“Now, as I was later to learn from Mr Yarrow, this was not the place where the dead girl’s body had been found, and yet it seemed to hold a fascination for Noah Blogg. Could it be, I conjectured, that he had witnessed something there involving Northcote, and that the latter had threatened him in some way, in order to secure his silence? This conjecture, I need hardly add, was strengthened considerably when, by the process of argument I described to you earlier, I concluded that the spot which held such a morbid fascination for Blogg was indeed the very spot on which Sarah Dickens had been murdered. The more I reflected on the matter, the more I became convinced that it was Northcote who had murdered Sarah Dickens, for the hypothesis accorded with every other fact of which I was aware.
“Clearly, it was imperative that I find a way to overcome the fear that had been planted in Blogg’s breast, and persuade him to tell what he knew. I could, I judged, present a reasonably compelling case without Blogg’s testimony, but to have it would undoubtedly strengthen my position considerably. I realized that to gain his trust on such an important matter would be no mean achievement, but I am glad to say I eventually succeeded this morning, with considerable assistance, I must record, from Blogg’s father, whom I had earlier managed to persuade of the truth of the matter.”
“Thank the Lord you did succeed!” cried Reid.
“You have performed a very great service to all of us, Mr Holmes,” said Mary Blythe-Headley. Holmes bowed his head in acceptance of the compliment as she continued, “Those who doubted John’s honesty and integrity, and who doubted, also, your abilities and motives, owe you both a sincere and profound apology.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room for a moment, then Admiral Blythe-Headley stepped forward and extended his hand.
“I regret greatly,” said he in a gruff voice, “the manner in which I addressed you last night, Mr Holmes. I was guilty of gross rudeness. Please accept my sincerest apologies.”
Holmes nodded as he took the hand that was offered to him. “You were guilty, perhaps, as I observed earlier, of being a trifle hasty in your judgements.”
“I have often felt, during the last three years,” said Anthony Blythe-Headley abruptly, “that my father’s great animosity towards Reid was borne at least partly from an unstated, and perhaps unacknowledged, fear that I had been involved in some way with the dead girl. No, Father, do not protest! I know it to be true; I have read it often in your eyes. I need hardly say that such a fear was quite groundless, but I resented my father thinking such a thing of me, and in my stupidity I blamed Reid for causing him to have such thoughts.” He paused and shook his head. “I used to think that I was such a clever fellow, but my pretensions to intellect have been shamed by this gentleman,” he continued, indicating Holmes. “He alone has used his brain in an honourable and worthy manner!” He paused again. “It is clear to me now that I am the most stupid dolt in the parish! And to think that all along it was Northcote that had been involved with the girl!”
“I doubt it was as simple as that,” said Holmes with a shake of the head.
“I do not follow you,” said Anthony Blythe-Headley.
“Regrettably, it must be admitted that men and women do sometimes murder those with whom they have been affectionate, but not usually so quickly as in this instance, and we must suspect that the true motives in this case have not yet come to light. What does seem very likely, however, is that Northcote’s involvement with Sarah Dickens was not quite as it appears, and that any display of affection on his part was feigned merely to ensure her silence for a few weeks until he could seal her lips permanently. That he did feign some affection is suggested, I believe, by a page which has been cut from her exercise book of poems: it has been very neatly removed with a pair of nail scissors, and we must suppose it was done by the girl herself. The page is nowhere in evidence now – I have questioned John Dickens on the point – so we may further suppose that she gave it to Northcote. Very likely, that cold and heartless man feigned an interest in her poetry, as he had feigned an interest in the girl herself, and requested it. She would have been flattered by this request, not realizing that he wanted the page only to have a sample of her handwriting from which to prepare the note he intended to leave in Jenkin’s Clump when he had murdered her. If that page ever turns up among his papers, incidentally, I’ll warrant that it contains no instances of the letter ‘f’.”
