Текст книги "The Mammoth Book of the Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes"
Автор книги: Denis O. Smith
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 36 страниц)
“As I was speaking to Miss Norman on the terrace, I saw a man in the distance, examining the ground by the side of the house. Thinking that this might be Inspector Sturridge, I took myself over there and introduced myself. My conjecture proved correct, but the welcome he afforded me was not a friendly one. Indeed, he appeared determined to take offence at my presence.
“‘I was wondering when someone of your type would show up,’ said he in a disagreeable tone, ‘now that a reward has been offered.’
“I assured him that my presence there had been specifically requested by Viscount Latchmere himself, and that I had been perfectly unaware that a reward had been offered until within the last hour. This seemed to satisfy him and, from that point on, he became decidedly more genial. He is, in fact, a very genial man, but an absolute dunderhead as a detective. He described to me what he had discovered so far, which was, in truth, practically nothing.
“‘As Lady Latchmere’s bedroom door was locked,’ he said, as we walked round the outside of the house, ‘and as the little dressing room that adjoins it can only be entered from that bedroom, it is clear that the thief must have climbed in through the open dressing-room window. It would not be very difficult for an intruder to climb up there: this part of the house is covered with ivy and other climbing plants, as you can see.’
“‘Have you found any signs of such an intruder?’ I asked as we stopped below the window in question.
“‘I cannot say in all honesty that I have,’ he replied. ‘It is this that makes me think it must be the work of some highly professional criminal gang; but the creepers are so intertwined and tangled just here that any such signs would be difficult to make out, in any case.’
“‘Any footprints?’ I asked, as I surveyed a strip of bare earth by the house wall.
“Inspector Sturridge shook his head. ‘As you can see, the ground is dry and hard just here. I had a good look round, but didn’t find anything – apart from the glove, of course.’
“‘What glove is that?’ I asked in surprise.
“‘Have they not told you? It is not of any significance, I am afraid, Mr Holmes. It is just one of Lady Latchmere’s own gloves. I found it on the ground, just here where we’re standing. The thief must have accidentally got it caught up in his clothing, I imagine, and dragged it out of the window as he was making his escape. The only other explanation I could think of for its presence here was that the thief had used it to signal to a confederate who was standing out here on the lawn, but that seems unlikely, for several reasons.’
“‘Not the least of which is that it would have been pitch black at that time of night.’
“‘Precisely. So, as I say, it is probably of no significance. The glove is lying on the chest in the entrance hall. They left it there in case I wished to see it again, but I don’t.’
“Inspector Sturridge returned to the house then, to try once more to gain an audience with Viscount Latchmere, while I, thinking that I might have missed something during my first examination, applied myself again to the search for evidence that an intruder had been there on Saturday night. Fifteen minutes later I was obliged to conclude, as I had earlier, that there was not the slightest trace on the outside of Latchmere Hall that any intruders had been there at all, let alone that one of them had climbed up the wall below Lady Latchmere’s dressing-room window. Of course, I could be wrong – I occasionally am – but I have handled perhaps seventy-odd cases in which shrubberies or creepers on the wall of a house have played some part in the matter, and I cannot recall a single one in which I have been so completely unable to detect any sign of human presence. I even attempted to climb the wall of Latchmere Hall myself, and although I am reasonably agile, and certainly not heavy, I at once broke several small stems on the creeper – damage which, if anyone else had caused it, I could not possibly have failed to observe.
“I then returned to the house. In the hallway, I examined the glove that Inspector Sturridge had mentioned. It was a woman’s right-hand glove, of a soft light-grey fabric, with small embroidered flowers on the back, very similar to the gloves I had seen upstairs in Lady Latchmere’s dressing room, except that the embroidery on those had included two little pink flowers, whereas the embroidery on this one contained two little blue flowers. There was nothing at all unusual about it, and no sign that it had been used for anything out of the ordinary. This glove intrigued me, Watson. The whole business was admittedly impenetrable, but over all the other mystifying points in the case, this glove reigned supreme. I could not agree with Inspector Sturridge that it had fallen or been dragged from the window accidentally. It had, I felt sure, been cast out deliberately.
