The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘Yes. I continue to work on the practical uses of science in the investigation of crime. I’m putting together a small, portable case containing all the requirements of a scientific detective. There is powder, for fingerprints. There are glass jars with stoppers in which to place small items found at the scenes of crimes. There’s a camera and some other things. The bag is rather heavy, but it would be a great convenience to a detective to have all the necessary equipment to hand when rushing to a crime. Rather like a doctor’s medical bag. Lestrade has given it a cautious welcome. The trouble with the police force is that they half resent a scientific approach. Science minimises the importance of individual policemen in the detection of crime; it makes crime less personal, less a matter of one band of men, the police, pitted against another, the perpetrators of crime. And no investigator makes a reputation for heroism by using scientific techniques. But come and look – I’ll show you my bag.’

  It was a green crocodile-skin valise, some two feet long and two feet deep, fitted with sections and pockets for small items. Charlotte explained how to discover fingerprints by the use of a magnifying glass, and how hairs, threads or other items left behind after a crime could be picked up and preserved, uncontaminated, in the small jars. She showed Mary how to examine a hair under a microscope, took her thumbprint by pressing her thumb on to an ink pad, then on to a piece of paper so that an impression was left. Betsey stood by in a smock, witnessing all this, then, accompanied by the black cat, who had been her companion in the laboratory, returned to the house to help with the preparations for dinner.

  Just after Betsey had gone back to the kitchen, as Charlotte was explaining to Mary the use of the camera in forensic work, a tall man came up the garden.

  ‘Queen’s messenger,’ he said briefly, and handed Charlotte a letter, fixed at the back with a red seal.

  Mary watched Charlotte, evidently somewhat astonished, break the seal and read the letter. She perused the page of heavy type, which was signed at the bottom. Then she exclaimed, ‘And damn you, Mr Gladstone. We shall see about that.’ Whereupon she entered her laboratory, lit a bunsen burner on her workbench, set fire to the letter and flung the burning page into the garden.

  Mary asked no question about all this. When Charlotte sent Betsey off in a cab to the post office with a telegram, evidently an urgent one, she again asked no questions. Dinner, eaten in the garden, was a pleasant meal, the guests being a professor from Harvard and a rather silent Kravonian composer, but Mary detected an uncharacteristic agitation in her friend. Later the composer played some of his own work on Charlotte’s piano while they sewed. ‘Rather advanced,’ was her silent comment as she deftly smocked a small white garment for her coming baby. After the guests had gone she enquired if anything was troubling Charlotte.

  ‘Thank you, Mary,’ Charlotte responded. ‘I’m sorry if my mood is not good. I shall have to explain several things to you in a week or so, I expect. But for the time being …’

  ‘Of course, my dear,’ said Mary placidly. She rose to her feet. ‘I’d better go now. I have a sense I shall be taking delivery of a parrot quite early in the morning. I don’t think the gentleman taking care of it at present wishes to have it in his possession any longer than he needs to.’

  Charlotte smiled. ‘Let me visit you tomorrow. I want to see this unwelcome legacy for myself.’

  *

  Charlotte was, however, detained next day. She had been called to the scene of the murder of a peer, Lord Thursby, who had been found dead in what the House of Lords calls ‘the other place’, tied, in fact, into the chair normally occupied by the Speaker of the House of Commons. His throat had been cut.

  The body having been discovered at seven o’clock in the morning, Charlotte was hastily summoned by Lestrade, now a convert to her use of photography at the scenes of crime. She was to take photographs before the body was removed. Though the House was not in session it would have been dreadful to leave the corpse there any longer than necessary.

  Lestrade told her when she arrived, ‘We’re trying to find Sherlock, so that he can hurry here; but he seems to be somewhere in Wales.’

  Charlotte propped up her tripod in a position suitable to photograph the body, and replied, ‘I’ll do what I can in case you can’t track him down. This isn’t a pretty sight, Jules.’ The strong, thickset body of the black-moustached Thursby, a man in his forties, was sagging in the great chair at the end of the long chamber. His head lolled forward. His shirt-front was covered in blood. He was wearing evening dress.

