We followed her through the hallway and into the drawing room. The lady showed us to two comfortable armchairs in which we sat. Holmes remained motionless, composing his thoughts, and I waited in anxious silence for one or the other of them to speak.
“I imagine the events of this morning have been difficult for you, Lady Sophia,” said Holmes at last.
“Finding one’s husband murdered is hardly likely to have been anything else.”
“It must have been twice the tragedy for you. A question of the past repeating itself.”
For a moment, the lady’s dark eyes flickered, as though she were startled by the extent of my friend’s knowledge of her life. “I have had the misfortune to lose both my husbands, if that is what you mean.”
“You also discovered the body of your first husband?”
“Yes, although that tragic part of my life has no bearing on my present grief. Why do you recall it to my memory in this crude fashion?”
Holmes placed his hand on his heart. “You must forgive me, Madam, but a strange circumstance has brought me to your door.”
“That being?”
Holmes deflected the question. “There is no doubt, I suppose, that Mr. Wargrave took his own life.”
“None whatsoever.”
“What would you say, Madam, if I told you that a man swears that he saw Mr. Wargrave alive and well, only this morning?”
“I would say that he is mistaken. Which man?”
“His name is Henry Collins.”
“It means nothing to me.”
“He once worked for your husband.”
“Then he did not know Theodore personally. This man Collins is in error, Mr. Holmes. I can assure you that my first husband is dead.”
Sherlock Holmes rose from his chair and paced to the window. He spent a few moments staring out into the street, and I knew from his demeanour that he was turning over in his head each fact of the matter which he had learned.
“One last question, if I may,” said he. “What reason would your husband have for taking his own life?”
Lady Sophia shook her head. “I can think of none.”
“He had no financial troubles?”
“No. He had sold his publishing company for a sizeable fortune.”
“Which you inherited on his death?”
Her eyes became fierce and her lips parted in an angry snarl as she turned back to my friend. “Do you wish to make some accusation, Mr. Holmes?”
“There is no indictment, Madam. I merely seek the truth.”
“By answering your question, I shall excuse your impertinence. In return, I must ask you to leave my house.”
Holmes’s eyes were no less aggressive. “I shall honour that agreement.”
Lady Sophia rose from her seat and glided across the room with a purposeful step. At the fireplace, she turned back to face us with an expression of controlled defiance. “I inherited my first husband’s fortune. Now, with the present tragedy which has befallen me, the Galsworthy fortune will also pass into my hands.”
Sherlock Holmes contemplated the woman, his eyes darkened by distrust and suspicion. I expected him to make some parting remark which would betray his emotions, but he said nothing. Instead, he gave a brusque bow of farewell and ushered me from the room. A few final words were said to Lestrade, and we left the house. Once we were some distance away, Holmes’s austere composure dissolved into an expression of savage outrage.
“I have had to deal with many murderers in my time, Watson, but none of them have repelled me quite as much as that woman. In her assured demeanour, I see only the wickedness of the Devil himself.”
“She is stoic, no doubt, but she has suffered a great shock.”
“Watson, is it possible that you are so naïve? Do you not see a curious coincidence at play? We have heard of the deaths of two wealthy men. In each case, the wife is the same woman and she stands to inherit a significant sum of money by each death. Mark my words, Doctor. I have no doubt that old Collins was mistaken and that Wargrave is dead. Nor have I any doubt that his wife was responsible.”
“But Galsworthy was a heavily-set man, Holmes. That woman could not have overpowered him.”
Holmes dismissed my objection with a wave of his hand. “A woman can easily stab a man in the back, Watson, and a man is less likely to be afraid of turning his back in the company of his own wife than he is in the presence of an enemy.”
“But you said yourself that Wargrave’s death was suicide,” I insisted.
“So the facts appeared to suggest, but facts are capable of manipulation. Come, Watson, we must set ourselves very seriously to investigating the death of Theodore Wargrave.”
We spent a busy afternoon making various enquiries. Holmes was seized by that keen energy which I have observed before, but it seemed intensified by his personal determination to prove Lady Sophia a murderess. Our initial investigations took us to the dark, dank corridors of the Scotland Yard archives, where Holmes was a familiar presence. The attendant constable had no difficulty in obtaining the Wargrave file, and he handed it to my companion with a keen eagerness. Holmes found a small table in the corner of the room and opened the file on his knees. I leaned over him in the dim light afforded by a single lamp on the desk beside us. After a few moments of flicking through the pages, Holmes handed me the medical examiner’s report.
“Does anything strike you as important in there, Watson?”
I scanned the contents. “Wargrave was not in the best of health. He was below average weight at the time of his death, and his teeth showed some signs of deterioration. He was a heavy drinker, too, judging by the state of his liver. Otherwise, the report confirms the facts as we know them. Death was the result of a single bullet wound to the right temple, powder blackening on the skin around the wound indicating a close-range shot.”
Holmes snorted in disappointment. “I had hoped to find some clue, Watson, some piece of previously overlooked evidence which would indicate the guilt of Wargrave’s wife.”
