by Marvin Kaye
“Lamson… Lamson,” Doyle said. “The name is familiar.”
Lestrade noted the address in his book and absently took a large gulp of his tea. After a few moments he said, “You don’t think his sister…?” but, unable to continue the thought, became exceedingly flushed, sat his cup down and found his way stumbling to a chair. “Sorry, chaps, not feeling too well at the moment.” He unbuttoned his collar. “The tea must have been too hot.” He rubbed at his chest.
Watson rushed to his side and removed his watch. “Weak pulse, Holmes. I make it fifty, no, forty beats to the minute.”
“Bitter taste to that tea,” Lestrade said, as his eyes began to close. “What brand do you use, Doyle,” he managed, as he lost consciousness.
“Holmes!” Watson yelled, as he frantically grasped for a stool and lifted Lestrade’s legs. “You’ve poisoned him!”
“I have been wishing to do that for some time, Watson. Dr Doyle, if you would be so kind as to administer the atropine and belladonna.”
With difficulty, Watson pulled the jacket off the lolling Lestrade and pulled up his sleeve. Doyle expertly plunged the needle into an exposed vein.
We watched and waited.
“Shallow respirations,” Watson said, a strong note of concern in his voice.
“Slow, erratic heart rate. All signs of a bitter alkaloid,” Doyle said.
“Aconite poisoning, I should think. Ah, look, our patient is responding to your tonic,” I observed. Slowly Lestrade was regaining his senses. His crimson hue had faded to a safer shade of rose, and Watson nodded reassuringly to his watch as the heart grew stronger and more steady. “Could be a number of species of the plant—it grows all over the world—monkshood, Devil’s helmet, leopards’ bane—all members of the genus Aconitum.”
“The liniment John rubbed on his skin would have worked its way into his circulation during the first half of the game,” Watson said. “It’s a good bet that Hubert would have been involved in some sort of pileup or collision by the time the poison took effect. Ingenious!”
“I should think a call upon the Lamsons would be in order. The Inspector should recover, but perhaps it’s best we bring him along with a spare dose of the antidotes, as a precaution.”
We assisted the dazed inspector back to the carriage and made our way to Cheltenham where we found Mrs Lamson at home in mourning for her brother.
“We are sad to intrude at this trying time,” Watson said, making introductions. “I was an acquaintance of your brother at Blackheath.”
“So kind of you to come to express your condolences, Doctor.” She ushered us into the parlour of her modest home, eyeing the woozy Lestrade warily. “Your company is appreciated, gentlemen. I have not yet had the fortitude to notify my brother as yet. His health has been failing and, well, he’s an invalid… and I was just off to the home to break the sad news.”
“Yes, polio,” Watson said, “We have heard.”
“Poor Percy, his birthday is tomorrow. I was working up the strength to go to the sanatorium and bring him some small gifts.”
“Madam, the news is grimmer than you know, I am sorry to say. Watson, some brandy from the small flask you carry,” I said.
“I’m not thirsty just this moment,” Watson said.
“Not for you, Doctor, for Mrs Lamson.” I gestured to the confused woman as Watson withdrew the flask. “I regret to inform you that we suspect that your brother Hubert has been murdered.” The news had the predicted effect and soon the doctors had abandoned the first patient and were attending the fainting woman. Lestrade fell onto a nearby settee, upsetting a jardinière on the way. We patiently waited for both to regain their senses. When the lady had been restored I asked, “May we inquire as to the whereabouts of your husband?”
She shook her head. “I regret to say that I have not seen him in several days. This is not unusual. He has been…unwell lately. Somewhat erratic in his behaviour, you might say.” She began to weep. I nudged Watson to offer his kerchief. “I am afraid his use of morphine has become an addiction. We have fallen on hard times.” She wept.
The sudden coalescence of the conclusion swept through my body as if I had injected myself with some drug. “You have my deepest sympathies. Might I ask what birthday your brother is celebrating?”
“Why, he will be twenty-one tomorrow.”
“Quickly, men! We haven’t a moment to lose!” The doctors dragged Lestrade to his feet as I escorted Mrs Lamson to our carriage and with all haste we sped the short distance to the sanatorium that was the residence of her brother Percy.
We were out of the vehicle before it had ceased to come to a complete halt and charged into the building. The attendant stood from his desk. “Why, Mrs Lamson, what a pleasant surprise. Master Percy will be joyed to see so many visitors on his birthday.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In the solarium. Your husband, Doctor George, has just been here a few moments ago. He brought Percy his favourite—Dundee cakes, and the nurses have set up tea in celebration.” He gestured toward the room at the end of a long hall.
