Текст книги "The Mammoth Book of the Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes"

Автор книги: Denis O. Smith

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We passed through the kitchen, where Miss Calloway noted with surprise that the back door from the kitchen to the garden was not locked.

“I have never known the professor to go out and leave the house unlocked before,” said she.

“Then that is certainly curious,” responded Holmes, “but perhaps the reason will become clear to us shortly.”

We followed Miss Calloway down the long back garden, Holmes pausing to pick up a trowel and small pail which were lying on the ground beside a garden shed, until we reached a small wicket gate. “This is the way into the woods,” said our guide as she pushed open the gate and led the way through it, into the wood beyond. It was a dense wood, where the trees grew close together and brambles and other undergrowth filled much of the space between them. Most of the trees had lost their leaves now, and stood bare and damp-looking, but it was still not possible to see very far through the wood, for the cold grey fog had thickened in the last hour, and all but the nearest trees were little more than shapeless blurs.

All at once, Holmes stopped and let out a little cry of surprise. “Halloa! Someone has passed this way today,” said he, indicating clear footprints on the soft earth of the path.

“It was probably the professor,” said Miss Calloway. “Perhaps we shall find him in the woodland glade, smoking his pipe and ruminating.”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Holmes, speaking to himself as much as to our companion. “There is something decidedly odd about these tracks. Please keep as much to the side of the path as you can.”

From that moment on, Holmes led the way, his keen eyes following the footprints in the soft earth beneath us, and occasionally stopping to examine some mark at the side of the path that had caught his eye. Presently we came to a steep incline, where the ground ahead of us rose up ten feet or more.

“Professor Palfreyman believes these tall ridges which run through the wood are evidence of pre-historic agricultural practices,” remarked Miss Calloway, “and have been here since long before the trees. He has often said he will investigate them more thoroughly when he has the time.”

We had been climbing this steep little hill as she had been speaking. Now we reached the top and stood a moment on the narrow ridge. Immediately below us, the ground dropped down once more to a narrow gully, perhaps six feet wide, then rose up again to another ridge, similar to the one on which we were standing. It was not the ground that seized our attention, however, but something else, which had just become visible to us. On the second ridge, or just beyond it, stood a large, spreading tree, and from a low, horizontal branch of this tree, silhouetted against the grey mist, hung a rope, looped in the form of a noose.

“What in heaven’s name is that thing?” cried Miss Calloway in alarm.

“It is a hangman’s noose,” said Holmes. “What devilry is this?” He dashed down the slope and up the other side of the gully, Miss Calloway and I following close behind him. Again, we paused at the top of the ridge, and with a thrill of horror I surveyed the scene before us. Immediately ahead of us now was a small, open glade, perhaps twenty feet in each direction, and hemmed in on all sides by the dense wood. Upon the damp, leaf-strewn turf of this glade, stretched out on their backs about a dozen feet apart, were the motionless figures of two men, their sightless eyes staring up at the clouds above.

Miss Calloway began to scream, but the scream died on her lips, and she collapsed and would have tumbled back into the gully had I not caught hold of her. Holmes sprang down into the glade and bent to examine the two figures on the ground. The first was an elderly man with grey hair and moustache.

“Dead,” said Holmes after a brief examination. “Head stove in at the back.”

Then he turned his attention to the other figure, a younger man.

“Also dead,” said Holmes. “Shot through the heart.”

Miss Calloway showed some signs of returning consciousness, and Holmes helped me get her off the ridge and into the glade, where I sat her on a large fallen log and put my arm round her, as much to physically support her as to comfort her.

“Who are these people?” Holmes asked her as she looked about her in bewilderment.

“That is Professor Palfreyman,” she replied, indicating the grey-haired man, “and the other is Tim – Mr Martin. Are they both dead?”

Holmes nodded. “We can do nothing for them now. Watson, please take Miss Calloway back to the house and give her something suitable to drink, and send that gardener for the police. You’d better write a note for him to take. Stress that the matter is of the utmost urgency. Don’t bother with any details; just state that two men have been found dead, and that they may need to call in someone from Scotland Yard.”

