“I’m sorry about all of this, Ambassador,” Holmes greeted.
“So am I, Mr Holmes,” Walsh said then gazed teary eyed upon the covered statue. “I am not going to take the sculpture home. I can’t bear it. The humiliation of this publicity circus turns my stomach and is against everything I was hoping to accomplish. The sculpture has become nothing more than a ghostly reminder of my wife, cold and unreal... incapable of receiving or giving love. If only Eliza were here, in the flesh, I would destroy it with my own hands... make amends for everything I’d done to her.”
“I would help you with that, Ambassador Walsh,” Holmes said then Benford, noticing that we were all here, raised his hands and quieted everyone down.
“Yesterday,” Benford began. “Scotland Yard, represented by Detective Inspector Lestrade and aided by consulting detective Mr Sherlock Holmes... ” he motioned towards them as he spoke their names, “came into my home and grossly accused me of murdering my client’s, Ambassador Walsh’s, lovely wife, Eliza. With wanton disregard for the law, they ordered constables armed with sledgehammers and shovels to destroy a patio I had just laid and then dug up my yard in a misguided attempt at finding her body.” He pointed at the pile of dirt and the deep hole left just outside the French doors. The sledge hammers and shovels had also been left behind, because Benford had been so insistent on getting everyone off his property as quickly as possible, and were leaned up against the inside studio wall next to the opened French doors as evidence to reporters of Scotland Yard’s much too enthusiastic attempt at investigation. Very cleverly staged!
Detective Inspector Lestrade’s face turned pale, his mouth and chin squeezed hard in embarrassment. Holmes watched Benford, betraying no emotion other than keen, calm interest, his hands clasped confidently behind his back.
“I tell you all truthfully,” Benford continued. “That I had nothing to do with Mrs Walsh’s disappearance. I was hired by the good Ambassador to capture his wife in marble. She would sit for me and I would sculpt. I have had no other relationship with her other than that. As proof of this, I will reveal to you the work in question and would ask the Ambassador to collect it for transport home after these proceedings.”
Ambassador Walsh shook his head defiantly. “I’ve told you already, Master Benford, I will not take it home. It has no meaning for me until my wife is found, dead or alive! And I will not stand here while you sully her memory by showing the sculpture in this public proceeding. It is a deeply personal work fit for my eyes only! You should all be ashamed of yourselves!”
“I disagree, Ambassador,” Benford retorted. “It is an object of such beauty, such skill, in the realm of the classical Greek marble works of old, that it should be appreciated by the people of the entire world. I am not ashamed of what I’ve done! In fact, I’m proud of it! It is my greatest work!” With that, Benford reached over, grabbed the sheet and pulled it off with a flourish. A wave of awe-inspired, stunned oooohs and aaaahs swept over the reporters, not a single one had pencil to paper. I noticed that Benford hadn’t corrected the triangular pit that hung in the marble between the breasts, but everything else was perfect beyond imagination. The reveal had happened so quickly that the Ambassador hadn’t had time to fight his way through the crowd. His face squeezed into a tight ball of red anger as they all ogled his wife’s nude form.
Holmes quickly grabbed the Ambassador’s forearm and leaned in to his ear. “It is in your best interest to stay for the entirety, Ambassador,” Holmes murmured. “We should know where your wife is very shortly.”
The Ambassador’s mouth fell open in shock as he let Holmes return him to his place in front of the statue.
“Detective Inspector!” one of the reporters blurted out. “Is that the lady you are searching for?”
“It is,” Lestrade replied. “If any of you has seen Mrs Walsh, contact Scotland Yard immediately.” Now the pencils started to tear up paper, it sounded as if a thousand rats were scratching at the baseboard of a wall.
“As a public figure and a proven honest businessman, I’ve gathered all of you here today to publicly demand vindication of my good name in the form of a sincere apology from Scotland Yard and Mr Sherlock Holmes,” Benford went on. “And monetary restitution to rebuild the patio I spent an entire day laying.”
All eyes fell upon Detective Inspector Lestrade and Holmes.
