The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

by Denis O. Smith

  ‘A day or two after this, I arrived home in the afternoon and went straight into the garden, intending to sit for five minutes in the sunshine and finish the newspaper I had been reading in the train. After a few moments, however, I became aware of voices in the distance. From where I was sitting, a double row of elms and rhododendron bushes formed a natural corridor, along which I had a perfect view. Even as I looked, two people appeared round the corner at the far end of this corridor, my wife and the gardener. They were walking close together, very slowly, apparently in deep conversation. I was about to call out to them – for they had evidently not seen me – when I realised with a shock that they were entwined in embrace, he with his arm across her shoulder and she with her arm around his waist. My greeting froze upon my lips, and at that very moment my wife looked up and met my gaze. Her mouth fell open and her arms dropped to her side, and for several seconds we stared at each other in silence.

  ‘“What is wrong?” I called, without really knowing why I did so. My wife’s face was such a mask of guilt that I could scarcely bring myself to look at it and, to be frank, it was evident to me that the only thing that was wrong was that I had surprised their little tête-à-tête. But I called out, nevertheless, and thus presented my wife with an exit from her embarrassment. Why one should wish to assist another to lie to one, I do not know, but my wife took the cue and responded with alacrity.

  ‘“Dobson has sprained his ankle,” she called back. “I am helping him back to his house.”

  ‘I threw down my newspaper and hurried over to where they stood. There seemed little wrong with his ankle so far as I could see, but, without comment, I helped him to the cottage and left him in the care of his wife. Lettie had returned to the house, and when I saw her later she made no reference to the incident. As I had decided that I would certainly not be the first to bring the matter up, it remained therefore unaired, although I twice caught her looking at me in an odd fashion that evening, as though wondering what was passing in my mind. Since that time I have never seen the two of them together so intimately, but I cannot of course speak for the times I am away from home.

  ‘If I thought then that I had cause to resent the gardener, I was soon to find out that his wife’s behaviour could be equally uncongenial to me. Lettie began to refer to the woman continually, in a way which gradually began to irritate me intensely. It was always “But dear Mrs Dobson says this,” or “Helen thinks that we ought to do that”.

  ‘One afternoon, I returned home from town earlier than usual and, hearing the sound of female laughter from the garden, I strolled in that direction. As I approached a rose-covered pergola, on the other side of which was a small arbour, I recognised the voices of my wife and Mrs Dobson.

  ‘“I really don’t think I can agree with you, Helen,” I heard my wife say.

  ‘“But you must, Lettie, you foolish girl. You are simply being stubborn!” retorted the other. There followed a further remark which I did not catch, then peals of laughter. I was surprised to hear my wife indulging in such banter, but I endeavoured not to show it, as I turned into the arbour where they were sitting.

  ‘“Hello!” I cried. “You sound jolly!” But even as I spoke I saw the smiles vanish from their faces.

  ‘“Yes, dear. We were discussing the garden,” replied my wife, attempting unconvincingly to force a smile to her lips.

  ‘“Really? And what were you saying about it that was so amusing?”

  ‘My wife gave some response, but it was not very interesting and, in any case, I was not really listening. It was clear that my appearance had as good as thrown a funeral pall over their gaiety.

  ‘Later that evening, when we were alone, I spoke to my wife about the Dobsons.

  ‘“It does not strike me as an altogether good thing for you to encourage Mrs Dobson in such a degree of intimacy,” I remarked somewhat stiffly.

  ‘“But we were only talking together!” she retorted hotly. “I suppose you think she is not good enough for me, being only a gardener’s wife!”

  ‘“Not at all,” I returned. “You know that I do not possess a single ounce of snobbery and you may take what friends you please; but in this case you are the woman’s employer and such intimacy can lead to difficulties.”

  ‘“I think not,” said she simply, “so let us drop the matter.”