The hardest part of what Holmes had asked me to do was getting Miss Calloway back to the house. She was, understandably, in a state of extreme nervous collapse, and almost fainted twice more before we reached the kitchen door. In between times, she kept bursting into tears and weeping copiously, and I had to keep stopping to comfort her.

“The two people I have been closest to in the last year!” she cried in anguish, clinging on to me for support. “Both dead! Who could have done such a terrible thing?”

“Have no doubts,” I replied, “Mr Holmes will find out. He always does. Justice will prevail, Miss Calloway, and the guilty shall not escape!”

Once in the kitchen, I settled her in a chair, found some brandy in a cupboard and poured out a tot for her and one for myself. I am not ashamed to say that my nerves, too, seemed shot to pieces. It had been a tremendous shock to suddenly come upon those lifeless bodies lying in that peaceful woodland glade, and I could scarcely comprehend the matter any more than my distraught companion could. I found a piece of paper in the professor’s study, wrote a brief note, in which I mentioned Holmes’s name, and gave it to the gardener, then returned to the kitchen. The fire there had all but gone out, so I set about rekindling it with paper and sticks, so that I could boil a kettle. While I was doing this, and Miss Calloway sat watching me in a sort of numb silence, the cook, Mrs Wheeler, returned. I explained to her briefly what had happened and, after coping with her momentary hysterics, left Miss Calloway in her care and hurried down the garden again to see what Sherlock Holmes was doing.

When I surmounted the ridge immediately before the woodland glade, I saw that Holmes was down on his hands and knees at the far side of the clearing, inspecting something on the ground. For some time he moved about in this fashion, like a hound following a scent, then he eventually stood up and turned to me, a slight frown on his face. “I have made a broad sweep round the whole area,” said he, “to verify one or two points.” I told him that Mrs Wheeler had returned and was looking after his client, and he nodded his head. “I am glad you have come back, Watson. You can hold the fort here, if you wouldn’t mind, as I wish to look at something in the house. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”

It gave me a strange, eerie feeling, to be left alone in that silent, fog-shrouded glade, with two men lying dead on the grass at my feet. Why had these two – an old man and a young man – been killed in this strange, unforeseen way? What was the meaning of that sinister hangman’s noose that hung, like a symbol of death and retribution, over this terrible scene? Backwards and forwards I paced round the edge of the clearing, unable to rest, either mentally or physically. What, I wondered, did Sherlock Holmes make of it all? What could anyone make of it? Would this be the one occasion when even Holmes was lost for an answer, when the mystery was too dark even for his great analytical skills to unravel?

My friend was away a little longer than he had predicted, but when he returned the frown had gone from his face and he seemed almost relaxed. “I have found what I was looking for,” said he in answer to my query. “My case is complete.”

“What do you mean by ‘complete’?” I asked in amazement.

“Simply that I believe I now know all that there is to know about the matter.”

“What! You know who killed Professor Palfreyman?”

“Yes.”

“And Martin?”

“Yes.”

“And why they were killed in different ways?”

“Yes.”

“And the meaning of that hangman’s noose?”

“Yes.”

“What do we do next, then?”

“We sit on that log and smoke our pipes, Watson! We can do nothing further until the police arrive, and must hope that they send someone with more than just sawdust in his head! There is nothing I find so wearying and tiresome as having to explain everything ten times over before I am understood!”

“I will not ask you any more questions, then, until the police arrive,” I said.

“Good man!” cried my friend, filling his pipe with tobacco and putting a match to it. “That is considerate of you!” I lit my own pipe, and we sat smoking in silence for some time.

“It seems so unfair,” I said at length, “that Miss Calloway should be involved in this dreadful business when it is really nothing whatever to do with her.”

“Ah!” said Holmes. “The fair Georgina! I rather fancied that that was the way your thoughts were tending, old boy. But as a matter of fact she is not quite as irrelevant to the case as you perhaps suppose.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment. I think I hear the heavy tread of regulation police boots!” He knocked out his pipe and sprang to his feet. “I must warn them to avoid obliterating the footprints on the path,” he called over his shoulder as he hurried off to meet them.