Holmes turned towards Lestrade. “Allow me to go first, Inspector,” he said then stepped forward to address the reporters. “I apologize to Master Benford. It was my erroneous deductions that led to Scotland Yard tearing up his yard with these.” Holmes pointed to the sledgehammers and shovels leaning against the wall. With the grace of a ballet dancer, he slid over, grabbed a sledgehammer and held it horizontally in both hands. Then he just as gracefully slid back into his place to the right of the statue. “I never should have ordered the good constables of Scotland Yard to use these on his patio. It was my error and my error alone. Scotland Yard should not be held in further contempt for the results of my actions. You see, I should have told them to use it on this sculpture!” With that exclamation, Holmes brought the iron head of the sledgehammer backwards then forward, sending it into the upper spine of Master Benford’s greatest work with a deafening grunt!
Chapter Five: Holmes Redeemed?
Screams and shouts exploded from every corner of the studio as the sculpture rocked forward from the momentum of the sledgehammer’s head, nearly falling forward. The blow sounded like two stone blocks crashing together. Dust sprayed into the air but nothing resembling slivers of stone or marble followed. Instead, the area where Holmes hit the sculpture seemed to cave in, absorb the blow. Jagged cracks slithered across the once perfect surface of Mrs Walsh’s carved face.
As Holmes brought the iron head back for another try, Benford, enraged beyond all reason, shouted “NO!” at the top of his register and rushed Holmes, but Detective Inspector Lestrade caught him and secured his wrists with cuffs, just as he did the day before. Holmes’ second blow to the upper spine was the capper. The stone from the shoulders up exploded, large continents of oddly shaped debris spun away in quick arcs, splattering on the ground at the reporters’ feet.
The shock, the intense horror, of what was revealed to everyone in that moment stilled those in the studio to silence. Sprouting out of the remnants of what was left of the stone was Mrs Walsh’s actual head, neck and shoulders. Her long black hair had been straightened and disappeared down her back and into the confines of whatever made up the shell she was encased in. Her chin was resting low, her eyes were closed, preserved in the exact pose the finished external skin of the sculpture had shown. Her true skin was devoid of color, covered in a layer of white dust. I’d seen some horrifying things in my days fighting in Afghanistan, but this was worse than anything I could ever recall.
“My Eliza!” Ambassador Walsh cried and fell on to his knees, grasping desperately at the legs of the statue. Again, none of the reporters were putting pen to paper as they were completely involved in the drama unfolding on the stage before them.
Holmes knelt down, picked up one of those jagged pieces of debris that had flown off after the second blow, then he stood up again. “Concrete,” he said as he held it out for everyone to see. “Cleverly painted and coated to resemble marble.”
“My God, Holmes!” I ejaculated in disbelief. “The atrocity of it... h-how did you know?”
“It was my failure at the patio that set me on the right path, my friend,” Holmes answered. “I noticed as the constables were breaking it up that it had been set far too thin for practical use, only a few inches thick in some places, it would crack once the first person stepped on it. So I asked myself, why should Master Benford, an artist who works primarily in stone and obsessed with details, do a half-buggered job of laying a simple slab of concrete? The obvious answer was that it was runoff.”
“Runoff?” I asked.
> “Yes, Watson... runoff; extra concrete left over from a previous job. Then I asked myself, what was that previous job? Benford had no other areas of construction going on in the house or the studio. That was when I remembered the flat surfaced cart sitting in the kiln and how it was completely covered in what resembled piles of dried white clay. It occurred to me that it was most likely dried concrete.”
With everyone watching, I hurried to the kiln, reached in and pulled the cart out. A handful of reporters helped me and we inspected Holmes’ theory. “You’re right, Holmes,” I said. “It’s not clay or anything related to a kiln firing process. It’s most definitely set and dried concrete. But what’s the point of it?”
“That, my friend, is where Benford lay Mrs Walsh down and skillfully but hurriedly covered her in a layer of extra fine concrete, quick drying on the morning of October twenty-seventh.”
Looking down at it, Holmes’ deduction made perfect sense. I, along with the handful of reporters stepped away from the cart in horror.
