The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Holmes’s eyes were glancing round the room again, and an exclamation of surprise escaped him as they encountered a photo standing on the piano.

  “Surely that’s a photograph of Mr. Booth,” he said. “It exactly resembles the description I have of him?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Purnell, “and a very good one it is too.”

  “How long has it been taken?” said Holmes, picking it up.

  “Oh, only a few weeks, sir. I was here when the boy from the photographer’s brought them up. Mr. Booth opened the packet whilst I was in the room. There were only two photos, that one and another which he gave to me.”

  “You interest me exceedingly,” said Holmes. “This striped lounge suit he is wearing. Is it the same that he had on when he left Wednesday morning?”

  “Yes, he was dressed just like that, as far as I can remember.”

  “Do you recollect anything of importance that Mr. Booth said to you last Wednesday before he went out?”

  “Not very much, I’m afraid, sir. When I took his cup of chocolate up to his bedroom, he said—”

  “One moment,” interrupted Holmes. “Did Mr. Booth usually have a cup of chocolate in the morning?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, summer and winter alike. He was very particular about it and would ring for it as soon as he waked. I believe he’d rather have gone without his breakfast almost than have missed his cup of chocolate. Well, as I was saying, sir, I took it up to him myself on Wednesday morning, and he made some remark about the weather and then, just as I was leaving the room, he said, ‘Oh, by the way, Mrs. Purnell, I shall be going away tonight for a couple of weeks. I’ve packed my bag and will call for it this afternoon.’ ”

  “No doubt you were very much surprised at this sudden announcement?” queried Holmes.

  “Not very much, sir. Ever since he’s had this auditing work to do for the branch banks there’s been no knowing when he would be away. Of course, he’d never been off for two weeks at a stretch, except at holiday times, but he had so often been away for a few days at a time that I had got used to his popping off with hardly a moment’s notice.”

  “Let me see, how long has he had this extra work at the bank—several months, hasn’t he?”

  “More. It was about last Christmas, I believe, when they gave it to him.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Holmes carelessly, “and this work naturally took him from home a good deal?”

  “Yes, indeed, and it seemed to quite tire him, so much evening and night work too, you see, sir. It was enough to knock him out, for he was always such a very quiet, retiring gentleman and hardly ever used to go out in the evenings before.”

  “Has Mr. Booth left many of his possessions behind him?” asked Holmes.

  “Very few, indeed, and what he has are mostly old useless things. But he’s a most honest thief, sir,” said Mrs. Purnell paradoxically, “and paid me his rent, before he went out on Wednesday morning, right up to next Saturday, because he wouldn’t be back by then.”

  “That was good of him,” said Holmes, smiling thoughtfully. “By the way, do you happen to know if he gave away any other treasures, before he left?”

  “Well not just before, but during the last few months he’s taken away most of his books and sold them I think, a few at a time. He had rather a fancy for old books and has told me that some editions he had were worth quite a lot.”

  During this conversation, Lestrade had been sitting drumming his fingers impatiently on the table. Now he got up. “Really, I fear I shall have to leave you to this gossip,” he said. “I must go and wire instructions for the arrest of Mr. Booth. If only you would have looked before at this old blotter, which I found in the wastebasket, you would have saved yourself a good deal of unnecessary trouble, Mr. Holmes,” and he triumphantly slapped down a sheet of well-used blotting paper on the table.

  Holmes picked it up and held it in front of a mirror over the sideboard. Looking over his shoulder I could plainly read the reflected impression of a note written in Mr. Booth’s handwriting, of which Holmes had procured samples.

  It was to a booking agency in Liverpool, giving instructions to them to book a first-class private cabin and passage on board the Empress Queen from Liverpool to New York. Parts of the note were slightly obliterated by other impressions, but it went on to say that a check was enclosed to pay for tickets, etc., and it was signed J. Booth.

  Holmes stood silently scrutinizing the paper for several minutes.