“Then it struck me that there was something which I had overlooked, namely the other glove of the pair. In Lady Latchmere’s dressing room I had seen a pair of grey gloves, a left hand and a right; here was a third glove, but where, then, was the fourth? I could not recall seeing it anywhere. I asked Yardley, who had been hovering about all this time, to conduct me once more to Lady Latchmere’s chamber, and I took the odd glove with me. There, I proceeded to make a thorough search for the fourth glove. It was nowhere near the other pair, nor, indeed, anywhere in the dressing room, but I did find it eventually. In the bedroom, immediately to the side of the doorway into the dressing room, stood an upright wooden chair, on the seat of which lay a large-brimmed straw hat. Beneath this hat lay the fourth glove. I asked the butler if the room had been cleaned or tidied since the robbery, and he shook his head.
“‘Viscount Latchmere gave strict instructions that it should remain untouched until the police had completed their examination of it,’ he said, ‘and no instructions to the contrary have yet been received.’ Clearly, then, the glove I had found under the hat had been there since Saturday.
“And that, Watson, is that!” said Holmes, leaning back in his chair. “I believe I have given you a reasonably accurate account of my morning’s work, if in a somewhat condensed form. It illustrates well,” he continued as he took up his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco from the old Persian slipper, “what should be the fundamental tenet of any detective’s work, that one should never make assumptions before beginning an investigation, but should follow with an open mind wherever the evidence leads. That genial dunderhead, Inspector Sturridge, having assumed at the outset that there were intruders at Latchmere Hall on Saturday night, is obliged to make more and more assumptions – as to the almost supernatural cleverness of these intruders, for instance – when the evidence fails to confirm his initial assumption. I, on the other hand, made no such assumption, and the evidence has led me to a quite different conclusion.”
“What, then?” I asked in surprise.
“There were no intruders at Latchmere Hall on Saturday night, Watson. The pendant was taken by someone staying in the house, someone who deliberately threw that glove out of the window to lead us astray.”
I confess I was astonished at this suggestion. “But they are all highly respectable people, Holmes,” I protested.
“Highly respectable they may be, Watson, but I am convinced that one of them is a thief. Incidentally, all those concerned are now in London. I have their addresses here,” he continued, taking his notebook from his pocket: “The Rajah of Banniphur is staying at Claridge’s Hotel, Miss Norman has an apartment in Ladbroke Gardens, Mr Brocklehurst is at an address in Curzon Street and Miss Wiltshire is at her parents’ house in Doughty Street. Lady Latchmere herself is also in town, staying at their house in Belgrave Square for a few days. I could, of course, go to see any of them in pursuit of my enquiries, but I do not think it will be necessary. They were not able to speak freely at Latchmere Hall – that much was clear – and may wish to amplify their answers to my questions in circumstances of greater privacy. I have given each of them my card, and strongly suspect that one or two of them will come to see me before the day is out.”
I watched as he lit a spill in the fire and applied it to the bowl of his pipe, then leaned back once more in his chair, puffing away contentedly.
“But we have heard that Lady Latchmere’s bedroom door was locked on Saturday night,” I said after a moment, “and there is no way into her dressing room save through that bedroom. So how could anyone in the house have got in there to take the pendant?”
“Quite so. The evidence as we have it has brought us to an impasse. It makes it equally impossible that the pendant was taken either by someone outside the house or by someone inside the house. And yet it was certainly taken by someone, Watson, as it is no longer in the jewel case. I believe I know the answer to this conundrum, an answer I have been led to by the evidence of the fourth glove. This not only suggests to me who has taken the pendant, but suggests also that at least two people – possibly more – have lied to me.”
My friend fell silent then, and sat for several minutes with his eyes tightly closed and his brow furrowed with concentration. I knew better than to question him further. It was evident he was re-weighing all the evidence in his mind and verifying his conclusions to his own satisfaction. He would enlighten me when he felt ready to do so. As to my own thoughts on the matter, for some time I went over and over all that my friend had told me, but, despite my best efforts, reached no sensible conclusion.