A few moments later, he reappeared in the company of four uniformed policemen and a tall, flaxen-haired man whom I recognized at once as our old friend Inspector Gregson, the Scotland Yard detective. He greeted me amiably and we shook hands. “You have arrived very promptly,” I remarked. “Were you already at Beckenham?”

“No, Penge. But I got a message that something was afoot down here, and when I heard that Mr Holmes was involved, thought it would be worth my while to take a look. I’m now officially in charge of the case.” The policeman surveyed the scene for a moment, then he bent down and examined each of the bodies in turn. “This older man seems to have had his skull crushed in at the back,” said he. “This large stone near his head has blood on it, so that appears to be what killed him. This younger man – why, bless my soul! – he’s been shot through the heart!” He stood up and shook his head. “It looks as if there is some kind of homicidal maniac on the loose!”

“I think not,” said Holmes. “Things are not quite as they appear.”

“You don’t think the murderer is likely to strike again?”

“No.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I am. Incidentally, Gregson, the revolver that fired the shot that killed the younger man is over there on the ground, near the edge of the clearing. I have not moved anything, but left it all for you to see.”

The policeman walked over, picked up the pistol and examined it for a moment. “Only one shot discharged,” he said aloud. “I wonder why the murderer left it here for us to find?” He turned to Holmes, with a frown of puzzlement on his features. “What on earth has been happening here, Mr Holmes?” he asked. “Who are these men? What are they doing here, lying dead in the middle of this wood? Who killed them? And what the devil is that noose doing there?”

“I will tell you,” said Sherlock Holmes, “but it will take me a few minutes, so you must be patient.”

Gregson nodded. He dismissed the four constables, instructing two of them to guard the front gate of the cottage and not let anyone in or out, and the other two to perform a similar duty at the gate leading from the back garden to the wood. “And don’t trample down any of those footprints on the path!” he added with a glance at Holmes. “Now, Mr Holmes,” he said, “I am all ears.”

Briefly, then, Holmes described for the policeman Professor Palfreyman’s career, his colleagues at the university and the enduring, if unjustified, guilt the professor had felt for the death of his colleague, John Strange, thirty-odd years previously, which had caused him such mental anguish. He then explained Georgina Calloway’s connection with the professor, how she had come to move into Bluebell Cottage the year before, and the chief incidents during the year, including the arrival in the post of the anonymous letters and the tile. Finally, he mentioned the account that the professor had written for Miss Calloway of what had occurred in Western Macedonia.

“I see,” said Gregson, taking off his hat and scratching his head. “In the light of all that, things are beginning to look a little different. If we try to reconstruct what has happened here, then, it seems that after writing his account for Miss Calloway to read after his death, the professor changed his mind and left it for her to read now. That suggests to me the possibility that he felt he had had enough of life, and had decided to end it. He therefore came here, to what you tell me was his favourite spot in the woods, and rigged up that noose with the intention of hanging himself. It’s a sad business, but not so unusual, if truth be told. A lot of the bodies fished out of the Thames each year are of those who felt they had had enough of life, and had deliberately flung themselves into the river.”

“No doubt. But in this case, of course, the professor did not in fact hang himself, so the analogy with bodies in the Thames does not really apply. What do you make of the presence of the younger man, Timothy Martin?”

“I’m not sure. Do you know anything about the gun that killed him?”

“Not specifically. But Miss Calloway mentioned to us that Professor Palfreyman had a small pocket pistol, which is what that is, so I take it that that is the professor’s.”

“I see. Although, of course, just because the gun is his, it doesn’t prove that he fired it.”

“No,” said Holmes, “but other evidence strongly suggests it. If you examine the professor’s right hand, with your nose as well as your eye, you will detect a strong smell of gunpowder. It is an old gun, and he was using old cartridges, and the powder has leaked backwards out of the chamber. There is a slight burn on his index finger, near where it meets the thumb.”