  ‘I had never heard my wife speak in this way before and I do not mind admitting that I was cut to the quick. I could raise no specific objection to this Dobson woman, other than that she had often struck me as somewhat over-bold in her manner for one in her position, but this, in any case, was not really the point. I felt that I was being excluded in my own house by my own beloved wife and it was this that hurt me so deeply. Lettie perhaps saw this, for after we had remained some time in silence she began to speak to me in a softer tone, but I treated her advances coldly and left the room.

  ‘I could not begin to tell you all the wild thoughts that coursed then through my seething brain, but outside in the night air my head seemed to clear and my resolve to harden. If I had nothing specific against the gardener’s wife, I had a veritable catalogue of complaints against the gardener himself. I returned to inform my wife of my decision.

  ‘“It is no good,” I began. “The Dobsons will have to go. You should not look so surprised, Laetitia: Dobson has done scarcely a day’s work since he came here. I am sure that no one else would have tolerated the fellow as long as I have. Apart from anything else, his gardening skills seem to be non-existent. Why, the man is a perfect imbecile! Only yesterday he pulled up all my sweet williams in the belief that they were weeds!”

  ‘“He has been ill,” she protested. “He has had a touch of the sun. He will improve, Mark; you will see.”

  ‘“He is certainly sickly-looking: he makes me feel ill every time I see him. But this house is not a charitable institution, Laetitia, and much as I dislike the thought of turning a man out when he has no other post to go to, he will have to go.”

  ‘I thought then that the matter was settled and I certainly intended that it should be; but my wife begged and pleaded and cajoled, until once more, much against my better judgement, I relented. I have little doubt that I am a fool, but I could not resist the imploring look in her eyes. There the matter rested and rests still. Do I weary you with my story, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied my friend languidly, as he knocked his pipe out upon the hearth. ‘But I fail to see in what way I can help you in these matters, Mr Pringle. I make it an invariable rule not to interfere in domestic affairs, for there is generally profit in it for no one.’

  ‘At least hear the end of my story, Mr Holmes, before you make up your mind. On Sunday last I was so weighed down with these problems and, as I now realise, with the beginnings of another bout of the fever, that I found I was quite unable to sleep. About one in the morning I dressed quietly and slipped out into the darkened garden, thinking that a little fresh air would help to soothe my nerves. It had been a very hot, close day, as you no doubt recall, and the night was heavy and black and lowering. As I stepped down the path to the river, a single large drop of rain landed upon my cheek, and before I had gone another thirty yards the skies had opened and the rain was fairly crashing down. I ran for the shelter of an old yew tree which I knew to be just ahead of me, although I could scarcely make out its shape in the darkness. There I was standing, thankful for the dense cover that the tree provided, when there came a series of mighty flashes directly overhead, accompanied by the violent and deafening crack and rumble of the thunder. In an instant the veil of darkness was lifted from the garden and all was illuminated with that strange, ghastly light. With a thrill of horror that set my hair on end, I saw that there was someone upon the path, not thirty feet away and looking straight at me.’

  ‘A man or a woman?’ said Holmes sharply.

  ‘A man – so I believe; but I had only a moment in which to judge the matter. For as abruptly as the light had come, the darkness descend
ed once more, just as if a black cloth had been cast across my eyes. I shifted my position and prepared to defend myself, though against whom, or what, I did not know. I must have stood there in that rigid pose for several minutes, but nothing fell upon me but a few drops of the icy rain. Then for a second time the sky was split asunder by the zigzag strokes of the lightning, for a second time the garden was bathed in its eerie white light and I saw that the path was deserted. Whoever I had seen was no longer there. The rain was still teeming down, but I left my shelter and dashed at the top of my speed back to the house. To my surprise I found the garden door wide open, the rain splashing in and forming a puddle upon the parquet floor of the corridor. I was certain that I had closed the door firmly as I went out, and although it was possible that the sudden force of the storm had blown the door open – for in truth the catch is not a very secure one – I was not prepared to take a risk upon the point. I loaded my revolver and made a thorough search of every room in the house, but found nothing amiss.

