The New Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (13 page)

Holmes said suavely, ‘May I venture another deduction? Stubbings, have you had cause to consult an oculist of late?’

His client started. ‘I have arranged an appointment for next week, as it happens. But you and I only met today. How can you be familiar with my diary?’

‘It was evident from when you met myself, and later Watson, that you suffer from short sight. You scrutinised each of us in a manner bordering upon the impertinent. You screwed up your eyes again when we pored over the will together. I surmised that, as a proud man, you might have disdained spectacles even though the need for ocular assistance was pressing.’

Stubbings frowned. ‘If we are to talk about impertinence…’

Holmes raised his right hand to silence his client. ‘Please, Mr Stubbings, I have no wish to cause offence. My point is simply this. You have met Pawson twice before, and yet you do not recognise him. The disguise may in part account for that, I suppose, but your poor eyesight is undoubtedly a factor in the equation as well.’

‘I have never met this man before in my life!’ Stubbings retorted, wagging his forefinger in the direction of Pawson, as the hapless servant exchanged nervous glances with his wife.

‘On the contrary,’ my friend said. ‘May I introduce you to Mr Peter Mueller?’

***

‘In truth, it was a simple enough scheme,’ Holmes said with an ill-concealed yawn, following our return to Baker Street. The assistance of Scotland Yard had been summoned following his dramatic revelation, and John and Effie Pawson had been hauled away for questioning about their extraordinary fraud. ‘If Mueller was an impostor, the will must be suspect. The obvious question was:
cui bono?
’

‘The Amateur Mendicant Society benefited most from the changing of the will,’ I insisted.

‘I care little for the Society or its members, Watson. Their magnanimity is barely skin deep. Yet it struck me as inconceivable that they would stoop to crime to inflate their already considerable funds by a sum that is, to them, minuscule. If the minor gifts to the neighbour and the Kentish Town almshouse were discounted, the explanation must lie with the chattels bequeathed to John Pawson. Their value must far exceed that of one-tenth of Alicia Stubbings’ estate, to justify the elaborate charade. It was plain that Mueller was not the man he seemed. I suspected at once that someone had plotted to assume the person of a foreign lawyer and, having adopted an extravagant disguise, to act in such a way as to throw suspicion off the servants. I surmise that they intended to wait until their mistress died and then move speedily to effect the change of will. Their absence from the house at the time of Stubbings’ arrival struck me as excessively convenient. The likeliest explanation was that Effie Pawson pretended to be Alicia Stubbings and her husband disguised himself as Peter Mueller.’

‘Appalling!’ Stubbings expostulated. ‘To think that I kissed that wretched woman! And what did they do with my sister’s body?’

‘Kept it in the cellar for the arrival of young Dr Burr. I suspect the Pawsons wielded considerable influence in that household, despite what they would have us believe. No doubt they encouraged Alicia to dispense with the services of their work colleagues, so that they had the run of the place. I suppose they researched the reputations of medical men and established that Burr was a physician unlikely to ask too many searching questions.’

‘And all this merely for the love of art?’

‘By no means,’ Holmes said. ‘Pawson, as it happened, knew much more about fine paintings than your sister. When he recognised the work she had hung over the fireplace, he understood its value. Chance had placed a great prize within his grasp and he was determined not to let it slip.’

Stubbings sighed. ‘But why go to such lengths?’

‘He had to create circumstances in which the gift of the painting occasioned no comment. To achieve that end, he indulged in misdirection. The other gifts to him were bric-a-brac, and the fact that he was a legatee at all was scarcely a matter for comment when his wife had lost her inheritance, and the Amateur Mendicant Society gained at her expense. I suppose the plot seemed ingenious. Yet in the elaborations, he over-reached himself. He prompted you to call on my aid, and from that instant, he and his wife were doomed.’

‘But how were you able to identify that particular painting as the motive for the fraud?’ I cried.

‘As you know, I have art in the blood. The moment we walked into the sitting room at Dismore Street, the last element in the puzzle fell into place. That painting over the fireplace is called
Fields near Rouen.
Despite the fact that it was in a dilapidated condition, I recognised it at once.’

‘It is famous?’ Stubbings asked.

