“Holmes,” I said, my voice trembling. “I think we should-”
“Right, Watson,” he interrupted, grabbing his loaded Webley from a nearby book shelf. “And now!”
We sprang for the door, opened it then raced down the seventeen steps it took to reach Mrs Hudson’s darkened parlour. No one was in there but a small fire flickered in the hearth against the far wall near the couch. From the kitchen came the familiar clicking of the water pump and a series of fierce hisses, alerting us to a presence in there. Holmes, his pistol pointed forward, led the way.
The gas lights overhead were on full, nearly blinding me as we rushed in. We found Mrs Hudson standing in front of the sink basin, her gray hair, usually pulled back in a tight bun, was loosened and hanging down around her aged face like weary cobwebs. Her face was flushed of color and matted with a layer of perspiration, the glare of her eyes never left their focus on what she was furiously washing in the basin with a rag; a long, wood handled carving knife covered in a thick, red viscose material. The water in the basin was stained pink but was becoming darker the more she splashed and scrubbed.
But the true gobsmacker was on the kitchen floor near the opened inner door to the mud room, just beyond Mrs Hudson - a copper haired man lay there on his back, his arms and legs spread, a circular red stain drenched the white of his shirt over his gut. He looked to be in his late thirties, maybe early forties. Without thinking I rushed over and knelt beside the man, found no pulse. He had a wide, stout face but a long, slender ridged nose, his mouth was agape as if frozen in shock, his green eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling.
“Mrs Hudson?” Holmes asked, his voice sounding as bewildered as I felt. “Who in blazes is that man? What happened here?”
She ignored him and continued to scrub the blade free of blood.
II
While Holmes comforted a deeply disorientated Mrs Hudson on the couch in the parlour, I watched as Detective Inspector Lestrade and his contingent of constables searched the flat and the copper haired murder victim for clues.
The man had a billfold stuffed so thickly with five, ten and twenty pound notes that he had it secured with a rubber band, but there was no form of identification inside. He wore the clothes of a man in leisure, freshly pressed green suit coat and pants, freshly shined shoes, a black tie. The white dress shirt that had been pierced by the knife was made of the highest quantity thread count Egyptian cotton, the most expensive of its kind found in a London clothier. Since the victim lay in front of the inner door to the mud room, I deduced he’d come into the flat through the rear outer door of the mud room as Holmes and I hadn’t heard the front door open with its distinctive squeak that night, and we had been sitting playing our game in silence for many hours so we would have heard it clearly. The rear outer door of the mud room was in pristine condition, knob, jam and lock intact, so Mrs Hudson had let the man in, which meant she knew him - but she wasn’t talking. She just looked at Holmes and Lestrade with a determined stare as they asked her their questions.
“You can trust that I will eventually get to the bottom of this, Mrs Hudson,” Holmes stated. “You might as well answer my questions now, make it easier on everyone.”
But again, her answer was a stare that rivalled the coldest, emotionless mannequin standing in a store window.
“What are you hiding, Mrs Hudson?” Lestrade pleaded, frustration scratching his usually smooth voice. “Who are you protecting?”
Those were the right questions, but answers were not going to be had. Her eyes stared forward, her mouth was clamped down tight, jaw jutted forward.
Lestrade threw his hands up. “I’m sorry but you leave me no choice, Mrs Hudson,” he said impatiently, waving a constable over to collect her. “Maybe you’ll talk down at Scotland Yard.”
The constable stood next to her and waited while she sat there, obviously contemplating what her next move should be. Then her blank stare turned defiant. She nodded, stood up, held her arm out, allowing the constable to take it and lead her outside.
After she’d been extricated from the parlour, Holmes got up off the couch and approached Lestrade.
“Be gentle with her, Detective Inspector,” he said. “I gather there’s a good, decent reason she’s not cooperating and as I said, I will get to the bottom of it. I just need some time.”
“We’ll treat her right and proper, Mr Holmes,” Lestrade said. “But remember, you yourself caught her alone, standing over the dead body, washing off the evidence on the murder weapon. And I’ll not be able to control a jury that hears that bit of evidence.”
