“Was Sir Peregrine apt to lock himself inside the conservatory?”
“’E was,” said Miss Smith. “Sometimes ’e didn’t want to be disturbed. It ruined ’is concentration, ’e said, knowing there was the possibility of someone walking in at any moment.”
“Not that any of us would,” Mrs Frensham interjected. “We knew his ways too well for that. But locking it from the inside gave him that sense of security he needed.”
“And both of you watched Cecil Harrison break the door down?”
The women nodded.
“I was first ’ere,” said Mary Smith. “Then Mrs Frensham. Then Master Cecil. The two of us was in a right state before ’e came. We could ’ear Sir Peregrine all gasping and choking, and not a thing either of us could do about it. Cecil rode in like the cavalry.”
“Most useful thing the boy ever did in his life,” Mrs Frensham muttered. “Not that it benefited the master in the end.”
The interior of the conservatory was muggy and humid. Underfloor hot water pipes radiated warmth up through grilles. The atmosphere was ripe with the smells of verdure and soil. Plants, from ferns and shrubs to bromeliads, brightly coloured orchids and other even more exotic flora, occupied every inch of available space. Sir Peregrine’s body had been removed, but not so the hypodermic syringe, which lay on the floor beside its steel carrying case. Also on the floor was the tiny agent of the botanist’s doom, a humble little honeybee. Holmes picked the insect up in a gingerly fashion, holding it by the wings between thumb and forefinger, and brought it close to his eye for scrutiny.
“Yes, you can see by the wound at the base of the abdomen,” he said. “This bee has stung, and has pulled itself half inside out in the process. Amazing creatures, bees. I have always found them appealing – their industriousness, their organisation, their adherence to a rigid hierarchy. Mostly their lives are about productivity. They are difficult to provoke to ire, in spite of all the folklore about angry swarms. A bee only stings if it is frightened or protecting its queen. It would rather flee than fight.”
“Sir Peregrine must have alarmed it,” I said. “Perhaps, when it flew in, he panicked. He tried to swat it, and missed.”
“That would seem a feasible scenario,” Holmes allowed. “One would think he knew better, however. Since bees posed a fatal danger to him, he might surely have done his level best not to antagonise this one.”
He turned his attention to the syringe. Having examined it minutely, he proceeded to perform a highly unwise action. There was a small amount of clear liquid left in its glass cylinder, and he tipped it upside down so that the droplets collected at the needle’s base; then he pricked the point of the needle into the tip of his thumb and depressed the plunger.
“Holmes!” I cried. “What are you doing? Are you mad?”
“Merely a test, Watson,” replied he, eyeing his thumb. A bead of blood had formed, and gradually the skin around it paled, until soon the entire top segment of his thumb from the knuckle upward had gone stark white.
“Tingles,” he said. “A numb sensation. The syringe undoubtedly contains epinephrine.”
I continued to upbraid him. It had been an act of the utmost foolhardiness to inject an unidentified substance into himself. Holmes just gave a dismissive shake of the head, as though I were a bothersome nagging wife whom he had learned to ignore.
“Hullo, what’s this?” he said, sucking the thumb to restore the blood flow. His gaze had alighted on one of the many workbenches, where sat a pair of secateurs and next to them a few leaf clippings and a solitary suede gardening glove. “Miss Smith, was Sir Peregrine in the habit of wearing gloves while he worked?”
“As far as I’m aware, yes.”
“Yes, he did,” Mrs Frensham asserted firmly. She seemed keen to demonstrate that she had greater familiarity with their employer’s practices than did Mary Smith. “Especially when he was using secateurs to prune or take a cutting, in order to safeguard his fingers.”
“Clumsy, was he?”
“Just sensible and cautious.”
“Hmmm. Was he right- or left-handed?”
“Right.”
“This is a right-handed glove, and its mate is absent.”
“The left was still on Sir Peregrine’s ’and,” said Miss Smith. “I recall that quite clearly. I saw it as ’e was lying there.”