‘Some critics have called it a masterpiece. Certainly, it is untypical of his customary style, and his
penchant
for military subjects. But it has not been seen for many years. It disappeared after the artist’s death and the authorities concluded it had been lost or destroyed. Evidently Percival Stubbings picked it up on his travels, although whether he was astute enough to identify its provenance is another matter. I am happy indeed to have been the instrument of its rediscovery. It is that lucky stroke which raises this curious little affair out of the commonplace, so far as I am concerned. And I confess that it affords me an unwonted degree of personal satisfaction to see the painting itself, rather than a sketch of it in the histories of French art.’

‘Who was the artist?’ I enquired.

Sherlock Holmes smiled. ‘My grandmother’s brother. The celebrated Horace Vernet.’ 

The Case of the Impoverished Landlady

In December of the year 1908, my wife was summoned at short notice to the bedside of her ailing cousin, who lived in a tiny cottage in Padstow with her husband, himself an invalid. Soon it became apparent that her relative was unlikely to live beyond the New Year, and we agreed that my wife should remain in Cornwall over Christmas. On an impulse, I wired Sherlock Holmes and invited him to join me in London for the festive season. My old friend was disinclined to desert his Sussex home, but when he asked if I would care to spend a few days at his villa, I gave an enthusiastic assent.

‘I am reminded of our bachelor days, Watson,’ Holmes said on Christmas Eve as he stoked the fire. An excellent meal prepared by his housekeeper Mrs Langridge had been accompanied by a first rate claret and both of us were in a state of mellow contemplation. ‘How well I remember your persistent inquisition when I indulged in some modest stroke of detection, as well as your chagrin once I revealed the simple mechanics of my process of reasoning.’

I laughed and said, ‘I hope you do not consider that my accounts of your cases failed to do you justice.’

‘On the contrary, I could not have wished for more generosity in a biographer.’

‘It was almost as great a privilege to draw the attention of a wider public to your gifts as it was to share in your adventures,’ I said warmly. ‘From time to time I have reflected on our association, and it never ceases to astonish me that, for every investigation that I have chronicled, there are several more that were never written up, whether for reasons of confidentiality or otherwise.’

‘To say nothing of those in which you did not participate. In truth, I believe that some of them possessed features as intriguing as those of the little melodramas which you so faithfully recorded.’

‘Certainly I relished your accounts of the strange doings at Hurlstone and the affair of the
Gloria Scott
. Perhaps over the course of the next few days you might be good enough to enlighten me about some of your other exploits.’

‘Gladly, Watson. As you know, one is apt to recall the detail of the activities of one’s prime with rather more clarity than the content of a conversation last week. My dealings with the local tradesmen and with the good Mrs Langridge are not wholly without interest, and I am at present pondering an odd business concerning the man who supplies us with logs for the fire, but frankly one day in the wintry countryside tends to merge into another. I do not seek to re-live former glories, as you better than any man alive will understand. Plenty of interests keep my mind active, but nonetheless it pleases me on a long dark evening to recall incidents of the past which retain the power to intrigue. In that cupboard over there is an old tin box that you may find familiar, but it is no longer enough to hold every keepsake of my professional career.’

The cupboard was made from oak and stretched from floor to ceiling. I rose to my feet and gestured towards its doors. ‘May I?’

‘Of course, Watson. Feel free to mine my memories.’

This was an opportunity not to be spurned. Even now my friend’s moods were as apt to fluctuate as when he was at the height of his fame and I knew that, on another night, he might be unwilling to speak of the life he had left behind in such characteristically decisive fashion. I turned the key in the cupboard lock, to reveal deep shelves overflowing with sheaves of documents and unassorted bric-a-brac. The tin that, I knew, contained the relics of the Musgrave Ritual stood on the floor below the shelves. Next to it was a small white bird-cage. 

‘I swear that belonged to the loathsome canary-trainer!’ I exclaimed in amazement.

‘Ah yes.’ Holmes coughed. ‘I shall confess to you, my dear fellow, that I did not have the permission of its former owner when I took possession of it. But Mr Wilson is now safely buried close to Crippen, in an unmarked grave in Pentonville, and I doubt whether his heirs would care to be reminded of his dreadful career.’

Glancing at a bulky pile of papers tied by string, I spotted at once the enciphered message by which my friend had lured Abe Slaney to his doom. A note bearing the seal of his Holiness the Pope thanked Holmes for his discretion with regard to the matter of the late Cardinal Tosca. From a shelf above, I plucked a silver pocket-watch and a pewter flask.

