And Then There Was No One (6 page)

For a while Holmes reflectively rubbed his fingertips against his chin. He finally said, ‘Well, Dr. Gable, it is a most interesting and
outré
story that you have told us. And though, notwithstanding my versatility, I have never before been hired as a rat-catcher, yes, I shall indeed take your case. What say you, Watson, are you game?’

Having done everything I could to make my patient as comfortable as was humanly possible for one in so touch-and-go a condition, I answered that I would be very pleased to join Holmes on this oddest of missions.

‘Then how shall we proceed?’ he asked his new client.

‘I hardly dare impose upon you further,’ said Gable hesitantly, ‘but if it would not inconvenience you to accompany me to Aylesbury this very evening on the 8.15 from King’s Cross, Jerrold will be waiting to take us on to The Gables.’

‘Capital,’ said Holmes. ‘To Aylesbury it is.’ And Mrs. Hudson was immediately instructed to prepare our bags.

The journey itself was uneventful. With Holmes immersed in a volume of Petrarch while Gable and I chatted about India, a land with whose mysteries we were both intimately
familiar, we arrived at Aylesbury just after ten o’clock. And even if the station forecourt had not been deserted, I believe I should have recognised Jerrold from Dr Gable’s description: he was indeed of robust build, his right arm still bandaged at the wrist and hanging more slackly than the other.

There was a dog-cart standing by and we at once set forth for The Gables.

Not three-quarters-of-an-hour had elapsed when, without any apparent prompting from Jerrold, the horse turned in at a pair of wrought-iron gates then imperturbably trotted up the driveway to the house. It was a starless night; but although most of The Gables’ turreted façade was obscured in the enveloping gloom, I imagined I could make out a pinprick of light, as if from a waving lantern, directly in front of us. And so proved to be the case for, to our astonishment, before we had quite reached the main entrance, a wild-eyed young woman clad in a tartan dressing-gown, her hair all dishevelled, dashed forward into our path.

‘Oh, Dr. Gable, Dr. Gable, thank God you’ve returned at last!’ cried this apparition, swinging her lantern crazily from side to side.

‘Why, Mary Jane,’ rejoined Gable, nonplussed by her greeting. ‘Calm yourself! What is the matter with you?’

‘’T’aint me, sir!’ she screeched. ‘’Tis Master James, sir!’

‘Master James?’ said Gable, and he turned ashen-grey. ‘What about Master James?’

‘Oh, he’s dead, sir! Killed, sir! Killed by the rat!’

Preceded by our guide, and by the lantern which swayed and pitched ungovernably in her trembling hand, we descended from the carriage and rushed inside the house. So hurried was our pace, and so dimly lighted the downstairs area, Holmes and I had next to no opportunity to note the style or disposition of its furnishings. For it was up two flights of a broad central staircase that Mary Jane led us, until we found ourselves in a dark top-floor corridor, at whose far end, assembled on the threshold of an open doorway, a tight little huddle of people were to be seen.

When we, in our turn, stood outside that open door, the spectacle we encountered was perhaps the most extraordinary that I have ever known, even in my long association with Sherlock Holmes.

The room itself was in the nature of an attic, stark and cell-like, higher than it was long, save where its ceiling sloped down to nearly the halfway mark of the wall furthest away from where we stood. It was very sparely equipped, its furniture consisting, for all in all, of a low, monkish cot, two cane chairs and a massive mahogany chest-of-drawers whose legs were curved and squat like those of a bull mastiff. Just above it, with perhaps a foot-and-a-half to separate them, was the room’s only window, which was small, rectangular and glassless, and crosscut by a pair of narrow iron bars.

But it was the awful sight of James Gable, a boy of some sixteen summers, which transfixed our gaze. He lay stretched
out lengthwise on the cot in the exact pose, and with the same deathly pallor, of the dead Chatterton in Wallis’s celebrated painting, except that his two hands tightly gripped his own neck and his naïve and youthful features had been warped out of shape by a grimace of ineffable and indescribable horror.

With a ghastly moan the boy’s father made as if to fling himself on the cot, but Holmes, his lean frame suddenly exploiting that unexpected reserve of physical strength that has got the better of many a Limehouse bruiser, managed to hold him back.

‘Courage, man, courage!’ he cried. ‘Something foul has taken place here, and it would be best if the lad were left undisturbed for now.’ He turned to me. ‘Watson, there is, I fear, little doubt as to the ultimate diagnosis, but examine him nevertheless. And do so, pray, without moving him. Watson? Are you unwell?’