Holmes frowned then nodded. The three of us knew that a hangman’s noose awaited Mrs Hudson should she be convicted.
Once Lestrade and the rest of his men left, Holmes stood near the closed front door, chin on his chest, arms crossed in severe thought. “We must help her, Watson,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” I agreed. “But she won’t cooperate with us. We’ll have to do it on our own, without her blessing.”
“So be it, my friend.”
“Well, what’ll we do first?”
After a moment of introspection, Holmes finally replied: “The answers to what happened here tonight... who that man was, why he was murdered, are in this flat, Watson. We must turn it over with the instincts of a bloodhound.”
“But Lastrade and his men have already-”
“Yes, I know, but they are not Mrs Hudson’s friends, Watson. Come, help me.”
III
Holmes and I filtered through the parlour first, and through the closet underneath the stairs leading up to our flat; found nothing out of the ordinary except an old black fur coat I thought very much out of Mrs Hudson’s price range. Holmes stored the fact of its existence into his memory and we continued. Feeling queasy about doing it myself, Holmes decided to go through Mrs Hudson’s bedroom while I searched the kitchen.
I had no idea what to look for but did it anyway, knowing the life of Mrs Hudson depended on what we found in the flat. Holmes assured me that I’d know a vital clue when I came to it. But I came across nothing of note.
Feeling overwhelmed by emotion for our good landlord’s looming fate, I sat down at one of the chairs around the dining table and ran my fingers through my sodden hair. How such a thing like this could happen to Mrs Hudson was beyond me. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it. The visage of Mrs Hudson standing at that sink basin, calmly cleaning the blood off a kitchen knife like an experienced killer kept replaying through my mind in fast, blurry patches. Nothing made sense. It was sheer madness Holmes and I were up against!
Finally, exhausted mentally, I rubbed my eyes free of the horrible memory then saw a small red stain on the white tile of the kitchen floor where the copper haired man’s corpse had lain an hour before. There it was, positive, full color proof that my memory hadn’t been faulty. What I’d witnessed earlier had actually happened. I could come to no other conclusion except that frail, innocent, elderly Mrs Hudson had murdered the man, the only question was why?
I noticed the inner door to the unlit mud room remained open, revealing a small, shadowy eight by eight space with a rear door leading to the alley behind the flat. It had been the only room the constables from Scotland Yard hadn’t searched. I sympathized with them but decided it would be best to at least perform a cursory search, that would pacify Holmes, I thought. As I pushed myself up and out of the chair, my peripheral vision caught sight of something in the dark glass of the kitchen window near the inner door. When I flashed my full attention upon it, I saw the ghostly image of a man’s angry face staring back at me, white as a sheet with a wide face but a long, slender ridged nose and copper-colored hair.
The sudden shock of the man staring back at me through the window startled me so terribly that I jumped and backed into the wall, knocking a candle sconce to the floor. When I g
athered myself up enough, I looked back at the window and saw that the face had disappeared. Had I troubled myself so much with the memory of Mrs Hudson’s plight that I imagined the thing? My instincts knew better.
“Holmes!” I cried and in rushed the consulting detective.
“What happened?” he asked, glancing quickly at the shattered sconce on the floor. “I heard a crash!”
I pointed at the window, my hand shaking. “I-I saw a man... there... staring at me through the glass!”
Holmes’ sharp gaze dashed to the window. “A man? Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded stupidly.
“Calm yourself, Doctor! What did he look like?”
I ripped my attention from the empty window and looked at Holmes, “As God is my witness,” I began. “It was the man found murdered here on Mrs Hudson’s kitchen floor!”
IV
Holmes found some brandy in a cabinet above the sink basin and poured me a glass. Sitting again at the table I took the glass and swallowed it down briskly. The warmth of it soothed my incessant shuddering.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes, very much. Thank you.”
He sat down at a chair across from me. “Now, tell me again what you saw,” he requested.
