As I have said, there was a broad corridor there, which ran outside three empty bedrooms. At one end of the corridor we were all marshalled by Sherlock Holmes, the constables grinning and Lestrade staring at my friend with amazement, expectation, and derision chasing each other across his features. Holmes stood before us with the air of a conjurer who is performing a trick.
“Would you kindly send one of your constables for two buckets of water? Put the straw on the floor here, free from the wall on either side. Now I think that we are all ready.”
Lestrade’s face had begun to grow red and angry.
“I don’t know whether you are playing a game with us, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said he. “If you know anything you can surely say it without all this tomfoolery.”
“I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do. You may possibly remember that you chaffed me a little some hours ago, when the sun seemed on your side of the hedge, so you must not grudge me a little pomp and ceremony now. Might I ask you, Watson, to open that window, and then to put a match to the edge of the straw?” I did so, and driven by the draught, a coil of grey smoke swirled down the corridor, while the dry straw crackled and flamed.
“Now we must see if we can find this witness for you, Lestrade. Might I ask you all to join in the cry of ‘Fire’? Now, then; one, two, three—”
“Fire!” we all yelled.
“Thank you. I will trouble you once again.”
“Fire!”
“Just once more, gentlemen, and all together.”
“Fire!” The shout must have rung over Norwood.
It had hardly died away when an amazing thing happened. A door suddenly flew open out of what appeared to be solid wall at the end of the corridor, and a little wizened man darted out of it, like a rabbit out of its burrow.
“Capital!” said Holmes calmly. “Watson, a bucket of water over the straw. That will do! Lestrade, allow me to present you with your principal missing witness, Mr. Jonas Oldacre.”
The detective stared at the new-comer with blank amazement. The latter was blinking in the bright light of the corridor, and peering at us and at the smouldering fire. It was an odious face—crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-gray eyes and white eyelashes.
“What’s this, then?” said Lestrade at last. “What have you been doing all this time, eh?”
“A little, wizened man darted out.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1903
Oldacre gave an uneasy laugh, shrinking back from the furious red face of the angry detective.
“I have done no harm.”
“No harm? You have done your best to get an innocent man hanged. If it wasn’t for this gentleman here, I am not sure that you would not have succeeded.” The wretched creature began to whimper.
“I am sure, sir, it was only my practical joke.”
“Oh! a joke, was it? You won’t find the laugh on your side, I promise you. Take him down and keep him in the sitting-room until I come. Mr. Holmes,” he continued, when they had gone, “I could not speak before the constables, but I don’t mind saying, in the presence of Dr. Watson, that this is the brightest thing that you have done yet, though it is a mystery to me how you did it. You have saved an innocent man’s life, and you have prevented a very grave scandal, which would have ruined my reputation in the Force.”
Mr. Jonas Oldacre.
Charles Raymond Macaulay, Return of Sherlock Holmes (McClure Phillips), 1905
Holmes smiled and clapped Lestrade upon the shoulder.
“Instead of being ruined, my good sir, you will find that your reputation has been enormously enhanced. Just make a few alterations in that report which you were writing, and they will understand how hard it is to throw dust in the eyes of Inspector Lestrade.”
“And you don’t want your name to appear?”
“Not at all. The work is its own reward. Perhaps I shall get the credit also at some distant day when I permit my zealous historian to lay out his foolscap once more—eh, Watson? Well, now, let us see where this rat has been lurking.”
A lath-and-plaster partition had been run across the passage six feet from the end, with a door cunningly concealed in it. It was lit within by slits under the eaves. A few articles of furniture and a supply of food and water were within, together with a number of books and papers.
“There’s the advantage of being a builder,” said Holmes as we came out. “He was able to fix up his own little hiding-place without any confederate—save, of course, that precious housekeeper of his, whom I should lose no time in adding to your bag, Lestrade.”
“Holmes smiled and clapped Lestrade upon the shoulder.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1903
“I’ll take your advice. But how did you know of this place, Mr. Holmes?”
“I made up my mind that the fellow was in hiding in the house. When I paced one corridor and found it six feet shorter than the corresponding one below, it was pretty clear where he was. I thought he had not the nerve to lie quiet before an alarm of fire. We could, of course, have gone in and taken him, but it amused me to make him reveal himself; besides, I owed you a little mystification, Lestrade, for your chaff in the morning.”
“Well, sir, you certainly got equal with me on that. But how in the world did you know that he was in the house at all?”
“The thumb-mark, Lestrade. You said it was final; and so it was, in a very different sense. I knew it had not been there the day before. I pay a good deal of attention to matters of detail, as you may have observed, and I had examined the hall, and was sure that the wall was clear. Therefore, it had been put on during the night.”
“But how?”
“Very simply. When those packets were sealed up, Jonas Oldacre got McFarlane to secure one of the seals by putting his thumb upon the soft wax. It would be done so quickly and so naturally that I daresay the young man himself has no recollection of it. Very likely it just so happened, and Oldacre had himself no notion of the use he would put it to. Brooding over the case in that den of his, it suddenly struck him what absolutely damning evidence he could make against McFarlane by using that thumb-mark. It was the simplest thing in the world for him to take a wax impression from the seal, to moisten it in as much blood as he could get from a pin-prick, and to put the mark upon the wall during the night, either with his own hand or with that of his housekeeper. If you examine among these documents which he took with him into his retreat, I will lay you a wager that you find the seal with the thumb-mark upon it.”