  ‘Do you want me to go round collecting up any clues which might help?’ Charlotte asked. ‘This room is full of policemen, and shortly you’ll be removing the body – there’ll be a good deal of disturbance. It might be better to find and preserve what evidence I can now. I can hand the cigar ash (which I see there by the front government bench) or anything else which might prove relevant to Sherlock when he arrives.’

  ‘A good idea,’ Lestrade said. Charlotte, with a magnifying glass, began to crawl over the carpet of the House. With tweezers or with a tiny doll’s house dustpan and brush, she collected various items, putting them into small glass jars which she stoppered and labelled. Bystanding policemen watched this operation with curiosity and some scepticism.

  ‘No question of suicide, I suppose?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Very little – judging by the angle of the cuts. And the event did not occur here,’ Lestrade told her.

  ‘Any suspects?’ she asked.

  ‘Too many – we’re working on it, Miss Holmes,’ Lestrade responded, fascinated by the sight of Charlotte’s behind as she crawled up to the well-polished shoes of the late Lord Thursby. She pulled his foot and, with a small sharp knife, took a sample from the bottom of his shoe.

  ‘There are some damp footprints, not Thursby’s, leading to this chair. But, Jules, you are right. The murder, if it was murder, was not done in here.’

  She straightened up. ‘That’s all, I think. I’ll go back and develop the photographs. Do you want me to start work on the other specimens, Jules, or shall I leave them to Sherlock?’

  Lestrade hesitated. ‘Let me tell you that when I see whether we can find him.’ He paused, then said awkwardly, ‘Charlotte – Miss Holmes – I hope you don’t feel I’m making use of you …’

  ‘Then throwing me away like a sucked orange, Jules?’ Charlotte enquired merrily. ‘No, my dear. I’m only too glad to help. And for the rest – I have other things on my mind. I would be just as glad not to help with this affair of Lord Thursby. For one thing, I imagine questioning those with a grudge against him could be long and weary work. Still,’ she said, regarding the corpse, ‘he may have had many faults, but what a dreadful way to die.’ And with that she put her hands intrepidly into the pockets of the corpse and began to pull out the contents, placing the items in separate envelopes and labelling each. Lestrade looked on, puzzled but appreciative.

  The obituarists had difficulty in writing kindly about Mortimer, the late, eighth, Lord Thursby. He had begun his career as a second son, but a riding accident of the hushed-up variety had killed his older brother, making him the heir. This accident took place on the hunting field, when Gerald, the older brother, had been about to jump a hedge from one field to another. Mortimer, then aged nineteen, was hard behind. There was private talk among the witnesses of a deliberate jostling of Gerald’s horse by Mortimer, the result being a fouled jump, a messy landing in the ditch beyond the hedge, and two broken necks, those of the horse and Gerald. Six months later his father died, and Mortimer inherited the title.

  Gerald left a young grieving widow. Not two years later, after the manner of Richard II, Thursby married his brother’s beautiful widow, Alice, who bore him two sons in two years, and then left him, returning to the house of her father, a clergyman in Wales. There was more scandal, when Thursby refused to allow her to see her children, even on their birthdays, or provide any money for her support. A mere twenty-three now, with the death of his br
other and the alienation of his wife behind him, Thursby, leaving his children behind in the care of servants, embarked on a series of journeys, returning rarely to Britain.

  Five years later, his estranged wife Alice unwisely fell in love with a neighbour and conceived a child by him. She pleaded with her husband for a divorce so that she could remarry – by law she could not divorce him for adultery, though he could divorce her on those grounds. She was prepared to face this in order to marry the father of her child, but Thursby refused. Alice, to spare her clergyman father shame, drowned herself in a river.