All at once, the silence in our room was broken by a sharp pull at the front-door bell. A moment later, the maid entered to announce that Mr Peter Brocklehurst had called for Sherlock Holmes, and a tall, angular, dark-haired young man was shown into the room. Holmes waved him to a chair, but for a moment he hesitated and glanced in my direction.
“There is something I thought you ought to know,” he began, addressing Holmes. “I mean no offence to your colleague, but I would rather speak to you alone.”
“Whatever you wish to say you may say as well before Dr Watson as before me. He is the very soul of discretion.”
“I do not doubt it, but it is a very delicate, private matter, and I must insist that you do not repeat to a soul what I tell you.”
“You have our word on that.”
“Very well,” said the young man. “The fact is,” he continued, taking the chair that Holmes offered him, “that something rather odd occurred at Latchmere Hall on Saturday evening, which may perhaps have a bearing on your attempt to recover the pendant. Whether it does or not, I don’t know, but I didn’t want you to waste your time on a wild-goose chase. It is not really any concern of mine, and under other circumstances I should not have dreamt of interfering, nor of retailing unpleasant gossip. Nor should I have said anything – whatever the circumstances – if I had thought that you were one of those common enquiry agents who will snoop and spy on anyone for a few shillings. But I could see when we spoke earlier that you are a gentleman, Mr Holmes, and it is in that belief that I will entrust to you what may be extremely delicate information.”
“I will endeavour to justify your trust in me.”
“Then I will come straight to the point. I did not enjoy the dinner at Latchmere Hall on Saturday. The trouble was that I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to anyone. At Oxford I was considered something of a wit, but at Latchmere on Saturday I was like a block of wood. The conversation was dominated partly by matters to do with the Latchmere estate, and partly by the subject of education, and, to speak frankly, I was bored. I attempted to have a sort of side-conversation with Miss Wiltshire, but that was not successful. I also attempted to intervene in the main conversation with some humorous remarks, which I thought might draw Miss Wiltshire in – for she was almost as silent as I was – but my remarks fell flat, and that, too, proved a failure.
“As a result of all this, I drank rather a lot of wine – there didn’t seem much else to do – and as I became more intoxicated, my attempts to join in the conversation became wilder and – I must be honest – more stupid. Matilda – Miss Wiltshire – whom I admit I had hoped to impress in the course of the evening, became even less interested in me than she had been earlier, if that is possible, and I saw a look of disdain written plainly enough on her face.
“When the meal was finished and we had passed through the usual tedious and boring rituals, the three women took themselves off to their beds. This was some time between half past ten and a quarter to eleven. About fifteen minutes later, the viscount and the rajah did the same, leaving me mercifully to my own devices. I said I would find myself a book in the library, but when I got there, the room, which was in darkness save for the low glow from the fire, seemed warm and cosy, and I sat down in the big winged armchair by the hearth. I don’t know which made me feel worse, the large quantity of wine I had imbibed or the fact that I had made a fool of myself in front of Miss Wiltshire. Anyway, for one reason or another, I fell into a brown study and, not long after, fell fast asleep.
“I was awakened some time later by the sound of the door being opened and quietly closed, which was followed by the rustle of a woman’s skirts and soft, rapid footsteps across the library floor behind my chair. Even though I was still half asleep, I knew at once, without really thinking about it, that it must be either Philippa – Lady Latchmere – or Matilda. Uppermost in my mind was the thought that she – whoever it was – might be badly startled to suddenly find me there when she had been in the room for some time, so I made to stand up at once and declare my presence. Before I could do so, however, there came the sound of a curtain being drawn back and a window being quietly opened. This was followed moments later by hushed voices, a man’s and a woman’s, too low for me to make out what was being said.