‘I am sorry, Holmes,’ said I, and my voice quivered. ‘It’s … it’s just that it is all so uncanny … like a stage-set. Forgive me.’

While Holmes continued to hold his client back by the shoulders, I quickly stepped over to the cot. Although no doubt remained that young James Gable was gone, I was obliged to prise his hands from off his neck to learn the precise cause of his death. And there I discovered a cut so deeply incised that it had utterly severed the jugular vein, a cut, as I observed to my consternation, corrugated in form –
just as Jerrold’s was said to have been – and apparently effected by a row of huge razor-sharp teeth. Judging by the rictus on the youth’s face, I supposed that he had expired both from that cut and from the abrupt heart failure which would have been its immediate consequence.

This startling information I conveyed to Holmes as succinctly as I could, and I saw his hollow cheeks flush with horror. He ran his eyes over the assembled servants – they were still standing in the doorway, shivering with fear yet continuing to stare at the macabre
tableau
inside the attic room – and finally let them settle upon a handsome, tow-haired, barefoot young man dressed in nothing but a long white nightshirt.

‘You are Edward Gable, are you not?’ he enquired of him.

‘Yes, sir, I am,’ the youth answered rather hoarsely, no doubt in awe of Holmes’s masterful presence.

‘How old are you, Edward?’

‘Just passed eighteen, sir.’

‘Now, my boy,’ said Holmes, softening his tone, ‘you realise, don’t you, that your brother is dead?’

‘I do, sir,’ replied Edward, who, bar a faint trembling of his lower lip, allowed no expression of feeling to be visible on his face. ‘It was… it was I who found him so.’

‘Well, my name is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and later I shall have to ask you and everybody else a number of important questions. But first, I think, your father should be comforted. Will you take him downstairs and pour him some brandy?’

‘Yes, sir, I will.’

And, without a further word being spoken by either, he took his father by the arm and guided that now visibly broken man along the corridor and down the staircase.

Holmes meanwhile, facing the others, spoke to the oldest and most responsible-looking person there, a woman whose plump and kindly face was still streaked with the copious tears which she had already shed.

‘You are …?’

‘Mrs. Treadwell, sir. I am Dr. Gable’s housekeeper, if you please,’ replied this typical specimen of the housekeeping breed.

‘I do not imagine, Mrs. Treadwell,’ said Holmes, ‘that anyone has had the mind to send for the police?’

‘Why no, sir … that’s to say … if you please, sir, it all happened so sudden …’

‘Quite so. Then, Jerrold, may I suggest you take the dog-cart back to Aylesbury and alert the constabulary there.’

Tapping his cap respectfully with his bandaged hand, Jerrold left at once to carry out the request.

Holmes now closed the attic door. ‘As for you young women,’ he continued in his most authoritative manner, addressing Mary Jane and two other hysterically twittering maids, ‘I propose that you go downstairs also, that you stay close together and await the arrival of the police from Aylesbury. Mrs. Treadwell, if you will remain behind, I would like to ask you a few questions.’

Once the maids had left, Holmes turned towards that good lady.

‘Now, Mrs. Treadwell,’ said he, ‘it was Edward, I understand, who discovered his brother’s body?’

‘By rights, sir, it was him and me both.’

‘How so? Please tell me everything that occurred and omit no detail, however insignificant it may strike you.’

‘Well, sir, the facts are these. There’s been a fearful state of affairs in this house ever since Dr. Gable’s crates were shipped here and a horrid great rat –’

‘Yes, I know all about that,’ Holmes smoothly interrupted. ‘I wish you to relate only what happened here this evening.’

‘It’s just that, because of the rat and the stories that were being spread of it, young Master James, who was such a lively boy, always full of humour, had of late sunk into a kind of terror. And this very evening, when we heard its scratchings louder than ever, he swore he wouldn’t pass the night in his own bedroom – there being no lock on its door, you see – but would sleep in the attic, a room that no one ever entered or cleaned but could at least be locked from the inside. And that he did, sir, and turned the key behind him, at about half-past nine, I should say. Well, I was undressing in my own room when, no more than five or ten minutes after, I heard a scream coming from upstairs, a scream that changed me to stone, sir! I rushed out, just as you see me now, and I met Master Edward in the corridor, him only half-undressed himself. We came up here, and knocked on
this door as loud as could be, but no answer was forthcoming. We cried, “Jamie! Jamie!” fit to wake the dead in Mentmore graveyard, but there wasn’t a stirring from him.’

