"Second?" said Makinson.
"Indeed, Inspector. The first one is the removal of the hearts, though quite what such an intrusion could possibly disguise I have, as yet, no opinion. Equally, the reason for the missing flesh or the partial incision is still unclear."
We moved across to the third cot, pulling back the sheet to expose a grisly collection. The young woman's head was propped between the legs while the arm lay before it like some kind of gift and all were set out on the torso as if to resemble a construction puzzle. I lifted first the arm, turning it over in my hands, and then the legs, performing a similar study. There seemed nothing to give any clue for such a crime. I laid the limbs at the foot of the cot and turned my attention to the head.
The woman appeared to have been in her middle twenties. I lifted the head carefully, some hidden and forgotten part of me half expecting the eyes to open and regard me with a cruel disdain, and turned it around. There was a similar depressed fracture to that suffered by the farmer and I was sure, simply by the pulpy feel of the bone around the occipital region, that death would have been instantaneous. I set the head down with the limbs and moved to the torso.
The limbs had clearly been removed by chopping as opposed to sawing and one of the shoulders showed signs of mis-hits, with some cosmetic damage to the edge of the right clavicle. One could only give thanks that the poor girl had been dead when the madman went about his business.
I turned to face Holmes and shook my head. "Nothing here," I said.
"Nothing save for the fact that the arm is missing," Holmes pointed out. "There is clearly some significance in that fact and the fact that the heart has not been removed."
"Why's that, then?" said the Inspector.
"Elementary, my dear Makinson," said Holmes, clearly pleased to be asked to explain his deduction. "I suspect that the killer simply forgot about the heart, being so concerned with his
plan to remove all the limbs and then discard those he did not need. If your men have been as thorough in their investigations around the scene of the slaying as you say — and I have no reason to doubt that such is the case — then the killer must surely have taken the arm with him."
"You mean that he was prepared to chop off everything just to get one of her arms?"
Holmes nodded. "Otherwise, why did he not leave all of the limbs together? For that matter, why remove them and then leave them?"
"Why indeed?" I agreed.
"Let us consider the final body," said Holmes.
The face of William Fitzhue Crosby no longer existed. Where once had been skin and, undoubtedly, normal characteristics
such as a nose, two eyes and two lips, now lay only devastation, a brown mass resembling a flattened mud pie into which a playful child had inserted a series of holes.
The sheer ruination of that face spoke of a hell on Earth, a creature conceived in the mind of Bosch — though whether such a description might not be more aptly levelled at the perpetrator of such carnage is debatable.
"Look at the rear of the head, Watson," said Holmes.
I turned the head to one side and felt the skull: the same fracture was there and I said as much.
"Inspector," said Holmes, "did you know Mr Crosby personally? By that I mean, were he still alive, would you recognize him on the street?"
"I'm not sure as I would, Mr Holmes," said Makinson, frowning. "I don't as doubt that him and me has passed each other by on occasion but —"
Holmes strode purposefully from the cot to the door. "We've finished here, I believe. Come Watson, we have enquiries to make."
"Enquiries?" I pulled the sheet up over Crosby's face.
"We must speak with the relatives of the victims." He walked from the room, pulling his Meerschaum from his pocket. "The game is most definitely afoot. Though, if I am correct, then that in itself poses a further puzzle."
I had grown used to if not tolerant of such enigmatic statements, though I had long since recognized the futility of pressing for more information. All would become clear in good time.
In the early evening we gathered once more at the police station, a full and somewhat depressing day behind us.
The November air in Harrogate was cold but "bracing", to use the Inspector's vernacular. For Sherlock Holmes and myself, however, grown used to the relative mildness of southern climes, the coldness permeated our very bones. To such a degree was this invasion that, even standing before a roaring fire in the Inspector's office, it was all I could do to keep from shivering.
Holmes himself, however, seemed now impervious to the chill as he sat contemplating, staring into the dancing flames.
It had been a productive day.
Due to the fact that William Crosby had no relatives in the town, having moved to Yorkshire from Bristol some eight years earlier, we were forced to call in at the branch of Daleside Bank, on the Parliament Street hill leading to Ripon, there to interview staff as to the possibility of someone having some reason to murder their manager. A tight-faced man named Mr Cardew, enduring rather than enjoying his early middle age, maintained the stoic calm and almost clinical immobility that I have discovered to be the province of bankers and their ilk over the years. They seem a singularly cheerless breed.
When pressed, first by Holmes and subsequently by Inspector Makinson, Mr Cardew visited the large safe at the rear of the premises to see if the money deposited the previous evening was still in place and accounted for. Throughout the exercise, I watched Holmes who viewed the procedure with a thinly disguised disinterest. Rather he seemed to be anxious, as if needing to ask something of Cardew.
Whether my friend would have got around to phrasing his question to such a degree of correctness in his own mind that he would have committed it to speech I will never know for we chanced upon a portrait photograph of William Fitzhue Crosby hanging from the wall outside his office.
The photographer had gone to some considerable trouble to make the finished photograph as acceptable as possible presumably to Mr Crosby — using shadows and turning his subject into profile in order, clearly, to minimize the effect of the banker's disfigurement. But, alas, it had been to little avail.
