The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (36 page)

‘And then he was unmasked in England?’ I asked.

It was Holmes who now took up the tale, looking at me and shaking his head.

‘Not quite, I think. It is evident that he and his sister took to the stage. They were ignored at first by those like Gurney and Myers whose interests in psychic phenomena were sincere. When Gurney came to Brighton for a month’s convalescence, the performances of Professor Chamberlain were drawing crowds of holidaymakers for the fun of the thing. Gurney, however, at once saw the man as a charlatan and all he stood for as a mockery of true interest in unexplained psychic phenomena. We know that there was a bitter and probably libelous exchange of letters sent to the local newspapers. Chamberlain dared not sue, of course. He would have been proved a liar, and news of that must sooner or later have reached Philadelphia. Rumours of his quarrel with Gurney would inevitably reach occult circles in London. From there, they might easily cross the Atlantic in letters to like-minded spiritualists in Philadelphia and elsewhere. As a result of his cheap and demeaning vaudeville acts in Brighton, Chamberlain stood to lose everything that Mrs. Lesieur had promised him.’

Holmes paused, reached for the whisky decanter, and refilled Inspector Gregson’s glass.

‘Matters had gone almost too far for Chamberlain to retrieve his position, unless. …’

‘Unless, Mr. Holmes?’ Gregson asked.

‘Unless Edmund Gurney were to recant and confess his belief in these frauds. Chamberlain might say that Gurney had recanted. He might announce it all over Philadelphia, but of course Gurney would deny it and reveal him as a liar as well as a charlatan. It was necessary for Chamberlain that Gurney should recant and then be in no position to deny it.’

‘Because he had taken calomel?’ I asked skeptically.

‘No, my dear Watson. Trickery is Chamberlain’s trade and he was more diabolical in planning Gurney’s death than in contriving any of his stage effects. Whether he learnt this art of murder from the Comte Bertrand’s account of Napoleon or whether that merely refreshed his memory, I cannot tell you. Certain it is that he had that nobleman’s account of the St. Helena poisoning with him for the past six weeks—borrowed from the St. James’s Library. The dates are stamped in the two volumes.’

‘I have lost you, Mr. Holmes,’ said Gregson, ‘with the Comte Bertrand and Napoleon.’

‘Very simply, inspector, if the Comte Bertrand is to be believed, the Emperor Napoleon was murdered on St. Helena. Probably it was done at a distance by the command of his enemies in Paris. He was given arsenic in his medication over a period of time. It was not enough to kill him, indeed it may have stimulated his system a little. Yet arsenic in such doses very often produces both restlessness, as in Gurney’s case, and constipation. One night the Emperor Napoleon was prescribed a remedy for these afflictions. Ten grains of calomel to be taken with a glass of wine and a biscuit. After a night of severe sickness, he was dead the next day. None of these facts is in dispute.’

‘But he did not die from calomel, surely?’ I persisted.

‘No, Watson, indeed he did not. The secret that our modern judges at murder trials have so far prevented the press from reporting is this. The effects of arsenic, given in moderate doses over a period of time, are of questionable benefit but not fatal. Let us suppose, at the end of a few weeks, the victim is then given a single but sufficient dose of calomel—ten grains would be ample. The chemical reaction with arsenic in the stomach will create mercury cyanide, which kills quickly. Not only does it kill quickly, it also removes the traces of arsenic and is almost impossible to detect on post-mortem examination by methods at present known to us. Hence the continuing debate as to the proximate cause of the Emperor Napoleon’s death.’

Gregson and I looked at him in silence. Holmes drove his argument home.

‘This devil Chamberlain worked it to a nicety. From London he sent the complimentary box of Propter’s Nicodemus Pills in capsule form. He had, of course, bought a box of the pills and substituted gelatine capsules, nineteen filled with a moderate dose of arsenic and the last with a heavy dose of calomel. They were to be taken in order, so that the calomel would be swallowed last. To take capsules in a prescribed order is so common nowadays that the victim would think nothing of it. Chamberlain had also ordered a printed slip from a jobbing printer, who would not think twice about an apparently innocent prescription of this sort. The empty capsules themselves were readily available from any pharmacy, as was the calomel. Even the arsenic will present little difficulty until the new Poisons Bill becomes law. No alarm would be raised until tonight, when Gurney took the last capsule with its calomel—or rather until tomorrow morning when his body was found. By then Chamberlain and his sister would be far away. Moreover, the overwhelming probability is that death in his case was likely to be attributed to an overdose of chloroform. Such a pernicious habit was the perfect cover.’