‘And the door was locked from inside?’

‘Oh yes, sir. We tried rattling it, but it wouldn’t budge. At last Master Edward thought that it could be brought down by force – it was old and damp, sir, quite eaten up with rot – and it took just two heaves with his strong young shoulder to break it open. And there … Oh, Mr Holmes,’ she said, now openly weeping, ‘it was the most inhuman thing I ever saw …’

‘Please bear up, Mrs. Treadwell. What happened next?’

The housekeeper endeavoured to gather her thoughts. ‘Next …? Yes, Master Edward told me to go and wake Mary Jane that she might keep a lookout for Dr. Gable who, as we knew, was due back from London. I did wake the girl, and returned here within the quarter-hour to find him still standing watch at the door.’

‘You did not examine James to make certain he was dead?’

‘Master Edward did, and hoped to revive him too. But the boy was dead, sir, with not a breath of life left in him. And his face … If I live to be a hundred …’

‘Yes, indeed, it is a terrible business. But you have been of the greatest assistance to me, Mrs. Treadwell, and I would ask you now to join the others downstairs.’

After she had taken her leave, Holmes smiled grimly. ‘Well
now, Watson, let us, you and I, turn our attention to the scene of the crime. For I believe we’ll have a clear run of an hour or more until the police arrive, and I am most anxious to explore the room before the hobnailed boots of the Aylesbury constabulary contrive to stamp out what evidence there yet may be.’

Inside the attic, Holmes undertook his investigation as coolly as if there had been nobody at all on the cot, let alone the mangled corpse of a once personable young lad whose expression of naked terror appeared to pursue me wherever I moved. The door, as Holmes ascertained, had indeed been forcibly burst open, and its key was still in the lock – on the inside. That key impressed me as being, so to speak, the key to the whole affair, for I could not conceive how either a human being or a rodent had entered and subsequently quit the room without in some fashion causing it to be disturbed. And it was then it occurred to me that, if the cot on which James was lying sat too low on the floor to conceal a man, there was certainly space enough for a rat still to be lurking …

At that moment Holmes, with a negligent disregard for his trouser knees, clambered atop the chest-of-drawers and peered out of the barred window.

‘Interesting, by Jove,’ said he, as, with remarkable agility even for him, he leapt back down on the floor.

‘What is?’ I asked, one eye warily on the cot.

‘Running underneath the wall there appears to be a
stream, which doubtless serves as a drainage conduit for the house. Watson, have you something the matter with your eye?’

‘Not at all,’ I answered impatiently; then, mutely signalling my suspicion as to what might still be cowering under the bed, I said, ‘There is, I suppose, absolutely nothing to this queer story of a rat?’

Holmes looked up at me interrogatively and managed the closest to a true smile that I had seen on his features since we had ventured into this tragic house.

‘Your conjecture is,’ he said, ‘that the Sumatran rat is even now preparing to ambush us from beneath the bed?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ I muttered, none too convincingly, I fear. ‘However, as I see it, no man could have left this room, but a small animal might have climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, crept out of the window and plunged into the stream below.’

‘Precisely!’ said Holmes in triumph. ‘A
small
animal. Logic, man, logic! Oh, I grant you a giant rat might just have slain the boy – but then, it could no more have squeezed itself under the bed nor escaped by the window than I could. And no normal rodent capable of taking flight in the way you have just conjectured could ever have inflicted those teeth marks. No, Watson, instead of searching for major monstrosities, you should confine yourself, as I do, to minor oddities – such as this,’ and he drew his forefinger along one of the floorboards and held up its tip for my inspection.

‘Why,’ I said upon examining it, ‘I see nothing there.’

‘That,’ said Holmes, ‘is the minor oddity.’

Nearly two hours elapsed before the police arrived from Aylesbury, in the person of an Inspector Cushing, who turned out to be a genial red-haired man in his middle forties with a tendency to stoutness, and who came accompanied by two uniformed constables. Just a few minutes after that, we were all discreetly conversing in the library, Holmes, Cushing and myself standing some way apart from the members of the household staff, most of whom were gathered about the pathetic figure of Dr. Gable. The poor man, he sat still and hunched in an armchair, his head lolling limply forward over his chest like that of an unstrung marionette.