“The doctor knelt beside him, and held down the hand-lamp. One glance was enough to show the healer that his presence could be dispensed with.”
Frank Wiles, Strand Magazine, 1914
“Nothing has been touched up to now,” said Cecil Barker. “I’ll answer for that. You see it all exactly as I found it.”
“When was that?” The sergeant had drawn out his note-book.
“It was just half-past eleven. I had not begun to undress, and I was sitting by the fire in my bedroom when I heard the report. It was not very loud—it seemed to be muffled. I rushed down. I don’t suppose it was thirty seconds before I was in the room.”
“Was the door open?”
“Yes, it was open. Poor Douglas was lying as you see him. His bedroom candle was burning on the table. It was I who lit the lamp some minutes afterwards.”
“Did you see no one?”
“No. I heard Mrs. Douglas coming down the stair behind me, and I rushed out to prevent her from seeing this dreadful sight. Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, came and took her away. Ames had arrived, and we ran back into the room once more.”
“But surely I have heard that the drawbridge is kept up all night.”
“Yes, it was up until I lowered it.”
“Then how could any murderer have got away? It is out of the question. Mr. Douglas must have shot himself.”
“That was our first idea. But see!” Barker drew aside the curtain, and showed that the long, diamond-paned window was open to its full extent. “And look at this!” He held the lamp down and illuminated a smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill. “Some one has stood there in getting out.”
“You mean that some one waded across the moat?”
“Exactly!”
“Then, if you were in the room within half a minute of the crime, he must have been in the water at that very moment.”
“I have not a doubt of it. I wish to heaven that I had rushed to the window! But the curtain screened it, as you can see, and so it never occurred to me. Then I heard the step of Mrs. Douglas, and I could not let her enter the room. It would have been too horrible.”
“Horrible enough!” said the doctor, looking at the shattered head and the terrible marks which surrounded it. “I’ve never seen such injuries since the Birlstone railway smash.”
“But, I say,” remarked the police-sergeant, whose slow, bucolic common sense was still pondering over the open window. “It’s all very well your saying that a man escaped by wading this moat, but what I ask you is—how did he ever get into the house at all if the bridge was up?”
“Ah, that’s the question,” said Barker.
“At what o’clock was it raised?”
“It was nearly six o’clock,” said Ames, the butler.
“I’ve heard,” said the sergeant, “that it was usually raised at sunset. That would be nearer half-past four than six at this time of year.”
“Mrs. Douglas had visitors to tea,” said Ames. “I couldn’t raise it until they went. Then I wound it up myself.”
“Then it comes to this,” said the sergeant: “If anyone came from outside—if they did—they must have got in across the bridge before six and been in hiding ever since, until Mr. Douglas came into the room after eleven.”
“That is so. Mr. Douglas went round the house every night the last thing before he turned in to see that the lights were right. That brought him in here. The man was waiting and shot him. Then he got away through the window and left his gun behind him. That’s how I read it—for nothing else will fit the facts.”
The sergeant picked up a card which lay beside the dead man upon the floor. The initials V. V., and under them the number 341, were rudely scrawled in ink upon it.
“What’s this?” he asked, holding it up.
Barker looked at it with curiosity. “I never noticed it before,” he said. “The murderer must have left it behind him.”
“V. V. 341. I can make no sense of that.”
The sergeant kept turning it over in his big fingers. “What’s V. V.? Somebody’s initials, maybe. What have you got there, Dr. Wood?”
It was a good-sized hammer which had been lying on the rug in front of the fireplace—a substantial, workmanlike hammer. Cecil Barker pointed to a box of brass-headed nails upon the mantelpiece.
“Mr. Douglas was altering the pictures yesterday,” he said. “I saw him myself, standing upon that chair and fixing the big picture above it. That accounts for the hammer.”
“We’d best put it back on the rug where we found it,” said the sergeant, scratching his puzzled head in his perplexity. “It will want the best brains in the force to get to the bottom of this thing. It will be a London job before it is finished.” He raised the hand-lamp and walked slowly round the room. “Hullo!” he cried, excitedly, drawing the window curtain to one side. “What o’clock were those curtains drawn?”