“Wonderful!” said Lestrade. “Wonderful! It’s all as clear as crystal, as you put it. But what is the object of this deep deception, Mr. Holmes?”
It was amusing to me to see how the detective’s overbearing manner had changed suddenly to that of a child asking questions of its teacher.
“Well, I don’t think that is very hard to explain. A very deep, malicious, vindictive person is the gentleman who is now awaiting us downstairs. You know that he was once refused by McFarlane’s mother? You don’t! I told you that you should go to Blackheath first and Norwood afterwards. Well, this injury, as he would consider it, has rankled in his wicked, scheming brain, and all his life he has longed for vengeance, but never seen his chance. During the last year or two things have gone against him—secret speculation, I think—and he finds himself in a bad way. He determines to swindle his creditors, and for this purpose he pays large cheques to a certain Mr. Cornelius, who is, I imagine, himself under another name. I have not traced these cheques yet, but I have no doubt that they were banked under that name at some provincial town where Oldacre from time to time led a double existence. He intended to change his name altogether, draw this money, and vanish, starting life again elsewhere.”
“Well, that’s likely enough.”
“It would strike him that in disappearing he might throw all pursuit off his track, and at the same time have an ample and crushing revenge upon his old sweetheart, if he coul
d give the impression that he had been murdered by her only child. It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master. The idea of the will, which would give an obvious motive for the crime, the secret visit unknown to his own parents, the retention of the stick, the blood, and the animal remains and buttons in the wood-pile, all were admirable. It was a net from which it seemed to me, a few hours ago, that there was no possible escape. But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect—to draw the rope tighter yet round the neck of his unfortunate victim—and so he ruined all. Let us descend, Lestrade. There are just one or two questions that I would ask him.”
The malignant creature was seated in his own parlour with a policeman upon each side of him.
“It was a joke, my good sir, a practical joke, nothing more,” he whined incessantly. “I assure you, sir, that I simply concealed myself in order to see the effect of my disappearance, and I am sure that you would not be so unjust as to imagine that I would have allowed any harm to befall poor young Mr. McFarlane.”
“That’s for the jury to decide,” said Lestrade. “Anyhow, we shall have you on a charge of conspiracy, if not for attempted murder.”
“And you’ll probably find that your creditors will impound the banking account of Mr. Cornelius,” said Holmes.
The little man started and turned his malignant eyes upon my friend.
“I have to thank you for a good deal,” said he. “Perhaps I’ll pay my debt some day.”
Holmes smiled indulgently.
“I fancy that for some few years you will find your time very fully occupied,” said he. “By the way, what was it you put into the wood-pile besides your old trousers? A dead dog, or rabbits, or what? You won’t tell? Dear me, how very unkind of you! Well, well, I daresay that a couple of rabbits would account both for the blood and for the charred ashes.18 If ever you write an account, Watson, you can make rabbits serve your turn.”
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND FINGERPRINTING
ONE OF the first significant developments in forensic science was the ability to identify people by their fingerprints. As early as 1858, Sir William Herschel, a magistrate in Jungipoor, India, began requiring locals to impress their handprints (and later, their fingerprints) on the backs of contracts when signing them. Because the native Indians believed that physical contact with a document was more binding than a mere signature, Herschel’s procedure was meant more to enforce the contract’s legitimacy than to provide any sort of personal identification. Still, through this experience he came to realise that each individual’s fingerprints were unique. He began collecting the prints of family members and friends, studying how they remained unchanged over time.
Meanwhile, Dr. Henry Faulds, while working as a surgeon in Japan, discovered ancient fingerprint markings in prehistoric clay pottery and began taking people’s fingerprints so as to examine the properties and distinctions of “skin-furrows.” He even managed to use his collection to discover who had stolen a bottle of alcohol from his medical clinic, matching the greasy fingerprints found on a cocktail glass to those of one of his medical students, whose prints he had on file. (This is the first reported example of a crime being solved through fingerprinting.) From his research, Faulds published a letter in the October 28, 1880, edition of Nature, stating, “When blood finger- marks or impressions on clay, glass, etc., exist, they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals. . . . There can be no doubt as to the advantage of having, besides their photographs, a nature-copy of the for-ever unchangeable finger-furrows of important criminals.” Herschel published a letter in the following month’s edition of Nature, detailing his own use of fingerprints as identifying “sign-manuals.”
Despite Faulds’s attempts to persuade Scotland Yard to create some sort of fingerprint identification system, it was Francis Galton, an anthopologist and cousin of Sir Charles Darwin, who would get most of the credit for fathering the science of fingerprinting. Faulds had sent a summary of his research to Darwin, who, being advanced in age, had promised to forward it to his cousin. Using Faulds’s as well as Herschel’s research, Galton began conducting his own experiments and collaborating with Herschel, a man whose family credentials and social status were more elevated than Faulds’s.
