Sherlock Holmes and the Four Corners of Hell

by Seamas Duffy

‘He was until he acquired a wig, a pair of spectacles, and had some reconstructive surgery done upon his left lobe.’

  ‘Then Miss Evans must be Annie Fraser!’ said Hopkins.

  ‘Indeed. I am afraid I entirely failed to recognize her at first, for I merely recalled her as a tall woman from our brief meeting in Brixton. It is far simpler, of course, for a woman to alter her appearance than it is for a man. But once I realized who she was, I must confess that is who my money was on, for I read the whole affair as the jealousy of the older woman towards the younger wife.’

  I had been trying to bring the young woman round with an application of the hip flask, and a tinge of colour had come back into her cheeks. Eventually she at up and looked around at us with a terrified expression.

  ‘What will they do to me?’ she asked between her sobs.

  ‘I fancy,’ said Holmes, ‘that the death of Miss Farnham was by no means a wilful, cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder?’

  ‘No, I did not mean to kill her,’ the girl blubbered, ‘it happened almost by accident.’

  ‘I think I will be able to show, Miss Ellis, that you did not go to Miss Farnham’s house with the intent of murdering her. Let me put it to you that on the night Miss Farnham died, there had arisen some bitter jealousy between yourselves, which resulted in a violent quarrel. As I observed from her diary, Miss Farnham is somewhat given to self-dramatizing, and I can guess that your meeting was an explosive one.’

  ‘Yes, we had an argument, and I followed Ruth into the kitchen. I screamed something at her, something I would not repeat in front of you gentlemen, and she turned on me violently. I wish to God I had not said it, for if I had not, she might be alive today. She picked up a knife from the table, and then…’ the girl burst into a paroxysm of weeping.

  ‘And you defended yourself with the only weapon to hand.’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Hopkins.

  ‘Use your imagination, said Holmes, ‘which kitchen implement could cause two small punctures spaced an inch and a half apart – why, a carving fork.’

  ‘A carving fork?’ repeated Hopkins.

  ‘As she lashed out at you, you struck her on the neck and were probably instantly astonished to see how much blood you had drawn. By chance you had struck an artery and within a short time, Miss Farnham became unconscious through loss of blood. You rushed home and told all of this to Staunton, as you know him. By the time he returned with you to the house in Church Avenue, Ruth Farnham was already gone and he had his plan carefully worked out. Along with the other inmates of the house, he cleaned up the mess and decided to set up the charade which Mrs Kenny saw when she arrived in the morning. He burnt the bloodied clothing, then he went to the graveyard and opened an old crypt – all the better that it was one which had attached to it a legend of necromancy – and removed the bones from the coffin to suggest some undead spirit having been disturbed. I am afraid to say that it was good enough to take some of you in.

  ‘However, whilst this investigation was going on, this placed him in a dilemma: the longer he held on to the bones, the greater the chance was that the house and gardens might be searched and your guilt would be established. The brook was too shallow – I established that on my walk, therefore I suspect that he decided at first to burn them. As Doctor Watson will confirm, though, human bones, even old bones, are unfortunately very difficult to get rid of by burning. It takes a long time and requires a tremendous amount of heat. However, there was a chance that if he waited until Friday—’

  ‘Why Friday?’ asked Hopkins.

  ‘Come, Hopkins, every schoolboy knows what happens on the fifth of November! In time-honoured fashion there would be bonfires all around the town and it would be easy to put the bones at the bottom of the piles which have been accumulating for weeks and the evidence of his guilt would be gone. You know, I have often thought that it was the best time, apart possibly from Christmas Day, to commit a certain type of murder. I reasoned that Staunton would probably have buried them in the grounds rather than keep them in the house, which might be searched.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he wait until Friday?’

  ‘Because a better idea had come to him – he would return the bones to the coffin rather than take his chance with a bonfire. It was probably safer than holding on to evidence which would incriminate him. Miss Ellis came down to do that last night, but she was surprised by the two women. I suspect she was more frightened than they were. My stratagem was devised to make it look as though the coast would be clear tonight, and I’m afraid he rather took the bait too. He will go down for a very long time, Miss Ellis.’

