The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VII Page 10

  With Lestrade and me remaining at the door, Holmes began to scrutinise the scene. Though initially he did not approach the body, one needed no close examination of the deceased to conclude that Wilson had been attacked and that the encounter had produced the bloody abattoir.

  Holmes was generally quiet in scrutinising such scenes, but on this occasion he spoke out when he looked at the blood-spattered book. “A Collection of Poe stories,” he observed, “open to the last pages of ‘William Wilson’.” He studied the door lock, the windows, and the carpeting. He took out his glass to examine the bloodstains.

  Finally, he reached the body itself, noting the cuts, the blood, the knife. Following such work, Holmes usually kept his conclusions to himself. That night, however, he announced definitively to Lestrade, “Aside from your familiar boot marks and the man’s turned-out pocket from which you obviously extracted my card, I see no evidence of another person’s presence in this room.”

  “Surely not suicide, Holmes,” said I. “Wilson didn’t seem the type. Besides, no one could attack one’s own person so viciously.”

  “Really, Mr. Holmes. The door had been ajar. Someone could have made an escape.”

  “Never forget, Lestrade, that every murderer leaves traces of his presence at the scene. It is the prime tenet of detecting. As investigators, our job is to find those traces. In this room, there are none. Thus, I conclude that no one else was here besides the dead man.”

  Lestrade shook his head. “A murder with no murderer? This is more of that Poe business, I should judge. As much as I hate to say it, Mr. Holmes, I think you must be consumed by Poe’s lunatic fantasies. ‘The Raven’ is one thing. But it’s just a poem. From what I hear, his stories are not to be believed - a murderous ape let loose in a city? A vengeful dwarf? Body parts hidden under a floor?”

  “On the contrary, Lestrade. It was not I, but Wilson who had been consumed by Poe’s stories - so much so that in his own mind, like one of Poe’s characters, he invented someone he believed was following him and whom he actually envisioned committing murder. Only it was himself he was really seeing, which is probably why he broke the mirror.”

  “Like the end of Poe’s ‘William Wilson’,” I said, “seeing himself in the glass.”

  “Exactly, Watson. That poor wretch killed himself with a long-bladed knife in the same manner as his namesake in Poe’s story.”

  Here Lestrade leaned back on his heels and allowed a broad grin to work its way across his face. “It’s not often I can get the best of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Yet you persist in mentioning this William Wilson. But, you see, that was not the dead man’s name. Regardless of what he might have told you gentlemen, he was called Gordon Bleechford. His landlady gave us his lease agreement. Not only did he sign it that way, but that was how she knew him. What’s more, we knew of him at the Yard. He seems to have recently taken up cheating at cards. Écarté was his game. Played at the Tankerville.”

  Holmes allowed himself the briefest of smiles.

  “William Wilson, you say?” repeated the policeman with a self-satisfied grin. “No, Mr. Holmes, this time round I judge that you backed the wrong horse.”

  “Confound it, Lestrade!” Holmes fairly shouted. “The man’s name is irrelevant. Read the letter on his desk. Learn his background. He can call himself whatever he likes. The important fact here is that no one performed this atrocious act but the victim himself.”

  “Unless,” I felt obligated to put in, “there really was some sort of Doppelgänger that no one but Wilson could see, some spiritual double that followed him about, some villainous twin that performed this heinous act.”

  “Listen to yourself, Watson,” said Holmes. “You’re beginning to sound like Poe!”

  “Some do say,” Lestrade observed as he rubbed his chin, “that Edgar Allan Poe could see things in this world that others could not. I must say that Dr. Watson does have a point.”

  Holmes stared at the policeman in disbelief, then merely shook his head. Striding into the carpeted hallway, Holmes opened the outer door and walked down the few steps to the sidewalk and into the rain. Hailing a cab, he called to me, “Come, Watson! Back to Baker Street where reason reigns.”

  We left Lestrade standing in the hallway holding his bowler in one hand and scratching his head with the other.

  With the horse’s hooves clattering in the background, Holmes leaned over to me and said, “Let Lestrade comb the earth for a suspect. Wilson or Bleechford, whatever his name, we know what the poor man did to himself.”

  Of course, thought I. What other answer can there be?

  A peal of thunder punctuated my certainty. Or mocked it.

  The Adventure of the Marchindale Stiletto

  by James Lovegrove

  “Now here is a queer thing,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes one September morning in 1883. He passed The Times across the breakfast table to me and indicated a short article on the third page.

  Vanished Heirloom

  Mystery surrounds the disappearance of the Marchindale Stiletto, the famed heirloom of the Marchindale family of Abbots Grange, near Hailsham in Sussex. The dagger, having been thrown into a pond in the grounds of the house last Saturday, has not been recovered and has defied all efforts to find it.

  The throwing was an act of playful mischief conducted by the younger of the two sons of Sir Albert Marchindale, the present family patriarch. The young man, Nicholas, is said to be mortified that what was intended as a harmless prank has instead had dire unforeseen consequences.