‘I do not remember these,’ I remarked. ‘What stories do they have to tell?’

‘As it happens, they came into my possession before we were ever acquainted. The flask was once owned by Herbert Duckworth, the Preston wife-poisoner, while the watch was presented to me by Campbell Leith as a mark of his gratitude after I solved a mystery, apparently impossible of explanation, which he feared might cost him his reason.’

‘Campbell Leith,’ I said pensively. ‘Am I right in thinking that I have heard the name before?’

‘I will have mentioned him to you at the time of his sadly premature death. He was amongst the victims of a railway accident in Glasgow the year before I left London. A tragedy, for he was a decent fellow. Had he not found himself a wife, we might have shared lodgings in Baker Street and your path and mine might never have crossed. For a time we both occupied rooms in Montague Street and he was an agreeable companion who never ceased to flatter me with his astonishment at even the simplest of deductions.’

‘And the mystery?’

‘It concerned a room that vanished and an impoverished landlady who appeared nevertheless to be in possession of untold riches.’

‘My dear Holmes! You must tell me the whole story.’

‘I hesitate to do so,’ my friend said, a familiar gleam of irony in his eyes. ‘The explanation you will find prosaic enough and I would not wish to disappoint you.’

I had the grace to blush. ‘You need have no fear of that. I should value nothing so highly as the opportunity to hear you describe a case that pre-dates our friendship.’

Holmes sighed. ‘Perhaps I was too furiously busy at the time to appreciate how much I enjoyed those early struggles to acquire skills as well as experience. Living a stone’s throw from the British Museum, I was at liberty to explore its riches whenever I had a moment to spare from my researches into chemistry and other subjects the mastery of which seemed to me, in my enthusiastic youth, to be an essential pre-requisite for a career in detection.’

He poured us each another glass of claret and continued. ‘If memory does not play false, I was engrossed in the study of the agony column in
The Times
when Campbell Leith called upon me. At first I ignored the rapping on my door, aware that my landlady, a timid soul, knew better than to disturb my work. When the knocking persisted, I rose from my desk in a state of considerable irritation and my displeasure did not dissolve even when I saw that my visitor possessed an honest face and a transparently convivial manner. I fear I may have replied curtly when he introduced himself and said that he had come to live in the room below mine. Nothing daunted, he invited me to join him for a drink. When I refused he was evidently aghast at encountering a neighbour so averse to companionship.

‘I deduce that your visitor was a Scot by birth or ancestry,’ I announced.

‘We’ll make a detective of you yet!’ Holmes said sardonically. ‘Even without knowing his name, no-one could mistake Campbell Leith’ origins upon taking one look at his fiery red hair, far less after he had uttered a single sentence. He had spent a couple of years in England, as I later learned, but his heart remained north of the border, where his sweetheart, a young lady called Millicent, continued to reside.’ 

‘I take it that he was not deterred by your rebuff.’

‘Not in the least. Young Leith had the persistent qualities of his race and after breakfast the following day, as I was leaving the house for the Museum, he made it his business to intercept me in the hall passageway.’

‘“I hear from the estimable Mrs Willcock that you are a detective!” he cried, clapping a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I resisted the temptation to astound him by telling him that I gathered that he worked for a safe deposit company. Instead, I merely replied that he had heard correctly and sought to escape his clutches. Just as you have encountered countless individuals who have assured you that they would be equally as capable of reporting my inquiries if they only had the time to write, so I have in my time been accosted regularly by those who are fascinated to learn of my profession. All too often they claim matchless powers of ratiocination or urge me to help them fathom some trivial riddle that would not tax an intelligent ten-year-old. I had already seen enough of Leith to deduce not only his line of business but also that he had a fondness for alcohol, billiards and story-telling. In my youth, Watson, I was even more single-minded than I am today and, since I presumed that a few hours spent in his company would not advance my studies one iota, I had no wish to endure such a distraction. But our landlady was watching us from the kitchen door and in any event common courtesy meant that I could hardly brush the man aside. When he stood his ground and insisted that he had a pretty problem to pose to me, I had little choice but to consent to hearing the tale he had to tell. With a heavy heart, I agreed to meet him that evening, although I insisted that we should discuss the matter in my sitting-room, rather than visiting one of the local taverns which he frequented.’