“When the lamps were lit,” said the butler. “It would be shortly after four.”
“Some one had been hiding here, sure enough.” He held down the light, and the marks of muddy boots were very visible in the corner. “I’m bound to say this bears out your theory, Mr. Barker. It looks as if the man got into the house after four when the curtains were drawn, and before six, when the bridge was raised. He slipped into this room because it was the first that he saw. There was no other place where he could hide, so he popped in behind this curtain. That all seems clear enough. It is likely that his main idea was to burgle the house, but Mr. Douglas chanced to come upon him, so he murdered him and escaped.”
“That’s how I read it,” said Barker. “But, I say, aren’t we wasting precious time? Couldn’t we start out and scour the country before the fellow gets away?”
The sergeant considered for a moment.
“There are no trains before six in the morning54; so he can’t get away by rail. If he goes by road with his legs all dripping, it’s odds that some one will notice him. Anyhow, I can’t leave here myself until I am relieved. But I think none of you should go until we see more clearly how we all stand.”
The doctor had taken the lamp and was narrowly scrutinizing the body. “What’s this mark?” he asked. “Could this have any connection with the crime?”
The dead man’s right arm was thrust out from his dressing gown and exposed as high as the elbow. About halfway up the forearm was a curious brown design, a triangle inside a circle, standing out in vivid relief upon the lard-coloured skin.
“It’s not tattooed,” said the doctor, peering through his glasses. “I never saw anything like it. The man has been branded at some time, as they brand cattle. What is the meaning of this?”
“I don’t profess to know the meaning of it,” said Cecil Barker; “but I have seen the mark on Douglas any time this last ten years.”
“And so have I,” said the butler. “Many a time when the master has rolled up his sleeves I have noticed that very mark. I’ve often wondered what it could be.”
“Then it has nothing to do with the crime, anyhow,” said the sergeant. “But it’s a rum55 thing all the same. Everything about this case is rum. Well, what is it now?”
The butler had given an exclamation of astonishment and was pointing at the dead man’s outstretched hand.
“They’ve taken his wedding-ring!” he gasped.
“What!”
“Yes, indeed. Master always wore his plain gold wedding-ring on the little finger of his left hand. That ring with the rough nugget on it was above it, and the twisted snake-ring on the third finger. There’s the nugget and there’s the snake, but the wedding-ring is gone.”
“He’s right,” said Barker.
“Do you tell me,” said the sergeant, “that the wedding ring was below the other?”
“Always!”
“Then the murderer, or whoever it was, first took off this ring you call the nugget-ring, then the wedding-ring, and afterwards put the nugget-ring back again.”
“That i
s so!” The worthy country policeman shook his head. “Seems to me the sooner we get London on to this case the better,” said he. “White Mason is a smart man. No local job has ever been too much for White Mason. It won’t be long now before he is here to help us. But I expect we’ll have to look to London before we are through. Anyhow, I’m not ashamed to say that it is a deal too thick for the likes of me.”
42 The October 1914 issue of the Strand Magazine contained this summary of the prior issue’s contents: “The opening chapters of this new and thrilling adventure of Sherlock Holmes, which commenced in our last issue, described the receipt by Holmes of a cipher message, from which he deduces that some devilry is intended against a man named Douglas, a rich country gentleman living at Birlstone in Sussex, and that the danger is a pressing one. Almost as soon as he has deciphered the message he is visited by Inspector MacDonald, of Scotland Yard, who brings the news that Mr. Douglas has been murdered that morning [sic—see note 28, above]. He asks Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to accompany him to the scene of the crime, and the three go off together.”
43 The ancient stretch of forest known as the Weald (from the Old English wald, or weald, meaning forest) is nearly forty miles wide and rests between the chalk hills of the North and South Downs. It was once part of the much larger forest of Andredsweald (“the wood or forest without habitations”). As Watson notes in “Black Peter,” the Weald was heavily forested and once served as a centre for the iron industry, but the area remains one of England’s most densely wooded places. It is now heavily used for agriculture.
