There must have been something in his tone of voice, or some indication in his stance, perhaps. Whatever it was, Holmes sprang forward as Hopkirk ceased speaking – but it was too late. Still smiling, the captain shifted his weight onto the foot resting on the low stone wall and, without a sound, launched himself into the chasm. A second or two later the sound of a heavy, certainly fatal, impact reached us.
We stood in stunned silence, until Holmes bent down and collected the cigarette case from the ground. The catch must have broken on hitting the rocky floor, and it lay open in his hands, exposing two pieces of paper carefully folded into one corner. Fisher held the lantern over him as Holmes extracted each and stretched them smooth in his hands. The first was a crudely drawn map of the manor grounds, with the house sketched in at the bottom of the page and a dotted path drawn over it, running from the side of the house to what I was sure was the model Crystal Palace. The other was part of a letter. It was short and barely literate.
I havent said a word to nobody about this captain. I know what I owe you. But I seen his lordship about that glass building before the sun was up a load of times on my deliverys. And theres all sorts missing from the house they say. Get yourself down here before they sell the place and take a look. BR.
Holmes folded the paper up again and slipped it into his pocket.
“I think it is time we returned to the Crystal Palace,” he said. “There are one or two points to be cleared up.”
I nodded. “First, we must see to the inspector – and I have just realised that we have no idea of the whereabouts of Watt and Buxton!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Explanations
The bullet had passed straight through Inspector Fisher’s shoulder and, miraculously, had done very little damage in the process. We helped him back into the house where we found Alice sitting with a sobbing Julieanne Schell. There seemed to be no lasting sign of ill effects from Hopkirk’s blow to her head, and she was only too keen to blurt out her version of recent events.
“He had me under his spell, Inspector, you have to believe me,” she pleaded. “He threatened to cut my throat if I didn’t distract poor Judge Pennington, but I never for a second thought he would hurt him.”
She began to sob again, but I could have told her that, even at the best of times, any appeal to Fisher’s better nature was bound to fail. I could have added that now was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the best of times. As expected, he listened to her in silence, as she by turns claimed to have lived in fear of her life for days and to have been spellbound by Hopkirk’s English charms, then formally arrested her and handcuffed her to a table leg. Only then would he allow me to examine his wound.
While I bound it and settled him in one of the armchairs by the fire, Holmes and Forward went off in search of the two missing guests. They returned within a few minutes, Watt and Buxton in tow.
“Locked in their rooms,” Holmes announced. I expected the two men to demand explanations, but the sight of Constable Cairns’ body, even covered by Fisher’s coat, had obviously affected them, and they said nothing, simply stood by mutely as Holmes gave them a task to occupy their minds.
“Constable Halliday should be back with some of his colleagues very soon. If you could move Constable Cairns’ body to one of the couches in this room, Watson and I have one final item of business to attend to.”
Fisher tried to protest, but he had lost enough blood to make physical effort difficult and was quickly convinced to stay where he was. While Watt and Buxton – the former with fascination, the latter with horror – listened to his account of recent events, Holmes and I, along with Simeon Forward, left the room and made what I hoped would be our final journey back to the Crystal Palace.
* * *
We stood once again by the ruin of the palace, and waited for Holmes to explain why he had been so insistent we come with him.
“I saw the look on your face when the painting was revealed in the vault inside the Crystal Palace,” Holmes said, turning to Simeon Forward. “You were as shocked as Watson. But, unlike Watson, you did not long mistake it for a living person. You recognised it for a painting because you recognised the person portrayed, and knew she was dead, did you not? Long dead too, for the dress the lady wore has not been the fashion for half a century. A young girl, dead fifty years, whom you knew. Your daughter, perhaps?”
Forward nodded.
“She was linked in some way to Lord Thorpe?” pressed Holmes.
“Linked?” Forward muttered, his voice so soft I had to crane to hear it. “Aye, she was.”