  ‘My walk had done little for my insomnia, as you will appreciate, and I spent a sleepless night with the loaded pistol at my bedside. In the morning I scoured the garden for any trace of the intruder, but discovered nothing. I had half expected to see another of those infernal hand-prints, but that at least I had been spared. At breakfast my wife announced that she would accompany me up to town, as there was a sale of oriental fabrics at Liberty’s which she wished to attend, but I felt too ill and tired to go to work, so she travelled up alone and I returned to my bed, where I slept half the day away. In sleep, at least, I could escape from the troubles which beset me; but it was a false escape, for when I awoke, these troubles seemed to weigh yet more heavily upon my mind and appear yet more insoluble and impenetrable. What power is possessed by this woman, Helen Dobson, that she can gain such an influence over my wife in so short a time? What manner of man is her brooding, taciturn husband? Why does he pretend to be a gardener – which he very evidently is not – and what does he hope to gain by such an imposture? Who is it that creeps about my garden in the night-time and prints his freakish hand upon my wall? Does someone wish me dead? All day long, and late into the night, I cudgelled my brains with these questions and a thousand others, until I began to think that it was all a fevered nightmare, in which no answers or explanations might ever be found, but from which dawn would release me. Alas, this morning I woke up and saw my pistol beside the bed, and knew that some answer must be sought in the world of reality.

  ‘I had heard your name, Mr Holmes, in connection with the Claygate disappearance case, a couple of years ago, and it seemed to me that in you might lie my only means of retaining my sanity. And yet, even as the thought of your reputation brought a flicker of hope to my reeling mind, I still was not sure that consulting you would be the right thing to do. For the matter is so dark and in some ways so delicate and personal—’

  ‘And yet you have come.’

  ‘This arrived by the morning post.’

  Our visitor drew from his inside pocket a long blue envelope, from which he extracted a folded sheet of paper. This he passed across to Holmes, who unfolded it carefully and examined it upon his knee. With a quickening of the pulse and a prickling sensation in the hairs upon my neck, I saw that the paper bore but a single mark: the vivid violet print of a human hand.

  ‘Be so good as to pass me the lens, Watson,’ said my friend, an expression of intense interest upon his face. ‘It is a man’s hand,’ he remarked after a moment; ‘a coarse hand, with short, thick fingers; no stranger to physical work, I should judge, from the general development. Hello! He has a ring upon his second finger. Is this the same as the previous prints you observed?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘There is one point upon which I can set your mind at rest at once, Mr Pringle,’ said Holmes with a grim smile. ‘Whoever made this print has no more fingers than you or I have: the sixth digit is counterfeit.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘The anatomy is quite wrong. If you will look closely at the fingers you will see that whereas the first three and the last arise from a pad on the palm, the fourth does not, but arises from between the pads of the two adjacent fingers. Do you see, Watson? There is no indication whatever of a metacarpal. He has, it is evident, printed his third finger twice, having previously splayed out his little finger, in order to make room for the addition.’

  ‘Why, so he has!’ cried our visitor. ‘I can see it clearly now! But why should anyone do such a thing?’

  ‘Ah! That is another question! May I see the envelope which contained this remarkable communication? Hum! Common enough sort of stationery! Posted yesterday afternoon in the West End. Dear me! What a dreadful nib the pen must have – no doubt the address was written in a post office, or the writing-room of an hotel. Well, well! Your name has been curiously misspelt! The remainder of the address is correct, I take it?’

  Pringle nodded as Holmes passed the envelope to me and I saw that his client’s name had been rendered as ‘Mr Pringel’.

  ‘What a most interesting detail!’ said Holmes slowly and quietly, apparently addressing himself. With his elbows upon his knees and his chin cupped in his hands, he sat in silence for several minutes, an expression of intense concentration upon his face.