  The stiletto has been in the family since the late fourteenth century and is the Marchindales’ most treasured possession. It is believed, indeed, to be vital to their continued prosperity. Legend has it that should the stiletto be lost, the Marchindale dynasty will fall.

  This may seem just so much superstition, were it not for the fact that a series of peculiar mishaps has befallen family members in the days immediately following the stiletto’s loss. These include illness, injury, and financial disaster.

  Sir Albert is reputedly at his wits’ end and has offered a sizeable sum of money to anyone with knowledge of the stiletto’s whereabouts or information that might lead to its safe return. So far no reliable applicant has been forthcoming.

  “What do you make of it?” Holmes enquired, his keen grey eyes scintillating in the hazy morning sunlight coming in through the window.

  “It certainly would seem that some form of curse has blighted the Marchindales,” I replied, “one which can only be connected directly with the loss of this stiletto.”

  “I thought you might say that - and feared it. I myself will have no truck with curses, prophecies of doom, artefacts with magical powers, or any other such occult claptrap. There are no forces at work in this world save the actions of men and the laws of science and nature.”

  “Would you not allow that there is at least an outside chance that something other, something ineffable and indefinable, surrounds our lives and from time to time permeates them?”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ et cetera?” My friend chuckled. “To the rational mind, such a view is anathema. No, I would wager good money that there is nothing the slightest bit sinister or inexplicable about the events at Abbots Grange. There is simply a chain of circumstances which give the illusion of supernatural influences at work but which, if carefully unpicked, yields just link after link of plain, dull, unremarkable, readily testifiable fact. All it requires is the right approach, to wit the application of deductive reasoning. But do not take my word for it, Watson. I am quite convinced I will be able to prove my theory to you, and conclusively, this very day.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I could claim it was precognition,” said he, “perhaps even sorcery. Or I could show you this telegram, which arrived shortly before you got up.”

 
I had heard a knock at the front door sometime around seven, while I was still abed. I had assumed it was the butcher’s boy making a delivery, which he customarily did around that hour. It transpired, however, that it had been a messenger instead.

  Holmes handed me the slip of paper. It was a curt invitation from Sir Albert Marchindale to come down to Abbots Grange forthwith and investigate the disappearance of the stiletto. Although in those days Holmes’s career was still in its relative infancy, and I had not yet published any of these chronicles of mine which drew him to the attention of a wider public, nonetheless he was steadily garnering an enviable reputation and his client list was becoming ever more illustrious.

  “Well?” said he. “Are you interested? Would you care to accompany me?”

  My career, too, was in its infancy, and as a consequence patients were often thin on the ground. At that time I was going through something of a fallow patch, and so, out of both curiosity and a lack of anything else to occupy me, I said yes.

  We arrived at Hailsham Station at noon, and by lunchtime were pulling up at the entrance to Abbots Grange in a dog-cart. The place was a particularly splendid specimen of Tudor architecture, with a Flemish bond brick gatehouse, a lengthy drive, and sweeping gardens mostly laid to lawn, all providing the setting for a large manor house built with an H-shaped floor plan. Its timber beams were arranged in a herringbone-and-quatrefoil pattern, and the leaded windows were no less decorative, being intricate symmetrical arrangements of rectangles, lozenges, circles, and triangles. The overhanging jetties of the upper storey lent the edifice a top-heavy, somewhat unbalanced air, as though the whole structure might topple over at any moment. Yet the chimneys which towered above the tiled roofs and the various instances of stone footing and brick buttressing looked sturdy enough.

  A manservant ushered us in through the huge oak door, and soon we were in the presence of Sir Albert Marchindale. He was a ruddy-faced country squire, as rough-hewn as the woodwork of which the house’s interior was largely comprised. His features were more or less identical to those of his ancestors whose portraits hung in the hallway and in the study we now occupied. He was lineage and continuity personified.

  “A damnable business,” he said. “Nicholas is a fool. He should never have done it. Don’t know what got into him. I think he thought it would be funny: Drop the stiletto in the pond, have us all race around like monkeys trying to get it out. The idiot. His brother Edward would never have dreamed of performing such a stunt. Whatever common sense I have, he has inherited. Nicholas, on the other hand, calls himself a pragmatist but underneath it beats a wayward, contrarian heart.”

  “Edward, I take it, is the sole heir to your estate,” said Holmes.

  “Of course. Primogeniture and all that. Can’t have it otherwise. It’s the only way it works. Nicholas will naturally get some money when I go, plenty to be getting by with, but it’s Edward who’ll take on the title of the house and pass it on in his turn to his firstborn son. That’s assuming there is a house by then. The way things are heading...”

  “Yes. This so-called ‘curse’.”

  Sir Albert bristled. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss it, Mr. Holmes. Let me tell you a thing or two. That stiletto has been with us Marchindales since the time of the Crusades. My forebear, Archambault Marèche-en-Dalle, went to the Holy Land in 1396 in the company of Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary. Archambault was among a contingent of French nobles on that expedition and took part in the siege of Nicopolis on the banks of the Danube. The Ottomans won the battle and took three-thousand prisoners from among the attacking force, but he was not one of them. He managed to escape to safety across the river, and just as well, because barely any of those captives survived. On the Sultan’s orders, they were systematically executed.