“Of course, I had no idea what this was all about, but it was clear it was something secret and furtive. I at once saw what a dreadful position I was in. If my presence were discovered, the situation would be unendurably embarrassing for all concerned. These people – whoever they were – might even believe that I was deliberately spying on them. I could not think what to do. Carefully, I turned my head, and peered round the side of the chair, but could see nothing: the woman was on the other side of the curtain. I considered slowly rising to my feet, and tiptoeing to the door; but then I remembered how much the floor by the fireside chair had creaked earlier, and I decided against it. I should just have to stay in the chair and hope she didn’t see me. If she did, I would pretend to be asleep, and thus to have seen and heard nothing. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as I could and waited. How long they continued speaking, I don’t know: probably not much more than five minutes, although it seemed like half an hour to me. Eventually, I heard the window being quietly closed, a movement of the curtain, then soft footsteps once more across the library floor. The door was opened and closed, and the room returned once more to silence. I was all alone! I cannot tell you what relief swept over me at that moment! I waited five or ten minutes, then made my way up to my room, remembering to go by way of the side staircase, to avoid the creaking floorboards on the landing outside the bedrooms. I looked at my watch when I got to my room, and it was then five minutes to midnight.”
“Could you see if there was a lamp still lit in any of the bedrooms?” asked Holmes.
“No, all were in darkness. I climbed into bed and went to sleep, and heard nothing further. I believe the rajah was snoring, but it didn’t bother me.”
“Thank you for this information,” said Holmes after a moment. “I appreciate how uncomfortable the situation must have been for you, and how difficult to tell me. Whether it will have any bearing on my own investigation, I cannot say, but you need have no anxiety about such a delicate confidence: neither Dr Watson nor I shall ever repeat what you have told us.”
Holmes’s manner was one of polite if subdued interest in Brocklehurst’s story, but when the young man had shaken hands and left us, looking greatly relieved at having unburdened himself of his secret knowledge, Holmes’s manner changed completely. He sprang to his feet and paced about the floor in silence for several minutes.
“Was it Lady Latchmere or Miss Wiltshire?” I asked at length.
“It was Lady Latchmere, Watson. It must be.”
“Does this new information change your view of the case?”
My friend shook his head vehemently. “On the contrary,” said he, “it confirms precisely what I had already deduced. I doubt Mr Brocklehurst appreciates the significance of what he has told me.” Then he resumed his silent pacing about, and would say no more. At length he sat down at his desk with a frown, and took up a sheet of notepaper and a pen.
“How best to proceed?” said he aloud, speaking as much to himself as to me. “If I go there, I at once place myself at a disadvantage, and everything I say is simply denied. If on the other hand, I send a summons to come to this address, then the recipient suffers all the anxiety of wondering what it is that I know, and how to respond.”
He scribbled a few lines on his notepaper. “There,” said he after a moment: “‘If you bring the pendant, I may be able to save you from disgrace. If you do not, then the truth must come out, and you will be ruined.’ That should do it!”
When he had sealed and addressed his letter, he rang for the maid and instructed her to send it at once by special messenger, then he curled up in his chair by the fire and closed his eyes, as if exhausted. An hour and a half later, the maid brought in a letter that had just been delivered. Holmes roused himself, tore open the envelope and scanned the contents, then tossed it over to me without comment. The note was a brief one, and ran as follows:
Dear Mr Holmes – Propose to call on you this evening at nine o’clock.
Banniphur
At a quarter past eight there came a ring at the front-door bell. A few moments later, the maid announced the Honourable Miss Arabella Norman. She was a small, somewhat frail-looking elderly lady, with grey hair and a slight stoop. Holmes waved her to his chair by the hearth and brought up another chair for himself. For several minutes she sat there in silence, warming her hands at the fire, then Holmes spoke:
“You have something to tell us, I believe,” said he, “concerning the events of Saturday night.”
She turned to him, but did not respond.
“You wish to tell us,” Holmes continued, “that on Saturday night you could not sleep and, as you lay awake, you heard Lady Latchmere’s bedroom door open and her footsteps on the landing. You opened your door a crack and saw that, clad in a dressing gown over her nightclothes, she was going downstairs. On an impulse, you crossed the landing and entered her bedroom, where you unlocked her jewel case – the key was in the lock – and removed the Latchmere Pendant. To make it appear the work of an intruder, you took a glove, from a pair that lay under a straw hat on a chair, and threw it from the window to the lawn below, where you knew it would be found the following morning. You then returned to your own room, and hid the pendant in your luggage.”
