The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part XI

by David Marcum

  “And Mrs. Towers senior? His wife?” I asked.

  “Died in childbirth, Doctor, delivering me.” Mrs. Towers’ voice cracked, and her eyes flicked towards the child. “I was the apple of my father’s eye.” She turned to Holmes. “My father is innocent of this crime, sir. We do not have any savings, and I do not know what is to become of us. I can only throw myself, my father, and my daughter on your mercy.” She bent forward, sobbing, and the child screeched in alarm.

  “Watson!” Holmes cried, leaping up from his chair and retreating to his desk.

  I conveyed Mrs. Towers down to the omnibus stand, and when I returned, Holmes was putting on his coat.

  “You did not inquire about Violet’s father, Holmes.”

  “If there was a husband to hand, I should have expected him to be here beside his wife.” He pursed his lips. “An inquiry would have been indelicate.”

  The shutters that had protected the plate-glass windows of Barratt’s jewellery shop on Bishopsgate Street were bowed and bent, the metal twisted and torn into jagged remnants.

  A whistling young man swept up glass outside the shop, the fragments glittering in the sunlight, and a crowd of gawkers clustered on the opposite pavement under the stern glare of a mounted policeman.

  A portly man in a tweed overcoat stood in the shop doorway, smoking and talking with a police sergeant. His grey hair spilled out from under the rim of his bowler hat, joining ample side-whiskers in a Burnside style that framed his flushed and heavily dewlapped face. He frowned at Holmes and me as we stepped down from our cab, and his brows knitted further as we approached him.

  “You are, Mr. Holmes, the theorist,” the man said in a husky, wheezing voice.

  Holmes bowed. “And you are Inspector Jones, scourge of the criminal classes.”

  “I have no time for airy theories, Mr. Holmes. My feet are firmly parked on God’s own earth.” Inspector Jones sniffed and offered me his hand. “Athelney Jones, in charge of this case.”

  I introduced myself and Inspector Jones led the way into the showroom, a mess of shattered shelves and broken glass from empty display cabinets.

  “Now, many a Yard man might take exception to your turning up out of the blue, Mr. Holmes,” the inspector said, “coming uninvited, without an official position in the matter and poking in everywhere as you are wont to do, but I am not moulded of that clay. I welcome you and the doctor with open arms. Just so long as you do not interfere with official business and the solemn processes of the Law.”

  Inspector Jones waved a hand at the warped skeleton of a good-sized Milner’s safe that stood in the window alcove. “A bad business, gentlemen.” He leaned back against a broken counter, searched his waistcoat, produced a packet of cigarettes, and shook one out.

  “I keep nothing hidden and everything lies open before you, Mr. Holmes. We have a broken safe and missing jewellery. And we have a suspect, Mr. Thomas Towers, known as Long Tom, as skilled a cracksman as you’d find in a day’s walk. But he does not live a day’s walk away, gentlemen - he lives a furlong or so down the road in Cowper Street. He’s now contemplating his sins in the cells of the City Police at Bishopsgate Station.”

  Inspector Jones lit his cigarette from the end of the previous one and flicked the stub out the front door.

  “Fast work, Inspector,” Holmes remarked.

  “That is my style, Mr. Holmes, as you may recall. I arrived here at six-thirty-seven of the a.m., and I made my arrest at seven-and-four minutes, the instant I was apprised of the near location of the culprit. I do not let the grass grow, sir.”

  The inspector puffed on his cigarette and gripped his hands together, his fingers intertwining. “I am weaving the sinews of my case into a tight web of circumstance.”

  “I do have some slight official standing in the case,” Holmes said. “I have been engaged by Mr. Towers’ daughter.”

  “I met the young lady.” Inspector Jones laughed a wheezing laugh, his tiny, deep-set eyes twinkling below puffed lids and his jowls wagging. “You are her knight-errant, I make no doubt, Mr. Holmes!” His laugh became a prolonged fit of coughing. “But here,” he wheezed as he caught his breath, “here are stern facts that you will have to face, sir. I accept no airy-fairy theories on my watch.”