Holmes was brisk, as though he wished this conversation to be done with as quickly as possible. “She is the reason that work on the catacombs was broken off?” he asked. “You need not answer. Though I cannot speak as to the details, the timing is too precise for anything else to be the case. You were in charge of the work, if I remember correctly? Am I right in saying, then, that whatever happened, happened due to that particular circumstance?”
Forward nodded again, misery etched on his face. “Margaret used to come up to the digging every day, bringing my dinner. At first she’d just give it me and go; mine workings full of men are no place for young girls, and my Megs was the best girl in the village. Everyone loved her. Pretty as a flower she was, and innocent and sweet natured too.” Forward’s face darkened. “That was the problem. One day, she was there when Lord Thorpe showed his face, and he was smitten the second he laid eyes on her.” Forward’s gaze was no longer on us three standing round him, but on a young man and a young woman, decades previously. He stared straight ahead, acknowledging none of us as he continued his story. “Her head was turned, of course. How could it not be, with him a rich man, educated, a man of the world, and her just a simple village girl? I warned her, but she just laughed at me. Fondly enough, but laughter all the same, at her daft fool of a father. Maybe if her mother had still been alive…”
As though suddenly recalling where he was, his head snapped round towards Holmes, and he went on in a stronger, more forceful voice. “For the next month or more he took Megs all over – for dinner in fancy places, on trips to London and to the sea, and long walks through the country. He seemed respectful, I’ll say that for him. It’d have been better for us all if he hadn’t been. If he’d done something, anything, that I knew about, I’d have warned him off, Lord or no. But he didn’t do a thing – or that’s what I thought. I was wrong.”
Forward’s hands were clenched tightly and his voice shook with rage as he continued. “She came to see me, one night. Said she – they – had made a terrible mistake, done a terrible thing. She was in the family way, she said. He wouldn’t marry her, she said. Said he couldn’t.”
There were tears rolling down the old man’s face now. “He stopped the diggings at the catacombs the same day. Shut them down and sent everyone home. I spoke to him, of course. Told him I knew what was going on, grabbed him and would have pitched him down one of the shafts, but he’d got some lads in from the city, and they knocked me about a bit, and threw me out on my ear. He shut the estate that day and got them to build his palace for him. It was where they’d gone on their days out, she told me. It was their place.”
He choked as he spoke, and Holmes took the chance to ask the question uppermost in all our minds. “What happened to your daughter, Mr Forward?”
“She died having the child,” he said flatly. “I sent her to have it at my sister’s, who married a Derbyshire man. I wasn’t there. She sent her husband to tell me, and she raised the child until she was old enough to go to school. Ellen, we called her.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose noisily. “Try that, Mr Holmes. I’ll bet a penny to a pound Ellen is the name you’re looking for.”
Holmes looked at the man for a long moment, then turned to the stone wall and carefully pressed five panes. For a second nothing happened, then, with a loud click, a large section of the wall slowly swung open.
With the door open,
the interior was reasonably well lit, but still Holmes took the lantern he carried and held it at shoulder height as he stepped inside, the first to enter. I shall never forget the sight that greeted me when I followed a few yards behind.
Whereas the exterior was made of rough stone carved into the shape of glass, the interior walls were smooth plaster, painted a soft off-white. A high-backed leather chair sat in the centre of the room with a small cabinet to its side. Opposite it, on a wooden stand, stood the painting we had spied the day before.
Seen in better light, there was no denying the beauty of Margaret Forward. Long hair the colour of autumn leaves hung down each side of her pale, unblemished face and complemented her large brown eyes, while a playful smile suggested the sweet temper her father had described. Behind me, standing in the doorway without entering, he sniffed loudly and turned away, remaining in the woods while Holmes examined the remainder of the vault. In truth, there was very little to see.
“Lord Thorpe came here often,” Holmes said after he had paced the dimensions of the room, examining the walls and floor and investigating the contents of the little cabinet. “The leather of the chair is soft as butter, and on the arms worn away at the points at which his elbows would touch were he to be sitting, staring at the painting.”