  Up to this point the scandals surrounding Thursby had involved only his private life and were known only to a small circle. He was still living abroad when another scandal broke out, this time publicly. There had been many complaints about poor safety conditions in the Yorkshire coalfields which had made the Thursbys wealthy. These complaints had been ignored. A strike followed, which Lord Thursby sat out in Buenos Aires until the men were forced by want to return to work. Finally the deteriorated condition of the pit props led to the cave-in of a tunnel and subsequent flooding, causing the deaths of twenty-seven pitmen. The coroner, a local man dependent on the powerful Thursbys, declared the deaths to have been accidental, but the tragedy was so public and the small community round the pit so angry that a question was asked in Parliament and a commission set up to examine the facts. Thursby was declared guilty of negligence and forced to pay compensation to the dead men’s families. He retaliated by closing down all the pits he owned in that area, ruining two villages and throwing two hundred men out of work.

  During all this time he had remained abroad. He returned five years later to court and marry Suzanna, the beautiful, eighteen-year-old daughter of Lady Colindale, a poor widow, mother of five daughters. Lady Colindale’s father, though hard pressed to support the widow and his granddaughters himself, was so horrified by what he knew of Thursby, who was still only in his early thirties, that he refused as Suzanna’s guardian to allow the marriage. Thursby, thwarted and angry, faced with waiting until the girl was twenty-one when she could marry without consent, promptly persuaded her to elope with him. The couple went abroad, returning with a child, a boy, and Thursby took up a clubman’s life in London, rarely going to the family property on the Scottish borders where he had installed his wife and child – and his two older children. Suzanna was forbidden to communicate with her family in any way.

  Small wonder the obituarists, writing of Thursby’s death by murder, found it difficult to praise his character or achievements or suggest with any conviction that he would be deeply missed by family and friends.

  However, Sherlock returned and Charlotte disengaged herself from the mystery. Less than a week after Thursby’s death, she was at Battersea with Mary, studying Mary’s parrot with some distaste. The creature, small, grey and unimposing, encased in a large brass cage on a table by the window, was declaring, in a rumbling bass voice, for the fourth time, ‘Surely Thy goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life, Amen,’ and then began the psalm again, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me …’ At that point Charlotte hung a cloth over the cage, saying, ‘Into the valley of the shadow of death, with you, Poll Parrot.’ The parrot, mumbling, ‘… lie down in green pastures,’ then ceased to speak.

  Charlotte said to Mary, who was knitting, ‘I believe you were hoping I’d take a fancy to it and plead with you to let me have it.’

  Mary, needles clicking, responded placidly, ‘It was a faint hope.’

  ‘Now no hope at all,’ Charlotte said. ‘Who taught it to speak?’

  ‘John’s aunt was married to a very pious man, active in church affairs,’ Mary said. ‘He taught the parrot. He died many years ago but of course,’ she said ruefully, ‘parrots live on.’

  ‘Amen,’ said a voice from under the cloth. Mary started.

  ‘This is not good for you, Mary,’ Charlotte said. ‘In your condition you must avoid upset.’

  ‘I know,’ Mary said.

  ‘Besides,’ Charlotte continued remorselessly, ‘I have heard of cases where children learnt to speak by copying the family parrot. They started to screech and say “Pretty Polly”. Do you want your child’s first words to be “We have done those things we ought not to have done”?’

  To this Mary merely replied calmly, ‘Well, Charlotte, I have the impression that unforeseen consequences of every kind go with children, as ducks go with water.’ And Charlotte surprised Mary by agreeing unexpectedly and wholeheartedly to this proposition.

  *

  The reason for this was to come out during Mrs Watson’s visit next day to Charlotte. They were sitting in the garden at a rustic table on the lawn. Mary was now sewing a little nightgown while Charlotte, opposite, was reading to her from the recently published novel, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

  Into this peaceful scene came Sherlock Holmes, by arrangement, to collect the samples taken at the scene of Thursby’s death by Charlotte from the House of Commons a week earlier. Betsey brought tea out into the garden and all three sat at the table in late summer sunshine, drinking orange pekoe tea and eating warm scones with cream and Mrs Digby’s strawberry jam.

  Sherlock, in a white linen suit and panama hat, was quite relaxed. The samples were in a case at his side.

  ‘How peaceful,’ he exclaimed with pleasure, looking up at the cloudless blue sky. ‘One might as well be in the country.’