“You speak of Northcote wishing to ensure her silence,” interrupted Reid in a tone of some puzzlement, “but about what, pray?”
“Something she knew about Northcote himself,” replied Holmes, “something he did not wish anyone to know. It is a point, I admit, which exercised my mind for some time until I hit upon a solution. For how could a local peasant girl like Sarah Dickens learn anything of significance about a man such as Northcote, who occupied a station far removed from her experience and knowledge?”
“It does seem a trifle unlikely,” concurred Reid.
“Indeed; unlikely, but not impossible. It seems to me probable – although here I stray into the realm of conjecture – that this whole business began on the day that Sarah fainted from the heat when picking apples in the orchard here, an incident that Mr Yarrow described to me. If you will recall, Captain Reid, you helped carry her to the house.”
“I remember it well. We brought her into this very room, through the French windows, and laid her on the couch in the corner there.”
“So I understand. Mr Yarrow further mentioned that she was attended by the housekeeper. Now, let us suppose that the housekeeper, having satisfied herself that the girl was comfortable and in no danger of a further attack, had left her alone here for a time. Let us further suppose that, by chance, your father’s secretary happened to enter this room during the period the girl was lying here alone. He would not have known she was here, and she would not yet be fully recovered, so would be lying quite still. Under the circumstances, it is not impossible that he would have failed to see her. His view of the couch as he entered the room would have been partly obscured by this little table and the large vase upon it, and his thoughts would perhaps have been absorbed by his reason for entering the room.”
“What was that, do you suppose?” queried Reid.
“Perhaps to do something which he did not wish anyone to witness,” replied Holmes. “He may have intended to examine or abstract some private papers of your father’s in the desk over there. He would know that you and your friends were all out of the house, working in the orchard, and thus would not interrupt him.
“We may further conjecture that, as he was engaged upon his secret, furtive work, something, some slight movement of the girl’s, perhaps, caused him to look up, and he saw, no doubt to his very great alarm, that she was watching him.”
“I cannot see why the girl’s presence should have caused him any great alarm,” protested Reid. “After all, she could not have appreciated that he was engaged in anything underhand or dishonest.”
“Perhaps not,” returned Holmes. “But knowledge of his own guilt can have a powerful and disturbing effect upon a man’s reason and judgement. The result is not infrequently mental panic, and the conviction that others know more than they in fact do. The panic that would have gripped Northcote at such a moment would have arisen as much, therefore, from his own sense of guilt as from the girl’s presence. He would have seen only that, should she have chosen to do so, Sarah Dickens could have exposed his shameful dishonesty to the world, and this threat would have loomed above every other consideration in his mind. He is, however, a very cunning and deceitful man, and I have little doubt, therefore, that he spoke in a friendly and flattering manner to the girl, and perhaps in the course of the conversation, made an arrangement to meet her again in a few days’ time. That, I suggest, is how the connection between the two of them began. The girl was young and no doubt appeared impressionable. It must have seemed no difficult task to an educated man like Northcote to turn her head and manipulate her affections. On his side the arr
angement would have been one of expediency only, a way to gain a little time until he could dispose permanently of the threat that he considered she posed to him. We may imagine he began at once to plan the removal of that threat.”
“It still seems scarcely credible,” I interjected, “that anyone would so swiftly contemplate murder in such circumstances.”
“Perhaps so, Watson, but we do not yet know the extent of Northcote’s dishonesty. Perhaps his hidden crimes are yet greater than I have supposed. He may have been so deeply mired in deceit that he could see no other way out. Nor do we know the true nature of his character. Perhaps, despite the quiet and reserved appearance he presents to the world, he is a man easily moved to violence when his plans are thwarted. The annals of crime are full of such men. I have myself known several.”
“But surely he could have found some other way to prevent the girl speaking of what she had seen,” I persisted. “He could simply have dismissed the matter as of no consequence, for instance, and hoodwinked the girl in that fashion.”
