A Study in Sherlock Read online

  “Tut, my dear fellow. I am merely exercising the possibilities. In truth, I have barely scratched the surface. Where were we? Oh, yes. German. Indubitably German. But from which region in particular?

  “Let us begin with young master Heinrich. What was it she called him? ‘My sweet toad,’ wasn’t it? An expression which, although not restricted to Baden, is nevertheless much more commonly to be heard there than in other parts of the country.

  “Very well, then let us for the moment hypothesize that the young widow is from Baden. How may we test that rather broad assumption?

  “Let us dwell for a moment upon her teeth. Surely you noticed, as I did when she called out to her child, that she showed a very fine, strong set of teeth, remarkable however, not for their completeness or their pleasing alignment, but rather for the fact that they are pinkish: a rare, but nonetheless documented phenomenon which arises only in those who have been accustomed to drink, from birth, the iron-rich waters of certain spas.

  “As I know from my own remarkable cure in those waters, one of those with the highest content of ferric matter is at Mergentheim. Yes, I should say we could not go far astray if we pegged the lady as a Swabian from Baden. That and her accent, of course.”

  I couldn’t restrain a laugh.

  “Altogether far-fetched,” I told him. “Your hypotheses, as you call them, leave no elbow room for reality. What if, for instance, she is mourning her father? Or her mother? Or her great-grandmother, for that matter?”

  “Then her name would not have been splashed all over the front pages of this morning’s newspapers as the wife of a murder victim.”

  “What?”

  “Tragic, but nevertheless quite true, I assure you.”

  He reached with two fingers into his vest pocket and extracted a double-columned clipping which he proceeded to unfold and flatten on his knee.

  “Shocking death in Buncombe Place,” he read aloud. “Police were called at an early hour this morning to Number Six, Buncombe Place by Mrs. Frieda Barnett, who had, moments before, found her husband, Welland Barnett, aged fifty, of the same address, dead in the drawing room in a pool of his own blood. The victim had received a number of stab wounds to the back of his neck, any one of which might have proved fatal, according to the police surgeon at the scene …

  “They oughtn’t really to put that in,” he interrupted himself. “Not until autopsy and inquest are complete. I’m quite sure that heads will roll—if it is not indelicate to express such an opinion.”

  I couldn’t find words to respond, and Montague went on with his reading.

  “The deceased was described as a man of regular habits, and had no known enemies, according to Mrs. Barnett, who is left to mourn with her only child, Heinrich, aged four years …

  “They always go for the heart, don’t they, these scandal sheets—like the bullets at a military execution. Where were we—oh, yes, her child …”

  Montague paused to look out at the little boy who had now fished his stick from the water and was giving the surface a good wet thrashing by way of repayment.

  “ … her only child, Heinrich, aged four years,” he went on. “Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard has given it as his opinion that robbery may have been a motive, inasmuch as a small silver key of peculiar design was missing from its customary place upon the victim’s waistcoat chain, according to Ellen Dimity, the Barnetts’ cook. Inspector Gregson declined to give further information until investigations are complete, although he has requested that any person or persons who might have further information bearing upon this crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Would you like to read it?”

  He offered the paper, but I shook my head.

  “No thank you. I find such things upsetting.”

  “Indeed,” he said, “as do I. Which is precisely why I made my way to Number Six, Buncombe Place, and begged my old friend Gregson to let me have a look round.”

  “Inspector Gregson? You know him?”

  Montague chuckled, a surprisingly shrill cackle that ended in a suppressed cough.

  “Old lags have friends, too,” he said. “Surprising, isn’t it, the people you meet in a park?”

  I said nothing because there was nothing to say.

  “The thing of it was,” he went on, as if I had asked him to, “the position of the wounds, which were high on the back of the neck. Welland Barnett was an exceedingly tall individual, over six feet in height—as much as six foot three or four, by my own measurement of his prostrate body. Am I upsetting you?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve not yet eaten today, and I’m afraid it’s telling.”