Inspector Gregson did as Holmes suggested, and after a moment nodded his head. “You are quite right, Mr Holmes. I agree completely. There is a singe mark in the crook of the thumb. Therefore Professor Palfreyman fired the shot that killed Mr Martin. I think we must conclude then,” he continued after a moment, resuming his seat on the log, “that, as Professor Palfreyman was about to hang himself, Martin arrived and tried to dissuade him. But by then, I suppose, the professor was so determined to do away with himself that he resented the other man’s interference, drew his gun and threatened him with it. Martin probably persisted – as anyone would in the circumstances – and the professor lost his temper and shot him. These would-be suicides can be uncommonly determined, you know. Then I think what must have happened is that the burn on the professor’s hand caused him to fling the gun away – which is why it was lying several yards over there – as well as causing him to stagger backwards, trip over and crack his skull on that little rock. Do you agree with that analysis?”

“No. The only part I agree with is that the burn on his hand caused him to drop the gun, and that the burn and slight recoil of the gun may have contributed to his falling backwards. But why did he not break his fall with his hand or his elbow? And although his head undoubtedly struck that stone – the fresh blood on it declares as much – such a blow would not, in my opinion, have caused such a terrible wound as the back of his head displays. But let us leave that for a moment, and consider something else. How was it, do you suppose, that Martin arrived here just as Professor Palfreyman was about to hang himself?”

“I don’t see that as a very important point,” Gregson replied in surprise. “No doubt he called at the house, and someone there told him the professor had taken a walk into the woods, so he followed him and found him about to hang himself.”

“But there was no one in the house then, Gregson. Miss Calloway was in Baker Street, consulting me, and the cook was away visiting her sister in Norwood. The house was empty.”

“Then perhaps seeing that the professor was not at home, Martin guessed where he might have gone to, and came this way.”

“But as I showed you earlier, there was only one set of footprints on the muddy path before we arrived here.”

“Then one of the two men must have come by a different route from the house.”

“There is no other route. There is a fence at the bottom of the garden, and anyone wishing to pass from the garden to the wood must pass through the wicket gate in that fence.”

“Then one of them – Martin, I suppose – must have come not from the house at all, but directly through the woods from the road.”

“Why should he do that?”

“Because he heard something from the woods, or saw something.”

“The wood is very dense between here and the road. It is not possible to see this spot from the road, and although the road is not far away, it is too far, in my opinion, for any but the loudest of sounds to be heard there. Besides, this speculation is superfluous, for I have made a very wide sweep of the whole area around this glade, and there is not a single footprint anywhere about, not one. Believe me, Gregson, when I say I would stake my reputation – my entire life’s work – on it!”

“If you say so, Mr Holmes,” said Gregson after a moment, “then that is good enough for me. But do you realize where your argument leads? We have two men murdered in this isolated spot, and yet we have, according to you, not three sets of footprints leading here, as I had first expected to find, being those of Palfreyman, Martin and their murderer, nor yet two sets of prints, which according to my later theory would be those of Palfreyman and Martin, but only one set of prints. It is completely impossible! Indeed, it is not only impossible, it is absurd!”

“Yes,” said Holmes, in a dry tone. “It does appear on the face of it to be impossible. You’re a good man, Gregson, one of the best, and I have gone carefully through all the evidence, so that when I tell you what really happened here, you will understand and believe me. With a lesser man, I probably shouldn’t have bothered.”

Inspector Gregson took a small cigar from his waistcoat pocket, struck a match and lit it. “Go on,” he said. “I am still all ears.”

“Very well,” said Holmes. “What we have here is a clear case of murder.”

“Well, yes, of course,” returned Gregson. “We know that Professor Palfreyman murdered young Martin. As you yourself agreed, the professor shot him with his pistol.”

Holmes shook his head. “No,” said he, “you have it the wrong way about. Palfreyman did not murder Martin. On the contrary, Martin murdered Palfreyman.”

“What!”

“It is one of the most callous, calculated, cold-blooded murders I have ever encountered. What you see here before you is, apart, of course, from his own death, the culmination of Martin’s scheme for murder which I believe he planned many months ago.”

“You amaze me, Holmes!” I cried. “I cannot believe what you are saying! How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion?”