So that was it! The last piece of the puzzle which Holmes’s conduct had presented to me in the past few days had now fallen into place.

When we were alone together, my friend added an explanation which was not for Inspector Gregson’s ears.

‘As for the letter of apparent reconciliation from Chamberlain to Gurney,’ he remarked, ‘it required only a girl dressed as a chambermaid to enter the room while Gurney slept or was elsewhere. Whether she or Chamberlain himself carried out the exchange of papers, it was simple to take the key from the bureau drawer—the first place that any thief would look. It was then only necessary to replace whatever document was in that envelope with the letter that we found the other night. It required only the commonest black dress and white apron, purloined from an unlocked servants’ cupboard on the landing, for Elvira Chamberlain to impersonate a hotel servant if she was challenged. In the dim light of an internal corridor, at midnight, the night porter saw a chambermaid, or rather a girl in a chambermaid’s livery. The only girl who served these rooms was Effie Deans. Therefore, the fellow easily persuaded himself that he must have seen what Mr. Gurney might call a phantasm of the living—in the shape of Miss Deans.’

‘They appear to have found entering such rooms and opening bureau drawers rather too easy,’ I said with a trace of skepticism.

Holmes laughed.

‘We may never know how, or when, one of them purloined the key to Gurney’s room and made a wax impression. I swear that Chamberlain the burglar reconnoitered his victim’s rooms at the start, saw the Nicodemus Pills and the way to be rid of his antagonist. Perhaps Elvira was able to do everything else with a passkey. However, I may tell you that with my burglar’s kit at hand, I could open any of these old bedroom locks in a twinkling. At some point, I have no doubt, the sister replaced some ephemeral piece of correspondence by the effusive thanks that is in Gurney’s correspondence box now and that Chamberlain marked with whatever date of receipt he pleased. In consequence, the world, including Mrs. Marguerite Lesieur, was intended to hear that the two men had made up their quarrel and that Chamberlain’s reputation was restored. Had the villain’s scheme worked, his benefactress would also have heard that the psychic investigator Edmund Gurney had, tragically, been found dead in a Brighton hotel bedroom from misuse of chloroform.’

‘Does all this make Madame Elvira a murderess?’ I asked.

‘I suspect she is no more than her brother’s dupe in the matter of the letter and that she knew nothing of the poison. That will be for a court to decide when the pair of them are tried for attempted murder. I have no doubt that if Chamberlain also entered Gurney’s room at some point, which on the face of it seems almost certain, his principal intention was not to exchange the two letters but to inspect that counterfeit tin of Propter’s Nicodemus Pills and to satisfy himself that Gurney was taking his prescribed doses of the capsules.’

Not all of this was revealed at the Central Criminal Court a few months later. Chamberlain was proved to have been previously convicted of a number of petty offences of dishonesty before the forgery of two letters of credit from the Midland Counties Bank, which had sent him to Pentonville prison for six months a few years earlier. The jury in the present case found him guilty of attempted murder by ‘arsenical poisoning,’ but all mention of calomel was omitted. He went to penal servitude for seven years. Madame Elvira was not proved to have known of his intention and was found guilty of no more than breaking and entering the hotel room. She went to Millbank prison for six months.

As for our client, Effie Deans was taken back by the manager of the Royal Albion Hotel on the positive insistence of Sherlock Holmes. To be sure, the manager had reason to be grateful to us. However, the matter did not rest there. The owners of the establishment undertook that upon her seventeenth birthday, not that many months away, Miss Deans was to be promoted to the position of assistant housekeeper. This, in itself, was the first rung of a ladder to higher things than she or her parents had dreamt of.

Needless to say, we never saw the remote delights of Ilfracombe or Tenby with their respectable families building sand castles or riding the local donkeys. We were, as Sherlock Holmes was soon reminding me, far too busy for that and much too occupied to visit the Wiveliscombe cousins.

