The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes

by June Thomson

  The countryside now lay spread out before us and we saw that the land sloped gently downwards through open meadows to a shallow valley where a cluster of rooftops and a church tower, set a little distance from the houses, indicated the village of Lower Haybrook. Apart from a few outlying farms and cottages, it was a compact place, ringed, as if by a moat or a defensive wall, by a circle of trees towards which the footpath, clearly defined by its stony surface, led its meandering way alongside the irregular field boundaries.

  However, three-quarters of the way down, it branched off to the left to take a more direct route through the graveyard of the church itself, another finger-post pointing the way. Having climbed a second stile, we found ourselves in a newer part of the burial ground, judging by the more recent dates on the headstones and their unblemished condition, for they had not yet become either weather-stained or blotched with lichen. Holmes, who seemed interested in these graves, had dropped back a little to examine some of them, leaving Mumford and me to walk on alone towards the lychgate where we paused to let him catch up with us. As I turned to look back at him, I saw he was bending over a freshly dug grave, little more than an oblong heap of earth, which was close to the path and which was unmarked apart from a simple white wooden cross and a single wreath of withered flowers, to which was still attached a black-edged memorial card.

  Seeing us waiting, he stood upright and came striding towards us but, although I looked at him inquiringly, he made no reference either to the graves or to his interest in them, merely commenting generally on the picturesqueness of the scene and the great age of the yew trees which grew either side of the churchyard gate.

  Beyond this gate, the footpath finally petered out as it met the road leading directly to the village which we could see at the bottom of the hill about two hundred yards away. As we set out towards it, Holmes again showed an inclination to linger, on this occasion to examine any muddy patches on the left-hand side of the road which, like those we had followed on the way to Barton Wood, were still moist from water draining down from the fields. Mumford, unaware of the significance of these damp stretches, seemed a little impatient at the delay and looked back several times as if to urge my old friend to quicken his pace. But, knowing what Holmes was looking for, I was not at all surprised when he drew to a complete halt at a gap in the tall hedge which ran along the side of the road and pointed down it.

  ‘This way, Inspector,’ he called out.

  ‘Why that way?’ Mumford asked as we turned to retrace our steps.

  ‘The marks of bicycle tyres,’ I said briefly.

  There was no time to give a longer explanation for we had reached the opening in the hedge which led on to a narrow path, although Mumford seemed to grasp the meaning for he nodded quickly before setting off after Holmes who was now stalking rapidly ahead of us, head lowered and his whole frame alert like a gun dog scenting its quarry.

  The path was only a few feet wide and seemed little used, for the ground was hardly marked either by wheels or by the passage of feet and in places was overgrown with grass. But here and there in the moister soil the distinctive pattern made by the tyres of a bicycle led us as inexorably forward as the chalked arrows on the trees.

  We came upon the house as suddenly and as unexpectedly as we had stumbled across the clearing in the wood. It was a small, low, whitewashed cottage which had the same simplicity of design which may be found in a child’s drawing of a house – a mere oblong construction with a central door, two chimney stacks at each end and four casement windows, two up and two down, beneath the sloping eaves of a tiled roof. All it lacked to complete the similarity were curling streamers of smoke rising from the chimney pots.

  The absence of these signs of life and the neglected state of the front garden gave the impression that the place was unoccupied, although the open front door and a woman’s bicycle propped against the wall beside it suggested someone was at home.

  Holmes rapidly inspected the tyres of the bicycle, silently drawing our attention to the pattern on them before knocking on the door with his stick and calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’

  There came no reply. Beyond the open door, we could see a short passageway from which a precipitous staircase rose to an upper landing, and two doors set on either side, both of which were closed.

  Having knocked and called again, still with no answer, Holmes stepped into the hall and turned the handle of the door to the right.

  His sudden exclamation of horror and the abrupt manner in which he threw the door fully open and rushed into the room warned both Mumford and me that something dreadful lay within but neither of us was prepared for the scene which confronted us as we crowded in behind him.