“I will tell you my reasoning, Watson, and you can see if you can find any flaw in it. First, let us return to the matter of the footprints. As you remarked, Gregson, the fact that there appeared to be but one set of footprints leading here seemed an impossibility. There is, however, one way in which it could have come about, and that is if one of the two men was in fact carrying the other. Now, in what circumstances might that occur? Surely only if one of them was incapacitated, probably by being unconscious.

“I had noted the single set of footprints earlier, when the three of us first came along the path, but gave it little thought at first. I assumed the footprints were those of the professor, and the fact that there were prints leading into the wood, but none coming back, suggested that – unless he had gone further afield – we might find him sitting smoking his pipe in the woods, as Miss Calloway had told us he often did. Then, however, I noticed an odd thing: the footprints in question were unusually deep – much deeper than either Dr Watson’s or my own – with the heels especially marked. This suggested that the man that made them was carrying an exceptionally heavy burden of some sort. My attention having been drawn to this curious feature, I then observed that although, to judge by his shoe size, the man was of roughly average stature, the footprints were often much closer together than one would expect, which also suggested that he was struggling with a heavy burden.

“When we reached this clearing, and found the two dead men, I examined their shoes and established that the footprints on the path had been made by Martin. There were no other footprints anywhere about in the woods surrounding the clearing, so it was evident that, as I suspected by then, Martin had carried the professor here. The more I considered the matter, the more it seemed crystal clear that Martin had intended to murder the professor by hanging, to make it appear to have been a case of suicide. Martin had often visited Bluebell Cottage, and would be familiar with the routine of the household, so he would know that the cook always went over to Norwood to see her sister on Wednesday morning. When Miss Calloway told him that she was going to consult me this morning, he would have realized that there would be no one but the professor in the house, and he would thus have the opportunity he needed to put his evil scheme into effect. He must therefore have called in at the cottage on some pretext or other, and been let in by the professor himself. But how did he manage to subdue the professor in order to get him out here? Clearly, by striking him on the back of the head, probably as the professor sat at his desk. This is what would have caused that very severe wound to the professor’s head, which simply falling over and banging his head on that stone over there could never have done.

“What I think must have happened when they reached the clearing here is that Martin dropped the professor to the ground while he rigged up that noose on the branch of the tree. But the professor, who was, in a sense, dying at that moment, and would probably not have lived another ten minutes under any circumstances, must have regained consciousness sufficiently to see what Martin was doing. When Martin turned back to him, the professor had drawn his pistol – it is very small and weighs little, which would explain why Martin failed to notice that it was in the professor’s jacket pocket – and shot his assailant with it at point-blank range. The recoil and the burn on his hand made him fling the gun to one side and stagger backwards, where he fell to the ground and struck his head on that stone, which finished him off. It is because he was so severely injured, and probably scarcely conscious, that he was unable to break his fall. He may even have been dead before his body struck the ground. Therefore, to sum up: Martin murdered Palfreyman, and although Palfreyman undoubtedly shot and killed Martin, that was not, legally speaking, an act of murder, as he was acting in self-defence. That, I believe, is what happened.”

We sat in silence for some time after Holmes had finished speaking. If his analysis was correct, what had happened here in this quiet woodland glade seemed both too terrible and too fantastic to contemplate, yet I felt sure that, on the evidence, he must be right.

“If you require any further proof of the truth of my view,” said Holmes after a few moments, “then you could look in Martin’s jacket pocket. He trimmed the rope with which he made the noose, and there is a small length of the rope in his pocket, along with a sharp jack-knife. There is also a mark of blood on the back of his jacket, near the shoulder, which must have come from the professor’s wound when he was being carried out here. I also took a look in the professor’s study, to see if there was any evidence there to support my theory that it was there that Martin had attacked the professor, and found among the disorder that the poker in the hearth is smeared with blood and hair. That is clearly the murder weapon. I have left it where it was, in the hearth, for you to see, Gregson. No doubt Martin left the kitchen door unlocked because he intended to return to the house to tidy up the study and conceal what had happened there.”

“But surely,” said Gregson, “if Martin’s scheme had succeeded, and we had found the professor hanged here in the woods, our suspicions as to what had really happened would have been instantly aroused by that savage wound on the back of his head. Martin could not have supposed that we would not notice that!”