  “Ah, then. Presently we shall step round to the Hart and Hurdy-Gurdy for a pig’s knuckle and a pint of Burton. Then we shall be fit for whatever lies ahead.”

  I gave him a weak smile.

  “And then there was the widow,” he said, glancing at the woman in black who sat, again motionless, upon the bench, her gaze fixed firmly upon the ground.

  “How peculiar, don’t you think, that she should leave the house under circumstances in which drawn drapes and smelling salts are most often the order of the day?

  “But perhaps it was the child—perhaps she wanted to get young Heinrich as quickly as possible away from that house of death. But no, the good Gregson assured me that the child had put up quite a fuss—what you might call a scene, in fact—over being dragged into the street and involving, in the end, more of the neighbors than it ought.

  “Gregson could not detain her, of course. She had given her account of finding her husband’s body; her words had been taken down in the prescribed form; the house had been searched; the body was in the process of being removed.

  “Why, then, would she leave?”

  I shrugged.

  “Who could know?” I said. “There are as many reasons as stars in the heavens. It is pointless to guess.”

  “Guess?” Montague’s voice and his eyebrows shot up. “Where murder’s afoot the guess is disallowed. The facts must be driven home one by one like nails into the shoe of a horse. Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Do you hear them, Mr. De Voors?”

  “No,” I replied, “but then I’ve never been given over greatly to imagination.”

  “Then I shall help you,” he said. “Imagine this: imagine that on a fine day in autumn a woman leaves the house in which her husband has just been brutally murdered, and sets out with her only child, for a park that is somewhat more than a mile away.

  “Why not the park that is directly across the street from where she lives? Why not the one in the next block—or the next?

  “The child has no sailboat, but only a stick which he picked up near the gate. I saw it with my own eyes. So it is not the water which is the attraction. It is, in the second place, distance. She did not wish to be observed. She came here, as I knew she must have done. Where else may one with a child become invisible but in the city’s largest park?”

  “The second place, you say? Then what is the first?”

  “I should have thought it obvious,” Montague said. “She came here to meet someone.”

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Who?”

  “You,” said Montague, folding the clipping and returning it to his pocket. “Before you arrived, I watched the lady fiddling with the key. She fished it from her bag a half-dozen times to make sure she still had it. When you finally appeared—you were late, by the way, judging by the number of times she consulted her watch—she made a point of not looking at you. More to the point, you did not look at her. Quite astonishing, when you come to think of it: such a fine figure of a woman seldom remains unogled by a gentleman of your … ah …”

  “This is preposterous,” I said.

  “Is it?” he asked, his voice as level as a gaming table. “In spite of the evidence to the contrary?”

  “What evidence?” I could not resist asking. The fellow was trying to rack up a score against me.

  “Your height, of course,” he
said. “You would be quite capable of stabbing in the neck someone as tall as Welland Barnett—not that that means anything in itself. But then we come to your behaviour: you circled any number of times round the bench upon which the lady is sitting, but you did not approach. At first, it was because of the nanny—that one with the curly red hair who was begging to borrow her pencil to fill in one of those new-fangled crosswords that are becoming all the rage. Then it was the retired tea broker who perched beside her for a maddeningly long time as he fed the pigeons. After that, the two police constables who strolled by. No, sir, she has simply not had the opportunity to hand over the promised key, a key which quite clearly, even at this distance and with my no-longer-perfect vision, is one of those used to unlock a box at the National Safe Deposit Company in Victoria Street.

  “As to your relationship to her, it is best not to enquire, except that it ended in a pretty little plot involving a worthwhile amount of money and, if I am not mistaken, a life insurance policy. It is an old story: the Freudian practitioner; the female patient who is trapped in a loveless marriage; the sympathetic talk (‘transference,’ I believe you call it); the temptation; the fall …”

  “This is outrageous,” I said, my voice rising. The governesses were by now staring at us openly.

  “And then,” Montague said, almost as an afterthought, “there is the blood upon the instep of your right shoe. I saw it when you crossed your legs.”