In the photograph, Crosby's eyes spoke volumes about his attitude to the dark stain which, we subsequently discovered from Mr Cardew, ran from his left temple and down across his cheek to his chin. Those were eyes that barely hid a gross discomfort, hardened around the corners with something akin to outright hatred.
Cardew explained that, in the flesh, as it were, Crosby's stain was a deep magenta. The banker had grown his sideburns in an attempt to hide at least some of it but the effect had been that the sideburn on the left side had been wiry and white.
Believing that the answer to the puzzle involved a killer so mortally offended by such a mark that he would go to great lengths to remove it, we proceeded from the Daleside Bank to the school at which Gertrude Ridge had been, until recently, a teacher, having decided that it might not be necessary to trouble the young woman's grieving parents. On the way, Holmes seemed particularly thoughtful.
The story at the school was similar. Miss Ridge had had a large birthmark on the back of her right hand, stretching up over her wrist to an undetermined point above. Her colleagues at the school had been unable to comment as to how far that might be, Miss Ridge never deeming to appear at school in anything less than a long-sleeved blouse or dress, and even then one with the most ornate ruffled cuffs.
Diana Wetherall and Jean Woodward, widows of, respectively, the deceased landlord and the Hampsthwaite farmer, said that their husbands had suffered similar markings, Terence Wetherall's being a small circular stain about the size of a saucer, situated just to the left of centre of his chest, while Raymond Woodward's disfigurement had stretched across the back of his neck and down between his shoulder blades.
It was I who, eventually, back at the police station, voiced what had been Holmes's concern all along. "We now most probably know the reason for the killings," I said, "but how o
n earth did the killer know of Wetherall's and Woodward's marks? They were covered at all times when they were not at home."
Makinson frowned and considered this.
Holmes, meanwhile, said, "You say we know why the killer committed the acts, Watson. But do we really know?"
"Why, of course we do," I ventured. "The chap is mortally offended by what are, in his eyes, such abominations and he feels it his rigorous duty to remove them from sight. He came up with the idea of removing hearts simply to mislead us hence, on one occasion, even forgetting to remove the young woman's."
Holmes nodded. "I think you are almost correct, old fellow," he said, in a gentle tone that was anything but patronizing. "However, you have neglected to take into account the fact that the killer first stuns his victims and only then obliterates nature's handiwork. My point is," he continued, "the killer needs to stun his victim without interference with the mark."
"Whatever for, Mr Holmes?" enquired Makinson.
Holmes looked across at the Inspector and gave a thin smile that was devoid of any sense of pleasure. "In order to remove them, Inspector."
"Remove them?" I said. The suggestion seemed preposterous. "Indeed, Watson. Let us adapt the facts as we know them to my proposition.
"Wetherall, the landlord, was stunned or killed by a blow to the head. The killer then stripped his victim to the waist and skilfully removed the birthmark from his chest. Then, in order to conceal his action, he proceeded to open up the chest in such a heavy-handed manner that the disappearance of the piece of skin which once bore the mark would not be so noticeable. He concealed the opening of the chest with the removal of the heart.
"The farmer was next. Again, the blow to the head was the all-important immobilizing factor. Once that had been effected, the killer could concentrate on removing the mark from the victim's neck and back before training a shotgun on the exposed area and destroying all signs. However, the blast failed to cover up all signs of his work, as you noticed, Watson. The removal of Woodward's heart tied his murder into the first death quite neatly."
Holmes cleared his throat.
"Then came the teacher. With her it was more complicated. The position of Miss Ridge's mark — on her arm — was such that a blast to the affected area, once he had removed the skin bearing the mark, could not be the killing factor. Similarly, the removal of the heart would not conceal the removal of the mark. Thus he decided upon the method of removing her limbs, still tying the murder into the first two deaths by peripheral
association, only later to discard the three limbs for which he had no use. The final limb, the young woman's right arm, he discarded far from the scene of the crime and only then when he had removed the affected area.You mentioned earlier that he had forgotten to remove the heart: the fact was that he did not consider it necessary.
"With the banker he returns to the earlier method. A blow to the head, a common element throughout, then the careful removal of the facial skin bearing the mark, and then the shotgun blast to the face, destroying once again the evidence of his real reason for the murder. The removal of the heart ties the crime to the first two and, arguably, to the case of Miss Ridge."
Holmes stretched towards the fire and warmed his hands. "I read the reports from your forensics people, Inspector," Holmes continued. "I was interested to discover that, while there were traces of linen and wool fibre in the farmer's wound, there were no traces of skin except at the very extremities of the blasted area, confirming that, perhaps, a portion had been removed prior to the blast. And as for the banker, Mr Crosby, the gun shot damage to the wall bore no traces of skin or tissue. This indicates that the killing shot and the invasion which preceded it were done at some other location, with a second shot being fired directly at the wall."
"But what other place might that be, Mr Holmes?" Makinson enquired.
"Wherever Mr Crosby went after leaving the bank might give us a clue," Holmes retorted. "I saw from your report, Inspector, that Crosby's apartment showed no signs of anyone being there since the morning: the fire was burnt down and breakfast things were in the sink. It is my opinion that wherever Mr Crosby went early that evening is where he encountered his killer."