I took a deep breath, for this had been the third time he’d asked such a favor from me. “I saw the face of the dead man on the floor standing there, staring at me through the window,” I replied. “I-I know it sounds mad but the hair, the nose, the green eyes, it was him, I tell you!”
Holmes sat back in the chair, staring at me but his glare was dreamy and unfocused, he was thinking. “I believe you, Watson,” he finally said.
“You-you do?”
“Yes. It confirms a suspicion I’ve had since we first came down those stairs.”
“What suspicion?” I asked.
“That there was another person down here with Mrs Hudson and the victim,” Holmes replied confidently. “A third person... the actual murderer.”
“A third person?” I echoed. Now I was wondering which one of us was going mad.
“Yes, Watson. Remember the thump and the bang we heard while listening upstairs?”
I did remember it and nodded.
“It’s my suspicion that the thump was the dead man hitting the floor and the bang was the rear outer door of the mud room slamming shut.” I must have looked unconvinced because Holmes got up, “Here, let me prove it to you,” he said then went into the mud room, grabbed the door knob of the outer rear door and twisted it. “Listen closely as I slam the door.” He pulled the door back then thrust it forward as hard as he could, into the jam. The resulting bang I heard next exactly resembled the sound I’d heard earlier.
Holmes came back into the kitchen. “You see? It couldn’t have been the dead man and it doesn’t make sense for Mrs Hudson to have killed the man and, with bloody knife in hand, rush over to the back door, open it, slam it closed, then go back to the basin and start cleaning the blade. No... there was most definitely a third person down here with them tonight and he escaped through that door.”
“But the man I saw resembled the victim,” I reminded him.
Holmes rubbed his chin. “Yes, it may have been a projection illuminated by your mind or it may have been something else, something I’m still not convinced of yet but it explains how Mrs Hudson knew the two men and why she’s protecting the murderer.”
“But why would the murderer come back to the murder scene, risk getting caught?”
“There’s something here he wants,” Holmes answered as he glanced around the room. “Perhaps something he left behind. He figured that after Mrs Hudson was taken away by the police the flat would be abandoned, it would be safe enough to come back and steal it away. But he saw you through the window and fled when you saw him. That’s why, Watson, we need to scour this flat from top to bottom.”
“Well, I’ve searched in here and found nothing,” I interjected. “I was going to start in the mud room when I saw the face in the glass.”
“Then I’ll help you, my friend. Come, the work will ease your nerves.”
Holmes took an oil lamp from off the countertop near the sink basin and lit it, then I followed him into the mud room. The walls were painted yellow and the only window was the small square one cut into the door. A pair of leather boots, their soles thick with dried, crusty soil, lay on their sides near the door. The floor was made of weathered wooden slats, covered with a large, dirty brown rug patterned with green flowers. There wasn’t much, in my estimation, to see in there but Holmes forged on, swishing the flickering lamp around the room, illuminating every corner and crevice with soft yellow light. Then he came to the rug and stopped with a violent double take. It was something I’d seen him do whenever he discovered a well hidden clue. He knelt down, placed the lamp on the wood floor next to the rug and leaned forward, a magnifying glass suddenly in his left hand. With the fingertips of his right hand, he skimmed the flowered pattern of the border.
“Ah! What have we here, my dear Watson?” he asked rhetorically.
V
The light from the oil lamp exposed a long, thin inverted shadow on one side, spanning the entire length of the rug - there was seam of some kind in the floor underneath.
With great vigor, Holmes grabbed the end of the rug and threw it back, revealing a trap door built into the floor. A squarish, shallow indentation was built into on one end of it and a thick loop of lightly frayed rope lay inside the indentation, perfect for lifting the door up.
“What in blazes?” I asked.
“There seems to be another level to Mrs Hudson’s flat, my friend,” Holmes said. “Shall we explore it?”
I felt a little uneasy at delving into our landlady’s personal business and hesitated to answer, trying to think the morality of it through first.
“Watson,” Holmes said. “I believe the answers to Mrs Hudson’s problem are down there, should we ignore it and let her face the gallows or -?”