  It was a well-used sheet, but fortunately the impression of the note was well in the center, and hardly obliterated at all by the other marks and blots, which were all round the outer circumference of the paper. In one corner the address of the Liverpool booking agency was plainly decipherable, the paper evidently having been used to blot the envelope with also.

  “My dear Lestrade, you have indeed been more fortunate than I had imagined,” said Holmes at length, handing the paper back to him. “May I ask what steps you propose to take next?”

  “I shall cable at once to the New York police to arrest the fellow as soon as he arrives,” said Lestrade, “but first I must make quite certain the boat doesn’t touch at Queenstown or anywhere and give him a chance of slipping through our fingers.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Holmes quietly. “I had already looked to see as I thought it not unlikely, at first, that Mr. Booth might have intended to sail by the Empress Queen.”

  Lestrade gave me a wink for which I would dearly have liked to have knocked him down, for I could see that he disbelieved my friend. I felt a keen pang of disappointment that Holmes’s foresight should have been eclipsed in this way by what, after all, was mere good luck on Lestrade’s part.

  Holmes had turned to Mrs. Purnell and was thanking her.

  “Don’t mention it, sir,” she said. “Mr. Booth deserves to be caught, though I must say he’s always been a gentleman to me. I only wish I could have given you some more useful information.”

  “On the contrary,” said Holmes, “I can assure you that what you have told us has been of the utmost importance and will very materially help us. It’s just occurred to me, by the way, to wonder if you could possibly put up my friend Dr. Watson and myself for a few days, until we have had time to look into this little matter?”

  “Certainly, sir, I shall be most happy.”

  “Good,” said Holmes. “Then you may expect us back to dinner about seven.”

  —

  When we got outside, Lestrade at once announced his intention of going to the police office and arranging for the necessary orders for Booth’s detention and arrest to be cabled to the head of the New York police; Holmes retained an enigmatical silence as to what he purposed to do but expressed his determination to remain at Broomhill and make a few further inquiries. He insisted, however, upon going alone.

  “Remember, Watson, you are here for a rest and holiday and I can assure you that if you did remain with me you would only find my program a dull one. Therefore, I insist upon your finding some more entertaining way of spending the remainder of the day.”

  Past experience told me that it was quite useless to remonstrate or argue with Holmes when once his mind was made up, so I consented with the best grace I could, and leaving Holmes, drove off in the hansom, which he assured me he would not require further.

  I passed a few hours in the art gallery and museum and then, after lunch, had a brisk walk out on the Manchester Road and enjoyed the fresh air and moorland scenery, returning to Ashgate Road at seven with better appetite than I had been blessed with for months.

  Holmes had not returned, and it was nearly half past seven before he came in. I could see at once that he was in one of his most reticent moods, and all my inquiries failed to elicit any particulars of how he had passed his time or what he thought about the case.

  The whole evening he remained coiled up in an easy chair puffing at his pipe and hardly a word could I get from him.

  His inscrutable countenance and persis
tent silence gave me no clue whatever as to his thought on the inquiry he had in hand, although I could see his whole mind was concentrated upon it.

  —

  Next morning, just as we had finished breakfast, the maid entered with a note. “From Mr. Jervis, sir; there’s no answer,” she said.

  Holmes tore open the envelope and scanned the note hurriedly and, as he did so, I noticed a flush of annoyance spread over his usually pale face.

  “Confound his impudence,” he muttered. “Read that, Watson. I don’t ever remember to have been treated so badly in a case before.”

  The note was a brief one:

  The Cedars, Fulwood.

  September sixth

  Mr. Jervis, on behalf of the directors of the British Consolidated Bank, begs to thank Mr. Sherlock Holmes for his prompt attention and valued services in the matter concerning the fraud and disappearance of their ex-employee, Mr. Jabez Booth.

  Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, informs us that he has succeeded in tracking the individual in question who will be arrested shortly. Under these circumstances they feel it unnecessary to take up any more of Mr. Holmes’s valuable time.

