Sherlock Holmes (6 page)

“In other words, this random, anonymous bargee made his way across a number of back gardens, armed with his boathook, with the intention of entering one or other of the houses – for what purpose?”

Tomlinson quirked one corner of his mouth. “Robbery, perhaps.”

“Was anything taken from the Graingers’?”

“Not so far as we can ascertain. The family were not what you might call over-endowed with wealth, but such valuables and heirlooms as they had were still present when we inspected the place. We’re considering the possibility that the bargee was surprised in the act by one or more members of the family and killed them in a fit of panic.”

“It seems awfully coincidental,” I said, “that this bargee should find his way onto the Graingers’ property on the one night that the man of the house was absent and the back door unlocked. And, moreover, that he should take it upon himself to massacre them – a trio of defenceless females – rather than simply turn and flee.”

“Dr Watson, please do not misconstrue my words. Nahum Grainger is the perpetrator. I know it as surely as I know my own name. The man is as guilty as sin. The damnable thing about the case is that we cannot prove it. This business with the boathook and the bargee is patently a tissue of lies, designed to lead us astray and have us chasing after some anonymous itinerant who never existed. Grainger had the motive. Yet we cannot find the murder weapon, nor can we make a dent in his alibi. He will get away with murder unless we can somehow prove that he returned to his house that night.”

“Where is Grainger now? Do you have him in custody?” Holmes asked.

“Regrettably not. We had insufficient grounds on which to charge him and so were compelled to let him go. Subsequently he has gone to ground. The Judds claim not to know his whereabouts, and his employer says he hasn’t reported for work in five days. My opinion is he won’t stay hidden for long. The lure of the demon drink will draw him from his lair soon enough, and if we need to find him again, we have only to do the rounds of Oxford’s seedier pubs and there he’ll be – no doubt laughing aloud at the idiot coppers who’ve not been able to nail him. Of course, Mr Holmes,” Tomlinson added, “now that you’ve arrived, there’s a better than even chance we can finally bring the scoundrel to justice.”

“Well, it’s down to me and the Thinking Engine, inspector,” said my friend. “I’d like to hope that one or other of us can oblige.”

Jericho consisted of little red-brick artisans’ cottages arranged in terraced rows. It had been built to provide accommodation for employees of the Oxford University Press, that venerable publishing house situated on nearby Walton Street, and was mostly occupied by print workers and their families, although a number of people from other professions, like Grainger, also made their home there. Nobody was sure of the derivation of the area’s name, but since it sat just outside the old city wall it was reckoned to have been christened in emulation of the Biblical term Jericho, which denotes a remote place.

This information was vouchsafed to us by Briggs, the constable whom Inspector Tomlinson had charged with escorting us to the scene of the crime and whom he had instructed to give us every conceivable form of co-operation. It was a novelty for Holmes and me to have the police unequivocally on our side, not impeding us but rather smoothing our path. It helped that Tomlinson was such an admirer of Holmes’s work and methods, but coupled with that was his resentment of Professor Quantock’s vaunting assertion that the Thinking Engine might one day do away with the need for police detectives altogether. Tomlinson had almost as much at stake, professionally speaking, as Holmes himself did. They were fellow travellers in more than one regard.

The day was drawing down, the sun low. There was a damp chill to the air that deepened the further we ventured into Jericho’s warren of streets and the nearer we got to the canal. Oxford was palpably a degree or two colder than London. The gloaming of early evening had a dark golden hue which reminded me of twilight in the Scottish Highlands, yet the surroundings couldn’t have been more different from that countryside with its wild, desolate beauty. Everything here was perfectly urban and ordinary.

Ordinary, too, would describe the Graingers’ house, a classic two-up-two-down dwelling that was all but indistinguishable from any other in the street. That said, it bore an aura of desolation. I don’t think that was just my imagination. It seemed to project emptiness and misery from every window, from every crack in the brickwork. One might have sensed that something awful had happened there even if one hadn’t known.

Briggs let us in with the key, then left us to our own devices, confessing that he had “had enough of the wretched place” and did not wish to spend a minute longer within its four walls than he already had.

