This would never do, I knew. Holmes was relying on me to search these rooms thoroughly, and I could hardly do so while in such a melancholy mood. I gave myself a mental shake, and set to.
Half an hour later, I had discovered nothing of special interest. Mrs van Raalte had lived as I expect many women of her age and status live; quietly, carefully and without ostentation. Far from uncovering a clue as to her killer, in fact, I had merely accumulated a small pile of the most mundane items imaginable. A programme for an evening of cultural events, dated more than a decade previously; a modest collection of letters, tied with a ribbon and written in a foreign language that I took to be Dutch; and a card with an image of a large waterfall on it – these were the highlights of my trove, leaving me painfully aware that I had thus far been wasting my time. I dropped the papers onto the nearest table and, in my haste and lack of attention, contrived to knock the teacup to the floor, where it smashed into several pieces. The sound of breaking china echoed through the empty house, far louder than I would have expected.
There was a small utility room off the sitting room, containing, I felt certain, a brush and shovel with which I could clean up the mess. Sure enough, exactly what I needed stood just inside the door. I was reaching over a low dresser that was in the way and had just pulled the brush towards me when I heard a creaking sound and a cough, coming from somewhere outside the sitting room door.
The combination of the stuffy atmosphere, the long period of silence and my general unease had left me unsure of myself and ready to believe the worst. I cursed the fact that I had not thought to bring my revolver with me, and I cast my eyes quickly round the utility room in search of a potential weapon. To my delight, a slightly bent iron poker lay immediately to hand. I grabbed it with a sigh of relief. The very feel of the heavy metal in my hand restored much of my equanimity, and it was with a confidence that had hitherto eluded me that I slowly crept towards the closed sitting room door.
I stood as close to the door as I dared and, holding my breath, listened for further evidence of an intruder. The thought that the police officer outside might simply have come in out of the rain occurred to me, but was as swiftly discarded. Certainly, he would have called out my name as soon as he entered the house, and not crept around like a petty burglar.
Just then, I heard a heavy breath immediately on the other side of the door and so, raising the poker above my head, I pushed it quickly open and rushed through, determined to confront the intruder, whoever he might be.
“Good afternoon, my dear sir!”
The gentleman who stood before me was barely five feet tall, portly to an unhealthy degree and smelled strongly of whisky. As I burst through the door he was mopping his brow with a voluminous handkerchief, which had the fortunate effect of blocking his vision and so allowing me to hide the poker behind my back, out of sight. Whoever he might be, I very much doubted he posed a physical threat.
“Good afternoon,” I replied in kind, then, “My name is Dr John Watson. Forgive me, but may I ask your name, and what you are doing in Mrs van Raalte’s apartments?”
“Algernon Hinton at your service, though all my friends call me Algy.” He held out a hand and I, after transferring the poker to my left, shook it in greeting before inviting him to join me in the sitting room.
I quickly discovered both that Algy Hinton was a talkative man and that he had a fondness for strong liquor. Within a few minutes, he had told me his life story, recounting his upbringing in the interior of the country, his desire as a young man to better himself, his move to the city twenty years previously and his current role as a writer of romantic fiction for several of the smaller New York publishing firms. He rented, he concluded, a small room in the house in which he wrote his romances.
In turn, I explained that a colleague and I were helping the police in the matter of Mrs van Raalte.
“The matter of… why, what is wrong with that dear, precious lady? I have been asleep all morning with a painful head and have seen no one.”
Either Hinton was telling the truth and knew nothing of his landlady’s untimely demise, or he was the finest actor I had ever encountered. As I elaborated, his face, until that point a faint purple in colour, blanched as much as it possibly could and tears sprang to his eyes. I feared for a second that he would weep, but thankfully he chose instead to push himself to his feet and cross to a cupboard that sat under the window of Mrs van Raalte’s sitting room. He took out a bottle of brandy and two glasses, then poured us each a substantial measure. It was rather too early in the day for me to be drinking spirits, but I sipped at my drink while he gulped his down and poured himself another.
“I’m sure she shouldn’t mind our partaking of a drop of her medicinal brandy,” he said once he was settled again in his chair. He sighed sadly and drained his glass before refilling it for a second time. “Not that we can ask her, even if we wanted to,” he added with a slow shake of his head.
“Had you known Mrs van Raalte for long, Mr Hinton?” I asked, keen to move the conversation along before Hinton became completely intoxicated, which he showed every sign of doing in the very near future. “How did you come to be her tenant?”
“Algy, please. Call me Algy.” He smiled brightly and stirred his drink with a finger. “Let me see, it must be five years I’ve known that most wonderful of landladies. Yes, five years. I’m sure of it. Her husband had recently died and she had decided that changed finances meant a change in her life. Not lodgers though. Oh no, not lodgers. She told me herself when I answered her little notice – ‘I will not have lodgers, Mr Hinton,’ she said. ‘No man will sleep under the same roof as me except Mr van Raalte,’ and then she wept like a baby. Little did she know the relentless way some swine would pursue her.”
