The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

by Graeme Davis

  The two girls appeared to be very comfortably off. Mary was always smartly dressed; and the baby girl, whom she had placed in Mrs. Williams’s charge, had plenty of good and expensive clothes, whilst her keep, 5s. a week, was paid with unfailing regularity. What seemed certain, however, was that they did not get on well together, that Susan violently objected to Mary’s association with Mr. Lydgate, and that recently she had spoken to the vicar asking him to try to persuade her sister to go away from Ninescore altogether, so as to break entirely with the past. The Reverend Octavius Ludlow, Vicar of Ninescore, seems thereupon to have had a little talk with Mary on the subject, suggesting that she should accept a good situation in London.

  “But,” continued the reverend gentleman, “I didn’t make much impression on her. All she replied to me was that she certainly need never go into service, as she had a good income of her own, and could obtain £5,000‡ or more quite easily at any time if she chose.”

  “Did you mention Mr. Lydgate’s name to her at all?” asked the coroner.

  “Yes, I did,” said the vicar, after a slight hesitation.

  “Well, what was her attitude then?”

  “I am afraid she laughed,” replied the Reverend Octavius, primly, “and said very picturesquely, if somewhat ungrammatically, that ‘some folks didn’t know what they was talkin’ about.’”

  All very indefinite, you see. Nothing to get hold of, no motive suggested—beyond a very vague suspicion, perhaps, of blackmail—to account for a brutal crime. I must not, however, forget to tell you the two other facts which came to light in the course of this extraordinary inquest. Though, at the time, these facts seemed of wonderful moment for the elucidation of the mystery, they only helped ultimately to plunge the whole case into darkness still more impenetrable than before.

  I am alluding, firstly, to the deposition of James Franklin, a carter in the employ of one of the local farmers. This man stated that about half-past six on that same night, January 23rd, he was walking along Ninescore Lane leading his horse and cart, as the night was indeed pitch dark. Just as he came somewhere near Elm Cottages he heard a man’s voice saying, in a kind of hoarse whisper:

  “Open the door, can’t you? It’s as dark as blazes!”

  Then a pause, after which the same voice added:

  “Mary, where the dickens are you?” Whereupon a girl’s voice replied: “All right, I’m coming.”

  James Franklin heard nothing more after that, nor did he see anyone in the gloom.

  With the stolidity peculiar to the Kentish peasantry, he thought no more of this until the day when he heard that Mary Nicholls had been murdered; then he voluntarily came forward and told his story to the police. Now, when he was closely questioned, he was quite unable to say whether these voices proceeded from that side of the lane where stand Elm Cottages, or from the other side, which is edged by the low brick wall.

  Finally, Inspector Meisures, who really showed an extraordinary sense of what was dramatic, here produced a document which he had reserved for the last. This was a piece of paper which he had found in the red leather purse already mentioned, and which at first had not been thought very important, as the writing was identified by several people as that of the deceased, and consisted merely of a series of dates and hours scribbled in pencil on a scrap of notepaper. But suddenly these dates had assumed a weird and terrible significance: two of them, at least—December 26th and January 1st followed by “10 A.M.”—were days on which Mr. Lydgate came over to Ninescore and took Mary for drives. One or two witnesses swore to this positively. Both dates had been local meets of the harriers, § to which other folk from the village had gone, and Mary had openly said afterwards how much she had enjoyed these.

  The other dates (there were six altogether) were more or less vague. One Mrs. Hooker remembered as being coincident with a day Mary Nicholls had spent away from home; but the last date, scribbled in the same handwriting, was January 23rd, and below it the hour—6 P.M.

  The coroner now adjourned the inquest. An explanation from Mr. Lionel Lydgate had become imperative.

  3

  Public excitement had by now reached a very high pitch; it was no longer a case of mere local interest. The country inns all round the immediate neighbourhood were packed with visitors from London, artists, journalists, dramatists, and actor-managers, whilst the hotels and fly-proprietors of Canterbury were doing a roaring trade.