I could sympathise. The moment we crossed the threshold I became acquainted with a smell familiar to me not only from the numerous murder scenes Holmes and I had attended but from my time in Afghanistan, where it had been all too prevalent. There is a distinct difference between the odour of blood when it is spilled by accident or during the course of a medical procedure and when it is spilled through an act of malice. The latter kind, with its uniquely acrid tang, hung in the air here. Even five days after the murders, it was rank and unmistakable. Blood charged with fear.

Holmes began to explore the property with his usual questing, terrier-like intensity. He went from the cheaply furnished front parlour to the cramped back room which served as both dining area and kitchen, scrutinising a torn patch of wallpaper here, an ornament there. He tried the back door and found that it opened smoothly and quietly. Outside, in the untended garden, he scouted around, tramping through the overgrown grass and peering across the waist-high dividing walls. He concluded, without much surprise, that out here there was a dearth of useful evidence to be found. A recent heavy rainfall and the tread of countless policemen’s boots had erased it all. Then he headed back indoors and up the uncarpeted stairs. I followed.

On the narrow landing we came upon the first bloodstains, dried to a dull black patina on the floorboards. Constable Briggs had told us that the body of the elder of the two Grainger daughters, Elsie, had been discovered sprawled on the landing. She had been in her nightdress. It was supposed that she had heard a sound and emerged from her bedroom to investigate. She had been the first to die.

In the front bedroom stood an iron-headed double bed. The covers carried a bloodstain too, this one more extensive than the one on the landing. Mrs Grainger had not awoken, it appeared, the depth of her slumber attested to by the half-empty bottle of Dalby’s Carminative by the bedside. The murderer had slain her in her sleep.

Finally we entered the rear bedroom, which the two girls had shared. This presented such a pitiable sight that it very near unmanned me, for there were two narrow beds side by side and on each a stuffed toy: a cloth doll and a ragged-eared bear. Beside the bear was yet another dismal bloodstain. Spatters of blood also besmirched the adjacent wall.

I could not linger in that room more than a handful of seconds. I excused myself and returned to the landing. Holmes reappeared not long after, and I could see that even his iron nerves had been affected. No matter the strength of one’s constitution, the brutal killing of innocent children cannot be but shocking. One would not be human if one found it otherwise.

“Ghastly,” Holmes said, his grey eyes reflecting the horror that must have been in mine too. “This is a squalid matter, Watson, however you look at it. Squalid and appalling. I shall be glad to see the culprit face the hangman’s noose.”

“I would willingly pull the lever if asked,” I said. “Anyone who can do such a thing as this does not deserve to live.”

With a nod, Holmes turned his attention to the ceiling behind me. He pushed past me wordlessly, and examined a trapdoor which had escaped my notice. Going on tiptoe, Holmes was just able to reach it and thrust it open. Then, stepping onto the banister that cordoned off the landing from the stairs, he hoisted himself through the aperture. His legs scissored like a swimmer’s as he pulled himself up out of sight.

He was gone for quite some span of time, ten minutes at least. I heard the rasp of a match being struck and saw the beam of his pocket lantern flash around. Finally he rejoined me, descending in much the same manner as he had ascended. He brushed dust from his hands and the knees of his trousers.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“Not what I expected, and that in itself is telling.”

“Pray elucidate.”

“Terraced houses like these, built for the labouring classes, tend not to be the most structurally sophisticated. That is to say, corners are cut, amenities skimped on. For instance, there is quite commonly no partition between the attics, just a single continuous space beneath the roofs stretching from one end of the terrace to the other.”

“My goodness. You mean that a person could crawl from the attic of any one house to the attic of another?”

“It would not be too taxing a proposition. You would need to squeeze around the chimney masonry of each house, which stands directly beneath the roof apex, but there is sufficient room. A determined man could manage it.”

“A determined man such as Nahum Grainger.”

“Yes. As long as Grainger took care to put his weight only on the wooden battens that surmount the ceilings so that he didn’t break through the plaster, he could have used this route to travel from the Judds’ to here and back without anyone realising.”