  “Barratt’s is a family owned firm?” Holmes asked.

  “The premises are in the care of Mrs. Barratt in the absence of her husband,” Inspector Jones said, puffing on his cigarette. “Mr. Barratt ran off with his Jezebel fifteen months ago, and his rejected wife carries the business on with the help of a manager, a Mr. Spinelli. Mrs. Barratt was asleep in bedroom above the shop when burglars entered and blew open the safe with explosives.”

  I frowned. “Mr. Barratt ran off?”

  Inspector Jones blew a stream of smoke across the shop. “With his fancy woman, a shop girl at Whiteley’s Emporium. You know the type, gentlemen.” He sniffed. “Mr. Barratt is thought to be somewhere up Harrogate way.”

  “May I talk with Mrs. Barratt?” Holmes requested.

  “The lady is in shock and has taken to her bed. Or more exactly, to her estranged husband’s bed, as her own room is in disarray, broken windows and so forth.” Inspector Jones pointed to cracks in the ceiling.

  “The safe is in an odd position,” I said. “It faces the shop window, where anyone could look inside or spy as the door is opened and closed. Was it shifted here by the blast?”

  A pale-faced man in a dusty frock coat had been sitting behind one of the few undamaged counters, writing. He stood, handed Inspector Jones a sheaf of papers, and faced me.

  “If I may correct you, sir,” he said in English tinged with a faint Italian accent. “The safe is unlocked only once a day, before we open our doors for business and when the metal shutters are closed. The contents are on trays that are transferred to the display cases. After closing time, the reverse process is adopted: We close the shutters, open the safe and store the trays inside. At no point in the procedure may anyone outside view the contents of the safe.”

  Inspector Jones introduced Mr. Spinelli, the manager of Barratt’s. Then he glanced through the papers he had been given and whistled. “The inventory lists items worth almost two-thousand pounds.”

  “There is, or was, a peephole in the outside shutters,” Mr. Spinelli continued, “so the patrolling constable might check that the safe was unmolested as he passed on his rounds. I uncovered the peephole and lit two gas burners as my last act before locking up last night. The lights burn all night, illuminating the safe. The water or blast doused them, and I believe the first policeman at the scene turned off the gas.”

  “PC Hanson was three streets away, five minutes at the run,” Inspector Jones said. “He heard the blast, sprang his police rattle, and sprinted here. He found the safe as you see it, and the window alcove flooded.”

  I frowned. “I wonder where the water came from?”

  “How long is Hanson’s beat?” Holmes asked.

  Inspector Jones consulted his notebook. “Thirty-three minutes at regulation constabulary pace. Hanson stated that he passed the shop every half-hour, give or take, from the start of his beat till the blast, and he conscientiously checked the peep hole on each round, noticing nothing amiss.”

  Holmes scanned the floor. “You found no debris? No broken watch parts, or bits of jewellery?”

  Inspector Jones snapped a finger at the sergeant, who showed Holmes two items on his palm.

  “Just this length of fishing line attached to the curtain rod, and a candle stub in a corner,” the inspector said. “Nothing else.”

  Holmes pulled out his magnifying glass and examined the items.

  “The burglars cleaned the safe out, Mr. Holmes,” Inspector Jones said with a wide grin. “They took the lot, two-thousand worth. My men are searching Long Tom’s crib as we speak.”


  Holmes nodded slowly, then looked up. “The constable was here within five minutes, you say? Did he see anything?”

  “He tried to get in through the shutters but could not. In fact, he cut himself on some shards of metal making the attempt and I sent him back to the station to clean the blood off his uniform. He states that he hammered on the front door until the boy opened up. By that time the devils were long gone, out the back.”

  “The boy?”

  “Reece, the groom who sleeps in the attic above the stables. He was awakened by the blast, and he hurried downstairs in his night attire.”

  Holmes turned to Mr. Spinelli. “How long has Reece been in your employ?”

  “He works for Mrs. Barratt, sir, not the shop. I believe Mr. Barratt took him on a year-and-a-half ago to tend his horse. Since then, Mrs. Barratt has purchased a carriage-and-pair, and the boy drives that.”