  “Archambault attributed his good fortune in avoiding this fate to the stiletto, which he had purchased in Rome on the road to Nicopolis. Such a dagger was a new weapon then, and manufactured only in Italy. Archambault used his during his escape, slaying several foemen with it after he lost his sword. He considered it a lucky talisman thereafter, and the stiletto justified that belief since after his return to France he became ever more prosperous. His vineyards flourished, his property expanded, his coffers grew fat.

  “So it continued through subsequent generations. Archambault’s many-times-great-grandson Philippe Marèche-en-Dalle emigrated to England in the late seventeen-hundreds. Philippe had seen which way the wind was blowing in his homeland. Revolution was in the air. Aristocrats were under threat. He used what money he managed to smuggle out with him to buy this house and started afresh. Soon, through prudent investment and careful husbandry of the land, he was wealthy once more. The stiletto had crossed the Channel with him, of course, and cast its benevolent spell over his affairs.

  “Every Marchindale since - Marchindale being the Anglicised form of Marèche-en-Dalle which Philippe adopted - has been custodian of the dagger. Father after father has inculcated in son after son the importance of the stiletto to the family. While we have it, we lead what most would consider, not without accuracy, to be a charmed life. Should we mislay it, we are doomed. That is the legend - and recent events are clear evidence in support of the assertion.”

  “Yes, the papers describe a ‘series of peculiar mishaps’,” said Holmes. “Would you elucidate?”

  “The very day after Nicholas’s ridiculous, vandalistic act,” said Sir Albert, “all the fish in the pond died.”

  “The pond into which he threw the stiletto?”

  “None other.”

  “How singular.”

  “There were dozens of carp in there, and bream, perch, a few others, and every last one was found floating belly-up the next morning. Gave me quite a shudder when I saw it.”

  “By then you had already searched the pond?”

  “Thoroughly all the previous day. The servants, Edward, myself, we spent long hours combing through the reeds and mud. No sign of it.”

  “Could the disturbance your actions inevitably caused have upset the constitutions of the fish somehow?” I said. “Could they conceivably have died of fright?”

  “A capital question, Watson,” declared Holmes. “I was about to ask the same thing myself.”

  “It is possible, I suppose,” said Sir Albert. “But these are not delicate exotic species we’re talking about. Far from it. They are hardy natives. I would have thought it would take more than a few humans splashing about to scare them to death. Often in summer we swim in the pond, and the fish do not seem to take that amiss. But dead fish were only the start of it. Then my wife took ill with quinsy.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” said Holmes, and I voiced similar sympathy.

  Sir Albert waved a hand. “It was serious at first, but the doctor insists Constance is out of danger and will make a full recovery. The infection is clearing up, the pus has cleared from her throat, and as long as she gets rest the prognosis is positive.”

  “You must be relieved.”

  “Immeasurably. At the time, though, it was alarming. Not least because, the selfsame day, one of the housemaids burned herself. She tripped on the stairs while carrying a pitcher of freshly boiled water up to Constance in her sickbed. The water doused the girl’s arms and one leg. The doctor, being on the premises already, treated her straight away. The burns are widespread but not severe and he believes Agnes - that is the housemaid’s name - will be fine. There should be no permanent scarring.

  “By this stage, as you may imagine, I was starting to feel very anxious indeed. It was dawning on me that the loss of the stiletto was having the foretold adverse effect on the family’s wellbeing. My fears were compounded with the arrival just yesterday of a letter from overseas. It was sent by the manager of my agricultural interests in the West Indies, where I own a number of sugar plantations. The harvest has been wretchedly poor this year,
it transpires. I am going to suffer a considerable financial setback.

  “Hot on the heels of that letter came a telegram informing me that one of my tea clippers, the Hilda Gay, had been lost at sea with all hands. She fell foul of a typhoon three days out of Shanghai. Wreckage was spotted floating in the vicinity by a Royal Navy frigate, amongst it a spar with the ship’s name on.”

  Sir Albert sank back in his chair, burying his face in his hands.

  “If this streak of bad luck continues,” he moaned, “I will surely be ruined. The Marchindales will fall. And all because of Nicholas and his absurd little ‘joke’.”

  Holmes requested to view the place where the stiletto had been kept. It usually sat mounted upon a stand in a glass cabinet in the library. The cabinet was locked and Sir Albert had the key, which was stored in a drawer in his desk.

  “An unlocked drawer?” asked Holmes.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Meaning anyone in the household could have access to it. That might be construed as irresponsibility on your part.”

  “But who would take it? Why would they? Everyone in the household is aware of the significance of the stiletto. The staff would not dream of touching it. Neither would a family member. That was my thinking.”

  “Nicholas nevertheless was able to avail himself of the key and retrieve the dagger from the cabinet.”

  “And I have upbraided him for it repeatedly ever since. I have railed at him and chastised him, and he is greatly upset. Contrite, even. But still the damage is done, and may well worsen.”