannot be sure of that. Whatever, he raced downstairs to discover what had happened and ended up helping Robinson hide the body in the cellar. He is a clever man, and I have no doubt that he smashed Salah’s watch at the same time, to make absolutely certain that, if need be, he could – all too reluctantly, it seems – use his affair with Mrs Schell as an alibi.”
Fisher scribbled a last note and closed his book. “That may very well all prove to be true,” he said, “but you have not explained what Hopkirk and Robinson were plotting together. Even if they knew each other, and even if Hopkirk helped Robinson cover up Salah’s murder, why was Hopkirk so keen to come to the manor house? How did Robinson entice him here in the first place? Because it could have had nothing to do with the presence of Alim Salah.”
Holmes nodded, in recognition of a valid question. “I have my suspicions, Inspector, but no more than that. Perhaps Hopkirk and Robinson will provide explanations, given enough encouragement.”
He said no more, but instead filled and lit his pipe, and spent the rest of the journey smoking and looking out of the carriage window at the snowy countryside.
Chapter Twenty
Back to the Manor
We arrived in the village little more than half an hour after leaving Stainforth. Fisher was keen to go straight to the manor, but Holmes insisted we stop at the post office and, since we were already doing so, the inspector decided that he might as well take Robinson into custody at once. We waited for Holmes to complete his business, then crossed the road to The Silent Man.
The door was locked and knocking brought no response. Fortunately, Holmes located a spare key on Robinson’s keyring and quickly unlocked the door, then held it open for us to enter.
As soon as we crossed the threshold, a terrible sight appeared before us, reflected in the same mirror in which Salah had seen the man who had attacked him a decade before, and so set all these events in motion.
Robinson hung by the neck above the same spot at which I had always seen him, at the end of the bar, facing the fireplace. As we walked towards him, a gust of air entering from the open door behind us caught his body and twisted it a little, so that his face swung in our direction. His dead eyes stared across at us until I stepped on the base of a bar stool and reached up to close them.
Of Judge Pennington there was no sign. I called on Holmes to hold the dead man’s legs as I sawed at the rope with my penknife and, as I cut through and the body sagged into his hands, I heard voices behind me raised in further alarm.
“In here, Doctor!” called Inspector Fisher. “Quickly!”
The anxiety in his voice was very different from the irritation and anger he had almost exclusively displayed when roused in the past. It concerned me enough that I left Holmes to grapple Robinson’s corpse to the floor, and hurried through the door into the back rooms of the pub.
A short corridor separated the public from the private quarters of the house, at the end of which was a beaded curtain of the type used by gypsy fortune tellers. Beyond was a large kitchen, neatly kept but freezing cold. In the corner, a terrier with one leg wrapped in bandages looked up at me and whined pitifully. It was to the table in the centre of the room that my eyes were drawn, however.
Fisher stood at one side of it, with Halliday on the other, and both men were looking down at the pale-faced, unmoving figure of Judge Pennington. His jacket had been removed and lay on the floor at Fisher’s feet, exposing a crumpled white shirt, which someone had opened to the waist. A large circle of dark red blood had soaked through the material of the shirt, staining the breast and right arm.
“He was on the floor here when we came in,” Fisher explained quickly. “He’s been stabbed in the right side of his chest and struck a blow to the back of his head. The head wound’s not too bad, it’s barely broken the skin, but the chest wound…” He shook his head. “You can hear it yourself, Doctor…”
I came closer and bent down towards the unconscious man. Even as I did so, I could clearly hear the dreadful wet sucking sound which betokens a punctured lung. “The knife has pierced his lung,” I said, “and done a great deal of damage, from the sound of it.”
I had no medical equipment with me, but there was a pot of petroleum jelly by the sink which I used to partially close the wound, then bound it tight with a clean shirt Halliday found drying on the back of a chair.
“That may hold him until he gets to the hospital,” I said, “so long as the damage is not too extreme. But time is of the essence, Inspector.”
Fisher shouted to Holmes and between us we lifted Pennington and laid him carefully in the police carriage outside. Halliday stayed in the back, supporting the injured man and preventing him from moving, while Fisher gave instruction to the driver.
That done, we watched the carriage set off for the hospital, then Fisher grabbed Holmes by the arm and twisted him round so that the two men were toe to toe.
“How did this happen, Holmes?” he snarled. “You assured me that the man was securely tied. How did he break free? At least he had the good sense to top himself after he attacked Pennington. He must have known he wouldn’t escape the hangman’s noose twice, and preferred to make his own.”
He would have said more, I think, had Holmes not spoken first.
“I think not, Inspector. Even had he been able to break free of his bonds, overpower a watchful Pennington and wound him as we saw, even had he been able to do all that in his weakened state, he surely did not pause before he took his own life to clean and put away the knife he had used. Yet I have seen no bloodied knife here, or in the kitchen.”
Holmes was correct. Though we searched everywhere, there was no sign of a knife, bloodied or otherwise.
Fisher was the last to quit the search, emerging from the kitchen drying his hands on an old towel. “There’s no such knife here, I’d swear to that,” he said. “Which means the killer is still on the loose.” He threw the towel on the bar. “You realise this brings into question your claim that Robinson killed Salah, Holmes.”