  ‘It is I who deserve to be punished; neither he nor any of the others did anything to harm Sister Farnham.’

  ‘Perhaps, but tampering with the evidence in a murder case is serious matter and I am willing to stake my reputation on the supposition that you wanted to make a clean breast of the matter but were talked out of it or, more likely, terrified out of it.’

  The girl said nothing.

  ‘Besides, this gentleman’s colleagues,’ he indicated Hopkins, ‘have been looking for the man you know as Staunton for some time. His real name is Henry Peters and I am sorry to say that he is wanted for attempted murder. I’m afraid your husband, as you would have it, is unlikely to see the outside of a prison again for the rest of his natural life. As to yourself, Miss Ellis, I think you will find that the law will treat you fairly, and I shall be happy to render any assistance I can when the trial comes up.’

  ‘Sergeant Channon will take you down to the station,’ said Wills quietly.

  ‘I would lose no time in quietly surrounding the vicarage with your men, Inspector, for Peters is a most devious character, and by now he may have become suspicious about Miss Ellis’s delay in returning. He has the distinction of being one of the very few men to have escaped my clutches after I had cornered him.’

  On this occasion, though, half a dozen burly constables stood between him and his escape, and we heard later that he and Annie Fraser had gone along quietly with Wills and Hopkins.

  ‘When I considered the evidence,’ said Holmes later, ‘I was fairly certain that it was the sort of crime which a woman would commit; it was impulsive and inopportune. I had often thought that the most difficult murder to solve would be one committed by, or indeed upon, a pillar of the community, particularly some churchgoing spinster noted for her charitable work. I never thought I should see one.’

  ‘You mentioned a precedent; two, in fact.’

  ‘That was how the woman in Forfarshire was murdered: I believe she was killed by her maid, who, after putting up with her insults and degrading treatment for years, one day flew into a dreadful rage and lunged at her. The maid fled immediately afterwards, however, and was never seen again. The Society for Vampirism Research gave great publicity to the incident at the time, and recalled as proof the Breton case to which I also referred, where the nature of the injuries had given rise to a corresponding moral panic.’

  ‘And a humble carving fork was to blame.’

  ‘Have I not always said that the dreary conventionalities of existence often conceal the most outré circumstances?’

  ‘And they did not even take the trouble to hide it.’

  ‘No, for its absence would have been more remarkable than its presence. It was simply cleaned and replaced in Miss Farnham’s kitchen drawer where it remained ever since. I gave both Hopkins and Wills the hint at the time, but they refused to take it.’

  ‘And at what point did you realize this man was Holy Peters?’

  ‘As I have said before, Watson, you are a great conductor of enlightenment. I was sure I recognized the man’s features and that set me thinking about previous cases, but when you pointed out his colonial accent, then that narrowed the field considerably. When you mentioned the developments in otoplasty, my suspicion became a certainty. Attaching himself to gullible females under the guise of religious ministry was this man’s hallmark. The last time he sailed very
close to murder and was almost caught. Though I cannot believe that he has completely divested himself of his murderous tendencies, I think he may have learned his lesson in the Carfax case and he no doubt pledged himself to avoid such dangerous tactics in future. I had known that it would not be long before we made his acquaintance once more. He was a trifle unfortunate in that, once the bones were back in the coffin, it would have been difficult to prove anything. The matter would have remained, perhaps, as one of our many unexplained occurrences.’

  ‘He could have thrown Ellis to the mercy of the court, and justly have claimed complete innocence.’

  ‘Yes, but he would still have been called upon to give evidence in court. In that event he could not be absolutely certain that his real identity would not come to light, and he had his previous exploits to consider.’

  Henry Peters was sentenced to fifteen years for his part in the Carfax and Farnham cases, and Fraser received ten years as an accomplice. Rebecca Crouch was fortunate in that the judge took a more lenient view of her association with Peters and she escaped with an eighteen-month sentence. Drusilla Jane Ellis was acquitted on the basis of the evidence submitted by Holmes to the effect that she had acted purely in self-defence. Holmes received a letter from her some weeks after her acquittal to say that she had left the Order and was going out to India to work as a missionary. Ephraim Crouch returned to England for the trial, which received the most sensational coverage in the popular press. Afterwards, he made various attempts to shore up the Order of the Purple Rose, but after the scandal and exposure of Peters as a potential murderer, even its most deluded adherents abandoned it in droves. It failed miserably, and both the church building and the Aion Erospiti have now fallen into sad ruin.