  The room, which ran the full width of the cottage, served as both a kitchen and a dining room, an old-fashioned black iron stove standing in the chimney opening at the rear, two wooden cupboards and, under the window, a pump for water erected over a shallow sink providing its limited equipment.

  The front part, the end at which we had entered, contained nothing more than a deal table and three Windsor chairs. Apart from one shabby rug in front of the fireplace, the flagstoned floor was bare.

  However, it was only later that I noticed these details. As I entered the room at Holmes’ heels, my whole attention was fixed on the dreadful sight which met my gaze and which blotted out all awareness of my surroundings.

  It was the body of a woman dressed in black, a veil drawn down over her face, which hung suspended from a rope fixed to a hook in a ceiling beam and which was twisting slowly in the draught from the opened door. An overturned chair lay a short distance from her feet which were also swinging gently to and fro below her black skirts like a ghastly, human metronome keeping time with some inaudible rhythm.

  I heard Holmes shout out an order which at the time I failed to register properly although its intention was quite clear. While Mumford rushed off to fetch a knife from a kitchen drawer, Holmes and I supported her weight from below. On the Inspector’s return, Holmes took the knife, righted the chair and, having mounted it, cut the rope and between us we lowered the body to the floor.

  As with Crosby’s corpse, I had no need to feel for the carotid artery in her neck to know that she was dead. Rigor mortis was already too well advanced for there to be any hope of her revival.

  ‘It is too late, Holmes,’ I said, looking up at him as I knelt beside the body. ‘There is nothing I can do to save her.’

  I was shocked by the expression on his face. Never in our long acquaintance had I seen him look so gaunt and haggard. It was as if the flesh had fallen away from his features, leaving the bony structure beneath pitifully exposed under the thin membrane of the skin so that he resembled a living death’s head, ashen in colour, the eyes sunk deep into their sockets.

  ‘Him,’ he corrected me.

  ‘Him?’ I repeated, greatly astonished.

  ‘It is a man, Watson, not a woman,’ he said abruptly.

  It was only then I realised that his order to us had been to cut ‘him’ down.

  Kneeling down beside him, he lifted back the veil to reveal the features, terribly distorted by the effects of strangulation. Nevertheless it was still possible to discern under the bloated flesh the lineaments of a young man in his early twenties, handsome if a little over-refined and sensitive, especially about the mouth and chin which gave the lower part of his face a vulnerable quality.

  ‘How were you so certain it was a man, not a woman?’ I asked.

  ‘The newly dug grave by the churchyard path which confirmed my suspicions that a recent bereavement could have led Crosby’s murderer to seek revenge,’ he replied. ‘The card on the wreath was inscribed with the words: “To my dearest mother from her ever-loving son, Rupert.” There then followed last Wednesday’s date and a brief biblical quotation: “To proclaim the day of vengeance; to comfort all that mourn.”* Her death ten days ago was, I believe, the event which triggered his decision to murder Algernon Crosby.’

&nb
sp; ‘According to this suicide note, you are quite right, Mr Holmes,’ Inspector Mumford remarked unexpectedly. He had picked up a sheet of paper from the table from which he began to read out loud.

  “‘Since my dear mother’s death, I have found life intolerable. I have therefore decided to put into action my long-thought-out plan to murder Algernon Crosby, the man who brought so much grief and despair to my parents, directly causing my father’s suicide and my mother’s suffering which hastened her own untimely end. You will find Crosby’s body in a clearing in Barton Wood. I have placed all the documents relating to this affair in a deed box in my bedroom.” It is signed Rupert Sefton,’ Mumford concluded.

  There is not much else I wish to add to this account. Inspector Mumford volunteered to walk into the village to requisition a suitable vehicle in which to transport Sefton’s body to the mortuary in Guildford. In his absence, Holmes and I inspected the remaining rooms in the house, all sparsely furnished, including the late Mrs Sefton’s bedchamber which was left exactly as it must have been on the day she died, with a bible placed on the night table and the few clothes she possessed hanging in the press or lying neatly folded in the drawers. It was doubtlessly from among this apparel that Rupert Sefton had acquired the mourning dress and veiled hat which he had worn in his role as the lady in black.