“You are certain of that?”
“I am.”
“That is suggestive.”
“Of what?” I enquired, but Holmes had already put down the glove and moved on. Now he was applying himself to the little awning window which stood open, held by a bar fastener on its inmost peg. Standing on tiptoe he was able to swing the window in and out, assessing the ease with which the hinges operated. He went out into the twilit garden and surveyed the conservatory’s exterior by the beam of his pocket-lantern. On hands and knees he inspected the ground immediately around it, which was laid to lawn. He pronounced himself satisfied.
“The only footprints I can discern match yours, Miss Smith,” he said. “But that is only to be expected, since you were the one who washed the windows last week.”
Mrs Frensham snorted. It was all the confirmation she needed that Mary Smith had, through carelessness, signed Sir Peregrine Carshalton’s death warrant.
“Do not be discouraged, my girl,” Holmes went on. “All is not lost. Watson and I will engage rooms for the night at a hotel in Haywards Heath. There are anomalies here that merit further enquiry. Tomorrow we shall return, and by then I hope to have all the data I need to deliver a definitive verdict on the incident.”
* * *
As we were leaving the house, Mrs Frensham waylaid us on the front steps.
“There is something I must tell you,” she said. “If I interpret aright your remark about ‘anomalies’, you are of the opinion that there may be more to Sir Peregrine’s death than meets the eye.”
“Some of the evidence at the scene does not add up.”
“In that case, I imagine that you are considering one of us three as a murder suspect, since we were the only persons on the property at the time.”
“Do you have a confession to make, madam?”
“Oh no, sir! Perish the thought. It occurs to me, however, that the finger of blame might point, if not in Miss Smith’s direction, then in Master Cecil’s. If this was murder, who would seem to gain the most from it? Master Cecil, of course. As the obvious heir to Sir Peregrine’s estate, he stands to become a very rich young man. Now, he is a feckless boy, to be sure, and has yet to make something of his life. He hardly knows the meaning of responsibility. If Sir Peregrine had not been giving him work, it is doubtful he would be able to obtain gainful employment elsewhere. That said, I believe him not to be of an acquisitive nature, certainly not to the degree that he would kill someone for whom he bore a great familial fondness. That is not my reading of his character.”
“Well, you know him better than I do, Mrs Frensham.”
“Miss Smith, on the other hand, is just the kind of girl who would stop at naught to get what she wants.”
“You dislike her.”
“I resent her. And would you care to know why?”
“Very much so.”
Mrs Frensham leaned close to us and said in viperish tones, “She is in Sir Peregrine’s will. To be precise, she is his heir, not Master Cecil.”
Holmes’s eyelids narrowed. “How fascinating. You know this for a fact?”
The housekeeper looked very smug. “I do. Sir Peregrine had the will redrafted not long after he lost Lady Jane. Naturally, with his wife gone and the pair of them childless, someone had to be the inheritor. He chose Miss Smith over Master Cecil, for reasons one may only speculate at. I saw the new will on his desk earlier this year. Mr Stafford Cramb, his solicitor, had brought it over personally. Sir Peregrine had been verifying the wording of it and had left it out on the blotter. By chance, while he was absent from his study, I went in to empty the waste paper basket, and ther
e it was. I couldn’t help but notice the name of Mary Smith listed as sole beneficiary.”
“Why her? Why not Harrison?”
“That was for Sir Peregrine to know, and he now cannot tell us.”
“Are you insinuating that there was impropriety between the two of them?”
“A widower. A young woman of no breeding but a certain coarse attractiveness. It is not unheard of.”
“Does Harrison know about this?” I asked. “That he is not to see a penny?”
“I can’t aver to that with any authority, but how likely is it that he was not aware? My point is this: Of the three of us, there is only one who would profit at all from Sir Peregrine’s death. She, the wicked little Jezebel, must have worked her wiles on the poor man during the period when he was grief-stricken and at his most vulnerable. Do not be fooled by her guileless demeanour. She has not brought you here to clear her name, but to mock us, to rub our noses in her immunity from prosecution. No one can prove that she left the window open on purpose, but we who know her know she did.”