“Perhaps he attempted such a stratagem,” returned Holmes, “and met with no success. Perhaps the girl said something, which indicated to him that she understood all too well the nature of what she had witnessed, and made it clear that any further attempts at deception on his part would be unavailing. As I have frequently had cause to observe, the simplest of people can have surprisingly accurate intuitions as to the motives and character of others. What seems likely, anyway, is that however agreeably he may have spoken to her, and however flattered she may have been by his attentions, she still, nevertheless, considered that she had some hold over him, and was disagreeably pressing in her attentions.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Reid.
“I feel certain that the window that was broken shortly before your departure for India was broken by Sarah Dickens herself. You blamed it on village boys who had been playing in the orchard earlier, but I always thought that unlikely: the broken window was that of the upstairs study, which is on the opposite side of the house from the orchard. I think it more than probable that Sarah, anxious to hear when she would see Northcote again, endeavoured to communicate with him by throwing pebbles up at the lighted window of the study, in which she knew he would probably be working. Unfortunately, we must suppose, her throw was a little over-vigorous.”
“What you are suggesting, then,” said Reid after a moment, “is that Northcote has been swindling my father in some way?”
“I think it highly probable. It is by far the most likely motive for the crime. The account you gave me last week of your family’s affairs suggested that Northcote had advanced quite quickly after his arrival here from simply being your father’s amanuensis to a position of greater confidence and intimacy. I believe he found the temptation to abuse that position too great to resist.”
“Wait a moment!” cried Reid abruptly. “Hidden in the bottom of Northcote’s wardrobe, where I found my satchel, were many bundles of documents and sheets of paper covered with figures. I was so excited then at finding my satchel that I did not give the other things any consideration, but now that I think about it, I am certain they were private papers of my father’s, including a copy of his will. Oh Lord!” he cried all at once in a tone of desperation. “Whatever can I do?”
“You must institute a thorough examination of your father’s affairs at once,” said Holmes in a firm voice, “and seek the advice of the best lawyer in West Sussex. I have little doubt that such an examination will reveal that fraudulent transactions have taken place. You must remember that Northcote has already successfully counterfeited both your father’s hand and that of the dead girl. He may well have signed your father’s name to many things of which no one has any knowledge.”
“This is almost too much for my brain to absorb!” cried Reid, shaking his head. He looked in turn at each of us, an expression of stupefaction upon his features, as if appealing for our help.
“The actions of my family have been shameful,” said Anthony Blythe-Headley abruptly, “and I am sure we would wish to do anything that might help to expunge that shame. I for one should be very pleased to do anything you wish, Reid, to help you to sort out what must be done.”
“Do not falter now, Reid,” said Captain Ranworth, putting his hand upon his friend’s shoulder. “Everything will soon be put to rights, you will see! I’ll go at once and bring all the papers from Northcote’s room, pile them on the desk here, and make a start at sorting them.”
Then Mary Blythe-Headley stepped forward from where she stood beside her father and offered Reid her hand.
“You must be exhausted by all that has happened,” said she. “Let us sit together in the garden for a little while, before the daylight vanishes altogether. I have a great deal of news and other things I wish to tell you, and you, I imagine, have much to tell me.”
“I think it is time for us to make our way back to the village, Watson,” said Holmes to me. “There is no more for us to do here now!”
Outside, in the garden of Oakbrook Hall, Holmes expressed a desire to follow a footpath he had observed earlier, which he thought might offer a route to Topley Cross more direct than the road. It was a pleasant pathway, which passed by field and hedgerow down the hill. The sun was just setting as we left, and behind us the sky was a deep blue and the moon was up. Ahead, the horizon was a glow of reddish-orange, above which, in a turquoise sky, a few fugitive scraps of cloud were tinged pink by the dying sun, and a few late crows were hurrying home to roost. For some time we tramped over the rolling countryside in silence, and it was one of the most memorable walks of my life.