Holmes, however, was barely listening. He strode quickly to the door of the pub and pulled it open. Though I could not make out exactly what he was doing from where I stood, it appeared as though he said something, then stepped outside and grabbed at someone in the street. A moment later, he was back, dragging Simeon Forward with him.
“Get your hands off me!” Forward protested as Holmes pulled him towards us. “I’ll get the police on to—”
His complaint was instantly bitten off as he was heaved round the corner of the dogleg and saw Fisher standing over the body of Robinson, across which the inspector had just draped his jacket.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, crossing himself and swallowing heavily. “Who’s done for him?”
Fisher stepped in front of the body, blocking Forward’s view. “What makes you think anyone has done for him at all?” he asked, in the familiar tones of the policeman who believes he has spotted an inconsistency. “Why can’t he just have slipped and fallen?”
“With his hands tied?” Forward sneered. “I can see the rope marks from here.”
>
Fisher reddened and barked at the villager to sit down. He frowned at Holmes. “What did you bring this old fool inside for?”
“It is more than half an hour past opening time,” Holmes replied evenly. “Mr Forward is a regular of this hostelry and one who, if previous experience is any guide, arrives early. Therefore he has been standing outside for at least that long. Is that not correct, Mr Forward?”
The old man nodded glumly. “More’n an hour since I first come over,” he grumbled, then glanced across at Robinson’s still form and fell silent.
“And in that time did anyone leave the premises?”
“That’s why I come across in the first place. I saw the other one coming out and running off, and I reckoned landlord must have opened early. But the door were locked fast, so I went back home. Only come back when I saw you three go inside.”
“The other one? What other one?” Fisher asked. “Did you see someone leave the pub? Did you recognise him? What was his name?” His questions rattled out like bullets, just as they had when he had questioned Captain Hopkirk days earlier, but this time the intention was not to unnerve or disorient but simply to extract the information as swiftly as possible.
Forward leaned back, however, and observed the inspector through narrowed eyes. “There’s more going on here than just him,” he said, pointing at Robinson. “What’s happened, though, that’s what I’d like to know.”
At this, Fisher’s hand closed in a fist and I thought he would strike the old man, but he controlled himself with a visible effort. “A man has been stabbed and may die, Mr Forward,” he said, his voice flat. “If we are to catch the villain who did it, we need to know who he is. Now, I repeat, did you recognise the man you saw leaving these premises and, if you did, who was it?”
Forward sucked air in through his teeth, considering Fisher’s words. “Stabbed, you say? Well, I don’t know about that, but it weren’t a man I saw at all, anyway. It were a woman, a pretty young thing. Red haired. Not from around here. She come out of the pub like the old Lord’s ghost were on her heels, and run up the path to the manor house.”
“Julieanne Schell!” I gasped.
“But what has Robinson to do with her?” Fisher asked. “Has the threat of divorce driven her mad?”
He was plainly talking to himself. Distractedly, he dragged his jacket from the corpse at his side, pulled it on and ran to the door.
“No.”
Holmes’s voice was without emotion or volume but it stopped Fisher in his tracks. He paused in the doorway and looked back at us.
“This is not Mrs Schell’s doing,” Holmes went on. He picked up Robinson’s left arm. “Mr Forward is correct. Observe the marks on Robinson’s wrist. They are extensive. The skin has been completely abraded at points and there has been a good deal of bleeding. We left him unconscious and he would have remained so for some time after Judge Pennington arrived unless violently provoked. And here,” he walked over to the spot at which Robinson had hung, “there is nothing upon which he might have stood before hanging himself.”
“But we know he didn’t hang himself, Holmes,” I pointed out, unsure what Holmes was driving at. I spied Fisher out of the corner slowly walking back towards us.
“We do,” he said, looking across at Holmes. “But I believe Mr Holmes is suggesting that he was hanged by someone else, while he was still bound. Someone dragged Robinson over there with his hands still tied, and winched him up in the air. The deep marks on his wrist were made in his frantic struggles to escape that fate, and the ropes on his wrists only cut after he was dead. And Mrs Schell couldn’t have hoisted him. She wouldn’t have the strength.”
“No, she would not,” Holmes agreed. “What was it she said, Watson? That she would do anything to survive? And how will she survive now that her husband has deserted her? To whom must she necessarily now turn for support?”
“Captain Hopkirk.”
“Yes, indeed. Captain Hopkirk.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sheaf of telegrams he had collected from the post office. “Lestrade reports that Hopkirk was drummed out of the army for theft from regimental funds, not for defending the honour of a lady, innocent or otherwise. Furthermore, his batman’s name was William Robinson and Hopkirk gave evidence for the defence at his trial.”
Seeing the surprised look on Fisher’s face, he explained. “I telegrammed Lestrade and asked him to check on Hopkirk’s military career. He quickly identified him and was able to turn up rather a lot of other information in a surprisingly short time – one of the strengths of routine police work, I readily admit. He was good enough to send it down by telegram.”