  Unless the subject will cause terrible grief or offence, it is impossible of course, knowing someone is involved in a murder case, not to discuss the matter. Sherlock himself introduced the subject: ‘I tried to spare John the visit to Yorkshire to interview the strike leader, Matthew Truscott,’ he said to Mary. ‘I said I would go myself. John should be with you now. But he claimed you were adamant he should go and you were perfectly well able to look after yourself for a short while.’

  Mary said, ‘We do not expect any excitement before Christmas, so I am well able to do without John for a few days. A man must have his liberty, after all. Marriage is not serfdom. But thank you, Sherlock, for your consideration. So he will be seeing the man who led the strike at Lord Thursby’s mines? Do you really believe a miner was responsible for Lord Thursby’s death?’

  ‘It is a possibility, no more. Truscott could be the villain, for Thursby’s closure of the mines after the strike caused much suffering, and is still remembered. When he reopened the mines the men had to go back to work, but there’s still very strong feeling against him up there. Thursby was a silly fellow,’ Sherlock said. ‘Shutting down, then reopening the mines cost him a fortune, for they were flooded. I suppose he finally concluded it was more profitable for him to have them open. He closed them out of spite, of course, an absurd motive for any action.’

  ‘Let us hope he improved the safety of the mines when he reopened the pits,’ remarked Charlotte.

  ‘I believe he did,’ agreed Sherlock. ‘Perhaps more for his own reasons than for the miners’ benefit. He could not afford another scandal and further compensation payments. But of course, even as Thursby died the miners were on strike again demanding unions. Thursby had the coalfields again at his throat. He was trying to starve them out. I don’t fancy John’s welcome will be warm when the men hear he’s trying to find out who killed their employer. Too many of them will be only too glad he’s dead, and not keen to find his killer, I regret to say. As to whether he was killed by a miner seeking vengeance, I cannot say. He was a man with many enemies.’

  ‘The fact that his dead body was transported to the House of Commons might indicate some kind of political motive for his killing,’ said Charlotte. ‘I told you of finding odd, damp footprints on the carpet leading to the Speaker’s chair. Meanwhile I’m putting together some statistics, in an attempt to establish a statistical basis for catching the perpetrators of murders, based on certain constant factors such as the means used to kill the victim, where the deed is done and so forth.’

  ‘Sensible,
’ said Sherlock.

  ‘A matter of common sense, I should have thought,’ Mary said, her head bent over the little white flannel nightgown.

  ‘There’s always a point to analysing and systematising what we call common sense,’ Sherlock said. ‘To take an example, if a man were to die of poison in his own dining-room we would probably assume the murderer was someone in his own household, most probably a woman, and that the motive for his murder was personal. But if the same man were shot with a revolver while riding in the park we would no doubt consider it more likely that his assailant was male and that there might be a number of reasons for the murder – an assassination for political reasons, for example, or revenge for a wrongly given order on the battlefield, causing many deaths. Common sense, one might say, is a conclusion based on experience. Yet,’ he said, ‘it might be very useful to make a proper analysis of these things, to produce a formula, if one existed. This could make the process of detection swifter and more exact. Congratulations, my dear,’ he said to Charlotte.

  ‘I’ll accept your congratulations only after I have come to some useful conclusions, if I do,’ Charlotte smiled. ‘Meanwhile, Sherlock, although I haven’t analysed the samples, I think you’ll find something very curious about the particle I took from the jacket pocket of the late Lord Thursby. It was so big, about the size of my little fingertip, that analysis was hardly required.’

  ‘And it was – you think?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘Opium,’ she replied.

  ‘Opium!’ he exclaimed.

  She nodded, but at that moment they were interrupted by the arrival through the french windows into the garden of a young woman in Kravonian national dress – an embroidered blouse, a full embroidered skirt of red and white, a pinafore and stockings. As they gazed at her, a small, fair-haired boy of about three years old, wearing green knickerbockers and a green jacket, erupted from behind the young woman and sped up the path towards Charlotte, crying, ‘Mother!’