  The Adventure of the Rotherhithe Ship-breakers

  The reading public has long been aware of my association with Sherlock Holmes through the publication of his numerous adventures over the last two decades. During that time, I have been greatly privileged to share in his myriad celebrated successes as well as a small number of his professional failures. Nonetheless, there remain a few cases of greater or lesser interest which have never been subject to public disclosure for various reasons, and which have been buried away at the bottom of my dispatch box in anticipation of the day when their publication should be considered appropriate. In the natural course of events, the details of some of those cases had, in one way or another, already entered the public realm, occasionally through newspaper reports of the arrest of the culprit, or more commonly, of the proceedings at the Assizes. In such instances, there was no lawful reason for my withholding the particulars of the case once the jury had delivered its judgement, and often it was little more than the combination of forgetfulness and indolence upon my own part which held things back.

  I was reminded of one such case whilst drowsing over a copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine one autumn evening in the comfortable stupor of the bar of my club. The article in question had praised the charitable work of a well-known banking heiress on behalf of the East End poor, and had also referred to the ceaseless campaigning of the Reverend Osborne of Holy Trinity to have the worst slum tenements in the metropolis demolished and replaced by more salubrious dwellings. This set off a train of thought which brought to my mind some of the notorious rookeries which had been swept away in the last years of the old century, the sorts of places which were Holmes’s natural hunting ground.

  Friar’s Mount north of Shoreditch, built on a burial pit and better known as the Old Nichol, had been cleared; Tiger Bay in the Ratcliff Highway remained only in the memories of nostalgic writers of wharfside fiction; the infamous shanties of St Giles and the labyrinthine alleyways of Seven Dials in the West End had long since fallen to the demolishers. But, the march of progress being somewhat slower south of the river, there lingered another of these criminal plague-spots near the point where the low-lying ground between Bermondsey and Deptford makes a peninsula, of which I was reminded when reading the article. This particular quarter of the parish of St Barnabas, which stands in the shadow of the mercantile fortress of the great Greenland Dock, was a warren of impoverished streets and courts of ill repute, and which the Morning Chronicle had once described as ‘the Venice of Drains’, so badly was the place riven by open and noxious sewers. The area around the Deptford Lower Road was known locally as ‘the Four Corners of Hell’, due chiefly to the disorderly and disreputable dockside taverns straggled around its skewed crossroads. It was in this colourful locality, reached through the archway of a narrow vennel off Chilton Close, where Holmes kept one of the hideouts whither he would occasionally disappear, and in which vicinity occurred some years ago a remarkable series of events which I now lay before the public for the first time.

  Holmes and I had read of the incident in the morning paper during a lull following one of Mrs Hudson’s ample breakfasts. My friend had picked up the paper, glanced desultorily at the heading – ‘Shot Fired At Surrey Wharfinger’ – and then, having cast his eye over the first few lines, tossed the paper aside muttering that, as usual, there was nothing in it deserving his serious attention. It was only when the sturdy, florid-faced figure of Inspector Baynes of the Surrey Constabulary, one of the few police detectives for whom Holmes had a genuinely high regard, appeared in our sitting room some half an hour later, that my friend rekindled his interest in the matter.

  ‘It must be three or four years since we first met, Mr Holmes,’ said Baynes by way of introducing himself, ‘but I trust you still recall me from the Oxshott case.’

  ‘Yes, I remember both you and the case well. Doctor Watson may correct me if he wishes, but I am sure certain that it is the only narrative he has yet produced which has included a case of voodoo!’

  ‘I notice that your reputation has continued to expand,’ said Baynes.

  ‘You have not done so badly yourself,’ Holmes continued heartily, ‘for if I recall correctly, you managed to put away the Randall brothers for a long spell after the raid on the gambling club in Peckham, and caught the entire Spencer John gang red-handed in Camberwell. I also read that you trailed Woodhouse all the way from Norfolk to Liverpool and took him just as he was about to step on the boat to America.’