  Certain facts and one vivid picture stood out clearly before the thoughtful mind in the midst of a chaos of conflicting and irrelevant evidence: the picture was that of the two women tramping in the wet and pitch dark night towards Canterbury. Beyond that everything was a blur.

  When did Mary Nicholls come back to Ninescore, and why?

  To keep an appointment made with Lionel Lydgate, it was openly whispered; but that appointment—if the rough notes were interpreted rightly—was for the very day on which she and her sister went away from home. A man’s voice called to her at half-past six certainly, and she replied to it. Franklin, the carter, heard her; but half an hour afterwards Mrs. Hooker heard her voice when she left home with her sister, and she visited Mrs. Williams after that.

  The only theory compatible with all this was, of course, that Mary merely accompanied Susan part of the way to Canterbury, then went back to meet her lover, who enticed her into the deserted grounds of Ash Court, and there murdered her.

  The motive was not far to seek. Mr. Lionel Lydgate, about to marry, wished to silence for ever a voice that threatened to be unpleasantly persistent in its demands for money and in its threats of scandal.

  But there was one great argument against that theory—the disappearance of Susan Nicholls. She had been extensively advertised for. The murder of her sister was published broadcast in every newspaper in the United Kingdom—she could not be ignorant of it. And, above all, she hated Mr. Lydgate. Why did she not come and add the weight of her testimony against him if, indeed, he was guilty?

  And if Mr. Lydgate was innocent, then where was the criminal? And why had Susan Nicholls disappeared?

  Why? why? why?

  Well, the next day would show. Mr. Lionel Lydgate had been cited by the police to give evidence at the adjourned inquest.

  Good-looking, very athletic, and obviously frightfully upset and nervous, he entered the little court-room, accompanied by his solicitor, just before the coroner and jury took their seats.

  He looked keenly at Lady Molly as he sat down, and from the expression of his face I guessed that he was much puzzled to know who she was.

  He was the first witness called. Manfully and clearly he gave a concise account of his association with the deceased.

  “She was pretty and amusing,” he said. “I liked to take her out when I was in the neighbourhood; it was no trouble to me. There was no harm in her, whatever the village gossips might say. I know she had been in trouble, as they say, but that had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t for me to be hard on a girl, and I fancy that she has been very badly treated by some scoundrel.”

  Here he was hard pressed by the coroner, who wished him to explain what he meant. But Mr. Lydgate turned obstinate, and to every leading question he replied stolidly and very emphatically:

  “I don’t know who it was. It had nothing to do with me, but I was sorry for the girl because of everyone turning against her, including her sister, and I tried to give her a little pleasure when I could.”

  That was all right. Very sympathetically told. The public quite liked this pleasing specimen of English cricket, golf and football-loving manhood. Subsequently Mr. Lydgate admitted meeting Mary on December 26th and January 1st, but he swore most emphatically that that was the last he ever saw of her.

  “But the 23rd of January,” here insinuated the coroner; “you made an appointment with the deceased then?”

  “Certainly not,” he replied.

  “But you met her on that day?”

  “Most emphatically no,” he replied, quietly. “I went down
to Edbrooke Castle, my brother’s place in Lincolnshire, on the 20th of last month, and only got back to town about three days ago.”

  “You swear to that, Mr. Lydgate?” asked the coroner.

  “I do, indeed, and there are a score of witnesses to bear me out. The family, the house-party, the servants.”

  He tried to dominate his own excitement. I suppose, poor man, he had only just realized that certain horrible suspicions had been resting upon him. His solicitor pacified him, and presently he sat down, whilst I must say that everyone there present was relieved at the thought that the handsome young athlete was not a murderer, after all. To look at him it certainly seemed preposterous.

  But then, of course, there was the deadlock, and as there were no more witnesses to be heard, no new facts to elucidate, the jury returned the usual verdict against some person or persons unknown; and we, the keenly interested spectators, were left to face the problem—Who murdered Mary Nicholls, and where was her sister, Susan?