“Not even the Judds’ dog?”

“The dog, Inspector Tomlinson said, cannot tolerate anyone leaving the house or coming in without making a fuss about it. It defends what it regards as its domain. However, it would not have counted the attic trapdoor as an exit. The attic, to the dog, would still seem part of the house, its territory.”

“Then you have solved the case, Holmes,” I declared. “There was never any bargee. Grainger is the killer.”

“Not so fast, old friend.” Holmes pointed upward. “There are no gaps flanking next door’s chimney breast. They have been bricked up.”

“In such a way that they fully prevent access?”

“Fully. What is intriguing is that there is no similar obstruction that way.” He gestured towards the next-door house on the other side. “The terrace runs north-south, and there are no partitions between here and its northern end, at least as far as I can see. Could the attics between this house and the southern end of the terrace all be properly partitioned, and the ones northward from here not? It seems unlikely. Let us go outside now. I don’t need to see any more, and we have spent long enough in this miserable place.”

I felt no small relief as we stepped out onto the street. The late afternoon air, though dank, smelled comparatively sweet, free from the taint of violent death.

“Constable Briggs?”

The policeman straightened to attention. “Mr Holmes?”

“Show us the Judds’ house, would you?”

“Right this way.”

It took no more than thirty paces in a southward direction to reach the home of Nahum Grainger’s friend and alibi provider. Scarcely had we paused by the front door than the most tremendous barking began inside. The door shook in its frame as a beast of some considerable bulk threw itself against it. The barking continued, little muted by the thin barrier that separated us from its source.

I took an involuntary step backward. Since my experiences at Baskerville Hall, I have harboured no great fondness for the canine species.

A female voice within the house tried in vain to hush the dog. “Hercules, that’s enough. I said that’s enough. Hercules!” She soon gave up the attempt, and the wan, weary tone she used suggested that she hadn’t been holding out much hope of success anyway.

Hercules the dog quietened down only after we had moved on, and at that, grudgingly.

“That was Mrs Judd we heard,” said Briggs. “You don’t want to speak to the lady? I could coax her outside, so that we need not have to deal with the dog.”

“I see no call for it,” said Holmes. “From what Inspector Tomlinson has told us of the Judds’ marital relationship, I can’t imagine Mrs Judd would tell us anything her husband wouldn’t want her to. He himself isn’t home, either, else she would have left chastising the dog to him. I would like to ask you, though, about the murder weapon. You and your colleagues are quite certain it was a boathook?”

“I know only what I’ve been told, Mr Holmes. The inspector himself observed that the wounds were not simple perforations. There was a peculiar bruising next to the point of entry. The coroner confirmed it during his post mortem examination. A boathook, as I’m sure you’re aware, has a split head, with the hook part protruding at right angles to the spike and curving downward. Bit like a medieval pike, you know? Sometimes the spike can be blunt or knobbed, but bargees favour the sharp-tipped ones because they give a better grip when pushing off tunnel walls or the bank. The back of the hook left a mark on the victims’ skin, showing amongst other things that the stabbing was done with some force.”

“And no boathook has been discovered in the immediate vicinity?”

“We performed a thorough search, working on the assumption that the murderer might have discarded it as he left the scene, but we turned up nothing. If you ask me, it’s at the bottom of the canal.”

“Don’t boathooks float?”

“They do thanks to the wooden shaft, but the head, if detached, will sink like any other lump of metal. If I were going to dispose of the evidence, that’s what I’d do, take the head off and toss it into the canal. Then all you’re left with is the shaft, which looks like any old pole, something no one would glance at twice, wherever you got rid of it.”

“Of course, it may be that the bargee and his boathook are already halfway to Manchester by now.”

“If there ever was a bargee,” said Briggs. “Grainger did it. I know I oughtn’t to say that. Innocent until proven guilty and so on. But I know he’s our man, and somehow he’s covering it up in such a way that we can’t nab him, much as we’d like to. Cunning as the devil, he is.”