by william Todd
Tapping his fingers on the armrest as he thought, Holmes then asked, “Pray tell, did you leave the hotel through the front doors?”
“No sir, Mr. Holmes. I left out a back door by the kitchen since our house is behind the hotel and four streets west.”
Holmes was silent, momentarily, then began again. “And, you wouldn’t know for how long the room door was left unattended before Jack Erdley arrived?”
“It wasn’t left unattended, Mr. Holmes. I waited until George Erdley came back with his brother before I left. Like I said, I take my job seriously and would never have left that door unattended. I figured I wouldn’t miss much in the five minutes it took to fetch his brother.”
“So, are you a new father yet?” I asked.
The man wrinkled his brow. “That’s the thing, sir. When I got home, my wife wasn’t in any labor at all and didn’t know anything about telling anyone to come fetch me. Well, that worried my wife, so I stayed home with her, knowing that Jack Erdley had taken my place.”
After a few moments’ contemplation, eyes closed, fingers crossed, Holmes reanimated and said, “Thank you, Constable Jones, that will be all. Please send in Erdley the Younger next.
George Erdley was a bit younger than his brother, barely over twenty, and quite frankly seemed a polar opposite. He was slightly built with long, straight, black hair in the French style that covered his ears and dark close-set eyes. He was emotionless and sat quietly in the seat opposite Holmes.
My friend said nothing at first and just eyed the young man curiously. This unnerved him for he began to fidget in his seat and pushed back the long hair from his ears, momentarily, then arranged it back.
“You told Constable Jones,” Holmes began, “that a man came looking for him to tell him his wife was about to give birth, is that correct?”
“Yes,” was his curt answer.
“Can you describe this man?”
“Not really. I met him at the far corner of the street. There were no streetlamps there, so he was but a shadow as we spoke. I asked him where he was going, and the man said he was on his way to fetch the constable at the hotel because his wife was having a baby. I told him to go tell the constable’s wife that he was on his way, and I’d run up to tell him because I knew where he was.”
“And you went straight up and relayed the news to Constable Jones?”
“Without delay,” he replied.
“Just a few more questions, if I may. Did you see anyone or anything unusual in the hotel across the street at around midnight?”
George Erdley replied without hesitation, “No, should I have?”
Holmes didn’t answer the question. Instead, he asked, “What were you reading under the streetlamp? The constable on the roof mentioned seeing you reading.”
“A letter.”
“From whom?”
The young man momentarily looked down at his feet then re-engaged Holmes. “A—she’s a female acquaintance. A friend from back home. She wrote me a letter before we left Calais. When I get lonely, I pull it out and read it.” He stopped then added hastily, “I know it’s a silly notion, sir, but I assure you, I am not a lovesick child. We were going to be away only a month, but she was insistent on giving me the letter to read while apart.
“Why did you not read it out in front of the hotel? There is more light coming from the hotel lobby and with the streetlamp there, surely that would have afforded you more light with which to read your billet-doux.”
He seemed unsure of what to say. At last, he remarked, “The lamp outside the hotel does not work, and I did not wish any prying eyes see me reading instead of walking my post.”
“Would your father have been upset with you, if he found out you had not followed instruction?”
George Erdely chortled. “I doubt my father would have cared one way or another.”
“Do you have this letter on you presently?”
The young man’s face became flushed. “I do not. It is—it is in my room, and I do not wish for someone I do not know to read intimacies meant for me.”
Sherlock Holmes was about to remark when there came an insistent knock at the door. Our constable/driver entered. “A note for you, Mr. Holmes.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the paper. A thin, wide grin creased his features as he read. “Bravo, Mrs. Hudson! This is exactly as I had construed.” To the constable, he then said, “Please have the other three gentlemen come back into the room. Then please have Chief Constable Mear ask for Mr. Hughes to join us. He will no doubt like to hear what I have found out. Then, tell Mear to do as I had instructed him earlier.”