An ashtray with the remains of a cigar and a dusty glass sat alongside a small collection of what we took to be letters from Margaret Forward, though the ink was so faded as to be illegible, excepting an occasional word. Holmes carefully replaced them in the cabinet.
“Come, Watson,” he said. “I have seen all I need to. We have found our ghost, I think.”
We closed the door behind us, and heard whatever mechanism it was that controlled the lock click back into place. Forward watched us from the edge of the trees. As we approached, he stooped and picked up a fragment of broken stone from the ground. He examined it for a moment, turning it this way and that in his hands.
“He made sure that her daughter got the best education money could buy, but he never had anything to do with her,” he said, before either of us could say a word. “I went up to the manor, the day I got back from her funeral. I marched right up to him, where he was sitting in the big hall, drunk. I told him what had happened and who was to blame for it. He just squinted up at me and said his heart was broken, that he’d had no choice, that it wasn’t his fault, lots of tomfoolery like that, feeling sorry for hisself, stinking of wine and beer. He said that he wished he was dead too.
“So I told him straight. You either do right by your daughter or you’ll get your wish. I’d a gun with me, an old hunting rifle, you see. Turned out that he’d heard the news already – don’t ask me how – but only that she’d gone, not that the baby had lived. That stopped him in his tracks.”
“He agreed to pay for the child’s upbringing?”
“He did.”
“And sold off the Thorpe Collection to pay for it?”
“Why not?” Forward shrugged. “It’s not like them paintings were doing anything, sitting in the dark at the manor. I didn’t care how he got the money then, and I don’t care now. All I cared about was that the money was always in the bank when it was needed. That’s where I’d been when I met you on the train. Not a funeral in London, but at the lawyer’s in town. Finding out what’d happen now.”
“And what did the lawyer tell you?”
“He said that there’d be no more money, now Lord Thorpe was gone.”
Holmes’s brow furrowed in thought. “I imagined that would be the case. Is that likely to be a problem?”
Forward shook his head. “It will not. There’d been less and less money over the years in any event. And Ellen’s a grown woman, married with children of her own now. Thorpe money gained her a good education and a good husband. She wants for nowt, and she’ll not suffer for the loss. But I wasn’t asking about that.”
“You were asking if Ellen might inherit,” I said, in a flash of understanding.”I was,” Forward confirmed. “But the lawyer said what I knew he would, that she couldn’t, not with her being born out of wedlock and no proof she’s his daughter.” He suddenly noticed that he was still holding the fragment of stone in his hand. With a frown, he tossed it away. “For Margaret’s sake, I’d have liked him to have admitted she’s a Thorpe, but there it is. What can’t be cured…”
I looked back at the Crystal Palace. I wondered at the strangeness of a man who would deny himself happiness with a woman he loved, and then spend the rest of his life in misery, pining for her. And of another who had crossed half the world to find a family, and failed.
“Must be endured,” I said, completing the old saw. “But I believe there is a man in Stainforth police station who would be delighted to discover he has a great-niece.”
Forward stared at me in confusion, but I simply took him by the elbow and steered him between the trees. “I’ll explain on the way back,” I said. I saw Holmes smile as he fell into step behind us, and I led the old man back towards the manor house.
Chapter Twenty-Three
One Final Mystery
The remainder of that night and much of the next morning was taken up in dealing with the aftermath of the day’s events.
Soon after we reached the manor house, Halliday arrived with police reinforcements in a pair of carriages. Fisher immediately assigned one of them to carry the bodies of Constable Cairns and Walter Robinson to Stainforth, with Simeon Forward, after a brief discussion with the inspector, sitting alongside the driver. The other took Lawrence Buxton back to his cottage, along with Amicable Watt who had swiftly taken advantage of Buxton’s offer of a bed for the night.
