“So you will take the case?”
“I shall. You will hear from me soon. Please, as you leave, go carefully in the fog.”
* * *
“Really, Holmes?” I said as our visitor departed. “You feel investigating this affair is a worthwhile use of your time?”
“Why ever not, Watson?”
“Sir Hubert Cole died of natural causes. Conceivably, the stress arising from the traumatic events at Miss Efralstein’s precipitated his heart attack, but it was only a matter of time before he was struck down by one anyway. A man of his character, prone to explosions of anger, imposes repeated strain upon his cardiovascular system. The séance merely hastened the onset of an inevitable catastrophe.”
“But what if, friend Watson, the causes were not natural?”
“You mean the heart attack was artificially induced, as the valet Deakins indicated? Sir Hubert really was poisoned?”
“Precisely.”
“Arsenic or strychnine can induce symptoms that may be mistaken for coronary thrombosis. But I cannot believe Carstairs added it to, or perhaps substituted it for, the sulfonal.”
“Why not?”
“He strikes me as altogether too timorous for such a deed.”
“Could it be that our client is not the worryguts naïf that he would have us believe? Could it be that he is, in fact, an excellent actor?”
“What about his eczema? Actor or not, that condition cannot be faked.”
“A chemical irritant such as lime, poured on the skin, would mimic the symptoms. Consider the possibility, if you will, that Carstairs has lied to us and he did in fact know, prior to Sir Hubert’s death, that he was in line to inherit his employer’s estate. Can you conjure up a better motive for cold-blooded murder than getting one’s hands on a king’s ransom?”
“Carstairs would have obtained the money regardless. He did not have to kill Sir Hubert. He simply had to allow time to take its course. That would surely have been the more prudent tactic.”
“Perhaps he could not wait. Perhaps he had grown weary of his employer’s abusive ways and decided to hasten his end. The inheritance, then, was the reward for murder as well as an added incentive.”
“But if so, why would he engage your services?” I said. “That is reckless in the extreme, given that you are liable to expose him as the killer. Should he not instead give you a very wide berth?”
“Not recklessness so much as brazen effrontery,” said Holmes. “Carstairs would not be the first client to come to me, having committed what he believes is a perfect crime and challenging me to unravel the cunning web he has woven. Nor, I imagine, will he be the last. We must consider, too, Sir Hubert’s insomnia.”
“Insomnia is often an indicator of poor general health, which conforms with my assertion that his heart attack was simply a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
“It can also be an indicator of a guilty conscience. Sir Hubert, as you may or may not know, was notorious for his sharp practices. He would undercut his rivals at every turn and drove several out of business. Moreover, throughout his career he gained a reputation for cutting corners, the seaworthiness of his ships being called into question more than once. It would hardly be surprising if, in the dark watches of the night, he was plagued by inner torments – pangs of regret – of which he exhibited no outward sign.”
“No man is entirely without scruples, I suppose.”
“Quite. And that leads us to the words Miss Efralstein uttered – I beg your pardon, the words a spirit uttered via Miss Efralstein. ‘Remember the eagle.’ What does that mean? Does it refer to an actual bird, or to something else? And why should it have had such a profound effect upon Sir Hubert?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I cannot even hazard a guess.”
“Good, because this agency has no truck with guesswork. Now then, Watson, I believe tomorrow we should wend our way to Brixton and the home of Miss Efralstein. I shall make the arrangements and wire you the details. That is, if you would be willing to accompany me?”
I rubbed my hands together. “You know me, Holmes. I should like nothing better.”
* * *
Thus it was that, the following evening, we found ourselves in a modest terraced house in the suburb of Brixton, as guests of Miss Ellen Efralstein, the medium.
I must say that she presented an unsettling sight. In addition to the half-veil, her hair was raven dark and cascaded about her face in long, thick ringlets like a gypsy woman’s. It was hard to distinguish any of her features save rather wizened lips and a strong jaw, for which reason an estimate of her age could only be a rough approximation. I reckoned her to be in her mid-forties, but she might have been a decade older or indeed younger. She wore a black satin dress to match the veil and moved slowly and heavily, as though weighed down by woe.
“Mr. Holmes,” said she in a wisp of a voice, “I am loath to attempt to summon the spirits tonight. The stars are not in their best alignment, and the partition between this world and the next is thicker than usual. Then there is the fog. It interferes with one’s mental perceptions, just as it obscures the physical senses. I advise you to come back another time, when the conditions are more propitious.”
“You warned me earlier, in your reply to my telegram, that I should arrange an appointment for a later date,” said Holmes, deploying all the suave courtesy he was accustomed to use when addressing the opposite sex. “Nonetheless, madam, I am fascinated to witness for myself your prowess as a medium, and cannot put it off. That write-up in Light could not have sung your praises more highly.”
“I must say, from what little I have heard about Mr. Sherlock Holmes, he seems hardly the sort inclined towards spiritualism.”
“Consider me a seeker after knowledge, both esoteric and less so.”
“Very well. I must reiterate, however, that you and your colleague should prepare yourselves for disappointment. Will you both join hands with me? Thank you. It is crucial that we do not break this circle. Our shared energies will help pave the way for the spirits. You may wish to close your eyes as well.”