The officer nodded then left as quickly as he came.
In short order, the four men were back inside the room with Mr. Hughes joining us. They sat and stared at one another in silence, each seeming to size the other up for guilt. Hughes looked them all over with a somewhat confused look upon his face, as though somehow not believing any of the men could be the culprit.
Finally, Chief Constable Mear barged through the door. He had a look of amazement upon his face. “I don’t know how you knew Mr. Holmes, but by George you hit it square on. Just where you said it would be.” He then marched over to Milton Hughes and grabbed him by the arm. “I am arresting you for the murder of Francis Erdley.”
The man looked around astonished. “Why, this is preposterous! How on earth could I have been the murderer?”
I must readily admit that I, for the life of me, could not figure out how Holmes had come to such an outlandish conclusion.
Holmes spoke up, regarding Mr. Hughes directly. “Let me tell the sequence of events, and you can tell me where I have strayed from the path of fact. Nodding to me, he asked, “Do you remember, Watson, me telling you that the name Milton Hughes sounded familiar to me?”
“I do,” said I. “I remarked to you that you should look the name up in your index, but we would then miss the train.”
“Yes, well looking up that name would have been fruitless. But Mear unwittingly gave me a name that my index would have had—the Fuller Brothers’ Circus. When we got to town, I had a constable send a telegram to Mrs. Hudson, who returned the telegram just now, relaying everything I had on my index card. It was a case I was very interested in some years back. It involved the murder of one of the owners, Gerald Fuller in Ipswich. It was a murder never solved. I had followed the investigation closely for a while and was about to insert myself into it when the police began running out of leads. Unfortunately, some fortuitous events took me to Switzerland, and I was forced to drop my interest in the case. You see, I believed, but it was never proven, that his half-brother and co-owner was the murderer.”
“And that was Milton Hughes,” I finished.
“I was an innocent man then, and I am innocent now,” Hughes resounded. “Just because I was part of a murder investigation some six years ago, does not make me a murderer now. And you have yet to mention how this was pulled off. One door was guarded, the other locked, and people on the roof and street. How could I have done it without being seen?”
“I will get to that point shortly. Please, let us set this out in order.” Holmes continued as he paced the floor. “If you were going to pull this off, you needed an accomplice, and he took the form of George Erdley.”
Now, it was George Erdley’s turn to look surprised.
“Why would the boy help in the murder of his father?” I asked.
“You are incorrect on two points, Watson. It was not meant initially to be a murder, only a robbery. Also, George Erdley is not Francis Erdley’s son. He is Milton Hughes’.”
Hughes glared at Holmes, and George Erdley only stared at his feet.
“And what makes you think the boy is mine?” Hughes asked smugly.
“It is quite easy. You both have the same facial anomaly. You make others cast their gaze elsewhere by your dapper appearance. Your son chooses only to conceal it with his long hair. When he briefly rearranged his hair as we spoke, it was quite obvious
. Both of you were born with your right ear considerably lower than your left. A hereditary trait, no doubt.”
Looking upon Jack Erdley, Holmes then said, “Your father knew the boy was not his, and that is why he paid so little attention to George.”
Jack nodded. “On one of our first trips to see Aunt Bea, my father and mother had a row after having taken me to see the circus. It started over dinner, and they both liked their wine, so it was probably alcohol-induced, whatever it was about. She stormed out and returned late that evening. They made up the next day, but in that time away, she’d had a…dalliance with another man. My dad was heartbroken after she admitted her subsequent pregnancy and that the baby wasn’t his. Our mother would die within two years of George’s birth, overcome with the guilt of her indiscretion. We never knew who his father was.”
“Well, you do now,” Holmes continued in that almost emotionless way he can sometimes have. “Many regrettable things are done in anger, and when alcohol is involved the ramifications are quite often more dire.”