Frustrated, he assumed that abstracted expression which I have come to associate with the supreme manifestation of his extraordinary gifts. So intense was his expression that I dared not speak. At last, with a sudden release of suppressed energy, he sprang from his chair with an exclamation of triumph.
“Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot! We must hurry if we are not to allow a devious murderer to evade justice.”
We stopped at a telegraph office where Holmes dispatched a hastily worded telegram, whose details I could not see but whose importance was evident. We hailed a cab and Holmes gave Merchant Road as our destination. Daylight was failing as we approached the heart of Whitechapel. The maze of streets were narrow alleys of sin and decay, the air hanging heavy with the stench of poverty and deprivation. Decaying husks of human beings, in various stages of drunkenness, tottered around the filthy cobbles, and the closeness of the surrounding tenements gave the impression of the whole area closing in and swallowing us. Shadowy figures of children hung out from the open doors of the lodging houses, their hands outstretched in fraught pleas for food or shillings. It was hard to believe, amid that mire of insufficiency and desperation, that the thriving heart of opulent and wealthy London beat strongly a few scant miles behind us.
We knocked on the door of number 38, and our summons was answered by a rough-looking character with a scar down the right-hand side of his crimson face. The promise of a sovereign was enough to ensure his cooperation, and he confided that he had had no new tenants since the arrival of a certain Mr. Chappell. A second sovereign ensured our entrance and the landlord’s consent to wait for Mr. Chappell in his room. We made our way up the narrow wooden staircase, which threatened to give way beneath our feet at any moment. Suspicious eyes glared at us from cracks in the various doorways as we passed. At last we reached the door of Mr. Chappell’s room, and
Holmes gave a brief knock.
The room was deserted and reeked of damp. It was a meagre space, furnished in the most rudimentary fashion, with a small table in one corner and an old wooden chair beside it. The bed was little more than an old mattress and a soiled, discoloured sheet. The curtains were sheets of old lace, torn in some places and moth-eaten in others.
“We must possess our souls in patience, Watson,” said Holmes.
“What is the meaning of all this?”
“Greed, Watson. Undeniable, unpalatable, and unrelenting avarice, resulting in the death of two entirely innocent men.”
Before he could elucidate further, the door was flung open in a gesture of rage. Into the room there stepped a tall and strongly built man with closely cropped hair and the dark eyes of a scheming villain. His teeth snarled at us from behind his cruel, thin lips, and his voice came out in a harsh, guttural whisper.
“What the devil is going on here?”
“Mr. Chappell, I believe,” said Holmes.
“That wastrel landlord downstairs said I had men intruding into my privacy. Who are you? What business do you have here?”
Sherlock Holmes remained at the window, where he had positioned himself. He looked out through those miserable lace curtains into the street below. “Perhaps we had better wait for the person whom I have summoned here.”
“Who are you?” repeated the demon in the doorway.
Holmes offered no reply. In the silence which fell between us, we heard the hurried footsteps on those old stairs. Within seconds, standing behind the apparition who had burst in on us, there stood Lady Sophia Galsworthy. Never before have I seen a woman’s expression change from anxious panic to abject hatred as quickly as her face did that evening. Upon seeing Sherlock Holmes, her eyes turned to fire, and her mouth let out a shrill shriek of betrayal.
Holmes walked to the centre of the room. “Close that door, Madam. We shall have the privacy which Mr. Chappell so desires.”
She obeyed my friend’s authoritative tone. When she turned back to face Holmes, she threw a piece of paper at his feet. “You sent that telegram, luring me here to trap me.”
Holmes picked up the slip of paper and handed it to me. The message was clear and concise: THE CHARADE IS EXPOSED. COME TO MERCHANT ROAD AT ONCE.
“It was no trap, Madam. If you were innocent, it would have meant nothing to you. Only this man’s accomplice could possibly have construed any message of importance from those words.”
Chappell stepped forward so that his face was only inches from my companion’s. In response, I moved from my position and was beside Holmes in an instant. Chappell’s eyes were on me, but I held his gaze, tightening the grip on my cane.
“There is much to explain,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It might be as well for me to give my version of the extraordinary events which have brought us together in this room, and you can elaborate or correct me as you see fit.
“From the moment I learned that Sir Benjamin Galsworthy had been murdered, I suspected that Lady Sophia was somehow involved. It is the naïve detective who does not admit the possibility of coincidence, but the detective who fails to recognise a pattern in a series of events is a fool. I could not ignore the obvious connection between the death of Theodore Wargrave and the murder of Sir Benjamin. That connection, the common denominator, was Lady Sophia, who was married to both men and inherited a fortune in the event of each of their deaths. For that reason, I had concluded before I left the Galsworthy residence that you, Lady Sophia, had murdered both your husbands.
“But Theodore Wargrave had committed suicide. It was inconceivable that the wound to the head could have been forcibly administered without a struggle taking place, and yet there had been no evidence of such a struggle. It is not easy to put a gun to a man’s head and shoot unless that man is unprepared or somehow restrained, but there was no evidence of any restraint, and there was no evidence of any attempt by Wargrave to defend himself. The suicide verdict had been accepted as the truth and the matter had been closed. My task, as I saw it, was to determine how Lady Sophia had managed to commit murder and make it appear so convincingly as suicide.
