by David Marcum
“Very good. I shall go over myself, of course. If anything comes to my knowledge in the meanwhile, of course I’ll let you know.”
An hour or two after this a cab stopped at the door, and a young lady dressed in black sent in her name and a minute later was shown into Holmes’s room. It was Miss Mary Rewse. She wore a heavy veil, and all she said she uttered in evidently deep distress of mind. Holmes did what he could to calm her, and waited patiently.
At length, she said: “I felt that I must come to you, Mr. Holmes, and yet now that I am here I don’t know what to say. Is it the fact that Mr. Bowyer has commissioned you to investigate the circumstances of my poor brother’s death, and to discover the whereabouts of Mr. Main?”
“Yes, Miss Rewse, that is the fact. Can you tell me anything that will help me?”
“No, no, Mr. Holmes, I fear not. But it is such a dreadful thing, and Mr. Bowyer is - I’m afraid he is so much prejudiced against Mr. Main that I felt I ought to do something - to say something at least to prevent you entering on the case with your mind made up that he has been guilty of such an awful thing. He is really quite incapable of it, I assure you.”
“Pray, Miss Rewse,” Holmes replied, “don’t allow that apprehension to disturb you. If Mr. Main is, as you say, incapable of such an act as perhaps he is suspected of, you may rest assured no harm will come to him. So far as I am concerned at any rate I enter the case with a perfectly open mind. A man in my profession who accepted prejudices at the beginning of a case would have very poor results to show indeed. As yet I have no opinion, no theory, no prejudice, nothing indeed but a large outline of facts. I shall derive no opinion and no theory from anything but a consideration of the actual circumstances and evidences on the spot. I quite understand the relation in which Mr. Main stands in regard to yourself and your family. Have you heard from him lately?”
“Not since the letter informing us of my brother’s death.”
“Before then?”
Miss Rewse hesitated. “Yes,” she said, “we corresponded. But - but there was really nothing - the letters were of a personal and private sort - they were.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Holmes answered, with his eyes fixed keenly on the veil which Miss Rewse still kept down. “Of course I understand that. Then there is nothing else you can tell me?”
“No, I fear not. I can only implore you to remember that no matter what you may see and hear, no matter what the evidence may be, I am sure, sure, sure that poor Stanley could never do such a thing.” And Miss Rewse buried her face in her hands.
Holmes kept his eyes on the lady, though he smiled slightly, and asked, “How long have you known Mr. Main?”
“For some five or six years now. My poor brother knew him at school, though of course they were in different forms, Mr. Main being the elder.”
“Were they always on good terms?”
“They were always like brothers.”
Little more was said. Holmes condoled with Miss Rewse as well as he might, and she presently took her departure. Even as she descended the stairs a messenger came with a short note for Mr. Bowyer enclosing a telegram just received from Cullanin. The telegram ran thus:
Body exhumed. Death from shot-wound. No trace of small-pox. Nothing yet heard of Main. Have communicated with coroner.
O’Reilly
II.
Holmes and Mr. Bowyer traveled towards Mayo together, Mr. Bowyer restless and loquacious on the subject of the business in hand, and Holmes rather bored thereby. He resolutely declined to offer an opinion on any single detail of the case till he had examined the available evidence, and his occasional remarks on matters of general interest, the scenery and so forth, struck his companion, unused to business of the sort which had occasioned the journey, as strangely cold-blooded and indifferent. Telegrams had been sent ordering that no disarrangement of the contents of the cottage was to be allowed pending their arrival, and Holmes well knew that nothing more was practicable till the site was reached. At Ballymaine, where the train was left at last, they stayed for the night, and left early the next morning for Cullanin, where a meeting with Dr. O’Reilly at the mortuary had been appointed. There the body lay stripped of its shroud, calm and gray, and beginning to grow ugly, with a scarcely noticeable breach in the flesh of the left breast.
“The wound has been thoroughly cleansed, closed and stopped with a carbolic plug before interment,” Dr. O‘Reilly said. He was a middle-aged, grizzled man, with a face whereon many recent sleepless nights had left their traces. “I have not thought it necessary to do anything in the way of dissection. The bullet is not present, it has passed clean through the body, between the ribs both back and front, piercing the heart on its way. The death must have been instantaneous.”