Hughes protested. “Abnormalities of all sorts are common to most folks. There is no way it can ever be proven that George Erdley is my son. Ask his mother who the father is. Oh, wait. You can’t. She is dead.”
Nodding to Mear, Holmes asked, “Did you bring the implements?”
“They are out in the hallway. Shall I retrieve them?”
“Yes, now would be a good time.”
Mear brought forth a long, thick length of rope. Attached to one end was a large two-pronged hook. Along with it, he produced three long poles that could be attached at the ends. At the end of one pole was a small bifurcation in the shape of a Y. “They were found in a utility closet in the hallway, just down from Hughes’ office.”
Holmes proceeded. “Either the poles were already fastened together and handed to George Erdley through the front doors of the Wurthing Park Hotel, which is the more likely scenario, or perhaps he fastened the poles together himself outside. He then placed the hooked end of the rope in the notch of the long pole and hoisted it up and hooked it onto the railing padded with the balcony mat so as to avoid any metallic clanking. The other end was already attached to a winch on Hughes’ balcony, which is directly across the street.”
“I left the winch in the utility closet due to its bulky weight,” Mear interrupted.
“George Erdley then placed the implements back inside the Wurthing hotel and went up to his father’s room to tell Jones of the imminent birth of his son. It was during this anxious time and the switch of sentries from Jones to Jack Erdley that the murder and robbery took place.”
“He shimmied along the rope to the other side?” I asked.
“No, Watson. Along with being a co-owner of the circus, Milton Hughes was also an accomplished tight-rope walker. He was part of the show. Did you not notice that both wrought-iron railings across from each other were bent outward? Hughes managed to disfigure them, however slightly, on his walk over and back.”
“You cannot prove any of that,” Hughes retorted. Pointing to the rope and poles, he continued, “Those are just old trinkets, fond memories I took with me when the Circus folded from all the bad publicity. You still haven’t hinted as to how I gained access to a locked room.”
“Mear?” Holmes called out.
Mear produced the golden letter opener, the one I remembered from Hughes’ desk and handed it to Holmes.
“I shall show you how the door was unlocked and relocked. Watson, would you be so kind as to lock the French doors behind me, please?”
We both walked over to the doors, and Holmes stepped out onto the balcony. I closed the doors and locked them. As soon as I stepped away, the doors bent in slightly, just enough to put a sliver of an opening between them, and Holmes stuck the thin blade of the letter opener into that gap and ran it upwards, pushing the hook out of the eye latch.
“That is step one,” said I. “What about the much harder relocking of the door?”
“It is not as impossible as one would think.” He then produced the long thread he had picked up from the balcony floor earlier. He proceeded to tie one end around the hook then fed the string through the eye latch. Keeping ahold of the string, Holmes then slowly closed the door. Then, from the other side, he gently pulled the string, and the hook fell onto the opening of the eye latch. With one harder tug, it re-latched. With a second, firm yank, the string was pulled free from the hook and pulled outside.
I was, quite frankly, amazed.
I opened the doors and let my friend back in.
“That,” he said, “is how you unlock and re-lock a hook and eye latch lock. This all happened while Constable Archer was watching Hughes’ wife undress in the hotel room across the street to keep him away from the area while the whole event transpired.”
Hughes began to clap. “Bravo, Mr. Holmes, but there is one problem: without the necklace, all this is but conjecture. It all fits, but there is no proof the murder and robbery happened that way at all. In fact, I would wager most would think it a quite wild theory.”
Holmes gave Mear a look, and Mear nodded slightly in return. “We had men placed at the train stations in Oxford and Yarnton,” Mear began. “We snared her while catching the 4:10 to York in Oxford. Guess what we found on her? A beautiful ruby necklace.”
Holmes said, “As long as there was no proof, you knew no one would ultimately be charged in this case. So, you had your wife leave with the necklace for safekeeping until you could meet up with her and exchange it on the black market for cash.”
Turning to Archer, Holmes added, “His wife is the woman you saw in the window.”