Holmes nodded. “I doubt that he originally intended to strike the professor quite so violently. Having done so, he would probably wait until he was sure his victim was dead by hanging, and then contrive to make it look as if the noose had slipped from the tree, and the professor had fallen and struck his head on a stone.”

“Had you any suspicions of Martin before we arrived here and found them both dead?” I asked my friend.

“I had noted that Professor Palfreyman’s really tangible troubles – the arrival of the anonymous, blank letters, and the tile – only began after Martin started calling at the house. Of course, that might have been mere chance – after all, the same observation could be applied to Miss Calloway herself. But it was also notable from Miss Calloway’s account that Martin seemed to take every opportunity he could to try to persuade her that Professor Palfreyman was dangerously insane, and that she should leave Bluebell Cottage. There was, moreover, one particular incident that I thought especially odd: when Miss Calloway mentioned her intention to consult me, Martin at first dismissed the idea as pointless, but when he changed his mind he said that perhaps I could somehow discover what lay behind the professor’s troubles. But there was no mystery there to be uncovered, nor had there ever been. Apart from the professor’s private feelings of guilt, what had happened in Macedonia all those years ago was a matter of general knowledge to all of Palfreyman’s colleagues, and thus, probably, to Martin, too.

‘‘No one, as far as we know, seemed to attach any blame to Palfreyman over the matter: the guilt he felt about it was simply his conscience prodding him with the thought that he could perhaps have acted differently. This feeling of personal guilt was, of course, exacerbated by the fact that – as he willingly admitted himself – he disliked Strange intensely. In other words, the trouble, up until this year, was really all in Professor Palfrey-man’s head, and there was nothing there that a detective could ‘discover’. The arrival of the letter and the tile, however, were quite different. They were not simply in the professor’s head, but definite, provocative acts, which any detective worth his salt would see as the starting point of his investigation.”

“I quite agree,” said Gregson. “When you were describing the matter to me earlier, I at once thought that those things were the most important part of the case.”

Holmes nodded. “And yet, Martin, a supposedly highly intelligent, and certainly highly educated young man, did not mention them to Miss Calloway at all, but referred simply to what had occurred many years ago. It seemed to me almost as if he was deliberately trying to deflect her attention from what was obviously the central part of the whole case – as indeed he probably was. It seems certain now that it was Martin himself who sent those things to Professor Palfreyman.’’

“But why?” I asked. “What could his aim have been?”

“He knew, as did everyone, that the professor was troubled in his mind – that he suffered from nightmares and so on – and considered, I imagine, that by persecuting him he might be able to drive him mad and suicidal. And if he couldn’t succeed in making the professor kill himself, then he would contrive to make it appear that he had – which is what this hideous and evil tableau was about. In fact, of course, the professor was nowhere near as unhinged as Martin seemed to think: guilt-ridden certainly, a little unbalanced perhaps, but otherwise, he was, for most of the time, as sane as anyone else.

‘‘When he dug out his little pistol from the old tin trunk in which it had lain for twenty-odd years it was not to use it on himself, but to protect himself against the threat he recognized was closing in upon him. I even wonder if he suspected that the threat might come from Martin. His questions to Miss Calloway concerning her future, and her feelings for Martin, were somewhat ambiguous, and it may be that he was in fact ‘fishing’ for information as to what she really thought about the young man.”

“What of the person loitering in the woods?” asked Gregson. “Do you reckon that was Martin, too?”

“It must have been. He would know when Miss Calloway was likely to catch her train home, and it would have been easy for him to take an earlier train and get down here before she did. His intention was no doubt to frighten her into leaving Bluebell Cottage altogether, as this would make it easier for him to pursue his scheme against the professor, and would allow him to portray himself as Miss Calloway’s ‘protector’, and thus advance his matrimonial prospects. In addition, if Miss Calloway was unsure of Professor Palfreyman’s whereabouts at the time of these frightening episodes, she might begin to suspect that the professor himself was responsible, which thought, to judge from her account, had already crossed her mind, and which was all to the good for Martin’s evil scheme to make the professor appear insane.’’