“I prefer to keep them open,” Holmes averred.
“So be it.”
In the parlour’s candlelit gloom, we waited. There followed an interval of some ten minutes during which nothing happened. Miss Efralstein finally roused herself from her trance and announced that, as she had predicted, nothing was coming through from the spirit world.
“Please try again,” Holmes said. “Ignore me. Concentrate instead on Dr. Watson here. Perhaps you might ask the spirits about him. I am curious to learn if they have any messages they would wish you to pass on.”
With further professions of reluctance, Miss Efralstein resumed her trance. Her hand was dry and cool in mine. I found myself sinking into a kind of stupor. I had had a hard day at work, with many patients coming to me with pulmonary complaints. I began to feel drowsy.
Then the candle guttered and Miss Efralstein emitted a sharp hiss.
“Great Brown Owl, is that you?” said she. “Rap the table to confirm that you are gracing us with your presence.”
Immediately there came a series of thumps from the table. I felt the vibrations through my elbows.
“We hear you, loud and clear. Is all well with you in the great beyond?”
Further thumps resounded. The table practically lifted from the floor.
“We have annoyed you,” said Miss Efralstein. “I apologise. I realise it is an imposition, summoning you on a night when the curtain between worlds is so hard to penetrate. Nevertheless, I have here two gentlemen who wish to commune with the spirits. I crave your indulgence. May we, through your auspices, speak with the dead?”
There was one last thump, which I took to mean yes.
“Great Brown Owl is stepping aside,” Miss Efralstein said. “He is making way to allow someone else to come through. I am sensing… A close relative. Is it a brother?”
I started. In spite of everything Holmes had said, I coul
d not but think that she was referring to my own brother, departed not long since.
“A younger brother?” she added.
“No,” I said.
“Yes. That’s right. Older. An older brother. He seems full of regret, Doctor. There is much for which he feels he must atone.”
I was conscious of Holmes’s keen grey eyes fixed upon me. Yet my own attention was on Miss Efralstein to the exclusion of almost all else.
“Now, I am receiving an initial,” said she. “A faint impression. An… ‘N’, is it?”
“An ‘H’?” I offered.
“Yes. Yes, that is it! An ‘N’ and an ‘H’ look so similar, do they not? It stands for Henry, of course.”
“Harry,” I said. “He was always known as Harry.”
“Harry bids me tell you he is sorry for not being a better brother. He says he let you down.”
Emotion welled within me. A small sob formed in the back of my throat. I bit it back.
“He never meant to be a wastrel,” the medium continued. “He wishes he had looked after himself better and could have lived longer.”
“I wish that too.”
“He is safe and sound there in the hereafter, however. He is with your beloved father. He has found peace.”
Holmes interjected. “Ask him about the watch, Miss Efralstein.”
“The watch?”
“Ask him where it is.”
“The watch is lost,” said she, after a moment’s pause. “But it may yet be found. Look… Look in the familiar place. It has fallen, but is waiting to be rediscovered.”
“The familiar place? Can Harry be more specific?”
Miss Efralstein only shook her head, not so much in refusal as confusion.
“The spirits’ voices are fading,” she said. “I… I cannot hear them any more. We have lost the slender thread of linkage we had. Be assured that your brother is happy, Doctor. All earthly cares are behind him. He rests easy.”
* * *
“I trust you are satisfied,” Miss Efralstein said, as she ushered us to her front door.
She was speaking to me, but it was Holmes who replied.
“I am quite enlightened, madam,” he said, and passed her a sovereign. “For your trouble.”
The medium tucked the coin away in a pocket. Her eyes glittered behind her veil. “A good evening to you both. I imagine our paths will not cross again.”
“Who knows what the future has in store?” Holmes said. “Perhaps not even the spirits themselves.”
As our hansom trundled northwards, Holmes seemed in an amused, ruminative mood. I myself was thoroughly confused, in fact somewhat shaken. Was it possible that my late brother had genuinely reached out to me across the gulf between the land of the living and the land of the dead? If so, he had seemed to want a reconciliation between us, one I myself had longed for while he was still alive. His years of dissipation, during which he had worked only sporadically and spent most of his time in pubs, had contrived to drive a wedge between us. Where we had been close as children, we had become estranged as adults, and all my attempts to repair the rift had come to naught. I felt there was a chance now to change that. It was just a shame that it had taken death to bring Harry to his senses.
“You don’t, of course, believe for one moment that that was your late brother talking, do you, Watson?” my friend observed as we neared the river.
“I would have said not, but for the fact that Miss Efralstein knew so much about him.”
“But, as you yourself recount in The Sign of Four, I was able to deduce whole swaths of information about your brother by simple examination of your watch.”
“So? Miss Efralstein did not examine my watch. She had no clues whatsoever to go on.”
“Really? Think, Watson. Think. Cast your mind back. What happened right at the outset, after she established contact with the spirit world?”
“She stated she was in touch with Harry.”
“Not so. She said, in these exact words, ‘I am sensing a relative.’ She then tentatively proposed that it was your brother. You immediately reacted.”