  “Perhaps I might have a word with Reece?” Holmes said.

  The sergeant called through the front door and the fair-haired boy of perhaps eighteen or so came in from the street holding a broom. He shook his head. “Blimey, what a mess.”

  “Watch your mouth, young man,” Inspector Jones snapped. “There’s no call for language.”

  “I should like to establish a timeline, if I may, Inspector,” Holmes said. “Perhaps Reece could re-enact the proceedings of this morning from the moment of the explosion?”

  Inspector Jones wagged an admonitory finger. “Charades, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Bang,” I said, feeling foolish, as a police rattle sounded from the main house. I stood in the doorway of Reece’s simple bedroom in the attic above the stables at the back of the garden. I checked my watch and made a mental note of the exact time.

  The boy swung out from under the bedcovers, rubbing his eyes. He put on his boots, stood, reached into a wardrobe for his dressing gown, and slipped past me. He leaned over the baluster, peering down to the stable.

  “The horses were frightened by the noise, so I spent a moment calming them, then went out into the garden.”

  “Do so, please,” I instructed him.

  Reece scrambled down the stairs to the stable. He stroked the horses’ necks, then looked out of the stable door towards the main house.

  “There was a deal of smoke,” he said. “My first concern was for Mrs. Barratt. The back door of the house was open wide, so I ran across the lawn and upstairs. I knocked on her door and asked if she was well.”

  Reece loped across the lawn to the back door, and I followed him through the scullery and kitchen and upstairs. He mimed knocking at a bedroom door and murmured. “The mistress was distressed, and she asked for a glass of water.”

  He went to the bathroom and ran the tap. “I heard a hammering on the front door and a cry of ‘Police!’, so I jumped downstairs and opened the door to the constable.”

  I followed the boy downstairs to the hall where Holmes and Inspector Jones waited, each with his watch open on his palm.

  Inspector Jones smiled. “Seven minutes and eight seconds, Mr. Holmes, from the blast to opening the door. Time for the villains to clear the safe and escape out the back while PC Hanson was hammering. They ran the few hundred yards to Towers’ crib. I’ll stake my reputation that the loot is hidden there.”

  Holmes nodded. “Assuming the thieves grabbed the jewellery and ran out the back door, where did they leave the garden?”

  The inspector and I trooped through the house behind Holmes, followed by Reece and the police sergeant and out the back door. It was a fine autumn day with bright sunshine, wispy clouds high up and a slight wind.

  We crossed a well-kept lawn to a fence perhaps five feet high. Beyond the fence was a narrow lane, not wide enough for a carriage.

  Holmes looked thirty yards or so back towards the house, then to the stable block beside us. He faced the boy. “You saw nobody crossing the garden last night, no dark shapes or shadows?”

  “No, sir, but I was focused on the house. The wind was blowing this way and it carried with it the stink of chemicals and smoke. I guessed a gas explosion and thought the house was on fire.”

  “The thieves slipped out while Reece was upstairs tending to Mrs. Barratt,” Inspector Jones said. “It was a dark night, with just a sliver of moon.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Holmes said. He turned back to Reece. “The garden is very fine. Who looks after it?”

  “Mrs. Barratt cares for the roses,” the boy answered. “I do the heavy work, the weeding and the mowing. Mrs. Barratt is down on weeds, sir. She cannot abide a weed.”

  “You do a good job. And the roses are remarkably healthy. Did you do any gardening this morning or yesterday?”

  “No, sir, not for a day or so.”

  “What are your plans for the empty flower bed against the wall by the back door?” Holmes asked.

  Reece grinned. “More roses I expect, sir. Mrs. Barratt is main proud of her blooms. She has prizes from the Spring Show at Kensington Gardens.”

  Inspector Jones and the sergeant exchanged amused looks, and I avoided their eyes. I was always somewhat bemused by my friend’s very occasional expressions of horticultural interest.

  “Is that your shed?” Holmes asked, indicating a wooden shed by the back fence. Reece opened the door and Holmes peered inside. “Very neat.”

  Holmes smiled at Inspector Jones. “Perhaps another word with Mr. Spinelli?” he suggested.