“Hurry!” I shouted. “We may be too late!” We ran down the corridor, which ended in the bright room awash with the light from the many windows. At a small table a young man lay face down in a plate of cakes. Kitty screamed. Lestrade fainted.
“The antidote, Doyle!” I yelled.
We pulled the insensate Percy off the table and out of his chair. Watson tore open his shirt and Doyle plunged the atropine-loaded syringe between the ribs and into the poisoned heart. We waited hopefully for some moments, but it had soon become apparent that we had not arrived in time.
By then, the commotion had roused the hospital staff, who piled into the room. A curtain at the far end of the room rustled, and a man whose deranged look could only have meant he was Dr Lamson emerged and pushed his way through the crowd, dove through a window and tumbled onto the lawn in a shower of glass. Doyle and I were in immediate pursuit. Doyle ran well for a big man and we quickly overtook the fleeing fugitive, but he fought with the furious strength of one crazed on the wild effects of some mind-altering substance. Just as Lamson had broken free and was about to make it to the open field, he was struck blindside as if by a train. Watson, head low, shoulders square, took down the perpetrator with a textbook tackle.
When the mess was cleared, George Henry carted away, Percy’s body taken to the morgue, Lestrade revived with another dose of atropine, and Mrs Lamson blessedly sedated, Doyle, Watson and I repaired to a nearby pub and partook of a long drink of bitters.
“I knew I recognized the name,” Doyle said, wiping foam from his moustache. “George Henry Lamson studied at Edinburgh while I was there. He took a special interest in Cristinson’s toxicology classes, but apparently never made it as a practicing physician.”
“Chap grew desperate for money to support his evil drug habit. Even at the expense of his wife’s family,” Watson said.
“Bloody brilliant, tying up all the loose ends,” Lestrade added, sipping tea and rubbing his head, “if I had not taken ill, I am sure I would have drawn the same conclusions.”
“Yes, Lestrade, I am certain that you would have realized that aconite poison is drawn through the skin and it would take the skill of a deranged doctor to concoct such a lethal ointment to poison both brothers-in-law, making both deaths seem accidental, and all before the twenty-first birthday of Master Percy, so that the small inheritance he was due would fall to Mrs Lamson and so, by law, become the property of Dr Lamson, her husband.”
“Fantastic, just fantastic,” Doyle exclaimed, and raised his glass. “John, I have to apologize for ever doubting the skills of Mr Holmes or for thinking your accounts of his adventures mere fantasy.”
“I couldn’t have done it without your medical expertise, doctors,” I said.
As an evening chill settled over London, Doyle and Watson made cheerful plans to publish a rousing account of the events of the case while Lestrade finished his notes and prepared to tak
e credit for another sensational arrest. As the gaslights came up, I stared long into the darkness and wondered how I could have been so slow in my deductions to have not saved the life of Percy John1.
1 Professor Cristinson had taught George Henry Lamson that aconite would be an undetectable poison, but by the time Lamson had graduated and carried out the murder, forensics had advanced to the point where this was no longer true, and his defense attorneys did not bother to call any scientific witnesses on his behalf. Lamson killed Percy with a laced Dundee cake for what would amount to only £1500 of inheritance money. In spite of public pleas made by his family and friends in America, Lamson was hanged for the crime in 1881. Strangely, the record of the trial was not published until 1914. This odd fact, combined with the significance that the first Holmes story Watson and Doyle published was 1888 (A Study in Scarlet) and that Holmes and not Watson only chose to record the events after the trial publication, makes one wonder if there is not some other important bit of mystery as yet unrevealed. It would be one hundred and thirty years until another aconite murder conviction in London: In February, 2011, a spurned Lakhvir Singh was convicted of killing her ex-lover by poisoning his leftover curry found in his fridge. A roommate had witnessed Singh remove the curry, and upon Singh’s arrest, herbs containing aconite were found in her coat pocket.
THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and ’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some, too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him. There is, however, one of these last which was so remarkable in its details and so startling in its results that I am tempted to give some account of it in spite of the fact that there are points in connection with it which never have been, and probably never will be, entirely cleared up.
The year ’87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque “Sophy Anderson”, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man’s watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that time—a deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the case. All these I may sketch out at some future date, but none of them present such singular features as the strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.
It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her mother’s, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker Street.
“Why,” said I, glancing up at my companion, “that was surely the bell. Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?”
“Except yourself I have none,” he answered. “I do not encourage visitors.”