His face fell as he considered his late landlady and, in the manner of drunken men from Kandahar to Coventry, quickly moved from cheerful good humour to maudlin self-pity. “And now we shall never speak again, she and I. And I will be forced to move offices! If I can even find suitable new premises at a decent price…” He fell silent and blinked at me glassily several times. “Who did you say you were? The police?” He attempted to stand but he had imbibed enough brandy to make that a fool’s errand and he fell back, spilling his latest drink down his shirt front. “Show me some identification then!” His words were slurred but the belligerence in his voice was unmistakable. It was plain that I would obtain no further information from him.
I left him where he sat with an empty bottle in his hand and walked back round towards the front of the house, passing what I assumed was his office on the way. The door stood ajar and, though I paused on the threshold for a minute or more, I knew Holmes would expect me to investigate while I had the opportunity.
Listening carefully for footsteps above the drumming sound of the rain outside, I pushed the door open and slipped inside. The room within was physically a duplicate of the imposter’s office, with a corridor opening out to the right into a square area, but where the fake Holmes had placed a desk within sight of the door, Hinton had pushed his up against the wall, hidden from the view of casual visitors.
The reason was obvious. An empty bottle of whisky lay on its side under a chair, a mirror of its equally empty twin on the desk. An overflowing ashtray and a selection of alcohol-stained manuscript pages completed the clichéd image of the dissolute artist at work, but when I examined some of the papers more closely, I wondered just how much of an artist Algy Hinton actually was. No single page had more than a line or two on it, primarily the worst sort of doggerel – limericks, “humorous” stories that led nowhere and poor quality puns predominated – with, here and there, a few lines of what might have been autobiography or rough entries for a diary. The writing was sufficiently scrawled that I struggled to read much of it, and so I pulled open the desk drawers in search of more useful details.
The first drawer was empty, but the second contained a folder, inside which nestled a sheaf of closely spaced, typewritten page
s. A cursory inspection suggested that these pages constituted a clean copy of the diary notes I had already discarded, with references to Hinton’s arrival in the city and a period spent living as a tramp on the streets. I doubted Holmes would have much interest in tales of Hinton sleeping on a park bench, so I flipped forward a dozen pages and was rewarded by the sight of Mrs van Raalte’s name in the very first paragraph.
Mrs van Raalte – Edith, as she had been so kind as to invite me to address her – has proven a true friend, an angel in earthly form, a veritable savior! More like a wife than my own ever was, I find myself daily admiring her further. Not, I should add, simply because she has rescued me from the perilous existence I had heretofore led. No, not because of that at all, in fact! I admire and respect her because, in this modern, immoral world, she has remained true to the memory of her beloved late husband and has turned down offers of matrimony that a lesser, weaker woman would have embraced wholeheartedly.
She told me so herself, on our very first meeting, in fact. We sipped a glass of wine in her sitting room, while she recounted such tales as would make an honest man’s hair turn white overnight! How, like vultures, confidence tricksters and criminals swooped down on her while Mr van Raalte was barely cold in the ground, asking for her hand in marriage – and the money that went with it!
And it did not stop there! Only this morning as I woke from a pleasant nap at my desk, I heard that black-hearted fiend Sherlock Holmes bother the dear lady once again, whispering his vile flatteries to her just yards from my own office door, even though she is a decade his senior, at least! And she will weaken in the end, I know it, for she has told me before that Holmes would do anything to make her his wife, and she is only a woman after all, alone in the world with nobody to protect her!
I wished to strengthen her weakening resolve, so I pushed my larger dictionary to the floor in order to startle him, which thankfully it did, but still – the morals of the man are no better than those of a weasel!
I believe that I shall be forced to speak to Holmes if he does not take his unwanted offers and leave this otherwise contented house in peace. I must be careful though – if I am to confront the blackguard, it must be when his voiceless ape, Watson, is not around. That silent horror is enough to make even the bravest of souls quiver in his boots! But I would have my path devoid of thorns!
The page ended there, and by the next Hinton had changed topic altogether, but there was a date at the top, exactly a month ago. I scrabbled in a drawer for a pencil and piece of paper and copied the entire entry down, snorting to myself at the description of the “ape Watson”, and considering – as a fellow scribe – Hinton’s rather frantic writing style.
An extended coughing fit and the sound of a chair scraping against the floor in Mrs van Raalte’s quarters jerked me back to the present, however. I stuffed the sheet of paper into my jacket pocket and, after a last quick look around the room, made my way to the front door and out into the wet street. I asked the policeman still standing outside in the rain to check on Hinton and make sure he did himself no harm in his inebriated condition, then hailed a passing cab before the continuing downpour soaked me completely.
* * *
I had been gone only an hour and a half but, to my surprise, Holmes had beaten me back to the hotel once more. He beckoned me over to his table and, before I could even begin to recount my adventures, insisted that I light my pipe while he told me of his own.