“I understand the situation, Holmes,” I replied curtly. “It’s just that whatever is down there she obviously wants kept secret and I’m afraid of what we may find out about her. It’s none of our business.”
“No, but our friend’s well-being is,” Holmes stated, reached down, grabbed the rope and pulled. The trap door came up easily on its hinges, revealing a wide row of stone and mortar steps leading down into an endless darkness. He carefully brought the door all the way back and laid it down on the floor, then he took up the oil lamp and stepped into the darkness of the vault. The odor of soil and must filled my nostrils, telling me that the vault below had been dug a long time ago.
I followed Holmes all the way down, a dozen steps in total, and when we reached the bottom his oil lamp exposed a sparse, rectangular room not much larger than the mud room above, with brick walls and a stone floor. There was a single wooden chair with a flattened gray cushion standing like a sentry in front of Holmes. Beyond that, against the west wall, was an altar-like cherry wood table with an unlit candle on top, but a single drawer and a small steel Mosler safe underneath. Hanging on the wall above the table was a painted portrait of a young, attractive red haired woman and a dashing, dark haired man. Both were wearing what resembled their Sunday finest; she in white, he in black. Holmes held the light forward as he stared at the portrait.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious, Watson?” Holmes replied.
Taking a little more time I inspected the portrait more deeply, especially the woman, it was the eyes I recognized first. “Why, it’s Mrs Hudson, at a very young age!” I said in amazement. “How beautiful she was.”
“Yes,” Holmes agreed wistfully. “The slow crawl of age has a way of erasing beauty, in every woman, so that she is nearly unrecognizable later on.”
�
�That means the man next to her must be her long deceased husband.”
“Yes, the ever-present yet never discussed Mr Hudson,” Holmes said as he glanced around. “Judging by the worn cushion on the chair, she comes down here often, lights the candle and stares at the portrait, remembering. It appears she’s still grieving.”
“After all these years?”
“Grief is different for everyone, Watson. But you already know this.”
I nodded.
Holmes put the lamp on the table and opened the drawer. Inside was a rather large Holy Bible with a leather cover and gold embossed writing. He reached down, pulled it out and placed it on the table where I could see yellow slivers of loose, torn paper sticking out from the pages. I joined Holmes at the table and watched as he opened the Bible, coming across the first slip of paper, it was a newspaper article dating from 1832 and concerned the robbery of a government official while traveling on a forest road south of London during the night of July, 11th. The official, though unharmed, had been carrying notes in the amount of forty pounds intended for the purchase of a plot of land near the coast. The robber was dressed all in black, had a black scarf over his face, rode a large brown steed and used a pistol to intimidate his victim. Holmes turned to the next insert and found yet another article dated a few months later, about a brigand dressed all in black who had robbed a local business man of his payroll, again it had happened on a forest road at night.
“Why would Mrs Hudson preserve these articles?” I asked.
“Let’s continue,” Holmes answered and came to a third article, the editor by this point in March of 1833, had come up with a catchy name for the dastardly thief - The Black Brigand. The dozen or so articles that followed all referenced the Black Brigand who seemed more a ghost than a flesh and blood human criminal, escaping from every trap the authorities set for him. He had a penchant for disappearing without a trace into the darkness of the woods after his crime, not even the tracks of his mount could be followed. Meanwhile, as the years passed, the jewelry and coinage the mysterious thief had amassed was ever growing, well into the many thousands of pounds. Finally, Holmes came to the final article, dated August, 1842, detailing the shooting of the Black Brigand by the Sheriff of Walworth, who’d set a trap, pretending to be another government official transporting a chest filled with two pound coins to Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. The bait was too tempting, though transparent in hindsight, as no government official would ever travel without Royal guard into the forest with a chest full of English mint. The display of the Black Brigand’s body in London’s Central Square set people’s fears at ease, though the true identity of the thief had never been discovered. No one who’d seen the corpse, at least publicly, recognized it.
Sherlock Holmes Page 8