  4

  After the verdict we found our way back to our lodgings. Lady Molly tramped along silently, with that deep furrow between her brows which I knew meant that she was deep in thought.

  “Now we’ll have some tea,” I said, with a sigh of relief, as soon as we entered the cottage door.

  “No, you won’t,” replied my lady, dryly. “I am going to write out a telegram, and we’ll go straight on to Canterbury and send it from there.”

  “To Canterbury!” I gasped. “Two hours’ walk at least, for I don’t suppose we can get a trap, and it is past three o’clock. Why not send your telegram from Ninescore?”

  “Mary, you are stupid,” was all the reply I got. She wrote out two telegrams—one of which was at least three dozen words long—and, once more calling to me to come along, we set out for Canterbury.

  I was tea-less, cross, and puzzled. Lady Molly was alert, cheerful, and irritatingly active.

  We reached the first telegraph office a little before five. My lady sent the telegram without condescending to tell me anything of its destination or contents; then she took me to the Castle Hotel and graciously offered me tea.

  “May I be allowed to inquire whether you propose tramping back to Ninescore to-night?” I asked, with a slight touch of sarcasm, as I really felt put out.

  “No, Mary,” she replied, quietly munching a bit of Sally Lunn;¶ “I have engaged a couple of rooms at this hotel and wired the chief that any message will find us here to-morrow morning.”

  After that there was nothing for it but quietude, patience, and finally supper and bed.

  The next morning my lady walked into my room before I had finished dressing. She had a newspaper in her hand, and threw it down on the bed as she said, calmly:—

  “It was in the evening paper all right last night; I think we shall be in time.”

  No use asking her what “it” meant. It was easier to pick up the paper, which I did. It was a late edition of one of the leading London evening shockers, and at once the front page, with its startling headline, attracted my attention:—

  THE NINESCORE MYSTERY

  MARY NICHOLLS’S BABY DYING

  Then, below that, a short paragraph:—

  “We regret to learn that the little baby daughter of the unfortunate girl who was murdered recently at Ash Court, Ninescore, Kent, under such terrible and mysterious circumstances, is very seriously ill at the cottage of Mrs. Williams, in whose charge she is. The local doctor who visited her to-day declares that she cannot last more than a few hours. At the time of going to press the nature of the child’s complaint was not known to our special representative at Ninescore.”

  “What does this mean?” I gasped.

  But before she could reply there was a knock at the door.

  “A telegram for Miss Granard,” said the voice of the hall porter.

  “Quick, Mary,” said Lady Molly eagerly. “I told the chief and also Meisures to wire here and to you.”

  The telegram turned out to have come from Ninescore, and was signed “Meisures.” Lady Molly read it out aloud:—

  “Mary Nicholls arrived here this morning. Detained her at station. Come at once.”

  “Mary Nicholls! I don’t understand,” was all I could contrive to say.

  But she only replied:

  “I knew it! I knew it! Oh, Mary, what a wonderful thing is human nature, and how I thank Heaven that gave me a knowledge of it!”

  She made me get dressed all in a hurry, and then we swallowed some breakfast hastily whilst a fly was being got for us. I had perforce to satisfy my curiosity from my own inner consciousness. Lady Molly was too absorbed to take any notice of me. Evidently the chief knew what she had done and approved of it; the telegram from Meisures pointed to that.

  My lady had suddenly become a personality. Dressed very quietly, and in a smart close-fitting hat, she looked years older than her age, owing also to the seriousness of her mien.

  The fly took us to Ninescore fairly quickly. At the little police station we found Meisures awaiting us. He had Elliott and Pegram from the Yard with him. They had obviously got their orders, for all three of them were mighty deferential.

  “The woman is Mary Nicholls right enough,” said Meisures, as Lady Molly brushed quickly past him, “the woman who was supposed to have been murdered. It’s that silly bogus paragraph about the infant brought her out of her hiding-place. I wonder how it got in,” he added, blandly; “the child is well enough.”

  “I wonder,” said Lady Molly, whilst a smile—the first I had seen that morning—lit up her pretty face.