  Her son’s room across the landing was as bare and contained little more than an iron bedstead and a chest of drawers on the top of which was placed a wedding photograph. Both the bride and groom were good-looking, the woman in particular, bearing about her features that sensitive and refined expression which I had discerned in the face of her dead son. The black ribbon pinned to the frame and the little posy of wild flowers placed in a vase before it made their radiant happiness as they smiled at the camera even more poignant.

  The deed box, referred to in Rupert Sefton’s suicide note, stood beside it but, apart from picking it up and carrying it downstairs to leave in the hall, Holmes made no attempt, then, to open it. He also avoided re-entering the room where Sefton’s body was still lying on the floor. Instead, he wandered out into the garden where I followed him, a little anxious about his state of mind, for he had lapsed once more into that brooding silence which always presaged one of his blacker moods. However, a glimpse of his former self reasserted itself when, in the course of his restless peregrinations, he came upon the gully into which water from the kitchen sink drained and called me over to examine what he had found. Lying in the bottom were several loathsome, reddish-coloured leeches of the type which had been placed on Crosby’s body, the discovery of which seemed to afford him a sombre satisfaction.

  On Mumford’s return with a wagonette and its driver, both borrowed from a nearby farm, we laid the body of Rupert Sefton on the straw in the back and, having covered it with a blanket, set out by road for Barton Wood to collect the second body, that of Algernon Crosby, still guarded by Constable Huggins. With his help, we gathered up the objects laid out upon the man’s chest and then, between the four of us, we carried the corpse on a hurdle to the road where it, too, was loaded on to the wagonette and covered over. So the two men, who in their lifetime had probably never met, apart from that fatal encounter in Barton Wood, were laid side by side, united in death in a final intimacy.

  It was a melancholy journey back to Guildford through that magnificent countryside which but a few hours before I had observed with so much pleasure, its autumn colours now enriched by the glow of the setting sun. Not one of us spoke and the only sound was the creaking of the wheels and the slow, heavy tread of the horses’ hooves on the road.

  Having left the bodies at the mortuary, Holmes and I accompanied the two officers back to the police station where, in Mumford’s office, we read over the contents of the deed box which included old newspaper cuttings, bank statements and letters, among them the last two written by Rupert Sefton to Algernon Crosby which Sefton must have taken from his victim’s pocket. The first promised, as Holmes had predicted, to name Crosby’s anonymous correspondent who was threatening his life. In it, he suggested a meeting at the Rose and Crown in Steeple Barton and gave the time of the train he should catch from London. The second was a hurried note which the so-called lady in black had left for him at the tavern changing the rendezvous to Barton Wood and directing him to follow the arrows to the meeting-place. Both were signed ‘Elizabeth Sefton’. Amongst these various documents, we also found a journal of a sort kept by Rupert Sefton over a period of years. From these papers, we were able to piece together the family’s tragic story and the events which had led to Crosby’s murder and Rupert Sefton’s suicide.

  Sefton’s father, a once prosperous stockbroker, ruined by the collapse of a South African gold-mining company in which he had heavily invested, had indeed been refused a bank loan by Crosby, acting on behalf of Mott and Co. Faced with bankruptcy and inevitable ruin, Frederick Sefton had, as his son was to do later, hanged himself, leaving behind a widow and their only child, Rupert, then aged fifteen.

  Forced by penury and the stigma of social disgrace, Mrs Sefton retired to the isolated cottage in Lower Haybrook where the two of them lived like recluses on a small annuity, hardly big enough to pay the household bills. It was then that Rupert Sefton’s implacable hatred of Algernon Crosby first took root for, with the emotional illogicality of youth, he mistakenly laid the entire blame for the family’s misfortune, including his own, on Crosby’s shoulders. A brilliant scholar with every expectation of going up to University to study natural science, he found those bright hopes suddenly dashed when he was taken away from school as his mother could no longer pay the fees. He tried to continue his education as best he could by studying the local flora and fauna, thereby fulfilling yet another of Holmes’ predictions about his interest in nature.