“The pastor lives at the other end of the island,” Holmes began as I made myself comfortable, “but such is the splendidly logical nature of the roads here that it took hardly any time to travel there by hansom cab. The house itself is equally impressive, on three floors, plus a below-stairs area, and reminded me of the sort of townhouse that might be found in one of the better areas of London. The front door is approached via half a dozen stone steps, with a servants’ entrance to the right of the main entrance, down a flight of iron stairs. I knocked on the former and, having given my name as Inspector Lestrade once again, was shown into a large public room by a servant, describing myself, as I said I would, as a colleague of Inspector Bullock. The pastor was already present, standing with his back to a large, open fire, and asked me to take a seat in a high-backed silver chair that sat nearby.”
Holmes gave a sudden bark of laughter and glanced at me with a mocking gleam in his eye. “I hope you appreciate the pains I have taken to remember the furnishings and the like, Watson. I know your audience delight in your gift for describing the most mundane elements in excruciating detail and I would hate for them to be disappointed by our American adventure.”
I waved these words away impatiently, keen to hear more of Pastor Hoffmann. “Very humorous, Holmes,” I countered, “but my audience far prefers to hear of the events that took place, rather than the place itself.”
Holmes was contrite. “My sincere apologies, Watson. That was mischievous of me, I admit.” He stubbed out his cigarillo and lit another before continuing his narrative. “As I say, the pastor stood by the fire and I sat in front of him. He evidently thought that a clever thing to do, placing me in an inferior position from the beginning, but I imagined myself the schoolmaster and he the errant pupil and was swiftly in control of the conversation. Or so I thought!”
“You mean Hoffmann was obstructive?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. We began with the usual social pleasantries, Hoffmann asking how long I had known Bullock, how I found New York and so on, and I, without lying directly, allowing him to think I had been called over from Scotland Yard in order to track down a dangerous criminal, recently fled to the United States from England. It was obvious at once that the pastor was not an amiable man, nor one given to levity, and he seemed from the off to be disinclined to help if it were likely to prove inconvenient to himself. But he called down to the kitchens – he used a speaking tube situated by the fireplace, you might like to know – for tea and was willing to answer a few questions, so long as it did not take up too much of his time.”
“Kind of him.”
“Indeed. In any case, once the tea had been served, the pastor hooked his fingers in his waistcoat like some riverboat gambler and told me to ‘go ahead and state my case’. As you can imagine, Watson, I was loath to tell such a man that someone who might well have been carrying out a confidential and personally embarrassing task for him was an imposter. Instead, I implied that Bullock had asked me to put together a file on all known private detectives working in New York, with a view to enlisting their help in catching my mysterious master criminal.
“The effect of my words was as surprising as it was instantaneous. Where before the pastor had been polite, if not welcoming, now his attitude was one of pure rage. He railed at me directly, asking why he thought I could help him in such an endeavour, what business it was of mine how private individuals chose to spend their money, and who had given me his name. He then rang for his servants and, with two of the burlier in close attendance, had me shown to the door.”
“My word, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “So you were threatened and expelled for no good reason? You found nothing out while you were there?”
“Not quite, Watson, not quite. You see, having discovered that the pastor had an ungovernable temper, I contrived to make him as angry as I could, by taunting him that I knew all about his secrets and that in England we had a better class of religious leader than he.”
“You said that even though he had two thugs ready to silence you? I’m not sure whether to call you brave or idiotic, Holmes.”
“Neither, I hope. No, it was a calculated risk, that is all. I thought it unlikely that a minister of the church, no matter how ill-tempered, would risk the adverse publicity concomitant with such an action, and I doubted the two large gentlemen who escorted me from the building would care to assault someone they believed to be a police officer.”
“Still a risk, Holmes.”
“It may have been, I suppose, but even if it were, the result more than
justified the risk.”
“The result?”
“As we traded insults, Hoffmann became more and more intemperate in his rage until, just as the door was slammed on me, he screamed one final thing in my direction.”
Holmes straightened the crease in his trousers and waited for me to ask about this occurrence. There was little point in pretending that I would not eventually do so, and so I put the question to him.
“He screamed this, Watson. ‘You’d already be speaking to Donaldson, if you were as smart as you think, Lestrade!’” Satisfied with his trouser crease, Holmes smoothed his hair back and reached for his pipe. “We have a new name, Watson, and one that promises much progress in our search for the imposter. I have already sent a telegram to Inspector Bullock, asking him to search police files for any mention of Donaldson. But I forget myself – how did you get on at Mrs van Raalte’s home?”
In comparison to Holmes’s tale, my own desultory search through the van Raalte residence and brief meeting with a dipsomaniacal romance author felt distinctly anti-climactic. Still, I recounted events to Holmes and showed him the diary entry I had copied from Hinton’s desk, taking pains to highlight the section that mentioned “Sherlock Holmes” and “Watson”. To my surprise, however, Holmes was less interested in this than he was in Hinton’s description of his relationship with Mrs van Raalte.
“She drank wine with him and told him that many men had made her offers of marriage,” he said, tapping the paper with a long finger. “That is not impossible of course. A widow, still relatively young, with a fine house as dowry. She would indeed make a good catch for an ambitious New Yorker.”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--The Counterfeit Detective Page 9