"Good lord," I said. I glanced across at Makinson and saw that he looked as queasy as I felt.
"But why would he want these ... these marks in the first place? What does he do with them?"
Holmes turned to me. "Watson, perhaps you would be kind
enough to explain the causation of a so-called birthmark?" "Well," I said, "nobody actually knows why they are caused. "They are most common in newborn babies, often called
the 'stork's beak' mark because they occur on the forehead between the eyebrows and on the nape of the neck ... as though a stork had had the child's head in its beak. These are transient phenomena that disappear as the baby grows. A popular but incorrect theory is that they are caused by the caul, the inner membrane enclosing the foetus, adhering itself to the child and becoming enmeshed into the child's own skin as it develops in the womb. Such marks are also sometimes referred to as 'God's fingerprints', and to many they signify good fortune."
Makinson snorted loudly. "Doesn't seem much like good fortune to me," he said, "carrying a big red mark on your face all your life."
"As I said, Inspector, these marks usually disappear as the child grows older. The ones that stay are called port wine stains or strawberry naevi, due to their colouring.The technical name is cutaneous haemangiomata, which refers to an abnormally large collection of blood vessels in the skin ... an over production, if you will. These are most commonly on the face — the case of Crosby the banker is typical — although they can occur anywhere on the body.
"The port wine stains stay throughout life, although they do lose some of the intense colouring in later years; the strawberry naevi do not usually persist."
Holmes nodded. "Let us imagine that our killer believes the old tale that such signs are the harbingers of good fortune," he said. "It might follow that such a fellow could conceivably feel that to own more of these would be to improve the quality of his life. Someone, perhaps, whose life has not been particularly fortunate."
"You said 'more' of these," I said.
"Yes, I did. I would expect the killer to be equally marked and to have been told, perhaps by his mother, that such a marking meant that he had been touched by God. The fact that his life did not reflect such fortune caused him to think that further marks were needed to change his luck."
I looked across at Makinson. The Inspector seemed unconvinced. "That's as well as maybe, Mr Holmes," he said, "but how does the killer identify his victims? Apart from the teacher and the banker, these marks was covered over all the time they was on public show."
"Perhaps not all the time, Inspector," said Holmes, his eyes
flashing wide. "Tell me, do you have a municipal swimming bath in the town?"
Makinson shook his head. "No, nearest swimming bath is in Leeds.
Holmes smiled, and this time the smile did have traces of pleasure. "Watson," he said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. "For what is Harrogate renowned?"
"Renowned? Harrogate?" I searched my brain for some clue as to what my friend had in mind. "Other than a cold wind that would not be out of place at the North Pole, I cannot imagine," I said at last.
"The water, Watson!"
"Water?" I still failed to grasp the significance.
"Harrogate is a spa town, famed for the so-called medicinal and curative properties of its water, taken from natural springs. Is that right, Inspector?"
"Why, yes it is, Mr Holmes," said the Inspector.
"And you have in the town a bath which enables people to bathe their bodies in these waters?"
"A Turkish bath and such, yes," said Makinson. "I've never been, myself, of course, but I believe as how they're popular with some people." He paused. "Run by a queer sort of fellow, they are," he added.
Holmes leapt to his feet. "Queer, you say? With
a birth-mark?" Makinson shook his head. "No, no birthmark — at least none as is visible."
Holmes visibly shrank in size, the excitement evaporating almost as quickly as it had appeared. "Then why queer?"
"Well, he's ..." Makinson seemed to be having trouble describing the fellow and I was about to prompt him when he added, "he's sort of big on one side and smaller on the other."
"That's it, Holmes!" I shouted. "Is one half of his body visibly larger than the other, Inspector? Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes, his head is mis-shaped and one arm is longer than the other. His leg is longer on that side, too, and he walks with a limp because of it."The Inspector shook his head at the thought. "Strange fellow and no denying."
I turned to Holmes. "Henri hypertrophy," I said. "Caused by an underlying brain haemangioma, beneath a port wine stain; it means an increased blood flow through the mark results in a disproportionate growth on one side of the body. He's our man," I said, "I'd bet my pension on it!"
"What is the name of this fellow?" Holmes enquired of the Inspector.
"His name is Garnett, as I recall, Frank Garnett. The spa baths stay open until ten o'clock in the evening," the Inspector said. He removed his watch from his waistcoat pocket and flipped open the casing. "Five and twenty to nine," he said.
Holmes sprang for the door, grabbing his hat, scarf and coat on the way. "Come, Watson, Inspector ... there's no time to lose."
Minutes later we were on our way by carriage, driven by a hard-faced Sergeant Hewitt through a blustery, moonless night.
The Pump Rooms in Harrogate are situated down Parliament Street and on the left towards the Valley Gardens, a scenic spot favoured in the daylight and early summer evenings by young couples and nannies walking their charges. When we arrived, Holmes leapt from the carriage and burst through the doors.
A matronly woman wearing a pince-nez and seated behind a desk in the foyer got to her feet, her hand to her throat.
The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures Page 38