  “Rather cool, eh, Watson? I’m much mistaken if they don’t have cause to regret their action when it’s too late. After this I shall certainly refuse to act for them any further in the case, even if they ask me to do so. In a way I’m sorry because the matter presented some distinctly interesting features and is by no means the simple affair our friend Lestrade thinks.”

  “Why, don’t you think he is on the right scent?” I exclaimed.

  “Wait and see, Watson,” said Holmes mysteriously. “Mr. Booth hasn’t been caught yet, remember.” And that was all that I could get out of him.

  One result of the summary way in which the banker had dispensed with my friend’s services was that Holmes and I spent a most restful and enjoyable week in the small village of Hathersage, on the edge of the Derbyshire moors, and returned to London feeling better for our long moorland rambles.

  Holmes having very little work in hand at the time, and my wife not yet having returned from her Swiss holiday, I prevailed upon him, though not without considerable difficulty, to pass the next few weeks with me instead of returning to his rooms at Baker Street.

  Of course, we watched the development of the Sheffield forgery case with the keenest interest. Somehow the particulars of Lestrade’s discoveries got into the papers, and the day after we left Sheffield they were full of the exciting chase of Mr. Booth, the man wanted for the Sheffield Bank frauds.

  They spoke of “the guilty man restlessly pacing the deck of the Empress Queen, as she ploughed her way majestically across the solitary wastes of the Atlantic, all unconscious that the inexorable hand of justice could stretch over the ocean and was already waiting to seize him on his arrival in the New World.” And Holmes after reading these sensational paragraphs would always lay down the paper with one of his enigmatical smiles.

  At last the day on which the Empress Queen was due at New York arrived, and I could not help but notice that even Holmes’s usually inscrutable face wore a look of suppressed excitement as he unfolded the evening paper. But our surprise was doomed to be prolonged still further. There was a brief paragraph to say that the Empress Queen had arrived off Long Island at six a.m. after a good passage. There was, however, a case of cholera on board, and the New York authorities had consequently been compelled to put the boat in quarantine, and none of the passengers or crew would be allowed to leave her for a period of twelve days.

  Two days later there was a full column in the papers stating that it had been definitely ascertained that Mr. Booth was really on board the Empress Queen. He had been identified and spoken to by one of the sanitary inspectors who had had to visit the boat. He was being kept under close observation, and there was no possible chance of his escaping. Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard, by whom Booth had been so cleverly tracked down and his escape forestalled, had taken passage on the Oceania, due in New York on the tenth, and would personally arrest Mr. Booth when he was allowed to land.

  Never before or since have I seen my friend Holmes so astonished as when he had finished reading this announcement. I could see that he was thoroughly mystified, though why he should be so was quite a puzzle to me. All day he sat coiled up in an easy chair, with his brows drawn down into two hard lines and his eyes half closed as he puffed away at his oldest brier in silence.

  “Watson,” he said once, glancing across at me. “It’s perhaps a good thing that I was asked to drop that Sheffield case. As things are turning out I fancy I should only have made a fool of myself.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I began by assuming that somebody else wasn’t one—and now it looks as though I had been mistaken.”

  For the next few days Holmes seemed quite depressed, for nothing annoyed him more than to feel that he had made any mistake in his deductions or got onto a false line of reasoning.

  At last the fatal tenth of September, the day on which Booth was to be arrested, arrived. Eagerly but in vain we scanned the evening papers. The morning of the eleventh came and still brought no news of the arrest, but in the evening papers of that day there was a short paragraph hinting that the criminal had escaped again.

  For several days the papers were full of the most conflicting rumors and conjectures as to what had actually taken place, but all were agreed in affirming that Mr. Lestrade was on his way home alone and would be back in Liverpool on the seventeenth or eighteenth.