* * *
We drove to Haywards Heath with Mrs Frensham’s words ringing in our ears. Holmes was absorbed in deliberation, and remained that way – aloof and reticent – all through supper and at breakfast the next morning.
Eventually, as we left the hotel, he broke his silence. “Watson, we have two ports of call today before we return to Bridlinghall Place. The first will be innocuous, the second less so.”
The first was the offices of Stafford Cramb, Sir Peregrine’s solicitor. Holmes prevailed on him to show us his copy of the will. Cramb was reluctant, but it transpired that he was an admirer of Holmes’s and something of a devotee of my writings, and his personal enthusiasm overcame his professional discretion.
The will, formally notarised and fully official, was as Mrs Frensham had said. Once probate was complete, Mary Smith would own outright the manor and Sir Peregrine’s substantial capital assets, aside from a few trifling charitable disbursements.
“It is a somewhat unconventional bequest,” said Cramb, “and I counselled against it, but Sir Peregrine was resolute. He felt this Miss Smith was the most deserving person of any of his acquaintance, more so even than a blood relative.”
“Was there any indication of a romantic relationship between the two?”
“Not that I could tell, Mr Holmes, although I was not privy to the workings of Sir Peregrine’s heart. In my judgement, his decision, although out of the ordinary, was made in a spirit of sincerity and moral probity, and with a sound mind. He liked the Harrison lad well enough, even felt a sort of paternal duty of care towards him, but I remember him telling me once that a man ought to make his own way in the world and that to confer a large sum of money on somebody with little gumption or ambition would unquestionably be the ruin of that person.”
“Did Mary Smith know she was in line for a sizeable legacy?”
“If so, she would have learned it only from Sir Peregrine, not from me.”
After bidding Cramb adieu, we travelled to the local hospital, where Holmes inveigled us a visit to the morgue in which the body of Sir Peregrine Carshalton was being held in advance of the coroner’s post-mortem examination later that same day. The procedure entailed, I am afraid to say, bribery. An orderly whom Holmes identified as burdened with gambling debts took half a crown from us and led us furtively to the little mausoleum-like building that was set apart from the main bulk of the hospital, an old-fashioned “dead house”. Sir Peregrine was laid out on a shelf there, under a sheet. I kept watch at the entrance while Holmes pored over the cadaver. Within a few minutes he had found what he was looking for.
On the journey back to the manor, I enquired about the fresh evidence he had discovered.
“A puncture mark on the inside of the left forearm.”
“Is that it? But we know already that Harrison injected Sir Peregrine with epinephrine.”
“Ah, but there are puncture marks and there are puncture marks, Watson. I also learned where he was stung.”
“Where?”
“On the tip of the index finger of his right hand.”
“That would make sense. Presumably he was trying to swat the bee with that hand. The bee would have none of it and stung him.”
“But why was he not wearing his suede gardening glove at the time? If he had a glove on his left hand, why not the right as well?”
“He had put the left on first, immediately prior to the bee making its presence known. Let’s not forget that the fellow was right-handed. Gloved or not, he would have instinctively used his dominant hand to try to kill the bee, would he not? Possibly he was even using the glove itself as a swatting implement.”
“An inefficient weapon, I would say. It would have been safer, surely, just to vacate the conservatory and avoid a confrontation with the bee altogether, knowing that attempting to swat it might be potentially deadly for him.”
“He was not thinking straight. Fear got the better of him.”
“Watson, your insights, while well-meant, lack rigour. They succeed in showing only how little you have learned about the art of scientific deduction during the time we have been together, and thus how little respect you accord it.”
“Well, dash it all, Holmes,” I said hotly, “why don’t you simply tell me what you know happened, and put me out of my misery? All these years you have derived an almost sadistic pleasure from watching me flounder as I try to arrive at solutions you have already fathomed. For once could you not come out with the answer and not make me feel imbecilic and muddle-headed? Is that too much to ask?”