44 The treeless range of chalk hills extending from the north of Hampshire through Surrey into Kent.
45 According to Baedeker’s Great Britain, Tunbridge Wells was “one of the most popular inland watering-places in England … and owes its present favour rather to its pretty surroundings and invigorating air than to its somewhat weak chalybeate springs.” It became “a favourite resort of the Puritans, who have left traces of their partiality in such names as Mount Ephraim and Mount Zion; and it is still specially affected by adherents of the Evangelical school.” Tunbridge Wells was a station on the Hastings branch of the South-Eastern Railway, between Tunbridge Junction and Hastings.
46 The First Crusade, in which European Christians marched upon Jerusalem and captured the city, took place from 1095 to 1099. The movement was instigated by Pope Urban II, who called Christians to arms in his speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095; he spoke of the desecration of the holy lands and abuse of pilgrims, encouraging his supporters to rise up as they echoed his cry of “Deus volt” (“God wills it”). The ragtag “People’s Crusade,” led by preachers Walter Sans Avoir (Walter the Penniless) and Peter the Hermit, were defeated by the Turks, but four other armies amassed at Constantinople and besieged Jerusalem in July 1099, massacring the city’s Muslims and Jews even after the governor had surrendered.
47 There is no known historical figure named Hugo de Capus. “The name,” H. W. Bell writes, in “Three Identifications,” “seems not to have existed in England, or indeed anywhere nearer than the province of Carniola in the present kingdom of Yugoslavia.” In Practical Handbook of Sherlockian Heraldry, Julian Wolff suggests that Holmes was likely referring to “Hugo comes [sic],” the name of a nephew and companion of William the Conqueror, whose descent from Hugh Capet, King of France, could account for the “de Capus.” “Hugo’s father, the half-brother of William,” Wolff elaborates, “was awarded seven hundred manors, and it is not unlikely that the Red King, William Rufus, the Conqueror’s son, granted Birlstone to Hugo to build a fortalice there.”
48 A small fortified building.
49 That is, during the reign of King James I, 1603–1625.
50 H. W. Bell identifies the house as Brambletye Manor, which was twelve miles from Tunbridge Wells and stood next to the ruins of Brambletye House (immortalised in Horatio Smith’s 1826 novel Brambletye House). The crest, he states, was that of the last known occupant of Brambletye House, Sir James Richards, Bart., who lived there in the reign of Charles II. Bell also notes that Arthur Conan Doyle lived for some years in the neighbourhood.
A better identification seems to be that of James Montgomery, who, through the efforts of James Keddie, Jr., reproduced a title page of The Valley of Fear with the handwritten inscription “With all kind remembrances from Arthur Conan Doyle who hopes you have pleasant memories of Groombridge House which is the old house herein described. June 22/21.” Groombridge Place, Montgomery reveals (in his pamphlet entitled A Case of Identity), is a manor house about three miles from Tunbridge Wells. The village of Groombridge is actually in two counties, the New Town being in Sussex and the Old Town in Kent. While the Groombridge manor house has many of the characteristics described by Dr. Watson, it is deficient in many respects, including the placement of the windows, the number of moats, and the absence of stone pillars at its gate. David L. Hammer, in The Game Is Afoot, accepts the Groombridge identification and ascribes the deviations from Watson’s description to “a writer’s inspiration seeking to sharpen and heighten.”
D. Martin Dakin is not so sanguine about the discrepancy. He calls attention to several architectural impossibilities, including, most tellingly, the drawbridge, which is simply not present at Groombridge (although part of the original castle). Dakin maintains that the theory (advanced by Charles O. Merriman, in “A Case of Identity—No. 2”) that Watson “decided to incorporate [the drawbridge] to whet the appetite of his reading public” is insupportable and furthermore
implies a travesty of the facts by Watson, without any excuse on grounds of discretion, that would be highly damaging to his integrity as an author… . [W]e may have to acknowledge sadly that, in spite of the charm of Groombridge Place and the authentic atmosphere it radiates, the true original of Birlstone manor either still awaits discovery, or has suffered the demolition that has overtaken so many fine country houses whose owners cannot afford to keep them up and whose local councils will not accept them as a charge on the rates.