Fisher was itching to be after Mrs Schell and Captain Hopkirk, but he was too much the policeman not to ensure he had every scrap of information possible. “What else did Inspector Lestrade say?” he asked, already halfway back to the door.
“There is too little time to go into detail, but I believe that the various facts Lestrade uncovered, once he knew where to look, suggest strongly that it was Hopkirk who helped Robinson escape from prison before the hangman could despatch him.”
“The rest will have to wait, Holmes,” Fisher shouted from the doorway. “For now, all I need to know is that Hopkirk murdered Robinson and tried to kill Pennington, with Julieanne Schell’s assistance. I’m going to the house to arrest the pair of them. You’re welcome to come, if you wish.”
The last few words were barely audible, for by that point he was in the street, leaving the door swinging in his wake.
I looked across at Holmes, shrugged, and hurried after the inspector. I heard Forward say that he was coming too, and the sound of two sets of boots at my heels as I shoved through the door and headed as quickly as I could to the manor house.
Chapter Twenty-One
An Audience at the Palace
We quickly caught up with Inspector Fisher, and so it was as a group of four that we arrived at Thorpe Manor.
The interior was deserted and the only sound a muffled, irregular thumping coming from upstairs, but there was no doubt that our quarry had been there recently. Lying at the foot of the stairs, his eyes staring glassily at the ceiling, was the untidy form of Constable Cairns. A long kitchen knife protruded from his chest. Beside his outstretched hand lay his truncheon. There was fresh blood on one end of it, but much, much more pooled beneath him.
He was obviously dead.
I looked across at Fisher, and at that moment nothing would have convinced me to swap places with James Hopkirk. I thought I had seen the inspector angry before, but now I realised that those fits of temper I had witnessed had been mere bluster. Now, his sallow skin barely coloured at all, but his eyes were cold and unblinking as he looked down at his murdered constable, and his hands were balled in fists so tight that each blanched completely white. He shrugged off his coat and draped it over Cairns’ body, then pointed to the area behind the stairs, where splashes of blood were visible on the wooden floor.
“He went that way,” he said and walked purposefully in that direction. We followed him through the kitchen, and from there into the gardens at the rear.
Twenty feet or so from the steps, the crumpled figure of Julieanne Schell was stretched out on the snow. We rushed over to her, fearing the worst, but as I knelt down to take her pulse, she stirred and opened her eyes.
“Dr Watson?” she said groggily, reaching up to touch the back of her head with one ivory-gloved hand. Wincing, she brought her hand back down and gazed curiously at the blood that stained the pale cotton. “I seem to have struck my head,” she said.
Her eyelids fluttered and, fearing concussion, I spoke to her loudly, telling her not to go to sleep. Fisher crouched beside me and took her hand carefully, as though she were fragile.
“Mrs Schell,” he said quietly, his voice friendly and almost tender. “We’re looking for Captain Hopkirk, my dear. I wonder, have you seen him?”
Mrs Schell’s eyes widened suddenly and she shook her head, then gasped
at the pain of the movement and instead whispered, “He did this! He promised we would be together for ever if I helped him by distracting the judge, and then he did this!” Tears welled up in her eyes and slid in parallel down each cheek. “What am I to do now?” she asked, but nobody answered.
“Where is he now, Mrs Schell?” Fisher asked again. “He should answer for doing this to you, don’t you think? Tell me where he is, and I shall make sure that he does.”
She looked up at him and smiled, murmuring, “You are a true gentleman, Inspector. He said he had a collection to make, at the palace.” She giggled. “At the palace,” she repeated, still laughing.
Fisher let her hand drop in the snow, and rose to his feet. Holmes pointed across the gardens to the distant copse of trees that surrounded the model Crystal Palace. “That way, Inspector,” he said, and the two men set off towards it, making slow progress through the thick snow in their walking shoes. I inspected the wound on the back of Mrs Schell’s head to make sure it was not serious, then told Forward to stay with her. “Do not let her sleep. Keep talking to her until we get back.” Though he grumbled to himself, Forward nodded and took my place at her side.
Holmes and Fisher were only a few yards away. As I caught up with them, they shifted position so that we walked one behind the other, somewhat increasing our pace, but even so it was twenty minutes before we were standing beneath the grove of trees, with the stone palace directly in front of us.
* * *
The ground was littered with small fragments of stone which turned underfoot, and the few patches of snow were coloured by brick dust. The cause was clear. Hopkirk was nowhere to be seen but evidence of his recent presence was unmistakable.
On the left-hand side of the building, the glass had been smashed and lay strewn about the interior in jagged shards. A chisel and a large hammer of the sort used by labourers stood with its handle upright among the uneven panes, though its primary purpose had clearly not been to smash them. Instead, as we moved cautiously inside, we could see the destruction that Hopkirk had caused to the brickwork, evidently to break into the vault inside. He had not succeeded in gaining entry, as Holmes had predicted earlier, but he had managed to create a small hole, no more than three inches in circumference at one point. I pressed my eye against the hole but it was pitch dark inside and I could make out nothing.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse Page 21