  —

  On the evening of the last named day Holmes and I sat smoking in his Baker Street rooms, when his boy came in to announce that Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard was below and would like the favor of a few minutes’ conversation.

  “Show him up, show him up,” said Holmes, rubbing his hands together with an excitement quite unusual to him.

  Lestrade entered the room and sat down in the seat to which Holmes waved him, with a most dejected air.

  “It’s not often I’m at fault, Mr. Holmes,” he began, “but in this Sheffield business I’ve been beaten hollow.”

  “Dear me,” said Holmes pleasantly, “you surely don’t mean to tell me that you haven’t got your man yet.”

  “I do,” said Lestrade. “What’s more, I don’t think he ever will be caught!”

  “Don’t despair so soon,” said Holmes encouragingly. “After you have told us all that’s already happened, it’s just within the bounds of possibility that I may be able to help you with some little suggestions.”

  Thus encouraged Lestrade began his strange story to which we both listened with breathless interest.

  “It’s quite unnecessary for me to dwell upon incidents which are already familiar,” he said. “You know of the discovery I made in Sheffield which, of course, convinced me that the man I wanted had sailed for New York on the Empress Queen. I was in a fever of impatience for his arrest, and when I heard that the boat he had taken passage on had been placed in quarantine, I set off at once in order that I might actually lay hands upon him myself. Never have five days seemed so long.

  “We reached New York on the evening of the ninth, and I rushed off at once to the head of the New York police and from him learned that there was no doubt whatever that Mr. Jabez Booth was indeed on board the Empress Queen. One of the sanitary inspectors who had had to visit the boat had not only seen but actually spoken to him. The man exactly answered the description of Booth which had appeared in the papers. One of the New York detectives had been sent on board to make a few inquiries and to inform the captain privately of the pending arrest. He found that Mr. Jabez Booth had actually had the audacity to book his passage and travel under his real name without even attempting to disguise himself in any way. He had a private first-class cabin, and the purser declared that he had been suspicious of the man from the first. He had kept himself shut up in his cabin nearly all the time, posing as an eccentric semi-invalid person who must not be disturbed on any account.
Most of his meals had been sent down to his cabin, and he had been seen on deck but seldom and hardly ever dined with the rest of the passengers. It was quite evident that he had been trying to keep out of sight, and to attract as little attention as possible. The stewards and some of the passengers who were approached on the subject later were all agreed that this was the case.

  “It was decided that during the time the boat was in quarantine nothing should be said to Booth to arouse his suspicions but that the pursers, steward and captain, who were the only persons in the secret, should between them keep him under observation until the tenth, the day on which passengers would be allowed to leave the boat. On that day he should be arrested.”

  Here we were interrupted by Holmes’s boy who came in with a telegram. Holmes glanced at it with a faint smile.

  “No answer,” he said, slipping it in his waistcoat pocket. “Pray continue your very interesting story, Lestrade.”

  “Well, on the afternoon of the tenth, accompanied by the New York chief inspector of police and detective Forsyth,” resumed Lestrade, “I went on board the Empress Queen half an hour before she was due to come up to the landing stage to allow passengers to disembark.

  “The purser informed us that Mr. Booth had been on deck and that he had been in conversation with him about fifteen minutes before our arrival. He had then gone down to his cabin and the purser, making some excuse to go down also, had actually seen him enter it. He had been standing near the top of the companionway since then and was sure Booth had not come up on deck again since.

  “ ‘At last,’ I muttered to myself, as we all went down below, led by the purser who took us straight to Booth’s cabin. We knocked but, getting no answer, tried the door and found it locked. The purser assured us, however, that this was nothing unusual. Mr. Booth had had his cabin door locked a good deal and, often, even his meals had been left on a tray outside. We held a hurried consultation and, as time was short, decided to force the door. Two good blows with a heavy hammer broke it from the hinges, and we all rushed in. You can picture our astonishment when we found the cabin empty. We searched it thoroughly, and Booth was certainly not there.”