  From his journal, we were able to trace the development over the years of his one idée fixe, which Holmes had also deduced, to avenge his father’s death until by a gradual process of deterioration in his mental state, brought to a climax by his mother’s death, he was consumed by the one burning desire – to murder Algernon Crosby.

  This aspect of his personality was reflected in the coroner’s verdict after the inquest which we both attended although only Holmes was called upon to give evidence. It found that Rupert Sefton had first murdered Algernon Crosby and afterwards had taken his own life, the balance of his mind being disturbed.

  As I considered the case to be of interest to my readers who, like me, greatly admire Holmes’ remarkable methods of deduction, I asked for his permission to publish this account of it. However, he has adamantly refused.

  Although I have known Holmes for many years, certain features of his singular personality remain an enigma to me and I can only guess at the reason behind his refusal. However, I am convinced that some aspect of the Barton Wood case, in particular the suicide of the young man, Rupert Sefton, has touched some deep chord in Holmes’ memory, of what I cannot say although I strongly suspect it may concern a relation or a close friend who took his own life in a similar fashion.

  Until the time when he chooses to confide in me or withdraws his refusal, this account of the case will therefore have to remain in the vaults of my bank, Cox and Co. of Charing Cross, among my other unpublished records.*

  * This inquiry took place in August, ‘some months’ after Mr Sherlock Holmes’ return to England in spring 1894 after the Great Hiatus. Many commentators therefore date the case to August of that year although some prefer to assign it to the following year, August 1895. Dr John F. Watson.

  * Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, which was published monthly, contained train timetables. Dr John F. Watson.

  * Although in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,’ Dr John H. Watson remarks that ‘appreciation of nature found no place among his [Sherlock Holmes’] many gifts,’ in ‘The Adventure of Black Peter,’ dated July 1895, Mr Sherlock Holmes invites Dr Watson to ‘walk in the woods … and give a few hours to the birds and the flowers’. Dr John F. Watson.
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  * In ‘The Adventure of the Priory School,’ Mr Sherlock Holmes remarks that he was ‘familiar with forty-two different impressions’ left by bicycle tyres. Dr John F. Watson.

  * According to St Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 27, Judas repented his betrayal of Jesus and tried to return the silver to the chief priests and elders but they refused to take them because it was blood money. Judas then threw down the coins and went away and hanged himself. The money was used to buy a field, known as the potter’s field, as a burial ground for strangers. Dr John F. Watson.

  * Medicinal leeches were widely used in the past not only to draw blood but to treat a number of illnesses including gout, tumours, headaches and skin diseases. Dr John F. Watson. Because their saliva contains hirudin, an anti-coagulant, leeches are again being used by surgeons to drain blood from the restored part of, for example, a severed finger after it has been sewn back using microsurgery. Leech farms have been established for the breeding of medicinal leeches. Aubrey B. Watson

  † This species of leech was first recorded in the Zoological Gardens in 1850. It has since spread across the country as far as South Wales and southern Scotland. Dr John F. Watson.

  ‡ After coming down from University, Mr Sherlock Holmes studied chemistry and anatomy at St Bartholomew’s hospital where Dr John H. Watson had been a medical student. Dr John F. Watson.

  * Although the concept of the idée fixe (obsession) had been known since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first serious research into abnormal psychology was carried out by J. M. Charcot at Salt-pêtrière, the hospital for nervous diseases outside Paris. Sigmund Freud was one of Charcot’s students in 1885. Dr John F. Watson.

  * In ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ Mr Sherlock Holmes remarks that ‘there is no branch of detective science which is so important as the art of tracing footsteps’ and, in the same account, he assures Dr John H. Watson that ‘the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told by the length of his stride’. Dr John F. Watson.