“It could not have been,” Archer rejoined. “I know Mrs. Hughes. She is not blonde. She has brown hair.”
“You did not recognize her because of her use of a wig. It was her fear of identification that kept her face from the window.”
Turning back to Hughes, Holmes said satisfactorily, “Am I missing anything, Mr. Hughes? I believe I have produced methods and proof. That should suffice to see you in a noose.”
As more constables came into the room, Hughes smiled and nodded in acquiescence to Holmes. “If you would have been in my circus, I could have made you a rich man with that great brain of yours.”
“Then I would have been betraying my master for thirty pieces of silver, and that is something I shall never do.”
As Hughes and George Erdley were led out of the room by constables, Jack Erdley came up and shook Sherlock Holmes’ hand. “Thank you for bringing that murderous letch to light, Mr. Holmes. It saddens me to think my brother had a hand in this black affair, but I am glad that justice shall be served.”
“For all but your brother,” was his reply. “He had no hand in how he was created. If he had been treated differently by those closest to him, this ordeal may never have presented itself.”
“There will be much guilt that I shall have to live with,” said Jack mournfully.
“What will you do now?” I asked the young man.
“I have some sad news to depart to my aunt. I shall stay with her just as my father would have done. But I suspect I shall cut the visit short. There is a burial to prepare for and a business that will need an Erdley hand to operate. I truly hope I am ready.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure you will do just fine.”
When we were finally alone on the train back to London. I engaged my friend. “I just do not understand what a well-to-do hotelier would need with a necklace. Do you think he was trying to use it to get extra capital to buy that hotel in France?”
“No, Watson. He was not buying a hotel in France. That was a cover for his correspondence with his son unless the hotel’s name was George. Even upside down and partially covered, I can read French. That letter George was reading under the lamp post, certainly now destroyed, more than likely had the intended plan and George’s part in it. During their correspondence, George must have made mention of the valuable necklace, and that started Hughes’
evil mind turning. Circus performers have a unique set of skills that would come in handy should they decide to take a more nefarious turn in life. I happened to see several bills strewn across that calamity of a desk of his. My guess would be that the hotels were losing money, and he saw the necklace as a way to pay off some of his many delinquent bills. He had killed once and avoided the docks. When Erdley woke during the robbery, it was an easier step this time to murder.”
“I wonder how Hughes and George Erdley ever came to realize their relationship. Do you think it was the ears?”
“You saw them, Watson. Maybe apart, people would not notice the similarity. But it was quite easy to see with the two of them together that there were too many featural similarities to come to any other conclusion. I suspect once Hughes realized his brief interlude with Mrs. Erdley created an offspring, he approached the young man, told him the details, and struck up a long-distance relationship. It is also quite possible Hughes knew all along that George was his son and bought the hotels as a way to see his son, even if only once a year.”
“I shook my head. “I don’t understand why he even contacted you at all. He all but signed his own death warrant by doing so.”
“When he overheard Mear contemplating bringing me in, he usurped the police and contacted me himself.” With a flair of his hand, he added. “Who would think to believe the one employing my services to find the murderer would, in fact, be the murderer. Friends close, Watson, and enemies closer.”
“Little did he know…” I started.
“Yes, Watson,” came the reply with a smile, “little did he know…”
The End
Mass Murder
(Previously published in MX Publishing’s Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories)
1901 was a year bookended by loss. The country lost its queen in the beginning weeks of the year, and Holmes and I lost a dear friend on the last day of December. We were, however, lucky enough to have had the pleasure of spending some time with him before his death. Yet life does not sit idle as you have your last moments together. It goes on in all its glory and all its indignity. It is these indignities of life with which my friend Sherlock Holmes so competently deals, and he must deal with them regardless of the circumstance or time in which they arise. So, it should not surprise the reader which path Holmes took when presented with such a dilemma during a time he would rather have spent with a sick friend.