  “I suppose the other sister will turn up, too, presently,” rejoined Elliott. “Pretty lot of trouble we shall have now. If Mary Nicholls is alive and kickin’, who was murdered at Ash Court, say I?”

  “I wonder,” said Lady Molly, with the same charming smile.

  Then she went in to see Mary Nicholls.

  The Reverend Octavius Ludlow was sitting beside the girl, who seemed in great distress, for she was crying bitterly.

  Lady Molly asked Elliott and the others to remain in the passage whilst she herself went into the room, I following behind her.

  When the door was shut she went up to Mary Nicholls, and assuming a hard and severe manner, she said:—

  “Well, you have at last made up your mind, have you, Nicholls? I suppose you know that we have applied for a warrant for your arrest?”

  The woman gave a shriek which unmistakably was one of fear.

  “My arrest?” she gasped. “What for?”

  “The murder of your sister Susan.”

  “‘Twasn’t me!” she said, quickly.

  “Then Susan is dead?” retorted Lady Molly, quietly.

  Mary saw that she had betrayed herself. She gave Lady Molly a look of agonized horror, then turned as white as a sheet and would have fallen had not the Reverend Octavius Ludlow gently led her to a chair.

  “It wasn’t me,” she repeated, with a heartbroken sob.

  “That will be for you to prove,” said Lady Molly dryly. “The child cannot now, of course, remain with Mrs. Williams; she will be removed to the workhouse, and—”

  “No, that she shan’t be,” said the mother excitedly. “She shan’t be, I tell you. The workhouse, indeed,” she added, in a paroxysm of hysterical tears, “and her father a lord!”

  The reverend gentleman and I gasped in astonishment; but Lady Molly had worked up to this climax so ingeniously that it was obvious she had guessed it all along, and had merely led Mary Nicholls on in order to get this admission from her.

  How well she had known human nature in pitting the child against the sweetheart! Mary Nicholls was ready enough to hide herself, to part from her child even for a while, in order to save the man she had once loved from the consequences of his crime; but when she heard that her child was dying she no longer could bear to leave it among strangers, and when Lady Molly taunted her with the workhouse she exclaimed, in her maternal pride:

  “The workhouse!
And her father a lord!”

  Driven into a corner, she confessed the whole truth.

  Lord Edbrooke, then Mr. Lydgate, was the father of her child. Knowing this, her sister Susan had for over a year now, systematically blackmailed the unfortunate man—not altogether, it seems, without Mary’s connivance. In January last she got him to come down to Ninescore under the distinct promise that Mary would meet him and hand over to him the letters she had received from him, as well as the ring he had given her, in exchange for the sum of £5,000.

  The meeting-place was arranged, but at the last moment Mary was afraid to go in the dark. Susan, nothing daunted, but anxious about her own reputation in case she should be seen talking to a man so late at night, put on Mary’s dress, took the ring and the letters, also her sister’s purse, and went to meet Lord Edbrooke.

  What happened at that interview no one will ever know. It ended with the murder of the blackmailer. I suppose the fact that Susan had, in a measure, begun by impersonating her sister, gave the murderer the first thought of confusing the identity of his victim by the horrible device of burying the body in the slimy mud. Anyway, he almost did succeed in hoodwinking the police, and would have done so entirely but for Lady Molly’s strange intuition in the matter.

  After his crime he ran instinctively to Mary’s cottage. He had to make a clean breast of it to her, as, without her help, he was a doomed man.

  So he persuaded her to go away from home and to leave no clue or trace of herself or her sister in Ninescore. With the help of money which he would give her she could begin life anew somewhere else, and no doubt he deluded the unfortunate girl with promises that her child would be restored to her very soon.

  Thus he enticed Mary Nicholls away, who would have been the great and all-important witness against him the moment his crime was discovered. A girl of Mary’s type and class instinctively obeys the man she has once loved, the man who is the father of her child. She consented to disappear and to allow all the world to believe that she had been murdered by some unknown miscreant.