“A sensible place to start was the original police report into the investigation. I confess that I was disheartened when I found no clue, but my friend, Watson, summarized the medical examiner’s report, and I saw the first glimmer of light. Watson, do you recall the contents of that summary of yours?”
“Liver damage from alcohol excess, signs of tooth decay, below average weight, if I recall correctly.”
Holmes went to the window and drew aside one of the curtains. “The London streets below us teem with people suffering from a lack of food, a dependence on drink, and similar horrors. But Theodore Wargrave was a wealthy man, the owner of a successful business which he had sold for a small fortune. Why should a man of the higher class of society suffer from the ailments of a man from the very lowest rung of that same ladder?”
Lady Sophia had regained her composure. “Must we listen to this discourse on medical reports and society’s troubles?”
Holmes’s eyes blazed. “You must, Madam! It goes to the very heart of the matter. There was no reason why such a man as Wargrave would have displayed those medical conditions more in tune with a life of poverty and deprivation. Therefore, the body which was found with a bullet hole in its temple was not Wargrave, but a man whose name we shall never know, who had fallen into the depths of misery and despair.”
“I identified the body as that of my husband,” said the lady.
“That could only mean that you were involved in the crime,” I said.
Holmes nodded. “Precisely, Watson. It was not your husband whose body you identified, Madam; instead, it was the body of a vagrant whom you had enticed into your grasp, with the promise of food, warmth, and the presentation of a suit of clothes of your husband’s which served as proof of your benevolent intentions. Whilst he was admiring himself in his new attire, the real Theodore Wargrave came up from behind and shot him in the temple, before he could either react or acknowledge what was taking place.
“All that was required was for Wargrave to vanish and for his wife to discharge a suitable period of mourning, inherit the money, and move on with her life. The fear had always been that one fortune would be insufficient to slake your thirst for wealth, and so it proved. It occurred to you both that, if Mrs. Wargrave here could again marry a man of equal or better wealth than Wargrave, then that man could return from the dead and murder the new husband without any fear of suspicion being aroused. Death is the greatest of all alibis. Lady Sophia would inherit the second estate and move abroad to distance herself from her grief.”
I was beginning to see some light. “The ‘dead’ Mr. Wargrave would then join her under an assumed name, and they would marry once more.”
Holmes nodded gravely. “An ingenious plan. Unfortunately, a man whom neither of you had ever noticed in the past saw Wargrave only this very morning, no doubt returning from the murder of Sir Benjamin Galsworthy. I had concluded that Harry Collins had been misguided, and I became convinced of it when I began to suspect Lady Sophia of the murders of her husbands. Collins had not known your first husband well and he was elderly, so it was entirely possible that he had been mistaken. And yet, he had believed it absolutely. Only when I read the post-mortem report on Wargrave did I begin to suspect the truth.”
Chappell stepped to one side, distancing himself from the woman who stood by his side. “You talk of people I have never heard of, of murder, and things I know nothing about. I took these rooms because they are all I can afford. Be gone and leave me in peace.”
Lady Sophia glared at Chappell with the eyes of a woman who sees the wolf discard the fleece of its disguise. “You devil! Do you not see that the telegram condemns us both?”
Sherlock Holmes spoke with the calm, controlled manner which showed that he was maste
r of the situation. “She is quite right, sir. There must be a connection between you, or else the telegram would not have brought her here. Not just to this house, mark you, but to this very room.”
“And you know the connection, of course,” said Lady Sophia.
“I think it is clear to us all, my lady. This man is Theodore Wargrave. Collins was not mistaken. He had seen Wargrave, but it was not a case of a miraculous return from the dead, for Theodore Wargrave had not died. In his place, a common man whose life was thought by both of you to be expendable had been sacrificed so that you could murder a richer but no less innocent man for his money.”
Theodore Wargrave, since no longer could he be called Chappell, walked to the small wooden chair in the corner of the room and sat down.
“I doubted we could pull it off a second time,” said he, his head in his hands. “But the allure of money has always been strong for both of us. When you come from nothing, Mr. Holmes, the desire to have everything swells within you. I had built up that business honestly, and I had made something of it. I knew I could never again go through the sacrifices and the toil required to build a new company, not at the age I had reached. But, still, I had this passionate lust for money. We both had.”
The lady took his huge hand in hers and kissed it. “We knew that it would have to be the last time. We were fearful of the very coincidence which you had identified, Mr. Holmes, but we felt that the death of Theodore would be sufficient protection.”
“It might have been, Lady Sophia,” said Holmes. “Women have lost both husbands before, even to violence. In the case of Wargrave, it was necessary for you to find the body because you had to identify it but, with the Galsworthy murder, anybody in the house could have discovered the crime and my suspicions would not have been aroused. Indeed, it would have been better for you had someone else discovered the body, but like many criminals before you, you overplayed your part. The coincidence of a wife finding the bodies of both her husbands was too much to be credited.”
The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 16