Miss Norman did not reply, and after a few moments, during which I could see that he was observing her features keenly, Holmes continued:
“Now you have returned home with your booty, and have realized that your momentary impulse has placed you in a difficult – even possibly disastrous – situation. You do not really want the pendant: you cannot wear it, and nor can you possibly sell such a well-known piece of jewellery. What is to be done? And then you received my letter, offering a way – perhaps the only way – out of your difficulty.”
“If you were right,” Miss Norman interrupted, “and I did in fact have the pendant, would you be able to return it to Viscount Latchmere without mentioning my name in any way?”
“Yes. That is my intention. Nothing would be gained, and much lost, by dragging your name through the mud.”
“Very well,” said she in a tone of resignation. She unfastened the capacious bag that lay in her lap and took from it a small bundle, wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief. This she unfolded, and held it out for us to see. Upon the handkerchief, in an elaborate gold setting, lay the largest gemstone I have ever seen in my life. The flickering light from our fire caught the facets of this remarkable stone, which flashed and sparkled with every slight movement of Miss Norman’s hand. “Here is my ‘booty’, as you call it,” said she. “That is all that I took. I know nothing about the missing ring.”
Holmes took the pendant from her hand and held it up by the chain, so that it flashed as it twisted. “There you are, Watson!” said he. “This little object – this little lump of compressed carbon, as a chemist would describe it to us – has been a focus for men’s greed and violence for more than a century! What a record of bloodletting and hatred it has carved for itself in that time! Here,” he continued, leaning across and placing the pendant in my hand. “You realize, of course, my dear fellow, that you are now, technically speaking, a handler of stolen goods! Miss Norman,” he continued, turning to our visitor, “you are an intelligent woman. What can have possessed you to commit such a bizarre and uncharacteristic crime?”
“I will tell you,” she responded. “There are facts of which you are unaware, Mr Holmes. But first, would you please indulge me by telling me how you knew that it was I that had taken the pendant? You are evidently a better detective than Inspector Sturridge, who seemed content simply to make our blood run cold with a list of gangs – Foulgers, Clays, and I don’t know who else – who were likely to climb in at our bedroom windows any night of the year. Or did you just guess?”
“I never guess,” returned Holmes firmly. “It is destructive of the logical faculty. Occasionally one must balance probabilities in order to proceed, but in this case that was scarcely necessary: the indications were clear enough.” He described to Miss Norman his thoughts on the glove found on the lawn, and the absence of any trace of an intruder. “It seemed to me then that the glove had been tossed on the lawn deliberately to throw us off the scent. What could this mean but that the pendant had in fact been taken by someone in the house? As I had, to my own satisfaction, eliminated the household staff from any suspicion, that left only Viscount Latchmere’s four guests and the viscountess herself. Unlikely as it may seem, the possibility that Lady Latchmere had herself had a hand in the disappearance of the pendant could not be dismissed. Her manner was certainly odd, and I was convinced she was keeping a secret of some kind, although whether that related to the missing pendant or not, I could not say.
“However, when I found the fourth glove, it clarified my view of the matter. Presumably the glove found on the lawn had been with the other one of the pair, under the straw hat. But why, then, had that particular glove been chosen to act as a blind, rather than one of the other pair which lay on the table in the dressing room? The only conclusion I could reach was that whoever threw the glove from the window wished it to be found the following morning, when, of course, the loss of the pendant would also be discovered, but did not wish its absence to be noted that evening, so that the precise time of the theft would not be known, and the notion of an intruder would therefore be plausible. But the only person who could have noticed that evening that a glove had disappeared was Lady Latchmere herself. Obviously, it is absurd to suppose that she would take such a precaution against herself, and therefore the glove was not taken by her, but by someone else.