Holmes quickly examined the two wounds, back and front, as the doctor turned the body over, and then asked: “Perhaps, Dr. O’Reilly, you have some experience of a gunshot wound before this?”
The doctor smiled grimly. “I think so,” he answered, with just enough of brogue in his words to hint his nationality and no more. “I was an army surgeon for a good many years before I came to Cullanin, and saw service in Ashanti and in India.”
“Come then,” Holmes said, “you’re an expert. Would it have been possible for the shot to have been fired from behind?”
“Oh, no. See! the bullet entering makes a wound of quite a different character from that of the bullet leaving.”
“Have you any idea of the weapon used?”
“A large revolver, I should think; perhaps of the regulation size; that is, I should judge the bullet to have been a conical one of about the size fitted to such a weapon - smaller than that from a rifle.”
“Can you form an idea of from what distance the shot was fired?”
Dr. O’Reilly shook his head. “The clothes have all been burned,” he said, “and the wound has been washed, otherwise one might have looked for powder blackening.”
“Did you know either the dead man or Dr. Main personally?”
“Only very slightly. I may say I saw just such a pistol as might cause that sort of wound in his hands the day before he gave out that Rewse had been attacked by small-pox. I drove past the cottage as he stood in the doorway with it in his hand. He had the breach opened, and seemed to be either loading or unloading it - which it was I couldn’t say.”
“Very good, doctor, that may be important. Now is there any single circumstance, incident or conjecture that you can tell me of in regard to this case that you have not already mentioned?”
Doctor O’Reilly thought for a moment, and replied in the negative. “I heard of course,” he said, “of the reported new case of smallpox, and that Main had taken the case in hand himself. I was indeed relieved to hear it, for I had already more on my hands than one man can safely be expected to attend to. The cottage was fairly isolated, and there could have been nothing gained by removal to an asylum - indeed there was practically no accommodation. So far as I can make out nobody seems to have seen young Rewse, alive or dead, after Main had announced that he had the small-pox. He seems to have done everything himself, laying out the body and all, and you may be pretty sure that none of the strangers about was particularly anxious to have anything to do with it. The undertaker (there is only one here, and he is down with the small-pox himself now) was as much overworked as I was myself, and was glad enough to send off a coffin by a market cart and leave the laying out and screwing down to Main, since he had got those orders. Main made out the death certificate himself, and, since he was trebly qualified, everything seemed in order.”
“The certificate merely attributed the death to small-pox, I take it, with no qualifying remarks?”
“Small-pox, simply.”
Holmes and Mr. Bowyer bade Dr. O’Reilly good morning, and their cart was turned in the direction of the cottage where Algernon R
ewse had met his death. At the Town Hall in the market place, however, Holmes stopped the cart and set his watch by the public clock. “This is more than half an hour before London time,” he said, “and we mustn’t be at odds with the natives about the time.”
As he spoke, Dr. O’Reilly came running up breathlessly. “I’ve just heard something,” he said. “Three men heard a shot in the cottage as they were passing, last Tuesday week.”
“Where are the men?”
“I don’t know at the moment; but they can be found. Shall I set about it?”
“If you possibly can,” Holmes said, “you will help us enormously. Can you send them messages to be at the cottage as soon as they can get there today? Tell them they shall have a half-a-sovereign apiece.”
“Right, I will. Good day.”
“Tuesday week,” said Mr. Bowyer as they drove off; “that was the date of Main’s first letter, and the day on which, by his account, Rewse was taken ill. Then if that was the shot that killed Rewse he must have been lying dead in the place while Main was writing those letters reporting his sickness to his mother. The cold-blooded scoundrel!”
“Yes,” Holmes replied, “I think it probable in any case that Tuesday was the day that Rewse was shot. It wouldn’t have been safe for Main to write the mother lying letters about the small-pox before. Rewse might have written home in the meantime, or something might have occurred to postpone Main’s plans, and then there would be impossible explanations required.”