“You see, Watson,” Holmes continued. “After I left you in the cab yesterday, I went to various local store fronts that carried construction materials, asking managers if they’d sold any materials to Master Benford, who is quite a well-known celebrity in this city. They would surely remember him. But every time I asked, the answer came up in the negative. Then I happened upon an institution only a few blocks from here named The Greater London Masonry Emporium. The manager, a Mr Springly Reese, quickly remembered that Master Benford had been in on the twenty-fourth of October, three days before Mrs Walsh had gone missing, and purchased three forty pound bags of extra fine, fast drying concrete. All one has to do is add water and apply.” Holmes reached into his inside coat pocket, pulled out a small slip of yellow paper then held it up over his head. “And here is the receipt, dated and signed by Master Benford himself.”
The pencils were scratching away again, much more furiously this time.
“But three forty pound bags of concrete,” I surmised aloud. “That seems too much to cover a body of Mrs Walsh’s petite size.”
“Correct, Watson,” Holmes agreed, nodding as he gave the slip to Detective Inspector Lestrade. “Master Benford had made a crucial mistake. You see, he’d done this dastardly deed before, three times to be exact, but on men of husky build and above average height and he mistakenly used the same calculations of material he’d used on those three men on Mrs Walsh, finding, to his utter dismay, that he’d had too much concrete left over after completing Mrs Walsh’s encasement. Knowing that he didn’t have much time to hide his error, as Scotland Yard was sure to be placing a visit upon him concerning his latest client’s disappearance, he cleverly used the extra concrete to make a patio, thinking no one would suspect a thing and if they did, they would find nothing underneath, as I had proved only too eagerly.”
“But these three men you speak of,” I asked. “Where are they?”
Holmes pointed to the north wall and everyone looked in that direction. “Over there,” he said. “Those sculptures of the sailor, the chef and the stone mason. Those were Benford’s practice pieces. I’m sure when Detective Inspector Lestrade gets around to them later, he’ll find three men encased inside a layer of the same kind of concrete that Mrs Walsh is currently encased in.” Holmes faced Lestrade. “They’ll be transients with no name or history. Completely devoid of identification of any kind and untraceable.”
Lestrade nodded in understanding.
With everyone’s attention focusing on the three statues, no one had noticed that the Ambassador had removed himself from the floor and was staring at the pale, lifeless corpse of his wife. “But how did he kill her, Mr Holmes?” he asked, his voice trembling with deep felt emotion. “Did he put his filthy hands around her neck and strangle her?”
Holmes shook his head. “No, Ambassador, he stabbed her with a riffler, right through the heart.”
“That explains the triangular pit in her chest,” I said, pointing to the mark still on Mrs Walsh’s chest, where the concrete hadn’t broken off yet.
“Correct again, Watson,” Holmes agreed. “The same pit Benford called an ‘imperfection’ that needed ‘minor alteration.’ It’s the clue that actually confirmed my deductions as to what had happened. I remembered that during the first interview with the Ambassador, he didn’t mention this mark, and he surely would have if he had seen it. This meant that this statue was not the original carved from the first block of marble that the Ambassador had seen, but it was a second later version. This pit is actually the fatal stab wound, carefully preserved by Benford.”
“Preserved?” I asked incredulously. “Why would he want to preserve something of that nature.”
“Because, my friend, whenever Benford sees it, it allows him to relive that exact moment in time when he murdered Mrs Walsh, something most sociopaths cherish. It’s like the gold locket you carry with you that reminds you of your mother, Watson. It brings back a clear, distinct, warm memory of her in your mind whenever you see it. That’s why he never altered it. Benford knew that the good Ambassador here would never take something of this flagrantly erotic nature home, he could never show it to people and it would always remind him of his missing wife. Master Benford correctly assumed, therefore, that he would remain in possession of the statue forever.”
“But why?” I asked.
“It’s the one thing I was right about yesterday, Watson,” Holmes explained. “Benford’s motivation for killing Mrs Walsh was unrequited love. Isn’t that so, Master Benford?”