“I was thus faced with something of a dilemma: if Lady Latchmere’s account were true, that she had retired for the night and locked her door immediately her maid had left her, then no one but she herself could have taken the pendant. On the other hand, the evidence of the fourth glove was that someone other than Lady Latchmere had moved the glove and taken the pendant. If that were true, then Lady Latchmere was not being entirely truthful and must have left her bedroom, if only for a few moments. How to resolve this conundrum? On balance, I felt more certainty in the mute testimony of the gloves than the testimony of Lady Latchmere, and therefore decided that the pendant had been taken by one of the guests, and that Lady Latchmere had indeed left her room, despite what she had told me. I dismissed the rajah as a possibility. Everyone seems to have heard him snoring, and although one can feign snoring for a few moments, it is not possible to keep it up for any length of time without bringing on a state of physical collapse. Neither Mr Brocklehurst nor Miss Wiltshire could have reached Lady Latchmere’s bedroom without treading on the creaking floorboards on the landing, and as you stated that you slept very badly away from home, and lay awake for a long time on Saturday night, you would have heard this noise, but you did not. This, I regret to say, left only yourself, Miss Norman.”
“It all sounds so obvious now you have explained it,” remarked our visitor, “that I am surprised I wasn’t arrested first thing on Sunday morning.”
“Now you must answer my question,” said Holmes with a chuckle. “Why did you steal the pendant?”
“I have been a visitor at Latchmere Hall for forty years or more,” replied Miss Norman after a moment. “As an unmarried female relative, I was aware that I was, generally speaking, nothing but a nuisance to the family, but I did have one specific merit: being single, I was always useful as a simple way of balancing the numbers and the sexes at dinner parties. The present viscount’s father always included me in any gatherings he had arranged. I think he hoped to marry me off to one of his single male guests – then he would have satisfied his family duty and could forget about me with a clear conscience – but for various reasons it never happened. So as the years rolled by, I continued my respectable but penurious existence in a small apartment to the north of Notting Hill, answering the summons to Latchmere Hall at regular intervals – the previous viscount always sent me the train fare – to solve the dinner-setting problems of my wealthy relations, and gradually becoming transformed, in the eyes of the world, from young and marriageable, if a little too independent-minded, to elderly and eccentric.”
“How is your family related to that of the viscount?”
“My father was a distant cousin, on the poverty-stricken side of the family. He succeeded to the Barony of Patrington as a young man, but it was not a title that brought any tangible benefit and he hardly ever used it. For many years, he farmed in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which is where I was raised, but he could never entirely break free from debt, and at the time of his death the farm was heavily mortgaged. My brother, Thomas, had been an officer in the Indian Army, but had lost his life during the Mutiny, and my mother had been dead some years, so, upon my father’s death, I was thrown very much on my own resources. I scraped together what money I could, from the sale of the farm and a few other odds and ends, and moved to London, where I had a few friends and where I could supplement my meagre savings with a little teaching work.
“I used to enjoy my periodic visits to Latchmere Hall – at least I knew I would get a square meal there, and would occasionally meet some interesting people – but my enjoyment has faded a little with each passing year. Of course, the estate is beautiful at this time of the year, clothed in the colours of autumn, but I can get a similar pleasure by taking a walk in Hyde Park. My main reason for continuing to go is so that they don’t forget I exist and will continue to invite me down for Christmas. The main problem is that I don’t care very much for the present viscount. Still, I didn’t mean to bore you with my personal concerns. I don’t expect you to understand, and I know it is no justification for my moment of madness, but I have come to resent the viscount’s wealth and my own poverty. It would not matter if they were not so mean. I know there was a time when my father approached the old viscount for a loan, which could have saved him from great difficulty, and which the viscount could easily have afforded, but he turned him down. I mentioned to you that the old viscount used to send me my train fare for visits to Latchmere, but I should add that when I had bought a return ticket from King’s Cross to Hatfield, there was usually not a penny left over. The present viscount is, if anything, even meaner than his father was, and when I had to sit and listen to him on Saturday evening, describing at length how his income from the estate – which I happen to know is huge beyond the dreams of avarice – had declined slightly this year, I’m afraid it made my blood boil. And the irony is that that precious stone, of which Viscount Latchmere and his predecessors have made such a show over the years, does not even really belong to them.”
“What do you mean?” asked Holmes.
“There is a persistent story in the family that Samuel Tollington, who later became the third Viscount Latchmere and was the one that brought the diamond back from India, had in fact murdered his uncle, Sir George Tollington, in order to get his hands on it.”