“A client, then?”
“If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out on such a day and at such an hour. But I take it that it is more likely to be some crony of the landlady’s.”
Sherlock Holmes was wrong in his conjecture, however, for there came a step in the passage and a tapping at the door. He stretched out his long arm to turn the lamp away from himself and towards the vacant chair upon which a newcomer must sit.
“Come in!” said he.
The man who entered was young, some two-and-twenty at the outside, well-groomed and trimly clad, with something of refinement and delicacy in his bearing. The streaming umbrella which he held in his hand, and his long shining waterproof told of the fierce weather through which he had come. He looked about him anxiously in the glare of the lamp, and I could see that his face was pale and his eyes heavy, like those of a man who is weighed down with some great anxiety.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, raising his golden pince-nez to his eyes. “I trust that I am not intruding. I fear that I have brought some traces of the storm and rain into your snug chamber.”
“Give me your coat and umbrella,” said Holmes. “They may rest here on the hook and will be dry presently. You have come up from the south-west, I see.”
“Yes, from Horsham.”
“That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite distinctive.”
“I have come for advice.”
“That is easily got.”
“And help.”
“That is not always so easy.”
“I have heard of you, Mr Holmes. I heard from Major Prendergast how you saved him in the Tankerville Club scandal.”
“Ah, of course. He was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards.”
“He said that you could solve anything.”
“He said too much.”
“That you are never beaten.”
“I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a woman.”
“But what is that compared with the number of your successes?”
“It is true that I have been generally successful.”
“Then you may be so with me.”
“I beg that you will draw your chair up to the fire and favour me with some details as to your case.”
“It is no ordinary one.”
“None of those which come to me are. I am the last court of appeal.”
“And yet I question, sir, whether, in all your experience, you have ever listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of events than those which have happened in my own family.”
“You fill me with interest,” said Holmes. “Pray give us the essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to those details which seem to me to be most important.”
The young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out towards the blaze.
“My name,” said he, “is John Openshaw, but my own affairs have, as far as I can understand, little to do with this awful business. It is a hereditary matter; so in order to give you an idea of the facts, I must go back to the commencement of the affair.
“You must know that my grandfather had two sons—my uncle Elias and my father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry, which he enlarged at the time of the invention of bicycling. He was a patentee of the Openshaw unbreakable tire, and his business met with such success that he was able to sell it and to retire upon a handsome competence.
“My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and became a planter in Florida, where he was reported
to have done very well. At the time of the war he fought in Jackson’s army, and afterwards under Hood, where he rose to be a colonel. When Lee laid down his arms my uncle returned to his plantation, where he remained for three or four years. About 1869 or 1870 he came back to Europe and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his reason for leaving them was his aversion to the negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in extending the franchise to them. He was a singular man, fierce and quick-tempered, very foul-mouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I doubt if ever he set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or three fields round his house, and there he would take his exercise, though very often for weeks on end he would never leave his room. He drank a great deal of brandy and smoked very heavily, but he would see no society and did not want any friends, not even his own brother.
“He didn’t mind me; in fact, he took a fancy to me, for at the time when he saw me first I was a youngster of twelve or so. This would be in the year 1878, after he had been eight or nine years in England. He begged my father to let me live with him and he was very kind to me in his way. When he was sober he used to be fond of playing backgammon and draughts with me, and he would make me his representative both with the servants and with the tradespeople, so that by the time that I was sixteen I was quite master of the house. I kept all the keys and could go where I liked and do what I liked, so long as I did not disturb him in his privacy. There was one singular exception, however, for he had a single room, a lumber-room up among the attics, which was invariably locked, and which he would never permit either me or anyone else to enter. With a boy’s curiosity I have peeped through the keyhole, but I was never able to see more than such a collection of old trunks and bundles as would be expected in such a room.
“One day—it was in March, 1883—a letter with a foreign stamp lay upon the table in front of the colonel’s plate. It was not a common thing for him to receive letters, for his bills were all paid in ready money, and he had no friends of any sort. ‘From India!’ said he as he took it up, ‘Pondicherry postmark! What can this be?’ Opening it hurriedly, out there jumped five little dried orange pips, which pattered down upon his plate. I began to laugh at this, but the laugh was struck from my lips at the sight of his face. His lip had fallen, his eyes were protruding, his skin the colour of putty, and he glared at the envelope which he still held in his trembling hand, ‘K. K. K.!’ he shrieked, and then, ‘My God, my God, my sins have overtaken me!’