“Such a case as this one,” said Holmes as we passed along the edge of a ploughed field, “never fails to remind me of the old saying, that truth is like water: confine it how you may, it will find a way out.”
“It might have taken somewhat longer to emerge without your efforts in the matter,” I remarked with a chuckle.
“It is kind of you to say so, Watson,” returned Holmes, “but I am conscious sometimes of being, in some mysterious way, but a vessel, a mere conduit down which the truth can pass.”
“I think you do yourself less than justice, Holmes.”
“Well, well, I shall not argue the point. Life is a series of such mysteries, and in solving one, we merely arrive at the next.” Abruptly, my friend stopped and turned to me. “But how is your wound, old man?” he queried. “I really must beg your forgiveness! I have been quite lost in my own reflections, I am afraid. It was unpardonably thoughtless of me to drag you over these fields.”
“Not at all,” I returned. “It is nothing; nothing, at least, that a hot cup of tea at The White Hart will not put right!”
“Good man!” cried my friend with a chuckle. “There is much tragedy in the world, Watson,” he continued after a moment, as we resumed our progress, “and much sorry loss of life, from Maiwand to the Willow Pool. Yet as the night that now creeps over the land quickens our desire for the rising of the sun in the morning, so, perhaps, each dark passage in our lives may teach us to strive always for the light. So, at least, with the help of a merciful Providence, we must hope.”
The Adventure of
QUEEN HIPPOLYTA
IT WAS AN AXIOM of Mr Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, that one should not attempt to fill one’s head with every item of miscellaneous knowledge one chanced across, but should take in only that which was likely to be of service. “You may depend upon it,” said he in his precise, logical fashion, “for every item of irrelevant information you cram in, something important will be forgotten. It is not simply a question of cerebral capacity. On the contrary, history shows us countless examples of the quite amazing capacities of the human brain. It is rather that one’s reflective powers become distracted and diffused when a forest of irrelevance stands between them and their goal. Like the prince in the fairytale, one must chop a way through this forest in order to reach the castle beyond, where the one relevan
t fact lies sleeping.” In accordance with this rule, he generally paid little heed to the news of the day, except in so far as it had a bearing upon his work. Yet, despite this, he had perhaps the broadest spectrum of knowledge of any man I have ever known. He had, too, an uncanny knack of recalling the most obscure of facts at the most useful moment, and of perceiving connections between facts which appeared to others to be perfectly unrelated.
To what extent these abilities were an inherited gift, and to what extent the result of rigorous self-training, it was difficult to say, but his capacity to surprise those around him was certainly undisputed. Sometimes, as in the case I now propose to recount, which concerned the singular experiences of Mr Godfrey Townsend, Holmes’s recollection of an apparently trivial fact would make the difference between the success or failure of an investigation.
I had called at my friend’s lodgings in Baker Street on a bright, sunny morning in the autumn, and had found him seated by the window, examining a small object with the aid of a powerful lens. He waved me to a chair, but did not speak, and for some moments I watched as he inspected every side of his specimen, which I saw was a small cigar case. Evidently satisfied, he then opened the case, removed the contents, and subjected the interior to the same careful examination as he had given to the outside.
“It is, as you know, a little hobby of mine,” said he at last, looking up as he replaced the cigars and closed the case with a snap, “to determine a man’s character and habits from an examination of one of his possessions. For a man cannot own any object for long without impressing the stamp of his character upon it. It is a skill at which I believe I can say I have reached a certain level of proficiency.”
“Indeed,” said I. “No one could deny it. I have seen you perform the trick many times, and the conclusions you have reached have frequently amazed me.”
“The results are certainly often curious, sometimes striking and occasionally extremely surprising. Here, for instance, we have an apparent anomaly.” He passed the cigar case and lens across to me. “You know my methods, Watson. See what you make of it.”
The Mammoth Book of the Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes Page 44