  ‘Well, as he had sworn your life away, I suppose you had more than a passing interest in that case,’ said Baynes, whose bright eyes twinkled with unconcealed pleasure at my friend’s words of praise. ‘I see you have been studying form,’ he continued, with a gesture to the newspaper.

  ‘Oh, the business at Rotherhithe, yes. But surely it is an open and shut case to a man of your calibre? Find this Donovan character and you have your culprit,’ said Holmes.

  ‘So I had thought at first, but I recalled the importance that you attached to minor details, and there are some aspects of the case which have puzzled me; just a few small things that have given me cause to be cautious about jumping to obvious conclusions. I like to keep to my own methods as you know, but you have a knack of turning over apparent trivialities until you can see something that isn’t always apparent to the rest of us. The press got some of the incidental details wrong – they mixed up the Christian names of the Donovans, father and son – and as usual, they give only the sensational stuff and omit the important details.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked, for I had read the report myself and had come to a similar conclusion as had Holmes.

  ‘Well, I’ll start at the beginning, gentlemen. Late last night, I received a report that a shot had been fired through the window of the house of a Mr Elias Burdock, a ship-breaker who owns a small wharf at Rotherhithe, which as you may know, is a rough and ready sort of place. Sailors get knifed or robbed there with monotonous regularity, and the stevedores and the fish-porters knock merry hell out of one another in the street once they’ve had a few. But a pistol shooting: now, that’s very rare. So I went down immediately, and when I arrived there, I discovered that the man for whom the bullet appears to have been intended – Elias Burdock, the proprietor – had left
the house earlier on the day in question and had not returned. In fact, he had decided to visit his wife in Margate that morning on the spur of the moment and had left at about midday to catch a train. It was therefore a good many hours later, just after darkness had begun to close in, that someone fired a pistol shot through a window at the rear of the house – presumably intended to kill this Mr Burdock. As I said, he was gone by then, but his foreman, a Mr Richard Parlow who lives on the premises, had remained behind and just missed being hit by the bullet. The assailant escaped in the darkness and unfortunately was seen by no one.’

  ‘And you think the assailant mistook one man for the other?’ asked Holmes.

  ‘I am not quite sure about that. You see, it is complicated by the fact that the window shutters were closed at the time.’

  ‘You do not mean that the assailant fired through closed shutters?’

  ‘As far as I can ascertain, the bullet was fired through the left-hand shutter, shattered the window, and lodged in the kitchen dresser.’

  ‘Rather odd, surely, to take a shot through a closed shutter in the hope that your bullet will find the target. Do you know if this assailant had taken the trouble to ascertain whether his quarry was present in the room?’

  ‘It is difficult to say,’ Baynes replied. ‘Apparently the two men would often sit at the kitchen table at the end of the day with the books, making out the gains or losses to the firm. So unless the assailant knew who was in the room, it would be pot luck as to which man he would hit,’ said Baynes. ‘That was what inclined me to think at first that it was not a professional assassin at work, or even a serious attempt at murder; more the sort of thing some reckless young lad might attempt.’

  ‘Young Donovan, for instance?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What makes you certain that it was not the foreman, Parlow, who was the intended victim?’

  ‘Because there was some history of animosity between Burdock and the Donovan family. Some months ago, Burdock accused one of the Donovans, who runs a rival ship-breaking business, of stealing his timber. It resulted in one of my men arresting young Donovan and carrying out a search of his father’s yard. Nothing was found, but Burdock remained adamant that he had seen Tadhg Donovan hanging around outside the yard just before the timber went missing. Personally, I believe it was Donovan who did it, but as we had no proof, the matter went no further. Anyhow, the Donovans apparently vowed vengeance on Burdock – the son, who is a wild one by all accounts, declared he would knife him. According to the foreman, Parlow, they had been on their guard at Burdock’s Wharf ever since the incident. It seems that young Donovan has been missing for a few days and his family have told us they don’t know where he is. Went off to find a boat in the Downs, his father said. He also swears that no one in the house owns a pistol. The old man, Peter, has a record, too; mostly minor offences admittedly – petty theft and brawling in the taverns – and the boy seems to be growing up in his father’s image.’