  I leaped to my feet and looked round wildly. There sat Frieda, still staring at the ground as if in a trance. Had she even noticed my predicament?

  “Watson,” he said in an altogether different voice, “I believe this is where you come in. Pick up his rolled newspaper. Be careful of the knife.”

  The doctor, who had been standing all the while casually under one of the limes, came forward, and there was suddenly in his hand an ancient but no less dangerous looking military pistol. He held it shielded by his black bag in such a way that it could be seen only by Montague and myself.

  “Keep quite still,” Montague said. “My medical friend is somewhat out of practice in the small-arms department. The thing has a hair trigger, and we don’t want any nasty accidents, do we?”

  “Ah, constables!” he said, as the strolling policemen made their appearance. “Right on the second, as usual. We’ve been expecting you. There’s someone here your superiors will doubtless be pleased to see. Who knows? There might even be a promotion in it.”

  “You devil,” I spat. “You’re no more Samuel Montague than the man in the moon. You’re Sherlock Holmes!”

  As the constables, one on each side, seized me by the arms, he stood up, put one heel to the instep of his opposite foot, and made a little bow.

  “By the way,” he told them, “the lady on the second bench is Mrs. Barnett. Inspector Gregson will be forever in your debt if you should mention to him the curious silver key which you will undoubtedly find in her handbag.

  “Come, Watson,” he said to the doctor, “the incomparable Evelyn Laye is at the Gaiety and we have just time enough to fortify ourselves with roast beef at Simpson’s. The thespian art is one which does not always receive sufficiently hearty applause.”

  As they dragged me away, I couldn’t resist taunting him over my shoulder.

  “What will you do, Holmes, when you’ve brought to book the last criminal in London? You’ll have no more excuse to dress up in your fancy disguises!”

  I’ll admit my fury had got rather the better of me. As we passed in front of her, Frieda—poor, dear, weak Frieda, with the now-that-you-mention-it pinkish teeth—didn’t give me even so much as an upward glance.

  “Elementary,” I heard him call out as we passed beneath the limes and walked towards the iron gates. “Elementary, my dear fellow. I have my eye on a cottage in St. Mary Mead.”

  Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries have been translated into thirty-one languages. Bradley has retreated to a Mediterranean island, taking with him only his wife, his books, and two cat assistants. As a boy, he was introduced to the Holmes tales by a favorite uncle, who faithfully reread them every fifth year. He is also the coauthor (with the late Dr. William A. S. Sarjeant) of the controversial Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, in which the authors prove that Sherlock Holmes was a woman. Bradley may have changed his view since.

  The last official record of Holmes’s life is the story “His Last Bow,” published in 1917 in the collection of the same name. It tells of Holmes’s war service as an undercover agent and is written by an unknown author (although it appeared under the byline of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

  AS TO “AN EXACT KNOWLEDGE OF LONDON”

  Tony Broadbent

  It was a crisp morning and quite bracing even for that time of year, the fog of yesterday thankfully consigned as if to distant memory, and certainly cold enough for my breath to steam in front of me and linger for a moment before it disappeared into the ether. I remember staring up at Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s magnificent iron-and-glass canopies, a sequence of all-encompassing spans that dwarfed everything beneath. And maybe it was the hour or my heightened sense of place, but I couldn’t help but notice that the diffused light from above reduced shadow and perspective to such a degree that people below were rendered as tiny indistinct figures in a landscape. It struck me then that the many diverse aspects that presented themselves to my gaze resembled nothing so much as a series of huge painted backcloths in some newly got-in production at Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But, as the immortal Bard once wrote, all the world’s a stage.

  Indeed, the noise and bustle of the great terminus sounded for all the world like an orchestra tuning up and awaiting its conductor; all at once cacophonous, discordant, and deafening and yet even to my untutored ears, oddly comforting; a sonic harbinger of a symphony newly composed to celebrate a mighty capital city in constant reinvention of itself.