Most recently, Catherine Cooke, in “The Ancient Manor House of Birlstone,” carefully weighs Merriman’s and Dakin’s arguments and concludes that Merriman’s points carry the day, explaining away the discrepancy of the drawbridge on the grounds that Watson may have deliberately obfuscated its description at the behest of the actual owner, who wished to remain anonymous. Of course, this argument could be used to undercut every aspect of Watson’s description and so must be used cautiously. Nevertheless, the weight of modern opinion seems to be on the side of Groombridge.
51 That is, a concert at which smoking was permitted. How modern!
52 In “Barker, the Hated Rival,” Darlene Cypser identifies Cecil James Barker as Barker, Holmes’s “hated rival” of “The Retired Colourman.”
53 Originally, this meant one who fought for a prize, but the word came to mean a professional boxer. Arthur Conan Doyle, as we have seen, was a boxer. He declared himself “well-qualified for the heavy-weight division,” and in 1910, he was invited (but declined) to judge the world heavy-weight championship match between James J. Jeffries and Jack Johnson. His splendid novel of the ring, Rodney Stone (1896), was ranked by The Bookman (January 1897) among his four or five best works. “The Ring is supposed just now to be very wholesome,” the reviewer wrote. “At least an admiration for its past is held to check decadence. So be it.” Beverly Stark, reviewing Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel in The Bookman in November 1906, called Rodney Stone the best of Conan Doyle’s work, and apparently Arthur Bartlett Maurice, the “Junior Editor” of The Bookman for many years and an avowed Sherlockian, did as well.
54 This is plainly and curiously incorrect. As Ian McQueen notes, White Mason was able to send his message to Scotland Yard “by the five-forty train” (see text accompanying note 56, below).
55 John Camden Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (1865) credits “rum” as originally meaning “fine, good, gallant, or valuable, perhaps in some way connected with Rome. Now-a-days it means indiffer
ent, bad, or questionable, and we often hear even persons in polite society use such a phrase as ‘what a rum fellow he is, to be sure,’ in speaking of a man of singular habits or appearance.”
E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) has a different slant on it, defining the word to mean “Queer, quaint, old-fashioned. This word was first applied to Roman Catholic priests, and subsequently to other clergymen. Thus Swift speaks of ‘a rabble of tenants and rusty dull rums’ (country parsons). As these ‘rusty dull rums’ were old-fashioned and quaint, a ‘rum fellow’ came to signify one as odd as a ‘rusty dull rum.’ ” Brewer traces a tentative etymology back to booksellers doing business with the West Indies. Rather than money, rum was exchanged for those books that would not sell particularly well in England.
Sergeant Wilson, of course, may have meant to express either meaning in this situation: “bad or questionable,” “queer or quaint,” or some combination of both.
CHAPTER
IV
DARKNESS
AT THREE IN the morning the chief Sussex detective, obeying the urgent call from Sergeant Wilson of Birlstone, arrived from headquarters in a light dog-cart behind a breathless trotter. By the five-forty train in the morning56 he had sent his message to Scotland Yard, and he was at the Birlstone station at twelve o’clock to welcome us. Mr. White Mason was a quiet, comfortable-looking person, in a loose tweed suit, with a clean-shaven, ruddy face, a stoutish body, and powerful handy legs adorned with gaiters, looking like a small farmer, a retired gamekeeper, or anything upon earth except a very favourable specimen of the provincial criminal officer.
“A real downright snorter, Mr. MacDonald,” he kept repeating. “We’ll have the pressmen57 down like flies when they understand it. I’m hoping we will get our work done before they get poking their noses into it and messing up all the trails. There has been nothing like this that I can remember. There are some bits that will come home to you, Mr. Holmes, or I am mistaken. And you also, Dr. Watson, for the medicos will have a word to say before we finish. Your room is at the Westville Arms. There’s no other place, but I hear that it is clean and good. The man will carry your bags. This way, gentlemen, if you please.”
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