Over a very bad road they jolted on and in the end arrived where the road, now become a mere path, passed a tumble-down old farmhouse.
“This is where the woman lives who cooked and cleaned house for Rewse and Main,” Mr. Bowyer said. “There is the cottage, scarce a hundred yards off, a little to the right of the track.”
“Well,” replied Holmes, “suppose we stop here and ask her a few questions? I like to get the evidence of all the witnesses as soon as possible. It simplifies subsequent work wonderfully.”
They alighted, and Mr. Bowyer roared through the open door and knocked with his stick. In reply to his summons a decent-looking woman of perhaps fifty, but wrinkled beyond her age, and better dressed than any woman Holmes had seen since leaving Cullanin, appeared from the hinder buildings and curtsied pleasantly.
“Good morning, Mrs. Hurley, good morning,” Mr. Bowyer said, “this is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a gentleman from London, who is going to look into this shocking murder of our young friend Mr. Rewse and sift it to the bottom. He would like you to tell him something, Mrs. Hurley.”
The woman curtsied again. “An’ it’s the jintleman is welcome, sor, and doin’s as ut is.” She had a low, pleasing voice, much in contrast with her unattractive appearance, and characterized by the softest and broadest brogue imaginable. “Will ye not come in? Mother av Hiven! An’ thim two livin’ together, an’ fishin’ an’ readin’ an’ all, like brothers! An’ trut’ ut is he was a foine young jintleman indade, indade!”
“I suppose, Mrs. Hurley,” Holmes said, “you’ve seen as much of the life of those two gentlemen here as anybody?”
“Treu ut is, sor; none more - nor as much.”
“Did you ever hear of anybody being on bad terms with Mr. Rewse - anybody at all, Mr. Main or another?”
“Niver a soul in all Mayo. How could ye? Such a foine young jintleman, an’ fair-spoken an’ all.”
“Tell me all that happened on the day that you heard that Mr. Rewse was ill - Tuesday week.”
“In the mornin’, sor, ’twas much as ord’nary. I was over there at half afther sivin, an’ ’twas half an hour afther that I cud hear the jintlemen dhressin’. They tuk their breakfast - though Mr. Rewse’s was a small wan. It was half afther nine that Mr. Main wint off walkin’ to Cullanin, Mr. Rewse stayin’ in, havin’ letthers to write. Half an hour later I came away mesilf. Later than that (it was nigh elivin) I wint across for a pail from the yard, an’ then, through the windy as I passed I saw the dear young jintleman sittin’ writin’ at the table calm an’ peaceful - an’ saw him no more in this warrl’.”
“And after that?”
“Afther that, sor, I came back wid the pail, an’ saw nor heard no more till two o’clock, whin Mr. Main came back from Cullanin.”
“Did you see him as he came back?”
“That I did, sor, as I stud there nailin’ the fence where the pig bruk ut. I’d been there an’ had me oi down the road lookin’ for him an hour past, expectin’ he might be bringin’ somethin’ for me to cook for their dinner. An’ more by token he gave me the toime from his watch, set by the Town Hall clock.”
“And was it two o’clock?”
“It was that to the sthroke, an’ me own ould clock, as right too whin I wint to set ut. An’ ”
“One moment; may I see your clock?”
Mrs. Hurley turned and shut an open door which had concealed an old hanging clock. Holmes produced his watch and compared the time. “Still right I see, Mrs. Hurley,” he said; “your clock keeps excellent time.”
“It does that, sor, an’ nivir more than claned twice by Rafferty since me own father (rest his soul!) lift ut here. ’Tis no bad clock, as Mr. Rewse himsilf said oft an’ again; an’ I always kape ut by the Town Hall toime. But as I was sayin’, Mr. Main came back an’ gave me the toime; thin he wint sthraight to his house, an’ no more av him I saw till may be half afther three.”
“And then?”