“I did not.”
“You did. I saw your eyes widen. Not only that but your hand clenched mine – it stands to reason that the one holding Miss Efralstein’s did too. These involuntary gestures told Miss Efralstein that the fish was hooked. Up until that point she had merely been casting a line in the water. She then elaborated upon the point by telling you it was a younger brother. You corrected her, whereupon she made out that that was what she had claimed all along. ‘Yes. That’s right. Older. An older brother.’”
“Very well, but how did she know about Harry’s misfortunes in life?”
“A piece of informed conjecture,” said Holmes. “She began by suggesting your brother’s spirit had regrets. What a sweeping remark! Who amongst us does not have regrets? Again, through tiny physical signals, you inadvertently gave away that she was on to something, so she took the logical next step and declared that Harry felt he had let you down. She also said he wished he could have lived longer. There are few of us, alive or dead, who would not espouse that desire.”
“She called him a wastrel, which, alas, he was.”
“You are far from being an old man, Watson. By implication your brother, even if senior, would not have been in his dotage when he passed on. For him to have died at a relatively young age would suggest some kind of infirmity. Miss Efralstein chanced her arm by plumping for a dissolute lifestyle as the cause of his death. She might equally have said he had contracted some fatal disease, and if you had then set her right, she would have pretended, as before, that she had not said anything different. You, Watson, were supplying her the answers without realising it. You were doing half the work for her.”
“What about his initial?” I protested. “She knew it was ‘H’. That could have been no mere lucky guess. The odds, if it were, are one in twenty-six.”
“Tut! She did not know his initial was ‘H’. Recall how she said first of all that it was ‘N’.”
“Yes. That is true. However, as she pointed out, the one letter is easily confused with the other.”
“Confused by whom? By your brother, the owner of the initial? Hardly. By her? But if your brother was speaking to her, whence the confusion? Moreover, ‘H’ does not sound like ‘N’. It may resemble it when written, but Miss Efralstein was listening, not looking.”
“Where did she get his name from? Answer me that.”
“Henry is by far the commonest male name beginning with ‘H’. Miss Efralstein aimed for the largest target, and scored a hit. You amended the name to ‘Harry’, and thereafter she called him that, as though all along she had known that and was on the same intimate terms with him as you. She followed it up with that lamentable nonsense about your watch. By that point I could hardly restrain my laughter. I am surprised you were not yourself chortling.”
“It was you who brought up the subject of the watch,” I said.
“And she latched on to it, assuming I was referring to an object that had been mislaid. Many people visit mediums wanting to know the whereabouts of lost personal treasures. All I had in mind was the watch I mentioned a moment ago, the one I analysed, the very one you have upon your person right now. She, however, assumed I meant some missing heirloom, and so she spun a cock-and-bull story about it being ‘in the familiar place’, implying it had fallen behind some cabinet or shelf.”
“My brother might consider that he had lost it.”
“Oh, Watson!” my companion ejaculated. “Come, come! You must concede by now that everything Miss Efralstein said in that parlour was the purest hogwash. A few clever stabs in the dark, some intuitive ‘reading’ of your good self, but essentially a tissue of supposition and insinuation. For each success of hers there was at least one failure, yet you have remembered only the former and are disregarding the latter. She was playing on your earnestness, and if the technique can work so well on a seasoned, intelligent fellow such as
Dr. John Watson, it can only be that much more effective on the less wary.”
I felt my cheeks redden. Holmes had meticulously debunked Miss Efralstein’s imposture. “I must seem such a fool to you.”
“Not a bit of it. You, like so many, are desperate to believe that the soul survives death and that there is a happy hereafter where we may reconvene with those who have passed on before us. Mediums like Miss Efralstein exploit that yearning, using it for their own ends. It is their meat and drink.”
“Do you not believe in an afterlife?”
Holmes pursed his lips. “Ask me again when I am considerably older, Watson, and death is breathing down my neck. For now, the present life is more than enough for me. There is much to be said for cherishing the mundane. It offers its own rewards. Speaking of which, you observed, did you not, some very singular features about Miss Efralstein’s house and about the lady herself?”
“Her house is as ordinary as can be,” I said. “She, on the other hand, is decidedly eccentric.”
“Broad strokes. I am talking about the fine details. Her necklace, for instance.”
“I did not even notice she was wearing one.”
“And that is where we differ, you and I. I not only noticed it, but noticed, too, an anomaly. It was a short silver chain from which hung a medallion with her initials engraved into it. There was something very unusual about that ‘E.E.’”
“Namely?”
“A number of the crossbars on the characters were fresher than the rest. Three in total. They had been added recently. Then there were the framed photographs on the sideboard in the hall.”
“Now, those I do recall,” I said. “I counted six or seven of them.”
“Eight, to be precise. But do you recall anything about the content of the pictures?”
“They were of several people – children and young men.”
“How remiss of you not to discern that they were all of a single person. The same fellow, depicted at various stages in life from a baby to a grown man. Certain of his facial features were consistent from one picture to the next, in particular the mole on his left cheek. The first photograph, taken when he could not have been more than six months old, was a daguerreotype with the year marked in the corner: 1868.”
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