  ‘Do you see some clue, Mr Holmes?’ cried his client at last, clearly unable to endure the silence a moment longer.

  ‘Eh? Oh, possibly, Mr Pringle, possibly,’ replied Holmes in an abstracted tone. ‘The misspelling of your name is certainly a singular thing. It is so grotesque, so un-English, you see, that it argues not simply for the hand of a stranger, who was obliged to enquire your name, but for that of an illiterate or a foreigner, who was then unable to spell correctly the name he was given. The remainder of the address is so neatly and correctly rendered, however, that the first of these alternatives seems unlikely. It also suggests—’

  ‘What?’ Pringle enquired eagerly.

  ‘Something I must think about,’ Holmes replied at length. ‘There is of course a further possibility,’ he added more briskly.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That the sender of this letter is someone known to you, who wishes to disguise the fact.’

  ‘If so, it is an absurdly crude attempt!’ said Pringle with a snort.

  ‘I quite agree. Nevertheless, it is a possibility we must bear in mind. The case is at present a chaotic and confused one, and we cannot afford to dismiss any chance, however remote. Tell me, have you ever travelled in the Balkans?’

  ‘Never!’ replied Pringle in some surprise. ‘I have not even been near that part of the world, except for a passage through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘To the best of my knowledge she has only twice been away from England since she returned from Ceylon, and on both occasions it was to stay with a distant cousin who lives on the outskirts of Paris.’

  ‘No matter,’ said Holmes, shaking his head; ‘you are a finger short, in any case. Is there anyone you would call an enemy – someone who might perhaps feel he had cause to persecute you?’

  ‘None that I know of. I was once called upon to act as a witness to a hanging, during my time in Ceylon, and there was some ill feeling in the area for a while afterwards, stirred up by the man’s family; but it was not directed principally at me, for I had no other connection with the matter. In any case the trouble subsided fairly quickly, for the poor wretch had certainly been guilty of the most ghastly murders, as even his own family conceded.’

  ‘You were married at Gloucester, I believe you said,’ Holmes remarked after a moment. ‘Was that simply because your wife was living in that part of the country at the time?’

  ‘Not entirely. Her family had always lived in the town. Her maternal grandfather, she told me, had at one time been Dean of Gloucester Cathedral.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Holmes, leaning back in his chair and tapping the tips of his fingers together. ‘Th
e problem you have presented us with, my dear sir, is a most remarkable one, with several features which are not yet clear to me. But if you leave these papers here, I shall give the matter my consideration and let you have my opinion in due course.’

  ‘You have hopes, then, of uncovering a solution?’ cried Pringle eagerly. There was something almost pathetic about the beseeching look upon his face, which was terrible to see in so fine a figure of a man.

  ‘There is always hope,’ said Holmes shortly. ‘Will you be in your office tomorrow? You will? Then I shall call in to see you if I have any news; otherwise please be so good as to call in here on Thursday, if that is convenient.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Holmes,’ responded the other, who was evidently much cheered by Holmes’s confident manner. ‘But might I ask what steps you propose to take?’

  ‘The only steps I shall take this evening, my dear sir, are to the chair in which you are now sitting, which is somewhat better appointed for prolonged meditation than this one.’

  ‘That is all?’ cried Pringle in disappointment. ‘You will do nothing more?’

  ‘I shall consume a great quantity of the strongest shag tobacco. It is quite a four-pipe problem and it would be unwise to attempt to come to any premature conclusions.’

  Pringle shot a questioning glance at me, then shrugged his shoulders with an air of resignation.

  ‘Did you show this letter to your wife?’ asked Holmes, as his visitor rose to leave.

  ‘I saw no point,’ the other replied simply, with a shake of the head.

  ‘You are probably correct – at least for the moment – and nor should you mention to anyone that you have consulted me.’

  ‘I should not dream of doing so!’

  ‘Nevertheless, you might let it slip without intending to. Be upon your guard at all times, Mr Pringle! One final thing—’