“An’ thin, sor, he came across, in a sad takin’, wid a letther. ‘Take ut,’ sez he, ‘an’ have ut posted at Cullanin by the first that can get there. Mr. Rewse has the sickness on him awful bad,’ he sez, ‘an’ ye must not be near the place or ye’ll take ut. I have him to bed, an’ his clothes I shall burn behin’ the cottage,’ sez he, ‘so if ye see smoke ye’ll know what ut is. There’ll be no docthor wanted. I’m wan mesilf, an’ I’ll do all for ’um.’ An’ sure I knew him for a docthor ivir since he come. ‘The cottage ye shall not come near,’ he sez, ’till ut’s over one way or another, an’ yez can lave whativir av food an’ dhrink we want midbetwixt the houses an’ go back, an’ I’ll come and fetch ut. But have the letther posted,’ he sez, ’at wanst. ‘’Tis not contagious,’ he sez, ‘bein’ as I’ve dishinfected it mesilf. But kape yez away from the cottage.’ An’ I kept.”
“And then did he go back to the cottage at once?”
“He did that, sor, an’ a sore stew was he in to all seemin’ - white as paper, and much need, too, the murtherin’ scutt! An’ him always so much the jintleman an’ all. Well I saw no more av him that day. Next day he laves another letther wid the dirthy plates there mid-betwixt the houses, an’ shouts for ut to be posted. ‘’Twas for the poor young jintleman’s mother, sure, as was the other wan. An’ the day afther there was another letther, an’ wan for the undhertaker, too, for he tells me it’s all over, an’ he’s dead. An’ they buried him next day followin’.”
“So that from the time you went for the pail and saw Mr. Rewse writing, till after the funeral, you were never at the cottage at all?”
“Nivir, sor; an’ can ye blame me? Wid children an’ Terence himself sick wid bronchitis in this house?”
“Of course, of course, you did quite right - indeed you only obeyed orders. But now think; do you remember on any one of those three days; hearing a shot, or any other unusual noise in the cottage?”
“Nivir at all, sor. ’Tis that I’ve been thryin’ to bring to mind these four days. Such may have been, but not that I heard.”
“After you went for the pail, and before Mr. Main returned to the house, did Mr. Rewse leave the cottage at all, or might he have done so?”
“He did not lave at all, to my knowledge. Sure he might have gone an’ he might have come back widout my knowin’. But see him I did not.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hurley. I think we’ll go across to the co
ttage now. If any people come will you send them after us? I suppose a policeman is there?”
“He is, sor. An’ the serjint is not far away. They’ve been in chyarge since Mr. Bowyer wint away last - but shlapin’ here.”
Holmes and Mr. Bowyer walked towards the cottage. “Did you notice,” said Mr. Bowyer, “that the woman saw Rewse writing letters? Now what were those letters, and where are they? He has no correspondents that I know of but his mother and sister, and they heard nothing from him. Is this something else? - some other plot? There is something very deep here.”
“Yes,” Holmes replied thoughtfully, “I think our inquiries may take us deeper than we have expected; and in the matter of those letters - yes, I think they may lie near the kernel of the mystery.”
Here they arrived at the cottage - an uncommonly substantial structure for the district. It was square, of plain, solid brick, with a slated roof. On the patch of ground behind it there were still signs of the fires, wherein Main had burnt Rewse’s clothes and other belongings. And sitting on the window-sill in front was a big member of the R.I.C., soldierly and broad, who rose as they came and saluted Mr. Bowyer.
“Good day constable,” Mr. Bowyer said. “I hope nothing has been disturbed?”
“Not a shtick, sor. Nobody’s as much as gone in.”
“Have any of the windows been opened or shut?” Holmes asked.
“This wan was, sor,” the policeman said, indicating the one behind him, “when they took away the corrpse, an’ so was the next round the corrner. ’Tis the bedroom windies they are, an’ they opened thim to give ut a bit av air. The other windy behin’ - sittin-room windy - has not been opened.”
“Very well,” Holmes answered, “we’ll take a look at that unopened window from the inside.”
The door was opened and they passed inside. There was a small lobby, and on the left of this was the bedroom with two single beds. The only other room of consequence was the sitting-room, the cottage consisting merely of these, a small scullery and a narrow closet used as a bath-room, wedged between the bedroom and the sitting room.