  Maintaining British-army time, I stood there, fully five minutes early, both feet firmly planted, as wave after wave of blank-faced commuters streamed past me toward the exits and the entrances to the Underground. I took several deep breaths so as to help gather myself for the day ahead. I may have also rubbed my arms with my gloved hands and even stamped my feet, though I’m sure that was more from a simple desire for additional warmth than any undue display of impatience. But then as I’ve so often observed when in London, the very act of waiting, be it for taxi, Tube train, omnibus, or policeman, is a necessary part of one’s visit, and to fight against the inevitability of lost minutes or indeed lost hours would be as if to try and hold back the very times and tides, which is to say quite impossible. Not that that has ever stopped people from trying. I do remember I pulled back the cuff of my leather glove to glance at my wristwatch. “Times and tides, indeed,” I muttered.

  “Er … you wanting a cab, are you, sir?”

  “Well, yes, I have been waiting … I mean, yes, I do want a cab, thank you.”

  “Very good, sir, where is it you’d like to go; that all your luggage, is it?”

  “Ah … Baker Street, please, number 221B. And, yes, it is.”

  “Need help with it, sir? Only, I couldn’t help but notice the walking stick.”

  “Well, perhaps a hand with the suiter; it is a little heavy. I’ll keep my shoulder bag with me.”

  “Right, you are, sir. Nice Brady bag, that. Got one myself and very handy they are, too. Going hunting, shooting, and fishing, are you, sir?”

  “Yes, I rather suppose I am,” I said good-humouredly.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous bang, in all probability nothing more than a luggage trolley or parcels van hitting a barrier, but it startled me no end and I may have uttered a cry of alarm, I can’t recall. For it was then I took a single step forward and stumbled over my ballistic nylon garment bag, lost my balance and went sprawling, dropping my walking stick and sending myself and everything flying. “Blasted leg!” I cursed aloud. “It’ll be the death of me yet.”

  “Here, you okay down there, are you, sir
?” the taxi driver called out.

  It’s as much the embarrassment as the shock you have to contend with when you suffer an unexpected fall, and it took me a moment or two to gather my wits. “Thank you, I’m fine,” I shouted back, quickly waving away a passerby who’d stopped to enquire whether I needed help. “Just me being clumsy,” I offered by way of explanation. “Perhaps, Mr. Taxi Driver, if you’d be so kind as to store my suiter up front, with you?” I called out to the cabby.

  “Righto,” he shouted, and I heard him exit the cab and saw him fully for the first time as he came round to where I was still lying on the cold concrete. I slowly got to my feet, holding on to the side of the taxi for balance, and bent down and after a little scrambling around managed to retrieve my tweed cap, my walking stick, and my shoulder bag. As I brushed myself down, the cabby shook his head in sympathy. “You took a right tumble, but as long as you’re alright?” I nodded and waved a hand as if to wipe away the whole incident. “Very good, sir. I’ll get this garment bag of yours stowed up front. Need help getting in? Only, I’ve got a ramp I can pull out if you can’t manage the step?”

  I shook my head, thanked him profusely for his concern, opened the passenger door, and climbed gingerly into the back of the taxi. The cabby nodded and returned to the driver’s seat. I have to admit I was a little shaken by the incident and I took no small comfort in hearing the door-locks engage as the cab drove off, up towards Praed Street. And I settled back in my seat, let out an audible sigh of relief, and then reached for my mobile telephone.

  “Stop! Please stop! Please pull over,” I called out. “I think I dropped my phone, back there, when I fell over. If I can possibly get out and take a look?”

  “Blimey. Righto. Hold on.”

  The taxi skidded to a halt and the moment I heard the doors unlock I grabbed the door handle and was out and onto the pavement and off like the proverbial rabbit. “Thank you,” I called over my shoulder. But I hadn’t gone ten feet when I stopped dead and spun slowly around. “No, no, wait a minute. Fool me.” I returned to the taxi and bent down to be at eye-level with the driver. He lowered the window. “Sorry to be such a bother, but could you open up so I can take a quick look inside my garment bag before I go scuttling off like an idiot? As now I come to think of it, I’m sure I put the damn thing in one of the pockets.”