“And deprive you of the dramatic dénouement you require for your narratives?” Holmes chuckled. “No, old friend. I must leave you twisting in the wind a little longer. All will be revealed once we arrive back at Bridlinghall Place.”
* * *
And so, in due course, all was revealed. Holmes gathered the three disparate members of the household in the drawing room, and addressed them as follows.
“Any coroner worth his salt would assess the circumstances of Sir Peregrine Carshalton’s demise and deem it death by misadventure. Even if the awning window had been left open deliberately by someone who knew of Sir Peregrine’s fatal allergy to bee stings and was counting on a bee finding its way into the conservatory, there would be no way of proving malfeasance beyond a reasonable doubt. As murders go, it would be a cunning method. It would also, by the same token, be a highly unreliable one. Who could guarantee that a bee would even enter? Who could ensure the creature would actually sting the intended victim? The odds against achieving the desired result by happenstance alone are astronomical.”
“So he wasn’t murdered,” said Cecil Harrison. “That’s what you’re telling us.”
“Oh no. He was. Just not by that exact means.”
Mary Smith gasped, as did Mrs Frensham.
“No,” Holmes continued, “the way Sir Peregrine was despatched was altogether more calculated. A bee did not end up in the conservatory by chance. It was put there. It was, moreover, secreted in a place where there was an almost one hundred per cent certainty it would sting him.”
“Where would that be?” said Miss Smith.
“As if you didn’t know,” Mrs Frensham muttered under her breath. I was standing close to her, so that only I overheard.
“Why, inside his gardening glove, of course. It would be a relatively simple matter to capture a worker bee, in a jam jar perhaps. It would then be no less simple to tip the aforementioned bee from the jar into one of the gloves – the right, to be precise – and leave it there, trapped by the weight of the material, unable to free itself. If the deed was performed sufficiently in advance, during the small hours of the morning, then the bee would have ceased buzzing in frustration and would have quietened down by the time Sir Peregrine made his daily foray into the conservatory. He would have had no inkling that the insect was sequestered in the glove until he came to slip the glove on.”
“How hor
rid,” said Miss Smith.
“Quite. A tiny living bullet waiting in the barrel of the gun, set to fire when the person pulling the trigger was not around. As simple as it is sinister. But of course, Sir Peregrine had his hypodermic syringe full of epinephrine on him, ready to save him. Once he had been stung, the first thing he would have done was inject himself. But what if the injection failed to work? What if our murderer had taken the precaution of replacing the syringe beforehand with another syringe containing a liquid of no medicinal value, such as water?”
Holmes cast an imperious gaze round the room.
“Then, when Sir Peregrine thought he had counteracted the effects of anaphylaxis, it turned out he had not. He rapidly realised this, and that was when he began screaming and calling for help. Help came. It came, however, too late, and more to the point it was not help at all.”
“But Master Cecil administered an injection after he broke in,” said Mrs Frensham. “He used Sir Peregrine’s own syringe.”
“Did he? Or did he only purport to?”
Cecil Harrison shot to his feet. “This is absurd. Preposterous. Am I to take it that I stand accused of my own uncle’s murder?”
“Please sit down, Mr Harrison. Posturing and chest-beating will get you nowhere. You know as well as I do what you did. You barged your way into the conservatory with the proper syringe hidden in your hand. You took advantage of being first into the room, ahead of the two ladies here. You shielded Sir Peregrine from their view with your body and brandished that syringe as though it was the one from his carrying case, at the same time slipping the other syringe, the ineffectual counterfeit, into your pocket. You then injected Sir Peregrine in precisely the same spot where he had injected himself moments earlier, so that there would be only a single puncture mark.”
“I defy you to back up these assertions with proof,” said the young man vehemently. He was puffed up with indignation, like a cornered cat with its fur bristling.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 22