Yet for the man I believed we had saved, the drama did not end happily after all. A year or so later I picked up the
Times
one morning after breakfast, as wheels and harness rattled up and down the length of Baker Street. I was turning the pages of the newspaper when my eye was caught by a brief obituary column.

We regret to announce the sudden death, by misadventure, of Mr. Edmund Gurney, Joint Secretary of the Psychical Society, author of
The Power of Sound
and other works. Mr. Gurney, who was born about 1847, was the son of the Rev. Hampden Gurney, late Rector of Marylebone. He received his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow after taking his degree as Fourth Classic in 1871. Mr. Gurney was the author of
Phantasms of the Living
and had published two volumes of essays. He suffered from obstinate sleeplessness and painful neuralgia, and succumbed to an overdose of chloroform, incautiously taken last Friday evening when alone at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton, whither he had gone for a night on business.

I passed the paper without comment to Sherlock Holmes. He was sitting in his black velvet jacket while very precisely dividing the leaves of a cigar butt in the butter dish with the aid of a small surgical knife, in pursuit of a case of robbery with violence. He made no immediate reply as he read the newspaper notice.

Presently I said, ‘My warnings about chloroform, such as they were, seem to have done him little good.’

He put the newspaper down, picked up the scalpel, and resumed his inspection of the cigar butt. Without looking up, he said, ‘Had it not been that Chamberlain is still serving seven years in Pentonville, I should have been haunted by the spectre of the professor crossing the threshold of that hotel room and dripping chloroform remorselessly onto the face of the sleeping victim until respiration ceased. I hold no very high opinion of coroners and their juries, as you know. You might murder half of London and they would bring in a verdict of natural causes. In Gurney’s case, I assure you, they would have called it misadventure. Not suicide, you observe, and certainly not murder. The poor fellow’s weakness was the centre of all that passed. Without that, Chamberlain would have got nowhere.’

‘I fear my advice to him was ill judged, for all the good it did,’ I said quietly.

Holmes frowned at the work upon which he was engaged.

‘Then make amends now, my dear fellow, by warning the world against such pernicious habits. When you come to write up this little adventure of ours, which I fear will probably happen, play up the dangers of the practice and give it some such title as ‘The Mystery of the Brighton Chloroform-Eater.”’

As the reader will observe, I declined Holmes’s advice in the matter of the title.

It was not often that Holmes and I had a client whom we served twice, in quite different matters. Yet such was the case with Lord Holder. The events of this second inquiry followed at some little distance the Newgate Adventure, as my friend described it, early in 1902. More than once they hinted at the great criminal enterprise, frustrated by Sherlock Holmes on that occasion, which had involved the great but deserted prison as a command post of the underworld.

It was on a morning not long before the coronation of Edward VII that Holmes first mentioned Lord Holder. I confess I did not recognize the name of our intended visitor and said so. Holmes folded his newspaper and said,

‘You would know him better as Mr. Alexander Holder, of Holder & Stevenson, bankers of Threadneedle Street. He is now both a peer of the realm and an alderman of the City of London.’

At once my mind went back to the Case of the Beryl Coronet, one of our earlier investigations. Mr. Holder had been approached by an illustrious client whose name was of the noblest and most exalted. As security for a short-term loan, this client deposited a coronet of thirty-nine fine beryl stones, pale green shading into yellow and blue. It was one of the most precious public possessions of the Empire.

The sequel requires few words. While the coronet was in Mr. Holder’s possession, there was a robbery—three jewels were broken from their settings and stolen. Suspicion fell on his son. Holmes proved the boy innocent, a youth of generous instincts, one of whom any father should be proud. Since then, the banker had been ennobled for his services to the nation, not least to patrician families who raised money in difficult times by pledging jewels and works of art.

When he entered our sitting room, I still recognised Lord Holder as our client in the former case. Though now about sixty, he remained a man of striking appearance. His figure was tall, portly, and imposing with a massive, strongly marked face and commanding figure. He was dressed in a somber yet rich style: black frock coat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut pearl-grey trousers.