In normal circumstances, I suspect that Inspector Fisher would have wished to discuss the evening’s events, but his wound had left him weak enough that I was able to insist that he get a good night’s sleep first. Exhausted as we were, Holmes and I were happy to follow him upstairs soon after.
* * *
Next morning, we came down to find the inspector standing in the doorway of the manor house, looking out at the snowy driveway. To my surprise, Holmes wandered over to stand beside him. He offered Fisher a cigarette and lit one for himself, and for a minute or so, the two men stood smoking in silence.
“Mrs Schell was very chatty while you were away last night,” Fisher said after grinding the stub of his cigarette out with his heel. “She claims that Hopkirk inveigled her into securing him an invitation to the auction after he received some news from an old friend. She says she had no idea who this friend was, and I believe her, but there’s no doubt it was Robinson. She does admit that she knew from early on what Hopkirk was after – Lord Thorpe had repeatedly been seen by Hopkirk’s mysterious friend, entering a building in the grounds in the early hours of the morning. Presumably this was when Robinson was delivering kegs of ale,” Fisher explained. “You can just about see the replica of the Crystal Palace from the path at the side of the house.”
“And as the letter we found said, Robinson jumped to the conclusion that Thorpe had something valuable hidden inside,” I interrupted, as I came up behind the two men.
“The Thorpe Collection, I imagine,” Fisher agreed. “The map Robinson drew, though crude, was enough to pinpoint a location, and Hopkirk had been using the excuse of his long walks with Mrs Schell as a cover for his investigation of the palace’s workings. Evidently, unlike Mr Holmes, he never figured out how to open it properly, though. Running out of time, and discovering his confederate had been arrested, he must have feared that Robinson was likely to talk, and so decided to kill him and flee. Had he not made one last attempt at the Crystal Palace he might even have escaped.” His pallid face crumpled into a frown. “Though not for long. Not after he murdered a policeman.”
The thought was enough to silence the inspector. It seemed that he would say no more, for he made to go back in the house, then at the last moment turned back.
“Halliday will be here soon to collect me and Mrs Schell, but one other thing before I go, M
r Holmes,” he said. “Simeon Forward admitted that he was the one who sold Lord Thorpe’s paintings. He collected them from Thorpe at regular intervals and sold them to ‘a fellow he knows’. From the sound of it, he didn’t get the best price for any of them, but I got the impression that he didn’t care much about that.”
“No,” said Holmes simply. “He cared only for his daughter and his granddaughter. Who can blame him for that? They are, after all, the only blameless ones in this whole affair.”
Fisher nodded and fastened the buttons on his coat. A second later, he was gone and Holmes and I were left standing alone.
“A little breakfast, then we should be going, Holmes,” I said. I smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid this has not turned out to be the relaxing few days away that I had hoped. Still, you solved the murder, even if you were unable to put your hands on either the Thorpe Collection or the legendary ruby!”
Holmes cocked an eyebrow in surprise. “On the contrary, Watson,” he said. “The location of the jewel, at least, could not be more clear. I am surprised nobody has found it before now, in all honesty. If you will wait a moment, I shall be happy to drop it into your hand.”
He strode back into the house, and almost immediately re-emerged, with some bulky object hidden inside his jacket. Saying nothing, he walked straight past me and into the gardens. As I hurried to catch up with him, he provided a commentary over his shoulder.
“A key consideration in any investigation is to bear in mind that simply because a claim is repeated ad infinitum, that does not of itself make that claim true. No matter if a thousand people say a thing, it is no more factual than if only one had done so. And in this case, as in several in our past, Watson, one claim stood out as so preposterous that its very repetition sent warning bells ringing in my head.”
It seemed as though Holmes were heading back to the mausoleum. What business could he possibly have there? Could de Trop somehow have contrived to have the gem hidden on the exact spot upon which his tomb would later be built? Hopefully, I would soon find out, for as Holmes mounted the stairs at its entrance, he halted in order to catch his breath and continue his oration.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse Page 23