  The inspector, Holmes, and I returned to the shattered showroom, and Holmes questioned the manager about the contents of the safe.

  “Full, sir,” Mr. Spinelli answered, shaking his head. “Apart from our usual stock, I had just purchased an eight-hundred-pound collection of jewellery from a lady, the wife of a person of rank in reduced circumstances - with Mrs. Barratt’s approval of course.”

  “Who knew of this purchase?” Inspector Jones asked.

  “Just she and I, sir, aside from the bank and our insurers.”

  “All the articles in the safe were insured?” the inspector asked.

  “Naturally.”

  Inspector Jones narrowed his eyes and turned to Holmes. “Don’t you want to know where Mr. Spinelli was at three-ten this morning, Mr. Holmes?”

  Holmes smiled.

  “As I told you Inspector,” Mr. Spinelli answered in a soft tone, looking embarrassed, “I was staying with a friend in a room above the bar of the Horse and Groom Pub by Lambeth North Station.”

  “I know the Horse well.” Inspector Jones said with a grin. “And this was with a lady friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are a married man, Mr. Spinelli?” Holmes asked.

  “I am engaged to a lady.”

  “To the lady at the Horse and Groom?”

  “To a person in Napoli.” He flushed. “I hope that my whereabouts last night might be kept from my employer, gentlemen. Mrs. Barratt is a lady with the very highest moral standards.”

  The door opened, and Reece poked his head in. “Miss Dennis is here, Mr. Spinelli.”

  “Miss Dennis is our clerk,” Mr. Spinelli said. “She comes in for the afternoon and evening when the City offices close and most of our business is transacted. She lives at home with her mother. She is a drummer in the Salvation Army band.”

  “Do you wish to interrogate Miss Dennis, Mr. Holmes?” Inspector Jones asked. “As we know well, nine times out of ten there’s an insider involved in a robbery. Common sense, sir! Someone told someone of the extra swag to be had after Mr. Spinelli’s purchase.”

  Mr. Spinelli blinked at the inspector.

  Holmes smiled. “I will leave the young lady to you, Inspector.”

  Inspector Jones, Mr. Spinelli, and the boy filed into the showroom.

  “Come, Watson,” Holmes murmured as the door closed behind them. “We h
ave a few minutes to ourselves. First upstairs.”

  Holmes loped up the stairs and opened the door to the room above the showroom. I followed him. “Any observations?” he asked.

  “A lady’s bedroom, Mrs. Barratt’s presumably.” The room was dominated by a high, four-poster curtained in paisley fabric. The chairs and curtains and lampshades were frilled, and a great many pots and jars of beauty potions crowded the dressing table. Two of the window panes were boarded and cracks stretched up the walls.

  “The scent?”

  I sniffed. “Rather pleasant.”

  “A fine fragrance from Molinard. Milady does not stint herself.”

  He opened the wardrobe. “Silks, feather boas, hats of fashionable hugeness.”

  “I am uncomfortable, Holmes. Why are we here? What has Madame Barratt’s boudoir to do with the attack on the safe?”

  Holmes led the way downstairs, across the lawn, and into the stables. He stroked the noses of a pair of fine chestnut mares as he looked around a well-kept space with horse brasses decorating the two stalls.

  “Keep still, Watson. I will have a quick look upstairs.”

  “I say, old chap, shouldn’t we wait for the inspector?”

  Holmes leapt the steep wooden stairs to the attic.

  I turned and found myself facing the stable boy, Reece. “What a fine pair of horses,” I said, for want of anything else to say.

  “Mrs. B. and I got them from the Gypos’ horse fair on the Downs.”

  “And the coach is, ah-”

  “Carrington’s of Brighton, sir. They do good work.”

  Holmes clambered down the stairs, passed the boy and me without a word, and strode across the lawn to the main house. I scurried after him, my face flushed with embarrassment.

  I followed Holmes into the showroom, where he again questioned the manager. Inspector Jones leaned against a shattered counter with his arms folded, smiling a knowing smile. A young girl sat on a stool, sobbing softly.