Benford just stared at Holmes, his eyes dark and soulless.
“Day after day, over the weeks and months, as Mrs Walsh sat for him, her intense beauty wore him down. Soon, he’d realized he’d fallen in love with her and then it developed in his mind that she might possibly love him back. Because, he rationalized, a woman of her beauty couldn’t possibly love a man of the Ambassador’s plain and meager façade. Yet, here Benford was... tall, successful, handsome, famous and has had personal audience with the Queen and many other official dignitaries. He was clearly the better choice. But this fantasy turned out to be erroneous, didn’t it, Benford?”
Again, no reaction from the sculptor.
“Of course it did. Benford hadn’t counted on the fact that Mrs Walsh may actually have been in love with her husband. So, realizing that he was nearing completion of the actual marble statue of her likeness and that he wouldn’t be holding audience with her any longer, Benford decided to confess his true feelings to her on the morning of the twenty-seventh. And it went badly. But he’d planned for this scenario, he’d practiced and perfected, over the years, his method of skillfully covering his victims over with fine-grained, quick drying concrete, painting it to look just like marble. The crime would be so unbelievable and carried off with such skill, no one would figure out what happened to Mrs Walsh. So, Benford and Mrs Walsh argued and in the heat of the moment, he took a riffler off the wall and plunged it into her heart, the very thing he desired more than anything else in the world, to possess.”
“But what’s a riffler, Mr Holmes?” the Ambassador asked, his eyes red with tears.
“Good question, Ambassador. Being somewhat ignorant in the detailed production of many forms of art, I didn’t know what a riffler was either. After I visited those construction suppliers, I went to London University and interviewed the artist in residence, Mr Orville Stringdon. He educated me on every tool and carving method a sculptor of marble would use. I found out that a riffler is a small or medium sized file-like tool used for shaping and smoothing stone, distinguished by size and the shape of its file heads, like those hanging on the wall over here.” Holmes confidently went over to the west wall and stood in front of the section marked “RIFFLERS” on a large wooden plate. “As you all can see,” he said. “All the tools on this wall are covered by a thin layer of white marble dust. All of them except one... Num
ber Seven.” He pointed at the object in question, its two, pointed metallic heads indeed sparkled in the sunlight coming through the six skylights above. The other rifflers were dull and unremarkable. Holmes reached out and pulled the tool from its perch on the wall. Then he held it out for everyone to see in his two palms, as if he was catching rainwater. “Why does this one, and none of the others, seem brand new? Because it has been recently cleaned of Mrs Walsh’s blood. Let me prove it to you.” Holmes went over to Mrs Walsh, took the riffler in one hand, and slowly, carefully slid the tip of one end into the triangular pit between her breasts.
“It fits perfectly!” a reporter gasped and an excited buzz spread through the crowd.
Holmes handed the riffler to Detective Inspector Lestrade then addressed the throng of reporters. “I have proven to all of you Master Benford’s motive for the murder of Mrs Walsh, his unique method and that he had clear opportunity. You may write it up as you will, but now, I implore you to exit the premises and give the good Ambassador proper privacy for the display of his grief.”
***
Holmes was right about the three statues against the north wall. Once their concrete shells had been broken apart, the desiccated skin, muscle and bones of three anonymous victims were revealed. These, along with Master Benford, the receipt from The Greater London Masonry Emporium, the riffler and the carefully preserved concrete section of the wound in Mrs Walsh’s chest, were taken by Detective Inspector Lestrade and a group of constables to Scotland Yard in preparation for Master Benford’s trial, which promised to be the highlight of the year.
After everyone left and silence fell over the studio, Holmes and I helped the Ambassador lay his wife’s corpse down on the wooden floor and removed it completely from her concrete shell. Then we covered her under that red paisley sheet so the Ambassador could pay his last respects in some measure of dignity. I said a short prayer, aloud, then Holmes told the two Scotland Yard morgue workers waiting outside in their wagon to come in with a gurney and collect Mrs Walsh.
Sherlock Holmes Page 6