Although Galton had to concede failure in his attempts to establish a link between fingerprints and race, intelligence, or genetic history, his work progressed, and in 1892—acknowledging the research of Herschel, but not Faulds—he published the book Finger Prints, which not only determined that no two people’s fingerprints were alike but also introduced a classification system that broke down the patterns of each print’s loops, arches, and whorls. This system was developed further by Edward R. Henry, future commissioner of the London metropolitan police. Following the 1893 endorsement of the Troup Committee, fingerprinting was successfully introduced in India in 1897, and in 1901 Scotland Yard established its own fingerprint bureau using the so-called Galton-Henry system (or Galton’s Details), which remains the preferred classification system today. Galton was knighted in 1909. Faulds, on the other hand, received no recognition for his work until the mid-1900s.
Scholars have long pondered how much Holmes might have known about this fledgling science. As “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” is thought to have taken place in 1894, Holmes could certainly have read Herschel and Faulds’s letters in Nature, read Galton’s book, or attended Galton’s lecture on “Personal Identification and Description,” given on Friday evening, May 25, 1888, at the Royal Institution. (Alternatively, Holmes may have seen the reprint of that lecture in the June 28, 1888, issue of Nature, which discussed Herschel’s work and the use of fingerprints in China to identify criminals.) Additional work by Galton was published in Nature on December 4, 1890, and referenced by Henry E. Varigny in an article entitled “Anthropology—The Finger Prints According to M. F. Galton,” in Revue Scientifique (May 1891). During this time, fingerprinting was also being utilised in Argentina, where police official Juan Vucetich solved a murder case in 1892—of a mother who killed her two sons—by extracting a bloody fingerprint left on a doorpost. In 1904 Vucetich developed his own, Galton-based classification system, which is now used in most Spanish-speaking countries.
Holmes’s stated admiration in “The Naval Treaty” for Alphonse Bertillon, founder of a sophisticated system of measurement to identify criminals, leads some scholars to wonder why he did not similarly reference Galton when speaking to Lestrade about fingerprinting. Vernon Rendall, noting specifically that Holmes made no mention of Galton’s Finger-prints and the Detection of Crime in India, a paper he presented to the British Association in 1899, concludes that egotism in this situation prevented Holmes from giving others proper credit: “All one can suggest is that Holmes was not eager to take up other people’s methods. With his vanity, he found it difficult to use another expert to help him.”
William S. Baring-Gould makes nonsense of Rendall’s claim, exposing his error in thinking Holmes would have read a paper that would not be presented for another four or five years. (Baring-Gould puts “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” as occurring in 1895, not 1894, as most other chronologists have determined.). “On the contrary,” Baring-Gould declares, “the obviously sarcastic tone of Holmes’ ‘I have heard something of the kind’ clearly indicates that he had studied fingerprints and was aware of their importance in the detection of crime. It is more difficult to explain how Lestrade, in 1895, was aware that ‘no two thumb-prints are alike,’ since the system was not adopted by Scotland Yard until 1901.” Of course, Lestrade, while lacking Holmes’s prodigious intelligence, may also have read any of the various publications about this intriguing new science.
Holmes clearly understood the importance of fingerprints; indeed, his knowledge is demonstrated by his observations in five other reported cases, three occurring prior to “The Norwood Builder”: The Sign of Four (thumb-mark on letter sent by Thaddeus S
holto to Mary Morstan); “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (letter to Mrs. St. Clair posted by “a man with a dirty thumb”); “The Cardboard Box” (box had “nothing distinctive save two thumb-marks”); “The Three Students” (there are no finger impressions on the examination papers); and “The Red Circle” (paper torn away to eliminate thumbprint). In “The Three Gables,” even the police are aware of finger-marks, as evidenced by the anonymous inspector’s remark to Holmes as he passes Holmes a sheet of foolscap.
Therefore, it is safe to assume that by 1894 or 1895, Holmes would indeed have been familiar with the technique of fingerprinting and the uniqueness of fingerprints. Clearly Watson was (“It was evident to me that our unfortunate client was lost”); and Lestrade was apparently aware of the notion as well, regardless of whether the Yard had officially adopted a system of fingerprinting. Until a bank of fingerprint data was available, however, the technique alone would have limited value.
1 “The Norwood Builder” was published in the Strand Magazine in November 1903 and in Collier’s Weekly on October 31, 1903. The manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
2 The manuscript reveals that the phrase “late lamented” has been inserted in Watson’s original draft, in the same hand as the manuscript.
3 Contrast this with Watson’s remark in “The Solitary Cyclist”: “From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man.”
4 The phrase “as a Junior and insignificant member of the firm” is added in the manuscript.
5 Curiously, in the manuscript Watson originally refers to “Crocker.”
6 The reader will recall that in “The Greek Interpreter” Holmes describes his grandmother as the sister of “Vernet, the French artist.”
7 Most scholars accept this as a reference to “Wisteria Lodge,” in which “ex-President Murillo” of the fictitious country of “San Pedro” figures, although the reference to “papers” is puzzling, for “papers” are not directly involved in the case.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 10
